Superb work. Thank you 🙏Unfortunately most diagonalists (love the term) will not get far in this but it certainly will help those that unexpectedly find themselves adjacent to them.
A great nuanced analysis of how the dynamics of our relationship to others influences our take on events we haven't actually experienced ourselves. I was all but celebrating my new-found status as a diagonalist until I read on...
As a lone wolf myself I am nevertheless drawn to the crowd while permanently hovering on its edges. There is a fear of being swallowed up. The promise of human warmth turning into suffocation. The perspective of being on the outside is so valuable but consigns you to a relatively lonely road. Small gatherings are more manageable than large crowds but we live in a world which is pushing us all into larger groupings beyond our villages and towns and even nations.
This is my problem with tech generally and fintech in particular. It is a way of attempting to manage larger and larger groups but with none of the finesse of personal interaction. It has a host of weaknesses that can be used by the ruthless and the more 'safeguards' that are appended the greater the power conferred on those who control them.
There is an obsession with 'making things better' ('Faster not Better') as if mere human interaction could not be the pinnacle of our humdrum lives. What could make our lives much less humdrum is turning away from our slavish adherence to the structures built with our clever tools and a better appreciating what we have had in abundance for centuries - if not millennia - what remains of the beautiful life around us and the warmth of true connection with others.
Let's start appreciating abundance much more by naming and demonstrating ancient practices like those that enables the pooling of commitments to resiurces without money, still alive today from Ireland (Meitheal) to Kenya (Mweria).
'Those that don't move, don't notice their chains' .... Let's dance
I resonate with your description of hovering on the edges. Also agree on with you on the tech ideology: we need to counter that idea of large-scale complexity being superior with the idea of simplicity and small-scale connection being a lot more meaningful
this work contains some really deep insights and i admire you for resisting the siren voices of acceptance by right-wing extremists. i guess its really hard and i'm not sure i could do it if i face the same temptation. keep it real!
what i find especially perplexing is the ease the right-wing took over originally leftist causes with only a slight modification..
This is really good. I've been concerned about these problems since Patreon canceled Benjamin Carl(for saying things I would never say myself), but the scope of your analysis is phenomenal. I never thought about Welfare cards that way.
Thanks for writing this. BTW, I found it on nostr.
Do you accept zaps on nostr or have a lightning address?
I'm glad you like it. I'm not on Nostr actually - too many social networks to try keep up with. I don't have Lightning address no. What wallets are you supposed to use?
Each wallet has trade-offs. Some have KYC, some do not.
I'm using minibits for zaps and I use getalby and the zuess LSP for lnbits, but mostly for paywalls.
The good thing about nostr is your social graph travels with you on many seemingly unrelated clients. No need to have a seperate login for reddit, instagram, twitter, meetup, zoom, etc.
I think we are definitely waking up to the fact that much of the world's people have been exploited and abused for a very long time, and it's only now that some of us are viscerally feeling it ourselves, even if it's nothing like what others have suffered and still do. But it's kind of normal not to fully understand or even be able to show an interest in what's going on until you are personally affected. Vaccine mandates were a huge wake up call.
Teasing out who to trust, feeling into who is using manipulation and who is genuine, can take a while. I note that for myself there are few big YouTube or Substack personalities, like Russell Brand, who I've wanted to stick with, even if I've sometimes been so grateful to hear them voice something I'm seeing or feeling. It's quite a journey of learning to trust oneself and let go of needing to rely on loud external voices. And of allowing oneself to be drawn into yet another tribe.
Thanks for your sane and articulate voice!
I am pretty sure that Schwab and Gates are up to no good whatsoever, mind you ! :)
Hi Helen, thanks for the comment. I guess the complexity here is that many people who are experiencing that for the first time are people who have not noticed it previously because they were benefiting from it. So, it's not so much the case that some Big Powers were exploiting group A, and now they're also exploiting group B. It's that the Big Powers historically grant excessive power to group B through the process of exploiting A, and still often do.
