#But now when we talk about aristocracy it's a new form of monarchy

[randomnameless]

I was wondering if you ever made a post talking about ladle's idea of meritocracy?

I don't think I did?

Watch out, it will be long lol

Let's take the Flayn'n'Ferdie ending - of course unavailable on Tru Piss, because Flayn is a Nabatean :

Assuming people are extra horny and start to breed like rabbits, because Flayn and Ferdie are extra “loving” and all, a nabatean blooded baby pops up (half or quarter nabatean, it depends on your hc about Flayn herself) from their "extra loving" shenanigans : that baby will obviously have a crest, since it is a nabatean (or part nabatean).

Assuming that baby will have his mom’s crest, baby will still be able to heal “better” than seasoned healers or trained ones, because of the power-up the crest gives them + baby, with their nabatean genes, might have a longer lifespan and be sturdier than a “regular human”.

So, if someone should become a healer, baby will obviously be picked, because baby can heal better than anyone else (save for their mom) in that situation.

Which makes me think about the Holst’n’Goneril house issue :

Thanks to Nopes, we have the hard confirmation Holst has no crest, and is so OP that he still manages to defend the border because he’s just that awesome. So yes, potentially, someone can do the work a crested dude can do, if that someone is exceptionnally good at doing what he does - Holst is a strong warrior, so he can protect the border, even if he doesn’t have a crest - meaning Hilda is free to live the life of leisure she wants even if she has a crest and can use Freikugel.

But 2 points :

First, iirc, from their supports, in Nopes, Holst actually says Hilda is amazing, and might be even stronger than him, she just doesn’t realise it yet. Is it because Hilda is also super strong on her own, or because Hilda… has a crest?

Second, checking weapon ranks again - Relics have a E rank. Meaning a crested person, without even having to train, can use them to unlease mighty artes and destroy people. To say it better, base Marianne, with her shit E-rank in swords and laughable physical attack stat, can kill people just as fine as Holst - a seasoned warrior - if she picks up Blutgang.

And it’s kind of sad because realising this, no matter how awesome Holst is - to be able to defend the border when it was usually thought only a person with a crest could do so - if a crested random comes with a relic, even without any prior training, they can kick ass as much, if not even more, as Holst, who graduated from a military academy and most likely spent the last 5 years of his life on a battlefield.

That’s not fair!

But that’s precisely the point - Relics and Crests are cheat codes! They make a few “ones” better at some things than others.

Randolph wants to be “successful” in battle to show how useful he is to guarantee his position? Sure, but when Sylvain, by flexing with his shiny lance, can do everything Randolph does in battle, but better, how can Randolph be successful? How can he guarantee his position? Why shouldn’t Sylvain’s achievements be rewarded with, say, the position Randolph was eyeing?

Back to Flayn’n’Ferdie’s kid Baby is a Nabatean hybrid.

If they have their mom’s crest, fine, Baby can heal better than anyone else on the continent, save for mom. If they have dad’s crest, they can be inherently better fighters than Randolph, due to that crest, but also to their Nabatean body (Rhea can eat 3 nukes and still be alive, a quarter nabatean hybrid might be able to tank 1 when a human, uh, is not be able to tank any!).

Even for governance, Baby will be long lived, they will have +100 years of experience and wisdom, compared to John the random human who might also want to become a governor.

Battle wise? Governance wise? Baby will always have more “facilities” and boons than “regular humans”.

I developed it a little in one of the “Lycaon the half-nabatean AU post” - no matter what angle you look from, Baby will have opportunities and chances to be “better” than any human around. 

So if positions of power, or jobs, or whatever, are given to the most “competent” people, Baby will obviously be given all those jobs offers, positions and whatnot.

Does it automatically mean doom’n’gloom for the crestless humans out there? No, because there are things being a Nabatean or having a crest or being able to use a relic doesn’t impact, like, say, Bernie’s dad’s job, or being in charge of foreign affairs, or trying to develop new tech (even if Constance’s gift for magic is implied to be due to her familial crest), or being in charge of engineering bridges, cities, canals, etc etc…

But in the other domains, like fighting and healing and whatnot (performing magic)?

If everyone should rise and fall by their own talents and merit, then what about the ones born with cheat codes, who rise through the ranks by snapping their fingers?

They will of course parasite the “rise and fall by their own talent”, since no one else, no matter how hard they work, will be able to match them.

Which is why the solution is either to remove crests from crested people (and erase nabateans from Fodlan because I don’t think they can survive exsanguination), or to get rid of that “by their own merits” system - but what system should be put in place then?

Good question!

We know the original noble “someone who knows, seek knowledge, leads and protects people” definition ended up being distorted in the current Adrestia, so, again, what should be put in place?

The game… doesn’t answer.

Bar a milquetoast “everyone should accept each other with or without crests” it’s radio silence. 

Only in some endings we have clues, Hanneman making tools to make crests obsolete (but it would just move the debate from who has magic blood to who has enough money to get those kick ass tools), or Sylvain wanting to find a way to stop fighting at the border.

And yet, the main issue remains : Nabateans. 

They are people who can, without tools, do superhuman stuff (at least lore wise!). Why should Jack pay for an automatic lamp 100 gold if Rhea can lit hers by snapping her fingers, for free?

Ultimately, given how the main character - Billy - is the reincarnation of the Goddess herself, and part nabatean, I don’t think the game wanted us to reach the solution that one day everyone will have the same lifespan and be able to use magic normally and everyone will one day stand on the same starting line.

Just like I don’t think Tolkien wanted to give a… message, when he designed Numénoreans - the most Noble of all Men - and the Lesser Men who lived in Middle Earth. Some people have magic powers, and some don’t and that’s the setting. 

Is it annoying because it’s again a story of a chosen one?

Maybe. 

Is it kind of a downer because it means the most basic random will never be able to swing a sword like Aragorn does, or in FE16, emulate Billy’s prowesses and be able to go back in time too?

Maybe.

What does it mean then, if a character’s leitmotiv is to change the world so all should “rise and fall by their own merits”?

The game tries to give an answer to this riddle - having the main hub being an orphanage and a place to shelter “those who have no status in the world” or the ones who fell, and with the “parley” - some people cannot rise on their own, they need support. If a name or a family line should dictate whether someone is going to be great or if they’re going to suck, ditto for their “merits or achievements”, it’s not because someone fumbled at life that they should just die and be “weak”.

It’s like an exam, if you’re first, yay good for you, you are received, but if you are last? What are you going to do? Re-sit? And if you’re last again, then what? Is it just the end of the road for you?

Sure it’s kind of cliché “together we can be stronger and survive” or “the strong must protect the weak, and the weak make the strong strong” but I feel like this was the kind of answer the game - that is a game that purposedly is left vague to make the world “feel larger” - wanted to give.

Nakama power, power of friendship, you name it! But imo, it’s always the same message in the series : it’s not the king that makes the country, but the country that makes (and can unmake!) the King.

It’s not the answer you’d like if you are looking at real life history or to make real life parallels but…

No matter how many “real life parallels” you might be tempted to make regarding FE16′s system of ruling/social system, FE16 and the world of Fodlan is still a world where some people have magical dragon blood that gives them superpowers.

It’s not supposed to be a mirror of the real world. It’s a fantasy setting - with interesting questions - but ultimately questions raised in that fantasy setting.

....

i don't even know if i replied to your question lol

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Talking science fiction, technological self-determination, inequality and competition with physicist Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is a physicist at JPL and the author of many popular, smart books about physics for a lay audience; his weekly Mindscape podcast is a treasure-trove of incredibly smart, fascinating discussions with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The latest episode (MP3 is a 1h+ interview with me, on wide-ranging subjects from adversarial interoperability, inequality and market concentration; science fiction and its role in political discourse; and the power and peril of technological self-determination.

For those of you who prefer to read, Carroll is kind enough to provide a full transcript.

0:02:52 SC: So here’s an ambitious question to start us off then. We’re clearly not in equilibrium; the internet and the way that we use it is changing rapidly. Do you see us approaching a future internet equilibrium? Even if you can’t say exactly what it is, can you imagine various forms of steady states that we will eventually reach in terms of how we use the internet and how it affects our lives, stuff like that?

0:03:16 CD: I think there’s actually a risk of that. I would not call that a good outcome. As other people have observed, the web has become five websites filled with screenshots from the other four, and that domination of the web by a small number of firms that continues to shrink, and who clearly carve out competitive niches for one another, and occasionally compete with each other, but mostly are content to just sit pat, that has been, I think, a net negative for the internet, and for human thriving, and for things like human rights. And I fear that the path to that becoming permanent is that regulators will observe the dysfunction of a highly concentrated internet, for example, a single social platform with 2.3 billion people on it, whose choices about algorithmic filtering and recommendation drive all kinds of negative outcomes, including people who understand how to game the system to livestream mass shootings in Christchurch.

0:04:16 CD: And that they’ll say to these firms, “Since we can’t imagine any way to make you smaller, and therefore to make your bad decisions less consequential, we will instead insist that you take measures that would traditionally be in the domain of the state, like policing bad speech and bad actions.” And those measures will be so expensive that they will preclude any new entrants to the market. So whatever anticompetitive environment we have now will become permanent. And I call it the constitutional monarchy. It’s where, instead of hoping that we could have a technological democracy, where you have small holders who individually pitch their little corner of the web, and maybe federate with one another to build bigger systems, but that are ultimately powers devolved to the periphery, instead what we say is that the current winners of the technological lottery actually rule with the divine right of kings, and they will be our rulers forever. But in exchange for that, they will suffer themselves to be draped in golden chains by an aristocracy of regulators who are ultimately gonna be drawn from their upper echelons, because when you only have five companies in an industry, the only people who understand them well enough to regulate them are their executives. And so you end up with just a revolving door.

0:05:28 CD: And so the aristocracy will call upon the tech giants to exercise a noblesse oblige, where they will suffer themselves to make certain concessions to the public interest at the expense of their shareholders, but in exchange they will be guaranteed a regulatory environment that precludes anyone ever challenging them. And I think that will be studied, but not for long, because I also think that if we think that Google and Facebook are intransigent today, if we give them a decade without even having to buy potential competitors to prevent them from growing to challenge them, imagine how bullyish and terrible they’ll be in 10 years.

69 | Cory Doctorow on Technology, Monopoly, and the Future of the Internet [Sean Carroll's Mindscape]

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/22/talking-science-fiction-techn.html

[innuendostudios]

A small supplement to Always a Bigger Fish, The Origins of Conservatism. If we’re going to claim conservatism is fundamentally about preserving social hierarchies and defending the powerful from democratic principles, we need to talk about where conservatism comes from, going all the back to the late 18th Century. From there we take an extremely truncated traipse through conservative thought throughout the ages.

Keep this series coming out by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

I have suspicions that some of the claims I make in Always a Bigger Fish - that conservatism isn’t, at its core, about fiscal responsibility, limited government, or the rights of the individual, but is about maintaining social hierarchies, that it believes people are fundamentally unequal and likes the free market because it sorts people according to their worth, and even softly implies capitalism itself may be innately anti-democratic - might, ah, raise some eyebrows? So I’m gonna show my work on this one.

Two of the architects of conservative thought were Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, who formulated much of their political theory while writing about the French Revolution. They, in turn, were influenced by earlier writings from Thomas Hobbes on the English Civil War. And what all three of these men were doing in writing about these wars was defending the monarchy. The sentiment that the masses should be powerless in the face of nobility was being challenged, and, while these men thought the revolutionaries themselves actually quite compelling, the democracy they were fighting for Hobbes, Burke, and de Maistre found repulsive.

Come the end of the Revolution, when it seemed democracy might actually spread across Europe, Burke, especially, began to hypothesize ways that one’s position within the aristocracy might be preserved even should the monarchy fall. He turned his eye to the market.

So, OK, round the cusp of the 19th century, the prevailing economic theories were those of Adam Smith, who championed what’s called the Labor Theory of Value, which I don’t super wanna get into because there’s like a billion videos about it already, but really briefly: if you take materials out of the ground and turn them into useful goods, it is that labor that makes the good more valuable than the raw material, and when someone buys that good, they cover the cost of materials plus the value your labor has added to them. In contrast, what Burke argued was… well, a lot of nebulous things, but, among them, that, in actuality, when a person of means buys a good, that, rather than the moment the good is produced, is when value is bestowed upon it. Value is not dictated by the producer, but by the consumer.

Now there’s like two centuries of argument about this, we’re not gonna dig into it all, but, obviously, this is, in some sense, true: if the people with money don’t want to buy a good at a certain price, eventually the price will come down. So price is not solely dictated by labor. But what Burke does is claim that price and value are the same thing. No one ever gets cheated, no one ever gets a good deal, whatever the buyer pays for a thing, that’s what the thing is worth. Your labor is only as valuable as the degree to which it satisfies the desires of the moneyed classes.

This was Burke’s nod to the fact that, within capitalism, the wealthy held outsized influence - being that, the more money you had, the more value you could dictate - and he argued that this was moral. That the wealthy deserved this influence. (Burke was, by the way, wealthy. Sort of. He had a royal pension) What he felt the French Revolution revealed was not that oppressive nobility was bad, but that France must’ve just had the wrong nobles, because a proper aristocracy wouldn’t have been overthrown. The problem was, as we’ve discussed, not the hierarchy itself, but the wrong people being in power.

The Revolution had taught him that perhaps power should not come by birthright. Perhaps we needed a system whereby those deserving of power could prove their worth. This should, ideally, be war, but capitalism would suffice. The structure of royalty would continue to exist, simply derived by different means, because the structure of democracy, where, on election day, the nobleman has no more power than the commoner, was, to an aristocrat, profane. What the structure needed was some tinkering to make it democracy-proof.

So that’s Burke. Over the next century, democracy did, in fact, spread across Europe, and Burke’s - and several others’ - theories of value were picked up and iterated on in what came to be known as The Marginal Revolution by economists Carl Menger, Stanley Jevons, and this Valjean-looking motherfucker Leon Walras. Marginalism amped up the idea that it is a good’s utility to the consumer, and not the worker’s labor, that gives it value, which confers a unique power upon those with money, and brought this thinking into a post-monarchal world. Their theories became especially popular when people realized they could be used to rebut Marxism. Jevons was taught all over Europe, and Menger became core to the Austrian School.

And by the time we get to Austrians, this mass of theories has, somewhere after Burke and before Hayek, coagulated into what we know of today as “conservatism.” These are among the most influential thinkers in conservative thought, and they are in a direct lineage with Burke and de Maistre.

Now, while Burke is called “the father of modern conservatism,” these boys are not the alpha and omega of early conservative thought, but their ideas helped form the basis of conservatism and have never gone away. If you can point to some paradigm shift in the history of conservatism where the royalist sentiments of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre were rooted out, I’d love to hear about it. Because I listen to the thinkers championed by conservatives throughout the ages, and I keep hearing the same thing: that humans are innately unequal and society flourishes when power is doled out to the deserving.

Friedrich Nietzsche was not a conservative but was deeply influential on the early Marginalists, and he claimed the purpose of society was to produce the handful of Great Men who created everything that made life worth living, believing, “Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness."

James Fitzjames Stephen, who wrote a book-length rebuttal against early progressivism, believed, “[T]o obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

Hayek and Schumpeter believed, respectively, that “The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use” and “[W]hat may be attained by industrial or commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man." (He’s saying that’s a good thing, by the way.)

Need I mention Ayn Rand’s belief that "The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment... The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains."

The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, echoing Burke’s yearning for a good war, felt the hierarchy should extend beyond the borders of a single country, believing, “What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

And modern conservatives love the “natural hierarchies” of Jordan Peterson, who believes “blblblblblblblblblb.”

We keep behaving as though conservatism’s disdain for equity isn’t there, or, if it is, that it’s new. But it’s been there since the beginning. Conservatism upholds the status quo and defends the powerful, first from democracy, then from communism, now from social justice. Conservatism has rallied every time a movement has tried to share power with the disadvantaged: They were against same-sex marriage, they were against giving women the vote, they were against freeing slaves (note I said conservatives, not Republicans; do your research.)

Conservatives say, “We are the party of measured steps, caution, of evolution over revolution,” and that’s usually just before they say, “But now, now is the time for swift, decisive action!” Most every Republican claims to be a break with tradition. “This time we’re gonna flip the script: bend the rules, outspend Democrats, invade your privacy, and start a war with no exit strategy.” And that’s what they’ve always said. All that changes is which continent the war is on. I’m not going to say the slow, stodgy conservative doesn’t exist, but it has never typified the Party. Rhetorically, it’s a character that they bring up to contrast themselves with whenever they need to rally their reactionary base. They tell us that’s what their Party is like, and we just take their word for it.

I don’t feel the need to pretend that, just because most democracies have a left wing and a right wing, that both are equally valid and moral. There is no rule that proves this. There is only the liberal sentiment that saying otherwise is poor sportsmanship (a standard the Right does not hold itself to). Conservatism is a reactionary politics that has, at best, mixed feelings about democracy, where my biggest issue with liberalism is that it is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of conservatism and does not fully commit to its own democratic principles.

I’m going into all of this not because I want to stick it to the people who insist I don’t research my videos - though I, a little bit, do - but because we can’t talk about the Alt-Right if we keep portraying them as a break with the conservative tradition. They are the conservative tradition, only more. There is nothing they believe that conservatives don’t have a long history of being sympathetic towards, they’re just usually more ambivalent about it. As I’ve said before, this is, ultimately, my interpretation of history, and, while many experts agree with me, I am not an expert. But I do my homework.

