Solidarity When?

Late last week, I happened to be listening to a popular YouTube broadcast of the left when a listener from Florida called in hoping to make a point about how one of the "biggest obstacles to left-wing power in this country" was its "antagonistic relationship with working class people like me and what I believe is a racist anti-white culture within the left that is driving this antagonism "   He came prepared with a 2019 academic study from Colgate University and a personal anecdote to support his premise.  The Colgate Study measured attitudes of those who identified as either liberal or conservative toward a story about the life circumstances of man named Kevin who "lived in NYC, was raised by a single mom, struggled with poverty his whole life, and was currently receiving welfare assistance" but whose race was varied along with whether or not the subject was first given information to read about white privilege.  The researchers found that while conservatives seemed to look down on poor people of either race with or without the benefit of receiving information about white privilege, and liberals who were not first given information about white privilege expressed sympathy toward a poor man whether he was described as black or white,  self-identified liberals who had read about white privilege before hearing Kevin's story were more sympathetic to his present circumstances if he was described as black than if described as white, even to the point of blaming the white Kevin for his own poverty or agreeing with the proposition that "White people deserve to be poor in a kind of moral sense." 

As an illustration of the application of the study to his own experience, he related the story of how when he was a teenager in Florida in the 90s his single mother, working her way through school behind the cash register at a liquor store for little more than minimum wage unknowingly and absent-mindedly neglected to ask for an ID before selling a 6-pack of beer to a woman who turned out to be an underage undercover agent.  Weeks later, the lapse came back to her tenfold when the bust came down.  His mother was subsequently humiliatingly arrested on the job for it for which she was fired on the spot and "frog marched" out of the store to be charged.  Unable to raise bail she was jailed overnight without a chance to let her teenage son know where she was and what had happened to her. Saddled with legal expenses and court obligations for months and no longer on an income she was forced to go on public assistance.  The police and "by extension the lawmakers had nothing better to do with their time and taxpayer money than to publicly humiliate a poor white woman and drive her life into the ditch."  The caller used this as an example and not the worst of how poorly white people are treated by the police and yet at a leftist rallies he had attended  in support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd's murder by police he had gotten the message that "poor whites have no skin in the game" and their struggles with the police did not matter.  As he told it, he was there in support and solidarity but came away from it disillusioned when one of the speakers reportedly said apropos of nothing that had been said before, "Poor white people, you all need to understand that your problems are not important right now" and then "went on to plug her small business."  The last part of his point was drowned out by one of the hosts mocking his sense of insult.   

Declarations of victimhood for being white have a tendency in leftist circles to raise suspicions along with eyebrows.  (Mine were raised.)  And of course as bad as poor people as a class have it at the hands of police, black people have it the worst .  But I think somewhere in there, the caller (who was not after all raining on a Black Lives Matter protest in progress, but merely trying to air his experience from one to illustrate an assertion on a leftist call-in show) had a valid point which I don't think he perfectly expressed-- not entirely through his own fault, although the responses he excited from the presenters of the broadcast which made it difficult for him to lay out his argument without protest may have to some extent made it for him. His framing of his mother's experience and of the results of the Colgate study as a case of anti-white racism, aside from doing him no favors with the audience he was addressing, is a mischaracterization of the problem that obfuscated matters, provoked a defensive response from the broadcasters and prevented the landing of what I think is actually a very important point.  

"There is without a doubt a class struggle but there is no white people's struggle." the host of the broadcast said accurately in support of his objection to the caller's story and it echoed my thoughts about the fault in the caller's presentation.  But to say that the caller's experience at the rally was an example of narcissistic extrapolation that has no bearing on leftist power seems to me to be missing the crux.  As the caller said, "If we're talking about winning power in this country, we need as many people on board as we can get so when the left alienates poor white people it's not just me the guy in the crowd who got his feelings hurt it's sort of a ripple effect."  Like it or not, and who the hell likes it, there is a problem building solidarity on the left (and has been at least since the time of Marx) which is very much exemplified by the readiness with which many poor whites are prepared to abandon class solidarity at the moment their own very real struggles are discounted by those who should be comrades due to the lack of a racial component to them (which if there is anything to the Colgate study seems to be the point of it).  The anomalous speaker at the George Floyd rally so hasty to draw a boundary of race on whose experiences were permitted to be brought to the table was tellingly a member of the black bourgeoisie according to the caller (or at least that was the perception) -- did she have skin in the poverty game?  Truthfully, how attuned to the pain and humiliations of poverty that doesn't fit the liberal mold are the hosts of the broadcast?  What the caller was talking about is the kind of pocketing of aggrievements that the left is lately so brilliant at festering and fostering but that only manipulators of the right seem to be capable of corralling to their own benefit.

