Hey there folks I’m a little teapot short and stout and my name is John Henry from johnhenry.us, welcome to TLDR – “Too Long; Didn’t Read” – let’s have a short conversation about “the anger vote.”
Ran across this meme from Michigan Republicans posted via motivational speaker Matt Fol…er, sorry, that’s Matt Hall, who as it happens is my state representative.
The only thing breaking here is my eyeballs trying to find something meaningful in this statement.
The original post adds a comment about an “extreme partisan agenda” and a comment about “Big Labor,” with a link to more empty verbiage built to make you angry and stop you from asking about the details.
So first things first: “big labor” is you and me. Working people trying to get a living wage and dignified compensation and conditions for their work. That’s who he’s really pushing against here. Us.
Second, there are assertions made here that aren’t supported anywhere in the related text or links – “taking money away from the classrooms,” “giving it to corrupt (also unsupported) union bosses.” There’s no direct information path from this graphic to the substance of the issues he’s yammering about; you have to dig into the comments, follow the link to the Michigan GOP’s website article, read all the way through it, almost at the bottom you find the actual bill numbers.
Then you have to google and go read them, just to find out none of what he’s saying is true. For instance one of the bills he’s talking about repeals a law preventing state agencies from processing union dues as a payroll deduction, making it as annoying as possible to pay union dues.
Make the lie loud and clear. Make the truth hard to find.
You aren’t supposed to notice folks like Matt taking money away from public classrooms and giving it to churches and other private school operators, all of whom make political donations and in-kind contributions. You aren’t supposed to notice that’s an end-run around the establishment clause used to con the government into funding religious instruction.
Eventually you can take religion out completely and pretend you’re just a plucky entrepreneur “improving” education for everyone by privatizing it and monetizing it, and we’ll just ignore that you’re also destroying it and perpetuating outrageous abuses of power and elitism and reinforcements of systemic imbalances of power like racism and sexism…and most importantly, capitalism.
When I was a kid you had to pay out of pocket to access that privilege, now you just have to know the right people and fill out the right forms and the state will pay it for you – essentially giving you the same thing you were getting directly from the state 40 years ago, except it costs fifty times as much because of all the middle-men taking their cut along the way to pay folks like Matt here, plus it’s been split into separate systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest, and the privileged have stationed themselves as brokers and middle-men all along the way to get paid.
Told y’all when they started outsourcing the lunch lady to save a buck (which it never did) that it wouldn’t be long before they outsourced the whole school. People like Matt sneered and laughed from his van down by the river, just like they’ll sneer and laugh now because they think he cleverly avoided this whole conversation by simply saying “classrooms,” which helps hide the fact that what he’s really talking about is those privately owned classrooms that ultimately help fund his political career.
THOSE are the classrooms he’s really worried about money being taken away from – the classrooms that pay for his campaigns.
Then of course there’s the whole anti-union framing which is normal GOP politics and I won’t go into here other than to notice it.
What Matt here wants to motivate you to do is ignore the facts and feel like you and your kids are being attacked and robbed. There’s no evidence of that, there’s not even anyone credibly suggesting it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you go for the emotion and that bypasses the critical thinking and boom, half of southwest Michigan is pissed at the Democrats for stealing their schools.
It works the same everywhere. Stop falling for it. Cultivate emotional detachment from these issues and you’ll be able to see them more clearly.
That’s it for me I’m John Henry from JohnHenry.US reminding you that I stay independent by being crowdfunded, and that means everything I do here depends on you so remember to like, share, subscribe, and spread the word, and if you can please drop by johnhenry.us/money and you’ll find a range of one-time and ongoing weekly or monthly support options to help pay the bills and buy the gear that makes all this happen.
Hey there everyone I’m intrepid ace reporter John Henry beaming you this encoded message from my undisclosed secret hideaway somewhere underneath the Mojave desert, and welcome to today’s Morning Message!
I’ve talked a lot over the years about the inherent conflicts of interest that exist in capitalism. The minute you start chasing profit or focusing on making money, you are compromising whatever it was you started off doing.
