toward a worldwide culture of love

I enjoyed this recent article from bell hooks, which connects Buddhism, love, and social engagement. I think that what she's talking about is what led me to become politically and socially engaged in the first place. I think in many cases, developing compassion, empathy, and love will naturally inspire one to address the suffering of others when possible, and that many of the ways love is expressed coincides with what we'd label ‘leftist’ political and social movements precisely because such movements are often motivated by love and a desire to protect and uplift others. They're less focused on 'me' and more on 'us' in the sense of all of our lives and predicaments being interconnected.

Love compels us to move away from things like greed, selfishness, and competition and towards generosity, compassion, and cooperation. That's at least why I was drawn towards social engagement and more to left-leaning politics, because that's where love and compassion directed me. A mind suffused with love, for example, will see someone struggling with injury or illness within a system that makes it difficult for them to afford and access care and be inspired to help, whether through charity or through supporting a more accessible and universal healthcare system.

That doesn't mean I think that only people who are political active or on the left end of the political spectrum are capable of love, only that I see why she connects love to the end of domination, and how that tends towards movements and ideas that we associate with the label 'leftist' today. Alternatives to capitalism. Universal healthcare. Addressing climate change. Gender equality. Black Lives Matter. Etc. Because much of that domination is rooted in fear and anger and greed. Systems and institutions and cultures have been built to protect what we have from others and to maintain positions of privilege for certain segments of the population, and love compels us to confront and end those things because of the suffering they engender—from sexism and racism to imperialism and militarism and the profit motive.

Love is also a key component of most spiritual traditions, and it suffuses their soteriology. And I'd even go so far as to say that, after studying and practicing in multiple spiritual traditions myself, a truly spiritual person who follows the underlying message of their respective faiths will necessarily be empathetic, inclusive, and ultimately, intersectional in their politics, but more importantly in their actions, as a result of the presence and development of love regardless of what their politics are. I think this can be seen from the lives and works of people of faith like bell hooks, Giro Seno'o, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, Oscar Romero, Paul Tillich, Malcolm X, Thich Nhat Hanh, Gustavo Gutierrez, MLK Jr., Rachel Held Evans, and countless others. As Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr puts it:

"If we are going to have truly prophetic people who go beyond the categories of liberal and conservative, we have to teach them some way to integrate their needed activism with a truly contemplative mind and heart. I’m convinced that once you learn how to look out at life from the contemplative eyes of the True Self, your politics and economics are going to change on their own. I don’t need to teach you what your politics should or shouldn’t be. Once you see things contemplatively, you’ll begin to seek the bias from the bottom instead of the top, you’ll be free to embrace your shadow, and you can live at peace with those who are different. From a contemplative stance, you’ll know what action is yours to do—and what is not yours to do—almost naturally."

Love moves us to act against suffering and injustice, because love motivates up to try and heal rather than harm. Love moves us to swim against the current of what she terms "dominator thinking and practice," which "relies for its maintenance on the constant production of a feeling of lack, of the need to grasp"; and that conversely, "Giving love offers us a way to end this suffering—loving ourselves, extending that love to everything beyond the self, we experience wholeness" and through that "we are healed." And that love can be expressed in many ways, not just in the realm of the political. It can be expressed in any number of daily personal interactions and small acts of kindness and generosity.

ffs sam

I still remember when I first discovered Sam Harris. I stumbled upon some of his articles on contemplative science and meditation around 2004-5. I thought he was awesome because he was this rational scientist who was willing to look into things like consciousness and meditation and I felt a connection with his determinism, since I also saw the world through a similar POV. I didn't even mind The End of Faith even though I was deeply into Buddhism and starting to appreciate aspects of contemplative Christianity more. I thought his criticisms of religion were strong. But he lost me when he started to use his gift of making anything sound reasonable in the defense of torture. Then his ire towards Islam and Muslims drove him further from the place of esteem I once held him in. Fast forward to today and his most recent podcast episode, Can We Pull Back From the Brink [1], which really struck a nerve. Listening to it, I found myself strongly agreeing with NYD30304d's take via reddit [2]:

I don't understand how Sam is so right on the non existence of free will but so baffled by issues of race and still views racism as a matter of personal choice and not the accumulation of ten trillion causes over generations which drive the fully determined actions of individuals in the moment that result in racist outcomes. That right there is the whole fucking thing and Sam is an expert in one side of the coin but an imbecile in the other. That right there is why a black cop can do something racist, because the causes driving him demand racist effects. FFS Sam.

