June 14th: Our Love is Louder Than Our Fear

(The title needs work but it sounds better than the alternative: Hippy-love-fest-but-getting-shit-done-and-oh-my-god-we-need-to-party-before-the-world-ends-apalooza!)

What it is:

A Day of Effective Altruism followed by a Night of Freaky FundRaising.

Effective Altruism:

Putting our energy out there in ways that make a positive difference. There are many different ways of doing this through volunteering, through research, or through funding charities that do the most good with the funds they receive.

What can we do?

Help organize community cleanups, civic service projects, or other volunteering opportunities. We should try and focus on areas that Trump is harming the most:

Inner cities. Can we clean up some of the inner city neighborhoods, can we establish some tutoring centers, or some day care centers? Can we build some inner city food oasis where there are food deserts? Can we have lawyers volunteer at court to try and keep a few kids out of a counterproductive judicial system?

Latino and Muslim Communities: Can we ask for volunteers to prepare food and provide instruction on some of the projects that might impact their community? Can we all play soccer? How do you say 'I love you' in Arabic?

The environment: If you have as much trouble as I occasionally do with crowds, why not take to the woods for trail maintenance or trash pick up? Why not collect water samples to test for toxins? Volunteering to help coordinate trash and recycling collection would be a huge help!

Freaky FundRaising:

Well, imagine Woodstock but all over the country. Or imagine your jam band and a few people from the neighborhood. Or a 5k you do all by yourself or with a few thousand people you found online. The more people we have hosting fundraising events for the institutions that are quickly becoming the best chance we have for having a future, the better.

I say Freaky because while preventing harm and repairing damage is important, we also need to send a message. We need an ungodly amount of coverage on this. This message, that our love is strong, that our love is effective, and that our love is louder than our fear needs to be heard all over the world. We need gags and gaffs and a reason to turn a camera our way. We need an impossible amount of attention. We need enough attention to drown out Trump, even if it is only for one day, that day should be his birthday.

If you are interested in helping, please let me know. If you are interested in partying, please be patient and stay tuned.

Triage

The Scene

After working ourselves up to the reality of a Trump administration and wearing our fingers out, trying to cling to any hope it won't be as bad as we think, the reality is setting in and it is just as bad as we suspected.

Whether his efforts are designed by malice, ignorance, or manipulation, the response needs to be the same. We see the wounds opening up and we need to staunch the blood loss.

The Problems

Can illegal immigrants and the Latino communities who will get swept up in his proposed punitive measures resist on their own?

No. They have little enough political clout but are protected by moral and practical reasoning. They benefit communities but if Trump is able to break the cities, they will be tossed out.

Can the black communities respond to further misguided attempts to fix struggling communities by themselves?

No. Both sides of the aisle have been trying everything short of just admitting to racism and letting them fully integrate. If they had the power to force the wider culture to accept them, they likely would have already.



Can liberals of all stripes continue to foster compassion while the President pushes hate if they sit alone at home and do nothing?

No. As a pot smoking hippy, I am fairly aware of how potent my 'dreams' are when I sit alone and imagine wild schemes while staring at the ceiling, imagining a world where I didn't sit idly by, hoping someone else would step forward.

Can conservatives work for better opportunities and less government interference while Trump expands the government and her interventions exponentially?

No. The policies that will be enacted will be the same sort republicans have always enacted. They 'help' business the same way democrats 'help' minorities. There is a token show of support but really the only ones who are helped are the ones that don't need it: the big businesses that are thriving already and the 'articulate' black men who are polite enough not to cause problems.

Everything that is Trump is pushing for will only help out a few individuals and will only help them for a short time. All of us are going to suffer through reduced opportunity, larger, more restrictive government, and 'definitely not racist but totally targeting race' legislation and cultural influences.

So. We can stand together or fall apart.

BLMBSDOLBMBLNANAAWITTCHTLOPWVOGIATTCHPWAWBSAGFGBSOTA

We know how this is going to happen. We have seen it before. We need to stop it now.

But where do we start? What is the triage for such cultural wounds?

Why don't we start with the most impacted? The people who are already working to better their lot? Why don't we start at the bottom because the more people we can get working on this the more effective we can be.

I don't have all the answers. I don't have most or many of them.

It would make sense to begin by acknowledging we need to work together and that this will be most effective if we start with those who need help most.

To that end, I say we start the Black Lives Matter But So Do Other Lives But Maybe Black Lives Need Attention Now And As We Improve Theirs They Can Help The Lives Of People With Vaginas Or Gender Issues And Then They Can Help People Who Are White But Are Still Getting Fucked From Both Sides Of The Aisle.

