Tinfoil Hat Territory

Landscape - Ivan Rabuzin (1960)

Ready for a crackpot conspiracy theory?  I have one!  Two years ago, it was Critical Race Theory.  Last year, it was Gender affirming care and Trans Rights.   This year it's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  It's as if every year about this time, some council decides what diversionary tactic is going to be used this year to keep the heat off of endtimes capitalism as the major culprit in its own and our society's death. That might be just a little bit nutty, but to really slather on the almond sauce, what if the same neoliberal forces of the elite that introduce these concepts to the corporate workplace and to our national discourse-- the convenient nebulous scapegoat of the populistic rightist social media bloviation machine as well as their tailers on the horseshoe left-- are in fact actually in cahoots with those who annually seek some new ruse to rile up and muddy the waters with?  What if namby pamby liberal neoliberalism is itself a plot of the far right-- the avant garde for the development and testing of loathsomely performative and transparently self-serving versions of legitimate leftist theory and concerns.  No neoliberal has to actually believe in the ostentatiously obnoxious albeit toothless formulations of social justice that they are creating additions to the C-Suite for in order to implement, just as no mouth-foaming conservative talking head has to actually believe that the latest liberal fad has anything to do with the deterioration of standards in the pursuit of corporate profit.  All that is needed is a steady supply of fodder for the diversionary spectacle of rightwing blather and an army of loudmouths to highjack the conversation with it. 

Frankly, with DEI, I think they have hit the bottom of the barrel-- or certainly jumped the shark.   DEI is being blamed on the right for the rash of safety failures on airplanes in flight and now for the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.  In both cases, the company at fault (Boeing in the first case, Maersk in the second) has demonstrably put profits over safety -- the new American way-- explicitly cutting corners for the bottom line for their shareholders, and in each case, right on cue the right-wing talk machine has chimed in in unison to divert attention from the true cause to DEI as what is behind the decline in quality.  "What?!" you may well ask.  Elon Musk tried to explain the ruse in his recent contentious conversation with Don Lemon in the fifteen minutes of their public association before Musk booted Lemon's new venture off of his platform.  Two more perfect representatives of the bloviating right and the simpering neoliberal left respectively could hardly be imagined.  In this frustrating exchange (which I've extracted and edited for space), Lemon unfortunately interrupts Musk at the point at which his badgering questioning gets closest to getting Musk to having to put his money where his mouth is (bolded and italicized below):

Don Lemon (45:59): Okay, so listen. After the door blew off this midflight and this Alaskan airline flight, do you remember that you responded [with] a post claiming that the average HBCU grad was less intelligent than the average airline pilot and stated that it will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE? I don’t know if you… misspelled it on purpose, which should be DEI. Do you believe that women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?
Elon Musk (46:37):  No. I’m just saying that we should not lower the standards for them.
Don Lemon (46:41): Okay. But there’s no evidence that standards are being lowered when it comes to the airline industry.  
Elon Musk (47:00):  The incentive structure I believe at Boeing changed to include DEI as a fundamental executive incentive, but in my view, it should be purely about passenger safety.
Don Lemon (48:06):  Okay, but do you understand how by saying just that standards are being lowered, that you’re implying that they’re being lowered because people are less skilled and less intelligent and you’re talking about people of color and or women?
Elon Musk (48:24): Look, I’m saying we should not lower standards, that’s it.
Don Lemon (48:33): But you’re implying that they’re lowering standards because of people of color or women because someone is not a white male. You’re saying that they’re less skilled and less intelligent, that’s what you’re saying?
Elon Musk (48:42):  No, I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that they are-
Don Lemon (48:43): Then why would they be lowering the standards?
Elon Musk (48:45):  I don’t know. Why are they lowering the standards?
Don Lemon (49:01): Well, you’re saying that the standards are being lowered because of certain people. You don’t believe in DEI, right? Do you not believe in diversity, equity and inclusion?
Elon Musk (50:17): Like I said, my view is that the only basis for promoting somebody should be [their] skills, talents, and their integrity. And that’s it.

What Musk meant to say was that the performative promotion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a company that hires pilots or engineers who are not white males gives cover to the bigot in all of us to overlook the profit incentive as what is behind the lowering of safety and quality standards of American corporations in late stage capitalism. The beauty of the trick is taking a problem that any two observers can agree on (the decline of quality and safety in capitalist enterprises) and tarnishing a handy liberal project (the promotion of diversity in boardrooms and in the workplace) with it by eliding a spurious association.  The outrageous non sequitur nature of it demands a change in subject from the problem that can be agreed on to the spurious association that can only inspire intense wheel-spinning debate.  

Both sides of the debate are happy!  Meanwhile, actual critical race theory, actual trans rights and healthcare, and actual diversity equality and inclusion are weakened and diminished by being on the receiving end of attacks for the sins of the ersatz corporate versions of them.   And the swelling of corporate coffers and the decline of safety and standards continues apace.