All of his citing of black crime statistics are almost begging the question, don't they deserve it? The reason black people commit more crimes is because of the racist system driving them, not because they choose to. But Sam also believes that nobody deserves anything, that we are just the sum of our past, our current conditions and our mental state in any given moment. I would like him to explore how he can feel these things simultaneously and maybe follow [his] own deterministic philosophy to its logical conclusion - that racism is a system driving racially disparate effects and not a feeling in the heart.

Elaborating on that, from the very beginning he frames it as an issue of conversation vs. violence, with the implication being that the protesters and the left in general are on the side of violence, and that if people don't stop protesting, society will collapse or self-immolate. He literally says people are tearing the country apart and that we can't tell fact from fiction anymore. Except that's hyperbole. People are protesting police brutality, yes. And some of those have resulted in damage and harm. But they're not tearing the country apart, unless a few statues, a couple of jacked up buildings, and graffiti are his idea of the country falling into ruin. The police are the ones who are clearly the most violent party in all of this. But never mind that, because then he brings up COVID-19 and makes it sound like he thinks protesting is irresponsible because of the probability of increased infection rates as a result, and it makes me wonder if he'd say the same if an outbreak had occurred during the civil rights movement. No protesting, just talk about getting rid of Jim Crow and forget all these marches and protests and riots, as if black Americans hadn't been talking about that and lynchings and everything else for years and years. Maybe that's not what he'd say, but it follows from his logic at any rate. And then he goes into how the protests are stifling the ability of people to express themselves, as if black voices haven't been stifled and that's why they they're so upset, because people like Sam still don't even believe that black people are experiencing the level of discrimination and police violence that they've been trying to communicate or that the statistics clearly seem to show. And that's just the intro, the framing of the truth that Sam purports to be after and telling.

To be fair, I agree with him about Trump, both about how terrible he is and how this shit helps him (which I think is true because many Americans are pretty reactionary). But then he asks how many people will die because of the protests, but he doesn't ask why so many people are willing to take that risk. Maybe there really is a problem that needs to be addressed, Sam? It's easy to say that it's just a case of mob mentality and violence by overreacting leftists and black people, but can we just entertain the possibility that this problem exists, has existed, and that the people suffering under it the most and have been talking about it and trying to change it for years, even generations, might have a reason to engage in civil unrest to try and finally get real solutions? Sam mentions the fact that the officer was indicted. Yeah, after all this started, which he concedes may be the reason only to latter argue against their efficiency! And he admits that racism is a problem only to then later try and show how it's not really the problem that people think it is or literally experience. Like, he's not down with racism, but then he seems to me to downplay it every chance he gets in this 2 hour long episode. And my biggest issue with the whole thing is that he wants to control and contain what people are trying to do to change it in their demands for material, institutional solutions that have been a long time coming, including defunding and demilitarizing the police and removing qualified immunity so they can actually be held accountable for a change. But poor Sam and other rational critics of the left, they're a victim of this in many ways too, dontcha know? He acts like he can't talk about any of this in a rational and critical way and push back on the idea that racism seriously affects black people in the US, like just doing so will ruin his career or worse.

And of course after this, he takes more shots at the protesters and violence without even fully going into how those things have started this country, ended slavery/the country splitting apart, gave women the right to vote, ended segregation and Jim Crow, and killed Hitler. Does he think that people just talked their way into all those things? Did they lead to the breakdown of society? And he says things like oh no someone was fired for saying all lives matter as if that's proof of something. People get fired for less and worse all the goddamn time, and if you're a person representing an organization and you say stuff that negatively reflects on them then they can and will fire you! It's completely legal and happens all the time. And some people get fired illegally, such as for trying to form a union, but he doesn't touch on that because he's trying to frame the truth to point towards the dangers of left-leaning censorship and away from other issues even though he's ostensibly just being objective. And to slight the protest movement even more, he talks about it as a religious awakening that isn't "making honest contact with reality."