So, tell you what: I’ve made a post on Tumblr listing all the books, essays, and documentaries I’m consuming for this series - the ones I have lined up, the ones I’ve completed, and some notes on what I’ve found valuable in them. I’m going to treat this as a living document and add to it as the work continues. Not that the people who say I just make shit up ever read the show notes, but I will keep a link in the show notes of every video, so, if you want to check my work, or research alongside me, you can do that. I have also livetweeted several books, including the primary source for this and the previous video, The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, under the hashtag #IanLivetweetsHisResearch, so, if you want a play-by-play of an entire book complete with my own observations, that’s where you can find it. So far, in addition to Robin, I’ve done Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works, and one weird essay on Lara Croft I read for the Fury Road video.

If you want to read more about the history of conservative philosophy, in addition to The Reactionary Mind, I recommend “No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty” by Elizabeth Sandifer, in the essay collection Neoreaction a Basilisk. (El recently got some grief from Nazis, so maybe consider buying her excellent book.)

Going forward, if anyone comments that I clearly don’t know anything about conservatism, I hope you will stand with me in not taking them too seriously unless they demonstrate having done at least some research, because I do mine.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Will America still exist after next week? Only if the Senate votes to convict Donald Trump.

#HeatherCoxRichardson helps makes sense of the current political fog. January 18, 2020 (Saturday)

"Today the impeachment managers for the House of Representatives released their trial memorandum for Trump’s impeachment, getting underway Tuesday. Written in simple language, it begins, “President Donald J. Trump used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain, and then attempted to cover up his scheme by obstructing Congress’s investigation into his misconduct.”

The managers explain: “The Constitution provides a remedy when the President commits such serious abuses of his office: impeachment and removal,” and points out that “the Senate must use that remedy now to safeguard the 2020 U.S. election, protect our constitutional form of government, and eliminate the threat that the President poses to America’s national security.” It lays out where we now stand: “The House adopted two Articles of Impeachment against President Trump: the first for abuse of power, and the second for obstruction of Congress. The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that he is guilty of both. The only remaining question is whether the members of the Senate will accept and carry out the responsibility placed on them by the Framers of our Constitution and their constitutional Oaths.”

In 111 pages, the document lays out, in detail, with quotations and notes, the timeline of the Ukraine Scandal, making a clear case that Trump has abused the power of the presidency and obstructed Congress.

Trump answered. His lawyers, Jay Sekulow and Pat Cipollone, slightly cleaned up the same hysterical defenses Trump has been making since the Ukraine Scandal first broke. In just 5 and a half pages, with no footnotes or evidence, Trump argues that the Democrats are attacking “the right of the American people to freely choose their President.” He claims impeachment “is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.” He calls the articles of impeachment “constitutionally invalid on their face,” “an affront to the Constitution of the United States, our democratic institutions, and the American people.” The president, he says, “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

So there it is. On the one hand, we have a reasoned argument, based in fact, that can be challenged as we try to get to a shared agreement on what happened. On the other hand, we have our president telling us to accept what he says as true, despite the fact that he has provided no factual evidence and, indeed, much of what he has said is demonstrably false.

In the 1600s, European settlers to North America came from a land dominated by kings and aristocrats. Those men ruled because society was organized around the idea that God had made them to rule, and that the little people, who survived as best they could, had no choice but to be loyal to them. But changes in technology, religion, and the world economy were challenging the belief that society should be organized according to a traditional order, theoretically established by God.

Thinkers began to argue for the power of learning, scientific experiments, and argument to try to discover how the world worked. This “Enlightenment” led to new theories about government. In 1690, political philosopher John Locke argued that humans had an innate ability to learn based on their experience of the world, so all knowledge came from trying out new ideas and facts. As men learned, they would be better able to understand the natural laws that underpinned the real world. If a man’s understanding could change, though, that meant traditional patterns of society did not necessarily reflect natural law. One man was not necessarily better than another by virtue of his birth. Government, then, should not rest on birth or wealth or religion—all of which were arbitrary—but rather on the consent of the governed.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he quoted Locke almost exactly. Rather than establishing a new monarchy or even an aristocracy, Jefferson and his colleagues began America’s founding document with a startling new proposition: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They added another proposition: “To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Founders’ vision was badly limited. They enslaved native peoples and African captives and their African American neighbors, and they never imagined women could be equal to men. But the idea that all men are created equal, and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, made the United States of America a shockingly radical step in human governance.

In 1787, the Founders created our Constitution, the body of laws on which our government rests. In it, they tried to bring the Declaration of Independence to life, basing their system on the idea that everyone is equal before the law. And, knowing from personal experience that politicians crave power, they tried to prevent the rise of an autocrat—especially an autocrat who was getting help from a foreign government—by separating power into three different branches. They believed that men (for, of course, they could not imagine women in Congress) would so jealously guard their own power that they would impeach a president who tried to become a king.

But once the government was up and running, what did it mean in practice to say that it depended upon the consent of the governed? It meant that leaders could not simply declare they were in charge. They had to appeal to voters with reasoned arguments, based in facts. For sure, politicians always spun the facts as best they could, but their opponents made their own arguments. It was up to voters to figure out which leader made the most sense

Under no circumstances could a leader tell the voters what he was doing in office was none of their business.

It was PRECISELY their business.

Until the rise of talk radio in 1987 and the establishment of the Fox News Channel in 1996, we honored the Enlightenment values on which our government was founded: politicians had to attract voters with fact-based arguments or be voted out of office. But talk radio and FNC pushed a fictional narrative that captivated viewers who felt dispossessed after 1954, as women and people of color began to approach having an equal voice in society. That narrative—of a heroic white man under siege by a government that wants to give his hard-earned money to black and brown people and grasping women—has led us back to where we started in 1776: a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism.

Today, the House managers laid out a fact-based argument that honors our heritage. In contrast, Trump’s statement rejects not only facts but also the need to make a fact-based argument. He rejects the need to be accountable to the American people. He rejects the idea that no one is above the law. He evidently does not believe in American democracy: the great American experiment that says human beings can govern themselves.

What will happen in the Senate trial is unclear. How much it will matter is also unclear. More information is dropping daily that links Trump, members of his administration, and congress people to the Ukraine Scandal. In addition, the Supreme Court will decide in the spring whether Trump’s financial information must go to the House. He is also clearly deteriorating mentally. This administration will continue to surprise us.

But in the most crucial way, what happens in the Senate is important. Do our Senators believe in American democracy or are they willing to rubber stamp an authoritarian? Make no mistake: this is not about partisanship. Reasonable people can—and should—disagree about important policy decisions in our country. That's how we learn new things and gain a better view of how the world really works.

But if we abandon our Enlightenment principles, we will, after almost 250 years, have abandoned the American experiment altogether."

12KYou and 12K others

1.4K Comments

8K Shares

[bombardthehq]

Patriarcha

by Robert Filmer

published 1680 (written by 1640), read 15/09/19 - ???

Filmer was, by all accounts, the most popular and influential political theorist in England in the 17th century. The seminal works of many major contributors to the political theory of that century - particularly Locke - were responses to Patriarcha. But he is not read today, really by anyone. He was the principle theorist of a tendency which would, by the next century, no longer exist anywhere: of absolutism, and in particular, that Kings ruled by divine right. Most courses of political science or political philosophy in universities do not even mention Filmer: the only reading list that I found him on was an infographic originating from /pol/ which was structured from most socially acceptable (things like Hayek and Burke) to least (things like Hitler and Kaczynski): under the section ‘Reactionary Right’, Patriarcha appears at the very bottom.

I began reading out of curiosity but it became clear that it was both a relatively complex text and one that is both downstream and upstream of things important to us: thinkers like Tacitus and Machiavelli, and the theory of Sovereignity respectively. So, notes. I always say I’ll try to keep my notes brief and never do, how about this time I promise to be thorough?

Chapter I: That the First Kings were the Fathers of their Families

Filmer opens by talking about an idea which contemporary political theorists believed in, which is that humans are “naturally endowed and born” with “freedom from subjection”, and that forms of rule only have power over them because they give them that power.

Often Hobbes and Rousseau are contrasted on a certain point about human nature: Hobbes believed that civilization was a necessary imposition because of the disastrous anarchy of man’s natural condition, while Rousseau believed (something like) man’s natural condition being good and peaceful and civilization creating problems, although he still affirmed the necessity of civilization in some sense. Anyway, both of these thinkers were later than Filmer, and both take as their beginning the very point that Filmer notes here, which Rousseau makes when he writes that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Filmer says that this is a new idea, and not something originating from the bible or the early church fathers, and hints that it was devised by the Jesuits!

He gives a logical conclusion to the idea: that if the people gave the Prince his power, they can take it away. He considers this a dangerous idea.

In fact, Filmer rejects the very idea that Kings are subject to the laws of their country, and when other theorists (he names ‘Buchanan’ and ‘Parsons’ - two names I’ve never heard) criticize the sovereign for breaking the law he considers it an error.

Equality is mentioned (just like that!) in connection to natural liberty, when he mentions their position as “the natural liberty and equality of mankind.”

Anyway, he comes around to saying, its time someone takes this seditious idea of natural liberty to task! (An early appearance of the ‘say what you’re going to say in the introduction’, by the way!)

Filmer enumerates a number of ‘cautions’ he’s giving himself for the discourse.

First he spends a paragraph going over how it isnt for him, nor anyone else, to pry or meddle into the affairs of the state, “the profound secrets of government”, which he refers to as arcana imperii. “An implicite Faith is given to the meanest Artificer in his own Craft,” he writes - true enough! - and so even more faith ought be given to the sovereign, who is “hourly versed in managing Publique Affairs.”

Arcana imperii (literally ‘mysterious power’, more semantically ‘state secrets’) is an expression from Tacitus which has gone on to have a certain currency in political theory (see here), apparently appearing as recently as Agamben, and having been appropriated earlier than Filmer, by “Botero and Clapmar” (who?). In Tacitus, arcana denotes secrets which ought to be kept secret.

The end of this paragraph is confusing to me, so I’ll note its location (here). The gist is that people ought to obey the sovereign, and he relates this to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s...”

In a sentence which goes “...knowledge of those points wherein a Sovereign may Command...”, he has a footnote - attatched to the word may ! - which leads to a paragraph weighing rule and tyranny. For Filmer, a King who rules by his own laws becomes a tyrant, "yet where he sees the Laws Rigorous or Doubtful, he may mitigate and interpret.” I’m going to note the location of this footnote too (here), because it is actualy a very clear and very early exposition of the Non-Derivative Power of sovereignity, and states precisely what Carl Schmitt means by “the leader keeps the law”.

His second caution is that he isn’t going to dispute the “laws or liberties”, only inquire wether they came from Natural Liberty or from “the Grace and bounty of Princes.” Obviously, Filmer will come down on the latter position: that any liberty one has is the benevolant gift of the Sovereign.

He says that the greatest liberty in the world is to live under a monarchy, and that anything else is Slavery, “a liberty only to destroy liberty” - although this whole paragraph is actually plainly an apology for writing a political text, which was surely somewhat dangerous back then, and while this is the official ideology that everyone had to believe (even Rousseau makes the same gestures, framing his dialogues by saying ‘this is all what I would say if I didnt live under a benevolant rulership...’), its actually clearly a bit more extreme than even Filmer is willing to commit to.

His third caution is that he isn’t disparaging the people he criticizes, simply adding on where there are gaps in their thought, and so on. “A Dwarf,” he writes, “sometimes sees what a Giant looks over.” He briefly summarises his idea about the cause of their error: that in order to ensure the authority of the Pope, they placed the People above the King. I’m not sure if thats how Buchanan saw it! Anyway, this is how he explains that the two major factions at the time were the “Royalists” and the “Patriots” - the error, for Filmer, is that people had come to believe that one could be loyal to ones country while traitorous to the King. (True enough - isn’t patriotism always a kind of category error?)

Cautions set aside, he begins the critique proper. He starts by quoting Cardinal Bellarmine (now a saint!), which we’ll reproduce:

Secular or Civil Power is instituted by Men; It is in the People, unless they bestow it on a Prince. This Power is immediately in the whole Multitude, as in the Subject of it; for this Power is in the Divine Law, but the Divine Law hath given this Power to no particular Man— If the Positive Law be taken away, there is left no Reason, why amongst a Multitude (who are Equal) one rather than another should bear Rule over the rest?— Power is given by the Multitude to one man, or to more by the same Law of Nature; for the Commonwealth cannot exercise this Power, therefore it is bound to bestow it upon some One Man, or some Few— It depends upon the Consent of the Multitude to ordain over themselves a King, or Consul, or other Magistrates; and if there be a lawful Cause, the Multitude may change the Kingdom into an Aristocracy or Democracy.

Filmer comments that this is the strongest defence for Natural Liberty that he’s ever seen, and thats why he selects it for critiism: after all, as he said earlier, its usually never a position argued for but simply taken for granted. Filmer now begins a fairly fascinating sequence of deducing things ‘backwards’ from this quote and examining what it presupposes, in a way that very closely reflects the way I approach argument (this is the reason I decided to take notes on this text)

“First,” Filmer writes, “He saith, that by the law of God, Power is immediately in the People”, and therefore the political system that God gave the world is Democracy! because Democracy has no meaning but power belonging to the people. Therefore, not just Aristocracies, but also Monarchies are against God’s will, who rightly gave the people Democracy. (This is a sort of reductio ad absurdum, I think - today it seems quite a natural thing to say!)

We want to object to Filmer here by saying that the Bellarmine does not necessarily refer to Democracy (of course, he explicitly refers to Democracy as something other than the ‘Power and Law of the Multitude’), but its not quite as easy to dismiss as one would think initially. Bellarmine does not argue for a kind of Hobbesian state of nature here, because in Hobbes’ anarchy there are surely no Powers, nor a Law. For Bellarmine, God gave men powers and laws. I would like to look more into what Bellarmine meant by this, that he perhaps thought of a prepolitical power, prelegal law... but there is surely some basis for Filmer equating it with Democracy. That said, it does not necessarily follow that investing those powers and laws in a form of government should be against God’s will.

Second, Filmer says, the only Power that men have in Democracy is to give their power to someone else, and therefore they really do not have any power. (Ho hum!)

“Thirdly,” Filmer writes, Bellarmine says “that if there be a lawful Cause, the Multitude may change the Kingdom.” Filmer asks: who will be the judge of wether something is lawful or not? It would be the Multitude. Filmer considers this “pestilent and dangerous.” (Again, surely quite natural today.)

Now Filmer quotes Bellarmine making what he feels is his only argument for the existence of Natural Liberty. Bellarmine writes: “That God hath given or ordained Power, is evident by Scripture; But God hath given it to no particular Person, because by nature all Men are Equal; therefore he hath given Power to the People or Multitude.”

Filmer now pulls out another quote from Bellarmine to refute the position just quoted, which he is proud as punch about, calling it out right before he does it and also including it in the chapter summary at the beginning (”Bellarmine’s Argument answered out of Bellarmine himself”).

The promised passage goes like this: “If many men had been together created out of the Earth, they all ought to have been Princes over their Posterity.”

Take that, shitlibs! Absolutists: 1 Republicans: 0! See you in hell Milton!

Anyway, Filmer takes this to be true: that Adam, and the succeeding patriarchs, had authority over their children: “by right of father-hood”, they had “royalty over the children”, in fact.

So children are subject to their parents, and parenthood is the “fountain of regal authority”, and this authority was bestowed by God himself. The argument promised in the chapter title begins to take shape: the first Kings were Fathers of their Families.

God also specifically assigned it to the eldest parents, which I think becomes important later.

He ‘saith’: Adam had dominion over the whole world, a Right granted him by God, and that Right was passed down to the Patriarchs. He gives what this Right is specifically, using biblical examples of authority: Dominion over Life and Death, the ability to make War, and to Conclude peace. (All of this is quite fundamental to later theories of sovereignity, especially critical ones: biopower! necropolitics! Indeed, Filmer refers to them as the “chiefest marks of Sovereignity”)

Although his history is Biblical and not the kind of historic epistemology we tend to use, as far as we’re concerned, Filmer’s argument is correct. At least for some parts of the world. I need to read more about stone & bronze age sovereignities globally but my reading on ancient Greece absolutely confirms this: the first forms of authority in that part of the world that we have record of was that exercised by a familial Patriarch who governed over a small kinship villages, setting the law (which is spoken of in terms of having ‘power over life and death’), and declared wars. There would eventually become a ruler who was largely symbolic but who, for this or that reason (not even political reasons, but often reasons related to the development of the productive forces or of national security) would appropriate more and more power from the Patriarchs while the social groups based on kinship ties would lose coherence.

Filmer’s argument here is not quite a naturalistic fallacy because he does not argue directly that it is right because it was so. Rather he uses history here to say that liberty is not natural to men, which he feels most Republican theories of government presuppose. Monarchy is argued to be good only indirectly, so the fallacy only happens ‘between the lines’ of the page.

[hadarmarkin]

Encountering a tiger by the Well: Stories from Rural Yemenite Communities

Now comes the story of a community that is so distinct and fascinating that it deserves its own blog. The Yemenite Jewish community is large in size and presence, and historically and culturally different from the general Sephardic diaspora. However, for various reasons, mainly the human need to classify, Yemenite Jews are often included under the Sephardic umbrella.  

Living in a fairly remote location shaped the distinct folklore, liturgy and cuisine (more on that later) of the Yemenite community. And although Yemenite Jews were not detached from the major events happening in the Jewish world, local factors such as Yemen’s history, diverse terrain (jungle, seaside or dessert) and wildlife were the most influential. Another striking characteristic of the Yemenite Jewry is its demography: the majority of Yemenite Jews resided in villages scattered around the land - often one or two families per village. However, despite being surrounded by a (frequently hostile) Muslim majority, Yemenite Jews maintained a very observant Jewish lifestyle. A book that portrays this arduous and yet unique existence in the first half of the twentieth century will be reviewed later in this post entry.  But first, here is a brief overview  of the Yemeni community.

