#just says you can vote in polls about future topics | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

There are dozens of funny blogs to kill time on Tumblr.

#just says you can vote in polls about future topics

embarrassinglastwords · 11 months

Text

the results are in!

with 314 votes these were the top 10 stsg moments people can’t believe are canon (top 10 based off of the ones i listed lmao) this will be long but i did say i was gonna make a post of the results so -

10: in last place with only 1.9% - their names complimenting each other + Geto’s robes being called “gojo-gesa robes”

i included these together cause they are similar imo. both being based around the other.

9: “the only one i have”

the iconic quote with 3.2% that is so misquoted cause of that translation that i’m pretty sure people ignore that that’s actually what he says rather than “my one and only”💀 (myself included but for the sake of the poll i did the accurate translation)

8: the light novel in general

maybe i’m biased cause of my user but only getting 3.8% of votes surprised me lmao.

i mean i just think about “Even if everything was different now, there was still one thing- from that very moment it all started- that had never changed” as well as “Geto Suguru It was a name that the Jujutsu tech organization feared…but to Gojo Satoru, he was—“ all the time

i posted more quotes from it here

7: with 7.3% (nanami surprise appearance) we have their official songs stated by Gege.

Shame On Me being Gojo’s

and Come Back Home being Geto’s.

6: 8.9% of votes for this insane moment from the newer chapters after Gojo’s resurrection lmao

him and Kenny are fighting and Gojo offers to fight on Dec. 24th (Geto’s death anniversary) with Kenny replying “How romantic”

this legit made me scream when the chapter came out… anyways

5: i almost didn’t include this moment because i was sure it was gonna win because of how often it’s brought up but i’m glad to see i was wrong💀

but still in the top 5 with 9.6% is Gojo recognizing Geto by smell in JJK0… i have nothing to add to that cause like. what.

4: with 10.5% we have Gojo’s last words to Geto being “3 words” as stated by Gojo’s english va! (which i also mentioned in the post linked above)

(that being paired with the light quotes above and “such embarrassing words” and it being words they had “never said to each other before” … we all know what he said…🙄)

3: with 12.4%, the one that made me spiral and realize Gojo is probably done for, Gege himself saying “one cannot exist without the other” about Gojo and Geto…

so either Geto is miraculously gonna come back or they are sharing a death anniversary lmao

2: at 18.8%!

the infamous vol 0 quotes that are 100% parallels because the entire movie is.

Gojo, to Yuta in reference to Rika: “Love is the most twisted curse of them all” (idk why i said 'worst curse' in the poll lmao)

Geto as he dies: “At least curse me a little at the very end.”

bangs my head into a wall… okay and number 1!!

1: at 23.6% is the stsg moment. “My six eyes tell me you’re Suguru Geto but my soul knows otherwise! Hurry up and answer, who the hell are you?!”

not only was seeing Geto the reason for him getting sealed but he went against his own power, his own technique which makes him the strongest, to listen to his soul. and to quote Song of Achilles (which i made a joke the other day about stsg being modern day achilles and patroclus) “He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”

okay this was the first poll i’ve done like this besides some random funny ones on my other blog and i can’t believe it got 300+ votes. maybe i’ll do more in the future if i can think of some topics.

#they make me insane #i just want them to be happy #i have my stsg playlists on repeat #jjk #jujutsu kaisen #gojo satoru #geto suguru #jjk manga spoilers #jjk spoilers #satosugu #sugusato #stsg #satoru gojo #suguru geto #jjk 0 #jujutsu kaisen 0 #poll results #batposting #batpostingships

254 notes · View notes

paradox-gaming-network · 2 months

Text

youtube

Do Flying Mounts and Fast Travel BREAK IMMERSION in Persistent World Games? Coming off of my YouTube video about optimizing the fun out of MMORPGs, someone asked me to do a video on Do Flying Mounts and Fast Travel break the immersion in Persistent World Games? The poll is here if anyone hasn’t added their vote or you want to add in some more feedback: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxX1p7V6lRotjeHrp2ubDkOTmgbfXM5M6f

One of the biggest problems with persistent world (MMORPG) worlds as we know them now is that there isn’t any danger from the environment/world. As it is now the only real danger in most of these games are the few zones that happen to be “max level” zones or from PVPers in games where non-consensual PVP is allowed. Some games that are due out in the future like Throne and Liberty basically operate on a zone-level concept where you know if the mobs in the area are going to be a threat. This has been repeated in other games like FFXI, FFXIV, WoW, Archeage, Eve Online (security system) and most other games. I am still hopefully for Ashes of Creation, because one of the biggest selling points is their node system, which doesn’t create zone that have a fixed level content in them, but instead creates a world where there is a range of content from starter content to a maximum level as determined by the level of the Node.

Still I think another game in development, Eternal Tombs, is taking this risk or threat of an open world to a new level. Eternal Tombs plans on having events run by live staff so that you aren’t ever really sure if you are safe since an event can spawn off anywhere. If you’ve not seen this topic, I did a video on it here: https://youtu.be/Dx_B6RNP4LM

I would agree with most of the respondents to the poll that Flying Mounts and Fast Travel do break the immersion of persistent world games, however, from the Massively OP article that started this optimization discussion, Sam Kash wrote “as if the fun was in screwing around for an hour waiting for the actual game you want to play to begin.” If you’ve not had a chance to check out that article you can do so here: https://massivelyop.com/2024/03/07/massively-overthinking-are-we-optimizing-the-fun-out-of-mmos/

I would argue that Sam is right. Players, the average players not the college students or high school students on summer break, have on average about 3 hours per night for play sessions and more on the weekends. A player who only has 3 hours doesn’t necessarily want to trek 90 minutes to do content, especially if the content is going to take an unknown amount of time. As much as I hate to say it, I think gone are the days of 6 hour power gaming sessions on a nightly basis, so unfortunately that is where fast travel comes in unless you make the trip meaningful.

If you either have meaningful events pre-planned into the trek, or the dungeon can only be done as part of a story chain and not just on farm, or if you have random world events that can spawn at any time (which also have to be of a risk/reward. Content for the sake of content isn’t good, neither are cheesy rewards for the rewards.

This will lead into the next question, what kind of open world content is good?

#mmorpgs #Youtube

0 notes

haleykatherinejoy-blog · 2 years

Text

Democracy Into The Classroom

If I’m going, to be honest, I have to admit that democracy is a topic I have never given much thought to. Prior to watching the documentary called What is Democracy? by Astra Taylor, I’d say the only thing I knew was that democracy is a system used to dictate politics and allow citizens to vote for the platforms that they believe will make their country better. I find the topic of politics to be a messy and intimidating place to explore. I dislike the dualities and extremes that exist within politics and the tension that it can create between people.

When it comes to voting in a democratic society, I have witnessed the hearing of two sides that people often hold. One side is the belief people have that voting won’t make a difference and the other side is that voting is crucial to being an active citizen. In the middle, I assume there lie folks who are just uneducated and even uninterested. If I take a look at my own involvement in politics and democracy, I can remember only a handful of times that I have voted in the past ten years. Mostly because of a mix of the things I mentioned above.

Although in the past I may not have actively sought out information on local politics or global politics, I have always been someone who when presented the information through education or conversations with others, shows interest in listening and learning. Sometimes this has led me to do further research of my own to further educate myself on certain topics and other times I was happy to listen and learn at that moment, but not interested enough to go deeper.

Throughout the film What is Democracy? it’s discussed that democracy is supposed to protect the well-being of all people, both rich and poor, and provide justice for everyone but in reality, many people are being left out, especially people of color. And that voter suppression is a real thing. This made me reflect on Canada’s democracy and voting rights. The requirements say you must have proof of legal Canadian citizenship, be of 18 years of age and show ‘acceptable’ proof of identity and address. This excludes those who are permanent residents of Canada and who contribute to the economy and society. I read further about voter suppression affecting Indigenous citizens of Canada's accessibility to voting poll stations. To me, these two examples aren’t at all inclusive of what democracy should be.

As I become more aware of political issues and further my understanding of what democracy is, I am beginning to think about what this means in relation to the education system and my part in it. If democracy is to be defined as it was discussed in Astra Taylor’s film: Protecting the well being and justice for all people; then I feel as an educator it is beneficial to bring democracy into the classroom and build a democratic envrionment where all students voices are equally heard and supported. An article from Edutopia talks about a democratic classroom as a safe and inclusive place that is co-constructed and promotes social responsibility and engagement with oneself and others. I feel that this kind of environment fosters many positive characteristics that tie in with Dewey’s ideas on progressive education; self-expression, growth, positive relationships, collaborative learning and community building. And this is the type of environment I hope to support as a future educator.

If there is one thing I am certain of when it comes to the kind of society that I want to live in, it is a just one. I might still feel that my vote doesn’t matter or that the worlds problems are too complex to be solved, but despite those feelings, I still have a burning desire to be a part of the good in the world. So although I do not label myself to be a political person, I recognize that my values and beliefs do align with certain political ideas that dictate the way I choose to live my life. And I aspire to bring the kind of world I want to live in into my classroom.

#democracy #dewey #johndewey #edutopia #democraticclassroom #politics #astrataylor #whatisdemocracy

1 note · View note

elizabethsharmon · 4 years

Text

So. Poland has chosen its "president" yesterday - if we can even talk about real choice here when he won by approximately 422k votes. When he won in 6 out of 16 regions, all of them with significantly lower number of eligible voters. When there are huge discrepancies between the results displayed in each polling district and the ones published on the website of the National Electoral Commission. When there were recurring instances of some voting cards not having the necessary stamps which automatically classified the vote as invalid. When some people went to vote and it turned out they're not registered in their designated district because of system error. When people abroad didn't get their voting cards on time. When his party sent over 150 buses to villages in Eastern Poland to take older, conservative people to voting stations. When this is how the results map looks like - and somehow the blue wins with orange.

In the last five years, Du*a and his party PiS (literally lAw AnD jUsTiCe but believe me, they're none of these things) have completely ruined the country and regressed it to Middle Ages.The democracy practically doesn't exist anymore, not since they have the majority to rule (the opposition won the senate back in the parliamentary elections so it's a small win but it's still not enough). They started with the judicial system, appointing conservative judges who are always ruling in their favour. The courts are not independent anymore. The Constitution is being broken over and over and over again. People have been marching and protesting for years now but to no avail.

The national television, TVP, is practically owned by the ruling party. The propaganda, fake news, hatred on the opposition and minorities is getting stronger each day. What you need to know is that this is literally the first channel on every TV set in the country. No matter where you live, no matter if you have cable or satellite, you turn on TV and TVP is what you get. Their reach is so much higher than other TV stations from the big four (TVP1&TVP2, TVN, Polsat). Poland has fallen to 62nd out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index compiled annually by Reporters Without Borders. Before PiS took over in 2015 we were 18th. For du*a's presidential campaign now they gave TVP 2 billion PLN in order to strengthen the propaganda. There was a project to give those money to hospital oncology wards but PiS said no. TVP has only been showing him during the campaign. The other candidates have either been showed in a bad light or haven't been showed at all. Voters for whom TVP is the only source of information haven't seen other candidates nor their campaigns.

During the second round of the campaign, when another tv station, TVN, with two major Polish online media, Onet and WP, invited him and his opponent, Rafał Trzaskowski, for a debate. Du*a declined because he said he won't participate in a debate which isn't available for everyone and he asked them to reach an agreement with TVP to host the debate together. In the end there were two debates. Du*a on his own in TVP, answering predetermined questions from journalists reporting to his party and people in the studio that were paid to be there. Trzaskowski on his own in TVN and live on his Facebook channel, answering questions from the journalists from 16 independent offline and online media teams.

At the beginning of his and PiS first term of destroying the country, they started their crusade against women, because as we all know middle aged men are the most eligible people to make choices for women and their bodies. Abortion is Poland is (was? honestly who knows now) only allowed in three cases: if the woman's life was in danger, if the prenatal testing indicates severe damage of the fetus, if the pregnancy was the outcome of rape. With their pro life and anti women initiative, PiS was determined to ban abortion completely and punish it by prison. The bill was so flimsy that in some cases even miscarriage could be turned against woman. Even if the baby would've been born sick or severely disabled, even if the pregnancy could be fatal for the mother, even if it was caused by rape. We went on the streets. All dressed in black, with umbrellas in hand. Hundreds of thousands of women and allies marching and protesting together against the government. And they got scared. The bill proposal was dropped but the fight wasn't over and it still isn't. They tried to bring it back now during the pandemic just because they knew we wouldn't go out protesting. But we did, we blocked the streets with our cars.

The day after pill can only be bought on prescription. But if you end up going to the conservative ob/gyn they can invoke conscientious objection to abortion and they won't prescribe it for you. They want to ban sex ed from schools. In their opinion sex ed “demoralizes children and teaches them masturbation.” They want young people to be uneducated and have sex and get pregnant and give birth. They want to make kids have kids just so they would depend on the government and social wage programme 500+ which gives 500PLN (approximately 125€) each month to families with 2 or more children for each of their children. Right now you can be a woman raising your three or four kids and you will get the equivalent of minimum wage just for that. This program made people vote for them in 2015. First Du*a used it in his presidential campaign, then PiS was blackmailing the voters saying the program will only happen if both president and the government will be on board aka they have to get in so Du*a will sign the bill and people will get the money. People still believe only they can ensure the stability of the program even though almost all the other candidates said it will not go away.

