Time for another Random Wednesday here on The Zen Pagan — this week’s dose of links, short bits, and curiosities. Heavy on politics this week, as you might expect.
The idea of a universal basic income has been popping up in the news lately. But it’s not a new idea — Alan Watts wrote about it forty-five years ago in his essay Wealth Versus Money:
Any child should understand that money is a convenience for eliminating barter, so that you don’t have to go to market with baskets of eggs or firkins of beer to swap them for meat and vegetables. But if all you had to barter with was your physical or mental energy in work that is now done by machines, the problem would then be: What will you do for a living and how will the manufacturer find customers for his tons of butter and sausages? The sole rational solution would be for the community as a whole to issue itself credit money for the work done by the machines. This would enable their products to be fairly distributed and their owners and managers to be fairly paid, so that they could invest in bigger and better machines, And all the while, the increasing wealth would be coming from the energy of the machines and not from ritualistic manipulations with gold.
If you’re trying to understand what the “alt-right” everyone’s talking about is all about, I’ve found two of it’s “finest” explaining it in it’s own words. It’s pretty awful, but if you can screw your courage to the sticking point for the read you might try to make it through An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right by Allum Bokhari & Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart. For context you might follow it up with The Racist Moral Rot at the Heart of the Alt-Right by Ian Tuttle at National Review. It’s unpleasant reading to wade through a right-wing civil war over who opposed progress better, but knowledge is power.
The most amazingly underdiscussed revelation of the leaked Podesta e-mails is that the Clinton campaign deliberately set out to legitimize Trump, Cruz, and Carson as “pied piper” candidates, to elevate them “so that they are leaders of the pack”. Democrats were publicly overjoyed when Trump entered the race, they thought they could easily defeat him; so they apparently urged their friends in the press to take him seriously. The phrase “hoist by their own petard” is jaw-droppingly appropriate.
Andrew Cockburn’s cover story in the latest Harper’s explores The New Red Scare and explains why the attempt to pin Clinton’s loss on Russian covert action is not just unfounded but dangerous:
As Carr, a rare skeptic regarding the official line on the hacks, explained to me, “They’re basically saying that the Russian intelligence services are completely inept. That one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, that they have no concern about using a free Russian email account or a Russian server that has already been known to be affiliated with cybercrime. This makes them sound like the Keystone Cops. Then, in the same breath, they’ll say how sophisticated Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities are.”
In reality, Carr continued, “It’s almost impossible to confirm attribution in cyberspace.” For example, a tool developed by the Chinese to attack Google in 2009 was later reused by the so-called Equation Group against officials of the Afghan government. So the Afghans, had they investigated, might have assumed they were being hacked by the Chinese. Thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden, however, it now appears that the Equation Group was in fact the NSA. “It doesn’t take much to leave a trail of bread crumbs to whichever government you want to blame for an attack,” Carr pointed out.
If you’re local to Baltimore, I’ll be teaching a four-week introduction to self-defense at Firehouse Arts & Music starting November 30th. This class is open and welcoming to all regardless of race, religion, orientation, or identity.
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