Category Archives: Ayn Rand

There are two stories you could tell about Wikipedia.

One is that 20 years ago a web resource was launched that threatened academia and the media, and displaced established sources of knowledge. It was an encyclopedia anyone could editchildren, opinionated ignoramuses and angry ex-spouses. If I edited the page on particle physics to claim it was the study of ducks, the change would be instantly published. If I edited your page to call you a paedophile, that would be published too. Worse, although anyone could edit it, not everyone did: the editors were a self-selecting group of pedants and know-it-alls and overwhelmingly men. All of this led to biases in what soon became the worlds first port of call for finding out about anything. In time the sites co-founder, Larry Sanger, would concede that trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.

But there is also anotherincreasingly plausiblestory. Namely, that Wikipedia is the last redoubt of the idealism of the early World Wide Web. From the moment of Tim Berners-Lees 1989 paper with its proposal of how information could be connected and made accessible via a hyperlink, visionaries began to imagine a kind of global democracy, where anybody, anywhere, could use a computer to discover the world. Amid a raft of developments known (in a 1999 coinage) as Web 2.0which allowed everybody not merely to consume content but also to create itsome dared to dream that we would all become digital citizens shaking the plutocracys hold on established media and other elitist hierarchies.

Bit by bit, most of the web let us down. Yes, we were given a voicebut it didnt come for free. Websites like Facebook harvest our data in order to attract advertisers; screen addiction, raging tribalism, trolling and misinformation reign. Tech billionaires got far richer than the old press barons ever were, and the rest of us became not empowered e-citizensbut data sold to companies wanting to target us.

But despite being the seventh most-visited site in the world in 2020, Wikipedia still seems different. It is the only not-for-profit in the top 10, with no adverts, no data collection and no billionaire CEO. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers maintain and create pages for free, correcting one another and upholding an impressive veracity. As early as 2005, the science journal Nature found that Wikipedia comes close to the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica online (to the displeasure of the Britannicas editors). Back then, the young Wikipedia had four errors per science entry to Britannicas three. Wikipedia may not have reached the ideal of Jimmy Wales, the sites more prominent co-founder, of being a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, but it isnt far off. In February 2020, Wired named Wikipedia as the last best place on the internet.

As Wikipedia leaves its teenage years, the question iswhich of our two stories is more valid?

Wikipedias creators might seem like unlikely revolutionaries. Growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was born in 1966, Jimmy Wales had a deep affection for his household encyclopedia. He would sit with his mother sticking in entry-updates sent by the publisher that referred the reader to a more accurate entry in a later edition. Speaking from an attic in his house in the Cotswolds during lockdown, Wales tells me that one entry that needed updating was the moons, for the good reason that people had landed on it for the first time.

Wales studied finance and went on to work as a trader. His intellectual heroes were the novelist and philosopher of selfishness Ayn Rand (one of his daughters is named after a Rand heroine) and the Austrian free market economist Friedrich Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom was a favourite of Margaret Thatchers. He spent much of his free time on the early internet, playing fantasy games and browsing, and became fixated by its potential. He quit his job and with two partners set up Bomis, which started as an information directory but developed into a mens site (whose Babe Engine was basically a way to search for pornography).

Wales decided to create a free, virtual encyclopedia that could be updated in real time and that anyone could access. Like its predecessors, it would be a secondary, not a primary sourceit would cite information from the media or academic papers, rather than publish original researchand it would have a strict approvals process. It was really very formal and very top-down, you had to be approved to write anything, and you were expected to submit a completed essay, he says. Nupedia launched in October 1999, with Larry Sangera philosophy graduate student whom Wales had met online via philosophy mailing listsas editor-in-chief.

There are now over 300 Wikipedias in different languages, and over six million entries on the English language site alone

Thanks to the long submission process, the site had published only 21 articles after a year. Meanwhile, Sanger and Wales had come across the concept of wikiscollaborative, freely rewritable web pages that can be used to run group projects, collect notes or run a database (wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick). As an experiment, they launched another encyclopedia on 15th January 2001 that ditched the checks in favour of a wiki-style approach: Wikipedia.

Intended as a sideshow to Nupedia, the new site exploded. One of the things that was interesting, Wales remembers, is that in the early days, people started writing things that were pretty good. They were very short and basic, but there was nothing wrong with them. There are now over 300 Wikipedias in different languages, and over six million entries on the English language site alone. Over time, three core policies were established: pages should take a neutral point of view; contain no original research; and be verifiable, meaning that other visitors can check the information comes from a reliable source. Interestingly, none of these tenets is accuracy: the site effectively outsources this by resting everything on citations.

Two of the sites servers crashed on Christmas Day 2004, and Wales had to keep the site limping along himself. Shortly after, he launched a fundraising campaign. Today, regular energetic campaigns, highly visible when you click on an entry, bring in over $100m a year for Wikipedia and other projects of the superintending Wikimedia Foundation, mostly from small donationsthe average is $15.

Despite the incredible number of pages, there are fewer active editors than you might think: on the English-language Wikipedia only 51,000 editors made five or more edits in December 2020. A 2017 study found that in the sites first decade, 1 per cent of Wikipedias editors were responsible for 77 per cent of its edits. An edit can be as small as a tweak to the formatting, or it could be starting a new page.

The site is now vast, with over 55m articlesthe English-language Wikipedia alone would fill 90,000 books, giving it comparable volume (if not always quality) to a typical Oxbridge college library, available free to anyone with an internet connection, whether a rice farmer in Bangladesh or a physics student with out-of-date textbooks. Most impressive is its speed: articles are edited 350 times a minute. Wales says one of the first moments he truly saw Wikipedias potential was on 9/11. While television news was looping footage of the towers falling, Wikipedias network of volunteers were doing something different: People were writing about the architecture of the World Trade Center, its history. The site has come into its own during the pandemic, too, moving far more rapidly than established publications: since December 2019, there has been an average of 110 edits per hour on Covid-19 articles by some 97,000 editors.

The passion and dedication of Wikipedias editors is clear, but that doesnt necessarily mean theyre always good at what they do. One sobering recent revelation concerned entries in the Scots language, a close cousin of English that is primarily spoken in the Scottish lowlands (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic). Thousands of Wikipedia pages in Scots had been created by someone who didnt speak the languagea teenage user called AmaryllisGardener from North Carolina. Some words were still in English, others seemed to have been translated into Scots via a poor online dictionary. AmaryllisGardener sincerely thought he was being helpful, saying in a Wikipedia comment that he had started editing the pages when he was 12, and was devastated by the outcry (and abuse from other editors). Ryan Dempsey, a Scots language enthusiast from Northern Ireland who first flagged the errors on Reddit, tells me that he believes the errors went uncorrected for so long mostly because Scots is not very widely spoken, still less read, and those fluent in it are more likely to be older and rural and so have less of an online presence. After outing AmaryllisGardener, he realised that there were many other editors who were far worse on the Scots site.

The story was covered all over the world, but isnt the best example of Wikipedias effectiveness: mistranslationsespecially in little-read languagesare far more likely to survive than factual errors, given the requirement to cite facts carefully (youve doubtless seen a bright red citation needed mark next to an apparently innocuous statement). However, there have been many other controversies about accuracy. Lord Justice Leveson was blasted in 2012 after his report into the culture and ethicsand accuracyof the British press listed one of the founders of the Independent newspaper as one Brett Straub, an unknown figure who erroneously appeared on the papers Wikipedia page.

