Rich 'may evolve into separate species'

[Iamwhomiam]

Whoops!

Like fluoride, "it's good for you" and just as subtly sold.

The "Rich" have evolved into a specious species.

Rather than cleaning their cesspit for the health and pleasure of all, they let it grossly overflow before moving on to more pleasant surroundings, remembering once they were carbon-based lifeforms called hmns living on a planet called Rth, way back when some gave a shit about something called "wealth."

[Freitag]

I still wanna be rich though

[Lord Balto]

Rich 'may evolve into separate species'

Not if we eat them first.

The next big device to wander into our lives is robots.

Mmmm. Rich! Now in a can, for your eating convenience.

The sources of most human foods have been bred over many hundreds of generations. Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."

[OP ED]

To say the overpopulation scare is "total bullshit" is amazingly naive. Infinite exponential growth is impossible.

Exactly. Infinite exponential growth IS impossible, so there is no point in trying to control the population because it will always adjust itself naturally. The overpopulation scare is a tactic that our corporate eugenic overlords use to justify their population reduction agenda. They want to kill off everyone who isn't under their direct control. You are helping them do this by spouting this eco-fascist garbage.

The best way to address overpopulation would be to provide voluntary birth control and education to everyone on the planet. People would be more interested in enjoying their lives than having lots of kids. More affluence inevitably leads to lower birthrates. The current system of wealth inequality creates massive numbers of expendable human lives at the mercy of a few elite monsters.

You didn't answer my question. Who are you to decide who gets to reproduce and who doesn't? Furthermore, how could a society ever decide with any justice that certain people are allowed to reproduce and others are not? It doesn't make sense at all, unless you're a closet Nazi.

OP ED is openly fascist, in the latin sense of the term.
We decide who is allowed to drive a car, why is deciding who may reproduce less beneficial to my personal health and safety?
OP ED believes that if basic tests of competency, responsibility and sanity were requirements, that artificial barriers of economic inequality would be statistically irrelevant. Likely the opposite.

This view is unpopular. This is unsurprising.

(Most über-rich don't drive for themselves either)

[brekin]

OP ED wrote:

OP ED is openly fascist, in the latin sense of the term.
We decide who is allowed to drive a car, why is deciding who may reproduce less beneficial to my personal health and safety?
OP ED believes that if basic tests of competency, responsibility and sanity were requirements, that artificial barriers of economic inequality would be statistically irrelevant. Likely the opposite.
This view is unpopular. This is unsurprising.
(Most über-rich don't drive for themselves either)

Yes, why not have the DMV also be in charge of eugenics. What could go wrong? They've already safeguarded everyone's personal health and safety by preventing all the incompetent and reckless drivers from driving.

[Searcher08]

OP ED wrote:

OP ED is openly fascist, in the latin sense of the term.
We decide who is allowed to drive a car, why is deciding who may reproduce less beneficial to my personal health and safety?
OP ED believes that if basic tests of competency, responsibility and sanity were requirements, that artificial barriers of economic inequality would be statistically irrelevant. Likely the opposite.
This view is unpopular. This is unsurprising.
(Most über-rich don't drive for themselves either)

Yes, why not have the DMV also be in charge of eugenics. What could go wrong? They've already safeguarded everyone's personal health and safety by preventing all the incompetent and reckless drivers from driving.

The Rich will want to be rich Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere be able to demonstrate their Richiness.

Given the studies into financial power centralisation, I would think that very similar forces are driving both a large US government department and the Eugenics Think Tankers (sorry... "Researchers into Social Health Informatics space and full scale genetic dominance scenarios")

[Iamwhomiam]

Brings a bit of a different meaning to societal hunters and gatherers.

