#and structurally replace it with an anarchist foundation

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.5 What alternative social organisations do anarchists create?

Anarchism is all about “do it yourself”: people helping each other out in order to secure a good society to live within and to protect, extend and enrich their personal freedom. As such anarchists are keenly aware of the importance of building alternatives to both capitalism and the state in the here and now. Only by creating practical alternatives can we show that anarchism is a viable possibility and train ourselves in the techniques and responsibilities of freedom:

“If we put into practice the principles of libertarian communism within our organisations, the more advanced and prepared we will be on that day when we come to adopt it completely.” [C.N.T. member, quoted by Graham Kelsey, Anarchosyndicalism, Libertarian Communism and the State,p. 79]

This idea (to quote the IWW) of “building a new world in the shell of the old” is a long standing one in anarchism. Proudhon during the 1848 revolution “propose[d] that a provisional committee be set up” in Paris and “liaise with similar committees” elsewhere in France. This would be “a body representative of the proletariat …, a state within the state, in opposition to the bourgeois representatives.” He proclaimed to working class people that “a new society be founded in the heart of the old society” for “the government can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourselves.” [“Aux Pariotes”, La Représantant du Peuple, No. 33] This was echoed by Bakunin (see section H.2.8) while for revolutionary syndicalists the aim was “to constitute within the bourgeois State a veritable socialist (economic and anarchic) State.” [Fernand Pelloutier, quoted by Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France, p. 22] By so doing we help create the environment within which individuals can manage their own affairs and develop their abilities to do so. In other words, we create “schools of anarchism” which lay the foundations for a better society as well as promoting and supporting social struggle against the current system. Make no mistake, the alternatives we discuss in this section are not an alternative to direct action and the need for social struggle — they are an expression of social struggle and a form of direct action. They are the framework by which social struggle can build and strengthen the anarchist tendencies within capitalist society which will ultimately replace it.

Therefore it is wrong to think that libertarians are indifferent to making life more bearable, even more enjoyable, under capitalism. A free society will not just appear from nowhere, it will be created be individuals and communities with a long history of social struggle and organisation. For as Wilheim Reich so correctly pointed out:

“Quite obviously, a society that is to consist of ‘free individuals,’ to constitute a ‘free community’ and to administer itself, i.e. to ‘govern itself,’ cannot be suddenly created by decrees. It has to evolve organically.” [The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 241]

It is this organic evolution that anarchists promote when they create libertarian alternatives within capitalist society. These alternatives (be they workplace or community unions, co-operatives, mutual banks, and so on) are marked by certain common features such as being self-managed, being based upon equality, decentralised and working with other groups and associations within a confederal network based upon mutual aid and solidarity. In other words, they are anarchist in both spirit and structure and so create a practical bridge between now and the future free society.

Anarchists consider the building of alternatives as a key aspect of their activity under capitalism. This is because they, like all forms of direct action, are “schools of anarchy” and also because they make the transition to a free society easier. “Through the organisations set up for the defence of their interests,” in Malatesta’s words, “the workers develop an awareness of the oppression they suffer and the antagonism that divides them from the bosses and as a result begin to aspire to a better life, become accustomed to collective struggle and solidarity and win those improvements that are possible within the capitalist and state regime.” [The Anarchist Revolution, p. 95] By creating viable examples of

“anarchy in action” we can show that our ideas are practical and convince people that they are not utopian. Therefore this section of the FAQ will indicate the alternatives anarchists support and why we support them.

The approach anarchists take to this activity could be termed “social unionism” — the collective action of groups to change certain aspects (and, ultimately, all aspects) of their lives. This takes many different forms in many different areas (some of which, not all, are discussed here) — but they share the same basic aspects of collective direct action, self-organisation, self-management, solidarity and mutual aid. These are a means “of raising the morale of the workers, accustom them to free initiative and solidarity in a struggle for the good of everyone and render them capable of imagining, desiring and putting into practice an anarchist life.” [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 28] Kropotkin summed up the anarchist perspective well when he argued that working class people had “to form their own organisations for a direct struggle against capitalism” and to “take possession of the necessaries for production, and to control production.” [Memiors of a Revolutionist, p. 359] As historian J. Romero Maura correctly summarised, the “anarchist revolution, when it came, would be essentially brought about by the working class. Revolutionaries needed to gather great strength and must beware of underestimating the strength of reaction” and so anarchists “logically decided that revolutionaries had better organise along the lines of labour organisations.” [“The Spanish case”, pp. 60–83, Anarchism Today, D. Apter and J. Joll (eds.), p. 66]

As will quickly become obvious in this discussion (as if it had not been so before!) anarchists are firm supporters of “self-help,” an expression that has been sadly corrupted (like freedom) by the right in recent times. Like freedom, self-help should be saved from the clutches of the right who have no real claim to that expression. Indeed, anarchism was created from and based itself upon working class self-help — for what other interpretation can be gathered from Proudhon’s 1848 statement that “the proletariat must emancipate itself”? [quoted by George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, p. 125] So Anarchists have great faith in the abilities of working class people to work out for themselves what their problems are and act to solve them.

Anarchist support and promotion of alternatives is a key aspect of this process of self-liberation, and so a key aspect of anarchism. While strikes, boycotts, and other forms of high profile direct action may be more “sexy” than the long and hard task of creating and building social alternatives, these are the nuts and bolts of creating a new world as well as the infrastructure which supports the other activities. These alternatives involve both combative organisations (such as community and workplace unions) as well as more defensive and supportive ones (such as co-operatives and mutual banks). Both have their part to play in the class struggle, although the combative ones are the most important in creating the spirit of revolt and the possibility of creating an anarchist society.

We must also stress that anarchists look to organic tendencies within social struggle as the basis of any alternatives we try to create. As Kropotkin put it, anarchism is based “on an analysis of tendencies of an evolution that is already going on in society, and on induction therefrom as to the future.” It is “representative … of the creative, instructive power of the people themselves who aimed at developing institutions of common law in order to protect them from the power-seeking minority.” Anarchism bases itself on those tendencies that are created by the self-activity of working class people and while developing within capitalism are in opposition to it — such tendencies are expressed in organisational form as unions and other forms of workplace struggle, co-operatives (both productive and credit), libertarian schools, and so on. For anarchism was “born among the people — in the struggles of real life and not in the philosopher’s studio” and owes its “origin to the constructive, creative activity of the people … and to a protest — a revolt against the external force which had thrust itself upon” social institutions. [Anarchism, p. 158, p. 147, p. 150 and p. 149] This “creative activity” is expressed in the organisations created in the class struggle by working people, some of which we discuss in this section of the FAQ. Therefore, the alternatives anarchists support should not be viewed in isolation of social struggle and working class resistance to hierarchy — the reverse in fact, as these alternatives are almost always expressions of that struggle.

Lastly, we should note we do not list all the forms of organisation anarchists create. For example, we have ignored solidarity groups (for workers on strike or in defence of struggles in other countries) and organisations which are created to campaign against or for certain issues or reforms. Anarchists are in favour of such organisations and work within them to spread anarchist ideas, tactics and organisational forms. However, these interest groups (while very useful) do not provide a framework for lasting change as do the ones we highlight below (see section J.1.4 for more details on anarchist opinions on such “single issue” campaigns). We have also ignored what have been called “intentional communities.” This is when a group of individuals squat or buy land and other resources within capitalism and create their own anarchist commune in it. Most anarchists reject this idea as capitalism and the state must be fought, not ignored. In addition, due to their small size, they are rarely viable experiments in communal living and nearly always fail after a short time (for a good summary of Kropotkin’s attitude to such communities, which can be taken as typical, see Graham Purchase’s Evolution & Revolution [pp. 122–125]). Dropping out will not stop capitalism and the state and while such communities may try to ignore the system, they will find that the system will not ignore them — they will come under competitive and ecological pressures from capitalism whether they like it or not assuming they avoid direct political interference.

So the alternatives we discuss here are attempts to create anarchist alternatives within capitalism and which aim to change it (either by revolutionary or evolutionary means). They are based upon challenging capitalism and the state, not ignoring them by dropping out. Only by a process of direct action and building alternatives which are relevant to our daily lives can we revolutionise and change both ourselves and society.

[gun-witch]

OK so I have a fun thing I wanna try out. I'm gonna explain the footnotes about the factions in my worldbuilding project, and end with a poll, and I want people to vote on which faction they'd most support if they lived in this world, and optionally share why. I honestly hope this breaches containment because my friend group would pretty much exclusively support two of them and I'm more curious about people on Tumblr as a whole. There's not many and they're pretty simple ideologically, with the member planets having some variety so even if you don't entirely agree with a faction you can probably find a member planet that matches your exact beliefs.

ESA

The ESA is a regional alliance centered around Sol (our solar system) in the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Planetary governments range from moderate socialism that could be argued to be social liberalism to hardcore Communism. Homelessness and inequality are almost entirely eradicated, and the ESA Navy keeps their territory exceptionally safe. There's also heavy government transparency, with the IAC (think SCP foundation) as the most secretive group, still publicly known to exist, and publishing records on their operations once they're complete. War crimes and corruption are heavily punished, and advanced bioengineering has allowed people full freedom in their appearance and identity.

The Republic

The Republic is a libertarian alliance centered around the fictional Valderna system in the Cygnus arm (connected to Orion to make up Orion-Cygnus). Originally an ESA colony that declared independence to free itself from socialism, the Republic has adopted a meritocracy where financial success directly translates into political power, "vote with your wallet" in a literal sense. Those in poverty as well as criminals are given second chances through a rehabilitation program, in which a person is subjected to advanced biological and neurological restructuring which allows them a guaranteed position in the company handling their case. Their navy is on par with the ESA and has most of the same ship designs, albeit with some different weapons.

Iris

Iris is a secret society organizing anarchist systems and pirate crews throughout the Galactic Bulge (yes this is a real place in space, in universe we renamed it to Sagittarius for obvious reasons) l. Iris uses a heavily decentralized structure in which leaders are simply the people others listen to, and laws are replaced with public opinion. Despite their political nature, Iris boasts one of the most advanced fleets due to their willingness to salvage ancient technology that other groups consider too dangerous or even heretical to touch.

