Creation

Human life is complex.  It stands the test of time.  And any attempt at a systematic construction of thought about human life is also a deconstruction too.  Whatever magnificent structure we construct to occlude the slow slide into ruin that is the unyielding process of time on our minds, bodies and the soul of our civilization, those structures will be subject to the same rules that govern the slow passing away that all parts of the universe undergo.  In other words, time passes.  But the bulwark against time's destruction is memory, creation, innovation, and all the other things we human beings are so good at.  If you can implant one thought into the mind of another human being, where it takes root, then time hasn't passed at all, merely slid around that though like a rock in a stream unmoving.  In other words, we human beings are good at conquering the ravages of time.  If you wonder what will last after you are gone as a human being, rest assured it will be in something that you have created. 

The generality of this moment

Taking in the generality of the moment

November 24, 2022

In this moment, there is so much reality to see so long as you can stay beneath the surface, which is full of illusion.  Continuing from the previous, consider this, for instance: with this whole Trump thing, whether we're talking about the latest or any in the long line of people who have tried to check him by legal means, the problem has always been that his opponents on the prosecutorial side have almost always had a checkered past of going after people who haven't deserved it, or not going after people who did deserve it.  The latest prosecutor has brought enormous prosecutorial power to bear on the New York Times in an effort to get them to disclose confidential sources.  Which prompts the question: will this prosecutor be equally aggressive against Trump?  The Trump paradigm is full of people whom normally you wouldn't say did much wrong, sitting on the sidelines where they have been put, baffled as to why they were deemed enemies of the state so forcefully before, while Trump can't be got.  This should be a signpost pointing to what is really in contention during the Trump era. 

This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons

This Is Also A Story About The Tragedy Of The Commons. 

November 23, 2022

Nobody can live up to the ideal of moral purity held by any group.  The point of having ideals is to act as correct as possible in every situation, not only when it's convenient.  When it comes to animal rights for example, the point is not to start all being vegan and liberate all animals held in captivity.  It's not false that it's from owning livestock and domesticated animals that the notion of death being a part of life entered human consciousness in the long ago.  Some uncomfortable but true philosophical arguments place the origin of executive authority theories in the politics of the sheep-fold and the slaughterhouse.  The point of animal rights discourses is to improve the conditions of life for domesticated animals.  There's a lot of weird facts about animal domestication that problematize our discourse about nature and our relationship with the natural world.  Several species of rabbit were transplanted to Australia to be hunted in the wild, but having no natural predators, outran their bounds and denuded the landscape.  Parts of Australia were made a desert by these imported rabbits.  The comparison between European rabbits and the European settlers is besides the point I am making now.  No amount of hunting could control the imported rabbit population, and now the government tries to control the rabbit population thru' their infection with rare and novel diseases.  It was a thoughtless sort of quasi-domestication that caused Australia's rabbit problem in the first place.  But now there's a paradox.  It would be thoughtless to allow the population of imported European rabbits to multiply unchecked (and it's thoughtless to imagine that that would be some sort of idyll or Eden for rabbits), but, it is equally thoughtless to be infecting them with diseases just to control their population.  And it's not beside the point that germ warfare as is now used against the rabbits was introduced to the region by the germ warfare used by belligerents in the Pacific Theater of WWII.  It was reported many times to have been used by the Japanese against Chinese cities, but the use of germ warfare against the European rabbits of Australia corroborates reports that the Allies used germ warfare too.  A common refrain that you will hear when you look into things is that the facts of the world are complicated. Australia's rabbits tell a story about the ecological consequences of transplanting ideologies.  But they tell a story about simple human thoughtlessness, too.  This is also a story about the tragedy of the commons. 

