#inequality is a part of the human condition but that just means it's our job to combat it ceaselessly

[renee-mariposa]

So I'm reading Utopia For Realists

This book feels very frustrating to read because he talks about social phenomena, wonders aloud about them, then puts forth his conclusions - and it feels like he's missing a huge piece of the social phenomenon, and as a result, I'm wondering if his conclusion is flawed. And it's infuriating!

Most recent example I've read so far: he talks about the history of the Reduced Hours Work Week (4 day work week, 15-hour work week, etc), noting the rise in popularity of the idea in the twentieth century, then the sudden halt of progress in making the idea reality, noting that women entered the workforce in the 80s (attributing it solely to "the feminist revolution") and workers in the Netherlands ("the nation with the shortest workweek in the world" he claims) being expected to be on-call more and more in the 2000s. He presents these things without any context or commentary, as if they were just an incidental finding in 'our modern life'. Like, 'gosh, everyone wanted a shorter work week but then women entered the workforce and now everyone is just required to work more hours! Crazy stuff, huh?'

Along with this, it really feels like he's looking at populations in a country as one unified whole, wealth-wise. So, for example, he makes claims several times to the tune of, 'the US is several times as wealthy [today, in 2014] as in XYZ time." So he goes on to ask aloud, 'how are Americans so wealthy and yet so overworked and stressed?'

And like. It feels like there's this huge elephant in the room he's missing: why is he not addressing the presence of and effect of stagnant wages and skyrocketing rent/grocery/daycare/medical costs when talking about these social problems he's addressing? Why is he not addressing Regan's empowering of corporations to be as greedy as possible i mean the effect of Trickle Down Economics on the US economy? Why is he not addressing the fact that 1% of Americans hold, what, 99% of the wealth in the USA? Why isn't he addressing the decline of unions? Why does he make it sound like 'the people' loved these ideas then turned away from them, when it was more likely 'the people' have always loved these ideas and it's corporations who hated them and gained enough power to stamp the ideas out? I know that the term 'enshittification' didn't exist when this book was published but I can feel the absence of the idea like a cardboard cutout in almost every argument he makes. Has the US econonomic situation really gotten so much exponentially worse in the last decade that these problems are only clearly visible now vs 2014???? I read his book and all I can think is, the problem is unchecked corporate greed, the problem is corporations being allowed to grind people up for profit, the problem is the government being allowed to treat the poor as less than human because "people can only be poor if they're bad people, and bad people don't deserve any help".

Like. I can accept that I am probably not the target audience for this book. I already believe that laziness does not exist, and if we give people UBI and more leisure time people will be happier, healthier, and more 'productive' (i.e. do the things they actually want to do). I already believe whole-heartedly that to improve the health of the population, poverty must be alleviated, and to alleviate poverty, you just gotta give people enough money to live on with no strings attached. I am convinced that we need to crack down on corporate greed, but I'm absolutely overwhelmed with how much legal power corporations have in the USA. I feel utterly defeated by how my corporate employer treats the entirety of their workforce (cutting the budget at my hospital while the CEO of the head corporation makes 395 times the median wage of non-C-suite employees), how much bitching and moaning and furious lobbying they'd do if they had to comply with a four-day workweek or even a four- or six-hour workday for all employees. And if that got passed into law they'd find a way to make an exemption for nurses, so nurses would have to keep working 12- and 14-hour days. Mega corporations - unchecked corporate greed - monopolies - are a fucking tumor on the human race, but shrinking them would fundamentally alter our economy as we know it.

I guess this book is frustrating to read because it feels like he's trying to convince regular people that these ideas are good. Which is admirable! If I would've read this book in 2014 it would've blown my mind. Convincing people that helping the poor helps everyone is very admirable! And I suppose if enough regular people become convinced of these ideas, then there will be more power on our legislature to actually implement them. It's just frustrating to me that he's utterly ignoring the presence and effect of corporate greed. And he's not necessarily addressing the people who have the power to get the ball rolling on these changes.

#i had to talk through this to realize what was bothering me #i didn't realize i was being so cynical #long post #corporate greed is constantly on my mind these days bc of the shit my employer is doing #because i'm stuck in it right now it feels inescapable #the author is from the netherlands so i can understand not focusing on the USA i get it #but he does talk about the US specifically a lot! #and he has the fucking gall to say 'well if we didn't have inequality then society would stagnate!' #fuck you #you only say that because the inequality doesn't affect you asshole #inequality is a part of the human condition but that just means it's our job to combat it ceaselessly

[kenyatta]

What if I told you that there’s no such thing as an individual action? That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting?

To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I can effortlessly distinguish between myself and a horse, I’m aware that neither I nor the horse alone can produce the action of riding. Riding emerges as a kind of co-action between myself and others, and these others are not limited to the horse: they extend towards the particularities of the terrain, the open space that affords movement, the training that the horse and I have undertaken together, the bridle and saddle, and even the food we have ingested to give us energy. All these agencies and many more collaborate to produce the event of riding.

I’m going to suggest that, just like riding, all actions are collective. While this would be close to common sense for a Chinese philosopher of the ‘classical period’ (roughly 6th to 2nd century BCE), it might seem counterintuitive to those of us raised in Western contexts.

There’s currently a dominant tendency in what we call ‘the West’ (the Anglosphere and some parts of Europe) to buy into the myth of individualism: the notion that individuals alone are responsible for their failure or success, that we are self-reliant and independent from each other and the natural world. Basically, that we can do things by ourselves. A prominent manifestation of individualism is the American Dream – which in her bookCruel Optimism (2011) Lauren Berlant called a desire that becomes ‘an obstacle to your own flourishing’. Individualism promises prosperity and success based on individual effort and merit, but it delivers ideas and conditions that make those things unattainable for all but a privileged few. Under this ideology, drug addicts are blamed for their weakness, pregnant women who choose not to become mothers are shamed for their recklessness, and the unemployed are condemned for their laziness. Yet in a world where corporations manipulate doctors to overprescribe drugs, where reproductive rights are in retreat, and where jobs are often humiliating, exhausting and poorly paid, individualism has become a cover for those very entities responsible for these grave injustices and inequalities. The performance of an ideology that supposedly benefits the person but brings about the opposite of what was intended – that’s the notion of cruel optimism.

What happens, though, if we dispense with the individualistic way of framing reality? In parts of contemporary academia, the countervailing notion of relationality has become a prism to rethink both the humanities and the sciences. There are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s assemblages; Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory; Donna Haraway’s posthumanism; and Karen Barad’s entanglement, among many others. And this is just in the West. Asia has more resources to think through relationality simply because it’s been doing it for a longer time. Along with classical Chinese philosophers, I support a form of relational and process metaphysics, which favours flowing interrelations, interconnectedness and interdependence. These concepts can help us think differently about issues that affect our daily lives, reframing agency in terms of our relations and dependencies with others. Much as we can’t ride a horse by ourselves, there’s nothing in our social and political life that’s entirely up to us as individuals. We are co-constituted, co-acted and co-dependent on others – from the air we breathe to the ground that affords our walking. If we start seeing the world like this, it has the potential to make things much better for the many life forms that inhabit this planet.

[studysagesblog]

Unlocking the Future: The Paramount Importance of Education

Introduction:

Education is often described as the cornerstone of human development and societal progress. Its significance transcends borders, cultures, and generations, making it an integral part of our lives. In this blog, we will delve into the multifaceted importance of education and explore why it remains an essential aspect of personal growth and societal advancement.

Empowerment and Self-Realization:

Education empowers individuals by providing them with knowledge, skills, and information. It serves as a tool for self-realization, enabling people to discover their interests, passions, and potential. Through education, individuals can pursue their dreams and aspirations, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

Economic Prosperity:

One of the most tangible benefits of education is its role in promoting economic prosperity. Well-educated individuals tend to have better job prospects and higher earning potential. Education equips people with the skills and expertise needed to contribute effectively to the workforce, driving economic growth at both personal and societal levels.

Social Equality and Inclusion:

Education plays a pivotal role in promoting social equality and inclusion. It serves as a means to bridge the gap between different social and economic backgrounds. Access to quality education ensures that individuals have an equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of their socioeconomic status or background.

Innovation and Progress:

A well-educated population is more likely to foster innovation and progress. Education encourages critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity, which are essential for advancing technology, science, and various fields of knowledge. Innovations born from educated minds have the potential to transform societies and improve the quality of life for all.

Global Citizenship:

In an increasingly interconnected world, education is instrumental in fostering global citizenship. It promotes an understanding of different cultures, values diversity, and encourages tolerance. Through education, individuals can become informed global citizens who are equipped to address global challenges such as climate change, poverty, and inequality.

Health and Well-Being:

Education also has a profound impact on health and well-being. Educated individuals are more likely to make informed decisions about their health, leading to healthier lifestyles and better overall well-being. Furthermore, education is often associated with access to better healthcare and healthier living conditions.

Civic Engagement and Democracy:

A well-educated populace is essential for the functioning of a democracy. Education cultivates informed and engaged citizens who are capable of participating in civic activities, making informed decisions, and holding their governments accountable. It strengthens the foundations of democracy and the rule of law.

Personal Fulfillment and Happiness:

Education is not just about acquiring knowledge; it also contributes to personal fulfillment and happiness. Learning new things, pursuing one's passions, and achieving personal goals through education can bring immense joy and satisfaction.

Conclusion:

The importance of education cannot be overstated. It is a transformative force that empowers individuals, drives economic growth, promotes social equality, fosters innovation, and enhances overall well-being. Education is not just a privilege; it is a fundamental right that should be accessible to all. As we recognize its paramount importance, we must continue to strive for inclusive and quality education for everyone, ensuring a brighter and more prosperous future for all of humanity.

#study motivation #study time #studyblr #study tips #study notes

[w-ht-w]

Career path: data science / analytics

Personal fit / day-to-day

Data science jobs involve obtaining data, cleaning it, analysing it and communicating actionable insights to decision makers in organisations. 

... range from entry-level positions only requiring basic knowledge of databases and Excel, all the way to high-level roles which involve inventing new algorithms, working with very large data sets and undirected research into open-ended questions. 

You can gain detailed working knowledge of the industry and organisation you work in, but otherwise data science isn’t especially good for exploration value.  

Our impression from talking to data scientists is that the work is highly intellectually satisfying and the results of your work are highly tangible. Working conditions for data scientists are typically better than many corporate jobs, with 40-50 hour weeks (though this varies a lot on industry and team), and cultures of learning and mentorship are common. The biggest and most commonly cited downside of the job is cleaning data, which you spend a significant portion of your doing (but this varies by company and role), and is the least interesting part of the job. (1)

Ethical / impact considerations:

As a data scientist your impact mainly comes from furthering the goals of the organisation you work for, meaning that your impact largely depends on where you work. Many organisations that employ data scientists contribute to innovation and are socially impactful, ... However your impact will be lower in industries with elements of zero-sum competition to gain market share such as marketing. (1)

I’m reminded: reason (and empirics) is a slave to passion. We can’t just offload ethical decision making to numbers or Big Data.

“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead.” ― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2)

I'm a data person. I pride myself on being logical and looking at the numbers before making decisions. And for quite a few years, I worked at a data visualization company and was a self-professed data geek. But can more data actually lead to worse results? ... algorithms based on big data don't always tell the truth or lead to a more fair world as they are purported to do. Rather, they contribute to a system that is opaque and hard to challenge, increasing the divide between the privileged and everyone else. 

But unfortunately, ideal data is not always available, so bad or irrelevant data is often used instead. And the resulting predictions are treated as gospel, increasing efficiency of the system, but harming those caught on the wrong side. It hurts a segment of the population while providing the rest of us with the false belief that fairness and justice has being done. In many cases, the algorithms' predictions create a negative feedback loop, directly influencing the outcome they were objectively trying to determine. (2)

Data science vs academia

1. https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/data-science/

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28186015-weapons-of-math-destruction

#career

[puttingherinhistory]

“Covid has unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime. While watching this happen, I have started to think we are witnessing an outbreak of disaster patriarchy.

Naomi Klein was the first to identify “disaster capitalism”, when capitalists use a disaster to impose measures they couldn’t possibly get away with in normal times, generating more profit for themselves. Disaster patriarchy is a parallel and complementary process, where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance, and rapidly erase hard-earned women’s rights. (The term “racialized disaster patriarchy” was used by Rachel E Luft in writing about an intersectional model for understanding disaster 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.) All over the world, patriarchy has taken full advantage of the virus to reclaim power – on the one hand, escalating the danger and violence to women, and on the other, stepping in as their supposed controller and protector.

I have spent months interviewing activists and grassroots leaders around the world, from Kenya to France to India, to find out how this process is affecting them, and how they are fighting back. In very different contexts, five key factors come up again and again. In disaster patriarchy, women lose their safety, their economic power, their autonomy, their education, and they are pushed on to the frontlines, unprotected, to be sacrificed. 

Part of me hesitates to use the word “patriarchy”, because some people feel confused by it, and others feel it’s archaic. I have tried to imagine a newer, more contemporary phrase for it, but I have watched how we keep changing language, updating and modernising our descriptions in an attempt to meet the horror of the moment. I think, for example, of all the names we have given to the act of women being beaten by their partner. First, it was battery, then domestic violence, then intimate partner violence, and most recently intimate terrorism. We are forever doing the painstaking work of refining and illuminating, rather than insisting the patriarchs work harder to deepen their understanding of a system that is eviscerating the planet. So, I’m sticking with the word. 

In this devastating time of Covid we have seen an explosion of violence towards women, whether they are cisgender or gender-diverse. Intimate terrorism in lockdown has turned the home into a kind of torture chamber for millions of women. We have seen the spread of revenge porn as lockdown has pushed the world online; such digital sexual abuse is now central to domestic violence as intimate partners threaten to share sexually explicit images without victims’ consent. 

The conditions of lockdown – confinement, economic insecurity, fear of illness, excess of alcohol – were a perfect storm for abuse. It is hard to determine what is more disturbing: the fact that in 2021 thousands of men still feel willing and entitled to control, torture and beat their wives, girlfriends and children, or that no government appears to have thought about this in their planning for lockdown. 

In Peru, hundreds of women and girls have gone missing since lockdown was imposed, and are feared dead. According to official figures reported by Al Jazeera, 606 girls and 309 women went missing between 16 March and 30 June last year. Worldwide, the closure of schools has increased the likelihood of various forms of violence. The US Rape Abuse and Incest National Network says its helpline for survivors of sexual assault has never been in such demand in its 26-year history, as children are locked in with abusers with no ability to alert their teachers or friends. In Italy, calls to the national anti-violence toll-free number increased by 73% between 1 March and 16 April 2020, according to the activist Luisa Rizzitelli. In Mexico, emergency call handlers received the highest number of calls in the country’s history, and the number of women who sought domestic violence shelters quadrupled. 

To add outrage to outrage, many governments reduced funding for these shelters at the exact moment they were most needed. This seems to be true throughout Europe. In the UK, providers told Human Rights Watch that the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated a lack of access to services for migrant and Black, Asian and minority ethnic women. The organisations working with these communities say that persistent inequality leads to additional difficulties in accessing services such as education, healthcare and disaster relief remotely. 