So I guess people like me are just being completely irrational? Completely ahistorical? Completely unhinged and out of touch with reality? I don't know if he'd use those words per se, but he definitely thinks we're motivated by "confusion and misinformation." Ok, sure. Maybe. There's a lot of that out there. But I'd counter that he's motivated by his distaste for identity politics because he feels he can't just say whatever he wants, that essentially free speech should mean not only freedom from government interference but freedom from consequences. He doesn't want people to be able to get angry at him for the things he says. And then he goes on to say that a person's race/skin colour or personal experience shouldn't matter when talking about racism. On the face of it, I agree that everyone should be able to talk about it. It shouldn't be taboo to have discussions about race and racism. But the idea that a black person shouldn't discuss their experience as a 'black' person amidst the racism of America, because that perspective doesn't somehow matter? According to Sam, we can apparently only talk about racism from some supposedly objective viewpoint that transcends race. Which isn't fucking possible, except maybe for people awakened to the nature of nonduality or a future where racism is all but eradicated. (He talks about weaponizing ideas, but I think he's weaponizing his contemplativism and scientism here to suggest he has the same standing to speak authoritatively on the experience of racism as opposed to a black person or community suffering under it, which I think takes away their voice but I digress.)

As I've said, he's very skillful at saying there's an issue or problem that exists only to then downplay it. And for as much as he seems to understand and champion causal determinism — the idea that we're not in as much control as we think are are conditioned by many internal and external causal factors — he doesn't seem to be able to connect the dots when it comes to the way social relations and institutions built on and suffused with racism can't condition the shit black people are experiencing and that have created and sustained the very identity of blackness itself. Or how those material systems and mechanisms can feasibly continue to cause issues, and that that is why people are trying to change them by defunding the police and using that money in other, arguably better ways. (Here Sam could have gone into the history of how the Enlightenment, besides the many great things it did, also helped to give rise to modern racism [3], and how that has influenced much of Western society founded upon Enlightenment ideals, both good and bad. How white supremacy was a part of that, and how it's an ingrained part of our culture and society and in some ways our thinking. Which doesn't mean every white person is a white supremacist, only that it's a part of our past and present and still ingrained in our social institutions and subconscious. But of course he doesn't.) In essence, it's not a bad faith argument as he says more than once; it's a causal deterministic argument that a materialist like him should be championing, too! And the statistics. He thinks this is his finishing move, FATALITY!

He says that white people suffer more from police violence than black people, that the police kill more white people, so basically the problem of racism isn't as bad as you might think. Those BLM people are just playing loose with the facts, right? Wrong. If we look at the numbers, we see that yes, more white people are killed by police over all, but we also see that they are also a much larger percentage of the population. This fact isn't inconsequential. He should understand how statistics work and the importance of looking deeper into the numbers. Comparing the numbers and taking into consideration the percentage of the population who are white vs. black, for example, we can see that black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. [4] And even in terms of more nonlethal means like tasers, there's obvious disparities in the numbers of black people killed vs. white people. It's clear, for example, that the use of tasers disproportionately kills black people in the US [5], so again, I'd argue that the scrutiny should be on the police and how/when they use force, and why black people seem to bear the brunt of it proportionately speaking. But not Sam.

Beyond that, though, he seems to miss or completely gloss over the entire issue of institutionalized racism itself and how ingrained biases can affect or infect everyone in that society and condition everyone in said society to operate in certain ways, such as studies that suggest women objectify women in the same way as men [6], likely due to the prevalence of sexism and patriarchy in our society; how black officers view black suspects more negatively than white ones and kill black suspects at similar rates as white officers [7], likely due to the prevalence of institutionalized racism; etc. And yeah, white people experience things like police violence, too. Nobody denies that, Sam. The question is, is their treatment equal? Are they equally targeted? Are they killed in proportionate numbers population-wise? If so, then maybe Sam's argument would hold water. But the answer, of course, is no, and he basically admits that, but then uses his downplaying trick by saying black people commit more crimes. In his view, obviously the police will target them more because they commit more of the crimes. (Again, no exploration of the role generations of discrimination, segregation, wealth inequality, etc. play in conditioning pockets of poverty in black communities, which conditions crime and how we could possibly address that with means other than sending in state agents with guns.)

Then he questions the explosion of anger over a black guy dying by cops and why there wasn't the same reaction over a white guy dying under similar circumstances. Makes you think, right? He seems to think that a poor perception of racism is responsible for people essentially overreacting over the death of one man, except he again completely misses the obvious fact that it's not just about one man but 400 YEARS OF HISTORY of black people in the US and the things they've had to overcome each generation by another group of people and a government that stole them from their land, treated them like animals and used them as slaves, constructed a racist narrative about them to justify it that poisons people's minds to this day, criminalized and vilified their skin colour, and once they were finally freed, turned around to segregate them, lynch them, prevent them from getting loans or homes in certain areas, and constructed laws that disproportionately affected them, courts that disproportionately sentence them, and a police force that obviously targets them for attention and the use of violence to this very day. There are a host of statistics that, to me, illustrate the ripples from this history still persist and in many ways are still a present reality, statistics that Sam never mentions. Disparities in jail time. [8] Wealth disparities. [9] Health disparities. [10] Educational disparities. [11] Employment disparities. [13] The list goes on. So again, re: Sam's argument against identity politics, even if many white people today aren't as prejudiced or racist as they once were and see beyond a person's colour, these built in barriers and inequalities clearly seem to still exert their influence and manifest themselves in the forms of disparities, inequalities, and violence that disproportionately affect the black community.

