JHUS Staging

Tag: disinformation

  • TLDR 2.3 – Racism: Unfortunately, Yes We Can

    (Disclaimer: in no way does this article assert that

    • racism isn’t a thing,
    • white racism hasn’t been the root of horrific crimes and sins against humanity,
    • racism is “over,”
    • there is such a thing as “reverse” racism,
    • racism in communities or people of color is “just as bad” in terms of impact and harm inflicted
    • people of color have to “go first,”
    • any of the other nonsense I just know people are going to try to read into it.

    So save us both some wasted time and energy and just don’t. Please: Read what’s written, not what you expect to be. Thanks and I look forward to your thoughts.)

    There’s a popular, informal theory which says only white people can be racists. It’s white supremacist theory masquerading as advocacy for people of color. The appeal of the theory to people of color who are rightly frustrated to outrage at entrenched white supremacist power should be obvious. Unfortunately, it’s also toxic and plays on the very same impulses that fuel white supremacy.

    This notion was probably most prominently featured in the important, worthwhile, and influential 2014 film “Dear White People”:

    Black people can’t be racist. Prejudiced, yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.

    Tessa Thompson as Samantha White in “Dear White People” (2014)

    The people primarily advancing this theory don’t want to end bigotry, oppression, and racism; they want to be the ones benefitting from it. They look to destroy Orwell’s Boot by wearing it, which has always been a misguided and fundamentally evil goal.

    Most insidiously this rhetoric directly fertilizes more racist and bigoted psuedointellectual hogwash from white supremacists (including validating the questionable concept of “race” in the first place), often from cover of academic qualifications that are themselves a result of the very racism being denied by those producing it.

    The theory clearly only considers US and Anglosphere cultures founded on European imperialism in its assertions of dominance. This is immediately obvious from the most basic considerations:

    Even if you make the case for white dominance on a global scale, it still breaks down as you get closer to the ground and start looking at smaller cultural groups like nations. This theory roots itself in supremacist reasoning simply by framing itself as a universal rule when it really only applies to part of the population. So you end up with three problems:

    • White people aren’t the dominant ethnic or social group on this planet, yet in modern history they’re responsible for the most widespread, systematic, and egregious racism at the largest scale. That immediately negates the premise that the “dominant group” is the only one that can be “racist” in the theory’s definition.
    • Attempting to create relative merit distinctions between “racism,” “prejudice,” and “bigotry” not only attempts to justify ignoring racism by people of color, it further stratifies and ranks “types” whereby one “type” is judged more or less “bad” than the other, e.g. prejudice is “not as bad as” racism because, under the theory, the merely prejudiced can’t access abuse-able power
    • These narratives erase the multiracial community whose lived experience often draws from multiple cultures but emotionally identifies with none of them deeply (disclosure, the author is among this group), and often finds them discriminated against for being part of one group by members of another group that they’re also part of.

    Rather than challenging racism, the theory validates, energizes, and promotes it without ever questioning the basic premise that any particular “race” possesses inherently “superior” attributes, trivializes the power (malignant power is still power) of non-white cultures, ignores racist behavior found in nearly all cultures, assumes in contradiction to evidence that the US perspective suffices for the general case globally, and seduces people of color into employing the same excuses for their racism used by the white racists they’re fighting

    If you prejudge someone based on what you perceive as their race, you are a racist. What ethnic groups you’re part of or how much power you have to make your personal racist beliefs into a cultural norm isn’t relevant.

    Don’t fall for it. Anybody can be a racist, even if it never has any outward expression at all. Claiming otherwise is racists rationalizing their own racism and gaslighting anyone who speaks up about it.

    These narratives represent attempts by power abusers to con you into believing you can wear Orwell’s Boot safely.

    You can’t, and to even try makes you one of the bad people, no matter what color your skin is or what language or dialect you speak or what shape your eyes are.

    Don’t be seduced by these bias-pandering theories. They’ll just keep you stuck in the same cycles of bigotry and conflict until the species ceases to exist at all.

  • TLDR 2.2 – The Anger Vote

    Hey there folks I’m a little teapot short and stout and my name is John Henry from johnhenry.us, welcome to TLDR – “Too Long; Didn’t Read” – let’s have a short conversation about “the anger vote.”

    Ran across this meme from Michigan Republicans posted via motivational speaker Matt Fol…er, sorry, that’s Matt Hall, who as it happens is my state representative.

