Industrial Revolution

Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

One product of the Enlightenment was the Industrial Revolution. It was the child of scientific progress and colonization and a growing consumer society. Wealth had become a substitute for breeding. The Industrial Revolution represented progress, but it was technological progress rather than human progress. The Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers were there to explain it all away and convince us that we all benefited from this progress. Think of them as early apologists for capitalism.

The Money Machine - Crimes Against Women

Jeffrey Epstein's Sweetheart Deal

One of the things that income inequality does to people is make them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Women especially. Girls especially. Children especially. Make the situation desperate enough, keep them at an economic disadvantage great enough and they will become available for exploitation out of sheer survival instinct. 

Slumming and Classism

It is one of life's great ironies that the upper classes envy the lower classes their freedom. They consider any interaction with us to be "slumming", but they like to be tourists in our world. It's been this way for a long time.

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment - A Timeline

The "Enlightenment" was a philosophical movement that began as a response to the religious wars of the 17th century. It was a rejection of faith and religion in favor of cold reason and science. Enlightenment philosophers felt that religion and superstition had failed us, and the only way to solve our problems was to think our way out of them. They had the beginnings of an idea, but the application and the conclusions they reached have caused terrible misery in the world. Perhaps because they managed in their great thinking to reduce humanity to an abstract idea and completely overlooked the humans who had to live with the consequences of their ideas.

Malthusianism

Thomas Malthus

In 1798 a man named Thomas Malthus gave us "Malthusianism". We have him to thank for some of the most heartless, paternalistic tough-love policies of the 19th and 20th century all the way up to the present day. Malthus' theory was that population growth was exponential while food production was linear. He believed that humanity would overbreed and outstrip their resources, like the proverbial deer on an island with no predators overbreeding and subsequently starving because they've stripped the island of food. 

Paternalism

Paternalism is the premise that the government or the church must make decisions for people on the basis that those people don't know their own best interests or can't be trusted to act in their own best interests. The history of colonialism is a history of paternalism. It was just better public relations to say that you were going to these countries not to rob and enslave them but to bring them the gift of civilization.

Trash and Classism

America has a tradition of dividing itself up racially, but even among the controlling demographic there is a subdivision into classes. The lowest among them are referred to as "white trash". Basically poor people and the working class. Privilege for them is largely symbolic. There isn't much social mobility for them, but in terms of supporting the ruling demographic they serve a purpose and therefore have to be appealed to. It's done extremely grudgingly by the ruling class, who both depend on them for their power and look down on them as their social inferiors.

Pronatalism

Why The Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous

"Pronatalism" is a new word I've learned. I used to work in a battered women's shelter, and one of the abuse tactics we learned about there was "reproductive coercion". What that is is a man pressuring and manipulating their partner into having children when she may not want them. The purpose of this, and the purpose of all abuse is to keep the woman from ever being able to leave them. It binds her to him through their shared offspring. It keeps her pregnant and dependent and hopefully never able to get out of the house because her hands are full raising his kids. That's not what pronatalism is, or it's only a tangentally related thing in the big picture. Pronatalism has a slightly different objective. It's like reproductive coercion on an institutionalized scale as a national policy. Its purpose is to out-reproduce the competition or preserve the desired demographic using women as essentially breeding stock to do it.

Long Term Memory

I was watching this video earlier and one quote stood out for me. "Long-term memory is the seat of understanding."

Austerity

Today in class we were talking about "zorg", or care work. We'd been given a worksheet about how there was a severe shortage in the Netherlands of care workers, especially for the elderly.

Lab Meat

US Paves the Way For Lab Meat

I think this could be a very interesting field in the years to come. For example, why make it exclusively to mimic the taste of existing meats? We might not be able to resurrect the mammoth or the aurochs, but we have viable tissue samples for something like lab-grown meat. We could get back the animals we hunted to extinction for their meat. We might not bring back the dodo or the passenger pigeon, but we might be able to eat them again and find out for ourselves why we ate them all the last time.

War Is A Racket

In 1933 there was a conspiracy in the United States seeking to overturn the government and place a puppet in power. It was called The Business Plot. Several business leaders had gotten together and decided that they could run the place better, as in better for themselves. The man they chose for their puppet was called Smedley Butler. He was a United States Marine Corps Major General, the highest rank at the time, and one of the most decorated war heroes of all time. He still is. Smedley Butler was popular. His men adored him and so did the public. His outspokenness had also won him some enemies, like president Herbert Hoover (famous for the homeless encampments named for him).

Old Dutch

I've started a new job cleaning in a nursing home. I was doing the washing up for a resident one day during my training. When I had walked in I introduced myself and naturally since I have an accent the first question was about where I was from. While we were chatting and I was washing I was looking at one of the framed certificates on the wall in front of me and he saw me noticing it. It was a certificate of appreciation for 40 years of service, and he pointed to his name. I got as far as pronouncing his first name and he seemed pleased that I got it right. He told me that he had played the trumpet in his youth and I told him I had played it as a child, but I'd forgotten how to read sheet music a long time ago.