The Nexus

The Nexus is a council of the remaining Veneran royal families who have yet to abandon monarchy in favor of joining another alliance. These houses unite under the Veniha religion, which teaches that the Veneran species are protectors of the universe and must use their unique psionic abilities and technology responsibly. They are not, as many think, supremacist, and modern Veniha welcomes converts from all species (though many choose to convert to the Veneran species, this is discouraged as much as encouraged). The Nexus keeps their footprint small, building settlements on singular planets to cover entire regions of territory, which they often leave to the other factions living there, choosing instead to simply observe and protect from catastrophy. Their navy is powerful but entirely pacifistic, though they don't judge violence in other groups, their technology allows them to subdue attackers with harmless psionics, and solve things as diplomatically as possible. When that doesn't work, there's always turning them into woodland animals.

[fatehbaz]

ughhhhhhhhh noooo stop it! aha! don’t release non-native earthworms in random plots of soil for enhancing gardens or free bait, don’t do it anywhere in North America lmaoooo! stop, it’s so dangerous and extremely harmful, with devastating and surprisingly dramatic and visible biome-wide effects! haha popular tumblr blogs should stop repeatedly and widely sharing advice recommending the release of non-native earthworms and calling it “anti-imperialist praxis” and “bioregional autonomy” and “vegan self-suffiency” lol! dooooon’t! it straight up destroys soil and outright kills forests :/ it directly causes death of understory plants; death of iconic species like goblin fern and serviceberry; elimination of vital fungal networks providing both soil structure and tree-to-tree nutrient-sharing; loss of native invertebrates and amphibians; savannification of the boundary between woodland and tallgrass prairie; death of red maple, sugar maple, and red oak stands; and especially harms hardwoods forests of the Great Lakes and Midwest lmao seriously stooooop it >:(

Anyway for real, I sure hope no one is deliberately releasing non-native and invasive earthworms, or bait worms, anywhere on Turtle Island/North American land, especially west of the Mississippi River or north of the Wisconsin glaciation. Earthworms and bait worms sold in stores are, by and large, not species native to the continent. They severely harm forests and soil ecology, leading directly to disruption of fungal networks; death of saplings and seedlings; death of forest understory plants; replacement of typical understory species with grasses; mortality in adult trees, as well; changes in pH; and other harm, especially devastating in northern hardwoods forests of the Great Lakes region.

Not gonna name names, but several times this year, popular blogs from the [forest-lover, anarchist/leftist/solarpunk, Moomin-fan, environmentalist-ish] realms of Tumblr have widely shared advice recommending the release of non-native earthworms or bait worms into the wild, as a form of “praxis”. I’ve got these posts screenshotted, but since I generally respect people in these circles - and in the interest of avoiding discourse and drama - I’m not going to share them. (A popular post was widely shared in February 2019; another “release store-bought earthworms” post was shared in December 2019.) I appreciate where their hearts are at. But:

Source: [x].

Some things:

From a Phys dot org summary of Great Lakes Worm Watch:

"The western Great Lakes region, which is the area we're focused on, has no native earthworms," says ecologist Cindy Hale, a research associate with the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. Native earthworms in the region were all wiped out after the last Ice Age. The current population was brought by Europeans hundreds of years ago, (soil was often used as ballast in ships) and they’re now changing the face of local forests. Anglers are adding to the problem by dumping worms that don't end up on the end of a hook.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hale's team created the Great Lakes Worm Watch website and outreach programs to stop the spread of non-native earthworms and to clear up the common misconception that they're harmless. [...] Earthworms may be small but when they take over a forest, the impact is dramatic. They cause the rapid incorporation of organic material into the soil, changing its structure, chemistry and nutrient dynamics. What's known as the duff layer is suddenly removed, and this duff, or decaying organic material on the forest floor, is habitat for several species of insects, spiders, small vertebrates, bacteria and fungi. It is also the primary rooting zone for most plants."What's really the biggest negative effect on the plants directly is the removal of their rooting zone. It can cause mortality of adult plants but, furthermore, it can cause a loss of reproductive potential. A lot of these native plants have seeds that have very complex seed dormancy and germination strategies," says Hale.

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Caption by Shireen Gonzaga for EarthSky: “A forest understory with a high diversity of native plants, the result when there are no earthworms in the soil. Image courtesy of Paul Ojanen.”

Caption by Shireen Gonzaga for EarthSky: “Forest soil with an abundance of non-native earthworms can result in a bare understory. Image courtesy of Scott L Loss.”

Non-native worms disrupt fungi networks, alter soil pH, damage seedlings, and allow grasses to gain stronger footholds to replace native/natural forest understory plants (from an EarthSky review of 2016 research by German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research):

Bottom line: European earthworms, introduced by early settlers, are changing the physical and chemical characteristics of soil in northern North American forests, creating a decreased diversity in native plants. [...] At the top soil layer, earthworms convert fallen leaves to humus. That’s a good thing if you’re growing a garden, but, in a natural forest, it causes a fast-tracking of the release of nutrients instead of allowing the leaf litter to break down more slowly, as it would without the earthworms.

Also, as they burrow through the ground, earthworms disrupt the mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. Some deep-burrowing worm species change the pH of upper soil layers by mixing in alkaline soil from deeper in the ground. [...]

All of these changes adversely affect native plants that did not evolve in such conditions. For instance, the goblin fern is rarely found in areas with high earthworm density. Other native plants facing threats include largeflower bellwort, trillium and Solomon’s seal. Earthworms also consume the seeds and seedlings of some plant species, influencing what grows in the forest understory.

In some locations, grasses, with their fine root systems that quickly absorb nutrients, dominate the forest floor. Non-native invasive plants that evolved in soils containing earthworms gain an even stronger foothold in these forests.

--

Cindy Hale, the prominent University of Minnesota-based researcher of non-native earthworms in the Great Lakes region, has published this book through Kollath-Stensaas Publishing:

--

Non-native worms harm birch trees specifically and hardwood forests generally (excerpt from University of Toronto research, 2016):

The worms can cause dramatic changes to ecosystems by altering soils, reducing leaf litter and disrupting microbial interactions, which reduces biodiversity. Now it seems they are also eating plant seeds in the wild, potentially altering the make-up of forest communities. (…)

“They eat a lot more seeds than we think,” says Cassin [ecologist at University of Toronto in Mississauga], now at the Ontario Invasive Plant Council in Canada.

The study shows another way that earthworms can alter forest ecosystems, particularly for small-seeded species such as birch, says Lee Frelich, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul. (…)

Once earthworms have invaded a habitat, they are almost impossible to eradicate, says Erin Bayne, of the University of Alberta in Canada. Conservationists must instead work to keep worms out of pristine habitats, he says, for example by restricting the use of worms as fishing bait and by controlling accidental transport of contaminated soil.

--

Non-native worms lead to wildflower, fern, and sapling death. In hardwood forests, this loss is probably due partially to how worms degrade the duff layer; the loss of this layer also provokes soil erosion and directly eliminates the forest floor shelter of larger invertebrates and amphibians. When saplings cannot establish themselves, there is tree loss. (From Minnesota Department of Natural Resources)

Studies conducted by the University of Minnesota and forest managers show that at least seven species are invading our hardwood forests and causing the loss of tree seedlings, wildflowers, and ferns.

--

Sugar maples, important both for forests and human food production, are devastated by the worms (from several years of research by Michigan Technological University across multiple national and state forests in the Upper Great Lakes):

A new study suggests that non-native worms are eating up the forest floor, causing sugar maples to die back and perhaps harming other forest dwellers.

Sugar maples are prized as much for their valuable lumber as for their sugary sap and dazzling fall colors. In Michigan alone, they are the basis of a multi-million-dollar industry. But several years ago, foresters began noticing that the crowns of the big trees appeared unhealthy, with bare limbs and little new growth. “They were losing trees before they could harvest them.” (…)

--

Great Lakes Worm Watch has some fun links and resources:

You can download a comprehensive key that helps identify earthworm species. Available for free, via Great Lakes Worm Watch:

Text from Great Lakes Worm Watch: “Different plant species respond to earthworm invasions differently. Some native plants appear to be very sensitive, so much so, that they can rapidly disappear when earthworms invade a forest. Some examples of these plants include…” 

Worm Watch: “If earthworm invasion leads to changes in the mycorrhizal community of fungi, the diversity of plants that make up the understory would be dramatically changed. Fungi are a preferred food of many earthworm species and they graze it heavily, which could dramatically impact the abundance and composition of fungi in the soil.  By grazing fungi on or near plant roots, the earthworms not only can damage the roots, but they prevent the plant and fungi from forming the symbiotic relationship where mycorrhizal fungi exchange nutrients and water for carbohydrates with green plants.  If the fungi can't get enough food, they will die back even further.  For some of the native plants that need mycorrhizal fungi, especially when the plant is young and small, survival will be difficult if earthworms prevent this relationship from being formed.”

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NO MUSHROOMS

[adhdo5]

I saw Nälkä and came bolting pls gimmie gimmie *grabby hands*

She got her title epithet thingy from the fact that she is a near constant pusher for change where she can see; she is v good at both molding her own physical form and also values ideological evolution which is much a her thing 

Her convent thingy was like. There was no real complicated hierarchy just the convent “mother” and various semi-underlings, with the convent “mother” being replaced via trial by combat; despite this the “mother” didn’t have too much like. Direeect authority she was more direction oriented rather than In Charge. Mutation was pushing for even this to be abolished because Mutation is an anarchist who believes the collective should work to help each individual in said collective to achieve their own apotheosis damn it and was about to leave to start a commune when the convent thing got Fucked Over in the Mekhanite/Nalka conflict 

She did eventually leave and successfully start a commune she’s still around to this day and because the commune is mostly concerned with eating gods and having cooler arms and skeletal structures and tissues and shit they pose little enough of a risk to the veil that the Foundation mostly leavez them alone 

[zedecksiew]

Troika!

