There are two general approaches to political change, the desire for something new or the desire for something old. Conservatives are by definition regressive. They wish for stasis or regression. Progressives are the other side, they wish for change and progress towards something new.
The problem is that there are many possible futures but we all share a past. It makes sense to have a single conservative party. However, in order to counter that you need a concerted effort to balance it, and that’s a problem because progressives can’t agree as easily as conservatives because there are many possible futures, some of which are mutually exclusive.
For example, I want to see a future with nuclear reactors and the freedom to own weapons. My reasoning isn’t relevant to this comment. The fact is that many progressives do not.
Now conservatives may disagree on which elements of the past to keep and how far back to emulate, but those difference are much easier to reconcile. Progressivism of any stripe is always going to be at a disadvantage in this context all else being equal.
My point is to prove that it isn’t logical to lump “liberals” together like it is to do so with conservatives, because of the shared past, divergent future, dichotomy.
That said, if any party is more guilty of ignoring facts it’s the conservative party (or conservative elements within progressive parties) since there are reasons we abandoned elements of the past when we did so.
Granted not all of them were valid and good reasons but for the most part we had good cause, at least at the time.
The right wing (be they overt or covert) in this country is completely fact immune on a whole slew of issues ranging from economics to climatology to sociology. When they aren’t simply lying for power on behalf of their 1% owners or pathological greed.
Basically we need a depth of process reform that simply isn’t going to happen prior to the singularity. And what I am hoping for is internal changes to the one party that overtly stands for change. Since currently the ship of state is headed for a waterfall.
Letting the 1% try to keep ALL the money is just insane. It will destroy the country. Though of course the wealthy can always just fly away. Realizing that they are a pathology at the systemic level is the first step towards finding an ethical cure.
That as opposed to merely executing them, French revolution style, which is perfectly possible given how few people we’re talking about here. And I should also point out that if this ever becomes the position of the government, there’s no where to run as our drone strikes have shown.
This is how transhuman upgrades will really begin. Repairs refined to the point of invisibility and advantage over the average.
Doctors will eventually have to ask themselves if an upgrade is identical to a repair in terms of application requirements then why not opt for the upgrade for the same reasons you deploy a vaccine?
The logic of the vaccine will be the foundation of creeping upgrades because it a treatment for a condition is known to be safe and also prevents injury by granting some practical asset, then how is failing to offer it not harmful?
This is also how immortality will arrive. Not as a magic injection, but as a series of germ line edits designed individually to prevent known pathologies, but which collectively add years of life.
When we think about making a gene edit we are making something the body does anyway more efficient. Those increases in efficiency will not just cure the issue at hand but will also add both quality and quantity of life.
However, this progress will be seriously limited until we have a single payer medical system whose primary purpose isn’t wealth extortion.
“If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life. I do not underestimate the difficulty that this involves, but I encourage you in this effort.” – Pope Francis addressing Congress today
Brothers and Sisters: I am not a theologian, an expert on the Bible, or a Catholic. I am just a U.S. senator from the small state of Vermont.
But I am emailing you today to discuss Pope Francis in the hope that we can examine the very profound lessons that he is teaching people all over this world and some of the issues for which he is advocating.
Now, there are issues on which the pope and I disagree — like choice and marriage equality — but from the moment he was elected, Pope Francis immediately let it be known that he would be a different kind of pope, a different kind of religious leader. He forces us to address some of the major issues facing humanity: war, income and wealth inequality, poverty, unemployment, greed, the death penalty and other issues that too many prefer to ignore.
He is reaching out not just to the Catholic Church. He’s reaching out to people all over the world with an incredibly strong message of social justice talking about the grotesque levels of wealth and income inequality.
Pope Francis is looking in the eyes of the wealthiest people around the world who make billions of dollars, and he is saying we cannot continue to ignore the needs of the poor, the needs of the sick, the dispossessed, the elderly people who are living alone, the young people who can’t find jobs. He is saying that the accumulation of money, that the worship of money, is not what life should be about. We cannot turn our backs on our fellow human beings.
He is asking us to create a new society where the economy works for all, and not just the wealthy and the powerful. He is asking us to be the kind of people whose happiness and well-being comes from serving others and being part of a human community, not spending our lives accumulating more and more wealth and power while oppressing others. He is saying that as a planet and as a people we have got to do better.
That’s why I was so pleased that in his address to Congress today, Pope Francis spoke of Dorothy Day, who was a tireless advocate for the impoverished and working people in America. I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history.
As the founder of the Catholic Worker newspaper, Dorothy Day organized workers to stand up against the wealthy and powerful. Pope Francis said of her today in Congress:
In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.