In 2015, the scientists Adam Wilson and Gene Likens looked into the edit histories of several science pages on Wikipedia, finding that within just a few days the page for acid rain was edited to define it as the deposition of wet poo and cats, and separately by another user who claimed that acid rain killed bugs bunny; a third dismissed the phenomenon as a load of bullshit. One repeatedly tried to change the spelling of rain to ran.

None of the rogue changes lasted longdedicated editors monitor popular pages for changes, as do the sites botsbut for Likens in particular, who led the team that discovered acid rain and had devoted time to editing the page himself, this was frustrating. (Of course, anything called acid may invite a certain volume of psychedelic gobbledygook.) Wilson says acid rain went through some very tumultuous edits. Their study found politically controversial scientific subjects attracted far more edits, which will also mean more quality control. Wilson tells me that he is fairly impressed by the discussion and edits on the climate change page.

The other problem with Wikipedias open-door editing policy is that theres little to stop those with a vested interest influencing entries. Wikipedias guidelines caution against editing your own page, or on behalf of family, friends or your employer, but this is tricky to police in a land of anonymous usernamesand the temptation can be strong. Indeed, a farcical controversy unfolded when Wales changed his own entry to remove references to Sanger as co-founder of the site, leaving him as the sole creator. He was called out in 2005, and later aired regret to Wired: I wish I hadnt done it. Its in poor taste. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed in 2012 that thousands of edits to Wikipedia were being made from within the House of Commons. The former MP Joan Ryan, who left Labour for The Independent Group, admitted to editing her own page, pleading that she had to tackle misleading or untruthful information.

But while both criticism and praise often centre on the claim that editing is a free-for-all, that is no longer quite the case. Thomas Leitch, author of Wikipedia U, points out: Wikipedias folklore is that Were the peoples encyclopedia. Were a democracy, anybody can edit. Thats not true[to edit] you cant be someone who has corrected, or in Wikipedias view miscorrected, a given page so many times youre now banned; or someone who has run afoul of an editor. You have to colour within the lines to be able to edit on Wikipedia.

While anyone can create a Wikipedia account and click edit on almost any page, your edit will likely be reversed by another editor unless it meets certain standards. If disputes ariseedits being repeatedly made and reversed, or a discussion turning ugly on the Talk discussion pages that accompany every articleusers can be banned by administrators, or an article can be locked against unsupervised edits.

Even the everyday friction between editors can put off the would-be Wikipedians. I decided to have a go, and added a short, factual line on a recent controversy to the history of Wikipedia page (admittedly one thats likely to be heavily scrutinised). Within seven hours it was removed by another editor, with the curt explanation: hardly notable or controversial. The page as a whole is marked as need[ing] to be updated as of August 2018based on my limited experience, perhaps over-precious editors could be to blame.

The stern eyes of experienced editors may be justified in some cases but there are serious consequences. Surveys show that editors on the English language site are overwhelmingly young menexactly in keeping with so much of Silicon Valley. The Wikimedia Foundation set a goal in 2011 to get to 25 per cent female editors over four years. In 2014, executive director Sue Gardner was forced to admit that I didnt solve it. We didnt solve it. In 2018, nine out of 10 editors were male.

Wikipedias open-door editing policy means theres little to stop those with a vested interest from influencing stories

Wales bemoans not nearly enough progress, and says the Foundation still has a lot to learn. He had hoped the phasing-in of a visual text editor (meaning the page youre editing looks like the published version, rather than resembling off-putting code) would attract more diverse editors, but it hasnt had the impact that I would like.

Whats at stake with diversity is, in Waless own words, not just some sort of random political correctnessit impacts the content. When male contributors predominate, you get certain kinds of entries and edits: in 2013, the New York Times journalist Amanda Filipacchi noticed that someone, or a group of someones, was gradually moving women out of the American Novelists category and moving them into one called American Women Novelists, meaning that the main list of American authors was becoming exclusively male.

With no application process for being an editor, and potentially anonymous and genderless profiles, this is a problem not easily amenable to the conventional corrective of monitoring. Jessica Wade, a physicist and Wikipedia editor, blames the skew to the male-dominated tech world from which the site was born: When the community started, it wasnt diverse, and it didnt welcome people from underrepresented groups.

When women or minorities do try to edit, she says, they can face old hands who dont encourage people enough to make them want to stay. Not everyone is so determined that they wont give up when theyre told the page they listed is rubbish, or that theyve not cited something properly.

Having dabbled in editing Wikipedia herself, Wade was shocked by the lack of entries for female scientists. She set herself a steep goal: to create a new page for a female or minority scientist every single dayand, starting in early 2018, shes done it ever since. Her project provoked some grumbles, and one fellow scientist made her doubt herself: They said that I was diluting Wikipedia and damaging the community by putting these entries on there. It really upset me. Shes quick to say, though, that the majority of the community is supportive, and the joys of collaboratingwaking up after a night of editing to see that contributors on the other side of the world have added useful edits or photos to your entryoutweigh the negatives. Mary Mann, a librarian who was spurred back into editing recently by inaccuracies regarding a type of pepper, tells me that her experience has been positive, with the caveat that the pages Ive tended to work on so far are non-controversial pages. Everyone likes Sichuan peppers.

Another important skew in Wikipedias contributions is geographical: Around 68 per cent of contributors are in America and the UK; Wales predicts that the big changes in Wikipedias next 20 years will be largely invisible on the English site: Wikipedias in the languages of the developing world [will be] a really huge part of our futurehow do we support whatever technological limitations people might have?

Wales believes that the reputation of Wikipedia has improved dramatically over the years. At the beginning, he found the storms about individual silly edits frustrating, but there are far fewer of them now. Its like how there was a whole spate of stories about eBay, about someone selling a gun, or someone selling their babies, or selling their soul. And then everybody realised that yeah, you can post pretty much anything you want on eBay, then someone will flag it and it gets taken down. Its not that exciting.

Meanwhile, stories of lecturers warning students not to cite Wikipedia conveniently omit that they would say the same about any encyclopedia, as theyre not primary sources. Several I spoke to regularly recommend Wikipedia as a great place to start researching a subject, as you can reach the primary sources through the links. Ellis Jones, a sociology professor, made editing Wikipedia pages on sociological theorists part of his syllabus: Its one of the most exciting things in the course for the students. It allows them to see that even though theyre not experts, they can contribute some small piece of knowledge to the public.

Leitch, the author of Wikipedia U, argues that the great gift of Wikipedia is the way that it teaches us to question sources of authority. Yes, of course, we have to be asking questions about Wikipedia. But while were on that subject, shouldnt we be asking those questions about liberal education in all of its avatars? Take the peer-review process: a 2017 study found that it comes with its own set of biases: women were under-represented, and both men and women tended to favour work by their own genders. Some charge the process with slowing down the publication of disruptive findings; virtually everyone involved with it knows that academics will insist on the addition of references to their own publications, as shameless a form of anonymous self-promotion as attempting to buff up your Wikipedia page.