    Graphic: dark gray box with thick horizontal lines in lighter gray scattered across the background, the top left and bottom right corners are cut off on an angle with white. At the top is the word "BREAKING" in white bold all capital letters, below which a red box contains white bold text reading "Democrats are taking money away from the classrooms and giving it to corrupt union bosses." At the lower left using the same color scheme is the logo of the "Michigan House Republicans." I have superimposed the words THIS IS PROPAGANDA in large red text over the lower part of the graphic, and my site logo, so that if it's shared nobody mistakes it for legitimate information.
    The only thing breaking here is my eyeballs trying to find something meaningful in this statement.

    The original post adds a comment about an “extreme partisan agenda” and a comment about “Big Labor,” with a link to more empty verbiage built to make you angry and stop you from asking about the details.

    So first things first: “big labor” is you and me. Working people trying to get a living wage and dignified compensation and conditions for their work. That’s who he’s really pushing against here. Us.

    Second, there are assertions made here that aren’t supported anywhere in the related text or links – “taking money away from the classrooms,” “giving it to corrupt (also unsupported) union bosses.” There’s no direct information path from this graphic to the substance of the issues he’s yammering about; you have to dig into the comments, follow the link to the Michigan GOP’s website article, read all the way through it, almost at the bottom you find the actual bill numbers.

    Then you have to google and go read them, just to find out none of what he’s saying is true. For instance one of the bills he’s talking about repeals a law preventing state agencies from processing union dues as a payroll deduction, making it as annoying as possible to pay union dues.

    Make the lie loud and clear. Make the truth hard to find.

    You aren’t supposed to notice folks like Matt taking money away from public classrooms and giving it to churches and other private school operators, all of whom make political donations and in-kind contributions. You aren’t supposed to notice that’s an end-run around the establishment clause used to con the government into funding religious instruction.

    Eventually you can take religion out completely and pretend you’re just a plucky entrepreneur “improving” education for everyone by privatizing it and monetizing it, and we’ll just ignore that you’re also destroying it and perpetuating outrageous abuses of power and elitism and reinforcements of systemic imbalances of power like racism and sexism…and most importantly, capitalism.

    When I was a kid you had to pay out of pocket to access that privilege, now you just have to know the right people and fill out the right forms and the state will pay it for you – essentially giving you the same thing you were getting directly from the state 40 years ago, except it costs fifty times as much because of all the middle-men taking their cut along the way to pay folks like Matt here, plus it’s been split into separate systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest, and the privileged have stationed themselves as brokers and middle-men all along the way to get paid.

    Told y’all when they started outsourcing the lunch lady to save a buck (which it never did) that it wouldn’t be long before they outsourced the whole school. People like Matt sneered and laughed from his van down by the river, just like they’ll sneer and laugh now because they think he cleverly avoided this whole conversation by simply saying “classrooms,” which helps hide the fact that what he’s really talking about is those privately owned classrooms that ultimately help fund his political career.

    THOSE are the classrooms he’s really worried about money being taken away from – the classrooms that pay for his campaigns.

    Then of course there’s the whole anti-union framing which is normal GOP politics and I won’t go into here other than to notice it.

    What Matt here wants to motivate you to do is ignore the facts and feel like you and your kids are being attacked and robbed. There’s no evidence of that, there’s not even anyone credibly suggesting it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you go for the emotion and that bypasses the critical thinking and boom, half of southwest Michigan is pissed at the Democrats for stealing their schools.

    It works the same everywhere. Stop falling for it. Cultivate emotional detachment from these issues and you’ll be able to see them more clearly.

    That’s it for me I’m John Henry from JohnHenry.US reminding you that I stay independent by being crowdfunded, and that means everything I do here depends on you so remember to like, share, subscribe, and spread the word, and if you can please drop by johnhenry.us/money and you’ll find a range of one-time and ongoing weekly or monthly support options to help pay the bills and buy the gear that makes all this happen.

  • TLDR: A Simple Bias Check

    Hey everyone welcome to another edition of TLDR, I’m the girl with kaleidoscope eyes John Henry from JohnHenry.US, please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe! Today we’re going to talk about bias, why you need to be aware of your own, and a simple bias check you can use to help ensure you’re living up to yourself.