Honestly, it shouldn't be so hard for a determinist of any stripe to understand this, especially when we have the history and the numbers at our fingertips. There's clearly something going on here. But instead of really wrestling with this, he spends a lot of time on things like how people should just not resist arrest rather than exploring the idea of fundamentally changing the material social relations, institutions, and systems built into the fabric of our society that arguably influence how it functions along with our views and perceptions about race. And I think his argument is ultimately a straw man because the left, protesters, BLM, etc. aren't arguing that it's all about feelings and individual prejudice, as if only white people are responsible and the ones doing the killing, etc. None I know at at least. They're ALL talking about systems of injustice, material conditions like widespread poverty and lack of access to equitable education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, etc. that condition these things, conditions that in turn lead to more crime in those communities and compel black police officers to shoot black suspects more than white ones. In essence, their argument (and mine) is that current power dynamics aren't equal, and that those dynamics push black and other people of colour within the system (politicians, police officers, etc.) to see and act in similar ways now that they are part of the system. And whether or not you agree with it, it isn't a bad faith argument or one that relies purely on the identity politics that he despises so much.

So yeah, this podcast both upset and disappointed me. For one, he's got a big platform and a lot of people put a lot of faith in his opinions. And he's smart and rational and I know that his opinions carry more weight than mine as he's famous, has written multiple books, has a podcast, and has an academic background in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience and I'm just some random guy on the internet. So people will hear this and likely have a negative opinion of these protests and the movement behind them without looking deeper. And I don't know why his take bothers me so much (maybe because I personally used to look up to him as a scientist and social commentator?); but I think I and others criticizing the system have valid points and he doesn't really address any of them. At least it seems to me that he glosses over a lot more than he digs into just so that he can seemingly focus on his criticism of the left and identity politics and not on the real question of, how the fuck do we finally get shit in this country equal for everyone? And so I find myself echoing NYD3030: FFS Sam.

/rant

1. Harris, Sam. (2020, June 12). Can We Pull Back From the Brink. Youtube. https://youtu.be/vmgxtcbc4iU
2. NYD3030. (2020, June 13). Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/h7wxus/comment/fup706l
3. Bouie Jamelle. (2018, June 5). The Enlightenment's Dark Side. Pocket (via Slate). https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-enlightenment-s-dark-side
4. Haddad, Mohammed. (2020, May 31). Mapping US police killings of Black Americans. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/05/mapping-police-killings-black-americans-200531105741757.html
5. So, Linda. (2020, June 15). Black Americans disproportionately die in police Taser confrontations. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-tasers-in/black-americans-disproportionately-die-in-police-taser-confrontations-idUSKBN23M16E
6. Association for Psychological Science. (2012, May 15). People see sexy pictures of women as objects, not people; sexy-looking men as people. ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515131719.htm
7. Jacobs, Tom. (2018, August 9). BLACK COPS ARE JUST AS LIKELY AS WHITE COPS TO KILL BLACK SUSPECTS. Pacific Standard Magazine. https://psmag.com/social-justice/black-cops-are-just-as-likely-as-whites-to-kill-black-suspects
8. Ingraham, Christopher. (2017, November 16). Black men sentenced to more time for committing the exact same crime as a white person, study finds. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/16/black-men-sentenced-to-more-time-for-committing-the-exact-same-crime-as-a-white-person-study-finds/
9. Lee, Trymaine. (2019, August 14). A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-wealth-gap.html
10. Orsi, Jennifer M. MPH; Margellos-Anast, Helen MPH; Whitman, Steven PhD. (2010, February). Black–White Health Disparities in the United States and Chicago: A 15-Year Progress Analysis. Am J Public Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804622/
11. Darling-Hammond, Linda. (1998, March 1). Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education. The Brookings Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/
12. Quillian, Lincoln; Pager, Devah; Midtbøen, Arnfinn H.; Hexel, Ole. (2017, October 11). Hiring Discrimination Against Black Americans Hasn't Declined in 25 Years. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-americans-hasnt-declined-in-25-years

blm 2020 (specifically directed towards white people)