Rather than Wireds description of it as the last best place on the internet, I prefer the way Tom Forth, another Wikipedia editor, described it to me: as the least bad place on the internet. It has many flaws, but many fewer than other huge sites. Dont be evil, Googles former motto, is a promise Wikipedia could claim to have kept.

The great gift of Wikipedia is the way that it teaches us to question sources of authority

Ironically for those who see Wikipedia as a disruptor, some of its greatest problems stem from the older institutions it relies on for citations. Its notability criteria mean that reputable sources must recognise a subjects importance before Wikipedia can. When I ask Jimmy Wales about his concerns about fake news, he highlights a much greater problem: the steep decline in local news outlets, which means the site often cannot cover local topicsat all.

However, the relationship between the resource and the world it reflects is not a one-way street. It can seem like if something isnt on Wikipedia, it may as well not exist. Conversely, newer pages like those created for female and ethnic minority scientists by Wade can, in some small ways, hack away at the biases in the world at large. During 2020, she and another scientist set about creating Wikipedia pages for those researching the pandemic, and says she soon noticed a gradual lessening in the white, male skew of experts quoted in the media.

One of the first pages Wade made was for Gladys West, an African-American scientist and a pioneer of GPS technology. The page started small, as little was known about her life, but over the years more has emerged, and she was recently profiled in the Guardian. For Wade, this encapsulates the joy of editing. When I see other people Ive done pages for getting recognition and honours and being celebrated, Im just like, this is the best day ever. This is the greatest thing ever. The power you have from just sitting up at night with your laptopits extraordinary.

There is something undeniably romantic about thousands of people pooling their knowledge onlinenot for money or fame, but because it seems a good thing to do. One of the editors I spoke to sent me a link to Listen to Wikipedia, a website that plays musical notes as it shows, in real time, which pages are being updated: bells for additions, strings for subtractions; deeper notes for large edits, higher notes for small. Kent county Delaware, Biondi, Upton State Pueblo Pottery, Italy National Cricket Team. Topher Grace, and words in languages I dont understand flash by. The longer I watch, the more it looks like the least bad place on the internet.

Read the rest here:

Wikipedia is the last bastion of idealism on the internet Prospect Magazine - Prospect Magazine

This is now being called a full-blown mania, an expression you dont usually hear in the price-hungry market. Even the highly cynical short sellers have been getting the wrong end of these prices. This idyllic everything-is-fabulous market is the result of Federal stimuli, the prospect of the vaccine ending the pandemic, and, to some extent, itchy investors and funds. Weird booms in prices, like ETF ARKKs staggering almost vertical rise to 10 times its values are playing havoc with indices. This also comes at a time when the rich are doing very well indeed, thanks for asking. Asset values have entered a realm of smugness rarely seen in United States market history. This isnt quite as whacko as it sounds. Zero interest rates have given the rich access to very cheap money. They could refinance anything and everything, and make money, and thats whats happening. This has been going on since 2001, but the pandemic has added fuel to the values. (Its no accident the rich got a lot richer in that timeframe. If youre borrowing at 1% and lending at 5%+, how do you not make money? This is one of the reasons interest rates have remained so low for so long. Its also one of the main reasons house prices and similar assets got more expensive. The higher prices were more accessible at lower rates.) Is this market good or bad? Both, actuallyThis is a far from simple situation. The new big money coming in IS spurring investment. The bad side is all too familiar:The market has a bad habit of following itself around, investing in itself at whatever price, rather than looking for new assets. This is the (groan) overbuy and oversell thing, which routinely makes and loses a lot of money and doesnt really do much but tread liquidity. A lot of capital value doesnt do much at all. Its accumulated, it makes some money, but it doesnt get out into the economy directly. This is somewhere between prudent asset management and stagnation, but that money sits tight. (To be fair, for many private investors, thats not such a bad idea and pretty reliably maintains wealth, if not making as much.)The hysterical, all-hype part of the market does mislead investors, intentionally and indirectly through price moves. Everything is the greatest thing since sliced bread, ALL the time. This rather obscene 5 second attention span approach to investment is one of the key players in big losses. So in a surging market, someones going to be left high and dry, for sure. The potentially good side of this market is much underrated, largely because its a type of investment most people dont really know much about: The pandemic has created a unique business environment which could benefit new businesses and investors. People are (naturally) trying new ways of making money. They need to be capital efficient. They know that. They know it all too well. A certain percentage of these new businesses are viable. They dont need a lot of money, but they do need capital input. Seed capital isnt even peanuts; its often much less. Its a very low-risk investment environment, when its managed properly. A modest, even trivial, investment could give access to any number of Next Pretty Large Things. The other unique environment at this time is Americas extremely unusual level of stagnant mediocrity in progressing new things. The geriatric, babbling Old Economy is on its last legs, in fact last toenail clippings. Drivel has replaced reliable visions. Everything from materials to energy is changing, very fast. Raising up a whole new economy from the filthy ashes is possible, but it takes capital investment to do it. Why not now, when the risks are low, and theres plenty of possible upside? Theres a huge irony here. The good side is the long-forgotten ideal of capitalism; forging the future to the benefit of all. Actual progress, not just good numbers. Forget Ayn Rand and the Apologists; this is what it can do when it knows what its doing and why its doing it. The question is, will it? Lets just hope someone figures it out.

This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com

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article image Op-Ed: Investors making big money, but where are the trillions going? - Digital Journal

Key Takeaways

Supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Washington D.C. Capitol Building last week in protest of Trumps election defeat, killing five people, including two police officers. Reports later revealed that many involved had been funded with Bitcoin.

Many alt-right and white nationalist figures were present at the riots, including self-described white majoritarian Nick Fuentes, outspoken neo-nazi Baked Alaska, and various other high-profile white supremacists.

The riot was planned via the social media site Parler starting Jan. 6, with Wild Protest movement leader Ali Alexander stating, If DC escalates so do we.

On Dec. 8, a single donor sent over 28.15 BTC worth over $520,000 at the time to multiple alt-right figures and organizations, including figures directly involved in the Capitol Hill unrest.

Cybersecurity firm Chainalysis identified the transactions and tracked them, building a paper trail.

Through the Namecoin blockchain, Chainalysis identified the donor as Pankkake. According to Chainalysis, domestic extremists in the U.S. have been receiving foreign funding traceable on the Bitcoin blockchain since at least 2016.

Nick Fuentes, a self-described white majoritarian and anti-LGBT speaker banned from YouTube for denying the Holocaust, received 45% of the Dec. 8 funds. That sum amounted to 13.5 BTC or approximately $250,000 at the time.

Chainalysis reports that Pankkake donated funds to the Daily Stormer, a neo-nazi media outlet, as well as alt-right podcaster Ethan Ralph, and the U.S. white supremacist group VDARE.

While most of the recipients were from the U.S., Pankkake also allegedly donated $26,000 to French neo-nazi and Holocaust denier Vincent Reynourard.

The cybersecurity firm stated its belief that Pankkake may have been an early adopter of Bitcoin who was active in crypto since 2013 and accumulated wealth as BTC gained in value.

Crypto Briefing traced the Pankakke NameCoin handle to Freenode chat logs archived on BTCbase.org where a user identifying themselves as Pankkake, a French programmer interested in Namecoin, had been a regular poster.