    It’s probably important to note the context here: Ed Whelan is an arch-right lawyer and talking head who clerked for Scalia and write for National Review – we are NOT in the same lane ideologically, and that makes the point that much sharper:

    I strongly disagree with Ed Whelan on nearly everything, but that’s not what this is about. The simple fact is he’s right in this case, and he’s not only right but it’s incredibly important that every human being on the planet knows it. This is an exercise I do constantly myself and believe we all should.

    Why does it matter? Look no further than the dialogue surrounding the ongoing indictments of former president Trump. The current leftist cheerleading for the Espionage Act – one of the most troubling and problematic sets of law in our entire history of law – is frankly more than a little scary, and provides a great example of why it’s important to go through the exercise Whelan describes. Any sort of law that criminalizes speaking against the actions of the government is terrifying and should absolutely be subject to the harshest scrutiny…and all it really takes to understand that is saying to yourself “what if it was Donald Trump trying to use this power to his advantage, rather than it being used against him? How would he be able to abuse or misuse it?”

    Reverse this situation and have the Trump administration prosecuting Joe Biden illicitly under some pretense like the minor scraps that turned up at his home office, suddenly it’s not so cool. When you’ve got a war being prosecuted for unjust or unworthy reasons, suddenly it’s not so cool that you can be sentenced to ten years simply for advocating against war when war is what the government wants, like Eugene Debs.

    That’s not to say I think the prosecution of Trump is at all illicit or even flawed, just that if we were thinking clearly we’d have a lot more conversation happening about the Espionage Act that isn’t driven simply by the former president’s sycophants trying to make excuses for him in the media.

    But it makes someone like me who constantly writes in criticism of power and its abuses and those who hold and abuse it feel really uncomfortable about some of the company I’m keeping, when I start seeing ostensible left-wing activists and personalities getting all happy about the Espionage Act.

    When you turn it around, the flaws in the act become problematic, and we can’t afford to ignore that simply because those flaws happen to be working in a way that is both personally satisfying and morally righteous in the particular case of Trump. I’m not even saying “fix it first, worry about Trump after.” It’s the tool we’ve got now to do the job and the job needs doing, so we’ll use it.

    What I am saying, though, is we’ll keep having problems like him until we build and implement systems that actually do what they say they’re supposed to, like form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

    The only way to do that for sure is to resist the urge to ignore abuses of power when they’re accomplishing things you like.

  • Morning Message 1.12

    Good Monday to ya everybody I’m John Henry your gluten free emotional support host, welcome to another Morning Message!

    Debt Ceilings

    I want to take a quick look at this debt ceiling “compromise” that was reached over the last week, with President Biden signing on Saturday in what was described as a “private” ceremony.

    I’m not a fan of this deal on the basic level that it’s completely unnecessary.

    I’ve already written two parts of a series on the national debt which goes deeper in to what that debt is and how it functions and how it’s used as a weapon of disinformation against you. I should have that wrapped up in the next couple of days, and it’s well worth reading and understanding.

    The great harm this whole pointless argument causes isn’t the “repercussions” or the lowering of investor confidence in US credit, but rather in the way it’s used as an artificial threat to justify fumbling compromises when no compromise is necessary.

    This allows the folks who hold status quo power on both “sides” to both preserve their interests and act as though they’re trying really hard not to. “Sorry, it’s those darned other guys.”

    Given that on the right this means they have to step back from just flat-out ending democracy and enslaving anyone who can’t buy their freedom, I don’t have a problem with that.

    My problem is half the ostensible “left,” i.e. the Democratic Party, caves as well to the simple threat of not signing a budget which isn’t a threat at all. There are constitutional mechanisms in place to go around precisely that sort of bone-headed power play. Rather than do that, the Dems chose to cave – on student loans, on work requirements for food stamps, on the Mountain Valley gas pipeline – and make zero cuts to the outrageously bloated defense budget. Moreover, increases in non-defense spending are capped, but defense isn’t.

    This is the same old crap, sorry. It’ll be interesting to see if and how Biden chooses to paint himself out of the corner on the student loan problem. It’ll be more interesting to see if the rising voices in the electorate can manage to get more folks like Sanders and Fetterman into office and start standing up to this game, because the simple truth is that it is a game, and it has to stop.

    Poverty is a political choice. It is not an economic necessity. We could quite literally top everyone off to $50K right now if we wanted to. There are good reasons we don’t, but those reasons are never part of these conversations. Realistically if we made the political choice we could implement a universal basic income and federal job guarantee program in a year or less. Problem is that would free a lot of people from being required to work for someone else’s profit in order to survive, and the people whose profit is at stake don’t like that.