Historical Glance: From Queen Sheba to Zionist Aspirations

Jewish Monarchy in Late Antiquity

Yemen’s current status as a poor and divided nation obscures the country’s glorious past as an ancient civilization known as the fertile oasis of the Arabian Peninsula. Jews immigrated to this promising land fairly early. Biblical texts (Book of Ezra) indicate a Jewish settlement in Yemen circa the destruction of the First Temple (587 BCE). Another legend says that Yemeni tribes converted to Judaism after the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon.Yet, historians assert that the Jewish immigration took place later, starting in the second century CE.  Regardless of this dispute, all sides consent that Jews were a key political and economic force during the pre-Islamic era.

A prime example of their power occurred in the 6thcentury when the kingdom’s aristocracy converted to Judaism. Some sources suggest that the king himself, Joseph Dhu Nuwas,was zealous for Judaism.According to these sources, Dhu Nuwas sought to convert Yemeni Christians to Judaism, but they refused to renounce Christianity.  What exactly happened afterwards remains murky given the conflicting accounts. Yet, it appears that Dhu Nuwas died as part of the religious rivalries. His death ended the Jewish hegemony in Yemen.

Maimonides and Messianic Aspirations

The 7thcentury Muslim conquest of Yemen marked a negative shift in the history of the Jews in Yemen. Historical knowledge about these early stages of the Muslim reign in Yemen is limited, but several sources from the Cairo Geniza indicate that the Jewish community was in a plight. The new Sharia law defined Jews as Dhimmis- or second class citizens. In essence, Jews were granted with freedom of worship but were subjected to additional tax and other (often humiliating) restrictions.

Although Islamic law categorized Jews as a protected minority, Jews suffered ongoing persecution under the various Muslim rulers. From the 10thcentury on, the living conditions of Yemeni Jews deteriorated significantly as the relatively tolerant Sunni sovereign was overthrown by the radical Zaidis (a Shia sect) dynasty. In the 1160s, the local ruler Iben Mahdi forced Jews to convert to Islam. As a result, a false prophet arose, proclaiming the amalgamation of Judaism and Mohammedanism. This messianic revival evoked the concern of Maimonides. The latter addressed the Jews of Yemen in an epistle, entitled Iggeret Teman,in which he urged them to remain faithful to their religion. The intervention of a scholar of that scale had a great impact on the Jews of Yemen; the false prophet was condemned, and thename of Maimonides was added to the Yemenite version of the Ḳaddish prayer. The defeat of Iben Mahdi in battle in 1173 and the conquest of Yemen by the brother of Saladin brought relief to Jewish community and those who had been forced to convert reverted to Judaism. Around this time, two sub groups were formed among the local community: theShami, who partly assimilated into the Sephardic culture and liturgy; and the Baladi, who followed Maimonides, especially the rules in his “Mishneh Torah”. Both sub groups fostered the mysticism prominent in Sephardic traditions.

Above: Maimonides 

The Modern Era: Zionism as the New Messianism

Fasting forward to modernity, the 19thcentury brought dramatic change in the life of the Yemenite community. At this time, the population was divided between the minority, who lived in urban-gated centers (such as, Sana and Aden), and those who resided in remote villages surrounded by Muslim neighbors. Commerce and craftsmanship (including carpenters and blacksmith) were common trades. Regardless of location and profession, the life of the average man was rough. The community was subjected to the jurisdiction of the local Imam (Muslim Zaidileader), and suffered from endless restrictions, limiting their transportation and monetary transactions.

The most notorious act enforced by the Zaidi rulers was the Orphan’s decree, which mandated the Zaidi government to take under its protection and to educate in Islamic ways anyJewish child whose parents had died when he or she was a minor. Accounts from this period portray numerous cases of abduction and forced conversion of children. As a measure of protection, child marriage became increasingly prevalent. Another consequence of this plight was yet again intense messianism, including three incidents of pseudo-messiahs in the second half of the 19thcentury.

           Under these circumstances, Zionist ideology spread by emissaries from Palestine found a good nesting ground. During the period from 1881 to 1914, about 10% of the Yemeni Jews immigrated to Palestine (the rest immigrated in the late 1940’s and 1950’s). Many died during the dangerous journey, and those who made it were recruited to work as cheap labor in the new Zionist settlements. They were housed in barns and provided with meager food and water. The exploitation of Yemenite Jews reveals an ugly chapter in the history of the early Zionist history. This tragedy opened the path to even more horrifying cases of discrimination, and mainly to the explosive affair of the possible abduction of Yemenite babies and toddlersin 1950’s Israel. According to this controversial case, the abducted Yemeni children were sold or given to Ashkenazi families, mainly to Holocaust survivors who could not have kids. The State of Israel firmly denies all allegations.

Above: Yemeni workers in Kinneret 

Sapri Tama Tamimaby Sarit Gradwohl

In the context of the turmoil of the first half of the 20thcentury, the book Sapri Tama Tamimaby Sarit Gradwohl offers a fascinating lens to explore the world of rural Yemenite Jews and their uneasy immigration process to Israel. Gradwohl recorded the personal accounts of her grandparents (mainly her grandma) and weaved them into a captivating novel. Gradwohl’s family memoire begins in a small isolated village in Yemen. Her grandmother, Hamama, is then a young child curious about the world. Through her childhood memories, we discover the rough existence, including constant harassments by Yemenite soldiers, the limited food and the presence of wildlife. One of the saddest stories in the book is the death of Hamama’s younger sister from a heart failure after encountering a tiger by a well.

As Hamama matures she falls in love with her cousin, Hassan, a resourceful and fervent Zionist. Soon after their marriage, they embark on the treacherous journey to Israel, then mandatory Palestine. In 1942, they finally made it to the Promised Land, only to be placed in a transit camp by Haifa. Then begins their second adventure. They face many challenges, including living in tents for several years and suffering from prejudice by the Ashkenazi population. In addition, coming from traditional households, they are also bewildered by secular Judaism and cannot grasp how the Kibbutznikim and the Zionist leadership strayed so far from Jewish law. Yet, despite the barriers and through hard work and perseverance, Hamama and Hassan built a happy life together with a strong sense of family.

Last November, I had the pleasure to meet with Sarit Gradwohl in her house in Skokie. In our fascinating conversation, Gradwohl shared additional insights about her grandparents’ immigration to Israel. From her perspective, they acknowledge that they were mistreated in certain times, but they never labeled these experiences as discrimination nor did they  harbored resentment towards the State of Israel. They remained, she proclaimed, innocent in heart and faithful to their core values: the love for Judaism and the land of Israel.

Above: Gradwhol and her Grandfather 

Lasis-A Dish Worth Fainting  

When I met with Gradwohl, we talked more about her grandma’s special delicacies, particularly Asid Va’zom, a dairy soup/ porridge eaten at the end of Yom Kippur, and her aromatic lentil soup. She also told me about her grandma’s Jachnun making techniques. This dense pastry dish became a Shabbat breakfast staple in Israel, served savory with mashed tomato and hardboiled egg or sweet with honey. Some buy it frozen, but it is best homemade cooked overnight on the Plata (the Shabbat hot plate).  

Despite the popularity of doughy Yemeni dishes, such as Jachnun and Malawach,Gradwohl debunked the common misconception in Israel that the key ingredient in Yemeni food is starch. Backed with academic research, Gradwohl argued that traditional Yemeni cuisine is mainly composed of fish, legume and grain dishes. The use of puff pastry type dough was a later Turkish influence. Gradwohl also added that Yemenite families did not suffer as much as Ashkenazi families during the austerity period in 1950’s Israel, in which eggs and dairy products were rationed. Since Yemenite women were skilled in making beans and lentils dishes, they were able to create nourishing meals using simple plant based ingredients.  

Above: Jachnun

An example of a basic legume dish is the Lasis, a slow cooked bean dish served on Shabbat. One of the most endearing stories in the book is the anecdote about little Hamama marching for hours with a jug of Lasis on her head. When she finally arrives home, her siblings falsely accuse her of stealing the favorite dish. Infuriated she runs away outside of the village, where she is nearly attacked by monkeys. Overly excited she runs back home, and receives the Michva treatment- a tribal remedy used to calm the agitated. After the hot iron rod is placed on her head, she faints.  

Lasis might not be a reason for a family drama, but it is definitely worth making at home. It is easy to make, satisfying and delicious. Below, is a recipe recommended by Gradwohl. Slow cooking the beans overnight definitely helps to accentuate the flavor.

Lasis

Ingredients

2 cups - red kidney beans

0.5 tsp  - baking soda

Salt

water

4 hard-boiled eggs

Cumin

Schug(Yemeni hot sauce)/ Jalapeno based hot sauce

Making

1.    Soak beans overnight with baking soda

2.    Drain and rinse beans

3.    Place beans in slow cooker or pot with hard-boiled eggs and salt, cover with water and let it cook very slowly

4.     Serve with a generous sprinkle of cumin and drizzle some chug

Above: Lasis in the making 

The Great Yemeni Cultural Contribution

This blog entry would not be complete without paying tribute to the rich cultural contribution made by Yemeni Jews to Israeli society. From the colorful Hinna (pre wedding) celebrations to Yemenite folk dancing, Yemenite Jews deeply influenced mainstream Israeli culture and particularly Israeli music. In the sea of great artists, I would like to highlight three particularly inspiring ones.

Zohar Argov (1955-1987)

In his short sad life Zohar Argov redefined the Israeli music scene. His distinct sound brought the Yemeni Piyutim (liturgical chants) from the synagogue into the ears of every Israeli, and created the genre widely known today as Muzika Mizrachit (Oriental Music). Initially, his music was turned down by the local radio stations, but through pirate cassettes and unforgettable performances Argov became a legend during his lifetime. Despite the catchy tunes, Argov’s lyric are often somber, addressing drug addiction and loneliness. Fame did not cure his mental issues, and Argov put an end to his life at age 32. However, his legacy is long lived by many Israeli musicians today, who still refer to him as HaMelech (the King). Below is his most famous hit- Ha’Pereach Be’Gani, a must have in every Israeli wedding to bring people onto the dance floor.

Ofra Haza (1959-2000)

Ofra Haza was one of the most popular singers in Israel in all times. Having a sweet tender voice and being extremely beautiful, it was hard not to be a fan. During the 1980’s and 1990’s she was everywhere: kids TV shows, movies, national ceremonies and on teenagers walls. In 1983, she touched the entire Israeli nation when she performed the song Chai (Alive) in the Eurovision Song Contest in Munich Germany, only 30 kilometers from the Dachau Concentration Camp. Haza was also a renowned artist outside of Israel, taking a lead role in the Ethnic Pop wave in 1980’s Europe. Her breakthrough as an international singer happened in 1984 after she released the album Shirei Teiman  (Songs of Yemen), which consisted of songs she had heard in childhood, mixing authentic Middle Eastern percussion with dance bit rhythms. Throughout her career, she earned many platinum and gold discs and was nominated for the Grammy award. Like Argov, Haza died young at, at the age of 41, of AIDS - related pneumonia

Below is the song Im Nin’alu a prime example of her ability to combine an ancient liturgical poem with a catchy tune. The beautiful video clip was set to emulate the landscape of Yemen.

Adi Keissar (born 1980)

Adjectives, such as provocative, uncompromising and straightforward, do not begin to describe the pungent poet Adi Keissar. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Keissar is using her poetry to criticize Israel social illnesses, and to spread her own agenda of prompting the culture and civic rights of Mizrahi Jews. Keissar strongly objects to the elitist reputation of poetry, and therefore she established the Ars-Poetica club, where poets from different walks of life come to share their words. Besides poetry, the Ars-Poetica club offers a fun celebration of Mizrahi culture, including belly dancing performances and Sephardic food banquet. Because of her sharp tongue and natural charisma, Keissar made poetry relevant again. People memorize her poems by heart, and she inspired so many others to follow her path. Below is a video clip of one of her inspiring   poems. 

[giancarlonicoli]

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Salo News Day

Regular readers will know I am a cynic. Try writing a Daily for over two decades and not be – and events over the last 24 hours underline that fact. Indeed, you could call it a “Salo News Day” in reference to the controversial Italian film “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom”, a loose adaptation of the 1785 novel by the Marquis de Sade. As Wikipedia puts it: “The film explores themes of political corruption, consumerism, authoritarianism, nihilism, morality, capitalism, totalitarianism, sadism, sexuality, and fascism.” In other words, a typical day at work in the markets of 2021.

After all, the Wall Street Journal reports “World Bank Cancels Flagship ‘Doing Business’ Report After Investigation”, frustrating to economists who rely on it. The rub is: “Chinese officials in 2018 were eager to see their ranking improve, and so Mr. Kim and Ms. Georgieva and their staff held a series of meetings to discuss ways that the report’s methodology could be altered to improve China’s rankings.” So untrustworthy World Bank data – and no consequences; a World Bank boss with a stained reputation – and no consequences; and an IMF boss with a stained reputation – and no consequences. That makes it two in a row for the IMF, with the previous one now running the ECB.

At the Fed, “Powell orders ethics review after Fed presidents disclosed multimillion-dollar investments”. Somehow this ethical violation on the part of the people running the global financial system passed them by until now. Yet is this really rare? How about if a rate-setter at a central bank told you over lunch about the land their company was snapping up for development? That happens - just not at the Fed. (As far as I know.)

One can openly trade stocks based on legislation one writes if a member of Congress: House speaker Pelosi is just one example of many. How about the swirls of corruption around the Trump administration, or Hunter Biden’s “Mr 10%” emails subject to an FBI investigation? A grand jury just indicted Michael Sussmann, the lawyer accused of making false statements during the 2016 presidential campaign to slander then-candidate Trump; and as Glenn Greenwald notes, this key story was then sugar-coated at the New York Times by the journalist whose ‘Russiagate’ book Sussmann helped to sell. Moreover, this is hardly just an American problem. What about the scandals around the revolving door, and wallpaper, of the British BoJo administration, former French president Sarkozy, or former German chancellors working for Russia? And have you ever been to an emerging market?

Even in terms of the most existential issues, the same selfishness prevails. We are seeing a flood of money into ESG funds, but Morningstar data published in February shows 256 funds repurposed or rebranded as sustainable in 2020, up from 179 the year before. In Q1 2021, it was 127. Morningstar states: “Transforming existing funds into sustainable strategies is a way for asset managers to leverage existing assets to build their sustainable-funds business, thereby avoiding having to create funds from scratch.” Repurposed funds typically just add terms such as ‘sustainable’, ‘ESG’, ‘green’, or ‘SRI’ to their names. Yet 40-years of the same neoliberalism, then a burst of idealism and Covid-19, have also seen energy prices exploding towards recessionary levels, matched by worries over food prices. The energy spike is likely to force the dirtiest of fuels to be used again, and the economic domino effects are just starting to be felt in an already-unhappy populace as we move towards winter (and more lockdowns?). Keep your fingers crossed for mild weather and Russian generosity on EU gas supply. Maybe Mr Schroeder can put in a good word?

Overall, we may need to coin a new markets term. “Immoral hazard”. Indeed, if 40 years of neoliberalism has rotted everything away, how exactly is liberal democracy not to fail, as some fear? The ancient Greeks, no longer taught in the West, argued government moves in cycles: aristocracy > timocracy > oligarchy > democracy > tyranny (Plato); monarchy > anarchy (Aristotle); democracy > aristocracy > monarchy, and their degenerate forms of ochlocracy > oligarchy > tyranny (Polybius), which seems to fit better.

Of course, that’s why we now have ‘Build Back Better’. However, it needs to get a move on - winter is coming. Years ago, I posited it would be far easier to sell ‘Build Bombs Better’ (i.e., national-security mercantilism) than social welfare. That fits the bill given AUKUS and military-industrial policy is now in play. Which has upsides and downsides. More jobs: but China now says Australia will be targeted in a nuclear war even if it does not have nukes. This morning, both the US and Australia underlined their commitment to strengthen ties with Taiwan, raising tensions further.

AUKUS also eclipsed yesterday’s launch of the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which appears to revolve around trade deals as if we are back in 1995 or 2005. Relatedly, I pronounce AUKUS as “Orcs”, as in Lord of the Rings. Some might see this as a contrast to the perceived ‘Elves’ in Europe. Unfortunately, it is more a case of ‘Hobbits’, the French Bagginses aside. Notably, if not by German leadership, the EU parliament yesterday adopted by a 570-61 vote a new position paper on China, concluding: “We must not be naive when dealing with China. Whilst China is an important trading partner, it is also a systemic rival that poses a challenge to our way of life and the liberal world order. Economic gains should not make us blind to the Chinese Communist Party's ambitious political agenda…”  

China also reacted to the ‘Orcs’ by officially applying to join CPTPP, the trade pact Australia is in: on the same day their press talked about nuking it. There are various takes on this latest move in our Great Game, but here is one more to note. The NAFTA 2.0 deal the US struck with Canada and Mexico gives the US veto rights over either country’s entry into a trade deal with a non-market economy: guess what China is in US eyes? Guess which trade pact Canada and Mexico are members of? And guess who therefore gets veto on Chinese entry into it?

Meanwhile, China, which still teaches the ancient Greeks in ancient Greek, and is very aware of the cycles of government, faces up to, as Bloomberg puts it, the “Nightmare Scenario” of an “Uncontrolled Crash” at Evergrande. The property behemoth is now to hold an auction 30 September to raise funds for investors who bought its wealth management products (paying 13%!), effectively offering cheap apartments in lieu of cash. Yet this is exactly the kind of forced margin-sales that can drag down prices in the whole property market. Things clearly can’t carry on like this; and a crash surely cannot be allowed to happen; and yet a Western-style ‘rich-first’ bailout looks incompatible with Common Prosperity. Build Back, yes - but how, exactly?