Nature and self-nature

Nature and self-nature

November 22, 2022

An interesting thought was uncovered in the 12/8/22 edition of the NYRB. Martha Nussbaum wrote that wilderness and wild spaces "offer people a genuine good that has vanished elsewhere." And the appropriate response is to ask why is that? - and what is that good? It is undoubtable that Nature offers people a consolation. In fact, that might be why people seek it out these days, through these wild spaces. I am also reminded of a certain American professor who cheekily mentions that "religion is the opium of the people," which is the famous phrase of Marx, is no longer true, because "opium is the opium of the people. It works better." I am reminded of this because to Americans, Nature stands in for what to Europeans is religion. American philosophy, in its earliest form, is Nature philosophy. Emerson and Thoreau are examples. Nature is to Americans, what is still there even when you are totally alone, and what you can assimilate into yourself at the most basic level, to grow in your own self-nature. It's the origin of a verdant, and not a desert, philosophy. It's this expansive destiny from the vaster interstices connecting our society, originating from the verdant ecosystem out of which American civilization sprouted, that allows Nature to take root in the in-between places of our way of life, and give rise to our thought. In this period of intense challenges to our ways of life, it is natural to turn to Nature again, to fill the void in our understanding. But do we turn to Nature now to find answers, or to find the unknown mystery, the sense that we don't have the answers? Is this a revanchism, an attempt to return to a mental state of nihilism, which means, a beginning point? This is the origin of the dark suspicions of our age. It is now that we have to cut a fine line of distinction on this paradigm. To seek Nature for a sense of mystery, can also be for the purpose, the objective, of explaining the world and way we live in it, in terms of mysteries, directly to our subconscious.

The mirror of the built environment, part two

Our built environment never makes as much sense as it does on a suddenly warm day in November, during a snow-melt.

The mirror of the built environment

November 16, 2022

Our built environment, says a lot about our innermost, thoughts and feelings.

One of the subjects that has to be broached, tho' with the utmost delicacy in the face of climate change, and geopolitical instability, in order to secure the future we want, and not the mess we have, is to rethink our built environment for a new era. 

In Ancient Rome, before Cicero's time, there was a ritual stone over which water was ceremonially poured on some occasions. After Cicero's time, the same word for that stone had become the word for a stone that sat at the bottom of a deep well in the ground, that was used for storing the grain harvests, where its role was to mediate between the insides of the earth and out, even, between life and death. The same word, had completely become a different meaning, in the span of about one lifetime. 

We are staring down a short path to a completely different relationship to the built environment too. Climate and technological change will bring with a huge changes to what we make with our hands in our tools in this new modern age.

Art, also, has changed. Art has a fundamental and inseparable connection to architecture. A recent and very interesting notion has been floating around academia, especially in the writings of Slavoj Zizek, that the age of modernist art was really the linchpin, holding diametrically Leftist and Rightist politics in opposition to the other. The keystone of this discourse is that architecture can profoundly change our perceptions of both our inner and outer worlds. As the modernists used architecture to further political tension in a period of ideological warfare, we could nowadays use architecture to further establish consciousness about the natural world and climate change. Architecture, of course, has always been to some degree about mimicking the architecture of the natural world, but we could more consciously, through living buildings, and other eco-conscious art and architecture, inspire a new mental age of Climate and Nature-consciousness in the human condition. Some of this work is already starting, but, wouldn't it be wonderful, if, during our own lifetimes, we could see the change in the way we think, mirrored in the very environment we walk around in?

Elon Musk, the nightmare scenario of.

November 14, 2022

I want to level for a second about Elon musk.

There's no more conflicted figure in modern society, I don't think, especially at this moment.

On the one hand, nearly everything that we expect a future society to require, he's trying to do, from electric cars to the whole Internet of things, thing. The neural stuff seems a bit out there, but if you've read contemporary Neal Stephenson books, and so on, it's not that far from what Futurists seem to expect us to focus on in the coming decades, like it or believe it, or not.

On the other hand, everything that he seems to be creating, seems to require the same labor conditions that are emblematic of what got us into a dire environmental situation in the first place.