    So they fight against it and we continue with half a million homeless, millions more on the brink of financial disaster – a brink the GOP insists on pushing them over after stomping on their fingers to make them let go, via that student loan problem I mentioned – and we continue playing these ridiculous games.

    Game Over

    The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Whether we progressives like to admit or not, Joe Biden is canny as hell, and he’s pulled a swerve more than once to end up far ahead of where we thought he was, even going back to his coming out in support of LGBTQ rights. I’m not betting you’ll see some workaround that extends the student loan repayment pause, but it won’t surprise me if you do either. The edge of what the GOP wanted in terms of cuts and Malthusian demands that humans with a right to exist earn that right by contributing to some billionaire’s monopology game was significantly blunted.

    Unfortunately, what we’re still not doing is saying loudly and clearly that we know that edge has no reason to exist at all, and the only it reason it does is so that ugly-minded, mendacious, slavering lapdogs of fascism and oligarchy can keep pleasing their masters at everyone else’s expense.

    What we’re also not saying is that we see the games the Democratic leadership is playing with trying to let things “cool down” enough that they can make their move in favor of preserving that status quo power I talked about, without causing too much uproar about it. They’re doing this by peeling off smaller groups of student loan debtors for special consideration separately from the main group, using that issue as an example. Eventually the group of people they’re sacrificing isn’t as loud anymore, and the group of people for whom it’s “not my problem” gets larger, and the problem slides into the background again until things get bad enough for people to start getting loud again.

    Lather, rinse, repeat, and the whole time the left gets to pretend they’re fighting hard and winning these big concessions. Mick Foley said it best: the real world is faker than pro wrestling.

    Until we have those conversations, out loud and without flinching, we’re not winning anything – we’re only holding the line or succeeding in not giving up completely, and frankly that’s ridiculous. It’s time to evolve, and if we’re gonna do it kicking and screaming then so be it.

    Because the other option is we choose not to evolve…which means we’re choosing to become extinct.

  • Morning Message 1.11

    Good Friday morning-slash-afternoon everyone, I’m your painfully handsome and consistently modest host John Henry, and here’s what’s on my mind this morning

    First: the obvious. I’ve changed the name of this newsletter to reflect the ongoing process of moving it out of meta-commentary and into production as a “real” newsletter, i.e. “not about me.”

    So with that handled, let’s get on with the show!

    Here’s another meme that makes me want to choke out the lower 80% of the intelligence pool.

    That word “thinking” is doing way too much of the lifting here.

    No, you probably DON’T know more about your experience in most situations where this attitude comes up

    • patients insisting their doctors are idiots because they don’t have instant magic answers
    • parents who didn’t graduate junior high but are now firmly convinced they’re qualified homeschool instructors because “I’ve got a right“
    • parents insisting the only way to keep their kids in line is to beat on them
    • people who think the rush they get from a handful of sugar pills is evidence that it’s working better than actual medicine
    • some 8th grade dropout who spends all their time at Mises dot org and Ron Paul’s website trying to explain to a political scientist what “libertarian” “really means.”

    No, chances are unless you have prior specialized training, your experience doesn’t mean you know more than the experts. Given the impact of bias in human thinking, it almost certainly means your opinions and perspectives are less objectively valid than those of the experts advising you, because they’re not emotionally invested.

    Having a heart attack doesn’t make you a cardiologist any more than having herpes makes you a urologist. Being autistic doesn’t make you a neurologist. Having several diagnosed neurodivergencies doesn’t make me a psychiatrist.

    It can be frustrating when you’re looking for professional help and they don’t have answers, or you don’t like their answers (which is most often the case when this attitude shows up), or you don’t understand their answers (second place), or they don’t seem to understand your experiences, but that doesn’t magically make you the doctor.

    Your experiences can’t replace years of education; even a bad doctor probably knows more about your body than you do…and the fact that they don’t know everything while you’re 100% convinced that hip pain is your dead aunt Shirley sending you messages from the great beyond does not mean “your experience” trumps their education, even if “they just don’t get” how ol’ Shirley used to tease you by poking you in the hip.

    Even a bad doctor on “ez mode” is diagnosing you based on a set of established knowledge and criteria that you almost certainly don’t have access to (and your Facebook survivors’ group is NOT access to that information!) And their work, unlike yours, is subject to peer review.

    People sitting around recounting their subjective experiences isn’t data, it’s anecdotes. Speaking of, how about a wrestling story?