This is part of the issue with Brand etc - his power base really are people who come from relative power, rather than from relative disempowerment, but the marginal decline in their power is creating an imagination of victimhood, and even a sense of equivalency with earlier exploited groups. We might imagine a significant proportion of the diagonalists as being people who are from a proverbial group B who now imagine themselves as group A. This happens a lot in diagonalist circles, where it is imagined that there is some kind of equivalency between say, a mask mandate, and being a Jew during the holocaust, or an African slave during the colonisation of America, but I guarantee that both those historically marginalised groups would take a mask mandate any day over experiencing what happened to them. This is not to say that people are not allowed to protest a mandate like that, but the issue is in the insensitivity to relative power
This is actually something I have a lot of historical experience of a white South African. Many white South Africans are relatively powerful within South Africa, but there are many white South Africans who imagine their relative decline in power since the end of apartheid as being somehow equivalent to exploitation of black people during apartheid.
I've been following and reading and recommending you to anyone who I respect for a good few years now. I read Cloudmoney the week you released it - brilliant book. I studied economics for 4 years in higher education and every one of your articles that I read is more enlightening and insightful than my accumulated Economics education.
I found out about David Graeber just a few months before he died. Was so sad when he did.
Delighted that there is someone out there doing what you are doing, thinking how you think, and willing and able to stay the course when there are forces which make difficult. This is an unusually nuanced, interesting and important article. Thank you for writing it.
Hi Monthrie, thanks so much for your kind comment. That really means a lot to me. It's often quite a lonely task producing these pieces, so it's great that you and others find them helpful.
A few months before David died a few of us were about to start a channel with him. I'm close friends with one of this former students here in Berlin, and we do our best to develop on and draw inspiration from his ideas (and the ideas of economic anthropology more generally). Thanks again
In other words, you're too blaming the victims for not being perfectly consistent, or having people making a buck making content about it (as if elite media, NGOs, institutions, etc. don't make 10000x the bucks promoting the elite narratives)
"It's crazy they think there's some covert conspiracy run by Bill Gates to get this or that scheme going - when it's just open policy suggestions by think tanks and global non-elected "social clubs", like Davos and such, which also hear the wisdom of people like Gates and others, and whose suggestions are then non-democratically magnified by media owned by a handful of moguls, promoted by bureucracies with tax-money, and given priority over popular demands".
As if that's that big of a difference (especially in outcomes).
Or
"It's crazy that western anti-establishment types were outraged about the Canada truckers incident, something in their own region of the world, that they read in the news about for weeks (including all the establishment news sites demonizing the truckers), over something similar-but-not-quite happening on the other side of the globe to Australian aboriginals and being very lightly publicized by the media"
Yeah, so crazy and hypocritical /s
Now consider how the exact type of critique you make here could also be used against aboriginals themselves, or immigrants, etc - and their also not 100% consistent and ideologically pure way to ask for justice, or some conspiracy theories or falsehoolds they might believe about their situation, or the existance of some "populists" that capitalize on their struggle.
I am not blaming anyone in this piece - just offering reflections on the limitations of victimhood narratives that are highly selective. I understand why people use selective victimhood stories, but that curation reveals a lot of politics: for example, the fact that you seem to assume - in your last paragraph - that the truckers are in the same position of power as aboriginal Australians, or indigenous Canadians, is a very political statement
Also, I spend a significant part of my life doing critique of big corporates, so I'm not ignorant about corporate power etc. Much of this piece revolves around the fact that I'm asked to come in as a commentator on state-corporate power, by people who choose to only see it when it suits them. In terms of understanding how I approach this, you might find this piece on CBDC stories useful https://aeon.co/essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy
Thank's for the response. One main difference is that you see this as self-focused hypocritical and thus invalid, whereas I see it as merely partial (and therefore good, whether as a start, or even in itself).
