And to be clear...

...we are already extinct. We just don't know it yet.

Anatomy and Dissection

So, a couple of conservative acquaintences are gloating and bleating to me, already, about how Hugo Chavez was a liar and thief and how socialism is all about stealing money from the poor and hard working so that jumped up peasants can live like kings. Yeah, I know. There's bunches of cross pollinated bullshit and bad logic in that.

In questioning one of them, I was trying to understand where this notion of Chavez stealing money from Venezuela was coming from.

I didn't take long to find out:

The  Criminal Justice International Associates (CJIA), which defines itself as a risk assessment and global analysis firm in Miami, claims that Chavez left about $2 billion dollars to his family. They allege he gave $5 billion to the Castro brothers each year in oil profits, from companies he stole. They also concluded that since 1999, he and his friends in the Bolivian gangs have stolen $100 million in oil profits.

The conservative echo chamber is a twitter with the news. Problem is, as with most conservative "facts," it appears to be the fabrication of a single man, one Jerry Brewer (he who is CJIA, pretty much all by himself), who didn't even say that Chavez stole the money. He said he believes that Chavez probably stole as much money as he believes the Castro brothers have "stolen" from Cuba, which guesses would be around $2 billion dollars.

I suppose it's just fairly predictable that conservatives can't conceive of socialism except as theft from the "real people" who really deserve all the world's wealth because they have the right morality, phenotypes and gods. I suppose there's also no use wagering against the likelihood that conservatives will reduce world figures into Bad and Good. Manicheans just think that way.

But, you know what I find really insidious about the treatment given to Chavez's legacy?

This:

As a politician, Hugo Chavez was a force of nature, as strangely masterful as he was polarizing. But as an economic steward, the socialist firebrand was something sadder and far more ordinary: "an awful manager," as author Rory Carroll succinctly put it in the New York Times today, who squandered a world of opportunity after he took over Venezuela's presidency in 1999.

Which sets up this conclusion:

But judging Chavez's record on poverty in isolation would be a mistake. Brazil, Peru, and Colombia also made significant progress on measures such as poverty and child death under more traditionally capitalist economies. Latin America, on the whole, was growing. It would have been hard for it not too: It's a resource rich continent that's reached relative political stability at a time when the world is desperate for oil, food, timber, and minerals. It was a bit like being dealt a pair of queens in Texas Hold 'em -- a very good hand, which  Chavez didn't play particularly well..

... Chavez isn't leaving Venezuela's as a full on economic basket case (we're not talking about Zimbabwe circa 2001, here). But rather than helping the poor by setting his country on a path towards long-term prosperity, he attempted to resurrect a long-discredited version of state driven economics that's led to the deterioration of the country's most important industry and wreaked havoc with its consumer market. It's hard to imagine who in the long run will benefit from that legacy. 

Conservatives may conjure up stupid phantasmagorias, sure. They do it all the time. That's what you get when you trap people in god-driven moralities and bourgeois sentiment, spending a quarter of their lives immersed in bootstrapper mythology and the seemingly concrete belief that one's victories are a reward for one's own, individual effort.

But, what explains the market technocrat, eh? What explains the merit liberal, who cannot conceive of the use of a resource for anything but growth?

Something far, far worse, I imagine. A triumphalism which makes the conservative variety look like an evening with Mr. Rogers.

Memoriam

I pity the fate of Venezuela.

Choreographic, Chiropractic

Markets are like ideologies, because they are ideologies. They do not occur by a process of natural accidents accumulating into persistent structures which evolve into self-propagating systems; they are choreographed, they are planned. Ants do not have markets, because ants do not create ideological spaces where values are determined and recorded. Ants do not sell. Monkeys do not sell. Crows do not sell.

They might exchange, those non-ideological creatures. But, they do not create and impose markets. Ideologists of markets would have you believe that markets are merely systems for exchange, that they occur whether or not people want to have them, that they are naturally arising.

Let's test this hypothesis. Say nothing for a week. Write nothing for a week. Type nothing for a week. Do not pay any bills for a week. Do not obey your employer, for the next seven days. Do not engage in any employment which obligates you to trade your labor for numbers recorded in a file. Do not make any purchases for a week. Do not enter into any agreements for this same period of time. Do not attempt any non-verbal communication. Do not explain any behavior to any other person. Obtain only what foodstuffs you can consume by casual theft, accident or happenstance.