    Back in the late 90’s when I was working as an announcer for Southern Championship Wrestling down in NC (shout out to the OmegaPowers), my buddy Toad was involved in a match where he did a diving, somersaulting body block over the top rope to the floor – through his opponent and a table.

    He immediately signaled he was hurt, the match was wrapped, and he went to the locker room and bandaged his ribs, convinced that he’d broken them. His entire torso was in pain so bad he could hardly move.

    Got to the ER, did some tests and scans, and then they asked him why his torso was ace bandaged. “Well, to keep those broken ribs from moving around too much.”

    They said “it won’t help.”

    “Why not?”

    “Your ribs aren’t injured. Your hip is broken.”

    But his hip wasn’t where the pain was, his torso was. He felt the impact of the table on his ribs and that’s where the pain was, so he assumed based on his experience that his ribs were injured…but the experts took a look and found out he was wrong, by what amounts to a mile anatomically.

    I get that it’s frustrating to deal with professionals who don’t seem to understand you, and I’m in no way suggesting that there aren’t bad or lazy half-asses hiding behind a degree they sailed through or paid someone else to do most of the real work on or whatever.

    I am telling you that by default “your experience” is about the least-qualified evidence of anything you can find because it’s filtered through your limitations of knowledge, your biases, your beliefs, your fears, and your misinformation.

    By all means, ask questions and advocate for yourself. By all means, be firm and strong when describing your issue to someone who doesn’t appear to be listening or taking you seriously. By all means if you feel you’re being ill-served find another provider.

    But never, ever assume that “your experience” is somehow of greater informational value to your situation than the expert who’s studied hundreds or thousands of experiences similar to yours.

    There’s nothing wrong with crediting experience as an information source. There is something very wrong when you start rejecting an entire field of study simply because you don’t like what the data is telling you.

    This is a meme encouraging irrationality and rejection of objective evidence and proven science in favor of anecdote and subjective perception. In no way does it advocate for “autism” (as the page that posted it claimed to be doing) nor for anyone who is autistic.

    It does, however, feed nicely into the egos of that great mass of non-autistic people who run around calling themselves “autistic” because it’s a convenient excuse to be an entitled jerk or be a pain in the ass to their waitress, while actual autistic people pay the price. Like fake “service animals” that obviously need a service animal themselves.

    A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an

    A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an “independent thinker.” It means you’re an egomaniac and have chosen to be ineducable, and I’m kind of tired of people like that hiding behind other people’s problems. Then those other folks with actual problems can’t get help with because these attention-seeking fakes have clogged the system and caused the creation of lots of barriers to prevent fraud and abuse…then those barriers only get in the way of people who legitimately need help, while the fakes and the big-mouths just lie and BS their way around the system

    Don’t be one of those people. They cause harm and do little to no good, even for themselves, beyond a little ego boost from feeling like they’ve projected power and told someone else what to do…and in the end, that’s doing nobody any good at all.

  • Morning Message 1.9

    Hey everyone, I’m your ridiculously photogenic host John Henry and this is the Morning Message!

    This person is not your friend. This person is someone who is seeding arguments against the left while pretending to be ON the left, agitating for unnecessary and cruel compromises that leave millions of Americans in the lurch in the name of “bipartisanship.”

    From a progressive perspective there is no reason for a “deal” because we’re not putting anything remotely radical or controversial on the table (aside from the saccharine controversy stirred up by the fascists).

    If the power core of the Democratic Party had your best interests in mind they’d be fighting tooth and nail for everything we need – student loan forgiveness, publicly funded health care and higher education, hell put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage as the top line in the budget just so the GOP has to waste time arguing about that and the rest of it goes through unchallenged. There is ZERO reason to compromise with the fascists here, other than that power core’s unwillingness to push for the spending we actually need.

    This tweet is from someone trying to gaslight the progressive left out of pushing for substantive reform and improvement of our systems. Whether they know that’s what they’re doing is not relevant. It’s what they’re doing. Call them out and don’t let them normalize the idea that effective social programs are a “pipe dream.”

    Fascist Followup

    Over the weekend I published a new article at Medium (disclosure – I may make a few cents from people reading it, but it’s not paywalled) which provides a broad, survey-level examination of a huge network of anti-western social media and web pages trolling super-hard for traffic in a variety of ways targeting folks who may be particularly vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation including boomers and US military personnel and their families with fascist propaganda.

