Author: VD

All the flavors of oppression

The Greatest “Science Fiction” Writer Ever explains why her work is such a joy to read:

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

And yes, reading her work is EXACTLY as painful as this little vignette suggests.

…

Only more ellipses. A LOT more. The only thing Jemisin enjoys more than oppression is ellipses.

When the personal should be political

The Christian church is now almost entirely bereft of leadership:

Calling it “pronoun hospitality,” Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear revealed on an “Ask Me Anything” episode of his podcast that he prefers to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns.

Greear said that while there is room for disagreement and Christians should disagree charitably, he sees it as a hospitable courtesy to refer to transgender people by their chosen pronouns, despite knowing that their sex does not match their descriptors.

Actually, I have no problem with this at all on the personal level. It is simply polite to address people as they prefer to be addressed, especially when they are crazy. But to take this position as a leader is simply wrong and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the leader’s duty to put himself and his personal preferences last, after the interests of the organization and his members.

Christianity has been betrayed by the Cult of Nice. And while niceties are an important aspect of civilization and correct etiquette is generally preferable to its absence, manners do not trump math, science, history, or DNA when it comes to speaking the truth about reality. The personal is not the political, which is why sometimes the latter should trump the former.

Chick-fil-A convergence confirmed

There is no longer any room for doubt. The cucking on the anti-LBGTPQ front is real and so is the first stage of the convergence of Chick-fil-A:

Chick-fil-A’s announcement that it was dumping the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which have come under attack by gay activist groups, caught Christian fans of the fast food chain by surprise. It shouldn’t have if they had been paying attention to CFA’s corporate structure.

The donations were coming out of the Chick-fil-A Foundation. The Executive Director of the CFA Foundation is Rodney D. Bullard, a former White House fellow and Assistant US Attorney. Some may have mistaken him for a conservative because he was a fellow in the Bush Administration, but he was an Obama donor, and, more recently, had donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign while at Chick-fil-A.

Like many corporations, Chick-fil-A branded its charitable giving as a form of social responsibility. Bullard became its Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility is a leftist endeavor to transform corporations into the political arms of radical causes. Like other formerly conservative corporations, Chick-fil-A had made the fundamental error of adopting the language and the infrastructure of its leftist peers. And that made what happened entirely inevitable.

In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, Bullard emphasized that the Chick-fil-A Foundation had a “higher calling than any political or cultural war.” The foundation boss was preparing the way for the shakeup that was coming in the fall. Even while he claimed that the CFA Foundation had a higher calling than a political or cultural war, he was preparing to accommodate the Left’s cultural war.

Bullard would have been seen as a safe bet. The CFA Foundation and the Christian groups it supported were so entangled that Bullard serves on the Salvation Army’s National Advisory Board and was on the National Board of Trustees of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But Bullard’s vision was not that of charity, but of corporate social responsibility. And the two things are fundamentally different.

Charity helps people. Corporate social responsibility is virtue signaling by capitalists to anti-capitalists. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility isn’t about helping people, but ticking off ideological and identity politics boxes like diversity and the environment. If people accidentally get helped in the process of helping a corporation signal its membership in the politically correct creed, that can’t be helped.

The Chick-fil-A Foundation will go on funding leftist groups like Atlanta’s Westside Future Fund. The Westside Future Fund is a project of the Atlanta Committee for Progress together with former Mayor Kasim Reed. It will just opt out of funding Christian groups whose views offend anyone on the Left…. There was also a $10,000 donation to Saris to Suits whose mission is to “advance women’s empowerment, education, gender equality, and social justice.”

There’s money for social justice, but not for the Salvation Army.

There was $25,000 for UNICEF and $75,000 for the Andrew Young Foundation. That last one isn’t a surprise. Carter’s radical UN ambassador sits on the CFA Foundation’s advisory board. $20,000 went to the Latino Leaders Network, another $20,000 to the Harvard Debate Diversity Network, $45,000 to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and $5,000 was allotted to Friends of Refugees.

Looks like I had better update Corporate Cancer sooner than planned. There is no excuse for any of this stuff. If Bullard isn’t promptly fired, then the SJW cancer will rapidly metastasize throughout the corporation.

Mister Metokur deplatformed

Patreon just deplatformed Mister Metokur in what can only be described as an epic fuckup of proportions that have seldom hitherto been seen. So much so that Mister Metokur may not even know it yet.

If anyone has his email address, send it to me. And if you are he, get in touch! Because you’re not going to believe this….

Mailvox: Apple and the debt bomb

Forget the good of society and the interests of the employees. The giant corporations aren’t even acting in the interests of their shareholders anymore, if this emailer is to be believed.