[JackRiddler]

This thread presents one of the most classic and wrong-headed false dichotomies in this community (in the larger sense of people who think they're the ones furthest down the rabbit hole to that light at the other end). There is absolutely no reason to say you must support either the eugenics control supposedly advocated by "the rich" or the religionists' idea of total fertility (itself implying social control over women's bodies, but since when do they get to enjoy "liberty" and individual rights?). As someone's pointed out above (unclear who due to incompetent use of quote function), when people have relative freedom and security in their lives, they make the choices that end up stabilizing population. Amazing! Sounds a lot better than (and just as natural as) letting "nature" do so by way of famine, hunger and disease, which some people here seem to prefer - am I unfair? Yes, you can understand that infinite population growth is impossible and that population control is a good thing that can be achieved without mass coercion; and simultaneously also understand that capitalism and consumerist religion are by far the greater reasons for the current destruction of the natural basis for human life on the planet. Population control doesn't solve that, but that doesn't mean it's inherently evil. Food and health care and education for all, women's rights, and unlimited availability of voluntary contraception methods, hooray!

[OP ED]

OP ED wrote:

OP ED is openly fascist, in the latin sense of the term.
We decide who is allowed to drive a car, why is deciding who may reproduce less beneficial to my personal health and safety?
OP ED believes that if basic tests of competency, responsibility and sanity were requirements, that artificial barriers of economic inequality would be statistically irrelevant. Likely the opposite.
This view is unpopular. This is unsurprising.
(Most über-rich don't drive for themselves either)

Yes, why not have the DMV also be in charge of eugenics. What could go wrong? They've already safeguarded everyone's personal health and safety by preventing all the incompetent and reckless drivers from driving.

It's unlikely that they keep fewer than a small percentage of idiots out pf the fast lane, but OP ED does appreciate that they at least require, for example, an eye exam before they issue a liscense. Clearly blind people should not be driving.

Let's not confuse an argument for an abstract notion of universal competency testing with the assumption that this implies assumed approval of existing structures of authority. Which is to say, OP ED never said it trusts government to make these decisions. At least not government in its current form. The notion in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad idea. Most ideas are not. They have infinite surveillance on Star Trek. What they don't have is authority that uses it to quash all dissent or disagreement.

If the artificial barriers were already nonexistent, applied eugenics wouldn't seem so fearful of a concept. We have it already anyway. That's what this thread is about. OP ED believes that certain eugenics concepts applied without referral to class could prevent millions from suffering and premature death.

OP ED considers it unlikely that the generational trending of psychopathy and criminal behavior, particularly among the generationally powerful, could be unrelated to their easily established tendencies toward inbreeding.

[Luther Blissett]

This is better than a lot of Hedges's recent output, and is relevant to a number of side threads here. Part of the argument here also paints a great reason for American Dream's drawing lines against racism and fascism - especially in a potentially revolutionary moment - when an ultraright backlash in a power vacuum puts us all in camps.

"We Are In a Revolutionary Moment": Chris Hedges Explains Why An Uprising Is Coming, And Soon
The status quo is doomed but whether the future will be progressive or reactionary is uncertain, Hedges tells Salon

By Chris Hedges / salon.com
In recent years, there’s been a small genre of left-of-center journalism that, following President Obama’s lead, endeavors to prove that things on Planet Earth are not just going well, but have, in fact, never been better. This is an inherently subjective claim, of course; it requires that one buy into the idea of human progress, for one thing. But no matter how it was framed, there’s at least one celebrated leftist activist, author and journalist who’d disagree: Chris Hedges.

In fact, in his latest book, “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” Hedges argues that the world is currently at a crisis point the likes of which we’ve never really seen. There are similarities between our time and the era of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe — or the French Revolutionary era that preceded them — he says. But in many ways, climate change least among them, the stakes this time are much higher. According to Hedges, a revolution is coming; we just don’t yet know when, where, how — or on whose behalf.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Hedges to discuss his book, why he thinks our world is in for some massive disruptions, and why we need revolutionaries now more than ever. A transcript of our conversation which has been edited for clarity and length can be found below.

Do you think we are in a revolutionary era now? Or is it more something on the horizon?

It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place.

That’s what that essay I quote by Alexander Berkman, “The Invisible Revolution,” talks about. He likens it to a pot that’s beginning to boil. So it’s already taking place, although it’s subterranean. And the facade of power — both the physical facade of power and the ideological facade of power — appears to remain intact. But it has less and less credibility.

