#I generally hate libertarians as far as the American versions go

[afroggyfrog]

Political compass

To some people a political compass is just a “fun” quiz like “what type of bread are you?” and if you’re that kind of person then don’t waste your breath telling me I’m overthinking. There’s people that take it seriously, maybe they live in a 2d world with simple, 2d beliefs that always be plotted on a 2d grid, or maybe they just want that to be true, because it’s more comfortable than to think “I really don’t understand politics”.

A political compass of political compasses.

One axis can’t be used for more than one question

Let’s say we have a political compass of 1 axis, lets say, it has 2  questions.(i would have added “do you prefer donkeys or elephants” but that would just make it unnecessarily complex)

https://forms.gle/gCifTpqu2hTNo7s86

Do you prefer blue or red?

If you’re in a maze and your path is split, do you go to the left or to the right?

These questions perfectly correspond to what a politics fan might call “democrat” or “republican”, and to be serious, the answers to this probably predict who you’re gonna vote for at least a little. So what’s the problem with this model? You might not think that people who prefer different colours or maze paths wouldn’t hate each other but the whole point of politics is to hate each other So imagine this was a real political test, and if someone answers differently from you, yo hate them. Now imagine that my political axis is GOP and DEM, if you select blue left youre a DEM extremist and if you select red right youre a GOP extremist, anything else and you’re a centrist.

From the point of view of an extremist (according to the american political compass), you’ve got your side, your polar opposite, and some people who are in the middle and it all seems to make some sense.

From the point of view of someone who happens to like red but also sticks to the left side of a maze your political compass results puts you in the exact same spot as your polar opposite whom you hate very much, in the same spot as someone who answered neutral to both questions, and to one side and to the other, sit people who you think as pretty much the same as eachother, since they both just agree and disagree with you in equal measures, and none of it makes any sense.

Now imagine if there was a country where the leftists wore the color red and the rightists wore blue (i think it might just be literally every country except america?) and all of a sudden the same political compass puts all the previous extremists into the middle and it splits the 3 centrists into the left, right, and center (that 1 guy who answers neutral on everything is literally the only person worth the title of centrist)

To put this into the simplest words I can, you can have extremists that are perfectly opposed to each other end up in the middle, unless the questions aren’t all just the same thing rephrased. And this is a huge flaw that you cant get rid of unless you add a new dimension to the compass, a new dimension for every single question you add, at 1 question a line, at 2 questions a 2d grid, at 3 questions a cube... So the political compass can only tell you as much info about someone as you can get frrom asking them only 2 questions, trying to cram more than 2 questions into it will only lead to misrepresentation.

Almost every political extremist sits in the center

Because the larger the number of possible policies you could use to guess someones political compass position, the more combinations of extreme stances on each policy could end up canceling each-other on the compass, but that doesn’t make them any less extreme, it just means that in order to be in one of the corners or the sides only 8 combinations of extremist opinions can be had. If you have 3 policies each with 2 extremist stances that can be had, thats already 8 combinations, for 4 policies thats 16, for 10 policies that let you be an extremist thats 1024 combinations. That means that if humans were only capable of having 10 policies then only 0.8% of the ideologies with the most extremist positions on each policy would be seen as an extremist by the political compass.

But even if it’s broken in theory, you would at least expect right wingers to be on the right side and left wingers to be on the left side of the compass, since even if your opinion isn’t represented by the political compass, neither is your opinion represented by the 2 parties, so they should at least misrepresent your opinion in the same way (it always boils down to 2 parties because our voting systems are just broken but voting systems deserve their own separate post)

Why americans are immune to noticing its defects

I’m not a historian, but I read somewhere that the popular version of the political compass cant be applied to 20th century european politics because the political compass of the time was this triangle.

It seems pretty intuitive that different cultures at different time periods would need unique and incompatible political compasses. A political compass may ask stuff about race to someone who’s never talked to someone of a different race irl, or a question about congress to someone who’s country doesn’t have a congress, it can ask “are people more divided by class than by nationality” and the answer feels like it should vary solely by the country they are in rather than by their opinion, these are all questions I randomly got by searching for political compass.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence but every political compass I ever saw seemed like it was designed to only work on americans, this may or may not be due to the fact that american politics are the only politics that are ever talked about internationally. I also went and searched for “compas politic romanesc”, i found a study written in english that contained a political compass quiz written for romanians  but the site where the quiz was hosted is just a blank page for me, you can still find the questions written in english in the link to the study at page 10) Every other result was also in english, so I wouldn’t even know political compasses existed if i didn’t know english.

So why does the compass designed for your personal culture  end up feeling useful?

There’s this bias called the halo effect. To put it simply, if you are a fan of someone, or something, you’re going to convince yourself that every part of it is good, if you’re a democrat, you’ll convince yourself that everything they do is right, even if there’s no reason why ideas like open borders, climate change alarmism, additional taxes, gay marriage etc are related, you’ll convince yourself that if you like more ideas from democrats than you like from republicans, you’ll have to like ALL the ideas that come from democrats.

If you live in a world where everyone’s convinced themselves that there’s 2 sides then all of a sudden the political compass doesn’t feel like its grossly oversimplified to the point of making no sense, in fact, it even looks like it has more nuance than it needs, why do we need the authoritarian axis again? oh, theres a couple loud minorities in addition to the main parties, like communists and fascists and libertarians and hippies and because they’re all american off-brands the political compass puts each of them into their unique spots on the compass.

Sure every american who calls themselves a fascist will end up on the far right, but not Mussolini himself with his “race is a social construct” ideas, the father of fascism himself could be deemed a centrist by a modern-day political compass because hes not american.

Extremists that happen to be seen as centrists by the compass can simply be forgotten, after all, they’re probably the way they are because they’re not americans which means you’ll never have to discuss politics with them.

The silver lining

In a world where due to a broken voting system there are only 2 parties that matter, and where the halo effect makes people unnaturally aligned with the either one of the 2 dominant parties, a political compass could be helpful to someone who lived in a cave and was never corrupted by constant stream of political propaganda that is spewed online. Sure that his randomly-generated political opinion is 90% likely to be somewhere in the center, where every extremist sits, except 4 of them, but just on the off-chance that he aligns with one of the sides that america has deemed worthy of being trademarked he will know it, and can buy their branded stickers and hats.

The alternative

Just don’t talk about politics It’s a waste of time.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): For your consideration today: Can Republicans find a way to stop nominating toxic (perhaps fatally flawed) candidates?

The immediate spark for this question is, of course, the GOP managing to lose a Senate seat in Alabama, one of the reddest states in the nation. But there’s a long (recent) history of other races the GOP has seemingly thrown away with bad candidates.

For example …

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Ken Buck in Colorado in 2010.

Sharron Angle in Nevada in 2010.

Christine O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Todd Akin in Missouri in 2012.

harry: Richard Mourdock in Indiana in 2012.

micah: Also, before we really get going, I just wanted to note that Nate wanted today’s chat to be about why Doug Jones is a legit 2020 presidential contender.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): That was Harry’s idea. He got it from a Twitter egg and talked about it on the podcast Tuesday night.

harry: There are no eggs anymore.

natesilver: My idea is that he’ll be the vice presidential nominee to a female nominee.

clare.malone: aaaaand we’re already sidetracked.

micah: In fairness, that was my fault.

harry: It’s always your fault.

micah: OK, so let’s start with why the GOP keeps putting up toxic candidates. (Then we’ll dive into ways they can not do this.)

