Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Teaching Resumes

Four habits of argumentative writing, performative dimensions of textual argumentation, and the significance of the printed Declaration of Independence. Should be a light day, but I'm tired and feeling scattered so we'll see.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Oh, How I Hope I Live To See It!

After we bullshit over driverless cars for a decade instead of building trains I wonder what we'll bullshit over the next decade instead of building trains.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

She Will Win, She Is Winning, She Deserves To Win

Setting aside my usual emphases here about my preferred candidate's conspicuous qualifications, superior policy proposals, admirable temperament, impressive command of the issues, connections to the diverse constituencies of the real America and endorsements from and working ties with the actual organizations and leaders who must be mobilized to accomplish good government and progressive reform on the ground, I would like to point out, in response to the absurd damaging embarrassing desperate flailing charges of the dying Sanders campaign that Hillary Clinton's victory results from "rigging" the election against him, this handy summary of alternative measures for gauging his shellacking over this primary slog, via "Scan"s dKos diary earlier today:


Saturday, May 28, 2016

Believe

Never believe anybody who begs you to "believe me" as often as Donald Trump does.

Antipartisan Party People

When it comes to it, most Libertarians are just Republicans who lack the discipline demanded by partisan politics but who want to pretend to play at them anyway. And most Greens are just Democrats with similar deficiencies. That the Republican Party could not protect itself from being taken over by bigot grifter Donald Trump reveals that there are few people with the discipline demanded by partisan politics within the Party itself after the generational debasement of the Southern Strategy and the Bush foreign war adventures and domestic looting sprees. The Democrats were organizationally healthy enough to ward off a hijacking attempt by Bernie Sanders -- and contra the media horse-race narratives and True-Believer hyper-ventilation about rally crowds and states won over the actual votes and delegates that are all that matter, the primary contest was more or less over by March 15, and given the Democratic Party's proportional delegate allocation Clinton's victory over Sanders (by most measures incomparably greater than Obama's prior victory over Clinton in 2008) is far from a close thing, but precisely the shellacking everybody expected it to be and was right to expect it to be. The Libertarians and Greens or independent Democratic Socialists on their own are little likely to manage to be spoilers except here and there around the edges and will have no more impact on actual historical change than they ever do, even in the year of Trump.

If I may dispense with the historical resonances prompted by observations of this kind, Nader pissed me off in 2000 because his party equivalence thesis was a damned and damaging deception -- even if the Democratic Party wasn't and isn't exactly love's young dream from my perspective as a democratic eco-socialist feminist anti-racist anti-militarist vegetarian atheist queer aesthete academic than it was and is for him. Nader certainly didn't piss me off for "losing Gore the election" because, as it happens, Gore won the election and Republican appointees to the Supreme Court stole the election for the utterly catastrophic George W. Bush.

Now, when I denigrate would-be radical Third Party political efforts I do want to be quite clear that my point is not to extol political moderation or diminish radicalism or deride ethical conviction. Radicalism invigorates public life and is a motor of necessary progressive change. The simple fact is that there is more to politics than partisan politics, of course. And quite apart from that, there is also more to doing good and making progress than politics -- there is making art, there is offering up support in communities, there is living ethically. And confining the focus on politics, I always say the partisan politics of problem solving, compromise and reform is indispensable but inadequate to sustain progress and the movement politics of education, agitation and organization to transform our sense of the possible and the important is just as indispensable and just as inadequate.  Neither is adequate on their own, both are indispensable all the time.

You know, I truly respect people of conviction who don't have the stomach or the stamina for the fraught compromises and heartbreaking slowness and exhausting effort of partisan politics and decide to direct their energies elsewhere. In my own life I've moved in and out of movement politics -- my Queer Nation days and a few more recent moments of adjunct organizing are different from the times in my life that I've devoted myself to teaching and writing and the occasional editorial or candidate contribution. My convictions haven't diminished and I hope I never retreat from doing my measure of work to nudge us toward sustainable equity-in-diversity in whatever form -- but definitely I understand that sometimes partisan politics are quite demoralizing and feel too constrained and contaminated to bear. Even in such moments I must say that simply doing one's least part and voting for the best candidates or initiatives on offer doesn't take that much time or energy, after all, and figuring out who to vote for in this moment of utter Republican debasement isn't really that difficult.