Pankkakes early political leanings can be seen in various racist, anti-semitic, and transphobic comments, stating blacks are born to be slaves anyway in 2013.

Pankkake was often in contact with Monero creator Riccardo Spagni, AKA Fluffy Pony, during that time. Their discussion focused on cryptocurrency and blogging, and Spagni informed Crypto Briefing that they never spoke in private.

Spagni privately shared with the author his rating for Pankkake on Bitcointalk, where he called Pankkake the The Trolliest Troll of Trollsville.

Pankkake discussed blogging with other users, including Mirceau Popescu, Romanian entrepreneur and founder of the now-defunct BitBet US site. Popescu was banned from Twitter in 2014 for threatening to kill Andreas Antonopoulos.

In the 2013 chat logs, a Freenode user linked a racist blog post that Popescu wrote on his personal site. Pankkakes comments on that blog led Crypto Briefing to Pankkakes own blog, called Headfucking, which contained various projects and files, including adult content and a fan site for a metal goregrind band.

Finally, the Headfucking site led Crypto Briefing to a blog under Pankakkes real name, where his final post was a suicide note.

Pankkakes name was Laurent Bachelier, a Parisian programmer with 47 repositories on GitHub.

His blog featured his thoughts on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, among other topics, with no posts from 2015 to late 2020.

Bachelier posted a suicide note on Dec. 9, 2020, one day after the 28 BTC donation was made. He stated that he suffered from Trigeminal neuralgia, a neuropathic disorder, also known as the suicide disease, characterized by extreme and chronic nerve pain. Bachelier cites tinnitus and fatigue, among other health problems, as reasons for his suicide.

If you are reading this, I am deceased. This is a message scheduled to be posted in the future; so there is no chance that i survived.

Bachelier went on to list more reasons, including his view that Western civilization is declining, while also bringing up Holocaust denial and 9/11 conspiracy theories by referencing wooden doors and building 7.

As examples of this Western decline, he stated his belief that the COVID-19 virus is not dangerous and that the police did not really kill George Floyd, making the BLM protests against his killing unjustified.

He ended the list lamenting that to top it off, the Fast and Furious 9 movie release had been delayed.

On his death, one of his former university classmates commented, describing Bachelier as having, even 15 years ago, a pure libertarian alt-right tendency that in other circumstances I would have abhorred. He was nevertheless a comrade.

In his suicide note, Bachelier pointed to his reasons for allegedly donating his money to hate groups and extremists, saying:

This is one of the things that has radically changed about me in the last few years: what happens after I die interests me. This is why I have decided to bequeath my modest fortune to certain causes and certain people. I think and I hope they will make better use of it than I do.

The incident proved to be a crucial demonstration of the transparency and immutability of the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing donations aimed at funding civil unrest in the U.S. to be traced to their original source.

Disclaimer: This investigation relies on Chainalysis accurately identifying Pankakke as the donor of the $520,000 BTC donation.

Disclosure: At the time of press, the author of this piece held Bitcoin.

The information on or accessed through this website is obtained from independent sources we believe to be accurate and reliable, but Decentral Media, Inc. makes no representation or warranty as to the timeliness, completeness, or accuracy of any information on or accessed through this website. Decentral Media, Inc. is not an investment advisor. We do not give personalized investment advice or other financial advice. The information on this website is subject to change without notice. Some or all of the information on this website may become outdated, or it may be or become incomplete or inaccurate. We may, but are not obligated to, update any outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate information.

You should never make an investment decision on an ICO, IEO, or other investment based on the information on this website, and you should never interpret or otherwise rely on any of the information on this website as investment advice. We strongly recommend that you consult a licensed investment advisor or other qualified financial professional if you are seeking investment advice on an ICO, IEO, or other investment. We do not accept compensation in any form for analyzing or reporting on any ICO, IEO, cryptocurrency, currency, tokenized sales, securities, or commodities.

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Unmasking the Deceased Programmer Who Donated 28 Bitcoin to Capitol Hill Rioters - Crypto Briefing

Almost every clich of political theory has been used to describe the events of January 6 carnage, coup, even riot. But while Donald Trump may have incited the mob, the events at the United States Capitol were the unfortunate but logical conclusion of the way in which a dominant section of the Republican Party has articulated its political strategy over the last decade or more.

The swearing-in of Joe Biden as President on January 20 may, therefore, formally end the tenure of Donald Trump, but unless and until the Republican Party transforms itself, January 6 will be one more marker on the route of destructive politics that is dividing the US more strikingly than at any time since the American civil war.

In many ways, the events of January 6 could have been foretold when Trump and the core of his support base refused to accept that he had lost the presidential election. It was clear that Trump would not, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, go gentle into the good night.

For most of his term, almost everyone who has observed Trump closely including many who have worked with him have been convinced that the incumbent in the Oval office is not entirely stable.

Almost a year ago, nearly 350 psychiatrists and other mental professionals petitioned to Congress that the Presidents mental health was rapidly deteriorating. At least two well-known psychiatrists from Yale and George Washington University stated that Trump appeared to be showing signs of delusion by doubling down on falsehoods and conspiracy theories. They concluded there was real potential that Trump could be ever more dangerous, a threat to the safety of our nation.

These delusions have only aggravated since the election, which Trump was convinced was stolen from him by fraud committed by the Democratic Party in collusion with local officials.

The dangerous politics of the Republican Party

However, the deeper cause that goes beyond the delusions of Trump lies within the Republican Party itself. While its core support is derived from an elite who are attracted to it on the basis of free market fundamentalism and what the writer-thinker Ayn Rand described as the virtue of selfishness (Rands The Fountainhead and its story of the architect Howard Roark is Trumps favourite novel), it needs a wider base to become electable.

In his review of Jacob S Hacker and Paul Piersons Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, Franklin Foer wrote in The New York Times: From their 19th-century inception, political parties of the right have faced an electoral disadvantage since, for the most part, they emerged as vessels for the wealthy, a definitionally small coterie. Their growth seemed further constrained by the fact that they could never match their opponents enticing promises of government largesse because their wealthy backers steadfastly refused to pay higher taxes

In order to become electable, the Republican Party has had to widen its constituency by adding toxic emotional content to its political ideology that has helped it to win the support of sections of the white working class.

It has done so by appealing to faith, patriotism, racial prejudice, and the so-called core American values and by exploiting the sense of victimhood of the white working class. While pre-Trump, much of the messaging was limited to dog whistling, the President was brazen in representing the Democratic Party as being against God and American values and freedoms (including the right to bear arms), and responsible for disenfranchising white voters by weakening voting laws and following pro immigration policies. Even the obvious need to wear masks during the Covid-19 pandemic was projected as an attempt by Democrats to undermine the fundamental rights of American citizens.

In the period after the election, Trump was publicly elusive, but was using the subterranean web and social media to mobilise his supporters to gather at the Capitol on the day Congress was to certify Joe Bidens election victory. His message was simple and direct: We will never give up, we will never concede You dont concede when theres theft involved. The former Mayor of New York and Trumps personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani added: Lets have trial by combat.

What followed at the US Capitol was a reflection of the delusional personality of Trump and the dangerous politics of the Republican Party, particularly aggrieved by losing both Senate seats from Georgia which was to a large extent due to an unprecedented mobilisation of black voters by Stacey Abrams, who almost single-handedly built a coalition of grassroots support for the Democratic Party in the state.