In more traditional market terms we also have the traditional looming US debt-ceiling Kabuki; triple-witching of US equity options today; and a backdrop of slightly higher US Treasury yields and a stronger USD due to a US retail sales beat helped by a downwards revision to the previous month’s data.

Now go enjoy another Salo news day. Happy Friday.

[dippedanddripped]

For centuries, dress codes have been used to maintain specific social roles and hierarchies. But fashion and style have also traditionally served another purpose: to express new ideals of individual liberty, rationality and equality, according to new research by Stanford legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford.

Video by Farrin Abbott

A new book by Stanford Law Professor Richard Thompson Ford examines the societal and political significance of dress codes over time.

Civil rights activists in 1960s America wore their “Sunday Best” at protests to demonstrate they were worthy of dignity and respect as they challenged the institutions that kept Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Centuries earlier, during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a pared-down business suit symbolized a departure from the status-based opulence of previous aristocratic regimes. Wearing the same clothes as everyone else, regardless of one’s social status, was a way of espousing the period’s new values, such as sensibility, rationality and even equality, said Ford.

These are just two of the many examples Ford has chronicled in his new book, Dress Code: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Simon & Schuster, 2021), in which he argues that people have used dress codes to assert political control and social hierarchies throughout history. Sartorial style can also be wielded to challenge those norms and offer new political ideals in their stead. For example, the Black Panther movement rejected the “Sunday Best” that their civil rights predecessors wore to establish a new kind of resistance.

“It’s worth noting that the Black Panthers had a Minister of Culture, so they saw very clearly the importance of aesthetics in changing politics,” Ford said. “That developed into the ‘Black is beautiful movement’ which focused quite explicitly on the political dimensions of racial aesthetics and changed dominant norms of beauty in order to incorporate and reflect the norms of the black community.”

Here, Ford talks about some of this research with Stanford News Service. Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your research, you argue that running parallel to a history of fashion is a history of liberal individualism. Can you explain that further?

In the modern sense, fashion involves clothing that is highly expressive; it can be a sign of individual personality. This kind of clothing emerged around the same time as the ideal of individualism began to emerge in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Clothing reflected new social and political ideals: the importance of the individual as opposed to the group-based statuses of aristocratic class and religious affinity. Fashion in this sense developed alongside other changes in the arts, philosophy and science: literature began to focus on individual psychology more than grand classical epics, prefiguring the transformation from epic to the novel. Philosophy and science put humans at the center of the cosmos, displacing a religious sensibility that subordinated human and earthly concerns to the divine and supernatural. Portraiture became expressive of individual personality. These changes in aesthetic sensibility eventually became part of liberal political ideology, that put the individual before the monarch or the church.

Fashion not only reflected these changes – it also may have helped to shape them by conditioning people to think of themselves first and foremost as unique individuals. In a sense, fashion lets people not only express their individuality but also experience it on their bodies.

Can you offer an example of how fashion reveals the politics of an era?

One example is the development of the business suit. As late as the early 1700s, the typical clothing for someone of high status in most of European society was opulent and adorned with things like brocade and jewels – this was true for men and women. This type of clothing signified status and aristocratic rank and a high place in society.

But as early as in the 17th century, things were beginning to change. In England, this involved the execution of King Charles I, who styled himself as an absolute monarch, and the rise of the Commonwealth. After the Commonwealth ended, the monarchy was restored but the old absolutist ambitions of the monarch didn’t come back. Instead, what emerged was a new kind of aristocracy in which the aristocrats – the people with a high place in society – dressed in a more toned down, subtle and utilitarian fashion.

There was a transformation during this period, which the psychologist John Carl Flügel later described as “the great masculine renunciation.” This was a renunciation of all of the opulence, jewels and brocade that defined the showy clothing of the past era. A new, pared-down aesthetic became the beginnings of the business suit which over time became a symbol of liberal individualism. At the time, people made the connection between the sparer, toned down suit and the ideals of human rights.

Another thing that the business suit accomplished was it created a kind of egalitarian uniform in which people of a variety of social statuses wore, more or less, the same clothing – this was new. Now, everyone from the most powerful heads of state to bank clerks wear business suits. That social leveling of attire symbolized and went along with – and even inspired and helped people to act out – the political ideal of formal equality before the law.

So that was for men. What about for women?

The story for women is longer and more complicated. During the same period [that saw the evolution of the business suit], menswear and womenswear diverged. As menswear got more streamlined with fewer extravagant details, womenswear got more opulent. In a sense, women almost compensated for the lack of opulent display by getting more of that for themselves. One might even say that men still engaged in opulent fashion vicariously through women.

Womenswear doesn’t participate in an evolution toward egalitarian norms until much, much later. And indeed, one of the stories I tell in the book is the way that this emergence of liberal egalitarianism goes hand in hand, and in some ways, deepens gender hierarchies, that in terms of clothing and attire, lasted well into the 20th century.

To give one example, while European men abandoned draped attire, which was the attire (characteristic of the ancient world) in the 14th and 15th centuries, women remained draped below the waist until the early 20th century. In the early 1900s, a woman wearing trousers might be subject to arrest for public indecency. For a long time in history, adventurous women would mimic parts of masculine style to express or assert their right to enjoy masculine prerogatives, whether it was masculine freedoms or masculine assertion of power. So, a woman wearing some element of menswear was a provocation and adopted by women on the avant-garde.

How is fashion intertwined with activism?

Fashion has played an important role in social activism for centuries. Sometimes that role has been as explicit: a social activist fighting against the power structure. Other times, it is more subtle. In the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance people resisted what were called “sumptuary laws,” which were designed to assign people in society a particular type of clothing that would express their social status.

They did so not so much as a direct political challenge to the power structure, but certainly as an indirect one. When a wealthy merchant or tradesperson adopted high-status attire, they weren’t necessarily trying to usurp the position of the nobility or bring down social hierarchies, but it was a way of saying “We deserve the same degree of social prestige and respect as the aristocracy and nobility. We are asserting our own status in society.” This was a new idea and one that turned out to be very challenging to the power structure and the status quo. Although those people may not have thought of themselves as activists, they were engaging in a form of activism.

During the racial justice movement in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists went to protest at lunch counters or to conduct public marches, there was a dress code. People were expected to wear their “Sunday Best” in order to demonstrate that they deserved dignity and respect. But importantly, it was also a direct challenge to a white supremacist power structure that endeavored to keep black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There were laws in the United States at times that required Black people and slaves to dress in clothing that was considered appropriate to their status – which was the lowest status. For Black people to dress in a manner that was elegant and refined was a challenge to that type of power structure and that’s also part of what was going on with the Sunday best attire in the civil rights struggle.

Later, a new generation of civil rights activists rejected “Sunday Best” attire as the politics of respectability. They adopted new styles that were suited to a new style of activism. Black Panthers wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks, berets and sunglasses. It was quasi-military but also it was a new visual statement designed to express a different kind of resistance to the status quo and a different type of racial pride – one that didn’t borrow from the symbols of the white bourgeoisie but instead constructed a new black aesthetic.

How do you see dress codes changing, given the new world we are currently living in?

These things can always be somewhat hard to predict, but one area where I’m fairly confident we’re going to see changes in dress codes is around norms of gender. We’re already seeing such dramatic changes in terms of the recognition of the transgender community and people who are gender non-binary. That’s a remarkable challenge to a centuries-old set of conventions in which men’s and women’s clothing diverged and were considered to be symbolic opposites. I think that is going to be fascinating to watch develop and I’m not sure exactly whether it will develop into something of a more unisex style of clothing or whether it will simply be a remixing and reconfiguring of the gender binary.

Another interesting area is post pandemic and what happens to the norms of workplace attire in the era of the Zoom call. First, there was the idea of the “Zoom shirt” that hangs at the back of their chair and is put on right before the meeting and presumably, for the rest of the day they’re wearing sweatpants, pajamas, or something like that because we’re all stuck at home.

But interestingly, another thing that developed was a kind of subtle new dress code that involved, not the clothing itself, but what was behind you in the room and how one should style the background of their Zoom call in order to communicate messages. That is very much like a different kind of dress code but your kitchen, dining room or living room are part of that public persona.

What inspired this research?

I teach employment discrimination and civil rights law and a surprising number of legal disputes have involved people challenging a dress code of some kind. For instance, women challenging workplace dress codes that required high heels or makeup or people of color challenging dress codes that outlawed preferred hairstyles that are suitable to the texture of their hair, like braids or locks.

Another thing that was very striking to me about these complaints was the intensity with which people fought the dress codes. People were willing to lose their jobs disputing workplace dress code and meanwhile, employers were willing to lose a valued employee trying to impose such a dress code. I wanted to understand why people felt so strongly about clothing, fashion and self-presentation.

The second reason is more personal. I grew up interested in fashion based on the influence of my father who actually trained as a tailor. This was at a time when African Americans often learned both a profession and a trade – the idea was they would have a trade to fall back on in case racial exclusion kept them from the profession of their choice. He never actually worked as a tailor but he learned the craft and he understood the importance of high-quality clothing. He also deeply internalized the importance of self-presentation, which was especially important for a black man growing up during the era of Jim Crow and in the era just after our civil rights laws were passed, where overt racial prejudice was still common and racial stereotypes everywhere. I saw for him how important it was to present himself in a manner that was dignified, refined and reflected his own sense of self, but also what he needed in order to negotiate a still fairly hostile society.

Image attributions in the banner: Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. from the Library of Congress; Men In Tailored Clothes, England, 1920s from The New York Public Library; Posing Louis XIV, Sun King, XXL from Getty Images; Fashion photographs for Vogue magazine from the Library of Congress, Trousers dress from Paris from the Library of Congress, Free Huey rally, DeFremery Park 1968. Reies Tijerina speaking & Brown Beret security from Bob Fitch; Man teleworking wearing a shirt, tie and pajama pants from Getty Images; Actress wearing a costume with ruffled blouse and trousers, from the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, Public Domain; A 1903 engraving of Joan of Arc by Albert Lynch featured in the Figaro Illustre magazine from WikiMedia Commons; Vanity fair on the avenue, from Library of Congress.

[sesamestreep]

of all the strangers, you’re the strangest that I see

(Read on AO3)

Hey, did you know it’s my friend-iversary with @taxicabsandcupcakes today?! Well, it is (I first messaged her on Valentine’s Day, how smooth am I?) and I wrote her this fic because I love her and she’s the best! Also, because like five months ago when I sent her twelve or so screaming messages about this idea, she didn’t call the cops or ignore me, but rather helped me map out an entire Vaguely Medieval Fantasy AU to go with it. Seriously, I have like 200,000 words in the form of emails to back me up on this. Anyway, here’s the first installment of this series you inspired me to write and here’s to many more years of embarrassingly dorky friendship!

Also, I’m too tired to import the summary from AO3, so click the link if you’re looking for it.

The door closes with a heavy thud and Cassian runs a hand over his forehead, trying to clear his mind now that the room he’s been in for over an hour is finally, blissfully silent. He can’t see anything now that he’s rubbing his eyes, but he hears, almost distantly, the rustle of his companion’s skirts and the creak of a chair that might be hers or might be his, he doesn’t know. He presses on his eyelids until he sees spots, and then takes another moment to calm down.

After his moment is up, Cassian withdraws his hands from his face and places them carefully on the table, giving the action at least three times more attention than it deserves. It helps, though, sometimes, to break a task that he’s dreading up into smaller tasks. First, he had to collect his thoughts, which he had not actually done but he’s pretending he has. Now, he has to sit up straight, not fidget with his hands, and project an air of casual indifference as he talks to Jyn Erso about their impending marriage.

When he actually looks at her, she’s turned slightly away from him, looking towards the door through which all of their companions have recently departed, and he finds himself growing irritated with the long line of her neck, from her clavicle to her raised chin. He merely pretends at the art of indifference, whereas she has achieved complete mastery of it. Here, in this moment, he resents her for it. Actually, he has resented her for it since their meeting began and various people, ranging from her brother to his commanding officer as well as several other prominent members of their new Republic, passionately debated the various advantages and disadvantages of an arranged marriage between himself and Lady—sorry, Miss Erso.

It takes some reminding, even for someone such as himself who has been fighting for the dissolution of the monarchy in his country for as long as he can remember, that their efforts have succeeded and they are all now the citizens of a democratic republic where he does not have to refer to anyone as lady or lord. For all his disdain for the aristocracy, the instinct to defer to those old titles and the etiquette that goes along with them runs deep. It’s harder with the Princess than with anyone else, but the combination of unfamiliarity and the haughtiness she wears around like armor makes him trip over what to call the woman in front of him as well.

Jyn is probably best. She will, in all likelihood, be his wife after all, and who could blame him for calling his wife by her first name? The old insecurities die hard, though, and he feels presumptuous and out-of-sorts even thinking of her as such. He has not even secured her hand in marriage yet and already he feels entitled to call her by her given name. Miss Erso is somehow both too formal and too familiar all at once. Before the revolution, she would have been well above his station, and as such he never would have dared to call her miss. But, in his youth, there were certainly women of his acquaintance whom he should have referred to in such terms out of respect for their unmarried status and he never bothered. He’d have been mocked mercilessly if he had, accused of putting on airs around people of his own class. And, of course, Lady Erso is no one. It was her mother, but she’s dead now, and there’s no aristocracy for her daughter to belong to anymore. It would in all likelihood cause more problems than it would solve to call her by that name.

It is because of this anxiety over titles and tradition and respect for the old ways that Cassian is even in this situation in the first place. The revolution was a success, the Emperor was dethroned, and the worst of his supporters were done away with, but now comes the hard part. It is so easy to tear things down that we often forget how hard it is to build them back up, he thinks to himself, and the words sound like his mother’s voice. The rebellion was not easy, by any standards, and their new government was hard won, but Cassian recognizes, more so than his younger, more idealistic compatriots, that most of the hard work is still before them. And some of that hard work will apparently involve him marrying a member of the aristocracy to soothe the worries of the former ruling class.

A decent amount of the aristocracy was surprisingly sympathetic to the revolution, mostly because the Emperor had done such a thorough job of alienating even those who would normally align themselves with the Crown. Now that all was said and done, those same aristocrats were loudly voicing concerns about their role in the new government and concessions had to be made in order to secure their continued support. The idea was put forth that alliances, in the form of marriage, between members of the former aristocracy and highly ranked members of the New Republic would go far in allaying the fears of the old ruling class. It had seemed like a good idea to Cassian at the time—it still does, if he’s being honest—he just never thought he would be called upon to do it himself.

It wasn’t hypocrisy that made him think think this. He did not expect others make sacrifices while he did nothing, after all. If anything, he is surprised he’s considered highly ranked enough to be even considered for such a match. But he supposes he is close enough with the General and with Mon Mothma that they would consider him a good choice for one of these strategic marriages.

It is something of a comfort that Jyn herself strikes him as an odd choice for such a match as well. The Ersos, as he understands it, were a good family, but not highly respected at Court. They were considered by many to be unsophisticated, as their estate was in the farming province of Lah’mu, and snobbish, as they rarely made appearances in Court. It was not an endearing combination to the others of their class, who bristled at being rejected by such provincial people. The only one of them that was well known in the Capital was their patriarch, Galen, who wanted to give the appearance of supporting the Emperor but who always looked so miserable to be present that he might as well have not shown up at all. Once the war started in earnest, Galen remained in the Capital to develop weaponry for the Imperialists but it was a poorly kept secret that he was sympathetic with the rebellion.

Cassian knows all of this, and more, about the Ersos partly from his time as a spy, but also because, in spite of the disdain the Old Court had for the family—or perhaps because of it—they became the center of much gossip during the war. And it’s not hard to see why. Galen’s wife Lyra was worse than her husband at masking her hatred of the Emperor and made almost no appearances in Court for that very reason. She was a practitioner of the Old Religion, and vocal about it too, which did very little endear her to the Crown. No one could ever prove that her death, which happened just as the rebellion was starting to gain traction, was ordered by the Emperor, but it is widely believed to be true, nonetheless.

As for Galen and Lyra’s children, there is no shortage of gossip surrounding them. Cassian has seen them, Jyn and her brother, as they pass through the halls of the former castle that now acts as the seat of their new Republic. They are inseparable now that the war is over and they are reunited. They walk around, arms linked, in a world unto themselves, oblivious to the way rumors chase at their heels like hounds. There are whispers about both of them and the things they did during the war that they show no signs of acknowledging one way or another. For one thing, it is widely known that, if they are anything to each other, they can only possibly be half-siblings. Jyn’s brother Bodhi does not even bear the Erso name, and there are stories, some of them nasty and some of them almost mythical, as to how he came to live with the Ersos. Many suspect he’s a bastard of Galen’s, taken in and raised as a ward to protect his wife’s feelings. No one dares say this in front of Jyn, however, for fear of inciting her legendary wrath when it comes to her brother. For that is what she always refers to and treats him as, her brother.

Jyn’s history, too, is the subject of much gossip. While there are no suspicions about the legitimacy of her birth, rumors swirl about what she was doing during the war, who she was with, where she was, and even who she was. After the death of her mother, Jyn Erso disappeared. For years, she was presumed dead by the Imperialists, but they pursued every rumor, every whisper of a child matching her description in order to keep her father motivated to work for them. The promise of someday finding his daughter was enough to keep him on the side of the people he hated.