In the US, more than 5 million women’s jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and November 2020. Because much of women’s work requires physical contact with the public – restaurants, stores, childcare, healthcare settings – theirs were some of the first to go. Those who were able to keep their jobs were often frontline workers whose positions have put them in great danger; some 77% of hospital workers and 74% percent of school staff are women. Even then, the lack of childcare options left many women unable to return to their jobs. Having children does not have this effect for men. The rate of unemployment for Black and Latina women was higher before the virus, and now it is even worse. 

The situation is more severe for women in other parts of the world. Shabnam Hashmi, a leading women’s activist from India, tells me that by April 2020 a staggering 39.5% of women there had lost their jobs. “Work from home is very taxing on women as their personal space has disappeared, and workload increased threefold,” Hashmi says. In Italy, existing inequalities have been amplified by the health emergency. Rizzitelli points out that women already face lower employment, poorer salaries and more precarious contracts, and are rarely employed in “safe” corporate roles; they have been the first to suffer the effects of the crisis. “Pre-existing economic, social, racial and gender inequalities have been accentuated, and all of this risks having longer-term consequences than the virus itself,” Rizzitelli says. 

When women are put under greater financial pressure, their rights rapidly erode. With the economic crisis created by Covid, sex- and labour-trafficking are again on the rise. Young women who struggle to pay their rent are being preyed on by landlords, in a process known as “sextortion”. 

I don’t think we can overstate the level of exhaustion, anxiety and fear that women are suffering from taking care of families, with no break or time for themselves. It’s a subtle form of madness. As women take care of the sick, the needy and the dying, who takes care of them? Colani Hlatjwako, an activist leader from the Kingdom of Eswatini, sums it up: “Social norms that put a heavy caregiving burden on women and girls remain likely to make their physical and mental health suffer.” These structures also impede access to education, damage livelihoods, and strip away sources of support.

Unesco estimates that upward of 11 million girls may not return to school once the Covid pandemic subsides. The Malala Fund estimates an even bigger number: 20 million. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, from UN Women, says her organisation has been fighting for girls’ education since the Beijing UN women’s summit in 1995. “Girls make up the majority of the schoolchildren who are not going back,” she says. “We had been making progress – not perfect, but we were keeping them at school for longer. And now, to have these girls just dropping out in one year, is quite devastating.” 

Of all these setbacks, this will be the most significant. When girls are educated, they know their rights, and what to demand. They have the possibility of getting jobs and taking care of their families. When they can’t access education, they become a financial strain to their families and are often forced into early marriages. 

This has particular implications for female genital mutilation (FGM). Often, fathers will accept not subjecting their daughters to this process because their daughters can become breadwinners through being educated. If there is no education, then the traditional practices resume, so that daughters can be sold for dowries. As Agnes Pareyio, chairwoman of the Kenyan Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Board, tells me: “Covid closed our schools and brought our girls back home. No one knew what was going on in the houses. We know that if you educate a girl, FGM will not happen. And now, sadly the reverse is true.” 

In the early months of the pandemic, I had a front-row seat to the situation of nurses in the US, most of whom are women. I worked with National Nurses United, the biggest and most radical nurses’ union, and interviewed many nurses working on the frontline. I watched as for months they worked gruelling 12-hour shifts filled with agonising choices and trauma, acting as midwives to death. On their short lunch breaks, they had to protest over their own lack of personal protective equipment, which put them in even greater danger. In the same way that no one thought what it would mean to lock women and children in houses with abusers, no one thought what it would be like to send nurses into an extremely contagious pandemic without proper PPE. In some US hospitals, nurses were wearing garbage bags instead of gowns, and reusing single-use masks many times. They were being forced to stay on the job even if they had fevers.

The treatment of nurses who were risking their lives to save ours was a shocking kind of violence and disrespect. But there are many other areas of work where women have been left unprotected, from the warehouse workers who are packing and shipping our goods, to women who work in poultry and meat plants who are crammed together in dangerous proximity and forced to stay on the job even when they are sick. One of the more stunning developments has been with “tipped” restaurant workers in the US, already allowed to be paid the shockingly low wage of $2.13 (£1.50) an hour, which has remained the same for the past 22 years. Not only has work declined, tips have also declined greatly for those women, and now a new degradation called “maskular harassment” has emerged, where male customers insist waitresses take off their masks so they can determine if and how much to tip them based on their looks. 

Women farm workers in the US have seen their protections diminished while no one was looking. Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, tells me how pressures have increased on campesinas, or female farm workers: “There have been more incidents of pesticides poisonings, sexual abuse and heat stress issues, and there is less monitoring from governmental agencies or law enforcement due to Covid-19.” 

Covid has revealed the fact that we live with two incompatible ideas when it comes to women. The first is that women are essential to every aspect of life and our survival as a species. The second is that women can easily be violated, sacrificed and erased. This is the duality that patriarchy has slashed into the fabric of existence, and that Covid has laid bare. If we are to continue as a species, this contradiction needs to be healed and made whole. 

To be clear, the problem is not the lockdowns, but what the lockdowns, and the pandemic that required them, have made clear. Covid has revealed that patriarchy is alive and well; that it will reassert itself in times of crisis because it has never been truly deconstructed, and like an untreated virus it will return with a vengeance when the conditions are ripe. 

The truth is that unless the culture changes, unless patriarchy is dismantled, we will forever be spinning our wheels. Coming out of Covid, we need to be bold, daring, outrageous and to imagine a more radical way of existing on the Earth. We need to continue to build and spread activist movements. We need progressive grassroots women and women of colour in positions of power. We need a global initiative on the scale of a Marshall Plan or larger, to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth. 

There would first be a public acknowledgment, and education, about the nature of patriarchy and an understanding that it is driving us to our end. There would be ongoing education, public forums and processes studying how patriarchy leads to various forms of oppression. Art would help expunge trauma, grief, aggression, sorrow and anger in the culture and help heal and make people whole. We would understand that a culture that has diabolical amnesia and refuses to address its past can only repeat its misfortunes and abuses. Community and religious centres would help members deal with trauma. We would study the high arts of listening and empathy. Reparations and apologies would be done in public forums and in private meetings. Learning the art of apology would be as important as prayer.

The feminist author Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986: “The system of patriarchy in a historic construct has a beginning and it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course. It no longer serves the needs of men and women, and its intractable linkage to militarism, hierarchy and racism has threatened the very existence of life on Earth.”

As powerful as patriarchy is, it’s just a story. As the post-pandemic era unfolds, can we imagine another system, one that is not based on hierarchy, violence, domination, colonialisation and occupation? Do we see the connection between the devaluing, harming and oppression of all women and the destruction of the Earth itself? What if we lived as if we were kin? What if we treated each person as sacred and essential to the unfolding story of humanity? 

What if rather than exploiting, dominating and hurting women and girls during a crisis, we designed a world that valued them, educated them, paid them, listened to them, cared for them and centred them?“

#women #coronavirus #life and style #world news #inequality #Covid 19 #COVID-19 #feminism #womanism #gender inequality #gender equality #corona virus

[becuzitisbitter]

All Cops Are Bad

The last of the essays i will be posting that I wrote for school, this one is an attempt at an approachable ACAB argument (my professor said that she was persuaded, at least)

    There is an old slogan with roots at least as far back as the 1920’s and is yet becoming more and more popular across the globe today: “All coppers are bastards.” Of course, most people just say “cops” these days.  The extensive history of the slogan might even make one stop to wonder why the police have been the object of such long-standing antagonism, if one isn’t the sort to grasp the slogan’s truth intuitively.  The reality is that all cops really are bastards, not in a literal sense, of course, but in the derogatory usage which communicates despicability.  The goal of this essay is to convince the reader that the police are bad and that policing should be done away with entirely.  After all, the police present themselves as the vanguard of the state’s repressive urges and as the guarantors of an order defined by deprivation and violence.

    Olivia B. Waxman, writing for Time Magazine, points to economic forces as dictating the development of the means and aims utilized by policing institutions in the U.S.  She writes that businesses had already been hiring private security to protect the transport and storage of their property, and that, “These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.” (Waxman) In other words, America’s first publicly funded police force was simply picking up after the work of private businesses to protect their own property, but with the cost foisted upon those who were being kept out. She continues this economic argument as she traces the lineage of the modern police force back to its forerunners in the Southern runaway slave patrols. She writes, “the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system”. Thus, the primary policing institutions in the South were the slave patrols, the first of which was formally established in 1704. (Waxman)

    The police developed historically to enforce property rights rather than to ensure the wellbeing of the populace.  If it is understood that white supremacy encodes human skin with either privilege or dispossession, it should be understood that, as Mariame Kaba writes in an opinion piece published by the New York Times, “when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.” (Kaba) Kaba is an organizer against criminalization and a self-described police abolitionist because she believes that “a ‘safe’ world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.” The police, then, are not focused on creating a safe world. They are interested in preserving the world as it is, which demands a tacit defense of misogynistic and white supremacist institutions.

    Regardless of personal attitudes or goals, the undeniable outcome of two hundred years of policing in America has been an uninterrupted avalanche of mostly arbitrary violence aimed at preserving the rule of law, that is, the sanctity of private property. In just the last year, the discourse about the role and place of police in our society has exploded with new questions and new ideas. What makes this conversation so powerful is that the police are considered so essential to the functioning of the modern world that the abolitionist movement must necessarily carry indictments on many other institutions and ways of relating that are bound-up with policing.

    Of course, many readers will be quick to react defensively.  Most disagreements with the argument presented here will take one of two forms: the claim that the argument over-generalizes police, and the claim that the police fill such an essential role that society couldn’t hope to provide an acceptable standard of life in their absence.  Both will be addressed below.

    The former argument comes in many varieties.  One might even say, “It is unfair to judge such a large group by the actions of a few bad apples,” without being aware that they were reversing the meaning of the idiom they are attempting to make use of, which actually originated as “A rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor,” according to Ben Zimmer, who is a linguist and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal. (Cunningham) Regardless of the backwardness of this idiom, many would maintain that it is wrong to generalize police or stereotype their actions based on our perceptions of a few bad actors.  Some police may abuse their power, or harbor prejudice, many readers would contend, but most police officers are decent people doing their best under difficult conditions.  The truth, however, is that literally all cops bring about harm simply by doing the jobs that they signed up for.  To go a step further, even if every police officer were to act in good faith, the task of maintaining a status quo defined by inequality would still force officers into the position of beating the cold, poor, and hungry back from the resources they need to live comfortably. This world of deprivation is not worth defending, and yet every cop has signed up to defend it.  Some readers might still say that to pain the police with such a broad brush, is to commit an act of prejudice on par with the attitudes the police are criticized for, but they are grasping at straws. No one becomes a police officer by accident.  By switching careers, they could avoid such judgement entirely.  One wonders if they would feel the same about criticizing other groups which are entirely opt-in, such as MS-13 or the Taliban.

    Could there ever be such a thing as a good cop? No.  Here is one example that I think demonstrates a larger principle: even if a given police officer is a dedicated and educated anti-racist, the logistical deployment of police departments across the US places more officers in poor neighborhoods and communities of color than in wealthy or majority-white areas. This means that even the most kind-hearted police would be more likely to detain or arrest poor people and people of color than affluent whites.  This is only one facet of a fundamentally unjust system.  The development of police departments as racist and anti-working-class institutions across History means that they are structurally and institutionally racist and anti-working-class in the here and now.  Police departments continue to defy reform because the problem is intentionally encoded into their purpose. They must be done away with entirely.

    When a protestor or graffiti artist echoes the old slogan that, “All cops are bastards,” it is an expression of a tautology.  Like the phrase “All triangles have three sides,” the slogan contains its own truth.  All triangles have three sides because it is part of the definition of triangles to have three sides.  We can’t even conceive of a triangle with four sides because by having four sides, it would cease to be a triangle.  Despicability is written into the definition of policing because the aims of policing are themselves despicable.  Any cop that ceased to work toward the aims of policing would cease to be deplorable, maybe, but he would also cease to be a cop as surely as a triangle with four sides would cease to be a triangle.

    The second primary counter argument to criticism of the police is that the police are a necessary evil, essential to protecting us from a rousseauian war of all against all.  This assumption that humanity could not get by without police seems silly, after all, the police are only a modern institution, hardly a blip in humanity’s story.  It has already been shown that the police were not created to protect the average person from harm, but to protect private property rights.  In any case, a counter argument from consequences is not the same as a refutation.  One need not know the correct answer to a problem to recognize a wrong one.  When asked, “What would you do with the psycho serial killers?” one should be unabashedly honest about not knowing the answer because there is no one answer.  The answer to each problem can only be located in the context in which the problem occurs.  This reflex to reach for a one-size-fits-all answer for all of life’s problems, along with its concomitant desire to preserve the tedious “peace” of the status quo, do a lot to explain the psychology of pro-police arguments.

    Neither the means nor ends of policing are acceptable.  The forces that shape and control our world, be they corporate or political, tower over us such that we only ever meet with their basest appendages.  The police are their piggy-toes, pun-intended.  Admittedly, the arguments presented here will be significantly weaker in the mind of anyone who really feels good about the state of the world which police maintain, however little is likely to be gained in dialogue with someone who could maintain a positive view of concentration camps, needless and ceaseless killings, the continuation of slave labor in the prison system, mass food-insecurity, etc.      

    It is incumbent upon each of us to improve the world around us.  The police are an impediment to a better, safer, freer world.  They are antithetical to equity, autonomy, and community; that is why all who fight too hard for a better life eventually find themselves faced with the police, one way or another. Nevertheless, while so much hangs in the balance, we can’t let the bastards get us down.

    Works Cited

Olivia B. Waxman. “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force” Time Magazine, https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ Published: 5/18/2017, Date of Access: 12/2/2020

Mariame Kaba. “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html Published: 6/12/2020, Date of Access: 12/2/2020

Malorie Cunningham. “'A few bad apples': Phrase describing rotten police officers used to have different meaning”

https://abcnews.go.com/US/bad-apples-phrase-describing-rotten-police-officers-meaning/story?id=71201096 Published: 6/14/2020, Date of Access: 12/2/2020

#school #homework #essay

[anamericangirl]

Okay, @beachflowerr​ you brought up a lot of things and it’s too hard for me to do this all in replies on the post, but I think they deserve a response. 

I’m not “pulling you into any philosophy” that you didn’t say. The very concept of the privilege that you say I have is skin color, is it not? You told me I was putting myself in a picture I was not a part of and if I was not black, this did not affect me. Those were your words. That means I have the wrong skin color to be affected by this and to be a part of the picture and doesn’t the “privilege” you say I have affect the way I see and understand things? Isn’t this what people call white privilege? And doesn’t the very name imply that I have inherent privileges based on my race and that it has an effect on what I can and can’t understand? That is telling me I have the wrong skin color to understand certain things. That is all based on what you said. I’m not putting words in your mouth or pulling you into any philosophy that you yourself did not project. 

