JHUS Staging

Tag: evolution

  • Breach Of (Social) Contract

    Breach Of (Social) Contract

    Time To Face Reality

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]I[/su_dropcap]t’s time for us as a species to accept a hard reality: about a third of us have no respect for nor intention of adhering to the vital social contract that hold us together and keep us functioning as a species.

    About a third of us – and this is across the board, not just in the US or any particular demographic group, which we’re going to discuss in a minute – are openly and proudly rejecting every lesson of human history about the futility and waste of tribalism and isolation and fear of the “other,” and are enthusiastic to proclaim their refusal to recognize or cooperate with any so-called “social contract.”

    I’ve observed many times in the past that in any time and place where there are large enough groups of people to form governments, about a third of the people in question are perfectly willing, or at least easily convinced, to throw the rest of them under any available bus if they think doing so will get them laid, paid, or praised.

    Clearly and for good reason on this day, the second of Donald Trump’s second term as US President, there’s a lot of frustration and trepidation and anxiety about what the future will bring, as well as a quite reasonable incredulous outrage at the idea that somehow there are 80-odd million people in this country stupid and evil enough to vote for him.

    We need to talk about that, both in terms of the risks it presents to our own integrity and in terms of how to address the emergent and exigent situation that has, as of noon eastern on Janyar 20, 2025, successfully ended American democracy, and is doing the same to democratic countries all over the world.

    First I want to talk about this “social contract” thing and where it comes from and what it means.

    What is the “Social Contract?”

    Formally in philosophy and political science the “Social Contract” is a theory with roots going back to the Greek sophists, and the first real description and labeling of which is usually credited to philosopher Thomas Hobbes (for whom that adorable tiger is allegedly named, incidentally), with Locke, Rousseau, and others following up and developing and applying various high-minded philosophical concepts focusing largely on the broad ideas of individual liberty versus the utilitarian and ethical demands of functioning on a planet which also features other humans (or forms of life at all, for that matter; cf. Bentham “does it suffer?”)

    In popular and informal use outside of academia, political science (and that weird subset of “m’lady” guys who think that being a verbose sanctimonious dull-witted boor somehow makes it better), the “social contract” refers to the very broad range of human activities and institutions, formal and informal, written and unwritten, from governments to handshakes, express or implicit, that generally tend to facilitate humanity not boiling down into a perpetual stew of hostile warring tribes.

    Clearly, it’s not a cure-all or some binary condition under which, once met, Society Functions Properly. It’s just the label we give to that set of ideas and systems and institutions and philosophies that say we’re generally not going to run around trying to hurt each other because that’s stupid and causes the whole species to evolve and progress more slowly.

    Governments and laws are one functional expression of that social contract, mechanisms by which people can be informed of and held to account for respecting the million little things that go into keeping us from collapsing into a frothing mob.

    We all agree to drive within the lines. If you don’t agree but insist on doing it your own way, you’ll be sanctioned. If you’re not aware of that clause in the social contract and violate it through ignorance…well first and foremost you’re probably driving without a license but also you might face a less punitive sanction that includes an educational component – go learn to drive and get a license before you try it again on public roads.

    So that’s what four years of political science classes taught me about what this “social contract” really is. Now let’s talk about why we need it.

    Divide And Conquer

    If you let the shiny junk distract you, you won’t see the monster behind you until it’s too late. Image courtesy Bing AI.

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]W[/su_dropcap]hile it’s always important to keep in mind, in a time of trepidation and previously unimaginable decline of ethics resulting in what appears to most to be an almost overnight collapse of the US political system into overt and unambiguous fascist totalitarianism such as we’re currently facing it it is critical to our survival to remember that none of this is about demographics and groups.

    It’s important to remember that rough third I talked about in the previous section can’t be identified by any external characteristic. They are rich and poor, black and white, Chinese and Ghanian and Guatemalan and American, they are man and woman and non-binary and trans, they are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Hindu and Buddhist and Jainist and shiniest and atheist. They are sex workers and PTA moms and deadbeat dads and captains of industry and church leaders and police and average everyday people you probably share a coffee or maybe lunch or some gossip with on slack or maybe they’re a member of your family. Maybe ALL the members of your family are part of that one-third.

    It is a time-worn and long-proven effective tool of oppressive and totalitarian power to set the populations they seek to subjugate against one another based on various meaningless attributes usually appealing, at their root, to fear and ignorance.