Looking across the table at the woman he’s supposed to marry, Cassian can’t decide if he believes anything he’s heard about her or not. There are rumors she trained with Saw Gerrera and his band of renegade soldiers. There are rumors she was a criminal, stealing supplies from the Imperialists and the Rebels alike, aligning herself with no one. Some say she was a spy, and the reason the Imperialists could never find her was because she changed names and identities at every turn, constantly becoming someone new. It’s that last one that bothers Cassian the most, he thinks. The other rumors are concerning, but she is here now. Maybe her only loyalty is to her brother, but he’s a war hero, a big deal amongst the Rebels, and he’s not going anywhere. It’s part of the reason Cassian thinks she was chosen for such an arrangement, being the sister of a living legend and all. It’s enough for most people to forget her family’s reputation for their rather cryptic allegiances in the past. If Cassian is any good at reading people—and he likes to think he is—he thinks Jyn Erso is on their side now. Whether she was in the past or not is something he will have to refrain from worrying over, for there is nothing he can do about it either way.

No, what truly worries him is that perhaps he’s being negotiated into marriage with someone exactly like himself. How will two people accustomed to hiding behind false identities and scavenging their every interaction for information they can use to their advantage later ever manage to be husband and wife to one another? He tries, as he looks at her, to imagine it: this woman being his wife, taking his name, sharing his bed, perhaps someday being the mother of his children. He cannot begin to picture it. He tries and fails to remember his parents together, what they were like, but it’s been too long. He lost his mother when he was young and his father when he was even younger. He cannot produce a single memory of them as a couple. How can he be someone’s husband, when he does not know what that means?

The room they are in is suddenly too warm and too small and Cassian stands up hurriedly. The scrape of his chair on the stone floor draws Jyn’s attention to him, although he suspects she’s been watching him out of the corner of her eye all along. Something about her eyes is unnerving to him; how luminous they are, how no detail escapes them. He’d been looking at her for a long while, but she’d done nothing, she hadn’t spoken or even looked his way. She’s waiting him out, he realizes. It’s something he knows too from being a spy: if you speak first, you’re at a disadvantage from the start.

But we’re not at war anymore, he thinks, and decides they’ve been silent long enough.

“We can tell them ‘no’,” he says, and he’s surprised by the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth. Not because he had any better ideas of what to say in his head, but more so that he actually managed to speak at all.

“We can?” Jyn asks, blinking in what’s probably supposed to look like surprise. Cassian sees the artifice in it, and hears the condescension in her tone, like she knows he’s wrong but isn’t ready to tell him yet.

“Of course,” he says, huffing. “You don’t have to marry me. They could find someone else, someone willing.”

“I’m willing,” she says, lifting her chin defiantly.

“Could have fooled me.”

Jyn’s answering smile contains no warmth. “It’s an arranged marriage, Captain,” she says, putting some sarcastic emphasis on his title. He pushes down the impulse to let it to raise his hackles. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t burst into song at the prospect.”

“Your brother does not seem inclined towards the match,” he says, ignoring most of what she’s just said.

“My brother is overprotective,” Jyn answers, unperturbed. “But it’s not up to him.”

“He wants to make sure you’re not being taken advantage of,” Cassian says, looking at the sill of the window as he leans back against it. Unconsciously, he’s put as much distance between himself and Jyn as possible. He hopes she hasn’t noticed.

“Well, of course I am,” she says, simply. “But that’s the idea behind this whole concept, isn’t it? Everyone is being taken advantage of, and everyone gets something out of it. You’re using me for my aristocratic family name, to keep the old guard happy, and I...”

She hesitates and Cassian is suddenly desperate to know what she thinks she’ll be getting out of their marriage. “And you…?” He prompts.

Jyn’s eyes sharpen as they look upon him. He’s hit upon some useful information she didn’t intend to give him, and she resents him for it. “And I,” she begins again, “will have the security that comes with being the wife of a high-ranking member of the new regime.”

“Your brother objects to you having security?”

“Of course not,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He objects to me marrying someone I do not love. He’s a romantic.”

“And you’re not?” Cassian asks, keeping his voice even. It’s not meant to be a leading question, but he can see how it could be mistaken for one. He just wants to know what to expect from her, if such a thing is even possible.

“No,” she says, and she’s searching his face for a reaction. Finding none, she continues, “I was raised to expect such a thing. My parents had an arranged marriage, as well as most of the other married people I knew. It does not mean they were unhappy. That depends entirely on the people.”

Cassian wants to ask if she thinks they could be happy, but it feels like too vulnerable a thing to ask. Besides, the end goal of this is not for them to be happy, but for their marriage to strengthen the alliance between the disparate factions of the rebellion. If the marriage works on a personal level, it will be viewed as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. But whether they are actually well-suited for one another is not the main concern of those in charge.

Cassian must lose a minute thinking on this, because he’s startled to hear the creak of Jyn’s chair as it’s pushed back. When he looks up, she’s standing beside the table, watching him intently. “In fact, Captain,” she says, “I’d say the only person in this room who needs convincing is you.”

Cassian shakes his head at her, but it’s half-hearted, at best. He’s too distracted watching her approach him. “Your friends didn’t seem convinced it was a good idea, marrying me,” she says, walking towards him slowly.

“Friend. Just the one.”

“He doesn’t trust me, I take it.”

“Kay doesn’t trust anyone,” Cassian says, trying to sound easy and missing the mark slightly. She’s right in front of him now, and her close proximity is unnerving him. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

Jyn makes a tsk noise in the back of her throat that feels decidedly like play-acting to him and reaches for his hand where it rests on the windowsill. It takes everything in him not to jump at the unexpected contact, but he manages it, barely. She turns over his hand so she can study his palm. “If it’s not his opinion you’re worried about, then what?” She asks, not looking up.

“I’m not worried,” he lies.

“I would be a good wife to you, Captain,” she says, and he doesn’t miss the way her voice drops, the emphasis she puts just so on the exact right words for the utmost effect. She runs her pointer finger along the crease of the third finger of his left hand, right where a wedding band would go and he has to rein in a shudder. He gets the distinct feeling he’s being seduced, or laughed at, or perhaps both. The impulse to pull his hand away, to put as much space between them as possible, is a strong one, a good one, even, but he doesn’t indulge it. Jyn must sense some hesitation on his part, because she adds, in a questioning tone, “Although, maybe, I am not your type. Perhaps, when you pictured your wife, you pictured her differently...”

It’s as clear an opening to compliment her as he’s ever heard, but he finds himself taking her implied question seriously instead. He tries to remember, as a kid, what he’d thought about marriage, if he’d ever imagined the kind of woman he’d marry, and comes up empty. As he’s gotten older, as the war dragged on, he pushed such matters, on the rare occasion when they arose, to the back of his mind. There have been women he liked, women he found beautiful and interesting, women he probably could have married. But it never occurred to him. He’s been fighting a war for so long he never stopped to think of the future like that. It’s fitting that the only thing that ever made him consider marriage was being asked to do so by his superiors. He almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

The war has taken so much from him, more than he realizes most days. His marriage might be a strategic move for the benefit of the New Republic, but he and his wife needn’t carry on as if they are still players in a war. He refuses to weigh every word and action for its strategic benefit, to view every admission as ground lost. This meeting is not a battle, his marriage will not be a war, and his wife is not his enemy. He knows very little about being a husband, but he does know that. If he wants anything out of a potential wife, it’s that she feels the same way. Maybe Jyn doesn’t feel that way yet, but he thinks they could get there. He thinks that they deserve some peace at long last, and it would be an honor to give that to her. There are surely men who could give her more romance, more money, more everything. The least he can give her is his honesty.

“Can I tell you the truth?” He asks, with this in mind, turning his hand so he captures hers.

She looks up at him, surprised, and he meets her gaze steadily. “Of course,” she says, and she really is beautiful, he thinks as he takes her in, and she’s certainly interesting. There are many who would look at her and assume he chose her for the reasons men often choose wives. He could never be accused of choosing poorly for himself if he does marry her, and if their conversation is any indication, he will certainly never be bored with her. He knows her to be fierce and strong, pragmatic and kind with those she loves. He respects her and wishes to know her better. It’s not quite affection, and it certainly isn’t love, but he knows he would be lucky to be her husband.

“You want to know what I imagined when I thought about my marriage,” Cassian says, looking once again at their joined hands. “I didn’t. I never imagined it.”

“No?” Jyn asks, quietly, all the pretense gone from her voice.

“I never imagined I’d live long enough for it to matter,” he says, just as quiet, a secret just for her and this room to know.

“Well, Captain,” she says, the words rushing out on an exhale, “we have that in common, at least.”

She sounds relieved, genuine, for the first time since their meeting began. He allows himself to smile at that and pull her hand that he’s still holding close enough that he can plant a kiss on her palm. “Consider me convinced, then,” he says and hopes she knows what he means. Her answering smile tells him she does, and they stay like that, holding hands in the quiet room, for a while yet.

[typhonatemybaby]

copypasta about liberalism for later reference.

One: we are defining it from  the outside ( yet still affected by it), and are defining it as being in distinction to materialism. That is: we are at least attempting to not be liberals because we are attempting to be materialistic. We feel materialism is a position that is to destroy liberalism  Ok so what does that jargon mean? Well this is about the idealism of liberalism and about how liberalism has this tendency to see the symptom yet not the cause, to see all of its solutions as being these situations where the structural basis has not actually changed but merely the wounds it created arent there A great example of this was when i was listening to a podcast the other day by afloweroutofstone (aka Brett, a big tumblr-left user, sort of famed amongst the more hardline and esoteric parts of that niche milieu, like for instance, me, for his bad takes), where he talked about his ideal socialist society. I would personally say that Brett is a liberal socialist, that he is an idealist socialist etc. In the podcast Brett talked about how his ideal socialist society would be a sort of mixed-market mutualist one where most property was personal or public, yet the private property form still existed and was still self sustaining. The society had landlords but " your landlord would know you didn't need him", it had renting, and there was still rentiership but that this problem was defeated by tenants unions and syndicalism. I feel this is a liberal approach to the socialist question because I hold that the problems that we face with capitalism arent just these surface problems of " well the poor proles all have to rent and cant own houses and its bad", but also that "private property is the concept that a person can enclose off a space they do not need in order to claim a rent on it. that an individual can extend their legal person over infinity enclosing any part of the world off from another human in order to claim a rent". I feel the solutions he offers are liberal because they rely entirely on this idea of a vast moral mass always being upright and upstanding in their tenants union. Its as if he saw the  Norman Rockwell painting " Free Speech" and conceived of the spirit of that painting as being the spirit of his new socialist society. Two: Liberalism  is dead, yet it was never alive Marx famously said : "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." 

I would put it that liberalism is dead politics and it lives by sucking political power from the masses, and lives the more the more power it sucks. This is power that the masses would use for their emancipation yet liberalism not only sustains itself through this parasitism, it defends itself also for it is against liberal societal structures that this power would be directed

This is why we see things like the Overton window, the dissipation of crude activism into the capitalist project and the co-optation of philosophy and cultural appropriation.This is not so much a moral failing of the activists or the philosophers ( though with the obvious exception of  the cultural appropriator)- it is the structure of liberalism going about its work. 

This is achieved via the means of enclosure of the commons, and enforcement of private property. It is an act of societal violence which forces all art to be commodified, and all politics to become subordinated to it. This is also why liberalism is so fiercely defended by those who benefit from private property: the Bourgeoisie. Liberalism is the class ideology of the bourgeoisie, who are the class of Rent and the class of Enclosure. their whole politics is a politics of phantasms: The Legitimate State, the hard workers, the rational calculus of business, the honest transaction and so on.

This brings me to point three which ive sort of already alluded to:

 Liberalism is about venerating the status quo. 

Stirner has something to say about this in the section of The Ego and its Own titled "political liberalism" which remains one of the better explanations of the ludicrous aspects of liberalism:

"The bourgeoisie is the aristocracy of DESERT; its motto, “Let desert wear its crowns.” It fought against the “lazy” aristocracy, for according to it (the industrious aristocracy acquired by industry and desert) it is not the “born” who is free, nor yet I who am free either, but the “deserving” man, the honest servant (of his king; of the state; of the people in constitutional states). Through service one acquires freedom, that is, acquires “deserts,” even if one served – mammon. One must deserve well of the state, of the principle of the state, of its moral spirit. He who serves this spirit of the state is a good citizen, let him live to whatever honest branch of industry he will. In its eyes innovators practice a “breadless art.” Only the “shopkeeper” is “practical,” and the spirit that chases after public offices is as much the shopkeeping spirit as is that which tries in trade to feather its nest or otherwise to become useful to itself and anybody else."

[jam2289]

20 Tiny and Mind-Blowing Documents for Learning

I recently sent a few documents to a 13-year-old girl that is intelligent, but is annoyed by reading long texts that take too long to get to the point. I've read thousands of books, and the more I read the more I value writing that can change your perspective on the world in just a few pages.

My book list is always changing. I update it every few days, but right now I have 388 things listed in 10 sections. Some of them are large book series. But, some of them are small. Some, very small.

So I looked through my list and pulled out a few small things that I thought might surprise her as to how valuable a small work can be. My selection was excellent. But, there were too many things. And, even though they were smaller than you would think, some of them could still be considered a book. I wanted to make the list smaller, and I wanted the works to be smaller. I went through it again.

This time I guessed at how long each work was and included the length. I got it down to 20 items. And I was pretty close on my guesses too.

I didn't send her the list in any order, but here I've listed them in a very approximate order of length.

4 words - "l(a" by E. E. Cummings

"l(a" is a poem that cannot be read, it can only be looked at. The symbology used in the spacing, the breaks, the shape, the letters and numbers, and the words, is immense. It's constructed vertically, and inside of the word "loneliness" it says "a leaf falls". Sometimes people pass over something so small thinking that it can't hold much meaning, but they are wrong. This small poem is an inexhaustible work of art.

581 words - "What We Mean by Civilization", Chancellor's Address, Bristol University, 2 July 1938 by Winston Churchill

Maybe I should have included something else by Churchill. He wrote so many papers and gave so many speeches that it's an overwhelming amount of material. I have a few things from him on my personal list. His 1950 unpublished article "This Is Freedom" is amazing, and that could be here. Alas, in the speech that I did send he is talking about authority and peace, and these are important concepts to contend with. Here's one line, "The central principle of Civilisation is the subordination of the ruling authority to the settled customs of the people and to their will as expressed through the Constitution." Churchill is an excellent place to dive into such a daunting subject.

5 paragraphs - "Cain and Abel" by Unknown Genius

How to interpret the world and how to act in the world are subjects that are too large for humans to comprehend. And yet, we must interpret the world, and we must act in the world. One of the ways that we cope with this problem is by using the tools of narrative, metaphor, and art. We are able to condense an enormous amount of information in a very small space. The ideas of good and evil, resentment, revenge, initiation of force, betrayal, rejection, aggression, economics, justice, truth, etc. are all contained in the story of "Cain and Abel". The great narratives contain more truths than the author can fathom. A well of insight that never runs dry, that we can return to over and over again. And "Cain and Abel" is one of the greatest, and tiniest, narratives in human history.

98 sentences - "The 95 Theses" by Martin Luther

It's rare for people to read actual documents from history, even though some of the most important documents are rather small. Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with this document. He was a professor that was debating moral theology, and started a religious revolution that resulted in a whole bunch of wars. But, as far as I can tell, almost no one reads this little document that transformed all of the Christian world and broke the Catholic Church apart. It's probably different than you would expect. The whole document is about repentance. The word "indulgence" is used 45 times. An indulgence was where you could pay to absolve yourself of sin. Luther was against that. If you think about the context while you're reading it, it's an intense document, and well worth the reading of 98 sentences.

1 page - "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities" by Gian Vittorio Caprara and Philip Zimbardo

We don't think of politicians like we do normal people, or famous people, or athletes, or celebrities. We think of them in a special way. Normally people can rate people across five major personality traits. But with politicians it's reduced to a simplified two. What these researchers call energy/innovation and honesty/trustworthiness. If you combine this idea with some insights on elections from the economist Joseph Schumpeter it paints a unique picture of how the process really works.

2 pages - From John Adams to Benjamin Rush, 27 September 1808

Letters offer amazing insights into history. One of the great things about the Founding Fathers of the United States is that so many of them kept their letters. These were some of the best educated men in the world in political theory, working to apply those principles in unique practical circumstances. And we can read what they were saying to each other at the time, we can read what they were thinking. In this letter John Adams is talking to Benjamin Rush about how hard it is to maintain a republican form of government. How corruption and a lack of virtue can tear a nation apart. Lessons for us all.

2 pages - "Constitution of Medina; Or, Charter of Medina" by Muhammad

In this little document you can see the problems Muhammad was working on in trying to form his new religion. He was converting pagan Arab tribes. He was trying to get them to stop killing each other. He was trying to reconcile them with the Jews that would join him. But, he was also trying to make sure that they were definitely separate from outsiders, and thus rules didn't apply when dealing with outsiders. Dividing people into in-groups and out-groups is a universal difficulty. One of the things that I find the most interesting is how much trouble Muhammad was having with blood-feuds, and he was working hard at stopping them. From Muhammad, to the Vikings, to the Hatfields and McCoys, blood-feuds have been a major problem for human societies throughout time.

2 pages - "“Multicultural” Education" speech by Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is the greatest living economist. In this little speech he defends the idea of teaching the history of Western culture. Something that has been strongly attacked over the last few decades by people that oppose freedom. Here's one line, "Much of the advancement of the human race has occurred because people made the judgment that some things were not simply different from others, but better." It's an excellent idea to keep in mind.

2 pages - "Objections to the Constitution of Government Formed by the Convention" by George Mason

Many of the most important Founding Fathers didn't sign the Constitution. Some had logistical difficulties, but others opposed it so much that they would not sign it. One of the major objections was the lack of a declaration of rights. That should have gone first. Luckily it was added a couple of years later. But, his insights about the division between the North and the South were ignored. His paragraph about the problems in the legal system is applicable to this day. And here's how he ends it, "This Government will commence in a moderate Aristocracy; it is at prese[nt] impossible to foresee whether it will, in it's operation, produce a Monarchy, or a corrupt oppressive Aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other." It's an interesting look into the mind of the godfather of the American Bill of Rights.