It did used to be that making and manufacturing an electric or hybrid car required more CO2 emissions, than would justify having the car just on the basis of the CO2 emissions alone. Now that isn't so much the case, but it seems like Tesla has gotten there pretty much at the expense of making working conditions at their plants practically inhuman in the fatigue their workers are required to endure. 

I want to pull back a bit from asserting that Elon Musk’s voracious appetite for new stuff has exceeded the boundaries of what's necessary to be assembled, into a proof of concept, for what society would need in "a future."

In many ways, Elon Musk is absolute proof that the future can be made. He's a hopeful figure.

But simultaneously he's gotten us started down the path of least resistance, when it comes to the means for which a future will be required. If all it takes is forcing the human body to work through immense fatigue, "powering through," as if it were a personal trainer prescribing the future to us, that leaves little room for the finesse required to make the future work for everybody. 

As is, there isn't a proof of concept that the future is possible for everybody, but only proof that the future is now, if you are wealthy enough to be a consistent consumer of Elon Musk's creations.

Musk isn't the only creator of future technologies who plays this role - of concierge to the rich. The technological divide is becoming a class issue.

What happens when these largely unaffordable technologies become basic requirements for a decent life?

The weirdness of near-future technological fiction

November 14, 2022

Before we could even attempt to deconstruct Black Mirror, we would need to examine its idea of near future technological fiction in and of itself.

It plays as if we are expecting an epochal event to occur that will happen soon and that restructures all of human understanding into a new framework.

The idea of the future has been shortened to the concept of tomorrow, in a sense very similar to the monotonous grind, the daily grind, of the protagonists in the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits.

In short, it makes me wonder if for all, our lives have become meaningless, or if gratification has simply been delayed.

The Poverty of Discourse, versus real poverty

November 13, 2022

Now is as good a time as any to mention that we have a problematic in this country right now where "the poverty of discourse" is opposed to real poverty.

The online book repository, Z-lib was shut down by the FBI yesterday. It's important to note that the voices often heard bemoaning "the poverty of discourse" these days, and (inappropriately I might add) linking that to the free downloading, or "pirating" of texts and books often, themselves, have no problem with real poverty. I've never used Z-lib or its like; but I am not writing this as if to assure somebody that I haven't. I consider myself more of a privateer than a pirate. I will plunder a library or a legitimate list of Google hits, but I don't go out of my way to get free texts online. 

I'm also not in dire poverty, but it strikes me that there is a certain absurdity in paying outrageous prices for digital copies of written works that may cause concern, even for authors themselves. And in the converse, it may also not concern authors, when people look for cheaper ways to download their works. It's primarily the publishers who are making more money from inflating the price of works that may be available online. Elsevier is one example of a company notorious for inflating the price of science articles, who has recently been suing against free release of them online. 

While this may be hitting actual authors of works harder now than in the past, according to some dispatches from the front, surely, a lot of that has to do with the way that publishers themselves are restructuring the publishing economy to put more onus on the authors themselves to do more of the publishing, which can be looked at as shifting the burden, such that the authors themselves now have to care about pirates where they might not have had to care about it before. 

There's so many marginalia about why this might be so, including that it's difficult to pay or subscribe or otherwise cross through a paywall, but the final estimation is that lack of creativity on the part of many online publishers, causes a resentment toward them above and beyond the standard resentment, that publishers eke out a lot more profits out of a piece of writing, than the writers ever will. 

And the bottom line, is that, in the Brave New World, the Wild West, that is the modern Internet, with the new ease of construction of any sort of thing envisioned in publishing before the Internet, what any publishing entity has to provide, is some thing above and beyond the clone, or a copy, of a paper and ink publication.

Subtextual manipulations

As a prelude to a discussion of art, or at least a mention of art for the furtherance of a discourse about politics, it's worth a mention that it is the best episodes of Black Mirror, and the nascent genre of cyberpunk near future dystopia is relevant to GenZ in a very personally, vulnerable way, so the best zombie films are very personally relevant for millennials. It's a notable observation, that zombie films are actually from a philosophical perspective about capitalist alienation. It's a suggestion that knowledge of radical politics, or facts on the ground when they intervened in the every day, are such that people feel that particular form of capitalist alienation that Marx among others described. There's no need to go too far into explaining this right now, besides to say that the reason the zombie flick 28 Days Later is unique in this category is because it also implicates the military industrial complex. 

