On January 18, 2016, in the hallway of the hotel where he was staying, Daniel Shaver, a white man, was fatally shot by Arizona police. Philip Mitchell Brailsford, the officer who killed Shaver, was acquitted of murder charges on December 7, 2017. The video is supplied by the Los Angeles Times. But if the media reported it at all, the story was soon sent down the memory hole.
Most people don’t know about the execution of this young man because his whiteness doesn’t fit the narrative. Even if they were in the room when it was reported, the lack of moral panic rendered the story mundane. But the truth is that far more white men are shot by the police than men any other race or ethnic group—including black men. For every black man killed by the police, cops kill two white men.
Have white cops internalized white self-loathing and this is what motivates violence against white civilians? Sounds absurd, I know. But progressives are arguing that the five police officers who killed black man Tyre Nichols, despite all being black themselves, are implicated in an act of white supremacy because they internalized black self-hatred.
Daniel Shaver was fatally shot by Arizona police in 2016.
Narratives are important. Progressives are shaming Tucker Carlson, who was expecting what everybody else was expecting, for the muted response. Imagine if five white cops had beat Nichols that way. Cities across the nation—maybe even in Europe—would be on fire. But even if five white cops had beaten Nichols, we’d still need evidence to show that racism was the motive. Empirical claims require empirical evidence.
Rev. Al Sharpton at Tyre Nichols’ funeral: “If that man had been white, you wouldn’t have beaten him like that on that night.”
Kelly Thomas died five days after being severely beaten by six members of the Fullerton Police Department on July 5, 2011. Kelly Thomas was white.
Woke progressivism doesn’t care about evidence because it is a religion. Its scriptures are certain in themselves because they are revealed truths. The supposed causal forces are non-falsifiable in the same way angels are. This is to say that it’s faith-based. And that’s why facts don’t matter. No matter how many times I show people the facts about lethal police shootings, they keep right on believing the myth.
See my latest podcast: “The Fallacy of Systemic Racism.”
Conservatives tell us that Marxists have colonized our institutions, especially the cultural and educational systems. As a Marxist, I confess that I know a handful of other Marxists in the university system, but there are very few (I believe I am the only one on my campus) and their ideas are fading.
It’s frustrating. Marx’s materialist conception of history should be the foundation of anthropology and sociology in the same way Darwin’s materialist conception of natural history is the foundation of life sciences. But it’s not. And so the social sciences remain pre paradigmatic in the Kuhnian sense.
What I do see a lot of in the university, their crackpot ideas pressed into 4k-12 curricula and pedagogy, are postmodernists and social constructionists. Remember that wonderful passage in Matthew? “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.” The attack on the republic and its creed represent the fruit of anarchist politics not Marxist. Marxism is not useful to the bourgeoisie. Marxism empowers workers. Anarchism disorganizes them.
Anarchism and the nihilism as its beating heart is a political and cultural tool to weaken the normative systems that sustain the nation’s institutional framework and values that legitimize its key institutions. Supranational forces are stepping up the project to dismantle democratic-republicanism. They’re portraying the Enlightenment as a projection of white supremacy. Science-denialism is rampant. Crackpot theories (critical race theory, queer theory, etc.) are ubiquitous. Public life is disordered by manufactured chaos and controversy.
Marx and Engels understood the threat anarchism posed to the establishment of a more free and just society; if the universities were indeed colonized by Marxist ideas, all the nonsense one encounters there would be missing. Instead, students would attend classes where they learned to do class analysis, critique the corporate state, and prepare to go out into the world and organize the organic interests of the proletariat. The 4k-12 teachers produced by a Marxist-run university system would stand as a bulwark against the crackpot theories embraced by the bourgeoisie.
The same absurd notions that prevail in our educational and cultural systems circulate in the boardrooms of corporations and in employee training sessions, where managers and professionals are instructed to take them up and use them to check others. That what appears as leftwing thought in our major institutions appears at all tells you that these are not the ideas of the left, but rather the ideas of the neoliberal order of things.
Sometimes I am astonished that this is not immediately apparent. Then I stop and remind myself of what I just said here: there are very few and increasingly fewer Marxists in the education system. Without the insights of Marxism, and instead the crush of bourgeois ideas, how will the youth of the West ever know what to look for, let alone recognize the truth of it when they see it?
The American political scientist Bernard Cohen observed in 1963 that the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” This, of course, “depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”
Host of Disney’s The View, Whoopi Goldberg, you will recall suspended a while back for debunking the false perception that the Holocaust was about race (I’m being sarcastic), asks “Do we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?”
Whoopi Goldberg on police reform:
"Do we need to see white people also get beaten before anybody will do anything?" pic.twitter.com/fzg2tk1fl8
She quickly disclaimed, “I’m not suggesting that. So don’t write us and tell me what a racist I am.” This was a revealing disclaimer, as it indicates that she doesn’t know that white men are far more like to suffer death at the hands of police officers than are black men—as if there is a paucity of body and dash cam footage of officers shooting and beating white men to death.
Image from the “mostly peaceful protests” following the release of the Nichols video
It’s true: every year, cops kill twice as many white men as black men. In fact, half of those shot by the police are white. Year after year. (See Manufacturing the Illusion of White Supremacy.) So if you wonder if it would help the public get the problem of police brutality for the public to see white people being beaten, then show the body and dash cam footage of police beating white people.
Clearly Whoopi is talking about the white public since she raises the issue of identification in empathy production. So why not ask why the media won’t show video of cops beating and killing white people? She has a television show. She can’t show people the footage? Show them Tony Timpa’s deaths at the hands of cops—including black cops. I remember he was calling for his mother. Show the black officers at the scene taunting him. (I can’t watch the video again, frankly, but I will share it below.)
Tony Timpa’s death at the hands of Dale police officers
Whoopi won’t show the audience of The View because she doesn’t know that video exists. Again, she’s worried people are going to complain that she is suggesting cops beat white people as if they aren’t already. If she wasn’t ignorant of the truth, she would herself show the public videos of cops shooting, beating, suffocating white men. Since it happens more to whites than blacks, there is plenty of source material from which to choose.
Does it seem odd to you that the mainstream media of a hopelessly racist society, a society with white supremacy beating at the heart of its institutions, a nation so systemically racist that protesters are out in the street calling for dismantling it and starting over—does it seem weird that the mouthpiece of a societal order so shot through with racism would go as far out of its way as it possibly could to avoid showing you video of black cops—or any cops—beating and killing white men?