Report back, if the pleasure so arises, on whether or not your outcomes were similar to that of the previous week.

Or, do all of the things you normally do at the supermarket, gas station, landlord's office, employment site, city hall and big box retail outlet. Take everything you want, but do not offer any paper or digitized numbers in return. See if you are "naturally" allowed to retain your even rudimentary liberties and freedoms.

Do not, in short, perform acts of valuation. Have needs, and meet them. If you aren't thrown into prison, it's because you are either very, very important or very, very wealthy. If you are deprived of your freedom, and forced to exchange even further ideological value in order to re-lease it, please afterward explain how markets are "naturally arising."

Markets are like gods: without the word, without the text, they do not exist. It is not nothing that, as Shlain insightfully and clumsily infers in his The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, that the written word shows up with the advent of priesthoods. It is not nothing that gods and markets cannot be idealized and faked into existence absent language.

It is not nothing that when Apples tries to sell you its latest tablet, it does so through choreographed goat-plays, accompanied by a liturgical rite.

Atheist

I'm not an atheist because I don't believe in God.

I don't believe in God, which is a clumsy way of stating that I lack belief in God. Belief is a narrative function. Belief is a story upon the completion of which, in the final sentence of the text, or the last frame of a series of emotionally colored images, the believer is instructed to begin the story all over again. Belief refers back to itself, closing the story in order to re-open it.

I make no value judgment about that process.

I just don't tell myself these stories about a God which resolve themselves into narrative cycles whose only function is to prevent their own cessation.

It's not that I don't perform this function. I lack this capacity only at least when it comes to stories about god(s). I'm pretty certain I engage in this narrative function each time a take a step, or fall to sleep assuming I've a decent chance of waking up, or kiss my wife as if her reaction will be mostly enjoyable for all parties involved.

But, I'm not an atheist because I don't tell myself stories about this mutable character, god. I'm an atheist because none of these stories satisfy a significantly stronger urge to test the character of this character, and to always find it wanting. From my point of view, there is simply no way to posit any sort of god (a creature by definition more powerful than mere mortals, if only in the way comic book superheroes are more powerful, by possessing a hypertrophied attribute which allows this god a greater chance of winning feats of strength, or contests of wit) who interacts with humans and doesn't come out of the relationship having harmed the human person.

And there is no way to posit a god who doesn't interact with humans, but is somehow still known by them, and find that character credible. That story - the god who is known, but who exercises such restraint as to never interact with humans - corrodes itself the moment you begin to tell it. It generates doubt. It collapses its own ability to sustain itself to the end sentence, and the instruction to return to the beginning.

There can be no god who isn't a monster, in the same way that there can be no government which doesn't govern.

It's not that god is or isn't real. "Reality" wouldn't even begin to be a valid descriptor which could apply to creatures which are not bound by the realized constraints of existence within contingency. It's that any god which can be conceived, must be conceived of as a monstrum, as a portent of a thing which mutates into an agent of harm at the instant of its conception. And any god which could be conceived of existing beyond human knowledge, or effect on human existence, decays with an astonishingly rapid half life: the narrative degrades the story it's supposed to sustain.

If you can identify with that monster, and not immediately be sickened unto death, or feel dread at the consequences of your fealty to that story, by all means enjoy the behavior. I hear also that some rapists enjoy raping, which no more justifies rape than the consolation felt in supposed unity with god justifies what the god must be, or not be at all.

A Day's Work

The death of a man with Down syndrome who was reportedly killed after lying face-down in police custody has been ruled a homicide. WJLA reports that Robert Saylor, 26, of New Market, Md., was asphyxiated on Jan. 12, according to a medical examiner's ruling late last week.

I'm sure better writers than I will come at this story from more significant angles, but what sticks out for me on first read is the following section:

Baltimore County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Jennifer Bailey said the case is still under investigation and that the three officers involved in Saylor's death -- Lt. Scott Jewell, Sgt. Rich Rochford and Deputy First Class James Harris -- "continue to work their normal assignments," according to the Post.