In short, the left has a Solidarity problem.  It will not be solved by alienating anybody for deficiencies in their place on the hierarchy of grievances.  True, the gentleman's story had a huge element of subjective hurt to it.  Whose doesn't?  When someone tells you they are feeling excluded unfairly, believe them first.  Then defend them.  Then march forward together.

Democracy by Lot

If you've ever looked at the sad state of leadership in this (or any other) country and thought, "I could do better than that!", I agree.  You could do better than that, and if we lived in an actual democracy, you would have the opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.  But none of us who select our representatives by plurality from candidates put forth by nomination of a party do live in a true democracy, because the party system, for all of its advantages and conveniences in an ideal world is in practice a terribly undemocratic way to select our leaders.  Particularly in the land of Democracy, the un-democratic bully of the world, the United States.

Proof is all around us.  In the US, mid-term elections are tomorrow.  Already $2 billion has been spent from extra-partisan PACs-- a record for a non-presidential election made possible by a Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) in 2010 that essentially protected unlimited political donations from corporations as free speech.  The result is a cacophony of negativity dominating the interstices between segments of our news and entertainment programs-- a vile non-stop parade of one horrifying character assassination after another, each cancelling the other out; the winner being the PAC with the biggest pot for the most unavoidable pattern in the carpet.  In practice, this is not the PAC representing the broadest possible interests, but normally only the narrowest of interests on topics of primary concern particularly to the deepest pockets that keep them funded.   This is not to suggest that the negativity doesn't bleed into the news coverage as the conversation takes shape around the tropes that money would like us to pay attention to.  

As for voting itself, can it be trusted?  Is it fair?  Does it reflect our wishes?  For a variety of reasons, the waters are muddied now-- which is becoming true when elections are rigged and even when they are not.  Across the US, one of our parties -- the Republican one--  is actively in the process of dismantling and straitjacketing the possibility of free and fair elections.  Why?  In the name of securing "free and fair elections" which they define as elections in which Republicans (the party of the dominant oligarchic minority) win.  The assurance of this, sadly for the planet, for the people and for human rights, necessarily entails the suppression of democratic votes, which is achieved through a variety of measures such as limiting how and when votes can be cast-- e.g., only during working hours on a workday; the gerrymandering of districts to consolidate Republican voters and diffuse those most likely to vote for Democrats; requiring voter IDs, the procurement of which can be time consuming and costly for those that society keeps at the bottom of the economic ladder; and if that's not enough to deter them, legal harassment up to and including entrapment, prosecution and imprisonment for infractions of arcane very selectively enforced voter fraud ordinances.  In pursuit of a lock on voting procedures across the country Republicans have for years been actively and very successfully working to take over oversight of local elections state by state in their truly frighteningly effective way and they will succeed thanks to control of state legislatures and supreme courts even in the least expected places-- in moves that even if they are challenged are likely to stand thanks to a very partisan republican hold on the Supreme Court of the United States. But the sentiment that leaving democracy to the people is dangerous is not restricted to one party.  A strong contingent of neo-liberal democrats regularly work hand in hand with media concerns to undermine challenges from the more populist impulses from the fringes of the party and many openly advocate for a democracy of the meritocracy on the theory that the benefit of the wisdom of the deserving will trickle down to the unmeritorious masses. 

The net effect of this chaos at the voting booth and control of the ballot and of the outcomes is that this neoliberal ideal of democracy by elites is to a great extent the reality,  See how great it's working?  It is no wonder that so many don't vote (for which the elites are thankful), and that even those of us who vote in hopes of preventing the worst outcome rarely get anything more from the process than severe anxiety and justifiable dread about the direction our country is taking.