In the last couple of weeks of presidential campaign, it became more clear than ever how Du*a is planning to win the elections - by trying to reach to the mindsets of elderly and conservative voters by attacking the LGBT community. He called us “ideological hurricane”. He said we are worse than communists. His party members have been saying we're not humans. He was saying over and over again how he doesn't care what people do in bed as long as they're not obnoxious on street and in real life about it. How sexuality is a private thing and we shouldn't be proud of it. How there's no place in Poland for “LGBT propaganda that wants to demoralize our children”. How there's no space here for unions for same-sex couples, not even mentioning marriage or adoption. How he'll do everything in his power to protect the “traditional Polish values and family model” (whatever that means). The most conservative parts of the eastern Poland has claimed their towns and villages as “anti-LGBT zone”. It's been going on since last year. After Dua's words now the hate crime is stronger than it ever was. When LGBT activists asked him to apologize for his spiteful words, showed him proofs that suicide rate among LGBT teenagers is higher than it was since his party is ruling, showed him the photographs and shared the stories of the people we lost because of the bashing they encourage and support, he said he won't apologize because he stands by his words and there's a freedom of speech in the country. Not for everyone I guess.

The journalists have been interviewing many people in different parts of Poland after it. What stuck with me were the words of some old man from the countryside who has said that “LGBT should be exterminated in Majdanek”. It's one of the places where the death camp was during World War 2. I don't think I have to tell anyone what words like this mean, how much they hurt, and how much worse it is when they’re said in the country that’s lost so so many lives during WW2. In a country that fought so hard for so many years to reclaim its freedom from the nazis and then from the soviets. In the meantime of this bashing, Du*a has pardoned a pedophile so he could return to his family (and the victim he abused). So that would be it for protecting family values.

The exit polls results yesterday were so close that they gave us so much hope that we would wake up in a new reality today but the hope died quickly. Now we're stuck again with a man who said in the middle of the global pandemic that he's anti-vaccination and he doesn't think vaccine for covid-19 should be obligatory. With a man who thinks climate change and global warming isn't real. With a man whose actions are constantly destabilitizing economy because he only acts like there is today and doesn’t look forward in the future and doesn’t know the way he and his party ruin the country will have terrible consequences in a few years. With a man who is homophobic, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and many, many, many other things. With a man who is a "president” of Polish people but only if you're a straight catholic man voting for his party.

Now our fear is that with him being “elected” as the “president” again, his party will try to meddle with the Constitution and try to change it so they could either extend his term for more years or extend the number of terms a president can have. And even if the change can’t happen so easily, what’s sure is that they will try to take away basic human rights from women and LGBT community. They made it perfectly clear in the last five years and during the campaign now.

So if you’re asking yourself now what can you do about it the answer is simple: spread the word. Read about it. Educate yourself. Make a buzz in the social media. We need as much help as we can get. We need foreign media to pick up the topic, we need them to talk about it and to make the noise. We need the foreign governments to know about it. European Union has already declared that if the bashing on LGBT continues, they will take away the development aid from the self-proclaimed “anti-LGBT zones”. Our country has suffered so much and somehow we’re still standing but I don’t know for how much long we will last. So please. Don’t leave us alone.

#poland #lgbt #feminism #tw homophobia #signal boost

1K notes · View notes

eyebeastposts · 3 years

Text

EyeBeast 2021 Interest Survey Results

The votes have been cast so let’s do a quick recap of the results and address a few things.

General Interest

Male Subjects in Fetish Stories: 57.5% Yes, 42.5% No

Female Subjects in Fetish Stories: 99.1% Yes, 0.9% No

-No surprise considering most of the subjects of my stories are female focused.

Preferred Subject of Fetish Stories:

Females: 70.8%, Both Male and Female: 22.6%, Male: 6.6%

Futa (Females with male genitalia): 53.8% Yes, 46.2% No

-I’m honestly surprised by the response to this question considering how taboo the subject of futa appears to be.

Direct Sexual Content in Fetish Stories: 77.8% Yes, 22.2 % No

Burping: 85.4% Yes, 14.6% No

Farting: 75.5% Yes, 24.5% No

Body Hair (arm pits, groin, belly, etc.): 54.2% Yes, 45.8%No

-In retrospect, I probably should have let people vote on the amount of hair on a person’s body.

IQ Loss/Mental Regression: 50.9% Yes, 49.1% No

Personality/Mental Changes: 77.4% Yes, 22.6% No

-Interesting to see the division between straight up intelligence drain as opposed to the general idea of mental changes considering how close the two subjects are.

Hypnosis: 66.5% Yes, 33.5%No

-I haven’t touched this subject very much, but judging by the reaction and my own interests, I wouldn’t be opposed to trying a hypnosis story again in the future.

Expansion and Growth

Weight Gain: 96.7% Yes, 3.3% No

Slob: 83.5% Yes, 16.5% No

Belly Expansion: 53.8% Yes, 46.2% No

-Strange considering how popular WG appears to be.

Breast Expansion: 62.3% Yes, 37.7% No

Butt Expansion: 74.1% Yes, 25.9% No

Inflation: 52.4% Yes, 47.6% No

Pregnancy (Female Only): 57.5% Yes, 42.5% No

Muscle Growth: 67% No, 33% Yes

Giant/Giantess Growth: 62.7% No, 37.3% Yes

Blueberry/Fruit-Based Expansion: 55.7% No, 44.3% Yes

Vagina Expansion: 66% No, 34% Yes

Penis Growth/Expansion: 60.8% No, 39.2% Yes

-Interesting that Penis Growth outdid Vagina Expansion considering the survey shows a higher a approval rate of female subjects. Must have something to correlate with the futa approval rate.

Shrinking: 71.2% No, 28.8% Yes

Transformation

Personality TF (Nerd, Bimbo, Himbo, Princess, Punk, Goth, etc.): 69.3% Yes, 30.7% No

Uglification: 62.3% No, 37.7% Yes

-Odd considering how close it is to slob, one of my more popular subjects.

Shortstack TF (Goblins, Dwarves, Imps): 56.1% Yes, 44.9% No

Age Progression: 62.7% No, 37.3% Yes

Anthro Animal TF: 51.9% Yes, 48.1% No

Full Animal TF: 76.9% No, 23.1% Yes

Humanoid Inanimate Object TF (Statues, Mannequins, Sex Dolls): 77.4% No, 22.6% Yes

Non-Humanoid Inanimate Object TF ( Clothing, Sex Toys, Appliances): 80.7% No, 19.3% Yes

Male to Female Transformation: 55.2% Yes, 44.8% No

Female to Male Transformation: 75.9% No, 24.1% No

Deviant Transformations (Fuckplant/Succplants, Buttfaces, Dorses/Queen's Stallions, Lady Pots, etc.): 67.9% No, 32.1% Yes

-Honestly surprised this category did this well, but that might be due to the sheer variety this subject matter covers. Might have to do another series of polls with each one individually to get a better idea.

Overall, I’d say the results were rather enlightening. If a subject you are interested didn’t get a high approval rating, it doesn’t mean I won’t ever write about it. I intend to keep things varied up like I usually do, but I will consider my options when doing polls in the future regarding these kinds of things.

Miscellaneous Questions and Comments

Starting off, let me address a few things people have mentioned I missed in this survey.

Hyper Expansion

-I kind of include this along with the other expansions, however my personal preferences usually steer me towards nothing too big with my stories. It’s very rare that I go anything beyond the size of a house for anything.

Bodypart tf ( butt tf, breast tf E.T.C)

-I find that very similar to inanimate object TF, but I can see enough differences to make it a different category. That being said, I’m not sure I’m too fond of the identity death usually associated with these.

Femboy

-Noted and definitely on the table depending on if the right story comes along.

Cavewoman/De-Evolution

-I originally had this on the poll, but I decided it’s more lumped into the Personality TF category.

General inflatable transformation like pool toys. Also flattening.

-I consider those part of the inanimate object TFs. As for flattening, nothing against it, but my usual repertoire consists of making things grow, not the other way around.

Head, hand, leg, and other body part inflation

-I’ve done head expansion to a certain extent in my recently done Raven slob story. As for the others, I think they’re a little to niche of a topic for me. Not forbidden, just not something I’m particularly interested in.

Fart Inflation

-Considering the positive reaction to both the inflation and fart category, I would have to assume this is a definite yes for most of my audience.

Candy/Sweets TF

-This has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but could never think of a good scenario to place it in. I’ll definitely put it on the table once I find the right premise for it.

Supernatural transformations (demons, angels, mythical creatures, etc.)/ Monster People

-For demons and angels, I feel like those should be included with the personality TFs. As for creatures, that depends on what we’re talking about. May need to do separate polls for each type to gauge interest.

Robot TF

-Not a particular interest for me, plus it kind of falls under the humanoid object TF category

Mutant TF

-Too vague

Monterfication

-Falls under both the uglification and/or anthro TF categories

Strong Fat

-A little too specific but seen as favorable with the results of the WG and muscle growth categories.

Clown

-Part of the personality TF category.

Possession

-Sort of close to hypnosis, but I can see enough differences to warrant a separate category. Just have to be careful to tread the line without going towards anything to icky in terms of rape or anything like that.

Immobility

-See hyper growth.

Clothing TF

-Already covered in inanimate object TF

Multibreast

-An excellent addition that’s more than welcome in my stories. Will definitely need to include this in a future poll.

Comments and Questions

Now let me address some questions and comments from the survey.

“But what about princess deadpool? watch the second deadpool musical.”

-I didn’t realize there was a Deadpool musical to begin with. I’ll have to take a look at that.

“Personally i always like if there is transformation between couple like male and female. Or even female and female. Rather than one transformation. Like i like it when one of slob, transformation can share with another person”

-I share this sentiment. Nothing better than two people indulging in one another’s desires. Although, I feel that’s for any fetish, not just slob.

“Your stuff is always a pleasure to read! Question though would be what are YOUR favorite things to do and such due to some of your things being commissions? Other than that you are quite grand at making kinky stories!”

-My personal favorites are just anything that can give me a challenge and an opportunity to try out things I haven’t thought of before, ergo my tendency towards variety.

“Dude i stay up day and night waiting for you to post everytime you do it makes me feel better about the evening btw if you want to chat sometime my discord is (NAME WITHELD)”

-I appreciate what this person is trying to do, but they really shouldn’t be posting information like this so willy nilly. Thank you for the offer, but you have to realize that there is a time and place for these sorts of things. Please do not come at me with friend requests or anything like that out of the blue. Regardless, I do thank this person for their kind words.

“I really like some of your darker stuff. I don't know if it's a common sentiment but I love unhappy stories.”

-I tend to avoid going dark in my stories, this is due in part to the prevalence of bad ends I’ve seen in most fetish content, especially things like hentai or doujinshi. Like I’ve said, it’s not off the table, but I usually prefer to keep things on a lighter tone in my stories.

“For the record Fat giantess slobs are the best.”

-That seems very subjective, but I won’t deny it’s a good combo.

“Recently I have noticed that you been doing a lot more slob material then just about anything else for the past few months. I admit I'm not a huge slob person it kind of comes down to my mood. while I would appreciate more variety in your subject matter you are the writer and I (and several others) appreciate you sharing your artistry with us.”

-A lot of that comes from what both my commissioners and people on my Patreon ask for. Keep in mind that I do have to oblige people that give me money to write. I do try to find time to write other things though.

“Just do what makes you happy. But i'd love to see more male focused expansion/transformation.”

-As I’ve said, I’m up for it, but I need the proper story and opportunities.

“male on female facesitting/squashing/trampling is always good.”

-See the above question.

“Do you ever feel discouraged to write something if it's about something you don't enjoy OR feel like you write too much of? Other than that, keep up the good work, take care of yourself, and good luck with your future stories!”

-For stuff I don’t enjoy, it depends. If it’s a fetish I’m not into, I treat it as way to try out some new things and vary up my writing ability. Whether or not I learn to appreciate said fetish is another matter. That being said, I’ve made it well known what fetishes I won’t touch at all such as rape, scat, or vore. I find that I don’t have too much of the second problem since I keep finding ways to vary things up with similar fetishes with either varied scenarios or interactions.

Various words of encouragement

-Thank you to everyone that sent me these, as they’re always a good pick me up for the day.

Finally, the Disney Princess empathy votes are:

Rapunzel: 37.7%

Alice: 24.1%

Belle: 20.8%

Tianna: 17.5%

Now you may be asking what this survey is for. Well…that’s for me to know and for you to find out at a later time. Although, I may be prompted to answer any requests about any associated writing things that come from this survey.