The irony of the prophet is that they see futures and truths that the majority of us refuse to acknowledge and believe to our own detriment, yet they cannot do anything but preach them despite being ignored or reviled by the very world they're trying to help. They are compelled to do so by something inside of them they cannot ignore, by a love for their fellow brethren and a deep compassion for the suffering and oppression the poor and marginalized experience due to the existence of greed, hatred, and ignorance in the hearts of those who rule over them. With their words, they lay bare the flaws and sins of society and try to show us another path, one leading to humility and justice and reconciliation. And oftentimes, those words and their prescriptions are a challenge and a threat to the rich and powerful, who profit at the expense of the least among us; and their witnessing to the truth puts their lives in danger.

There are prophets everywhere in the world and in every walk of life; and if we could only learn to listen them, our world would be a different place. They tell us the difficult things we may not wish to hear but are necessary. They warn us of the consequences that we don't wish to face up to if we don't change our ways. And if we heeded their words more often, perhaps the 'moral arc of the universe' would be a little less long and bend even more towards justice than it historically does. But more often than not, it seems, prophets are only appreciated by society far into the future, when their words ring loud and true and their warnings have unfortunately all come to pass. Only then are their words recognized. I think one of those prophets was MLK Jr., who spoke out against the evils of racism, poverty, and war. And in that witnessing, he also spoke out against capitalism and those who criticized the ways oppressed people fought their oppression. In 1963, for example, MLK famously wrote:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;' who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.'

They were powerful words then, and unfortunately, I think they still carry a great deal of weight today. I've been thinking a lot about those words while reading things like our mayor's response to the protests, watching the mainstream news coverage, and contemplating the role white people have historically played in the oppression of black people; and the way I see it, you're either on the side of the black community or you're not. It's that simple.

Black people in the US have literally suffered generations of oppression and racism in this country, from slavery to segregation and lynching to modern-day redlining, mass incarceration, and police violence. They have been patient enough for justice. Beyond patient. They have spent generations peacefully protesting and working within the system (and most still do). They have spent generations making their case for true equality and reparations for what they have had to endure. They have pleaded generation after generation for white society to see their plight, hear their cries, and to act. And for generations, those cries have mostly fallen on deaf ears or else have been answered by piecemeal reforms here and there, and often only after sustained pressure and civil unrest. Restorative justice has always remained a dream just out of reach.

That's why MLK said that the riot was the language of the unheard. Voices can only cry out for so long before they go hoarse and the generations of sadness, anger, and frustration start to boil over and become expressed in different ways, especially in reaction to watching yet another member of their community be killed—watching it over and over again on the news and social media and seeing how nobody stopped it and how nobody was held accountable, and listening to all the excuses for why his murder was justified or unavoidable. Can you imagine that level of sadness, anger, and frustration? And so just like Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, LA in 1992, Ferguson in 2014, Baltimore in 2015, etc., we have Minneapolis et al. in 2020.

This isn't said to challenge or shame anyone. Seeing beyond our privilege and through the propaganda and fairytale narratives we've been told our whole lives about the American Dream is a difficult task. We essentially have to be deprogrammed. But the hard truth of the matter is, if you're on the side of the police and those who talk about order and the rule of law and not about the scourge of racism and the terror that the police are for black and other nonwhite individuals (as well as the poor, homeless, mentally ill, etc.), you're ultimately on the side of institutionalized racism, classism, and oppression. And as well-meaning as many may be, I think MLK's criticism of the 'white moderate' is equally as valid for white moderates (and moderates and centrists in general) who today say that they support the black community and believe black lives matter yet criticize their methods or language or cynicism towards politicians, the police, and white society itself. His words were directed squarely at those who were in opposition to anyone fighting for immediate justice for black people (and other marginalized groups) with various means of direct action, because their opposition, in the name of civility and order, ultimately helped to maintain things as they were, as untenable as they were.

And MLK's advice is just as valid today as it was in 1963: Don't fall for the myth of time and waiting for a "more convenient season." The time is always right for justice, whether it's justice for BIPOC, justice for the poor, justice for immigrants, justice for women, justice for the LGBTQ community, justice for those with physical or mental disabilities, or justice for the planet. And we shouldn't be afraid to pick a side, because as Howard Zinn used to say, "You can't be neutral on a moving train." Silence is complicity, even if it's inadvertent. Nevertheless, it's easy to simply say that black lives matter, but now it's up to us to prove that they matter by doing what we can to defend and support those lives. And to do that, one of the things that must be done is to help force the radical restructuring of our world — materially, spiritually, and everything in between — while also standing in solidarity with everyone out in the streets right now. We have to help forge a future without racism. We created the problem, so it's definitely on us to help solve it.

