It seems like a good time to post this list of non-crazy conservative journalists and commentators to follow online, given to me by my friend Jason Hirschhorn. I haven’t fully vetted these, and I welcome any comments on where these writers lie on the nuts/not nuts continuum, their general merits and/or shortcomings, whether or not they are actually conservative, which ones you read, and who is missing from this list. Many of these writers write for many publications, so if you find someone’s work interesting there’s likely more out there on different sites.
Amazing Tagalog singers doing karaoke at Via Mare in Daly City on Friday night too, along side enormous portions of sinigang and chicken adobo. We tried all the delivery options for Filipino food in San Francisco, but none were anywhere near as good as Via Mare. But I didn’t know they also had live entertainment!
I found this article by Paul Krugman to be edifying on how Democrats can work with and around a Republican party that is more interested in investigating Hunter Biden than in governing, and who lack any kind of mandate other than thwarting Democrats, preventing the rich from paying too many taxes, and eliminating aid to people in need.
Yes, the imminent demise of Twitter, the departure of nearly all responsible parties, the readmission of Trump and the general malaise striking all the other social media platforms at the same are inspiring me to write my blog again. Hooray for Independent Online Media! Delighted.
Jyri sent me this 2018 lecture in Finnish (subtitled in English), given by Martti Kari, a former Colonel working in military intelligence, with expertise in Russian “strategic culture”, and who is now at the university. Here he is explaining why Russians think and behave so differently from us in the West, which gives us some ways of guessing what they might do in the future. This has, for me, shed much light on the motivation behind the Ukrainian invasion and so much else that Russia has done.
Finland, of course, borders Russia, and at various points in history has been part of Russia, fought with Russia, and invaded by Russia. They held off the Russians in the brutal 1939 Winter War, when they invented the Molotov Cocktail, and have, of course, deep knowledge of their bellicose neighbor.
It is an hour-long lecture, and I learned a lot from it. My timestamps are iffy at best, and I took a lot of liberty with my summations and paraphrases. But it’s worth watching in its entirety. Here are my summary notes if you need to get back to the demands of work, doomscrolling or the exigencies of CNN.
NOTES
3:09 Russia has many layers, which he will enumerate. The foundation of Russian society is Slavic culture. The Slavic people are seen as one, Russians are the most numerous and greatest of the Slavic people, and Slavic unity must be defended.
3:52 With the fall of Constantinople, Eastern Roman traditions came to Moscow, and with this came Religion, Conservatism and Authority and the belief that supremacy cannot be challenged as authority is given by God and is therefore infallible and cannot be challenged.
4:28 In 1240 The Mongols conquered Russia and held it for 150 years. It was a time of cruelty, as evidenced by the Russian words for torture, taxation and corruption, words which have Mongol roots. Total domination is granted to the sole leader, the Khan, and cruelty and corruption are part of his privilege. Under Mongol rule survival meant lying, crime and violence.
5:34 At the end of their reign, the Mongols did not depart, but merged into the ruling culture of Russia. A period of chaos followed the Mongol rule, and the Poles who conquered them did not have a strong leader. The chaos and confusion finally ended when the Romanovs were installed and the Russians saw that A strong leader eliminates chaos, and has, of course, the mandate of God.
It is important to note core Russian beliefs that Democracy is equal to Chaos, and Autocracy is superior to Chaos and Mayhem. Russia has consistently been under authoritarian rule since the Mongols.
6:48 The era of European Russia began, and Russian expansion from 1815-1914. Russia was reified through its culture, its writers, etc. (This was happening in Finland too, with the codification of their national mythology in the Kalevala)
8:44 Then came the Soviet Era and WWII taught them that it was better to fight outside their country. This is because of their fundamental geographical weakness. They have 11 time zones, and are difficult to defend. The Urals are easily attacked and have been throughout history (Napoleon, Hitler). They have no mountains or rivers or place to shelter, and are easy to conquer.
9:07 Russians believe strongly in Russianness, which is made up of ORTHODOXY + AUTOCRACY + NARODNOST. The Russian Orthodox church gives them the infallibility and righteousness of God, and Autocracy is what they have lived under since 1240. Narodnost is “the people” but really “the role the people play”.
Narodnost means submission, sacrifice and passivity: the Tsar cannot make mistakes. He is Just. Around him are Princes who will rise to become Tsar one day. But when mistakes are made they are made by a class of people under the Princes in the hierarchy, the Boyars. The Boyars are the ones who make mistakes and are blamed. These are those supperrich oligarchs and governors in league with Putin who frequently go missing, have boating accidents, or hang themselves in their garages.
