So..., having meditated for quite a long time on degeneracy this year, I was more primed and ready to explode on the #MeToo trope than little Rocket Man's spanking new MIRV. Not that I sincerely give a rat's nasty little flea-ridden patootty about the foolishness and phuckery of peasants - or even middle and upper class strivers peasants with a couple of nickels to rub together for that matter - I don't.
Above the gossipy fray, I don't care about the underlying gender/power disparities, or, virtue-signalling intersectional alliance with the oppressed either. It's simply not part of my psychic constitution to care
about the high-minded retelling of what amount to high-school style antics. The nekkid goings-on of chronologically grown-folk whose
psychological development can best be described as de-evolutionary arrested, is of little interest to me.
Simple critter that I am, at the reptile-brain level of engagement, it all comes down to my very weakly resisted inclination to wallow in schadenfreude. I am a glutton for the vicarious enjoyment of watching other despicable apes get ripped to
shreds on the plains of the popular-cultural serengeti by various and sundry wildly enflamed letgo beasts. I've been needing to go to confession six times a day for the past couple of months because of the obsessive and compulsive nature of my abiding and overarching enjoyment of this spectacle.
On the meta-level, i.e., philosophically above the sticky fray, what I care most deeply about is individual sovereignty and the
associated requisite science and methodology of asymmetrical violation
of the established order. If you haven't figured this out about me yet, if you haven't identified my "chief-feature" as it were, let me spell it out for you. I have a profound, all-consuming, and irrational problem with authoriteh.
This has not only been my career-limiting professional modus operandi, pared of all guise and dissimulation, it is truly my religion. It has been this way for me since about the age of eleven, when a phenomenal sunday school teacher encouraged me to question any and everything. This encouragement was permanently crystallized and violentized in my psyche at twelve when I first rebelled against peer authoriteh and beat the literal shit out of an arrogant neighborhood bully. (I would link to this buffoon, but I see he's still alive and never made it out of Wichita)
Anyway, as best I can gather, this current, energetic eruption of rule-breaking in polite society all started when the late Si Newhouse decided to go laughing to his grave by profoundly deviating from the established behavioral norms of the Trans-American Protectorate (now archived) - by publishing Ronan Farrow's expose on the disgusting degenerate rape-pig Harvey Weinstein. Publication of that story in The New Yorker amounted to detonation of a nuclear grenade of asymmetric, unintended consequences.
Said grenade has cracked an American cultural dam. Not only did it unleash the pent-up gender-flood from the oppressed and long-offended feminine-striver masses in entertainment/media/politics - it also unexpectedly unleashed the genuinely oppressed rage of the deplorables still rightfully and righteously angered over the cultural and moral pass given to serial rapist William Jefferson Clinton.
Now, which camp will keep the very hot fires of this cultural moment burning - remains to be seen. Whether the fires rise up to the Impyrian heights of the multi-billionaire TAP elites who are earnestly warring among themselves remains to be seen. That it's forced its way onto teevees all across America and is the hot potato that will determine the outcome of the Alabama senatorial special election - does not yet give us a clear indication of whether this moment will engulf, scorch, and shred all the really big killer-apeswho fundamentally have no game and need to get righteously burned. Meanwhile, I'll continue wallowing in schadenfreude and enjoying every single instance of yet another despicable ape getting shredded and scorched out'chere on these fields of dystopian sorrow....,
pagesix | A source familiar with the purchase said: “While everyone in New York
wants a doorman, Eric specifically said he didn’t want one. He doesn’t
want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out. He insisted on
his own elevator.”
Schmidt has also spent millions getting the 6,250-square-foot duplex —
which has four bedrooms and a large entertainment area with a wet bar
opening onto a 3,300-square-foot terrace — soundproofed, claiming he
“doesn’t sleep well,” but also affording him complete privacy.
Other sources say that earlier this summer, the tech mogul was
embarking on a tour of the French Riviera and asked his aides to find
alluring female companions to “decorate his yacht.”
Schmidt, who’s worth $8.2 billion, bought the 195-foot Oasis for
about $72.3 million in 2009. The source said, “He had one of his aides
approach beautiful and intelligent women that Schmidt never met before,
saying, ‘Eric would like to invite you to his yacht,’ which was cruising
around the Riviera.”
He was spotted in St. Tropez earlier this month, and later sailed to
the Cap d’Antibes, and we’re told that some of the women approached by
his aides had agreed to join Schmidt onboard.
