Woke Media vs Bill Maher. A tiff that only serves the KGB-confederates.

First, a reminder to all Californians... to vote. Mail that ballot in! I assume, since you are visiting Contrary Brin, that you're sane enough to vote: "No." 

Only now, since I've gone several weeks without posting anything provovcative or controversial, let's see what a storm I can provoke.

== Bill Maher, sellout or standard bearer for the Roosevelteans? ==

Well, it's an ecological niche that only Bill Maher occupies, alas. 

While I like and enjoy many of the late-night liberal show hosts - especially fellow sci fi nerd Stephen Colbert, who gave me a cap! - I do wish more of them will draw lines in the sand and admit: 

"Yes, there does exist some crazy among the good guys, too. And that crazy sometimes hurts the cause of justice and progress, more than it helps." 

Before you scream in outrage and/or wander off in disgust, let me reiterate what you see here frequently, that our greatest danger is from an insane and treasonous Mad Right - a risen Confederate lunacy - that is waging open war - at the behest of oligarchs, mafiosi and Kremlin agents - against not only justice and tolerance but vs. every single modern fact-using profession. That last aspect gets underplayed in liberal media, but it is the core hate-and vendetta of the oligarchy. Especially Fox News.

Having said that, I assert also that you would be nuts not to grudgingly admit that our side has some flaws, including a passl of real nut jobs and bullies. With this major distinction!

* Yes, the FAR left CONTAINS some fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality and symbol-fetishes on you. 

 

* But today’s ENTIRE mad right CONSISTS of fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality and symbol-fetishes on you.   

 

There is all the world’s difference between FAR and ENTIRE.  As there is between CONTAINS and CONSISTS. 

So sure. We must spend 99% of our current attention reinforcing humanity's sole hope - a rationally-tolerant and self-critically improving enlightenment experiment, fighting for its very survival against Putin-Murdoch and their hirelings! 

And yet, our Union side of this desperate latest phase of the 250 year American Civil War is harmed by the far-fewer but still horrible nut-job bullies on our own side. Splitters who helped make today's demographically-challenged GOP the force that it is and remains. 

== More voices needed ==

I must cite especially, Maher's recent riff about "cultural appropriation," a far-left guilt trip fetish that has no redeeming qualities. It's not an exaggeration or conflation of something good... it's just simple, flat out insanity.

Oh, I'll grant that original sources should be credited and acknowledged! Like Greece always leading the parade of nations at the Olympics. 

Sure. If any Hawaiians show up at a surfing competition, they oughta get - in perpetuity(!) - the right to go first! And first-pick naming rights on anything in the entire universe that's discovered by mighty observatories now using the one, great and unambiguously miraculous gift of Poli'Ahu, the crystal clear skies on Mauna Kea. 

And if there's a Black musician or Jew in a Jazz band, they get to choose the order of their instrument solo.... fine. And for the record, real theft, like native lands, should get major redress! But that's not the purpose of "cultural appropriation!" Which is sanctimoniously chemical. 

Elsewhere I discuss the worst addiction and most harmful one in the modern age... self-righteous indignation and sanctimony, which poisons every political extreme, especially the extreme that has completely taken over the U.S. mad Right... 

...but that also fluxes across elements of a farthest-left that - while wholly justified to impatiently demand progress - rejects any notion that they are beneficiaries of generations of vigorous but pragmatic reformers who had (and needed) much thicker skins and suffered far worse indignities in order to open doors for today's "trigger-warning" activists.

The indignity of proclaiming that one is fragile - dealt crippling wounds by the slightest error of wording - is one that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Robert Smalls and Mohandas Gandhi and Rosa Parks and MLK and Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X would have found puzzling, if not bizarre, even pathetic.

 The dissing and shit-hurling at ALLIES (as some will hereupon hurl at me) is less-surprising (read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia) but just as impractical, unhelpful and spectacularly self-indulgent.

== Loudness doesn't make you the leader of liberalism ==

In an article - The Specter of Illiberal Anti-Racism - by Nathan Gardels, Noema Magazine considers work by a person who takes this counter-argument farther than I would.  Into Bill Maher territory. But this passage is one to share:

"Fortunately, sober voices with irreproachable anti-racist credentials such as Barack Obama — “anti-anti-racists” in Torpey’s phrase — are calling out the extremists. Torpey cites Obama saying in 2019 that “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff … you should get over that quickly. … The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.” Obama, notes. Torpey, went on to say that “among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.’ … That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far."

On Bill Maher's show, he talked about "progressophobia", a term he claimed Steven Pinker coined to describe "a brain disorder which strikes far-liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress." Not a new observation for anyone who has spent time here. 