What’s going on here?

In Alabama, for example, Republicans had two other deeply conservative, perfectly viable primary candidates — Luther Strange and Mo Brooks. They went with Moore.

clare.malone: The GOP base has gotten a lot more conservative.

harry: It ranges, right? In Alabama, the GOP establishment candidate, Strange, was flawed too, with ties to an unpopular governor. (Brooks, on the other hand, likely could have beaten Moore in the runoff.) In Delaware in 2010, the GOP candidate running against O’Donnell was too liberal for the base.

But at the end of the day, it’s the voters who are doing this.

natesilver: I’m not sure it’s just that the base has gotten more conservative, in a traditional left-right sense. It’s more that Republicans have been trained to distrust the establishment and distrust the media, and some candidates have been able to exploit that.

clare.malone: Well, GOP voters certainly identify as more conservative:

And those things that you mention, Nate, are now intertwined with what it means to be a conservative in America.

harry: Dare I say it’s both?

micah: I think Clare is write that they’re intertwined now.

natesilver: I actually don’t think it’s both. President Trump’s nomination last year is fairly powerful evidence of this, IMO. Because he was one of the least conservative candidates in the field, in kind of an American Conservative Union sense.

micah: But when someone identifies as conservative these days, part of what they mean is “anti-establishment.”

clare.malone: Right. Most people don’t think in DW-Nominate scores; they think in terms of where their views fall on our cultural spectrum. And conservatism has taken on new contours — it’s not about economics anymore.

Right? Or, that’s not the motivating factor for voters.

natesilver: I don’t think “conservative” is a good term to describe those characteristics. Among other reasons, because it’s quite a radical viewpoint in some ways.

harry: Sometimes it really is about ideology though.

micah: But anti-establishment sentiment seems to correlate so strongly with “conservative,” Nate.

So, it’s like: There’s nothing about old-school conservatism that leads to toxic candidates. But contemporary conservatism is, in part, defined by anti-establishmentism. And that does lead to toxic candidates.

natesilver: Right and then we had a test case — named Donald Trump — who kept all the anti-establishment parts and dropped the movement conservatism. And he did just great. It’s just one data point, but a pretty influential one.

clare.malone: Yeah … I think it’s not just that some of these candidates are anti-establishment. It’s that there’s a certain strain of contrarianism that runs in the veins of some of these candidates.

micah: I think we’re having a semantics debate and in fact we all agree.

clare.malone: This is what we have to do when we agree!

micah: lol

harry: I hate you all.

clare.malone: The people want to see a fight.

micah: OK, so far we have: Republicans are more prone to nominating toxic candidates because anti-establishmentism has become so core to the party.

But why has anti-establishmentism become so core?

And why can’t they nominate an anti-establishment candidate who nonetheless appeals to a broad swath of a general electorate?

natesilver: Because anti-establishmentism is sort of defined by opposition to established order, and the established order is usually popular.

clare.malone: Conservatism is about, on a simplistic level, reducing government intrusion, allowing people the freedom to think and act as they like, within reason. (If you want to see a version of “think and act as they like, with no bounds of reason,” talk to some folks at a Libertarian convention.)

When the culture is moving at rapid clip toward cultural liberalism — the acceptance of what was not long ago considered out of the norm, such as allowing women to have abortions, gay marriage, the widespread acceptance of premarital sex — then you see more and more candidates capitalizing on an appeal to people who feel more and more like they are in an out group.

micah: Oh god, Clare … your inbox will suffer for that libertarian comment.

harry: It’s also important that Republicans don’t have a sizable group of base voters who are generally pro-establishment. Democrats have that with African-American voters, who delivered the nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

natesilver: Now, in theory, anti-establishmentism could morph into populism, which can be more successful as a long-term, majoritarian political strategy. But that would require Republicans to give up putting so much emphasis on things like tax cuts.

harry: Well, that’s what’s so bizarre, right?

clare.malone: Right, in theory. But as of yet, with the exception of Trump, the anti establishment/contrarian GOP candidates have been more in the vein of culture warriors. Right?

micah: Yeah, Moore, Akin, etc. were definitely not populists.

natesilver: I think a few of the tea party candidates in 2010 weren’t really culture warriors. Like, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson isn’t a culture warrior. But he sure as hell isn’t a populist, either.

clare.malone: Well, he won! So he wasn’t a bad candidate. He was more buttoned-up. And I think it helps to have a more buttoned-up facade if you’re going to run as an ideological anti-establishment person.

micah: Yeah, I wouldn’t put Johnson in this group.

clare.malone: This is actually where I think sexism and people’s unwillingness to see women as “serious” politicians comes into play with someone like Kelli Ward in Arizona’s Senate race.

Ward has been easily painted as a crazy conspiracy theorist when in fact she never said she believes in chemtrails.

She made an ill-advised comment to a constituent that she would be happy to answer questions about it. But a lot of the “chemtrail Kelli” stuff is excellent spin against her from fellow Republicans.

micah: I didn’t know that!

natesilver: Wait, chemtrails aren’t real?

clare.malone: Guys, this was the lede of my piece about the Arizona race!

micah: Busted.

(Kidding, I read that.)

harry: Oh boy.

clare.malone: From my piece:

Polished might not be what you’d expect from Ward if you first heard about her, as many outside Arizona did, in an ad from the Mitch McConnell–allied Senate Leadership Fund PAC that labeled her “Chemtrail Kelli,” a nickname spun out of an incident at a Ward town hall where she didn’t shoot down constituent concerns about the chemtrails conspiracy theory.

I mean, maybe that’s a more precise way to say it, but she was never saying, “Hell yeah, chemtrails are gonna killlll you.”

micah: What are chemtrails?

harry: But I think this points to a greater thought. These candidates aren’t all the same. They share some form of anti-establishmentism, but sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

The airplane thing.

clare.malone: They’re gonna kill you, Micah.

micah: ohhh

clare.malone: They’re the government coming to get you.

micah: Before we turn to measures to prevent toxic candidates …

Are the nominations of candidates like Moore, Akin, Mourdock, etc., a manifestation of a fundamental problem with the Republican Party — a split between the base and elected officials?

Like, isn’t that split real, unusual and a big problem?

I mean, it’s easy to overlook how weird it is that Moore basically ran against his party’s senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

McConnell’s net favorable rating in the exit polls in Alabama on Tuesday was like -245 percentage points. (It was actually -50 points.)

That’s crazy

harry: LOL.

natesilver: My favorite number from the exit poll was how McConnell was equally unpopular with Jones voters and Moore voters.

harry: Actually my favorite number is that those who had a favorable view of McConnell only barely went for Moore. That’s a Republican establishment “screw you, Moore” vote right there.

By the way, there were more Republican senators who lost primaries between 2010 and 2012 (three senators) than in the eight elections between 1994 and 2008 (two). And one of those Republicans between 1994 and 2008 was appointed.

clare.malone: A lot of this comes down to the fact that a chunk of the Republican base is simply receiving ill-conceived ideas about how realistic it is for a “pure” conservative agenda to be pushed through.