A Good Life

I don't mean to be an ingrate.  I have a lovely wife and a wonderful daughter.  I live in a good enough house in a nice enough town.  I have a job that pays nearly well enough and that I could possibly eventually retire from if I live long enough and they don't decide they don't need me. I have a hobby that keeps me somewhat active and that could occasionally even be considered rewarding in itself. I have a nice dog and two delightful cats.  I have health.  I have a good enough life. 

But do I have a good life?  Does anyone?  Is a good life possible in our present circumstances.

Our society is such that in order for most to have a good life-- let's define it as a rich, rewarding life free of worry and care-- we have to do harm.  If more than enough money is the minimum requirement for a good life (and it's not clear that it alone is), then we either have to have more money than we know what to do with or we have to need less than most people need.  If we have more than enough money, wealth and goods, we have necessarily in this economy starved someone else to get it.  Capitalism depends on most people not having enough to live on.  In times of crisis this becomes explicit as our economic ministers openly devise policies to inflict pain at the overpopulated bottom of the pyramid so that ease continues flowing to the narrow top.  This is the gushing up reality that gives the lie to The Trickle Down Theory.  They do this by making living more expensive for the property-poor or by making ways to earn a living more scarce or more meager. 

Even in good economic times for most, when the truly miserable shut-outs of society are fewer, the cheap material effects of a good enough life in the wealthiest lands of the planet are made from the blood and ruin of the most immiserated and exploited parts of the world that we are privileged not to see. Blindness to the violence that makes even our modest comfort possible is a luxury and the prerogative of the Free. But the harm we do without lifting a finger has ways of intruding on our consciousness from time to time-- in the increase in extraordinary life threatening weather events, in the proliferation of random shootings and terror, in the massing of migrants seeking refuge at our borders, in the wars and conflagrations in distant places that we hear about on the news or that our leaders too frequently engage us in.  In this world, it's a luxury to preoccupy ourselves with cancel culture and wokeness.  But we have to preoccupy ourselves with silliness to distract us from the lie we all live: that if we are not living the good life it is by choice and not by the violence enforced  inequalities built into our system.

We seem to have strayed far afield from our original question, but I would argue that the system that depends on the misery of the many makes a good life for any but a very few out of the question.  Who are the few?  Is it those at the top who inflict misery on the rest?  Is it those in the middle who live a good enough life thanks to the meager graces of the few at the top and the invisible misery of the many at the bottom?  It is neither of these.  It is rather the unicorns who need less than most people need and have the means to get it.  For some people-- perhaps for you, dear reader if you are deeply satisfied with your life and not merely deluded or consciously unconscious about the casual harm that is required of others for you to be so-- it is a disposition.  To give an extreme example, it might be the bohemian who doesn't need to possess or consume something to be enriched by it, who somehow always has enough money to get by without selling her soul to a career or a job, who feels passionately and engages in causes and activities and creativities that give to the world.  Or it could simply be the person who has the most modest of needs that are easily met and a place in his community. 

A good life it seems to me is one that does not begrudge or preclude a good life for others.  And this is the main point I would like to make today.  In our current system of economics and politics, we do not center our concerns around the ability of people to have a good life.  In fact, too often, the inequalities of our way of life require us to lie to ourselves about the culpability that people have for their own quality of life.  We pretend that those worse off than us have chosen their misery even though if we examine our own life it should be abundantly clear that our comfort was chosen for us and that maintaining it has forced a meanness on the way we conduct ourselves and a smallness in the pursuit of our goals that is preoccupied with adherence to the shallow values of an artificially unequal society imposed from above on all of us.   

A society that is not about securing a good life for all of its citizens--not just for the "right kind" of citizen-- isn't worth a damn.  By this criterion, it should be obvious to all but the willfully self-deluded that the one we live in, as expensive and gaudy and daunting as it is is a worthless shameful sham.  We could go a long way toward redeeming ourselves by doing whatever it takes-- even increasing the misery at the top; they can afford it-- to ensure the basics for all citizens: good meaningful work in a democratic workplace when we need it at not just a living wage but a "good living" wage; health care on demand; as much quality education as we need and want; a home that doesn't bankrupt us; abundant means of public transportation; art, science and technology for all of us; bridges that don't collapse when they bump up against the forces of capitalism.   Paid in advance by each of us for all of us so it's there when we need it.  To enable this will undoubtedly take some major adjustments to our political system.  We could start with some tweaks to the current system: setting limits on the terms of all public officials; removing obstacles to democracy such as the electoral college in order to make our choices at the voting booth a reflection of the popular vote;  installing a more parliamentary form of government with more voter-responsive parties that would force the make-up of our legislative bodies to be a reflection of the vote rather than a winner-take-all farce in which the losing party gets no representation.  Or we could cut to the chase and replace our current system with one of sortition in which our representatives are selected randomly by lot from among all of us for short, non-consecutive terms.  Whatever we do, we must do something if we are to begin the road to redemption.