Wendy Schmidt, who lives in Nantucket, said in an interview last year
that they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece
of luggage” following him around the world.
newyorker | We have witnessed a theatre of accountability insidiously refine itself,
quite quickly, in the past few months. Louis C.K.’s statement, for
example, following the exposé in the Times of his sexual harassment of
female comics, was not as passionate as, but was more coherent than,
Harvey Weinstein’s ramblings about Jay-Z and the gun lobby. The
opportunistic finesse of Kevin Spacey’s coming-out certainly tripped
some social alarms, but he nonetheless garnered some sympathy. Power
brokers like the Pixar animation baron John Lasseter have even scooped
long-labored-over articles by preëmpting them altogether. (Lasseter is
taking a six-month leave of absence.) No display was savvier than NBC’s
orchestration on Wednesday.
The “Today” show’s artful transposition of grief where there would
naturally be scrutiny continued into the 10 A.M.
slot, in which the
veteran host Kathie Lee Gifford spoke of how much she, too, loved Lauer
and how sad she was. It continued on this morning’s program, with
Guthrie and
Kotb again at the helm. Not since Bill Cosby—or Bill O’Reilly, depending
on one’s television diet—has the scourge of sexual assault so acutely
infiltrated the righteous perimeter of the American home. (President
Trump, also affiliated with NBC and accused of assaulting women, never
quite depended on a family-man image.) The influence of a
behind-the-scenes figure like Weinstein can feel diffuse, removed from
our everyday cultural consumption; Lauer was, and is, synonymous with
the family feel of “Today.” Part of this comes from the network’s
bloated investment in Lauer—he reportedly earns between twenty million
and twenty-five million dollars a year. (In 2014, a source told Page Six
that the
company chartered helicopter rides for Lauer from his Hamptons compound
to its Rockefeller Center studios at his request.) When, in 1996, Lauer
wrested
the anchor chair from Bryant Gumbel, gossip magazines swooned over his
geometric jaw and feathery hair; twenty years later, he was transforming
comfortably into a smug but wise paternal figure. His tenure at the
“Today” show was the longest in its history. Now instances of Lauer’s
public pettiness toward women seem like the exertions of a holistically
awful campaign. In 2012, he admonished the actress Anne Hathaway for
photographs that the paparazzi had taken of her exiting a car. “Seen a
lot of
you lately,” he said. And, famously, Lauer was an architect of
“Operation Bambi,” a plan that succeeded in getting his former co-anchor
Ann Curry fired from the show that same year. (“ ‘Chemistry,’ in
television history, generally means the man does not want to work with
the woman,” Curry said, according to Brian Stelter’s insider anatomy,
“Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.”) On her
final show, Curry wept and Lauer pretended to soothe her. His interview
of Hillary Clinton last year was intrusive and aggressive when compared
with his handling of Trump. How a man thinks of women dictates how he
works with them.
gabbard.house.gov | Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) held a press conference
and spoke on the House floor today urging Congress to overhaul the
broken system of sexual harassment and assault in Congress and across
the country. The congresswoman called for an end to taxpayer-funded
settlements which total more than $17 million in 268 Congressional settlements over the past two decades, according to recent reports.
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was joined by Reps. Ron
DeSantis (FL-06), Marsha Blackburn (TN-07), Jim Cooper (TN-05), and
Kathleen Rice (NY-04) to introduce the Congressional Accountability and
Hush Fund Elimination Act. This bipartisan, comprehensive legislation
would ensure that perpetrators are held personally and financially
accountable for their actions by ending taxpayer-funded harassment
settlements and require any individual who has settled such a claim
using taxpayer funds to fully reimburse the Treasury.
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said:
“For
too long survivors of sexual harassment and assault have been isolated,
shamed, and bullied into silence, while their abusers walk away
scot-free with the privilege of anonymity and without personal or
financial accountability.
“This has been happening
right here in Congress, in the media, and in many other sectors of our
society. No one, whether it be a Capitol Hill staffer, a Hollywood
actor, a school teacher, or a soldier or anyone in any profession, at
any time should have to choose between their job and personal safety.
“Congress needs to act now
to end the practice of taxpayer-funded sexual harassment settlements,
expose perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault, and provide a fair
and transparent path to justice for survivors. This behavior is
absolutely unacceptable. It has no place in Congress or in our society.
It must end."
NationalReview | The rules of society should be fair to everybody, not based on
tribal identity.
It’s amazing how complicated simple principles can become when they’re
inconvenient to your team.
On Sunday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi created a mess for herself
by insisting on NBC’s Meet the Press that Representative John Conyers
deserves “due process” in the face of a series of accusations of
improper conduct.