What I find quite ridiculous, however, and even frankly contemptible, really, are those who seem to want to denigrate partisan politics while focusing on quixotic hijacking or sabotage efforts within... partisan politics. It is hard to imagine anything more frivolous than someone who wants to declare their radicalism, or even their revolutionary sentiments, who then directs all their attention into a party primary fight of all things. Every candidate is a politician, every politician has compromised, anybody who would seek the highest political offices has to have a touch of the sociopath in them, and nobody remotely plausibly electable (for the Democrats at any rate) will be as far to the left in office as are the radicals of their Base who grasp the real extent of injustice and real danger of climate catastrophe.

A nationally viable party in the wealthy insulated continent-scaled multiculture of the United States will never be a revolutionary organization. Even in the terrible days of DLC capitulation and GOP ascendance, and certainly ever more so as the Party has moved left in the aftermath of ruinous neoconservative war crimes and neoliberal privatization schemes, in the storm churn of Occupy and BlackLivesMatter and queer feminism and climate change activism -- the Democratic Party is a vast, diverse, dynamic, storied, and indispensable collective instrument for transmitting progressive history, addressing shared present problems, and pushing in the direction of sustainable equity-in-diversity. But partisan politics in the United States are not revolutionary, they are reformist. The landscape in which they operate is continent-scaled, resource rich, intersectional in its oppressions, multilateral in its powers. It is not to not concede any measure of righteousness to incumbent elites or reactionary communities that I recognize as viable parties must do their actually real power and actually shared existence in this country demands political compromises I nonetheless morally disapprove. Generations of radical activism and expression might alter culture in ways that bring present radicalisms into a prevalence a nationally viable party might well accommodate (this has repeatedly happened historically), but there are no short cuts for arriving at such accomplishments. People who pretend voting in a party primary are engaging in some kind of Revolutionary activity are mocking revolutionary politics no less than tech-talkers who declare bitcoin revolutionary or marketers who declare a soft drink is revolutionary are mocking revolutionary politics.

More extreme political factions -- the ones that agree with me about ideal social and environmental justice outcomes very much included -- are unable to build or maintain nationally viable parties. This is evident in our Libertarians and Greens, to return to the post's opening salvo. Nor will marginal radical or revolutionary factions be able to hijack a nationally viable party, as independent kinda-sorta-socialist Bernie Sanders has tried and failed to hijack the Democratic Party... Nor, I must add, even if doing so is adding insult to injury, would marginal factions be able to maintain control over a nationally viable party were they to manage a hijacking in a moment of crisis. Such a party hijacking either announces the dissolution and supersession of that party or more pragmatic and mainstream-legible authorities regain control and mobilize a working coalition within and through the party soon enough, as I would say Donald Trump will find to his cost if I thought Donald Trump actually cared one way or another about such a thing.

I daresay our present party duopoly is quite terrible in its way, especially given recent geographical and ideological sorting and consequent polarization, and I might say some sort of Parliamentary system would be more accountable and more efficacious if this were some genial thought experiment. Saying so looks to me just about as relevant as the Founders warning against factions rather than better checking their predictable pathologies in the Constitutional system. It seems to me that in pretty much every practically conceivable instance (for me, you no doubt are smarter and more imaginative than I am), the politics through which one would create and maintain a nationally viable party to accomplish some more radical policy outcome than is presently entertained within the confines of one of our present parties are incomparably more difficult and slow than would be the effort to bring one of those parties around to the effort through education, agitation, and organization. Nationally viable parties are coalitions and they are susceptible to change from within by clear-sighted long-dedicated well-organized forces within them, especially when these changes afford the party electoral advantages in a nation that is also changing. Running a protest candidate, by the way, can be a form of such activism -- but do be sure your protest candidate knows that using a campaign to do issue education is not going to look like a campaign that is trying to win an election. So long as it remains a better bet to work through than outside of parties when what one wants is specific legislative accomplishments, then third parties are going to remain at utterly marginal spoilers at the edges or highly personal settings for indulging in narcissistic purity cabaret.