When the needs of the many are no longer knobs for the few to play with in order to ensure the fulfillments of their own many wants, but rather the shared concern of all, the question of what is a good life reverts to the one living it.

Pendulum Ride

I was recently watching Glenn Greenwald (of System Update) and Matt Taibbi (of the Twitter Files) talking  about :"why free speech has become a right wing issue".  I’m a masochist is why.  The conversation was occasioned by the Supreme Court's recent surprising indication in oral arguments to Murtha v Missouri that it could be favorable to letting the government freely communicate its displeasure about content on social media platforms with the Big Tech companies that run them. At first, it seemed to me that Greenwald and Taibbi were as usual eliding the fact that these platforms are not public entities, not even traditional businesses but something new entirely*,  and that the relationship of the government to Big Tech is deeply contractual. In other words, Elon Musk doesn’t need the CDC to tell him to boot someone off of X for speech he doesn't like, and if it does he’s free to ignore it, but he might find it in his interest to do so if he wants to continue to receive public funding for his ventures.  In my view there is no one to root for in this scenario.  The hypothetical anti-vax poster’s speech that is offensive to the federal agency was never free, it was always donated nonchalantly to Twitter which could always do as it pleased with it (and often did.)  (Note: I'm being hypothetical.  Any similarity to the actual case before the SCOTUS would be coincidental.)  It just mystifies me (not) how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, beneficiaries of the largesse of Big Tech billionaires, worry us with this stuff but have nothing to say† about for instance Tennessee making it an offense punishable by a $1-$5 million fine for a teacher employed by any school system to discuss race, sex or class in a classroom setting in any way that offends a white male student (read: at all).

Having now watched the whole conversation, and read the NY Times article they discuss and Taibbi’s response to it, I concede the value of the main point they want to express which has not nothing but less to do with the fact of government insinuation into Big Tech’s affairs (contra my first critique of it) than with the nature of what government officials are interfering about.  I.e., Greenwald and Taibbi are not on about the government officials (or ex-officials sock-puppeting for the deep state) leaning on Twitter executives to remove disinformation about Russian interference in US elections or about COVID health precautions and statistics-- they’re trying to draw focus on the government declaring its officials experts on  “disinformation” and arbiters of what to do with it.  Unwanted speech is protected; “disinformation” being the purview of experts is certified not to be.  

Their point about “liberals” (by which they mean not just neoliberal government officials and the deep state but also the anti-Trump left) is that labelling unwanted speech “disinformation” gives cover to allow censorship.  Liberals are all for censorship if it hurts Trump.  Trump is bad because he somehow slipped through the cracks to become president-- thanks to strategically welling popular support in just the right places-- and subverted the neoliberal agenda.  As continuous with the neo-liberal establishment as his first term wound up being,  there’s no guarantee his second term will continue to be (strong signs indicate that it won’t), and as much as I truly fear what a second Trump term portends and for that reason will do at least the bare minimum I can to avoid it (which could at this point even be just not moving to a swing state and voting against Biden), I think Greenwald and Taibbi are right to point out the troubling nature of government (and mainstream media; and citizens sympathetic to the status quo) practicing a new framework for censorship and thought control.  I don’t want to give them credit beyond this, but I think this is significant credit that they deserve. 

They mostly refer to the would be thought police as “liberals”-- at least Greenwald does.  But he also repeats that by not opposing this sleight of hand that turns unwanted speech into “disinformation” the left cedes Free Speech advocacy to the right.  He compares the state of things 20 years ago when Noam Chomsky led the charge to defend the right of Nazis to deny the holocaust against the FBI which was criticized for interfering, to today when the Twitter files are called a "nothingburger" and liberals clamor for their government to police their social media platforms into banning Trumpist disinformation.  Greenwald sees the main conflict today as being not between right and left but rather as between the separate sides of those inside or on the side of the liberal Beltway establishment (the perpetrators of this harm to freedom of speech and thought) and those outside and opposed to it.

Having conceded their point, I have swung back a bit this way on the value of this discourse -- actually I’m trying to sort out the mess.  One thing you’ll note about free speech.  The people we’re most often compelled to have to protect are basically saying unwanted, odious speech-- i.e., right wing talking points (frequently expressed as perverted subversions of valid leftist arguments), racist, sexist, homophobic, classist porn, or corporate lies.  Much disinformation is paid for by right wing think tanks expressly to mislead and obfuscate and undermine the spread of leftist ideas.  So we rarely find either Greenwald or Taibbi vociferously attacking the government or right wing media for the way it treats speech from the actual left-- basically shunting it to dark unseen corners when it’s not dismissing, mischaracterizing, vilifying, missing the point or advocating for (and often succeeding at) banning it.  Both former heros and allies are 100% of the time now critiquing the left (barely concealed behind the slur of “The Liberals”) for the authoritarianism that is actually actively being crusaded for by the most nefarious elements of the right--- many of whom fund the outlets for such critiques of the left as Greenwald and Taibbi provide.  So Greenwald saying it’s not right v left but inside v outside when he is 100% of the time attacking the left is infuriating.  