Time after time after time, police engage protesters with violence time after time after time they provoke it with the killing of unarmed black men, women, and children. Our mayors are complicit. Our legislators are complicit. Our governors are complicit. Our courts are complicit. Corporations are complicit. And our federal government is complicit. Where do they get their money? Where do they get their weapons and tech? Where do they get their orders and immunity? So how can we expect all of these bricks in a larger systemic wall of inequality and violence to do what is right and give us justice when they've failed to do so for generations? The police protect the socioeconomic order, an order that leaves many at the mercy of markets and predatory corporations and systemic injustice. They protect property, wealth, and white privilege. How many times have journalists reported on this? How many times has this been addressed in city councils? How many promises have we been given at podiums by our leaders that change is coming? So where are they? They're out in the streets right now. The change is coming with the power of everyday people rallying around a common cause, confronting the police and the system they protect. Change is coming because of our solidarity, our numbers, our direct actions, and our righteous anger at inequality, injustice, and oppression.

me who?

From Business Insider, one of the few articles I've seen actually taking Tara Reade's allegations seriously:

A former neighbor of Joe Biden's accuser Tara Reade has come forward to corroborate her sexual-assault account, saying Reade discussed the allegations in detail in the mid-1990s

I think the Democratic Party has some serious soul searching to do right now. Seriouy. While I understand that accusations aren't proof, I honestly question the morals of a party and its voters who willingly support someone with credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault leveled against them.

While most were ignoring this story and telling everyone that there's no alternative to Joe Biden so you have to support him no matter what, others were digging into this story to find out if anything out there could corroborate it. And guess what? There is. Within a matter of weeks, there are two more people who have gone on the record to say they were told about the incident and a video of what may be her mom calling the Larry King show for advice on where to turn for help besides the press.

After the Me Too and Times Up movement picked up steam, I thought people were finally going to start taking this kind of stuff seriously. But instead, it seems that it's no longer fashionable. People were happy to use this movement to try and stop a conservative Supreme Court nomination, but aren't so keen to us it to try and stop a liberal presidential nomination. Our country has consistently rewarded bad behaviour from white men, and there's little to stop it from continuing to happen except for people getting fed up with the hypocrisy and corruption of the ruling class and those who own and control the economy.

In this case, the rank and file of the Democratic Party need to do what the leadership simply refuses to do and demand that Biden step down. There are a host of candidates who are not only better, they don't have credible assault allegations hanging around their necks. Otherwise, there's little separating the Democratic Party from the immorality, hypocrisy, and corruption that they claim to abhor in the Republican Party. Because if they're not fighting against this, they're enabling it.

Maybe it's my previous interest in religion, philosophy, and ethics before becoming interested in politics that makes me feel so strongly about stuff like this, but the lack of concern and investigation into this, let alone any moral or pragmatic arguments against this situation, deeply disturbs me.

American society had a couple of years of being educated in the objectification and abuse of women, particularly by men in power, and the importance of the need to believe them and take them seriously only to then have all of that ignored or put on hold because of the insidiousness of lesser evilism in the support of the ghost of moderate neoliberalism. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

good friday

Today's Good Friday, the day we reflect on the death of Jesus. What does Jesus' death mean? We're told it means salvation, new life, peace. To be honest, it's a bit hard for me to understand what that means on a deep, theological level. But Jesus' death on the cross can also act as a template for our own lives.

Jesus had a mission, to seek and to save what was lost (Luke 19:10). And when Jesus went out, he went out to teach, to heal, to feed, and to share God's love by loving others, which in itself is radical thing. But his faith, his love, and his compassionate action were threatening to many, from those among the elite to even some among the common people. And they all eventually tried in their own way, whether out of fear, ignorance, misunderstanding, ill will, or attachment to tradition, to take away these treasures he possessed. But try as they may, he wouldn't give them up, even under the threat of death. He held tight to his faith, his love, and his compassion for all of humanity, all the way down to the least among us, and he willingly suffered death on the cross rather than lose them to fear, hatred, selfishness, and inaction.

In essence, his life wasn't just about himself, it was ultimately about his relationship to others, to the whole world, and to God. You could say that his message was "Not me, Us."