If you have a moment, imagine killing a young man with Down's Syndrome and returning to work the next day. The viciousness of murdering a twenty something with Down's Syndrome, aside, is there any other caste of people who can take a life on any given street in the US and return to work the next day, to be paid to do it all over again?

 I mean, other than the President.

Source.

Fuck the Motherfucker

Flashing back:


Thank you, Tim Minchin.

What I Prefer

What I prefer is to see women and children cut their attackers down. This is not to imply that they should not do the thousand other things needed to liberate themselves from the system of men, to challenge the assumptions about femininity and masculinity which shuffle people into oppressive norms, to create spaces which exclude the gender most likely to act as tormentor, abuser, patriarch, raper and rent taker.

In any system where sex* is rent, where childhood is debt and where gender is a distinction intimately tied to notions of property, propriety and right conduct, revolutionary violence is appropriate. It may not be the only response; it needn't be exclusive. But, it is justified.

If we can accept as generally true that labor must seize the means of production, and that morality is a limitation imposed from above in order to prevent just such a revolt, we must of necessity also concede that those who suffer the consequences of the domination class' control of property, family, wealth and gender itself have something akin to an inalienable freedom to harm those who would subject them to this system of alienation, and that any attempt to moralize or condemn this harm is expressly and intimately a decision to maintain oppression.

What I prefer is for women and children, for all those who have been feminized from without as a prelude to their submission, to organize as Furies, as winged erinyes, and for a period of no less than a decade, to have free reign upon the agents of their misery, until men understand in their marrow that what came before comes no longer, ever again. 


* - both as the act of sex, and as gender

Shame

Lady depicts torture in movie. Shame!
Dude orders torture in real life. Well, at least he's not Mitt Romney.

High Achievement

Would anyone care about Aaron Swartz's flight into corporeal oblivion if he was not the son of a white businessman, if he was not a "prodigy" and a golden child attending a prestigious elite university which itself exists to funnel high achievers into government, academia and the corporate world, where they will trade on an artificially scarce skill set while capturing wealth for those who lord over the rest of us?

Isn't the essential back story here that he was a young man who's been cast in the role of hero posthumously for doing nothing more than violating the minor expectation that, being upper class, he'd act like a dickish member of the ruling class all of the time?

And yet, that is why he is valorized and lionized by academics, so-called radicals and the rest of the middle and upper class white world which hadn't heard of him until he'd done spectacularly what rich kids do ordinarily. He checked out, and left other people to clean up his mess and make excuses for his actions.

His revolutionary act? Making academic papers available to the kind of people who can afford them in the first place.

Hacking a pay wall. Can't you just feel your groceries bills getting smaller already?

"Information will be free" is the mantra of people who don't have to worry about the cops, doctors' costs and hunger every single day. It's the kind of slogan you can expect from people who take a computer, an automobile and a college degree for granted. Its validity as a principle exists in direct proportion to the height one occupies in a social hierarchy.

For most of us, everything costs. All of it. All of the fucking time. Free stuff isn't revolutionary. It's unreliable good luck. It's what happens when the rich get lazy and bored and want to prove to each other that all that money makes them special. You don't count on it, because you can never count on the wealthy to keep their end of any bargain. They're rich because they learned how to live with using others as tools, how to betray and call it an economy - or they learned to live with inheriting that stolen labor as privilege and property.

So what if his name wasn't Aaron Swartz, but was instead something vaguely black sounding, like Vontaze Washington? What if he hadn't "liberated" a bunch of data that only matters to academics, white people with free time and Lawrence Lessig, but had instead come out of an underfunded public school, in a neighborhood where the cops and the bureaucrats start off assuming that your melanin per square inch exists in a causal relationship to your capacity for intelligence and moral value? What if, facing no chance of gainful and steady employment, he began to supplement his meager income by going into time debt to the crushing tyranny that is an illicit drug distribution pyramid? What if all he could afford to liberate was a few hours each week to help his mother with the laundry and the groceries, and that the almost inevitable outcome of his "choices" was that one day some suburban douchebag was going to give his name to the cops after getting busted at a college party? And while the future business major gets a warning and a "boys will be boys," young Mr. Washington gets the full penalty of the law?