And sorry but the fact that you’re white doesn’t mean anything here. I don’t care what color skin you have you can discriminate against anyone. Even other white people. And just to be clear, I never claimed you were discriminating against me because I don’t think you were. But saying “I'm also white so I'm not discriminating against you” doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t matter what color you are. 

But yes, please, let’s continue on American history. 

Thanks for the links but I am familiar with the slave trade. However, slavery goes back way before the 15th century. Slavery was literally going on all over the world and had been a thing for hundreds of years before America even existed and it certainly was not unique to African-Americans. Perhaps you are not aware of this but the very root of the word “slave” is slav, which is a reference to the slavic people who were the primary slaves during the Middle Ages and they were white people. 

Also, you are not correct that people from Africa were stolen by Europeans. The Africans who were slaves in America were actually enslaved by other Africans and then sold to the European slave trade. Another interesting fact for you is that most of the slaves in this slave trade did not even go to America, they went to South America. So it’s weird that America is the only racist country because of slavery even though less than 10% of the slaves came here and one ever shames Brazil for racism because of slavery.

But yeah, let’s focus on America because that’s where this issue is. So you might not know this, but not only black people were slaves in America. There where white slaves as well as black slave owners. In fact, at the height of slavery in this country 28% of free black people owned slaves while 1.4% of white people did, yet for some reason only the black slaves matter and only the white slave owners. People in this country like to ignore the fact that there where white slaves and black slave owners (a higher percentage even than white slave owners) for some reason. :)

Slavery did last here for a while but it officially ended in 1865 and that was a long time ago. People like to pretend that all the problems in this country are because of slavery and we, as white people, still have to pay for this evil even though there is still slavery going on in Africa today. Slavery was a bad thing and it happened. But it’s over now. No one alive today in this country was a slave or owned any slaves and it’s not responsible for what we see happening today. 

And let’s be glad those three amendments were added. I don’t get why it matters to you that it was three amendments and not one. Does it surprise you that completely shifting your culture and changing public perception of something that has been seen as normal and has been engrained in your culture for 100+ years doesn’t happen overnight? Is it a negative thing to you that, as a country, we worked and made changes until all people, regardless of skin color, were seen and treated as equals even if it took more than one amendment to get the job done? That seems like a positive thing to me. 

I realize in our country that black people have had a harder time gaining equality, but you are looking at this as a black v. white issue and that is not at all what it was. It was a democrat v. republican issue. If you look back through history at all these racist policies that we have had, every single one, from slavery to segregation, can be traced back to the democrats. Republicans fought since their formation for the freedom and equality of black people. One of the main reasons the republican party was formed was opposition to slavery. So it’s really not fair of you to just act like white people were oppressors and black people were oppressed. That’s a really shallow representation of what the actual issues were. 

You’re also misrepresenting redlining here. You’re acting like because a lot of black communities were subject to redlining because of their condition the reason is because they were black communities. And that’s not accurate. You’re just making an assumption. 

And yeah, I’ve heard of micro aggressions and I think it’s one of the dumbest ideas that has ever been presented. Micro aggressions aren’t real. African-Americans don’t commit more crimes because of micro aggressions, they commit more crimes because they choose to. You are literally trying to remove all personal responsibility here. But for whatever reason you want to think they commit more crimes, that accounts for the higher incarceration rate so it’s not alarming at all and it’s not racism. It’s expected that those that commit more crimes are more likely to be in jail. 

I agree, people can make subconscious race based judgments, but to just assume this accounts for all racial disparities is quite naive. There can be a lot of other reasons for these disparities, jumping right to racism is pretty extreme. Most people, whatever you would like to believe, aren’t racist and aren’t making subconscious race based judgments. Besides, most subconscious race based judgements would have to be rather small and it wouldn’t have a really profound effect on anything. To be infecting the entire criminal justice system, they would have to be pretty conscious judgements. I think there’s a lot you don’t understand about the justice system and that’s ok. But it’s not okay to just call it racist because you don’t understand it and because you, personally, can’t think of any other reasons disparities exist. I looked at that page you linked from the NAACP but you should know that website has a pretty strong political bias and I don’t consider them credible. But it didn’t say African Americans get higher sentences for the same crimes. But even if it did, there are a lot of different factors that are considered at a sentencing so assuming that the difference is just racism is ignorant. 

And I'm sorry, but your transition to police brutality is incredibly weak and makes absolutely no sense. Numerical inequality does not prove racism so you thinking it proves racial injustice and inequality just means you don’t really understand what racism is. 

You are also, it seems, oblivious to how white people can be treated by police. Police brutality is not unique to black people. A lot of white people have been victims of police brutality. They just don’t make headlines and don’t get protests because no one cares. More white people are shot by the police every single year than black people. Here are some for you to look at since you, apparently, think it doesn’t happen.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/you-re-gonna-kill-me-dallas-police-body-cam-footage-reveals-the-final-minutes-of-tony-timpa-s-life/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

There’s a couple to get you started. I know why the protests and riots are happening, but I disagree with what they are saying and I don’t think the reason they are protesting is valid or is something that is happening today. I think all the protesters, like you, are either misinformed or uniformed. There is absolutely no evidence that this killing was racial in nature. You and everyone else who buys into that idea are just saying that because George Floyd was black and Derek Chauvin was white. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got. You guys are the ones focused on race and you literally can’t see anything else. So everything is about race to you. 

I’m perfectly aware of the history. In fact, based on the way you went through it, I think I know more about the history than you do. I also, unlike you, am aware of the changes that our country has gone through and people can’t blame the history of slavery for everything bad that happens to black people.

You don’t seem like you know this so let me explain something to you: literally every race on the planet has, at one time or another, been treated very poorly by other races. Every single demographic has been through oppression of some sort. Why can every race get over their oppression to the point where it doesn’t have this lifelong mitigating effect on all future generations except for black people? Why is their bad history the most important? What you are doing is ignoring all of history except for the parts you want to acknowledge because they fit your narrative. 

I have America in my username not because I’m unaware of the history we have, but because I am aware of it. We have a big history. We have a lot of bad things in our history as well as a lot of really great things. I’m very proud of this country. I'm proud that the people in our history saw slavery for the evil that it was and stopped it. I’m proud that the people in our history saw segregation for the evil that it was and stopped it. I’m proud that the people in our history fought until black people were recognized as fully equal human beings in every single aspect under the law. Though you mentioned things that happened in history, you have failed to explain why this instance of police brutality is racist and how the history makes everyone racist today. 

White privilege is not a thing. And with your little explanation of white privilege you have proved that you were, in fact, telling me I have the wrong skin color to be able to understand certain things :) I appreciate you being concerned about my ignorance, but I would suggest you be more concerned about yours :) your idea of white privilege doesn’t make any sense. A white person is not the least likely to be ostracized or oppressed. You just made that up :) I get what people say white privilege, but I don’t accept that it exists and you have failed to prove that it does. You’ve made one of the weaker cases against it that I’ve seen. White people aren’t oppressed in America and black people aren’t oppressed in America. No one is oppressed in America. And there is no white privilege and there is no evidence that this was racism. I stand by what I originally said because you didn’t make a single valid point against any of it. I suggest you become more familiar with all aspects of our history, not just the parts that fit what you want to be true. To be honest, even the parts you are aware of you don’t really know that much about. 

Stop letting people make you feel like your skin color matters. It doesn’t. Your skin color doesn’t give you special privileges and you are capable of understanding this issue. Just like everyone else, you can see facts. Don’t believe people who tell you that your skin color means there are just some things you can’t understand. It’s racist for people to say or think that. The very concept of white privilege is inherently racist so don’t buy into that crap. 

#racism #white privilege #george floyd

[almasidaliano]

Almasi for President

so in about 12 to 16 years, i am running for president. i do not believe the world will have ended then, though i do believe things will be different. hoping for better, not, not expecting worse. our system is broken. all of the systems are broken. the government is corrupt. the justice system is corrupt. those in charge are turning blind eyes, covering things up, and allowing the fall of our country. i will not be surprised if a civil war commences; although i'm also thinking they are going to really create and push for a purge. we are in real trouble then. that just goes back to what i said, are you standing for something or dying for nothing?

people were excited for biden to win. and i have to say, i was not one of them. biden seems like another puppet to me. obama was a puppet. he was his vp. crazy how biden is president and he has a black female vp now. that sounds like a win huh? wrong, she contributed to the failed prosecution of the officers who murdered Oscar Grant. that went over everyone's head during the election though. trump was just so bad had to get him out. biden is anti LGBTQ+. everyone wanted to put it on trump folks getting rowdy and such however, biden won and nothing changed.

trump's slogan was "make america great again." personally, i think he could have. trump's a businessman and to say the least, entertainment. they gave trump four years, why do you think they didn't renew his contract? because he was playing them. trump is a classist. he doesn't like poor people. personally, i think he just believes hardwork pays off, his did and so he just holds everyone to the standard he held himself. there are circumstances, however i think that's fair. he said all this racist shit everyone got mad. yet, he won by a landslide because the country said they would still rather this "bigoted, racist, sexist, classist asshole" than a woman. then the country complained the whole time. he exposed america and instead of society shining light and doing something they continued to do what we have been doing; pointing blame.

the system has failed us. the system failed us a long time ago. all trump did was present a call to action. the one thing i can give rednecks is they patriotic as fuck. they want the america they invision type shit. i feel like melanated people in general struggle with that because america never felt like home. america never wanted us here. but the fact of the matter is, this all we know. this is home now. there are 3 real options. 1. go back to where your bloodline stems. 2. sit and conform, hope they dont get you. 3. defend your rights, your home, and your people; come out on top or die trying. you have to pick something though. we have to do something because they those set to protect us are out to get us.

we do not have a democratic government not even a representative democracy like we once thought. sorry if you were today years old when you found out. we operate out of a republic; a constitutional federal republic. what's the difference? in a democracy, all that voting that we do, matters.  even if it was a representative democracy. we would have representatives to disclose our decisions. the electoral college makes final decisions on elections.

a constitutional federal republic means that the constitution which is the law of the land governs the land. if this is the law of the land, why do we have sub laws? the constitution needs to be amended. want to fix the race and inequality issues? let me tell you how, real easy fix. call a convention. take out any amendment that gives rights to people AND reword the beginning anyway folks see fit so that women and americans from all ethnic backgrounds get the same level of respect and rights. there will always be an unspoken division until things like that are rectified. before black people got rights we were not even counted as complete people, simply 3/5s of a person. life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. these are unalienable rights. my very existence guarantees me these rights.

the judicial system coupled with the criminal law system are hopeful, and still in need of reform. prisons are privately owned institutions, which are supposed to be forms of rehabilitation. instead, they are condemning people and treating them inhumanely; creating the same environment they were in on the outside, on in the inside conditioning them to be stuck in these ways as means of survival and then continue to place blame on them. officers need to take crimes more seriously. people are people, bias, prejudices, and profiling have no place in the workplace. officers are corrupt, arresting kids for selling, who just are trying to help their mother with the bills, then turning around and selling it back out on the streets. officers are wrongfully convictind and killing predominately (as far as the media is broadcasting) though not only melanated people. on top of that, they are walking free. lives are being lost and they arent even losing their jobs. tax dollars are going towards keeping them safe. however, if a civilian shoots a cop. up the river for them.

lawyers aren't fighting hard enough. especially defense attorneys. it is fairly simple to get a conviction with the right information, proving innocence is always a bit more complicated. the problem is that attorneys get too big eyed. they looking at how to get their clients off, accountability is another taboo in this society. there are a multitude of people who are innocent behind bars, as well as those who received heinous outrageous sentences. that is not right.

people factor more than necessary when trying to make a decision, yet they ignore the things that remind them a person is human. its this art contest over who can paint the best picture of the defendant. which story is easy for a jurors bias to sway? how people look matters. and it shouldn't. our government since the building of america, has created dividing markers.

just like with royal kingdoms, the wife couldn't have things of her own. her role was cleaning, cooking, taking care of the kids, and whatever else was asked of her. if there was a divorce, the woman got nothing. they had no rights. imagine being the first born as a female in a royal family and being told you can't have your kingdom, correction you can but you must marry to get it. then if you get married the new king running things not you. what is that? its called patriarchy. our government is run off a patriarchy as well.

so i never really believed there could be like a true separation of church and state because every law and decision made was based on people's morals and beliefs. there is supposed to be a separation of church and state yet, due to people's religious beliefs gay marriage had to get legalized, despite there being no law for heterosexual marriage. would that not make it illegal? since gay marriage had to be legalized though there was not a law for it either? then on top of that, how do you make it a law, and still for religious reasons, ministers and such can refuse? there are always stipulations and hinderances for the rights of those who are not white men.

ABORTION: i really do not know why we are still having this conversation. its literally conversations like this that have me looking at americans like--- seriously? once again there should be a separation of church and state. so religion cannot be a reason to outlaw it. how can you put out a law that dictates what someone can do with their body? all of life, i mean every part of life should be pro-choice. its just that simple. Pro-Choice. i am all for the right to decide for yourself. and men want to feel a way about women making that decision on their own. and while i do stand behind the fact that ultimately it is the womans decision, that does not mean she can't listen to an opinion. it is a part of the woman, literally grows inside of her an entire being. and fathers can just dip out and folks will just look at the mom and suddenly she should just become super woman. the pressure that comes with having a child is enough on its own. like thats a being that is dependent on you. some people are honest with themselves and know they arent ready or dont want it. all they need is support. the mental toll life takes on us is huge as well. still people do not consider that at all.

there is no point of incarcerating people, if they have still lost a chance at a decent life once they get out. jail is for rehabilitation. they go, do their time and then they are supposed to be allowed to try again. our government knows nothing of redemption, that's why all the top leaders go through so much to hide their dirt. they crucify civilians trying to make themselves seem superior, really they are just like you and i. almasi for president. im going to save the world.

-Almasi

#actuality #thetruth #glitch in the matrix #blacklivesmatter

[justonecynicsopinion-blog]

Let's Help Make 'Black Lives Matter' MATTER:  10 Things America Needs To Do

"Walking between the pools of light cast by the street lights I saw the group of them from a block away, joking and jostling each other.  In a dark patch I crossed the street.  One of them noticed and they all stopped and stared, their heads rising like wolves testing the breeze for the scent of potential prey.  The tallest one said something and two of them broke from the pack and meandered across to my side of the road, one putting a hand to the small of his back, the other digging one deep into a pocket."

Who is black in that anecdote?  Who is white, yellow, brown, gay or trans?  Does colour change anything in the story for the teller?  Is the narrator 'blue,' a cop?  Off duty?  On duty?  Does that change anything, substantially, in the story?  

Black Police Are the Original BLM Leaders

They Volunteered For The Job of Protecting Blacks From Violence

The cold reality in America today is that guns are as easy to get as smartphones. That cold reality is what the police face every moment of every day.

Another cold reality is that, from the moment that humans got smart enough to band together instead of erring on the side of caution and scattering in the face of a mortal threat, the most dangerous risk any human faced was a more numerous group of humans. What empowered our species to come to dominate the planet was 'tribalism' (otherwise known as 'racism' and the root of 'nationalism'). It is permanently and indelibly hardwired into each and every human brain.

Familiarization with those 'not of our tribe' reduces the power of our instinctive tribalism over our reactions, but it never goes away. And tribalism is not exclusive to whites -- it is true of every human tribe out there.

What's the Most Crucial First Step BLM Has to Make to Succeed?

Black lives automatically matter less if you don't first acknowledge that blue-black lives matter just a bit more than all lives matter.

I'm not being 'cute': if the black community does not first and foremost stand up for the safety of black cops ("blue-black lives”) who are the ‘front line workers’ in their communities -- the first on scene when there’s trouble -- the claim that black Americans are faced with racism that systematically disadvantages them (places their lives in disproportionate jeopardy to that of others) is at best counter-productive, at worst not in their own best interests. Communities are successful only when we police our own people where we live, protecting each other from injury, trespass and property theft. If black cops tell you that they are more nervous about concealed weapons being drawn on them in their own community than in many others, then we can all begin to understand the knee-jerk, 'self-defence through offence' reactions of any cop in a similar situation where they are scared that a suspect may be going into his vehicle or his pocket, against the cops' specific instructions, to get a firearm.

The police have an EXTREMELY dangerous job in a country with more freely available weapons than there are citizens, and they're on high alert any time there's a confrontation, whether that's entirely justified or not. Add to this the fact that 911 calls come in SEVEN TIMES MORE in predominantly black areas and you have seven times the likelihood of high risk altercations taking place, regardless of what colour the police are.

Perception is not always reality and we don't like it when our most emotionally charged perceptions are proven false. The reality is that statistics prove that black men are NOT shot at a higher rate by white police than white men are, despite the impression that we're left with from media exposure. Racism on the part of white cops towards black civilians, outside of some 'bad actors,' is not the principal cause for needles deaths of black Americans: poverty, public education funding through property taxes and 'The War on Drugs' are.

Living in poor neighbourhoods is the highest risk factor for getting into dangerous altercations for people of any colour. In depressed areas crime may seem to be a good way to solve one's poverty, especially when the quality of public education is low. Young residents have far fewer opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty, regardless of individual ability and their interest in doing so. Living conditions can be so miserable and funding for social services like mental health treatment is so inadequate that taking drugs becomes a viable 'medication' for mental health issues. If the system that sets up the causes for unequal outcomes is not addressed, then the poverty, and subsequent risk of death from criminals and police altercations, will never be reduced.

"Defund the Police!" Really Means "Increase Social Support"

The 'systemic racism' in America lies in the fact that black communities continue to face profound inequality, not in the fact that more crime takes place in their neighbourhoods, per se. To fix the inequality problem we don't need less police, we need more health care, better social welfare support (a universal basic income, NOT more welfare for single mothers) and a vastly improved public school system across all American communities.

Using the overly provocative phrase "DEFUND THE POLICE!" detracts from the real message: "INCREASE SOCIAL SUPPORT“. Decreasing the amount of blue-blacks (and blues in general) in their own communities will only lead to the kind of mayhem and instability that holds the citizens of these areas further back in the competition we call life.

If we begin to place the 'right to zero-harm' for every citizen (including the criminals that exist throughout humanity, whether they are white collar criminals, grey collar criminals, blue collar criminals, or criminals whose full-time job is criminality), above that of the blues (the police), then civilization erodes very quickly into pandemonium. Civilization can only exist based upon mutually agreed-to regulations and laws that are enforced by a publicly funded and trusted police force and a judicial system that is fair across the board.

It is this lack of overall fairness, the current inequality of treatment evidenced by the incarceration rate of poor and black people in the US (especially poor black males from fatherless homes), as well as the lack of gainful employment that drives poor people into miserable lives that lead to drug use and crime, that is currently under debate. However, it is the underlying system, NOT the enforcers of the system, that needs reform. People of every stripe who seek simple answers to complex issues look at the most obvious, superficial symptom and claim that THAT is what needs changing, without understanding where the issues that cause the overall problem really lie.

Black Lives Matter: What's the Real Goal of the Movement?

Momentous 'movements' only change history when their aim is clear and the goal is simple. Either that, or, if the goal is complex and the steps numerous, the movement needs a powerful, central voice to coordinate and direct the movement's direction, step by step to achieve its ultimate goal.

Black Lives Matter simply doesn't matter if it has no clear goal that 'the movement' is aiming to achieve, and actionable steps to get there.

"End systemic racism" SOUNDS like just what America needs to improve the lives of many of its underclass, but a problem cannot be addressed if the meaning of its goal is unclear, or is far too complex to ever be achieved by simply shouting the goal over and over again. In the same vein, demanding worthwhile, straightforward social changes that unfortunately fail to address the roots of the underlying problems are just 'half measures.’ A current example is the recent demand to shift funding away from policing toward more social support like addressing inadequate mental health programs. While this is a necessary and wholly appropriate demand, especially given the growing militarization of the police, the enforcers (police) are largely a symptom, it is the laws -- from 'The War on Drugs’ to financing public education through local property taxes -- that are the cause of the problem.

"Systemic racism" means various things to the many and diverse participants in this growing movement. Definitions range from 'fixing the clearly unjust justice system,' to 'giving the underclass a leg up through improved education,' to 'equal outcomes for all, regardless of effort, ability, experience, or merit'. Other notions include 'ending police use of lethal violence against people of colour,’ to 'hand out large sums of cash to the descendants of former slaves,’ and even 'erase racism (tribalism) from humankind's hardwiring' (which would involve re-writing our genetic code).

"Systemic Racism" is Not Racism, It’s Policies, Programs & Laws

Policies, programs and laws expressly designed to keep the wealth-hoarders in charge, making ever more money, while increasing the inequality that prevents the poor from escaping The Poverty Trap. That trap is equally tough to escape no matter what colour you are and it is gettingmore and more difficult to break free from.

“Systemic Racism,” More Accurately, is “Systemic Inequality”

Systemic Inequality can only be addressed by changing programs, policies and laws in a meaningful, effective manner.

What is the Practical, Core Goal of the BLM Movement?

Once slavery was abolished in America, but not until electricity was available in most homes (outside of those households wealthy enough to employ servants), women were the de facto 'household work force,' they were the largely invisible 'engine under the hood’ of the economy. The Suffragette Movement that brought about the right to vote for white women (voting rights for black citizens in America didn't come to pass until much later) could not have come about until women began to be freed from household chores by electrical appliances. The success of the effort to win voting rights for women only came about once the cause of the problem of women being stuck at home 24/7 (i.e. washing clothes in a tub, hauling water, churning butter, hand-sewing clothing, etc.), was addressed. This continues to be the single biggest barrier to female emancipation in developing world countries (if women are out of sight -- even more so if they are all encased in black bags -- they are out of mind).

To solve any problem we cannot focus on the symptoms. The causes of the problem must first be addressed.

The underlying root cause for women not having the right to vote was not simply brutish male egos, it was a fundamental lack of power. Without the freedom to interact in the wider world outside of the home in sufficient numbers to be seen as a force to be reckoned with, without earning salaries to contribute to the household income, without sufficient education to qualify them to rise up into positions of power, women were powerless and could be ignored. Black and brown voices today face a similar challenge. Until the system that underlies their lack of power is changed and they are empowered to ENTER the world outside of their neighbourhoods by being released from ‘The Poverty Trap,’ until they can be given a leg-up to get the education required to fill white collar positions, they will be ignored by the same lawmakers that ignore the poor white voices demanding, for example, universal healthcare.

The ultimate goal of the BLM Movement MUST be to change the policies, programs and laws that undergird the system at its roots, NOT focussing on eliminating racism, whether in law enforcement or in the larger world. Black and brown lives only begin to matter to the wealth- hoarders at the top when their power is threatened, as happened with the Suffragette Movement. Those women were not demanding equal outcomes, they were demanding equal opportunity. That's a key benchmark for BLM to keep in mind if the movement is going to have any real long-term impact:

The fight is only winnable if it is for equal opportunity, NOT equal outcome.

What Goals Proved Achievable for Past Movements?

The Women's Suffrage Movement had a single goal: allow women to vote. Achieving that simple first goal opened up the Women's Rights Movement that followed, much to the betterment of the lives of 51% of the human population in developed countries over the ensuing decades.

The Abolitionist Anti-Slavery Movement had a clear and actionable simple goal: free the slaves.

A civil war had to be fought over it, but America, ‘land of the free,’ became better for achieving that simple goal.

The Black Lives Matter Movement’s single goal should be: end systemic inequality. Yes, the steps to get there are complex and numerous, but with a shared vision, it can be done.

Ending Systemic Inequality Requires a Fire, Not Just A Spark

Keeping a fire going requires the continual addition of fuel. The BLM protests that were sparked by the murder of George Floyd and many others have ignited a much needed conflagration, but like the Occupy Movement and Tea Party Movement that proceeded it, that fire is likely to die out without a unified, clear goal and shared understanding of all the policies, programs and laws that will need changing to result in the goal of ending Systemic Inequality. The fuel that will keep the fire burning will NOT be protests, it will be VOTING and ongoing organization and activism to demand changes to specific policies, programs and laws.

Why is the BLM ‘Fire’ Likely to Die Out?

A Lack of Consensus

The Occupy Movement was able to be crushed by the government for one reason: the occupiers lacked any clearly stated goal. Yes, they all wanted the corporations and the Wall Street gamblers who’d created the 2008 crisis to be held accountable, but they had no single voice to communicate that goal, no coherent steps they wanted to see followed, and no political (voting) power to push their progressive agenda forward.

The Tea Party lacked a clear, singular goal (the usual Conservative laundry list: less taxes, smaller government, immigration control, no black President, etc.), but had major political sway in red states. Yet, despite early success in garnering attention from Republican politicians, by 2016 Politico had declared the movement dead (and indeed the demographic who had initiated it, partly in response to being incensed by the young, diverse, urban, Progressive Occupiers, were older, white, rural and Conservative and have been literally dying off — Trump is their ‘last hurrah’).

To Succeed, Any Progressive Movement Needs:

1. Consensus on a simple, singular goal (a voice),

2. Clear steps to achieve that goal (a strategic plan),

3. The political power to make the steps happen (voter influence).

Without a clear understanding, among the majority, of exactly what the issues are that are causing inequality in American and around the world, we cannot solve complex problems like systemic inequality. A HUGE barrier to doing so is that the vast majority of our human population are not endowed with the ability to assimilate all of the information necessary to address the challenges, much less the ability to understand the roots and inter-connectivity of complex issues and then generate creative, effective solutions.

The majority can raise their voices in protest, but cannot offer up meaningful and effective solutions to the underlying causes of inequality without the leadership of some much more clever-than-average leaders. The solution the mass of protestors are currently offering up, as best I can parse it, is "White people are racist! They have more money than blacks and browns do and they should give a bunch of it to us!" Certainly the rich are currently enjoying ever-less taxation and staggering wealth-hoarding, and that hoarded cash will eventually go a long way to funding the steps necessary to fix the underlying problems (simply starting with making all public schools across America of equally high quality), but cash hand outs that get frittered away will not solve anything long-term. The only way to redistribute wealth that has ever proven effective is the system that the Nordic countries have had in place for many decades: Democratic Social Capitalism.

Taking action against injustice, against the unfairness of inequality, is not only essential to improving the human condition, it is the 'right thing' to do for the majority of us who feel morality in a tangible way, who 'sense' the weight of it in our lives. I was reminded of this in re-listening to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins discussing the scientific basis of human morality on YouTube. Morality is not simply a concept to be embraced or debated, it is a product of our unique human consciousness and a foundational building block for human civilization. Without our hardwired morality (religion is a just a software manipulation of that hardwiring) there would be no cooperation, no civility, no society for us to live productively and peacefully within.

Of Course Conservatives Resist Change, But Progressives Are Our Future

We hate change, especially in the short-term. Some of us much more than others (they’re called Conservatives). Like our innate tribalism, Conservatism is is an integral part of the human condition. It cautions us to NOT 'fix what isn't broken' and thus helps us to survive to live another day. (I'm always speaking from the point of view of most of our species' existence: the 7,000,000 years we survived since our split from our common ancestor with the chimps, not the 0.1% that we have lived in cities -- what I call our 7,000 year-old 'New Normal.' The circumstances we live in today are most certainly NOT what our species evolved to thrive in most naturally.)

An illustration of the early roots of human Conservatism: if it had always proven wise to have one tribe member stay up all night to maintain a fire burning at the cave entrance to dissuade sabre-toothed tigers and cave bears from coming in to snack on us, experimenting instead with hanging a bunch of dry sticks on a length of cat gut to rattle together to wake us up if an intruder entered the cave probably wasn't a wise innovation. Those individuals who were 'hardwired for Conservatism' back in the day either won out and the fire-tending tradition was maintained instead of the 'trip-wire' innovation, or there were no survivors of that tribe.

In the LONG-TERM, the Progressive innovation of the 'trip wire' helped ensure the survival of the tribe willing to allow the inventor to install it at the back of the cave, where a larger group from a competing tribe could sneak in through the cave system and kill the males and make off with the women and children. While Conservatives fight change (and dream of a return to the bygone fantasy of a better life in the past) in the short-term, they benefit in the long-term from progress. Grandma did NOT want to use her new iPad, at least not until she realized she could watch her grand-kids growing up from afar.

One thing is true of our 'New Normal' and that is that civilization has only flourished over time due to progress. Time and again civilizations of humankind grew and prospered only on the back of Progressivism: innovation that improved the lot of the majority through mutual cooperation. It is only through Progressivism that our cities can grow ever larger, that our ability to feed a human population that is on course to destroy the planet by its ever-increasing volume, is possible. Only by making constant progress can we figure out how to live in peace, rather than tearing each others' throats out due to our hardwiring for irrational tribalism.

In other words, it is only through Progressivism, NOT Conservatism, that humanity can survive in our 'New Normal.'

Let’s Help Make Black Lives Matter MATTER!

10 Things America Needs to Do

We all, deep down, know what the situation is. Despite the abolition of slavery, the door was left open for those who opposed the movement to come up with innumerable subtle and manipulative ways to continue to benefit from the nearly free labour of black Americans, especially the men, by incarcerating them for a myriad of trivial, double-standard reasons and making the length of those imprisonments arbitrarily long. This was taken up another notch by making the prison system for-profit, incentivizing those at the top to increase the volume of imprisonment by increasing the number of crimes related to being poor in the first place (the War on Drugs').

Another intangible barrier to upward mobility was cemented into place by funding public schools from property taxes, thus ensuring that anyone living in poor areas would grow up within a very effective 'Poverty Trap' that would keep poor kids from getting a sufficiently high quality of education that they would graduate 'at parity' with kids from wealthier areas. The ceiling to attaining wealth was raised further by well-meaning, but disastrous 'social welfare for single mothers' programs which have seen young black males who don't have fathers at home being manipulated by criminals in their neighbourhoods to join in and ultimately become incarcerated in their tens of thousands across America. Felony conviction laws then make it nearly impossible for those who emerge from prison to land meaningful work, pushing them back into crime and prison (and working inside, essentially, as slaves for profit-making corporations owned by the rich).

So are there multi-layered issues for us to work through to solve the problem of inequality in America and around the world? Certainly, but it is time to stop blaming 'those not of our tribe' for our tribes' problems (whether your tribe is political, cultural, or colour-based) and get busy doing the effective things that will lead to real change:

1. Stop protesting in the streets! (It really doesn't make much PRACTICAL change happen other than satisfying our inherent love of chanting and marching together in large crowd while patting ourselves on the back and reveling in self-righteous moral outrage.) Put that same energy and investment of time into non-stop emailing, phoning and letter- writing to your Congressional and Senate representatives. They fear losing their seats and they'll listen to well-reasoned arguments and straightforward solutions that will have real impact if the messages come in large quantities.

2. Organize well-reasoned, fact-based (leave the tribal emotions outside) meetings in your living rooms and town halls to come up with REAL, actionable, effective solutions to chip away at the underlying causes, like providing financial incentives like a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to fathers/stepfathers who stick around to parent kids in poor neighbourhoods.

3. DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Educate yourself about the real causes of Systemic Racism and what can be done to change things, or at least allow those leaders among you who can explain the REAL causes (not simply manipulate your emotions to gain power for themselves) to lead (think: The Squad, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie).

4. Get back to acknowledging and respecting high 'Fluid IQ,' merit-based advancement (equal opportunity, NOT equal outcome), higher education and respect for science and data, as demonstrated by John McCain, deGrasse Tyson, Sowell, AOC, the Obamas, Pelosi and many more on both sides of the debate, but don't accept any 'notions' or 'opinions' about policies that have no historical proof of having worked effectively (Democratic Social Capitalism has been WINNING in the Nordic countries for decades).

5. Fund the Police! Ensure that more funding is going to individual police salaries, rather than hiring more police officers so that really smart people begin taking on the jobs, rather than the 'bad apples' who can't find higher paying jobs and end up hired by desperate municipalities.

6. Increase social support! If there's funding to be found by cutting money ear-marked for the police to buy more military equipment, great, but America has a bottomless pit of funding for anything its citizens really need, its called The Federal Reserve. They just push buttons to create zero interest money to bail out billionaires, corporations and the profit-making of the Military-Industrial Complex. They can do the same for infrastructure and out-of-work Americans if the Houses approve it. Just say no to "PAYGO" — after all, it never applies to bail-outs!

7. Push for an end to property tax funding of public education. All schooling in America needs to be federally funded at the same level everywhere and all teachers need to get paid the same, substantial wage to encourage the really smart people to take on the jobs. In areas where it's clear that kids are chronically under-performing, change the system: bring in tutorial programs that target the most challenged kids, do more field trips and outdoor teaching the way they do in Finland, end the ancient standardized testing and customize programs for each type of kid.

8. End "The War on Drugs"! Addiction is a deep and insidious problem for human brains. It is a disease, not a 'lifestyle choice,' whether the addiction is to food, gambling, sun-tanning, or drugs. Marijuana is legal in Europe and Canada because it is just like alcohol -- a tax-collecting BONANZA! (And then pardon every single criminal conviction based upon the old laws.)

9. Get out and vote! and work tirelessly to convince your family, friends, neighbours and every young person you come into contact with to vote too! Trump won simply because less people voted, and suppressing the vote is the GOP's go-to strategy moving forward.

10. Lastly, end "Citizens United." That single corruption by the Supreme Court effectively ended the "American Democratic Experiment" by using common human greed to corrupt every single politician on both sides of America's single-party/two-colours, Neo-liberal system. No founder of America ever would have bastardized the Constitution by claiming that a profit-making corporation should be treated as a human citizen of the United States of America. Most politicians are now trapped by their common greed within the corporate lobbying cash hand-out system to both fund their campaigns and line their pockets.

***

I have been blogging and vlogging about insights into why we humans do the so-often counter- productive things we do, and how we can turn things around to live our lives to the fullest (the real meaning of life!) for over a decade. Check out more thoughts and insights at:

• JustOneCynicsOpinion.Blogspot.com

• YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfi00q5yaQ0nK8wXkEbvk3Q/

• Support my efforts: https://www.patreon.com/JustOneCynicsOpinion?fan_landing=true

[workersolidarity]

Throwaway Culture: A Marxist Perspective

I never imagined I'd be interested in anything a Pope might have to say, but this caught my eye after Googling: Throwaway culture. It was something I had been thinking about all day.

I'm not religious in any way, and there are points of disagreement I have with how Pope Francis has framed Throwaway Culture, but he also gave voice to an aspect of Throwaway Culture I've personally been focusing on, our trained willingness to toss other human beings away like garbage.

So first my disagreement with the quotes above. Throwaway Culture isn't something that rose up out of nowhere from the bottom up. The set of ideas behind the development of the Throwaway Culture was something encouraged and developed from above. It began with the evolution of our Capitalist economy from one based on industrial production, into one driven largely by domestic consumer spending.

Beginning after the Second World War, consumerism began when US mega-corporations, hoping to take advantage of a better educated, wealthier population by encouraging families aspiring to be part of the expansion of the Petty-Bourgeoisie (Lower Middle Class), to buy disposable products that could simoly be thrown away after one use and replaced by subsequent purchases. This made life easier for busy Petty Bourgeois households to focus on their family, rather than the tedious cleaning tasks they were previously accustomed to.

At the same time, this fueled a massive economic expansion as the Resources and other spoils of America's development into an Imperialist Power poured back into the domestic economy. This created millions of stable, well paying jobs, funded further economic development and infrastructure, and further reinforced America's new status on the global stage as the major dominating Super Power.

Following the crises of the mid-70's and into the Reagan years, the Bourgeois politicians, grown fat after years of economic boom, were all too happy to oblige the further Corporate push towards Consumerism and the single use economy. Policy was used, not to discourage single use products and consequently heavy trash producing economy, but instead the State actively encouraged this evolution.

Movies and media began reflecting the turn towards Consumerism, encouraging a new culture, one of post-modern aloofness, cynicism and sarcasm. A brave new society was being built by cultural elites. They were creating a world where people were expected to be disgusted by the sentimentality and emotion of human interaction. It slowly became culturally taboo to feel deeply for anyone else but oneself. Sentimentality was treated as a sign of weakness, and by extension, someone who could never succeed under the Neoliberal Capitalist order. They'd managed to repackage an old idea (Classical Liberalism or laissez faire Capitalism) into a new ideological framework dominated by free markets, deregulation, global free trade and specialization, consumerism and financialization.

Everywhere you look, society tells you the only things worth investing yourself in are economic success and fame. In other words, public acknowledgement of your economic success, thereby enshrining a kind of reality television mindset into the id of the public. Everything else is just an expression of weakness.

Which brings us to today. A time when society seems to be breaking down. Many people are deeply disatisfied with their lives. Instead of being showered with fame and fortune, most people have had to experience extreme economic uncertainty, disappointment with their career, and an inability to accrue enough money to satisfy their habit of trying to buy their way to happiness. Just as we'd been trained since childhood to do.

Unfortunately, even the mountains of cheap plastic crap overflowing from landfills hasn't exactly left very many people feeling fulfilled.

For most people, this brave new world filled with opportunity and free wheeling human interaction, has turned out to be even more alienating than the 19th Century factories Marx once observed. Except today that alienation extends well beyond the workplace.

Despite spending endless hours a day perusing social media and bragging about ones latest good time, people are more likely than ever before to feel lonely and listless. The cool cynicism encapsulated in so many movies and television characters, has swiftly turned into bitter resentment, loneliness, depression, poverty and addiction.

Where once detachment seemed a hallmark of the successful Capitalist, the ironic optimism people once felt from leaving behind human emotions, particularly emotions such as love, simpathy and empathy, has devolved into a society willing to throw families living in poverty onto the streets, only to arrest them the next day for the crime of being homeless and visible.

Instead of Liberating society from life's ills, Throwaway Culture has led to a society willing to tolerate even the most offensive of injustices, stripping away the humanity for those who's fortunes never rose alongside Neoliberal Capitalism.

Consumerism, as encouraged by the newly reformed ideology of Neoliberalism, manifested itself most obviously in the 90's culture of Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism soon devolved into today's Throwaway Culture. Today, workers tolerate some of the most horrific conditions under Capitalism since the end of the Guilded Age.

A society with a high tolerance for extreme exploitation, oppression and abuse at the hands of both employers and the Bourgeois State was always a critical goal of the ruling elite. The Neoliberal ideology was built on, and driven into the minds of the masses as the tool with which to train the workforce into developing this tolerance, and it has largely succeeded. Workers today are more willing to blame themselves for their economic failures, as opposed to recognizing a system specifically designed to create the illusion of opportunity, while nearly always leading to economic mediocrity at best, and brutal destitution at worst.

That same Neoliberal alienating logic even extends to those around us. When someone loses a job,or can't pay their bills, or goes to jail for minor unpaid fines, we tell ourselves that they must not have worked hard enough. Why should we help these people when they won't help themselves? Yet, when we experience these same conditions for ourselves, instead of waking up to the reality of the inherent inequalities of Capitalism, we are trained to blame ourselves. Every economic failure we live through, no matter how absurd, how unavoidable, we see it as a failure on our part. We must have done something wrong right?

Neoliberal ideology has so infected the public mindset, that we fault ourselves for even the cruelest of outcomes, despite knowing we did everything we could, worked as hard as possible, and still we often suffer severe economic distress despite doing everything right.

It's been drilled into us from the time we are toddlers, that Capitalism offers success to anyone willing to work hard and make good decisions. (Good decisions as determined by Capitalist interests). Yet, even when this idea proves to be false, we blame ourselves rather than question Capitalism.

All of these markers of today's society are a direct result of unfettered Capitalism run amok. The Bourgeoisie and their Bourgeois State have so thoroughly manipulated the public consiousness, that we find ourselves steadfastly clinging to the assumptions of Neoliberal ideology. Capitalism has become indistinguishable in the public consiousness from ideas like "freedom", "democracy" and "the pursuit of happiness".

These buzzwords have served to make the Capitalist System omnipotent in the mind of the public. It has effectively taken the Capitalism out of the arena of politics. No longer is Capitalism something to be debated. It has officially become sacrosanct, scientific fact, and essential to personal freedom.

Taking all these assumptions of Neoliberalism to their logical conclusion brings us to today's cutting edge of Capital expansion and reproduction.

Anything can be a product to be sold on the market, even you and your most personal information, and the market is infallible. So if cruelty is a side effect of Markets, well than cruelty must be acceptable too.

As Marx once said, it's either Socialism or Barbarism. Well, the results are in and Barbarism is now a dominant feature within the frame of this Throwaway Culture and Neoliberal Capitalism.

So when Pope Francis talks about people individually taking responsibility to change their behavior, it's not that he's wrong. But he's purposely avoiding looking at the cause of today's culture. He is, like it or not, part of the elite. And the elite cannot effectively criticise, or criticise at all, other sections of the elite. That's why it has always been up to the Working Class to lead the Proletarian Revolution to Socialism. The Petty-Bourgeois reformers in Organizations such as the DSA cannot be depended on to challenge the basic tenets of Capitalism.

As much as I admire our DSA Comrades for their hard work, they seem incapable of acknowledging the Nature of Capitalism and the Bourgeois State. To understand Capitalism would mean to understand why Reformism and Electoralism within the context of the Bourgeois State can never succeed.

In much the same way, Pope Francis is incapable of confronting the threat Capitalism poses to his own Church. He neglects to see (or just ignores) the way the Church as been deeply intertwined with the fortunes of the Bourgeoisie, depending on wealthy benefactors to pay for the day to day operations of the Church.

Taking individual responsibility is something that must happen after we've cast aside the Bourgeoisie. It's something that must be confronted eventually, but only after we've begun to build a new Revolutionary Socialist society. A Socialist society must be built on empathy, collective success, collective liberation, collective wellbeing and collective responsibility. Only then is it warranted to even mention personal responsibility, which has always been another buzzword for the Capitalist Class.

Throwaway Culture has been so incredibly successful at raising the individual above all else (think the "rugged individualism" of the American ideal pushed upon us all our lives).

This is, of course, a necessary feature of Capitalist domination and exploitation. To control the masses, the Bourgeoisie must divide the masses, and the easiest way of sustaining and normalizing a divided society is by creating a culture centered around the individual while minimizing into insignificance the importance of the collective, the importance of community, and even minimizing the importance of family and friends.

This has been so successful that most human relationships have become so shallow as to be practically meaningless. This of course making it easier to allow Throwaway Culture to move from an attitude towards society generally, into an attitude towards even the most important relationships a person can experience in life.

After all, in order for someone to find it acceptable to throwaway even those closest to her, then her relationships with them must be reduced to simple, meaningless economic transactions between herself and those around her. (think of our holiday "traditions" that always seem to require consuming large amounts of disposable products, overcooking massive meals and giving of gifts. All of which require prolific spending that is treated as a competition)

This is essentially where we've arrived today. All relationships are being reduced to simple and meaningless economic transactions. And after all, as we've been trained to do all our lives, our economic interactions are always disposable.

Pope Francis is right to bring these issues into the fore for the world. The Church, just as Communities and families do, requires a certain degree of importance placed on human relationships. The Church brings people together under one roof on a weekly basis, and must convince them all that this religious Community is at least equal in importance to their economic concerns.

This where the analysis by, and strategies of, Historical Materialists and those employed by the Church for its own survival meet. Generally, throughout the history of Capitalism, the needs of the Bourgeoisie have run parallel with the needs of the Religious elites. But Throwaway Culture, Consumerism, and Neoliberal Capitalism are becoming antithetical to the very survival of the Church.

And I'm not necessarily calling the Pope an Opportunist. For all I know he may truly believe that Throwaway Culture and Neoliberal Capitalism go against the teachings of the Church. Still, we have yet to see either Pope Francis or the Church more generally turn against Capitalist ideology.

If Pope Francis and the Church really wants to challenge the Culture of Consumerism, just like Socialists he must name the enemy of the Collective: Capitalism, Imperialism and the International Bourgeoisie.

Additionally, no amount of idealism, religious or otherwise, will help us to defeat the Reactionary forces of Imperialism. Only a deep Materialist analysis and understanding of how we got here can open the eyes of the masses, and help us to develop the strategies and tactics we will need to defeat Capitalism on an international scale.

We didn't arrive at this point when Throw Away Culture dominates the ideological underpinnings of society overnight. Nor can we expect to sweep generations worth of manipulation, historical lies, and Bourgeois propaganda under the rug.

Opening the eyes of the masses will take time, and unfortunately time isn't on our side. A multitude of crises are converging more quickly than anyone could have predicted. Yet, for those of us living in the heart of the Imperialist world, we are vexed by the least developed Proletariat in nearly two centuries.

How we can develop and educate the Proletariat of the Western world fast enough to avoid complete disaster on a planetery scale? This is something we must organize around and work through.

The time for Academic Marxist papers and years of drawn out debates are over. Climate Change and sea level rise are occuring many times faster than anyone predicted just a couple decades ago. Capital, instead of working to solve this Global problem, is actively making things worse. Meanwhile our Throwaway Culture is corrupting the very souls of the masses. If change must occur quickly to save the planet, then the human race is headed in completely the opposite direction.

We must unite as Workers and begin the hard work of educating and organizing the Proletariat. We have to find a way of uniting and organizing behind a single Vanguard Party, and developing our Praxis without delay.

Capitalism is sucking the very humanity out of us all. Unless we act quickly with an urgency that matches the scale of the problems we face, and unless we put aside our differences and our final visions for the Socialist society to come, instead working together to develop the fledgeling Socialist Movement, than it may soon be too late to change course.

I want to live in a Society that values empathy. A Society that embraces the human condition and our human emotions. Not a culture that ignores the trashing of our planet, embraces greed and detachment, and assumes the consequences of our actions can be solved by idealistic notions of just moving to another planet once we've trashed and exhausted the resources of this one.

A want a world where those living in the Global South aren't starving while Americans throw away tens of thousands of tons of food a day, just to keep the homeless and hungry from getting a free meal out of our trash cans. How disgusting a society are we willing to live with?

And so even though I am motivated by objectively Idealistic notions of Community. I turn to Historical Materialism to understand how we got here, and how we may fix it.

Socialism offers the only way out.

I'm not so naive as to think simply appealing to our humanity is going to change anything. Even if suddenly the great masses of workers agreed with those appeals tomorrow, we would still be at the mercy of Capitalist exploitation, oppression and a Bourgeoisie ready and willing to use any destructive and violent means to enforce it's will. A simple look at the Middle East shows Imperialism is alive and well, and what it looks like when Western Bourgeois interests are threatened.

A strategy and set of tactics must be developed. Theory is only as good as the praxis it's used for. We must also provide for the development, education, and organization of the Working Class.

Lastly, we must be ready for massive resistance by the Bourgeoisie. They will almost certainly react with violence to any major challenges to their power and the system they've spent more than three centuries building. Potentially a violent Revolution and even civil war on a massive scale must be prepared for. Socialists cannot expect to passively win this war. One look back on Proletarian Revolutionary History should tell us all we need to know about what we must be ready for.

But NEVER forget Comrades, there's many many times more of us than their are of them! We will win the Revolution to come!

Solidarity Comrades

Workers of the world unite!

#throwaway culture #throw away culture #disposable culture #disposable relationships #consumerism #historical materialism #anti capitalism #anti capitalist #capitalism #late capitalism #climate disaster #climate change #climate justice #socialist politics #socialism #revolutionary socialism #pope francis #the church #marxism leninism #marxist leninist #marxist #marxism #marxist analysis #communist #communism #revolution #violent revolution #the bourgeoisie #bourgeoisie #workers of the world unite

[brokemultidotexe]

I know of my white privilege...

Lately I wake up feeling like i'm living in the dystopian novels I love to read. Between COVID-19 pandemic and the fight for social injustice for African Americans that is currently sweeping our nation, it almost feels like this can't be real.

I will be honest and say that with my white privilege things like this aren't on my mind constantly. It is something I personally deal with and i'm disappointed in myself that it takes something so inhumane to ignite the need to speak up. If you were to ask me if i support the african american community and what they are fighting against i would tell you absolutely, but it shouldn't take someone asking me. It shouldn't take someone losing their life for me to speak out.

I came across a post the other day that absolutely struck a cord with me and has caused me to look deeper within myself and the privileged life i live. i don't have to worry about what will happen if my family were to get pulled over by the cops. I don't have to worry about someone profiling me or my child. The things i have to worry about as a parent is a lot less than those of another race. I'm not even speaking about JUST the african american community, i'm talking about any and all race whose skin is dark and beautiful. I came across a list of names, many that i had never heard of that faced the same injustice and brutality that George Floyd faced. Many names that were never given a headline or visibility. I will be making a separate post with those names because they deserve to be seen and noticed and validated that they are no less important than George Floyd and the many others we have seen on TV for all the wrong reasons.

Situations like these always sober me up and make me truly look at myself and my privilege and the injustice other people face daily. Huntsville is filled with people of every race, we are diverse, we have many languages, and many different beliefs within a single community. I grew up playing alongside kids of every color, because i was lucky to be born in a time where segregation by law was no longer. I grew up in a family where everyone was welcome and became family, i was taught that every human being has rights and should be treated with respect no matter their skin color, religion, beliefs, etc...

I want my child to have the same privilege i did by having friends of all races and beliefs. I want my kid to understand that while we live in a country that is making the same mistakes over and over it does not mean they should become complacent with how the world is. I want them to realize that while their voice may be small in a vast world, it is still one more voice to be heard.

I know this is a long post but if you have the funds to donate to the Act Blue Fund, which is helping peaceful protestors that are our boots on the group and making the voice of the many that much louder, that would be wonderful. This fund was founded by the group Progressives Everywhere and is specifically geared towards helping any protestors that have been unfairly arrested, I have included more information on the Act Blue Fund below. If you feel that this nonprofit does not align with your views or beliefs i have listed other non-profits below that are helping fight injustice in many different ways.

As for me personally, I unfortunately cannot take part in any protests due to my job. I work for the government and doing so could put my job at risk and I am the main "bread winner" within my family. So everyone who is out there doing the hard work, helping people like me so our voices can be heard...i thank you from the deepest part of my soul. While I wish I could be along side of you, the only thing I can do is donate to various causes that will hopefully help protect you. Stay healthy, stay safe, and WEAR A MASK !

If you plan to protest protect yourself by doing the following:

GRAB A MASK COVID-19 numbers have increased by over 15,000 within the last 24 hours and a lot of government entities are using Facebook and other social media sites for facial recognition.

SET ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES TO PRIVATE so the only thing available for facial recognition software would be your profile picture (note: odds are they already have your pictures within a database because once you post a picture it's out there forever, but setting to private would block them from a lot of other personal information)

DISABLE BIOMETRICS (finger print unlock) on your phone whole out protesting so police cannot force you to unlock your phone.

If you're like me and struggle to decide where to donate to the Act Blue Fund allows you to donate and it will automatically split your donation equally between all listed non-profits that are taking part in helping post bail to protestors fighting for injustice. Act Blue also allows you to choose multiple nonprofits you would like to donate to and you can input the exact amount you would like to donate to each. The donation website is confirmed to be secure so you can be sure that all your card information is safe. More information on the Act Blue Fund can be found below...

Progressives Everywhere has created a fund devoted to help low-income people, protestors and bystanders who have been unfairly arrested and must post high cash bails (another feature of our unjust system).

Groups include:

Brooklyn Community Bail Fund

Louisville Community Bail Fund

The Bail Project

Massachusetts Bail Fund

Chicago Community Bond Fund

Northwest Community Bail Fund

Michigan Solidarity Bail Fund

Restoring Justice (Houston)

Philadelphia Bail Fund

National Bail Out

NorCal Resist Activist Bail & ICE Bond Fund

Baltimore Action Legal Team

Columbus Freedom Fund

OTHER NON-PROFITS:

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans. LDF also defends the gains and protections won over the past 75 years of civil rights struggle and works to improve the quality and diversity of judicial and executive appointments

They valude a society that vaules its people, their freedom and recognizes their contribution to the greater good. A society that does not condition pretrial freedom on class or identity, that has ended mass incarceration, and that invests in restorative and transformative injustice.

Equal Injustice Initiative: A nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. They challenge the death penalty and excessive punishment and we provide re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.

Founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, they are winning immediate improvements in our lives.

*if you know of any other non-profits that would fall within this category please message me or send an ask with the name and if possible the URL and I will add it to this post.

People who are looting and vandalizing are NOT protesting for a cause they are opportunist using the current situation to cause havoc.

#George Floyd #the bail project #Act Blue fund #Black Lives Matter #Blm #Minnesota Freedom Fund #Equal Injustice Initiative #naacp legal defense fund #covid 19 #COVID-19 #coronavirus #Corona virus #Protest

[gstqaobc]

Sophie, Countess of Wessex, speech in Nairobi

A speech by The Countess of Wessex at the Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting, in Nairobi, Kenya

Published 19 September 2019

Gender equality is a fundamental right but it is not yet the reality for many

Jambo,

Your Excellencies, Madam Secretary General, Ministers, honoured guests, I am delighted to be here for the 12th Commonwealth Women's Affairs Ministers Meeting and I would like to thank the Commonwealth Secretary General and the Commonwealth Secretariat for organising this important gathering as well as the Government of Kenya for being such generous hosts.

Today I bring you special greetings from Her Majesty The Queen, who is delighted this meeting is convening once again and, as you would expect, I am honour bound to return with a good account of the full and productive outcomes of this conference, particularly as it is such an important precursor to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Rwanda next year.

Gender equality is a fundamental right but it is not yet the reality for many. Changing this is the best chance we have in meeting some of the most pressing challenges of our time - from financial and economic crisis, lack of healthcare, climate change, to violence against women and escalating conflicts. Women are not only more affected by these problems, but also provide some of the solutions and leadership to solve them; it is imperative that women are included in addressing these issues.

As a passionate advocate of the Commonwealth, I believe that this great family of nations has a vital role to play in leading the world on gender equality issues. Together we need to have an increased focus on ending gender inequality and discrimination, and an increased focus on building environments that enable women’s political participation and economic empowerment. Only by ensuring the sustained rights of women and girls will we see justice and inclusion and a transformed future.

Earlier this year I publicly committed myself to championing women's meaningful participation in peace processes and to support the vital role women are already playing in resolving conflict, countering violent extremism and building peace at the local level. I am also urging greater support for all survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, both male and female, and for the many children born of rape.

To truly achieve sustainable peace and security, it is imperative that women’s voices are heard when peace is being negotiated. It is so encouraging to hear about the positive impact of initiatives such as the network of Women Mediators across the Commonwealth and FEMWISE, in helping to build the capacity and confidence of women mediators and to champion their role in building peace.

But we must not limit our ambitions - we also want to promote women as negotiators, as ceasefire and peace agreement monitors, as front-line peacekeepers and as political leaders. Women throughout the Commonwealth, particularly at the grassroots level, have experiences to share that we can all learn from; their expertise should be recognised and promoted. But, for the benefit to be really felt we need to find more sustainable, flexible ways to support them, including protecting them in the roles they play.

The Women, Peace and Security agenda is a powerful tool for moving from exclusive to democratic decision-making, from gender inequality to gender justice, and from conflict and violence to sustainable and feminist peace. To realise the transformative potential of the WPS agenda it is time to move from verbal commitments by Governments, civil society and the private sector to action and implementation across the board.

However, the right conditions need to be in place for women's meaningful participation in resolving conflict, countering extremism and building peace, and this needs to start with how we empower our young women. We all know that education has the ability to transform young people’s lives. It is crucial that all girls receive at least 12 years of quality education in order to realise their rights, increase their political participation and to open opportunities for them to secure better jobs and livelihoods.

I am delighted that tomorrow I will join the launch of the next Platform for Girls' Education policy paper on gender responsive education sector planning, encouraging states to adopt a whole system approach to advancing gender equality in and through education. It is good to see the UK and Kenya working together to advance this important area.

We must also fight to end violence against women and girls, including conflict related sexual violence. This violence significantly undermines their educational and employment opportunities; it harms women and girls’ prospects in so many ways.

The public and private business sectors of the Commonwealth must also step forward to realise women's human rights to live free from violence. The SheTrades initiative, for example, focuses on economic growth and job creation in Commonwealth countries through the increased participation of women owned businesses in trade. Since April 2018, 2,500 female entrepreneurs have received support to create business linkages in Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. 318 companies have participated in trade fairs and met buyers, resulting in trade leads, which if converted into sales, will be worth over 22million US$. Initiatives like this really do work, empowering women, giving them equality and the dignified prospects they deserve.

In November, I am pleased to be attending the Time For Justice: Putting Survivors Firstinternational conference on tackling conflict-related sexual violence. The event in London is a global call to action to strengthen justice for survivors and hold perpetrators to account, to address the stigma endured by survivors, and to strengthen efforts to prevent sexual violence in conflict. I very much hope the Commonwealth membership is strongly represented at the conference and that it brings us together again to constructively address these issues.

Looking ahead, 2020 is a big year with the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action on gender equality and the 20th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. CHOGM will also be an opportunity to demonstrate how the Commonwealth is actively progressing gender equality and women's rights.

Her Majesty The Queen reminded us all earlier this year as we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Commonwealth that the "nations of the Commonwealth agreed to move forward as free and equal members". This equality I believe does not just mean those in government, or at the top of the tree of enterprise... it encompasses all of society regardless of gender, of background, or origin, race or religion.

More and more women’s voices are being heard. However, we still have a long way to go before we can honestly say that these voices are not only being listened to, but being acted upon. Therefore we must ensure that we are keeping these issues high on the political agenda so that women and girls may play a full role in all aspects of life.

To effect change we need to live up to and embody the original values that the Commonwealth was founded upon; to uphold human rights, to strive for peace and security, to promote tolerance, respect and understanding, to ensure access to education and to accomplish gender equality.

It is an honour to be a part of this collective effort and I will continue to support and champion your work in tackling gender inequality across the Commonwealth. This will not only secure a more equal platform on which women and girls can build, but deliver an empowered – and ultimately brighter – future for the women of our Commonwealth family.

Asante.

[bookrecollection]

Do I have a diverse bookshelf? Pt 4: Gender & Equality

Protagonists—whether they be human, animal or inanimate—are overwhelmingly male according to our reference blog. In the last post, I mentioned that many minority writers write politically whether they mean to or not. And I think that’s true of gender; it is about social justice, and that social justice deals a lot with sex. However, since I already touched on some gender inequality in the last post, in this one, I’ll focus on titles with protagonists who strongly identify as women or LGBQT. Or I’ll add books by authors who are seriously discussing the condition of being a women or being LGBQT.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit How can I not start with this one? For those who don’t know, this essay collection begins with an anecdote by Solnit of a party. At the party, she is talking to a man who continually tells her to read a book he hasn’t read but heard about. Another partygoer (she) tries several times to explain that Solnit is the actual author of said book. But the man doesn’t hear or acknowledge them till more than 4-5 attempts later. As Solnit describes: “And then, as if in a nineteeth-century novel, he went ashen.” The situation is awkward for everyone. When feminists talk about gender equality, it includes situations like this—of women not being heard for our perspectives and wisdom. Of how often women seem to be required to just listen and validate a male perspective or train of thought. Remember the purpose of a diverse bookshelf is to help broaden our understanding of the experience of others. For women like me, stories like this validate our own humiliating like experiences. For others, it makes them visible. It declares they are real, and they are not cool! Also, it’s very humorous even if the topic is grim.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton A professor gave me this book to help with my own writing, and I fell deeply in love with May Sarton’s style. For the purposes of this list, Sarton identified as a lesbian and lived her life as such. However, her famous journals of which this is the first are about being human, about being a poet, about living life through the years. They’re about friendships and even love (of which she doesn’t hide the fact that her loves are women). They’re about change and how we move through time. They’re very very beautiful. Don’t miss out!

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey I used to read a lot of fantasy series as a child, but as I grew older I tired of them. One reason is there is a LOT of violence against women in them even if there is a heroine protagonist. As such, much like in Game of Thrones, sex is ugly. It’s not about mutual love or being a good partner. It’s about power and how people weaponize it. In contrast, what I love about the Kushiel series is how much Carey turns typical fantasy tropes on their heads. The hero is a courtesan. However, the culture doesn’t denigrate her; instead the culture is built around the sacred religious tenet of love as thou wilt. This means that courtesans are akin to priests. And because of that, typical societal sins: nonmonogamy, homosexuality, BDSM and sex work are treated as normal since they are consensual. What would be salacious in other fantasy stories is just culture here. And Carey does an amazing job showing how consensual sex and personal preference is sexy whereas weaponized sex is not. But go read it; the whole book is really about how our heroine needs to save her country from invasion by her wits alone. Quite adventurous and filled with political intrigue.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson This nonfiction book is many things, but its back bone is relationship between the author and artist Harry Dodge, who is transgender (she to he). There is so much beauty and love and thoughtfulness in this exploration of so many things. I’m an avid Maggie Nelson reader. She’s a genre-bender so dive into her work!

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser Known as one of the great novels of American realism, Dreiser recounts how young country girl Carrie moves to Chicago in the late 1890s. She’s in pursuit of the American Dream, and for a woman, that involves becoming the mistress of several men who seem more powerful and then ending as an actress. Because Carrie lives against societal mores, the author had to fight against censorship attempts at the time. Today, it’s praised for its accurate portrayal of the human condition. For my part, I don’t know if I like Carrie, but I admire her grit. And unlike many other classic novels with female protagonists who end up badly in their bid for independence because of MEN and SOCIETY (i.e. Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, etc.), Carrie gets exactly what she wants and thrives.

#books #diversity #reading #booklovers #bookshelves

[erlglvn]

Poverty Essay

Even though our country has an improved economy today, majority of the people that living here is still struggling in poverty. Poverty happened when people does not meet all their basic needs. Those people encountered struggles in life and probably cannot eat every day or every meal. They can’t afford to buy clothes as protection to their body. They also have no shelter to live. Poverty is visible on how people lived and how much the money they have. Poverty teach human how to adapt the conditions and how to become a good worker in our society. Poverty is the overall terms of describing the state of being poor. And it can also be described simply as of the word “lack of”.

It can also be divided by priority into the following causes: poverty that caused by laziness to work harder, poverty that caused by lack of quality consciousness, poverty that caused by mismanagement of government due to lack of sincere interest for the benefit of all, and lastly, poverty that caused by social injustice created by mankind, industry and investors.

It also has a factor that contribute to poverty. First, is the unemployment. Because some people even the one’s who had graduated with a degree belong to the percentage of being unemployed. It’s either because there is no enough job offerings related to their degree. And if the person is unemployed, he cannot buy anything what they want because they have no money to use to support their basic needs. Therefore, it may fall to depressions which can also cause complicated diseases. Second, is the lack of education. This is one of the reasons why people become poor. Some people who are less fortunate can’t afford to go to school. They tend to become a construction worker or will belong to the lowest paid individual in the society. And their salary is not enough to support the needs of their families. Third, is the disasters, the natural calamities. Such as, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, landslides and war. Because of that, it damages a lot of properties. People lose their source of living and income. They are then, left without anything. Lastly, is the corruption. Those who worked from the government and steal money from the funds of our country.

How can we prevent the poverty from our country? It is on going, its been living with the country since its independence and it won’t be going away unless everyone cooperates. We can prevent poverty if we engaged ourselves in entrepreneurship. People should strive to go to school because if people in our country are educated, they can compete with other nations. There are a lot of opportunities knocking elsewhere that can contribute to income generation. Also, if people in the Philippines are earning, our economy will be able to stand better than before. Corrupt officials should also be punished. Government should do their job and serve the country with honesty. And people should take good care of the environment.

Poverty is a longtime concern for the Philippines. Poverty cannot be defined as a single term, it has multiple meanings and is linked through a series of resemblances (Spicker 230-239). Fundamentally, poverty could be viewed through different social sciences perspectives (Austin 2-4) which include economics (Jung and Smith) psychology (Turner and Lehning 57-58) anthropology (Frerer and Vu 73-74), political science (Lehning 88-89) and sociology (Wolf). Despite of these perspectives, some of the efforts to lessen poverty only address some of the causes and not poverty as a whole (Cerlo 34-35). Firstly, Spicker defined poverty as a material concept our needs, patterns of deprivation and lack of resources. People lack the income in order for them to buy what they need. Spicker further explained another concept of poverty, which is poverty as an economic circumstance. Second, he defined poverty as a standard of living, inequality and economic position which basically means if you have low income you are poor same as to the people who is unable to attain minimum standard of living, disadvantaged compared to others in terms of income and low economic position in the society, this definition is comparable to the concept of relative poverty, whereas being poor is based on the comparison of the majority of the people in the society (Moller, Huber, Stephens, Bradley and Nielsen). Thirdly, Spicker defined poverty as a social circumstance, wherein he views poverty based on social class, dependency, lack of basic security, lack of entitlements and exclusion. It is the idea that poverty is not only based upon who among the people has a low income but, who has a low socioeconomic status, dependent to aids, living under struggle and vulnerable to social risk, lack of rights, and excluded from participation in the normal pattern of social life. It is similar to the idea of social exclusion where it is defined as the inability to fully participate in society, caused by low income, unemployment, poor housing, and bad neighbors (Dewide 122-123). Lastly, the concept of poverty that is related to moral judgement Spicker stated that “Poverty consists of serious deprivation, and people are held to be poor when their material circumstances are deemed to be morally unacceptable” which means that to describe a person to be poor implies that something must be or should be done to help them.

Poverty exists in the Philippines because of our country’s inadequacy and lack of capacity to meet the basic and prior needs of all its citizen. A family who’s experiencing poverty are struggling to live and survive every day. Most of them, before closing their eyes at night, wishes to never wake up in the morning, because every time they woke up, the first thing that comes to their mind is a hanging question on how they are able to face and endure their reality once again.

Hunger, unemployment, injustice, inequality, slavery, illegality and criminality- these are some interconnected words that compromise the term poverty, as they say, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” Extreme state of poverty kills thousands of life, numerous opportunities and life chances and most of all, poverty hinders someone’s right especially children’s rights. Children are the most affected unit of poverty. Every child has the rights to have enough food to eat, the right to have proper health care, right to have a decent clothes and shelter, rights to education and most especially rights to have an adequate standard of living that are free from abuse and slavery, but due to extreme state of poverty on where several number of families are affected, children aren’t able to access and enjoy their lives and childhood. Most of the children are forced to labor, slavery and child trafficking.

Poverty is a man-made dilemma that can possibly eradicated by human deeds as well. There can be no change in our country if we, people, do not change our hearts and minds to address these reality head on. This is in need of unity and responsibility; everyone must take their parts on and in changing our former mindset in order to build a just and humane society.

What is poverty? Economically, Poverty is an economic condition in which people experience shortage or lack of certain resources that are required for human life, such as money and material objects, for example: food, clothing, and shelter. Poverty is therefore a multifaceted term that involves social, economic and political components (Kumar 2018). In rural areas, therefore, the only way in which people can earn income is through agriculture, based on established farming and fisheries. Such people are forced to work in farming areas because they don't get enough schooling, or they don't get any schooling at all. This causes poverty and unemployment to be much higher among indigenous peoples than any other place like the region.

There is a lot of knowledge of poverty here in the Philippines and living in poverty is a terrible state to be in, because individuals would lack the basic aspects required for life. Poverty has remained largely in the Philippines due to lack of rural employment; economists say. Rudimentary farming and fishing are anchoring the way of life in many of the 7,100 islands in the world. Poverty remains the biggest issue in most of the population of the Philippines. The economy of the Philippines is not doing anything to help these people lead a better life. In almost all areas in the Philippines today, inequality the difference between rich and poor is very high and is always widening. Poverty has always been a reality. The poor ones or family that has a low income will much likely to get experience poverty and one of the reasons is the inequality of distribution of income. The uneven distribution of wealth would make the wealthy and their families wealthier and the poor poorer only to the extent of not being able to afford necessities. According to Shah, rich citizens would also have limited access to housing, employment and other programs. Problems of poverty, malnutrition and illness affect the poorest in society. The poorest are often usually excluded from society and not be involved or voice in public and political discourse, making it much more difficult to escape poverty.

Filipinos are having a hard time living in these harsh circumstances, and more and more of them are slipping into severe poverty. Poverty was also one of the reasons why the effect of family income on children's lives and growth in several ways. Living on a low-income basis raises parents ' stress rates, which in turn impact relationships and family dynamics. Increased family income will improve children's educational accomplishments and their emotional and physical well-being.

As poverty continues to worsen in the Philippines, people, especially in poverty, are experiencing consequences. All of them is experiencing health issues. Since they live in poor living conditions and are unable to meet their needs, they are very vulnerable to health problems. Poverty in the Philippines is also rising the rate of crime. Poverty leads people who are desperate for money to steal and commit crimes for easy cash. Child labor is one of the consequences of poverty. Kids are no longer going to school to work in order to be able to survive. Members: HUMS02 - IS206 Diaz, Editha Mae Galvan, Earl Mikel Novilla, John Arnold Padual, Stephen Randell Paraiso, Jhaydelle Lynn Reyes, Janna reyes

#HUMS-02 #IS206 #Poverty

[creepingsharia]

“Lovers of Islam, Force These Demonic Creatures Out!” Muslim Persecution of Christians, May 2019

by Raymond Ibrahim

The Slaughter of Christians

Burkina Faso: A number of fatal Islamic terror attacks on Christians and their churches took place or were reported in May:

On Sunday 26 May, armed Muslims stormed a Catholic church during mass and opened fire on the gathered worshippers; four were killed and several others injured. killing four and injuring others.

On May 13, armed Muslims attacked a Catholic procession, slaughtered four Christians and "burned a statue of the Virgin Mary."

On May 12, approximately 30 armed Muslims stormed a Catholic church, slaughtered at least six worshippers—including the officiating priest—and then burned the church to the ground.

On Sunday, April 28, Islamic terrorists stormed a Protestant church and killed six worshippers, including the 80-year-old pastor and his two sons. According to a local, "The assailants asked the Christians to convert to Islam, but the pastor and the others refused." So "they called them, one after the other, behind the church building where they shot them dead."

On April 5, Islamic gunmen entered a Catholic church and murdered four Christians.

Nigeria: On Sunday, May 26, Muslim Fulani herdsmen ambushed and slaughtered as many as 30 Christians as they walked home after church service. The Muslim tribesmen also torched approximately 20 Christian households as part of their planned "Islamization" of Nigeria, said a local pastor, adding, "These targeted attacks on innocent Christians are unacceptable, particularly with confirmed arrests of over 30 Christian women [who work as] fruit and food vendors by soldiers ... after the attack." Separately, on May 18, Islamic gunmen killed a Christian and kidnapped two others at a Baptist church.

Central African Republic: An elderly Christian nun of Spanish/French origins who spent her days teaching young girls how to sew in the African nation was beheaded by a militant group representing and partially composed of Muslim Fulani herdsmen; around the same time the group massacred at least 26 people, in what one report refers to as "one of the biggest single losses of life in the Central African Republic (CAR) since a February peace deal."

Turkey: The murder of an elderly Christian man is believed to have been a hate crime. According to the report, the "86-year-old Greek man was found murdered in his home with his hands and feet tied. He was reportedly tortured":

Zafir Pinari's death on May 14 comes just five days before the commemorative anniversary of the Greek Genocide. This genocide was conducted from 1913-1922 by the Ottoman Empire and was the systematic killing of Christian Greek citizens. By the time the Ottoman Empire collapsed and modern Turkey formed in 1923, most of the Greek population were either murdered or had fled the country. A wave of killing of Greek Christians again occurred in the 1960s.

A suspect has been arrested in this case and three others are under investigation. It is not yet clear as to what motivated the murder. However, given the historical context, local press covering the incident are labeling it as a hate crime.

Pakistan: A Muslim man kidnapped and tortured his Christian employee to death after he tried to quit his job. Javid Masih, 45, worked as a livestock farmhand for Abbas Jutt. According to a source acquainted with the case "Masih wanted to quit because he was often subjected to discrimination and religious hatred." The deceased's widow confirms:

"We had been experiencing religious hatred from [Jutt] and his colleagues, however, we had no courage to register this with police. We are poor and belong to a downtrodden segment of society. Therefore, we are never heard. Jutt has damaged our lives and we have nothing to live for now."

Egypt: A Muslim employee murdered his Christian supervisor on May 7, "because of his Christian faith" notes a report. Surveillance footage from a nearby building captured the incident. While passing each other, the two men speak briefly, before the Muslim man returns with a knife and butchers the Christian, who leaves behind a wife and two boys aged 15 and 9. "The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began nearly two weeks ago," the report adds. "It is common for Christians to suffer increased violence and harassment during this time. Persecution is a constant theme of life for Egyptian Christians, as they are already viewed as second class citizens in this Islamic nation."

Syria: Islamic militants bombed a Christian village; five children and a 35-year-old woman were killed. "The kids went out to play after some days of calm" near a monastery, said a local priest, when a rocket struck near them, "instantly killing five and wounding others... the woman was killed in a nearby street by a separate rocket."

Iraq: On May 13, Islamic militants joined with the Shia group, Shabak, which is supported by Iran, broke into the home of two elderly Christian women, a mother and daughter, and stabbed them. Although the mother's age is unknown, it can be surmised considering that her daughter—who was last reported as "struggling with death" and "in critical condition"— as around 69. According to one report, "The women were repeatedly stabbed with a knife and their gold and money were stolen. The two victims were then hospitalized in Mosul. The daughter, who sustained a violent head injury, remains in critical condition." Although the women were robbed, local Christians say that plunder was not the primary motive:

"The attackers tried to deliver a message of threat.... I don't think it was a robbery because they stabbed the daughter on her head by a knife which means the criminals tried to kill them.... You know who could be the ones who may attack Christians. Everyone knows them. But no one can give you the names since they are supported by the militia."

Separately, in an address delivered in London, the Rev. Bashar Warda, Archbishop of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, accused Britain's Christian leaders of indifference to the genocide of Iraq's Christians. Parts of his comments follow:

Christianity in Iraq, one of the oldest Churches, if not the oldest Church in the world, is perilously close to extinction. Those of us who remain must be ready to face martyrdom.... Our tormentors confiscated our present, while seeking to wipe out our history and destroy our future. In Iraq there is no redress for those who have lost properties, homes and businesses. Tens of thousands of Christians have nothing to show for their life's work, for generations of work, in places where their families have lived, maybe, for thousands of years.... Will you continue to condone this never-ending, organised persecution against us? When the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campuses hold demonstrations and carry signs that say "We are all Christians"? And yes I do say, the "next wave of violence", for this is simply the natural result of a ruling system that preaches inequality, and justifies persecution. The equation is not complicated. One group is taught that they are superior and legally entitled to treat others as inferior human beings on the sole basis of their faith and religious practices. This teaching inevitably leads to violence against any "inferiors" who refuse to change their faith. And there you have it—the history of Christians in the Middle East for the last 1,400 years.

Attacks on Churches

Nigeria: Muslim Fulani herdsmen stormed a church during evening choir practice and kidnapped 17 Christians on May 18. "As we were in the church, Fulani herdsmen numbering over 20 just surrounded the church and started shooting," a church member recalled.

"Everybody was terrified, but there was no way we could run because they had already surrounded the church. They were asking for the pastor's house, and they threatened to shoot us if we don't show them the house. Some of them went to the pastor's house while others kept watch over us."

Kenya: On May 17, a rampaging mob of Somali Muslims destroyed the properties of four churches—Kingdom Gospel for All Nations Ministry, Evangelical Victory Church International, End Time Army Church, and Kale Heywot Church—and injured several Christians. On the previous day, locals had called police on an outdoor Islamic event because it was getting too loud and rowdy. Citing "public disturbance," police responded by pulling the plug on the event. On the next day, "a group of Muslim adherents stormed our church building armed with stones, machetes, and petrol," the pastor of one of the destroyed churches said.

"They broke into the church and damaged everything; from chairs to sound equipment. They also attempted to set the church on fire, but police arrived and contained the situation.... After they destroyed the chairs and equipment of this church, they split into small groups and went around stealing from the nearby shops operated by Christians. This was outright persecution of the people that subscribe to the Christian faith."

Another pastor of an attacked church said:

"Our freedom of worship has been violated and we can only pray for a time when the Muslim community will allow Christians to worship without fear of being attacked. Our members are now scattered and ... we have received notes at our church warning us against going to church, praying and preaching."

"The influx of the Somali people who are majorly Muslims has posed a great danger to the churches," said the leader of another attacked church. "They have erected four mosques and are looking for portions to build other mosques. They have been threatening churches to leave so that they can build mosques on those plots."

Turkey: On May 21, police interrupted a baptismal ceremony while raiding and subsequently shutting down an unauthorized church composed of Iranian Christian asylum seekers. "Turkey does not have a pathway for legalization of churches," the report adds:

Many are instead forced to register as a foundation or association, and most even then will not be allowed to open a church building. For this reason, many like the church in Bolu are forced to exist in apartment buildings. It is common for Christians to report harassment and intimidation by the police who monitor their church services. For Iranian Christians, they are often challenged in that as asylum seekers, they are usually housed in extremely Islamic areas who do not want a Christian presence.

Iran: Authorities directly under the control of the Supreme Leader raided an Assyrian Presbyterian Church on May 9. They tore down the church's cross, changed the church's locks, and made it clear that worship was no longer be permitted at the church. Apparently the church's crime was that it used the Persian language alongside its own Assyrian language; because the overwhelming majority of Iran's Muslim population speaks only Persian, conducting church services in that language is seen by the Islamist regime as a seductive threat to the Muslims' faith.

Algeria: Citing a law that requires special authorization for non-Muslim places of worship, authorities shut down another church and its Bible school on May 22. "I am sad to have to face this injustice," its pastor said: "We prayed for those authorities who are persecuting us, as our Lord Jesus Christ commanded." The church had filled all other prerequisites for legalization, and had been waiting since 2017 for approval, which never came. This is the latest of several churches to be closed in recent years. According to the report, "Officials have yet to issue any license for a church building under the regulation...

Several churches have since received written orders to cease all activities, and authorities have closed a number of them for operating without a license. Islam is the state religion in Algeria, where 99 percent of the population of 40 million are Muslim."

Egypt: Authorities closed down another church in response to Muslim disapproval. "This is a very hard situation," said one local Christian. "You can see kids praying in tears because of their feelings of fear ... that is very painful for us as Christians personally. I don't trust in the government promises, but we have to continue praying for [a] reopening [of] the church." "Many years ago we were praying in our houses with the priest because there was not an [existing] church," said another local Christian.

"Now there are more than 400 Coptic persons in our village and the number of us increases day by day... During the last feast days (Orthodox Easter) many Copts prayed and the police had secured the building, but then the police asked Bishop Georgius to close the church because some Muslims in the village disagreed."

In a separate incident, an American professor teaching at Cairo's American University was fired for refusing to emphasize Islam over other religions during his Religions of the World Class. According to one report:

Professor Adam Duker has taught Comparative Religions at the university since 2016. His dismissal reportedly comes after a conflict with Saudi billionaire Tarek Taher, who maintains close ties to the university. Taher had requested that Professor Duker focus more heavily on Islam. When Professor Duker refused, his contract was terminated effective October 2019. Professor Duker says that Taher asked him to encourage non-Muslim students to convert to Islam and that Taher wanted his lectures pre-approved before teaching. [A more detailed report on this development appears here.]

Pakistan: "A pastor ... received a letter on May 1 warning him that his church would be the site of a terrorist attack unless he paid a ransom of more than $3,500.00," notes a report. "The threat has many church leaders in Karachi on edge and calling on local authorities to provide their communities with protection....The letter also warned that if Pastor Azeem went to police, there would be consequences like the recent terrorist attacks on churches in Sri Lanka."

Separately, 38 Christian graves at a Pakistani cemetery were desecrated; the unknown assailants also defaced several crosses fixed to the graves.

Attacks on Apostates and Blasphemers

Uganda: Muslims burned the home of a former Muslim convert to Christianity and his large family (when still a Muslim he had married three women who gave birth to 14 children). Most of the family was indoors and barely made it out in time before the charred roof collapsed. "We thank God that no one was physically hurt but emotionally are very hurt as we continue receiving threatening messages warning us of a possible attack," the father said. "The pressure from the extended family and radical Muslims is really troubling my family, and we cannot risk going back to our houses." Problems began once Muslims learned the family had embraced Christianity; local Muslims, on the same day they saw the family attend church, began stoning their home. Muslim villagers and the imam of the local mosque also began insulting and harassing the family, with one villager remarking , "If you do not come back to Islam, then expect something unusual to befall your family." "Since then," the father said, "my family became vigilant, and we even hired a guard to take care of the family during the night, but the stone-throwing continued in one of the houses while the guard was on patrol on the other side of the homestead." Even after being made homeless, the family continues to receive threatening messages. These include: "The burning of the house was just warning. If you continue hardening your hearts and fail to return to Islam, then expect a worst thing that you have never seen before." The father concluded,:

"We sincerely need prayers and financial support... My family is scattered, and the children are unable to go to school. We gave our lives to Jesus and here we are living a troubled, restless life. The law should bring these perpetrators to book."

Pakistan: On May 15, a Muslim mob attacked a Christian family accused of allegedly blaspheming against Islam. The incident began after a Christian man asked a Muslim who was loudly cursing on his phone near the Christian family home to move away. The Muslim responded with a derogatory, anti-Christian slur, which led to a physical altercation, until the Christian family managed to separate the two men. That night, the local mosque's megaphones started blaring out against the Christian household, accusing its members of blasphemy and adding: "All the lovers of Islam must gather together and force these demonic creatures out of this village." A family member explained what happened next:

"This was a horrifying moment for my whole family and other Christians. We felt totally helpless. In our panic we started to get ourselves ready to flee our homes and get far away from the village, however, we were all to slow. In no time we start to hear Muslims gather outside our home—even the children. The violent mob surrounded our home and all of them had weapons including guns—which were being shot in the air, sticks, axes, poles and farming tools. Even the small children had weapons [and] we feared for our lives. The mob began shouting outside our home asking for our family to exit our home and receive divine retribution for our sin. It did not seem very divine—we just saw raging evil violent people ready to kill us."

Seven Christian family homes were attacked before the mobs dispersed.

Sexual Abuse of Christians

Indonesia: A May 23 report says that " a new form of persecution is on the rise—Christian girls are being targeted by Muslim men... Influential leaders are literally training young men to target Christian girls to impregnate them":

They target them to try and sort of diffuse the spread of Christianity because the family of the Christian girl is so ashamed that...they're forced into marrying that daughter into a Muslim family.... The family, because the shame is so overwhelming, they agree to that... and the Muslims who are being trained to do this, they understand that. That's why they're doing that. They're taking a Christian into a Muslim family so they can influence [her]. Once girls are married into the Muslim families, they're often cut off from or abandoned by their families and they face even more difficult circumstances. In some cases, girls are the second or third wife of their persecutor and they have few freedoms.

Pakistan: Neha Pervaiz, a 15-year-old Christian girl, was raped, forcibly converted to Islam, and married to a 45-year-old Muslim man.

"I was taken by my aunt, a Muslim convert, to her house on April 28 to help her look after her sick son," recalls Neha. "But there I was asked to marry a Muslim man named Imran. When I refused, they beat me up and threatened to kill my minor brother who was with me." She was then forced into another room and raped by Imran. "They then pressurized me to convert to Islam and marry Imran." Over the following two days she was forced to convert, renamed Fatima, and taken to court where she was illegally married to Imran. She eventually managed to escape back to her parents.

Egypt: Muslims reportedly kidnapped a Christian wife and mother of three near Cairo. Her family has since received threatening messages saying that unless the woman embraces Islam one of her sons will targeted for slaughter. After the family took the matter to the authorities, the police refused to open a case. They suggested that the woman had left her home of her own free will.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

About this Series

While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by extremists is growing. The report posits that such persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place irrespective of language, ethnicity, or location.

#Sharia #Jihad #Islam #Legal #News #Poltics

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING SUMMER

In Lisp, all variables are effectively pointers. Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs?1 Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.2 It's hard to engage an audience it's better to start with what goes wrong and try to trace it back to the root causes. A lot of the new startups would create new technology that further accelerated variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, the former because founders own more stock, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up.3 When we first started Y Combinator we have some kind of secret weapon—that he was harming his future—that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that was more than enough technical skill. There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP. How little money it can take to start a company of any size to get software written.

I needed to remember, if I could give an example of a powerful macro, and say there!4 Design means making things for humans. Wrong. Big companies also don't pay people the right way to get an accurate drawing is not to make the poor richer. This sort of thing was the rule, not better off, as more than a plan A. In some ways, this assumption makes life a lot easier for the users and for us as well. Why did desktop computers take over?5 Programmers have to worry about infrastructure. For the first week or so we intended to make this point diplomatically, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.6 Similarly, good new problems are not to be had for the asking. Don't be too legalistic about the conditions under which they're allowed to leave.

Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight in the eye and say I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp;-Though useful to present-day union organizers rather than an attack on early ones. I think mathematicians also believe this. In the middle you have people who are poor or rich and figure out why. We were just able to develop stuff in house, and that if grad students could start startups, they'll start startups. Eric Raymond here. Which seems to me one of the most interesting differences between research and design. In fact, it may be slightly faster. We were terrified of starting a startup, there are even worse tradeoffs than these. I think about why I voted for Clinton over the first George Bush, it wasn't because I was shifting to the left or right in their morning-after analyses are like the financial reporters stuck writing stories day after day about the random fluctuations of the stock market.

This metaphor doesn't stretch that far. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. You can't trust authorities.7 They were, as a rule, not better off, as more than one with a 50% chance of winning has to pay more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server. I'm letting you in on the secret early. But since then the west coast has just pulled further ahead.8 It is not the way it's portrayed on TV. And if you're writing a program that attacked the servers themselves should find them very well defended.

Sometimes I can think with noise.9 Our only expenses in that phase were food and rent. It's hard to imagine now, but when they do get paged at 4:00 AM, they don't think of themselves that way. When you switch to this new model, you realize how much software development is affected by the reactions of those around them, and c they're individually inconsistent. If you want, but not totally unlike your other friends. And that might be a great thing. As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them.10 I'm a little embarrassed to say, I never said anything publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they planned. So there you have it.

Notice I said what they need, not what a piece of code. Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. And more to the point of view. And creating wealth, as a rule, not better off, as more than a plan A. You never had to worry about those. If you work this way too.11 Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can just turn off the service. I could tell I knew how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to program better than most people doing it for a living. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds.12 Prep schools openly say this is one reason intranet software will continue to do so but be content to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old was Bill Gates? Programs.13 The way to get in the software as soon as they got their first round of outside investors 36x.

It allows you to give an example of this rule; if you could count on investors being interested even if you're not certain, you should get summer jobs at places you'd like to work. You have the users' data right there on your disk.14 And you don't have to be poked with a stick to get them to stay is to give them enough that they don't dress up. Only 13 of these were in product development. No one will look that closely at it. You have the users' data right there on your disk.15 At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their fortunes will continue to do so much besides write software.16 So startup culture may not merely be different in the way of having the next. Though we were comparatively old, we weren't tied down by jobs they don't want to, but they didn't actually drop out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot who get rich by taking money from the rich. If you write the laws very carefully, that is a good idea—but we've decided now that the party line should be to discover surprising things. This was done entirely for PR purposes. What you're afraid of competition.

Notes

Management consulting.

If you're expected to do work you love, or boards, or even being Genghis Khan is probably a losing bet for a couple hundred years or so and we ran into Yuri Sagalov. Most of the reason the founders. In fact the decade preceding the war had been a waste of time on is a new version from which they don't know. 6% of the products I grew up with much greater inconveniences than that.

Even in English, our sense of a startup enough to invest in a safe environment, and then a block or so and we did not become romantically involved till afterward. They seem to be hard on the grounds that a startup is rare. Companies often wonder what to do whatever gets you there sooner.

9999 and.

Globally the trend has been around as long as the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. The point where things start with consumer electronics.

People and The Old Way. But if you tell them what to do video on-demand, because you can't even claim, like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, the other cheek skirts the issue; the point where it was briefly in Britain in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M.

Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering. In fact the less powerful language in it.

The only people who might be 20 or 30 times as much income. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to think about, like arithmetic drills, instead of editors, and astronomy. Incidentally, the police treat people more equitably. There can be done at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of how to use those solutions.

For example, because it doesn't cost anything. What will go away. In a startup in a deal to move from London to Silicon Valley like the increase in trade you always see when restrictive laws are removed. Come work for us now to appreciate how important it is certainly part of a safe environment, but mediocre programmers is the discrepancy between government receipts as a technology startup takes some amount of damage to the size of a startup, as on a map.

Success here is that they've already decided what they're going to need to run an online service, this would work.

But no planes crash if your school, secretly write your dissertation in the right sort of wealth, not like soccer; you don't know of no Jews moving there, only Jews would move there, and power were concentrated in the imprecise half.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the art itself gets more random, the increasing complacency of managements.

For example, the laser, it's this internal process in their target market the shoplifters are also startlingly popular on Delicious, but since it was 10 years ago.

In a project like a core going critical.

How could these people make the right not to stuff them with comments. The state of technology, companies that an investor, than a product of number of discrepancies currently blamed on various forbidden isms.

If you did that in practice that doesn't lose our data. Anything that got built this way is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.

Thanks to Mike Arrington, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Patrick Collison, and Paul Buchheit for sharing their expertise on this topic.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #Silicon #jobs #data #development #day #core #union #soccer #problems #Program #block #art #peers #companies #cell #funding #week #things #sup #users #server #founders #talks #trend #west