The name needs work. But we all need help. And we all need to work together or we are all going to suffer immensely.

Many groups are starting to come together. But let's start networking even more and working to resist. This will be a weak link game and we need to shore up our weakest sections first.

Day 1

In what will likely be known as the most timely post of all time,

I'd like to talk about Trump's record as a business man:

On this, the first day his wondrous reign, it would be more prudent to post various tips and tricks on surviving authoritarian con-men but I find myself distracted by things I have procrastinated upon too long. Namely, whether or not Trump is a good business man.

Method:

* Establish Criteria

* Do some research.

* Draw conclusions

Criteria:

There are many ways to judge a businessman (height, weight, bikini contest), but I will be focusing on two main aspects:

* Success as compared to the market

* Success as compared to other individual businessmen

* Moral good, in terms of ethical practices and improvement of community.

I know this last one may not be important to others, but I think it is relevant if he is going to be running the country as a business (Our product will be bigotry and Russian nesting dolls. They will sell like hotcakes.).

Success as compared to the market:

For this metric, I was just going to compare his claimed worth that is the result of his actions versus what we would expect his worth to be had the market taken care of it.

If you measure the value of the money he received from his father and what it would be if he would have invested it in some conservative growth funds, then no. He lost 10 Billion.

Now, it could be argued that the media exposure and political connections he made while mismanaging his businesses have greater value than the 10 BILLION he would have had if he let the market handle his money. But I would argue that social and political capital, while very much tied to business, is not what we are discussing.

And it could be said that maybe he wished to take a more active role and we shouldn't criticize his attempts that failed because failing is always the first step and that is true. He did try and tried again and the fact that he still has a company and lots of money (Probably. Tax returns, anyone? Tax returns?) would lead me to believe he has at least a modicum of competence or the wisdom to hire someone else to run things while he collects an allowance.

And so, perhaps we should compare him not to the market but to other innovators and entrepreneurs and businessmen.

Other successful businessmen

There are many self made billionaires (many compared to zero, anyway, not as a relative value to the population) that started off with far less than Trump and did way more! Trump started out with 14 million (31 million today) and grew that into 3.7 Billion (Or more... or less. Tax returns?). That is 250% (check my math, please, it's been awhile edit: I totally fucked up the math! It's 25600% or 11900%. Way more impressive!)). This is an impressive number.

Of course, my daughter did the same thing when she spent $10 (roughly, it was awhile ago) on lemonade supplies, sold $25 worth of lemonade, and repeated that process until she had the $300 she needed for a new phone... Is she a great businessman? And she didn't have the political and commercial connections that Trump was given. She didn't have the mentorship that Trump would have.

Meanwhile other billionaires who actually earned their billions started with way less and earned way more ('way' is the professional economists measure of intensity).

And they did far more good with their money.

Moral Good:

It has only been recently that anyone has been able to indicate any "good" Trump has done (my own cursory searches did not turn up much). Doubtless this is a result of the 'unfair' media who is working against him while giving him free air time on a regular basis (?).

I had simply assumed there wasn't much to say since it was never talked about. What we did hear regarding his charitable acts involved scandal.

But, as the brave redditor pointed out, he has done some very flashy good by giving away so many rounds of golf and helping out headlining tragedies.

So, if we value his giving at (very roughly) $200-300 million dollars (and we assume that all of that benefited good causes) we can say that the man has (probably) given his 10% (TAX RETURNS?) tithe to the community (in addition to paying taxes, maybe?).

Conclusions:

I don't know. Maybe I should stop using 'failed' to describe his businessman acumen, but it hardly looks impressive when you compare it to other billionaires. He earned more in trying than he would have had he done nothing, he showed no innovation in the businesses he started up so it isn't a matter of trying something new and failing. He entered into some very established markets and failed several times.

Elon Musk tried something new and then continues to try new things. They are not all successful yet but he is definitively trying new things.

This is why I don't consider Trump to be an effective businessman. In a field ripe with cronyism, given a good chunk of money, mentorship, and a rolodex of connections, he underperformed the market, declared bankruptcy several times, and brought nothing innovative to the market (apart from his presidential campaign, that shit was wild! I am excited for more of this going forward.). In other words, while I should refrain from saying 'failure', I will also withhold the term 'succesful'.

And I still lack that for which I am most hungry: Some reason to think he is not an authoritarian with no clue how to run the country well. A puppet or at least an easily manipulated useful fool with little hostages with his name all over it scattered through the world.