Or, what if young Mr. Swartz was not Mr. Washington but was instead a young miss Hernandez? What if what she was trying to quietly liberate was her autonomy - not the assumption of it, nor the probability of it as an intellectual exercise, but an autonomy so normal and unquestioned that no man would ever assume that her freedom came at the cost of his needs and labor? What if her act of liberation wasn't hand waved away at every turn? What if her expected existence was not an endless grind of male possessiveness and weakness masquerading as attraction, a social norm which establishes from the day she is born until the day she's predictably reduced to a statistic that she owes an explanation and a justification for her every decision, else she's a whore, a bitch, asking for it, stupid, should have been more careful, had to have given mixed signals, provoked her attacker, tempted her harasser, learned her lesson?

What if?

We wouldn't know their names. That's what.

So, what?

Some rich high achiever offing himself after he's treated like a working class woman, a migrant worker or a black man could only seem astounding to white people, to libertarians and climbers and merit liberals, because the cops, management and the law fucking with their worlds daily is precisely out of the norm. Their everyday is a base line deference, an assumption that they will do good in the world and that the social order exists for their benefit. They depend upon it. It's the air they breathe. It takes some kind of chutzpah heavy self-absorption - maybe even an "epistemic closure" - to discover in Aaron Swartz's fate a monumental tragedy.

So that's Mr. Swartz's high achievement, as his history is forgotten and his myth commences. He got a bunch of white liberals and libertarians to congratulate themselves over their shared outrage at his bathetic end.

(Crossposted at High Achievement)

Crow Falls Down

Crow Falls Down

Resistancies

It's not that you've caused a person to doubt a narrative, that alienates him. It's that you've shown that he can no longer trust how he arrives at belief, or knowledge. Undermine faith in the certainty that an opinion was arrived at correctly, and you knock out one of the buttresses of the over-wrought and too-expensive cathedral of self.

Self is epiphenomenon. All of the chemistry of experience occurs before the emergence of thought and identity as a kind of cast shadow, or echo.

Societies function in this way, as well. You don't provoke stasis by attacking them head on. This strengthens the fiction of unity. You get their constituent parts to see that the single personality disorder that is culture is contrived not of falsehoods, but of untrustworthy conclusions.

Hello

Wife has cancer, looks like she's beating it. I have an auto-immune disease, which is how two years of poor health has finally resolved into a diagnosis. Doesn't look so good. I don't have any living tissue lymph nodes left in my lungs, and the inflammation has spread to my arms and arm pits. Don't know why I care to post this, mostly because I don't care. Can't say that I miss the blegh. But, sometimes it approaches amusing to have a chat with strangers.

Am glad that our kids won't be orphaned. It's weird to write that, but for a couple of months, we had to have this conversation between us. Not intellectually stimulating, but it requires a certain vigor which neither of us would have identified before.

World is still shit. Don't need me to tell you that.

Reckoning a personal apocalypse isn't necessarily liberating. I was pissed, mostly. Now, it's easier to let go. I don't want to let go. I'm not young, I'm not old, but I still cast a shadow.

Want to keep doing that.

Die At The Right Time

CT scan not promising. Have to learn to live with this reality. Ride well, for as long as you can, folks.

Cause and F/X

This is a living person. This image is not digitally altered. This appearance was accomplished with surgery, and daily by hand:



It's not my place to speak to her personally narrated reasons, or whatever justifications she's used for her own self. But, I think when feminists are discussing what they mean by conformity to femininity, this is a good illustration. It's not so much that it's extreme, it's that it's an extremely obvious example of an otherwise pervasive, but less obvious set of phenomena.

In a not unrelated pique of literary melange, a quote from Elizabeth Bear's deliciously excellent Sci-Fi novel, Carnival:

"...'The only significant natural predator that human women have is heterosexual men...Traditionally, the responsibility for safety falls on the victim. Women are expected to defend themselves from predators. To act like responsible prey. Limit risks, not take chances. Not to go out alone at night. Not talk to strange men. Rely on their own, presumably domesticated men for protection from other feral men - in exchange for granting them property rights over the women in question.''..."

I don't know if this is Bear's personal opinion, and I don't think it matters. She's using two (not randomly homosexual) characters' discussion to lay out the logic of a matriarchy they've been sent to undermine.

I can't help but see that the picture above, and Bear's character's observation below are intimately, intricately related.

Entirely Avoidable Outcomes

If you don't want to die in a US embassy or consulate, don't work in one.