The Boyars were once landowners and governors of their land. They owned territories and property. But in recent years they no longer own their lands, but have tenure, and with their tenure comes the understanding that they can control the territories and their slaves so long as they behave.
Once a Boyar reaches a certain level, he is entitled to a certain amount of corruption. High ranking Boyars get to steal, but there are rules. You can’t steal from certain people, and you can’t steal too much. Business oligarchs are Boyars too.
And Narodnost. The Infallible Tsar knows better than the people what they need. And Russians can endure an incredible amount of suffering. In Russia suffering is a virtue. It is honorable to suffer. And the role of the people is to sacrifice themselves for the Tsar.
18:13 Russians live in two realities: the reality of the outside world, and the kitchen table reality. That is, they have conversations around the kitchen table about how things are, but when they leave, they enter a separate reality. This is normal.
21:02 Nikolai I said Russia’s sacred mission is to be “messenger of a higher civilization.” and, a relevant quote “A little warfare in the border regions is needed to maintain a patriotic spirit.”
80% of Russians get their new on Putin-controlled television, comprised of “different facts”. The relevant story on those channels is that NATO is constantly attacking Russia, which is perpetually under siege. Russia sees itself as being at constant war with NATO.
The task of the state leadership is to stay in power. They are not interested in the lives of ordinary Russians. As George F Kennan, American diplomat and US Ambassador to Russia, and architect of the containment policies of the Cold War, said in 1946 “The Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is based on their traditional and instinctive insecurity.”
He also says:
“Russia is deaf to the logic of reason, but very sensitive to the logic of power.”
American imperialism is based on some want or need. Say, oil. Russian imperialism is based on fear.
28:20 Information Geopolitics works by misdirection promulgated by spokesmen. Lenin originated the idea of Useful Idiots, like Trump, who believe they are being given power, but are actually pawns in a game they don’t know they’re playing. (this is my own embroidery; Martti Kari didn’t say this exactly)
30:28 Russians have savior complex: They saved Europe from Napoleon and from Hitler and believe they are saving Europe, even if they have not been asked
33:11 The Bronze Horseman by Pushkin is one of the first poems every Russian child reads. (Which, Wikipedia notes “…symbolizes “Tsar Peter, the city of St Petersburg, and the uncanny reach of autocracy over the lives of ordinary people.”)
36:29 In spite of what may be otherwise believed, Russians are not innovators or technologists. They copied the microchip and nuclear weapons. The current priority under Putin is AI.
38:00 Russian has two words for truth and three words for a lie. Significantly “pravda” means the truth, but not the absolute truth. It’s a “truth” told to get out of an awkward or bad situation, a tactical truth. “Istina” is a truth that is the opposite of a lie. “Vranjo” is a noble lie or a strategic lie. A lie that can be told to people outside your community. Russians are skillful practitioners of Doublethink.
40:27. Everyone understands when someone says something different at the kitchen table than out in public. “We had nothing to do with the shooting down of the Malaysian plane”, for example. Or Putin saying “We did not meddle in the 2016 US Elections. Read my lips.” Russians know, we did, but we didn’t get caught. They will revise the truth when they have been caught. He goes on to give numerous examples, each more egregious than the last. And of course someone’s Grandmother is disappeared for showing her grandson receiving a medal from Putin for a crime he ostensibly did not commit.
44:57 So what would destabilize Russia? He eliminates several possibilities such as “the global recession is not really a problem since they are always in a recession” He homes in on:
The Russians fear turmoil, chaos, as in the time before the Romanovs. the Post Soviet 1990s were a time of turmoil. They equate chaos with having a weak leader.
46:27 Then he shows Putin’s friends from his 70s era Judo club, back in the day, including Zolotov, a lathe operator by trade, but who, though laughably under-credentialed for the job, has been elevated to Boyar by Putin, a three star general in charge of the National Guard–since Putin cannot entirely trust the armed forces
47:38 The National Guard is in charge of suppressing internal unrest, with a mandate to use violence. Except against pregnant women.
Navalny called out Zolotov on his ill-gotten gains, because Zolotov is high ranking and entitled to a high level of corruption. He challenged him to appear in a conversation with him on TV. Zolotov responded by threatening to make “minced meat” of Navalny in a physical fight. Judo, maybe. Business as usual in Russia.