Capitol consequences, case for 25th Amendment

The short-term consequences of the events of January 6 are obvious. There is widespread outrage within most sections of public opinion, akin to a political catharsis. Internationally, US democracy is no longer the shining city on the hill.

But whether the outrage will be a moment of awakening, or epiphany as the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi put it, remains to be seen. Much will depend on whether the Republican Party realises the limits of destructive Trumpism; there is some evidence in the distancing of key figures of the party from Trump and his follies.

As of now, for many, every one of the next 13 days that Trump has remaining in the Oval Office is a day too many; this is true for Americans as well as for the world. Trump is still in charge of the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, weapons that could destroy the planet as we know it several times over.

Therefore, there are serious moves to invoke the 25th Amendment. The Amendment, ratified in February 1967, deals with presidential disability and succession. While Section 3 of the 25th Amendment allows a President to declare his own inability (and has been invoked in the past during the Reagan and Bush eras), Section 4, which allows the Vice President and Cabinet to declare the Presidents inability, has never been invoked before. This is the critical section at issue today.

Under Section 4, if Vice President Mike Pence and the majority of the Trump Cabinet or another body approved by Congress give a written declaration to the President pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, stating that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, Vice President Pence would assume power as the Acting President.

Thereafter, President Trump would have the right to challenge the decision through a written declaration stating that no inability exists. The Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet (or another body approved by Congress) would then have another four days to provide a second written declaration of the Presidents inability.

Within 21 days of this declaration, Congress would need to confirm the Presidents inability through a two-thirds vote of both Houses. However, this step would be unnecessary in Trumps case, because his term ends on January 20.

The American constitutional law scholar, Joel K Goldstein, has argued that while the 25th Amendment does not provide a definition of inability, legislative authorities indicate that Sections 3 and 4 of the Amendment refer to a wide range of physical and mental inabilities, which could be produced by attack, injury, illnessor could result from a degenerative process.

This definition could clearly encompass a range of possible psychological assessments of Trump. Moreover, as Goldstein points out, Section 4 applies both when a Presidential candidate refuses to recognise an inability, as well as when he is unable to do so. Thus, Trumps refusal to accept an assessment of his inability is irrelevant to an invocation of Section 4.

Going forward, India and post-Trump United States

Will the Trump Administrations perceived proximity to India cast a shadow on bilateral relations during the Biden-Harris era?

India-US relations have bipartisan support and a majority within the US Congress recognise the importance of India, given particularly the rise of a belligerent China. Nonetheless, it is critical for New Delhi to dispel the impression that it had a special relationship with the Trump Administration or that it would have been more comfortable with the re-election of a Republican President.

This demands also subtly tempering sections of the India diaspora who were enthusiastic Trump supporters, and reaching out to Democrats beyond key figures within the Biden-Harris administration. A willingness to engage with critics within the Democratic Party, and to be more open on sensitive issues could help to quickly ensure that the transition from Trump to Biden could be seamless at least for bilateral relations.

Read the original:

An Expert Explains the US Capitol Hill riot: anatomy of an insurrection - The Indian Express

Mayor Mike Coffman talks with CBS Channel 4 News Denver reporter Shaun Boyd after his week posing as a homeless vet last week. SCREEN GRAB

Mayor Mike Coffman told a Denver TV reporter this week that people are deceiving themselves in thinking theyre doing the right thing when it comes to dealing with the regions homelessness problem.

He should heed his own advice.

Coffman fooled himself into thinking that by pretending to be homeless for a week he now has the answers to one of the regions most heartbreaking and complicated social problems.

If only it were that easy.

The Aurora mayor became the story this week after posing as a homeless veteran for seven days and hanging out in a few local encampments and shelters.

Becoming the story was clearly his intent. He invited an obliging Channel 4 TV News Reporter Shaun Boyd to exclusively relate his adventure.

This made-for-TV gambit resulted in hubbub over Coffman and Boyd perpetuating old chestnuts and tropes about the cause of homelessness and the mischaracterization of those who dont have a place to live.

Coffman said he pretended to be homeless to learn about whats driving the problem. Instead, he ended up being schooled by homeless advocates, mental health workers and some of his municipal peers about what a bad idea the pretense was.

I think he should issue a formal apology for it. Its completely unacceptable, said Englewood City Councilmember John Stone. He scolded Coffman during a virtual news conference Thursday, called by a consortium of area elected officials and homelessness experts. Stone said he was homeless between the ages of 16 and 21. I was homeless for five years. And Mayor Coffman believes that I am a hopeless case.

Stone was referring to Coffman telling Boyd that, after receiving his masters degree in homelessness last week at street school, he understands now that the regions homeless problem is a lifestyle choice and addiction quandary. Coffman tried backpedaling on the comments the next day on his Facebook page.

My intent was to (highlight) the difference between those staying in the shelters and those staying in the encampments, Coffman wrote.

He surmised that people who live outside choose to so they can do drugs, because drugs are against the rules in shelters. After talking with some urban people on the street who were homeless, he determined that the people living in camps prefer their life on drugs to having to get a job.

Boyd didnt offer any expert opinion during the exclusive segment, nor did she fact-check Coffman even once. The segment allowed him to toss out a veritable catalogue of debunked cliches about the causes, the conditions surrounding people who do not have homes.

He took his show on the road Saturday to FoxNews, where he told his story to an anchor there while B-roll ran from the Channel 4 segment and nobody questioned Coffmans private assertions.

Coffmans scheme was rife with red flags and problems from the beginning.

The mayor is not a journalist, but a journalist should have advised him about the ethical peril he invites by being dishonest about who he really is. Professional journalists embed themselves, but they never lie.

Coffman was also quickly and rightfully called out for passing off a week sleeping away from home as anything close to not being able to call for an Uber to get whisked back to reality if his charade went south or just got tiresome.

Many of the storys critics were incensed by Coffman telling Boyd that he wanted to get information for himself, outside of those with an agenda.

Over many years, Ive talked to and at one point worked alongside advocates in the trenches. I cannot even fathom what kind of nefarious agenda Coffman thinks this army of endlessly heroic do-gooders have. Boyd didnt ask.

Really, homeless advocates dont want people camping in parks and public spaces. Nobody does. They dont see a healthy supply of visibly homeless people as job security nor a financial ticket to the good life.

These patron saints see an endlessly complicated problem that, in the end, results in people living stressful, dangerous and often wretched lives, unable to find a way out of their quagmire.

Visible homeless people are now all over the region.Theyre next to Home Depot in Golden. Theyre behind Lamars Donuts in Broomfield. They are all camped across the metro area, trying to stay alive.

While addiction and homelessness on the street often go hand in hand, there are plenty of addicts with homes and even more people without homes and no addictions. Substance abuse may appear to the untrained as a desire and choice. Of those Ive known, who were addicted to heroin, opioids, alcohol or meth, not one wanted their addiction. Not one. Ever.

For each of them, their addiction was their cruel and relentless master. Heroin and meth dont care that you sleep on a sidewalk.

Coffmans other awakening came from determining that most homeless people arent from here. You dont have to hang out in homeless camps to know that most people everywhere in the metro area arent from here any more. Real experts could set him straight in understanding the problem of homeless is statewide. There are indeed plenty of native homeless people in Colorado.