There are all sorts of neutral indicators that show that. Low voter turnout, the fact that Congress has an approval rating of 7 percent, that polls continually reflect a kind of pessimism about where we are going, that many of the major systems that have been set in place — especially in terms of internal security — have no popularity at all.

All of these are indicators that something is seriously wrong, that the government is no longer responding to the most basic concerns, needs, and rights of the citizenry. That is [true for the] left and right. But what’s going to take its place, that has not been articulated. Yes, we are in a revolutionary moment; but maybe it’s a better way to describe it as a revolutionary process.

Is there a revolutionary consciousness building in America?

Well, it is definitely building. But until there is an ideological framework that large numbers of people embrace to challenge the old ideological framework, nothing is going to happen. Some things can happen; you can have sporadic uprisings as you had in Ferguson or you had in Baltimore. But until they are infused with that kind of political vision, they are reactive, in essence.

So you have, every 28 hours, a person of color, usually a poor person of color, being killed with lethal force — and, of course, in most of these cases they are unarmed. So people march in the streets and people protest; and yet the killings don’t stop. Even when they are captured on video. I mean we have videos of people being murdered by the police and the police walk away. This is symptomatic of a state that is ossified and can no longer respond rationally to what is happening to the citizenry, because it exclusively serves the interest of corporate power.

We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.

What do you think is the most likely way that the people will respond to living in these conditions?

That is the big unknown. When it will come is unknown. What is it that will trigger it is unknown. You could go back and look at past uprisings, some of which I covered — I covered all the revolutions in Eastern Europe; I covered the two Palestinian uprisings; I covered the street demonstrations that eventually brought down Slobodan Milosevic — and it’s usually something banal.

As a reporter, you know that it’s there; but you never know what will ignite it. So you have Lenin, six weeks before the revolution, in exile in Switzerland, getting up and saying, We who are old will never live to see the revolution. Even the purported leaders of the opposition never know when it’s coming. Nor do they know what will trigger it.

What kind of person engages in revolutionary activity? Is there a specific type?

There are different types, but they have certain characteristics in common. That’s why I quote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when he talks about “sublime madness.”

I think that sublime madness — James Baldwin writes it’s not so much that [revolutionaries] have a vision, it’s that they are possessed by it. I think that’s right. They are often difficult, eccentric personalities by nature, because they are stepping out front to confront a system of power [in a way that is] almost a kind of a form of suicide. But in moments of extremity, these rebels are absolutely key; and that you can’t pull off seismic change without them.

You’ve said that we don’t know where the change will come from,and that it could just as easily take a right-wing, reactionary form as a leftist one. Is there anything lefties can do to influence the outcome? Or is it out of anyone’s control?

There’s so many events as societies disintegrate that you can’t predict. They play such a large part in shaping how a society goes that there is a lot of it that is not in your control.

For example, if you compare the breakdown of Yugoslavia with the breakdown of Czechoslovakia — and I covered both of those stories — Yugoslavia was actually the Eastern European country best-equipped to integrate itself into Europe. But Yugoslavia went bad. When the economy broke down and Yugoslavia was hit with horrific hyperinflation, it vomited up these terrifying figures in the same way that Weimar vomited up the Nazi party. Yugoslavia tore itself to pieces.

If things unravel [in the U.S.], our backlash may very well be a rightwing backlash — a very frightening rightwing backlash. We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources.

In terms of a left-wing populism having to build itself back up from scratch, do you see the broad coalition against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a hint of what that might look like? Or would you not go that far?

No, I would.

I think that if you look at what’s happened after Occupy, it’s either spawned or built alliances with a series of movements; whether it’s #BlackLivesMatter, whether it’s the Fight for $15 campaign, whether it’s challenging the TPP. I think they are all interconnected and, often times — at least when I’m with those activists — there is a political consciousness that I find quite mature.

Are you optimistic about the future?

I covered war for 20 years; we didn’t use terms like pessimist or optimist, because if you were overly optimistic, it could get you killed. You really tried to read the landscape as astutely as you could and then take calculated risks based on the reality around you, or at least on the reality insofar as you could interpret it. I kind of bring that mentality out of war zones.