How much progress has been made in this area in so many parts of the world! How much has been done in these first years of the third millennium to raise people out of extreme poverty! I know that you share my conviction that much more still needs to be done, and that in times of crisis and economic hardship a spirit of global solidarity must not be lost. At the same time I would encourage you to keep in mind all those people around us who are trapped in a cycle of poverty. They too need to be given hope. The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts, especially in its causes. I know that many Americans today, as in the past, are working to deal with this problem.
The fact that the pope singled out Dorothy Day — a fierce advocate in the fight for economic justice — as one of the leaders he admires most is quite remarkable. We are living in a nation which worships the acquisition of money and great wealth, but turns its back on those in need. We are admiring people with billions of dollars, while we ignore people who sleep out on the streets. That must end.
Dorothy Day fought this fight, and as Pope Francis says, we must continue it. We need to move toward an economy which works for all, and not just the few.
We have so much poverty in a land of plenty. Together, we can work to make our country more fair for everybody.
Alfrid Lickspittle: The Patron Saint of Devknights
Anytime you say anything in any game community that isn’t licking status quo crack you’ll get dogpiled by the dev defense league. That’s just a reality across every gaming community on earth. People are naturally followers. We’re a species of lickspittle toadies in search of an alpha to give us orders, exploitation, and meaning. That has consequences in every context.
In gaming it means an ever-vigilant mob of change-averse way-it-is devknights.
And if you ever start to thrash them in the ensuing debate you’ll have your thread locked or be banned because it is invariably those types that are given contextual power by the devs.
No one wants to empower people that question them. We only ever empower flatterers and yes-men.
Like the lady said in the 80s… “…some of them want to be abused…”
The solution is always just to let the devknights have their bootlicking hateful last words. Trust me when I say otherwise it NEVER ever ends.
Best thing you can do to help is comment that you agree and then unsubscribe. Or start your own thread and then abandon it. Unless you just enjoy a debate with regressives every now and again.
But firstly, what is a devknight? Anyone who defends a developer’s interests above and beyond even their own is like a vassal. A knight. That is, a warrior servant tasked mainly with suppressing a large but relatively weaker population. (Weaker only by virtue of peacefulness, and disproportionate backing of an exploitative owners class.)
Devknights are slaves in many senses of the word. They are essentially owned, they work for free or very very little, and they have essentially zero chance of ever becoming a lord or king themselves. They are also wildly dogmatic. Think the real historic version of chivalry. (Sexist, hypocritical, racist, classist, etc. You know, fox news.) Not the romantic version of Arthurian legend.
Devknights rush to the defense of developers regardless of their behavior or role in the conflict. This is exactly how a knight was required to behave. A knight was essentially a walking sword. No thought, no questions. Just obedience, propaganda, and mercenary combat.
Obviously this is an exploitative role. And just like in history, the knight’s gain in this was further exploitation of a larger group. The serfs. Like a trustee in a prison. They exchange their soul and integrity for a slightly better ranking in the pecking order amongst the rabble. Like today’s right wing rank and file or middle echelons, they think by kissing lordly ass they’ll meaningfully better their own position.
Rank and file gamers are the serfs here. Typically exploited by a monopolistic owner to one degree or another.
They buy in with our small individual software fee, instead of working the land etc. Our collective small fees pay for the castles of the devs and publishers. And somehow, just like in those times, knights and lords and kings think that their role as administrators makes them producers, when in fact they are parasitic middle men and it is the cooperative principle that is the actual productive multiplier.
By virtue of an economic monopoly. (IPL and ultimately software patents.) We have established a new feudalism. There’s no class mobility in this system. (That is why it badly needs reform.)
So, why do devknights even exist? Well, that’s a simple question with a complex answer having to do, for a start, with the basic ways a child responds to threats. (Fight, flight, appease.) I conjecture that they are essentially people who when faced with a giant monolithic seemingly unbeatable foe, have internalized their enemy’s world view to stay sane.
Sort of a psychologically callow version of ‘If you can’t beat’m, join’m.’
Of course there’s more to it then that. (Always is.) Mostly extending from the fact that the vast majority of engaged gamers, especially from the English speaking western world, are monied young white men. And the speaking online portion of that crowd is disproportionately right wing.
We’re essentially dealing with the gamer version of the tea party here. They in a very literal sense worship greed and psychopathy enabled entrepreneurialism.
Somehow these people have got it into their head that being a thief makes them producers. No doubt a consequence of the totally bogus “job creators” myth of trickle down fame.
Their economic religion essentially asserts that anyone who wants an economy with anything like integrity or consumer protections is an entitled socialist weak greedy parasite whiner.
I oppose these people in virtually every ideological arena since they were essentially manufactured to be trustees in a massive economic prison.
If you don’t like being called a devknight, then stand with your fellow gamers for once.
Why does this even matter?
Because the entire gaming industry, and all debates connected to it, rest on deeper foundations and ideas about what an idea is, what an object is, what a possession is, and what a right is, etc.