Coffman and Boyd together virtually ticked off a catalogue of cliches and myths that homeless advocates have worked so hard to debunk.

Asked by Boyd what advice Coffman has regarding panhandlers and do-gooders, Coffman advised not to give them food or money because it only perpetuates the problem.

That fable is common among some people who confuse the erroneous concept of tough love with discipline and accountability.

Successful homeless recovery programs like Bridge House in Boulder and its Aurora counterpart, Ready to Work, work well because they integrate accountability and opportunity.

The debunked tough love fantasy dont feed them is a strategy to control feral cats.

Homeless people are not feral cats. The idea that free food only encourages homeless people to not get jobs is nothing but the fiction Ayn Rand got rich from.

The problem with not feeding the hungry is that they starve. Then, you have starving homeless people and an even more serious problem.

Finally, Coffman said hes hopeful because, out of the blue Denver Mayor Michael Hancock rang him and said he wants to look at a regional solution to the endless problem of homelessness.

Thats nice.

Hancock helped make the problem of camping homelessness a regional problem with camping bans and sweeps that pushed people down the Platte River and up Cherry, Clear, Sand and Ralston creeks years ago.

My entire life Ive heard Hancock and other metro officials call for a metrowide approach to addressing the problem of homelessness.

Hancock and others see sharing the pain of the symptoms of homelessness as the answer, rather than finding ways to treat the problems that cause it.

Well get there, but we need real expertise, real conviction and real resources. What we dont need are boneheaded publicity stunts like this.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or [emailprotected]

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PERRY: Mayor Coffman's mock-homeless close-up highlights the danger of unreality TV - Sentinel Colorado

getty

Good things happen when people work. Honest effort lifts the soul, like medicine for the body, making a vocation much more than a paycheck.

Work produces income, which covers rent and keeps families fed. But at a more fundamental level, work produces feelings of worth. Goal setters in pursuit of happiness for the New Year and beyond cannot overlook the link.

The influence of work on a persons psyche is one reason that forced labor is so abhorrent. Most people recognize the immorality of slavery in all its forms. Covid-19 has uncovered the harm that comes from the opposite: Forced closure of a business or forced unemployment.

Telling individuals they cannot work is just as dehumanizing as telling them they must work. More than just their survival is at stake when this happens. Their meaning is at stake. Nutritionists say, You are what you eat. But a more accurate slogan would be: You are what you do.

Normally no one stands in the way of a persons right to decide when, where and how to work. But the pandemic has shaken things up. For the sake of public safety, government officials have divided work into two categories: Essential and nonessential.

Some people have received permission to continue working while others have received fines or even arrest. Putting first responders and medical workers in a special category makes sense during a health emergency, but other exemptions have been more dubious.

Examples include executive orders favoring Big Box retail over mom-and-pop shops, strip clubs over churches and daycares over schools. California officials even authorized an outdoor catered film shoot while shutting down outdoor restaurant dining in the same parking lot.

Regardless of the justifications, telling anyone that their lifes work does not matter or ranks below someone elses vocation can lead to despair. Television host Mike Rowe, famous for his Dirty Jobs series on the Discovery Channel, describes the risks in a recent Facebook post. Predictably, mental health cases have spiked along with Covid-19 cases.

Even before the pandemic, society has elevated some pursuits over others based on arbitrary or misguided distinctions. People assume, for example, that the noblest and most rewarding work prioritizes others over self, family over career, and corporate social responsibility over core business activity. As I explain in previous columns on selfishness, work-life balance and philanthropy, all of these dichotomies are false.

Another damaging dichotomy is the forced choice between making a social contribution or making money. People who buy into this construct see a necessary tradeoff between doing good and doing well. In their minds a person can have purpose without profit or profit without purposebut not bothas if more of one means less of the other.

My late mentor, Philadelphia Flyers founder Ed Snider, rejected this idea. He saw purpose and profit working together. Money should be the reward, but not the reason, he said, talking about his motivation to stay active. You do it because you enjoy it. You enjoy creating things, building things, and making things better. And the money follows as a reward.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham agrees. Business critics sometimes think the only way to become a billionaire is to exploit others, but Grahams experience as a venture capitalist has taught him the opposite. Entrepreneurs have the greatest likelihood to shake up an industry when they identify novel solutions to problems that are personally meaningful.

RAJSHREE AGARWAL

True success requires purpose and profit. People can track their progress in these areas on independent, parallel axes. But the interplay between the two dimensions is easier to visualize in a grid with intersecting lines. The upper-right quadrant, where purpose and profit meet, is the sweet spot for happiness. As philosopher Ayn Rand explains, happiness is the state of consciousness resulting from the achievement of ones values. This is where Snider found himself when he hoisted the Stanley Cup with his championship National Hockey League franchise.

Zappos founder Tony Tsieh went the other direction after achieving financial success, descending to the lower-left quadrant of the grid prior to his fire-related death in November 2020. Paying his Park City Crew to follow him from Las Vegas to the Utah ski resort town, Tsieh indulged in a hedonist lifestyle with no purpose or profitusing previously earned money to bankroll excessive and endless parties. Without honest work, the mantra to be happy became whim-worship, fueling paranoia and depression in a drug-induced mindlessness that ultimately resulted in self-destruction.

People stuck in the lower-right quadrant at least produce value. They are not criminals or parasites who live at the expense of others. They earn their place in society and receive compensation. But they fail to serve their own values, perhaps never having defined them in the first place. In many cases they mistakenly pursue profit as the end goal. They fail to understand that money is a tool to serve ones values, but it cannot substitute for them. Wealth and status in other peoples eyes cannot fill the emptiness that such people perceive when looking in a mirror.

People in the upper-left quadrant make the opposite mistake. They see profit as exploitative or mistakenly assume that self-interest is immoral. Either way, they follow their values without regard to practical concerns like payroll and rent. They may achieve their purpose to some extent, but they fall short of their full potential because they fail to understand the trader principle. To scale up innovation and make it sustainable, people must leverage the power of enterprise and markets. This requires profit, the currency that brings people together to collaborate.

Goal setters looking for happiness in 2021 must work to maximize purpose and profit. The following four principles provide guidance.

Work Is Essential

Nothing worthwhile comes without work. Nature demands it, not only to provide daily sustenance, but also to feed the soul. Some physical comforts seem automatic in free societies, where innovation, specialization and trade enhance productivity. But no one can escape the basic law of economics: Before goods and services can be consumed, they must be produced.

Even if someone inherits wealth or depends on others for food and shelter, they cannot escape the necessity of work for mental well-being. Meaningful work allows people to combine their abilities and aspirations for true success, so they can say: I love what I do and I am good at it. Honest effort in any environment leads to fulfillment.

Work Is Personal

Simply deciding to stay productive is not enough. People must choose among many options to find a vocation that is personally meaningful. As a first-order principle, they must work at identifying their purpose and the accompanying hierarchy of values that comes with it.

What work is essential cannot be left for others to dictate. The crowd is never satisfied anyway. Some critics demand wealth and status as signs of worth, while others demand self-sacrifice and poverty as signs of nobility. Each individual must tune out the voices and think independently. The correct answer might involve working at an orphanage, on Wall Street or at home.