    There’s certainly some reasonable criticism to be directed i our current situation; large identifiable demographic groups contributed significantly and inexplicably to Trump’s victory. Among other relevant observations I’ve had my own words for the Latinos and those of middle-eastern descent who withheld their votes from Harris or voted for Trump on some pretext like failure to support Palestine or the “sin” of women not being compulsory brood mares for any man who cares to force himself on her. because they’re among those groups most certain to be targeted by the Trump administration for oppression soonest and most violently, and I think that’s a thing worth noting for any number of reasons.

    So I’m not saying I don’t “get it.” Nor am I trying to shout down the idea of saying “hey wtf were you thinking over here? Seriously?”

    If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of focusing on those demographic numbers and wondering about specific examples of why this group or that group would have to be out of their mind to have done this, we will alienate others like us and begin thinking in precisely the ways we’re trying to resist. That’s why making such divisions happen is so important to the despot or tyrant. The more intramural rancor and hostility and distrust can be sewn among the proletariat, the easier it is for the aristocracy to get away with unimaginable levels of exploitation and malice in the distraction.

    Ironically this can only be done by first pushing us together under labels – black, white, gay, straight, Christian, man, woman, Jew, etc. – and then defining an antithesis to that label and pushing others of us under that, and then setting us at each other’s throats like a disturbed child agitating cats to fight each other.

    The only defense against that is a diligent ongoing mindfulness about our own thinking, because human brains like patterns and groups and categories and sorting things and labeling them, and we’ll do it off-hand if we’re not paying attention and not even realize it until months later it dawns on us that some basic idea worked its way into something way back when that didn’t belong there and has caused harm to whatever ongoing effort it infected.

    We have to be honest with ourselves and we have to be willing to admit when we’ve blown it, because none of us are perfect and we’re all going to screw up sometimes. The important part isn’t that you’re perfect, but that you’re aware of your imperfections and working in good faith to ensure your thinking is clear and hasn’t become infected with some bad idea without you realizing it.

    Individual Choices

    Demographics don’t vote. Individuals do.Edmond Dantès at Pexels

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]W[/su_dropcap]ith all that said, in the end elections still come down to individual human beings making individual human decisions. Every single person who voted for Trump knows what he is and what he’s about and they signed on to it. There is no demographic descriptor that covers all of those people, nor one that guarantees through some other observable trait that they can be easily identified.

    It’s about individuals, and that’s really important because you know what? We gotta fix it individually. That means no more debate callouts and back and forth and trying to give benefit of doubt or keep the peace or reach across the aisle. That means we don’t just roll our eyes at ol’ drunk uncle Cletus when he starts screaming racism, we make it quite clear and without any room for further debate that Uncle Cletus is welcome to either stop being an unrepentant monster or he’s welcome to not come around at all, period. Yeah, that’s gonna hurt his feelings and make you feel bad, tough. You have to stop letting these bullies push you into allowing them to be part of your lives when all they do is make you miserable and exploit you and insult you and disregard you on every human level unless they want something.

    It means no more relentless relitigation of every conceivable idea just because team dumbass tagged in a new partner. No, I don’t have to rationalize or validate my belief that we shouldn’t be pushing trans kids around just because some adults are sex-obsessed perverts. No, I’m not required to step through my every internal dialogue for the last fifty-four years related in any way to whatever we’re talking about just so you can whip out some snotty condescending gotcha when I make a typo or get a meaningless trivia point wrong.

    We’re done doing all that now. That is my individual choice. And yours. If you want to persist in holding values and beliefs that are objectively reprehensible, then I am under no obligation to keep explaining to you why they’re objectively reprehensible.

    That also means you might be the odd person out, maybe you’re in a whole family of these ridiculous cretins and somehow you’re the only one who managed to find any human decency or redeeming character trait. This is where it gets hard, because we need a community out there that’s ready to be family to those folks, that’s ready to take the place of the sniveling, cowardly traitors who turned their backs out of ignorance and fear. And that doesn’t just mean a pat on the back and thoughts and prayers, a lot of folks are stuck in these situations because they have nowhere else to go. That means you need to consider being a place for them to go if you have one. Not because they share your hobbies or identity or interests or religion but because they share your humanity.

    Individuals did this. Individual human beings making individual human choices to allow or create suffering in others for their own benefit.

    THAT is the problem that needs fixing.

    The only way it gets fixed is we make it frankly and unambiguously clear to every one of them one by one that their money’s no good here and their custom isn’t welcome, playtime’s over, this is no longer acceptable at any level under any circumstances, and if that’s too big a problem for someone then they are welcome to remove themselves from the society whose contracts they refuse to respect.