If you just watch Fox News … you’re not getting the full picture.

natesilver: That’s putting it mildly, Clare. I think the conservative media bubble is a big part of this story.

clare.malone: And the politicians in the party read the real news.

natesilver: Fox News was once sort of a bridge between the establishment and insurgent wings of the GOP. In the Trump era, it’s gone much more fully to the insurgent side.

clare.malone: It has certainly jumped the shark.

micah: Jumped the horse, if you will.

clare.malone: Wouldn’t the fox jump the hound?

natesilver: By the way, it’s relevant too that doing well among white working-class voters happens to really help you in the Electoral College, and also the Senate and the House, given how voters are distributed (and how districts are gerrymandered). So Republicans can be competitive essentially playing to 45 percent of the country, when Democrats couldn’t really be.

harry: Well, it’s not just that Fox News has become more anti-establishment. It’s also that it’s become the dominant news source.

micah: OK, to change gears: What can Republicans do about this?

natesilver: Nothing.

To a first approximation.

Or at least, nothing easy.

Not while Trump is their president.

clare.malone: Right, they can’t do jack.

This is the identity crisis that they’re going through, that they’ve been trying to paper over.

harry: Well, I think what you might want to do is play it safe. What do I mean by that? Don’t try to get your preferred candidate. Try to ensure the least desirable candidate doesn’t win the nomination. In Alabama, for example, don’t go after Brooks. In last year’s presidential election, go after Trump early.

I don’t know if that works.

natesilver: For sure, there are some cases where they could work to ensure the establishment candidate isn’t a total stiff. They did a better job of that in 2014/16 than in 2010/12, for instance.

harry: Yes, they did.

What I’m essentially saying here is that the GOP thought they could beat the clown car that was Moore because they assumed Brooks voters would join up with Strange voters in the runoff. Don’t assume anything.

micah: Wait, that’s all they can do?

What about not easy things?

What difficult things could they do?

harry: Well, they could eliminate primaries.

clare.malone: What does that mean?

That would be … radical.

micah:

natesilver: They could impeach Trump.

micah: How would that help?

natesilver: It might make things harder in the short run.

micah: That doesn’t answer my question.

natesilver: Basically all the characteristics that make for “toxic” candidates are also the characteristics that got Trump the GOP nomination.

clare.malone: They could wage a campaign against media disinformation from the Bannon/Fox corners of the universe.

Now THAT would be hard.

harry: Here’s a thought. What ultimately killed the Bush wing of the party was what was seen as a disastrous presidency. Maybe just maybe? If Trump loses in 2020, it could help out?

micah: I buy that.

clare.malone: Possibly, though don’t you think there are enough Trumpians to keep things going?

micah: See Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky.

clare.malone: Right.

natesilver: Republicans should be rooting for Trump to lose in 2020? #slatepitches

I think there could be a pretty big backlash to everything associated with Trump in the long run if he’s deemed to be an unsuccessful president.

There’s a pretty big backlash even to successful presidents sometimes.

micah: OK, what would happen if elected Republicans tried to correct the bad info flow, as Clare mentioned? Basically, every GOP member of Congress stops playing footsie with media outlets that skew the truth — talk radio, digital, TV. So the only stuff we hear from them is straight-dope truth. Would that help?

The goal would be to align voter expectations more with what’s possible.

clare.malone: Although, of course, there are also the powerful factions, like the House Freedom Caucus, that exist within Congress that skew the idea of what’s actually possible from the inside.

natesilver: I think you have to pick your battles more. Like, stop picking fights with the Congressional Budget Office or lying about the effects of your health care plan or tax bill.

Also, start thinking about policies that will benefit the actual GOP base, and not just the donor base.

micah: Nate, you just named the two biggest GOP priorities.

natesilver: They picked about the most unpopular ways possible to do health care and tax reform.

They could easily have had an across-the-board, Bush-style tax cut. Instead they do something convoluted where the winners and losers aren’t obvious to anyone, apart from corporations and certain types of very-high-net-worth individuals.

micah: So maybe the disconnect is really between the GOP base and the GOP donors. And elected officials are stuck in the middle.

harry: I mean, who are the donors?

micah: People who give the party

clare.malone: Oh wow, I thought it was all just powered off of ideas!?

natesilver: The super PACs, basically. The Mercers and the Adelsons. Not the well-off lawyer maxing out his individual contribution to the party.

When you’re catering policy to people making $200 million a year instead of $200,000, some things are going to change.

Meanwhile, the GOP has retreated on Bush-style “social issues.” So basically all they can offer the masses is a sense of grievance, which has become increasingly racialized.

clare.malone: That’s very true. I think the nativist notes being struck over the last year or so really created a permission structure to let a lot more of the subtle (eh, maybe not so subtle) racism of the Obama era just go bananas.

natesilver: Yeah. And the thing is, it works pretty well as an electoral strategy. Not brilliantly, by any means — Trump and the GOP are in a lot of trouble for 2018 and 2020. But the Trump version of it works a lot better than the Ted Cruz version, for instance.

harry: Well, the Trump stuff isn’t religious. And yet he wins over white evangelicals.

micah: Final thoughts?

clare.malone: Not all the anti-establishment candidates are bad!

I think Marsha Blackburn is really interesting. This is a good ad!

harry: The GOP has problems. It has problems. Those problems could potentially be solved by 2020, but it’s going to be tough to solve them by 2018.

natesilver: Just that I think the “toxic candidate problem” is endogenous (to use a fancy term) to where the GOP stands as a party, overall. You can’t eliminate the risk of toxic candidates without changing a lot of other things about Republicans.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

[prolifeproliberty]

The Handmaid’s Tale Actually Isn’t Terrible

I started (binge)watching The Handmaid’s Tale yesterday, and I was prepared to hate it. Everything I had heard and read about the show prepared me for thinly disguised liberal propaganda constantly bashing Christians, Conservatives, and Pro-Lifers. The premise, as I understood it, would be “this is what happens if the Christians/Conservatives/Pro-Lifers get their way.” This came especially from everyone who jumped straight to “Trump is going to make this come true.”

I was wrong, and so are a lot of the liberals who think that The Handmaid’s Tale supports their ideology.

Warning

If you haven’t watched the show, my warning to you is that rape is a constant theme in the show, and you will see multiple rapes per episode. Generally they are not physically violent, more on the side of coerced compliance. As such, these scenes are fairly “quiet,” which I think makes it all the more disturbing. Do not watch the show if that is something that will cause you significant emotional distress.

The Premise

The Republic of Gilead, a terrorist group of “Christian” fundamentalists, has taken over much of the United States. Other nations regard them much the way we regard North Korea. They are vaguely aware of the human rights injustices in Gilead, and have mostly responded with trade embargoes and other sanctions.

In the world where this takes place, infertility is a global crisis. Most women can’t get pregnant, and those who do often miscarry or give birth to babies who die soon after delivery. Gilead’s solution to this problem is to enslave those women who can have healthy babies and force them to act as surrogates for “the faithful,” aka the leaders. In a twisted misinterpretation of the Biblical story of Rachel asking Jacob to father children via her maid, these women are raped by the men they are assigned to while laying in the lap of the man’s wife. I honestly cannot overstate how disturbing these scenes are. Ugh.