Attachment

Earlier this year I was watching a show about genealogy featuring Bryan Cranston and his family tree. According to the research they were able to do, about three of his male forebears had started families and then abandoned them by running away and joining the army. It displayed something that could almost be described as an enduring pattern, but of what? My theory is that it exemplifies intergenerational attachment trauma being passed down from parent to child.

Size Queens

Warning Over Online Penis Enlargement Pills

A while ago I read this article about fake penis pills being sold online and I thought to myself that men are much bigger size queens than they think women are if the existence of pills like this is anything to go by. Hell, throw in penis pumps and implants and we've got a whole basket of penis-oriented male neurosis. There's waaaay more than just those things to go by. 

Red Flag

The State of Menstruation Education

This is what I was reading this morning. I remember the girls and the boys being split up in about 4th grade to see separate films. To this day I have absolutely no idea what film the boys got to see. We got to see a film made by a sanitary product manufacturer about the joys of womanhood, or more specifically what to expect and what to do when we got our periods. 

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

I was reading an article this morning about how the midterms took away the bogeyman that the conservatives were using to strike fear into the hearts of their constituents. Namely the convoy of displaced people from Central America wending its way toward the southern border. Evidently they weren't able to make the threat convincing enough to stop everybody from voting against them. As far as I'm concerned, that is a marvelous thing.

Saturday Morning Ska

I'm up early so I'm going to do another music post. This time ska. I am waking up to ska this morning and I'm going to share some of my favorite tracks.

False Advertising

Entertainment is fantasy, film and television aren't real. Sometimes they touch on the truth or reference it directly or indirectly, but television programs don't actually reflect the real-world situation most of us live in.

What brings this to mind? I've been asked three or four times now by fellow immigrants, "Why did you leave the US?", because to them the idea of wanting to leave such a nice place is unfathomable.

Reclaiming My Time

In the words of Maxine Waters, I am starting to reclaim my time. Not quite in the way that she was when she said that, but maybe in a big picture sense I am.

I've been developing a taste for digital asceticism. I'm rebuilding my attention span and trying to live my life out in the real world for a change. I'm an old-timer. I've been online almost since there was an internet. It was very different back then, and I'm not sure it's changed so much for the better.

Sunday Morning Trip Hop

Trip-hop is one of my favorite genres of electronic music. I love what they do with samples and turntablism and generally engineering a song out of a patchwork of various influences and mediums. It's creative using existing sounds in a wholly new way. It's been interesting watching the genre develop over the years. I decided I'd share some of the classics. It's good music for waking up on a Sunday morning.

Meth House

Back in the US about fifteen years ago, before we had the opioid epidemic we have now we had a meth epidemic. It was what inspired the series Breaking Bad. Even on the prairie we had a big problem. Nearly everyone's family and social circles were touched by it. It seemed like every family had a methamphetamine addict in it or knew somebody who was cooking or dealing meth. Out in the country where there should have been nothing but the night sounds of nature, sometimes we'd hear a pickup driving into the treeline and we'd find a cooler with chemicals in it. Farmers had to lock their anhydrous ammonia tanks because meth cookers would steal it and sometimes injure themselves badly in the process, all to be able to cook meth. Drugstores instituted limits on Sudafed and made people present ID to buy it because rings of meth-addicted shoplifters had been going into them and cleaning them out of every over the counter medicine that had pseudoephedrine in it to make meth with. When they started tightening up restrictions on pseudoephedrine in the US, cheap meth from Mexico started making its way into America to meet the demand. Biker gangs and skinheads and organized crime got involved and made it a very dangerous drug far beyond how destructive it was all on its own.

You Catch What You Put Out Bait For

I've been thinking about the laws of attraction and how what we think affects what we do when we set ourselves up for self-defeat. What got me thinking about it was a conversation about why people do things like seeking fame or accumulating wealth or power, etc. Because if those things were the end goal then it would be something of a letdown once you had accomplished it. It would be like Alexander the Great's disappointment when he had no more world left to conquer. So what's it all for, if it's not the actual goal itself? And I thought to myself that it was a misguided attempt to get love. The people who seek those things want the love of many and also the love of individuals in their personal life. They want admiration and praise and respect, which ultimately boil down to other forms of love and positive regard.

Nieuwe Groep

I'm continuing in the new classroom. I was pleased to find that I am able to keep up with the N2T course. It's nice to be able to have real conversations with my classmates. It's also nice to find that I already speak better Nederlands than many of them in spite of the fact that their Nederlands is quite good. It makes me feel more confident in my own abilities.