#they are winning the propaganda war so much it doesn’t matter if there is zero truth to the things they’re saying

[sunsoakedsand]

the whole fetal heartbeat thing drives me insaneeee because it’s so ascientific like cardiac muscle cells will contract just growing in a petri dish…doesn’t mean they’re a person

[porta-decumana]

Here, I'll help you with some asks!

For Cassius...

- Did he have any older or younger siblings? If not, what were his interactions with his parent(s)/guardian(s) like as a child?

- Did/Does he have any sort of hobbies?

- What are some of his views on Garleans that have defected?

- How about beliefs?

- If not at "work", what kind(s) of outfits does he like to wear casually?

- With the current events, how does he look at Eorzea and other nations as a whole?

- Favorite colors?

- If he could settle down by himself, or with a partner, where would he place his residence?

- How does he feel about Gaius van Baelsar? ;)

- What food does he like to eat? Least favorite?

- If has a current residence, how does it look? (messy, clean, etc)

- Cassius is the only child of Subrius and Hadriana Flavus. Despite attempts to conceive other children, his parents were unable to do so and thus spent the majority of their time doting upon their son. Around the age of nine, Subrius was enveloped in a conspiracy to assassinate Solus zos Galvus. Ultimately, the attempt failed and Cassius's father was killed during the attack by Solus himself. This left Cassius and his mother disgraced, despite being ignorant of the rebellion. They fell out of favor with the Emperor and most social circles quickly shunned them. A sizeable portion of their wealth was seized for damages done to the Imperial Palace, adding insult to injury. Solus made the Flavus family into an example and soon enough, Cassius and his mother were both effectively bankrupt. He grew up being a devoted momma's boy. Understandably, losing everything was traumatic to Hadriana and to make matters worse, she began to show symptoms of a chronic illness that steadily ate away at her energy. Because she was unable to work, it fell on Cassius to provide for both of them, a task he undertook at a very young age. He remains very close to Hadriana, who is bedridden more often than not these days.

The rest is under the cut because long!

- When he was still rich, he was actually quite gifted at music-- particularly piano. He still plays every so often. He wanted to take up violin at one point but he doesn't have time for it. I'm not sure if poledancing counts as a hobby because he mostly took it up for expanding his repertoire when he was working as a prostitute.

- His view of defectors is pretty negative, mostly due to his father being a traitor. He was treated poorly because of Subrius's actions and doubles down on his own performative patriotism to convince others that he was not a “dirty traitor” like his father-- even if he doesn’t necessarily like or agree with what the Empire was doing.  Gaius betraying the Empire and being accused of killing Varis was like salt in the wound for him, especially because he and a few others were blamed for letting the Black Wolf back into the city-- something he holds against Gaius heavily, as it resulted in him being conscripted into the VIIth Legion under one Valens van Varro.  In The Last Light of Dawn and pre-Shadowbringers, his view is that the Empire is an unstoppable force that will eventually win the war against Eorzea.  However, presently in the canon, he’s given up on the Empire and has gone entirely rogue out of a need for survival.  He served under Zenos during Stormblood and knows better than to trust him as an emperor.  So, in a way, he’s a bit of a defector himself depending on the verse you’re looking at.

- Pretty firmly atheist in terms of religion.  Doesn’t particularly care for the idea of gods playing with people’s fates.  

- Sweaters.  Anything comfy and snuggly.  Has a lot more winter clothes than summer clothes.  He does have his fair share of tank tops because he enjoys flaunting his looks.  He has zero shame.  Absolutely.  No shame.  He knows he’s pretty and he will make your head turn in his direction.

- Shaking Imperial propaganda is hard, especially when one has firmly set themselves in certain beliefs in order to come across a certain way.  Cassius doesn’t dislike Eorzea or other nations.  He views things fairly objectively-- eikons seem pretty bad so those should probably be destroyed.  The lack of technology in some areas makes certain civilizations seem more primitive but he doesn’t really jump on the idea that Eorzeans are savages.  He will play the part of acting that way, however, because he wants everyone to know that he’s very loyal to Garlemald (out of fear of what could happen to him or his mother otherwise).  But the reality is he has no real opinion one way or another about other nations, so long as they aren’t doing things like summoning gods to kill them all... then he might have a problem with that.

- Black, gold, and red.

- Honestly, I think he would pick pre-destroyed Garlemald for the convenience of technology and he doesn’t really mind cold weather.  Doma is a close second, however.  He quite liked the sights there.  He thought Ala Mhigo was a bit too arid and dusty.

- HAHAHAHA ooohhhh boy.  Cassius falls for others easily.  He sees the charm in a lot of people, but he likes to lie and pretend like everything is all “no strings attached”.  Gaius was one of those times where it was supposed to be “no strings attached” but they were both hurting in their own ways and it became something of a “we’re kind of best friends but also we’re sharing a bed”.  The tow hit it off pretty instantly both as friends and as sexual partners.  Cassius tried to think of Gaius as a fling but caught feelings.  Gaius, still recovering from losing Midas to tempering, also caught feelings but more in the rebound sense.  Then Gaius “died” and Cassius was heartbroken (also partially insistent that he wasn’t actually dead).  House Baelsar was sort of in a shaky position since Gaius had gone to Eorzea without permission.  Then Varis was allegedly murdered by Gaius and Cassius (along with the other two of Gaius’s paramours) was believed to be an accomplice for it.  Cassius felt ultimately betrayed by it all, especially cause Gaius never told him he was still alive.  So there’s some resentment there.  However, through all the bad feelings, Cassius still cares for Gaius.  He’s just very, very mad at him atm in every verse.  Whew, that got wordy, I hope that makes sense.

- He loves salty food.  I often joke that he bums around on Gaius and Kaida’s couch eating chips and being their annoying third wheel roommate.  Least favorite food is anything ultra sweet. 

- His quarters are mostly clean and organized.  He will occasionally leave his bed unmade or leaving a shirt laying around.  Mostly, though, he tends to keep organized.  

Thank you so much for the ask, this really helped me!

[punkrockpolitix]

Trumpism and the Tyranny of the Minority

by Mitch Maley — I'm often asked why self-described patriots seem to be okay with fascism or how those who scream in defense of concepts such as liberty and freedom can fail to be troubled by our slide toward totalitarianism, but such questions seem to miss the larger point.

Trumpism isn't a new phenomenon or even unique to the man at its helm. It is simply the logical end point for the so-called Tea Party movement that has completely taken over traditional conservatism in the past decade, a movement that aims to fully impose the will of a minority, even if their views are grossly out of step with most Americans.

In that sense, 2010 was the official end of bipartisan government, the moment the opposition became the enemy. It became more dangerous to reach across the aisle than to sit on your hands and do nothing, unless you could do everything your constituents wanted. It became a zero sum game in which half a loaf of bread was worse than none at all.

Make no mistake, extremism—whether it comes from the right or the left—is always about minority rule. Otherwise, the beliefs would be mainstream. Donald Trump was only the fourth president in U.S. history to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, and he did it with less of a share of the total vote (46.9) than any of the others. Not once during his presidency has his approval rate hit 50 percent, and it's recently been as low as 35.

I point this out because to hear his supporters tell it, they are part of a silent majority, despite what the math tells us. However, minority rule has been at the core of this movement from the beginning—at least for its architects. From restrictive voting laws clearly meant to suppress opposition turnout (including the current misinformation campaign on vote by mail) to packing the courts with judges that hold views grossly out of step with the majority of Americans and seeking to subvert the Supreme Court decision on a woman's right to choose with laws meant to curtail the ability of women to access abortion under bogus pretenses, the right-wing platform has increasingly become about a minority of people imposing their beliefs on a majority who find them objectionable.

Sure, there are memes, slogans and talking points that attempt to rationalize things like voter ID laws, limitations on early voting, requiring OBGYNs to have admitting privileges near their clinics or that the clinics to be expensively retrofitted to meet arbitrary codes, and on and on across a broad spectrum of issues, but when you read the literature of the think tanks and policy groups that craft such legislation, their objective is clear: How do we get what we want, without the power of the majority behind us?

One way is to argue that the rules favor the minority view, which is why there are always so many lay constitutional scholars ready to tell us how things like universal health care, mask mandates during a pandemic, sensible environmental regulation and other policies favored by a majority of Americans run afoul of the founder's intent, even if those same experts fail to find their voice each time this president tramples on the Constitution on behalf of something they agree with.

But gerrymandering districts so that you can keep at least part of Congress under your control despite getting less total Congressional votes cycle after cycle, or packing courts with sympathetic judges who might uphold the unconstitutional laws you are able to get passed is part of the kind of long game most people don't have patience for. In the end, if you want to see your country look exactly the way you want—and most of your fellow Americans do not share your vision—there is only one route: ceding power to a totalitarian dictator who has been able to turn minority support into presidential power and is willing to dance to any song his supporters play, so long as they provide the means for him to remain in power—legitimately or otherwise.

It is in this effort that fascism becomes quite useful, for it allows the minority to actually claim defense of our freedoms against an enemy that can now be identified as the other, an outsider group who they don't need to count among their numbers, as those people are now the enemy, making for a false reality in which they are no longer a minority but rather a majority of real Americans who love their country and are therefore intent on stopping the evil others at all costs.

Fascism is, at its core, not an ideology. Most simply put, it is an attack from the right on the left, on the basis that the central tenets of liberalism represent a constant threat of socialist takeover that is always close to being upon us. Draped in nationalism and an appeal to a brand of inherent righteousness most commonly found in religious movements, it should be no surprise that its adherents often espouse rhetoric that is just as dogmatic and evangelical.

Conversely, socialism is, in many ways, a similar attack on the perceived inherent evils of capitalism. Like fascist revolutions, socialist ones routinely justify violent insurrection, theft and even the execution of those who do not bend their knee, as necessary nearly to the point of being benevolent—regardless of the majority's will. One need not look further than the recent upheaval in Seattle, where a group of left-wing radicals vandalized private property while occupying six city blocks and making ridiculous demands until eventually devolving into the deadly chaos of a miniature failed state. The means to take power already exist through democratic channels, but because a majority is needed to seize it, the malcontent convince themselves that such a system is inherently corrupt to the degree that such criminal reappropriations are not only justified but completely necessary in order to force their minority view on the rest of the community who so desperately needs to live by it, even if they don’t realize it yet.

What the extreme left and extreme right have in common is an unwavering belief that there is but one way to do things—theirs. The big difference, however, is that while the extreme left doesn't even like the Democratic Party, even the progressive left is but a fringe force in a party almost wholly controlled by right of center NeoLiberals who drape themselves in progressive slogans, while remaining contemptuous of progressive politics.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement has, in just 10 years, completely vanquished the NeoConservative forces that preceded it as the power center of the Republican Party. Trump's election in 2016 signaled the passing of the torch, or rather it being pried from the cold, dead hands of the House of Bush. The extreme right, very much unlike the extreme left, is in control, with both the White House and the Senate under its wing. Those who haven't bent their knee in fealty to Trump and his tribe like former NeoCon stalwarts Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley and Mitch McConnell have, have either been marooned in a political no man’s land (Mitt Romney) or have gotten out.

What's left of the NeoConservative Republicans is now part of team Biden, seeing far more commonality with the NeoLiberals than Trump's crowd. That should be no surprise. The majority of Democrats and Republicans of 2000-2010 disagreed on little when it came down to brass tacks. Sure, they dangled identity politics, social issues and class warfare as red meat for the crowd, but when it came to Wall Street, globalization, bad trade deals and forever wars, they had much in common and were happy to divy the loot.

Of course, if you're a Trump supporter, you might be inclined to think something totally different. To hear his campaign frame the 2020 election, he's not running against the guy who wrote the crime bill, voted for every war and military spending bill ever put before him and routinely worked across the aisle to make deals. No, they're running against Antifa, AOC, looters in Portland and the impending socialist revolution that will always be on the verge of taking over, lest Donald J. Trump protects us.