3 pages - "Erro, Ergo Sum: An Evolutionary Map for Consciousness, Cognition and Free Will" by Andrew W. Notier

This ingenious little paper is almost completely unknown. I only know about it because we both belong to The International Society for Philosophers. As soon as I read this paper I emailed Andrew and thanked him for his insights. He's emailed me about some of my original ideas as well. It was a nice exchange. Here's the basic idea of the paper from one sentence, "Life appears to be unique in the universe in its ability to produce erroneous information, and human beings have the ability to generate these errors on a staggering scale." To adjust for perceptual errors you need four things: separateness, data access, evaluative facility, and authority to act. That is, thinking and free will. He makes a strong case that at the deepest level we humans are mistake-makers and truth-seekers.

3 pages - "Original Rough Draught of the Declaration of Independence" by Thomas Jefferson

Five important Founding Fathers were on the committee to write the "Declaration of Independence": Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Benjamin Franklin turned down writing it because he didn't want to write something that other people would edit. And it did get edited. I like both versions, but there are a few pieces in the original that I wish made it into the final version.

4 pages - "The Address of Gen. Washington to the People of America on His Declining the Presidency of the United States" by George Washington

Washington tried to leave the office of President after his first term. He had James Madison prepare a farewell address for him. But, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson both convinced him to stay for one more term. Then, after 8 years as the first President of the United States, Washington finally had enough and retired to his farm. He had Hamilton redo the address and issued it. He talks about what's needed to support the continued integrity of the nation, and about the dangers to it, like party politics.

6 pages - "Of Society" by Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy

This is a chapter from "A Treatise on Political Economy" by de Tracy. It was translated from the French by Thomas Jefferson. There are a ton of great insights in these few pages. For instance, before the subjective theory of value became popular in the 1870s, de Tracy had already clearly explained it, "It is equally true that an exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain." The man was a genius that is now largely forgotten.

7 pages - "Of the Market for Products" by Jean Baptiste Say

This is a chapter from "A Treatise on Political Economy; or the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth" from 1819. And it contains one of the most important ideas in the history of economics, often called Say's Law, or Say's Law of Markets, or supply-side economics. It's the basic idea that to exchange things, you first have to have things to exchange. As Say notes, "It is worth while to remark, that a product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." It's an idea that's commonly forgotten, often by economists, to the great detriment of everyone.

8 pages - "The State" by Frederic Bastiat

Bastiat directly confronts many of the contradictions in politics and economics. And they are the same in September of 1848 in France as they are in any other place, at any other time. For instance, "The state is not and cannot be one-handed. It has two hands, one to receive and the other to give; in other words, the rough hand and the gentle hand. The activity of the second is of necessity subordinate to the activity of the first." At some point these things always come to balance, then as now.

8 pages - Edmund Burke��s Letter To Charles-Jean-François Depont, November 1789

Burke was a Brit that saw the justice in the American Revolution, and the danger in the French Revolution, at the time they were happening. That's a unique record. Several of the Founding Fathers of the United States were involved in the French Revolution: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. But, there was a major difference. I would say it's an emphasis on individual rights. Burke said this, "Believe me, sir, in all changes in the state, moderation is a virtue, not only amiable but powerful." So true.

10 pages - The "Jacques Bonhomme" articles by Frederic Bastiat

Bastiat published four issues of the journal "Jacques Bonhomme" during the French Revolution of 1848. Yes, there were a lot of French Revolutions. In the selection I have there are 8 of his articles. It's extraordinary to see him trying to explain economics to people, to convince them to do good during a time of tumult. It's an attempt at reconciling practical politics and economics with ideals. Even when being translated from the French to the English Bastiat still has a way with words, "Do you seriously have such faith in human wisdom that you want universal suffrage and government of all by all and then you proclaim these very men whom you consider fit to govern others unfit to govern themselves?" That's a contradiction that we have never resolved.

12 pages - "I, Pencil: My Family Tree As Told To Leonard E. Read" by Leonard Read

Read uses the complexity of what it actually takes to make an simple pencil to demonstrate some important concepts. And here's the moral of the story, "The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited." To the extent that society can do that, it thrives.

16 pages - "There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon" by Jack Kent

The psychological depth of this children's book cannot be overstated. I'll give you the first two pages, so you're already a ways into the book. "Billy Bixbee was rather surprised when he woke up one morning and found a dragon in his room. It was a small dragon, about the size of a kitten." And, I'll give the whole idea away, so you can jump right into gathering insights from the metaphor. The dragon is a problem, on multiple levels of analysis.

61 pages - "A Contract with God" by Will Eisner

When I sent this as a recommendation I had forgotten how long it is. But, it's a comic book. Many people count it as the first true graphic novel, ever. And, it's not your average comic. Let me read page 5 to you. "Not so unusual, a father brings up a child with care and love only to lose her... plucked, as it were, from his arms by an unseen hand - the hand of God. It happens to lots of people every day." Oh yes, this is a comic with an immense amount of depth, and not for the faint of heart. I highly recommend it.

Anyone can read these works. They're small, but they're powerful. Often the most powerful insights are communicated in such a condensed way that it doesn't seem possible for them to hold so much meaning in such a tiny package. But they do. From art to economics, politics to religion, philosophy to psychology, and history to humanity. It's all contained in these 20 little documents, just waiting for their riches of knowledge to be explored, and their depths of wisdom to be plumbed.

________________________________________________

To read more from Jeff go to JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/what-the-west-can-learn-yellow-vests/

What the West can learn: Yellow Vests are demanding a Cultural Revolution (8/8)

by Ramin Mazaheri 

For years I have talked about “White Trash Revolutions”, and the emergence of the Yellow Vests proves that my finger is perfectly on the pulse of things: the only people publicly wearing “Yellow Vests” on the streets of Paris prior to November 17, 2018, were… garbage men.

So, imagine me, with my love of Trash Revolutions of all hues (Iran’s 1979 “Revolution of the Barefooted” amounts to the same idea)… and then the French adopted the look of trash collectors as their uniform – I couldn’t be happier!!!

But this idea is not new – even in modern 24/7 politics, genuine historical processes take years or decades to culminate. In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump in the United States, Slavov Zizek expressed the same idea offhandedly: “Sorry, White Trash is our only hope. We have to win them over.”

I could not agree more. But we must go further than just “winning over Trash” – we must let them win.

That is the essence of China’s Cultural Revolution.

I penned this 8-part series because the Yellow Vests show us – urgently, courageously, necessarily, violently – just how relevant China’s Cultural Revolution (CR) should be to Westerns in 2019.

If you have not read the previous 7 parts of this series (and know only anti-CR propaganda) then you may not realize the China’s CR proved how good, productive, efficient and equal society can be – democratically, economically, educationally and culturally – when rural people are supported instead of insulted.

This entire series has not been designed to celebrate China or socialism – it has been written to show what happens when the rural-urban divide is seriously addressed in modern politics, as it was in China during the CR in an unprecedented manner. Society has many seemingly irreconcilable poles of contention – the only one this series seriously addresses is the rural-urban divide.

The CR showed that solutions to this seemingly irreconcilable divide are possible if we accept that Trash is our only hope and not – as the urban-based Mainstream Media insists – the cause of our ills.

Not everyone in a small town is a farmer, but the exclusion of village values is obviously why France’s rural traffic roundabouts have been blockaded for 5.5 months (the government started banning these rural protests on May 11).

More than anything, I think that studying and emulating the CR can end the urban West’s hatred, fear and disgust of rural citizens in power. Islamophobia – every definition includes the fear of Islam as a political force – is pretty bad, but Hillbillyophobia – fear of rural values as a political force – is truly at a modern apex. Thus this series.

The world has seen 2 Cultural Revolutions already – is the West finally ready for 1?

This series used the CR to to illustrate that France and the West are 50 years behind China because they are being wracked by a Yellow Vest movement which is essentially demanding a Cultural Revolution which the Chinese already had. However, because the neoliberal empire known as the European Union has been undemocratically forced on Europe during the interim, the French have even more work to do than 1960s China, but the first step is to realize that the Yellow Vests are essentially demanding a Cultural Revolution.

That IS what this is all about every Saturday – Yellow Vests want institutions to cease their terrible functioning, every major policy to come up for review (constitutional changes, staying in the EU, Eurozone and NATO, Françafrique, austerity spending policies, taxation policies, environmental policies, banking, education, housing, industrialisation, etc.) and new local, grassroots groups to implement them – a Cultural Revolution.

Like Iran from 1980-83 (Iran had the world’s only other state-sponsored Cultural Revolution, obviously modelled on China’s), like China from 1965-74, France wants several years where everything is brought to a halt in order to engage in mass discussions, with the aim of drastically updating French democracy and French culture in order to accord with more modern political ideals.

Capitalists cannot tolerate such a halting. Not only because it would lead to a reduction in their power, and not only because modern political ideals must be Socialist Democratic and not Liberal Democratic – it is also a cultural thing: “keep calm and carry on” is the fundamental ethos of conservatism worldwide.

The two Cultural Revolution have said: “To hell with this – halt! Now waitaminut…. what on earth have we become and should we keep being like this?” Both CRs also led to miniature civil wars, as reactionary or fascist forces, and insanely radical and democratically unwanted leftist forces (like the Mojahedin-e Khalq – MKO), were pushed out.

And, after the halt, as the trajectories of both China and Iran show amazing success. They started over (revolution), then stopped (cultural revolution), then restarted anew yet again.

A Cultural Revolution – China and Iran prove – does something the US and French Revolutions did not do: put into power the formerly-oppressed class of people, which is also the majority class. These four revolutions all eliminated monarchies, but only the former two put the oppressed in charge.

(I do not call the French or American aristocracies “oppressed”, as they previously colluded with the king and shared in the ill-gotten gains – call me a radical, I guess.)

The Yellow Vests are this oppressed class which deserves to lead, and which would certainly lead the country better than France’s current leaders. Everybody in France knows this, but they feel powerless to make it happen. The Yellow Vests are also – everyone in France knows this as well – the majority class. The conditions for Cultural Revolution – for Trash Revolution – are as clear as the yellow vests of garbagemen who wear reflective gear to avoid traffic.

Yes, the Yellow Vests are not solely the result of an untreated urban divide, but anyone following them knows that this is one of the primary causes of the movement.

Those who have been following this series will know what I mean: what should rural “Jimo County, France” be demanding in their nascent French Cultural Revolution?

It’s a genuine political question to ask: is the future only for cities?

Modernized countries need to honestly ask themselves: should humanity’s goal be to empty the rural areas of people?

Are rural areas that bad? That depressing, boring, backward and hate-filled?

The rural-urban migration of the past century is universal, but do we not need any rural inhabitants? Will robots, drones and computers allow everyone to live in supposedly-superior urban areas? Are the values which flourish in rural areas more often than in urban areas not necessary for human culture any more – are these values only hindrances to human progress?

Because if the answer is: “No – rural areas will always have some people; farming areas will never be so efficient as to not need human involvement; rural people actually do learn a useful thing or two about life which city people don’t learn,” then we have no choice but to tackle the urban-rural divide as much as other key societal divides.

So, when we realize that we must clearly affirm that, “Yes, we need rural areas,” that necessarily implies a huge overhaul of value systems in the modern capitalist West, which has become hugely urban dominated. The aspects of this dominance – the financial futures exchanges, mass media, only-urban cultural hubs, the denigration of a collective ethos inherent in rural communities, etc. – are so obvious and so numerous that I don’t need to list them here. The path of history shows that the era of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of farmer-citizen-soldier have been totally jettisoned in the West, probably due to the industrial/electrical/digital revolutions. However, China’s CR showed how necessary it was to re-balance the scales in favor of the country life.

What is more interesting is to discuss how specific policies of the China’s CR could be translated to the West. The Iranian CR was the democratically demanded introduction of Islam into governance, which resulted in what is clearly Iranian Islamic Socialism (out in book form this summer, Inshallah), but I don’t think the West is interested in religion-based ideas anymore – they have deluded themselves into thinking that religion is always regressive, never progressive. (The West prefers secular zero-theism – which is actually the bleakest and most egotistical version of monotheism, because zero is not a plural number, after all.)

But what are being demanded are cultural changes. These precede and influence political changes.

On the level of practical politics, which I will discuss later, I will be sweeping and brief here: neoliberalism (and free-market capitalism) is incompatible with democracy, and we all know it, and thus this particular version of the pan-European project is inherently anti-democratic; the historic heavy, urban-based statism of France is an anti-democratic legacy of the Napoleonic “revolution”; the 1789 French “revolution” was bourgeois and thus not democratic… 2019 France has to stop holding on to all of these falsely progressive legacies. China’s CR – and all forms of socialism – prove that local, socialist democracy is the only guarantee of success and stability. But back to cultural changes….

Above all, a Western Cultural Revolution must begin with an urban mea culpa – the gift of apology is the only way to start in any such situation of familial division and bad blood, which is what France currently has. Even Jesus son of Mary said the same thing, according to Matthew 5:23 – Therefore if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

After reconciliation comes actual gifts – reparations – in order to even the scales in the favor of rural areas.

But reparations and admission of arrogance/imperialism is verboten in capitalist societies – what the CR proves is that the rural-urban divide can only be healed through a collective mentality, not an individualist mentality: the urban individual must renounce their alleged superiority.

That is the primary psycho-cultural message of the Yellow Vests; the proof of this is obvious in the exaggerated hatred of President Emmanuel Macron.

His aloofness and arrogance are unprecedented in modern times, I agree, but his anti-democratic methods and beliefs are not at all different from his predecessor, Francois Hollande. Perhaps his anti-democratic methods and beliefs are 10-15% worse than Hollande’s, but many Yellow Vests only want Macron to quit simply because they have been so deranged by Macron’s urban sense of entitlement that they lose their sense of scope – I hear it often from Vesters every Saturday. But, just like Trump, Macron is the symptom and not the disease.

Macron has become a symbol of what we can call the “anti-CR forces in France”, and the danger is that if the symbol falls – if Macron actually quits – that could stave off the demand for an actual French Cultural Revolution. Certainly, Macron’s puppet-masters will allow him to resign before they allow the sweeping discussions and changes of a CR.

Thus the first step towards reducing the rural-urban divide in the West begins with a revalorisation of rural areas. As long as mainstream journalists continue insisting on a “red state-blue state” divide, no nation can possibly be united, healthy and successful.

This revaluing is a cultural change – what about practical measures?

The CR sent politicians to do farm work – no wonder the Western political class hates the idea of a CR

The disease which roils the West is something which socialism is based on, and especially Maoism, and which was ably demonstrated in the Great Leap Forward – the collective mentality must triumph over the individualist mentality. Indeed, I fairly refer to the CR as the “Great Leap Forward #2” because the CR was an unquestionable restarting of collectivist projects.

But Westerners don’t wanna! To hell with the collective!

The collective line – which in Western Liberal Democracy is only limited to preserving the solidarity of the 1% among themselves – is really rather religious in its view, as it is based on the idea of something larger than just the individual and goes far beyond day-to-day concerns.

Nor is it mere nationalism, which is just a larger, modern version of tribalism. In neoliberal capitalism the loyalty is only to one’s self and family (and often not even to family, but one’s “household” within the necessarily multi-household “family”… and often not even to one’s household!), so it does not even achieve tribalism. How someone can live without a view of something larger than one’s own self is beyond me – it is truly to live without honor, and only with ego.

(In order to prove the enormous socioeconomic success of the CR, this book drew heavily from the ground-breaking investigative & scholarly work The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village, by Dongping Han, a former Chinese villager himself. Han hailed from and studied rural Jimo County, interviewing hundreds of locals about the Cultural Revolution (CR) and poring over local historical records. Han was kind enough to write the forward to my new book, I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China, which is available for purchase. This 8-part series is not a part of that book.)

Accordingly, Han relates the motivation of someone who worked for free on Jimo’s irrigation project during the CR: “She said that she, like others, volunteered to work at these projects at the time because it was an honorable thing to do.”

The major problem in Western capitalism is that their people are not lacking in honor – that would be untrue, as well as insulting: the problem is they do not believe their governments should promote selflessness and honor, as morality is a strictly personal issue. In China, Cuba, Iran and other socialist democratic-based systems, maybe everybody ignores the government’s morality campaigns, LOL, but such campaigns exist, at least, and thus surely have an impact (and a positive one).

A lesson of the CR is that if the government does not promote a “collective mentality”, then there is no “free-market magic” which can reliably conjure up the same necessary feeling, action and outcome.

But promotion is not leadership – leadership is done by doing! Perhaps the Chinese had a leg up in understanding this concept, as Confucianism stresses leadership by example.

“After the failure of the Great Leap Forward , many farmers in Jimo were so bitter about the food shortages that they declared they would not do any more work for the commune. Why, then, were Jimo farmers willing to work hard for the collective during the Cultural Revolution? What was behind this change of attitude? Some workers and farmers testified that the practice of cadres’ participation in production during the Cultural Revolution made an important difference. They said that when leaders worked hard, common villagers would work hard with them. … More importantly, village youth, politically emboldened through the Cultural Revolution conflicts and educated in the new schools, were ready to challenge party leaders if they did not work with ordinary people. … Common villagers would not tolerate lazy leaders. If leaders did not work, villagers refused to work as well, which would lead to a decline in production and living standards. If the leaders did not work hard, villagers would elect someone else to replace them in the year-end election, someone who was ready to work hard.” (emphasis mine)

Now Macron constantly says that he works hard, but he does not work hard with ordinary people – therein lies a world of difference.