The truckers are a Canadian example of something that is used against other westerners, which is why westerners referrence it.
It's only logical they'd be more concerned with examples from the same geopolitical region and in countries like Canada where they know are involved in the same extended political sphere, following the same policy trajectories with them too, than with the indigenous plight in the other end of the world. Same way some person from the US, UK, France, etc. is more likely to listen to Drake, Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, or Neil Young or whatever (Canadians) than aboriginal music.
Their victimhood narratives are not as much selective, as focusing primarily on their own, and close (culturally, geographically, historically, etc.) examples. I think that's totally understandable (the same way one sees e.g. protests in a latin american country against imperialism to draw primarily from examples from other latin american experiences). In fact I'd also understand them not including victim groups in their country that they might not identify with too (say, Yukon natives).
Sure, it would be better if they had a unified narrative of global victimhood and global "camaraderie" "The Second International"-style. But I think the main question is whether they describe a real victimhood, and actual troubling developments, as opposed to whatever they missed other remote victimhoods and whether their references are exhaustive enough.
I don't think they argue otherwise, anyway, or pretend they're talking about the plight of global marginalized communities in general. Nor that they have to make their complaint universal first for it to be legitimate.
Isn't "people who choose to only see it when it suits them" also another way to describe people seeing it when it affects them? So when they have skin in the game, and not talking abstractly, as opposed to some kind of abstract defenders of global victim?
That's not necessarily bad, especially when it's not themselves that hurt those other victims.
I understand your point, and - from a particular angle - it is valid. I'd encourage you, however, to go beyond the surface level of this. Yes, of course people are more likely to respond to things that directly affect them and people they know, but our failure to see things that don't affect us is not some neutral thing - it's a core feature of how politics works and expresses itself. As a commentator on the politics of finance, I have to address that kind of thing
Here is a metaphor that may be helpful. Imagine two groups in society: Group A has a power level of 100, and group B has a power level of 20. Group A is *used to* having that power, so they don't really notice it. They take it for granted and see it as just their *baseline expectation*, almost like their *zero line*. Of course, from the perspective of Group B, Group A looks unequally powerful - they appear to Group B as +80.
Now, let's imagine that Group A loses a small amount of power, taking them down to 95. If they're used to having 100, and imagine that as their zero line, they may now imagine themselves to be -5, rather than +95. They take on a victimhood status, despite the fact that they actually remain much more powerful than Group B. Fine, they are entitled to go onto social media and show examples of the -5, and they may authentically feel loss, but the issue is their blindness to their relative position.
I'm not saying that everyone in the Freedom Convoy was someone who went from +100 to +95 and then experienced it as a colossal loss that they view a historic injustice, but there definitely are some people in that convoy who were like that. When they try to draw an equivalency between themselves as others who are, for example, at power level 20, that's a problem, especially when they themselves are sometimes complicit in that structural inequality, as is the case in Canada historically.
For example, all those media outlets that covered the Freedom Convoy were not particular interested in covering a different Canadian trucker convoy in support of indigenous people who were mourning the discovery of 215 indigenous kids found in unmarked graves https://globalnews.ca/news/7925257/kamloops-convoy-indigenous-canadians/
This is really good. I've been concerned about these problems since Patreon canceled Benjamin Carl(for saying things I would never say myself), but the scope of your analysis is phenomenal. I never thought about Welfare cards that way.
Thanks for writing this. BTW, I found it on nostr.
Do you accept zaps on nostr or have a lightning address?
Just wanted to say the opinion of Krista Stelkia that a indigenous trucker strike would have been immediately shut down is suspect. Native protests in central Canada have a high rate of success . Over the course of a year or two they blockaded Cornwall island and eventually the Canadian border agency from the island leaving them to conduct border checks in supermarket parking lots . There are other blockades around that particular Mohawk territory as well as blockades farther west near London that have run successfully for months/years at a time. Pipeline blockades in the west were the tribe is split on taking proposed buyouts are a different matter
Perhaps. She is speculating on police treatment of protesters, rather than success of protests, and references the case of the 2019 Coastal Gaslink pipeline protests on sovereign Wet’suwet’en land, where police were reportedly told to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” etc. She also cites research showing that "Since 2017, Indigenous peoples in Canada are more than 10 times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers than their white counterparts". I guess her point is a more structural one, about general trends of police brutality rather than the relative success of particular campaigns.
One other point: I do strongly suspect the media outlets and influencers that would cover the story would shift if it were an indigenous protest. I'm struggling to imagine Tucker Carlson, or even Russell Brand for that matter, taking on indigenous causes with even remotely the same speed as they took on the trucker cause
The diagonalist group think you bewail is surely inevitable in any political movement. The narrative is inevitably simplified because it is unbelievably complicated. We can and should seek to explore the nuances, but we also have to act before knowing the nuances. What I saw of the truckers protest seemed legitimate - I could only with similar protests accompanied the earlier blockades you mention.
I'm not sure it's correct to compare those overtly political blockades with the experience of the poor, which is surely a much more passive, or incidental kind of exclusion. However your Australian Paternalist example is eye-opening.
And yet, limiting access to payments is only shocking if you think governments are committed to a free market and a free society. Payments is just one of a raft of tools that a government might use to control or restrict its citizens, just with road signs, or dog licences, or ways in which convicts and ex-convicts are restricted. I mean payments restriction is not always political.
Sounds like you are putting words in alt-media's mouth when you say "Abbot’s attack on Aboriginal payment freedom is mere Prudence"
I don't understand why, when you had a chance to go on some of these outlets, you didn't accept and offer a bigger picture, instead of refusing and criticising them in your blog. They are not all as disingenous as the creator of the FB vid.
The elephant in the room that is this essay is government funding. Money distributed by an imaginary entity that claims the right of initiating violence and committing fraud is morally and qualitatively different than money exchanged voluntarily in an emergent order.
Those referred to as “diagonalists” agree fundamentally on the principle that forced consensus is not consent.
Hi Peri, I'd agree that libertarians have a certain conception of how money is *supposed* to work in some ideal sense (regardless of whether this is actually ever how it *has* worked), but I don't think the various strands of diagonalism are united on that by any means. In terms of your last statement, I'd say that's part of the *self-image* of some members of this political constellation, but I'd personally never take that sentiment at face value. Many members of current diagonalist movements have been more than happy to accept other forms of forced consensus in the past, provided they're things they agree with
Ah. So you’re refraining from listing or defining your straw men so as to more easily identify those you disagree with as one of them.
Of those you did name, I think you would find that objection to the principles of forced consensus and of government control of money are high on their priority lists. Do they have pet issues they wouldn’t mind imposing upon others? Well, they’re human, so yes.
Libertarians? Not so much. The notion of using government to impose a system of less government yields a political party that is even more absurd (though less terrorist) than the two “legitimate” parties.
Superb work. Thank you 🙏Unfortunately most diagonalists (love the term) will not get far in this but it certainly will help those that unexpectedly find themselves adjacent to them.
Thanks so much, glad you find it useful
A great nuanced analysis of how the dynamics of our relationship to others influences our take on events we haven't actually experienced ourselves. I was all but celebrating my new-found status as a diagonalist until I read on...
As a lone wolf myself I am nevertheless drawn to the crowd while permanently hovering on its edges. There is a fear of being swallowed up. The promise of human warmth turning into suffocation. The perspective of being on the outside is so valuable but consigns you to a relatively lonely road. Small gatherings are more manageable than large crowds but we live in a world which is pushing us all into larger groupings beyond our villages and towns and even nations.
This is my problem with tech generally and fintech in particular. It is a way of attempting to manage larger and larger groups but with none of the finesse of personal interaction. It has a host of weaknesses that can be used by the ruthless and the more 'safeguards' that are appended the greater the power conferred on those who control them.
There is an obsession with 'making things better' ('Faster not Better') as if mere human interaction could not be the pinnacle of our humdrum lives. What could make our lives much less humdrum is turning away from our slavish adherence to the structures built with our clever tools and a better appreciating what we have had in abundance for centuries - if not millennia - what remains of the beautiful life around us and the warmth of true connection with others.
Let's start appreciating abundance much more by naming and demonstrating ancient practices like those that enables the pooling of commitments to resiurces without money, still alive today from Ireland (Meitheal) to Kenya (Mweria).
'Those that don't move, don't notice their chains' .... Let's dance
Well put Will
I resonate with your description of hovering on the edges. Also agree on with you on the tech ideology: we need to counter that idea of large-scale complexity being superior with the idea of simplicity and small-scale connection being a lot more meaningful
this work contains some really deep insights and i admire you for resisting the siren voices of acceptance by right-wing extremists. i guess its really hard and i'm not sure i could do it if i face the same temptation. keep it real!
what i find especially perplexing is the ease the right-wing took over originally leftist causes with only a slight modification..
Thanks, doing my best :) Yep, it's a big issue - I recommend checking out some of Quinn Slobodian's work on diagonalism too. You might find this piece I did of related interest too https://aeon.co/essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy
Yes!
This is one of your best essays yet!
You have found the middleground!
Thanks for the support Johan - I appreciate that
Fantastic write up. Excellent insights. Check your email if you get a chance Brett!
Thanks Steven, I will respond today!
Fantastic work! Many thanks for these stories. They help with unraveling today's complexities.
Thanks Reinjan, glad you like it
This is really good. I've been concerned about these problems since Patreon canceled Benjamin Carl(for saying things I would never say myself), but the scope of your analysis is phenomenal. I never thought about Welfare cards that way.
Thanks for writing this. BTW, I found it on nostr.
Do you accept zaps on nostr or have a lightning address?
I'm glad you like it. I'm not on Nostr actually - too many social networks to try keep up with. I don't have Lightning address no. What wallets are you supposed to use?
It depends what you want to do.
https://lightningaddress.com/
Each wallet has trade-offs. Some have KYC, some do not.
I'm using minibits for zaps and I use getalby and the zuess LSP for lnbits, but mostly for paywalls.
The good thing about nostr is your social graph travels with you on many seemingly unrelated clients. No need to have a seperate login for reddit, instagram, twitter, meetup, zoom, etc.
I think we are definitely waking up to the fact that much of the world's people have been exploited and abused for a very long time, and it's only now that some of us are viscerally feeling it ourselves, even if it's nothing like what others have suffered and still do. But it's kind of normal not to fully understand or even be able to show an interest in what's going on until you are personally affected. Vaccine mandates were a huge wake up call.
Teasing out who to trust, feeling into who is using manipulation and who is genuine, can take a while. I note that for myself there are few big YouTube or Substack personalities, like Russell Brand, who I've wanted to stick with, even if I've sometimes been so grateful to hear them voice something I'm seeing or feeling. It's quite a journey of learning to trust oneself and let go of needing to rely on loud external voices. And of allowing oneself to be drawn into yet another tribe.
Thanks for your sane and articulate voice!
I am pretty sure that Schwab and Gates are up to no good whatsoever, mind you ! :)
Hi Helen, thanks for the comment. I guess the complexity here is that many people who are experiencing that for the first time are people who have not noticed it previously because they were benefiting from it. So, it's not so much the case that some Big Powers were exploiting group A, and now they're also exploiting group B. It's that the Big Powers historically grant excessive power to group B through the process of exploiting A, and still often do.
This is part of the issue with Brand etc - his power base really are people who come from relative power, rather than from relative disempowerment, but the marginal decline in their power is creating an imagination of victimhood, and even a sense of equivalency with earlier exploited groups. We might imagine a significant proportion of the diagonalists as being people who are from a proverbial group B who now imagine themselves as group A. This happens a lot in diagonalist circles, where it is imagined that there is some kind of equivalency between say, a mask mandate, and being a Jew during the holocaust, or an African slave during the colonisation of America, but I guarantee that both those historically marginalised groups would take a mask mandate any day over experiencing what happened to them. This is not to say that people are not allowed to protest a mandate like that, but the issue is in the insensitivity to relative power
This is actually something I have a lot of historical experience of a white South African. Many white South Africans are relatively powerful within South Africa, but there are many white South Africans who imagine their relative decline in power since the end of apartheid as being somehow equivalent to exploitation of black people during apartheid.
I also dig into this from a different angle in this comment here https://www.asomo.co/p/the-outsiders-guide-to-payments-censorship/comment/60710036
I've been following and reading and recommending you to anyone who I respect for a good few years now. I read Cloudmoney the week you released it - brilliant book. I studied economics for 4 years in higher education and every one of your articles that I read is more enlightening and insightful than my accumulated Economics education.
I found out about David Graeber just a few months before he died. Was so sad when he did.
Delighted that there is someone out there doing what you are doing, thinking how you think, and willing and able to stay the course when there are forces which make difficult. This is an unusually nuanced, interesting and important article. Thank you for writing it.
I'm pretty sure David would be very proud of you.
Keep it up.
Hi Monthrie, thanks so much for your kind comment. That really means a lot to me. It's often quite a lonely task producing these pieces, so it's great that you and others find them helpful.
A few months before David died a few of us were about to start a channel with him. I'm close friends with one of this former students here in Berlin, and we do our best to develop on and draw inspiration from his ideas (and the ideas of economic anthropology more generally). Thanks again
Well-said! Thanks for stating it so clearly,
Glad ya like it Jay
Great article. Kudos to you for resisting the gravitational pull of the diagonalists.
Edit: more and more I've come to view most politics as a war of personality types.
Thanks DJ. I've seen many former (and current) allies get pulled into the diagonalist fold, but I'm doing my best to stay true to my course
I agree with you on personality types, though I'd add in emotions (especially those that relate to economic situations)
In other words, you're too blaming the victims for not being perfectly consistent, or having people making a buck making content about it (as if elite media, NGOs, institutions, etc. don't make 10000x the bucks promoting the elite narratives)
"It's crazy they think there's some covert conspiracy run by Bill Gates to get this or that scheme going - when it's just open policy suggestions by think tanks and global non-elected "social clubs", like Davos and such, which also hear the wisdom of people like Gates and others, and whose suggestions are then non-democratically magnified by media owned by a handful of moguls, promoted by bureucracies with tax-money, and given priority over popular demands".
As if that's that big of a difference (especially in outcomes).
Or
"It's crazy that western anti-establishment types were outraged about the Canada truckers incident, something in their own region of the world, that they read in the news about for weeks (including all the establishment news sites demonizing the truckers), over something similar-but-not-quite happening on the other side of the globe to Australian aboriginals and being very lightly publicized by the media"
Yeah, so crazy and hypocritical /s
Now consider how the exact type of critique you make here could also be used against aboriginals themselves, or immigrants, etc - and their also not 100% consistent and ideologically pure way to ask for justice, or some conspiracy theories or falsehoolds they might believe about their situation, or the existance of some "populists" that capitalize on their struggle.
I am not blaming anyone in this piece - just offering reflections on the limitations of victimhood narratives that are highly selective. I understand why people use selective victimhood stories, but that curation reveals a lot of politics: for example, the fact that you seem to assume - in your last paragraph - that the truckers are in the same position of power as aboriginal Australians, or indigenous Canadians, is a very political statement
Also, I spend a significant part of my life doing critique of big corporates, so I'm not ignorant about corporate power etc. Much of this piece revolves around the fact that I'm asked to come in as a commentator on state-corporate power, by people who choose to only see it when it suits them. In terms of understanding how I approach this, you might find this piece on CBDC stories useful https://aeon.co/essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy
Thank's for the response. One main difference is that you see this as self-focused hypocritical and thus invalid, whereas I see it as merely partial (and therefore good, whether as a start, or even in itself).
The truckers are a Canadian example of something that is used against other westerners, which is why westerners referrence it.
It's only logical they'd be more concerned with examples from the same geopolitical region and in countries like Canada where they know are involved in the same extended political sphere, following the same policy trajectories with them too, than with the indigenous plight in the other end of the world. Same way some person from the US, UK, France, etc. is more likely to listen to Drake, Shawn Mendes, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, or Neil Young or whatever (Canadians) than aboriginal music.
Their victimhood narratives are not as much selective, as focusing primarily on their own, and close (culturally, geographically, historically, etc.) examples. I think that's totally understandable (the same way one sees e.g. protests in a latin american country against imperialism to draw primarily from examples from other latin american experiences). In fact I'd also understand them not including victim groups in their country that they might not identify with too (say, Yukon natives).
Sure, it would be better if they had a unified narrative of global victimhood and global "camaraderie" "The Second International"-style. But I think the main question is whether they describe a real victimhood, and actual troubling developments, as opposed to whatever they missed other remote victimhoods and whether their references are exhaustive enough.
I don't think they argue otherwise, anyway, or pretend they're talking about the plight of global marginalized communities in general. Nor that they have to make their complaint universal first for it to be legitimate.
Isn't "people who choose to only see it when it suits them" also another way to describe people seeing it when it affects them? So when they have skin in the game, and not talking abstractly, as opposed to some kind of abstract defenders of global victim?
That's not necessarily bad, especially when it's not themselves that hurt those other victims.
I understand your point, and - from a particular angle - it is valid. I'd encourage you, however, to go beyond the surface level of this. Yes, of course people are more likely to respond to things that directly affect them and people they know, but our failure to see things that don't affect us is not some neutral thing - it's a core feature of how politics works and expresses itself. As a commentator on the politics of finance, I have to address that kind of thing
Here is a metaphor that may be helpful. Imagine two groups in society: Group A has a power level of 100, and group B has a power level of 20. Group A is *used to* having that power, so they don't really notice it. They take it for granted and see it as just their *baseline expectation*, almost like their *zero line*. Of course, from the perspective of Group B, Group A looks unequally powerful - they appear to Group B as +80.
Now, let's imagine that Group A loses a small amount of power, taking them down to 95. If they're used to having 100, and imagine that as their zero line, they may now imagine themselves to be -5, rather than +95. They take on a victimhood status, despite the fact that they actually remain much more powerful than Group B. Fine, they are entitled to go onto social media and show examples of the -5, and they may authentically feel loss, but the issue is their blindness to their relative position.
I'm not saying that everyone in the Freedom Convoy was someone who went from +100 to +95 and then experienced it as a colossal loss that they view a historic injustice, but there definitely are some people in that convoy who were like that. When they try to draw an equivalency between themselves as others who are, for example, at power level 20, that's a problem, especially when they themselves are sometimes complicit in that structural inequality, as is the case in Canada historically.
For example, all those media outlets that covered the Freedom Convoy were not particular interested in covering a different Canadian trucker convoy in support of indigenous people who were mourning the discovery of 215 indigenous kids found in unmarked graves https://globalnews.ca/news/7925257/kamloops-convoy-indigenous-canadians/
This is really good. I've been concerned about these problems since Patreon canceled Benjamin Carl(for saying things I would never say myself), but the scope of your analysis is phenomenal. I never thought about Welfare cards that way.
Thanks for writing this. BTW, I found it on nostr.
Do you accept zaps on nostr or have a lightning address?