Likewise, each individual must make personal choices about profit, spending it to promote their values. They cannot let others dictate how they earn income or spend it. Both actions are expressions of self.

Work Is Challenging

Staying the course to achieve purpose and profit requires careful goal setting. Research from U.S. psychologist Edwin Locke shows that the best way to feel motivated is to push yourself to do things that you are not certain you can achieve.

Simply identifying stretch goals and making plans to execute them takes effort. Success often requires investment in developing new skills and competencies, which requires pacing and sequencing of tasks. Success also requires anticipation of tradeoffs. Once implementation begins, people must take care to not give up higher values for lower values.

The entire process takes effort. Work is hard, and so is thinking about work. Rather than diving in like a daredevil, people who find purpose and profit usually take a scientific approach. They reflect, plan and then act.

Work is Win-Win

Despite the need for self-reflection, meaningful work does not have to be a lonely endeavor. Once individuals define their personal values, they can embark on a quest to find kindred spiritscolleagues who complement their abilities and match their values to work toward common goals. Win-win relationships result.

The benefits multiply when allies are kind instead of nice. Rather than worrying about hurt feelings, they speak hard truths and keep each other honest. The feedback helps individuals identify holes in their value hierarchy, fostering growth and development. This helps the journey become the destination.

Happiness is hard work, and those who achieve it earn their just rewards. Instead of picking purpose or profit, they choose both. Ultimately, they make no apologies for their success because in their own eyes, they know they are worth it.

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The Meaning Of Work For A Happy Life (And New Year) - Forbes

What should we think of people who flatly refuse to wear masks in any situation? Some pundits give an unequivocal answer: Failure to wear a mask [is] an incredibly selfish act that puts other peoples lives at risk. Being against masks is a selfish personal choice that impacts others. One even describes skeptical attitudes about masks (including President Trumps) as a sign of a broader cult of selfishness.

Is stubbornly refusing to wear a mask really selfish? That depends on what you mean by the term.

The conventional view is that selfishness means doing whatever you feel like, regardless of its effects on others. By that standard, people would be considered selfish if they dont want to wear a mask because its uncomfortable or inconvenient, even though it can save the lives of other valued people.

But if selfishness also means the dedicated pursuit of ones self-interest, how does a disregard for others help in this pursuit? It doesnt.

A world full of sick and dying people is not to anyones advantage.

There is also the obvious short-term benefit of the social effect of good will. I want other people to wear masks so that I wont get infected. One way to signal this to them is by wearing a mask myself as a gesture of respect. It communicates Ill protect you if youll protect me. Gestures of respect generally open our lives to the good things others offer. As someone concerned with his self-interest, this is the kind of virtue signaling Im happy to do.

If you dont care about how others affect your own interests, do you really care about your self-interest? The broader point is that pursuing self-interest isnt just doing whatever you feel like. I never feel like wearing a mask: they are uncomfortable, inconvenient, and ugly. But not liking them doesnt mean theyre not good for me. I almost always feel like eating donuts, but I know that wouldnt be good for my health. By the same token, inconvenient masks may still be good for my health.

READ ALSO: The Dangerous Thinking Behind Pandemic Partisanship

This latest evidence is far from conclusive. But there is very conclusive evidence that Covid is very dangerous (with a significantly higher fatality rate than the seasonal flu).3 So when you compare the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask to the chance of guarding against the (admittedly unlikely) prospect of a terrible outcome, isnt it a rational bet to wear a mask at least in the riskiest situations like a form of insurance?

Theres no justification for government mandates about masks: private institutions should be the ones to decide about the rules for entering their premises, which we are then free to enter or not. A government dedicated to the protection of individual rights should play a role in combatting the pandemic by testing, tracing, and isolating infected people (there should be no mandatory lockdowns). But the reason to leave individuals free to choose is to allow them to think rationally about what choice to make.

Rand rejected the common view that being selfish means doing whatever you feel like regardless of its effects on others. What achieving your own selfish interests fundamentally requires is love for the truth.

There are some who wear masks in situations where there is no clear risk to protect against, like when they are outside exercising all by themselves, or even on Zoom calls. If they do this only because they think its expected of them, this is the flip side of the same error as the people who refuse to ever wear masks simply because they want to defy other people. Neither of them is thinking rationally about their own interests, independently of what others expect.

Ayn Rand, who famously defended the virtue of selfishness, had this to say about the importance of thinking rationally: Reason is the most selfish human faculty: . . . its product truth makes [one] inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler.

This is why Rand rejected the common view that being selfish means doing whatever you feel like regardless of its effects on others. What achieving your own selfish interests fundamentally requires is love for the truth.

Not everyone cares about the truth, or about their own best interests. If only there were a mask we could wear to protect ourselves from all of the other ways their destructive behavior affects our lives.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group.

If you value the ideas presented here, please become an ARI Member today.

Footnotes

Go here to see the original:

Is It Selfish to Never Wear a Mask? - New Ideal

I first read Ayn Rands best-known novel, Atlas Shrugged, at the height of the financial crisis. Amid the bailouts, the misery, and the crushing of livelihoods by forces of which most of us were only dimly aware, the prevailing narrative at the time was that the excesses of capitalism would give way to socialism. And to some extent it did, emboldening a financial philosophy that we should be shielded from risk, as well as all kinds of new market-distorting monetary experiments.

Yet Rands uncompromising stories of heroic individualism, her rejection of self-abnegation, her elegies to the creative force of the entrepreneur and her elevation of reason above faith led many more in a different direction. Sales of Atlas Shrugged, in which wealth creators bring the world to its knees by revolting against the demand that they owe the products of their own minds to the rest of us, soared. Bailouts of failing industries and the alarming realisation that much of what purported to be the free market was a cronyistic con between enormous corporations, politicians and regulators disgusted many on the Right as much as the Left.

Rands philosophy of objectivism rational self-interest, radical individualism and her odd-ball characters, with their determination to live their lives on their own terms, were to millions an electrifying alternative.

There is an argument that Rand has no relevance in the age of the pandemic. At the most basic level, I can have the virus without knowing it, and cause others harm at no cost to myself. In the US, the Ayn Rand Institute, which promotes her ideas, even accepted a government-backed loan to tide itself over.

Here, part of the logic of the furlough scheme and all the billions taxpayers have spent propping up firms that have been forcibly shuttered is that there is a moral obligation to support those whose livelihoods have been destroyed through no fault of their own.

Yet I will be re-reading Rand nonetheless. Most of the worlds response to the pandemic is, by definition, collectivist. Those who are unlikely to fall ill from the virus face much the same restrictions on their liberties as those who are genuinely at risk. Entrepreneurs are asked to sacrifice whatever self-worth they get from their labours by closing their businesses for the greater good. Politicians appeal to our altruism in their demand that we protect the NHS, an offence to reason given that it is meant to protect us.

I am not surprised that, among friends of all ages, I increasingly hear the question: why cant we be trusted to judge the risk for ourselves? I had originally thought the pandemic would push society to the Left. But there is something morally offensive about a virus strategy that devalues all that makes life worth living, and which hinges on the incompetence of the Government and the states chronic inability to foresee the demands that will be placed upon it. That it then blames its failures on the very individuals it claims to serve only compounds the outrage.