Politically, Pelosi’s performance was a gift to her many critics.
For
liberals who think she’s passed her sell-by date as a Democratic leader,
her hapless effort will now be Exhibit A in the brief against her,
despite her subsequent efforts to clean up the mess.
For populists on the left and right who think the political
establishment is rigged to protect members of the club, Pelosi’s effort
to protect Conyers — and Senator Al Franken, who has also been accused
of several sexual transgressions — while at the same time insisting that
we know all we need to know about President Trump and Alabama Senate
candidate Roy Moore is simply a naked partisan double standard.
“We are strengthened by due process,” Pelosi insists when the topic
is Conyers. But Moore is “a child molester.”
This raises the most dismaying gift that Pelosi lobbed to the mob.
By
circling the wagons around Conyers and Franken (and Bill Clinton to some
extent), Pelosi is all but guaranteeing the election of Moore.
It is difficult to exaggerate the anger among many Republicans who
believe that liberals use the rules selectively, shamelessly invoking
standards of conduct to delegitimize and destroy their enemies while
exempting their own.
“Zero tolerance” for thee, “it’s complicated” for
me.
It was this belief — hardly unfounded — that let millions of Republicans
dismiss allegations of sexual abuse against Trump and now Moore.
Every
day, conservatives angry at my opposition to Moore tell me “we” can’t
“unilaterally disarm.” If they won’t play by the rules, why should we?
freebeacon | Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) said Wednesday that she isn’t sure
what to do about her Democratic colleagues facing sexual harassment
allegations.
Hirono did not say Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn) or Rep. John Conyers
(D., Mich.) should step down, adding that the world is not "so black and
white" as to make it clear what to do. Franken was photographed with his hands over a sleeping woman’s breasts and Conyers is facing numerous harassment allegations, but Hirono called for regular procedures to continue.
"I think that we are [cleaning up politics] in the sense that we have
procedures, you know?" Hirono said to MSNBC's Chuck Todd. "We are
figuring out how we can best deal with the kinds of complaints that have
come forward, the allegations."
She was quick to say that the problem is not confined to the
Democratic Party and extends to other parties and industries. Todd
countered by saying, "you have to start somewhere," and he asked Hirono
if she was comfortable working with Conyers and Franken.
"I have served with them before we knew that they engaged in this
kind of behavior—which, by the way, anybody who engages in this kind of
behavior should be held accountable—but notice that good people do bad
things," Hirono replied. "Gee, I wish that life were so black and white
that you can't think of a single good person who has done bad things."
Hirono emphasized that the problem is cultural and argued that people should not focus too much on individual offenses.
Noah called the feud between Trump and Warren a “tricky one to
process” because his nicknames for other people like “Low-Energy” Jeb Bush, “Little” Marco Rubio, and “Lyin'” Ted Cruz are more self-explanatory than “Pocahontas.”
“When he says ‘Pocahontas,’ you might be thinking, ‘Trevor, I’m confused. Is Elizabeth Warren Native American?'” Noah asked. “And you see, that’s the question. Because for a long time, she said she was.”
He then played numerous news clips that explain that without any
proof, Warren claimed to have Native American heritage and that minority
status helped her get a job at Harvard University, which they touted
their “diversity” with her employment.
“Wow,” Noah reacted. “How white is your college that when you get
called out for being too white, your response is, ‘Nuh-uh, we’ve got
her!'”
He then mocked her recipe contributions to a 1984 Native American cookbook called Pow Wow Chow and
pointed out that the New England Genealogical Society found “no proof”
that Warren had Native American lineage, which Noah called “problematic”
because she wrote for Pow Wow Chow.
“I mean, that would be like finding out I’m completely white, I have no African blood, and yet I wrote the book Snacks For Blacks,” Noah quipped.
Noah concluded that while Trump “is racist,” but he’s hitting Warren
for saying she’s Native American when she wasn’t, something he noted she
“never apologized for or owned up to.”
“Elizabeth Warren did something problematic, the kind of thing we
rightfully call each other out for every single day,” Noah continued.
“So as weird as it is to say, in his own racially offensive way, Donald
Trump was being woke. Yeah, and that’s unfortunately the truth.”
BostonGlobe | Longtime “Today” co-host Matt Lauer has been fired by NBC News after a
“complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the
workplace,” the network reported Wednesday morning at the top of its
“Today” broadcast.
A memo from NBC News Chairman Andy Lack noted
that it was the first complaint against Lauer, but also said the company
had reason to believe it may not have been an isolated incident.
The
network said it had received a complaint on Monday night from a
colleague and made the decision to terminate his employment.