That state of affairs doesn't exactly thrill me, but the simple truth is that there are far worse problems that demand our attention and that progressive change from movements on the ground and representatives in office is the struggle at hand. If you're not up for partisan politics -- just vote for the best available candidates by your lights and then do such good as is otherwise available to you. But don't expect those of us who know better to indulge the pretense that purity cabaret or hijack fantasies or this-time-it's-happening protest candidates amount either to real radicalism or real reformism. Such efforts are useless and confused and the proper province of pampered narcissists and mis-educated dupes.

A Pattern Emerges

The awfulness of so many people on twitter reminds me somewhat of the awfulness of so many people generally.

One Down Five To Go

My first week of teaching this summer's intensive is already over. This is the twenty-first year in a row I've taught in the Rhetoric Department at UCB, and somehow each year I manage to forget how, well, very intensive these intensives are. I slept in this morning, watched a diverting frothy BBC spy melodrama on blu-ray, and more or less spaced out all day recovering from the level of energy I expended in this first week already. It's a good class and a good group this year, I think -- their alertness and eagerness would be a terrible thing to disappoint or squander and it is wonderful, really, still feeling myself incited to reach them with everything I've got to communicate what I care about so much. But I'll tell you, the minute I sink into a seat on the bus on my way home from class it's like I scatter into shards. If nothing else, all this seems a lovely diversion from the last idiotic pyrotechnics of this demoralizing primary election.

Friday, May 27, 2016

We already know Trump will piss all over California if we let him.

In Fresno, Donald Trump says environmentalists are to blame for California's drought and he will solve it by "opening up the water." -- James Cook, BBC

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Best practices in reply to Bernie supporters:

Okay.
Good luck to you.
Let's fight Trump and the GOP together.
Get well soon.
There there, dear.

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Revolution In Idiocracy

It sure looks like fun when everybody says "yuuuge!" real loud together, and then one time there was a bird.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Elizabeth Warren on Trump

The reason none of the "Establishment" Republican attacks landed on Trump is because Trump's bigotry and hostility to public service and investment is shared by nearly the entire membership of the Republican Party. Democrats calling out Trump will fare far better than Republicans did who disagreed with his presentation but not his actual positions or who are too afraid of their own voters to admit to their disagreements. The REAL real America is diversifying, secularizing, and planetizing -- the Obama coalition already won twice and grows by the day. Not only will the gross, vacuous, fraudulent, embarrassment Trump fail to win the Presidency, but the Republican Party will not long survive in its present form in the aftermath of the way he fails.

Syllabus for my Berkeley Rhet Summer Intensive "What Is Compelling?"

Rhetoric 10: The Rhetoric of Argument 
"What Is Compelling? Argument, Reconciliation, Obligation"

Summer 2016, Session A, 2.30-5pm., Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 88 Dwinelle

Instructor, Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com;
Course Blog: http://whatiscompelling.blogspot.com

Participation/Attendance/In-Class Activities, 20%; Reading Notebook, 20%; Precis, 2-3pp., 10%; Mid-Term Exam, 25%; Final Paper, 5-6pp., 25%. (Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies)