    I’ve now followed up on that “officially” by doing what I could to get it in front of the face of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. We’ll see what they do with it.

    My approach would be to rip the mask off the whole thing and now let’s sit down and talk about why Americans are so extraordinarily vulnerable to fascist propaganda, and do something to address that problem directly with the American people…and I mean like a two-hour network broadcast interruption for a national class on information literacy followed by an all-out comprehensive initiative to inoculate the American people against the viruses of hate and autocracy just as we do against any others…and expecting, of course, the same pushback from the same tragically benighted folks who refuse to vaccinate or mask up in response to Covid.

    Remember, folks: just because they’re wearing your colors or look like you doesn’t mean they’re on your team.

  • Morning Mess, May 30 2023

    Hey there kids, after a bit of a mental health break I’m back and at it.

    Me Stuff

    I’ve changed the title of this newsletter to reflect the shift in focus away from me and more toward news and comment. Necessary URLs will be set up with redirects so old links continue working.

    You can skip to the next header if you don’t care about internet drama.

    I’m not going to go on about this too much because it just feeds the beast, but this is once again a pattern that I’ve been observing for a long time.

    Close friends with whom I’ve discussed it over the years know that I’ve suspected the source for well over a decade, but they finally slipped and outed themselves beyond any reasonable doubt when trying to recruit yet another troll to do their dirty work last week.

    This person’s behavior is rooted in whisper campaigns and back-room antics, ingratiating themselves to the clickbait crowd or not realizing they outed themselves many, many times over the years.

    It includes calling my new roommate – within literal hours of my changing my address on my voter registration and domains, who I’ve mentioned previously has a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis so that’s totally on-brand for le stalker, they did the same to my parents’ last years – to harass them with similar lies, which was pointless.

    It’s gross, sick, and obsessive. The person responsible has been involuntarily committed to psychiatric confinement in the past, and has tried repeatedly to con me into committing myself…often in response to some emotional distress I’m experiencing that they actually inflicted.

    Going into the ugly details of that person is more attention than they deserve. Unfortunately I have a triggerable mental illness and they know it and they know my triggers because they’ve been trying to cuddle up to me for a quarter-century so it has to be spoken about a little.

    The evidence is sufficient for me, but not likely to be enough to take to court and get a restraining order that wouldn’t do any good anyway.

    Eventually they’ll crash and burn and end up back in the nice white room with the soft walls, the only reason they’re not there now is they’re predatory as hell and keep attaching themselves to insecure women with lots of money (this isn’t speculation; more than one of his partners has asked me to get him to stop in the past, as though that’s within my power). Their endgame for me is to leave me with nowhere else to turn so they can play hero, like a fire-fighter who sets the fires themselves so they can get the praise for putting them out.

    The bottom line is this person has been trying to push me over the edge of suicide for about twenty-five years because they resent me talking them out of their own (and leaving them no honorable way to rationalize it), and every time it doesn’t work they escalate with a new low. In the end there’s no punishment worse for that person than having to wake up every day being who they are and knowing they’re too weak of character to ever be anything else.

    So now, I’m still quite down and not feeling greatly motivated but I’m forcing myself to get back on the ol’ horse and keep riding now because if I let this keep me idle much longer it’s only going to further damage my work and reputation. Enough of the personal drama, let’s get on with it.

    The (Actual, Very Late) Morning Message

    Two stories I want to look at quickly today.

    The first is the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which is doing a great job of getting the “capitalist, let’s keep up appearances” fascists arguing with the “we’ve won so let’s stop pretending this is about anything but gaining power” fascists.

    To be clear, Paxton’s behavior being illegal and unethical isn’t what’s driving this. What’s driving it is the risk that allowing him to get away with it anymore will tend to tip off the marks and people will start looking more closely at how the GOP does business. As a sidebar it helps get lefties cheerleading part of the GOP and attempts to create a narrative that the whole party isn’t completely off the rails into full blown fascism, which of course is not true.

    Keep your eye on this situation and watch for one GOP faction to try leveraging it as a redemption tour, “see, we’re not all bad!” They are.

    The other story is the launching and subsequent detection of a massive new fascist disinformation/propaganda campaign designed to troll people susceptible to such things into outing themselves and following fascist agitprop pages.