50:14 During the time of turmoil, Power was decentralized, more power went to the various regions, corruption continued. Russia embraced, incredibly, free speech, the West was no longer a threat, and also incredibly, Russia considered joining NATO. But the era of democracy turned the word Democracy into a curse word.
50:48 But fortunately, in the eyes of the Russians, a strong leader emerged in 2000. Putin. And all the familiar things returned:
Authoritarian system of leadership
Corruption and cronyism
Persecution of the opposition
The West portrayed as a threat
A mock democracy
The Messianic Mission
Imperial expansion
Make Russia Great Again
53:13 Unlike with the Nazis vs. the Jews, who belonged to different tribes, there were executions and victims in every family and every home in Russia. Both the killer and the victim could be from the same family.
Russians celebrate Stalin and wish to go back to their (fictitious) heroic past. They see their actions as correcting historical injustices. Other nations leave their histories in the past, but to Russia all wounds are fresh wounds.
55:15 So what will happen in Russia? Some possibilities. (remember this was from 2018)
1 Stagnation and status quo until Putin is out in 2024 2 Stalin 2.0: oppression stepped up, more purges 3 Collapse of state due to external shock 👀 4 Democratic uprising (unlikely) 5 East vs. West again. Escalation between pro-West “Zapadniki” and anti-West “Slavophiles”
Who are the Princes, the Tsars-in-Training? They will need to guarantee a peaceful end of reign for the retiring Tsar, as Putin did for Yeltsin. Medvedev is too soft. And the prince needs to be a hero. He presents two:
Aleksey Dyumin -previously Putin’s chief security guard -As Spetsnaz chief, oversaw the annexation of Crimea (and extracted Yanukovich from Kyiv from the “fascists” in power ) in 2014 -Hero of the Russian Federation -Plays goalie on Putin’s hockey team, and is a pretty good goalkeeper, unless Putin is shooting on goal. -“on standby” as Governor of Tula Oblast until Putin retires in 2024, where hopefully nothing goes wrong before 2024 so he can stay clean
Yevgeny Zinichev -KGB/FSB/FSO background -Minister of Emergency Situations …Except he was killed in 2021 (he fell off a cliff) he was made a Hero of the Russian Federation posthumously
58:40 Putin’s reputation and popularity is in decline (Fall 2018) People are saying Putin is responsible for Russia’s problems. That the people’s well being is important, not the military. 20 million people live in poverty.
Olga Koltsova, a protester: “Either those in power are aware of the mood and listening to the people, or some kind of social explosion will happen. When the lid of the boiler is too tight it will fly into the air.” (Nov 2018)
As in 1917, and the November Revolution.
59:49 Last he shows a protester, a child, being arrested. The kid probably doesn’t get his information from Putin’s TV, but from the internet.
It doesn’t make sense. But it’s filling the God-shaped hole. And it’s got all the features of a religion: irrefutability, Good and Evil, Crooked Hillary.
Many years ago I read one of those short interviews they have at the back of the New York Times magazine. I don’t remember who they interviewed, but he was asked what he thought was the most dangerous idea. And he responded the most dangerous idea is monotheism.
Monotheism claims to have in their possession the truth in the form of the word of God, which no one can disprove. Since their god is the One True God, allowing for no others, its word is final. And if one is a devotee and defender of the One True God one is entitled to do anything in God’s name, slaughter, massacre and genocide for example. People aren’t reasonable about their beliefs as the Pastafarians have demonstrated.
Today we live in an ostensibly unreligious culture which evinces nevertheless religion-like beliefs and behaviors. Since God was declared dead, the question has been: What will fill the God-shaped hole? Unhappy people need something to believe in, a solution and salvation. God died, Zealotry did not. The Cult of Science prevails in my part of the world. And some of the masses have found opiate-like relief in the belief of their victimization.
The High Priest of Total Victimization, the wounded and witch-hunted Donald Trump, fans the flames. His cries of victimization are constant, and he is the heir of a long tradition of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay it is worth reading now, if you haven’t read it already, and if you’ve read it already, it’s time to read it again.