But it’s not just the Handmaids who are enslaved. Virtually all citizens of Gilead have lost all of their civil and human rights, including the “elite” who appear to be living “the good life.” The government is socialist, in that it controls all means of production and distributes goods to the people through ration cards. There are shortages of many items, such that the characters get excited when the grocery store is carrying oranges. However, it is apparent that higher-up leaders can get things that lower-ranking party members might be denied. Jobs and marriages are also distributed by the government.

Everyone is under near-constant surveillance through a network of state spies and neighbors who will report you for fear of being “complicit.” Interrogations are conducted using cattle prods, and guilty verdicts are reached by a judge asking the accuser to swear he’s telling the truth and then saying the equivalent of “well, okay, if you say so.” Death sentences are handed down and carried out almost instantaneously. 

Religion

An emphasis is placed on the religious aspect of Gilead society. As mentioned before, the Handmaid system is based on Rachel asking Jacob to father children through her maid. The characters have call-and-response greetings and phrases that come from Scripture or general Christian language. It can be very tempting to consider Gilead “Christians Gone Wild.”

However, there is something very interesting that disrupts this interpretation that I noticed in the very first episode. There are no clergy. Anywhere. No pastors, no priests except one who has been executed for his crimes, presumably speaking against the state. We see a church being demolished, and two Handmaids talk about churches they knew from “before” that have been destroyed.

What this tells us is that no Christian church got on board with Gilead. No churches, no clergy, nobody. This is a case of a relatively small group of absolute nut jobs managing to take over the government and control the masses through fear and brainwashing.

The show also makes it clear over and over again that all of the Scripture used by Gilead to justify their actions is taken completely out of any context whatsoever. The Rachel, Jacob, and Bilah story used to justify the Handmaid system is a prime example. The people of Gilead treat this story like a direct command from God to rape women so you can have children. It is so incredibly not that. Really, the whole story, in context, is a warning about why polygamy is a terrible idea. God never condones Rachel’s solution to her infertility, and in other places He explicitly condemns similar situations, such as when Sarah tells Abraham to sleep with Hagar.

Most importantly, the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale leave out of the story the part where Jacob gets mad at Rachel for even suggesting the idea, and she has to talk him into it. His first reaction to her suggestion is the right one: “Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel, and he said, ‘Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?’“ (Gen 30:2). The end of Genesis 29 tells us that God made Rachel barren and made Jacob’s other wife, Leah, fertile to protect her. Jacob loved Rachel and hated Leah, so God let Leah have children so Jacob would have to treat her better. When Rachel proposes having Jacob impregnate her servant, she is trying to circumvent God’s will.

We also see instances where only part of a verse is quoted, such as “Blessed are the meek,” which is used to tell the Handmaids to “know their place.” Offred, the main character, finishes the verse in her head: “for they will inherit the earth.” The Handmaids are reminded to “remember their Scripture,” which seems to refer to selected fragments of verses used to control them, as they are not allowed to read the Bible (or anything else) themselves. In fact, the only Bible I’ve seen in the show so far is kept in a locked box by the Commander, only taken out for the “ceremony” (the monthly ritual rape intended to impregnate Offred). At this point, only the verses about Rachel, Jacob, and Bilah are read, and then not the complete passage. The Commander reads Genesis 30: 1, 3-5 (King James Version), skipping verse 2 that talks about Jacob being angry because Rachel was trying to circumvent God’s will.

Civil Liberties

I think the big warning for us is not about “religion run wild.” It’s about our civil liberties and the dangers of socialism. In fact, I think The Handmaid’s Tale makes an excellent case for Libertarianism. We see this in how the Republic of Gilead manages to take over the country and strip the people of their rights. They do this through coordinated terrorist attacks which destroy all three branches of government (they bomb Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court and basically kill everyone) and convince the people to give up their rights and submit to martial law.

Once this is achieved, Gilead leaders take control of the banks and essentially all industry very quickly and in a very strategic way. They ban women from having jobs or owning property all at once, freezing every woman’s bank account and credit card before the people realize what’s happening. They start shooting protesters and anyone who opposes them, shutting down resistance before it can get organized.

Offred remarks in the show on how she didn’t see this coming because she wasn’t paying attention. She had her own life and her own problems, and she didn’t speak up or take action when her rights were taken away. In fact, it is made clear that most people didn’t realize what was going on until it was way too late. In this story, the complacency of Americans with tyranny and their disregard for their own rights was America’s downfall.

Gilead happened not because of religion or Conservative ideology. It happened because people were willing to give up their liberty for a promise of temporary safety. They ended up with neither.

#rape #the handmaid's tale #civil liberties #libertarian #freeblr #Christianity #Religion #slavery #terrorism #socialism

[ileneca7]

Divisive economics

  Guest author David Brin — scientist, technology consultant, best-selling author and futurist — explores the records of Democrats and Republicans on the US economy in the following post. For David’s latest posts, visit the CONTRARY BRIN blog. For his books and short stories, visit his website. And don’t miss David’s latest article, Maddow, Mueller and the dems push a dare at McConnell.

  Divisive economics

Courtesy of David Brin 

Let’s step away from politics…. till the end of this missive… and look instead at economics:

Fiscal Management

The Evonomics site — where Adam Smith would post, today — offers this: Economists Agree: Democratic Presidents are Better at Making Us Rich. Eight Reasons Why.

The difference is stunning and inarguable… an average of 4.4% annual growth vs. a piddling 2.5%… and it has been consistent across 70 years. How to explain it?

The eight hypotheses offered here are interesting and consistent with modern economics. (Which “Supply Side voodoo” is not.) But #7 will resonate with what I have been saying to so-called market conservatives for years:

7. Fiscal Prudence. True conservatives pay their bills. From the 35 years of declining debt after World War II (until 1982), to the years of budget surpluses and declining debt under Bill Clinton, to the radical shrinking of the budget deficit under Obama, Democratic policies demonstrate which party merits the name “fiscal conservatives.”

Now, in fairness, a cogent Republican would answer: “Hey, weren’t there Republican Congresses during some of that time?” Yes, and that actually mattered once – during the anno mirabilis year 1995, when Newt Gingrich corralled enough GOP support and negotiated with Bill Clinton to give us both Welfare Reform and the Budget Act. We almost got a third miracle, when the bipartisan Danforth-Kerrey commission proposed a compromise Entitlements Reform package that would have secured our finances for decades while ensuring every American child got health care.

We know what happened then. Led by Dennis “friend to boys” Hastert, the Murdochian Republicans rendered the Danforth kind extinct, ending all semblance of adult politics in America. (And Newt knuckled under, instead of fighting for America.)

Proof that Clinton, not the GOP, merits credit for the Clinton surpluses is simple. Those surpluses turned red almost overnight in 2001. What changed politically? A shift in the White House, not Congress, Cause-and-effect. Subsequent Republican Congresses were the laziest in U.S. history, passing almost no bills and holding few non-Clinton-aimed hearings, except for eagerly passing Supply Side tax cuts for the uber-rich. But that’s another matter.

Alas, this list is incomplete. The best hypothesis for why the economy does better under democrats is left off is my addition:

#9: Under democratic presidents, regulators act to enforce the rule of law. That’s the chief function of the Executive Branch. And when there is a democratic president, his appointees actually try to make the duly legislated laws of the United States function in the best manner intended.