I work for a company that was involved in [REDACTED]. It struck me as strange that a company with the cash pile that Apple has – just over $100bn in their last earnings release – would be issuing debt to raise even more cash, so I looked a little deeper and the below may be something relevant to your blog given some of your recent posts on financialisation…

When Steve Jobs died in 2011 Apple didn’t have a single penny of debt, which was unique among Silicon Valley’s tech giants. That lasted not a full 2 years after his death because in April 2013 Apple conducted the largest non-bank bond issuance in history, raising $17bn in debt (as an aside, Goldman Sachs led the bond issue). The justification for this would likely seem counter-intuitive to those outside finance: Jobs’ successor Tim Cook was supposedly under pressure from investors to return some of its cash to shareholders, which meant a program of buying back shares and paying out higher dividends. However, a large portion of Apple’s then $200bn cash pile was held outside the US and if repatriated would face a 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} tax charge, so it made ‘financial sense’ to keep the cash abroad and raise debt in the US at interest rates of c.3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} instead to fund this gigantic shareholder return program. Paying out a 3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} charge on cash instead of 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} sounds good, right? Apple certainly thought so, as they continued to issue debt over the next few years.

As we know, Trump’s signature piece of legislation so far is his tax cuts bill. It slashed the rate of corporation tax payable on foreign-held cash reserves when repatriated. Interestingly, Apple duly began repatriating some of its cash held abroad in 2017. So presumably it then stopped raising more debt? Nope. Throughout 2017 and 2018 Apple issued more and more debt to fund payouts to its equity investors. This brings me back to this month’s ‘Green Bond’ issue – the largest of its kind in Europe. Putting aside the virtue signalling aspect of issuing a ‘Green’ bond (the idea is that it’s used to fund initiatives designed to reduce Apple’s carbon footprint), it appears that Apple has become addicted to debt. In short, just 8 years on from Steve Jobs’ death when they were entirely debt-free, Apple now owes around $106bn in debt and pays out around $3.5bn annually in interest payments alone.

There is literally no business case for Apple to be taking on such debt. It is simply sucking cash out of the company. It does not need to raise cash to invest in R&D, hire new staff or expand its business. If you read through the FT, Forbes etc., the best explanations are that “debt right now is cheap, so they may as well raise cash this way to pay shareholders”. Apple themselves state the reason for issuing debt is for “corporate reasons” according to their Italian CFO, i.e. nothing related to creating productive value for the firm. They now hold slightly more debt than cash – a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once debt-free and held over $200bn in cash at its peak. Even more alarmingly, Apple has issued releases saying that they intend to become a “cash neutral” company, i.e. it will pay out any excess cash to shareholders and debt holders, and given Apple’s ever-increasing debt pile it therefore looks as though the lenders will be milking the firm for years to come. The debt vampires have well and truly sunk their teeth into Apple.

There are plenty of arguments one can make on this, but one wonders whether any of this would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive and running the company.

It’s like reading about Wakanda

They’re just so advanced! Seriously, though, who reads about the convoluted maze that is Israeli politics and then concludes, “you know, the USA would just be so much better if only it had super-smart people like that running the media, the courts, and the financial system?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday, prolonging the country’s political uncertainty as it looks set to head into its third national election in a year.

Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a “witch hunt” and “political coup,” faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of bribery and a maximum 3-year term for fraud and breach of trust, according to legal experts.

The Israeli inability to form a stable government does certainly tend to confirm the DNA studies that indicate their Italian ancestry.

Why we do what we do

A supporter of the Junior Classics 2020 edition observes 60’s-era convergence:

My father in law recently gave us a 1962 edition of the Junior Classics that was sitting around his house. All female editors with a corresponding convergence in the stories included therein. Still some good stuff by today’s standards, but the rot was well established by then.

I’ve never seen that edition, having grown up on the 1958 edition, but I’m not even remotely surprised. Preserving knowledge, teaching children, and taking back cultural ground. The objective is right there in the name.

Speaking of the intellectual offensive, if you emailed about your interest in the Castalia Deluxe subscription but haven’t signed up yet, this is the time to do so. I don’t know if we’re going to close subscription sign-ups for the even months or add a sign-up fee during those months, but regardless, we want to pass 50 percent before we place the initial order with the bindery. Right now, we’re at 32 percent, which isn’t at all bad for the first 18 hours, but we can certainly do better.