There is a solution.  It's called sortition-- democracy by lot.  Let elections be decided not by money but by fate.  In short, what if we elected our leaders from among each and every one of us not by majority or plurality vote for a handful of names offered by parties, but from among all the members of the citizenry by a certified random selection process. We are already familiar with the concept of this from our jury system in which we are periodically selected for duty by lottery (based on certain qualifying criteria).  What I am talking about is rule by citizens  (among whom could very well at any time be you or me) selected by a chance process. The practice, still trotted out these days from time to time for special purposes such as "citizens' commissions" in Europe in particular, was more widespread in ancient times particularly in Greece, and from renaissance times in Italy -- Florence, Lombardy and Venice specifically-- but candidates were generally selected from only among land owning males.  Nothing about the notion requires that however, and of course here and there it was designed to take the fullest advantage of its most appealing potential attribute, inclusivity.  Most charmingly, according to Wikipedia, "Local government in parts of Tamil Nadu such as the village of Uttiramerur traditionally used a system known as kuda-olai where the names of candidates for the village committee were written on palm leaves and put into a pot and pulled out by a child."  I'd be in favor of something like that in this country-- but only if the names in the pot were from everyone in the community.  

How does this work?  The procedures for it require that eligibility for selection be agreed upon and that the method for selection be transparent and accepted.  Both of these simple requirements are opportunities for disagreement.  On the matter of transparently random selection, I have ideas of my own but am open to suggestion.  On the contentious matter of eligibility, several possibilities present themselves.  There will no doubt be those in favor of restricting it to much the same class of people we are stuck with now at the top, much as the Greeks and Italians did.  Alternatively there is certainly something to be said for making it wide open and voluntary.  Volunteering oneself for the possibility of being selected is no guarantee of being selected, so opportunities and incentives for corruption are limited on this side of the equation. Even so, one can easily imagine restrictions and suppression on qualifications and the process of volunteering evolving to the point at which the self-selection of volunteers trends toward a homogeneous pool of names-- a situation which should be engineered against.    

For my part, for American democracy by sortition, I would advocate for true random selection from among the set of Everybody in the US, with the barest minimum of requirements for eligibility (age, opt outs based on special circumstances, a notion of who qualifies based on citizenship, for instance).  I would not exclude the incarcerated or the undocumented.  I would in fact be in favor of involuntary participation for all permanent  residents above the age of -- let's say 13-- and voluntary participation of non-permanent, but long-term current residents in the country.

What I am advocating is that for our representation in government, we pull random names out of a hat, such that you and I have just as much of a chance at running things for a change as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.  The end of money in politics-- a cure for the corruption of campaign finance.  Random selection also means representational democracy--  a government that reflects the makeup of the population by every demographic, by all income levels, by social relations, by height, by weight, by interests, by musical taste, by eye color, by handedness.  Representation for all instead of just the 16,000 households (not mine, and none of them likely to be yours either) that the 2 parties currently represent, and who are already over-represented.  Aside from the abolishment of parties (Get Rid of Them!), I see no reason to tamper too much with the structure of our legislatures at this stage-- this is merely a fix for the selection process, which I would predict would in short order begin to result in a fix for the governing. 

And why stop at the legislature?  We should select the president (or perhaps an executive committee), the cabinet, our judges from circuit court to supreme court the same way.  The terms for each  would be short and staggered so that at any time every branch of government would be run by fresh, perhaps hesitant and reluctant hands as well as by those who know the ropes but who will not be entrenched.  Would some of the selected suck at the job?  Yes! Would some take advantage of the opportunity to enrich themselves to the extent of dereliction of their duty to their fellow citizens?  Yes! Would many refuse to serve?  Yes!  And what's your point?  This is different from the current situation, how exactly?  The certainty that random selection will result in some bad apples or duds is why terms are short and do not repeat (already a vast improvement-- a fix-- of the current system in which incumbency advantages the worst of the lot to remain in place to suck indefinitely).  Is it worth it to ensure that our representatives truly represent us?  Yes! Yes! and Yes!  

I imagine we would naturally structure our civic education in a way that would prepare each of us to the extent of our abilities for the possibility of being selected to serve.  But this is hardly as important as the possibility for each of us that our raw ideas will be heard without being drowned out by money or prevented by corrupt control of the limited interests that partisan politics enable. The result I am convinced would be better, more representational government that is less bought, less professional and more creative in coming up with and implementing solutions for the real challenges that actually face all of us.  And as I have said elsewhere, the principles of sortition applied to government could also be applied to other troubled and troubling areas of our failed democracy: the military, the constabulary and industry for starters.  Imagine if instead of shouting into the darkness about crime for instance, you were for a brief period of time given some degree of charge over it as a randomly selected one-term officer of the peace.