When I got Daniel Sell’s Planescape-meets-Fighting Fantasy-but-odder RPG Troika! in PDF I screenshot-ed its intro paragraphs:

“ excuse me but I think @Ignus1 has written the best introduction to roleplaying games ever I think the rest of us can go home now ” 

was what I said about it on Twitter.

When I got it in hardcopy -- book arrived this week -- I read it cover to cover. One sitting. This rarely happens with books, for me, and never with RPG books.

I’m a little bit in love, maybe.

+

Three things stand out.

One: the prose has a real ease to it.

There’s no door-stopping chapter about Troika!’s setting. All its world-building is done via available character background options; the item and spell and monster lists; the odd intro adventure in the back of the book. 

Here’s one of the player-character backgrounds you could roll:

“65 YONGARDY LAWYER

Down in Yongardy they do things differently. They respect the Law. Every day there is a queue outside the courts to get a seat to see the latest up and coming barrister defend their case with three feet of steel. The people follow the careers of their favourite solicitors, watch all their cases, collect their portraits, and sneak into the court after hours to dab the patches of blood on white handkerchiefs.

In Yongardy, they love the Law.”

Here’s how the “Befuddle” spell is described:

“A wizard’s touch can shake up someone’s mind like a snow globe. The target makes all rolls at a -1 penalty until their head clears. Lasts for 3 minutes.”

This isn’t 100% natural language. But even when Daniel is explaining the rules for armour or initiative (initiative being the ruleset’s weirdest feature) his style is pithy, evocative, a pleasure to read. " ... like a snow globe.”

Like Luka, I do think that RPGs could be written better. And I think Troika! does that.

+

Two: where Daniel designs from.

Not sure how else to put this; I’m not a rules or design person. Maybe some examples will help.

There’s the introductory salutations above. Here’s a bit in character creation:

“Roll randomly to determine your starting Background. Notice that they only touch the edge of specificity: it is up to you to tailor them to the worlds you play in. Rework them or remove them entirely and replace them with your own unique vision of the spheres. Boldly lay claim to the games you play, create content recklessly, and always write in pen.”

The following is from a Q&A section that starts off Troika!’s intro adventure, “The Blancmange & Thistle”, essentially a six-floor walk up a hotel full of weirdos:

“I don’t know what’s going on! None of us do. Ride it out and see what happens! You can apply meaning and history to everything in your next session in light of the events of the first. Encourage the players to connect the dots for you.”

The whole book has a: “You’ve got this! I believe in you! YES!” tone to it.

As a system Troika! is pretty loose. It provides just enough for a foundation, then exhorts the GM and players to build upon that foundation.

I know this will rankle the kind of players who need boundaries to optimise up to and argue against --

But I like it. It is game design that springs from a sense of trust. The system assumes players can and will find their own fun; resolve conflicts in ways that are considerate to each other. In the absence of a higher Designer-God to enforce balance or scold bad behaviour, you only have each other.

Patrick, in his review, observes:

“You could, if you wanted to, make a kind of soft social-justicy, vaguely anarchist, James C. Scottish argument here about very rules-light systems minimising authority structures and necessitating flat and collaborative social arrangements because there is simply not enough to argue about and because the necessary lacunae in rules description silently urge the players and DM to work together to resolve problems of mutual description without ever demanding that they work together in a flat social structure. Guidance through silence and opportunity rather than through warning and control.”

That rings true, to me.

Considering my past experience with tightly-wound, defensive rulesets meant to prevent exploits or steer play along “correct” tracks -- like Torchbearer -- it should be obvious which kind of design I prefer; which kind I think is more humane.

+

Three: how the damn book feels.

Have come to realise that if I only have a book in PDF form I never read it closely enough to write about it. Guess a book’s hand-feel is really important to me?

Troika! feels damn good. I love the matte softness of its pages, the warmth of its colours. Something about its palette really edifies the art -- by Jeremy Duncan, Dirk Detweiler Leichty, Sam Mameli, and Andrew Walter; a veritable dream team. (The non-digital pen-work looks particularly nice.)

I’ve got a new book to show off to my friends.

+

GET IT HERE. (And get it in dead-trees format. So worth it.)

[ravenwings-noyreallyback]

Emotions and socialist theory

This is long as fuck but I think it's important and it's broken up by topic. Tldr stop telling people they need to read a book, stop shitting on potential allies, and start asking them what they're thinking about, what worries them, and appeal to those feelings with emotionally honest radical wholesomeness of your own.

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I want to do something in the local person to person community that gets to people. Something to get people interested and invested in small ways that can grow legs and develop something good, and isn't bogged down in Party Politics.

People know the world's bad. They know capitalism sucks. They don't need a book or a working theory. They need hope and action.

The situation

People are feeling shock, panic, depression about the news in general. Nothing can be done etc.

People feel a sense of being a burden on others when they express that. People want to tip toe around things so as not to freak everyone out. To avoid the morbid grief and anger and fear. They still have it but nobody wants to talk about it in a personal way.

People have a need to express that fear but not in a therapy kinda way, or rather the therapy way would make it very very difficult to maintain and do appropriately for even skilled activists. Folks talk about not pouring from an empty cup? This is like trying to fill a bathtub with a cup and the tub isn't plugged.

Marx wrote a lot about alienation from daily life, not just economic job alienation. Similar to today?

People like radical compassionate sensitivity. There's a need for that.

People don't want a fuckin art installation theatre play or a communist party paper article thing they won't read. If you're reading this it's a fucking miracle. Nobody wants "here's the economic theory about why you're sad and what to do about it maybe it'll work if literally everyone does it" tbh. They engage in memes, in self destructive self care, hedonistic stress eating, drinking, sex etc. And that's okay. That's honestly probably good. Better than being depressed and doing nothing. But they can't go too hard because they don't have to put much time into because life's busy. Fuck is it busy. And every moment you try to get someone to go do theory based activism that isn't Shock and Awe or Radical Wholesomeness, it's just a dull hell grind.

The dsa in the states and corbynism in the uk is good actually, fuck it, for all their problems the ndp in Canada are worth working with. Leftists saying they're all bad because they're socdem really discount a couple things.

A, the massive political emotional energy behind those movements lately.

B, the people in those movements that are absolutely skeptical at least of capitalism. And many are legitimately radical but sticking with it because it's a structure to organize in.

Some history

Marx wrote during a time where theorists were bogged up in utopian socialism, where there were ideals of the kind of world they wanted to live in, but no means to make it happen. Marx wrote it to apply to everyday life in the industrial revolution, and establish an actionable plan for a better world.

Now today, things are in the rosiest of terms, not looking better in a lot of ways, and not optimistic in any. People are almost crying out for some emotional honesty and vulnerability and wholesomeness and just general heartfelt spirituality and human connection in uncertain times. Do I need to tell you how much the youth of today like games and shows that have this zeal of positivity these days? How much energy there is in queer movements? (oh yeah if you're anti LGBT, or honestly even just passively okay with it but not enthusiastic in your socialism, you will be left in the dust by today's movements tbh.)

Marx of course wrote a bit about that alienation shallowness of society thing in terms of talking about cultural alienation (more than just jobs) and the use of religion to people who have nothing else, etc.

Current responses

Today in response to that alienation, we've got irony poisoned reactionaries who don't want to engage with reality, and when they do, hide behind layers of "just kidding" etc and generally want to distance themselves from their victims. Big focus on nostalgia for when things made more sense, idealistic past worlds that never really existed in the first place. Maga and qanon conspiracies about how it all fits together and there's actually a pattern in the chaos. They end up isolated from all but their echo chambers until the pain of not being able to relate to society in healthy ways makes them go and do terrorism out of their conviction that the world is so broken and their way is right.

Meanwhile, good voices with good spiritually connective ideas like the almost saturday morning shoujo cartoon optimism and heart of Marianne Williamson connects with people, but offers no substance (and is backwards as fuck when it does) and proposes a world where if we hope hard enough, we can stop hurricanes and shootings. All for the benefit of selling self help books and crystals. But people still eat that up because it's hopeful and optimistic and fuckin romantic. People go nuts for that kind of optimism. Why don't we have that with good faith?

We do, but not enough of it. Artists and people who are out there pouring their hearts out are doing that good shit. But we need more of that. Hell the dsa is better at inspiring people to get involved with it than the left is.

Voices combining hope and reason and sincerity like AOC and the squad bring what people need, but tearing them down for not being radical enough is kind of stupid. The far left isn't organizing to connect this message of hope to people. We've got cynical takes and hell world worst timeline jokes. We've got theory as dry as Lenin's preserved corpse. We're right about the world being this awful, but God damn that's depressing.

Good responses in the past and today

I think the black panthers got this. They knew this and spoke to it. It was community solidarity first and foremost. People joined up and felt good about it being the right thing to do. It threatened the government in ways no internal western movement ever has, except probably the IRA but I'm not that spicy.

Regardless black panthers good. Standing rock good. Ferguson good. Unist'ot'en good. Antifa good. Soup kitchens and food banks good. Unions good when they actually stand up and challenge unfairness beyond their immediate industry connections. But throwing books by musty ass old men (and Rosa) hasn't worked. Even when they're right and relevant is still an implicit way of just saying "read more and maybe once enough people understand the theory, the revolution will come".

Still read, but don't tell other people to read unless they ask is all. Reading won't inspire revolution. Newspapers and blogs won't either. Informative podcasts aren't.

It's not gonna come that way. People don't respond to theory. Fuck, people barely care about facts.

Idea

Anti theory Theory: peoples' desires for emotionally honest and sensitive narratives isn't reflected in our theory at present. Potentially in part due to the materialist foundations of marxism, and certainly in the often dry motivations and spurs to resistance and revolution, which seems far off and at odds with the timeline of climate change that is weighing on peoples minds. Yes making good differences isn't a timeline thing, but people feel pressure to do it, which makes them even less effective at doing community action. Fear of collapse replaces will to revolt. People want to do something certainly, but lack the emotional connection to revolution. You could say something about base and superstructure being at odds, but I'm not as fluent in those ideas as I'd have to be to articulate.