Summary

Thank you everyone who took the time to answer the survey and let their opinions be heard. In the end, we had over 200 people participate to give a pretty sizable sample size. I may consider doing several more of these in the near future to focus on specific topics and cover things I may have missed.

#eyebeast #survey #results

5 notes · View notes

justamusicpodcast · 3 years

Link

Episode 6 out today!

We’re talking about Blues music

Transcript under the cut

Sup, I’m Laura Cousineau and welcome to Just A Music Podcast, where I, Laura Cousineau, tell you about some music history, how it relates to the world around us, and hopefully, introduce you to some new tunes. This show is theoretically for everyone but I will swear and when it comes down to it and sometimes we may need to talk about some sensitive topics so ur weeuns might wanna sit this one out.

And boi unless you’ve had that talk with ur kids about systemic racism you might wanna let them sit this one out because we’re gonna be touching on a bunch of terrible racist shit this week Because we’re gonna be talking about the Blues and various different type of blues musics. I’m actually really excited to talk about it too because blues, as you guys will find out in the future is kinda the basis for a lot of other, what one might consider more modern, genres of American popular musics. So this one’s gonna be important for ur earholes and ur brainholes. Just like last time I will be airing a sensitive content warning for some graphic descriptions of violence and I will put the time stamps in the description for y’all for when that starts and ends.

First though, I wanna issue an apology for being away so long, I tend to work on this podcast in my free time, and currently I’ve had none of that what so ever. It just so happened that October worked out this year that it was thanksgiving and my birthday and then a bunch of big projects due then Halloween and now I’m working on my fucking thesis proposal, I’m actually recording this episode at 1:35 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, so needless to say all this in combination with trying to deal with my depression hasn’t been a cake walk but we’re making it work. I will likely run up against a similar time issue during the first couple weeks of December because that’s when all my final papers are due. After that thought I should have smooth sailing for about a month. I wanted to make sure I had an episode out this week because as I think… well everyone… is aware the American election took place this week and understandably people were stressed as shit about that. So I think we could all use a little music right now.

Ok so Like all fuckin things we need to know where blues came from. Now blues is actually a lot older than a lot of people are gonna be expecting, like really damn old. Like pretty much everything in academia (and I mean EVERYTHING, at least in the humanities), the dates are contested, but it seems that the blues, or at least what began as the blues, started in and around the 1860s. For those who didn’t listen to last week’s episode on slave songs, spirituals, and gospel, or just those who don’t know their American history too too well, the 1860s marks a very important time for black people, many of which at that time had been enslaved, because in 1865 the thirteenth amendment was amended into the American constitution. For those who aren’t aware, the thirteenth amendment as stated by the national archives of the United States of America reads as such: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Now this of course was fantastic news of course! And for some people, this might be where you think oppression in the Americas ends for Black people but you would be incredibly wrong! Because this is the period where we see the start of a phenomenon referred to as sharecropping. Sharecropping or crop sharing as it’s known otherwise is considered part of what we historians sometimes refer to as the Jim Crow economy of the American South after the civil war. But what is Jim crow economy, what did it come from, why is it bad, why is sharecropping bad, how does any of this relate to the blues? Well lucky for u lil turnips imma tell ya.

Jim Crow culture is something that I imagine most North Americans will have even the most basic knowledge of but for those that don’t the name Jim Crow as applied to economy, laws, and any other part of American culture during these time periods refers to sets of crazy fucking racist laws written and unwritten that kept black people subjugated under the whims of the government as well as their fellow white countrymen. The term Jim crow itself is reference to a song often featured in the supremely racist minstrel shows of the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s referred to as “Jump Jim Crow” in which a white man in black-face sings in a parody centric dialect about the life of a charicaturishly uneducated back-woodsy Black man named, you fuckin guessed it, Jim Crow. The significance of the Crow being that it was a pejorative term for black individuals which can actually dated back to the early mid 1700s. Now I wanna preface the excerpt of it with the fact that I’m uncomfortable listening to this, I understand if others are too. The thing is that acknowledging these uncomfortable things and knowing about them is necessary in order to understand the type of historical impact that they had. “So laura, you must obviously support statues being raised to commemorate things like slavery and secessionism!” Absolutely not. Where statues and monuments exist to praise the efforts of individuals, the listening to and learning about songs in a teaching context like this very podcast are meant to educate. Statues commemorating culture surrounding one of the worst atrocities to have taken place on American soil should never have been erected in the first place let alone celebrated. One is meant to celebrate while the other is to educate because one is a historical primary source that lets us think critically about the history, the other is a tertiary celebration. The purpose of listening to a clip like this is then to educate and understand a piece of actually history, not to replicate and enjoy. The version of the song that I have is sung without the charicaturish accent but uses the original words but with all that in mind here’s a bit of Jump Jim Crow:

In terms of laws I’m sure just about everyone knows separate drinking fountains and schools but this really permeated pretty much every sphere of life for Black peoples especially those in the south. I say especially those in the south but not exclusively those in the south because racial segregation, although not as supported by law but more socially, also existed in the Northern States as well as in Canada. Anecdotally, my mother grew up in a suburb of Cleveland Ohio, she remembers going into Cleveland when she was a kid when Cleveland was still a very racially segregated city, Black peoples lived in, shopped in, and attended schools in certain areas of the city and white people in other’s. My grandmother who was also raised in the area even remembers Black people having separate lunch counters if any at all in some of the larger department stores in the area.

It might also be handy when I mention the south to actually talk about what the south and particularly the deep south is for y’all outside of America. So when we talk about the south we are talking about a geographically bounded area just not the area that one might think of by looking at a map because where you might be thinking like ah just take the country and cut it in half, and the bottom half is the south that wouldn’t be correct. So, from the United States Census Bureau itself the south we’re talking about is Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Now some who live in the surrounding areas such as Kansas might also consider themselves as being from the “south” somewhat culturally but those states previously listed as the official ones. When we talk about the DEEP SOUTH however, that range closes a little more, and that would mainly just include Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and sometimes Texas and Florida due to their involvement as part of the confederate states of America, meaning states that were on the south side of the civil war.

Also briefly just so we’re clear, again this is for those people who didn’t receive the best education on Slavery and the Civil War in general but to be clear, the civil war was fought over primarily states rights to use and perpetuate slavery. The common narrative you hear a lot in protests by those on the right, who would like to uphold the institutions set out by their forefathers in the creation of the abominable act, is that the civil war was primarily fought over states rights. What they then so often forget to elaborate is that those rights were perceived as the right to govern themselves independently so that they may still be able to employ slave labour in the operation of their economies and also to expand further westward to continue and be able to use slavery out in those areas as well.

The reason that we hear about these Jim Crow laws particularly in the South is because where the Northern states and Canada did have (and still continues to have) some violent racist issues, the Jim Crow south was specifically really bad. And I mean fucking abominable. Though Black people were free from being directly owned, society at large and all it’s trappings found new ways to oppress them. This started with Black Codes which were individual state law codes that dictated where Black peoples could move, for how long they could stay, restricted their rights to vote (or made it extremely difficult to vote via poll taxes, literacy tests, etc), as well as where they could work, and in some cases even if their children could be taken away from them on the basis labour needs. So I really can’t drive home the point enough of how much life sucked for Black peoples under Jim Crow laws and economy in the southern states, to call it any less than abominable would seem to understate it in a major way. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws hadn’t started to be rolled into large southern cities yet so many Black peoples were inclined to move into them because life was actually slightly easier for a short while. White people being offended and upset at this, because “how dare a black person just try to live their lives in my good white pure Christian neighborhood,” then fully supported Jim crow laws being rolled out to remove them from areas where white people would normally interact with them. This included but was not limited to, barring them from public parks entirely, having entirely different theaters at one point and then segregated theaters after a while with separate entrances based on your race, restaurants, bus and train stations, water fountains, restrooms, most building entrances in general, elevators, amusement park ticket windows, public schools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, elderly care homes and even fucking cemeteries. Of course being treated as diseased subhuman parasites is never enough for the racism machine that is the public conscious at this time so there was also a lot of violence both systematic and grassroots that accompanied this era.

And here’s where I’m going to have to issue a sensitive content warning because I’m about to describe some truly heinous shit in a whole second. So by violence, I mean very public and very culturally accepted violence, similar to what we’re seeing more and more of in the states again. As many will know now in the light of the many many many police shootings of unarmed, unthreatening black people in the states, the police traditionally haven’t been on the side of black citizens. This is due to a number of reasons, for one, on the most basic of levels the police serve to protect the interests of those in power, in our case that means the property and lives of middle to upper class (mostly) white Americans. The natural extension of this is that many police forces in the states, especially in Southern states started out as slave catching forces bringing back runaway enslaved people to their owners. So as time progressed and Black peoples became a “free” population this still meant protecting mainly middle to upper class white people from the “threat” of black people. This was enforced in a number of ways, such as arresting black individuals found breaking these rules, framing black people for crimes committed by others and arresting them for population suppression, and turning a blind eye to the grassroots violence perpetrated by non-black citizens, which very often were white citizens. An example of just straight up police brutality can be found in the case of Isaac Woodard JR. who was viciously beaten by police only hours after being honorably discharged from the fucking military on February 12 1946. The bus driver driving Woodard and some of his fellow soldiers called the police after Woodard asked the bus driver if there might be time for him to use the restroom as they approached a rest stop. When the police arrived, the bus driver accused Woodard of drinking in the back of the bus and he was hauled off, dragged into an alley and beaten with nighsticks. That night he was thrown in the town jail, by morning he had been beaten so severely he was left permanently blind in both eyes.

And that grassroots violence is just as nasty, really fucking nasty. The violence could be perpetrated for things as small as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, entering a white neighbourhood, “talking back to” the wrong person. Since black men have always been are still to some degree subject to the stereotype that they are all sex incensed monsters, being left alone in a room with a white woman could be enough to incite violence against them. In the Mississippi delta during the season where share cropping debts were settled up, there was a sharp uptick in violence against and killings of black people. If you were white, because let’s be real here some white people definitely were on the side of their oppressed countrymen, you could be hung on the basis of being an N-word lover, which could range from being found to being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a person of colour, to just being fucking friends with them. The violence was often varied too, where kidnapping and hanging someone either with or without brutalizing them first (also known as a lynching) is the form most commonly associated with Jim Crow era violence less extreme but still horrible harassment could perpetuate in any form. Mississippi had the highest amount of lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581. You might think that is a low number but first, similarily to when we were talking about slavery in the last episode, 1 lynching is too fucking many, and secondly these are only the ones that were officially recorded. Since lynchings didn’t always happen in broad daylight and since law enforcement really didn’t care about Black individuals, there were almost certainly more that happened that just never were recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. 79% of lynching happened in the South. So as I said before though, lynching was not the only form though, beatings were also entirely all too common forms of violence perpetrated against blackf people to make them scared and thus more compliant. A good example of this is the case of Emmet Till a 14 year old boy who made the mistake of playfully flirting with a white woman, who was beaten nearly to death, had one of his eyes gouged out, was then shot in the head, and tied to some cotton mill equipment before his body was thrown in a river. This wasn’t even that long ago, the beating happened on the 28th of August 1955.

THE next parts are also gonna be not great but there wont be anymore descriptions of graphic violence, so I’m calling an end to the sensitive content warning. So the then how does sharecropping play into all this and what does it have to do with the blues (we’re getting there babes I promise.) So as I explained previously, sharecropping was a part of the Jim Crow economic era. It was part of the era of reconstruction meaning the period of rebuilding after the civil war. How it worked was that let’s say for a second, come with me into the theater of the mind for a second, take a seat, close your eyes, take a deep breath, Ok so lets imagine for a second you’re a farmer in the south, the civil war has kinda left you in a spot, if you’re black, you’re starting off without an awful lot, you don’t have any generational wealth you don’t have property likely aside from maybe a relatively small plot of land (but this was uncommon,) you probably didn’t have much if any equipment because that would have been way too expensive, and the land you may have had may have been of shitty quality. So what could you do to earn yourself a living?! Well you would go to a landowner, and ask him rather kindly if you might be able to work the land they lived on in exchange for some of the profits of the crops that you would produce. The landowner would provide you with the tools, seed, housing, land, store credits at local shops in order to subsist offa for food and other supplies and sometimes a mule in order to help you work the land seeing as motorized machinery was still few and far between in the united states at this point. The issue of this system is that how much you receive for you labour, the cut that you actually get from selling crops, that you grew with ur own backbreaking labour, is more or less decided by your landowner. And as I mentioned last episode, those who’ve ever had to rely on the benevolence of a boss for any period of time knows that this shit ain’t gonna cut it. So often you would end up underpaid, underfed, and in a debt hole that lasted as long as you did. If it sounds like legal slavery that’s kinda because it was. You would basically remain in indentured servitude to the landowner for as long as you were a part of this system. Like don’t get me wrong there were people who managed to not be a part of it but it was an incredibly largescale problem.