His life was an example to us, a mandala, a living tapestry meant to inspire and hearten us. His life was like a lamp shining forth the bright light of hope into the future in order to guide us and help us not lose our way to the kingdom of heaven, that joyful world we wish to one day see, born out of love in action.

normalize diversity

I know I don't post about this kind of stuff much, but every once in a while I see something that makes me feel like I need to because I forget that not everyone is like most of my friends and accepting of other people. So, I get that we live in a cis-normative society—a society where people outside of rigid binaries like man/woman, gay/straight, cis/transgender, etc. face marginalization and violence for being who they are and must present themselves like some kind of exotic animal. Cis people expect it, and many feel justified in reacting violently if they are "surprised." The amount of hate and violence directed towards LGBTQIA+ individuals is astounding. But it shouldn't matter what gender or sex you are or somebody else is. Seriously. If you find it weird, shocking, or offensive that someone is different than you expect or wish them to be, then it’s up to you to educate yourself and learn to appreciate and enjoy the diversity of people in this world. We need to stop making excuses for this kind of belief and behaviour and deprogram ourselves of what society has taught us about rigid binaries and what's "normal." If you find someone you're fond of and attracted to, then explore ways to enjoy being together. It's not a difficult concept.

what's capitalism got to do with it?

Instead of doing my school work today, I decided to elaborate upon an idea I found in a tweet because I think it's important.

One of the main reasons that people like me always take aim at capitalism when criticizing social phenomena, including our political system, is the basic Marxian concept of base/superstructure relations. It's the idea that a capitalist state and its ruling class (political superstructure) are a manifestation or reflection of underlying economic social relations (economic base), where the few exploit the many for profit. In the US, we can see empirical examples of political inequality as it manifests out of inherently unequal social relations of production. [1] But you don't really need in-depth studies to see things like, maybe there's something wrong when one person is making $8 million an hour while the majority of workers in the US make less than $20 an hour, half make less than $15 including most of the "essential workers" working right now [2], and over 10 million people have filed for unemployment in 2 weeks and are unsure how they're going to pay for things like rent, healthcare, and food. [3] Some think that a tweak to the system here, or a higher tax there, will fix economic inequality and a host of oppressive isms that have been built into the system from its inception.

But critics like Marx, seeking answers to similar problems and a better alternative, uncovered some of the underlying logical contractions inherent to how capitalism functions, as well as the historical violence, oppression, and theft that heralded the beginning of this relatively new mode of production. The short version is, countries with emerging mercantile markets enclosed local common land; colonized other lands; stole land, wealth, and resources; and exploited slave labour in what Marx called the process of 'primitive accumulation.' [4] Then after the industrial revolution, those in power further forced their own people off of communal land and into the cities to work in the factories under new social relations, one in which they were forced to sell their labour-power to someone for a wage, not fully realizing that the person who now owns that labour-power owns the products of that labour and all the extra value added by their labour. [5] So first they accumulated by theft, then they accumulated by the exploitation of wage workers once feudalism gave way to mercantilism and then capitalism. And into that system was planted all of the racism and sexism of the time because they fostered this growing system. Racism was used to dehumanize other people so that their slave labour and colonial exploitation was accepted by the colonizers. Sexism was used to keep women at home to do all the unpaid labour of raising the next generation of workers (children) as well as sustain the current generation (husbands), allowing the ownership class to keep the maximum amount of the wealth their workers created for themselves as less was needed to materially maintain the workers thanks to this unpaid, supportive labour. (Wages are essentially a fraction of the total value created in the labour process that's given back to the worker by the capitalist so they can materially reproduce their labour-power, i.e., live.) The US was no exception as it followed the basic model of the rest of Europe. It was based in part on Enlightenment ideals and English and Roman political models in which white, male property owners had the most freedom and power. Combine that with the colonization of the Americas and theft of land and resources of the native inhabitants, slave labour from Africa, and the support role women played predominantly in the background, and you have the soil in which our system grew. It, too, was built on slave labour as well as gender discrimination. And once both black people and women were somewhat liberated from the worst of their oppression, they were allowed to go to school and into the workplace and eventually vote, but even there the racism and sexism continued, so that they were marginalized and paid less for the same work and were often used to suppress wages overall.