I do not have time, patience or credentials to make a scholarly, bullet proof case for the practice.  I present this to you merely in an effort to get the concept before you.  I am convinced that this quite obvious cure for democracy will never make it past this blog post.  But you can't blame a guy for trying.

In Spite of Ourselves

Viagra Boys present a cover of John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves featuring Amy Taylor:

The song was written for the 2001 Billy Bob Thornton Southern Gothic comedy-drama Daddy & Me, screenplay and mise en scène by Thornton and starring Thornton, Laura Dern, Brenda Blethyn and Andy Griffith with Prine in a supporting role.  Originally recorded for the closing credits by Prine and Iris DeMent, both were seen performing the song Live from Sessions At West 54th in the same year:

Bonus fun: Amy Taylor performing Hertz with her usual gig Amyl and the Sniffers.

Proxy Wars

Getty Images

At the start of Putin's war on Ukraine in February, President Joe Biden made telling statements that revealed the attitude of the US toward the impending invasion of Russia's neighbors to the West -- a conflict undertaken on the part of Russia to assert its dominance over a country and people that outside of a few pockets had exhibited a troubling tendency-- openly and clandestinely encouraged by US and other Western alliance officials and operatives-- to list westward in its orientation for most of its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992 while Russia, in contrast, was increasingly marginalized.  The day that Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden explained gratuitously that sanctions imposed on Russia prior to its invasion were not intended to prevent the war but to send a message to those most hurt by them, not the oligarchs or those planning for the invasion but the Russian people, that Putin by being the cause of the sanctions was the cause of their misery.  The war was not a thing the US was determined to avoid -- it was the point.  

"For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said of Putin in remarks in Poland a month into the Russian president's war against neighboring Ukraine over the latter's suppression of pro-Russian factions in the Donbas region and its stated intentions to join NATO.  As an opinion, Biden's remarks are unremarkable, but as executive of the American project, his thoughts are the seeds of history.  As it turned out they were more intemperate than the national security establishment was prepared for and had to be walked back in an op-ed column signed by the president in the New York Times Many Americans I'm sure share the sentiment as Biden originally expressed it-- I've had it myself once or twice.  But why Putin and not Netanyahu or Muhammad bin Salman?  The answer is obvious considering the sameness of US national security apparatus objectives at least since the end of World War II-- because Israel and Saudi Arabia do not threaten or reject the dominance of America and its closest  and most similar European allies over global affairs like Putin and Russia do.

Is Ukraine fighting a proxy war against Russia for the US and its NATO allies?  Since at least 2015 the CIA has trained Ukrainian special forces in undisclosed locations of the south -- not southern Ukraine, but Southern USA--  on countering a Russian invasion.  Is this evidence of incredible foresight or has something else been going on?  

To Ukrainians and Russians immiserated by it, the war is immediate and real.  To the US military and diplomatic apparatus which did little to prevent it and has done virtually nothing to try to bring it to an end, it is a boon to munitions suppliers and military advisers, whose bread and butter for once comes without a cost of American lives, and therefore with even less friction than usual from the yard sign contingent.  If Russia won quickly as many in the American establishment claimed to believe would happen or if Ukraine could muster a protracted resistance to drain Putin's treasury as long as possible, what did it matter to the US?  Considering the entrenched apparently unconditional involvement of American interests in Ukraine leading up to and since the February invasion, why does no one in the American national security establishment seem able to articulate what we envision as a satisfactory end of the conflict-- and why do so few Americans seem to care?

I wonder if others who have tried their hand at writing about the Ukraine war as critics (and not as journalists) have like me struggled to get beneath the surface of what can be gleaned by the most carefully worded google searches, or discussed at high volume at a depth of mere inches on 24 hours news channels, or pre-digested and regurgitated to us from the pages of newspapers and magazines and joked about on late night talk shows.  Do they know that Boris Johnson talked Volodymir Zelensky into abandoning productive peace talks with Russia mediated by Turkey in April in spite of a substantial list of agreed upon points reportedly because "Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end"?  Do they recall  US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time those talks ended stated American objectives in Ukraine as being to prolong the war to the point of exhausting Russian conventional military capabilities? Are they aware that Amnesty International has reported that Ukraine is violating International humanitarian law by placing military installations in heavily populated civilian areas and launching attacks that endanger those populations from Russian artillery responses?    Are they aware that since April, 66 UN member nations representing most of the world's population have called on those involved to end the war; that events on the ground reflect Biden's off the cuff remarks and  contradict the words of his May editorial?  Are they aware that the narrative of the war is being cleansed in real time by those reporting on it (if it even breaks through the wall of what is officially allowed to be said)?  As Patrick Lawrence says in the Scheerpost essay linked to above:

All correspondents bring their politics with them... This is a natural thing, a good thing, an affirmation of their engaged, civic selves not at all to be regretted. The task is to manage your politics in accord with your professional responsibilities, the unique place correspondents occupy in public space. There can be no confusing journalism and activism. You do your best to keep your biases, political proclivities, prejudices... out of the files you send your foreign desk.... We are not getting this from the Western correspondents reporting in Ukraine for mainstream media. You may associate the error of mistaking journalism for activism with independent publications, and ... [i]t happens. The truth here is that almost all mainstream journalists reporting from Ukraine are guilty of this... They are effectively activists in the cause of the American national security state, its campaign against Russia, and Washington’s latter-day effort to defend its primacy.

Putin's war is unjust and brutal; ordinary Ukrainians have no choice but to raise resistance to it, and yet, the war could have been avoided, and failing that the US -- whose response has been to provide virtually unlimited and unconditional material and strategic support to Ukraine in the conduct of their resistance-- could have been and should now be engaged in efforts to bring the war to a conclusion. We should be skeptical of the motives of a national security apparatus that enables genocide in Yemen, cultivates repression in Haiti, ignores apartheid in Israel, sides with anti-democratic forces in country after country in Latin America, that is known to have trained and supported anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan only to have to war against them 20 years later and in keeping with the pursuit of a hostile course intended to surround and economically isolate its former cold war adversary Russia, has had its fingers in Ukrainian affairs ever since that country's independence.  The fact that we are not yet actively engaged in hand to hand combat with Russians is not reason to unqualifiedly support our efforts materially or advisory in the present conflict.  While Russia's actions in Ukraine are a travesty and must be stopped, 1)  What exactly is the problem with proposing peace talks as a way to do that?; and 2) While waiting for the moment when negotiating for peace is actually ok to hope for, why should we not engage skepticism about the aims of US involvement and about the further extension East of  unlimited American hegemony?

Weaponizing Ukraine because we are not there is seen as the right thing to do when technically what we are doing is having Ukraine do our battle for us. Which is fine with Russia since they would rather kill Ukrainians as substitutes for us since there are few consequences risked than there would be killing Americans.  Similar wars take place daily online. Occasionally they spill over into the real world as when right cultish hecklers show up at town halls of congress people to voice histrionic opposition to votes taken or not taken.  But these are done for the cameras of social media and the effect they have is proxy flame wars online.

People fight each other on social media in place of making actual change.  This is an excellent way the system has devised to keep us on our asses in front of our computers at odds with each other instead of in the streets making noise together.  But while we are engaged online, we believe ourselves to be doing something.  Occasionally, in the cause of something bigger like Medicare for All, someone might urge others on line to tweet at a famous politician, preferably of the left, ideally of a squad in order to threaten them into action toward a long dreamed for policy change-- say a force of a vote on Medicate for All.  The tweet starts out as being about Medicare for All but rapidly degenerates into a battle between ostensible allies over tactics. Actions taken in the flesh and blood world are done for twitter ratios. 

AOC was publicly challenged on her votes to fund US military and advisory support of Ukraine and she needed to be, and her recent confronters at a town hall meeting in the Bronx had me with them until they mentioned the very problematic and non-voting ex-congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (the opposite of a model of purity) as a counterpoint.  They turned out to be adherents of the very bizarre, necrophiliac cryptofascistic LaRouche movement. Why must everything nowadays be filtered through some sectarian lens?  Why must we establish our corners before we can even hope to come to common cause on issues that should be accumulating solidarity rather serving as prisms of our differences?  Why is so much effort on the left from every corner expended on how correctly the most progressive members of Congress behave, and not at all on those who will never behave?  I suspect it's because we are too close to a tipping point for the neoliberal order.  We thwart our own progress because we are terrified of success.