“We are deeply saddened by this turn of events. But we will face it
together as a news organization — and do it in as transparent a manner
as we can,” Lack said in the statement.
Lauer had been an anchor on the show for 20 years, taking over in 1997.
strategic-culture |That
the relationship between Moscow and Washington should be regarded as
important given the capability of either country to incinerate the
planet would appear to be a given, but the Washington-New York
Establishment, which is euphemism for Deep State, is actually more
concerned with maintaining its own power by marginalizing Donald Trump
and maintaining the perception that Vladimir Putin is the enemy head of
state of a Russia that is out to cripple American democracy.
Beyond
twisting narratives, Russiagate is also producing potentially dangerous
collateral damage to free speech, as one of the objectives of those in
the Deep State is to rein in the current internet driven relatively free
access to information. In its most recent manifestations, an anonymous
group produced a phony list of 200 websites that were “guilty” of serving up Russian propaganda, a George Soros funded think tank identified
thousands of individuals who are alleged to be “useful idiots” for
Moscow, and legitimate Russian media outlets will be required to register as foreign agents.
Driven
by Russophobia over the 2016 election, a group of leading social media
corporations including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have been
experimenting with ways to self-censor their product to keep out foreign generated or “hate” content. They even have a label for it: "cyberhate". Congress
is also toying with legislation that will make certain viewpoints
unacceptable or even illegal, including a so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that
would potentially penalize anyone who criticizes Israel and could serve
as a model for banning other undesirable speech. “Defamatory speech”
could even eventually include any criticism of the government or
political leaders, as is now the case in Turkey, which is the country
where the “Deep State” was invented.
thenewyorker | McCarthy wasn’t persuadable on the matter, and certainly not through
personal testimony. To his way of thinking, there was no such thing as
inappropriate tech or inappropriate speech. Besides, who could be
trusted to decide? One post, which McCarthy endorsed, suggested that
letting I.T. administrators determine what belonged on the computers at
Stanford was like giving janitors at the library the right to pick the
books.
McCarthy’s colleagues innately shared his anti-authoritarian
perspective; they voted unanimously to oppose the removal of
rec.humor.funny from Stanford’s terminals. The students were nearly as
committed; a confidential e-mail poll found a hundred and twenty-eight
against the ban and only four in favor. McCarthy was soon able to win
over the entire university by enlisting a powerful metaphor for the
digital age. Censoring a newsgroup, he explained to those who might not
be familiar with Usenet, was like pulling a book from circulation. Since
“Mein Kampf” was still on the library shelves, it was hard to imagine
how anything else merited removal. The terms were clear: either you
accepted offensive speech or you were in favor of destroying knowledge.
There was no middle ground, and thus no opportunity to introduce
reasonable regulations to insure civility online. In other words, here
was the outline for exactly our predicament today.
McCarthy, who died in 2011, considered his successful campaign against
Internet censorship the capstone to a distinguished career. As he
boasted to a crowd gathered for the fortieth anniversary of the Stanford
computer-science department, on March 21, 2006, his great victory had
been to make the school understand that “a faculty-member or student Web
page was his own property, as it were, and not the property of the
university.” At the time, almost as much as in 1989, McCarthy could
safely see this victory as untainted; the Internet still appeared to be
virgin territory for the public to frolic in. Facebook wouldn’t go
public for another six years. The verb “Google” had yet to enter the
Oxford English Dictionary. The first tweet had just been sent—the very same day, in fact.
Today, of course, hateful, enraging words are routinely foisted on the public by users of all three companies’
products, whether in individual tweets and Facebook posts or in flawed Google News algorithms.
Championing freedom of speech has become a business model in itself, a
cover for maximizing engagement and attracting ad revenue, with the
social damage mostly pushed aside for others to bear. When the Internet
was young, the reason to clean it up was basic human empathy—the idea
that one’s friends and neighbors, at home or on the other side of the
world, were worth respecting. In 2017, the reason is self-preservation:
American democracy is struggling to withstand the rampant, profit-based
manipulation of the public’s emotions and hatreds.