If you won't want your death to be used to by (a) a fuckhead Mormon Republican, to justify drone wars and Hellfire missile attacks on Iranians who had fuck all to do with your summary execution at the hands of putative allies, or by (b) a callous, rat bastard Democrat, to justify sky death robot bombings and Hellfire missile attacks on Libyan non-combatants, in the name of retaliation, don't put your silly little self in a position to die in a US embassy or consulate.

If you don't want Diane Sawyer staring moon eyed into the camera, whisper voiced and falsely solicitous, while she discusses how you were a gentle ally of the Libyan people, and a peacemaker, examine whatever decision tree it is you use to plan out your next five or ten years. If it leads you towards a job with the State department, and an assignment to the CIA riddled gutter hole that is post-Qaddafi Libya, you get what you get. Plus, there's good money on the wager that Diane won't remember your name in passing three weeks from tomorrow. You're a prop. This was avoidable.

If you don't want your kids to sit in an overcrowded class room, it painted in prison grey and pysch-ward eggshell, being taught on entirely excusable autopilot by an overworked public school teacher who's already picking up the tab for most of the in-class materials, the next time your town or city has an official choice between further militarizing the cops, or hiring more teachers - perhaps your first thought shouldn't whimper along about "rising crime" and "criminal elements."

If you don't want so many people to hate your admittedly underpaid profession, learn to hit back hard enough to make the mayor's head crack on the wall behind him. Nobody likes a loser. More importantly, nobody trusts one. That pity thing? It's always laced with contempt.

If you can't remember what it's like to sit in a hot classroom while the autumn winds beckon, and play, play, play winks at you from behind a distant cloud or hill top, you probably won't avoid a simple failure to understand why a healthy child hates school. Children learn when they play and overcome. They remember when they're boxed into classrooms.

If you don't want to deal with the ramifications of Republican anti-women measures, or the Democrats' anti-labor ones, and you don't want to have to put up with the election season, practice swinging blunt objects. If you aren't willing to make a rat fuck in a suit worry for the security and integrity of his hide and vital organs, he's going to occupy himself with yours.

If you don't think that violence works, please explain the defense department's budget. Please explain the President's Praetorian Guard. Please explain why it is that those who rule can never agree with each other about how to fuck over their subjects, but there's no discord between them on the subject of how to keep them scared and running.

If you let a wrong go unrequited, somebody will always notice. If you don't like the conclusions they draw, about you, learn to requite a little. If the opponent isn't calculating what he can't predict about your possible conduct, he's already moved on to how he's going to take what's yours.

If you don't want to believe that whiteness and maleness are constructed out of the historic victories had over those who are defined by their exclusion from the winner's circle and its inheritances, that's your business. You shouldn't be surprised when people reach the obvious conclusion that you are well off, white, male and blind to fact that you were one of the inheritors. Think for a moment: what would all that unpaid labor look like, in terms of real capital and property, were it not taken from the not-male and not-white people who had to produce it, but could not decide how it was handed down, or what was built, sheltered, hidden away and protected by it. Think about unpaid household labor.Think about all the failures to remunerate. Actually, think. There's no spirit. There's no will. There aren't any numina. It's all just stuff, and stuff made into stuff. So, what would whiteness and maleness look like if it wasn't backed up by violent, brutal, deceitful misappropriation so bold and grand its called History? If you can't answer that question correctly, it's probably fairly unavoidable that you're a dude with pink skin.

Not Nothing

Men and women differ, fundamentally.

You can read this assertion from any number of pick up artists, anti-feminists, evolutionary psychologists, traditionalists, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, holybookers, perennialists, conservatives, manarchists, Marxist-Leninists, anti-liberals or misogynist lawyer douchebags who really don't like Jews, homosexuals, "girly men" or the reality that some people identify with government because for the last thirty or so years it's been the wolf which has kept equally nasty wolves more or less at bay.

To be fair, Maoists (despite their many flaws) tend to be amenable to women who make decisions. Kind of.

I don't feel like linking to an example of each, so I'll just refer you generally to Manboobz, and the last year of output there. Seminal work, that.

An equally common complaint resolves to this: feminists are working mightily, from their lofty perches atop the human universe, to undermine, well, everything; but, especially the natural-supernatural-scientific gender differences that keep the cosmos in balance.