Yes, there are anecdotal examples of that being a bad thing! But negative in general? Dig it. Across 6000 years, all flat-fair-competitive markets were destroyed by cheaters (mostly feudal lords), until the recent invention of regulatory law… As recommended in Wealth of Nations. As we see in professional sports, you only get competition that is flat and fair when there’s regulation.

Yes, it is conservative dogma that all regulation’s bad! (On occasion, regulation can be cloying, as with the industry-captured ICC and CAB — the examples relentlessly cited by Ayn Rand — which were eliminated by… Democrats.)  But is faithful execution of duly-enacted U.S. regulatory law negative in general? The actual evidence – both from 6000 years and the last 70 or so – suggests that the dogma is just plain wrong.

Oh, see this important Evonomics article, too!  “Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers”. Why has business education failed business?” If we and Russia were truly friends, we’d send them half our MBAs. Both economies would skyrocket!

And this Evonomics piece about Wall Street parasitism. These are the heirs of Adam Smith.

The ongoing civil war

One of our best essayist-historians avows that “The American civil war didn’t end. And Trump is a Confederate president.” Yes, I’ve been saying similar things about a resurgent Confederacy for almost two decades. In this case, Rebecca Solnit proposes that we’ve been fighting the same Civil War for 158 years. Moreover, the Confederacy has now accomplished what it never could in the 1860s, taking Washington.

Ms. Solnit further ascribes this phenomenon to a broad loathing of modern trends by White Males. (Though, indeed, weren’t they a majority of those who fought and died under the Blue, in earlier phases of this conflict?)

Most of you know my version of this is a bit more broad — that this “civil war” is a clash of culture going back much further, to the 1770s; it ebbs and surges in phases and we are now in Number Eight, a particularly nasty one that could go “hot” as described in Sean Smith’s novel “Tears of Abraham.”

We agree (as always) far more than we disagree. Still, as a Social Justice Warrior – albeit a brilliant one – Ms. Solnit can only see this ongoing conflict in terms of racism and sexism. Those certainly play major roles! But as historical psychologists have long known, the deepest undercurrent of confederate culture is romanticism — a tendency to clutch voluptuously resentful delusions and pledge fealty to a lordly caste.

In the 1770s that caste was the British monarchy and aristocracy that made Southerners more loyal to the Tory cause, and made them deeply abusive toward the Scots-Irish, deemed as sub-human. In the 1860s it was fealty to plantation lords. Today it is a fast-rising world oligarchy that red (gray-confederate) Americans far-prefer over the Union’s favored elites — men and women of skill and knowledge and productivity and science. That has always been a key divide: meritocratic achievement over inheritance and blood. Nazism was a notoriously romantic movement.

(An aside, one can understand the Gray Grudge better if you look what happens to small towns every June, after High School graduation, when the best and brightest quickly scurry off to blue universities and cities and all that impudent meritocracy-stuff. This annual trauma has been going on for more than a century, feeding an underlying simmer of hate, as we literally steal their children.)

This is not a zero-sum disagreement with Ms. Solnit. Attributing confederatism to embedded romantic culture does not excuse racism, sexism and all that! My explanation should only strengthen our resistance to this chronic, 250 year-old American affliction. See my earlier missives – Phases of the US Civil War…and about how phase 3 (1852-1860) needs especially to be remembered.

We’ve both shown that the average American is more likely to act heroically in any emergency, rather than with cowardice. (Solnit’s “A Paradise Built In Hell or her latest collection of essays on American crises: Call Them by Their True Names.) I’m enough of a fellow-traveller and ally to be glad she’s out there, spreading powerfully true memes. I still think calm generalship and tactics and understanding the enemy will matter, over the long run. But yes, there are occasions when pointed fury is more apropos than mere moderate militance! I am next to you, blue kepi on my head. We need altos and tenors, baritones and sopranos singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Again, libertarians wise up!

I keep reaching out to an intellectual community that some of you dismiss as “hopeless.” Because I think it is worthwhile. And so I point to obvious things.

1. Flat-fair-open competition is the greatest creative force in the universe. Sound pretty “libertarian”? Ah, but for all of time, flat-fair-open competition was ruined by a destructive force… cheating. The mighty use their wealth & power to cheat and prevent competition from below, preserving their sons’ privilege to own other peoples’ daughters and sons. Across history this always wrecked the promise. Always.

3. The Enlightenment found a tentative way out of this trap. It gradually improved 5 great competitive arenas, markets, democracy, science, courts and sports.  All are tightly regulated to prevent inevitable cheating. And cheaters innovate! Hence a need for revised or new regulations. Imagine a sporting league without rules or referees, but with massive money rewards at stake. Watch Rollerball.

3. Liberals tend to frown at the word “competition.” Conservatives snarl at “regulation.” When it is only Regulated Competition that ever worked! Yes, over-regulation can cloy or get captured. But again, who banished the captured ICC and CAB and broke up AT&T?  Replace GOP with POC… the Party of Cheaters.

4. Meanwhile libertarians have completely abandoned the “c-word” that should be their center… “competition” in favor of “property.”  Ignore that it’s Democrats who are ending the Drug War, who are taking the Law out of your bedrooms. It’s Democrats under whom entrepreneurialism always does better. That’s always. Ask any libertarian and he won’t care about any of that. The goal of Steve Forbes and Rupert Murdoch and the Kochs is to to have them hold their noses and vote Republican, because “the GOP is ‘slightly less bad”. And that’s enough.

Keep these Mensa-type, underachieving nerds ignoring 6000 years of history, Pay for some pizza and some ego-flattering meme-rants and they’ll  trust that the fast-rising conniving cabals of oligarchs won’t re-impose the great enemy of freedom — feudalism. This time — we pinkie swear we won’t!

Oligarchs are blocked from total power by fact folks and civil servants… so pour hate on those dedicated folks!

Oh, those 5 great competitive arenas, markets, democracy, science, courts and sports?  They all thrive to exactly the extent that all participants can clearly see what’s going on. Transparency. All five wither and dies amid clots and cancerous clouds of secrecy.

Rant-mode off!  😉

End to Gerrymandering?

It is within range of possibility – one could pray and hope – that John Roberts will decide to personally save America and Western Civilization and all our hopes for an advanced and decent human future. One ruling – this one – could be how his name will echo down time, either like Roger Taney or like Earl Warren, perhaps reversing the cheating that has stolen American democracy.

Yes, one of the worst gerrymanderers is Maryland… one of the last holdouts amid a wave of voter-led reform in Blue States. Watch as Obama and Holder and other top dems file amicus briefs against Maryland democrats, in part because this crime is now MOSTLY a Red cheat, of course. But also because it is an outrageous crime.

How to fix it? Past SCOTUS rulings evaded the issue, saying they could not see a simple remedy. Bull. Almost any nonpartisan commission would eliminate 80% of the travesty. But we now know excellent mathematical metrics to maximize “voter efficiency.” Moreover, I have offered a plan that answers every known GOP objection. Unlike all others, it even retains “state legislature sovereignty!” It allows one of each state’s three chambers to be gerrymandered and STILL corrects the injustice!

Miscellaneous thoughts

“Today’s (2018) Congress is dominated by party leaders and functions as a junior partner to the executive,” according to an analysis by The Washington Post and ProPublica.