If police body cam footage show cops suffocating a white man and no media shows the footage, are white men actually suffocated by the police?
So now you know that over the last several years, the police have killed twice as many white men as they have black men. You should also know that controlling for situational factors (was the assailant threatening officers and civilians with violence?) and considering benchmarks (such as the rates of criminal violence in the vicinity), that there is no evidence of racial bias in lethal police encounters involving black civilians.
We’ve known from scholarly work going back at least to the 1980s that, while one can find instances of racial prejudice here and there (it’s probably a pipe dream to believe that we will completely eradicate race prejudice in our lifetimes), there is no evidence of systemic racism in the criminal justice system.
I have blogged about extensively. Here’s a summary of some of that scientific research on the subject (I apologize for the length of this paragraph): William Wilbanks, in The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, published in 1987, produced a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers and found that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system (of course), there is insufficient evidence to support the claim of systematic racism in American criminal justice. In a comprehensive review of studies of the criminal justice system, published in the pages of Crime and Justice in 1997, Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen find “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias.” Roland Fryer, in a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2018, finds no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force. Joseph Cesario and colleagues report in a 2018 issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science that, adjusting for benchmarks, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. In fact, when analyzing all shootings given crime rates, exposure to police accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. This is the “exposure hypothesis,” where serious criminal activity increases the likelihood of officer-civilian interaction and this influences the frequency of policing shootings. In a 2019 study published in Journal of Crime and Justice focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, Brandon Tregle and colleagues find that blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers.
What explains the finding in some of these studies that cops are more likely to shoot white assailants/suspects? We must be careful not to speculate as to why this is the case, but analyses suggest that police officers are more reticent to shoot black men than they are white men. Ponder that in light of the media coverage.
And may I note for the sake of reason that approximately ninety-five percent of those killed by the cops are men. Is that because cops are sexist? Or is there another reason why the vast majority of those who die at the hands of cops are men? If so, ask yourself why you didn’t jump to the conclusion that cops are sexist. Do you think Jordan Peterson thinks it’s sexist to point out that men are overrepresented in criminal violence? Then consider how you have been programmed to react without thinking. (See The Police are Sexist, too.)
In their 1957 American Sociological Reviewarticle on the techniques of neutralization, Gresham Sykes and David Matza elaborate Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory which states that individuals learn criminal behavior through techniques of committing crimes, as well as enculturation in the motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes conducive to violations of the law. Neutralization is defined as a technique that allows a person to justify or rationalize criminal conduct.
There are five techniques of neutralization. Two of them directly pertain to this question. One is denial of responsibility. In this technique, the individual blames his conduct on forces beyond his control, for example his personal situation of poverty and joblessness. When segments of society constantly tell people that their situation is somebody else’s fault, they will feel justified in breaking the law. The other pertinent technique is denial of victim. In this technique, crime is viewed as a punishment or revenge towards a person who the perpetrator believes wronged him, thus redefining himself as a victim. “They deserve it,” the perpetrator tells himself as he separates a man from his money or ends his life.
There is a notorious illustration of neutralization techniques at work in the person of Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s. Cleaver rationalized his rape of white women as a political act. “Rape was an insurrectionary act,” he writes in his book Soul on Ice. He admits that he found it most satisfying “because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”
Of course, none of this means that all blacks are murderers or robbers or racist against white people (saying that would commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or stereotyping). But we might ask whether, if race prejudice motivates some whites to target blacks with violence, does race prejudice motivate some blacks to target whites with violence?
And we must ask why blacks are so drastically overrepresented in serious crime. Keep in mind that, with respect to murder, most victims of black perpetrators are other blacks. And if black lives matter, then why isn’t this problem high on the priority list of the antiracist?
These are important questions, but it seems a equally pressing question as to why the media is determined to convey the false perception that black overrepresentation in the criminal justice system is the work of racist police officers, prosecutors, and judges rather than the very clear evidence that this is really because blacks are overrepresented in serious crime. In order to move forward rationally, the public needs facts.
After all, the behavior of the media is very curious if the claim is true that the United States is systemically racist. We’re told that white supremacy is ubiquitous in American culture (which is probably why we have such a hard time seeing it). As a man trapped in the academy, I hear it all the time. White progressives weep in public over the white supremacist character of America. (See below and also Such a Beautiful Moment—The Self-Flagellating of White People; The Church of Woke: A Moment of Reckoning for White Christians?). This is an institutionally racist society, we’re told.
The media is one of the dominant institutions in America, is it not? The media, like the educational system, oversees the shaping of mass perception and opinion. If this were a racist society, one marked by a pervasive antiblackness, why is the media and the education system devoted to creating sympathy for black Americans while casting white people as collectively suffering blood guilt? Whites are all racist to some degree, we’re told. You don’t even know how racist you are thanks to the fact that your bias is subconscious. They teach this in college classrooms. Hell, they teach to 4k-12 students. They teach students that whites as a group enjoy a systemic privilege, that whites are collectively responsible for the intergenerational trauma that explains the situation of black people. This is critical race theory.
Think about it: that the media obscure that fact that white men are more often killed by the police than members of every other racial and ethnic group (and not by a little) disappears white victims of lethal police encounters (see Disappearing the White Victims of Lethal Police Violence). That doesn’t sound like the propaganda one expects from racist institutions rooted in white supremacy.
Wouldn’t a racist system hammer home every day the phenomenon of black cops—or self-loathing white officers—killing white civilians to provoke widespread fear and loathing among whites of black people? Maybe to spark white riots in the street? Why are there even black police officers in an institution shot through with antiblack racism? For that matter, why are there so many affluent black academics, businessmen, lawyers, politicians, scientists, etc. How does that happen in a systemically racist society?
Not only is it paradoxical for the institutions of a white supremacist nation to portray whites as perpetrators and blacks as victims but, like the myth of the racist criminal justice system, it’s not true. The system of institutional racism, Jim Crow segregation, was abolished in the 1960s. I was just a wee lad. Many of the people reading this blog weren’t even alive yet. Think about it: racial discrimination against black people was made illegal when this old man was only a few months beyond his second birthday.