Course Description

This course provides students with tools they can use to make better, more compelling, arguments and also to read arguments in better, more critical, ways. We will draw the tools for our argumentative toolboxes from the long history of rhetoric, from sophistical dissoi logoi, to the Aristotelian appeals, to Quintilian's four master tropes, to the rich archive of formal and informal fallacies, to argument modeled on litigation via Toulmin's schema, to argument modeled on mediation via Rogerian synthesis, to the pragmatism of the ends of argument. All the while we are workshopping these technical skills we will also be reading and discussing a range of texts that tackle questions of the reach and forms of violence and nonviolence in historical struggle and in everyday life. These texts will likewise draw from a long history, from Immanuel Kant, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt to Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We will also talk through a play by Euripides, an essay by Nietzsche, a novel by Octavia Butler, a film by Cronenberg… The crucial thing to understand about the course is that we will not be taking on two separate projects, one practical and another theoretical. This course proposes that there is an indispensable relation between the traditional focus of rhetoric as instruction in the art of making compelling arguments and the theoretical preoccupation of many rhetoricians with questions of what violence or compulsion ultimately consists. It is commonplace to see Persuasion offered up as an alternative to the violent adjudication of disputes or hear Argument idealized as a space "outside" of violence. But the truth is that many arguments rely on the acceptance of a violent status quo or depend on conventional assumptions that deny marginal testimonies to violation. Also, many arguments stealthily threaten violence while at once congratulating themselves on their peacefulness. Ultimately, the course proposes that it is rhetoric's definitive concern with the traffic between the literal and figurative dimensions of language and its situated understanding of truth-telling that connects the work of rhetoric with a project of reconciliation that resists violence even as we cannot help but risk it.

A Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One

May 24 SKILL SET: Key Definitions
[1] Rhetoric is the facilitation of efficacious discourse as well as an ongoing inquiry into the terms on the basis of which discourse comes to seem efficacious or not.
[2] A text is an event experienced as arising from intention, offered up to the hearing of an audience, and obligating a responsiveness equal to it.
[3] An argument is a claim supported by reasons and/or evidence.
Introductions: Rhetoric as occasional, interested, figurative; The literal as conventional, the figurative as deviant.
May 25 SKILL SET: Reading Critically/Writing Critically; Audience/Intentions -- Audiences: Sympathetic, Unsympathetic, Apathetic; Intentions: Interrogation, Conviction, Persuasion, Reconciliation
Euripides: Hecuba
May 26 SKILL SET: Ethos, Pathos, Logos; Writing A Precis
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Week Two

May 31 SKILL SET: Four Habits of Argumentative Writing: 1. Formulate a Strong Thesis, 2. Define Your Terms, 3, Substantiate/Contextualize, 4, Anticipate Objections; Performativity
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
June 1 SKILL SET: The Toulmin Schema
William May, "Rising to the Occasion of Our Death" (In-Class Handout)
June 2 SKILL SET: Rogerian Rhetoric
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Precis should be posted to the blog by midnight, Saturday, June 4 

Week Three

June 7 SKILL SET: Debate
Randal Amster, Anarchism and Nonviolence: Time for a "Complementarity of Tactics"
Arundhati Roy, War Is Peace
George Ciccariello-Maher, Planet of Slums, Age of Riots 
Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
Chris Hedges, Evidence of Things Not Seen
June 8 SKILL SET: Propositional Analysis; Enthymemes, Syllogisms, Formal Fallacies, Informal Fallacies
June 9 SKILL SET: Literal/Figurative Language; Figures, Tropes, Schemes; Four Master Tropes
Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense; Workshopping

Week Four

June 14 Mid-Term Examination
June 15 Screening and Discussion of the Film, "A History of Violence," dir. Cronenberg
June 16 Correspondence of Tolstoy and Gandhi
Interview with Amitabh Pal
Louise Gray, Telegraph, Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution
Nick Cohen, Guardian, The Phantom Menace of Militant Atheism
Edward Oakes, First Things, Atheism and Violence

Week Five

June 21 Frantz Fanon, Concerning Violence from The Wretched of the Earth
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations
Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, The Role of Highways in American Poverty
Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute, From Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits of Government Sponsored Segregation
June 22 Hannah Arendt, Reflections On Violence, Preface from Between Past and Future, and "Must Eichmann Hang?" (In-Class Handout)
June 23 Workshopping Final Paper: Producing a Strong Thesis; Anticipating Objections; Providing Textual Support