However!1  The New York Times article they were discussing was absolutely pushing a false narrative about Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files --i.e., that Taibbi found and reported no government collusion with Twitter execs to censor tweets among the Twitter files until March 2023 when he met the Trumpist crackpot conspiracy theorist (or propagandist) Mike Benz who has lately been pushing the Taylor Swift hysteria shortly before Taibbi's testimony before Congress about the Twitter files, with the insinuation that Benz must have planted the idea of government collusion.  As I vividly remember, the government collusion angle was in Taibbi's Twitter file reporting early on, in December 2022, so the NYT is just wrong about that (and almost certainly knows it).  Plus the same article, as Greenwald very capably demonstrates, repeatedly bemoans the caution with which government disinformation specialists now have to proceed since the Twitter files were exposed and the deleterious effect it has had on the government’s ability to stay ahead of disinformation on social media.  It’s actually disgusting frankly.  

Like I say, there are no good guys.  Or rather the good guys are shut out of the conversation.  But I would like to remind us that the already free don't need freedom.  It's the rest of us who could use some liberation.

~~~~~

*  YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Substack, Rumble, Racket, Bluesky, etc are not public squares where speech must not be infringed.  They are “marketplaces of ideas”-- and not in any good way.  They are at best imperfect restricted spaces where speech is heavily regulated by market forces.   (They’re actually queen bees whose users and visitors are slaves willfully creating their value for them without their having to do jack diddly.)

† Taibbi at least is happy to talk about how the right should fine tune its attack on woke education if it wants to be less buffoonish.

Room for Improvement

Another in a series of examples of facts lying around deliberately unseen...

Capitalism is often presented, even by anti-capitalists, as the system of production and distribution whose perfection was forged by centuries of progress, whose emergence across Europe from the cocoon of the pre-capitalist marketplace was a pinnacle of human discovery-- in a time of decreasing evidence of heavenly insinuation into daily human affairs, an advanced and worthy object of devotion*-- made possible by advances in human knowledge and technology that unfettered capitalism from the mere potentiality inherent in the market.  

The story that Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism tells, based as it is on a study of the facts is quite different and to my mind, far more plausible.  While the market always existed, it was historically used primarily for luxuries,  for trade of resources originating in one part of the world for resources plentiful in another, and for artisanal goods and crafts.  The explosion of mercantilism in the 17th century that brought wealth and maritime adventurism to the Netherlands was not and did not engender capitalism according to Wood.  Instead, capitalism had its origins in agriculture in England.  

The twin engines of this innovation were the two innocuous sounding concepts of enclosure and improvement.  Under feudalism, peasants lived on and worked the land for themselves.  Annually they were taxed a portion of their yield to the king or local lord for the privilege of keeping their kneecaps intact.  By the sixteenth century, this had changed as the practice of enclosure in which -- under the auspices of government and with the aid of government forces-- common lands were sealed off from the peasants who had worked them as a concept of property ownership caught vogue among the idle upper classes.  Now, the right to work and live off of arable land had to be leased from a landlord, forcing all but the most successful farmers into homeless vagrancy. In order to remain viable as tenants of the land, farmers engaged in a process of "improvement"-- literally devising ways to increase the profitability of the land through greater yields with less labor.  This drove the search for better technology, and for the first time markets for the sale of factory farm-produced crops and meat.  

The peasantry that was driven from the common lands, now homeless and impoverished was forced into cities where they were now required to sell their labor in return for meager sustenance  (procured now exclusively from the marketplace) and cramped shelter in vast tenements.  The production of food needed to live was thereby taken from the masses and given to a class of agrarian capitalist.  The locus for the procurement of food was now transferred from one's own garden to the marketplace, which became also the primary seller of all household goods, such as pottery and clothing, now manufactured in the largely urban enterprises that hired the landless masses. 

The transition from feudalism to capitalism gave England an edge in the international trade of goods that had to be maintained by transplanting the agrarian revolution to Ireland and other overseas colonies; moreover it raised the stakes on the continent to follow England's lead with varying degrees of difficulty and success. In time, the capitalist forces and relations of production, circulation and reproduction were everywhere. The priorities of the owning and political classes became centered the world over on profit, and capital "improvement".  As Wood notes at the conclusion of her history,

Then there are the corollaries of ‘improvement’: productivity and the ability to feed a vast population set against the subordination of all other considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people who could be fed are often left to starve. There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers. The ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.

Capitalists have claimed the Enlightenment for capitalism, but Wood, without going into a lot of detail puts this notion to bed, saying that although capitalist England contributed to the enlightenment (via Newton, Bacon and Locke in particular) it was basically a product of the non-capitalist continent, which is why its most salient values-- individual freedom and rationality-- have little to do with business and more to do with human progress.  In fact, the consequences and prerequisites of capitalism-- inequality, growth for growth’s sake, poverty and homelessness-- are antithetical to enlightenment values. The whole book is basically a reminder that capitalism is just a societal organization that originated as an accommodation to the particular circumstances of an insular European province, that then trended-- not the apotheosis of human history.  The trick for all of us (and it’s a tough one unfortunately) is extracting the world from the organization that capitalism requires.