No, as just a comparative mention, The Black Mirror show Fifteen Million Merits is the best of the genre from a GenZ perspective by far, along with perhaps, Hang the DJ from the same series. It's everything that threw us for a loop in the day, and it is still relevant. But the big question is, what does it say about us, really? Why does it all hurt to watch, but that one most of all?

If social media is over…

November 11-12, 2022

If social media is over, can we finally start critiquing Black Mirror now?

The Atlantic ran a story today about the death of social media. With falling profits, interest, and employment in that sector of the new economy, it asked if we should call an end to that paradigm too in case it wastes away with us all still on board.

As part of what was that social media generation, I think it's time to call it quits. What is more important than the platforms themselves is the ecosystems they supported in human behavior, and the behaviors they sparked amongst the generation of people who were practically introduced to literate culture through the now-defunct, we can now say, social media. Those behaviors are not going away, tho' social media may. 

I say, alongside this article, to react to the social media platforms' collapse by "embracing their ruination". The laying-waste to social media might - hey, you never know - reveal just how much influence my social feed actually had in those bad ol' days.

Black Mirror, for those who have seen the hits, is mostly about social media, but in a human way, that implicates depictions of those human ecosystems of behavior, I just mentioned. But it's worth a notice, even for the uninitiated, that the effective social media in those stories is a casual mistake, that the cops, from their perspective, can exploit, to catch malfeasors and scandalous rogues. From the perspective of a lot of these cop shows, and increasingly out there as reality catches up to science possibility, we are buried in a mountain of personal information that could serve as an accidental confession. This is no surprise to someone who has witnessed political radicalization on social media, and observe the social fallout for that person, or people coming out as gay or trans on the net, and that associated fallout. But for those who haven't, it's on TV too. Or it will be, after it happens. Real life leads art in all cases after all.

Black Mirror fully embraced, the three most life-changing, problematic paradigms of the Internet, but of those three, social media was the most powerful. But here's what has happened: the interesting points of social media, people or entities, have outrun the bounds of 140 characters, and outpaced the bounds of their casual social circle on the 'net.

What is the scope of this problematic in social media? One evaluation was dug up by the author of the Atlantic article, in a book called Zero Comments, by Dutch author Geert Lovink.

"In or out?" He writes.

"This book will prove, that, contrary to the "new new" hype, the position of new media in society is no closer to resolution than it was during the "old new" hype of the first Web bubble. Mass adaptation has led to a "statu anxiety" of an emerging discipline that is polymorphously perverse in nature. The in-between position is increasingly becoming uncomfortable. There is a multitude of talent going nowhere. Shifts in the integration of technological networks into the everyday have proven no guarantee that institutional change will occur. Despite all the talk, the Internet has not delivered the revolution it promised. Societies adapt to Information and Communication Technologies, but do not change in a fundamental way and prove remarkably flexible in staying as they are. Logically speaking, this means that the ideology, and not the world will have to adjust. So far, this has not happened."

The scope of the influence social media had for the longest time was always problematized by the sad effect that it was the retweet, or the share that got the attention and reward, rather than the creative creation act, and almost never the creator or progenitor of the idea. We had a revolution without attribution, and that meant we had a corporate windfall instead, while eventually the discourse itself was reduced to poverty. The results of the creators brought down social media, in part. If no one will see this anyway, then I'll make sure no one sees it. 

Integration of the net into every day reality resulted in a double movement across the border between the ins and outs, both toward, and then away from full scale, integration into social media, and then away from social media, in disillusion about its limits, or more properly speaking the limits of its discursive act.