Week Six

June 28 Octavia Butler, Kindred (Purchase in time for class.)
June 29 Judith Butler, from Chapter One of Undoing Gender, "Beside Oneself," pp. 17-26, roughly, and the concluding chapter of Precarious Life, pp. 128-151.
June 30 Concluding Remarks. Final Paper Due

Monday, May 23, 2016

"Unqualified"

You can say that again. And I suspect she will.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

In The Tank

I see EVERY Presidential campaign as the choice of which sociopath to my right I hope will help do some good while mostly aggravating me.

The Usual Suspects: Ben from Ben & Jerry's, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and Tim Robbins for Nader in 2000

Tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, no difference between secular pluralist environmentalist Al Gore or vapid belligerent plutocratic George W. Bush, no difference between the corrupt parties, hold Democrats to account, heighten the contradictions, blah blah blah blah...


The point of posting this video is not the facile one which singularly blames Nader for Gore losing the 2000 election and unleashing unquestionably the worst most catastrophic Presidency of a generation. I say this because Gore didn't lose the election. Gore won the election and then Republican appointees on the Supreme Court abetted a putsch. The point is that these arguments were objectively wrong. They revealed an indifference to differences that make a difference that exposes privilege not righteousness. They mistake the clarity of logical advocacy or passionate agitation for an ideal position for the compromised work through which progress toward better policies are accomplished and maintained. They mis-educated and mislead millions of people about distinctions that urgently mattered and demoralized majorities about real possibilities for change when people organize and struggle, solving shared problems through legislation and pushing our sense of the possible and the important from movements on the ground. The stomach churning thing about this Nader video is not just that so many of the faces have not changed in the fauxvolutionary epoch of the Bernie Brigade but that, word for word, their arguments have not changed to reflect the evidence and experience of the collective disaster of the first decade of this century, a disaster from which the nation has not yet recovered, a failure to recover which leaves us as planetary peers radically unprepared for the challenge of climate catastrophe which is already reshaping the world and history in the image of disaster.

Fifth Avenue, New York City

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Friday, May 20, 2016

“Nice party you got there, shame if something happened to it...”

...is The Revolution I guess?

Sanders Keeps Making Friends

I like it when Sanders wails about the "Closed Door" of the Democratic Party which welcomed his bid to be its Presidential nominee despite the fact that he has never been a Democrat and declared he ran as one only for the attention and money and resources and legitimacy it confers while he smears its membership as corrupt and sues it over and over.

Bernie bragging about the high percentage he's losing by = The Revolution.

Hillary mentioning the higher percentage she's winning by = anti-democratic corruption.

If HRC said the Earth is round...

...she would likely be chastised for her arrogance, concern trolled over alienating desperately-needed flat-earthers, and then lectured sanctimoniously about how there can be no globalization without a globe which means Flat-Earth Is The Revolution!

A scooter isn't a "hoverboard" and algorithms aren't "AI." They just sell them that way.

Futurological "progress" is a marketing phenomenon.

Fresh As The Future

Pretty sure the world needs another representation of "The Future" involving a naked blue bald dude in an angel-hair swirl of strings of light or zeros and ones.

Status-Quo Amplification As Future Schlock

Futurology peddles What Is as What If?

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Counting the Days

Pining for the Democratic primary to end so those who enjoy my calling out tech fauxvolution but hate my calling out Bernie fauxvolution can like my writing again...

You Say Startup

I say stopit.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

We Will Be Heard!

A zealot always thinks disagreement means you just haven't haven't heard them yet.

When "Open" Means Stolen

Anyone can join the Democratic Party and work as a member to reshape it to better reflect your own progressive vision and choices. Why, it's almost as if that "Closed Door" is already… open.