Almost 60 years ago, all the institutions of US society were forbidden under penalty of criminal or civil consequence of practicing racism against black people. A year later, in 1965, Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, requiring all government contractors and subcontractors to take affirmative action to expand job opportunities for minorities. In other words, where discrimination is allowed to exist in America, it’s against white (and white-adjacent, i.e., Chinese) people in the practice of affirmative action, or what Europeans are honest enough to call positive discrimination.
How is it possible for people to continue to argue that systemic racism against blacks in American society is a thing when the entire structure of the social system is designed to prevent racial discrimination against black people?
This doesn’t help us understand why the media is perpetuating the myth of systemic racism in criminal justice. It doesn’t explain why our educational system, basing its curriculum on various crackpot theories including critical race theory, is indoctrinating the youth of America in the myth of systemic racism. But the fact that they do and that this is entirely contrary to fact after fact should strike you as a curious thing. Indeed, it should should you suspicious.
Please respond in the comments. I am genuinely curious. Have you ever bothered to ask yourself this question? Maybe that’s too embarrassing to admit. But has this paradox never dawned on you? A sophisticated propaganda system would have you not only repeating the approved slogans, but it would also produce the character of mind to which much of the obvious would never even occur. Is that it? Is that you?
Ask yourself why the media is so clearly biased in its reporting on lethal police encounters. The police kill twice as many white men as black men every year in America. But elites and activists want you to believe that this is something that more often affects black men, and to “prove” it they select the most unusual cases to illustrate a “systemic problem.” They make the extraordinary ordinary. The reason why the Memphis case stands out is that is so rare in America for the police to do something like this.
Should we criticize the police for their wrongful behavior. Absolutely we should. I am highly critical of the police. Obviously. In my criminal justice class students read Samuel Walker’s texts on police accountability. The entire semester is a critique of the cops and the justice system. My complaint here does not flow from some pro-cop line. I’m a libertarian Marxist, for Christ’s sake.
My complaint is the way the media manufactures the perception that policing in America is shot through with racism and that black men are targeted by the state in a manner analogous to slave patrols or Lynch mobs (see Debunking Mythologies Surrounding the American Criminal Justice System). Such a construction is utterly false. It’s a big lie. Maybe the biggest lie. And those in high places who spread the lie know it’s a lie. This is a propaganda project designed to dissimulate class power and disorganize the proletariat by ginning up racial antagonism.
As I said, systemic racism was dismantled when I was a little boy. Today I am an old man. One of the greatest fears of this old man is that, if we tacitly accept this narrative, we will again find ourselves in a nation marked by widespread racism. Isn’t this what elites want? Isn’t this what Whoopi wants?
The task of the thinking man is not to pick a tribe, consume its propaganda, and regurgitate it on the daily, but to study the evidence and decide for himself what is really going on.
Since what has inspired this blog is the death of Tyre Nichol, I feel obligated to share with readers a key piece of my work with young people, which is devoted to keeping them safe during civilian-police interactions: Dealing with the Police.
So a bit of advice: What’s the point of resisting arrest? If it’s an unlawful arrest, then you will have plenty of time to file a complaint later. But you can’t file a complaint if you’re dead. Just let the officers make the arrest and sort it out. Police will use force sufficient to overcome your resistance. The more you resist the more force they will apply. It’s not about who’s to blame. It’s about staying alive.
Kayla Lemieux, the shop teacher with the Z-cup plastic breasts, is in the news again. Tightening the code on professional dress in the Halton School District is on the table because of Lemieux. The Halton District School Board Trustees unanimously passed a motion on January 3 ordering the education director to develop a policy to ensure “appropriate and professional standards of dress and decorum in the classroom.” Director of Education Curtis Ennis will have until March 1 to come up with a policy. It is unknown whether the policy will run afoul of Canada’s Human Rights laws (which at this point have become an absurdity).
The Oakville Trafalgar high school shop teacher Lemieux was also in the news for skydiving with porn actor Voodoo. Strapped to his body hurtling through the atmosphere was quite a sight (I share one of the many pictures above). Did Lemieux know what Voodoo does for a living? I suspect so. Voodoo claims Lemieux didn’t. But those fake mammalian protuberances are the sort of fetish gear one picks up at a porn shop—perhaps shipped in plain brown paper wrappers to the homes of less audacious autogynephilics. How could Lemieux not know one of the bigger stars of the industry? It’s possible, but unlikely.
The trial of the British Columbia nurse Amy Hamm is instructive here; the case of Kayla Lemieux, formerly Kerry Lemieux, was cited at her trial. Accused of transphobic behavior, Hamm is facing the possibility of losing her nursing license for expressing opinions on social media that amount to heresy in the quasi-religious system of gender ideology, especially queer theory. Hamm had said that there are only two sexes. She said that a woman is an adult human female. She said that boys and men do not belong in spaces reserved for girls and women. Today, among the woke, these are bigoted beliefs.
Several days into the disciplinary hearing, while under cross-examination by Lisa Bildy, legal counsel for Hamm, expert witness Dr. Greta Bauer, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, testified that, if a male teacher who wears large prosthetic breasts identifies as a woman, then he should be considered a woman and allowed access to female-only spaces. (I will try to find some time to blog about the situation in Scotland where men recognized as women are houses in women’s prisons where they can daily intimidate women with their physical size, deep voices, and male genitalia.)
Leaning on the work of Ray Blanchard, who in the 1980s coined the term “autogynephilia” to describe heterosexual men who are aroused by the thought of themselves as women, Bildy questioned Bauer about the existence of the two types of trans-identified males: on the one hand, the homosexual and effeminate type, who typically display gender dysphoria from a young age, i.e., homosexual transsexuals (HSTS); and, on the other hand, the autogynephilic type (AGP), who are typically heterosexual and masculine, and tend to transition later in life, often after having children. It is worth noting that when Blanchard first came up with his theory of autogynephilia, it was widely accepted in the field of gender medicine that erotic desire was the driving force behind a significant number of males identifying as women or presenting as one.
Assistant Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine under Biden may be a useful example of the latter type. At a recent event, the former Pennsylvania health official expressed happiness at having transitioned after having children. Levine expressed this sentiment despite an aggressive stance concerning the transitioning of children. Effectively admitting that transitioning results for in the permanent loss of reproductive capacity, at least for some, Levine speculated that being a 15-year-old in today’s environment might have led to transitioning while still young before stating: “I have no regrets because if I had transitioned when I was young then I wouldn’t have my children. I can’t imagine a life without my children.” What is it about today’s environment that might have led Levine to transition while still young? Is this an acknowledgement of social contagion? Of social pressure?