Why? Because there's not a very sound argument for minority rule or trading democracy for autocracy to get it, unless the wolves are at the door and your only choices are giving up your freedoms or being eaten alive. For many Trump supporters, the constant rhetoric and propaganda has led them to a place where they truly believe there's that much at stake in November. It doesn't matter that the streets were peaceful when he took office or that Americans have never been as divided as they have become under his rule, at least since the Civil War. That's not because of his actions. In their minds, it's in spite of them. If Biden were to win, every American city would be overtaken by violent leftists, AOC and the Squad would be pulling his strings, and their country would become unrecognizable. Of course they would hand over any power needed to the one man who could save them from such horrors.

For the rest of us, the country has already become unrecognizable since 2016, and in the worst way possible. We're living their nightmare and the notion that four more years of Trump (or perhaps more, given his regular references to deserving a third term) might indeed see the United States slide into a totalitarian autocracy in which dissenters or even those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about Dear Leader could be sent off to the gulags seems all too possible. The only thing that remains certain is that it won't be over on November 3, no matter who wins. America is at the crossroads of a cultural reckoning, and it will take more than just a presidential election for it to fully play out.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

[pierrehardy]

China vs America: Europe will decide

In just half of this wretched year, the world’s trust in China was cut in half. The current and crumbling world order is still American built. Or to be more precise, Western-built with American leadership, founded on principles of a liberal and open society. So what happens when a rival rises up to challengethe leader’s might, who is currently not acting like one? A rival that has a different ideology, at that. You get a quake that threatens to crumble the current world order.

On one side is the champion, America. On the other, the challenger, China. Whoever wins is whoever the rest of the world chooses to side with. I argue that the most significant determinant of that is the world’s old champion who still has considerable sway today, which has at least two of the past world leaders: Europe.

Europe and China

Not too long ago, Europe tried to be the diplomatic best-of-both-worlds kind of mediator between China and America. Europe nurtured its long-founded transatlantic alliance with America and was warm towards a growing China. Then came 2020, where China did a three-hit combo on trust. The first one is China’s repression of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang. This systematic act appalled Europeans due to its genocidal nature. The second was the virus, which originated in China. The country’s first response was to cover it up,  which really doesn’t inspire trust. When they vanquished their second wave, China’s obnoxious trumpeting of triumph and crass jumping at the propaganda opportunity left a bad taste in Europeans’ mouths. The third is China’s blatant breaking of the handover treaty between the UK and China regarding Hong Kong’s promised autonomy until 2047. The passage of the national law went above what’s necessary, violating the treaty, and signaling that China puts self-interest above the rule of law. It’s hard to play with a country that does not play nice and fair.

Then there’s America, escalating its campaign to cripple Huawei. This Huawei kerfuffle is catalyzing the decaying relationship between the West and Europe. Europe was initially not as hostile as America towards Huawei. Take the UK, which tried to integrate Huawei into less sensitive parts of its planned 5G network. UK spooks were assigned to thoroughly investigate Huawei’s kit to ensure that there’s nothing suspicious in it. But it was not reassuring when China failed to make it easier for the experts to examine their kit. Perhaps it was serendipitous for the UK to use the US sanctions against Huawei as an excuse to cancel plans to have them build their 5G network. They argue that the sanctions would make Huawei’s supply chains less dependable, increasing the risk that Huawei cannot deliver on its contract. The perfect excuse. 

But this is much bigger than just Huawei and 5G. The main cost is not delaying the adoption of new and crucial technology but in the decaying relationship that would undoubtedly affect trade and technology (I wrote about that in my last blog). Foreign direct investments from China to the EU have already declined by 69% (nice) from its 2016 peak (Figure 1).

Figure 1 [1] 

What to do with China?

Europe shares America’s ideals, so the obvious answer is that they’ll side with America and squash China, right? Well, that would be reckless and risk tearing the world into two. Remember my last blog’s warning about the seeds of world wars? No, China is a growing country that the West cannot change (though they tried to) and cannot ignore. More sensible is to save the current world order and modify it to accommodate, not suppress, an influential authoritarian country.

Many institutions around the world represent this “world order” I keep babbling about. Still, the main one for this topic is the World Trade Organization (WTO), a necessary but limp and frustrating institution. To be fair, maintaining order in the complex world of international trade is a daunting task, especially in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world that’s efficient but mercilessly self-interested and ruthless. Nonetheless, that’s not to excuse the WTO’s failure to adapt to the digital economy and the rise of a more authoritarian Mr. Xi Jinping. So America’s loss of faith towards the WTO is not without cause, but it’s still wrong to abandon it.

Ultimately, everything I will write here will be easier said than done. But it’s good to have goals. The biggest concern about why the West now wants to have some distance from China is how encroaching China’s government is. They have tentacles attached to every company in China. The West, understandably, do not feel comfortable with the presence of the CCP in their territory masked as a private business. 

While that may sound like forcing China to adapt to how they do it in the West, it is a reasonable need. Especially when there’s no excuse not to do it. Take Unilever, a traditionally Western multinational company that grants autonomy to its subsidiaries around the world. Your local Unilever would be hiring local executives that operate on its own, without fear of foreign government interference.

No matter what solution today’s leaders will develop, its efficacy ultimately falls on its execution. This is where I believe Europe comes in. 

Why does it depend on Europe?

Dealing with China requires the West to act together. America is already one country and one country that clarifies what it wants: not to let China be able to do what America is already doing. Hypocritical, I know, but it doesn’t invalidate the need to address China’s growing ambition and methods that goes against the grain of the predominant ideology. 

While it’s easy to dismiss Europe to follow whatever America decides, that’s just not them. The Europeans are a proud bunch with a history of supremacy (take that positively or negatively, up to you). Europe is America’s friend, but they’re no pushover or slave to it. The EU and America have their own bickering, the most significant of which nowadays is the whole antitrust and tax issues with America’s technology giants, mostly the FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet, aka Google). 

It has been one of Europe’s biggest insecurity of not being able to produce technological giants like America has and hates being dependent on said giants. But this lack of giants is a natural result of the EU’s more robust antitrust regulations, which is the legislation that ensures a healthy amount of competition in the market. This goes straight to the heart of one of the new problems that economists have been grappling with: competition and the digital economy (my specialty, yay!)

So let me give you the basics. The digital economy is unlike the normal economy. It doesn’t follow the same rules. I won’t explain my entire degree here, but I’ll tell you what you need to know in the next six paragraphs. For context, first is the importance of healthy competition to ensure that capitalism serves the people (capitalism is not evil, it just needs to be taken care of. Anybody that vilifies capitalism doesn’t understand it enough. It’s a spectrum, aka countries can be both socialist and capitalist as much as China is both capitalist and authoritarian.) Anyways, competition usually means that there are enough companies in a particular market that compete. The main enemy of antitrust regulators are monopolies, which are companies that are alone in a specific market.

Let’s use an example from the Philippines that I personally witnessed. There used to be two ride-hailing firms back then: Grab and Uber. They weren’t a duopoly because they competed: they kept competing with each other by lowering their prices. Filipinos like me enjoyed the cheap rates and being able to choose the app with superior service. Then came Japan’s Softbank, which has stakes in both, and made Uber sell its PH operations to Grab. After that, suddenly, there was only Grab (or at least the only dominant ride-hailing app at that time). Grab quickly took advantage of this monopolistic position and jacked up its taxi rates into ridiculous heights. Here, the government failed to cultivate healthy competition at the expense of us, the consumers. We lost in this situation because we were left with no other choice but this expensive and, subjectively, inferior product. The underlying message is: competition is great for the people. It gives us excellent prices and quality. Without it, we get the short end of the stick.

The second concept is the digital economy, more specifically, network effects. If you read my last blog, you might be groaning on reading about this again, but I have no choice. It’s prevalent. But if you didn’t read my last blog, don’t worry, I’ll explain it again here. 

The rise of computers upended traditional economics. A quick example is that a car used to have many costs to design, then additional costs to actually make a bunch of it to sell. For software, though, there’s many costs to code a program but costs almost nothing to replicate it. Traditional economics would say that the price of that good is zero dollars, but that’s not right, is it? Pricing code, or ideas, or information, or data, or whatever you want to call this intangible good, is trickier. Data is just a bunch of ones and zeros, but god damn is it a valuable set of ones and zeros. That’s even how you “pay” for free services, right? With your personal data.

Pricing digital goods is one thing, but the focus is in the nature of its value. Digital goods usually exhibit network effects, which means it gets more valuable if it has more users, and subsequently, more data. More data, more input to make the product better. Knead this point another way. It means that the best digital companies have a monopoly, or at least a duo or oligopoly, of the market to suck up all that data for their taking. This implies a complete 180 turn from the whole monopoly-is-evil (it still is) thing. For example, a streaming service is only excellent if it has all the shows, right? It’s pretty shitty to have to subscribe to multiple services just to watch all the shows you like. So for a user, the ideal would be that only one streaming service that has everything. That’s why digital products usually have one or two dominant brands in every field. Streaming? Netflix. Music? Spotify. Online shopping? Amazon. Search? Google. Phones? Apple or Android. The reason why Google Maps is so useful is that everyone uses it and makes it better. The reason why Facebook is (was) engaging is that all your friends are in it. So you get the point: to make tech giants, you need to rethink antitrust regulation. 

Let me make it clear though, this is quite a dilemma for economists. Because while we discovered that digital goods of monopolistic companies benefit consumers the most, it still holds that companies can abuse this dominant position. This winner-takes-all outcome is risky for innovation and for everyone. Currently, we’re still hashing out clear rules and guides on how to balance this delicate tradeoff. We’re not there yet, but it is what it is as of the moment. 

So let’s take it back to Europe. Compared to America, antitrust in Europe is much more robust. Where America only has 4 major (and 2 minor) mobile networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint), Europe as a whole has 5 major mobile networks but with more than a hundred minor ones. This granted Europeans cheaper data plans than America, and the speed quality is basically the same (Figure 2). Good for European consumers, but not for European telecommunications companies. This same story applies to other industries.

Figure 2 [2] 

So Europe’s lack of tech giants is caused by healthy competition that’s great for its citizens. But this opens up the fear of lagging behind the rest of the advanced world technologically. Can’t have it all, it seems. But here’s where we connect it back to China: since the whole Huawei thing is about 5G, plenty of Europe’s short-term reactions have to do with their insecurities about lagging behind in the 5G arena.

So let’s talk about that. I think my blog is getting too long to explain what 5G is, so I’ll leave that for you to Google or YouTube. But basically, 5G is the next generation of 4G that promises 100 (!!!) times faster than 4G. For ordinary people, you don’t need that much. We’re okay with 4G for our daily needs. But that insane speed would enable the next generation of technology such as the Internet of Things or autonomous driving, which requires the back and forth of enormous amounts of data in real-time. But the more important feature of 5G is its ability to reconfigure the network for tailored needs. Taking advantage of this is still in development, and profitable business models to take leverage of this is yet to be born. So if there’s no big rush, we can hope that other companies can step up, like Nokia, Ericson, or Samsung. Or better yet: open standards regarding 5G could be developed, forgoing the need for proprietary kits.

Another possible good news for European network operators is that this 5G insecurity might be just the thing for European antitrust to acknowledge the need to ease competition requirements for some tech companies. This could allow for European tech giants to sprout, but knowing Europe, this will be heavily deliberated.

So, in short, I would say that there’s no time pressure and rush for adoption. In this part of the equation, Europe can afford to delay its 5G progress and ditch Huawei to make their networks a bit more secure. China’s retaliation, however, is another thing. This brings us to the final point of this write-up and one of the most significant factors affecting how the West will respond to China: Germany. Or, more precisely, Mrs. Angela Merkel.