It is impossible for an unempathetic leader (as Macron clearly is), who has never worked a regular, dreary, timeclock-punching job in his life (as Macron never has) to make policies which benefit the average worker when he has no idea what an average worker goes through.

I include that passage because it is a fascinating phenomenon, seemingly unique to Chinese socialism – it is a dagger in the heart of Western technocratism. I wonder: how it can be replicated? Did Mao or Fidel spend time working in the fields at 55 years old? LOL, an elder-worshipping Iranian would probably commit suicide before being forced to watch Khamenei, 80, do hard labor in front of them (the guy already lost use of his right arm due to a bomb from the MKO, so how much more effort should he give?).

But what if Macron spent just one week working at a farm? I think his approval rating would rise 10 points immediately!

Macron is 41 – is he just lazy? Is he so effete that he doesn’t like hard & sweaty work? Or is it that he is trying to cultivate an image of someone who is “above” or “smarter than” everybody else in France, and thus only deigns to spend his time on a “superior” type of work? It’s clearly the latter – Macron is trying to cultivate the image that his mind and soul are too valuable, too finely-tuned, to waste on lower-class work.

(But it’s really surprising that a young Western leader doesn’t do these types of propaganda ops. If anybody in the Iranian government is reading this: I will GLADLY work a pistachio farm for months, even years at a time – sheesh, that sounds like heaven, as I write this from the most-population dense city in the Western world. (Y’all would have to pay to store my stuff, though. I guess I’d lose my apartment in Paris. Not that I own it, of course, but it is SO HARD just to find a long-term apartment to rent here – I moved 10 times in my first 3.5 years in France.) Anyway, I predict that in the future, with viral videos and the omnipresence of screens, there will be some leader who takes advantage of every country’s love of hard work – and this will be denounced as “populism” by general population-hating capitalists.)

Crucially, Han writes, “They participated in manual labor more conscientiously than their predecessors had. In some localities it was stipulated that members of the county revolution committee had to participate in manual labor for about two hundred days a year, and members of the commune revolutionary committees had to work in the fields for more than two hundred days a year.”

How can these ideas be applied elsewhere? Could we possibly imagine President Macron working manual labor for 8 hours a day for 10 days, much less 200? What about Theresa May working at an elder care center? These ideas are delicious but ludicrous – certainly, their defense would be that they have “more important things to do”. They are “above” such work; such work would degrade their incredible abilities.

These unstated, but universally perceived, beliefs, is a real problem – the CR solved this problem; thus this series.

This is a huge, flaming, primary message of the CR – rural toil (but also factory toil, service sector toil, or other toiling lower and middle class jobs) is indispensable in creating good governors. There is only one clear solution – joining the masses at work – and yet it would take a CR in the West for such things to occur.

I have relayed Han’s data which show the economic, industrial educational explosion for rural areas – seeing the cultural changes the CR wrought on their local political leaders: How fortunate (and superior) is the Chinese system that they had the CR?

Such practices are inherently anti-technocratic: a politician with a PhD who has to work some manual labor may be a worse technocrat, due to less time spent wonking out, but he or she is a better human being and governor.

Han relates a great story: A respected Peoples’ Liberation Army veteran returned to Jimo after four years in the army, to much acclaim, and he was elected secretary of a village Communist Youth League. He was asked to work on the irrigation project, which involved four people pushing a wheelbarrow of mud weighing 1,000 pounds. “But his army life had never put him to the test of such hard work.” The leader could not do the work, and thus was the naozheng – the incompetent person – in the group. He was not re-elected the following year.

“It was important that leaders could talk high-sounding words, but they had to live up to what they said at the same time. Otherwise nobody would listen to them. … The CCP’s policy then was: yu chenfen, dan bu wei chenfen (class labels are important, but they are not the exclusive factor in judging a person).”

I find it very hard to believe any demonstrating Yellow Vest wouldn’t agree with these policies and beliefs of the CR; putting politicians to work would be Yellow Vest demand #26 if they only knew about it.

Macron does not appear very physically strong… but that is no matter. What is important is that he only finally said the words “Yellow Vests” in public on April 25rd – he clearly has no interest in working shoulder to shoulder with them, no matter what job we can find for him to not be the naozheng at.

Why would such a sensible policy – forcing politicians to do SOME real work – likely be opposed by supporters of Liberal Democracy? Because forcing them to do things they personally don’t want to do is an alleged violation of Western individualist rights. The irony, of course, is that the 1740-1840 heyday of Liberal Democracy rested upon the stolen wages of slaves. And when the slave-masters were forced to work in the countryside – what a horror the CR was!

I don’t see it that way at all. I think, especially when tied to promises of advancement, it is a perfect apprenticeship for future politicians. China knows that, and they are sending another 10 million urban cadres to the countryside – more well-rounded, respectful leaders in the future for China thanks to CR 2.0.

The Cultural Revolution lessons for modern schools

Culture is taught – it is not inbred. Thus a revolution in education is just as fundamental as a revolution in the “work” of politicians. The CR grasped this as well.

I would be remiss not to include a short section on education in this final part. Previous parts of this series examined Han’s data and conclusions regarding educational policy changes, because giving equal access to education – and making schooling truly egalitarian and not urban-elite based nor technocratic – was truly a primary, if not the primary, motivation and goal of the CR. I reiterate Han’s thesis and data, which I gave in Part 1, because it is so necessary: “…this study contends that that the political convulsions of the Cultural Revolution democratized village political culture and spurred the growth of rural education, leading to substantial and rapid economic development.” Education change is the middle link between political culture change and economic change.

Firstly, there is a major problem of gender imbalance in modern schools: in Iran and seemingly all other modernised areas women outperform men, including at security spots i at university. This is not a cause for celebration, but a huge problem.

If men were outperforming women, we would say that there is some sort of prejudice occurring or, as is the case now, the system is simply set up for young men to fail more often than young women, correct? You never hear this view in the West, as their societies are far more matriarchal than in Asia.

But China’s Cultural Revolution did what I think all schools should do: not simply “be schools”.

It is something like a crime against humanity how young, fun, spirit-filled boys are forced to wedge themselves behind a desk for their entire youth. The Cultural Revolution did what many boys find fun – doing stuff: they had to work on a farm, a workshop, a lab, and even money-making activities. That all beats “school” for young and teenage boys.

Crucially, these are all activities which educate kids on the serious facts of life, facts which are vital for happiness far more than yet more technocratic learning.

A teenager who cuts grass, picks up garbage or simply breaks rocks for 7 hours one day a week learns many things. Among them: if you do not study you will be doing this boring work for the rest of your life; hard work is needed to maintain society; manual labor is hard, and thus those who do it must be respected; “boring” or toiling labor requires just as much attention and effort as “office work”, or mental work, and thus must be respected; some jobs wear humans out faster than others, and thus social safety nets – with different rules – are required to avoid widespread misery.

But in a capitalist system, which is technocratic and not meritocratic, 21st century students are incredibly overburdened by testing and homework.

Of course: this is primarily a result of forcing competition via false scarcities in education and jobs – forcing competition is what free market/neoliberal societies are built upon, of course. The CR recognised this and I relayed Han’s detailing of the enormous explosion in rural school creation.

But Liberal Democratic supporters will insist that schools must remain dull and conservative with nihilistic claims such as: “School is just a way to make sheep; is really just child care, because both parents have to work in order to survive; societal masters are only interested in creating compliant cubicle drones, human robots for factory work, and subservient service industry slaves.” I agree: in capitalist countries.

But in socialist countries, where power has been devolved to workers and away from the 1%/technocratic class, other educational policies ARE possible and ARE implemented. Because the Chinese Communist Party explicitly sought to reduce the influence of schoolteachers, and to reduce China’s longstanding over-admiration for them, it is thus little wonder that schoolteachers across the West have zero interest in teaching the truth about the CR!

A Yellow Vest CR must include major educational reform:

“Exclusive book learning that used mainly the rote method was opposed. During the educational reforms, the concept of education was greatly broadened to include productive labor and many other related activities. Education was no longer limited to reading books inside the classroom; learning could take place in the workshops and on the farms, and many other places. Teachers were not considered to have a monopoly on knowledge. Workers and farmers and soldiers could all impart experiential knowledge to students. In fact, even students might know something the teachers did not know.”

Socialism rests on two pillars: redistribution of money and redistribution of political power. Redistributing political power in the realm of education can have enormously positive impacts on how rural societies view, and benefit from, schooling.

The Yellow Vests want a Cultural Revolution – will it succeed? Right now, I’d say ‘No”

Brexit, the election of Trump and the Yellow Vests – these are all viewed as horrifically negative historical & sociopolitical developments in the West’s fake-leftist and elite circles. The Yellow Vests are yet another “basket of deplorables” who have been rendered insane by… what exactly? Racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism….

Firstly, we should ask, in order to find parallels: did China’s deplorables have these problems of prejudice and “identity politics” when their CR started in 1966? Or what about Iran’s barefooted?

No, neither did – that cannot be disputed – and the reason why is indicative of why I feel the Yellow Vests will not achieve their revolutionary goals:

Iran and China already had governments inspired by socialism when they embarked on their Cultural Revolutions, whereas France does not. State-sponsored efforts to end prejudice is just one of many, many proofs which show how much more politically-advanced China and Iran were when they embarked on their Cultural Revolutions than the Yellow Vests are.

I am not blaming the Yellow Vests: because the West has totally rejected socialism’s advances and ethos – unlike Iran and China – they have many types of reactionary problems which China and Iran did not suffer from as strongly at the time of their CRs.

There is a tremendous amount of political regression among the Yellow Vests and their leaders, who have aims which are merely incremental improvements and not truly a new French order. This was illustrated by my last article, A French cop on why French cops will never join the Yellow Vests – many Vesters not only expect but want the cops to join them… even though it cannot and should not work because they are the devoted dogs of the reactionary order! Whoever heard of a revolution were the forces of order remained unchanged? Is France still stuck in hippie, utopian 1960s thinking?! Perhaps they are… it leads to regression, individualism and nihilism.

This political-cultural backwardness and conservatism of many Yellow Vests cannot cannot be repaired by an 8-part series, nor by protests which only attracted 2% (1.3 million) of the nation on its biggest day (the first Yellow Vest demonstration, on November 17, 2018, – data according to a police union, not the French Interior Ministry).

So when I wrote that “everyone knows” the Yellow Vests are the majority, that is true – the problem is that they don’t act like it!

It is amazing how effectively the French political class is able to suppress polling about the Yellow Vests. This suppression coincided with March 23, when President Emmanuel Macron deployed the army, unveiled even harsher measures of repression and banned of urban demonstrations. The latest poll I can find, from a month ago (even though this is the most important issue in French society) still has their approval rating at 50%, and that follows months of anti-Yellow Vest propaganda.

But being a Yellow Vest and merely supporting the Yellow Vests are two different things entirely. After all, the latter can be appeased even more easily than a right-wing Yellow Vest can be bought off. The Yellow Vests are the cultural majority but not the political majority.

Therefore, what the Yellow Vests are is this: they are the nation’s political vanguard party.

However – there is no “nation” anymore. There is no more political and economic sovereignty in Europe, and that is a concrete, structural, “rule of law” reality and not hyperbole.

The prime adulthood of France, and 41-year old Macron exemplifies this 100%, is full of people who grew up being culturally inculcated into blindly and hysterically supporting not modern socialist democratic ideals, but instead the neoliberal empire known as the European Union, and also the even more undemocratic banking empire known as the Eurozone.

Therefore, there is no “France” for the Yellow Vests to be – as they should – raised upon the People’s shoulders and put into power nationwide; the Yellow Vests, thus, have to be a pan-European movement in order to succeed in their aims. We are talking about an order of magnitude, here.

The reality is that the Yellow Vest movement reflects the same schizophrenia as most Western governments and societies: this is succinctly encapsulated by a favourite phrase and policy of the West’s – “humanitarian intervention” (whatever that is – as though nations were dogs which were humanely euthanised).

Vesters are certainly clearer than most – this is why they are the vanguard party, i.e. the most enlightened local leaders – but they also partially suffer from the tremendous cognitive dissonance and intellectual fog caused by the intersection of European neo-imperialism, bourgeois-centered European Enlightenment ideals, and the undemocratic concepts and political structures of the liberal democratic European Union empire.

Yellow Vests, especially on the right-wing of their spectrum, are often so blinded by their “glorious” view of France’s (bourgeois) “revolutionary history that they have not updated their political thought in 200+ years – they don’t want to admit their revolution was not enough; that they probably need a true revolution before a 2nd revolution; that the CRs of Chain and Iran should be their model.

And yet they do admit this….

Simply review number 7 on the list of their 25 primary demands: “Rewriting a Constitution by the people and for the interest the sovereign people.” It’s the latter part which would require a revolution in French/Western culture because it is obviously rooted in socialist democratic ideals; the people were not sovereign in US and French Revolutions (the only Western nations to have revolutions), as non-Whites, women and the poor, landless masses were all most glaringly excluded, of course.

This “they do but they don’t” is exactly why French society is both “revolutionary” in self-conception but incredibly reactionary in practice.

It would take a Cultural Revolution to sort out these issues, and that is what the Yellow Vests are truly asking for; it is the leftist ones which are willing to slough off the ancient husk of 1789, not the right-wing Vesters.

Any way you look at it, two things are clear: the Yellow Vests still have very far to go, and victory will look like Cultural Revolution.

Series Conclusion

This series emphatically demonstrated that China’s post-1980 economic success did not start with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms but instead was built upon on the Cultural Revolution’s hugely successful creation of human, educational, and economic capital in China’s rural areas.

By focusing on and promoting the values of the rural areas, China has soared past us all today – this is the hidden lesson of the CR and the genius of Maoism.

Han’s book, this series, and the lessons of the Cultural Revolution should have tremendous interest for developing countries – the CR is a blueprint for lifting essentially non-industrial societies into the socioeconomic stratosphere. The blueprint is not provided by the IMF – they have certainly had decades of chances.

The idea that China’s success is due to being a “Western sweatshop” is, it is rarely remembered, merely a way to credit the West for China’s success. No, it is due to Chinese innovations and adaptions of ideas already present around the globe.

A key flaw in Western capitalist allegations that the CR was simply a way for Mao to gain control: if that’s true – what could he have possibly gained by encouraging criticism of Confucius? The CCP was already in control – there was no “pro-Confucian Party” which was taking the CCP’s power. Confucianism is an inherently conservative ideal – why rock that boat? Bring up this point to those who are anti-CR and they will certainly be totally flummoxed.

But criticising Confucianism – which is such a thrillingly productive and superbly admirable philosophy which I have learned much from for years – was a way to pull down the dominant class and replace it with the oppressed classes.

However, Chinese culture remains incredibly Confucian, any Chinese person will tell you. I predict that one day the ubiquitous phrase “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” will be replaced with a regional generalisation of “Confucian Socialism”, and this phrase will describe not just China but include Vietnam, Korea and (hopefully) others. This is exactly the same as how “Iranian Islamic Socialism” is a variant of the larger “Islamic Socialism”. These truths are self-evident, if not yet fully flowered….

When discussing the anti-Confucius campaigns, Han writes: “But it had specific meaning for ordinary people. The major theme of the campaign was to criticize the elitist mentality in Chinese culture. It promoted Mao’s idea that the masses are the motive force of history and that the elite are sometimes stupid while working people are intelligent. These were not empty words. Villagers toiled all year round, supplying the elite with grain, meat and vegetables. But they were made to feel stupid in front of the elite. They did not know how to talk with the elite, and accepted the stigma of stupidity the elite gave to them.”

This idea – that rural Trash are stupid, that urban leaders are right to view themselves as “elite” – is something which has to be remedied in the West, or else Western society can never be whole. The rural-urban divide is the most urgent divide in the West today, but the CR shows it can be resolved.

Unfortunately, because they adhere to capitalism-imperialism, many nation in the West are not trying to be united at all – their people subsist on contempt for “the other” as well as competition to join the 1%, as capitalism-imperialism ceaselessly instructs them.

**********************************

This was the final article in an 8-part series which examined Dongping Han’s book The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village in order to drastically redefine a decade which has proven to be not just the basis of China’s current success, but also a beacon of hope for developing countries worldwide. Here is the list of articles slated to be published, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Part 1 – A much-needed revolution in discussing China’s Cultural Revolution: an 8-part series

Part 2 – The story of a martyr FOR, and not BY, China’s Cultural Revolution

Part 3 – Why was a Cultural Revolution needed in already-Red China?

Part 4 – How the Little Red Book created a cult ‘of socialism’ and not ‘of Mao’

Part 5 – Red Guards ain’t all red: Who fought whom in China’s Cultural Revolution?

Part 6 – How the socioeconomic gains of China’s Cultural Revolution fuelled their 1980s boom

Part 7 – Ending a Cultural Revolution can only be counter-revolutionary

Part 8 – What the West can learn: Yellow Vests are demanding a Cultural Revolution

[harryandmeghan0-blog]

Royal wedding: Meghan Markle's induction into the Royal family is a break from conservative customs

New Post has been published on https://harryandmeghan.xyz/royal-wedding-meghan-markles-induction-into-the-royal-family-is-a-break-from-conservative-customs/

Royal wedding: Meghan Markle's induction into the Royal family is a break from conservative customs

Updated May 19, 2018 19:28:46

It was 101 years ago that King George V (the present Queen’s grandfather) decided to relax the door policy on spouses marrying into the Royal family.

What time does the Royal wedding start?

Previously, English princes and princesses — to keep the bloodline impeccably noble — had tended to marry their royal German cousins, but with that gene pool becoming not only soupier but more politically awkward thanks to World War I, King George initiated a snap rebrand.