Regardless, people want hope. Not as a slogan or buzzword, but as an action and a personal connection. They know society's in a bad place. They know there's something deeply wrong with capitalism, if not in general then at least with how it's being used right now. But when theory speaks mostly of society, or our place in it, but never asks "hey, you seem kinda hurt... how are you doing? What's on your mind? Can I listen?", people feel disenfranchised.

So on that hopeless emotional raw angst? Maybe folks just want to be heard and given permission to talk about the things they're told not to talk about? Climate anxiety, job stress, wanting someone to just talk to because social media is alienating and brief and temporal. Like, I'm not gonna interview them, but the right wing reactionaries are scared too. That's why they do what they do. Or at least that's what leads them into the irony poisoned spaces they go to.

Maybe some kind of local project of interviews in a humans of new york kinda way, or a postsecret way, or some other kind of way to ask and get people to tell us "here's what I'm thinking about that I'm afraid to tell even my best friend or my wife" "here's what scares me" "here's what I care about".

Maybe take some time to map out the things people are talking about? Use that as a source of identifying needs. Any excuse to get out there and listen to people instead of telling them things, which they won't always be ready for anyway.

Dunno how much solidarity it would build or who it would reach but it can open up conversations, not to radicalize but just to build a sense of human compassion and connection? Because really, if there's gonna be a left movement that takes off and gets things done, it's not coming from the communist parties, it's not coming from existing anarchist movements, it's gonna be something new and multilateral. People don't respond to theory they respond to emotions and passion projects and stories that get to them and tell them they're not alone. Hell, people say populism is bad? No, it's been used by bad people, but it's just another tool to get people on your side. And thinly veiled racism is only one direction it can take. Populism can help us if we're just straight up about compassion and empathy and listening.

Just fucking close your mouth and open your ears I guess is the point. If we want to be vanguards, we want to know where the movements are, facilitating them, not creating them ourselves.

And that takes listening.

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

It is commonplace to observe that the post-crash era is defined by the rise of populist movements on both the Left and the Right, amid a trend of growing political polarization. Yet rather less remarked upon is the return of the party as a central actor in the political arena.

Across the West, and in Europe in particular, we are witnessing a resurgence of the political party. Both old parties, like Labour in Britain, and new ones, like Podemos in Spain and France Insoumise, have experienced spectacular growth in recent years, while also undergoing important organizational innovations.

This revival of the party-form is remarkable given that for many years sociologists and political scientists almost unanimously predicted that the political party was losing its primacy in a globalized and highly diversified digital society.

In fact, the current left resurgence has itself belied such forecasts. For digital technology has not supplanted the party. Rather, activists have used its advances in order to develop innovative mechanisms for appealing to citizens, even as they assert the party-form anew as the main instrument of political struggle.

Botched Forecasts

That political parties are undergoing a revitalization is first of all evident in the growing number of party members, a clear turn from the long-falling memberships that many historical European parties experienced beginning in the 1980s.

In Britain, the Labour Party is on course to hit 600,000 members, after having touched a nadir of just 176,891 in 2007 at the end of Tony Blair’s leadership. In France, Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Insoumise movement counts 580,000 supporters, making it the largest party in France, just a year and a half after its foundation. In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014, stands at over 500,000 members, over double the figure for the Socialist Party. Even in the US, a country that for most of its history has lacked mass parties in the European sense of the term, we can see a somewhat similar trend, as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist formation, has grown to 50,000 members in the aftermath of Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

This spectacular growth in the membership rolls of left-wing parties — many of which are new formations — strikingly contrasts with the forecasts that had until recently been made by many political scientists. Between the 1990s and the period just before the 2008 financial crisis, scholars concurred in predicting the ultimate demise of the political party. Amid growing voter apathy and declining memberships, the political party seemed to many an outmoded type of organization — a stubborn relic of a bygone past.

In 2000, famed political scientists Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg argued that “today mounting evidence points to a declining role for political parties in shaping the politics of advanced industrial democracies. Many established political parties have seen their membership rolls wane, and contemporary publics seem increasingly skeptical about partisan politics.” Irish scholar Peter Mair asserted that we were witnessing the passing of the “age of party democracy,” arguing that a number of phenomena, such as the volatility of the electorate and the rise of a widespread “anti-political sentiment” pointed to the decline of political parties.

Besides being a commentary on the decline of the membership of historical mass parties, such a diagnosis was often informed by postmodern theories about “the end of history”; a prophecy which for many also meant that the party — in most traditional Marxist theory, the decisive historical actor — had met its end.

Amidst the extreme differentiation and individualization of the “network society” described by sociologist Manuel Castells, with its increasing room for individual autonomy and flexibility, all organizations would approximate the horizontal morphology of the network, rather than the vertical structure of the pyramid that dominated industrial-era organizations. This did not seem to bode well for the future of the political party, which by its nature involves the presence of a centralized leadership structure, demanding discipline and submission of individual wills to a collective goal.

Added to this was the perception of a crisis of partisan identification. Class identities were seen as no longer capable of mobilizing voters, and parties were becoming “catch-all” organizations, opportunistically seeking votes wherever they could find a gap in the “electoral market.”

This sociology of extreme complexity, individualization, and class disintegration was accompanied by the argument that in a globalized world, the party would lose importance for the simple reason that the nation-state — the party’s traditional object of conquest and framework of operation — was losing power in favor of global governance institutions. Self-proclaimed “Marxian” maîtres à penser Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt celebrated the shift from nation-states to a global empire, not too dissimilarly from the way in which New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman waxed lyrical about the impending victory of globalization over nations.

The global condition seemed to favor other types of collective organization, operating transnationally and focusing on “single issues”: networked protests, social movements, charities, and NGOs. It is significant that the World Social Forum, the main gathering of the anti-globalization movement, explicitly excluded parties, as if they were not just outdated but also morally reproachable.

Anti-Party Suspicion

This strong anti-party sentiment that has shaped the political education of past generations of left-wing activists was informed the form’s authoritarian distortions over the twentieth century.

Nazism and Stalinism demonstrated the extent to which the party could be turned into a cruel machine bent on manipulating its members and commanding unswerving obedience. Film and literature have handed down vivid portrayals of the malign psychological and political effect of party obedience, such as the abomination of Hitler’s Nazi Party or the show trials and persecutions conducted by Communist parties in the Soviet bloc, as dramatized in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. More benign social-democratic “mass parties” also engendered widespread disappointment.

But what was problematic was the way in which this justified criticism became allied with a longstanding liberal resentment toward the political party, underpinned by an anti-democratic fear of the organized masses and their demands of democratic control and economic redistribution.

This liberal discourse has a very long history that harks back to the origins of modern democracy. Personalities as different as James Madison, Moisey Ostrogorski, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Simone Weil vocally criticized the political party. They attacked political parties for subjecting the individual to obedience and uniformity, and argued that rather than serving the general interests of society parties ended up defending the narrow interest of a faction.

Emerson, for example, famously argued that “a sect or a party is an elegant incognito, devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking,” while Christian anarchist Simone Weil wrote that political parties led to a situation in which “instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind.”

(Continue Reading)

[turkiyeecom]

Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar

Photo-Illustration: Jed Egan, Photos: Getty Images At least it’s not “GlobalCoin.” For months now, rumors, leaks, and speculation have held that Facebook’s newly developed cryptocurrency — the entrance of the most powerful private surveillance apparatus on the planet into a sector created by and for obsessively secretive cypherpunk libertarian cranks — would be called “GlobalCoin.” It felt a bit on the nose. (Was NewWorldOrderCoin already taken?) Instead, the coin will be called Libra … a reference to the currency system of history’s most famous conquering empire, Rome. I personally would have gone with “Facebucks.” Libra, which was finally, officially announced this morning, is expected to launch in 2020 with Calibra, a digital wallet for securely storing the currency that can be used as a stand-alone app or in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Previous reporting has suggested that Indian WhatsApp users will be first to have access to the cryptocurrency, for no- or low-fee money transfers, and Facebook has apparently, and uncharacteristically, been wooing regulators and central bankers around the world to smooth the coin’s landing. The Libra blockchain — that is, the shared ledger of all transactions made in Libra — will be maintained by a network of nodes, which verify transactions and store the continuously updated record. These nodes will be operated by outside companies (early partners seem to include Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, and Booking.com), each of which will reportedly pay $10 million for the privilege, and the money from these licensing fees, the Information reports, will be used to back Libra with a “basket of currencies and low-risk securities from various countries,” keeping its value stable. How, precisely, users will exchange Libra for physical currency remains to be seen, though the most likely option is that Facebook partners with a cryptocurrency exchange, and the Information reports that there are plans for “physical terminals similar to ATMs.” Facebook is insistent that Calibra will not share “account information or financial data” to it, or to third parties — but that the wallet will use Facebook data to “comply with the law, secure customers’ accounts, mitigate risk and prevent criminal activity.” What this means in practice is not precisely clear, except that Facebook wants to make sure you’re aware that your Libra account balance will not be used to help target you with ads on its main platform. The coin itself will be governed by an independent foundation, the Libra Association, consisting of representatives from Facebook, financial institutions, nonprofits, merchants, venture capitalists, and the companies running the nodes. Facebook is already working on creating its own private supreme court, after all; why wouldn’t it want its own private, independent central bank as well? This highly centralized structure is very different from that of “traditional” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which spurn centralized authority and allow anyone to set up a node for free. And unlike Libra, whose value will be fixed to the aforementioned basket of currencies and securities, most cryptocurrencies don’t maintain fixed exchange rates — which is exactly what makes crypto such an exciting and volatile speculative market. Libra, by contrast, is intended to be boring because Facebook’s short-term plans for the currency are similarly boring or, at least, straightforward: Facebook wants to enter, and own, the cross-border payments market. If it is indeed launching in India, it’s not as part of a test run but because nearly $80 billion in remittances were sent to India in 2018; with more than 200 million Indian WhatsApp users already, the company is well-positioned to make its apps, and its currency, the method of choice for international money transfers to India — and, eventually, the world. But domination of the $689 billion global remittance economy is not actually Facebook’s end goal. In fact, it almost certainly won’t make much money directly from cross-border payments, since unlike its competition (payment systems like M-Pesa or remittance apps like PayPal’s Xoom), Facebook reportedly won’t charge transaction fees for peer-to-peer payments. That’s a very bad way to make money, but as Facebook knows well, it’s a very good way to entice new users into your network and, in turn, to convince stores, restaurants, and other businesses to set up to accept GlobalCoin in payment. This is the medium-term plan for Libra: To compete not just with money-transfer businesses but with credit-card companies, using cross-border payments as the beachhead for all payments everywhere. You receive a no-fee Libra payment from an expat family member, and then use that Libra to pay back a friend, who in turn uses the Libra to pay for a Chicken Maharaja Mac at the local McDonald’s. Facebook here is openly mimicking WeChat, which is both China’s largest social network and also the country’s ubiquitous payment app, an utterly dominant Facebook–WhatsApp–Apple Pay–Venmo–Seamless hybrid. It’s easy to see why Facebook might want this. There’s a familiar business model in merchant fees (though, if you’re levying payments in the currency that you yourself mint, “taxes” might be a better word), and payments fit much more naturally than advertisements in the privacy-focused, chat-based future that Mark Zuckerberg claims is coming for his company. But Facebook insists that its merchant fees would only be high enough to cover the cost of fraud risk. The real value of becoming the world’s ubiquitous payment app (outside of China, at any rate) goes beyond the revenue from merchant fees. Facebook’s biggest problem right now — the problem that lurks behind stagnant user growth in Europe and North America — is that it’s just not essential. Like any megaplatform, Facebook wants to be infrastructure: a service so important to daily life that most people have no choice but to use it. But Facebook in 2019 is increasingly easy for Americans and Europeans to quit without particular consequence, in a way that Google, say, isn’t. Libra could, if it takes off, change that. Payment infrastructure isn’t just (potentially) more lucrative than social infrastructure, it’s much less easy to replicate, either on the business side or on the consumer side. It’s pretty easy to quit Facebook, the app where you fight with your childhood neighbor about politics. It’s much more difficult to quit Facebook, the app you use to pay your rent. I imagine the widespread adoption of a digital currency on an aggressively centralized and privately surveilled blockchain tied to real-name ID is not really what the bitcoin faithful had in mind when they got into cryptocurrency in the first place. Even so, there’s some excitement about Libra among crypto nerds, who are hoping that Facebook’s backing will normalize cryptocurrency and entice the uninitiated into crypto culture. But the opposite seems more likely to me. Once you’ve got a usable digital currency, why would you want to “get into” other currencies? I use dollars every day, but don’t spend a lot of time buying up euro and yen. Still, it’s worth asking, at this point: Why a cryptocurrency at all? If the limit of Zuckerberg’s ambition is to be the Western WeChat, or the new Visa and American Express, why does Facebook feel like it needs a whole new means of exchange? It could partner with a global banking conglomerate to undercut rivals’ fees, and leverage its already enormous network to enter the payment sector, the way WeChat or, to a lesser extent, Apple has — all without having to build out an enormous, headache-inducing technical and regulatory apparatus. But since when has Zuckerberg limited his ambition to competing with mere companies? As far as I know, there’s only one other entity out there developing a blockchain-based digital currency for a billion-plus-member economy: China. The People’s Bank of China has been amassing blockchain and digital-currency patents as it develops its own cryptocurrency — loosely pegged to a basket of other currencies, just like Libra — which could help it more efficiently monitor and control capital flows. (So much for the decentralized, anarchist dream of cryptocurrency.) Facebook doesn’t want to compete with Mastercard, or even with Goldman Sachs. It wants to be the currency platform Mastercard operates on. Facebook’s payment product is a whole new currency because its long-term competition isn’t PayPal or Visa or even WeChat, but the renminbi, the euro, the yen, and the dollar. There’s long been a segment of crypto nerds for whom the ultimate goal of bitcoin is that it replace the dollar as the global reserve currency, held in mass quantities by monetary authorities and used as the dominant unit of account for international finance. But for most of its still fairly short life, bitcoin has been much too volatile, difficult to use, and unregulated for the idea of a global reserve cryptocurrency to be anything but a wild pipe dream. But what if — bear with me now — you had a stable cryptocurrency, created with regulator and institutional accession, and already in frictionless circulation among 2.3 billion people? Plenty of economists and central bankers have suggested that a supranational instrument might make for a better reserve currency than one printed by a national monetary authority. John Maynard Keynes’s proposed currency, the “Bancor,” is notable in that it might actually have a worse name than Libra, but it also seems to presage the ambition of Zuckerberg’s project — albeit as the product of an international system of cooperating sovereign governments, rather than as an app created by a Roman Empire–obsessed programmer. We’ve now entered the realm of wild, dystopian speculation, of course. Facebook has already tried and failed to build a sustainable proprietary payment system, called Facebook Credits, and there’s every chance that Libra could similarly fail. Even its short- and medium-term goals of entering and dominating payment sectors will be difficult to achieve — let alone the unprecedented idea of a corporation’s private digital currency being widely enough adopted and respected to be the foundation of a global reserve currency. But Facebook, right now, is being very open about its plans to remake the world’s financial systems. People may even welcome that: In the global banking industry, Facebook has probably found the one group of corporations less liked and less trusted than itself. But if you think Facebook is powerful now, just wait until it’s, essentially, the global federal reserve, overseeing a global currency over which it has not just monetary control but a visible, minable record of every transaction made. Maybe GlobalCoin would have been the right name after all. Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar 10 mins ago The Washington Post has the details on a horrific incident that may have tripped up Patrick Shanahan’s nomination In November 2011, Shanahan rushed to defend his then 17-year-old son, William Shanahan, in the days after the teenager brutally beat his mother. The attack had left Shanahan’s ex-wife unconscious in a pool of blood, her skull fractured and with internal injuries that required surgery, according to court and police records.Two weeks later, Shanahan sent his ex-wife’s brother a memo arguing that his son had acted in self-defense.“Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force,” Shanahan wrote. “However, Will’s mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.”Details of the incidents have started to emerge in media reports about his nomination, including a USA Today report Tuesday about the punching incident in 2010.In an hour-long interview Monday night at his apartment in Virginia, Shanahan, who has been responding to questions from The Post about the incidents since January, said he wrote the memo in the hours after his son’s attack, before he knew the full extent of his ex-wife’s injuries. He said it was to prepare for his son’s initial court appearance and that he never intended for anyone other than his son’s attorneys to read it. 1:07 p.m. Trump dumps Shanahan Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who has done a wonderful job, has decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family….I thank Pat for his outstanding service and will be naming Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, to be the new Acting Secretary of Defense. I know Mark, and have no doubt he will do a fantastic job! —@realDonaldTrump 12:43 p.m.the national interest the national interest Leftists Have Turned Obama Into Mitt Romney By Jonathan Chait Obama has been accused of redistributing wealth upward and undercutting Elizabeth Warren’s attacks on business. Both claims are false. 12:18 p.m. What a mess Montana @GovernorBullock has qualified for the second Democratic debates in July, after the DNC confirms that the three CBS/YouGov polls count as qualifying polls.21 candidates have now qualified for the Detroit debates, triggering the tiebreaker rules. —@kendallkarson 11:40 a.m. The Orlando Sentinel does not seem enthused about Trump’s re-election campaign kickoff 11:33 a.m. Trump’s characteristic blunder gives immigrants and advocates time to prepare for whatever’s coming DHS is planning to target “families” as part of stepped up effort to deport undocumented immigrants, a senior admin official told me, in response to Trump’s tweet last night. But the official said there are “not a lot of happy faces” at DHS, as Trump revealed plans in the works. —@Acosta vision 2020 Amy Klobuchar Needs a Plan to Enact Her 137 Plans By Ed Kilgore The Minnesotan now has more specific plans than the wonky Elizabeth Warren. But she could use some priorities and a strategy for enacting legislation. paul manafort Paul Manafort Rescued From Rikers by Deputy Attorney General By Adam K. Raymond “Calling this highly unusual doesn’t even begin to capture” it, one legal expert tweeted. life in pixels Facebook’s New Competition: The U.S. Dollar By Max Read Facebook just introduced Libra, a new cryptocurrency designed to blow up the global financial system. 10:41 a.m. The ship with the whimsical name is doing some serious work Boaty McBoatface’s maiden outing has made a major discovery about how climate change is causing rising sea levels. Scientists say that data collected from the yellow submarines’s first expedition will help them build more accurate predictions in order to combat the problem.The mission has uncovered a key process linking increasing Antarctic winds to higher sea temperatures, which in turn is fuelling increasing levels.Researchers found that the increasing winds are cooling water on the bottom of the ocean, forcing it to travel faster, creating turbulance as it mixed with warmer waters above. 10:08 a.m. Stocks are surging on this news Had a very good telephone conversation with President Xi of China. We will be having an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan. Our respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting. —@realDonaldTrump 9:41 a.m. Hopefully this will not be reminiscent of the 2011 quake TOKYO (AP) – Magnitude 6.8 earthquake hits off northwestern Japan, tsunami warning issued. —@carlquintanilla 8:56 a.m. Tonight’s rally will be even more of a spectacle than usual President Trump will announce his reelection campaign Tuesday in Orlando, where he will be greeted by a tailgate party as well as protesters and the orange “Baby Trump” balloon loved by his critics.Trump and Vice President Pence are making their 2020 candidacy official with a rally expected to pack a 20,000-seat arena, with thousands more outside. Supporters began lining up a day early, local news outlets said Monday.“The Fake News doesn’t report it, but Republican enthusiasm is at an all time high,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. “Look what is going on in Orlando, Florida, right now! People have never seen anything like it (unless you play a guitar). Going to be wild - See you later!”Trump campaign spokesman Marc Lotter said Tuesday morning that the campaign had set up an “outdoor festival area” that will feature live bands before the event. 8:29 a.m. Trump the peacenik Facing twin challenges in the Persian Gulf, President Donald Trump said in an interview with TIME Monday that he might take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but cast doubt on going to war to protect international oil supplies.“I would certainly go over nuclear weapons,” the president said when asked what moves would lead him to consider going to war with Iran, “and I would keep the other a question mark.”Just hours earlier, Iran announced an escalation of its nuclear program, saying that within 10 days it will breach the limit on its stockpile of enriched uranium that was set under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.Last week, U.S. officials blamed Iran for attacks against Norwegian and Japanese oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Trump described those and other recent attacks attributed by administration officials to Iran as limited. “So far, it’s been very minor,” Trump told TIME. racism How Police Brutality Can Function as Terrorism By Zak Cheney-Rice These incidents, like Phoenix cops drawing guns on a young family, have psychological effects that mirror living under the threat of terrorism. 7:59 a.m. What kid is going to vape if they know it’ll keep them out of the National Honor Society?! So one small Nebraska school district is trying an aggressive new approach: Forcing students in grades seven through 12 to submit to random nicotine testing if they want to take part in extracurricular activities such as speech competitions and the National Honor Society.… Though teenagers and privacy-rights advocates might find it extreme, the new policy is legal thanks to a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oklahoma school district’s policy of randomly drug testing students who participate in “competitive” extracurricular activities ranging from cheerleading to choir. In 1997, the Supreme Court had determined that testing high school athletes for illegal drugs was constitutional.Fairbury Junior-Senior High School, where roughly 60 percent of the 387 students participate in after-school activities, has had a random drug-testing system for two years. Students and their parents are required to sign a consent form agreeing to the urinalysis tests, which are randomly assigned to 10 percent of the students in extracurriculars each month, the Journal Star reported. 7:52 a.m. Reinstating Obama’s environmental policies? Raising the minimum wage for federal contractors? Let’s not get too ambitious here Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants to reenter the Climate Paris Accords, raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 and require publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending over $10,000 to their shareholders — and that’s just three out of 137 ideas she wants to put forward in her first 100 days as president.On Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate released an exhaustive list of policy prescriptions — more than 137 bullet points, extending over 17 single-spaced pages — that she would prioritize in the first months of her administration. Klobuchar’s plans run from extending veterans’ benefits to their newborn babies to restoring the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era environmental protections. 7:36 a.m. Steve Bullock doesn’t need the Democrats’ stinking debate. His campaign has town halls and unexpected profanity Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, after failing to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debates, announced on Tuesday morning that he would be participating in locally televised town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire on the days of the dueling events next week.Bullock will appear June 26 on Iowa’s WHO-TV with Dave Price, and June 27 on New Hampshire’s WMUR with Adam Sexton. The appearances will be televised ahead of the debates in Miami rather than concurrently.Bullock and his campaign have been hustling to turn his debate-outcast status into an advantage, with a round of free media coverage prompted by his willingness to attack the Democratic National Committee for its rules on polling and donor thresholds.“DNC is saying Governor Bullock doesn’t qualify for the debates. That’s horses**t,” one Montana voter said in a campaign web ad released last Friday. 7:20 a.m. New York narrowly passes law that gives undocumented driver’s licenses The New York State Senate approved a bill on Monday to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, a deeply polarizing issue that had splintered Democrats and stirred a backlash among Republicans in New York and beyond, who have already vowed to highlight it during next year’s elections.The vote, together with the Assembly’s passage last week, thrust New York into the center of the explosive national debate over immigration. It would reverse a nearly 20-year-old ban and end years of political paralysis on the issue.It also signaled the strength of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which for months had pressed moderate legislators to support the bill despite concerns about alienating swing voters, especially among first-term Democrats who flipped seats on Long Island and helped their party win a majority last year. mueller report This Summer’s Hot Beach Read: The Mueller Report By Mark Walsh With more than 300,000 copies sold, the damning document is a certified publishing sensation. migrant crisis Trump Announces ‘Removal’ of ‘Millions of Illegal Aliens’ Starting Next Week By Matt Stieb Trump announced by tweet that ICE will begin removing “millions of illegal aliens,” surprising officials who didn’t know he would broadcast the plan. 6/17/2019last night on late night last night on late night Jon Stewart Stops by Late Show to Yell at Mitch McConnell Over 9/11 Survivors By Halle Kiefer If we’re being honest, Jon Stewart does seem “bent out of shape” about the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. 6/17/2019 As of April, Bernie Sanders was leading Democrats with $20,688,027 Per pool report from Biden’s NYC fundraiser tonight, Biden told donors his campaign had 360,000 donors with an average contribution of $55. If correct, that math comes out to about $19.8 million since he joined the race on April 25. pic.twitter.com/0vxhsGd3Z1 —@myhlee politics Mitch McConnell Calls Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico ‘Full-Bore Socialism’ By Matt Stieb The quote is certainly consistent with Mitch McConnell’s block-anything-blue legacy, but not all Republicans agree with their leader in the Senate. 6/17/2019intelligencer chats intelligencer chats How Worried Should We Be About Escalation With Iran? By Benjamin Hart and Heather Hurlburt Intelligencer staffers discuss whether tit-for-tat provocations between the two countries will lead to something much scarier. 6/17/2019presidential pardons presidential pardons Supreme Court Won’t Stop States From Prosecuting Federal Defendants By Ed Kilgore By leaving an exception to double-jeopardy rules in place, the Court did not make it easier for Trump to keep people out of jail via pardons. Read More Read the full article