~~~~~

* See The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher.

Free Won't

Abridged from https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner (click image to enlarge)

As it happens, the book I am reading about Free Will-- Determined, by Robert Sapolsky- has indeed changed my mind.  It's not a case of going from belief in Free Will to disbelief in it.  My mind is not a switch.*  On the contrary, I have gone from disbelief in the relevance of the question in everyday life (and annoyance at the smug, self-satisfied certainty of the "You have no free will" camp) to an understanding of the mechanical basis on which such a belief could be based and acknowledgement of its relevance and usefulness in the guidance of such public policy questions dear to my heart as criminal justice reform and mitigation of inequality.

Right off the bat, Sapolsky softened me up by dismissing the importance to the question of those Libetian studies in which researchers, by reading brainwaves of subjects tasked with randomly choosing whether to push one of two buttons, claimed to detect the outcome of the decision microseconds before the subject was conscious of it, thereby supposedly disproving the existence of conscious free will.  In Sapolsky's formulation, the Libetian timespan-- aside from being too trivial and on account of flaws in the experiment, overstated-- is the end of a chain of events and circumstances in the button pressing subject's life stretching back seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime, hingeing on the absence or presence of traumas, advantages, disadvantages experienced in childhood, in the womb, in the culture and society and species that the subject was born into and beyond, back to the very origins of the universe.†  The nature of the universe, given random fluctuations and uncertainties is not such that one could. by calculating the trajectories of each bit of matter starting from the big bang, predict the button that Subject 22 will pick Tuesday morning at 9:43 am, Chicago time says Sapolsky-- indeed, "determined does not mean predictable."   Rather, humans (like all organisms faced with the matter of survival) are decision making machines, the quality of whose choices (indeed of what choices confront them) will depend very much on circumstances of their birth, the place of their parents in society, the stigmas or privileges of their ethnicities, the culture that they were born into (and sometimes, in the case of immigrants, whatever it is that drives them to switch cultures).  

As for cultural questions, Sapolsky notes that the choices of those born in the individualistic cultures of America, Europe and the West will be demonstrably different from those from the collectivist cultures of Asia and Africa.  Whereas someone from Dallas might be expected to opt in a way to gain advantage for himself or his nuclears, someone from Shanghai might be primarily motivated by considerations of extended family,  social group, society as a whole, or indeed global neighborhood, species, planet.  Indeed, the primacy of others in the cultural values of Asian societies is foundational in its religious traditions.  As an extreme example, the practice of self-immolation in Buddhism is considered not suicide but an act of selfless sacrifice-- as Americans were horrified to learn through images and news reports of the monk Thích Quảng Đức's 1963 protest  in the streets of Saigon against  American ally and Catholic South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm's anti-Buddhist persecutions at the start of American involvement in the region.  Indeed, Quảng Đức's was the first of many Buddhist self-immolations which culminated in a crisis from which Diệm could not prevail.  Weakened by the opposition to his out of touch autocracy, Diệm died in the military coup that replaced him by the end of the year. As extreme a choice as the Buddhist monks' was, it is in keeping with a culture that emphasizes sacrifice for the group over glory for the self.

While martyrdom has a rich and glorious history in the west, no tradition of self-immolation exists in Western religions, which prefer meek acquiescence to those at the top of the hierarchy if armed confrontation will not do.  But ever since the potent image of Quảng Đức's act spread across the planet, the practice has been applied to a number of protests in the West over the years, most recently this week, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, as a protest against the US's enabling of Israel's war on Palestinians in Gaza  by Air Force Cybersecurity specialist Aaron Bushnell who died from his injuries later that day.  Bushnell live-streamed the act on Twitch and prefaced it by saying:

I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

On Facebook, Bushnell had written:

Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now.