I really hope this is the first day of 4-8 years of being proved wrong.

A few indicators we can look at over the coming months are:

* S&P 500 is valued at 2,269.50

* Total Uninsured Rate: 8.6% (exceeded 10%)

* Median income is around 55k/yr

* We are still (barely) in the top 50 for most free press.

* An estimated 1.2 million violent crimes are committed per year.

Now, much of this is old data for 2015 or earlier. As more current data becomes available, I will try to keep things updated.

Wacism

Of man's many accomplishments, I believe I am most moved by his overcoming of reality in the year of our lord, 2016.

Certainly, many cartographers of man's mind might claim we did so ages ago but I might argue that in such times, there was not so great a preponderance of evidence available to so many that they might overcome it. In other words, can one overcome that which they have not encountered?

Undoubtedly we still are without a complete understanding of the world and the universe it nests within, but we have easy access to compelling evidence of familiar claims. Racism, for example, or unfair tax policies, or the destructive affects of authoritarian rule on intimate and international scales.

Racism

Racism is the game we play when we arbitrarily divide featherless bipeds into groups based on physical characteristics. Discrimination is a broader term that can encompass other team drawing exercises that tend to feature large amounts of distrusting and blaming the weakest teams. Discrimination can feature religion as the basis for team building, but it can also feature geographic location, nationality, or the type of music a person listens to.

As social bags of gas and fat, it is quite natural that our pattern seeking soft tissue would assign values to physical characteristics. As upright apes intent on existing in proximity to other vertically inclined hominids, it is likewise assumed that we will seek to rank our place in the wider sphere of thumb juggling monkeys. It is important to know your place in the world. It is important to know who is above and who is below you.

This confluence of tendencies make it likely that meat-bags such as look like us would likely devise some grouping of arbitrary traits, rank the members of the group, set the group in groups of groups with their own rankings and then blame the less powerful groups for being less powerful because they lack a certain level of 'articulation'.

Does Racism Exist?

Thoroughly overcoming reality, though, has made it possible for racism to no longer exist and exist at the same time.

One thing I am forced to ask people who proclaim the death of racism is "What would it look like if it were alive? What signs exist or would exist to indicate the presence of racism?"

When we look to at the distribution of wealth and knowledge and opportunity, we notice that significant portions of the population are clustered around the bottom that share certain physical characteristics. Given we are wonderfully rhetorical creatures, there are all sorts of stories relating to how this came about. People love stories and become quite defensive if you question the facts or legitimacy of their story.

Who can I yell at so I don't have to think about it? Surely if we just burn few white guys in effigy and vote for democrats, we can solve this thorny issue.

But maybe the words of a story are less important than listening to one another tell it. Maybe the most valid story is not the story that will help us solve a problem that is hurting everyone but is hurting some people way more than others. Maybe, rather than vilifying people for exposing biases that we all have, we should accept each other's handicaps with love and help them overcome them.

I think by denying we have racial biases is why our previous interventions haven't worked to the extent we might prefer. I think we should be able to open up about them and say things like, "I am kind of afraid of black people," or, "I get really uncomfortable around Arab people," or, "Why are why are Mexicans not as hilariously foolish like they are in movies?" These are questions we can answer and help people overcome these fears or see Latinos as a diverse group from many cultural backgrounds who don't always know where to score some dank weed but they might know a guy or maybe they don't and that's ok too because my white neighbor who works with computers has a cousin in Denver and he sent me this primo bud that gives you the ability to travel in time.

At this point, people usually stop me and explain that we are travelling through time even as we write these words or read them and rather than acknowledging that they might have a point, I will pivot and say:

Maybe it doesn't matter?

Maybe it doesn't matter what story, precisely, you believe to most accurately reflect the events which led to a continuous struggle of getting people of certain phenotypes to succeed in this society. There are numerous advantages towards integrating a society. Race is not a field that benefits from specialization. In the same way that the whole body is affected when even the littlest toe is in pain, the whole society suffers when one group has a much harder time finding happiness and success.

We have seen what happens when a significant portion of a group feels their need is unmet: those needs get met in unhealthy ways. It is dangerous, it is immoral, and it is pretty darn difficult to deny the existence of racism in America.

I would say that it is also misguided to suggest attacking people who show racial biases. Instead, I would suggest we encourage talk about racial biases and look at ways we can overcome this cultural infection.

Because we all have it.

Every. Single. One of us.

And it's ok.