If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us.

Yet you rebel not only for what you can achieve, but for who you become. In the end, those who rebel require faith — not a formal or necessarily Christian, Jewish or Muslim orthodoxy, but a faith that the good draws to it the good. That we are called to carry out the good insofar as we can determine what the good is; and then we let it go. The Buddhists call it karma, but faith is the belief that it goes somewhere. By standing up, you keep alive another narrative. It’s one of the ironic points of life. That, for me, is what provides hope; and if you are not there, there is no hope at all.

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.

[Luther Blissett]

Where Are These Pitchforks That Billionaires Are So Scared Of?
The ultra-rich and radical anarchists can agree on one thing: If inequality keeps getting worse, there could be trouble. Is the fear of class warfare founded?


When Wall Street executives received hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses after receiving billions in government bailout money during the financial crisis, the popular reaction was outrage. Yet some on Wall Street were actually outraged by the outrage: The uproar over bonuses "was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses," said former AIG CEO Robert Benmosche.

In the wake of the crisis and recession, despite the fact that nearly all the gains of the recovery have gone straight into the bank accounts of the wealthy, America's billionaires keep doing things like comparing themselves to persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany and talking about the ever-popular pitchforks. Many aggressively denounce policies designed to redistribute wealth as "class warfare."

It's been noted extensively that if there is any class warfare happening, it's the wealthy waging it against the lower classes. Yet the idea of a popular worker uprising that results in loss of property or violence against America's rich is a bogeyman to which we keep returning. Even those in favor of addressing growing inequality use "avoiding class warfare" as the argument that putting in a fix is urgent. In a recent New York Times article, William Cohan, a former Wall Street banker, lays out the stakes of continued inequality: "That’s the real danger...This little thing called the French Revolution."

It's been nearly 100 years since the last true uprising of American workers. In 1921, 10,000 striking miners took up arms against their bosses in protest of working conditions in West Virginia's coal fields. After nearly 100 deaths in what's known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, the strike was eventually put down by the U.S. army. The reforms that followed, and the New Deal a decade later, were, as historian Peter Turchin writes in Aeon Magazine, a truce designed to keep America's society and economy functioning at any cost:

"The U.S. elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution)."

Despite the elites straying farther and farther from their end of that compact, are we any closer to that revolution? Protest, when it happens, is largely nonviolent—and encouraged to be so, often by both the protesters and history. Change, in the United States at least, has generally occurred incrementally—and within the system. Tens of thousands of people might have marched in New York, but most of the people in the city—and in the country—were content to stay home.

Yet some see this as a real possibility. Not now, but soon: Nick Hanauer is a venture capitalist—he was one of the first investors in Amazon; he's doing quite well—who has been very vocal about the need to end income inequality, and who has personally pushed for raising the minimum wage in his hometown of Seattle (as well as the recent wage increase for New York fast food workers). He told Co.Exist that fear of revolution shouldn't be anyone's driving factor in trying to fix the problem ("If the only reason you care about rising inequality is because you're afraid of a violent uprising, then you're a fucking sociopath."), but that such a concern is real, if not immediate.

If current economic trends continue for the next 30 years, he says, things will go from problematic to dangerous: "If you take 50% of the country, and you only allow them to share 5% or 6% of national income, they'll be fucking pissed. Will they be pissed enough to come kill you and me? I don't know. But my bet is that life will suck, if we get to that place."

With his work on the minimum wage, Hanauer is essentially operating under the same principles that Turchin outlines: Stability is good for everyone. "The better other people do, the better I'll do. It's a feedback loop. … I think there's opportunity to come together on economic policies that make that happen and lead to an economy where everyone participates more robustly and thereby creates an even bigger opportunity," he says.

That's why he's working on policies to help working people: "If no one can buy anything anymore, then it's 'Now I need to have security people, and that sucks.' I don't want to live in a society where I have to have security people. I want to live in a society where everyone is happy."