nautil.us | Meanwhile, over the last four decades, the winds have shifted, as
often happens in science as researchers pursue the best questions to
ask. Enormous projects, like those of the Allen Institute for Brain
Science and the Brain-Mind Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, seek to understand the structure and function of the brain
in order to answer many questions, including what consciousness is in
the brain and how it is generated, right down to the neurons. A whole
field, behavioral economics, has sprung up to describe and use the ways
in which we are unconscious of what we do—a major theme in Jaynes’
writing—and the insights netted its founders, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon
L. Smith, the Nobel Prize.
Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of
philosophy at University of California, Riverside, has conducted
experiments to investigate how aware we are of things we are not focused
on, which echo Jaynes’ view that consciousness is essentially
awareness. “It’s not unreasonable to have a view that the only things
you’re conscious of are things you are attending to right now,”
Schwitzgebel says. “But it’s also reasonable to say that there’s a lot
going on in the background and periphery. Behind the focus, you’re
having all this experience.” Schwitzgebel says the questions that drove
Jaynes are indeed hot topics in psychology and neuroscience. But at the
same time, Jaynes’ book remains on the scientific fringe. “It would
still be pretty far outside of the mainstream to say that ancient Greeks
didn’t have consciousness,” he says.
Dennett, who has called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
a “marvelous, wacky book,” likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the
doubt. “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the
completely wild junk,” he says. Particularly, he thinks Jaynes’
insistence on a difference between what goes on in the minds of animals
and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its
origins in language, is deeply compelling.
“[This] is a view I
was on the edge of myself, and Julian kind of pushed me over the top,”
Dennett says. “There is such a difference between the consciousness of a
chimpanzee and human consciousness that it requires a special
explanation, an explanation that heavily invokes the human distinction
of natural language,” though that’s far from all of it, he notes. “It’s
an eccentric position,” he admits wryly. “I have not managed to sway the
mainstream over to this.”
It’s a credit to Jaynes’ wild ideas that, every now and then, they
are mentioned by neuroscientists who study consciousness. In his 2010
book, Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio, a professor of
neuroscience, and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at
the University of Southern California, sympathizes with Jaynes’ idea
that something happened in the human mind in the relatively recent past.
“As knowledge accumulated about humans and about the universe,
continued reflection could well have altered the structure of the
autobiographical self and led to a closer stitching together of
relatively disparate aspects of mind processing; coordination of brain
activity, driven first by value and then by reason, was working to our
advantage,” he writes. But that’s a relatively rare endorsement. A more
common response is the one given by neurophilosopher Patricia S.
Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San
Diego. “It is fanciful,” she says of Jaynes’ book. “I don’t think that
it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of
consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity.”
Jaynes
himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was
disappointed with the research community’s response. Although he enjoyed
the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular
windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian. Jaynes’
drinking grew heavier. A second book, which was to have taken the ideas
further, was never completed.
And so, his legacy, odd as it is,
lives on. Over the years, Dennett has sometimes mentioned in his talks
that he thought Jaynes was on to something. Afterward—after the crowd
had cleared out, after the public discussion was over—almost every time
there would be someone hanging back. “I can come out of the closet now,”
he or she would say. “I think Jaynes is wonderful too.”
Cambridge | The World Wide Web has had a notable impact on a variety of epistemically-relevant activities, many of which lie at the heart of the discipline of knowledge engineering. Systems like Wikipedia, for example, have altered our views regarding the acquisition of knowledge, while citizen science systems such as Galaxy Zoo have arguably transformed our approach to knowledge discovery. Other Web-based systems have highlighted the ways in which the human social environment can be used to support the development of intelligent systems, either by contributing to the provision of epistemic resources or by helping to shape the profile of machine learning. In the present paper, such systems are referred to as ‘knowledge machines’. In addition to providing an overview of the knowledge machine concept, the present paper reviews a number of issues that are associated with the scientific and philosophical study of knowledge machines. These include the potential impact of knowledge machines on the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the role of social participation in the realization of intelligent systems, and the role of standardized, semantically enriched data formats in supporting the ad hoc assembly of special-purpose knowledge systems and knowledge processing pipelines.
Knowledge machines are a specific form of social machine that is concerned with the sociotechnical realization of a broad range of knowledge processes. These include processes that are thetraditional focus of the discipline of knowledge engineering, for example, knowledge acquisition, knowledge modeling and the development of knowledge-based systems.
In the present paper, I have sought to provide an initial overview of the knowledge machine concept, and I have highlighted some of the ways in which the knowledge machine concept can be applied to existing areas of research. In particular, the present paper has identified a number of examples of knowledge machines (see Section 3), discussed some of the mechanisms that underlie their operation (see Section 5), and highlighted the role of Web technologies in supporting the emergence of ever-larger knowledge processing organizations (see Section 8). The paper has also highlighted a number of opportunities for collaboration between a range of disciplines. These include the disciplines of knowledge engineering, WAIS, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, data science, and machine learning.