    Because what they stand for and advocate and support is what has made my life far too often a miserable waste as it has billions of others, it’s disgusting and it’s evil and it’s wrong and I don’t want it around me and no human being should be subject to this treatment and these conditions and this futility of a life, and that’s all the reason I need. Dismissed

    As long as they’re going through life supporting and propagating and validating ignorance, hate, servility to power, bigotry, and violence, they have self-selected non-participation in our society. They have chosen to egregiously violate the social contract, to the extent that some of them will haughtily declare they didn’t sign one and millions of others want to renegotiate it.

    That means they don’t want to be part of our society, so GTFO. Can’t throw most of ’em out of the country, but I can damn sure throw ’em out of my world, and I can make sure they stay gone.

    As long as someone is willing to try or help those who are trying to replace progressive democracy with totalitarianism and oppression and exploitation, they are not welcome in my life, or my social circles, or my church, or my public events. They are shunned. They are subject to precisely the same treatment they wish upon others whose sole offense against them is their existence, because that is the justice that has been long-delayed by the distaste held by decent people for the unavoidable unpleasantries of seeing it applied. If they want to use my bathroom, they have to show me their genitals first so I know which one they need AND I know they’re not lying about it to gain access to me or my family in a vulnerable moment. If they want to eat my food, they have to show me they earned it. I wouldn’t want to impose my socialism on them by just giving it to them, they have to contribute somehow. If they want anything from me, at all, they have to jump through every hoop I can possibly come up with and then I’ll deny them anyway.
    Because that’s the world they’re trying to create for us, and I’m not having it.
    Or we can talk about them growing up and acting like an adult and facing the facts that the way they think is harmful to others and that is wrong and they need to change it, starting right this minute.

    Because anything else is their choice to dishonor that social contract, and if they’re not participating in the contract, they’ve self-selected out of that society.

    That was their choice to make, as an individual.

    And these are the costs of that choice.

    Now is that how I want to be to people? No. But there’s about eighty million of y’all who need to hear me loud and clear, right now:
    You’re not leaving me or anyone else with a conscience any choice. You ARE the trolley problem, and we’re the ones who have to decide whether to act or passively allow harm to happen to innocent people including us.

    Clock’s ticking. There’s only one right side of any of this. Get on it and mean it.

  • You Say You Want A Evolution…

    You say you want a evolution, well, you know. We all want to change the world.

    There can be no serious question that right-wing authoritarian structures like fascism and autocracy are on the rise around the world, even in places once thought to be resistant or impervious to them like the United States.

    This isn’t merely happening within governments but also in the media, both news and entertainment.

    There can be no serious question that the interests not only of human liberty but of human survival lie in resisting those structures with all our energy.

    I need you to listen to me now:

    The best way to fight fascism is, first and foremost, to simply not be a fascist.

    To not be a fascist means doing the hard work of understanding that human thinking has been broken since day one, and it means understanding what we can do within ourselves and out in the world to fix it, as best we can with whatever resources and ability we may have.

    Not being a fascist means being consistent and firm and honest within ourselves about how and what we think. It means being the voice in our own head that asks hard questions like “wait…that’s a little racist, isn’t it?” or “am I really being fair here?” and answers them honestly, even when we don’t like the honest answer.

    Not being a fascist means resisting that urge to “go along” with microaggressions that aren’t targeted at you…or that may even benefit you.

    It means not allowing yourself to fall into the trap of believing that your freedom lies in your ability to imitate those who enslave you by enslaving others, by declaring others less than (or greater than for that matter) by virtue of some ridiculous external characteristic like skin color, gender or gender identity, or sexuality.

    It means not merely “class solidarity” or solidarity with some other identity group like our ethnic heritage, gender expression, or sexuality, but life solidarity: understanding that we are all nodes in an incomprehensible mesh of interacting interactions interacting with interactions ad infinitum, and fundamentally we *must* all work together, as best as we can understand how, to ensure that life exists and persists. 

    That IS the “meaning of life.”  To create and propagate more life.  It’s what we’re “here for,” one way or another, and as a much wiser man than I once wrote, “all things serve The Beam.” Sagan: “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Hicks: “We are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively…we are the imagination of ourselves.”

    The grand procession of Life is all about keeping live alive and evolving so we can imagine ever more wonderful selves as we grow and evolve over time, always knowing that fundamentally there is no finish line to evolution. Either you keep evolving, or you go extinct. (Except you, mister horseshoe crab. Contrary bastard.)

    It’s fairly ludicrous to suggest that in an effectively infinite universe, intelligent life only exists on this one backwater rock…but it’s also a non-zero possibility. 

    We may be IT. We and our companions here on this rock, could be the only developing intelligent life in the universe.  I’d say it’s much more likely given the span of time that we’re not, but it’s possible – *someone* had to be first.

    It is our duty to life, to do our best to keep life moving forward. That is what we’re here for, in whatever ways our individual lives present the possibility.

    You know this, and we know this together, but we are steeped in literally *our entire history* of thinking differently. We’ve gone through all the things we’ve gone through from the caves and treetops through all manner of strife and abuse and thousands of years of struggle, and now we are here. This is the moment when humanity becomes Next. It’s happening around you, and to you, every minute.

    Keep moving forward. We are breaking the chains of the past and writing the direction of the future all at once, and we owe it to ourselves, to all who came before us, and to all who will come after, to get it right as best we can.

    Part of that process is eradicating fascism and the dark human tendencies that fuel it as completely and irrevocably as possible.

    That starts with each one of us, in our own minds, every day.

    Don’t be a fascist.

  • Taking Exception

    The Exceptions, Unaccepted

    Hey, folks.

    I want to talk about being exceptional.

    Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.

    There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.

    Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.

    That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.

    You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.

    Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.

    "When you're an exception, you're harder to rule." Photo of Temilola Ftoyinbo-Aqueh. She's standing in a wild area with a large fallen tree trunk behind her extending from foreground at right to the background at center-left, with the subject standing in front of the background terminus of the trunk and looking slightly upward while standing and facing to the left of the viewer. She's wearing a dark blue short-sleeved blouse top of no particular description otherwise, and khaki pants. Her left thumb is hooked in her left pants pocket, with the rest of her fingers hanging below.
    When you’re an exception, you’re harder to rule. Meet Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

    Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.

    Being What You Are

    Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.

    That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.

    You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.

    You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.

    You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.

    “Noblesse Oblige”

    It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.

    There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”

    That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)

    If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”

    Gifted Child – A Digression

    This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)

    When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.

    I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.

    It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.

    One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.

    So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.

    By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.

    Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.

    In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.

    Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.

    School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.

    So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.

    I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.

    I’m the person that guy thinks he is.

    The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.

    That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.

    Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.

    If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.

    Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.

    If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.

    Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.

    Getting There

    Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.

    If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.

    Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.

    That’s how we get there.

    I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.

    We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.

    We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.

    The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?

    How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?

  • The Progressives Are Winning

    We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.

    We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.

    It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.

    Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.

    These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.

    They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.

    Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.

    We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.

    The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.

    The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.

    These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.

    They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.

    We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.

    The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.

    It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.

    The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.

    With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.

    That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.

    That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.

    That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.

    Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.

    We are right.

    We have the answers we need.

    Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.

  • When I Was Forty-One I Had A Very Good Year…

    A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.

    Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.

    2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…

    If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.

    Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.

    Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.

    But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.

    “C’mon now, who do you think you are?
    Hah! Bless your soul…
    You really think you’re in control?”

    Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

    Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.

    These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.

    I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.

    But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.

    Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.

    Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.

    As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”

    People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.

    The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.

    The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.

    I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.

    That’s pretty nuts.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.

    Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.

    The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.

    The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.

    Now ask yourself this question:

    Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?

    I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.

    What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.

    Class dismissed.

  • Can’t You Take A Joke?

    The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.

    All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

    Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.

    One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.

    Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.

    Oh stewardess, I speak jive.

    If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”

    If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.

    Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.

    The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.

    This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.

    I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.

    When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.

    Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.

    Three words makes all the difference

    Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”

    Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)

    The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?

    These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.”
    I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.

    When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.

  • The Right People

    We have bad policies for combating homelessness and poverty for one reason: because the very wealthy need the very poor to keep everyone else in line.

    The Right Policies

    During my usual daily searches through the news for things to be worried about, I came across this letter to the editor from Jake Trimble in the Salt Lake City Tribune titled “Latest abatement shows Salt Lake City is plagued by bad homeless policy.”

    Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.

    That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.

    So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.

    Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.

    The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.

    Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.

    The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.

    The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.

    The Right Charities

    The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”

    There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.

    You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.

    You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.

    You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.

    To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.

    The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.

    “You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.

    “Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.

    “Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’

    “Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!

    “Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.

    “Awwwwww, what a champ!”

    Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.

    The Right Systems

    Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.

    The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.

    There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.

    Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.

    There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.

    To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.

    I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.

    So What’s Left?

    You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.

    The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.

    The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.

    The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”

    If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!

    And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.

    What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.

    As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.

  • Back To Normal

    What We Need

    What we need, they said, is to get “back to normal.”

    As I write this, we’re well into the fourth or fifth “wave” of COVID-19 infections, depending on who’s counting and how. Deaths are on the rise again in many states in spite of increased vaccination.

    A few days ago a young black man, Daunte Wright, was shot and killed by a police officer over yet another vague insinuation about registration tags or air fresheners or something, literally a few miles down the road from the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd. People are protesting nationwide, with the attendent arrests and further abuses of police power that we’ve come to expect here in the “land of the free.”

    Our love affair with mass public shootings got off to a high-energy restart in March, when a man who later blamed “sex addiction” went on a killing spree targeting Asian-American women in massage parlors. Since then there have already been so many public shooting incidents I’ve lost track, and it’s only the fifteenth of April.

    It looks like normal is exactly what we’ve gotten back to, and just like the normal we left behind when COVID started, it sucks. Millions unemployed or underemployed for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without reliable or even meaningful access to health care for no reason other than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs. Millions without access to education, and much of the education they can access deliberately distorted, for no reason than that it’s profitable for a handful of oligarchs.

    A nearly extinct middle class. The death of popular leisure. The rise of profit-based humanity, when what you “deserve” as a human being depends entirely on how much profit you’re willing to generate for a handful of oligarchs. It’s hilarious and terrifying to me that just in my lifetime we’ve gone from glorifying the dream of a day when nobody needed to work, to vilifying the idea that any decent person would ever want to do anything but work.

    Racism. Sexism and other gender-based bigotry. And of course, always, classism…except some of y’all who thought you were “us” have found out the hard way over the last year or so that you’re “them” just like I am, so now what?

    Now What?

    alex-jones-cap-crop-rogan-youtube
    Pictured: “Normal” – via YouTube

    Apparently for some folks “now what” is “desperately scramble back to the crap we used to put up with, because at least that was predictable and safe.” You may hear me looking down my nose at you but I’m not; I understand better than you think.

    You see, this is a common thinking pattern in codependency – families and loved ones of people who are addicts. The drunk or junkie gets sober and then of all things you, the codependent, find yourself thinking like “well jeez at least when he was drunk all the time I knew how to deal with him.” Nuts, but also very real. I lived through it; I know. Was way easier to lift five bucks off the old man when he was passed out.

    So I get it. I also get that it doesn’t work and never did and we have to set that nonsense aside now. We’re evolving – in real time, at high speed, and we’re watching ourselves do it and can make choices about how it happens… and into what we finally evolve.

    We have to reject these self-serving hypocrisies that we’ve so fallen in love with. We just love to be the heroes in our own movie, but we rarely stop to think that maybe we’re the bad guy…and the unfortunate reality is we are the bad guy far more often than we like to believe. Not only are we the bad guy, but a lot of what we’ve been taught to believe was good about us is bovine excrement. The taming of the wild land and noble savage by the educated European; the grand and sweeping reforms of democracy that were for white, land-owning men only; the common defense that defended the wealthy with the lives of the poor.

    We’ve been coming to terms with that for a minute now, especially for the last fifty-five years or so, since the great cultural revolutions of the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of the terms we’ve come to may be as misguided as those we’re rejecting. Wide-eyed credulity has been supplanted by bitter, arrogant cynicism; is that an improvement? We continue to think of our democratically elected governments in “us v. them” terms, and in so doing continue to fail to understand our role both in our government and in our society; we continue to look for someone or something to blame rather than working to solve the problem we’re complaining about. We engage in empty, performative gestures, but then when someone is sincere we doubt and discredit them.

    I’ve talked about this in my own field as well, right? The audience clamors for authenticity but not without ten thousand dollars worth of studio effects on it. We want informed and passionate advocates for justice, but then we give all the airspace to the same fifteen voices working for the same six companies that we always have…unless we want to look smart, then we go off the rails and end up in Alex Jones land.

    What about any of this merits any rush to get “back to?”

    The Reality At Hand

    brown mountains
    Photo by Roberto Nickson on Pexels.com

    The reality at hand is, simply put, what I’ve been saying all along: we’re evolving. That kind of behavior, all that hypocrisy and self-contradiction for the sake of upholding a public image that probably isn’t as great as we think it is to begin with, all of that doing one thing behind closed doors and saying something else out in public…it’s all going away.

    What we are facing is the stark and inescapable truth that these behaviors work in opposition to the “universal ethic,” i.e. the survival and propagation of the species. It does not promote sustainability to continue turning a blind eye to human rights abuses. It does not help preserve and expand the species for us to continue deliberately making life a start to finish terror for huge segments of the population.

    It doesn’t serve the universal ethic to invent all these labor-saving devices and then refuse to stop wasting our labor because that’s the habit we’re in and we’ve come to believe it’s the only way to do things.

    It doesn’t serve the universal ethic to keep the vast majority of the population subjugated, even if you can con a big chunk of them into being happy about it.

    As we’ve discussed previously, anything that doesn’t serve the universal ethic is, eventually, rejected by life itself as contrary to its purposes. This broken, purposeless “normality” to which we’re all in such a hurry to return because we’re exhausted and confused and scared and feel unstable and vulnerable in the face of COVID-19 simply does not serve and must therefore be rejected.

    Right now is the time, folks. This is the moment many of us, and indeed many in generations long past, have waited for. Right now it’s in our hands to shape the future. We have that power, you and me, together. The more together we are, the more power we have, and the more power we have the more effectively we can push back against those whose behavior and ideology are hostile to the survival and propagation of the species.

    It was always us, man. Not the big rich folks. It’s always been us – “the people.” “Little folks” like you and me looking around and saying to ourselves “no, there’s got to be a better way.” That one simple thought has been the impetus for every advancement in human life since some fifteen-foot-long pre-Cambrian mudskipper decided it was easier to walk over the dry spots than to swim around, and also there’s food up there.

    A Better Way

    Zack de la Rocha, 2016 publicity photo by Juan Luis Garcia via Billboard.Com

    There is a better way, and we can nearly all see it now. The democratizing of information that has come with the information age has made the structures that protected old entrenched power structures impossible to maintain. It’s too easy to see through now. Religion is dying. Even as we cry out internally for those connections and exchanges of power and energy that are often lumped into “mysticism” simply because we haven’t yet understood their science, we are actively rejecting the superficial substitutes for those connections and exchanges. We’re stripping away all the barnacles and remembering what’s supposed to be so great about all this in the first place.

    It is a fascinating and exciting time to be alive. I absolutely believe that the things we’ve done in the last 70-80 years, and the things we’ll do in the next 30-50, will define everything about our species for at least the next five centuries.

    Philosopher and poet Zack de la Rocha once posed this thought:

    It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime;
    What better place than here? What better time than now?

    Rage Against The Machine, Guerilla Radio

    It’s here, it’s now, and it’s time. A revolution not of arms and battles and the same stupid pointless escalations, but of mind and spirit, an internal revolution that begins, as all true revolutions must, in the mirror of the prospective revolutionary. We’re going to have to get used to the idea that “a job” isn’t gonna be a thing here in another few decades. We’re going to have to lose this ego-driven aversion to the “welfare state,” because the reality is that’s all any state ever is or can be, if it’s to be a state at all. We’re going to have to stop allowing ourselves to be taken in by euphemism and double-talk, without losing the art and beauty of capricious language.

    We’re going to have to stop bullshitting ourselves about who we are, and why, and what it all means, and what we’re going to do about it all, because this crap of hiding under our desks and ignoring the elephant in the living room and whistling past the graveyard and pick your metaphor is done. No, it’s not all magically disappeared, but it’s fading away very quickly now. We are literally growing out of who we’ve always been; I call it an evolution. If you’re a pedant and a biologist you might prefer to say that homo sapiens sapiens is perhaps entering its adolescence or adulthood as a species.

    However you put it, whatever way you need to frame it to make it something you can internalize, find it. Because this is the reality we’re in, your moment is now, and the fate of the world really is in your – our – hands.

    Thanks for reading, please be sure to follow and share JH using the social media icons scattered throughout the site!

  • In My Room S1E1 – The New Poor & More

    Hey welcome to my ad-hoc replacement for the John Henry Show, which will last until I’ve got more stability and can properly plan Season 3 of TJHS. I think for iTunes we can do fractional seasons, so if it works you’ll see this as season 2.1, episode 1 of “The John Henry Show.” That’ll save subscribers the hassle of going back and forth between shows.

    This show we’re talking about fundraising, about evolution, about self-honesty, about how many times does someone have to see big public things coming way before the mainstream and have them play out as predicted before people start thinking that someone might know what they’re talking about? And “The New Poor” get a hard answer to “why is this happening to us?” All this and a ton more on “In My Room,” the new low-key, get the cool people in early show from longtime activist, musician, actor, writer, and director John Henry

    Don’t forget you can help support my work at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/join/ with anything from a one-time tip for coffee money to a monthly subscription. For those who prefer Patreon, membership is available through the link above as well.

  • Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNt7ZGCW-o[/embedyt]

    The Problem

    Sweet’s “Fox On The Run.”  Perhaps the distilled essence of what we now call variously “glitter rock” or “glam rock” or “power pop.”

    Another great song that’s gonna get canceled as soon as the “woke” folk read the lyrics.  You can find ’em yourself if you want, but allow me to summarize:

    “[verse 1 & 2]Hi, I’m a rock star.  Yes, you’re a female indicating you want to have sex with me, or at least you’re a female in my general vicinity and that’s close enough because it’s 1974 and we still think “leaving the house” constitutes consent.  From a distance in the dark, you appeared to be a female of legal age to have sex (note well:  that’s not 18, this is a UK band from the 70’s; “underage” is 15 and under, not 17), but now that you’re up close you’re clearly too young and [chorus] you have to go.  [Verse 3 & 4]  Hi, it’s years later and I’m still a rock star.  You’re still a female and you are again indicating you want to have sex with me.  I remember you from when you were too young, but now you’re old enough and you’ve clearly been around a bit and had some fun…and I liked you better the other way, that is to say ‘innocent,’ that is to say ‘underage.’  [Chorus] Bye, Felicia.”

    So let’s take this one thing at a time.  First, I think it’s about time we had a clear, open, and straightforward conversation about sex in popular culture.  That conversation goes like this:

    FFS, people. POPULAR MUSIC IS ABOUT SEX. GETTING LAID. DOING NAUGHTY THINGS. BREAKING RULES. DOING THE NASTY. ROCKING. AND. ROLLING.  Even when it’s not, it is.

    I’m so, so, so, SOOOOOOOOOOO sick of living in a culture where we all pretend very loudly to hate sex on social media and in public, where we all act like nobody’s got any kinks or hangups, and absolutely every single person waited until they were a happily married adult before engaging in sexual congress for the purposes of procreation only, when we all know better and just don’t admit it.

    THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET MRS. GRUNDY MAKE THE RULES.

    Everybody lies about sex.

    It’s bullshit. Just another facet of that same old big picture where some old white guy goes ‘NO’ and we all go “hhhokay” and from now on that’s the rule and we all have to cooperate with it (or pretend to) on pain of shunning. BULLSHIT.

    You know what else? If you DON’T like sex THAT’S FINE TOO. You don’t HAVE to. Those of us who do might feel like maybe you’re missing out, but in the end it’s your business and nobody else’s.  There are WAY more than enough folks who are into it procreationally to cheerfully accommodate and fully staff a population of those who are into it more recreationally, or not at all!

    And guess what? As long as we’re not putting our hands on anyone who can’t give or hasn’t given informed consent for our hands to be on them, it’s FINE. It’s all FINE. And we nearly all do it. The very fact of something being forbidden or taboo or socially risky is commonly what tends to turn people on about it; I’m telling you, we’re not as different as we think we are and you’re probably not nearly as big a pervert as you think, relatively speaking.

    Feathers vs. Chickens

    With that in mind it’s not unreasonable to say every damned single one of us has SOME kind of kink. All a kink is, is something that you find sexually pleasurable that, generally speaking, falls outside the range of “strictly one man, one woman, missionary position, no funny talk or spank and tickle.”  Your kink might be oral once a year, that guy over there’s kink might be the only way he can really enjoy himself is with six Armenian jugglers.  Long as he can find six Armenian jugglers who consent, I fail to see any problem with that at all.

    That’s where the term “vanilla” as used in communities related to kink comes from – because some folks like vanilla ice cream, and some folks like rocky road or black cherry or mint chocolate chip.  Some folks might like them all on alternating days, or at the same time, and as long as the ice cream is cool with it, it’s all good.

    And some folks might not like ice cream at all and that’s cool too.

    Heck, your kink might be simply the wonderful feeling you get from being intimate with someone you love.  Destigmatize that word “kink” in your head a bit, it’ll do you good.

    We have seen incredible growth in our understanding of human dignity and interpersonal respect, in my lifetime.  Things I did in my twenties I wouldn’t do if I was twenty now, because back then we didn’t really know the less egregious stuff was as bad as it manifestly proved to be.  That’s good change – that’s GREAT if you are (or present as) female.

    But it sucks if you really are just a person who was part of the context of groupies and nobody’s checking ID’s at the afterparty and all that stuff, never set out to hurt anyone, never got pushy or shitty with someone when you got told no, didn’t take advantage of anyone when they were passed out or otherwise so incapacitated as to be unable to give meaningful consent, did your best to be respectful and decent, and twenty, thirty, thirty-five years later you’re supposed to feel like an asshole because you *should have* known in 1991 that when a woman walks up to you and offers you free drugs and sex after a gig, she’s probably got serious issues and may need immediate help.