Not all proxy wars are bad.  Two climate activists in London startled the world by tomato souping Van Gogh's very pricy piece Sunflowers and then supergluing themselves to the National Gallery walls to protest Big oil production. What did Sunflowers have to do with anything?  As a solitary act it was shocking and seemed unnecessary. On the other hand, was it?  Compared to the crisis we are facing that no one seems to be doing anything about?  As a solitary act, a single world famous very expensive painting assaulted with tomato soup seems anomalous and paltry and unfair.  But imagine if this became a daily thing.  Imagine if painting after paintng, Guernica, the Mona Lisa, American Gothic, Whistler's Mother, Stuart's portrait of George Washington, preferably those in private collections-- every day a new familiar bauble were to be splashed.  Would capital start listening?

My intentions are good

Ten people asked me today, "How are you?"  Did you ever notice how many states are uncomfortable?  And I’m not talking Abalama.  But seriously, how often is the answer to the "How are you?" question, “Comfortable”.   How about itchy, sore, nervous, anxious, annoyed, hungry, full, hot, cold, tepid, bored, horny.  Because if you were comfortable you wouldn't have need of so many other words to describe your state.  In conversation, I find it best not to go down the road of truth if you don't enjoy the podium.*   So "Fine" is the only strategically prudent answer.

In truth, I haven't been myself lately.  Unless myself is a depressed malcontent.  In which case, I've been the same as usual. No one really wants to know the truth anyway. 

Why  is it that human interactions so rarely go well for me. Embarrassment, miscommunication, being taken advantage of, missed opportunity, infinite boring tangents, unsolicited lecturing. These are many of the most likely outcomes of almost any interaction-- even the most trivial interactions with people I've never met and will never see again.  It seems to me.  Am I right?  I'm always tempted to think I don't belong in public.  I have been told I'm reserved.  Could that be the problem?

Not like the public space is lacking anything on my account.  Although mask requirements (and even mask suggestions) are being lifted across the country and our president has declared the COVID crisis over, I'm still wearing a mask in public.  If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would never have pegged me for the type.   'He's too self-conscious,' I would have thought.  'He'd rather not stick out.' Outside of major metropolitan areas (also known as germ incubators) I'm in fact more inclined to go with the flow which seems to be an embrace of masklessness, but on my own turf (a major metropolitan area) I surprise myself by not giving a fuck what other people think.  I fantasize about what I would say if I were bullied by some strange asshole who decided to be offended enough by my precaution to openly challenge me on mask-wearing.  I like the idea of pulling down the mask,  violently hacking in his face, and then politely explaining, "I have ebola."

You see, Jayden (for that's the name of the out-of-towner who confronts me about mask wearing in my fantasy), I don't wear a mask for political reasons.  I'm not a fan of performative gestures and that includes performative mask wearing to demonstrate your contempt for Trump as well as performative non-mask wearing to demonstrate your contempt for public health officials  (and I'm no great fan of either).  

True, I barely wear it for health reasons anymore anyway.  As it happens I discovered a comfort level, a commitment to the bubble in wearing a mask.  And part of the comfort is an absence of a need to explain it to anyone. Least of all Jayden.  People do suck.  How can they not see that.  If only they could see what I see they would realize that, the motherfuckers. If people only knew what dumasses they were being, Twitter would be a very quiet place.  The world would be beautiful.  And if people knew who to thank for suddenly being able to see their own dumassery you and I would get the thanks and appreciation we deserve.

I miss quarantine.  So maybe mask wearing for me is just one of my many out of date fashions.

~~~~

Post Script: I wrote this a while ago.  In the interim, a sore throat that had been bothering me for a few days prompted me to test myself for COVID.  Mask wearer though I am, I tested positive.  Trust me, if a masked vaxed hermit can get COVID when the COVID crisis is over, anyone can.

~~~~

* On the other hand, complaint is the stuff of inspiration for a compulsive blogger who has forced a monthly quota on himself.  Apologies.

Good grief

Hugging Faces' Stable Diffusion image of "Skyscraper rising over jungle 1950's paperback style"

Phil Edwards is a video producer at Vox who made a recent You Tube video on his personal channel called "I found the perfect metaphor for AI Art" that is getting some views.  The preponderance of videos on AI art are evangelistic demonstrations of its mushrooming proficiency, made by mostly enthusiastic embracers of it, and are presented-- with very little skepticism or curiosity (or certainly information) about the workings of it-- for the benefit of would-be users.  Phil Edwards' video is for the rest of us. The borrowed analogy referred to in the title, which Edwards sweetens with Dad humor, is to the history of lace making, a highly skilled and specialized human art form developed in 16th century Northern Europe, the practice of which was assumed in the Industrial Age almost entirely by machinery. In the process lace was transformed from a rare luxury commodity prized and enjoyed almost exclusively by the wealthiest to a material widely available and affordable to all with a loss of quality according to Edwards discernible only to the most careful observers.  