Time and again we’ve seen it – in criminal justice, in education, in journalism…and in health care. A couple of days ago MLive.Com published an investigative report about the profits generated by several hospital networks in the state, including one of the two major hospitals in my city.
Analyzing the records of a handful of non-profits (which are public by law) the investigation found significant profit increases during the pandemic. This isn’t entirely surprising, but does stand in stark contrast to the claims of massive losses by hospitals early on.
The story at Bronson Healthcare based in Kalamazoo and McLaren Health Care headquartered in Grand Blanc is similar to many stories in many sectors over the last few years. Corporations take in millions or billions of dollars, executive pay and bonuses skyrocket, prices go up, government subsidies are leveraged, etc.
It’s interesting to me that the story focuses on these two networks when they weren’t even the most profitable. I feel like the reporters are putting a lot of weight on the idea of non-profit status as though that magically means money isn’t necessary, and focusing on the $455m in profit growth from 2019-2022 at Bronson while not mentioning the $880 gained fifty miles up US-131 at Metropolitan Hospital in Grand Rapids strikes me as rather strange.
Mostly what’s interesting is that at no point do the reporters ask why we’ve allowed health care to become a thing that is money-dependent in the first place.
Focusing on the frankly exorbitant executive compensation packages and profit margins during an unprecedented and unpredictable moment in history seems to me to entirely miss the point. They edge closer in pointing out how many of these executives are specifically skilled in business and marketing rather than health care. It absolutely is important to know that public funds are in play and what’s being done with them.
Somehow lost in all of this is the basic question: why would we expect any other result in a system based on profit and capitalism? This is what money does to systems, regardless of whether they’re “non-profit” or not. If you have to focus on money, you’re not focusing on health care or education or whatever else.
Every other point of failure in this story starts there, but the reporters didn’t touch it. Instead they chose to recite a laundry list of offenses by these two systems while basically ignoring the rest – the only place in the article that the profits of other systems is discussed directly is an embedded map showing hospitals in the state and their profit growth or loss between 2019-2022. Similarly, the sheer reality that the real resources sufficient for a quality public health system do not exist was overlooked with only passing mention of staffing shortages during the peak of Covid.
We don’t have the personnel and material for a proper health care system in this country…because it’s all being done for money, and how do we save money or how do we make money or how do we pay more money for this hotshot executive or that one to come in and rearrange a few things to generate more money?
That’s the real story here, and it’s being overlooked in favor of a more sensational but less meaningful examination of two hospital networks’ finances…because that generates more interest, and therefore more eyeballs, and therefore more money. Again: the compromise.
Today’s morning message is simply this: whenever there’s money involved, all other core goals are compromised to some degree. It can’t be avoided. Keeping your eyes open to that can help you make better informed and more effective decisions when you’re asked to make that compromise.
That’s it for me, speaking of money please don’t forget that I’m entirely crowdfunded here so please do help out if you can via PayPal, Patreon, CashApp, lots of other options available and those are all linked at johnhenry.us/money, and as always the best support is your engagement so please do like, share, subscribe, and comment, and I will see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!
Good Friday morning-slash-afternoon everyone, I’m your painfully handsome and consistently modest host John Henry, and here’s what’s on my mind this morning
First: the obvious. I’ve changed the name of this newsletter to reflect the ongoing process of moving it out of meta-commentary and into production as a “real” newsletter, i.e. “not about me.”
So with that handled, let’s get on with the show!
Here’s another meme that makes me want to choke out the lower 80% of the intelligence pool.
That word “thinking” is doing way too much of the lifting here.
No, you probably DON’T know more about your experience in most situations where this attitude comes up
patients insisting their doctors are idiots because they don’t have instant magic answers
parents who didn’t graduate junior high but are now firmly convinced they’re qualified homeschool instructors because “I’ve got a right“
parents insisting the only way to keep their kids in line is to beat on them
people who think the rush they get from a handful of sugar pills is evidence that it’s working better than actual medicine
some 8th grade dropout who spends all their time at Mises dot org and Ron Paul’s website trying to explain to a political scientist what “libertarian” “really means.”