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a black phenomenon either, white tenants of sharecroppers existed and in incredibly large numbers as well. By 1900, 36 percent of all white farmers in Mississippi were either tenant farmers or sharecroppers (by comparison, 85 percent of all black farmers in 1900 did not own the land they farmed). This all sucks for various reasons but like partially because there was this whole other plan proposed that after the war, all the land that had been seized from slave owners would have been divvied up to the newly freed slave populations. It was colloquially known as the 40 acres and a mule plan but yeah unfortunately never happened cause fuckin president Andrew Johnson was like ”WELL AKSHULLY SWEATY I THINK THE LAND SHOULD GO BACK TO SLAVE OWNERS BECAUSE UHHHHHH” AND THEN IT DID AND THEN WE ENDED UP WITH SHARE CROPPING. But anyway that’s sharecropping. And of course I could go onto describe how all of this still affects black people in the united states and how the effects of systematic racism are still being felt generations later but… we’re gonna save that for a different episode. FOR NOW THOUGH, WHY IS THIS ALL IMPORTANT, WHY DID I TAKE ROUGHLY 3000 WORDS TO TELL YOU GUYS ABOUT THE HORRORS OF RECONSTRUCTION ERA SOUTH!? Well because we’re talking about the blues, and what does it mean when you have the blues, it means that you’re sad as hell, given all that I’ve just described to you is it no wonder that the blues emerged as the soundtrack to the lives these people lived?

So then what is blues? Well as I mentioned last time, blues sort of develops out of the field holler/spiritual tradition. A fair amount of field hollers, a type of work song that enslaved peoples would sing in fields while they were doing their work, were about regular ass things for regular ass peoples; this dude stole my girl, im gonna find me a girl to love, life sucks and im gonna sing about it, life doesn’t suck so much but I’m still gonna sing about it. Blues then tended to explore more themes related to the sadder points of those stories but in similar ways and styles. So where did blues come from specifically, what makes it a different genre than a field holler or a spiritual, and that’s a great question so let’s get in it.

Let’s say for a second you went through a real shitty period in your life, you significant other named steve dumped you, your pet armadillo, also named steve, died, ur mom (also coincidentally named steve) has taken away your showering privileges, you’ve forgotten how to speak ur native language and to top it all off you just burnt your gotdamn mac and cheese. You spiral into a deep situational depression that lasts quite a little while. During this time you listen to one album on repeat just over and over again, you know it all inside out and backwards and diagonal, you know every instrumental part by heart, you’ve got the lyrics tattooed on your ass, the whole 9 yards. And then you start working your way out of it, slowly but steadily the days start getting brighter, you move out of your abusive mother’s house, you find a new partner or get comfortable being single, you appropriately morn the loss of ur pet armadillo, hell you even learn to make a better mac and cheese, things aren’t all fixed, and life isn’t breezes and cakes but it is ever so slightly easier than it was before, at least you have ur freedom right? BUT NOW, everytime you listen to one of those songs from that album it mentally brings you back to the way things used to be and it’s not great. Well that’s kinda what happened with blues music but, ya know, infinitely worse. Essentially, black people wanted a new sound to accompany this new life and so they fuckin made it and it’s great.

The similarities of blues to field hollers and spirituals are relatively easy enough to hear if you know where to look which isn’t really surprising given that blues is the evolution of it. For example the basic structure stayed pretty similar, simple rhyming schemes, simple harmonies, melismatic vocal structures in places, and many times the lyrics were often very similar to those forms before them. But it goes even further than that! Most of the early blues melodies were directly derived from their spiritual predecessors. So for some comparison here’s some songs, first one is gonna be a field holler, next one is gonna be a spiritual, and then the last one is gonna be a blues song mmk? And here we go:

AND ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT WAIT, JUST CAUSE IM FUCKIN, OOO BABE, OK, SO WHEN I WAS RESARCHING THIS FUCKING EPISODE I WAS TRYING TO FIND GOOD AUDIO CLIPS TO USE, AND LEMME TELL YA MAN YOU WOULDN’T THINK SPIRITUALS WOULD FUCKIN EXIST OUTSIDE THE LIBRARY OF FUCKING CONGRESS CAUSE APPARENTLY THEY HAVE A GODDAMN STRANGLEHOLD ON ALL BLACK SPIRITUALS EVER RECORDED BY THE LOMAX’S. The thing is is that fuckin copyright at least in the states is supposed to run out 75 years after the death of the recorder or fucking owner of the rights, which it certainly has been for Alan Fucking Lomax BUT NOOOOOOO, I HAVE TO NEARLY PURCHASE A GODDAMN CD IN ORDER TO GET YOU GUYS A FUCKING ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF MUSIC THAT CAME OUT LIKE 100 YEARS AGO. To be clear I refuse to buy anything for this podcast other than my recording equipment, but man researching this podcast is big joab hours, god just keeps fuckin testing me. Just slap my ass and call me a pickle, ok, rage is over, time for songs:

These freed populations wanted a new music, a music that fit their current situation better, that didn’t rely on the imagery of the past in order to get across the situation they were in. And so that’s what blues did, it was a new sound for a new era and even more importantly it was a sound entirely their own. Whereas field hollers and various other types of music sung by enslaved peoples were by definition their invention, many of them still borrowed heavily from the dominant cultures of their oppressors, and so in creating blues what they had was something they could 100% call their own. Even if they didn’t own the land they worked/lived on, and had few rights to the crops they sewed and reaped, they did have blues, and that’s something beautiful.

But when does it become a thing, like when does blues start becoming a thing? And that’s a hard part. Like any cultural phenomenon it’s hard to fuckin say, there’s some accounts that say 1865 like the fuckin second the civil war ended, then there’s some that attribute it to the 1920s. Most of the sources I’ve looked at put it around 1890-1910. It originates unsurprisingly in and around the Mississippi Delta Region and East Texas where you have a lot of farmland and thus a lot of poor folks just trying to scratch out a living for themselves. AND SO THE BLUES BECOMES A THING AND IT’S COOL AS HELL AND IT DEVELOPS IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS! And I’m sorry that I’m not gonna get enough time to do every subgenre of blues, but we’re gonna look at 3 of the big regions or subgenres of blues.

So blues first of all have all those things that I mentioned before simple rhyming schemes, like ABAB or ABCC, simple harmonies, Call and response is definitely a thing that still happens in this specific style, but then they also have blues notes, for those who missed the last episode, blues notes are notes within a standard scale that are “bent” (or at least that’s how they were initially described.) These notes are lowered by a semitone making the overall colour of the sound a bit darker and more… emotional, sad? Like we ascribe emotions to the way things sound and that might be western centric, I’m actually gonna have to look into it later, but for western listeners we’re gonna read the emotion in these tones as sad. So the notes specifically are lowered the 3rd 5th and 7th degrees of a regular scale. I’m going to play you guys an example of blues scale in just a second but the guy playing the example is using the pentatonic version of the scale meaning only 5 notes of it.

In terms of instruments the most standard you’re going to find in any blues band is at it’s most basic one guitar and a person singing. You could even make an argument that just singing could be blues if you’re using a blues scale but usually there will at least a guitar and one dude singing. The rest of the intstruments are gonna depend on the region you’re playing from. So remember the moaning thing I mentioned last time? The moaning style vocals? Not pioneered by but made popular by a man that went by Blind Lemon Jefferson? This one:

Well he falls under the Mississippi/Texas type of blues which we’re gonna call texasippi. It differs from other types of blues in the united states for a couple reasons but one of them is that moaning style of vocals, in other parts of the country the style where the blues vocals function similarly to other styles of singing, clean and clear, no moaning. Another cool thing that texasippi blues also does is they incorporate a lot of metal into the way they play their guitars. Not like the heavy screamy kind that’s come to be MY fave, but like actual metal objects! How they incorporate this is through the strings of the guitar specifically causing a little extra twangy buzzing when the strings resonate but also a sort of pleasing screech when they’re shifted up and down the strings like this:

but what did they use to make this sound? Well just about anything small enough and metal you could thread between the strings or held against them while playing, this coulda been bottle caps, pocket knives, silverware. Remember, we’re still talking about a type of music that was very much being played by people without very much or no money, so you’re using what you can to make it. Nowadays you can purchase wee cylanders made of glass or metal that go over ur fingers that you press up against the strings to create the desired effect. In addition to this, something that’s pretty regional to the blues in this area is the harmonica. I’m assuming most of you know about the harmonica and have heard it but for those who don’t, the harmonica is a squanky reed instrument that you play with your mouth. I would tell you the physics of how it works but fuck if I ever studied physics. Basically when you blow in it, it vibrates the reed and makes a note depending on the holes you blow into, and when you suck air in it, it makes other sounds! They can be very very large or very very small thus changing how low or high the sound is respectively. They were invented somewhere in the early 1800s in Germany we think and they sound something like this:

How were harmonicas introduced into blues music? Well turns out, much like some of the other instruments we’ll see in a hot minute, harmonicas were often carried by soldiers during the American civil war, even President Abraham Lincoln himself was reported to have carried a harmonica with him in his coat pocket and would play it as he “found it comforting.” Thing about the harmonica was that it was relatively easy to make and it was extremely cheap to buy in comparison to other instruments at the time, even better was that you really didn’t need lessons to figure out how to make it sound good. So during the reconstruction period, as industrialization rapidized in America, and harmonicas became more available, and previous soldiers reminisced about the songs they heard played in their camps during the civil war, more and more people started picking up the harmonica. And so poor southern americans were able to incorporate the instrument into this new music they were developing like this:

Also I would big time recommend just watching the video for that song, dudes just sittin there legit just suckin on his harmonica at some point, that’s what I fucking call dedication bud. The cool part about blues from the texasippi way is then during the great migration, the phenomenon that I mentioned last episode, where black southerners just start heading northwards, is that the blues travels with them too. Just briefly on the great migration, remember all the shitty stuff I discussed earlier, the lack of work, sharecropping, lynching and what have you? That’s why the great migration takes place. Basically black people all around the south are going jesus fucking christ shit sucks let’s get out of here and find somewhere better to be, and so they do, and about 6 MILLION Black Americans head north to where it’s… better. I mean there’s definitely still racism and all sorts of jim crow era laws and practices up north but it is still some degree better than the south. So this great migration is how texasippi blues music then comes to be transplanted into Chicago, and turns into Chicago blues.

“BUT LAURA” YOU SAY, UR HANDS CLENCHED INTO FISTS AT UR SIDES, “IF TEXASIPPI BLUES IS THE SAME AS THE ONES IN CHICAGO THEN HOW’RE THEY DIFFERENT!?” YOU CRY WITH TEARS FORMING AT THE SIDES OF YOUR EYES. And you’re right b, they are the same so why are they different? Well ya gotta remember that time does funny stuff to music similarly as it does with language and just abut anything else, things change over time, AND, things get invented over time. And time as we’re moving into now is like 30s and 40s era. So in the case of Chicago blues we get the additives of the piano, which has been around for some time but people are now just being able to put into their blues music due to becoming more financially stable, BUT WE ALSO GET THE COOL NEW INVENTION OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR. Now there is some speculation over the invention of most things throughout history, for example, y’all might be familiar of Thomas Edison not actually inventing the lightbulb and being a bit of a dick about things, so when I talk about inventors of things, unless otherwise stated, please take it with some amount of a grain of salt. So Paul H Tutmarc may have been the first person to invent the first electric guitar when he managed, by some feat of science, which I will not explain because science is for wizards and freeks and while I am both of those I am not at all qualified or able to explain it, but essentially he managed to electrify a Hawaiian guitar! He supposedly invented this sometime in the 1930s. Here’s an example of what that sounds like:

Very Spongebobby… spongeboblike…spongebobesque… so EITHERWAY the electric guitar, as well as the electric bass is invented and so those are then infused into Chicago blues. In some cases you will also get the addition of drums and saxophone, but it is the electrified elements as well as the piano that really characterize the biggest difference between Chicago blues and texasippi blues. Overall, it sounds like this:

Something you also probably heard in there was just the level of intensity, the volume or what I’m gonna call the perceived volume, is louder. Whereas the songs of the texasippi blues is a little softer, quieter, very much just dude and his guitar volume, Chicago blues is gonna sound a little louder and a little more intense at most times. This is due to blues clubs becoming a big thing during this time period. And why shouldn’t they? In diaspora communities, that is communities consisting of people from a similar ethnic or national background, you often get patterns of similar settlement. So in our case, when Black Americans started moving northward, they would often settle in similar communities or move into similar communities based off of their ethnicity. Afterall you wanna be able to live in places where people understand your experience. There’s also the element of racism of course, homeowners associations making it hard for Black folk to move into white neighbourhoods and of course school segregation which didn’t end until the 1954. So while in some cases there was def an element of wanting to feel safe in a community of people who understand you, there’s also a big ol element of racism as there pretty much always is when we talk about anything. Seriously ur gonna be surprised at how far reaching and fucking just convoluted and stupid racism is, especially when we get into like Europeans being racist against other Europeans. So since we have all these people moving up north they need to be entertained, we all need entertainment after-all, but lo and behold! They can’t go to white clubs in a lot of cases because fucking racism (unless you are a performer in which case sometimes you can go to white clubs but only to perform, I’m gonna get more into that when we have our jazz episode.) So we start having blues clubs and because they’re a club and there’s drinking and talking and what not, often these songs tend to be a little louder or more rowdy to compensate.

On the other end of the country we also have my favorite flavour of blues which is the New Orleans blues. I’m definitely 100 percent biased when I say this but why does everything in New Orleans just sound better? If I had to guess it’s the multiculturalism and thus people bringing in tonnes of different ideas, but it’s hard to quantify awesome so we’re just gonna leave it there. BUT YEAH so we have texasippi blues that travels down the river (cause things rarely travel up a river) and hits New Orleans. But again, if we’re talking about the same style of blues then what makes it different? A lot hunny, a lot. So as we talked about in our last episode there’s a lot of different cultural elements at play in Louisianna culminating in some cool ass musical styles and changes. It’s also absolutely something we’re gonna talk about when we go back and do the Jazz episode cause lord knows New Orleans jazz is just as fuckin hot and dangerous (like serious lemme just go fuckin hangout with you guys down there, that’s all I want, musical tour of louisianna) I will say though that the line between jazz and blues does tend to get a little blurry though when we’re talking about New Orleans Blues so just hold onto ur femurs there yall and strap in.

So New orleans blues is different from other types of blues again by incorporating horns and piano into the music, most notably this will be the trumpet cause trumpets after the civil war just kinda leached out into the general public and since people got used to them in that capacity they became sorta naturally engrained into the soundscape of the music of the area. “but laura doesn’t Chicago also have horns?!” and ur right man they absolutely do, but there’s even more. So where texasippi blues relies on a rather standard rhythms in most cases, the New Orleans Blues scene takes from some of that different heritage and combines Caribbean inspired or based rhythms. We can find a good example of the inspiration for those rhythms in another genre of music that was popular at the same time, Calypso. Calypso is a genre of music which we will look more in depth in the future but just really generally for now it is popular in the Caribbean as well as certain parts, South America (particularly Venezuela), Mexico, and of course New Orleans during this time. It is usually up-beat and relies a lot on emphasizing the offbeat, and these are all things that we hear being incorporated into New Orleans blues during the time. So when we hear blues from New Orleans, one of the things we can usually use to tell the difference is merely just the upbeat tempo of things and slightly more rhythmically complex manner in which it existed. In fact Blues in New Orleans was so fuckin different it actually started what we know of as R&B or rhythm and blues which sounds like this:

Just a quick detour, I fuckin love like, blues and jazz names. The Man I played just there was Roy Brown but man the names really take off on occasion my personal favorite being Guitar Slim Jr., but we also got Fats domino (sometimes just known as fats, or the fat man), we god fuckin Professor Longhair, we got a dude who just goes by the name sugar boy, like… guys…. What happened to nicknames like that, I wanna walk around and when people see me comin at a distance they just point and go oh lord here comes swamp papa, like, that’s livin man, I dunno what to tell you but that’s absolutely livin.

Anyhow, what ur gonna notice, or maybe you didn’t notice but I’m gonna tell you and you can go back and notice is that blues, (along with jazz but we’re gonna get to that) as it goes on and evolves starts sounding a lot like early rock and roll music, and that doesn’t happen by coincidence. Also you’re probably noticing that blues at least as far as it goes for the Chicago variety and the New Orleans variety we talked about, sound a hell of a lot like Jazz and again we’ll get more into the specifics later. The thing is when we talk about invention, whether it be music, or physical things, or even sometimes schools of thought and ideas is that things get borrowed and changed and moulded into something else by other people. Hell the phenomenon of something being invented in multiple different places at the same time is so common enough that it even has a name, it’s called multiple discovery. Generally people in North America prefer a more black and white “this thing was developed at this time and this place by this person because definitive reason definitive reason definitive reason.” Because we have this weird sense of individuality and crediting individuals with discovery as opposed to a group or the society itself as maybe it should more rightly be. This means that in our endless want to categorize and systematize and ize all these things, particularly things like music, it gets sorta difficult to discern what is what and why and how. Of course we’ve already seen this with spirituals and gospel, and now we’ve seen it with blues/jazz/and early rock.

I just wanted to bring it up sooner than later because, especially as we move into more modern north American Genres, and honestly genres from various other places throughout the world. I wanted to bring this up now before we go any further in this podcast because as we get into more modern genres and hell maybe even with this episode I imagine I might get some rather angry mail from elitests who will smash their foreheads on the keyboard in absolute blind fuckin dismay and rage accusing me of putting the wrong genre lables on the wrong songs. The thing is though, like most art, or definitions in life, things are salient. Just because music fits one genre doesn’t mean it only fits within that genre, in the case of the Rhythm and Blues song by Roy brown that I played earlier, while it is definitely Rhythm and Blues there’s also gonna be other people who strongly consider that Rock and Roll. And that’s alright! Music doesn’t have to rigidly fit into one genre, we give things genre titles or group things into genres to help more easily understand their histories and identify other things that sound like it! All music is going to have variation, and in the case of rhythm and blues, a style of blues that very much informs early rock, you’re going to have cross roads like that. So instead of getting defensive, maybe take some time to think about how cool it is that music exists on an ever evolving spectrum.

So with that, that’s all for just a music podcast this week, I hope you’ve heard something new, and I hope you’ve heard something that you like. If you haven’t there’s always next time where we’re actually gonna do something a little different. Next time we’re gonna look at the Minstrel show which I’m subtitling right now, “why we don’t wear black face.” In the meantime, though if one of y’all would like to suggest a topic I would love nothing more than to answer your musical questions or talk about topics that interest you guys in music. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]

List of Music: Jump Jim Crow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIXWRG09Qk

Belton Sutherland's field holler (1978) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CPJwt14d5E&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=2

Wash Dennis & Charlie Sims - Lead Me To The Rock - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmPqmLovNms&list=PLAyuUbD3Cdhxx__cTlFDrkxxKiYllrYwJ&index=4

Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell - How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEw0ek2BhJE

Blind Lemon Jefferson – Black Snake Moan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU&feature=emb_logo

Red River Valley -Traditional - Harmonica solo by Kyong H. Lee - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKM4bn4kS-0

Sonny Boy Williamson - Keep it to Yourself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtRxJDb3vlw

Paul Tutmarc performs - My Tane - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUOms5y6cmI

Buddy Guy - First Time I Met The Blues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1jruvTBleY

Roy Brown - Mighty Mighty Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhp8jMykAVg

Technical Clip I used: PianoPig (on youtube) - Minor Pentatonic vs Blues Scale https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwz0b-At1ys

#music #music podcast #podcast #just a music podcast #music history

13 notes · View notes

hqgolden · 3 years

Text

hello loves!

so we have mentioned a few things in the discord, but as always that is not official until you see it here. the two topics are character additions & a gossip blog. i’m going to put everything under a read more since this will probably get long, but there is a poll linked beneath that i want you to vote on after you’ve read through what these proposed ideas are!

on character additions:

i originally had a low limit because personally, i didn’t think i would be able to handle that many muses. with the help of the others & my other roleplays closing / being left, that is no longer the case. i personally prefer to play close to ten characters, however i am not willing to let that be the case here. i know we seem to have polls for character additions often, and the last one was pretty close, but i want to explain some things about this final proposal.

the final character per player cap is suggested to be raised to 6. however with these final two muses comes extra guidelines. as an admin team we will require them BOTH to be diverse, so body diverse, age diverse (35+), non-cis, gender diverse, or people of color. these two have nothing to do with your already standing ratio, it does not matter what your other characters are, these diversity rules apply to muses five & six specifically. additionally to even be allowed these muses, you must not have been on an activity check or hiatus in a week, and it must be 5 days after you were granted your fourth character (from their follow if you submitted an account or their acceptance if you are using a multi-muse).

and we as admins will be monitoring your activity. if you have shown a tendency to only rp with certain people, extremely favor ships, or post just to pass checks, we can deny you. i don’t want this to sound too harsh, but 6 characters is a lot to handle and we aren’t willing to let people who are already struggling or barely posting to get that high. you all know how strict i am about not allowing people to just hog spaces here.

and this will be the very last allowance for a character cap raise. i typically hate saying things like this because i do admit that circumstances change and maybe we might raise it in the future, but i have no plans to allow this cap to raise anytime soon. the only reason i am willing to do it now is because we aren’t as full as we were when we opened and so i don’t see an issue in allowing a member who can be dedicated to six characters and actively play them to hold those spaces.

so yeah, here is that poll. we will let it run for a full 24 hours before decisions are made.

on a gossip blog:

gossip blogs can be a lot of fun, however they can also cause a lot of toxicity in a roleplay. as an admin who has run one, i often would find myself sort of stuck when i would get an anon about a character that was particularly nasty. when i reached out to the player about it, turns out 90% of the time they are the ones that sent it.

so my proposal is to allow a gossip blog that sort of operates more like a news letter where the admins compile the gossip and post it. we might still answer asks, but in a format that the original ask is no posted, and here’s why:

any gossip sent in will only be off anon & you can only bring up your own characters. this way the admins can ensure that you are comfortable with what is being shared and said, and it completely removes the ability of someone to bully another character on anon. as admins we may come up with additional things to post based off of threads we’ve read or chats in the discord, but we will approach all members involved to get permission before just posting anything about your character.

this blog will be silly, and fun, with things like “lost chinchilla found on 8th floor” not just who is hooking up with each other. this is meant to be a fun addition, not a toxic place where only “popular” characters are mentioned. and by having members be responsible for sending things in about their characters, it removes a lot of issues that i think are what cause the blog to end up being about the same characters.

also i doubt we will do any type of superlative things, in fact we are pretty against it. so none of that “best smile,” “top 5 prettiest,” or any fmk stuff.

so yeah, just like with above here is that poll, we will let it run for a full 24 hours at least before deciding anything.

pretty please <3 this post once you have voted!

#hqg.admin

5 notes · View notes

ivandra-winters · 3 years

Text

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST THAT I CAN'T PUT A TL;DR ON EVEN IF I TRIED. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN BOTH D&D AND THE MCU, YOU'RE WELCOME TO READ IT BUT DON'T FEEL AN OBLIGATION TO DO SO

So, a poll showed up in my recommended home page on Youtube that simply asked who would win in a fight: IW!Thor or Wanda as the Scarlet Witch (WandaVision!Wanda, basically). After selecting my answer, the full results of everyone who voted showed that more people believed that Thor from Infinity War would win. Now ya'll get to see me ramble about why, in fact, Wanda would win the fight. First, let me set some guidelines for the debate:

1. When debating this topic, the comics must be pushed to the side.

As convenient as that seems for evidence gathering- since, in the comics, Wanda concedes that she can't beat Thor- they have to be pushed to the side. The reason for this is that while the MCU does take inspiration from the comics (WandaVision definitely being inspired by House of M), it clearly didn't play out in the same way as it did in the comics. Mephisto wasn't involved with Billy and Tommy's birth, Agatha Harkness wasn't a servant of Mephisto, and she didn't become the mentor that she is to Wanda in the comics. Same thing goes for Thor with a few of his storylines being referenced but not followed to the letter. So obviously, the difference in power between Wanda and Thor is going to be much different from the comics.

2. We have to keep the considerations for Thor and Wanda restricted purely to the referenced media provided.

We can't say that Thor is stronger or Wanda is stronger because of powers they might gain in the future unless it's shown within the referenced media that they're still gaining power. For example, we can't say that Thor is stronger because he'll receive or might have received Odinforce, nor can we say that Wanda is stronger because she's a Nexus Being. This is because we haven't seen or heard any of this being confirmed. However, we can say that Wanda is stronger because she's shown to not only already have the reality warping capabilities inspired by the comics, but also that she's clearly being shown learning more of her powers, meaning that she's still in the process of gaining power.

3. You cannot conflate having a powerful weapon with having more innate power.

A lot of people in the comments of the poll kept saying that Thor is stronger because he has Stormbreaker and that since it could withstand the power of the Infinity Gauntlet, he could use it to beat Wanda and therefore win the fight. Allow me to explain why this is a rather flawed way of evaluating the hypothetical battle: Thor having Stormbreaker does not increase (or rather, permanently increase) his actual stats in the fight. Should Wanda separate him from the axe, Thor would lose the advantages that Stormbreaker gives him. Therefore, we cannot make the full comparison based on Thor having an easily disarmable or destroyable weapon.

With the rules out of the way, let's use D&D to properly explain why Wanda would beat Thor in a fight.

Let's say that Thor, given his experiences and age, is a Level 12 Paladin and that he leveled up in Thor: Ragnarok. He receives Stormbreaker, which is a magical weapon that allows him to go things that he previously could not (i.e. open the Bifrost). Just like magical weapons in D&D, Stormbreaker doesn't actually increase his baseline stats; at most, it can give him an advantage on saving throws (let's say it gives him +3 modifier for Strength) and resistance to certain forms of damage. Should he be disarmed of that weapon or should it be destroyed, those modifiers don't stay with him. Also, I'm putting him as a paladin since Odin was able to strip him of his power similar to how an oathbreaker could be stripped of their own power before being redeemed.

Wanda, on the other hand, is much different. Let's say that due to her power level in episode 8 of WandaVision, she's a Level 17 Sorcerer (I'm equating her creation of the Hex to the spell Wish, which is a Level 9 conjuration spell). Already, she's a formidable opponent to Thor, but both the final fight and the end credits scene spells out bad news for him. In the final battle between Agatha and Wanda, it looks like Wanda not only takes back her own magic from Agatha but also strips Agatha of her magic, too. This alone would probably bring Wanda up to Level 18, but there's more. The end credits scene of the series finale of WandaVision clearly shows Wanda studying the Darkhold and possibly learning more magic from it. Due to the fact that it looks like she's doing what Dr. Strange did in his own movie in that she's astral projecting in order to learn the spells and material faster than normal, she's most likely going to have a drastic leveling up. So, let's say that she levels up again due to her extreme studying of the Darkhold. In total, that puts her at a Level 19-20, with Level 18 at the lowest since her beating Agatha might not have caused her to level up at all.

Now that we've established their power level, I think it's pretty clear who would have the better chance. Even with Thor's strength, speed, and own magic, it's highly unlikely that he would be able to beat Wanda. However, I don't think that Wanda would straight up kill him due to Thor's natural endurance. But all Wanda would have to do is cast Hold Person on right when the fight starts and then cast Wish to either completely strip him of his powers or just disarm him of Stormbreaker so that he would have to yield. Either way, Wanda still comes out on top.

#wanda maximoff #wandavision #wandavision show #thor odinson #thor vs. wanda #thor ragnarok #marvel cinematic universe #mcu #marvel mcu #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #infinity war #stormbreaker #dungeons and dragons #dnd 5e #dnd paladin #dnd sorcerer #wanda is a level 17 sorcerer guys #thor can't compare

5 notes · View notes

ignitingmindsforliberty · 4 years

Text

Why a Republican needs a Democrat.

Fall foliage is beginning to remind us that the Holidays are just around the corner. Halloween with adults in costumes in the attempt to either relive their childhood or overcome the poor costumes parents with cameras who kept the moment for us to cringe accepting the loving attention the adult had then now grown is missed. Yet, how could they dress you in that?! If your a parent, that pic you show your child is why you either do the same to them or you seek better in allowing them to choose their own. If have it right, this is how it's been since shortly after the end of ww2. This has always been and we had believed always will be. Parents, today are facing the loss of sharing their enjoyment of their childhood and the uncertainty about the future of their children, what to plan and how to guide them when we struggle ourselves from week to week as the country's governing has become unstable, contrary and hostile. We all agree on this on thing. Those days are gone. As a people we have been shaken out of the day to day, our focus is off our goals personally and financially, we were made frightened of contracting an illness, then muzzled in attempt to keep us healthy while two very opposing political parties violently wrestle over the free world. We quickly retreated when out of the blue, violence and rioting exploded in the west and Northwest. None, no not one of us would of ever dreamed we would hear the chant "defund the police" as loud as we did as we still do since it began back in May. Just speaking for myself...I feel traumatized. I would be lying if I said I can accept this "new normal." There is nothing "new" has in common with "normal." I passed my high school English class. So, my fellow Americans, as the elections approach Halloween is in question. We all are reflecting on what went wrong and by who. no matter what news source you get your news from or how much social media is researched. One good thing has happened we all are either thinking about politics and we are now discussing the subject amongst our friends and families. Politics are no longer a taboo topic. Its not considered rude or inappropriate to discuss in grocery stores, in passing or in one another's homes with children present, young and old. Keep this One thing always in your mind and ready on your tongue. Without a two party system there is no need to vote. Elections become obsolete. Your Rights as Americans exist because of a two party system. The United States presidency has had 19 republican and 14 democratic in Office. The 111th congress was 2009-2011 with both house and senate controlled by Democrats and the sitting President. I think I can point there to say is where our current crisis originated from. Why? Its not cause they were democrats. Republicans have controlled the 115th Congress, both house and senate with the last two years of Obama and the other two years Trump. Republicans have not held the majority in the house since the 83rd Congress the year was 1952, 68yrs ago. We the people wanted less government. In 2014 Republicans controlled both the senate and the house for the first time since the 109th congress , years of 2005-2007. Yet, not the Majority which means independents' stopped that from occurring. That sent a message to both parties that we would consider other options. As We the people again considered another option for President. A man who was more like us being not establishment or a career politician. The reason to this opened mindedness? Can u guess? I couldn't until I researched it. We didn't fall for Obamas smooth speech who we listened to and didn't understand most of what he said. Be honest, I realized if I didn't understand that I wasn't alone and won't take the time to but the video footage with his sound bites, now that got my attention. The Republicans when they had control of the senate and house during the first two years of Trumps term just weren't ready or equipped to know how to handle a president who had never before November 2016 Election been in a elected office. Trump wasn't a politician whatsoever. We have as a people since 2011 been sending Washington we were tired of politicians both parties. Admit it, we considered in poor taste to mention politics at dinner and gatherings. We even dreaded the holidays; concerned if politics came up arguments would begin. God forbid if our child chose Political Science major in college; parents believed they had done something wrong, there was shame until it just couldn't be us and then blamed the school. With that being said. By our vote we must shoulder some responsibility for what has occurred. When did we start believing that by our united voice at the polls exempted ownership of governing actions made on our behalf. Remember "For the People, by the People." been a minute since any of us has heard that. With that vote it is unfair and cruel if we don't allow a business man we elected to prove that "Any American can Be President." That's another idea we haven't heard in a long time. Well, we finally made it happen. We the people broke the mold. Shook up Washington. What generations since the first congress adopted the constitution just talked about, we did it. We need to see this through, we made a choice to elect Trump. We upset the old ways things got done in Washington. Now we are suffering for that and by that suffering we can really see what these people, in the house and senate, truly are, Republican and Democrat. This November will determine not only our future but also if We The People are fit to have a democracy and will we fight for it, and discuss it . Not some far off half a world away country. This Country, Our home. #politics #elections2020 #democrats #republicians #Congress #senate # patriot

3 notes · View notes

raisingsupergirl · 3 years

Text

I Didn't Vote

Yep, you heard it right. On 11/3/20, I didn't go anywhere near the polls. I woke up, went to work, went home, and went to bed. Sure, I'd had a long day, but I certainly had a chance to swing by and punch my ticket. I thought about doing it. From the time I woke up I thought about it. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it, and I didn't really know why. Even the next day I couldn't figure it out. And I've been mulling it over since then. I still don't have a satisfying reason, but at least I have a reason. Actually, I have several.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. My first reason for not voting is ignorance. No, not on the part of the political candidates, or social media, or you. I didn't vote because I'm ignorant. I know so little about the two old guys (and there was a woman, too, right? That third-party so-and-so?) fighting to "rule" our country. Here's what I do know… First, Trump: He's filthy rich. He owns some companies (honestly couldn't tell you which ones). He had a TV show (can't remember the name) and a tower. He has been our president for the past four years, and he did some things that veterans and conservatives like (I can't tell you with certainty even one thing that he's responsible for changing). He's a republican, but I think he used to be a democrat. I also think his wife's name is Ivanka, he has a daughter, and his VP is Mike Pence. Lastly, people either love him or hate him, which has only further divided our nation. He comes off at different times as a megalomaniac, a bully, and an idiot (though he may not be any of those things. Who knows?). He has no filter, he has Twitter, and he claims that everyone else is out to lie, steal, and cheat to make him look bad, which is ironic, because his ridiculous hair does that all on its own. And now on to the other guy.

I actually forget Joe Biden's name a lot. I want to call him Pence or Kerry or even McCain. Seriously, though that's not saying much. I'm horrible with names. But I also forget what he looks like. When I think about him, all I see is Jim Carrey. Oh! That must be why I tend to call him Kerry in my head. Silly me. Now… what about him? He's a lifetime politician, he's democrat, and he's really old. I know that much. And his running mate is a woman, I think. Seems like he's probably going to be our next president based on the Electoral College, but I couldn't tell you with confidence what that means. And that's about it. Honestly, I don't know anymore than that.

But why don't I know more? Am I dumb? Well… I don't think so. I received a master's degree over a decade ago (with honors, no less), and I like to think I've only grown smarter and wiser since then. I love learning new things—ideas, talents, how things work. But one of those things just isn't politics. So, the second reason I didn't vote is disinterest (I'm racking up quite a compelling argument, I know). I've written about how I don't have a passion for BLM even though I think it's a worthy cause. And I think the main reason is because it falls under the "politics" umbrella in my mind. Too many people with too many emotions and not enough listening. I just don't have the stomach for it. I would rather spend my one life changing the world one person at a time. I'd rather show love to my neighbor (as a Christian), fix someone's knee pain (as a physical therapist), and help other people get their ideas across clearer (as an editor). And, if I'm being honest, all of the doom saying just doesn't scare me. I'm a country boy at heart, and I have simple needs. My family is small, and I have a cabin in the woods. I was sad when Y2K didn't happen. I love individual people, but I'm not a big fan of society. In large groups, people are mean and naïve. And so, fear just doesn't enter into the equation for me. Life is so much bigger than what the marketing campaigns claim.

If you haven't caught on yet, I'm a bit of a skeptic. I don't know if I was born that way, but I became aware of it in college. I didn't particularly like my research classes, but I loved learning how to read scientific articles. Specifically, I love learning how to recognize BS (Biased Science, that is…). I have a knack for seeing through it in any situation. I can generally tell when people are lying, and even though I don't know everything, I do understand concepts, theories, and ideas better than the average person. And like Aristotle (and Plato), I'm keenly aware of my own ignorance as well as that of others. I see how people embrace sensationalized "fake news" and assume causality just because of correlation. Everyone does it. I do it. But I'm aware of it. I'm aware of social media algorithms, of herd mentality, of confirmation bias. And so, the third reason I didn't vote is because I assume everyone is either lying or buying into lies (lying and bullying are my two biggest pet peeves, by the way). And we've already established that I don't have the time or the energy (or the mental capacity) to learn the truth of every political topic and use those truths to set everyone straight. But hey, at least I'm honest…

Remember when I said earlier that fear didn't factor into the equation for me? Yeah, obviously that’s not true. I mean, sure, I'm not afraid of societal collapse or the end of the world. But I'm obviously afraid of being wrong. We've established that I don't know much about Trump or Kerr—er… Biden. That I'm ignorant about politics, in general. And we know that I'm a skeptic—that I have to come to my own conclusions. And most of the time that looks like stubbornness. I hate being told what to do. I hate being micromanaged. I hate the virus on my computer that sets Bing as my default search engine instead of Google. I hate the alarm on my wife's van that makes me wear my seat belt. And I hate the Facebook banners that keep telling me it's my duty to vote. I'm a grown boy. I can make those decisions all on my own. And I will not blindly trust a random source with dubious intentions to make those decisions for me. And, as much as I love my friends, I don't buy their claims that it's my duty to vote, either. Countless brave men and women did not die for my DUTY to vote. They died for my freedom to do so. Same as my freedom to be a Christian. Which means I'm also free to NOT vote.

But why wouldn't I WANT to vote? Because I'm afraid of whom I would have voted for. I'm aware of where I live and what my local culture thinks. In short, I voted for Trump last time, and I probably would have voted for him this time. And I couldn't stomach that thought (side note: I do have one regret, and that’s not voting local. I do know people personally who were running for office--as well as local bills--but I missed the opportunity to vote on things that I DO know about because of my fear of voting for the “wrong” president). It’s not that I doubted that Trump would do positive things while in office (even though, as I said, I'm not sure what he actually did the past four years…), but I'm just so tired of everybody acting insane. There's a reason I don't have cable. There's a reason I only get on social media to post pictures and check my notifications. And while I don't buy into all the sensationalism claiming the president has ultimate power, I do believe that he has a microphone. And a Twitter account. And even though our government is based on checks and balances, our media definitely isn't. If Biden is, in fact, our president for the next four years, my only hope is that he'll keep his mouth shut.

Okay, everyone's mad at me now. And that's okay. I put myself out there. I was honest about my ignorance, my bias, and my fear, which is more than I can say about most other people (presidents included). And maybe my honesty will compel others (you?) to reevaluate the "truths" they (you?) assume are self-evident. It's taken me four years, but I finally understand what "Make America Great Again" means. What would it take for our country to be great? Accountability. That's it. If every man, woman, and child did everything possible to give back to our country, we WOULD be great. If we worked hard to repair crumbling buildings, if we painted breathtaking murals, if we learned classical philosophy and used it shape our thoughts, if we refused to blame someone else for our unhappiness, if we did everything in our INDIVIDUAL power to contribute to the greater whole, if we truly loved our neighbors and gave them the shirt off of our back regardless of their political leanings… THAT would make us great. Right now, we're all so divided. We're all so afraid and easily manipulated. I've chosen to put my time and energy into things "smaller" than politics, but that doesn't mean I don't care about the future of my country. Quite the opposite, in fact. And hopefully, when I'm dead and gone, my tombstone won't read, "The guy who didn't vote in the 2020 presidential election."

#voting #politics #trump vs biden #biden #trump #go vote #2020 presidential race

2 notes · View notes

yes-mybodymychoice-world · 4 years

Text

An Ohioan’s Letter to her Local Government and its constituents:

The coronavirus global pandemic hit our neck of the woods just shy of March 2020. It runs our headlines, dinner table conversations, fills the pages in our journals and minds. We breathe the topic of this virus in our everyday lives. As Ohioans, we find ourselves looking to our elected leaders for guidance. In the election season, I find myself thinking how pertinent it is for us to stay aware of the actions and decisions our lawmakers make for us. Mike DeWine has served our state since 2019 as Governor. Before that, he acted as Ohio's Attorney General from 2011 to his election in 2019. However, how many of us find ourselves following his decisions from office? DeWine finds himself on our nightly television screens, front-page headlines, and phone alerts as he takes the front stage with his plan of attack concerning COVID-19.

Through DeWine’s news coverage, we have easily followed his choices to shut the state of Ohio down and his mandate regarding mandatory masks in public spaces. He canceled weddings, graduations, shut down parts of our economy all for the sake of human lives. This, we understand. This we have followed in suit. We keep up with the coverage because the outcome of his decisions affects the state of our health, our financials, and our futures.

But, can we say the same thing about his decisions pertaining to abortion access? As voters in Ohio, can we assuredly say we know every decision and statement he has made in reference to women's reproductive health access? Before writing this, I, as a young voter, was unaware of all his movements regarding reproductive health access. I was unaware of his old news coverage in which Planned Parenthood sued him and Ohio for defamation after he made statements accusing P&P of putting fetal corpse tissue in landfills and then selling that same tissue, which proved to be false. Ohio taxpayers then were settled with the legal bills as a result of his defamatory remarks that were factually incorrect.

The witch hunt does not end with Planned Parenthood as our sitting Governor supported the passing of the Heartbeat Bill, which restricts abortion as early as six weeks, and then subsequently signed the bill into law. This bill holds no exceptions for rape or incest.

It is imperative to bring these two concepts together in a digestible way. Many right-winged voters have voiced their outrage at Governor Mike DeWine in response to his mandate on mandatory mask-wearing in our state through the pandemic. These voters declare it a violation of our civil liberties and that our federal and local governments have no say in what we should do with our bodies. This fight is something that rings all too close to the pro-choice voters in not just Ohio, but our entire country. These advocates have fought tirelessly to gain our right to legal abortion access for decades. So, I ask you how much are these two topics different?

We vote into our legislation elected officials who make abortion after just six weeks illegal even in the case of rape and incest. At six weeks, most women are not aware they are pregnant.

We continue to debate abortion on two separate aisles. We see this fight as either pro-choice or pro-life. But I ask of you, are you aware of who you are voting for? We rise in outrage over wearing a mask in public but not when a seventeen-year-old girl gets raped at a college party and cannot get the courage to ask her parent for signed consent. And even if she does obtain permission, she must go through two separate visits to the physician? That she must find a hospital without religious ties to get her restricted legal abortion. You might respond that she should simply go to a clinic.

Ohio has a mandate that abortion clinics must have a transfer agreement with a local hospital within thirty miles.There is no exception for rural clinics. Nothing requires hospitals to enter a transfer agreement with clinics. Ohio prohibits state hospitals, university and college hospitals from entering transfer agreements.

Where do these restrictions leave our women in Ohio? Our sisters, daughter, friends. Women who have been preyed upon or find themselves with nowhere to turn. Our women of color face a disproportionate inequality in respect to birth control access and health care. Yet, we expect them to carry on with unplanned pregnancies in a way that we see fit. What ramifications do we insist upon them because of who we elect into office?

We find ourselves rallying in our streets against wearing a mask when we go to dinner, the store, or to get our hair done.

We have found ourselves in utter outrage in response to our Governors decisions during this pandemic for just over half a year.

Imagine how our women in Ohio have felt since 2011.

My fellow constituents, I ask that you remind yourself of more than just the pandemic the next time we find ourselves in the voting polls, think of our sisters, friends, and our daughters. What do our choices do to them?

Sincerely,

An Ohio Woman

#ohio women abortion

2 notes · View notes

stoiccthulhu · 3 years

Text

Update time...actually, why should these be titled? I mean, whats the point of writing a title to these if all I’m going to do is ramble on and on with no specific topic of discussion, just several things on my mind?

Election day 2020 happened yesterday and I voted for nobody. And if I would have voiced my polling choice I would have voted for the candidate I see as being the best option in line with my thoughts and opinions concerning the state of the world at the moment as well as the future.

You can insert whomever you want to believe that would be based off an assumption and a look at my internetting footprint, but you would be wrong, but that’s part of the fun of interpreting what I’m writing down for you in the future. Trying to figure out what I’m actually saying. While it makes complete sense to me, because you don’t have the hidden key phrase you can’t decipher what it is that I am putting to digital paper.

I get it, I’m an asshole.

And this isn’t, completely, a justification towards my actions but a direct result of your intervention within my life that has caused this behaviour. Think of it sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You interpreted me, came back, and intervened in any little way imaginable. Negatively or positively, but no matter your justification, it was still an intervention that didn’t need to happen because, as Malcolm once said, “Life, finds a way.” And just like destiny, it will find a way. But enough of all that crazy talk, you’re here because you want to hear all about my political leanings and to unravel the mystery as to this anonymous random on the internet’s preferred presidential choice in the election that has already passed.

But before I do that, let’s get some shit off my chest because I tend to swear and if you don’t like it, go the hell away. I’m sick of people being sensitive over everything. As if they’re looking for any reason to complain or get offended nowadays.

“The internet has given everyone in (the world) a voice, and evidently everyone in (the world) has chosen to use that voice to bitch about (anyone they find offensive)” -Holden McNeil (with some modern revisions)

And that’s why I’ve chose not to be PC in this thing, whenever I feel the urge to put pen to paper, relatively speaking.

Like, let’s see who I can offend right off the bat.

Women need to start getting punched more and treated like human beings instead of china dolls. If you’re a pro-gender equality advocate, and you’re a woman, you need to be willing to be punched in the face for doing ANYTHING a man would otherwise be punched in the face for. They also need to be held accountable for the shit they do to everyone. I am a strong supporter in believing that no matter what women say about women controlling the government and such, while women have great communication skills, they have the worst track record when it comes to not being aggressive, biologically speaking.

In the wild, whom are normally the more aggressive of the genders? Whom is usually the one more protective of the young? more willing to go out to hunt?

To be fair, I have a very limited knowledge when it comes to the animal kingdom. But, I mean, the Black Widow is normally depicted as being a deadly female, the female preying mantis devours the head of her mate after they’re done mating. There are so many, example, of females being worse than males in nature its hard to ignore. And, to add religious believers to the list of people offended, if you’re not ignorant to science and knowledge, or at least the pursuit of it, we evolved over a long period of time from apes, which, by nature, makes us, humans, not white people, black people, yellow people(to stick to the color scheme), brown people(gotta throw the other Asian people’s in there as well), animals. Highly evolved and communicative animals, but animals none the less. Was that supposed to be one word? Nonetheless?

Doesn’t matter. So, if you stick with my logic, you’ll see that women are terrible. Terrible. But, because men like to have sex with females as opposed to men for the most part in today’s society women have a stranglehold on the pelvic reason of an entire world, which means they can make anyone, for the most part, do anything they want and see things their way, even if they’re saying the sky is as green as the skies of Namek. An example of this is perfectly laid out in a clip from That 70′s Show. Kelso and Hyde prove women can’t play fight because they’ll turn it real, for whatever reason, just because they’re girls. To prove this, Kelso and Hyde play fight, and it looks bad, but they stop, laugh, and hug it out. Then Jackie and Donna play fight, starting out playfully, but then turning it into hair pulling and needing to be pulled apart. Both visibly angry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUwxxJvtQnI

(OK, my memory was bad, it was Eric and Hyde, and it was set up differently, but the concept is still there.)

And I get it, they’re actors, being paid to do what the script is telling them to do, but it is true. Girls are worst during puberty as well, from what I’ve heard. And I get it, I have a biased standpoint being a male, but in today's culture that shouldn’t matter, it’s about what’s being said, not my gender.

Now that women are out of the way, lets also as black people, but not specifically black people, its more of a systemic form of racism that I believe shouldn’t exist. In which, if you are not of that specific race, you are not allowed to say the n-word. What makes me giggle right now is that with just that sentence every single person reading this probably got a bit riled up. A bit ruffled in the feathers because I’m not a black person. And if you weren’t, you are now, knowing what you know now.

So let me provide you with some context so you can understand how I’m not racist at the same time as saying what I said above.

I enjoy rap music and hip-hop, as do a lot of people throughout the world, black or otherwise. Which, in this current climate, would be considered one of the forms of cultural appropriation we tend to sweep under the rug because it doesn’t fit our narrative of being offended about something. Because I like rap music I tend to learn the word to all of the songs I enjoy listening to. Because I learn the words to the songs that I enjoy listening to I sing along. But, because I’m not black, I have to ruin my flow to edit myself just because the artist chose to use nigger in their song. Which, as an artist, is their choice.

Now, why should I have to edit myself? I have tried to replace it with “wigger”, but because of the closeness of the words, I felt that would still be offensive if I was ever overheard by the wrong black person who, understandably, would be mad if they heard a pasty white boy say the word nigger without any context.

I just think, unless the person is using the word in a hateful way, directed at the person the speaker either personally knows or is conciously speaking about, as in “i hate that nigger” or “you’re a nigger”. If it’s something like that, totally beat the shit out of that racist.

But if you’re singing along to Wu-Tang, and you say:

I be that insane nigga from the psycho ward I'm on the trigger, plus I got the Wu-Tang sword So how you figure, that you can even fuck with mine? Hey, yo, RZA! Hit me with that shit one time! And pull a foul, niggas, save the beef for the cow I'm milkin' this ho, this is my show, Tical! The fuck you wanna do on this mic piece, duke? I'm like a sniper, hyper off the ginseng root PLO Style, buddha monks with the owls Now who's the fuckin' man? Meth-Tical It shouldn’t be labelled as being racist.

There is more rattling around in my head right now, things that I’ve been thinking about for years, and things that have been bothering me for just about as long, but for now those were the two that fell out when I vomited all over my keyboard.

And if you’re offended. Get over it. You need to start.

Oh, I almost forgot. I was going to tell you whom it was I was going to vote for yesterday if I had voted for anybody. Jokingly I wanted to write-in “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. But in truth I was going to vote for Biden. Not because I thought he was the better candidate, but because there was not a good option at all, he was just the lesser of two evils. This election has made me decide I want a third option when it comes to my politicians, or at least, get rid of political parties all together. We spend so much time infighting and holding each other back instead of up no real change has happened in the past decade? Longer? And whatever change that does happen gets nitpicked apart so much it becomes a shell of its former self. But, enough about that. I have a baby demanding eggs and waffles and I still need to tag this.

1 note · View note

douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT WEB

You only take one shower in the morning, and if you're thinking about investors during it, then you're not thinking about the product. Clothing is only the most visible battleground in the war against formality. But I don't think it's worth putting a lot of popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them slow to load and sent the user the message: this is our site, not yours. The main significance of this type. Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. They're sailing with the wind, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. What next? Cofounders are for a startup. Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. And even that's going to be hearing in the press about what Jessica has achieved.

But in her case it goes beyond that. Most startups don't manage to. If you're ramen profitable, everything changes. I was interested in AI a hot topic then, he told me I should major in math it will be better for your own morale, which is usually unanimous. So I've thought a lot about specific, cool problems. Subject FREE Subject Free Subject free FREE! In the best case, though. Not those guys are working on a great idea. Ramen profitable means no more than the definition implies.

What happened to him? By similar comparisons you can make without using sales talk. When I said I was speaking at a high school student. Since there didn't seem any way to answer that is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future should not depend much on how you deal with html. In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. A round. That's a filtering rate of 92% with 1. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. Sometimes they even agree with one another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize how much room there is for a startup to be cheap. I do this by the small size of their corpus, but if your company was making software for building web sites, you could degrade fairly gracefully into consulting by building sites for clients with it. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms are biased against female founders.

There's a fundamental problem in computer science generally tried to conceal it. Google set off the tagging movement. Unfortunately, t is still very far from infinity. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a concentration of smart people too, but again, diluted; there are two great universities, but they're far apart. So I'm going to tell you what sort of people you're among. And the advantage of a PhD besides being the union card of academia, of course may be that a significant number of those who voted for Kerry felt virtuous for doing so, and were eager to tell pollsters they had. Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of the Bradley Effect. Another reason attention worries her is that she hates attention, but because you shouldn't have a fixed amount you need to find out. So when something seemed amiss to them, they don't realize how much room there is for a startup to a standstill while raising money. Those require experience. Prep schools openly say this is one of the most striking things I've read was not in a book, but the truth turns out to be. Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out.

And that is just what tends to happen. What I came up with was: someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself. What will happen when they do, apparently, is note down the age and race and sex of the person, and guess from that who they voted for. Control the channel and you could feed them what you wanted, on your terms. It costs not just the message, but the effect on your morale and your bargaining position is anything but. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it. Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. When I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114.

1 note · View note

didanawisgi · 4 years

Text

CAN WE PULL BACK FROM THE BRINK?

Sam Harris, June 18, 2020

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

“OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we’ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next? Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop. It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

19 percent more likely to draw their guns

24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology. We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.”

#sam harris #philosophy #politics #controversy

1 note · View note

blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years

Text

walaw17 asked: Any thoughts on Scottish independence?

I have tried avoiding answers about Scottish independence and by proxy Brexit because like everyone else I am just bored into numbness by the whole on-going soap opera saga. There’s no escaping it. Even within families the conversation around the dinner table is about the next referendum and by proxy, Brexit.

I have Scottish roots on my father’s side and so when I meet my Scottish cousins up in Scotland for weddings, funerals and the like the topic does come up. This summer I was up in the Angus glens for the annual ‘Glorious 12th’ - the start of the shooting season - to join a family shooting party to shoot grouse and share a feast afterwards.

Most of the clan and family friends gathered would be High Tory. Thus they are very much in favour of the Union as they are strong monarchists to boot - even if they have fought for and against the crown at different times in their gilded past. They remain fierce Scottish patriots to the extent that they (good naturedly!) admonish me for taking my Scottish ancestry for granted and being ‘Anglicised’ on my father’s side.

I believe the Scots are for the largely loyal to the Union and they proved that at the last referendum on Scottish independence. But Brexit is now added into the mix and its has clouded the picture somewhat for many Scots. It’s easy to see why.

If I take the Scottish part of my family and their clan. As loyal as they are to the Union there were grumblings about how Scotland seems to be pushed to the margins as Little Englanders run around and use the cover of nationalist fervour to concentrate wealth and power in the City of London to become a free market Singapore 2.0. Even worse leave the United Kingdom vulnerable to the whimsical mercies of Donald Trump if we ever did a trade deal.

Where the Scots differ from the English is that they are natural Euro-philes. Scotland has always been close to France - even shared past Queens. The Scots are naturally outward looking people who in their proud history have always been travelers to the world - to seek work, or settle in new lands, or to trade. Look at the the British Empire, the Scots virtualy ran the empire and even populated it as far as India and North America. So one can’t ignore the impulse of the Scots to not turn its back on Europe.

The first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, now proposes a second Scottish referendum. While politically justifiable even if it’s opportunistic, this is not the best way forward.

Less than three years removed from the first referendum, in which Scotland voted to remain in the UK by 55%, the question of national sovereignty returns to the political forefront. While 52% of the UK opted to leave the EU, 62% of Scots voted to remain Citing the manifesto of her Scottish National Party (SNP), which holds the majority in the Scottish Parliament, Ms. Sturgeon stated that Brexit constitutes a significant and material change from the 2014 vote and a new referendum is necessary. In this, the first minister is right to call for a referendum, as circumstances have unquestionably changed. Forced to leave a union most Scots prefer, the nation should have the right to reevaluate the partnership with their southern neighbours.

Scotland is better off remaining part of the UK than leaving it. The SNP, a separatist group at heart, is misleading its countrymen by saying otherwise. The timetable set by Ms. Sturgeon places undue pressure to resolve Brexit during an already tight window of two years. With Greenland taking roughly seven years to finalise its departure from the European Economic Community, it is hard to believe the UK, a political and economic behemoth in the region, departing in a mere couple. The timetable also provides Scots with little ability to make an informed decision. Much uncertainty exists regarding Brexit and its future ramifications for the UK after Oct 31st. These are not empty words, as Scots increasingly believe that there should not be another referendum in the next few years.

Even for a leader with high approval ratings like Ms. Sturgeon, referendums are risky. The first minister need not look further than her European counterparts, where referendums in the UK and Italy led to the self-inflicted downfalls of David Cameron and Matteo Renzi. Ms. Sturgeon would be wise to learn from the past, as referendums can have dire and unpredictable consequences on a political career. She should act more like the citizens she was elected to represent, who currently have little appetite for another vote. Even if one were held, the most recent polls shows only 37% of Scots supporting Scottish independence.

Arguing for departure from the UK may play well politically, but it would have disastrous ramifications for the small northern nation.

How did we get here?

Through the inattention of the leaders of the British government of the two major political parties is one obvious answer. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was eager to devolve power from London to representative assemblies in Scotland and Wales, despite the constitutional problems. Large majorities of Scottish and Welsh parliamentary constituencies elect Labour members of the House of Commons, and particularly in Scotland there was deep discontent with the policies of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They associated them with the inevitable decline of Scotland’s heavy industries — steel, shipbuilding — and the high unemployment that resulted. Glasgow, once the proud “Second City of the Empire,” as you can readily imagine when you see its impressive century-old downtown office buildings, was particularly hard hit. Scotland, since the Act of Union of 1707, has provided a disproportionate share of Britain’s philosophers, statesmen (11 prime ministers including its most recent in Blair, Brown, and even Cameron), colonial administrators and military officers and men.

Now the Scottish economy is dominated by the public sector, and the Scots are suffused with self-pity over what they regard as the underfunding of the welfare state. Scotland’s second Parliament went into operation in 1999, with Labour party stalwart Donald Dewar as chief minister and with power over much of Scottish domestic policy, including the ability to raise taxes. Indeed under the 1707 Act of Union, Scotland retained Scottish law rather than the English common law, kept the Presbyterian established Church of Scotland rather than the episcopal established Church of England; and under later legislation ran its own education system.

But in 2007, as Labour’s popularity was declining in the UK generally, Labour lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish National Party’s Alex Salmond became chief minister. With a Scots Nats majority, Salmond pushed for the referendum and he got an apparently absent-minded Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to agree to terms favourable to the separatists: the 16-year-old vote, the exclusion of Scots in the military or otherwise living outside Scotland, the fact that a “yes” vote favours separation rather than continuation of a relationship that has produced one of the world’s greatest nations for 307 years.

Scottish independence advocates argue that an independent Scotland will be able to tax itself to its heart’s content and will be able to draw on endless North Sea oil revenues to pay for whatever level of social services and community provision Scots want. But that’s unlikely. North Sea oil production is declining, and a pro-independence vote would be followed by negotiations between England (or rUK, rest of United Kingdom, as some dub it) over the division of oil resources — and division of the national debt.

UK authorities have made it plain that Scotland is not welcome to retain the UK pound, and that if it does (as Panama and Ecuador have the U.S. dollar as their currency), Scottish financial institutions won’t get a bailout if they get into trouble. So it seems likely that the two major Scottish banks and other financial institutions will move their headquarters and legal residence to London if Scotland votes for independence.

The EU’s doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’ seems superficially pro-devolution and the Treaty of Maastricht created the ‘European Committee of the Regions’ to promote regional identities against national capitals. But what is the reality? Neither Spain nor France will permit the precedent of secessionists joining the EU. During the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum, the European Commission said Scotland would not inherit the UK’s membership of the EU.

Brussels instinctively backed Madrid against Catalonia, prompting famous Breton musician Alan Stivell to lament “Catalonia’s political prisoners represents the suicide of the idea of Europe”. And the EU has a poor track record of looking after small states like Ireland. Brussels forced two ‘People’s Votes’ after Irish referendums went against the Nice and Lisbon treaties. The bail-out imposed on Irish taxpayers, politicisation of the Irish border and Corporation Tax harmonisation fuel rising Irish Euro-scepticism.

For all this politics are about passion and not reason, especially when you deal in mobilising (low information fed) populist sentiment.

This is why I fear that the economic arguments against Scottish independence, while strong on the merits, are less likely to be persuasive than an appeal to cosmopolitanism and history: the fact that Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, has in many ways led the world over the last 307 years, intellectually in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (which helped inspire America’s Founding Fathers), economically in the industrial revolution, politically in the British Empire and then the British Commonwealth of Nations. Scotland looms larger in the world as part of the UK than it would as a separate nation.

The first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, has the right and perhaps may even be right to hold a Scottish referendum in the near future, but she should not do so at the expense of her citizens’ prosperity. Once the ramifications of Brexit and voting to leave the UK are fully known, then Sturgeon could consider proposing another referendum.

But I hope the arguments against independence prove successful and that whenever Scotland has a second referendum the vast majority of Scots vote ’No’. And if or when that happens the Scots will cease to be transfixed by the idea of secession, as have voters in Canada’s Quebec. Casting aside a working relationship which has had such outstanding results for the (by no means assured) chance of a slightly higher-spending welfare state seems like a foolish idea.

I have argued with Scottish family and friends that Scottish independence would disturb our identities more profoundly, in ways that few yet grasp.

Our modern politics are Whiggish. Even the name “Whig” comes from the term “whiggamor” meaning a Scots cattle-driver. As someone who was raised High Tory values from an early age, I find that hard to concede but it’s painfully true certainly from the 17th and 18th Centuries onwards with the rise of parliamentary democracy. I suspect it’s even harder for Marxist inspired leftists to stomach given the socialist driven Labour Party have traditionally worked within Whiggish principles despite their fiery rhetoric being matched only by their incompetence to actually govern.

Whiggism favouring the theories and practices that evolved in the formation of the British constitution. But a lot of Whiggish ideas evolved out of High Toryism and so as a committed British royalist I have a strong attachment to the Anglican Church, and of course the British constitution is modelled upon and arose directly from Anglican theories of governance. But it is British, not English. Perhaps because her name begins with E, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is sometimes thought of as an English monarch. But she is Elizabeth I of Scotland, of a German family introduced to rule in Britain not just in England. We have little, if any, reason to imagine that, absent the joining of crowns in 1603 or the Union of 1707, the constitution of England (or England and Wales) would have evolved remotely to resemble the British constitution as we have had it.

British Whiggism has not only slowly seeped into and eroded the ideological underpinnings of High Toryism (think of Thatcherism rather than Lord Salisbury) but it has also ben entrenching a Whiggish inspired constitution over the past 400 years or so. But if Scotland leaves, that constitution and its history are over. There is little reason at base to imagine an English-only constitution any more (or less) likely to evolve in a future direction I would favour than, say, a European constitution. If Britain is literally finished – if the Union is broken and our constitution is no more – why would an England-alone future be any better than, say, membership of the Single European State? England survived perfectly happily as a component of a larger Union within Britain. Why should it be any less content as part of a larger union in the EU Federation?

The reality is that despite the marginalising of High Toryism, it is the Conservative party as the party of Britain, that has been the inheritor of the Whiggish tradition and appointed protector of the Whiggish constitution. If Scotland leaves the Union the Conservative Party would be finished in its present form, because it would dominate England so overwhelmingly that it would inevitably split. To be sure, it would perhaps last two or three more General Elections, in which with huge majorities it would govern in England (Wales doubtless becoming semi-autonomous and Northern Ireland departing to join Scotland forthwith). But no party that won 75 per cent and more of the seats in the House of Commons could last for long. Our adversarial politics needs an opposition as well as a governing party. So the Conservative Party would split, perhaps into Tories and the rest.

This is why ironically I believe in Brexit even if our current crop of incompetent politicians are making a real dog’s dinner out of it.

Passions aside, for me Brexit is an opportunity to reboot unionism between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It may twitch my High Tory nerves a little but I am coming around to the view that Brexit, the biggest ever vote of confidence in the political project of the United Kingdom, is an opportunity to fashion a new unionism. This new unionism might well have a sharper focus on citizenship and rights but it might also trash the canard that Brexiteers are little Englanders. A clean Brexit can rejuvenate marginalised and fraying institutions that were once the bedrock of a collective national identity. But only if we re-orienteer ourselves and go back to the original principle that allegiances of Unionism are to institutions and symbols of nationhood and shared national values. If we can do that as a union then one might be able to capture a greater diversity that narrow nationalisms rather than widening them - under of course a unifying national figure of a monarch.

Even the most ardent of the free market Brexiteers will have to accept that the best one can hope for is a Unionism as the quintessential one nation politics. Here such Unionism acknowledges the reality of an inegalitarian society made up of people with different talents but tempered by roles and responsibilities that has an ingrained sense of a duty of care to others. But equally Unionism stands for equality amongst citizens governed by the same rules and respecting the authority of enduring institutions. All votes are of equal value in one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies where MPs serve constituents rather than outside sectional or multi-national corporate interests.

Ironically then the best chance Scotland for its future is Brexit. Brexit will protect the Union that puts the ‘Great’ into Britain. Unionists can be confident we will stay better together in the good Union of the United Kingdom as we leave the bad union of the EU.

Thanks for your question.

#question #scottish independence #britain #scotland #union #brexit

32 notes · View notes

Last Seen Blogs

jsblessinghair1-blog

rachid1960

Sans titre

mistmorphine

Just things that's interest me at the moment

here-comes-the-snow

Icedagger

chanceoniffy

Art and Writing account