COMPUTER JESUS REFRIGERATOR

Why Facebook Is Never Safe

From Wikileaks and TOR developer Jacob Appelbaum, on Facebook among other things:

Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate.

What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: "Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself!"

Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

Acoustic Levitation Chamber 1987

The Goose and the Commons

A 17th century English protest rhyme against enclosure:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

The just-world hypothesis

The just-world hypothesis refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault.

In more depth.

Why the U.S. used to have and should reinstate an effective maximum wage

Professor of Economics Michael Hudson explains how anti-labor economic policies have damaged the U.S. economy, how views on capital gains, interest, and rent have shifted in the capitalists' favor, and how lower taxes on the rich (down to 35% from 90% on the highest marginal tax bracket) have supported rampant speculation and the growth of the financial sector rather than actually aiding directly-productive investment.

"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."

- Albert Einstein, 1949

And yet there were things even worse. You would begin talking to some poor devil who had worked in one shop for the last thirty years, and had never been able to save a penny; who left home every morning at six o'clock, to go and tend a machine, and come back at night too tired to take his clothes off; who had never had a week's vacation in his life, had never traveled, never had an adventure, never learned anything, never hoped anything—and when you started to tell him about Socialism he would sniff and say, "I'm not interested in that—I'm an individualist!" And then he would go on to tell you that Socialism was "paternalism," and that if it ever had its way the world would stop progressing. It was enough to make a mule laugh, to hear arguments like that; and yet it was no laughing matter, as you found out—for how many millions of such poor deluded wretches there were, whose lives had been so stunted by capitalism that they no longer knew what freedom was! And they really thought that it was "individualism" for tens of thousands of them to herd together and obey the orders of a steel magnate, and produce hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth for him, and then let him give them libraries; while for them to take the industry, and run it to suit themselves, and build their own libraries—that would have been "Paternalism"!

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906

Soviet Image Editing from 1987

"I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans."

It is quite possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. Intellectually, you are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate volunteer action overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968. "Mission-vacations" among poor Mexicans were "the thing" to do for well-off U.S. students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to much worse poverty at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual insight into the difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the spirit of Peace Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.

Ivan Illich tells off a group of CIASP volunteers at their annual convention

Charity vs Solidarity

On charity, mutual aid, and class struggle:

A definition of solidarity I’ve heard is that it’s about providing concrete support to an oppressed group so that they can more easily use their own power to change the conditions of their lives. As I understand it, solidarity is about working with people who are struggling for their own liberation in a way that means my future gets bound up with theirs.

On the other hand, charity is about me feeling good, assuaging guilt, feeling like I’m doing something about injustice but without actually threatening the status quo. Charity doesn’t really cost me anything, especially my self-image as being someone who’s down with the struggle and on the side of the oppressed. With charity I don’t have to acknowledge my privilege in a situation, and in the case of work in New Orleans, I don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that my family and I have materially benefited, historically and presently, from the racism that bludgeoned the south long before the hurricane. With charity, I don’t have to connect the dots between sudden catastrophes like Katrina, and the perhaps slower but very similar economic devastation happening in poor communities and communities of color, every day, right here, in my city. And most importantly, with charity, I don’t have risk that what I’m doing might truly transform society in such a way that white folks like me may not end up on top anymore, because charity actually reinforces existing relationships of power.

On Neoliberal Globalization

The poor complain; they always do,
But that's just idle chatter.
Our system brings rewards to all,
At least to all who matter.

- Canadian economist Gerald Helleiner

Animal Bedding Mixture

The internet is a wonderful thing:

An animal bedding mixture is disclosed herein. The animal bedding mixture includes a bedding material and a bedding material additive. Bedding material is preferably straw, sawdust, sand or recycled manure solids. The bedding material additive is preferably 60-99% by weight absorbent clay powder, 0.1 to 35% by weight chlorite salt, and 0.01-35% by weight sodium bisulfate or sodium percarbonate. The bedding material additive of the present disclosure is inert when dry and neither germicidal or acidic. However, when the additive is exposed to moisture, such as animal urine, the sodium bisulfate will acidify the liquid, causing the formation of hypochlorous acid and chlorine dioxide. Hypochlorous acid and chlorine dioxide are very powerful, broad spectrum germicides that have proven efficacy against E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and other micro-organisms commonly found in animal bedding.

An exchange with an anarcho-capitalist

Says an enlightened commentator:

Private property is dependent on the existence of the State.
Without a state, who is to say that fancy car of yours isn't MY fancy car? [sic; cars are actually personal property]
Why do you think the state even exists in the first place? Without capital, there is no reason for the state to exist.

Says the anarcho-capitalist

The lock on it, the car alarm that will go off and the bullet in my chamber all disagree with who's what is really who's.

Says me:
The anarcho-capitalist's point doesn't actually rebut the original argument. What if the other guy is holding the gun instead? Is he suggesting that possession of property simply boils down to whoever can marshal the most force in defending or taking it? If that's the case, all we have then is rule by warlords and a tyranny of the strong over the weak.

At some point people would need to agree to collectively defend and protect the notion of private (non-personal) property, which seems philosophically contradictory, to say nothing of the impracticality of a landlord asking his tenants to defend his exclusive ownership of their building (possibly with their own lives) while still paying rent and yet without granting them any actual ownership stake in exchange. I'd almost say that sounds like feudalism.

Ultimately, it comes down to the difference between personal and private property, where the latter is property used solely by people who don't own it (e.g., a factory or office), and the fruits from such use flow back to the owners. It's one thing to actually live in the building you own. It's another to extract money from people who need to use it (e.g., to live there) simply because you already possessed the wealth to buy it in the first place; i.e., to use capital as a wealth-yielding instrument in and of itself, requiring no actual labor on your part and no direct (personal) involvement with said asset. The former case constitutes personal property while the latter constitutes private property.

As one of the 95% who do not own for a living, which would risk your life for — your home, or your corporate employer's office park? This reasoning can show how the essence of capitalism is impossible without the centralized threat of violence, whether on the part of the state or private-sector enforcers.