[hankkalet]

The Demagogue’s Speech

It has been four years since I stood before you and asked you to follow me in a great awakening, a grand internal revolution that has begun the process of reclaiming for our nation the greatness it has forsaken. Four years -- a time of great success and progress, a list so great that it is impossible to enumerate all the remarkable results that have been reached during a time which may be looked upon as probably the most astounding epoch in the life of our people.

We have led our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace. We are, once again, a country of generosity and warmth, built on a foundation of law and order. The violence and chaos that threatened our way of life are things of the past.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead. We have led. We have been honest. We have closed our borders to the outsiders. We have empowered our police.

We are once again on the road to great prosperity and strength. No longer does a foreign financial cabal reap the rewards of our hard work; the forgotten workers, who built this great nation, the men who built our factories and farmed our soil, once again have seat at the table, a voice. I am your voice.

The forgotten men and women of our country are forgotten no longer. You have, by the tens of millions, created a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement has been the conviction that America is for Americans. Our bedrock is total allegiance to our great nation, and through our loyalty, we have rediscovered loyalty to each other.

We stand at the birth of a new millennium of national greatness in which a new national pride will stir us, lift our sights and heal our divisions. We have made great strides in reconstructing the structure of our state, and while we have taken back our government, it remains foreign to our own national character, our historical development and our national needs.

We are a people of action, yet our legislative branch prevents action. It is characterized byz inertia and can no longer be depended upon to act on our behalf. It is a critical situation that cannot be remedied by collaboration; it requires revolutionary reconstruction. This radical change, which is needed if we are to reach our full potential as a nation, can not be carried out by those who see themselves as custodians of the old order. Our constitution, which had served us well for decades and decades, has been dismantled by so-called judges who have no concern for the safety and well-being of real Americans. As such, the constitution no longer resembles the shining vision offered by our Christian forebears, and stands as an impediment to furthering our radical reformation of political, cultural and economic life -- a revolution necessary to returning this nation to its former greatness.

As I said, we have made great strides in four years, but the path ahead is long. It will require courage, it will require sacrifice -- of life and blood, if that should be necessary. I do not endorse violence; and I have empowered the police to do everything possible to quell the unrest we have faced from outside agitators, from false revolutionaries paid by the monied elites to stir up trouble and slow our progress. The monied elites, the international bankers, they look down upon us and will do everything they can to protect their sinecures, to maintain their political and economic power. But it is not their nation; it is ours, and our revolution will continue moving forward, continue remaking our nation in its proper image. We have succeeded, so far, without causing damage to property, unlike those defending the old order. We have protected property, against the agitators, the anarchists, the unionists. We have ended the extortion racket that was the union system, and have made the worker truly free. We have unleashed the creativity and power of capital, by freeing our great business owners from the burdens of regulation. And we have done all of this without violence.

This bloodless revolution was possible because we followed a simple principle: The purpose of a revolution, or of any general change in the condition of public affairs, cannot be to produce chaos but only to replace what is bad by substituting something better.

Our way is better. Our way is safer. After decades of record immigration had produced lowered wages for our countrymen, we constructed a wall and rounded up and deported the invaders. This has allowed us to rebuild our nation in the proper image, and to prevent Muslims from intruding themselves into our nation as an element of internal disruption, under the mask of free exercise of religion, and thus gaining power over us or giving them the opportunity to engage in terrorism.

Together, we have taken back our nation. We have made our nation safe again. We have made our nation strong again. We have made our nation whole again.

We have more work to do. Together, we will bring back our jobs and make our nation wealthy again. We will demonstrate our might and make our nation proud again. We will how to no one and regain our independence.

I must once again thank all those millions of unknown countrymen, from every class and every region, who have given their hearts, their lives and their sacrifices, for this new national experiment. We have made this nation great again, and I promise to make it even greater still.

This speech is a merger of Trump and Hitler speeches.

[thomasreedtn]

Integrating the North Node: Personal, Work and Writing Updates

For years, I’ve found that when a client embraces his or her natal North Node of the Moon, it opens portals where concrete walls once blocked the way. Your South Node represents where you came from — in previous lifetimes and early this life. Your North Node points to your soul’s idea of purpose and success. Like magic, leaning into North Node qualities beckons positive synchronicities, flow, and opportunities. Think “best of the past” with a new, soul-approved, focus and direction. This works in health and other areas of life, so I often explore the North Node in seemingly “unrelated” types of sessions.

Having recognized this power for my clients, I’ve spent the past few years working hard to integrate my own Capricorn North Node, but not without some challenges. Read “big challenges” that involve strongly competing desires, goals, and aspects. As with clients, I knew I needed to find ways to honor that North Node while also recognizing my own quirks and ways of summoning energy. I decided to share some of my process, because it illustrates how we can take a complex chart (or competing desires) and embrace instead of run from it. When we know what and whom we’re dealing with, we can make deals that honor all involved. Even if all those aspects exist inside ourselves!