The punch line: "It's like situational blindness, only the thing that you can't see is that your dorm in 2021 is better than the south before the Civil War."

And yes, so much as mentioning Maher’s name makes me eeeeevil!  This despite the fact that he (and I!) have done more for progress in any month than most of those fuming at me right now have, across their entire lives. 

Alas that he and Barack Obama - along with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC (see below) - seem to be among the last voices for the most effective reform movement the US ever saw… Rooseveltism, that finally got progress in gear after beating back the oligarchs, invigorating labor unions, crushing fascist monsters and beginning a long, long, too-long grinding climb out of Jim Crow and the chasms that seem built-into human nature. 

Refusing to see how powerful that coalition was has led the left to make a series of mistakes that drove working whites into the arms of confederates, leading to Reaganism and our long slide. 

== Polling Americans ==

The Pew Research Center, which does some of the country’s best polls, classifies all Americans as being in one of nine different political groups. The categories range from “core conservatives” on the right to “solid liberals” on the left, with a mix of more complicated groups in the middle. While I am suspicious of many categorization attempts, this one makes a hugely important point, that on average most US racial minorities -- blacks, hispanics etc -- tend to be liberal of course, but also highly skeptical of the most-woke or leftish component.

"Much of the recent political energy in the Democratic Party has come from solid liberals. They are active on social media and in protest movements like the anti-Trump resistance. They played major roles in the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the rise of “The Squad,” the six proudly progressive House members who include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

"All six of those House members, notably, are people of color, as are many prominent progressive activists. That has fed a perception among some Democrats that the party’s left flank is disproportionately Black, Hispanic and Asian American.

"But the opposite is true, as the Pew data makes clear.

"Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters are to the right of white Democrats on many issues. Many voters of color are skeptical of immigration and free trade. They favor border security, as well as some abortion restrictions. They are worried about crime and oppose cuts to police funding. They are religious."

This is not to undermine "solid" liberals devotion to wokedness. You be you! And we'll get nowhere without conscience-prodding! 

And yes, as an old fart I know I must adapt to shifts in vocabulary and get more woke in some ways!  My kids, in their 20s, make sure of that!

Still, the fact that the very minorities that PC foks call clients sometimes sniff dubiously does help explain some electoral disappointments. And if you want these groups to be fully mobilized in 2022, it might be best NOT to assume all folks of color are clones of the most-visible activists. 

We need to be flexible enough to negotiate our coalition's best tactics...

...as I tried to point out in Polemical Judo.

== Oh, one last point about AOC ==

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is rightfully hailed as one of the savviest politicians of a new generation. But many of her fans don't know the half of it. 

Look more carefully! She is playing her role as a left-ish gadfly working with Liz and Bernie to keep the DP's Overton window from conceding too much. But she is not at all like the rest of her 'squad' in many ways. She very clearly wants Joe Biden to succeed, for example. And, like Bernie, her goal is re-establishment of the Greatest Generation's Rooseveltean social contract.

Watch what'll happen in 2022, when some of you will start trawling around for excuses to denounce Biden as "corporatist" ruled by Democrat-lite sellouts, as you go prepping to sit on your hands or otherwise betray us... the way the left betrayed us in 1980, in 1994, in 2000, in 2010 and 2016. 

Just watch how AOC and Stacey Abrams and Jamie Harrison and Bernie will come after you. With a stick.

READ MORE - Woke Media vs Bill Maher. A tiff that only serves the KGB-confederates.

Explaining what should be obvious about ‘transparency' yet again

FIRST a brief note for SF fans with e-readers!  Startide Rising, my Hugo and Nebula award winning novel, is on discount today.

Get hooked(!) only today with this ebook bargain at $2.99! Refreshed-updated with new cover & introduction and Uplift Universe timeline!

== The Transparency thing that gave us everything we value ==

I still give a lot of talks on this topic... though I suspect in some cases I'm invited in hope of using me as a strawman "foe of privacy," to be knocked down.  Some find it disappointing to learn that I fear both Big Brother and loss of privacy, as much as (or more than) they do, pointing out that only one thing ever thwarted tyranny or nosy neighbors, and that's light, the ability -- your ability -- to catch would-be oppressors and denounce their misdeeds.

Very few peoples and nations across 6000 years were ever able to apply this power of reciprocal light and accountability. Indeed, we don't sufficiently appreciate the power it gave citizens. Certainly the world's despots know it, and are desperately creating protected shadows for themselves. And lacking upward transparency (sousveillance), a return to feudalism... or much worse... is inevitable. 

With it, you might prevent Big Brother, only to reap a second layer of fearful oppression... by a judgmental majority who demand conformity, using democracy against those they do not like. The nightmare portrayed crudely by books/movies like The Circle and much better in that Black Mirror episode "Nosedive."