Whenever actual victims are identified–women in the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter—there is the outcry, the men’s movement twists its panties into bunches, the abuse against women and POC increases, there is a cry of “White Lives Matter! WE are the victims!” Classic Tu Quoque. You can take almost any statement by Donald Trump and see it clear as the day is long. What you give to others, takes something away from his Us, the particular Us that excludes Them. His core. Here’s a quote from a random article in this week’s New York Times:
“Westchester was ground zero, OK, for what they were trying to do,” he said on Monday, in an interview on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, referring to Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats. “They were trying to destroy the suburban, beautiful place. The American dream, really. They want low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.”
Westchester! That cesspool of Jacobins, thieves and demons!
In America we have an idea of justice that we hold up as a thing, our thing, THE thing–that we stand for and love: Liberty and Justice for all. But when people point out that there is not justice for all but justice for some, injustice for most–existing powers move to silence them.
You’ve got to have a code says Omar Little in The Wire. And indeed there is a code among criminals–and the justice system!–determining who is and isn’t deserving of justice, which crimes are acceptable and which are not. It turns out it’s not the crime itself that decides if a crime is ‘acceptable’. Like, say, murder is always wrong. It’s who it was done to: the victim. John J. Lennon, a prison journalist convicted of murder, writing from prison, defends his killing of another man by writing, in his “apology”:
I killed a criminal, not an innocent, and in prison that was respected. Walled off from society, we create our own social hierarchies here. Those of us at the top of the pecking order — gangsters, drug dealers, stick-up kids (all of whom also may be killers) — rationalized that our crimes were merely the predictable result of “the life.” The predators and sexual deviants who preyed on women and children were the miscreants at the bottom.
Good crimes are committed against worthy victims; bad crimes are committed against the innocent.
So. To convince people that your enemy is a criminal, you have to say it over and over and over and over and over until other people believe it: Crooked Hillary. And to convince people that she is not just criminal but evil, go to extremes. It’s hard to convince others your enemy is evil by pointing out that they support national healthcare, oppose privatizing social security, and are in favor of increasing the minimum wage. But child-raping satanists? Obviously, obviously evil.
Next, to ensure that the perpetrator you’ve chosen will be punished, you need a perfect victim. You yourself are a victim, but flawed. So you need a proxy victim, a perfect victim, to stand in for you. You look around.
Whenever a woman steps forward to accuse a man of some violation, her past is mined for things she may have done to show her to be undeserving of justice. Whenever a black man is shot, any bad thing he ever did or said is written about, and his mug shot–not his graduation photo–is published in the newspaper. Justice isn’t about what you’ve done, it’s about who you are.
There are no perfect victims.
There are no saints, there is not a single person who has reached adulthood in unalloyed virtue, who has not done something wrong, who has not been mean, or drunk, or stupid, who has not lied, said something offensive, slept with the wrong person, forgot to sign the permission slip, fell asleep while driving, neglected his kids.
Except one group of people, who haven’t lived enough yet–and that is children.
Which is why QAnon is the perfect belief system. It’s like monotheism: Q is unknown, invisible, nameless, and but is telling the truth. And no one who protects children can be wrong, nor can they be bad.
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, went to the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong, carrying an AR-15 rifle, went to the back of the restaurant, attempted to open a door, which he attempted to open using his gun, firing three shots. He thought the door went to a basement where Democrats were operating a pedophile ring, and he expected to rescue children. Instead, the door opened into a utility closet. He surrendered without resistance or incident, and was quoted as saying, “The intel was not 100%.”
For some reason, this quote of his has always stuck with me. It’s in the passive voice, like the famous George Bush Sr. quote “Mistakes were made.” It left the door open for there to be a real conspiracy. He admitted his actions were wrong, but only because they were misinformed. And he stuck to the position that there were Democrats (celebrities, billionaires, politicians) operating a pedophile ring, which he was heroically trying to destroy. And he held that door open.
He’d found a closet, but the door to the basement was somewhere else if not at Comet Ping Pong. You could feel the rush of air coming up from that basement. The door would open and from the basement emerged QAnon.
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a ‘day of reckoning’ involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians. No part of the theory is based on fact.
I mean, really, reasonable people, come ON. This QAnon thing has been so exasperating to me. But–it’s a religion, based not on reason, but belief. It’s got all the hallmarks. It’s bulletproof, waterproof, irrefutable, insuperable, inarguable, unattackable, unassailable, undeniably true. AND it has a perfect victim.