Our natal chart presents a blueprint, but how we build and decorate our lives remains up to us. As with feng shui, learning how to flow with energies and challenges of the birth design makes a huge difference in how we experience our lives:

Do we step into our lives and say, “Ahhhhhh! This is why I’m here!”?

Or do energies short-circuit and block each other, create jarring effects and a cluttered, non-harmonious space?

Does life feel authentic and free?

Or do we feel boxed in by structural limitations and our parents’ or society’s rules and style projected into our own interior design?

My natal chart is filled with Gemini, Air, trickster Mercury, and Aquarius. I have four planets in Gemini –including Saturn– in the 10th house of social status, public life, career and fame. Four or more planets in a house is called a stellium. When a stellium occurs, the themes and goals of that house get extra influence. Traditionally, Capricorn (ruled by Saturn) rules the 10th house, which makes Saturn’s influence here even stronger. My packed 10th house and especially my 10th house Saturn insist on a strong public life and/or career. In the 6th house of health, work, and service, I’ve got a Capricorn North Node.

Remember, along with the 10th house, Saturn rules Capricorn. With this double whammy of 6th and 10th house Saturn influence on my work/career, the responsible, committed Saturn is making his list and checking it twice. Even as a three-year-old, I felt a strong sense of calling and responsibility. I knew I’d write, and I always knew that I needed to find the “right” career of responsible service. Anything less wouldn’t cut it, no matter how much this Gemini dilettante wanted to flit, flirt and dabble her way through life.

In many charts, this Saturn setup might exert the strongest influence in the chart, but not in mine. Along with all that easy-breazy Gemini, I’ve also got an exact Grand Trine in Air with very private Pluto (in Libra), Gemini Sun (conscious mind/identity ) and Aquarius Moon (subconscious and emotions, inner life). Wherever he appears, Pluto acts as a force of nature. In this case, I’ve got Pluto in my 2nd house of values, body, and wealth. With Pluto exactly Trine both Sun and Moon, I experience outer and inner life, conscious and unconscious awareness, through a Plutonian lens. Pluto in my chart has the will and power to refuse the demands of 10th house Saturn and 6th house Capricorn North Node. They say, “Get to work, put yourself out there,” and Pluto says, “You wanna piece o’ me? Huh? You wanna piece? Oh, yeah? Screw you.”

Pluto can wreak havoc in a chart, and my life reflects a strongly aspected Pluto, complete with many near death experiences. Trying to manipulate or control me through money backfires big time, and I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t honor Pluto in my body and values, then Pluto tanks my finances. Unlike many people who dread Pluto’s impact, I love and honor my Grand Trine with Pluto. More than that, I respect Pluto’s influence. It’s one of my favorite aspects to explore in natal charts and transits. Sure, Pluto takes you to the Underworld, but that’s where you find real gems.

One astrologer looked at my chart and said, “You have the worst of luck, and the best of luck. You’ve got angels on both sides of the veil, and you walk both sides.”

Yep. I’ve been communicating with the dead since age three.

Life presents me with some of the strangest, scariest adventures, but somehow I always land on my feet. That harmonious Grand Trine with Pluto-Sun-Moon has also given me unusual powers of regeneration, shamanic abilities, and compassion to guide people in the depths of Shadow, finding buried treasure, and helping them rebirth themselves back into the Light. Like Persephone, I journey to the depths, but I always return with Spring in tow. I’m grateful for Pluto’s challenges and the gifts, because I feel them to the core of my being.

And that’s where Saturn has a problem. No one bosses Pluto around and lives to tell the tale. They might survive the ordeal, but they will not be the same person they once were. Pluto’s a badass and fiercely guards his privacy.

Saturn in my chart says, “Ahem, it’s time for that public career. You need to write, put yourself out there, go big. These are the rules. Go big or it will affect your health.”

Pluto says, “Over my dead body … and by the way, I don’t fear death.”

Saturn looks at his watch, clears his throat, sulks, tries a Gemini song and dance, crosses over my Capricorn North Node a few times, and Pluto just stares him down.

Unimpressed. Unamused.

Pluto knows that he’ll win any face-off, because Pluto will crash and burn, fail for spite, die and reinvent himself. If Pluto seems to have given up, he’s gone subterranean. He’s relentless, and he’ll pop up just to prove he can. Add to this showdown that my disciplinarian Saturn is closely Trine my rebel/innovator/anarchist Uranus, which also lives in the 2nd house with Pluto. Practicality? Doing things because “this is what you have to do to make money”? Uh-uh.

My Saturn and Capricorn North Node know they’re outmatched, even though they want the best for me. All they can do is appeal to conscience. They get some help because my Uranus in Libra exactly opposes my 8th house wounded healer Chiron in Aries. This centaur pleads with Uranus to embody his ideals of liberation and brotherly love. Traditionally, Pluto rules the 8th house, so my Chiron has some inroads to Pluto. Like Chiron, Pluto understands wounds and feels compassion for people undergoing an Underworld Initiation. Despite the desire for privacy, Pluto really does enjoy heartfelt intimacy. He just hates superficial stuff, power plays, or feeling trapped. In a battle of wills, Pluto wins, but he can be softened by compassion, just as zany Uranus will conform enough to support the Highest Good of All.

So what does all of this mean to my personal, work, and writing life?

I’ve grappled with the competing elements and come to realize which ones feel malleable and which ones will not budge. I love and feel committed to the intuitive coaching career I’ve had for 17 years, but I have never felt led to create an empire with that business or become a household name. I need to allow “my Cosmic Secretary” free reign in synchronously bringing the right clients at the right time. I enjoy the sense of Mystery, as well as my Cosmic Secretary’s uncanny ability to clear my schedule when I’ll need a break, to replace emergency cancellations with emergency session requests, and to keep my finances flowing in a balanced way. With Uranus and Pluto in the 2nd house, hats off to my Cosmic Secretary! I’m in awe of how she manages unruly Laura Bruno.

Since buying a house in Kalamazoo, Taurus hubby David and I feel led to put down roots. For me, that means more than getting settled. It also means restructuring the foundations and goals of my business after 17 years. It means David and me working with financial planners, a new accountant, and an attorney to get our wills, etc. in order. I’m on David’s health, vision and dental insurance, and I got a full physical and blood work for the first time since 2007. All clear, and all very Capricorn.

From the outside looking in, my business won’t seem too different. I’ll still offer sessions, but I’m changing my business name and will be “putting myself out there” in ways that honor my Plutonian need for privacy, and my Uranian and Gemini needs for freedom, especially creative freedom. In January, when the new business name goes into effect, I’ll release some already completed and nearly completed writing projects, including a guided journal for people with Lyme disease. I’ll publish these non-fiction projects under the name “Laura Bruno,” along with my in book-in-process The Metaphysics of Lyme Disease. I also have at least three more non-fiction book ideas that will flow from “Laura Bruno.”

After much consideration, dreams, and other synchronicities, I’ve given myself permission to release any fiction I write under one or more pen names. I’m also allowing myself to create T-shirts and other products under an anonymous or non-Laura-Bruno-related brand name. This shift allows me to release the message in a big way without private Pluto torching the entire enterprise. It also gives my four 10th house planets in Gemini (ruled by trickster Mercury) and my Virgo Ascendant (also ruled by Mercury), a lot of room for fun, change, diversity and play. At some point, I may merge with the pen name(s), or maybe I won’t.

Authors use pen names for a wide variety of reasons, including genre separation, privacy, and branding. I tend to avoid branding and social media like the plague, but I could even see a pen name version of myself maintaining a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram page. It would be kind of like what I always said about weddings, “If I ever had one, I’d get married on Halloween and insist that everyone go in costume. Then ‘the bride’ wouldn’t be the only one playing a role. If we just got it out in the open that everyone’s role playing, I could get into this.” For both marriages, I eloped, but I could have enjoyed a masquerade wedding in the same way, I might not mind social media if it wasn’t “me” doing it.

We shall see. I haven’t written any fiction since the now out of print Schizandra and the Gates of Mu, released in 2009. I’ve already felt a huge influx of creative freedom and joy now that Pluto’s mollified. I look forward to giving Saturn his due and experiencing the powerful flow of leaning into my Capricorn North Node. Like all of us, I just need to do it in ways that honor all of me. If you’ve struggled with the competing factions or unclear goals, you can find your way, too. The whole is greater — and more satisfying — than the sum of its parts.

from Thomas Reed https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/integrating-the-north-node-personal-work-and-writing-updates/

[insideanairport]

Eva Cherniavsky’s Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy

❍❍❍

From the jacket: 

"Book explores how the constellation of political and economic forces of neoliberalism have assailed and arguably dismantled the institutions of modern democratic governance in the U.S. As overtly oligarchical structures of governance replace the operations of representative democracy…” 

Since the perspective of the book is western and Eurocentric, ‘the oligarchical structures of governance replacing the operations of representative democracy’ is supposed to be a negative issue, if not ’the’ issue because assumably ‘People’ are not represented by the state anymore, or state doesn’t need to represent people anymore. Yet, if we look at the issues from the perspective of the oppressed, marginalized, indigenous or migrant, (which is not included in the book) this 'representative democracy' not only never actually represented them, it has always been used to push them down. So, when these groups of people are not included in the ‘so-called’ democracy, whatever system comes to replace the power wouldn’t necessarily make their life better or worst. A classic example of this is during the 1930’s Great Depression, which hit the black and migrant community with less intensity than the middle-class white Americans. It was simply because those marginalized groups and communities were already in depression before even it started. 

The book would help the minority subjects to rethink the role of community engagement, social-work and direct action. It might also be a great tool to understand the rise of philanthropy, non-governmental organizations and foundations, and non-profit organizations.  