Most importantly, here's the kicker: some said, if I'm writing about what I can't yet see, why can't I see it? And others said if I'm writing about what I can see why can't others see me? And thus there developed a problematique. 

This problematic implicated, not just a division in intellectual firepower, but a division in a social consciousness, and the social relevance of certain perspectives. 

"Should we believe in the power of the argument and continue the strategy of ideology criticism, knowing that such intellectual endeavors fail, time and again?"

Lovink again.

"Zero Comments was written in the firm belief that we have to work through issues. We have to study the patterns behind perpetual change."

There was a simple push-and-pull analysis in social media's history, especially the history of its fall. But the history of social's disillusionment is an archaeology of the limits of its discursive act. Are we re-examining what it means to be a writer and an author, in practical terms?

Michel Foucault writes (in the essay "What is an Author?") that the author, in a real sense, is distinct from another worker in that he is imprisoned by his own writings. However, there is another sort of writer that does the work for another reason; the relevant distinction being the "modes of characterization." 

Foucault notes that there is a "kinship between writing and death" which is linked sometimes to the "total effacement of the individual characteristics of the author" who sometimes becomes "transformed" into "a victim of his own writing". However, the "conditions" of the "spatial dispersion" and "temporal deployment" vary, and "the disappearance of the author...is held in check by the transcendental." There are other conditions which vary the situation of the author, based on role (we might also say social contract differences) as well as space and time. Foucault notes, in a transgressive, cheeky way we could notice that the character of an author can be found not only in his person but also in the characteristics of his body of work. And this could be not necessarily the same as the person of its authorship; tho' they should often be congruent, they may not always be completely identical. This can have merit in looking at the current situation with social media's decline and very perhaps, fall. On the one hand, there is a tension about losing a body of work by leaving social media, on the other hand, there is a suspicion about whether that work is or (even) was the same as how we really are. Where we all authors for using social media or were we not quite there? In essence, should we feel bad about it? Perhaps not. We should not forget about what we liked about it, that we should feel bad about, only if that happens. But its more like using social media was like taking a crowdsourced class. In what?  That's what we should be asking.

Politically speaking, in Michigan…

Politically speaking, a lack of trust inspires people to overthrow political incumbents, but they also simultaneously overthrow dominant notions in themselves.  Unfortunately, the dominant notion in Michigan since the 1980s when the Republican Party whose leadership was just overthrown in the state legislature was the misguided optimism of Reagan, that Michigan was just as competitive as other states, and not a backwater.  Now doubt has crept into the discourse about everything under the topic.  What people fail to see is that optimism was for a certain grouping of the rich and powerful when those pronouncements were made, in the Reagan years, and though they have not been democratized to the workingman, they still can be...

State of Art

 November 10, 2022

State of Art

What happened? It's not unfair to say, during this generation of mid-20-something's as of this writing, all the literature and art "happened" too soon. Novels and art came out by very young writers/artists that were really meditations on agriculture, fire, and the wheel, as if the truth was that we were in danger of losing the jewels of civilization. I blame the latest of America's nonsense wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) for part of this. The rest of the blame is due to generalized millenarian hysteria about the Internet corrupting young minds away from the practical. What actually seems to have happened is that attempting to social-engineer satisfaction with he practical jewels of civilization through young adult art and literature (in the aughts and early 2010's), while also isolating the Internet as a singular item of study or fascination actually had the opposite effect; that of prompting the rediscovery of the practical. What actually seems to have happened is that attempting to socially engineer satisfaction with the practical jewels of civilization that are the technology of fire, the wheel, and agriculture, on the Internet, in effect isolating the consciousness of this cadre of young thinkers. What was actually created by the priorities was not a cognitively focused group, but a hyper-literate and infinitely empirical and practical group, (but one that does not "do" art as a holdover from childhood.) How strange, that our priorities, did not create the priorities we prepared for. The most straightforward thing you can say about this phenomenon is that if you are under the age of 35, you were probably introduced to some very heavy and complex things (both technology and concepts; both constructs and concepts) thru' very simply stories. There was not a lot to hang you hat on in those stories. One might also say the same thing about the representations. 