He changed the English Royal family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gothe to the more patriotic “Windsor”, and let it be known that from now on, it was fine for heirs to the British throne to marry among the broader aristocracy.

For all the Royals’ feted attachment to tradition, the choice of “Windsor” has no family significance apart from it being the name of the vast medieval castle in which George’s grandmother, Queen Victoria, spent much of her time.

Victoria kept many servants there, including, for a brief time in the 1850s, a woman called Mary Bird. History has forgotten Mary and what she actually did for the Royal household.

But enthusiastic genealogists have claimed that her great-great-great-granddaughter is one Meghan Markle, due to leave the Windsors’ eponymous castle just after midday today (British time) having married into the family.

Such is the changing nature of the royal tradition.

The monarchy is an ancient institution whose admittance of Ms Markle — divorced, Catholic-born, biracial, American, and an actress who has done sex scenes on the television — is a genuine break from conservative customs.

But if history has proven anything about the Royal family, it’s that it will turn on a sixpence when required by urgent popular opinion.

Photo: Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle represent a new generation of Royals. (Reuters: Andrew Milligan)

A long-line of broken hearts

The century-long road of the Windsors is lined with the broken hearts of family members who — despite the free aristocratic love policy introduced by George V — still found themselves prohibited from marrying their first choices.

Edward VIII — the Queen’s uncle — famously abdicated in 1936 so that he could marry his twice-divorced American lover, Wallis Simpson.

Princess Margaret was never quite the same after the Queen — her sister — withheld Royal permission for her to marry the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend in the 1950s.

And as Meghan Markle proceeds down the aisle today, one should probably spare a thought for Prince Andrew, who like Prince Harry is a second son but unlike Harry was steered off his own beautiful brunette American actress girlfriend — Koo Stark — in the 1980s because it was judged that her movies were too racy.

Photo: Prince Andrew photographed in 1998 chatting to his former girlfriend, Katherine (Koo) Stark. (Reuters: Stringer)

“Welcome, Meghan, to the Twilight Zone,” wrote Stark in an open letter published recently to Ms Markle in the Daily Mail.

“The xenophobia that existed 35 years ago is fortunately less socially and politically acceptable now, but be aware old habits die hard, and the circles in which you now find yourself by association are propped up by maintaining old habits.”

Marriage of Meghan and Harry is ‘great PR’

Royal historian Anna Whitelock says that for all the family’s ancient traditions, it relies heavily on public approbation, and the marriage of a second son like Prince Harry can send a powerful public message without structurally changing the monarchy itself.

“If you remember, Diana had to be a virgin basically, even in the 1980s, because of course she was going to carry the Royal heir, the future king, so it mattered,” she says.

“For Meghan Markle — and this is why I think Harry and Meghan’s marriage is being applauded and is being supported by the Royal family and the monarchy — is it doesn’t really rock the boat.

“It’s great PR to have this young glamorous mixed-race woman marrying into the Royal family, but it doesn’t change anything fundamentally about what the monarchy’s about, about its future.”

Dr Whitelock emphasises the monarchy and the Royal family are two different things, and while the family might embrace diversity, the monarchy by definition is built on exclusivity and birthright.

The abdication of Edward VIII was triggered by the Crown’s indisposition toward American divorcees, and that attitude has demonstrably changed.

But that abdication continues to exert an immense and powerful influence on the future of the monarchy.

First, it created the extraordinary reign of Queen Elizabeth II, by hustling her sickly father George VI to the throne unexpectedly, then obliging the young Elizabeth to take over upon his early death.

Elizabeth — who has been on the throne now for 66 years — is the longest-reigning monarch in her country’s history.

Second, it’s made the matter of succession in the modern day Royal family a highly inflexible affair.

Dr Whitelock says any talk of the Queen abdicating in favour of her frustrated eldest son Prince Charles — or more controversially, as is sometimes suggested, skipping a generation and elevating Prince William to the throne — is fanciful.

“It’s not going to happen,” she says.

“Abdication is completely anathema to her … her uncle abdicated and the crisis that that threw the monarchy into … the fact that her father had to suddenly step up and be king … abdication’s never going to happen.”

Prince Charles, she says, is likewise unlikely to cede his claim to the throne.

“Charles has spoken really openly and said basically he wants to be king, he wants to have a legacy, he has been waiting all his life,” Dr Whitelock said.

“I mean he literally has itchy feet. He’s been the longest-serving Prince of Wales ever and he’s desperate to be king.”

It’s time to ‘freshen up’ an ageing institution

In ages gone by, kings died young in battle, or from disease, or were overthrown.

But in these days of minimal regal engagement in hand-to-hand combat, buttressed by sound healthcare and nutrition, the line of succession has — how to put this tactfully? — an ageing profile.

The Queen, who is of stout constitution, could rule for another 10 years. Her son could manage another 20 after that, quite conceivably.

So for all the current enthusiasm for the “Fab Four” — the younger generation of Royals comprising Princes William and Harry and their wives Catherine and Meghan — they could be quite advanced in years by the time any of their number make it to the front of the queue.

Photo: The younger generation of royals could be quite advanced in years by the time any of them make it to the front of the queue. (AP: Chris Jackson)

“It’s a nightmare,” Dr Whitelock says.

“It’s like the ultimate waiting room. It’s like — ‘Go on! You’re not supposed to be hanging around this long! We need to freshen it up!'”

An heir who waits around for six decades to take the throne has — of course — plenty of time to lose their appeal.

Prince Charles, through his disastrous first marriage and his controversial second, is a habitual tail-ender in public opinion polls.

Photo: Prince Charles and Camilla on their wedding day in 2005. (Reuters: Toby Melville )

And with two generations waiting in line, there is also ample opportunity for schisms to form between heirs.

Already there are reported tensions between the courtiers of Buckingham Palace, Prince Charles’ base at Clarence House, and Kensington Palace (where princes Harry and William live).

“There are three centres,” says Dr Whitelock, “but really where it’s all at is Kensington Palace, which is the home of and the offices of, William and Harry, Kate and Meghan. That’s really where it’s at.

“And the people they are employing to staff that — they’re young people. Meghan’s got a 20-something history graduate from Nottingham University [running things] and these young people are going to be advising her on which charities to support and her itineraries and what they should be doing and it’s very much a slick PR media machine.”

Asked who would prevail in an all-out PR war, Dr Whitelock says, without hesitation:

“Kensington Palace. I think they are all over this wedding and for the first time it’s coming from there, much more than William and Kate’s wedding, it’s being drip fed through social media, it’s a global wedding.”

Fruitcake out, disco in

Photo: Prince Harry greets crowds in Windsor ahead of the wedding. (AP: Frank Augustein)

The wedding itself is undoubtedly a modern affair.

Gone is the nine-foot wedding fruitcake of Elizabeth II (made from dried fruit donated by Australian Girl Guides) slices of which periodically surface at auction.

In its place is a highly perishable lemon and elderflower affair, the remains of which will be composted rather than hoarded.

The guest list is remarkably free of world leaders and stuffy relatives. There will be a disco later.

And the Royal family is admitting newcomers it would have found unthinkable a generation ago.

When the Queen battled in 1947 for her right to marry Prince Philip (a penniless Greek prince of eccentric family, who was moreover considered untrustworthy on the grounds of his excessive handsomeness), she would never have foreseen that one day she would be welcoming to the extended family an air stewardess (Kate Middleton’s mother) or a yoga teacher (Meghan Markle’s).

However, it’s advisable not to get too carried away; we’re still talking about a woman who — by virtue of a 14th-century statute — owns all sturgeon caught within three miles of the British coastline (dolphins, too).

Whose presence in any one of her castles is denoted by the raising above it of a special gold flag.

Who receives, once a year, a royal quit-rent from the City of London consisting of one sharp knife, one blunt, six horseshoes and 61 nails.

This is an outfit that holds on to tradition wherever it can.

Topics: royal-and-imperial-matters, human-interest, united-kingdom, england

First posted May 19, 2018 08:30:13

[apeurolol-blog]

Chapter 13 - Renaissance Notes

The fourteenth century witnessed the beginning of remarkable changes in the Italian society and in the fifteenth century, this “Renaissance” spread to northern Europe. Italy , particularly in Florence, produced a new attitude towards the world. The Renaissance (rebirth) was the product of men who saw the Middle Ages as a dark times and believed they were resuming a civilization like that of the Greco-Romans. * We must realize that the languages and nationalities, the institutions of laws government and the economy all originated in the Middle Ages. * However, the Renaissance did mark a new era in thought and feeling, particularly in the areas of literature and the arts. 

   -  The first artistic and literary manifestations of the Italian Renaissance appeared in Florence but toward the end of the thirteenth century, Florentine merchants and bankers acquired control of papal banking (acted as tax collectors for the papacy).  For Florence, profits from loans, investments, and money exchanges contributed to the city’s economy but the wool industry was the major factor in the city’s financial expansion and population increase as they purchased the best quality of wool.  The economic foundations of Florence were so strong that even severe crises could not destroy the city such as huge debts of King Edward III or the Black Death.

   - Everything sucked before the Renaissance, for instance…   

Black Plague and All Its Complications   Abruptly, almost half of the population was wiped out, a combination of sporadic local famines and the bubonic plague, which first struck in 1348.  There were massive insurrections of peasants, as Wat Tyler’s rebellion in England in 1381; begun over local grievances, these insurrections also led to spokesman questioning the class structure. -  Taxpayer resistance made this period a golden age of medieval parliaments. -  the Hundred Years War (1327-1453) between England and France. Battles were fought sporadically in France, with England winning all major pitched battles (longbow) and the French ultimately winning the war due to the rise of French national patriotism. - 

The Church    This Great Schism lasts from 1378 to 1414. -  John Wyclif, a teacher at Oxford, began to question the elaborate possessions of the church; he even began to doubt the necessity of an organized Church in achieving salvation. -  The result of this struggle was that real church problems could not be dealt with: Bribery and simony, the buying and selling of church offices were rampant; many churchmen had mistresses, and frequently gave lucrative church positions to children or other relatives (nepotism). Perhaps worst, indulgences, or the sparing of certain of the temporal punishments of purgatory, could be obtained for money–though of course the sinner must be properly confessed, absolved, and truly repentant. - [ Martin Luther’s explosion was set off in 1517 by the sale of indulgences by a friar named Tetzel, who was helping to finance the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. Luther, who thought the people were being deluded, posted 95 theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg and offered to debate these propositions concerning penance. His main point was the a sinner is freed not by the priest’s absolution but by the sinner’s inner grace and faith alone. Theses were soon printed and spread through Europe. When Pope Leo X refused to act against indulgences or even call a church council, Luther announced that the right to define belief was a matter for the individual, reading the Bible and freely making his own interpretation after his own conscience. – John Calvin, Calvinists, trained as a priest and lawyer, became a Protestant quickly and produced the Institutes of the Christian Religion.. He agreed with most of the main religious ideas of Luther, though he viewed communion as only a symbolic act. The main difference was his view that God, all knowing, had predetermined each soul’s salvation or damnation. ]

   -  Northern Italian cities were communes, worn associations of free men seeking complete political and economic independence from local nobles and fought for and won independence. A new force, popolo, disenfranchised and heavily taxed, bitterly resenting their exclusion from power, wanted places in the communal government.  Marriage vows often sealed business contracts between the rural nobility and the mercantile aristocracy forming the new social class, an urban nobility. New class made citizenship in the communes dependent on a property qualification, years of residence within the city, and social connections.  The popolo could not establish civil order within their cities and the movements for republican government failed and by 1300, signori (despots) or oligarchies (rule of merchant aristocracies) had triumphed everywhere Nostalgia for the Roman form of government, combined with calculating shrewdness, prompted the leaders of Venice, Milan, and Florence to use the old form.  In the fifteenth century, five powers dominated the Italian peninsula: Venice, Milan, Florence, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples.

   -  A humanism characterized by a deep interest in the Latin classics and a deliberate attempt to revive antique lifestyles emerged.  The literary movement was called humanism because of the rising interest in humane letters–writing about mankind. These humanists wrote in classic Latin, largely because they admired the classical forms and style, and partly because the ancients were interested in this world. Most wrote in the Italian of Florence, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which thus become a standard (vernacular).  He stressed classical scholarship and produced a moral philosophy no longer exclusively tied to religion but raising questions like what the good life ought to be and what the ultimate rewards of life were.  Where medieval writers accepted pagan and classical authors uncritically, Renaissance humanists were skeptical of their authority. Renaissance humanists studied human nature, and while they fully grasped the moral thought of pagan antiquity, Renaissance humanists viewed humanity from a strongly Christian perspective: men and women were made in the image and likeness of God. [ Secularism involves a basic concern with the material world instead of with the eternal world of spirit and thinking finds the explanation of everything and the final end of human beings. ]  Christian humanists believe that the best elements of classical and Christian cultures should be combined for example, classical ideals of calmness, stoical patience, and broad-mindedness with Christian virtues of love, faith, and hope. Northern humanists were impatient with Scholastic philosophy and believed it was capable of improvement through education, which would lead to peaty and an ethical way of life. 

lets talk politics   Italy did not unify, and most states passed from republicanism to despotism. Wars were common, and involved professional mercenaries known as condotierri; private leaders of armed bands. Politics became a tangled web involving subterfuge and conspiracy; states worked within an intricate, shifting, local balance of power. Machiavelli’s The Prince was written to convince Italians of the need for unity and provide a handbook of statecraft. Machiavelli concluded that human beings are selfish and out to advance their own interest and this pessimistic view of humanity held him to maintain that the prince may have to manipulate the people in any way he finds necessary (fox and lion). – Dictators and oligarchs of the Italian city-states preferred to be secure, rather than loved. These monarchs were new in that they invested kingship with a strong sense of royal authority and national purpose; they stressed that monarchy was the one institution that linked all classes and peoples within definite territorial boundaries. These monarchs ruthlessly suppressed opposition and rebellion, especially from the noble. –  Europe seemed on the verge of a “universal monarchy.” That it did not happen is due to a complex series of events involving the decline of the Church and the rise of humanism; the rise of “new” monarchs who wished to control all elements within their kingdoms, including the church; the resistance of feudal lords to these same monarchs; division of Germany, the zeal of Spain, the power of Charles V, and the fears felt in the rest of Europe, (esp France), of absorption by the empire of the Habsburgs. –  Henry VII used these assemblies primarily to confirm laws and Parliament remained the highest court in the land and a statute approved there by the lords, bishops, and Commons gave the appearance of broad national support plus thorough judicial authority. The center of royal authority was the royal council which handled any business the king put before it - executive, legislative or judicial.

   - In the Renaissance the social status of the artist improved as the Renaissance artist was considered a free intellectual worker and usually worked on commission from a powerful prince; thus the artist’s reputation depended on the support of the powerful patrons. Renaissance society respected and rewarded the distinguished artist Renaissance artists were not only aware of their creative power, they also boasted about it; some medieval painters and sculptors had signed their works but now, Renaissance artists almost universally did so, and many of them incorporated self-portraits. Religious themes appeared in all media—wood, carvings, painted frescoes, stone sculptures, paintings; art served as educational purpose—a religious picture or statue was intended to spread a particular doctrine, act as a profession of faith. 

   -  Printing transformed both the private and the public lives of Europeans making propaganda possible, emphasizing differences between opposing groups, such church and state. Printing also stimulated the literacy of lay people and eventually came to have a deep effect on their private lives; printers printed moralizing, medical, practical, and travel manuals Since books and other printed materials were read aloud to illiterate listeners, print bridged the gap between written and oral cultures.

let’s give it up for the LAAADDDIEEESSS   During the Renaissance the status of upper-class women declined – in terms of the kind of work they performed, their access to property and political power, and their role in shaping the outlook of their society, women had generally less power than women in the feudal age.  In cities of Renaissance Italy, young ladies learned their letters and studied the classics and many read Greek as well as Latin, knew poetry, and could speak Spanish or French. Women’s inferiority was derived not from the divine order of things but from themselves. Men frequently believed that in becoming learned, a woman ceased to be a woman. ya know, the stereotypical men are better BS.  In Castiglione’s The Courtier, the woman was to make herself pleasing to the man; with respect to love and sex, the Renaissance witnessed a downward shift in the women’s status. 

   -  But beginning in the fifteenth century, sizable numbers of black slaves entered Europe.  Most Europeans’ knowledge of the black as a racial type were based entirely on theological speculation; theologians taught that God was light and so blackness, therefore represented the hostile forces of the underworld: evil, sin, and the devil.  Blackness symbolized the emptiness of worldly goods, the humility of the monastic way of life; black clothes permitted a conservative and discreet display of wealth (Christ had said that those who mourn are those who are blessed). 

[mosaiciifinalprojectblog-blog]

Wollstonecraft talks about the social order in different capacities.  Perhaps the most unique way (compared to the other authors we read) is when she talks about the way the government is structured.  Wollstonecraft seems to be alluding to a possibility that a similar struggle that resulted in the creation of new governments is happening again.  This and the way the social order was constructed at the time can be seen in the quote: “In the infancy of society, when men were just emerging out of barbarism, chiefs and priests, touching the most powerful springs of savage conduct, hope and fear, must have had unbounded sway. An aristocracy, of course, is naturally the first form of government. But, clashing interests soon losing their equipoise, a monarchy and hierarchy break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, and the foundation of both is secured by feudal tenures. This appears to be the origin of monarchical and priestly power, and the dawn of civilization.”  Wollstonecraft seems to think that since now people are gaining more knowledge some are wondering why that have to take orders from certain people.  Wollstonecraft also seems to think that a new form of government should be created now;  that people have reached a time in which reason is valued.  In this new form of government she thinks it should be one run by those with superior knowledge.