Let's set aside the possible objection that Edwards's characterization of the differences between machine-made and human-made lace as trivial is perhaps a bit too eagerly dismissive (and his acceptance of the coming analogous comparison of AI generated art to human art a bit hasty).  AI is expected by experts to be commandeering computer graphic design in very short order in a very similar fashion.  For the time being still the domain of highly skilled and talented humans, AI generated design, Edwards says will sooner than we think dominate the field of art, obviating the need for multitudes of highly trained professionals for what has until now been assumed by those not paying close attention to be an exclusively human function.

He then proposes that as with lace making, we prepare ourselves for the coming transition from almost exclusively human produced computer graphics to nearly complete domination of the field by computers by thinking of it as a process of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief: First Denial (This can't be happening!),  then Anger (I'll be damned if this is happening!), Bargaining (I'll give you a dollar if this doesn't happen!), Depression (I guess no one but me cares that this is happening.) and finally, Acceptance (Oh well!).  If you think about it Edwards is urging Acceptance of the victim's death before the murder has happened.

I confess to some major skepticism about the capabilities that AI programs are exhibiting in the generation of original images.  Are we comfortable it's not just diffuse mechanized collage, if not plagiarism?  From my vantage given that they begin from phrases typed into a text box to the results of image searches presented in a graphically coherent meta-image I can’t get over the hump of thinking that even if I didn’t find it basically hideous to look at for the most part, it’s offensive to me that I'm basically being urged in the video to just accept that it is close to being “good enough” that there can be any sort of recovery of what is lost when it comes to dominate the visual aspect of what we produce and consume from now on.  Make no mistake, owing to simple economics combined with the dearth of imagination, will and character of those who commission art,  AI generated art (much of it as cheaply and thoughtfully made as Dollar Store lace) will become the dominant visual force whether we accept it or not.  And for that reason we will accept it due to inoculation by visual overload which will result in an erosion and atrophy of our will to fight it long before the opportunity to reject it has expired.  And then we’ll just wonder how our souls are being sucked, being no longer able to recognize the oppressive dissatisfaction of our visual yearnings in spite of the assault of artificiality of everything we look at.

Phil Edwards seems to be a journalist and it's tempting to take at face value that his voice is authoritative on the subject of the video.  And perhaps it is. Nevertheless it's easy to overlook the fact (a fact which is utterly absent from every corner of  the video) that acceptance is a choice.  It just happens to be the choice that the perpetrators of AI on the public would prefer we all make.

Proper skepticism here and here.

Little Victories

Giorgia Meloni-- co-founding member of the Brothers of Italy, a far right nationalist, anti-immigation, traditional values party with fascist roots in the ultra-national groups she has been a member of since childhood, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and an exponent of replacement theory-- who is expected to soon become the next prime minister of Italy may not technically be a fascist if you are a stickler for these things. (According to the Italian observer at the link, she's more of a contemporary American Republican if you care to cull out a distinction from that).   But I could not help but be amused by Hillary Clinton's assessment of the prospect of Meloni-- a euro-sceptical, climate skeptical, anti-abortion, pro traditional family proponent-- as Prime Minister of Italy,  to wit: "Every time a woman is elected to head of state or government, that is a step forward."* 

The icing on the cake was seeing that Glenn Greenwald, in making a valid point critiquing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden's promise to sanction Italy if it elected Meloni democratically, prefaced his tweet with an utterly vapid characterization of Meloni's significance through an anodyne Clinton-esque lens of identity: "Italy is on the verge of an election that will result in its first-ever female Prime Minister."  He later took pleasure in a tweet mocking Clinton's clueless second wave feminist take by rubbing her face in how Meloni's politics threaten the neoliberal world Clinton helped make. Erstwhile leftists Jimmy "Force the Vote" Dore and Jackson "MAGA Communism" Hinkle likewise expressed their approval for Meloni on different grounds, anti-vax sympathies in the case of Dore and performative anti-globalism in Hinkle's case.  

Harbinger of neoliberalism's long overdue death though it may be, the prospect of Meloni deepening Europe's ultra-rightward drift is disheartening to me at best.  And yet, churl that I am, I do take a perverted pleasure in the way in which Dore, Hinkle, Greenwald and Clinton team up for a chorus of twisted amens about her ascent, and in the process offer an unsolicited, free quartet of rare glimpses into the usually well-hidden logical conclusions of their steadfast commitments to their latest stunted ideologies, schemes, compulsions and predilections.

