He cites an op-ed from Marco Rubio as a link inside this eruction:
In this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency. We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains. The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked. We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.
Problem is, minimizing risks for the many means more tries and successes, and more work done generally, in less oligopolistic environments, so efficiencies will come from design and execution, not stock manipulation.
This was the European understanding of capital accumulation until World War One. You must wait, you may even have to die, for wealth to grow. The great-great-grandparents of many white Americans alive today crossed an ocean to get as far away from this unforgiving Old World order as possible. But the establishment of the New World required the compliment of necro-economics, which is what the Cameroon philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics: slave labor.
finally,
Many white Americans woke up on May 26 to an America that was devolving into an anti-life social order and the savage persistence of the necropolitics of slavery. I think the size and scale and tenacity of the present Black Lives Matter demonstrations can be attributed to a double resistance: the first, of course, concerns a demand for recognition (“I Am a [Hu]man!”); and the second is a rejection of the endless economic growth directive. There is nothing more tiresome than making money. There is nothing more important than life.
I had a sudden revelation the other day, which others have probably known for years. College tuition has gone through the roof, requiring huge loans that people have to pay over a decade or more, for the most part to keep people poor and locked into low paying jobs.
Am I naive to have just thought this? And has it been verified somehow?
This is a pretty common idea. I think there is evidence to support it, starting with Reagan’s time as governor and the idea that college kids with too much time on their hands was what lost us the Vietnam War. I think Jeff Sessions was involved in creating the current system of debt, but that just might be faulty memory.
Depends on whether your privileges can be used to offset your marginalizations, or whether your marginalizations tend to antagonize each other. Differs from person to person.
Example: Male privilege is for sure a definite thing - but comes with assumptions that you’re a provider. At least for yourself, but ideally for others as well.
So, as a young male who becomes poor, you’re pretty much shown the sidewalk and told to get a job you lazy bum. You can get some free food, but you’ll be preached at while you do, assumed a sinner/junkie/criminal, treated as suspicious.
A young female in the same circumstance is told that we have special women’s-only shelters, lots of programs to help you, and you’ll be first in line for affordable housing. ‘Women and children first’ means a lot of people will try to help you.
That does not in any way negate male privilege, but it certainly complicates it. When you throw in all the various other factors (age, ethnicity, religion, gender/sexuality, health, wealth, etc.), it gets way more complicated than any test like that could possibly account for. Privilege is not a binary thing where you have it or you don’t, or something that can be easily measured on a scale from zero to full.
For my part the downside of white privilege is 1. being expected by white supremacists and homophobes and mens-rights nutjobs to kowtow to their views and 2. dealing with the physical and financial blowback from them and their buddies when I haven’t. As an adult this is mostly a workplace issue, where the ability to disengage is limited and the possibility of violence is limited. As a kid it was a nightmare.
So yeah, I scored a 33 and I know the impulse to disengage and hide from my fellow white dudes. That said, it’s unlikely I’ll be targeted for assassination when I’m out for a walk.
Projection wrapped in a complaint about something that doesn’t exist: a massive communist conspiracy to get people to complain about something that fascists can’t admit exists (at least in public), all to cover up the actual murders and bombings that fascists actually commit.
Frankly, this is a terrible strategy. We are not very good supervillains. If we were really smart and were really dedicated to enacting all of our nefarious dethroning plans, we’d go after people with the most power. Yeah! We’d convince rich people, white people, Christian people, men, and most specifically rich, white, Christian men that they are the real victims here. Get them riled up, scared, tell them that immigrants are coming to replace them, that gay people were gonna make their marriages less special, that women were gonna falsely accuse them of rape, that Muslims were gonna force them to follow Sharia Law, that some rich foreign Jewish person was going around paying people to not like them, that scientists made up a whole pandemic just to take away their freedom for a few months and, probably, that black people are making up racism and police brutality just to hurt them and ruin their lives.
You know how people owning nothing but the clothes on their back used to be the standard for poverty? Capitalism has advanced beyond that. Now that is a dream that many will never achieve as long as they live. A net worth of zero and a fresh start. Million upon millions would kill for that. The system is good at what it does and that includes making sure that what can be taken from the weak will be.
They’re actually where I get my weather from: https://www.wunderground.com/ They’re very accurate, do a great job of packing a lot of info in a glance, and their ‘wundermap’, in addition to radar, satellite, etc., has an overlay to show the coronavirus cases reported.
That may not be what they’re talking about, but I’m no longer sure. Right-wing wackjobs proposing conspiracy theories about how evil weathermen are going to defeat their god by reporting rain where it happens instead of where it doesn’t - that seems all too plausible nowadays. But if that’s what you’re afraid of, just start worshiping the weathermen who can so easily defeat your god. Simple solution to a stupid problem.
It was a militant-ish hippy movement, or a hippy-ish militant movement of 50 years ago. They got targeted by cointelpro or something, likely the bombings were in part pushed by FBI plants.
The weather service is cool though but I haven’t used it in a few years, ever since the black pocket rectangles all started shipping with functional ad-free weather thingys.
It’s sad that most of my knowledge of the group (that’s actually being referenced) comes due to the “pallin’ around with terrorists” bullshit Palin and McCain floated in the 2008 election.
I put Palin first because McCain at least seemed slightly embarrassed by the smear, though I don’t remember him doing anything at all to reign it in.