    Particularly insidious about this run is that the majority of it is couched in appeals to nostalgia and military worship in the US, including active duty personnel and their families. Pages with names like like “I Love US Military” interspersed with “cute animals” and “hey old people who aren’t real good with computer literacy, don’t you long for the good old days?” bait to reel people in, then they start seeding fascist messaging to see who drops, knowing what whoever’s left is a prime target for their work. Probably the most important story I’ve ever written, and probably going to be ignored until some lone-wolf stochastic terror attack leads back to one of them.

    Sorry it’s a little short and boring today, but there it is. We’ll see you in the actual morning tomorrow, hopefully!

  • Morning Me 1.7 (23-May-23)

    Good morning you and good morning me I am your highly refined and erudite host John Henry, let’s get into today’s Morning Me!

    Yesterday we did a whole meta thing about this newsletter. Today we start moving the Morning Me into being less about “me” and more about doing the work I do. With that in mind let’s take a look at some news. This story at WRAL in Raleigh, NC today provides us with a nice look at how the media turns language to the advantage of those it serves. Check out this screenshot:

    Gosh I wonder who was driving a police vehicle to a call?

    What I want you to see here – and be sure you read the accompanying article! – is how much effort went into avoiding the statement “a police officer struck a civilian with a police vehicle.” The lead is ridiculous and goes so far out of the way to avoid speaking that core idea aloud that it ends up reading like someone stole a cop car and then stopped it, got out, and hit someone. That’s still a step up from the headline and the body of the story though, in which they repeatedly discuss how a “vehicle” was involved – “hit by police vehicle” in the headline, and in the story you get this gem:

    “The biggest shock for some locals was stepping out and finding a police car involved.”

    – someone who apparently thinks police cars are autonomous

    It’s not until the next to the last sentence – twenty words from the end of the story – that you finally find mention that there was an officer driving the vehicle.

    This headline and story are an absolute triumph of the passive voice. It reads like if they could’ve avoided mentioning that police were involved at all, they would’ve – “pedestrian hit by speeding vehicle.” All personal responsibility of the driver is cast aside – a cop didn’t hit someone while driving too fast, someone went and got themselves hit by a police vehicle responding to a call! How dare that scofflaw get in the way of our brave men and women in blue!

    [NARRATOR stands and salutes a billowing American flag in the background as a marching band plays “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”]

    It really is this abstruse and arcane. Media producers really do go to this level of fine-toothed Orwellian filtering to ensure the information they feed you advances their interests.

    I’m telling you as someone whose education easily qualifies them to be the people who do this: it is not accidental. This piece was gone over to remove as completely as possible any reference to the police officer who was driving the truck. The purpose of this is to separate and diffuse reactions centering on that fact – the debates over when emergency responders should be breaking traffic laws, who the driver was and what their record looks like, the history of the department overall related to traffic safety of officers on duty and in response – to avoid energizing discussion that reflects negatively on police and authority in general. I guarantee the original copy was more direct before the editors at WRAL put hands on it, unless they were the original writers.

    End result: you read this story about a police officer who probably was not doing their best work at the moment striking and injuring a pedestrian, and you walk away thinking “boy that guy got lucky, he should be more careful.” The thought of “what’s the deal with that cop” never crosses your mind. If anything it gets shunted to general internal grumbling about “cops” and how they drive, but nothing specific to focus energy on…so the energy dissipates and what could have led to protests – certainly should lead to some pointed questions and public engagement! – instead is a throwaway story that nobody bothers paying attention to.

    Words matter, and what matters most is that you pay attention to the words being used to tell you how and what to think.

    And that’s about all the time we’ve got for a short morning newsletter/podcast. It’s Tuesday so supporters and Patrons can look forward to a new JH Afterparty newsletter in an hour or three, and everyone else can look forward to last week’s Afterparty dropping today at noon eastern.

    That’s it for the Morning Me, this has been John Henry reminding you that all our work here is brought to you by YOU and your support is desperately needed, swing by johnhenry.us/money to find out how you can contribute. Whether it’s five dollars or five thousand, it’s all desperately needed to keep me alive and this entire operation running.

    Thanks again and don’t forget the best support is spreading the word so like, share, comment, and tell your friends: when you want truly independent political activism and information, you start with John Henry.

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

    The Gold Standard

    In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

    We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

    I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

    Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

    Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

    You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

    They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

    The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

    What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

    The Eurozone

    A Different Feather Of Fish

    The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

    “Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

    The Guardrails

    Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

    For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

    Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

    Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

    Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

    That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

    The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

    It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

    This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

    All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

    It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

    That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

    In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.