Please Proceed

Friday, May 13, 2016

#ImWithHer

Eric and I voted by mail today in CA for Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Barbara Lee, and Measure AA to help Save the Bay. Feels like


Made the Grade

Grading for SFAI spring term is done as of tonight. I've got a week off before my UC Berkeley summer intensive begins. Lovely!

Thursday, May 12, 2016

The Wait Is Over


Sociopathy Cult(ure)


"Incrementalism"

The work of incremental change isn't some "doctrine" progressives espouse as an end in itself, it's just that anti-incrementalism is a foolish, useless, selfish attitude for a shared world.

A Whole New World!

Pundit declarations that Trump seems to be able to get away with anything are merely admissions that pundits will not hold Trump to account for anything. Exposing the reality that political commentators have few standards is actually not the same thing as exposing a reality there are no longer any rules.

Argle Bargle

It is fortunate that there is literally nothing newsworthy happening in the whole world apart from the latest damn fool utterance out of Donald Trump's mouth.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

AUMA Purity Cabaret

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot: An "Anonymous" (naturally) commenter disapproving my post agreeing with a High Times endorsement of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA) ballot initiative in California declares:
Bad "legalization" laws are a real problem. In CA, the AUMA is a disaster. And, people are mistaken in he claims it will "let you grow your own", when it will really permit local governments to flat out ban outdoor grows, and will permit "reasonable regulation" of your indoor grow (and most folks cannot grow indoors for many reasons). This thing is a huge conglomeration of litigation-ready employment for cops and lawyers. We can't let the crappy be the enemy of the decent law we know is out there. The trick seems to be convincing some moneybag like Parker to back something worthwhile, and to convince the "pro pot lobby" to demonstrate a modicum of selectivity with their endorsements. The incremental "is it ANY better than what we have now (somewhat subjective, I might add) is threadbare at best, and probably harmful. We are not beggars. Demographics are shifting fast. We don't need to settle for a crap sandwich.
To which I reply (perhaps a bit intemperately, but I've already had it up to here with purity cabaret from the BS Brigade this last few months):
That you would prefer any facet of the present racist war on drugs and prohibition over an imperfect legalization of recreational use seems to me a revoltingly selfish and privileged position to take. How glibly you declare "somewhat subjective" the premise that life would be better and fairer for people who would NOT have their lives ruined by costly unjust disruptive drug busts based in palpably false assumptions of social harm that would cease to exist! It is truly hard for me to restrain the rage with which I greet your airy purity cabaret! You need not "educate" me on the issue -- this is the not the ballot initiative I preferred, I am not unaware of its problems, I am not indifferent to the compromised institutional conditions under which it has been promoted... and I fully embrace the better as the better that it is, I fully recognize the nature of political reform, I fully embrace the need to continue the struggle to build on imperfect reform to eliminate problems and keep on working for progress. Compromise doesn't make you a beggar it makes you a real activist and progressive citizen. Nobody embraces "incrementalism" as a doctrine, one simply recognizes that anti-incrementalism in a world shared by an actual diversity of stakeholders is a recipe for stasis and reaction masquerading as righteousness. It's complete bullshit. From the standpoint of purity cabaret politics is all crap sandwiches all the time all the way down. If you can't deal with that and still want to make the world a better place I suggest you try art or charity -- you may honestly lack the strength, patience, clarity, and character for real world politics.

I am the crap sandwich I want to see in the world.

I wish I could be righteous and pure, but Yass, Cthillary has warped my fragile little mind.

The Enemy

The Self Abuse of Selfish Beings

Techbros are always compensating for their Wiener.

Monday, May 09, 2016

Tech's Anti-Political Instrumentalization of the First Amendment

Libertechians are mostly wrong to declare Code Is Speech but they are most revealing in not even caring falsely to declare Code Is Assembly.

Anarchvertizing

Anarchism is primarily a PR phenomenon through which complacent privileged low-information consumers are marketed as radicals.