And people are getting extra security. Emily Brouchard, a managing partner at Wealth Legacy Group, a company that offers wealth coaching to the affluent, says that environment, especially right after the financial crash, wasn't great for her clients' feelings of safety. People upped security systems and others tried to live what she calls a "stealth wealth" lifestyle. "These individuals enjoy the finer things in life on the QT," she says, "And publicly choose to drive modest cars, and wear clothes anyone could buy at their local mall."

Those fears seem mostly unfounded now—give or take a lone revolutionary interested in making a point—but for members of the country's anarchist movement, the hope is that protests over income inequality and its related issues get even more frightening to the people in power. The political system is broken and inaccessible to regular people, says Eric Laursen, who works with Agency, an anarchist PR project. Traditional protest has failed, he says, because the police are so prepared for what's coming that it's impossible to be truly disruptive. The only way to create change, he argues, is to mess with what the people in charge care about most: property.

The goal of the style of protests he envisions, therefore, is to act "in defiance of this idea that's become really ingrained among people who you can call capitalists, or business people, which is that private property is sacred. There is nothing as sacred as private property, it's the foundation of everything in their world."

Most people around the country probably experienced the Occupy Wall Street protests as a series of marches that, at worst, stopped some traffic, but the anarchists were lurking on the fringe, sometimes taking the marches in a darker direction, like they did during the "battle" part of the "Battle in Seattle." That was fomented by anarchists from Eugene, Oregon, who felt that simply marching against the WTO wasn't going to work. Often denounced by more peaceful protesters, the anarchists sometimes use what are called "black bloc tactics," named for the all black clothing and masks that they often wear. These tactics include fighting with the police, building barricades, and otherwise far more disruptive activities than your standard march. It also sometimes involves destroying property: In Seattle in 1999, they smashed the windows of a Gap, a Starbucks, and an Old Navy. In Oakland, during Occupy Wall Street, they skirmished with the police (and were denounced as being counterproductive to the protest's peaceful mission). For his part, Hanauer says he had some of Seattle's OWS protesters visit his office: "They were scary people. ... They were insane. Absolutely rabidly ideological. And fired up about violence." If there is going to be an uprising, these are the people who want to start it.

"In my view, to be an activist is not to make compromises before you've even made your point," says Laursen. "It's to be intransigent, and it is to essentially stand on a principle of human rights and to not back down."

"That's why the black bloc tactics especially get people so upset, because they're literally in some cases defiling private property or smashing windows," he says. "The point of that is making this larger point: that human rights and the rights of working people are more important than all that and shouldn't be treated as secondary." You might recall the deep national concern over a burned CVS during Baltimore's Freddie Gray protests as a perfect example of what he's talking about.

The anarchists say the only way to make change in a society where you have no voice is to defy the law, as labor organizers did in the '20s and '30s, and civil rights protesters did in the '60s: "There needs to be, by working people and people of color, a reevaluation of the so-called criminal justice system and the laws that keep them from expressing themselves," Laursen says. "And the reason that scares capitalists is because that is where you start to see the possibility of a revolutionary situation. And that's exactly the point. Because until they see a potentially revolutionary situation developing, they're not going to budge."

But the average American has made it abundantly clear they aren't currently interested in that kind of revolutionary situation. Neither are the leaders of most of our major protests, coming to the conclusion that the best way to gain public support is to not threaten violence. Peaceful protests tend to have an easier time moving people from the fringe of an issue to joining a mass movement, and most people are turned off by violence (plus, violence against protesters by the police can be some of the most powerful optics a protest can get). Laursen bemoans that protest movements are told to "work within the system," but even for those who see that system as broken, it's a system they want to see fixed, not dismantled.

Both the billionaire and the anarchist agree that OWS and the Black Lives Matter protests have been fueled by a continued disenfranchisement of huge swaths of America. One wants to fix the problem before it leads to violence, and one wants to help catalyze the protests to the point that the upend the current system. But the question remains, if the enormous economic collapse of the financial crisis or centuries of racial oppression aren't creating a revolutionary situation, will anything?

Laursen says we might be surprised about what turns out to be the final spark: "Your question is 'How big does it have to be?" and my answer is 'It doesn't have to be that big at all.' It's a question of what we do with it."