The rest is here:

Ayn Rands power isnt dimmed by the collectivist age of the pandemic - Telegraph.co.uk

Cropped image from book cover

Adrian Daubs What Tech Calls Thinking is one of the most insightful critiques on the tech industry that Ive read. The book identifies, deconstructs and challenges the ideas, values and philosophies that permeate Silicon Valley. Daub unmasks terms like innovation, disruption, risk-taking and others, asking us to wrestle with their true foundations and implications, as opposed to tacitly accepting them.

What Tech Calls Thinking open with a discussion of dropping out; on figures like Elizabeth Holmes, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and others who attend prestigious universities but drop to found innovative companies that make them billions of dollars. When connected to the chapter deconstructing the tech worlds genius aesthetic, Silicon Valley promotes a view of education that is utilitarian and pretty openly transactional. Going to institutions like Stanford or Harvard become less about patient incubation of talent than a brief pollination with prestige

Daubs argues that the dropout genius approaches institutions of higher learning like a consumer. The leaders of Silicon Valley, who stay in school long enough to only get the gist of how the world works, retain a limited and myopic view of the world at the same time that their platforms garner global reach. This has troubling implications for society and a world as complex as ours.

In the chapter Genius, Daub talks about how the writings of Ayn Rand have influenced the tech industry. He writes of Silicon Valley Randians who place a big emphasis on heroic individuality, enlightened self-interest and personal freedom. To put more simply, the founders and CEOS of tech giants believe that pursuing what is best for themselves is ultimately best for the world (though they would argue it is the reverse), therefore, criticism is tantamount to fighting progress.

Daub gives a biting examination of the ramifications of Silicon Valley exec adopting Randian thinking and the self-image of some of the most rich and powerful people on the planet as the resistance vanguard:

Rands kind of resistance doesnt require you to change the way you live your life; it doesnt require you to grapple with a completely new picture of the world. It requires you to do what youre already doing, but now with the added halo of the political.

The paradox here is that companies and institutions in Silicon Valley are are invested in a kind of hyper-individualist version of the world while being some of the most collectivist working environments of any occupation. Its a structure where much of the research, labor and costs are socialized, but the benefits and cachet are privatized to the Steve Jobs and Elon Musks of the world. And when we think of social media like Facebook and Twitter, platform design and engagements algorithms cluster users into like-minded groups and then polarize them against opposing groups. In many ways, tech companies make the most money exactly for their power to get us to act more like collectives.

Surprisingly, the chapter I found the most interesting was the chapter on Desire. It talks about the theories of religions and literature scholar Ren Girard became influential in Silicon Valley, particularly for people like Peter Thiel.

Girard developed a mimetic theory of desirethat anything you desire is a mirror of another persons desire for that same thing. This idea makes me think of the work of David Golumbia and others who critique the strand of computationalism in tech and science communities. Computationalism is the underlying presumption that computer-based expertise trumps all other expertises because everything in the world is ultimately reducible to computational processes. To appropriate Frank Pasquale, it assumes that at bottom, humans simply are patterns of stimuli and response, behavior and information.

If you view the world through a computationalist lens, it make sense to think your desires are merely a mirror. After all, all humans are made of the same stuff (atoms, cells, organs, brain functions, etc.), have the same kinds of impulses (eat, sleep, secure shelter, socialize, have sex, etc.) and basic needs. So the equation becomes simple: if you know the desires of one human, you know the desires of them all. Luckily, you already know the desires of one humanyou.

On an individual level, tech CEOS who are influenced by this theory likely have a built-in way to solve their cognitive dissonanceor maybe to not have it at allwhen the products they make come under fire. When read with Daubs chapter on Failure, your desires are the worlds desires, and therefore, everything you do, on net, is a good thing. The scary thing is this gives a moral cover for and pseudo-objectivity to a kind of techno-narcissism. It allows for the tech industry to frame critics as regressive or unenlightened. At minimum, it likely dissuades tech leaders from engaging in meaningful introspection, of themselves and the industry they work in.

Overall, What Tech Calls Thinking is probably for readers who already have a critical relationship with big tech, but it provides some great insight and breaks things down in clear language. Aside from the clever prose and clear examples, the chapters (Dropping Out, Content, Genius, Communication, Desire, Disruption, Failure) build on each other while remaining connected to the central thread of Silicon Valleys cyber-libertarian philosophical foundations. Though I definitely recommend that you make time to read the whole book, the penultimate graf on the last page is a succinct summary:

Confronted with the uncanny smoothness of their ascent, Silicon Valleys protagonists fetishize the supposed break and existential risk entailed in dropping out of college to found a company. Confronted with the fact that the platforms that are making them rich are keeping others poor, they come up with stories to explain why this must necessarily be so. And by degrading failure, anguish, and discomfort to mere stepping-stones, they erase the fact that for so many of us, these stones dont lead anywhere.

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What Tech Calls Thinking: Book Review | by Joshua Adams | Oct, 2020 - Medium

IN WELCOME to Dystopia, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, a plague of what-if scenarios is released from the tortured imaginations of lefty sci-fi writers sharing one unified vision: What if Trump doesnt leave in November?

Hell breaks loose.

The tales represent a parallax view of the same event, from the perspectives of men, womenand multicultures.

In the opening story Sneakers, two male Canadians attempt to cross the border into the US to buy quality trainers cheaply, only to be detained for questioning for no other reason than the fascist border guard is in love with Trumps immigration vision so much it eludes him that the men arent trying to immigrate.

Men tells of new laws requiring statue replacements under a royal Trump regime Atlas, holding up the world at the Rockefeller Centre, is replaced by the Objectivist Ayn Rand and theres a story of forcedlabour marches to the Southern border to build the Wall.

Isnt Life Great is a dark tale that sees the US divided by strictlyenforced Red (Patriot) and Blue (Loyalist) neighbourhoods, an invasion of Iran and a war with China that ends with enlightenment.

Among the female writers Janis Ian, the singer-songwriter of At Seventeen fame a song quite in keeping with the tone of Welcome to Dystopia writes His Sweat Like Stars on the Rio Grande, a lyrical, sexy nightmare about a woman growing up in the shadow of the Wall, a tracker of immigrants trying to illegally escape over it back to Mexico.

N Lee Wood follows an email exchange between friends Michelle in New Zealand and Carrie in the US, the latter with cancer in a failed healthcare system in a failed state.

California has seceded, the nations a war zone and theres a mass flight towards the Canadian border.

In The Elites, Stephanie Feldman tells the two-pronged tale of an intercultural family breakdown caused by the policies of Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Indian writer Deepak UnnikrishnansBirds is a real gem. It tells the mawkish tale of Indian Anna Varghese, recruited as a taper at construction sites in Abu Dhabi.

When workers fall or jump from the buildings, shes there to sew and tape them together so that they can return to work.

No hospitals are allowed the workers cannot leave the site.

Varghese writes of their final thoughts: When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.

The 45 stories are no erudite or academic exorcisms but plain-speaking, oftenfunny, splendid reads. No philosophy, just rock-steady acknowledgements that the end is nigh.

Welcome to Dystopia is published by O/R Books, 16.

JOHN KENDALL HAWKINS

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Welcome to Dystopia: 45 Visions of What Lies Ahead - Morning Star Online