JHUS Staging

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  • JH Afterparty, Vol 1. Issue 1

    It’s Go Time!

    Hi everyone and welcome to the first official edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter! This will be my “supporter-Patron perk” content, or at least part of it: Patrons and people who support or have supported my work financially get to read this when it’s released, and everyone else will be able to see it in a week.

    Lots of exciting stuff to talk about here, so let’s get right to it!

    First, as should be obvious if you’re reading this on my site, I’ve implemented a proper authentication system on JohnHenry.US now, so that supporters who contribute via methods other than Patreon will be able to get their (admittedly nominal, at present anyway) “perks” as supporters.

    Right now this comes primarily in the form of posts/newsletters/content just like this one.

    The habit I’m striving for with this is “every Tuesday.” So every Tuesday (ostensibly!) I’m going to write a sort of “backstage diary” type of post where things are more casual, less go-go-go and bullet pointed, and more this is what I’ve been thinking about and doing lately.

    Also a place for some of my more personal musings and ramblings, for instance I think this would be the right place to tell the whole story of this old friend who deus ex machina’d out of nowhere and gave me exactly the things I was missing to turn everything around – basically the time and space to work that I’ve been promised multiple times in the past and always ended up getting “not so much” and conditions and hurry up and hey when you gonna get a job.

    All that sort of personal rambly stuff that has often taken place on my Facebook page will be shifting in to these newsletters, too – I figure most of the folks who would care to read stuff like that are already supporters anyway 🙂

    (Sidebar: if you are a past supporter but have never had an account here, get with me via the contact form and we’ll get you set up properly.)

    Now that I have the proper infrastructure in place, my weekly casual newsletters that I’ve been referring to as my “patron previews” and will now be known as “JH AfterParty” (see below) will also be posted here under the same “conditions” – they’re only visible to logged in users who have supported my work somehow for the first week after publication, then they’re public-access. Folks who just create accounts so they can access the forums are in a different group and will have the same access as the general public; the posts will be available to them a week after they’re available to supporters, both here and on Patreon.

    I do plan to continue duplicating the work at both JHUS and Patreon, though; there are people who are Patrons first and JH fans second, and I want to make sure they’re getting their due. Plus it helps the whole *shudder* marketing situation on that platform, by way of the same folks.

    Oh crap, I’m a rock star.

    Part of this comes from an unfortunate reality I’m facing: I’m going to have to stop being quite so accessible. The scope and volume of noise arrayed against me is just deranges, with obsessed twits crossing over into people who have jacked me around and got caught and cut off crossing over into plain old psychos crossing over into all those various forces of capitalism and grift that have plagued my online presence for so long now.

    It’s sad, but a lot of that over the years has taken the form of bad-faith “friends” and people playing on my various buttons to get close so they could use me or ingratiate themselves – and this is a problem that goes all the way back to my childhood, mind you, because of who and what I am – and it’s come to the point where I just don’t trust any private communication from people I don’t know anymore (or from a lot of people I do).

    Consequently I’m sort of shutting off most of the DM capabilities on my social media or heavily restricting it to a closely vetted list of friends when I can. I will instead have a contact form at JohnHenry.US (actually do now); if you’ve got something to say but you’re so worried about it being a problem for you that you’re afraid of leaving footprints behind with your message (like the network information that’s routinely collected by every website you visit), I don’t care to hear from you anyway to be honest.

    The hardest part of this is how many people who started out as readers have become friends over the years, and by no means am I shutting those people out en masse or going all Greta Garbo on everyone. I hope to continue developing new friendships and relationships from an expanding readership/fan base over time. But leaving myself wide open just invites too many bad actors to waste too much of my time and energy, and yours, so I’m closing some things off and “funneling” others, which also helps me manage my time more efficiently and effectively in terms of organization.

    I anticipate that, over time, the forum at JHUS will grow to supplant the greater part of the “community” aspect of my social media platforms, and from that perspective unfortunately I’m going to start looking a whole lot more like the standard-issue in terms of presentation. Hopefully I’m picking up the things that work without the things that don’t or that I feel fundamentally compromise the work when I start worrying more about advertising and marketing than about creating quality original content.