Yes, I absolutely am emotional about this because I see the logical roots and leaves of which the entire gaming market and any debate it might contain, is merely a branch.
These game companies are in the same family as Pfizer and Monsanto. The premises and logic that justifies dev behavior in this context, literally kills and tortures people in other contexts. Once seen, it can’t be unseen.
Honestly, given what’s at play in that context, I’m a Vulcan by comparison to 99% of people in those debates. They simply don’t have the training or education to see what I’m seeing, but if they did they would be on fire with rage, and I think rightly so.
When I calmly to any degree converse with the typical devknight I literally feel like I’m talking to a psychopathic sadist, the kind of which is one urge-set away from having a body collection, because that’s the logical end of the road of their self gratifying social Darwinist caveat-emptor right wing madness.
That they are unaware of this is the only thing that makes me able to speak to them, that they cannot be made aware of this is the greatest frustration about debate in this context and a big part of why debate is pointless.
To understand how I arrived here you have to start in a seemingly totally unrelated place.
Honestly, if you start from the axiomatic baseline I just linked, essentially stated as pleasure and life are of linked and paramount importance, then I can logically chart you to my opinions on the IPL market as a whole being ethically toxic, including gaming companies, despite the seeming triviality of their product.
It won’t be fast or easy but every step is as far as I know for lack of a better word absolutely correct, to the best of my knowledge. And I am always open to having a step tested.
Further up the tree from that root are ideas about what the point of culture is, what it means to be conscious, the role of compassion, the responsibility of power and opportunity, and so forth.
This entire market is extortion. What happens when humans start depending on hardware to live and software companies start pulling EULA/TOS garbage when the consequence of not paying the fee means your legs stop working or your robotic kidney shuts down?
We have got to nip this crap in the bud. Yeah, it’s “just a game” now, but it won’t always be, and by the time we realize it, it might just be too late.
Again, what happens when all text becomes code? When a computer can turn any cogent description into a program?
If we carried the publisher side of the IPL debate’s ideas backwards to apply to all public domain and the entire material world, life would be basically impossible. Literally everything you do would have a constellation of license fees and it would all be crippled or abandoned because no one could work together on anything. Every memory would be an infringement unless you were paying a fee, and they would have to have access to them and power over them for DRM reasons.
After all you can’t enforce file sharing without knowing what’s in the files. That’s why the DOJ/NSA/etc hates us having encryption. And that all that really matter is that as we move forward, the line between material and software will get ever more blurry.
Devknight logic is completely toxic. And I hate it like I would hate any other predator or parasite.
And I want to jam a spear in its brain. I’m human. /shrugs
Basically we need a species threat/opportunity triage system that includes prioritized lists of possible actions/mitigations and their cost benefit ratios.
This is how I arrive at my policy positions. I essentially put myself in the position of global emperor and think about how to do the most good for the most people with the least cost in the shortest amount of time while averting or preparing for situations of threat with a similar but inverted criteria.
Climate change for example is actually an easy problem.
Just roll out mid-scale nuclear power as fast as we can till the carbon curves break.
Another easy solution is a UBI and a wealth cap. By bookending the global economy with those elements you can achieve the best of both worlds of planned and free market economies. Again, that problem’s solution would solve a whole series of other problems.
Those root issues are the best things to focus on, the right things to worry about.
It’s a simple matter really to determine them if we are rational. Of course as baseline humans we never will be. We don’t actually change over time, only our environment and technology does. However, we can make ourselves aware of our emotional limitations, and of the fact that those emotions are stopping us from behaving in this rational way.
At the species level we seem to have a kind of pandemic phobia of facing problems rationally. This 0.2% sanity score tells us something about our own nature that should be factored in to policy choices.
It’s perfectly possible for us to decide to give power to rational goals in the abstract without falling into emotional traps. But we first have to decide that’s a good idea. Mostly people seem to reject that. They obey their emotions consciously, almost on principal. Never realizing that makes them puppets of whoever can best manipulate them.
The SEC is broken, and we’re hitting it on several fronts. This week, CREDO members helped win an important victory.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is broken and Democratic Chairwoman Mary Jo White is largely to blame. That’s why we’re hitting the SEC on several fronts, from demanding that Mary Jo White be replaced as Chair, to objecting to the waivers that let banks that admitted to criminal wrongdoing avoid penalties.
In our ongoing campaign to fix the SEC, CREDO members helped win an important victory this week: Forcing the agency to issue a rule on disclosure of CEO pay.
When we helped pass the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act back in 2010, we didn’t know that we’d have to fight for years to get the Democratic-led Securities and Exchange Commission to write a simple rule mandated by the law. Finally, five years later, under immense pressure from activists, the SEC voted 3-2 in favor of a new rule forcing publicly listed companies to disclose how much more their CEOs make than everyday employees.1
Make no mistake: This would not have happened without the sustained public pressure of CREDO members, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the progressive movement.