    No, in 1991 the expected and entirely common response to that situation was “let’s party,” and frankly I think it’s well worth discussing it with the participants of the time on the “female side” of that conversation before we go assuming all or even most of them feel or in fact were abused, exploited, or assaulted.

    Kill Your Idols

    The simple reality is that not all our heroes are all we wish they were, and we’re coming to grips with that.  We haven’t yet developed a clear and consistent standard to retroactively apply – what Kevin Spacey did was a million miles away from what Al Franken did…but they both paid the same price, didn’t they?  Because Spacey was an active predator whose behavior wasn’t even acceptable under the morals of the time and place it happened, whereas Franken is guilty of incredibly tangential and minor involvement in a bit of ribald humor typical of its time and place, and has expressed regret and even self-loathing at the idea that he participated in anything that genuinely hurt anyone.  It was “all in fun,” and in that time and place there wasn’t anything abnormal or really even mildly offensive about it, as evidenced by the clear and unmitigated enthusiasm and fun being had by the woman Franken’s accused of sexually assaulting visible in the tape of the incident.

    I think these errors of scope and scale, the refined discernment that truly must become a part of this process of recursively examining our past in the every-increasing light of new knowledge and wisdom, will sort themselves out in time.

    I just hope we can remember how to enjoy an old pop song with a good hook – and this one’s on the same heap as “You’re Sixteen” and “Only Sixteen” and all of the other work, in many cases full of beauty and talent, that stands as an uncomfortable and inconvenient reminder of the reality that as recently as thirty years ago it was still socially acceptable enough for a thirty year man to write a song about having the hots for a minor to have it become a hit.

    There’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look, just like there’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look at Twain’s use of the n-word in his writing.

    Unintended Consequences

    There is something wrong with pretending that stuff never happened or even that it doesn’t still constitute aesthetically pleasing art of its type.  Not only all of the sort of liberal and sex-positive things I’ve already outlined, but there’s one more much more ominous facet to all of this sweeping under rugs of dirty little secrets:

    It gives cover to predators.

    It drives people who engage in “non-vanilla” but still entirely legal behavior further into the shadows, where it becomes harder for communities to self-police and social stigma makes it much more difficult to prosecute active sexual predators.  Victims of abuse are already afraid to come forward because they’re like to be kink shamed and maybe even arrested by police, especially in same-sex situations because bigotry.

    Making everyone who’s a little kinky feel like Ted Bundy doesn’t solve any problem and makes it much easier for the real Ted Bundys of the world to do their damage, and that’s the end result of all this pearl-clutching.  Making it impossible to talk about sex doesn’t protect anyone, or at least not from much or for long.

    So definitely, hold people responsible.  Let’s not have Gary Glitter raking in millions in royalties from US sports broadcasts after being convicted multiple times of active and predatory pedophilia.  Let’s not just keep on with the “boys will be boys” crap.

    But let’s also make sure we’re keeping a fair and reasoned perspective.  No matter how many enlightened individuals there are, there simply is no reason to fault a person in 1955 for accepting as normal that his wife wasn’t allowed to get credit without his permission, because it was normal back then.  Many of those present at the time fought and even died to help secure the rights and privileges we’re now trying to retroactively condemn them for not supporting.

    Credit Where It’s Due

    It is in fact the very considerations of that guy in 1955, Mr. Joe Slightly-More-Progressive-Than-Average, asking himself whether that normality was really fair that advanced the conversation far enough that you can look back at him in condescension now.  The same’s true of the stuff I’m talking about above; those of us who were “on the ground” so to speak were the ones who by and large explored and defined and brought to life these new ways of understanding, new boundaries, new rules of respectful communication.

    We fought, hard, not just in public rhetoric but in our own heads to resolve that cognitive dissonance between our norms and our values, and to adjust our behavior and make it acceptable.  Sure, not all of us were on board, and not everyone who’s 21 is free from bigotry and sexual aggression now, either, but we – particularly “us” as in people now called “generation X” as well as the hippie segment of the Boomers who preceded us – had to actually *discover* this stuff through trial and error, and genuinely wrestle with the dawning realization that some of our behavior wasn’t acceptable even if she DID say yes, and we needed to make some changes.

    So I don’t want to get into some dumb inter-generational argument, but try to keep all this in mind when you’re standing there, immersed since birth in the values that we made norms, and thinking about getting sanctimonious because we didn’t adhere perfectly to those values before they were even fully developed.  Trust me, your kids are gonna do the same to you, and in retrospect they’ll have just as much cause.