Ironically, this is exactly the scenario - fear of oppression by 'the mob' - that Fox/KGB and their pals are now spreading across the MAGAsphere, in order to discredit democracy itself! They must, because if U.S. citizens truly recover voting sovereignty, there would be no political future for today's Mad Right/putinist version of confederate conservatism.

Still, there is an underlying point that they're exploiting, a fear that Ray Bradbury illustrated in Fahrenheit 451. If transparency is universal, but the culture is immature and judgmental, then you don't get Big Brother. Rather you get lateral oppression by that 51% majority - an oppression that's totally legal, democratic and above-board. Indeed, this is how "social credit" might make crude, Orwellian Gestapo-tactics unncessary in future despotisms, as the People themselves enforce conformity, laterally.

Hence, our narrow path of freedom requires a third ingredient, at the level of values. If transparency is universal AND we have a culture that scorns gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs and judgmental conformity-enforcers, then MYOB can prevail.

What's MYOB?

Mind Your Own Business.

It means if I'm not hurting anyone, then my quirks and eccentricities merit protection, same as yours. Lest a day come when I am not tolerated... followed by you.

Yes, I have learned that this simple idea is almost impossible for most folks to wrap their heads about, even though it's a fundamental, base level zeitgeist of our present society! Indeed, I show how Sci Fi books and films have been at the vanguard in promoting appreciation of individual eccentricity, in my recent nonfiction book: VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood.

Tolerance is actually encouraged best by transparency, especially when gossips and bullies and privacy busybodies and voyeurs are caught in the act... but only when gossip and bullying and conformity-enforcing are in disrepute.

Again, yeah it sounds counter-intuitive. Yet, it is exactly the baseline value system of a majority of westerners now.  It's very likely your baseline value!  And it is the only way we'll get beyond the danger zone to something decent.

== MORE ==

Under a broad program called "signature reduction", it is said (in this article) that the U.S. Pentagon supervises a secret force more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, that “carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.” This is in part to deal with the difficulties of modern intel gathering when adversaries have massive files and face recognition. Also: “The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”

Which raises a basic question. How will we evade this devolving into:

1) A deep state that is unaccountable to constitutional systems*… or

2) The sort of tit for tat conflict of reciprocal sabotage that the great science fiction author Frederik Pohl warned about in his terrifying novel The Cool War.

Neither of these outcomes frighten adversaries of the West, who are fully committed to these tactics in order to prevent the psychic collapse of tyranny that their models predict, if the Enlightenment is not toppled soon. But both outcomes should worry us.

Those currently in our intel/military/law officer corps are likely loyal to constitutionalism and law and all that. Moreover they need tools such as these, in order to wage a desperate struggle on our behalf.  But these methods can all too easily anchor into habit. Habits that prevent our servants from even noticing an alternative suite of weapons that have far better long term prospects. In fact, those alternative methods are the only ones that can lead to our sole victory condition.

Weapons of light.

== ...Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks... ==

Finally… Two notes on philosophy.

1) UCSD Professor Benjamin Bratton - author of Revenge of the Real - is fighting for us on a front that seems obscure to 99.999% of us, but is actually important -- the ongoing effort by 'postmodernist' philosophers (especially on French and US campuses) to denounce and discredit science, democracy, so-called 'facts,' and the very concept of objective reality. I recommend his article for those who would blink in amazement over Ben's depiction of the rage-howls that fulminate from elite subjectivity spinners, who demand that their incantations get paramountcy over the evidence and models we laboriously build out of a clay called 'reality.'

2) I had a note from someone else who felt caught between two philosophical “rocks.”

“Is there an intersection between ephemerality and nihilism - lately I have found myself fully seated in ephemerality - not as a negative - but - rather - as an awakening of the transitory aspect of my physical engagement with the universe  - it has awakened my creativity - am I way off – thoughts?” 

My answer is the same one I give at commencement addresses:

You can be large. 

More than one thing. 

Study the phrase "positive sum" as opposed to "zero sum."  Sure your individual life may be short to the point of apparent pointlessness. So is a bee's. But the hive does mighty things. 

We are building a civilization of extraordinary magnitude! One that has accomplished prodigious things, perhaps unprecedented across the galaxy, and we did it by standing on the shoulders of ephemerals who stood on the shoulders of ephemerals who clawed their way a little higher, out of a muck of ignorance. These accomplishments - forged in the spirit of our ancestors - are just hints at what might yet come.

You don't have to accomplish great things to be part of all that. Or even remembered! You will know the things you did, to be part of that rising pyramid of shoulders. Feel the weight of future generations on them. 

You have our gratitude.

READ MORE - Explaining what should be obvious about ‘transparency' yet again