We appeal to people’s reason to try to convince them their beliefs are wrong using Snopes, the New York Times, reputable journalism, or Wikipedia articles to back us up. This never works! So, if you’re managing a QAnon situation, what do you do? Maybe have a look at the How Stuff Works Getting out of a Cult page. And if the usual methods don’t work, you might need Deprogramming.
And meanwhile, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell.
My blog posts get a “D” for readability as graded by this web site, because my sentences are too long and the vocabulary I use is too advanced. Turns out I am writing at a college level, and that is, according to this article, a cause for alarm. According to the site, I’m limiting my readership.
I ran my blog posts through this analysis after ending up on an article about how the most successful writers–by successful they mean getting on a best-seller list–write for an audience reading at an elementary or middle school level. The author claims that Cormac McCarthy–Cormac McCarthy!–writes at an 8th grade level. If you’ve read McCarthy–a great favorite of mine–you’ll know that he demands a lot from his readers. He writes long, complex sentences, employing odd structures, repetitions, sentence fragments, and a strange, almost Biblical language. He uses a rarefied vocabulary, pushing words to the limits of their sense. I don’t think I’d’ve had an easy time reading him in 8th grade. I didn’t believe this result, so I grabbed this passage from Blood Meridian I had laying around and ran it through the same test.
“He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are ever given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.”
Have you ever heard the word “endarkenment” before? Me neither. Looks invented. Far from being at an 8th grade level, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level analysis put Blood Meridian–at least this passage–at grade level 14.6, requiring around 2.5 years of college to be easily understood. Here are the scores:
I felt vindicated. Would you rather write like the article was suggesting? In order to “succeed” should we dumb down our blog posts? We should not.
I had been raised with the idea that having an extensive vocabulary meant expanding your understanding of yourself, other people and the world, an idea similar to this exhortation from Joseph Brodsky’s commencement address at the University of Michigan in 1988, which I read in his collection of essays, On Grief and Reason:
“Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose here is not to boost your bedroom eloquence or your professional success — although those, too, can be consequences — nor is it to turn you into parlor sophisticates. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible; in a word, the purpose is your balance. For the accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. On a daily basis, a lot is happening to one’s psyche; the mode of one’s expression, however, often remains the same. Articulation lags behind experience. That doesn’t go well with the psyche. Sentiments, nuances, thoughts, perceptions that remain nameless, unable to be voiced and dissatisfied with approximations, get pent up within an individual and may lead to a psychological explosion or implosion. To avoid that, one needn’t turn into a bookworm. One should simply acquire a dictionary and read it on the same daily basis — and, on and off, with books of poetry. Dictionaries, however, are of primary importance. There are a lot of them around; some of them even come with a magnifying glass. They are reasonably cheap, but even the most expensive among them (those equipped with a magnifying glass) cost far less than a single visit to a psychiatrist. If you are going to visit one nevertheless, go with the symptoms of a dictionary junkie.”
“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grows together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”
The desperate state of public discourse today is partly due to the lack of words, the poverty of expression, the limited vocabulary that keeps us from understanding and communicating with one another.
In this time of Black Lives Matter, and after the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, I wanted to go back and find this post I wrote in 2012 about how the Constitution and the Bill of Rights contribute to the discrimination and abuse of black men and women, so entrenched in America history, with no signs of abating.
I had been reading about the work of the late William J. Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, who dedicated his life to studying the roots of racial discrimination in America’s criminal justice system. He was a conservative. Upon his death an obituary in the Nation said: “Widely acknowledged as the leading criminal procedure scholar of his era, Stuntz defied easy labeling. He was a conservative and an evangelical Christian whose preoccupation with race and mercy allied him with liberals, and whose insights were contrarian and often quite radical.” His solutions to the inequities of the criminal justice system had two parts: making trials local, and basing justice on principles rather than procedure.
“The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Stunt’s book) asks what went wrong and how it can be put to rights. Stuntz covers much ground and floats many reforms, but his answer is two-pronged. The first part of it is structural: “local democracy” must be restored to the criminal justice system by reducing plea bargaining and holding more jury trials—and the jurors must live in the same communities as the victims and the accused.
The second part of Stuntz’s answer is technical: he argues that we must turn away from the law of criminal procedure—broadly speaking, the guarantees of the Bill of Rights like the right to counsel and the freedom from unlawful search and seizure—and toward the substantive law of equal protection, which the Supreme Court left for dead during Reconstruction. The former proposal is an arresting insight that seems broadly correct and broadly unobjectionable (except to prosecutors). The latter is as provocative as anything you will read from a serious legal commentator, and raises many problems. Both proposals will be probed and tested by scholars for years.”