And you can tell this to be true, the argument's variations assert, because the universe is out of balance. Things aren't right. They aren't natural. If let be, the human norm would find itself again. Men would be men, women would be women, governments would wither away, corporate executives would self-defenestrate, markets would be fair, bigness would gave way to local smallness and motherfuckers would decide to be nice.

The problem, for these pitiable worm complainants, isn't that status quo ante is bad for most of the people stuck in it - it's that it isn't natural. (See also, primitivists, greenies, eco-pagans, democratizers and abolition democrats.)

Almost every assertion to naturality is, upon even rudimentary observation, a claim from transcendence. It's supernaturalist, because it attempts to impose from without definitions of right conduct, and wrong, which apply then to the within, also called "nature." The person staking that claim may not believe in gods or numina or dialectical historical planning committees, but he is demanding from the rough stuff of life an adherence to a norm which almost always suits his tastes, temperament and often enough, early childhood experiences.

But, contained within the complaint itself, is the concession what negates it.

The argument follows thus: if only [insert bête noir] didn't exist with its unnatural impact on human relations, [insert outcome clucked out disapprovingly] would not occur. If feminists weren't teaching women to be lesbian amazon man killers, girls would realize that they need to market themselves to men as better, more efficient sex toys. If the atheists hadn't taken over the schools, people would still know and love god. If the liberals didn't control the media [you are, of course, invited to scoff here], people would know that the government has violated the Constitution. Et cetera.

This seems like a simple enough declaration of cause and effect, but it's not. What it concedes immediately is that culture isn't a given, and that personality isn't merely inherited. That there is no natural, correct way to be human. If there was, there would be no reason to restore it. If the perennial were actually such, it would establish itself by virtue of its cosmic coherence.

Every argument about the shaping of hominid brains into bodies-with-personae recognizes immediately that what we call the "human self" is a made thing. It's an artifact, if you will. And that no right nature defines it.

Sometimes this self succeeds brilliantly, for its time; often, it collapses completely. Sometimes it doesn't sync with the body it inhabits, because it was shaped not for the body, but for needs of those around it. Very commonly, a single body houses several incompletely formed stages of one, in various degrees of struggle and accord. More often than soul-believers would care to admit, the self is in fact a multiplicity.

What matters here, though, is that it's made. It's a shaped thing that learns to shape itself. It's a shaped shaper. What this means - and it's a doozy given our larger culture, religious assumptions, scientistic premises and technological framework - is that everything and everyone are always up for grabs; the experience of self is not stable over time, because there is no norm for it.

The conditions which shape bodies into persons are always changing because there's no one correct way to accomplish this end, and truth has little to do with success or outcome.

The anti-feminists know this, perhaps without using this set of phrases exactly. Their complaint, reduced to its essential terms, suggests a basic awareness: women, like men, are made into self-referential genders. It's why these types constantly return to their tired, familiar refrain - that feminists violate nature in merely attempting to carve out the smallest of spaces where women can take some control of their own shaping. Where they can attempt these experiments without the unrelenting cultural subjection to men who have very strong notions about the proper uses of women. Not for nothing, anti-homosexuals and salvationists make the same concession - it's why they struggle so mightily to dominate the schools, the airwaves and the political contests which define acceptable and verboten.

So, here's this - and for what it's worth, I make no claim to revolutionary insight - there's no observable reason to believe in progress, given how often we all tend to regress, but it says something that the various traditionalists, paternalists and supernaturalists no longer argue as if they're right. They argue, right out in the open, as if they know it's all about who controls the story-making.

The RCC didn't use to have to try and persuade. It ordered, the Holy Orders obeyed. People burned and kings took a knee. Heads of state didn't use to have campaign. The cops didn't have full time public relations staff. People who used others as mere instruments didn't use to have to come up with market slogans and palliatives and misinformation.

The world was assumed to be, mostly by all, the best and only possible world. It was, you know, just natural and right that it was the way it was.

Most of us, I imagine, find that notion at least suspect, if not outright unnatural. Nietzsche called this the death of god. I won't be so bold, and rather refer to it instead as a kind of liberty. Our times are labile. The people trying to force human events back into the neat categories of caste, gender, faith, obedience and rigid class...well, they are trying to force things back.