Given that our success as a species is, at least to some extent, predicated on our ability to manufacture, represent, communicate and exploit knowledge (see Gaines 2013), there can be little doubt about the importance and relevance of knowledge machines as a focus area for future scientific and philosophical enquiry. In addition to their ability to harness the cognitive and epistemic capabilities of the human social environment, knowledge machines provide us with a potentially important opportunity to scaffold the development of new forms of machine intelligence. Just as much of our own human intelligence may be rooted in the fact that we are born into a superbly structured and deliberately engineered environment (see Sterelny 2003), so too the next generation of synthetic intelligent systems may benefit from a rich and structured informational environment that houses the sum total of human knowledge. In this sense, knowledge machines are important not just with respect to the potential transformation of our own (human) epistemic capabilities, they are also important with respect to the attempt to create the sort of environments that enable future forms of intelligent system to press maximal benefit from the knowledge that our species has managed to create and codify.
Counterpunch | The legend of Camelot has had a decidedly devastating effect on the
sober appreciation of US government institutions. The Kennedys were the
US variant of the Royal Family and even more to the point, seemed
photogenic, intellectual, glamorous.
The Kennedy family was itself the architect behind the faux
aristocratic fantasy, the fiction, if you like, of an administration
awash with shiny competence and brain heavy awareness. In truth, it was
essentially piloted by a medically challenged and heavily medicated
figure who suffered, amongst other conditions, Addison’s disease.
President Kennedy’s rocky stewardship, as Robert Dallek notes in
considerable detail, was marked by anti-anxiety agents, sleeping pill
popping, stimulants, and pain killers. The public image of a
formidable, robust Cold War warrior was itself an elaborate fantasy,
padded by its own conspiracy of deception. As if realising the
implications of his medical burrowing, Dallek had to reiterate the point
that Kennedy was still functioning and capable and was at no risk of
cocking up during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.[2]
The Kennedys were successful enough, be it through their army of
ideological acolytes and publicists (think of the unquestioning pen of
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), to create the impression of knight-like
purity, intellectual sagacity and calm. To kill, then, what is noble,
became an essential American trope: JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Behind each had to be a gargantuan conspiracy, an
establishment puppeteer.
The Kennedy files that are promised for release are hardly going to
rock the boat, alter the world, or change a single mind. Historians
will be able to bring out modestly updated versions of old texts;
official accounts might be slightly adjusted on investigations,
locations and suspects, but the conspiracy set is bound to stick with
grim determination to ideas long formed and re-enforced by assumptions
that refuse revision.
wearyourvoicemag | My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thing-ification.” – Aimé Césaire
The use ofsocial media
as a powerful tool for free education on various topics continually
rises, with definitions, experiential narratives, and resources being
shared through Twitter threads, short videos, Facebook statuses, and
even memes. And while this is a mostly positive phenomena, there seems
to be a trend of words, and thus words’ associated theories, being used
misguidedly.
Often, this is a simple case of
fighting character limits and the loss of nuance that occurs through
online mediums, and other times it seems a phenomena of genuine
miseducation and confusion. Words like intersectionality, decolonize, imperialism, socialism, and other loaded terms that come with decades of jargon are at times applied to everything, and their actual meaning is lost.
Observing this pattern is what lead
me to the idea of an article series titled “Words Mean Things,” wherein
each month I choose a different word and discuss the theories, uses,
theorists, examples, applications, and praxis surrounding it. The goal
is to do this as concisely as possible and, understanding these will
never be wholly conclusive of all definitions, applications, and
examples of certain words, to deliver small primers that exist as
resources to lead readers to study deeper. I often say that words mean everything, and then anything, just before meaning nothing.
Colonialism
Colonialism is a system of land
occupation and theft, labor exploitation, and/or resource dependency
that is to blame for much of our modern concepts of racialization. It is
an act of dominance in which a forceful state overtakes a “weaker”
state; this means that colonization is the act of forcefully stripping
sovereignty of a country through acquisition of land, resources, raw
material, and governmental structures. Systems of colonialism are based
in notions of racial inferiority, as they as they perpetuate
white/European domination over non-white colonial subjects.
The most obvious (and broad) example
of colonialism is the expansion of Europe into Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, and the subsequent creation of colonies. Through violence and
manipulation, a relationship of control and influence
was exerted economically, socially, politically, religiously, and
culturally. In Jamaica, for example, the British empire invaded and
colonized the island in the mid-17th Century, and subsequently
established British colonial school systems, laws and regulations
creating dependency on Britain, and pushed European gender, religious,
and wardrobe norms onto the society.