No, chances are unless you have prior specialized training, your experience doesn’t mean you know more than the experts. Given the impact of bias in human thinking, it almost certainly means your opinions and perspectives are less objectively valid than those of the experts advising you, because they’re not emotionally invested.
Having a heart attack doesn’t make you a cardiologist any more than having herpes makes you a urologist. Being autistic doesn’t make you a neurologist. Having several diagnosed neurodivergencies doesn’t make me a psychiatrist.
It can be frustrating when you’re looking for professional help and they don’t have answers, or you don’t like their answers (which is most often the case when this attitude shows up), or you don’t understand their answers (second place), or they don’t seem to understand your experiences, but that doesn’t magically make you the doctor.
Your experiences can’t replace years of education; even a bad doctor probably knows more about your body than you do…and the fact that they don’t know everything while you’re 100% convinced that hip pain is your dead aunt Shirley sending you messages from the great beyond does not mean “your experience” trumps their education, even if “they just don’t get” how ol’ Shirley used to tease you by poking you in the hip.
Even a bad doctor on “ez mode” is diagnosing you based on a set of established knowledge and criteria that you almost certainly don’t have access to (and your Facebook survivors’ group is NOT access to that information!) And their work, unlike yours, is subject to peer review.
People sitting around recounting their subjective experiences isn’t data, it’s anecdotes. Speaking of, how about a wrestling story?
Back in the late 90’s when I was working as an announcer for Southern Championship Wrestling down in NC (shout out to the OmegaPowers), my buddy Toad was involved in a match where he did a diving, somersaulting body block over the top rope to the floor – through his opponent and a table.
He immediately signaled he was hurt, the match was wrapped, and he went to the locker room and bandaged his ribs, convinced that he’d broken them. His entire torso was in pain so bad he could hardly move.
Got to the ER, did some tests and scans, and then they asked him why his torso was ace bandaged. “Well, to keep those broken ribs from moving around too much.”
They said “it won’t help.”
“Why not?”
“Your ribs aren’t injured. Your hip is broken.”
But his hip wasn’t where the pain was, his torso was. He felt the impact of the table on his ribs and that’s where the pain was, so he assumed based on his experience that his ribs were injured…but the experts took a look and found out he was wrong, by what amounts to a mile anatomically.
I get that it’s frustrating to deal with professionals who don’t seem to understand you, and I’m in no way suggesting that there aren’t bad or lazy half-asses hiding behind a degree they sailed through or paid someone else to do most of the real work on or whatever.
I am telling you that by default “your experience” is about the least-qualified evidence of anything you can find because it’s filtered through your limitations of knowledge, your biases, your beliefs, your fears, and your misinformation.
By all means, ask questions and advocate for yourself. By all means, be firm and strong when describing your issue to someone who doesn’t appear to be listening or taking you seriously. By all means if you feel you’re being ill-served find another provider.
But never, ever assume that “your experience” is somehow of greater informational value to your situation than the expert who’s studied hundreds or thousands of experiences similar to yours.
There’s nothing wrong with crediting experience as an information source. There is something very wrong when you start rejecting an entire field of study simply because you don’t like what the data is telling you.
This is a meme encouraging irrationality and rejection of objective evidence and proven science in favor of anecdote and subjective perception. In no way does it advocate for “autism” (as the page that posted it claimed to be doing) nor for anyone who is autistic.
It does, however, feed nicely into the egos of that great mass of non-autistic people who run around calling themselves “autistic” because it’s a convenient excuse to be an entitled jerk or be a pain in the ass to their waitress, while actual autistic people pay the price. Like fake “service animals” that obviously need a service animal themselves.
A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an
A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an “independent thinker.” It means you’re an egomaniac and have chosen to be ineducable, and I’m kind of tired of people like that hiding behind other people’s problems. Then those other folks with actual problems can’t get help with because these attention-seeking fakes have clogged the system and caused the creation of lots of barriers to prevent fraud and abuse…then those barriers only get in the way of people who legitimately need help, while the fakes and the big-mouths just lie and BS their way around the system
Don’t be one of those people. They cause harm and do little to no good, even for themselves, beyond a little ego boost from feeling like they’ve projected power and told someone else what to do…and in the end, that’s doing nobody any good at all.
Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…
Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.
Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.
Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?
Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.
Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.
Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.
I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:
The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.
They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.
They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.
We refuse.
Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.
Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.
Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.
Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.
Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.
When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.
That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.
I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.
What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.
And we…aren’t.
Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.
That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.
NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.
Those are your “American Values.”
When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.
Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.
In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.
As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.
Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)
Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.
So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.
Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.
There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.
Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.
That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.
You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.
Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.
Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.
Being What You Are
Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.
That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.
You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.
You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.
You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.
“Noblesse Oblige”
It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.
There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”
That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)
If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”
Gifted Child – A Digression
This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)
When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.
I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.
It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.
One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.
So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.
By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.
Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.
In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.
Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.
School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.
So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.
I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.
I’m the person that guy thinks he is.
The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.
That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.
Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.
If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.
Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.
If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.
Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.
Getting There
Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.
If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.
Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.
That’s how we get there.
I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.
We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.
We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.
The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?
How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.
Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.
2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…
If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.
Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.
Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.
But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.
“C’mon now, who do you think you are? Hah! Bless your soul… You really think you’re in control?”
Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”
Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.
These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.
I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.
But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.
Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.
Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.
As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”
People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.
The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.
The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.
I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.
That’s pretty nuts.
Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.
Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.
The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.
The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.
Now ask yourself this question:
Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?
I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.
What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.
Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.
Lately it seems like I’ve been on a bit of a tear, as they say. There’s been some status messages, and even a short video, all coming back to the core idea we’ve got to stop explaining basic things to people who completely understand them but pretend not to because the pretense allows them to continue engaging in unacceptable behavior.
I don’t mean to ever discourage reading or genuine intellectual curiosity. I absolutely believe that understanding what the facts are is critically important, and that of necessity that means understanding what a fact is, is pretty important too.
I’m just over the constant going back and forth with people who act like they don’t get it.
It sucks up too much energy.
Explaining why black lives matter and what that phrase means when it’s been under public discussion since 2013 is waste of time, as is arguing back and forth over what groups where and why “own” what “interest” in whatever related commercial trademarks there may be and how they’re used and why. First and foremost the conversation must begin with the basic understanding that black lives matter. Full stop. Anything beyond that is nonsense and argument, because anything beyond that means on some level and to some degree you are willing enough to compromise that basic idea to bother arguing about it.
Same thing with explaining why Confederate statues don’t have any place in the United States, same thing with explaining people why they should wear a mask in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic, on and on. We just expend so much time and energy on people not to educate them but to chip away at the idea that their position has some social acceptability, that we can’t ever move forward because these sandbaggers keep siphoning all our energy into just not going backwards any faster.
Manners?
The darker colors have smaller gaps; the darkest, the *smallest* gap is about 10% (women make a little over 90% what men do), and the lightest – in Utah, women make less than 70% of men on average.
Meanwhile women are still making 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, black people are still getting shot by cops on an almost daily basis if not more than daily, there are still thousands of kids in cages in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re doing worse than nothing to help them including losing them entirely.
I’m really not trying to be rude about it, but at this point who’s more rude here? The person who is continuing to act as though they don’t understand the arguments why human beings should be human beings and we shouldn’t put up statues to people who bought and sold human beings and fought against the interests of human freedom because that is neither honorable nor laudable? Or the person who says “enough, we’re moving on now?”
Who’s being more disrespectful, the person who refuses to wear a simple facemask, repeatedly demonstrated to have zero to negligible ill effects, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that’s already killed at least – depending on your source – 125-130-ish thousand people just in the United States at the time I’m writing this, and probably many more? Or is the person who firmly insists we’re done arguing about it now and have the best guidance possible, and that’s WEAR A MASK WHEN YOU GO OUT, being rude by their firm insistence? Who dies in which direction? How many cases are there, EVER, of people dying because they were wearing a mask? Right. Wear the damn thing. If you’ve got reason beyond selfish and spurious hypochondria not to, you really WILL have the advice of a doctor because you’ve already got other serious problems.
In the vast majority of cases that first person is simply not being honest. It’s silly that we keep having to say the same things over and over as if each individual person is always hearing it for the first time. For instance I’m quite sure that my friend’s friend, whose remark started the comment that became this article, has heard all of these arguments before. He just doesn’t want to accept them. He can’t find a reasoned basis in objective fact and ethical behavior to support his position so he just pretends not to understand the arguments against it. Maybe that’s a conscious decision, maybe it’s not, I don’t know the man well enough to say. But that’s what’s happening.
At some level that stops even being about questions of racism or sexism or xenophobia or bigotry, and just starts being about personal character and integrity. I know people are going to find that offensive and outrageous and insulting, but it’s more offensive and outrageous and insulting to continue to insist that we don’t understand the basic realities of life whenever they’re inconvenient for us.
Consequences
Worse, it’s deadly.
This whole “I don’t get it” game is half the problem in a lot of places right now, where you’re talking about coronavirus or gender issues or racial issues or economic disparity issues or any of it. Half of any of those problems at least is people who just insist on pretending not to get it because if they admit they understand the arguments they have to admit that they’ve been wrong. Nobody likes to do that, so we’ve developed this elaborate set of communications to justify not doing it.
That has to stop now. That’s really what all of this is teaching us.
In another example, there’s a big kerfuffle up the road from me in Allendale, Michigan over the removal of a “confederate statue,” arguably more a civil war memorial featuring a generic confederate soldier.
That statue, though, was placed in 1998. It’s less historically relevant than The Simpsons, Nirvana, or Baywatch. And, it’s in Michigan. Nobody from this state fought for the breakaway traitorous republic; the statue doesn’t represent anyone who has any sort of tie here.
But obviously it must be important, after all apparently nobody in that town heard about the Civil War until 133 years after it was over and that’s why we’ve got to keep the statue!
Top feature of Allendale MI civil war memorial statue. Statue photos courtesy reddit.com user u/resister_sister
No more of that nonsense. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a bunch of dishonest and disingenuous people complaining about things that don’t even have the slightest significance to them other than having something to complain about.
In the greater part, right now especially, they are complaining simply because other people whose oppression these people have benefited from for centuries are demanding an end to that oppression. The loudest subgroup of those voices, those with legitimate grievances that remain ignored, are those who descended from or look like the people who have been largely enslaved and dehumanized throughout the entire history of this country. And those people are saying “you see this? This is what we’re talking about!”
That scares people whose current state of privileged comfort is in some way is a product of their privilege and social standing they were born to and other irrelevancies like their gender or the color of their skin. They are facing the reality that pretty much their entire way of thinking is wrong and cruel and intolerable and it must stop. They’ve lived so long with privilege, they think they’re entitled to it. They’re afraid they can’t compete without the advantages privilege brings, against those who have historically been denied those privileges. So when the oppressed rise up and say “you see this?” the response of the oppressors is “I don’t know what you mean,” and they keep right on going.
Solutions
So the privileged are scared again because their privilege is threatened and they imagine that’s a threat to their comfort. That’s where all this comes from, right, is this stupid zero-sum thinking where in order for me to have, you have to do without. Some people, most of them simply mislead and others deliberately misleading, push that way of thinking to rationalize their own greed or self-interest above and beyond others. It’s uncomfortable for people who have defined themselves around a core creed to realize that it’s cruel and harmful, not only to those against whom it is directed but also against those who create it and perpetuate it. They don’t want to change because it’s not comfortable and they think it means they’ll lose something.
That, my friends, is just too bad. Those privileged folks are just gonna have to handle themselves, because if they continue behaving that way and treating the problem that way, they may just end up right. Problem is, so will we all, again, and that crap has to end or we’re going to end. So the traditionally privileged can just go find find those bootstraps they’re always telling the oppressed to pull themselves up by. Because the world is moving on, with them or without them.
The truly stupid thing is, it’s not even really “taking away” anything; it’s just making sure other people have access to the same opportunities and “rights” even if they’re *not* born into privilege &c.
Those people who are afraid they can’t compete on a level playing field rely on the power of their privilege to continuing to sabotage the game.
All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the statue itself perpetuates the idea that freedom of black Americans is a gift from white men rather than their right as human beings.
The problem is – and this is why I’ve been saying for years that “kumbaya liberalism is dead” – those same people have learned that they can manipulate the good nature of people who are decent. They can claim injury where there is none, or ignorance that is really saccharine stupidity, and rely on The Good Guys™ to continue being gentle.
It’s time we faced the difficult reality that the long term result of that has been a lot of good, dead people and a lot of live crappy ones, and it’s quickly becoming an existential threat to the species.
As I’ve paraphrased Heinlein so many times: survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality. Ultimately, as a totality of human consciousness and existence, anything threatening that single universal morality will be eliminated, one way or another, just as happens with Darwinian selection for any other species, to the greatest extent that can possibly be exerted by that totality.
What makes that humane and ethically acceptable – or what defines the point at which it becomes so – is the effect of individual human will. At some level, all else being equal, we can each choose to act in ways that benefit or detract from the universal morality. “Lower” life forms don’t always have a choice about that.
In the US and other nations we’ve built entire systems that detract from the sole universal human morality, and we’ve insisted on treating the very things about those systems which detract from that fundamental drive to survive as though they are themselves required for our survival.
We have, rather than elevating and empowering human life, chosen to subjugate and restrict it for our own material benefit.
That has to stop, and we can either choose to stop it or the greater will of the collective species will absolutely act to stop it one way or another.
Conclusions
When our self-serving idiocy begins to work against the universal morality of other species and we refuse to put an end to it ourselves, those species do their best to fight back.
When we act against the universal morality of great numbers of species, we act against the universal morality of all life, and all life will work together to ensure we can’t keep doing that.
This is how all of this crap keeps going on, every bit of it. Including coronavirus, even including an alarming percentage of seismic activity in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the natural disasters that are made worse by our destruction of the environment, and it just keeps going and it all starts with individuals thinking clearly and ethically. Individuals who make a deliberate choice to refuse to at least make the genuine effort to *try* to do either one of those things are making a deliberate choice to die.
We no longer have the option of first considering the hurt feelings of the privileged. Especially when it’s mostly adults acting like little kids, being afraid to remove a band-aid and see the healing where a wound used to be. None of this is really going to “hurt” anybody, beyond the blow to their ego in finding out they’ve got to actually start living up to their own self-image, they’re not allowed to keep faking it anymore.
The coddling of these egos has to stop, and it has to stop now. It’s killing us, in very large numbers, and those numbers are going to get larger still before they start shrinking. Aside from basic human selfishness in the immediate sense, what mostly keeps this going is that arguing over these things is a multibillion dollar industry, and in spite of the generalized damage is inflicts on society as a whole, it props up the power and lifestyles of the ownership class.
But if we don’t change what we’re doing, NOW, they’re not going to start shrinking until so many people have died that the human population is no longer a threat to the rest of the world or itself.
We can no longer, as a matter of that universal human morality I keep talking about, continue to be polite to the stupid. Yes, there are going to be people who genuinely don’t get it, but that’s what education is for. That’s ignorance and it can be fixed. I’m talking about stupidity, which is willful ignorance or pretense to it. There are many more people who get it just fine and pretend not to – they play stupid – like the people who get a fake “emotional support animal” just because they notice people with real ones and are pissed off that someone is getting something “special” and they’re not.
The protection of these people’s feelings has to end, or it’s going to end us. It sounds cruel, but it isn’t. What’s cruel is the price everyone has to pay to keep propping all this BS up.