Merkel and China

To have a unified response to China requires not only transatlantic cooperation but also European cooperation. It’s hard to talk about EU decisions without singling out Germany, especially regarding trade. In general, Mrs. Angela Merkel’s personal political conviction embodies old Europe’s view on China. Mrs. Merkel has always been warm with China and, in its essence, personifies this blog’s proposal to adjust for China. Mrs. Merkel has always wanted to include China into the world stage by wishing for its involvement in matters requiring global cooperation like climate change or writing the rules of governance regarding AI.

Being the economic-minded leader that she is, Mrs. Merkel is well respected and admired by most of us liberal economists. It’s no surprise that under her, Germany is the EU’s economic powerhouse, and it’s also no surprise why she’s cautious with relations with China. The difference between the West’s last superpower rival with differing ideologies, the USSR, is that China is a trade heavyweight. China’s market is vast and lucrative. However, China has also shown too much willingness to bully any country that dare go against it, weaponizing its trade heft to inflict economic damage. Now, if you notice, I keep saying “Mrs. Merkel” instead of “Germany.” This is because a sizable proportion of German politicians and businessmen have been turned off by China nowadays, and views Mrs. Merkel’s caution with China to be subservience to the bully. Even within Mrs. Merkel’s own party, this cowing to China has grown unacceptable, and they have a reason for that.

First, let’s see a snapshot of Germany’s exports (Figure 3). China is Germany’s 3rd largest trading partner. With America and China having a spat, of course, the best thing to do is be friends with everyone. But when it comes down to only choosing one, America would be the bigger trading partner. One thing to note is that most of their exports, which is Germany’s specialty in general, are high value-adding manufacturing products like cars, appliances, and machines.

Figure 3 [3]

Then came Mr. Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 initiative. If it wasn’t apparent at first, perhaps when Midea, a Chinese company, acquired Kuka, a German robotics firm, in 2016 was the wake-up call: China is trying to have Germany’s main competitive advantage, by also building to have a high value adding manufacturing industry. This turns China from partner to competitor. 

German businessmen have also been finding China as an unfavorable business partner. Figure 4 shows a survey from the German Chamber of Commerce in China. It shows at least a quarter of companies planning to stop doing business in China. Several reports cite the unacceptable terms that China demands on business partners, most notably in forced technology transfer. It certainly feels less of a partnership and more of an arrangement for taking advantage of. Put this in the context of the Made in China 2025, and this can be a serious threat for German exports.

Figure 4 [4] 

All in all, let’s go back to the point of China’s lucrative market. While it’s easy to see the reason for distancing from China, it’s also worth noting that German companies make a killing in China. Volkswagen earns a whopping 40% of its revenue there.

So cutting relations with China is not the key. Instead, a mere rebalancing is direly needed. Taking it from Thorsten Benner of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, Germany must build a wholly European 5G infrastructure, team up more with countries that share the same ideology (like South Korea or Australia), and advise German companies that they will no longer enjoy the same amount of political cover than before. Time to stop getting played and level things between the two countries.

As trust towards China declines, Chinese diplomats, dubbed the wolf warriors, have been active in a tongue lashing at every criticism. They would always retort that these anti-China sentiments are supposedly rooted in a colonial and racist mentality.  However, it’s undeniable that China also bears a considerable part of the blame for the blossoming mistrust against them. From the way they do business partnerships, to the economic bullying, to the inconsistent transparency on COVID-19 reporting, to the repression of Hong Kongers, to the suppression of Uighurs, to the territorial bullying of neighbors, to the lack of concrete reassurance that they don’t spy with their products, to the inability to take criticism, and others.

No country is perfect (I can list the same amount of American faults). But it’s the number of blunders in such a short amount of time that brought the trust down (people generally have short term memory and attention, but this was just too fast and too furious.) It was a trade-off between taking advantage of a global pandemic and seeming untrustworthy. I trust China to have seen this possibility and took calculated actions. But one doesn’t have to resort to such actions to assert one’s presence in the world stage. Europe tried to be warm to both the East and the West, but everyone has their limits.

References

[1]https://rhg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MERICS-Rhodium-Group_COFDI-Update-2020-2.pdf 

[2]https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/u-s-mobile-broadband-among-most-expensive-world-new-report-finds 

[3] The Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/ 

[4]https://china.ahk.de/fileadmin/AHK_China/Market_Info/Economic_Data/BCS_2019_20.SEC.pdf 

[fractalcult]

Market Myths: Good, Bad, and Bazaar

The stories that hold up western* capitalism

First, a procedural note…

The truth value of a myth doesn’t matter, where efficacy is concerned. However, some myths have become so strongly internalized that they become difficult to identify as myths; they are mistaken for “common sense”. For most of us, the ideas underlying western* capitalism are like this. It’s difficult to separate ourselves from these myths and gain the appropriate distance, so I’m going to engage in a little bit of ‘debunking’ — specifically, I’m going to take some time pointing out parts of the capitalist model that don’t match with reality or history, during the course of analyzing its structure and function. This doesn’t take away from the immense power and importance of capitalist mythology, nor does it indicate that I consider all of the ideas associated with capitalism to be strictly false.

On tautology

Academics tend to treat tautologies as a lesser form. Tautologies are shallow, by their nature. It’s quite reasonable for a system optimizing for novel and interesting ideas to reject tautologies. Nevertheless, some really important ideas can be rephrased as tautologies — as Charles Fort points out, natural selection is better summarized as “survival of the survivors” than “survival of the fittest” — and one can make the argument that any really true argument is in some sense circular. There’s no shame in a circular argument that depends only on true premises. In fact, this is one way to look at all of mathematics — which is true because of its internal consistency, and only accidentally coincides with physical reality.

When someone dismisses a seemingly profound statement as “just a tautology” they omit important information. An obvious tautology contains no information. However, a non-obvious tautology is just about the most profound thing imaginable — it takes a complex, incomplete, vague collection of loosely related ideas and replaces it with a much smaller and simpler set of rules, which (if the tautology is reasonably close to correct) is both at least as accurate as the original set of ideas and easier to reason about. A non-obvious true tautology refactors huge sections of our mental models. Obviousness is a function of existing knowledge, so what is an obvious tautology to some people will be non-obvious to others. It should come as no surprise that people seek out ideas that present themselves as non-obvious tautologies.

The drive toward seeking non-obvious tautologies can lead to mistakes. Looking for simple and efficient models of the world is a mechanism for enabling lazy thinking. When lazy thinking is correct it’s strictly superior to difficult thinking, but lazy thinking often comes with lazy meta-cognition. If we jump on ideas that look like non-obvious tautologies too greedily, we fail to see hidden assumptions.

Market efficiency is a very attractive model. Under certain circumstances, we can expect things to actually work that way. If a large number of competing producers really do start off completely even in capability, we really can expect the Most Unexceptional product to price ratio to win out. To accept it completely means ignoring hidden assumptions that serious thinkers should at least consider.

One hidden assumption in market efficiency is that competitors start off even in capability. This is almost never the case outside of a classroom demonstration. Companies enter established markets and compete with established competitors, and companies established in one market will enter another. Both of these mechanisms make use of existing resource inequality in order to reduce precisely the kinds of risks that lead to efficient markets, and while perhaps in the long run poor products might lose out, with the extreme spread of resource availability the “long run” can easily last until long after we are all dead. Given no other information, if age is not normally or logarithmically distributed, we can reasonably expect something to last about twice as long as it already has. With corporations, the tails of this distribution are further apart — we can expect a startup to be on its last legs, and we can expect a 50 year old company to last 75 more years, because resource accumulation corrects for risks. A company that has a great deal of early success can coast on that success for a much longer period of poor customer satisfaction.

Another hidden assumption is that communication is free within the set of consumers and between consumers and producers but not within the set of producers.

Free communication within the set of producers is called collusion, and the SEC will hit you with an antitrust suit if you are found to engage in it. People do it all the time, and it is usually worth the risk, since it reduces market efficiency down to almost zero.

Free communication between producers and consumers is also pretty rare: even failing producers typically have too many consumers to manage individually and must work with lossy and biased aggregate information; successful producers have enough resources to be capable of ignoring consumer demand for quite a while, and often encourage ‘customer loyalty’ via branding. (In other words, cultivating a livestock of people who will buy their products regardless of quality — ideally enough to provide sufficient resources that appealing to the rest of the customers is unnecessary). Customer loyalty can have its benefits compounded if wealthy customers are targeted: “luxury brands” are lucrative because something can be sold well above market price regardless of its actual quality or desirability, and sometimes the poor price/desirability ratio is actually the point (as a form of lekking / conspicuous consumption).

Free communication between consumers is becoming more and more rare, since flooding consumer information channels with fake reviews and native advertising is cheap and easy. There used to be stronger social and economic incentives to clearly differentiate advertising from word of mouth, but advertising’s effectiveness has dropped significantly as customers develop defenses against it and economic instability has encouraged lots of people to lower their standards. Eventually, consumer information channels will become just as untrusted as clearly paid advertising is now considered to be, and communication between consumers will be run along the same lines as cold war espionage.

Motivated reasoning

Considering that the hidden assumptions in market efficiency are dependent upon situations even uninformed consumers know from experience are very rare, why would people accept it so easily? The inefficiency of markets has no plausible deniability, but motivated reasoning lowers the bar for plausibility significantly.

During the bulk of the 20th century we could probably argue that anti-communist propaganda played a large role. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Nevertheless, in many circles faith in the invisible hand actually is increasing.

There’s another kind of circular reasoning — one that operates on the currency of guilt and hope. If one accepts market efficiency, it tells the poor that they can rise up through hard work, and it tells the rich that they earned their wealth. This is remarkably similar to the prosperity gospel, which claims that god rewards the righteous with wealth and therefore the poor must have secret sins. It also resembles the mandate of heaven, which claims that all political situations are divinely ordained and therefore disagreeing with the current ruler is sinful.

The similarity between the guilt/hope axis of the market efficiency myth and the prosperity gospel explains the strange marriage between Randian Objectivists and Evangelical Christians found in the religious right. We can reasonably expect many members of this group to be heavily motivated by the desire to believe that the world is fair. It’s not appropriate to characterize this movement as lacking in empathy — empathy is a necessary prerequisite for a guilt so extreme that it makes an elaborate and far-fetched framework for victim-blaming look desirable.

For the poor of this movement, at least on the prosperity gospel side, it might not be so terrible. Motivating a group of people to do the right thing has a good chance of actually improving life generally, even if their promised reward never materialized; second order effects from accidental windfalls are more dangerous, though. (For instance, if you disown your gay son and then win the lottery, you’re liable to get the wrong idea about what “doing the right thing” means).

That said, while the above factors encourage people to trust more strongly in an idea of market efficiency they already accept, bootstrapping the idea of market efficiency is much more difficult.

Natural law, myth vs legend

Market efficiency draws power from an older myth: the idea that money is a natural and universal means of exchange. This is historically and anthropologically dubious. David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, makes an argument for the idea that systematic accounting of debts predates the use of actual currency and furthermore only became necessary when cities became large enough to necessitate something resembling modern bureaucracy. Regardless of how accurate that timeline is, we know that gift economies, potlatch, and feasting are more common in tribal nomadic societies than any kind of currency exchange, and that feasting in particular remained extremely important in Europe through the Renaissance.

The legend that backs up the myth of money-as-natural-law takes place in a town. A shoemaker trades shoes for potatoes, but doesn’t want potatoes, so he organizes a neutral currency so that potatoes and apples can be traded for shoes. Graeber points out that this level of specialization couldn’t be ‘natural’ — the town is an appropriate place to set it, since specializing in a particular crop or craft would have been suicidal in the bands of 20–50 people that most humans lived in prior to around 2000 BC.

Our first examples of writing, of course, coincide with the first permanent settlements to have a large enough population to justify heavy specialization. Our first examples of writing are, in fact, spreadsheets recording debt and credit. This, along with the evidence that the unit of currency (the mina of silver) was too substantial for most people to afford even one of (and probably was mostly moved between rooms in the temple complex), is part of Graeber’s argument that independent individuals carrying money for the purpose of direct transactions (i.e., our conception of money) probably only became common later, when imperial armies were expected to feed themselves in foreign lands.

So, on the one hand, it seems to have taken a very long time for the ‘natural’ ‘common sense’ concept of money to take hold among humans. On the other hand, people exposed to the idea of money tend to adapt to it quickly and we have even been able to teach apes to exchange tokens between themselves in exchange for goods and services — in other words, it’s a simple and intuitive system that even animals we mostly don’t consider conscious can grasp.

If something is considered natural law, it’s very easy for people to believe that it is also providence. If something is straightforward and useful in every day life, it’s very easy for people to consider it natural law.

Moral economies

Thoughtful economists tend to recognize the caveats I present here. Some behavioral economists have done great work on illuminating what kinds of things aren’t — or shouldn’t be — subject to the market. This, in turn, illuminates the market myth itself.

It’s possible to think of social relations as economic in nature. Indeed, this is a pretty common model. Transactional psychology presents social interactions as the exchange of a currency of strokes, for instance. Nevertheless, Khaneman presents an experiment that shows social relations aren’t, and shouldn’t, be fungible.

The experiment went like this: a busy day care center has a problem with parents picking up their children late, and instates a fee. Parents in turn respond by picking up their kids late more often, and paying the fee. After the fee is eliminated, the percentage of on-time pickups does not return to the pre-fee state.

Khaneman interprets the results in this way: initially, parents thought of picking their kids up late as incurring a social debt (they were guilty about inconveniencing the day care), the fee reframed it as a service (they can pay some money in exchange for their kids being watched a little longer, guilt-free). But when the fee was eliminated, they felt as though they were getting the service for free.

This result looks a whole lot like the way fines for immoral business practices end up working.

If we consider that, typically, we can make up to people we feel we have wronged, we consider social currency to be somewhat fungible. Nevertheless, exchanging money for social currency is still mostly taboo — paying for sex is widely considered taboo, and even those of us who feel no taboo about sex work would find the idea of someone paying someone else to be their friend a little disturbing. If my Most Unexceptional friend helps me move furniture and I give him a twenty dollar bill, he might be insulted. If I left money on the dresser after having sex with my girlfriend, she might be insulted. (Or consider it a joke.)

We could consider the ease with which money is quantified to be the problem. We rarely can put a number on our guilt or joy. On the other hand, we can generally determine if we feel like we’ve “done enough” to make up for something — our measures of social currency have ordinality, if not cardinality.

Instead, the disconnect is that money is, by design, impersonal. I cannot pay back my guilt over Peter by giving him Paul’s gratitude toward me. This is where transactional psychology’s monetary metaphor for strokes falls apart: a relationship is built up via the exchange of strokes, and that relationship has value based on trust. Meanwhile, any currency has, as a key feature, the ability to operate without trust or even with distrust. Money makes living under paranoia possible, and sometimes even pleasant. But exchange of strokes has its own inherent value, and the trust it builds likewise: it cannot be replaced with money because money’s value is based only on what it can buy.

Speculation

The belief in market efficiency, and the emotional and moral dimensions of that belief, have some unfortunate consequences in speculation. Paradoxically, these consequences are opposed by the myth of money as natural law.

With speculation, one can create money without substance. Promises, bets, and hedges can be nested indefinitely to create value held in superposition. A stake in a speculative market is both credit and debt until it is sold. This is natural, since social constructs are eldrich, operating on fairy logic. This is both a pot of gold and a pile of leaves until I leave the land of the sidhe. Of course, there’s every incentive to oversell, so more often than not it’s a pile of leaves: when too many superpositions collapse, so does the market.

Naive materialism, when it intersects with the idea of money as natural law, finds the eldrich nature of money in speculation disturbing. Isn’t money gold? Or coins? How can something be in my hand and then disappear? So, we get arguments for the gold standard along moral lines: “it’s immoral for something that’s real to behave like fairy dust, so we should limit its growth to match mining efficiency”.

The eldrich behavior of money has some paradoxical results. Being aware that money is a social construct tends to decrease its value (clap your hands if you believe!). The question “if someone burns a million quid on TV, does the value of the pound go up or down” is very had to answer. (If you think you know the answer, substitute a million for a trillion, or for twenty.) On the other hand, being aware of its eldrich nature also tends to slightly decouple one from potentially-destructive drives.

Belief in market efficiency leads successful speculators to believe themselves skilled. While skill at speculation might be possible, statisticians who have studied the problem have generally come to the conclusion that the success distribution is adequately explained by market speculation being entirely random. Unwarranted confidence can lead to larger bets, which (if results are random) means half the time the money disappears into thin air. This does not require malfeasance, misrepresentation, or willful ignorance (as with the 2008 housing crisis). Believing that speculation involves skill is sufficient to cause the market to have larger and larger bubbles and crashes.

*“Western” is neither precise nor correct here. These myths seem to be present in western Europe, North America, Japan, and South Korea. Both China and the former Soviet states have different mythology I’m not qualified to analyse. In the absence of a better term than “western capitalism”, I will use it.

(originally published here: https://modernmythology.net/market-myths-good-bad-and-bazaar-7fa0cbc8f646)

[evangelineartemiasamos]

I would LOVE to hear your opinions on Hybern if you ever feel interested in writing it all out

Why, thank you for asking anonym^^

I think that Maas put zero thoughts into Hybern. Literally. She needed an enemy, she made them former slavers who want slaves again and to destroy any doubts about them, she has them boast about (sexual) violence at any chance. The king doesn’t even have a name which is hilarious, and calling the pro-slavery faction in the old war “loyalists” without ever explaining what the term means or who they were “loyal” to is extremely lazy.

The country of Hybern doesn’t get much of a description at all, not even when the inner circle goes there in acomaf. Literally “nothingness”, bleakness, cliffs, a barren land, an off-white castle, that’s it. I wonder how Hybern could have gathered the forces, goods and money to raise an army to attack Prythian. Hybern doesn’t trade, out of spite because of the treatry against slavery, so how did they recover from the loss of forced work? How do they nurture their population? How did they, without trade, prosper as a nation? Have they advanced technically? Have they found more productive ways to live since they had to change their way of life profoundly? Why are they still bothered by something that happened 500 years ago? How do they have enough workers to conscript a considerable number of them for the army?

Is it all magic? And if it is, why has Hybern such greater magic than Prythian faes?They’ve only had the cauldron for a short time, so is it like the king magicked food and weaponry from the cauldron and conscripted his soldiers last minute? IDK, Maas never explains this and I think I already thought more about Hybern than her.But this would explain a lot. There might have been propaganda as well. “Fight now, and you’ll never have to work again!” Or something. “Hybern deserve better!” I suppose mostly lesser fairies have to do most of the work since the end of slavery, as it happened in Prythian. This would give a chance for an interesting development, but I’ll come to that later.

The Hybern army consists of carousing, violent drinkers. They do not prepare themselves for battle but party instead and this “fun” includes torturing humans. As I said above, this is obviously for showing how evil they are, which again transmits the image they aren’t people but monsters who should be killed. But this also means they are bad soldiers. This colludes with my assumption above, that the Hybern soldiers were recruited last minute and aren’t disciplined and are only in to finally abuse some humans again. But you can’t win if you party the night before the fight, even less so if your soldiers are hardly trained. And the king is supposed to be insane. All in all, this portrays them as a force that is, if not easy, but still certainly to be defeated. After this information was stated in the book, I could no longer take the war any seriously.

The time Tarquin kills the surrending Hybern soldiers is just the peak of the iceberg. The Hyberns aren’t people, they are evil and must be killed, don’t ever feel bad for killing any of them, war crimes don’t exists and ransoming prisoners isn’t a possiblity. Sigh. This states how little Maas knows about medieval warfare. War prisoners are a thing, they’re useful bargaining chips and are often incarcerated for years. But even the end of the book, all of the Hybern army die, no matter how they came to be in that army or if they are ready to surrender once the king is defeated. Which is kinda the point of killing the leader, right? So you might negotiate with someone more open to peace?? But Feyre has magical knowing powers and insists they would all continue to fight to the death because they “felt wronged”, wtf is wrong with you, Feyre? Give them a chance to surrender, and many will say yes. Unless their officers force them to go on which doesn’t change how wrong it is to not even offer them the change when their commander is gone, their super weapon is stolen and their allies have deserted while another aerial army has arrived to wreak havok. But no, let Amren kill them all …

You know, I see Hybern kind of like Nazi Germany, however Maas has intended them. We learn so much of our past in school, so the connection came automatically. Germany lost in WW 1 and had to bear hard consequences due to the contract of Versailles which wore very hard on the population. But the country still managed to install a democracy for the first time, even though it was barely able to funtion. The frustration over the contract of Versailles, the political chaos, the Great Depression of 1929 and the growing fascist movements paved the way for Hitler’s Machtergreifung (rise to power, but Machtergreifung is the idiomatic term) 1933 and with a lot of propaganda, instigation and justifying of national superiority, WW 2 and the Holocaust happened. You should know about this. But all in all, the similarity should be clear: frustrated war losers rise up again to take what they think should be theirs. And I think, given that such stories are actual histories of actual people, you can’t write a story that dehumanizes a fantasy people written as nazis into monsters, even if they did evil things. That’s a toxic way to think because it isn’t a solution for real life conflicts. Enemies are people. Soldiers are people. Nazis are people. They should face justice and punishment but writing them as monsters you can kill with no remorse erases the complexicity of warfare and politics.

If you destroy Hybern as it happened after the first war, they’ll still feel wronged. It is necessary to negotiate and to help those who are left behind, to really start to have diplomatic relations and fucking PEACE. But the book doesn’t give an answer again, all that is talked about in the meeting after the battle is Prythian, their treaty with the humans, and gossip. No one gives a shit about Hybern when now is exactly the time to talk with those governing the island to sign a peace treaty, ask for reparations, set up a new government, exchange ambassadors and all that stuff I only think off the top of my head right now. It’s gross how Maas ignores this necessity and has her characters only talk about themselves. It’s the final nail in the coffin to confirm that Hybern is only there to be an enemy, not a country.

But there would be great potential and if Maas has any inspiration, she should write about Hybern in the sequels. The biggest chance is to give power to the lesser fairies, which I have suggested are the working class in Hybern. Tarquin hints at justice and equality for them in acomaf but this is never mentioned again while it should be considered. The inequality of lesser fairies is just another fantasy version of racism and white supremacy: Maas says lesser fairies exist, but they don’t matter in the story, as if no marginalized people matter to her.

The lesser fairies should take over Hybern. A huge part of the Hybern population has been killed in the war and that has to change the nation massively. New people have to be put in ruling and administrative positions, possibly a lot of the intellectuals are gone, probably many male citizens as well, and all in all the country is to be shaped anew - at best into an ally. But this requires communication and I need to see it.

…..

If I even read the sequels, that is.

TBH, anonymous asks make me a bit uncomfortable because I never know if you will ever read this post, buried by new ones, or if you’re even on tumblr. I hope you find the chance anyway.

@acourtofmalesandfemales @punitivepunning @throne-of-no @raven-reyes-reads

[funface2]

When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us – The New York Times

Even if Max Bialystock hadn’t gone to prison for embezzling from the backers of his hit Broadway show, trouble would have found him one way or another. Didn’t he slap his business partner, the accountant Leo Bloom, after dousing the poor man with a glass of water during working hours? And while Max’s hanky-panky with Ulla, the receptionist, may have involved consenting adults, his whole business model was based on trading sexual favors with senior citizens for money. If ever a man in show business was in need of cancellation, it was surely Max Bialystock.

Not a chance! Max is a beloved figure who has, for more than 50 years, inspired not outrage but delight. The man is an institution, an archetype. He turned a song-and-dance spectacle about Hitler into a Broadway smash. Hitler! Max’s exploits have been chronicled in a 2005 movie and a long-running stage musical, both called “The Producers” and both starring Nathan Lane. Long before that, Max was played by Zero Mostel, in the first film directed by Mel Brooks. That original “Producers,” released in 1967 with a very young Gene Wilder as Leo, was a staple of my youth.

Now that fascism seems to be in bloom once again, it is a good time to revisit “Springtime for Hitler,” the show that made Bialystock and Brooks into household names. But like Leo when he first shuffles into Max’s office to audit the books, I’m a little nervous at the prospect.

The question of how much and what kind of fun it’s permissible to have with Nazis never goes away, and the resurgence of right-wing extremism around the world makes the question newly uncomfortable. When “Jojo Rabbit” showed up at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the fact that it played Hitler at least partly for laughs — with the director, Taika Waititi impersonating a goofy, gangly, almost lovable Führer — you could hear the wincing from across the border. The relative innocuousness of the film (which won the audience award at the festival) doesn’t entirely dispel the uneasiness around it.

If you’re fooling around in the costume of history’s most notorious genocidal maniac, you’re working in proximity to a powerful taboo. Which is exactly what makes Hitler humor irresistible, in particular for Jewish comedians like Brooks and Waititi. (Brooks dressed up as the Führer not in “The Producers,” but in a 1978 television special called “Peeping Times” and then in the 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”) Such cosplay represents a form of exorcism, a way of appropriating the symbols of terror and hatred and stripping them of their power by exposing their absurd, idiotic banality.

The goose-step clowning in “The Producers” has a long pedigree. The film premiered two years into the run of “Hogan’s Heroes” on CBS, a madcap, Emmy-nominated comedy about a German P.O.W. camp in World War II. One of the prisoners would sometimes dress up as the Führer to bamboozle the hapless commandant, Colonel Klink, and his bumbling minion, Sergeant Schultz. Those guys were always being bamboozled, though Hogan and his pals never did manage to escape.

It was sometimes hard for a kid watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes” — as I did nearly every weekday afternoon that Gerald Ford was president — to square the foolishness of Klink and Schultz with the genocidal monstrosity of the real Nazis. Surely it’s in bad taste to take evil so lightly. But in 1967, when “The Producers” came out, World War II was still within living memory for many adults, and so was a wartime tradition of mocking the enemy. Brooks, who attacked the history of comedy with scholarly diligence, was following in the footsteps of two of the great comic minds of old Hollywood: Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch.

Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940) turned Hitler — thinly disguised as Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania — into a blustering, pompous clown, surrounded by snakes and toadies, drunk on ugly fantasies of world conquest. Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), set mainly in Poland just before and right after the German invasion in 1939, takes a less fantastical route to a similar destination.

These movies insist that what will defeat fascism — at the time a hope, not an assumption — is not so much military might or political cunning as an attitude that could be called the spirit of comedy itself. The fatal weakness in Hynkel, and in the officious SS men who spoil the fun in Lubitsch’s Warsaw, is their humorlessness. The simple, decent fallibility of the Jewish barber Chaplin also plays (a variation on his Little Tramp persona) is the opposite of the dictator’s buffoonish megalomania. The joke lies in the way the little guy impersonates the big shot, laying bare the empty grandiosity of his will to power.

Imposture is the ethical key to Nazi-mocking, a way of revealing the vanity and stupidity of people who insist above all on their own deadly seriousness. Bullies beg to be humiliated, and comedians are uniquely equipped for the task. In “To Be or Not to Be,” members of a Warsaw theater troupe pretend to be high-ranking Gestapo officers and Nazi operatives, and even Hitler himself. This ability to play, to pretend, to parody isn’t just a matter of professional training. The artistry of the actors — their ability to improvise and crack wise in potentially lethal circumstances — is what separates them from their foes. If the Germans were to win, all the fun would go out of the world.

The Germans didn’t win, of course, but unspeakable things happened anyway. With the terrible knowledge of hindsight, the gentleness of “The Great Dictator” and the high spirits of “To Be or Not to Be” take on a special kind of poignancy. Chaplin and Lubitsch saw the darkness clearly, but they could not yet measure its full depth and scale. Some of the jokes can make you wince. A vain German commandant is tickled to learn — from a fake source — that his nickname back in Berlin is “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.” “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping,” he says with a chuckle.

It wasn’t the best joke in 1942, and it sounded even more awkward in 1983, when Mel Brooks recycled it in his affectionate, puzzling remake of “To Be or Not to Be” (directed by Alan Johnson, who had choreographed “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers”). That film, unlike the Lubitsch version, is hard to find these days, but a snippet available on YouTube features Brooks as a rapping, break-dancing Hitler — a miniature tour de force of bad taste that reprises an immortal rhyme from “Springtime”: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party.”

It’s funny because everyone knows the opposite is true. The only “real” Nazi in “The Producers” is Franz Liebkind, the author of “Springtime for Hitler,” a German exile too pathetic for any war-crimes tribunal, who keeps pigeons on the roof of his Greenwich Village tenement. His heartfelt tribute to the Führer is taken up by Bialystock and Bloom because they are looking for a surefire flop, a work of such stupendous bad taste that audiences will flee in disgust. But it’s precisely because no one could possibly take Liebkind and his ilk seriously that Max and Leo fail so spectacularly at their attempted failure. Because Franz is manifestly an idiot, any even moderately smart person could only take the show as satire. The triumph of “The Producers” is to suppose a world where the anxious hopes of Chaplin and Lubitsch have come true — where fascism has been expunged, its spell permanently broken by humanism and humor. That’s the world of “Hogan’s Heroes,” too, and also of “Jojo Rabbit.”

But what if we don’t live in that world? For a long time, laughing at historical Nazis has seemed like a painless moral booster shot, a way of keeping the really bad stuff they represent safely contained in the past. It never occurs to Max Bialystock that the audience might respond to “Springtime” as satire, and it never occurred to Mel Brooks that the show might be effective propaganda.

“The Producers” is naughty and silly, but it works to establish boundaries rather than transgress them. It plays with a taboo that it is ultimately committed to upholding. Whether a show like “Springtime” represents absolute bad taste or delicious good fun, it exists in a place far removed from the norms of civilized, rational discourse. A patron can be offended or amused by its nutty Nazis, but no one in their right mind — no one who isn’t operating at the mental and moral level of Franz Liebkind — could find it touching or persuasive. The very possibility of an actual, effective, politically empowered Nazi, a Nazi who could pose a real danger, is unthinkable. And the job of “The Producers” is to keep it that way.

Maybe that was always wishful thinking. In any case, recent history shows that the medicine of laughter can have scary side effects. Fascism has crawled out of the dust pile of history, striking familiar poses, sometimes with tongue in cheek. It has been amply documented that “ironic” expressions of bigotry and anti-Semitism — jokes and memes on social media; facetious trolling of the politically correct; slurs as exercises in free speech — can evolve over time into the real thing. A dress-up costume can be mistaken for a uniform, including by its wearer.

Meanwhile comedians advertise their racist jokes as bold challenges to the tyranny of political correctness, and brand their bigotry as boundary-pushing, taboo-busting bravery. The anti-authoritarian spirit of comedy that flows through Lubitsch and Chaplin to Brooks and his heirs is twisted away from its humanist roots.

At the same time, authoritarian leaders prove impervious to satire. Laughing at how stupid, pompous or corrupt they are doesn’t seem to break the spell of their power. The joke may be on those who persist in believing otherwise. If it were revived today, “Springtime for Hitler” might wind up being a hit for the wrong reasons. Or it might flop because those old Hitler jokes aren’t as funny as they used to be.

I don’t blame Max Bialystock. I find myself envying his misguided faith in the high-minded good taste of the public, even as I cherish Mel Brooks’s belief in our irrepressible vulgarity. Part of me looks back fondly on the days when fascism seemed like history’s dumbest joke. And part of me thinks we’d all have been better off if the opening-night audience at “Springtime for Hitler” had stormed out of the theater in a rage, leaving Max and Leo to make their way safely to Brazil.

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Bài viết When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us – The New York Times đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/best-jokes/when-we-laugh-at-nazis-maybe-the-jokes-on-us-the-new-york-times/

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War Propaganda Is Exposed When Pearson Sharp Goes to Syria & Tells the Truth

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War Propaganda Is Exposed When Pearson Sharp Goes to Syria & Tells the Truth

“This sincere young journalist is having a real Mr. Smith Goes to Washington experience in #Douma,” tweeted journalist Caitlin Johnstone, referring to Pearson Sharp (One America News Network) whose on-the-ground reporting from Syria flies in the face of official mainstream reports out of Syria. Realizing that everything we’ve been told about Syria is false, Sharp — like Mr. Smith in Washington — goes about exposing the lies. While legacy media rants on about a horrifying attack, reports out of Douma suggest it didn’t happen. Sharp found no witnesses nor evidence. Nor did journalists, Robert Fisk (UK The Independent) and Uli Gack (German ZDF).

The world’s eyes are on Syria like never before. Concerns about potential full-scale military confrontation with Russia have caused people to re-examine the Syria situation, sending into overdrive the establishment’s megaphone, a.k.a. the mainstream media (“MSM” hereafter). The war machine relies on public support, so intelligence agencies have perfected the craft of psychological operations — psy-ops — to mind control us into supporting wars that benefit war profiteers and hurt everyone else. The cost has been more than a half million dead in Syria, 2.4 million in Iraq, and trillions in tax dollars. In the US, propaganda was legalized and Pentagon — yes, Pentagon — funds were earmarked for psy-op campaigns geared to cripple dissent and manufacture consent for wars.

In this article, we examine nine war psy-op tactics used by MSM in Syria. By comparing MSM Syria reports to what real journalism looks like — featuring Pearson Sharp — we get a crystal clear picture of how MSM goes about deceiving and manipulating us. The more expert we become at collectively decoding and exposing their tricks — and sharing these tools of discernment with friends — the sooner establishment narratives will crumble. Following is an investigation into just how they operate.

First we consider Sharp who’s a role model in how the Fourth Estate is supposed to function. In self-filmed videos, he randomly approaches and interviews locals and hospital personnel in Douma with the assistance of an interpreter. To prove he isn’t speaking to government plants, he randomly approaches people in the streets with film rolling. His interviewing style is thorough, covering all bases, never leading the speaker to a desired answer, and eliciting their assessment and conclusions. Of the five journalists reviewed herein, Sharp is the only one with full interviews, which creates transparency.

Ground zero interviews in Douma

At ground zero, we learn people laughed when they first heard about the alleged attack on TV. They think it’s a “show”. “The West keeps playing this game. This is not the first time,” they concur. “This is how the West plays its game to find an excuse to attack Syria or bomb Syria.” In the hospital, staff report there were typical cases of smoke and dust inhalation that day, but no deaths nor gas victims — fewer patients than usual. In a gas attack, they explain, hundreds of victims would be admitted. They say the video of children being sprayed with water and inhalers was staged by intruders yelling “chemical attack!”

1. Halt the Investigation & Make the Rest Up (Starring Robert Fisk, The Independent)

These hospital testimonies and Sharp’s inability to find a single witness of a real gas attack corroborate the findings of award-winning Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk in this article (also a short audio here), who interviewed “more than 20 people” in Douma. Fisk has more journalistic latitude than his MSM counterparts discussed below, but he doesn’t go far enough. “How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no one in Douma today seemed to recall?” he wonders. But without further investigation, he draws his conclusion that news didn’t spread due to people living in tunnels “so isolated from each other for so long” during the siege. That does not square. Military reports stated that the terrorists packed civilians in close quarters, yet he leaves it at that, not willing — or too polite — to call out MSM reports from up north the way Sharp does, such as in this tweet:

Just watched a Sky News report about Douma — reporter COMPLETELY LIES about what she saw. I didn’t meet ONE PERSON who saw the attack, but she makes it sound like an atrocity… These reporters act like they care about the Syrian people, but their lies are costing lives. (Emphasis mine)

2. Confuse the Reader Without Outright Lying (Fisk)

The horrors jihadists inflict upon civilians have been documented every time a town is liberated, including Douma. Fisk’s article touches on this matter, sprinkling seedlings of truth. He alludes to the miles of “wretched prisoner-groined tunnels” (i.e. civilian slaves), a Jaish al-Islam execution, and “jihadis . . . living in other’s people’s homes” (i.e. forcing civilians to be homeless), yet he avoids explaining that there are no moderate rebels. Sharp, on the other hand, explains it in black and white on Facebook (boldface mine):

What I can’t figure out is why journalists report about Syria the way they do — — it’s a stunningly beautiful country, with some of the kindest, warmest people I’ve ever met. The Syria they talk about in the news, and the Syria I’m visiting now are not the same place AT ALL. The people here are THRILLED the government has recaptured areas from the rebels: under rebel control, they had no jobs, no food, no power or water or medicine. They feared for their lives every day. EVERY person I’ve talked to (this is not an exaggeration, I have yet to meet someone who disagrees) says they are so relieved to be living under Assad, and that life is finally going back to normal now that he is in charge.

I simply don’t understand why other journalists would say differently. I have talked to Syrians from all over the country, not just one place, and they unanimously hated the rebels, and love President Assad. And these aren’t people who are fearful of speaking against the president, you can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice. They laugh when I tell them Western media says they hate Assad, and love the rebels. They ask me, “then why would we live here? We are free to do what we want, why wouldn’t we just go live in rebel held areas if we like them so much?” It’s a great question.

I don’t have all the answers, and I’m genuinely baffled at the VAST difference between the Syria on TV, and the Syria I’m seeing with my own eyes.

For seven years “they unanimously hated the terrorists” and “feared for their lives every day.” Fisk, however, keeps this pivotal detail cryptic, writing,

The story of Douma is . . . not just a story of gas — or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive.

For readers unfamiliar with the word troglodyte, that sentence means nothing. Again, Fisk talks over our heads.

Recent civilian testimonies expose barbaric terrorist war crimes in Ghouta. People are eager to tell their story, and one of Sharp’s hospital interviewees goes off-topic to say the terrorists starved his family for seven years. Surely Fisk was told these horrors, but he plays it safe, stressing there are two stories in war. His assignment is simply to investigate a gas attack, not expose war propaganda. Notwithstanding, the outcome of his ambiguity is a confused reader — not an informed one. In juxtaposition to this, we see Sharp blowing the lid off the entire war psy-op.   When Fisk visited the abandoned offices of the White Helmets — whose tweets alerted the world of the event — he found a gas mask and dirty military camouflage uniforms. He thought:

Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. . . . Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here . . . [because] every member of the White Helmets in Douma . . abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the . . . government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.

This point will fly past readers only familiar with White Helmets’ Hollywood image. A terrorist mecca, Idlib’s no ordinary travel destination. The US–funded White Helmets are a propaganda construct who rescue only terrorists, participate in beheadings, stage fake rescues, and are allied with Al-Nusra Front. The reason Fisk doubts that the gas mask and military apparel were planted is surely because he‘s aware of their terrorist activities. But once again, he doesn’t spell that out.

3. Make Sweeping Unsubstantiated Claims (Fisk)

Fisk probably believes what he says — but does not source his sweeping “ruthless dictatorship” claim. (He cannot.) But because he writes in an authoritative tone (see #8 below), we’re supposed to trust this party line. Nevertheless, regardless of the deficits, kudos for his report on the gas attack matter and his masterful free-flowing prose that brings the streets of Douma to life for the reader.

4. Lie Brazenly Straight to the Camera (Starring Louise Callaghan, Sky News)

Sky News reporter Louise Callaghan reports on her visit to northern Syria refugee camps — without presenting interview footage. She claims that “individually corroborating” testimonies of Douma “survivors” all witnessed the gas attack, experienced symptoms, and said the missile attack was “good” but wouldn’t deter Assad. No clarification is provided as to whether they’re pro-rebel or pro-Assad. This is because MSM pretends all Syrians hate Assad. She claims that she met a girl from the hospital video, that the White Helmets help people all over Syria and are not Al-Qaeda, and that Assad used gas many times.

Given MSM’s long history of lying us into war, when they stay perfectly on a war agenda script like this, you can be sure they’re lying. Because she broadcasts from Mosul, one cannot be sure she even went to Syria. It’s really unlikely everyone interviewed said the exact same thing. Without video proof, we should assume she made it up, especially because it contradicts video testimonies in Douma. Plus she says provable lies about the White Helmets and Assad, so she has zero credibility.

There’s no evidence Assad gassed his people. Ever. She doesn’t discuss Assad’s popularity nor the US-supplied terrorists’ penchant for gassing people. In fact, here’s a compilation of reports refuting hers, suggesting it was a false flag staged by her pals, the White Helmets. “This isn’t just bad journalism, it should be criminal,” Sharp tweeted. “I wish she had to live with the people she was lying about.”

One final clue that she’s lying is her body language: the rolling of eyes, blinking, smug grin and deadpan gaze hint of a trained liar. Those contrast with Sharp’s sincere expressions and steadfast eyes.

5. Act Like an Expert While Forecasting a Long War. Be Sure to Make it Sound Complicated. (Starring Callaghan)

Pushing the war psy-op envelope, twenty-something Callaghan acts like a seasoned foreign policy expert, declaring “The war’s far from over” because of the complicated web of warring factions — as if only experts could figure it out. This plants the idea of never-ending war in the public’s consciousness — just what the war profiteers ordered. In truth, the situation is not so complicated. Here’s how simple it is: It’s not an organic civil war. Assad, Russia, and the Syrian Arab Army are the good guys with mass popular support. There are various “rebel” factions, but no moderate rebels. As my friend John McCarthy points out, “War would stop immediately if outside forces stopped supplying the “rebels, most of whom are not even from Syria.”

6. Insinuate That Everything Fits Your Narrative (Starring Arwa Damon, CNN)

In our next video, CNN correspondent Arwa Damon reports from a refugee camp in northern Syria. This video got a lot of laughs because she debunks herself by sniffing and touching objects allegedly contaminated with chemical weapons — without donning gloves or mask. Her highly edited video features clips of interviews with her voice-over translation muting most of the original dialog.

Damon reports that they all witnessed the gas attack, and some were poisoned. Really? A bedridden woman, she translates, was leaving the hospital when the sick arrived — a “horrific” scene! Woah, that doesn’t jibe with Sharp’s and Fisk’s hospital testimonials. Damon implies — without saying it outright — that the husband died in the alleged gas attack — a perfect example of how to insinuate that everything fits official narratives. Damon doesn’t say the smelly items were contaminated in the attack, but she implies it by reacting to a sniff test — “definitely . . . stings,” she says. With the camera close up on a smiling child, she states:

This new camp is inhabited with those who survived the siege of Douma. Its relentless months-long bombing that drove families underground so that something as simple as feeling the sun on their skin was a luxury.

Her scolding tone is code for blaming Assad and his Army. Damon summarizes in the same chiding tone:

The limited US-French-UK strikes may have sent a message to the Syrian regime about chemical weapons, but not the rest of its arsenal. For those who have endured the unimaginable, it’s little more than a move on a gruesome chessboard.

This insinuates that Assad and the Arab Army are responsible for the “unimaginable” and it implies locals share this viewpoint — which is not supported at all by Sharp’s news coverage (nor other independent journalists, for that matter).

One-man act

7. Edit Craftily (Damon)

Damon’s big budget film crew production honestly cannot compete with Sharp’s one-man act. His interviews are not highly edited nor dubbed like hers — nothing is hidden. His 3rd party interpreter translates in real time on camera. No one should ever, ever trust CNN dubbed translations because CNN was literally caught reading scripts on air in the Bana Alabed Syria psy-op. An elderly woman in this video hardly utters a word on camera, but quite oddly, Damon translates an entire paragraph, saying “her country has caused her too much pain.” Hmm . . . did the woman really say “HER country”? Unlikely, considering that people in Sharp’s videos know the score.

Of four adults Damon interviews, we don’t see the faces of two. Why did the man in this picture refuse to be identified? There can be a reasonable explanation (or he could be a terrorist), but it seems there was a dearth of willing participants in this large camp. Could it be because few conformed to her agenda? Sharp’s videos, in contrast, feature many people unabashed to speak on camera. With tape rolling, he randomly approaches and interacts with many people — not the case on CNN where the settings and props (doll, clothes in wash basin, face mask, pot on boy’s head, infant on hospital bed) look pre-planned. Furthermore, her interviews are cut, so we don’t know if she asked leading questions. Compared to Sharp’s impromptu videos, hers look rehearsed — props and all. Truth does not need editing nor staging.

Did CNN provide the t-shirts, face mask or sunglasses as props?

8. Speak in an Authoritative Tone In Lieu of Providing Proof (Co-starring Callaghan & Damon)

Caitlin Johnstone points out that “Saying something [repeatedly] in an authoritative tone [is] now [treated as] the same thing as providing proof.” These Sky News and CNN segments lack video proof. Yet because they speak in authoritative tones, viewers are meant to believe that none of the refugees denounced the “rebels” and western governments like other Syrians do, and that they all witnessed the gas attack. Johnstone recommends, “Never, ever, ever let them push the burden of proof upon you” (at 18:00). As chance would have it, Sharp provided video proof that refutes these MSM claims.

9. Lie by Omission (Starring Frederik Pleitgen, CNN)

CNN senior international correspondent Fredeik Pleitgen reported from Damascus April 7, providing the first details of the attack for which Assad was accused (link is here). The week prior, Pleitgen had visited eastern Ghouta with a group including Vanessa Beeley, who tweeted:

Why no mention of #EasternGhouta terrorist chemical weapons lab u visited wth me on 6th March? Why no mention of 3,500* plus civilian prisoners of Jaish Al Islam held in “repentance” prisons? Who gains fm this alleged CW use?

Pleitgen lies by omitting these critical parts of the puzzle — which would turn the narrative completely on its head because Jaish al Islam had the motive, means, and proximity to captives. On the other hand, Sharp leaves no gaps in his reporting. The way to know they’re lying by omission is to follow credible media sources. Here’s a list of independent Syria experts to follow (plus Tim Anderson). (*Note: Jaish al-Islam lied about the hostage count. Only 200 survived, with thousands dead or sold to Idlib.)

Hold MSM Accountable & Spread the Word

This is not normal. It is not healthy for well-educated journalists to warmonger for a paycheck and fame. To recap, here’s a list of nine psy-op ploys used to manufacture consent for war.

MSM has literally turned into a Hollywood production, and puts on this charade because they can get away with it. We need to call them out, hold their feet to the fire, and show our friends how to spot these psy-ops. Quite demonstrably, Sharp models what real journalism looks like, in graphic relief to MSM. This drastic dichotomy proves how fake MSM is and how dumb they think we are. As John McCarthy points out, “. . . honestly and humanly, [Sharp] is giving a voice to the People of Syria.” Sharp has arrived back in the USA and is posting more “Mr. Smith Goes to Syria” footage from his journey. In an interview, Sharp offers strong advice as follows:

Don’t trust the media. There is so much that goes on that you don’t see reported. I work in the media. I was at Douma. I saw what I saw, and then I saw what the other news outlets reported, and it wasn’t at all the same thing. . . . Traveling around Syria, there’s so much to that country that people don’t see in the media. The people there are friendly and outgoing, and all they want is to live a normal life. They are trying so hard . . . to just have a normal life. . . . In spite of everything, Syrians love America.

The good news is that — gas, or no gas — this chapter has helped blow the cover off MSM’s wiles. That’s why MSM is doing damage control with a giant smear campaign targeting their indie media competition. We need to push back, hold them accountable, and expose their tricks. People’s lives depend on it. Maybe even our own. Let’s follow, support, and promote these independent Syria-expert journalists and get the word out about Syria. Peace.

Net News Global

Quelle

قالب وردپرس

[oldmanessays]

A Reflection On The Society That We Live In

Let us not murder equality, let us not create a divide, let us not weigh the aspects of the world we live in, measuring everything on a scale of biasedness. Let us not teach our children, the forerunners of the generation to arrive, that all Indians are my brothers and sisters, let us not tell them that the whole world is their family, let us not tell them that we are at war with some other country, that we are hell bent upon suffocating each other within, let us spare them the contradiction. Why embrace equality to finally murder it, our innocence begins to die since the very day we are born, raging psychopaths are we, if anything, for who conjures ethical principles only to wound them open and spill them as guts of innocents, a horrid dream for some, till it becomes a fairy tale notion. You are a Hindu, you are a Muslim, you are a Christian, You are a Jain – wait, why didn’t I begin the sentence with – you’re a Jain, or you’re a Muslim? If I had been born and brought up as a Catholic in America, I might have had initiated my lines with the aspects of being a Christian – see, it has steeped within our minds, infecting our subconscious – the prominence of dominence. A la a in George Orwell’s Animal Farm – ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than the others’ – hence no matter who you are, residing in what so ever part of the world, a fragment of equality shall be denied to you, if you hold your rights back, they shall be snatched, if you fight for them, you would be fought back by people with a zero fundamental range who recite slogans of dementia, and the fight shall continue, until you’ve won or until they have succeeded in oppressing your voice. The righteous has a voice, for the ones the will of who is flawed enough to be judged as wrong, have brute force in the form of guns and bombs, tear gas and pellets, agents of wounds that age into scars, tears that end up nourishing revolutions. Look there goes a Kashmiri, frown upon him. Reason? Isn’t being a Kashmiri enough, he must be despising us, he should be despising this nation and if this form of trending propaganda doesn’t appeal you much, then I shall churn out one too many for you. Come close and I shall whisper in your ear, I whisper for I know, I shall sound rotten to the core – he is a Muslim too. What am I? A Hindu and I feel as if I am flowing in a stream of equality, I have always thought as such. For my life is such a bliss. All through my childhood, I was taught, that in Hinduism exists a caste system, synonymous to ranking – from the most elite in the society, to the most futile – Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra and not only this – I always thought I was a Kshatriya until my father told me that I was a Kayastha and we didn’t belong in any of the above-mentioned categories. And though we were categorised as ‘General’, we were signing petitions to be listed as ‘scheduled castes’, so that we can derive the quotas, that drive the undeserving to access and claim what should have had been rightfully belonged to the deserving. Reservations. Just because, forefathers of many were oppressed a hundred years ago, that means that the future generations of theirs shall be provided with special privileges indefinitely, thereby making up for all that they have lost, no matter if they really deserve it or not. I don’t hear of a black quota in America. Are we Indians coward enough, does hard work and putting up a fight to win over something scares us to such an extent that we adhere to means as mean as such? Now a days, those who are actually capable, those who actually deserve, lose a lot more due to this reservation system, and we don’t realize that in a way, history is repeating itself, if not on a grander scale, if there is no elephant in the room, yet this parasite of a system is sucking us dry. What is this system, where biased tactics thrive, and what’s rightfully someone’s, shall be taken away? It happened then, it’s happening now and it’s just like standing in front of a mirror when axis change but the sense of the scenario transpiring remains the same. Where is the essence of equality in that? I don’t get it.  As of being a Kayastha, my father told me that we specialized in writing and other aspects that involved a pen and a paper, but I cannot forget that a classmate of mine in college, a person replete with castists beliefs, was spreading rumors about me, relating them to my caste – hence, you honor, if there is any, if one tries to create a divide with respect to religions, I rest my case, for my religion is rotten enough in itself, that I did rather unfollow the notion, become an atheist and kill any form of religious perspective, that might have had ever existed in me. Thank you. Equality, is it? I believe in the rights of women, I travel via the metro, I witness the separate compartment reserved for them, I witness their reserved seats. All right by me. What is not right by me, if when you are in your twenties, leisuring about your reserved seat, hooked up on your phone, all fine – walking, talking, then how can you deny an elderly woman, who has a problem standing in a crowd, the people in which are basically sticking to one another? From when did our ethical human virtues were taken upon by one’s right as a woman. Finally, a guy stood up and offered his seat to the woman. Equality – woman fight for equality when they cannot stand for one another. My words can be criticized, but yes, a singular incident is exemplary for human nature. Women’s magazines, with women acting as editors, don’t feature obese women on their cover, no short woman, no physically flawed woman, no rape survivors, no acid attack victims – for once we can do without the glitz and the glam, for once we can consider all women equal, and start treating them equally amongst one another. That would be the first step. Same goes for Men’s magazine, same goes for the billboards that prostitute around entire cities, same goes for everything. The truth lies within the folds, it’s a pity we are not opening up. LGBT, people treat your sexuality as if a weapon, people even treat the notion of sex as an abomination. The reason for their very being is an abomination. Three cheers to that. If you’re gay, you shall be frowned upon, you shall be bullied, here in India, you can even be killed honorably. That’s the story, you are a walking talking nuclear weapon, hell you can even be infectious, you shall not be interacted with – and the funny part is, that many a people, who take pride in claiming that they stand with the LGBT movement, make use of words of the likes of ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbian’ in manners that are nothing short of being derogatory. Hypocrisy, I tell you. And if that’s not enough, in comes racial bigotry. Brown people looking down upon blacks, yellow ones looking down upon brown, a white man looking down them all. Even here, even in our good old nation, if you are dark complexioned, you must be familiar with sarcastic slangs that find their derivation from the color of your skin tone. When not many, but a few in our own nation are racist, how offended are we, when we face racism in distant lands! Religion, sexuality, gender, color – and the forms of inequality have we derived from them are nothing but detestable. What should have had held us together, what should have blended everything in shades that please the eye – is tearing the world apart. And you know what, the most dangerous beings of all, the intellects, use your fallacies to their benefits. Yes, they understand what’s right, they understand what’s wrong, and they are spread everywhere, from politics to corporate enterprises, and yet they do nothing about it, because of narcissistic reasons, they want to be in power, they want to govern, they want differences to arise, they want the debate to go on and on and on, they love playing the puppeteer to us puppets. Every sane mind realizes that loving someone can in no manner what so ever be wrong, and yet, the government doesn’t legalize same sex marriages, owing only to one reason and one reason specifically – they don’t want to succumb to your demands, they want you to beg, plead and even fight them, for they want to show you who is in power, that who is ‘in-charge’. Such dismissive actions reflect of their importance. If the people in power grant us every single thing we demand, they shall be taken for granted, they shall not be regarded and owing to this, they prefer not to lose their Midas touch. That’s the recipe. The world today The world today- bans love, represses voices, kills innocents and chooses maniac clowns for leaders. Here, there, everywhere! Polish your principles to such an extent, that you, yourself, become the principle, then pick up a fight, for in the world as such, there are people who want to bring the change and people who want to stand beside revolutionaries and be noticed. They possess a greater threat than the one we believe we are facing. The change should first occur amidst ourselves, then should it be scattered like pollen in the world yonder, for the greater good.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Capturing the wisdom and the beauty of Donald J. Trump in just one statement escaping from his charming mouth: Our military has never been stronger. Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world – the best anywhere in the world, by far.1 Here the man thinks that everyone will be impressed that the American military has never been stronger. And that those who, for some unimaginable reason, are not impressed with that will at least be impressed that military equipment is being added EACH DAY. Ah yes, it’s long been a sore point with most Americans that new military equipment was being added only once a week. And if that isn’t impressive enough, then surely the fact that the equipment is NEW will win people over. Indeed, the newness is important enough to mention twice. After all, no one likes USED military equipment. And if newness doesn’t win everyone’s heart, then BEAUTIFUL will definitely do it. Who likes UGLY military equipment? Even the people we slaughter all over the world insist upon good-looking guns and bombs. And the best in the world. Of course. That’s what makes us all proud to be Americans. And what makes the rest of humanity just aching with jealousy. And in case you don’t fully appreciate that, notice that he adds that it’s the best ANYWHERE in the world. And in case you still don’t fully appreciate that, notice that he specifies that our equipment is the best in the world BY FAR! That means that no other country is even close! Just imagine! Makes me choke up. Lucky for the man … his seeming incapacity for moral or intellectual embarrassment. He’s twice blessed. His fans like the idea that their president is no smarter than they are. This may well serve to get the man re-elected, as it did with George W. Bush. The strange world of Russian trolls Webster’s dictionary: troll – verb: To fish by running a baited line behind a moving boat; noun: A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore. Russian Internet trolls are trying to stir up even more controversy over National Football League players crouching on one knee (“taking a “knee”) during the national anthem, said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), warning that the United States should expect such divisive efforts to escalate in the next election. “We watched even this weekend,” Lankford said, “the Russians and their troll farms, and their Internet folks, start hash-tagging out ‘take a knee’ and also hash-tagging out ‘Boycott NFL’.” The Russians’ goal, he said, was “to try to raise the noise level in America to try to make a big issue, an even bigger issue as they’re trying to just push divisiveness in the country. We’ve continued to be able to see that. We will see that again in our election time.”2 Russia “causing divisiveness” is a common theme of American politicians and media. Never explained is WHY? What does Russia have to gain by Americans being divided? Do they think the Russians are so juvenile? Or are the Americans the childish ones? CNN on October 12 claimed that Russia uses YouTube, Tumblr and the Pokemon Go mobile game “to exploit racial tensions and sow discord among Americans,” while the Washington Post (October 12) reported that “content generated by Russian operatives was not aimed only at influencing the election. Many of the posts and ads intended to divide Americans over hot-button issues such as immigration or race.” Imagine … the American public being divided over immigration and race … How could that be possible without Russian trolls? The Post (October 9) reported that the Russian trolling operation resides “in a large gray building north of the St. Petersburg city center … There, young people work 12-hour shifts and make between $800 and $1,000 a month, “an attractive wage for former students and young people. It is impossible to get inside the building, and there are multiple entrances, making it hard to tell who is a troll and who is not.” Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest are amongst the many Internet sites that we are told have been overrun by Russian trolls. The last named is a site that specializes in home decor, fashion and recipes. Have the Russians gone mad? Or are the American accusations the kind of stuff that is usually called – dare I say it? – “propaganda”? “How much the trolls affected the outcome of the U.S. election is unclear,” the Post had to admit. “But their omnipresence is evident on Twitter and in the comments section of publications like the Washington Post, where trolls can be found criticizing news stories, lambasting other posters and accusing one another of being trolls.” Are you starting to chuckle? At one point the Post reported that Facebook “identified more than 3000 advertisements purchased in a Russian-orchestrated campaign to influence the American public’s views and exploit divisions around contentious issues.” And Congressional investigators said that some of the Facebook ad purchases had “obvious Russian fingerprints, including Russian addresses and payments made in rubles”, and that “accounts traced to a shadowy Russian Internet company had purchased at least $100,000 in ads during the 2016 election season.” However, at other times the Post told us that Facebook had pointed out that “most of the ads made no explicit reference in favor of Trump or Clinton,” and that some ads were purchased after the election. We’ve been told, moreover, that Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos’s team “had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short.”3 In any event, we have to wonder: What political savvy concerning American elections and voters do the Russians have that the Democratic and Republican parties don’t have? I have read numerous references to these ads but have yet to come across a single one that quotes the exact wording of even one advertisement. Is that not odd? To add to the oddness, in yet another Washington Post article (September 28) we are informed that “some of the ads promoted African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, while others suggested those same groups posed a growing political threat, according to people familiar with the material.” Politico, a Democratic-Party-leaning journal, reports that Russian-funded Facebook ads backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Democrat Bernie Sanders, and Republican Donald Trump. Who and what is behind these peculiar goings-on? More fun and games: the Department of Homeland Security in September notified Virginia and 20 other states about Russian efforts to hack their election systems in 2016. Earlier this year, UK Foreign Minister Boris Johnson declared, apparently without embarrassment: “We have no evidence the Russians are actually involved in trying to undermine our democratic processes at the moment. We don’t actually have that evidence. But what we do have is plenty of evidence that the Russians are capable of doing that.”4 At a September 27 Congressional hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray joined this proud chorus, testifying: “One of the things we know is that the Russians and Russian state actors are trying to influence other elections in other countries.” Mr. Wray forgot to name any of the other countries and the assembled Congress members forgot to ask him for any names. Perhaps the main reason for questioning charges of Russian interference in the 2016 US election is that Russian President Putin would have been risking that the expected winner, Hillary Clinton, would have been handed a personal reason to take revenge on him and his country. But that’s just being logical and rational, two qualities Cold War II has no more use for than Cold War I did. Know thine enemy The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report in June entitled “Russia: Military Power: Building a military to support great power aspirations”. Here’s an excerpt: Moscow seeks to promote a multi-polar world predicated on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in other states’ internal affairs, the primacy of the United Nations, and a careful balance of power preventing one state or group of states from dominating the international order. To support these great power ambitions, Moscow has sought to build a robust military able to project power, add credibility to Russian diplomacy, and ensure that Russian interests can no longer be summarily dismissed without consequence. … Russia also has a deep and abiding distrust of U.S. efforts to promote democracy around the world and what it perceives as a U.S. campaign to impose a single set of global values.5 Great power aspirations, indeed. How dare those Russkis promote a multi-polar world, respect for state sovereignty, non-interference, the United Nations, and balance of power? It’s all straight out of Lenin’s playbook, 100th anniversary edition. As to the US promoting democracy around the world … Oh, right, that’s what the Pentagon calls Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, the Philippines, Honduras, Turkey, et al. Like the southern gentlemen who agreed that it was right to free the slaves, but did so only in their wills “Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.” – Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer (1828-1910) An anti-abortion congressman asked a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to get an abortion when he thought she might be pregnant. A Pittsburgh newspaper said it had obtained text messages between Republican Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania and Ms. Shannon Edwards, a divorcée. A message from Edwards said the congressman had “zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options.” It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant. The revelation came as the House approved Republican legislation that would make it a crime to perform an abortion after 20 weeks of fetal development. Murphy, a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, and popular among anti-abortion groups, is among the bill’s co-sponsors. He subsequently announced that he will not seek re-election next year.6 Our beloved president at one time clearly supported a woman’s right to abortion. In recent times he has once again exhibited his high (double) standards by speaking, just as clearly, against abortion. Anti-abortion activists like to speak of saving the lives of “unborn children”, of how the fetus is fully a human being deserving of as much love and respect and legal protection as any other human being. But does anyone know cases of parents grieving over an aborted fetus the way we have often read or heard of parents, as well as their friends, grieving over the death of a three-year-old child or a teenager? Of course not. If for no other reason than the parents choose to have an abortion. Does anyone know of a case of the parents of an aborted fetus tearfully remembering the fetus’s first words, or high school graduation or wedding or the camping trip they all took together? Or the fetus’s smile or the way it laughed? Of course not. Because the fetus is not a human being in a sufficiently meaningful physical, social, intellectual, and emotional sense. But the anti-abortion activists – often for reasons of sexual prudishness, anti-feminism, religion (the Catholic members of the Supreme Court have been very consistent in their anti-abortion votes), or other personal or political prejudices – throw a halo around the fetus, treat the needs and desires of the parents as nothingness, and damn all those who differ with them as child murderers. Unfortunately, with many of these activists, their perfect love for human beings does not extend to the human beings of Iraq or Afghanistan or any other victims of their government’s warfare. * Washington Post, September 8, 2017. * Washington Post, September 28, 2017. * Ibid. September 18, 19, 24, and October 13, 2017. * The Guardian (London), March 14, 2017. * “Russia Military Power,” Defense Intelligence Agency, pages 14-15. * Associated Press, October 4, 2017. http://clubof.info/

[jeremyau]

People Don’t Follow Titles: Necessity and Sufficiency in Leadership

June 15, 2017 | Reading Time: 6 minutes

“Colonel Graff: You have a habit of upsetting your commander. Ender Wiggin: I find it hard to respect someone just because they outrank me, sir.” — Orson Scott Card

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Many leaders confuse necessary conditions for leadership with sufficient ones.

Titles often come with the assumption people will follow you based on a title. Whether by election, appointment, or divine right, at some point you were officially put in the position. But leadership is based on more than just titles.

Not only do title-based leaders feel like once they get the title that everyone will fall in line, but they also feel they are leading because they are in charge — a violation of the golden rules of leadership. This makes them toxic to organization culture.

A necessary condition for leadership is trust, which doesn't come from titles. You have to earn it.

***

Necessary conditions are those that must be present, but are not, on their own, enough for achievement.

Perhaps an easy example will help illuminate. Swinging at a pitch in baseball is necessary to hit the ball, but not sufficient to do so.

War offers another example. It's necessary to know the capabilities of your enemy and their positions, but that is not sufficient to win a battle.

Leadership can be very similar. Being in a position of leadership is necessary to lead an organization, but that is not sufficient to get people moving towards a common goal. Titles, on their own, do not confer legitimacy. And legitimacy is one of the sufficient conditions of leadership.

If your team, organization, or country doesn't view you as legitimate you will have a hard time getting anything done. Because they won’t work for you, and you can’t do it all yourself. Leadership without legitimacy is a case of multiply by zero.

There is a wonderful example of this, from the interesting history of the Mongolians. In his book The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, Jack Weatherford tells an amazing story of the unlikely, but immensely successful, leadership of Manduhai the Wise.

250 years after Genghis Khan, the empire was in fragments. The Mongols had retreated into their various tribes, often fighting each other and nominally ruled by outsiders from China and the Middle East. There was still a Khan, but he exercised no real power. The Mongol tribes were very much at the mercy of their neighbors.

In 1470 the sitting Khan died, survived only by a junior wife. There were immediate suitors vying for her affection because by marrying her the title of Khan could be claimed. Her name was Manduhai. Instead of choosing the easy path of remarriage and an alliance, she decided to pursue her dream of uniting the Mongol nation.

First, she had to choose a consort that would allow her to keep the title of Queen. There was one remaining legitimate survivor of Genghis Khan’s bloodline – a sickly 7-year-old boy. Orphaned as a baby and neglected by his first caregiver, he had been under Manduhai’s protection for a few years. Because of his lineage, she took him to the Shrine of the First Queen and asked for divine blessings in installing him as the Great Khan. They would rule together, but clearly, due to his age and condition, she would be in charge.

Although her words would be addressed to the shrine, and she would face away from the crowd, there could be no question that, in addition to being the spiritual outcry of a pilgrim, these words constituted a desperate plea of a queen to her people. This would be the most important political speech of her life.

She was successful in securing the appointment. But Manduhai understood that the title of Great Khan for the little boy and Khatun (Queen) for her would not be enough. She needed the support of all the Mongol tribes to give the titles legitimacy, and here there were a significant number of obstacles to overcome.

Twice before in the previous generations, boys of his age had been proclaimed Great Khan, only to be murdered by their rivals before they could reach full maturity. Other fully grown men who bore the title were also ignominiously struck down and killed by the Muslim warlords who tried to control them.

First Manduhai had to keep herself and the boy, Dayan Khan, alive. Then she had to demonstrate that they were the right people to unite the Mongol tribes and ensure prosperity for all. This would take both physical battles and a strategic understanding of how to employ little power for great effect. Her success was by no means guaranteed.

Throughout their reign, as on this awkward inaugural day, they frequently benefited from the underestimation of their abilities by those who struggled against them. In the world where physical strength and mastery of the horse and bow seemed to be all that really mattered, no one seemed to anticipate the advantages of patient intelligence, careful planning, and consistency of action.

It was these traits that led Manduhai to carefully craft her plan of action. She needed to position herself as a true leader that could unite the Mongol tribes.

Vows, prayers, and rituals before a shrine added much needed scared legitimacy to Dayan Khan’s rule, but without force of arms, they amounted to empty gestures and wasted breath. Only after demonstrating that she had the skill to win, as well as the supernatural blessing to do so, could Manduhai hope to rule the Mongols. She had enemies on every side, and she needed to choose her first battle carefully. She had to confront each enemy, but she had to confront each in its own due time. Manduhai needed to manage the flow of conflicts by deciding when and where to fight and not allowing others to force her into a war for which she was not prepared or stood little chance of winning.

She made an important strategic alliance with one of the failed suitors, a popular and intelligent general who controlled the area immediately east of her power base. Then she went to battle to secure her western front. Some tribes supported her from the outset, due to the spiritual power of her partnership with the boy, the ‘true Khan’. The rest she conquered, support snowballing behind her.

In addition to its strategic importance, the western campaign against the Oirat was a notable propaganda victory, demonstrating that Manduhai had the blessing of the Shrine of the First Queen and the Eternal Blue Sky. Manduhai showed that she was in control of her country.

Grinding it out in the trenches inspired support. Manduhai demonstrated the courage and intelligence to lead and to provide what her people needed. She was not an empire builder, seeking to conquer the world. Rather, she was pragmatic desiring to unify the Mongol nation to ensure they had the means to thwart any future attempt at takeover by a foreign power.

In contrast to the expansive territorial acquisition favored by prior generations of steppe conquerors, Manduhai pursued a strategy of geographic precision. Better to control the right spot rather than be responsible for conquering, organizing, and running a massive empire of reluctant subjects. … Rather than trying to conquer and occupy the extensive links of the Silk Route or the vast expanse of China, she sought to conquer just the strategic spot from which to control them.

Her story teaches us the difference between necessity and sufficiency when it comes to leadership.

Manduhai ticked all the necessary boxes, being a Queen, choosing a descendant of Genghis Khan to rule by her side, and asking for meaningful spiritual blessings. While necessary these were not sufficient to rule. To actually be accepted as a leader, she had to prove herself both on the battlefield and in strategic negotiations. She understood that people would only follow her if they believed in her, and saw that she was working for them. And finally, she also considered how to use her leadership to create something that would continue long after she had gone.

Manduhai concentrated the remainder of her life in protecting what she had accomplished and making certain that the nation could sustain itself after her departure. With the same assiduous devotion she had applied to the battlefield and the unification of the Mongol nation, Manduhai and Dayan Khan now set to the reorganization of the Mongol government and its protection in the future.

In this, she succeeded. She cemented her power as Queen by ultimately working for the peace and prosperity of the entire Mongol nation. Perhaps this is why she is remembered by them as Mandukhai the Wise.