There are various forms of
colonialism and colonial projects, but all involve some form of
domination, control, and/or influence on an indigenous population
through violence and/or manipulation. It is also important to note that
these various forms of colonialism often intersect and overlap, too. In
his 1972 essay “Discourse On Colonialism,” one of the most important pieces of writing I have ever read, writer Aimé Césaire states:
“Between colonizer and colonized
there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police,
taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance,
self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No
human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the
colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison
guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of
production.”
medialens | The truth of corporate journalism, and the great irony of its
obsession with 'fake news', is that it is itself utterly fake. What
could be more obviously fake than the idea that Truth can be sold by billionaire-owned media dependent on billionaire-owned advertisers for maximised profit?
The 'mainstream' worldview is anything but – it is extreme, weird, a
product of corporate conformity and deference to power. As Norman Mailer
observed:
'There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable...
The unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the
service of a machine.' (Mailer, 'The Time Of Our Time', Little Brown,
1998, p.457)
A prime example of 'mainstream' extremism is the way the UK's illegal
wars destroying whole countries are not an issue for corporate
moralists. Physicians for Global Responsibility estimate
that 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan alone. And yet it is simply understood that UK wars will not be
a theme during general elections (See here and here). By contrast, other kinds of 'inappropriate behaviour' are subject to intense scrutiny.
Consider the recent resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon
and his replacement by Prime Minister Theresa May's Chief Whip, Gavin
Williamson. Fallon resigned after it was revealed that he had 'repeatedly touched the broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer's knee at a dinner in 2002'.
Fallon was damaged further by revelations that he had lunged at journalist Jane Merrick:
'This was not a farewell peck on the cheek, but a direct lunge at my lips.'
The Commons leader Andrea Leadsom also disclosed that she had complained about 'lewd remarks' Fallon had made to her.
Sexual harassment is a serious issue, despite the scoffing of some male commentators. In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Hitchens shamefully dismissed women's complaints as mere 'squawking'.
But it is strange indeed that, while harassment is rightly deemed a
resigning offence, other 'inappropriate behaviour' leaves 'mainstream'
commentators completely unmoved.
medialens | If the human species survives long enough, future historians might well marvel at what passed for 'mainstream' media and politics in the early 21st century.
They will see that a UK Defence Secretary had to resign because of
serious allegations of sexual misconduct; or, as he put it
euphemistically, because he had 'fallen short'. But he did not have to resign because of the immense misery he had helped to inflict upon Yemen. Nor was he made to resign when he told MPs to stop criticising Saudi Arabia because that would be 'unhelpful'
while the UK government was trying to sell the human rights-abusing
extremist regime in Riyadh more fighter jets and weapons. After all, the
amount sold in the first half of 2017 was a mere £1.1 billion. (See our
recent media alert for more on this.) Right now, the UK is complicit
in a Saudi blockade of Yemen's ports and airspace, preventing the
delivery of vital medicine and food aid. 7.3 million Yemenis are already
on the brink of famine, and the World Food Programme has warned of the deaths of 150,000 malnourished children in the next few months.
Meanwhile, Robert Peston, ITV political editor, and Laura Kuenssberg,
BBC News political editor, have seemingly never questioned the British
Prime Minister Theresa May about the UK's shameful role in arming and
supporting Yemen's cruel tormentor. Nor have they responded when challenged about their own silence.
Future historians will also note that British newspapers, notably The Times and the 'left-leaning' Guardian,
published several sycophantic PR pieces for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, 'a risk-taker with a zeal for reform'. 'Is he taking on too
much too fast?', asked a swooning Patrick Wintour, the Guardian's diplomatic editor. Martin Chulov, the paper's Middle East correspondent, waxed lyrical
about the Crown Prince's 'bold move' in arresting senior royals, a
prominent Saudi billionaire and scores of former ministers as part of a
'corruption purge'. The dramatic action was designed to 'consolidate
power' while bin Salman 'attempts to reform [the] kingdom's economy and
society'. As Adam Johnson noted in a media analysis piece for Fairness in Accuracy And Reporting, the Guardian's coverage was akin to a 'breathless press release.' A follow-up article
by Chulov, observed Johnson, 'took flattering coverage to new
extremes'. The 'rush to reform' was presented uncritically by the paper,
painting the Crown Prince as a kind of populist hero; 'a curious
framing that reeks more of PR than journalism.'
theatlantic | In flight from machismo, we have largely given up on adult male
self-mastery. But isn’t it also true that, allowed at last to be
confused about masculinity, we no longer accept men like Wayne as
heroes? Schoenberger herself alludes, perceptively, to “functional
masculinity,” and if I read her right, this is the core of her
provocative argument. Masculinity as puerile male bonding, as toxic
overcompensation and status jockeying—this is what’s unleashed when
masculinity no longer has an obvious function. Divorced from social
purpose, “being a man” becomes merely symbolic. So, for example, robots
in factories and drones on the battlefield will only make gun ownership
and mixed martial arts more popular. To push the thesis further, as men
become less socially relevant, they become recognition-starved; and it
is here that “being a man” expresses itself most primitively, as
violence.