The clarity of Bushnell's explanation of his act notwithstanding, the image of a US serviceman  in uniform screaming "Free Palestine" as flames consumed his body was such an unwelcome enormity that it was under-reported by being under-explained in the mainstream media.  Instead it was characterized as a suicidal act of madness-- the type of behavior for which an individual cannot be held responsible.  Indeed, suicide has been the annual leading cause of death among Active military personnel for 6 of the last 10 years.  Given the nature of the adventurism that our military involves itself in, the death of American soldiers in combat tends to benefit the owners and ruling class referenced in Bushnell's live-stream.  What sets Bushnell's act apart (though it turns out it is actually the second such protest on American soil since Israel's assault on Gaza began in October) is the collectivist nature of it-- an act undertaken to make flesh the suffering of Gazans before us-- undoubtedly inculcated in him as part of his upbringing in the Community of Jesus in Massachusetts. 

It is tempting to attribute the power of the protest (in this case, the assertion of a 'Won't' rather than a 'Will') to Bushnell's freedom to choose it.  But the degree to which the choice was actually free or one determined by Bushnell's biology, station in life and life story is not necessary in order to appreciate the power of it to change minds. Inspired as it certainly was by the selfless sacrifice of  Thích Quảng Đức's prototype act  60 years prior, it must not be viewed as a tragedy but as a crystal clear communication that it is hoped will be etched in Joe Biden's mind as he comes to grips with what he must do as the world's most powerful man to bring Israel's genocide in Gaza to a close.  Free will or not, though I deeply regret the magnitude and finality of it, I thank Andrew Bushnell for his service.

~~~~~

* Or is it?

† I have never had trouble attributing crime to formative circumstances beyond one's control rather than to freely chosen "criminality" of, say, a person who suffered Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in the womb, was born into poverty and abused by adults throughout childhood, and Sapolsky of course bolsters this view by absolving such persons of responsibility for their crimes.  No problem for me.  But the life changing consequences of the abolishment of free will follows a path along the lines of: if genetics and environment and deprivations and trauma and abuse make a person a criminal, what does punishment have to do with anything?  And if that’s true about crime isn’t it also true about just bad behavior or stupidity or what have you? And if it’s true about someone else’s stupidity and bad choices, what about mine?  And if it’s true about my bad choices what about my good choices?  Etc.

Don't keep me in suspense

By the time I read Bernie Sanders'  It's OK to be Angry About Capitalism last winter, it was clear that he was not going to be making another run for the presidency.  The reason was obvious-- he was not going to challenge Joe Biden who by a year ago had finally decided (to near universal dismay) to run for re-election.  Joe Biden's fault again.  But as I read Bernie's book, it was not hard to see it as a testament for the campaign that never was. I read it with some sadness at what could have been.  

About the same time, I happened to catch the historian Prof Harvey J Kaye of Wisconsin on some program singing praises for the campaign of Marianne Williamson whom he was advising in an informal capacity.  Apparently Williamson, the spiritual author, 2020 also-ran and ultimately Bernie Sanders surrogate, was also something of a student of American history who had a belief that a course correction for the ills plaguing America and the world could start from the unrealized ideals of the American Revolution, particularly as expressed by the radical, Thomas Paine--  a subject of study for Kaye.  As the professor was also an authority on FDR who had urged the revival of the longest serving president's unfulfilled ambition to establish an Economic Bill of Rights for Americans, Williamson had engaged Kaye to advise on how she could make FDR's dream a cornerstone of her 2024 campaign.  Kaye's unabashed enthusiasm for Williamson as the only progressive challenging Joe Biden from within his party piqued my interest, and ultimately won me over.  There was not exactly a clamor among other progressives to join the Democratic race.  I felt sure that an irresistible momentum behind Williamson's campaign was only a matter of time in coming.  

Alas, it never came.  From her initial 10% share in the early polling of likely Democratic voters, she never rose above 15%.  Trounced by Biden and outdone by the only other challenger, the billionaire moderate Dean Phillips in the first three contests, Williamson suspended her campaign.  Several factors worked against her.  First, a near total media shutout limited voter access to Williamson to her social media accounts and those were not exactly catching fire (aside from some reported excitement on TikTok of all places among a constituency she alone seemed to be courting: Gen Z).  The press she did get -- even on left media sites-- when it came at all was negative, often about drama within her organization.  Some of her progressive thunder was stolen by the party hopping picaresque entry into the race of Cornel West.  As other progressives joined the din of longshot candidates outside the 2 parties of the duopoly, there came to be an unspoken but somewhat rumbled and growing consensus among the many fragmented factions of the left that presidential politics in 2024 was not where it was at. If there was any spark for Marianne Williamson left, it could be found only in the uninhabited corners of the web, such as this.

Some chaotic thoughts, then about the obstacles that Marianne Williamson's 2024 campaign could not seem to overcome at the conclusion of her campaign:

Management Problems - A running theme of the explications of left media for the poverty of their coverage of Marianne Williamson's campaign were rumors of mis- and/or micromanagement, insane tantrums, Non-Disclosure Agreements. The candidate was reportedly closed to traditional concerns of the campaign-hardened series of managers she ate through -- concerns like ballot access, endorsements, coalitions. She was on record saying NDA's seemed to her a standard common sense step for an organization to take.   These only seemed to make the scorched earth that disgruntled staffers left in their wake anonymous.  At times, being asked to defend her temper even in friendly forums seemed enough to throw her off balance and bring out the surliness.  She became increasingly unable to conceal her bitterness about both her lack of mainstream media access and the inability of even left media to resist the behind the scenes drama or to focus on the message of her campaign.  Was there plausibility to the charges that the Bernie revolution was being carried on by a flaky high-strung out-of-control diva?  Okay.  Did it matter? I'm not so sure.  No one died working for the campaign.  After a rough shakedown, the organization seemed to settle by late summer.  Were its priorities of the early states of New Hampshire and South Carolina to the exclusion of every of other state malpractice?  It wasn't really that kind of campaign.  Plenty of campaigns that behave exactly as the pundits and experts tell us they should go down in flames before the first primary vote is cast.  Marianne Williamson is not doing it like everybody else has ever done it?  So what?  What kind of outsider does?

Money - There is no good way to fund elections.  Letting billionaires do it gives us the shit hole we live in.  But the alternative-- me and you doing it-- hurts like a motherfucker speaking for myself.  You and I should not be funding elections, so if you have already come to that conclusion, you're not wrong.  Nevertheless those of us who do shell out until we bleed for lack of any better ideas are not being taken.  We are buying a tiny morsel of peace of mind.  MW was not a grifter.  Her funders were not dupes-- if they thought they were getting something in return, I don't think it's MW's fault that they didn't.  But it sure is convenient to fault her.

Primary -  There is a time for complaining about your choices and a time for making a choice.  They can take turns every minute, but it seems to me in this case that the poorness of the choice was exaggerated whereas the reasons for choosing the only truly progressive candidate were aggressively downplayed.  

Given that Joe Biden was never going to lose the primary, I fail to understand how it mattered that an alternative came to be before you as long as you had an alternative. The choice that Marianne Williamson represented was not Perfect Guru in chief-- it was for an agenda sorely missing from the conversation.  I can't blame voters.  But I do blame the media shutout nearly across the spectrum.  I do blame the flakiness of the left in 2024.

What now? - Marianne Williamson is on 31 ballots, 3 of which have already happened.  As of today there are 27 of those states remaining (along with whatever others are left after the Dems are done pre-emptively cancelling them).  As the primaries approached, the decidedly dead momentum for Marianne Williamson or any other human challenger to Joe Biden* inspired some creative write-ins.  In New Hampshire there was a movement to write-in Ceasefire.   In Michigan there is hope that the write-in candidate Uncommitted will give Joe Biden a run for his money.  If it's true that a stick would be preferable to Biden in his toxic, passively pro-genocide, doddering state, then why not a concept like Ceasefire or Uncommitted?

I think it's fine if this is what people do.  Ceasefire got half the votes of Marianne Williamson in New Hampshire though.  It was not listed in the final official results.  As a social media candidate, it turned out to have no advantage that Marianne Williamson didn't.  I believe on the whole the smaller Joe Biden's percentage the better; and the symbolism of him losing to Anything Else has an aesthetic appeal, but it does not call for commitment to any single opponent.  Therefore vote for or write-in who or whatever you choose (including Marianne Williamson in the states she did not get ballot access to) and we'll see what happens.

For myself, an expression of the bankruptcy of the duopoly is not enough to vote for.  I am voting for Marianne Williamson's Economic Bill of Rights.

~~~~~

* And at this stage, the only challengers that matter are on the democratic primary ballot. 

Ear worm

An underreported sign of aging is the development of a habit of watching YouTube Reaction videos.  This is the genre of video in which a young person or a pair -- frequently a married couple-- of millennial age or younger takes requests to watch -- and specifically to "react" to-- a movie, a video or song that they have ostensibly never heard before.  What makes the genre skew old is that in order to increase the viewership, the thing reacted to ideally must have once been popular; and to increase the chance that the reaction is fresh, the requests tend to incline toward the vintage.  The pleasure in watching these for me is vicarious and nostalgic -- it affords the viewer an opportunity to view a fondly remembered song, movie (comedy routine, cartoon, vaudeville act, youtube video) through new eyes as though for the first time.  Done well, it's an addictive art form. An embarrassingly large percentage of my frittering is spent watching these videos, particularly by far most frequently, reactions to songs.

As such, I've observed some features of the reaction genre that the most successful have in common.  First and foremost naturally is the adherence to the premise of freshness.  To this end, the reaction video addict is on the lookout for assurance of a "First Time Watching" for at least one of the hosts.  (In the absence of a first time viewing, the reactor gets points from me for admitting it's a re-watch.)

Second,  the selections or requests that do best are the best songs.  A handful of reactors share my general tastes and interests in songs and artists somewhat off the beaten path; but the reactors I tend to watch the most have a lot of reactions offering a little something for everyone.

Third, the reactions hit harder if they exhibit a little something on the reactor's part that can pass for depth of analysis and sincerity.  Not all reactors get this right, but a surprisingly large number or them do.

But even more important than sincerity, Fourth is broad open mindedness to genres,  styles,  tastes, and appeal of a song-- a gameness for the catchiest hits of the one hit wonders, the most tired workhorses of classic rock, the cheesiest of the cheese, the artiest of art songs.*   Whatever is thrown at them, the most successful reactors are loath to yuck anyone's yum. Naturally,  at times the tension between openness to the redeeming qualities of a song and sincerity of the reaction is going to be stretched to a breaking point.  But the most successful reactors seem to have a consistently open personality to both the song (and for that matter to their partner's commentary.)

One of my favorite channels is hosted by a couple who started two or three years ago barely knowing how to tell a Beatle from a Kink but who have developed into creditable connoisseurs of the popular song of almost any era.  Their output of 3 videos a day is above average in prolificacy.  While watching any of their videos is almost always rewarded with consistently high quality reactions and sophisticated analysis, it's inevitable that not every song they select for a reaction is going to be of the same quality --  or even of any quality.

Case in point, the other day I discovered that my favorite intrepid reactors were honoring a (sadistic?) request for a reaction to Paper Lace's 1974 atrocity "The Night Chicago Died."  I hesitate to name any song the best or the worst of all time.   But The Night Chicago Died which I hated from the first "Glory be" which is to say a minute into the first time I heard it polluting the airwaves in its unaccountably long heyday in my youth, invariably pops into my head as a prime example of a turkey whenever I'm asked to conjure one.  

It starts out promisingly enough with a dark synth siren but takes a sudden jarring veer into icky bubblegum territory and never looks back.   Never mind that the event the lyrics recount never happened, that Al Capone never waged a war with Chicago police in which 100 died, that there is no such place as East Chicago in Chicago.   Never mind that the lyrics are repetitive, inane, lazy and a ridiculous bathetic mess.   If Chicago died it's because it was musically murdered in this song.  The rhythm that it settles into after its spoken introduction is a dull 4/4 but in spite of its presumably heavy subject matter, everything proceeds with the goofy momentum of an uninvited party clown springing into the room unannounced.  The lead singer has an annoying bubblegum rasp (see Micky Dolenz of the Monkees or the lead singer in the fake group The Archies, or the guy from  America, or Steven Stills, or 'How Do you Do?' dropping Mouth & McNeal's Mouth (or is it McNeal?))-- like fingernails on a chalkboard.  The "harmony" when it happens at all is unimaginative thirds above the melody line that are screeched  louder than the melody.  Usually the "harmony" is just a falsetto an octave or two above the melody-- the sort of thing that makes Queen unlistenable to me.  The whole thing is sprinkled with overwrought underthought frills like the boinging twang of guitars that accentuates the second line of each chorus and the ejaculated string of Nanana's before the echoing of the title in the refrain.   (And how many times can you fit the words "The Night Chicago Died" into three and a half minutes?  With 3 codas the song is harder to kill than Chicago.) 

As a child, and even re-listening to it tonight as an adult it's the kind of thing that would make me want to bury my head under a pillow until it's over.  In light of this, I could not help but regard it as an act of cruelty that it was suggested to a couple of innocent reactors.  I wanted to flee when I saw the title of the video but prurient interest got the better of me and I couldn't look away.  I had to see what they would do with it.  To my horror they started bopping to it, seemingly transported by its grabbag of cheap musical gimmicks.  It took me two watches to realize that as per usual they had toed the perfect line between their personal integrity as critics and their code of treating every new musical experience with openness and fairness.  If my need to have my disgust validated was disappointed, I had to admit I was not in the right place.  The reactors took the high road with the suggestion.  Their secret, I discovered, was in focussing not on the quality of the song as song, but on the novelty of the song as experience-- "This one took me by surprise." "I was not expecting this."  Props were given sparingly, but I could tell from the mysteriously abundant fans of the song in their comments that they had navigated the rocky shoals with aplomb.  I had to hand it to them.  They did not let Paper Lace win.

~~~~~

* A Fifth element of success for reactors is apparently resisting requests for the videos of Don Henley who is notoriously surly about the uncompensated use of his music by those who would profit from whatever clicks such reactions would generate.  As many qualms as I have philosophically about intellectual property and copywrite assertions (and I do not make money from my own writing let alone from the videos I feature), I might be somewhat more sympathetic to Don Henley (another bubblegum rasper come to mention it) if I hadn't had more than my fill of his music over the years.