Project Esther: A Trumpian Blueprint to Crush Anticolonial Resistance / Yoav Litvin

I Didn't Ask To Be Born Famous

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst, which is also the drink.

Royalty is a hereditary disease. It's the only hereditary disease you can catch through marriage. Well, there's also nobility. You can even buy your way into that disease. But there's nobility and there's nobility. There's the social status of "noble" and there's the virtue. What kind of self-important asshole designated his social class "nobility?" It's pathetic. Arrogating to oneself the label "noble" is the status equivalent of a child's toy advertised as "fun" or the package of a junk food item announcing it's "delicious." You can be certain such a toy is no fun, and the snack is yet another knot of flash-fried Styrofoam coated in salty orange dust chemically designed to mimic flavor.

And yet even supposed intellectuals are willingly knighted and consider it an honor. In Thailand you have to respect the king or they'll put you in prison. But what's everyone else's excuse? The Queen of England is just a glorified chimp we've gussied up in sparkles and given castles and horses.

Oh, speaking of royalty, it's the twentieth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris. Very sad. She was reasonable to deal with, from most accounts, and very generous with her time. She even had a streak of the do-gooder in her. Princess Diana, or as she was called, ironically it turned out, Princess Di, died a very popular person.

To commemorate the anniversary of her death, the BBC revisited the event with her bereaved sons, Princes William and Phillip. I can't remember which is which so I'll just refer to them collectively as Princess Wallop. Why? Because it's easier to say than "Princes Willop."

Princess Wallop, it turns out, was upset by his mother's death. So like us, the royals, aren't they? Emotions and everything. He blamed the paparazzi. Many blamed them.

Even the normally cool-headed George Clooney blamed them. But the paparazzi were only doing their job. "Oh, but maybe Princess soon to Di didn't want her picture taken that day. Why couldn't they just leave her alone?"

Neither Clooney nor Wallop wanted to consider that the paparazzi didn't create the situation by which they could exchange pictures of celebrities for money. They had rent to pay, they didn't have a castle or two to fall back on.

Wallop wasn't in a forgiving mood, though, at the time. He blamed being royal, and all the... read more

On climate change, automation, and the possibilities of life beyond capitalism. - Peter Frase

 The individual is a fiction: Why the left must return to party politics. - Jodi Dean

The Supreme Gamble

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

As founder and spokesmodel of the Socialist Leisure Party, I am under constant attack from every side. My detractors are legion. From the right, they want to shut us up because we're spreading the dirty secret threatening to undermine capitalism's extortionist hold over the masses: there's enough wealth in the world today for everyone to lead an easy, pleasant and fulfilling life. From the vanguardist left, they want us to quit advocating recalcitrance and the romance of shirking work, because it undermines their image of the noble laborer as a deployable soldier in the battle against the current regime they wish to replace with themselves.

My first task every morning is to fight the urge to get up and fight. It's not easy being aggressively inert. But somebody has to take it upon himself to do this thing that doesn't need doing.

Our stupid national ethos fetishizes certain types of risk. There was even a popular song about risk assessment: "You got to know when to hold em; know when to fold em," the singing Gambler cryptically advised. If you risk your last dime and, through a combination of obsessive devotion and luck, make millions, you are applauded, lionized, celebrated. If you risk your last dime and fail, you are stigmatized and shunned and swept under the rug of oblivion. If you take the risk of devoting your time to teaching or nursing or firefighting or farming or otherwise doing the grassroots labor society requires in order to function on a day-to-day basis, whether you succeed or fail you are pretty much treated like scum.

For the sake of a handful of winners, we are held hostage in a nightmarish casino where most of us sweep the floors or refill the shrimp buffet in a thankless bargain with the management.

One tenet of the Socialist Leisure Party is that we in the USA are pressured to accept risk in order to enter into any social contract, and succumbing to such pressure must be avoided at all costs. We will not invest our time into mastering a trade. We will not devote our lives to contributing labor to a company or a municipality or, god forbid, a government, against the empty promise that it will support us with a pension in our old age. Simply put: we will not devote. Governments, companies and municipalities have earned nothing but our distrust, and we owe them nothing more.

So, yes, the basic motivation... read more