I know you didn't set out to be racist. I know you know it isn't ideal. But just like pooping, we all do it. Unlike pooping, though, we need to find a better way.

Thanks for your time,

A. Racist
(but I feel really bad about it)

P.S. Send me some feedback if you would like me to expand on this or continue with a similar summary of taxes or authoritarianism or if you would like to suggest a topic, I am open to that as well.

Worth

This is a response to an inquiry on reddit.

Thank you for your engaging and respectful manner of interaction. I will try and reciprocate such civility in my responses.

1.) Do we own ourselves and our time?

Yes, with many caveats. Ownership is a tricky thing. Responsibility is a slippery notion. I mean, I might 'own' a piece of land but should I be able to put toxic chemicals in the ground and water? Do I own that water? If I poison someone else with my negligence, should I have the land taken from me?

If I assume you agree with the water principle, I might extend that to more individual circumstances. If butterflies flapping their wings can cause rain to fall on Jeff Goldblum through a series of micro effects, are we, in some small way, responsible for the greater effects of our actions? At least to the degree we can reasonably predict the outcomes?

If we are to any degree responsible for the downline effects we cause, and if we are effected in any degree by the small and large movements of our fellow bipedal beasts, can we say we 'own' a small fraction of other people's well being because we have some fraction of responsibility for it? If we can change something or prevent it from being destroyed, are we response able? If we are able to respond, do we have some level of ownership?

2.) Is life finite?

Yes, with infinite degrees contained within.

3.) Individuals exchange time and energy for stuff?

Yes... but money and rights and ownership are... abstractions(?). Emergent properties of the sense of belonging and value we place on one another as human beings? Money is a symbol of value, the value we place on our assistance of each other. But when we get a Brazilian people together all trading tokens of worth for time and energy, it creates a system that determines the value of an individual and the system cannot always see the value of someone who is struggling to provide it value.

The system, the society, though, benefits from not letting the individuals whose value the system isn't immediately appreciative of fall to seeking unconventional ways of seeking value/worth within the society (crime).

So we either need to murder the unemployed and handicapped, or we need to find ways of utilizing and caring for those people who are struggling to please a system that is huge and often inhuman and too large to look at individual circumstances that contribute to those who struggle to find their place.

4.) Taking bad! We earn stuff!

Yes. But again, I think your idea of what a human is and what mine is, differ. I think you see humans as beings of light who attain perfect rationality and responsibility at the totally reasonable age of... 18? 21? The brain stops growing at 25, so... but we still are changing...

Anyway, I tend to think of the thinking ape as a squishy robot. Or a single cell.

Imagine if your cells had rights. Did the fat cells 'earn' their mass by the hard work of replicating and transforming energy to store? Does the body have a right to take that energy back? Is it fair to throw the skin cells of our hands out to protect the soft tissues of our insides?

There are plenty of independent cells that do their own thing, but I think integrating into a multicellular organism that might 'unfairly' tax you is better. This is why amoebas don't run the world even though there are Brazilians of them all over your hands and screen and face and mouth.

But if being a part of a multi-human organism of a society is irksome and you don't agree with the appropriation of energy and resources, you have the opportunity to alert the brain via neurons like Reddit and voting, but the kind of narrow evaluation of worth that I think you are referring to neglects the interconnected chaos that we live in.

The good news is, you are not forced to live subject to the tyranny of human law. You can live on a boat or an island. If you can set up a group of humans that demonstrates your vaunted independence and the value of individual's worth, you can demonstrate that it is a more noble, more dynamic system that can outcompete the multibeing organisms you find to be unfair, maybe.

I want to live in a society where everyone is free to pursue their highest potential. But we need to get there together, otherwise, even though I may owe all of my skills and knowledge to a society that worked together to not kill one another and educate helpless offspring such as my infant self, I might feel like I alone earned my place far beyond the rest of the group, and they might feel differently...

By surrendering some of our freedoms we gain many more. On an island or in the mountains, I have far fewer restrictions on my behavior, but I have exponentially fewer opportunities (since I have monetized this response to your question, do I owe you some amount of my earnings since you had a hand in its creation?). So, I might be leasing my money and property from the government, but in exchange I am free from so much suffering and have the opportunity to communicate with intelligent folks such as yourself who would never come to my island (it's covered in rats... racist ones).

So many words... if I could condense these thoughts, I would be a more effective communicator... oh well, thoughts?

What is 'ownership' to you? What are 'rights'? What is 'value'?

Edit: added some links, changed some words. I will, I hope, return.