There's a limit to how much we can blame this on faulty social engineering, and how much, rather, is really the product of smart and early starters outpacing the social construct. 

What is crossing the border from theory into practice as these set of conditions gains majority in society, is a strained optimism about overcoming unpleasant aspects of human nature. Is this universally about calm assurance or does it cover up a narrowness of understanding about the essentials? That is, could it be that no one authors, young adult book conveyed, sufficient understanding of the essential it claimed to convey, enough for adults understanding? Some would contend that we took big lessons from books at an age when the lessons contained therein, were too thin for the weight of the message. Some would argue that simplicity is the name of the game itself. 

Internal to all this is the ideals newly ascribed to literature and art. People one more life like, understandable, depiction in the literature and art they create now. But along with that standard, that has changed, so also comes a desire for creating deeper messages within the art. Does the understanding conveyed to the artist from the literature and art? They consumed in training, have sufficiency to their desire? Surely they are working through inspiration to a degree not seen in many decades. 

There is a liminal space at work here. In a reasonable manner, it exists in the persons who derive their concepts of literature and art from what the literature and art is like at the moment, regardless of what that literature and art is. In a certain way, this is desirable, or at least expected, because formulating the inspiration for art should likely exist outside the common ken. What exists "on the threshold"of classic and popular notions of art, probably comes out of this group of perfectly reasonable, but disinterested and reliant people. Amongst this liminal selection of ideas right now, about literature and art is the notion that the creative process is a process of progressive revelation, but that the quality of the final extractable revelation is small, and not so meaningful. Which raises for me the obvious, to me, question: do the foundations of our understanding about the things that literature and art contends in, need to be updated? We should be very careful not to make artistic and creative endeavor only a process type of occupation. But this is, perhaps where someone else would start to wonder as well, is the art we consumed in our formative years made "it" all happen for us too soon, at too small a scale, and in too childish a vein. 

It is perhaps in this space of liminality caring about literature and art that the essentials can be found. That is to note the repetitions and inspiration and also the tendencies that go along with the essentials. And perhaps we have reached the point when the tendencies begin to outweigh the essentials on the patience of the onlookers.

And perhaps we have legitimately reached a place of re-centering the tendencies of the derivative literature, as a rebirth of a new, all the thing: that a human tendencies themselves, including the voice and the manner, and the tendencies of thought. The transparencies of a new honesty.

Democrats move forward

November 10, 2022

The Democrats have gained deep structural advantages in recent years by leveraging technology, for instance in a decade-long effort that was recently successful, in flipping the Michigan Legislature from Republican to Democratic control, which was powered mostly by grassroots text-messaging campaigns. 

Politically, this shows the appeal of a grassroots progressivism that never gives up, not by showing denial but by being adaptive and flexible in its tactics. 

Grassroots Democrats are interested in these new tactics because what grassroots progressives are mostly interested in is getting their message out there, while it is mainly labor movements that create the platforms and ideologies that get progressives excited. 

Fundraising techniques, which have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, are mainly driven by tech use amongst progressive grassroots Democrats, while labor unions don't need to raise money, so, fundraising is a tactics mostly unrelated to labor. 

Functionally this is done by leveraging people's expectation for nuanced policy against their desire for succinct updates. 

Labor unions set the platform by the economic analysis of the conditions of their members, so the messaging is always linked to the reality on the ground. 

The rise of new unions representing both campaign workers having to do with the Democratic Party, and unions representing knowledge workers like the tech sector and writers, have complicated things somewhat, but every union also eyes some outside group to carry its message, so not as much ha changed in the system as it may appear, except in variety of media representation. 

However, that said, it is in my opinion imperative that running for office be done for the honor, and not be bureaucratized, even if that means not being unionized. 

The divide between platform and messaging means that in the recent case of the Michigan Legislature win, the message might travel to other states that state legislatures are the most influential branch of government on the population, even as the creators of policy have already moved on to other objectives. 