    As I was writing this I decided to name this newsletter the “JH AfterParty.” The afterparty is where friends of the band hang out after the show, and everyone else hears about it a week later, so the whole thing ties nicely thematically. Especially since I plan to run it on Tuesday afternoons and that’s usually about when I’d be waking up from an afterparty from a really solid Saturday night gig back in the day 😉

    Keeping up & wrapping up

    I don’t want to duplicate work so in terms of raw, “this is what I did here’s the links and what it was all about” stuff please please PLEASE do get subscribed to my weekly Substack digest. (There’s also a signup form in the sidebar of JohnHenry.US). Every Saturday I publish a digest of the prior week’s work that includes links to new content and ongoing discussion of non-content work as well. That’s the very best way for anyone, regardless of whether or how they’re supporting my work, to keep up with what I’m doing. Please don’t forget to share those links around and all that other stuff; more than anything else, engagement is absolute king, and now that it finally seems like I’m firmly headed in the right direction it’s more important than ever.

    As I’m writing this message I’m bouncing back and forth between other tasks, including other content work plus putting together tomorrow’s newsletter. Let’s talk quickly about what you should expect to see upcoming, and I’ll get out of your hair.

    person wearing mask holding cocktail shaker
    Ain’t no party like a JH AfterParty cuz a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!? Photo by Thiago Miranda on Pexels.com

    I’ve just about finished adding/changing/tuning up the back end of JohnHenry.US. I have a column 95% finished for WeAntiFascists.Com, but I want to go through the same process with that site before I publish (some of that is also already done). Then I’ll do it again with Custode.Org, in preparation to get a whole bunch of things rolling there that I’m not prepared to discuss in any greater detail than “a whole bunch of things.”

    As part of the whole membership thing I was discussing at the top of the newsletter, I’ve also gone through and rearranged/simplified the user groups and permissions on the site. As of right now either you’re a “supporter” or a “subscriber.” Subscriber is the default group you’re in when you register with the site, and allows for things like posting to the forum. “Supporter” is the group you’re in if you contribute financial support; that’s the group that will see this newsletter when it’s published rather than a week later.

    Those of you who are already registered supporters right now are also part of the Legacy user group, which is mostly just for my own internal record-keeping mostly to ensure I’m staying in touch with you about any sorts of new offers or perks or whatever become available to supporters going forward, which those folks should by rights qualify for retroactively as most of them are among the group of people who has been keeping me and my work alive the last few years.

    These changes may make some things funky on your end that I can’t see from here. If so, let me know via the contact form. Note that if you’re logged in you have access to a higher-priority contact form, which you’ll find in the site navigation menu (It’s under “Forums & Account”)! You can also contact me directly through DM at Patreon if you’re a Patron.

    Fun fact: what’s actually going to happen is I’m creating this post twice. Once that will post now and is visible only to subscribers, and the other that will post in a week and be visible to everyone. This replicates the functionality of Patreon without having to get too crazy. Plus then if I get a little chaotic or whatever and “forget” to shut off the original, it’ll still be in place and ultimately I’ll just add a 301 redirect to the non-paywalled version of the article so all the traffic goes to that one, and then this actual post goes byebye.

    I’m gonna wrap it up and get out of here, get this posted, and see what else I can get done before I try to wrap up and have a bit of a weekend.

  • 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.

  • The Ownership Class

    “Ownership class” is a phrase I use fairly often, and even in doing so I understand that it can be ambiguously interpreted.  For that reason, I’ve added this definition to the JH Lexicon, to be defined as follow:

    The “ownership class” is not simply filled with the people who own things; rather it refers to the very, very small group – on the order of no more than a few hundred individuals, give or take at any particular point, and depending on how you’re measuring – who control most of the world’s wealth.

    These people control everything from institutions of higher learning (and on an ever-greater scale, primary education) to the media where we get the information we’re supposed to be learning to understand in school but aren’t.  As comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out as have others, it is simply not in the interests of this small group of people to have a generally informed, educated, and engaged population.  That sort of person challenges their power and can take it away.

    So they control the information, Orwell-style, to keep us distracted from their mendacity.  Part of that is ensuring that we’re always fighting and competing amongst ourselves, often over superfluous notions like religion that have no substantive impact on the Universal Morality.

    As mentioned above, in any given context “they” could refer to as few as the half-dozen or so people who own more of the world’s wealth between them than the “bottom” half of the total human population, or it may refer to as many as a few hundred people who make the most money from and control the behaviors of the largest corporations in the world.  It is not any one ethnic group, skin color, religion, gender, or sexuality per se, although the tables have been tilted largely in favor of some people based on those considerations.  It’s about individuals, making individual decisions including the decision to influence, for selfless or selfish means, the decisions of others.