BC HISTORY
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://t.co/US1YbwIikM

1/

 Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

2/
Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

3/
Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even harder than quitting yourself.

4/
And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking smoking and cancer.

https://t.co/716LbtZjkP

5/
But denial doesn't make problems disappear - it just incurs policy debt, and the interest on that debt is human suffering. Climate inaction, tobacco inaction, and inequality inaction only delay the day of reckoning, and make it worse when it arrives.

6/
That's where peak denial comes in. Over time, the mounting harms from policy debt make it harder and harder to deny the problem, At a certain point - long before we take action - the number of people who deny the problem starts to decline.

7/
This happens naturally, without any need for activist urging. The problem is that the natural peak denial point is often several steps beyond the point of no return. And that's when denial slides into nihilism:

8/
Here's what nihilism looks like:

"Well, I guess these things DID give me stage 4 lung cancer after all. No point in quitting now."

or

"You were right, rhino populations are in danger! But since there's only one left, let's find out what he tastes like?"

9/
That's why we can't wait for peak denial to arise on its own, why we must hasten its arrival - because we want people to engage with systemic problems BEFORE the point of no return.

That's where storytelling comes in.

10/
Stories are a fuggly hack, an illusion played on our empathy, wherein we're fooled into caring about the literally inconsequential fate of made-up people (your breakfast yogurt's death was more tragic than Romeo and Juliet's, for it was once alive).

https://t.co/W70UeVgPNQ

11/
But still, made up stories that make vivid and visceral the consequences of inaction can spur us into action, can create a vocabulary for discussing the lived experience of people in a future that has not yet arrived.

12/
Even better than stories, though, are HISTORIES, the real stories of real people who really suffered through real experiences comparable to those that we face on our horizon. Hence "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

13/
We're very good at forgetting history. The arrival of the covid pandemic was filled with stories of the dimly remembered 1918 influenza pandemic. Our failure to heed those warnings triggered tales of its brutal second wave the following winter.

Herp derp.

14/
Starting in 1968, successive US presidents began to dismantle Glass-Steigel, a corrective put in place after a horrendous finance sector collapse that triggered the Great Depression and WWII. Not one president heeded historians' warnings about the consequences.

Derp.

15/
Dismantling the checks on finance led to successive, worsening crises followed by crushing austerity a deepening inequality. Historical warnings about how this cycle ends with guillotines and Reichstag fires were ignored.

Derp derp derp.

16/
The ideology of finance is a subset of right-wing thought, defined by @coreyrobin (in "The Reactionary Mind") as the belief that some people are born to rule, while the rest are born to be ruled over.

https://t.co/17jf9MVW8q

17/
This belief has many guises (Dominionism, imperialism, racism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism) but they all boil down to one thing: eugenics.

It's one thing to believe that markets are meritocratic during a moment of dynamism, when the low-born can rise to riches.

18/
But when their offspring pull up the ladder and social mobility halts, "meritocracy" becomes hereditary: markets elevate the best people, and the best people are all descended from the wealthy, so the wealthy must be of better stock (cue Trump and his talk of "good blood").

19/
Eugenics was once a mainstream American doctrine, and American eugenicists inspired Nazi "race science." But after the Holocaust, eugenics fell into disrepute and we dropped it down the same memory hole that the 1918 flu disappeared into.

20/
But eugenics made a comeback under another guise: the "human capital theory," which holds that markets reward us in proportion to our value to society, and thus the CEO is paid 10,000x more than the janitor because the CEO provides 10,000x more value to the human project.

21/
Eugenics isn't just repugnant, it's also wrong. To understand why, you have to understand how desirable traits are social, not isolated in individuals.

@blair_fix's essay on the link between eugenics and human capitol theory is a must-read:

https://t.co/iGnwaRaITv

22/
By way of illustration, Fix describes geneticist William Muir's experiments with improving chicken egg-production through artificial selection, in which he only bred the best layers. The result? A disaster. Egg-laying plummeted.

23/
It plummeted because laying isn't an isolated trait. Chickens that produced the most eggs did so by bullying other chickens out of THEIR feed and resources. Selecting for laying selected for bullying and aggression and led to endless chicken-fights and no eggs.

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When Muir bred another flock of chickens based on a GROUP's ability to lay, THEN he got his eggs. Egg-laying is a social process.

This story will be familiar to anyone who's worked in a stack-ranked software development shop.

25/
Software managers have long noted that some coders can turn in 10X or even 100X more code than their median colleagues. But attempts to build "superstar" teams that fired all the median programmers end in chaos and destruction.

26/
If your 100X programmer is such a dick that no one can work with them, then their aptitude is irrelevant - you'll never ship.

I assume there are analogies to this in the sporting world, but I am vastly unqualified to discuss sports of any kind.

27/
Despite the bankruptcy of human capital theory, the systemic dangers it posed, and the obvious fact that it was just eugenics dressed up as economics, the theory festered for decades, poisoning our world.

28/
The C-suites of every major company are filled with hens whose egg-laying prowess is the result of their suppression of their peers' efficacy - while others whose social integration make them far more productive are relegated to worse jobs or forced out altogether.

29/
The lockdown provoked squeals of outrage from the world's wealthiest people, who insisted that the factories be re-opened. As the slogan of the day went, "If a billionaire needs you to go to work to maintain his fortune, then you are the source of that fortune - not him."

30/
We can't afford to be indifferent to any of our systemic problems any more: not climate science, nor inequality, nor monopoly, nor the lurking eugenics that justifies it all.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/


The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

3/

But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

4/
HISTORY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

1/

During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.

2/

Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.

3/

Porter is a force of nature. She is infamous - and celebrated - for her brutal, no-holds-barred questioning of both corporate and administration witnesses, using a white-board to pin them down and eviscerating any attempts at bullshittery.

4/

This isn't just about getting facts into the record (though, she is SO GOOD at getting facts into the record!), it's also about effecting change, like when she single-handedly cornered the CDC's chief into guaranteeing universal, free covid
POLITICS
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
TECH
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/


The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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CULTURE
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

1/


Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

2/

Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

3/

It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

4/

For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

5/
HISTORY

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Taj Mahal is Hindu Monument: Prof Marvin Mills, Reputed New York Architect.
@LostTemple7 @DivineElement


1.Professor Marvin H. Mills, a leading New York architect and professor of architecture at the Pratt Institute had studied the Taj Mahal in detail. Here is part of his letter published in The New York Times. 👇👇

2.“New information and analysis have come forth to constitute a compelling argument that the Taj was actually a former Hindu palace occupied and converted to a tomb by the Moguls…There are many other inconsistencies in the Taj legend. The building to its left is now a mosque.

3.Had it been built originally as a mosque it would almost certainly have been oriented directly to Mecca,instead of due west.The four“minarets”that surround Taj mausoleum r inappropriate,for they logically should have been in front of the“mosque”for convenient calls to prayer.”

4.Through the letter, he had appealed thus, “The origin of the Taj can best be determined through scientific dating by carbon-14 and thermoluminescence, which the Archeological Survey of India should be urged to undertake.”
According to Prof Mills,
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Suchi Sharma
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#THREAD
1.Meenakshi Amman Temple(472ft High)also called as Meenakshi Sundareswarar is a famous Hindu temple located on the southern bank of Vaigai River in temple city of Madurai, #TamilNadu.It is dedicated to Parvati(Meenakshi)& her consort Shiva(Sundareswarar). @LostTemple7


2.Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswarar temple was built by King Kulasekara Pandya (1190-1216 CE).This popular temple visits over 15000 visitors daily & around 25000 on #Friday !Friday sees the most number of devotees visit the temple with the number going as high as +25,000.


3.Meenakshi Temple also hosts an annual festival called Meenakshi Thirukalayanam that is held in April. A celestial wedding of the god and goddess marks the end of the festival. About 1 million devotees visit the temple during this festival.


4.the temple has been tagged as one of the seven wonders of India along with stunning Architecture.The temple is built using Dravidian South Indian style of architecture, and is one of the most impressive temple structures in South India.


5.The principle deity here is MEENAKSHI, a form of Goddess Parvati. The idol of the goddess is carved in emerald hued stone. The Meenakshi idol has 3 breasts as Meenakshi was born with three breasts and was blessed that the 3rd breast would vanish once meets right man of her life
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Joshua Hawley, Missouri's Junior Senator, is an autocrat in waiting.

His arrogance and ambition prohibit any allegiance to morality or character.

Thus far, his plan to seize the presidency has fallen into place.

An explanation in photographs.

🧵

Joshua grew up in the next town over from mine, in Lexington, Missouri. A a teenager he wrote a column for the local paper, where he perfected his political condescension.

2/


By the time he reached high-school, however, he attended an elite private high-school 60 miles away in Kansas City.

This is a piece of his history he works to erase as he builds up his counterfeit image as a rural farm boy from a small town who grew up farming.

3/


After graduating from Rockhurst High School, he attended Stanford University where he wrote for the Stanford Review--a libertarian publication founded by Peter Thiel..

4/

(Full Link: https://t.co/zixs1HazLk)


Hawley's writing during his early 20s reveals that he wished for the curriculum at Stanford and other "liberal institutions" to change and to incorporate more conservative moral values.

This led him to create the "Freedom Forum."

5/
HISTORY
Judicaelle Irakoze
Judicaelle Irakoze
@Judicaelle_
Happy black history Month.

January 1st 1969, Marien Ngouabi was sworn in as the President of Republic of Congo.

But who was he? And why was he assassinated 8 years later after refusing to grant the French the oil region of Cabinda

#Thread


1.French occupied Congo Brazzaville starting early 19th century. Every European colonial power wanted a piece of the Congo so the French commissioned Pierre de Brazza to explore Equatorial Africa in October 1875.

By 1891, French had already annexed Congo Brazza

2. Like any French Colony, Congolese endured ruthless exploitation of their land for 80 years

By 1958, Congo Brazaville was on a journey to decolonization under MSA ( movement socialist African) founded by anti-colonial leaders from Tchad, Senegal, Gabon, Cameroon, Mali,..

3. On August 5th 1960,French agreed on a peaceful transition to an independent state and give Fulbert Youlou to govern the new republic.

Youlou, a liberal nationalist was seen as less of a threat compared to other anti-colonial leaders

4. Youlou's presidency was a total failure full of corruption, incompetency and catering to French multinationals for validation

This ended very bad for Youlou because when the people started strikes all over the country, France did nothing when the military overthrew Youlou
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Pulp Librarian
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It's now over half a century since 1970, and I'm starting to wonder if we should bring back its concept of gracious modern living...


You see we've grown so used to Swedish-style modernism that we've sort of forgotten that maximalism, rather than minimalism, was once the sign of a cultured abode.


The 1970s in many ways reached back to the rich ideas of Victorian decor: heavy, autumnal and cluttered. Home was meant to be a baroque and sensual experience, rather than a 'machine for living in.'


Gaudy was certainly in by 1970: colour choices for interior design were rich and varied, with every room becoming a boutique of signature design.


Experimentation and adventurism were also coming to the fore: now we had landed on the Moon surely we should start to live like astronauts on Earth.
HISTORY

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Krishna and the False Vasudeva
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Paundraka Vasudeva was a King mentioned in Bhagavatha Purana. He was friend of Jarasandha, the king of Magadha. He believed that he is Vasudeva Krishna.
Once Paundraka Vasudeva received a letter from Shishupala, stating that he wanted


protection from Krishna, because it was Rukmini's wedding and Shishupala thought Krishna would take away Rukmini.

Paundraka Vasudeva agreed and went to Vidarbha, the Kingdom of Shishupala, but failed to provide protection as Krishna took Rukmini away. Paundraka Vasudeva was


feeling sad. His Minister's cheered him.
They said that Paundraka Vasudeva was the real Vasudeva and Krishna is a cheater. Everyone started to believe this and soon Paundraka Vasudeva soon started to taunt Krishna by saying that Krishna was a cheater.
Paundraka Vasudeva then


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to him. But, Krishna's throw was perfect that the Gadha hurled him to the Ground and the Chakra killed him.
Krishna soon killed king of Kashi with an arrow and his head went flying to Kashi.
Thus Victorious Krishna was recieved by people of Dwaraka.
Hare Krishna 🙏🕉🙏
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Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
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Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man fights off an unusual animal attack?"

The answer is artist Will Hulsey...


Will Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.


Very little is known about Will Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.


Their audience was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read; this led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.


As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!
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A thread of images from a Japanese illustrated history of America from 1861.

Here is George Washington (with bow and arrow) pictured alongside the Goddess of America. 1/


Here is Christopher Columbus (seated at center) reporting his discovery of America to Queen Isabella of Spain.

So far, kinda normal, but wait for it.... 2/


Now it's the American Revolution. Here is George Washington defending his wife "Carol" from a British official named "Asura" (same characters as the Buddhist deity). 3/


And here is Washington's "second-in-command" John Adams battling an enormous snake. 4/


Here is Washington and his wife "Carol" meeting an extremely youthful Benjamin Franklin, who has an impressive squat. 5/
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WHO ARE VALAKHILYAS?

Valakhilyas are 60000 Rishis who are thumb-sized. They were born to Kratu and Kriya. Rig Veda says that they sprang from the hairs of Brahma.
They move in front of Surya dev’s chariot as Sun moves daily and
shine like brilliant lights due to severe tapasya.


Tamil literature says that the main task of Valakhilyas is to prevent human beings from being scorched. They absorb the excess heat from the sun by travelling in front of him. They, in turn, get energy from Skanda and Ma Durga. The food of Valakhilyas is only wind.
@SriRamya21


Once, Rishi Kashyap performed a yagna and invited all the Devas and Rishis to help him. Indra brought a whole mountain of trees for firewood. The Valakhilyas were hardly able to lift anything but leaves. Even when they were moving leaves, they fell into rain water puddles.


Indra made fun of them. So they cursed Indra saying that his slayer would be born as the son of Kashyapa. When Indra apologized, they modified the curse that the son shall be initially an enemy of Indra, but later will become his friend.


This son born later to Kashyapa was Garuda. He flew to Indraloka to get Amrita and defeated Indra.
Later, he restored amrit vessel to Indra and was honoured as the King of birds and as the mount of Sri Vishnu.
@JumbuTweeple @artist_rama
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