Mars Needs Women


Sunday, May 08, 2016

Job Crises and the Perverse Inversions of Tech Discourse

Saturday, May 07, 2016

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...

...and die here now, starving and alone, awaiting a drone to deliver my Soylent."

Joyfully Running the Gauntlet of Hillary Haters

Already one of the most iconic images from Campaign 2016, on display here is the ugly vitriol of that vocal minority of Sanders supporters who are not content to vote and argue for their candidate but energetically harass the supporters of Hillary Clinton online and elsewhere and demonize the brilliant, tough, competent, hard-working, compromised and compromising, world-famous, unprecedentedly-qualified progressive woman who is the Democratic frontrunner by millions of votes, hundreds of pledged delegates, hundreds more superdelegate endorsements from the colleagues who will work with the next President within the party both candidates seek to lead, an image almost out of 1960s, a solitary woman joyfully and defiantly testifying to her judgment and enthusiasm in the face of a throng of angry, bitter men.

Facile Fauxvolutionaries

Friday, May 06, 2016

Nice

Stars of Purity Cabaret

Saying you want more progress, however stridently, is less progressive than working to make more progress, however modestly.

Man Versus Machine!

"Man Against Machine" as headline or as theme ALWAYS hides the truth in which some humans are using some machines against some other humans.

Thursday, May 05, 2016

World Economic Forum Issues Threats (er, Expresses Concerns): "Robots Will Take [Y]Our Jobs"



The relevant passage:
[I]t is true that since 1967, the share of men aged 25–54 without work has more than tripled, from five percent to 16 percent. But the reasons they’re not working have less to do with the rise of the machines than we’re being led to believe. According to a New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll of Americans without jobs, 44 percent of men surveyed said there were jobs in their area they think they could obtain but weren’t willing to take them. [Those lazy workers!--d] In addition, around a third of those surveyed (including women) indicated that a spouse, food stamps or disability benefits provided another source of income. [Ah, the "welfare class of dependency," a right-wing bit of vaudeville so old it's got whiskers on it!--d] An unwillingness to relocate geographically may also help explain the decline in labor force participation. In a 2014 survey of unemployed individuals, 60 percent said that they were “not at all willing” to move to another state. [Man, those unworthy poors!--d] These findings suggest that while the U.S. boasts the most job openings since the government began tracking them nationwide (5.6 million), many of those without work don’t want to apply for one reason or another. [Useless mouths with their crazy thug reasons for resisting wholesome austerity!--d] It’s not man versus machine yet. [It never is: It is rich men against the rest of us, using machines to concentrate their wealth and authority. Ask the Luddites.--d] These figures and polls paint a very different picture of the actual problem. [Don't you just love a picture that shows you exactly what you want to see?--d] In addition to geography constraints along with spousal and government income supports contributing to fewer people wanting to work. [Get in line, crappy poors, and take it when we treat you like robots or we'll replace you with robots! Serially failed austerity and wealth concentration is the only answer -- how else will we meritocratic point-oh-one-percenters afford our bubble dome protection zones in the aftermath of the climate change pandemic apocalypse we're profited from now? Don't worry, if you are photogenic we'll scoop some of you up for a few years as sexslaves unless we get the Holodeck brothels online before then. The Future is gonna be awesome!--d]





General Election Prediction


Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Another Teaching Day

Last class of spring term in the City today. First class of summer intensives at Berkeley in just under three weeks. A pile of papers from this term and prep for the new summer course... all looming. Summer vacation begins!

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

The Stupid Racist Asshole Party Picked The Most Stupid Racist Asshole To Lead It?

It's a world gone mad.

Teaching Day

Last day of class for my Biopunk! seminar. Haven't much left to say, students will be handing me their final papers and final excuses and then we're off. Eric and I are both gurgling and moaning over some bug I probably brought home from my last BART commute, which has me more than ready to bid this term farewell. The usual pile of grading awaits -- and I resume teaching, an intensive at Berkeley, in a couple of weeks. No rest for the weary.