Granted, I have filtered the foregoing through my own years long struggle to reconcile my gut dislike of all of the aforementioned with the dribs and drabs of their collective output (minus Hinkle) that has occasionally challenged me in the past even when they did not accidentally overlap with my own in enough particulars.  It was a clarifying moment for me though, in a week of clarifying moments.  

Another came in reading a review of Steve Bannon's favorite Putin influencer Aleksandr Dugin's latest book by an anti-globalist conservative eloquently articulating the reasons for his endorsement of Dugin's views on what the neoliberal order should be replaced with that gets at the heart of where I part with those who the aforementioned erstwhile leftists urge solidarity with in the project of finishing off our common foes.  In his very reasoned and meticulous analysis of Dugin's critique of Davos culture and transhumanist Big Tech, the author demonstrates to me how in making common cause with anti-globalist "populist" right movements to topple the neoliberal order, the left risks echoing the outcome of the red-brown alliance in Weimar Germany in 1933.  These people may want the same fate for the current power structure that we do, but in terms of what comes next, they are absolutely not the allies of any who want freedom for all from want, from repression, from a doomed future for the species and the planet and for all of us to be able to live our lives in peace to our full capacities and desires.†  We should not be tailing the masses being seduced into allowing if not outright supporting a worldview even more repressive (if possible) (and it is possible) than the one we are in.  We should be leading and encouraging people to support an entirely new world of all of our making.

Finally, a friend shared with me a post  I may not have seen otherwise by Cory Doctorow at pluralistic.net "Federalist Society v Corporate Personhood" that abounded in very relevant illuminating insights about left and right that I will carry with me and for a long time.  For starters, quoting a Raw Timber commenter named Frank Wilhoit (but apparently not that Francis Wilhoit):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

Another quote further on: 

Leftists have an ideology – Steven Brust says, "if you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're on the left; if you think property right are human rights, you're on the right – but the left understands this ideology as connected to, arising from, and mobilized by the material conditions of its adherents. 

 And another:

As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, the goal of the right is to create hierarchies in which the "best people" get to boss everyone else around. Christian Dominionists want to put men in charge of women and children; libertarians want to put bosses in charge of workers, imperialists want to put America in charge of other countries, racists want to put white people in charge of racialized people.

And a pithy diagnosis of one of the recurring strains in the culture wars:

Racism is an ideology – a terrible one – but increases and decreases in racism track to material anxieties, not better argument. Trump didn't make your uncle into an obsessive racism hobbyist with brilliant logic. He did it by linking your uncle's material anxieties to racist explanations.

My pessimism about the future based on the prospects for meaningful change for the many given the maddeningly reactionary trending of our politics as characterized most recently by events in Italy is severe.  I have spent an inordinate amount of the past 2 and a half years  in fruitless search of a successor to the project of the defeated Sanders campaign and been frustrated again and again by the chaotic state of discourse on the left.  My recent readings have not changed any of that.  But I may have found something I've been missing for the most part-- some validation that my naive belief in a better world is based on a solid foundation.  I am an island in an ocean of quicksand.  But maybe I'm that much more confident in my perception that some of these loudest most repulsive voices on the ostensible left that have been threatening to completely disillusion and dismay me for the past couple of years are not providing the alternative they profess to be; that my reluctance to hop aboard their train isn’t as much about the steadfastness of my reluctance as it is about the shoddiness of their train.  Confirmation of this arriving in snippets from beyond my horizon gives me some small hope that somewhere out there beyond the noisy demoralizing distraction, I cannot be alone in wanting better.  It's not much, but it's something.

 ~~~~~

* By this logic it's the same reaction she would have had if in the alternate reality of 2008, duly elected Vice President Sarah Palin was inaugurated as the US's first woman president following the untimely death of President John McCain in that administration's second term.

† It did have some very good advice for any movement that wants to succeed in building solidarity to accomplish its goals: Resist the temptation (so prevalent in leftist discourse in particular these days) to fight.  Discuss instead.  My suspicion is that taking this to heart is not only the biggest obstacle we have to getting the future we want, but perhaps the surest way for the left to find out who its real enemies are and who its soldiers will be in the process.