On the other hand, the newly elected Congress will be younger, more female and more diverse, than ever before.

Has there been electoral cheating? See my article on Medium: Henchmen: We are watching.

Post-election, carry forward your determination to save civilization. Have a look at Lawrence Lessig’s new campaign — to end super-PACS in America.

Divisive economics was originally published on MarketShadows

[kellydiels]

what's missing from mainstream success formulas detailed in books by Ryan Holiday and Peter Thiel

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this is from my most recent Sunday Love Letter. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

***

Right now I'm on a reading jag. I'm reading books waaaaaaaay outside my worldview. It's really useful; and it's not purely a literary counterintelligence exercise. Every thoughtful human might have insight I can learn from. Even an incomprehensibly rich libertarian tech founder/investor who campaigned for the devil might have things they can teach this inclusive feminist culture maker. In other words, I just finished Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

I also read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday (about how Peter Thiel conspired, successfully, to bankrupt Gawker Media; it's a rollicking good read) and Trust Me, I'm Lying, also by Ryan Holiday. Add to this mix, Anti-Fragile and Skin in The Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and basically I've been bodysnatched, send help.

Here's what's interesting about these books (which seriously, I did learn really useful things from): what's missing. What's not said.

In Thiel's book, for example, he writes a lot about the big thinking and big projects -- the space program that landed a rocket on the moon! -- that created huge technological leaps in our world. He sincerely values miracles (he thinks 'technology' is a synonym for miracle); he values nonconformists and people who've never fit in or been welcome in the mainstream world; he thinks something is systemically broken in the American culture and cultural imagination; he wants to create a culture where we invent things that make our world better. In this way, and in many others, I see so much common ground between my own culture making aspirations, my lefty feminist community members and colleagues, and Thiel. True story.

But when Thiel waves at and celebrates the last 30-40 years of intense, near-miraculous technological progress and productivity, he's leaving out something crucial -- and it’s what Anand Giridharadas writes back into the conversation in his book Winners Take All (it's really good, read it!):

"All around us in America is the clank-clank-clank of the new...But these novelties have failed to translate into broadly shared progress and the betterment of our overall civilization." (1)

'...three and a half decades worth of wondrous, head-spinning change [have had] zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans." (4)

"...the system -- in America and around the world -- has been organized to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world's billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else's..." (4)

I can see why people who mostly read books about success and business and The Good Life that are authored by the "winners" of our cultural lottery/system could sincerely be seduced by them.

I was -- and I came equipped with a systemic, counter-cultural, feminist analysis!

[side rant: Holiday's reading list on his website is revealing and disheartening. He’s underestimating himself and starving himself of the innovative insights that come from people who literally live outside the box. Someone please get him to pledge to only read people of colour and women for a year, stat. It seems to me that he’s intellectually receptive and a conscience-driven person (the early editions of Trust Me, I’m Lying notwithstanding) and reading excellence far outside his life experience and worldview would take his insights to a brilliant new level --

Holiday also spends some time in Conspiracy scanning the books in Thiel's home to get an understanding of his influences; it's an admission that who we're reading is what we end up thinking --

It’s so bizarre to me that so many of the people who value innovation and who *know* it comes from the weirdos and nonconformists overlook or devalue (often simply by overlooking) the intense brilliance that’s found in counterculturals and people with marginalized identities -- wisdom and insights that come from being on the margins and seeing our culture and social patterns in a way that people in the centre otherwise can’t]

It's really easy to not think about things that aren't being thought about.

One of the tasks of culture-makers, I think, is to constantly assess what brilliance and wisdom is missing -- and needed -- and reinsert who and what's missing back into our cultural narratives.

Because often what's missing is us.

And all the insights and wisdom we have to offer.

Absent from the narrative about how wondrous business is and the amazing things start-up culture has created in our world is a discussion of how sexual abuse and harassment and systematic exclusion are a feature, not a bug, of that same culture -- and how those biases get built right into the algorithms and platforms of the tech (miracles!) we're supposed to worship. (The book Technically Wrong is brilliant on this front.) Thiel, for example, talks about the traits of successful founder's but doesn't connect the dots to how a founder's bias (this is A Thing: Founder's Bias) gets built into the very products that are now structuring our brave new world.

That's because Thiel’s unit of analysis is business and founders. 

He may be concerned with The Common Good, and probably I'm a fawn prancing in a meadow with butterflies because I believe he sincerely is concerned with it, but because his unit of analysis is founders/business, he's looking at the conditions they require to create their version of that good...so that it facilitates more of their particular type of Common Good manufacturing.

It's a tragic, deeply political, narrowing of scope. You can't see what you're not looking for.

Ryan Holiday does this, too, in Trust Me, I'm Lying.

I have such a complicated imaginary relationship with Ryan Holiday. Again, this could be me frolicking in meadows with talking rabbits and charming insects, but I sincerely believe that he's grown and matured and is anguished by the state of our media and our culture -- part of which his book played a role in devolving (his most recent version of TMIL makes his regret pretty explicit). A few years ago, however, I hated this book and, by extension, him. I saw a twenty-something white man who lacked an understanding of social inequity and consequences publishing and profiting from a manual on how to manufacture outrage and manipulate the media. I saw that as a tutorial on how to manipulate people and our society. Which it is.

[Side rant: Using manipulative, disempowering tactics to influence the audience in order to sell shit is everything I oppose in my own work on The Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand. So I have super strong feelings about this book. And Launch by Jeff Walker. Even though I have no doubt Walker's a lovely person, I think the encouragement to use mental triggers against consumers is profoundly damaging to people and our larger cultural context; I also think it conditions the sellers and entrepreneurs to dehumanize other people in the name of profit. Which cannot be good for us.}

The book carried a warning, sure but it felt like Machiavelli’s disengenous warning about The Prince (Holiday references the same warning in Conspiracy so perhaps I’m correct to connect the dots). Back to my point. Holiday seemed to be warning us that media is corrupt and the system by which journalism functions needs to be fixed...but what that does, helpfully for his profile and the book’s sales, is justify deliberate media manipulation, not correct it.

His logic appeared to me to go like this: no, you don't have to feel bad about manipulating a broken system. It's corrupt. So go ahead and exploit those weakness for profit and pleasure.

The villain in Holiday's book was the corrupt media. By making it a villain, no one has to feel bad about whatever bad things they do to the villain.

Making the media system the focus of the book conveniently erases who gets hurt by wanton media manipulation: us.

Holiday's book basically helps its readers not feel bad about profiting from fuckery and deliberately fucking with their end user.

You know, people. Our society. Our democracy that NEEDS the fourth estate.

By leaving media consumers -- us, the general public, our society and our democracy -- out of the book and out of the equation, and focusing on ‘the media’ as a villain, his blueprint and tactics seem savvy and achievable. Though outrageous, the apparent do-able-ness of his advice (in the earlier editions of his book) is a function of what's left out of the book: the real victims. The damage it inflicts on people and our society.

Women in corporate spaces, for example, are acutely aware of how many women are not at the boardroom table (or on the reading list. Ahem). When my biracial daughters walk into a room, they count how many people of colour are present. How many white people or men do that? Does Ryan Holiday? Or Peter Thiel?

(I didn't scan for textual or physical absences until recently. I'm a person of a mostly dominant identity. I've rarely had to.)