The SEC is so dysfunctional and corrupt that even though Dodd-Frank required that the CEO pay disclosure rule be issued within a year of the law’s enactment, the SEC refused to act. More than 73,000 CREDO activists signed a petition demanding the rule, joining tens of thousands more who have demanded a tougher SEC that cracks down on Wall Street.2 Our voices, combined with those of countless allies who devoted time and energy to this fight, forced SEC Chair Mary Jo White to act and ultimately to vote in favor.
Our advocacy also resulted in a stronger than expected rule. Following the guidelines set out in Dodd-Frank, the rule requires companies to calculate the median pay – not the average, which could be skewed by a few well-paid individuals – of their employees, and compare it to the already-public compensation of the CEO. But it was tougher than anticipated in the specifics of how corporations go about calculating the median pay, for instance forcing them to count 95% of their overseas employees, who are often paid far less than U.S. workers.3
It is worth noting that this rule attracted so much attention not because it was a linchpin of Wall Street reform, but because it was one of the simplest and most commonsense elements of the Dodd-Frank reforms and was supposed to be issued with a year of the bill’s enactment – and yet the SEC still could not manage to implement it without a baffling and inexcusable delay. Last September, four years after Dodd-Frank passed, SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White told the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC hoped to implement the rule by the end of 2014. In Spring 2015, Mary Jo White even lied to Sen. Elizabeth Warren about the timing of the rule, telling her it would arrive shortly before the SEC announced a further delay.4
In short: Passing one rule that should have gone into effect years ago does not take the heat off of the SEC, Chair Mary Jo White, or President Obama.
The SEC is still broken. To date, President Obama has done too little to help. If recent reports are accurate, only sustained advocacy from CREDO members and our allies stopped the president from nominating corporate defense attorney Keir Gumbs to fill an open seat on the Commission.5 There is little indication to date that he will pick someone like Kara Stein, a reforming willing to pick fights with Wall Street who has been dubbed “Sen. Warren’s ally on the inside.”6
Most importantly, President Obama’s hand-picked chair, Mary Jo White, has had two years to live up to here tough-on-crime rhetoric, but has failed to change the culture of the SEC or rein in Wall Street. It is long past time for her to go. She has:
Backed “get out of jail free” cards for criminal banks, repeatedly voting to give big banks waivers allowing them to keep special perks despite breaking the law.7 White has even butted heads with reform-minded commissioner Kara Stein, who objects to these free giveaways to admitted criminals.8 As the fifth and tie-breaking vote on many issues, White regularly sides with Wall Street, not Main Street.
Overseen a paralyzed, Wall Street-friendly SEC. Reports describe White’s SEC as plagued “by discord and paralysis” and her office as “the cheese cellar: It’s where policy goes to age.”9 Rules have taken years to finalize, and her frequent need to recuse herself due to her background as a private defense attorney – and her husband’s current job as a corporate lawyer – has empowered Republicans to demand lighter punishments for corporate lawbreakers.10 In fact, White’s biggest fans appear to be Republicans, with Sen. Mike Crapo praising her “flexibility” and rabidly pro-Wall Street commissioner Daniel Gallagher offering additional plaudits.11
Hired a Goldman Sachs managing director and Romney donor as her new Chief of Staff. After overlooking Wall Street fraud as the director of investment at the SEC in the run-up to the financial crash, Andrew Donohue was later richly rewarded as managing director at Goldman Sachs, where he oversaw the firm’s legal matters. In 2012, he made a generous donation to Mitt Romney.12 And now, in a disgusting example of the revolving door, he’s about to return to the SEC in the highly influential position of chief of staff to Mary Jo White.13
On top of it all, the Securities and Exchange Commission has settled the majority of its cases without requiring companies to admit guilt, breaking a key promise Mary Jo White made in her confirmation hearing.14
The CEO pay disclosure rule is a sign that we are winning. It is evidence that putting direct pressure on the White House and on Mary Jo White personally produces results. Not only do we not intend to back off, we plan to expand our efforts. In the coming weeks, CREDO will continue to:
CREDO members have never been shy about taking on big fights when that fight is important. The Securities and Exchange Commission, with its wide-ranging responsibilities for overseeing private equity, hedge funds, mega-banks, and big corporations, is simply too crucial an institution to allow it to be hijacked by Wall Street.
That said, if any party is more guilty of ignoring facts it’s the conservative party (or conservative elements within progressive parties) since there are reasons we abandoned elements of the past when we did so.
Letting the 1% try to keep ALL the money is just insane. It will destroy the country. Though of course the wealthy can always just fly away. Realizing that they are a pathology at the systemic level is the first step towards finding an ethical cure.