Just wanted to say the opinion of Krista Stelkia that a indigenous trucker strike would have been immediately shut down is suspect. Native protests in central Canada have a high rate of success . Over the course of a year or two they blockaded Cornwall island and eventually the Canadian border agency from the island leaving them to conduct border checks in supermarket parking lots . There are other blockades around that particular Mohawk territory as well as blockades farther west near London that have run successfully for months/years at a time. Pipeline blockades in the west were the tribe is split on taking proposed buyouts are a different matter
Perhaps. She is speculating on police treatment of protesters, rather than success of protests, and references the case of the 2019 Coastal Gaslink pipeline protests on sovereign Wet’suwet’en land, where police were reportedly told to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” etc. She also cites research showing that "Since 2017, Indigenous peoples in Canada are more than 10 times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers than their white counterparts". I guess her point is a more structural one, about general trends of police brutality rather than the relative success of particular campaigns.
One other point: I do strongly suspect the media outlets and influencers that would cover the story would shift if it were an indigenous protest. I'm struggling to imagine Tucker Carlson, or even Russell Brand for that matter, taking on indigenous causes with even remotely the same speed as they took on the trucker cause
* eventually forced the border agency to leave the island
Why didn't you link to the FB conspiracy vid?
Diagonalists :)
The diagonalist group think you bewail is surely inevitable in any political movement. The narrative is inevitably simplified because it is unbelievably complicated. We can and should seek to explore the nuances, but we also have to act before knowing the nuances. What I saw of the truckers protest seemed legitimate - I could only with similar protests accompanied the earlier blockades you mention.
I'm not sure it's correct to compare those overtly political blockades with the experience of the poor, which is surely a much more passive, or incidental kind of exclusion. However your Australian Paternalist example is eye-opening.
And yet, limiting access to payments is only shocking if you think governments are committed to a free market and a free society. Payments is just one of a raft of tools that a government might use to control or restrict its citizens, just with road signs, or dog licences, or ways in which convicts and ex-convicts are restricted. I mean payments restriction is not always political.
Sounds like you are putting words in alt-media's mouth when you say "Abbot’s attack on Aboriginal payment freedom is mere Prudence"
I don't understand why, when you had a chance to go on some of these outlets, you didn't accept and offer a bigger picture, instead of refusing and criticising them in your blog. They are not all as disingenous as the creator of the FB vid.
You're pretty harsh on Russel and Richard W.
Firstly, I'm not 'bewailing' the diagonalists. I'm exploring them
Secondly, I did go on many of these shows, and still do
Thirdly, I'm not nearly as harsh on Richard W as I could be, believe me
The elephant in the room that is this essay is government funding. Money distributed by an imaginary entity that claims the right of initiating violence and committing fraud is morally and qualitatively different than money exchanged voluntarily in an emergent order.
Those referred to as “diagonalists” agree fundamentally on the principle that forced consensus is not consent.
Hi Peri, I'd agree that libertarians have a certain conception of how money is *supposed* to work in some ideal sense (regardless of whether this is actually ever how it *has* worked), but I don't think the various strands of diagonalism are united on that by any means. In terms of your last statement, I'd say that's part of the *self-image* of some members of this political constellation, but I'd personally never take that sentiment at face value. Many members of current diagonalist movements have been more than happy to accept other forms of forced consensus in the past, provided they're things they agree with
Ah. So you’re refraining from listing or defining your straw men so as to more easily identify those you disagree with as one of them.
Of those you did name, I think you would find that objection to the principles of forced consensus and of government control of money are high on their priority lists. Do they have pet issues they wouldn’t mind imposing upon others? Well, they’re human, so yes.
Libertarians? Not so much. The notion of using government to impose a system of less government yields a political party that is even more absurd (though less terrorist) than the two “legitimate” parties.
Not sure who I'm straw-manning. I've had years of experience of this now and recounting what I've experienced