Stuntz looked for the underlying reasons why we arrived at this impasse in America, how we are still, in 2011 when he wrote his book, seeing the unending injustice towards black people, finding it, ultimately, in the Constitution, and particularly in the Bill of Rights. I was hard struck by how right he was in what was wrong. The problem, as he sees it, is that the Bill of Rights is about process and procedure, rather than principles. Compare, he says, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with our Bill of Rights—Bills 4-8 establish our judicial system, and are how we end up with more black men in prison than were slaves in 1850, and more than six million people under “correctional supervision”. It’s appalling.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice…You can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong.
I’d always been uneasy with the over-valorization of the Constitution, and felt there was something off about the Bill of Rights, and certainly have always felt that the justice system rarely dispenses justice, but more often perpetuates the prejudices and privileges already existing in society rather than overcoming them–but I didn’t have the least idea why it was so bad. This is why.
The annual “national happiness” index came out again, and as usual, Finland and the other Nordic countries top the list. So we see these inane headlines again, recommending that people MOVE to Finland (or Denmark or Iceland or Norway). Yes there are many marvelous things about Finland–saunas, pulla, endless lakes, little red wooden houses, hedgehogs and a love of nature. But rather than move, agitate for the Nordic model at home and follow the recipe for national happiness.
What National Happiness means is that most people in Finland have enough to eat, are clothed and housed, have national daycare, a good education and national healthcare. That is what it means. Finland also has one of the lowest rates of immigration among the Nordic countries– only 5.8% of their population in 2015 was foreign-born, and most of those immigrants were from Russia or Estonia. Moving to Finland wouldn’t be easy, nor would it make any change to the average person’s happiness, that is, if they have food, clothing, shelter, work and healthcare. But what Finland has–and this is significant– is the happiest (safest, healthiest, best cared for) POOR people in the world.
So don’t move to Finland unless you’re eager to embrace 7 months of winter! Instead, agitate for national healthcare, universally good schools, and a social safety net that catches all who fall.
A witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People“ offers up the ideal mixture of intriguing and revealing facts” (Laura Miller, Salon).
Tim Wu points out in his article The Oppression of the Supermajority that the much-vaunted political divides in this country are fictitious and that the country is largely unified. In fact what is happening is that the Supermajority of voters who agree on a large slate of issues are being thwarted by their own government. He writes:
The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority.
He puts together a short list of some of the issues we agree upon, which
What’s causing this? Wu believes it is legislative stagnation, the gridlock created by industry groups, donor interests and the commitment of our elected leaders to preserving this gridlock.
“From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term “net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.
“From the man who coined the term “net neutrality,” author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.”
Until 2016, Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr.’s life on social media looked unremarkable. On his Facebook page, he posted photos of decadent meals, gym workouts, scantily clad women and sports games — the stereotypical trappings of middle-age masculinity.
This may be common, but it is far from “unremarkable” as reporter Kevin Roose states. I remarked many things about it. Then a quote from an expert in digital journalism:
“He went from posting pictures of women, real estate, dining and cars to posting pictures of ISIS, guns and people in jail,” said Jonathan Albright, the research director for Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “It’s a remarkable change.”
From unremarkable to remarkable. However, here is what I remarked in the first incarnation of Mr. Sayoc’s online persona. “Scantily clad women” denotes objectification; women as things, not people; decadent meals signal affluence and pleasure; real estate and cars are signs of prestige, money and power. All of these are signs of toxic masculinity, an idea of human relationships as transactional and impersonal, a technocratic bent, and a desire for male domination. These are completely consistent with the Twitter account, the support of Trump, and, eventually, the pipe bombs.
I’d suggest the proper way to frame this article is as a continuum of his offenses, displayed on social media. Just as many mass killers begin with domestic violence, many perverts as peeping toms; just as sexual harassers will forge expense reports, or take credit for other people’s work, the signs of violence are often visible in other actions and evidenced in seemingly minor social media posts online. “Criminal versatility” is common, and criminal tendencies can be read in early prejudices. I see the signs of César Sayoc’s tendencies already writ large on his Facebook page.
The people came to Samuel and said, “Put a king over us, to guide us.”
Samuel said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
These headlines are stupid and I get annoyed with them every year:
A witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, “
The Attention Merchants: 
Caterina.net 