Genies and bottles, cats and bags and all that.

They could definitely still win. They've got most of the loot and idiots who take orders under arms. But they're fighting from a distinct disadvantage, and one which doesn't require the rest of us to have so much loot, or armed staffers, or access to stable forms of power - they've already conceded, like the anti-feminists, that what they're really trying to do is to program the next generation, and the next, in ways which will re-establish "the right" and "the natural."

They've admitted, out loud and in public, that they're really just one more set of contestants, roughly aligned, in the struggle to define what is acceptably human.

It's a really big fucking deal, if you think about it. It's not that we're evenly matched. We're not, obviously. It's that, acknowledging that things are shitty as they seem, and worse, and that forces aligned in favor of reaction are well armed, they still have to regularly concede that "the natural" and "the right" are no longer a given.

They have to struggle to constantly maintain their claim on what is human.

There's an opening there. In fact, there are dozens of them.

And that's not nothing.

Premise

Expectation does not alter function.

The expectation of an outcome will not change the function of the tools used to achieve it.

The desire for an outcome bears little resemblance, upon close scrutiny, to the expectation for that same outcome. Training and memory produce expectations. An expectation premises that certain behaviors, plus a given number of tools and techniques, will result in a set of conditions which share overlaps and similarities with prior ends and conclusions, as promised by memory.

Organic memory lacks the reliability often associated with it. Cultural and exosomatic memory do not exist in a separate plane or protected bubble, untainted by organic memory. It takes organic memory, conditioning and perspective to interpret those memories stored outside of the body.

In every personal history, desire predates awareness, training and memory. Desire does not even presuppose awareness, though awareness would not likely develop without the recording of the memories of the satisfaction or thwarting of desire.

Awareness maps environment, but it does not take the same form in every person, or across every region or age. In order to identify awareness, memory must function, and feedback to and upon itself in a loop. No memory, no self awareness.

But, memory lacks reliability. Memory has no built in reward for enduring accuracy. Memory does not demand perfection. Memory rewards success, which definition itself does not remain stable over days and months, never mind years and ages. Memory, like desire, exists for outcomes which do not obligate truth, and which patently award error, so long as error results in the satisfaction of needs and desires.

Desire functions with memory, retaining its effect through memory's mapping of success and failure, strengthening and waning according to expectation - but memory will not record perfect facts separate from the feelings of reward, pain, pleasure or other strong emotions.

Desire reminds of need or want, but does not itself satisfy either.

The desire for an outcome will rely on memory to promise its satisfaction, or warn against failure, but memory - especially untrained memory which stumbles about unconditioned by an alternate and uncommon set of skills associated not with self-preservation and gross satisfaction but instead with self-regard and even vanity - will not reliably predict the conclusion of behaviors and choices if the satisfaction of desire or need forms the greater part of the feedback loop of awareness.

No person escapes desire. Not one.

And this adheres especially to the desire for outcomes associated with the use of tools, techniques and human memories.

Social communities function as tools, in part, for their members. They exchange persons as organisms into persons as resources. Every form of society or community, however enduring or temporary, obligates the use of unreliable memory, in order to map out relations of power, skill sets, persona, likeability, adversity, enmity and fealty. These memories lack both stability and permanence, as well perfectibility.

These memories form the basis of all hierarchies. A hierarchy functions as a trainable, and learned, set of responses to others by way of the repeated and reinforced forging of memories - establishing dominance not as a natural or supernatural condition* of existence, but as damage to memories already susceptible to error.

A person may expect the satisfaction of desires which that person cannot achieve as a repeatable outcome precisely because that person's memories produce patterns of errors which reinforce the likelihood of programmed blind spot, bias or self-betraying behavior.

A person raised within a hierarchy will very predictably and regularly reproduce these errors from the exercise of desires continuously thwarted by abused memory. Only those persons in the power positions of a hierarchy retain successful behaviors, because their skill sets allow them to train memory to preserve the hierarchy while still allowing them to see how it functions to reproduce in its support layers - and victims - the behaviors that keep them from seeing what those in power see. They learn to maintain a system which they must also actively conceal.