At any rate, returning to Bildy’s cross-examination, Bauer stated that the term “autogynephilia,” a term coined by Ray Blanchard in the 1980s, is a “controversial hypothesis,” one that “doesn’t resonate with a lot of trans women.” Of course, it wouldn’t, given that there are two types and not all trans women are autogynephiles. Paradoxically, Bauer acknowledges the types in dismissing them, suggesting that the categories of HSTS and AGP amount to “outdated language.” Bauer skirts the typology in saying that the problem with the theory of AGP is that it says that “all trans women are sexual fetishists, which is not true.” That’s a straw man. How about for some trans women? Bauer pointed out that there are “trans women who are attracted to women,” which some trans women and their allies argue makes them lesbians.
I should probably briefly elaborate on the obvious paradox here. For some trans activists, the homosexual and effeminate type will become a heterosexual women upon transition, since “trans women are women” and, in this type, the attraction is to men. It is also believed by the same crowd that the autogynephilic type, attracted to women, will become upon transition a lesbian. The latter belief has caused controversy as trans women are entering lesbian spaces (night clubs, online dating services) accusing persons born with vaginas of bigotry for rejecting persons with penises or those who formally had one. (See Lesbians Don’t Like Penises, So Our Definitions Must Change.)
It was at this point that Bildy brought up the teacher in Oakville, Ontario who began identifying as a woman last year and showing up to work wearing a blond wig and large prosthetic breasts. Barbara Findlay, counsel for the BCCNM, objected at this point claiming not to know about this situation, so Bildy shared a photograph of the individual in the classroom wearing the fetish gear in question. Bildy then asked Bauer, “So somebody who is dressed in that fashion, and describes themselves as a woman, in your opinion, Dr Bauer, is that a woman?” The exchange illustrates why we never judge a person by what he says about himself but instead judge him based on what he is and what he does (if these thing affect others, of course, otherwise we don’t much care).
“If she identifies as a woman, then her gender identity is a woman,” Bauer replied.
“With full access to female spaces if that’s in fact what they identify as,” continued Bildy.
“As per the law,” Bauer replied.
At this point, Bildy concluded her cross-examination.
One of the problems with gender ideology is that it depends on the individual’s subjective claims, not on external and objective facts. People do not generally admit to things they believe make them look bad or that harm the movement with which they identify. Autogynephilia thus became taboo with the dawn of the modern trans rights movement because it very clearly undermined the argument, especially when the goal is for men to enter female-only spaces. However, the current movement to repackage kink as an identity may in the future allow the autogynephile to become comfortable with that identity. After all, pedophiles are being rebranded “minor attracted persons,” or MAPs, and the erotic attraction to children mainstreamed. (See “Kayla Lemieux and the cult of validation.”)
The rebranding is widespread. Texas recently fired a teacher for telling Texas students to call pedophiles ‘minor attracted Persons.’ Here’s an account from the Sacramento Bee. This teacher tells students to call pedophiles “MAPs” (“minor attracted persons”). She is recorded saying, “Don’t judge people just because they want to have sex with 5-year-olds.” The El Paso Independent School District’s board of trustees unanimously voted to fire Parker last fall. Board trustee Daniel Call initially said, citing a district spokesperson, that the teacher’s comments were taken out of context. Instead, Parker was “pretending to advocate a position she didn’t actually believe in (in) order to challenge the students in preparation for them reading playwright Arthur Miller’s 1953 ‘The Crucible.’” The play is a fictionalized account of the Salem witch trials (which occurred in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late seventeenth century) serving as an allegory for McCarthyism, the name given to a instantiation of the on-going red scare when the US government persecuted people accused of being communists. This could only be relevant to the question of pedophilia as the teacher urging students to see pedophiles as wrongly persecuted.
The public can no longer easily fine a TED talk (because it was taken down by TED, but here’s a story about it), in which pedophilia is described as a sexual orientation rooted in biology. The talk makes pedophilia out to be analogous to homosexuality. There is no evidence for this claim that I know of. It’s just asserted and assumed because, since it feels congenital to the person, it must be innate, an inborn feature of his constitution (almost all of pedophiles are male, for the record).
To be sure, there are pedophiles who do not act on their sexual preference and are not criminals. I agree. One can harbor a sexual desire for children and even openly discuss this without being a criminal. We can and should criticize them for it, of course, but there is no punishment for what a person thinks or says. At least there shouldn’t be. At the same time, it’s more than a bit troubling to hear arguments asserting the legitimacy or validity of a sexual impulse on the premise that it is innate and therefore a right. This is where biological essentialism takes you. Now mix with that some postmodernist relativism and identity politics and out pops a truly warped worldview. You can justify anything if you root it in biology and moral relativism. “Why did you kill him?” “Because I was born to kill. It’s what some people do. I can’t help it. Who are you to say my personal truth isn’t true? Are you me? No? You’re a bigot.” (I will soon post as blog entry on the pedophilic roots of queer theory so stay tuned.)
I have two responses. First, I judge people who want to have sex with five-year-olds. They are pedophiles. And however much one might compassionately excuse their desire as mental illness (what else would it be?), it does not excuse the behavior—and it is behavior that what we care about. Everybody should be honest about this: the rebranding “MAPs” is about normalizing pedophilia. This brings me to my second response. See a pattern? I do. They tell you slippery slope arguments are fallacious, but there is something that happens to one’s tent when you let the camel’s nose under it. Soon the camel will be in the tent and all sorts of problems flow from the presence of such a beast in this space.
What is going on here? How is it that the majority, whom the activists smear as “normies,” finds itself on its back foot over the fetishes of a small number of, let’s called them abnormies? Why are our major social institutions mainstreaming perverse ideologies and practices? Could there be some purpose in the effects this will have? None of this seems accidental to me. The slogans are everywhere the same. The proponents all use the same newspeak. They read from the same bullet points. They sound like Islamist extremists—except with Islam, we are allowed to disbelieve in the doctrine and even criticize it without losing our livelihoods and reputations.
Of course, the Islamists will still brand criticisms of Islam “Islamophobes.” And, as we saw recently, when s teacher at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota was dismissed for showing a work of art depicting the founder of Islam in conversation with the archangel Gabriel, this smear can have serious consequences. (I blog about this here and here.) At the same time, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization devoted to academic freedom, announced a few days ago that it is launching an inquiry into the actions of administrators at Hamline University. It’s hard to imagine the AAUP coming to the aid of a gender critical feminist.
It doesn’t seem like entering women’s spaces is the primary interests of Lemieux. It appears more likely that the space of interest is the shop class at the high school where Lemieux teaches. What better class to be around boys than subject matter that self-selects for boys given their interests in things? Pedophiles put themselves in positions to be around targets. And public schools are a target-rich environment. Lemieux’s choice of occupation and presentation of self is indicative of the particular fetish at play. This is an obvious paraphilia.
Frankly, I had wondered early on whether Lemieux was doing this to make a political point. You know, do something so obviously sexual in so obviously an inappropriate place and time in order to mock gender ideology and thus undermine it. “Surely,” he would have thought to himself, if this were his angle, “they won’t let this madness continue.” But they did. However, even if this were his goal, it is not okay to enlist minors in such a project. Whatever the motivation, the boys in these photos are being sexualized by an adult whose responsibility is not only to teach them, but to protect them. Lemieux’s actions and those of the school are profoundly unethical at the very least. These students have a right to be free from sexual exploitation and learn in a distraction-free environment. How are boys supposed to focus on the work at hand with a man dressed like this? This is not comparable to a woman suffering from macromastia. Those tits aren’t real. Fetish gear can be left at home.
That there are people who deny the obvious reality of this situation tell us three things about today’s situation. First, some have completely internalized an ideology that obscures the desire of those suffering from paraphilias to engage directly with boys in a sexualized manner. For the sake of that ideology, they not only allow minors to be subject to sexualized activities but celebrate the teacher, elevating paraphilias to identities. Second, there are those who are pushing an agenda designed to disrupt ordinary understanding of long-standing social norms in a project to undermine the family and radically change society. Third, there are millions of people who are so terrified of being smeared as bigots that they have resorted to civil inattention. They’re like the throng that couldn’t see that the emperor was naked.
None of this is really about compassion for people. Who in these efforts to mainstream pedophilia care about parents trying to safely raise their children and establish and maintain communities that serve the wellbeing of working families? Who in this movement cares about the eighty-year-old feminist who just wants to change into her bathing suit last the YMCA without having a man look at her body?
I have heard so many times that our public education system is not a system of indoctrination. It’s not supposed to be. But it is. I’m not stupid. But I am beginning to think a lot of people around me are—or they’re in on the agenda and playing dumb. What I see going under the tag “education” looks all the world like a program to prepare the youth of the West for incorporation into structures of power that depend on their inability to tell truth from lies in order to dissimulate the central force shaping their life chances: their social class location. Why would I think this? Because the programming in all its explicit specifics is coming from the technocracy run by progressives who are the front-line soldiers for the revolution from above—the revolution designed to finalize the establishment of the corporate state.
“You won. You won completely. I did not end up in the right place.” — Scott Adams
Remember Scott Adams, creator of the syndicated Dilbert comic strip, when he was aggressively pushing the vaccine and condemning people who were skeptical? He was arrogant and intolerant. Now he admits that all of his fancy analytics got him to the wrong place. Check it out:
Of course they did. You could see everybody who was pushing the vaccine going through a set of mental gymnastics to justify obedience to technocracy. They were were victims of scientism. And they still are.
Adams admits that the heuristics used by those who were skeptical of the vaccine got them to the right place. Of course they did. Working from the right heuristic pushes aside ideology and creates the possibility of striking the vein of truth.
Now Adams has to worry about what the shot will do to him over the next several years of his life. I feel bad for him, of course, but I’m still trying to wrap my mind around why anyone would be so adamant about taking an experimental mRNA gene therapy designed to modify their cells to produce a protein that produces systemic inflammation throughout the body. What else is the code modifying? Parents marched their children to clinics to get jabbed. I feel bad for them, too. But it’s not as if I didn’t warn people.
Scott Adams is the creator of the syndicated comic strip Dilbert.
What’s so brilliant about Scott Adams’ mea culpa is not that he has the integrity to admit he was wrong and I was right. That’s obvious. It’s that he is saying that I was right because I don’t trust the corporate state. It is never wrong to distrust the government and corporations, he says. This is true. Yet that is exactly what Adams did.
In 2016, just a year or so away from realize how wrong I was about the motivations behind demographic patterns in lethal civilian-police interactions, I became a rather visible proponent of the idea that racism was the cause of the overrepresentation of black men in lethal police encounters.
I had no evidence to make this argument. Instead, I rationalizes the fact of racial disproportionality to explain racial disproportionality. When I discovered the body of scientific literature that finds that, accounting for disproportionality using benchmarks and situational factors, police are likely to shoot white men, I had to make a mea culpa of my own. I had made my assertions to the contrary so often and so loudly, I felt a responsibility to publicly admit my error.
I first wrote about it on Freedom and Reason in several blogs (search my blog for lethal civilian-police encounters). I produced a podcast on the subject. Then, in the fall of 2022, I traveled to downtown Nashville to speak about race and police encounters at a professional conference. My paper was titled “Racial Bias in Civilian-Police Encounters: A Review of the Literature.” In my presentation, I reviewed the scientific literature on civilian-officer interactions, including those involving deadly force, to show that the evidence does not indicate pervasive racial bias in police encounters.
I didn’t go into why I made the error at the conference, but I will hear: it was because of my political commitments. They had biased me. Political commitments are clearly biasing others on the matter of lethal police encounters to the point where the five black Memphis police officers who killed another black man are being accused of harboring anti-black prejudice—that their actions are a projection of white supremacy. But theories that work from the implicit bias thesis have no demonstrated predictive validity even for white officers. Moreover, the statistics on lethal police shootings provide no inferential support for racial bias in the phenomenon at all. Racism in lethal civilian-police encounters is a myth. Those trying to rationalize five black cops killing a black man as racist have reached the end of woke progressivism. They should take a break and reassess. All their beliefs are suspect.
Although my political commitments did not cause me to suspect that the Memphis police officers were tools of white supremacy, I did without sufficient evidence suppose that racism was behind fatal police encounters. And this is likely not the last time I will make this type of error. Indeed, another mea culpa may be coming.
After a record of scholarship in the field of environmental sociology, where I made several claims about the coming climate crisis (see a recent talk here), a review of the evidence to date is very powerfully suggesting to me that I may have gotten that wrong, as well. Give this podcast with Glenn Loury and Steven Koonin a listen to get a sense of what I am talking about. Here’s a video of their discussion.
My point in this blog is to push Scott Adams’ observation (not original, of course) that it is never wrong to distrust the government and corporations. In fact, not trusting the government and corporations is the default position that allows one to avoid the fancy analytics constructed to distract you from the truth. It is not 100 percent foolproof. But it’s the necessary starting point. Those who trust the government and the corporation, their scientists and their experts, are at risk for getting everything wrong. “Trust the science,” by which they mean “trust the scientists we tell you to trust” is a thought-stopping device.
Never forget this:
Coronavirus: Jacinda Ardern dismisses rumours being spread on social media about COVID-19 https://t.co/n1Az1DQ7QC
The Guardian has published an article by Simon Bolton with the headline “The killing of Tyre Nichols was heinous and shocking. It was also not an aberration.” Simon Balto is assistant professor of history and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lair of woke progressivism. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Part of the summary reads: “By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.” That should give you an insight into his worldview.
As readers of Freedom and Reason are well aware, Balto is hardly alone in the system that manufactures historical accounts entrenching the mythology of the racist criminal justice systems in the popular mind. The propagandists of the corporate state are no less involved. Here is a tweet by CNN political commentator, former congressman for New York’s 17th district, and current member of the US Commission on Civil Rights Mondaire Jones desperately trying to keep alive the false narrative that racism lies beneath these events—even when the police officers are all black.
If you think the Memphis police officers had to be white in order to exhibit anti-Blackness, you need to take that AP African American Studies course Ron DeSantis just banned.
Jones’ remark speaks well of the efforts by DeSantis and his team to keep out of k-12 woke progressive propaganda (although I am not sure the course in question includes the disinformation Jones believes it does). Look, if you’re trying to rationalize five black cops killing a black man as racist—just stop. You’ve reached the end of woke progressivism. Take a break. Reassess. All your beliefs are suspect.
Police killing an unarmed civilians is extraordinarily rare. It is an aberration. There are tens of millions of police-civilian interactions every year, and the number of unarmed civilians killed in those interactions is at most a couple of dozen. Too many, to be sure, but hardly a normal occurrence.
Moreover, being unarmed does not mean the civilian presents no danger to the police. I have viewed videos where an unarmed assailant disarms a police officer. I share one below. In a police-involved shooting in Victorville, California, a neighbor records an instance of attempted murder of police officers. In the video, you can see Ari Young attack a lone female deputy and beat her savagely. She draws her gun in self-defense. Young disarmed her and shoots at her. Fortunately he missed. Other officers are not so lucky.
I have extensively documents on Freedom and Reason that benchmarks and situational factors explain all but a handful of fatal police encounters. In the vast majority of cases, the actions of the suspect provoked the shooting, and in some cases the consequences that follow the provocation appear to have been the end the suspect sought (suicide by cop).
The claims about racism in lethal police encounters is one of the many big lies pushed out by corporate state media that we have to confront if we want to disrupt the elite project to mislead the public. The fact is that when police kill an unarmed civilian, it is more likely that the civilian will be white, not black. Indeed, police kill twice as many whites than blacks every year. And it goes unremarked upon that is some of those cases, it is a black officer shooting a white man.
Even in proportional terms, whites are at greater risk to be shot by police even though blacks are drastically overrepresented in the most serious crime (more than half of murders and robberies). To be sure, blacks are overrepresented in police shootings. But blacks are overrepresented in serious crime, and in most lethal police shootings armed and representing a threat to officers. Roland Fryer suggests that whites may be are overrepresented in police shootings relative to benchmarks and situational factors because cops are reluctant to shoot black suspects—the opposite of what the media tells you.
The attempt to save the narrative by claiming that blacks officers shoot other black men because they have internalized white supremacy is ludicrous. But then so is the claim that white officers shoot black men because they harbor implicit racism against blacks is ludicrous. That has, of course, not stopped psychologist and sociologists from trying to demonstrate that it does. There is a substantial body of empirical research on this question. However, theories that work from the implicit bias thesis have no demonstrated predictive validity. And given that the statistics on lethal police shootings provide no inferential support for racial bias in the phenomenon, the hunt for the effects of implicit racial bias is moot. Racism in lethal civilian-police encounters is a myth.
The way the media focuses almost exclusively on black civilian deaths at the hands of police officers cannot be accidental. It’s not. It’s propaganda. It’s well understood by those who are familiar with the statistics that the police kill twice as many white men every year than black men.
Unlike the belief that fatal police encounters have racism in back of them, the effects of the propaganda on public perception are very real. When I tell my students the truth, their faces screw up because they have been deceived by the corporate state propaganda. Their expression is one of incredulity. Frankly, it’s not their fault; they have been conditioned to disbelieve. They’re the victims of what propagandists call “prebunking,” a species of learned thought-stopping.
Since the bias in reporting is intentional, there must be an agenda at work here. How could that agenda be anything other than manufacturing racial resentment? Of course it is. Why would the corporate state media want to do that? It’s not obvious? This an old tactic called divide and conquer. Elites not only divide blacks and whites, but they also divide whites between “allies” and “bigots,” with the latter comprised of those who refuse to swallow the lies of the corporate state.
I wanted to see what all the fuss was about so I registered an account at OpenAI and have been initiating conversations with ChatGPT about a wide range of subjects. The past two evenings I have been asking the chatbot questions about boxing, something about which I know a lot. A lot more than ChatGPT, apparently. In this blog, I share screenshots of where our conversations go off the rails. It looks like ChatGPT bluffs and then when you call it out on it, it will apologize and attempt provide the correct information. As you will see, it bluffed me several times. Check it out.
The exchange is revealing because of the faulty logic the program used to rule out a fight with Armstrong. In fact, Garcia had at least two fights with Armstrong, Armstrong defeating Garcia over 15 rounds in a welterweight title match, then the draw for the middleweight title. I could have challenged ChatGPT on another error, as the middleweight fight with Armstrong was for 10 rounds, not 15.
I laughed out loud when it dropped Luis Firpo’s name. But there is so much more that’s wrong with this. Paul Berlenbach and Tommy Loughran were light-heavyweight champions. Berlenbach, who beat Mike McTigue for the title, did not lose his title to Loughran but Jack Delaney. To my knowledge Berlenbach never met Harry Grebs in the ring. For sure he did not ever hold the middleweight title. Loughran won the light-heavyweight title from Jimmy Slattery.
That was Wednesday night. On Thursday evening, ChatGPT’s performance was even more dismal. The first exchange concerned the lightweight great Benny Leonard:
I then moved on to a series of queries about the mighty Henry Armstrong.
I knew it was 18, but I wanted to see if ChatGPT would go with 14. Here’s some more Armstrong questions. The bot gets so much wrong in this exchange. You cannot trust the accuracy of the language model.
Robinson and Armstrong met in 1943, not 1945. ChatGPT corrected itself to say they never fought. So I corrected the bot (again):
These wild inaccuracies do not recommend this language model for use for anything. Those who talked it up did not spend much time with the language model or properly interrogate it. God help us when they use this in telemedicine.
Finally, I asked about the Marvin Hager. Watch what happens when I ask about his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard.
There is a lot of concern that high school and college students will use ChatGPT to write their essays for them. Somebody should tell them that ChatGPT can be highly inaccurate. Moreover, the writing is mediocre and formulaic. Ask for an essay on any thinker and his significant work and you get an introduction, three repetitive paragraphs in support of the thesis, and a conclusion—all paragraphs of approximately the same length. The conclusion invariably begins, “In summary, …”
Granted, this is not the best AI has to offer us, but maybe we are a little more than seven years away from singularity.
The United States is initiating a process that will result in the shipment of M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, according to two US officials who spoke to Reuters yesterday. This decision comes after the US previously feigned opposition to the idea of sending these tanks, despite requests from Ukraine and pressure from Germany to send its own Leopard battle tanks. In addition to the tanks, a small number of recovery vehicles will also be sent, according to one of the officials. These vehicles are used to assist with the repair and removal of tanks on the battlefield. This means that more military personnel (advisors, logisticians, maintenance, trainers, and soldiers), as well as an army of private contractors, will amass on the front lines of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
M1 Abrams battle tanks
As CNN reports, this move appears to break a diplomatic impasse with Germany, who had previously stated that they would only send their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine if the US also sends M-1 Abrams tanks. The US had previously stated that the Abrams tanks were too complex and difficult to maintain. If asked to speculate, the apparent reluctance to commit to sending tanks is a feign to perpetuate the appearance of reticence to get more deeply involved in the conflict. This move is mean to conceal the actual objective: escalating the West’s kinetic war with Russia. The reporting tells us that this decision marks a change in stance from the US and will allow Germany to also send their tanks, and for other European countries to approve the delivery of more German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, but the flow of Abrams M1 and Leopard 2 tanks opens the spigot for other weapons systems to flow, which in turn necessarily come with more military personnel.
At what point is this no longer a proxy war with Russia? Arguably, the West has already passed that point. Ukraine is not a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so the West is not defending NATO. Whether I support this security arrangement, NATO is not acting as a defensive alliance against Russian aggression against the West. NATO is preparing Ukraine as a forward staging area in an emerging war of aggression against Russia. These developments telegraph a pending massive offensive land campaign, with the obvious objectives of not only pushing Russia out of the autonomous Donbas region but reclaiming Crimea ostensibly for Ukraine.
Why would the United States and NATO organize a war against a nuclear power that has not attacked neither the United States nor any other nation in the NATO alliance? To understand the situation, one needs to consider the political economy of war and the ambitions of the globalists, namely the people who run the world. I will for the balance of this essay focus on the military piece, since the military-industrial complex has its own organic appetites and that in itself drives geopolitical policy and behavior. War stuffs billions of dollars of dollars into the pockets of those corporate elites who effectively run the complex. The current situation is C. Wright Mills’ power elite mapped onto the planet.
I begin with the United States Defense Department, also known as the Department of Defense (DoD). The official and legitimate function of the DoD is providing national security and protecting the country from foreign and domestic threats. The budget includes funding for a wide range of activities, including the development and procurement of weapons systems, the pay and benefits of military personnel, and the operation and maintenance of military bases. In addition to military hardware and systems procurement and the pay and benefits of military personnel, the DoD’s budget also includes funding for a wide range of other activities such as the operation and maintenance of military bases, research and development, and intelligence gathering.
One of the largest components of the DoD’s budget is the procurement of weapons systems. This includes funding for the development and production of new weapons, as well as the modernization and upgrade of existing systems. Some of the most expensive weapons systems in the DoD’s budget include aircraft such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the KC-46 Pegasus (aerial refueling and strategic air transport), as well as ships such as the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier and the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Thus, the DoD is also a corporate state instrument of offensive war and a strategy for laundering hundreds of billions of dollars to defense contractors annually, which includes weapons manufacturers and the wide range of services associated with the war machine.
The DoD budget has been consistently high in comparison to other government agencies, and it has been increasing over the years. In 2022, the DoD’s baseline budget (so not including supplemental and hidden expenses) exceeded 750 billion dollars, making the DoD one of the largest spenders in the federal government. The DoD budget takes up the substantial portion of the discretionary federal budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) funding for weapons systems constitutes about one-third of that budget. Claiming to be independent and nonpartisan, CBO provides a regular analysis of the long-term cost of planned weapons acquisition and reviews selected weapon programs. However, the full costs of the United States defense and security apparatuses is unknown and believed to be much greater than the stated costs. The Pentagon has repeatedly failed its audits and several of its components are offline to scrutiny.
The United States military, by far the largest in the world, works alongside the military apparatuses of other countries across the world. NATO is a major alliance that feeds these many war machines. What is NATO? NATO is a military alliance of thirty member countries from North America and Europe. It constitutes a major international security architecture. It was founded in 1949 with the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which established the organization’s purpose, namely to provide collective defense against any armed attack against any of its member countries. According to Article 5, an armed attack against one or more of the member countries will be considered an attack against all of them. In such situations each member country is expected to take the necessary action to assist the attacked country.
The original ostensive purpose of NATO was to defend the West against Soviet expansion. One might have thought, then, that with the coming apart of the great socialist experiment, NATO would be dissolved. It was instead repurposed and began and continues a campaign across the Eurasian landmass to pull nations formerly part of the Soviet Union into the fold. Thus, NATO has become a military piece in the expansion and deepening of capitalist globalization. In fulfilling its collective defense mission, NATO deploys of troops and military equipment to different parts of the world. The alliance maintains a standing military force, known as the NATO Response Force (NRF), which can be deployed quickly to crisis areas. Additionally, NATO conducts joint military exercises and training to improve the readiness and interoperability of its member countries’ armed forces.
NATO also has a strong focus on political cooperation, with member countries regularly consulting and coordinating on a wide range of security issues. The organization permanent political body, the North Atlantic Council (NAC), is made up of representatives from each member country and is responsible for making decisions on NATO’s policies and activities. It will probably not surprise readers Freedom and Reason, that the administrative and legislative apparatuses of the members countries are beholden to powerful corporate actors—including transnational business firms—and these commitments shape NAC policies and activities.
In my blog, History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War, written nearly a year ago, I provided an in-depth analysis of the Ukraine government and its fascist character. I will repeat there the conclusions of that analysis.
The corporate state is behind the Ukraine resistance to negotiations with Russia. Deep state actors in the West have been cultivating the forces of extremism on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere in order to expand and entrench the transnational corporate order and they need this conflict to continue. The longstanding goal of the West, which became obvious in 2014, was to provoke Russian into a military action in order to drag that nation into a resource-exhausting conflict with the West. The greater logic of corporatism that underpins the European Union and the transnational world order thus made its move on what it regards as a recalcitrant nation.
Enlarging the conflict would only serve the interests of no one whose interests matter from the standpoint of humanity. The suffering of ordinary folk would only be enlarged by either NATO military strikes on Russia or Americans fighting Russians side-by-side with Ukrainians on the ground. As I reported, Russia has put its nuclear forces on high alert, returning to consciousness a fact we don’t like to think about: Russia is still armed to the teeth with civilization-ending weaponry (as is the United States and a handful of other nations). We are facing WWIII. Zelensky and Putin need to talk now to bring an end to hostilities and address the misery they have wrought. And the West needs to force this happen by ending its proxy war against Russia. If the West doesn’t, that will go a long way to confirming the thesis of my argument.
I am still pondering exactly why, but while reading this story I was reminded of Christine Helliwell’s article, published in Signs in 2000, titled “‘It’s Only a Penis’: Rape, Feminism, and Difference.” Incredulous over the unusual response of women in the Dayak community of Gerai in Indonesian Borneo concerning the attempted rape of a woman in the village (they were laughing about it), Helliwell asked the victim why she was not angry over the incident. The victim, who did not seem to regard herself as such, answered “How can a penis hurt anyone?” Now that’s the extreme version of cultural relativism that a queer theorists can get behind!
I was also reminded reading this article about an incident that happened to me a few years ago when, trying to find relief from my enlarged prostate (the curse of many men as we progress towards our deaths), my doctor prescribed finasteride. I got the prescription, then sat down as I always do to read all about the drug. I discovered that it is a hormone with this side effect: it grows hair. Yes! I need more hair. Then I read on and discovered another side effect: it grows breasts. There’s nothing wrong with breasts, of course. I just don’t want them on me. The real shocker came when cross-referenced finasteride. It’s one of the main hormones used by transwomen who wish to alter their body shape.
The alleged rapist in this case is taking finasteride (and another cross-sex hormone). The defendant has changed names and there is an interesting moment in the court transcript where the individuals “dead name” was announced and an explanation was given in the court about what that means. It is not exactly clear, but it appears that when the rapes were perpetrated, Isla Bryson was known as Adam Graham. It is perhaps curious, then, that, even if we accept that the defendant had changed genders, the penis in question was then attached to an individual who went by masculine pronouns.
This is a short piece about the end of work adapted from thoughts expressed yesterday on my Facebook page. I will be elaborating the thesis here in the future (as the academic publishing industry has become ideological corrupted and thoroughly monetized, Freedom and Reason is where I am dedicating my intellectual efforts these days).
We are going to have to rethink society if we are going to leverage technology for the betterment of humankind while avoiding the trans humanism that not only the emerging technology portends (technology creates possibilities and limitations—it is not neutral) but also the active push by the trans humanists to construct a post human world.
For those who believe the fear of post humanism is the projection of a right wing Christianism, the fact that these developments have troubled an old leftwing Marxist like yours truly puts the lie to the deceitful attempt by progressives to sell trans humanism to the wide-eyed woke youth who think that what is really a form of neo-fascism is somehow a form of justice.
My thinking about this problem, which is long standing, has been re-stirred by the annual convention of the World Economic Forum that is wrapping up today after a week of glorifying the fusion of man with machine. If we don’t stop these people it will be the end of us, and the world we love will be replaced by a world of monsters.
In the 1950s, CIO president Walter Reuther recounted a conversation he had with a Ford manager during a tour of a fully automated engine plant in Cleveland, Ohio. The manager said to Reuther, “Aren’t you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all of these machines?”
Reuther replied, “The thought that occurred to me was how are you going to sell cars to these machines?”
Walter Philip Reuther (1907–1970) was a labor leader and civil rights activist who built the United Automobile Workers (UAW)
Today Big Tech is laying off thousands of workers. They won’t be hiring them back. Artificial intelligence will being doing the work. And robots will be the source of physical labor. Self-driving cars will replace millions of men in the transportation industry. And, soon, restaurants will run themselves—with fewer and fewer customers because there will be no jobs.
There are millions of foreigners pouring across our southern border, while tens of millions of Americans sit idle in disorganized and impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Given the future humanity faces, many will be happy to be kept by the vast custodial apparatus that already manages the lives of tens of millions of redundant humans—redundant from the standpoint of the corporations that rule the earth.
Ernest Mandel was a Belgian Marxist economist and activist
In 1967, Ernest Mandel penned the following: “Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated…. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to ’sell these products for which there were no longer any buyers!
“It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation. Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory [of surplus value], for at the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.”
Mandel was a modern-day prophet. We’re in trouble, comrades.
freedom and reason 