Socially engaged art and decolonizing methodology is always in reciprocal relationship with citizenship (institutions), belonging, otherness and violence. This book was a great analytical piece on the citizenship (institutions) part of the story. The most enjoyable and thought-provoking part of the book was the great analysis of Battlestar Galactica television series in chapter 4, and Distraction, a science-fiction novel by Bruce Sterling in chapter 5. Focusing on these two works helped to make the argument more digestible for beginners in political science.

There is an underlying conservatism in the book, which emerges later when she starts to go against Occupy Wall Street, Decolonize Oakland, and Wendy Brown’s idea of citizenship (in relation to neoliberalism). It becomes very clear at the end of the book that she is rejecting direct-action, activism, anarchist collectives and so on. She is criticizing today's self-organized communes and collectives using the example of Sterling’s dystopian book where everyone is organizing something, and governments are dysfunctional. With a great style of writing one might even find this dystopian description very pleasant. 

Cherniavsky is citing a lot of radical leftists such as Doug Henwood, Bruce Sterling and Joseph Stiglitz which showed her position on the issue of deteriorating citizenship (citizenship with its European connotation where any talk of subjectivity and autonomy is deemed as a divider, identity politics or exceptionalism). On the criticism of OWS, she sides with Jodi Dean and Marco Deseriis’s on the complaint about the absence of demands — “the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement”

Although throughout the book all the arguments were presented with delicacy and issues were analyzed systematically, from chapter 5 onward, the book became more like a one-sided critique of neoliberalism (in relation to the idea of citizenship) by an ultra-orthodox leftist against Wendy Brown!

[jwbarkstrom-blog]

“Bright Lines and Sharp Edges”: Outline and Part of Paper

Author’s Note: I don’t really know how good this is because I wrote it last night. It is an introduction that should set up the rest of the essay pretty well. I am concerned that it makes sense (it might not) and if it appears focused enough to lead to the end of the third paragraph (the main topic of the essay). I don’t want to spend to long getting into the details of blockchain, but I also want the reader to have some idea of what I’m saying. Hopefully the topic is engaging, but from my perspective I really can’t tell.

“A lot of people are talking about how they’re going to make us disappear. But here we are, one of the first users of the technology.”

—Michael Bodson, on behalf of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation

The anonymous creator or creators of Bitcoin—known only by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto—sparked a libertarian, anti-institutional “decentralization revolution” that continues to rock Silicon Valley and ignite the baffling world of cryptocurrency. The visionaries behind this revolution utilize a technology known as blockchain: a completely public, decentralized, anonymous ledger that can verify, enforce, and store transactions, eliminating the need for trust in a centralized institution. Essentially, they want to remove the need for institutions altogether. Opinions on the ideological leaders of this decentralization movement range from what Izabella Kaminska calls “libertarian tech anarchists” (FT “Blockchain’s Governance Paradox”) to literal godsends to the free world. In a recent buzzword-laden presentation at the University of Virginia I heard Kevin Chen, speaking on behalf of the blockchain technology based IOTA Foundation, refer to the recent events as the “fourth industrial revolution.” On his LinkedIn, he refers to his occupation as “Evangelist.”

Paradoxically, this crypto craziness fails to truly disrupt institution. Instead of being rendered useless by technology, as per the hopes of the blockchain visionaries, institutions are actually utilizing blockchain. The article “Wall Street Occupies the Blockchain,” from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, chronicles big banks adapting blockchain to strengthen their own internal databases. Essentially, they took the decentralized power of blockchain and modified it into a private, non anonymous networks. Now Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan all are developing and using privatized alternatives to blockchain. Blockchain, although extremely inefficient for containing all data because of energy costs (Fairley), works as a nearly unbreakable way to store the most important data because it spreads the data across a network in real time: instead of needing to take down one server, one must compromise half of the entire network to compromise the data. Thus, the big banks make their own private network more powerful and harder to crack with blockchain. Instead of disrupting institution, blockchain strengthens institution. Michael Bodson from the blockchain-utilizing Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—the group who settles and clears all U.S. stock and bond trades—puts the truth simply: “the blockchain here is about perpetuating the existing intermediaries, not about replacing them.”

The main problem with the world of cryptocurrencies is this contradiction: although crazy claims and noise such as “ending all institution” are everywhere, legitimate innovation is also being made. Financial news sources have to somehow cover both the illegitimate and legitimate, all while showing readers how to distinguish between both and quelling any possibly fears of the world ending. Fear-inducing ‘noise’ in the world of cryptocurrency is everywhere: from Block.com raising $200 million of ‘donations’ out of nowhere, to massive multimillion dollar hacks such as the DAO, to those claiming tokens could replace fiat money entirely—the yellow paper of cryptocurrency Ethereum, for example, says it could replace “all transaction-based state machine concepts”—and somehow readers of Bloomberg and The Financial Times have to make sense of it all and continue performing at their desk jobs. They have to see a picture of legitimate innovation underneath the insanity. Two popular columns targeted at very well-established professionals in finance, for example, use comedy to deal with the latest crazes in cryptocurrency and bring clarity their readers: Matt Levine’s Money Stuff from Bloomberg and Alphaville from The Financial Times. Investigating these columns reveals that comedy is largely a necessity: Matt Levine said that the world of crypto is a world of “bright lines and sharp edges” (Blockchain company’s smart contracts were dumb), and the writers need comedy to take some of this edge off. Because of comedy, readers can think hard about cryptocurrency without taking it seriously.

Outline

Quote from DTCC (set up contradiction)

Show contradiction

--1st paragraph: “revolution” will disrupt everythign

--2nd paragraph: use “Wall Street Occupies the Blockchain,” strengthen not disrupt

Contradiction is hard, and it makes it hard for news sources to cover it.

--Tons of noise, but innovation underneath

--Have to use comedy

Show development of article and coverage in general (next three points): begin with “this is insane!!!” (run the FT and Money Stuff parallel). Basically a structural analysis.

--LOTS of examples, but use the ones that will work in next two paragraphs in detail. Can quote random titles if they’re funny. Obviously quote first article in ICOmedy

Then go to “wait a minute, there’s something here? Funny hypothetical part

--Good examples: Levine’s “Blockchain Mania and MiFID II”, “Blockchain Diplomas the Real Deal,”

--FT’s “Blockchain’s Governance paradox”

Then reunite with world and end with something realistic

--Continue with articles used in paragraph before

What does this all mean?

[lovemajick]

Let's think abt this for real .. Hv ppl who support Trump, tht aren't anarchist, really thought thru wht president Bannon is proposing & wht hes criticizing? I knw the word "establishment", hs been so villanized, to represent the very worst .. greedy Wall Street, faceless corporations & hw elites jst wnt to enslave the masses. Theres a lot of truth in these associations of the establishment, bt it's also extremely linear & not at all true, in all cases. It's become a trigger word, so nw whn ppl hear it, they immediately think bad. Well .. the establishment, also hs a grt deal of positives & wanting to destroy or deconstruct it, is ridiculous, dangerous & unproductive. Yes, many of our institutions, may need some upgrading, fresh ideas & more forward thinking, in the 21st century, bt tht doesn't make thm evil or bad. Republicans hv harper on hw awful big govt is, tht it's intrusive, expensive & obsolete. On one hand, thrs some truth in tht, bt on the other hand, the very things tht need to be revamped, are areas republicans think need to be expanded, like the military, which is ridiculous, bc we spend more $ on the military,than anything else or the right of a woman, to make her own choices w her body, nw thts intrusive, bt tht kind of big govt, seems to be ok/justified, by the right. Jst imagine ,if we streamlined our military, made it more efficient & used tht money towards more postive & productive things, like infrastructure, creating programs, to retrain ppl, who's jobs hv become obsolete (like oil/gas), & a whole host of other areas, tht wld actually improve our country & it's ppl. Bt the core structure of our govt, is a positive thing & whn competent ppl are running it (rather than ppl who profess to hate it,yet reap all its benefits), govt is good. We hv become to attached to certain words & building ideologies around thm,which make it hard to move forward, bc we already hv a preconceived idea,of wht tht word represents. Govt & establishments, hv served us well, in many areas & hv been time tested, so they are trusted. We look for Dr's ,teachers, leaders, etc, who hv experience, bc they knw wht they're doing, this is a form of establishment? It doesn't mean they cnt continue to grow & become better, bt they're established & trusted. In this context, establishment is a positive. So, whn Bannon says he wnts to deconstruct the establishment, I'd say, be very wary of wht tht means. The great generation, which produced the longest time of peace, growth & upward mobility,were possible, by the establishment. Leninism, isn't something tht empowers the ppl, neither is communism. Maybe the glorified version, bt wht it turns out to be is, a dictatorship, where the ppl at the top make all the rules, hv all the $, pwr & the worker bees, are the rest of society. In Rome, the word proletariat stood for the ppl at the lowest level of society, thts wht Bannons pushing..NO THANK YOU! As w everything in life, change is always needed, bt it doesn't mean you tear everything dwn, it means you take the good parts of wht has wkd & revamp ,to make it more productive/progressive,for the times. The fact Steve Bannon, is openly declaring war on our institutions w no real vision of wht will replace thm, speaks volumes & is the age old huckster trick, to make ppl dissatisfied, angry & confused, to ultimately destroy all ltht we can count on, which is whn dictators, banana Republics, usually swoop in & install their regime & more often than not, limits ppls freedoms,lifestyles & rights,tht are given over to the new regime. Leninism didn't wk & it didn't empower the average person,bt to some, this sounds exciting. Unfortunately, it wld be a rude awakening,if it ever happened. Bannon isn't speaking of the foundation of our Founding Fathers, w their vision of the country, tht valued the individual, higher learning, involvement of the ppl, in their democracy, an established country, strong on freedoms,liberties & pursuit of happiness, it's the exact opposite. There is no such thing as a perfect anything, except in nature,bt wht we are facing & wht some are buying into w the Bannon /Trump ideology, is a farce. Constant chaos,is not productive or empowering to the ppl. Our institutions aren't are enemies & we need to stop demonizing the establishment. Let's work towards re-energizing thm,do away w wht not longer wks, bt keep the foundation. Jst a thought ..