As more and more entered to workforce, either out of necessity or desire, they were confronted with the same discrimination and were paid less; and since they would work for less, white men now had to not only compete with each other and with immigrants, but the other half of the population that had previously been excluded from the workplace and the electorate, and who worked for a fraction of what they could make. This only served to enhance the animosity that many white men had towards women and people of colour. Not only were cultural biases in play, but the system actively pitted them against one another because it helped suppress wages and maximize profits while simultaneously creating more factionalism within the electorate, further diluting the electoral power of workers. And this factionalism was intentional, being expressly created by the founders from the very beginning. Like most forms of government centered around private property rights (a central tenet of capitalism), the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the propertyless than anything else. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 10, "… the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." [6] So the ownership of property (which at the beginning included black people and to some extent women) and the social relations arising out of that formed the logical and material economic basis of our society, a basis that was in turn reflected in our political system that was embedded with systemic mechanisms of racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of factionalism and inequality. So while we are still seduced by flowery language of the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal and live in a land of opportunity, to think that a few extra regulations or taxes can fix all of this is naive. It can certainly mitigate the worst of things and provide what we call 'social safety nets,' but even much of those have either been privatized, minimized, or means tested, creating a system of bureaucratic hurdles and public shaming for those who qualify. And then there are the ways this inequality manifests itself in housing, education, the criminal justice system, etc., all of which contain tiers of inequality that are further built upon this socioeconomic foundation. In the end, working people as a class, splintered into various factions that can be more easily managed and pitted against one another, bear the brunt of this exploitation and inequality so that a few may thrive and steer the course of history.

In essence, the US is a capitalist, oligarchical republic. It papers over this reality with ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, but crises like this poke huge holes in that paper covering, revealing what's truly underneath. And people like Garrett Felber are 100% right when they point out things like, "Coronavirus was just the fuse in the tinderbox. The U.S. nation state is the cause. You don't get one man making 8 million an hour while 10 million file for unemployment from a bug in the system. This is a half-century of privatization and gutted out social welfare built on a permanent war economy, mass consumption, global capitalism, and mass criminalization, on a foundation of settler colonialism and slavery." [7] For the US to truly move away from its oligarchical political-economic makeup and towards real democracy in which social wealth is more equitably managed, it has to fundamentally alter the makeup of its mode of production through a radical economic transformation in which the exploitation, alienation, and commodity fetishism of the present system are gradually eliminated via a more socialized mode of production. And that not only requires fundamental structural changes, it requires the organization of working people into a force that can bring those changes into being. We need a revolution in our thought and in our morals. And more importantly, we need a revolution in our means of production. We need a new foundation to build our society upon, fresh soil in which to plant our future garden of plenty. Because we have the technology and labour needed to provide for the needs of everyone. The only barrier to that is a system predicated upon production for profit, private property rights that give owners as a class disproportionate control over the political and economic life of this country, and an ingrained belief that there is no other alternative. But we have to have the willingness to imagine one or else we're going to be trapped in this socioeconomic version of Plato's Cave for another 200 years, if the planet and our species even survive for that long. [8]

Many are under the impression that if we vote for the better for the two political options available to us, we will eventually achieve this new world. But the contradictions that shape and sustain our economic foundation also help to shape and sustain the political structure built on top of it, and both parties ultimately work to preserve that foundation, not rebuild it. That's not to say that there aren't qualitative differences between them. However, those differences stop short of addressing the real problem—capitalist social relations. Our strength as a class is in our numbers and our labour. We, together, are the true foundation of this society, and it's well past time that the world we live in reflects that. To summarize, I'm a leftist because I think the system itself needs to be fundamentally changed, and I think that a better system is one that is more democratic and more equitably distributes the wealth of our labour. In addition, working people have to be involved because such a change requires us as a force to make it happen, through our numbers, the withholding of our labour, the reclaiming of our ownership of that labour, etc. We need to realize our true political and economic power. I know I've sounded like a broken record for the last 10 years, and I may not be the smartest or most educated person, but I've seen and experienced much to validate this and little to disprove it.

1. Gilens, Martin and Page, Benjamin I. (2014, September, 18). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
2. Menon, Rajan. (2018, July 16). The Wages of Poverty in America. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/07/16/wages-poverty-america
3. Schneider, Avie. (2020, April 2). Staggering: Record 10 Million File For Unemployment In 2 Weeks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/02/825383525/6-6-million-file-for-unemployment-another-dismal-record
4. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
5. Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
6. Madison, James. (1787, November 23). Federalist No. 10. The Federalist Papers. https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10
7. Felber, Garrett. (2020, April 2). Twitter. https://twitter.com/garrett_felber/status/1245848099928649730
8. Spratt, David & Dunlop, Ian. (2019, May). Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf