Consequences

Unintentional consequences are a the result of conflicted priorities. What is it that you want most?

Hysterical

Hysterical rending, gnashing, and clutching is a gift for the inspiration of hours and hours of mockery. Every four or eight years we are treated to endless raw material as a partisan minority bemoans its defeat at the hand at another minority.  In terms of population, each tribe of political partisans is dwarfed in size those who do not participate in elections, or at best vote for candidates they hate the least.  Funny how this is never discussed by the press...

Disposable People

Economy requires essential disposable people. No wonder labor participation is so low.

Weak Narratives

 Weak narratives are a symptom of exhaustion.

Leverage

Leverage is a force multiplier.

Soothing

Lies are soothing to cowards.

Suspended from Twitter

For no apparent reason, I was kicked off Twitter. No response to the appeal. Oh well, it was getting old.

20 Years Ago Parts 3-5

http://chumpfish.blogspot.com/2009/12/10-years-ago-wto-memoir-part-3.html?m=

http://chumpfish.blogspot.com/2009/12/10-years-ago-wto-memoir-part-4-thursday.html?m=1

http://chumpfish.blogspot.com/2009/12/10-years-ago-wto-memoir-part-4-friday.html?m=1

20 Years Ago Part 2

Day 2 of recollections from 10 years ago, 20 years ago today here: http://chumpfish.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-years-ago-wto-memoir-part-2-tuesday.html

20 Years Ago Part 1

It's been 20 years since the WTO protests in Seattle. 10 years ago, I posted my recollections of those events.  Here is the first installment:

http://chumpfish.blogspot.com/2009/11/10-years-ago-wto-memoir-part-1-monday.html?m=1

Imcompetent?

Corruption and incompetence may straddle a fine line: "Which are you, incompetent or just corrupt?"

(And yes, C., the misspelling was on purpose.)

Murder

Murder doesn't care what you name it.

Internet Censorship

The Ultimate Guide to Internet Censorship is a useful and even practical primer on the subject. Absent outright censorship, counter-propaganda is another means of effective censorship by drowning out opposing points of view.

Suicide

From Suicide and the chimera of American prosperity:

If you are the sort of person who needs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to inform you that Americans are miserable, it's now official. According to the nation's top public health agency, the rate at which we are killing ourselves is higher than it has been in half a century. Fifty years of relentless technological advances, social liberalization, optimization, and GDP growth, five decades that brought about the end of Soviet communism and the birth of a new global order based on free trade and open communication and an infinite array of goods and services and what have we got to show for it? Suicide.

[...]

It will be tempting for some liberals to argue that the drug and suicide epidemic, which is most pronounced in states like West Virginia and in the post-industrial Midwest, is the muted response of white Americans to the prospect of their irrelevance in a rapidly diversifying country. But that's not what I think is happening — and not just because David Duke probably says the same thing. For one thing, the despair that is the underlying cause of these phenomena is universal. The difference is that black and Hispanic communities have more hard-won resilience than whites who have led increasingly atomized, if comparatively more prosperous, existences for half a century now. They live in self-segregated communities in which the only meaningful bonds with their neighbors and even their extended families are those to which they have consented. Their experience has not prepared them for financial uncertainty, violence, atrophying attention spans, and drug taking. For them there really is no such thing as society. They have achieved Auden's terrible dream — not universal love, but being loved alone. Now they are discovering what it means to hate themselves alone as well.

Blip Thinking

From The Baffler:

For God’s Sake, Do Nothing

Blip thinking is also exculpatory; it exempts its users from thinking too deeply about how we got into this mess, what their own role may have been, and the difficult work needed to get us out. What gets lost amid all this is the obvious contribution that the old order made to the emerging catastrophe. The global “populist” moment did not arise in spite of liberal capitalism, in defiance of the global rules-based order, but because of them. The situation today is not the parenthesis of progress but its product. And this is what is truly deranging about blip thinking: by mistaking entropy for a fleeting moment of collective madness, it ensures the political establishment’s comfort in doing nothing to address the real problems besetting the world today. It is a call for only the most superficial form of action—which is to say, an excuse for inaction.

 Link.

 Propaganda as a form of inoculation only goes so far.