Most people in the power positions of a hierarchy will receive the correct training which allows them to duplicate its existence into future generations. By accident or by the seemingly random development of necessary character traits, some will climb, lie, flatter or claw into better positions. These types often present an initial danger to that hierarchy, unless its training allows for their easy assimilation, or expulsion.

A hierarchy functions as a social tool.

The use of a tool obligates the experience of an outcome of its use. Tool use will result in an outcome in every imaginable circumstance, because tool use alters environments - but that outcome will not necessarily match expectations or memories of the tool's user or users.

A person should not perhaps expect that the use of a hierarchy will result in outcomes for which that hierarchy does not function.

A good way to illustrate this, maybe, would involve brushing one's teeth with a chainsaw. The desire for clean teeth exists. The expectation of the outcome, also. But not every tool will produce the outcome expected and desired.

A person can apply a chainsaw to his teeth.

We might all find it rather surprising if this decision to so actually cleaned them.

Perhaps equally surprising, all the same, is the very persistent conviction that hierarchies which function to preserve the power and wealth of their members, by subsuming others into them as less-than-human instruments, will somehow magically produce fairness, universal prosperity, rights, accord, peace, liberty and justice for all...



* - despite the claims of perennialists or their liberal adversaries, the meritocrats...

America

I had a temptation to write, "Americans have forgotten the feel of war," but truths in the need of telling, that sounded a lie in my head, before I ever wrote it.

The last two wars fought hard on this continent produced a triumphant, and yet equally morose religiosity, coupled feverish and desperately with a stern national faith in the right to expand limitlessly; two senses of life clutching at each other like a pair of illicit lovers tucked into a piss soaked alley, more grappling for dominance than making love.

The War For Slavery and the Indian Wars. And Americans still stamp the seemingly endless ramifications of those contests upon the skins of others.

But, we don't know war.

We don't understand the wake of death and chaos, the sundering of families, the breaking of heart and spirit, the degradation, the shattering of human perspective, the hardening of hatred.

We can't even remember it, because our faiths have no roots in memory. They burrow, instead, into the morrow, nematodes of belief seeking out new flesh and new victims for our devotions.

If you don't hate this America, this complex of ideas and beliefs and redemptive, holy violence, I say to you that you should know firmly now what side you've chosen. And that you should suffer it.

I want nothing more fervently than for war to come home. To tear this nation of 300 million predators and prey animals into tattering shreds. I want us to learn what it's like to be an Iraqi child, who watched her mother scurry towards the market, wincing at bomb blasts in the distance, and who never saw her come home. I want us to feel Hiroshima, Dresden, all of Vietnam, the Philippines, the Lakota, Arapaho, the Comanche, the Colombian and Argentine peasants shackled to the needs and ugly urges of Catholic putchist paramilitaries, Africa savaged Africa, to feel what we never even managed to learn to forget: war.

Until no more America ever lends its name to even a square inch of earth.

Even that would not come close enough to what we've taken wheedled, wrought and bought - returned in due and debts paid.

We have nothing worth saving. We should dream of no pale reflecting wings of angels, come to redeem us. Had we humanity at all, we would raise the white flag and let world have its vengeance, passive witnesses to our earned destruction, mute and without complaint.

But we lack that humanity, we Americans. We do not strangle our bosses and cops where they sleep. We do not take to the streets or the beaches, to echo even the flimsiest of French protests. We certainly have no Greek in us. The young of Egypt shame us, and they struggle against a reactionary Islam and capital's endless succession of martial juntas.

And we do not walk away.

So, war should come. And come, and keep on washing over us until we've left so little to remind our victims of the days of our dominion, that they can raise their heads and pity our remnants.

Or not

I have less to say, and fewer words with which to say it. I feel healthier for the first time in several years. I've managed to shed forty-five pounds since January, thirty-five of them since the first of May. I have my runs up towards the double digits, which has taken almost forever since a pair of fairly awful ankle injuries and a tumble down the side of a tall hill.

My kids still have to put up with me, and my wife is still foolish enough to go to bed next to me most every night.

The world still sucks.

And the fucking rich keep getting fucking richer.

But, being healthier does change the outlook some.

More on that later. Or not.

Recommendation

Please take a moment to read Jonathan Versen's "Fixing Health Care Good." It's one of the better summations, and is nothing short of an antidote to nauseating shit like this: "If you love him, be proud of him."