When we don't account for what and who are missing, it's easy to get seduced by rah-rah-cis(!)-boom-bah narratives and formulas for success and want to replicate them.

It's really easy to get dazzled by the superhuman feats of invention -- PayPal! Tesla! Space-X! Facebook! -- and notice and celebrate the way they're tangibly reconfiguring the world and creating huge amounts of value (capital) and totally fail to miss the fact that this is not shifting the material conditions of most humans.

All the money and capital being created in the USA by start-ups-cum-institutions did not increase the salaries of most Americans. It did not improve our democracies or the quality or safety of our public spaces. (Temple and church and school shootings. Police shootings of unarmed black people. Pipe bombs being mailed to political figures in the weeks before an election.) Knowing how to manipulate the media for fun and profit did not improve the quality or strength of our fourth estate. Instead, it contributed to a context in which the president of the United States can declare war on the media -- a pillar of democracy -- and the 'truth' becomes whatever ranks highest on Google's first page.

All of this to say: definitely read outside your experience and world view AND read every context, every room, every group, every book (and book list) for who and what is missing. It changes everything.

It makes our tactics and formulas and reflections for creating cultural change better.

And I think that's what we need to truly make a better world, for all of us.

***

this is from my most recent Sunday Love Letter. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

***

#WeAreTheCultureMakers #feministmarketing #peterthiel #ryanholiday #technicallywrong #trustmei'mlying #conspiracy #gawker #winnerstakeall #a seat at the table #culture making #feminist books #books #Ryan holiday #Peter thiel #feminist marketing #technically wrong #AnandGiridharadas worldchanging #anand giridharadas

[deniscollins]

A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland

If you owned a welding company, what would you do if informed that one of the welders was a committed organizer for the Traditionalist Worker Party, a Nazi-group, who did podcasts for Radio Aryan, and posted Nazi support material on his Facebook page: (1) do nothing and respect his freedom of speech, (2) speak with him about restricting his political viewpoints, (3) fire him, or (4) something else (if so, what)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

“I guess it seems weird when talking about these type of things,” he says. “You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York, observational-humor way.”

Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.

If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.

And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.

“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?

Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”

Flattening the Edges

Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, “edgy,” with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.

“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”

His political evolution — from vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist — was largely fueled by the kinds of frustrations that would not seem exotic to most American conservatives. He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair.

Ask him how he moved so far right, and he declares that public discourse has become “so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people.” He name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, architects of “anarcho-capitalism,” with its idea that free markets serve as better societal regulators than the state. And he refers to the 2013 science-fiction movie “Pacific Rim,” in which society is attacked by massive monsters that emerge from beneath the Pacific Ocean.

“So the people, they don’t ask the monsters to stop,” he says. “They build a giant robot to try to stop them. And that’s essentially what fascism is. It’s like our version of centrally coming together to try to stop another already centralized force.”

Mr. Hovater grew up on integrated Army bases and attended a mostly white Ohio high school. He did not want for anything. He experienced no scarring racial episodes. His parents, he says, were the kinds of people who “always assume things aren’t going well. But they don’t necessarily know why.”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

In an essay lamenting libertarianism’s leftward drift, he wrote: “At this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.”

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

A Growing Movement

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”

Friendships Made and Lost

In 2012, Mr. Hovater was incensed by the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, believing the story had been distorted to make a villain of George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager. By that time, he and Ms. Hovater had been dating for a year or two. She was a small-town girl who had fallen away from the Catholic Church (“It was just really boring”), and once considered herself liberal.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Hovater found herself on social media “questioning the official story,” taking Mr. Zimmerman’s side and finding herself blocked by some of her friends. Today, she says, she and Mr. Hovater are “pretty lined up” politically.

As they let their views be known, friends left and friends stayed.

“His views are horrible and repugnant and hate-filled,” said Ethan Reynolds, a Republican and city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, who said he had befriended Mr. Hovater without knowing his extremism. “He was an acquaintance I regret knowing.”

Jake Nolan, a guitarist in one of the bands Mr. Hovater played in, stuck with him. “There are people who literally go around Sieg Heiling,” he said. “Then you have the people who just want the right to be proud of their heritage” — people, he said, who are standing up against “what appears to be an increasingly anti-white America.”

Mr. Hovater befriended Mr. Heimbach in February 2015 at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Heimbach, who two years earlier had founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, was holding a protest outside the proceedings and praising Vladimir Putin. The pair founded the Traditionalist Worker Party in the spring.

Soon Mr. Hovater was telling people that he would be running for a council seat in his hometown, New Carlisle, population 5,600. The announcement caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the heavy metal press. But he never filed papers.

On a recent weekday evening, Mr. Hovater was at home, sautéing minced garlic with chili flakes and waiting for his pasta to boil. The cats were wandering in and out of their tidy little rental house. Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games. A day earlier, a next-door neighbor, whom Mr. Hovater doesn’t know very well, had hung a Confederate flag in front of his house.

“This is kind of brackish territory here,” Mr. Hovater said. “A lot of people consider Cincinnati the most northern Southern city.”

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

They spoke about their future — about moving to a bigger place, about their honeymoon, about having kids.

#Freedom of Speech

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By 1776

A planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial British conservative and tech editor for Breitbart, has been shut down by a violent mob of leftist protesters-cum-rioters who turned UC Berkley into their own version of Lord of the Flies.

Citing Milo’s allegedly fascist ideology as justification, they swarmed across campus, hurling stones, pepper spraying peaceful bystanders, setting fires, and just generally behaving like a pack of unruly thugs, until the police canceled the speaking event for fear of further unrest and violence.

Once again, the regressive left have demonstrated their unmitigated contempt for the basic principles of true liberalism. Instead of responding to Milo’s ideas – whether good or bad is immaterial – with ideas of their own, they have resorted to the very kind of “fascist” tactics they claim to oppose. Their behavior could have been scarcely more ironic if they had donned neatly pressed brown shirts instead of their characteristic red and black rags.

This troubling and reactionary trend within the American left and the university system specifically evinces a deeply dysfunctional mindset where emotions trump ideas, freedom from offense takes precedence over freedom of speech, and rational discourse gives way to mindless chanting, sloganeering, and outright thuggery. Of all the varying factions that can be found within the American political milieu, the radical left is quickly becoming the most dangerous to intellectual freedom. And that’s quite the accomplishment when one considers the multitude of authoritarians that can be found within that context.

Even more troubling is what this portends for the future of American politics and culture generally. Eventually, these grown babies will leave their safe spaces on college campuses and venture out into the real world, bringing their noxious mentality with them like mishandled baggage.

They will demand, as they already do, the most excruciating accommodations in an attempt to mold every environment to their personal satisfaction and caprice. They will try to turn America’s offices into suffocating environments where everyone walks on eggshells for fear of violating some arbitrary “social justice” dogma; they will try to turn America’s social scene into an increasingly cloistered and sectionalized set of echo chambers where fun and experiences take a back seat to sermonizing and politics; but worst of all, they will try to seize the political system in an attempt to leverage its police powers for their own selfish and egotistical ends. Naturally, their first order of business will be to deal with that pesky First Amendment.