The invention of John Wayne—is there a more primal scene of masculinity
being stripped of utility and endowed with dubious political karma? If
it was his idol’s cruelty, more than anything, that converted the
beautiful boy in buckskins, with the wavy pile of hair and not a line of
experience written on his face, into a Cold War icon, then we would do
well to understand that cruelty. Henry Fonda, who made eight pictures
with Ford, said of him: “Pappy was full of bullshit, but it was a
delightful sort of bullshit.” He pretended that he wanted only to be a
stuntman and was given the director job because he could yell; he
pretended that he hired actors based only on their skill at cards. His
whole persona was shot through with nostalgia for something he never
knew. He altered his dress, head to toe, because “he was trying to be a
native Irishman,” as one colleague noted, wearing his collar raised and
the brim of his hat down, so the Irish rain would run off it, and
rolling up the legs of his pants, as if he’d been stepping through the
Erin dew.
You may not be shocked to discover that it was Ford who had the
effeminate walk. His grandson said that Ford was “aware of his own
sensitivity and almost ashamed of it,” that he “surrounded himself with
John Wayne, Ward Bond, and those people because they represented the way
he wanted to be.” Ford’s biographer put it this way: “Without question
he preferred the company of men, and male bonding reached inordinate
proportions.” (Inordinate! Oh my.) It was left to Maureen O’Hara, one of Ford’s favorite actresses, to be more direct. In her 2004 memoir,
she speculates that Ford was gay. (She claims she walked in on the
director kissing a leading man.) It is painful to read, now, about men
who struggled as Ford apparently did; about how he would get so drunk
that he would soil himself; about how between shoots he let himself go,
watching TV in bed, wearing pajamas all day, his hair and fingernails
allowed to lengthen; about how ominously remote his marriage was.
medium | I’ve
received a sudden deluge of comments from men informing me that I
mustn’t write essays about rape culture anymore, so here’s another essay
about rape culture.
One of the most common recurring themes I’ve seen in the criticisms of my last couple of articles
on this subject is the claim that I only believe rape culture is a
thing because I’ve had a uniquely bad set of experiences with men, which
distorts my ability to provide a clear analysis of the subject. But
that’s just the thing — my experiences aren’t unique. Virtually all women have had extensive bad experiences with rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse.
All in all I’ve actually had exceptionally good
experiences with men; I have an amazing father, an amazing husband, and
an amazing son. If I thought men were just evil rape monsters I
wouldn’t write about the various ways rape culture is becoming conscious
and how we can explore this as a society. We’ve had a long, chaotic
march into the present moment as a species, and much of that march has
included the commodification of women as essentially the property of a
male partner who was entitled to sex whenever he wanted it. This has
left many vestigial relics in our culture that have yet to move into
consciousness, but we’re getting there. Here are four things that I
would like to use my little platform here to say to every woman about
this journey:
Reason, says Professor Caputo, “is a white male Euro-Christian
construction.” Since reason is white, reason is not neutral. It implies
that what is not white is not rational. “So white is philosophically
relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued.”
Professor Caputo ties into University of California professor Sara
Giordano who defines science as a “colonial and racialized form of
power” that “must be replaced with an anti-science, antiracist, feminist
approach to knowledge production.” https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10021
I can’t say that this would be all bad. This way we wouldn’t have
nuclear weapons and the frustrating digital age. But before I vote for
it, I want to know what feminist science is. I have a disturbing
feeling that it brings with it the genocide of the white heterosexual
male. After all, if white heterosexual males are responsible for all
the evil and ills of the world, how can we tolerate their existence?
Journalists seem to agree with the Oregon students. The European
Federation of Journalists is leading a “Media against Hate” campaign
against hate speech and stereotyping of illegal immigrants. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11214/europe-journalists-free-speech In other words, any European who protests his/her country being overrun by foreign invaders must be shut up. The scenario in The Camp of the Saints is now happening before our eyes.
Chat GPT chooses 42
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Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100 - which does it pick?
(by @Leniolabs_) pic.twitter.com/94xqfucd9C
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4/3
43
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