Ditching Fitbit

I wouldn’t wear a Fitbit regularly anymore now that Google has purchased them. And I certainly wouldn’t have an account tied to it recording my data:

When Mike Carpenter learned Google’s latest acquisition would be Fitbit, the maker of a device he wore at all hours of the day except in the shower, he left his Fitbit Charge 3 on the table at his office where he was working that day. He, and others like him, haven’t picked it up since.

On Nov. 1, Google said would be buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion in hopes of boosting its hardware business getting a foothold in the health space. Google explicitly said in the announcing the deal that it won’t sell users’ personal or health data. Despite that assurance, some Fitbit users say they don’t trust the company, and are shedding the product altogether.

“I’m not only afraid of what they can do with the data currently, but what they can do with it once their AI advances in 10 or 20 years,” Carpenter told CNBC, saying he didn’t believe the company’s privacy assurances. “Health insurance companies would love to get their hands on that data and their purposes wouldn’t be advertising so is that what they are going to do with it? They didn’t spend the money to not utilize it in some way.”

The trend of people throwing or threatening to throw out their Fitbit devices comes as Google faces a perception problem that has spanned everyday users and regulators alike. The company has paid data privacy fines in the EU and made recent strides into the stringently regulated healthcare industry, which has caused the public to re-think seemingly harmless tools.

“I only recently got it and now I’m thinking I don’t need Google watching literally my every step or my every heartbeat,” said Dan Kleinman, who said he is getting rid of his Fitbit Versa.

Any benefit of knowing that information is significantly outweighed by the disadvantage of Google also having it

Why won’t you move?

Economists are upset that Americans aren’t uprooting themselves from their communities as readily as the Baby Boomers and preceding generations did:

Mobility in the United States has fallen to record lows. In 1985, nearly 20 percent of Americans had changed their residence within the preceding 12 months, but by 2018, fewer than ten percent had. That’s the lowest level since 1948, when the Census Bureau first started tracking mobility.

The decline in Americans’ mobility has been staggering, as the chart below shows. Mobility rates have fallen for nearly every group, across age, gender, income, homeownership status, and marital status.

Declining mobility contributes to a host of economic and social issues: less economic dynamism, lower rates of innovation, and lower productivity. By locking people into place, it exacerbates inequality by limiting the economic opportunities for workers.

A wide range of explanations have been offered to account for these substantial declines in mobility. Many consider the culprit to be the economic crisis, which locked people into declining-value homes; others attribute it to the huge differential in the housing prices in expensive cities. Some economists contend that job opportunities have become similar across places, meaning people are less likely to move for work; others see rising student debt as a key factor that has kept young Americans in their parents’ basements.

Now, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that other, more emotional and psychological factors may be at work. The study uses data from the bank’s Survey of Consumer Expectations to examine the degree to which people’s attachment to their communities affects their willingness and ability to move. To get at this, they use data from the survey (which covers a monthly panel of 1,300 respondents and is nationally representative) to group Americans into the three mobility classes I identified in my book Who’s Your City: “the mobile” who have the means, education, and capability to move to spaces of opportunity; “the stuck” who lack the resources to relocate; and “the rooted” who have the resources to move, but prefer to stay where they are.

The survey identifies respondents’ most recent move, their probability of moving in the next two years, and other data related to moving including job opportunities and income prospects, housing costs, the distance from current home, costs of moving to various locations, crime rates, taxes, community values and norms, and proximity to family and friends. The researchers use these data to estimate the overall costs—what they call the “willingness to pay” or WTP—for people to move different locations. They then use statistical models to examine the importance of these psychological factors compared to other mostly financial explanations.

A significant reason for the decline in mobility is that many of us are highly attached to our towns. Nearly half of those in the survey (47 percent) identify as rooted. The rooted are disproportionately white, older, married, homeowners, and rural. Their reasons for not moving are more psychological than economic: proximity to family and friends, and their involvement in the local community or church.

Note the significance of the “disproportionately white” aspect of the so-called “rooted”. In the 1950s and 1960s, even in the 1980s, all those Midwesterners who moved to California were moving, or so they assumed, to another white state. My parents moved from Massachusetts to Minnesota in the 1970s, then my parents’ best friends moved from Minnesota to California in the 1980s. Both moves were textbooks moves made for purely economic reasons.

Would the latter move be made today? Almost certainly not.

Now keep in mind that the entire purpose of free trade’s supposed economic benefits is to expand this labor mobility worldwide. The only price is the complete destruction of everything you know and love, including your relationships with your friends and family. So, it’s good that the US labor mobility rate is falling, the real problem is that it can’t fall fast enough to prevent the country from collapsing or preserve the remaining unity of the least-invaded states.