Any immediate and massive change in life for Michiganders has probably more to do with how long the Republicans were in control of the Legislature and how much that change was needed there. 

The political condition of Bernie Sanders' political crew and other progressive movements was strong in Michigan relative to other places in the country and that accounts for the strength in the Democratic condition in Michigan too. 

However, there's a divide between the increasingly youth-led progressive grassroots and the older quasi-legal groups: the one works on messaging and tactics, while the other is increasingly trying to usurp power from the unions. 

"In the room" where weighty decision are made, there is a balance of objectives between swelling the Democratic Party membership, and removing the blinders of fear from the existing membership. 

There are totally speaking two major traditional components to a political party: a commanding presence, and a welcoming face. 

However there is a necessary third component, too: a power that works betwixt and between everything else, and builds consensus. 

It is taken for granted that any group can marshal significant resources to bear on any problem. 

It is often the case, however, as now that mobilization of resources in groups ignores the mobilization of those who make the most creative power with those resources. 

The reason consensus-building power can't operate well in today's Democratic Party is because too much effort has been expended on building up the membership and not enough on inuring the members to fear. 

Although the counter argument will be raised the concentrating on removing fear will focus power in too few hands, the current situation is that work is dissipated within a chaotic membership. 

A reconciliation between the two poles of group membership could be to focus on building political literacy amongst the membership. 

It is not to impede growing the Party membership that educational programming could be offered outside the confines of the Party. 

No condition of a group can remain predominant forever, but it is preferable at this time to make the people in the Party less afraid. 

The labor movement should have a more prominent role, among the other creators of the Party platform, in educating the members about the real condition of society. 

The Party membership needs to understand that deep decisions are made based on deciding the primacy and ordering of methods of achieving goals. 

This may soon change, however, to prefer those with the greatest accumulated wisdom to make benevolent governmental decisions on their own. 

The end goal is not only the restoration of our knowledge of our individual place in the world, but also what we may best do to improve it. 

The system we are creating is not a hierarchy by design, but is rational by design, showing us both where we stand and how we can improve. 

Democrats Win

November 9, 2022

Yesterday, for the first time in decades, Democrats flipped the houses of the legislature in Michigan from Republican to Democratic control.  It hasn't happened in so long that most people don't have a lot to say about it: we Democrats are starting out "in the sands", due to how long they've been out of power in the Michigan legislature.

Just imagine how much drek has accumulated from decades of calcified, Republican control, and how much of the grossness associated with that is going to be swept away so suddenly, it will be surprising to see just how bad of shape we were in before, that we hardly noticed.

Today is a celebratory day, but it's a celebration colored by the lingering thought that perhaps we've taken on a monumental task of righting a ship so long off course, and we almost can't see where, and when, it lost its bearings.

It's a celebration colored, that is, by the sensation that this is the calm before the storm; the absolute stillness of a race just before the starting gun goes off.  The worry even years ago, when retaking the legislature was just a pipe dream, was that the problem might be so big that the Democrats re-taking control might not even be enough to fix it.

Well, the years have gone by, and it's clearly not a pipe dream anymore that Democrats could control both houses of the state legislature, and I think I get why that worry was stated in the years before. 

The Michigan Republican paradox of embracing racial and gender stereotypes, while denying that they were embracing them eventually destroyed their organizational structure from within.  But at the same time it made discussions of race and gender issues toxic in the public sphere.  The only available space for genuine progress, avoiding the toxicity provoked by this Republican collapse, is class politics, which is what the Democrats have progressively to a greater extent been campaigning on. The coup that was the CHIPS Act, though it has provoked dissent over the procedure of building that high-tech economy, has opened up the space for exactly that kind of progressive, labor-based contention that the Democratic Party thrives on.

Previous Work: Plan of the Problematique

Plan of the Problematique (external link) found here. 

 

Previous work: Map of the Problematique

Map of the Problematique (external link) found here.