Yet these wannabe revolutionaries should take care. As for now, their opposition (re: reasonable people) are content to remain on the sidelines for now, there may come a time when these malcontents strain the tolerance of civilized society beyond its limits. In other words, people aren’t going to let their basic rights be threatened forever. Eventually, they will feel compelled to respond in kind, except when they do, it won’t be with pepper spray and baseball bats.

Do not mistake that last part as a call for violence. After all, I’m not a leftist. I prefer to resolve disputes the old fashioned way, with reason and persuasion. However, peaceful people can only take so much before they start pushing back – that is just a fact. What I fear will happen is these protests and riots go too far and some innocent person gets killed. After that, there won’t be any going back. The lines will have been drawn and people will start choosing sides and what comes after that is anyone’s guess.

Ironically enough, there is a way to sooth tensions and avoid such an eventuality, but the dysfunctional mindset that has produced this problem precludes the only nonviolent solution. In other words, how can opposing sides reach a reasonable compromise when one side despises the idea of peaceful dialog?

So it appears America is entering a new stage of instability from which it is unlikely to recover. The “union” at the heart of the US political system seems to be coming apart at the seams in the wake of Trump’s victory, with various factions throughout the country becoming increasingly distant, suspicious, and hateful towards one another. The only question that remains now is: What will be the spark that ignites this political powder keg?

WATCH:

UPDATE: 2/2/2017 10:00 EST

Adding to the already tumultuous situation, President Donald Trump has come out, via Twitter, claiming to full federal funds from UC Berkley over their violent protests.

If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

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STARTUPS AND PLANS

But the percentage is certainly way over 30%. If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can write about, then write your program in it. There is a large part of it. The top level of service no big company can. And yet the grad students seem pretty smart. Its syntax, or lack of syntax, ever become popular? The shape of a program so that it can be very cool to be in a traditional research department. That doesn't mean 16.

Most just want to get real work done. Growth drives everything in this world. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. At any given time there are a lot of i/o. Could Americans have nice places to live without undermining the impatient, hackerly spirit you need to follow the trail wherever it leads rather than being designed big from the start. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century was not a fixed quantity that had to be possible for the programmer to guess what they'll like. Surely a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. I was about 19.

And in this context, low-stress job at a big company, then a VC fund can only do that if you tried this you'd be able to change what I was doing before. Why do we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? Perl 4? So your site has to say Wait! Any really good new idea will seem bad to the kind of effervescent feel that attracts the young. If the founders have that first million, or at least log n more rewarding. And if you can, and your achievement will revert to the mean. Like many startup founders have had to expend to make them. O'reilly.

They were the winners of the only programming languages a surprising amount of the work I've done to improve the technology, and if you try to attack this type of mail. Even the best programmers are libertarians. And compared to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it's the one with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and one in which you work. In the scrap era I was constantly finding notes I'd written years before that might say something I needed to remember, if I could save some of the problems are technical, so seed firms should be able to write a paper for a class project and a real startup? No idea In a sense there's just one founder. I think that's ok. A hacker working on some problem. This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR people. Why? But Reddit solved the real problem. Procrastination feeds on distractions.

Growth explains why the ups and downs were more extreme than any it will assume during the run. What changed? Something similar happened when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what made startups fail. To me it means, I'm not eager to fix that by supplying a map through it. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb into the astonishingly successful organism it is now common for them to fund companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands or in rare cases even millions. Startups are stressful, and this is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way by prepending the subject to some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be slow to grow their number. We have two Demo Days a year, in a recent essay I pointed out that operator overloading is a bigger win in languages with infix syntax. He was like Michael Jordan. How will we take advantage of your ability to make something great. Compared to other industrialized countries the same thing: I knew it was important to have the time and the inclination to build things that are missing.

A Lisp macro can be anything from the 20th Century that can. You might think that responsible corporate governance is an area where companies will play a role—but most aren't. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a lot you can do to fix things? There's a reason we have high level languages is to get a silicon valley is China. It's hard to spend more than a declaration of one's ambitions. Amazingly, no one got far enough to ask that. Sam Altman, was 19 at the time that this was the era of get big fast. If companies started doing that, they'd learn some frightening things. At best you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. Weekly yearly 1% 1.

Bad circumstances can break the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of cooperation is stronger than the spirit of competition. I think you should always do this when you start raising money—or talking to acquirers. It's that way with most startups too. Not always, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO. Most subjects are taught in such a large number of companies could say to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your companies, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's not even that. The first step is to have a book about business plans to write. 3000 a month. He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise. My immediate reaction to this essay will be. When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600 daily uniques. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that?

Notes

At the time I did the same reason I say the raison d'etre of prep schools is to be in the US since the mid twentieth century. I apologize to anyone who had it used a technicality to get jobs. If they were to work with an online service, this is mainly due to recent increases in economic inequality, and it will have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay wrote: After the war. Not all unpromising-seeming startups encounter mediocre investors.

G. And in World War II. Record labels, for example, MySpace is basically the market price for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than risk their community's disapproval. Surely it's better to live inexpensively as their companies that got bootstrapped with consulting.

Icio. Ditto for case: I switch person. When Harvard kicks undergrads out for here, since they're an existing investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money. Rice and beans are a hundred and one or two, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

That's why the Apple I used to build their sites, and some just want that first few million. Whereas there is no grand tradition of city planning like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of just doing things, they sometimes say. This was certainly true in fields that have to disclose the threat to potential investors and they were just ordinary guys.

They could have tried to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. Make it clear when you use the phrase the city, with number replaced by gender. And starting an outdoor portal. Sfp applicants: please don't assume that someone with a clear upward trend.

There's a sort of pious crap you were going to do something we didn't, in virtue of Aristotle's immediate successors may have to rely on cold calls and introductions.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, which draw more and angrier counterarguments. One VC who read it ever wished it longer. If it's 90%, you'd see a clear plan for life in general. Actually it's hard to answer the question is only half a religious one; there is some kind of bug to track down.

That makes some rich people move, and for recent art that does. The reason Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the valuation turns out to be a lost cause to try your site.

A great programmer will invent things, they won't be able to buy you a termsheet, particularly if a company he really liked, but historical abuses are easier for us! The best investors rarely care who else is investing, which merchants used to end investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a base of evangelical Christians. Users judge a site for Harvard undergrads. Don't be evil, they very often come back.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation reaches a certain field, and this tends to happen fast, like play in a journal, and no one thinks of calling that unfair. No one seems to have gotten away with the earlier stage startups, and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. He was arguably the first version was mostly Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications greatly to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of just assuming that their explicit goal at Y Combinator is we can't improve a startup's prospects by 6. Quoted in: it's not enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the beginning of the company down.

If you're not doing anything with it, so had a big effect on the programmers, it will have to do this right you'd have to spend on trade goods to make more money chasing the same work, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and b was popular in Germany. You know what kind of gestures you use in representing physical things. We didn't let him off, either, that he could accept it.

In sufficiently disordered times, even if our competitors hate most? Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the most successful ones.

Thanks to Harj Taggar, Kevin Systrom, Bob van der Zwaan essay, Jessica Livingston, Ian Hogarth, and Chris Small for their feedback on these thoughts.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #thinks #spirit #macro #people #disapproval #PR #Bob #geography #mid #A #G #inclination #Taggar #enterprise #p #please #Procrastination #subject #things #beginning #bug #competitors #research #way #US