Author: Robert Mariani

Send me a tweet: @robert_mariani Email me: rjmariani0 AT gmail DOT com

Why wasn’t anyone talking about police militarization?

Paul Waldman recently wrote a piece at the Washington Post asking a a reasonable question: where is the libertarian outcry against the overbearing use of police force? At face value, his commentary seems very illuminating: the tragedy in Ferguson shocked all reasonable people into consciousness, and we can’t hear the libertarians doing the same, so they must be unreasonable.

If you talked about police militarization before this tragedy, you would be considered somewhere on the spectrum of paranoid conspiracy nuts molded from the same clay as Alex Jones, especially if you identified as a libertarian. The reason that libertarians didn’t seem to adjust their focus to accommodate for Ferguson is because their focus was already there. Everyone else has since moved into this territory, previously occupied only by those conspiracy mongering weirdos.

Simply by googling “police militarization libertarian” and constraining the search for results from before August 9th to a few years back, we get a treasure trove of now embarrassing snark aimed at ostensibly paranoid and reactionaries. Here’s a great one that spends a majority of the article building the case that a Radley Balko is hopeless reactionary puppet, a racist and not a real journalist. Eventually, there is a payoff to this buildup, when Balko takes the side of a man who defended himself against armed, militarized police engaging in a drug bust. The Alternet writers practically roll their eyes at the assertion that this man may have saved his own life by defending himself, and imply that the libertarian noise surrounding police militarization is just paranoia that is attendant upon Balko’s reactionary beliefs. If this same dismissal of police militarization and the right of a black man to defend himself against such militarization were called into question today, you would be called a racist.

You’d probably be someone who watches Fox News, too. In an odd coincidence, libertarian John Stossel warned against the militarization of police in a piece posted on Fox only two weeks before the Michael Brown’s death-by-cop. He isn’t caught up in his own libertarian headspace, either. Stossel makes the point as diplomatically as possible in the title, earnestly trying to appeal across the political spectrum:

It’s healthy for conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike to worry about the militarization of police. Conservatives worry about a repeat of incidents like the raids on religious radicals at Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. Liberals condemn police brutality like the recent asphyxiation death of a suspect at the hands of police in New York….

This is a rare issue where I agree with left-wing TV host Bill Maher. On his TV show last week, Maher ranted about no-knock raids “breaking up poker games, arresting low-level pot dealers.”

Going a little further back to April 22, a Libertarian Party official in Michigan rallies civilians to sign a petition against the local police being supplied with military equipment. As you might have guessed, the petition ended up doing nothing. Libertarians tried to make as much noise as they could, but nobody really heard them. This is something that libertarians are used to, but everyone else seems to have a selective understanding of just how small of a soapbox the libertarians actually have. The signal to noise ratio between those who cared about police militarization pre-Ferguson and the paranoid isn’t very high. Remember when the DHS had practice targets of children? Take a look at the bizarre comments on that article. Whether it’s conspiracy mongers or johnny-come-lately activists, you can count on the libertarian voice being drowned out.

kolbe nazis

Being good is not political

Some, like Christopher Hitchens, hold Mother Teresa to be an icon of trite, consumer-ready humanitarianism. This is probably true, at least on some level. My disagreement is with what I perceive as political about this view; a distaste for elevating Mother Teresa above any given saint is because the sentimental modernity that is apparently inherent to the narrative of Mother Teresa. This doesn’t mean that her life of selfless love is less inspiring or worthy of honoring. The modern media’s infatuation is not the exaltation of maudlin sentimentality, but the sigh of a spiritually thirsty creature in the spiritual desert that we inhabit.

Seventy-three years ago today, a friar named Maximilian Kolbe died from a lethal injection in Auschwitz concentration camp as a result of taking the place of a husband and father who was condemned to death. Like Mother Teresa, he led a life of poverty and service to his fellow man. After becoming a political prisoner due to broadcasting opposition to Nazi atrocities via radio, he was taken to Auschwitz concentration camp. The escape of another prisoners came to the attention of camp authorities, and the punishment was to select ten men to be starved to death in a small bunker. When one men selected made it clear that he had a wife and kids that needed him, Maximilian offered to be killed in his place. The purpose of the punishment, destroy the spirit and dignity of those condemned, was defied. When the nine others had expired from starvation, Maximilian remained, and was given the fatal carbolic acid injection. This is a moment when uncompromising peace stood toe-to-toe with uncompromising violence and managed a Pyrrhic victory, which is pretty damn impressive considering the match history between the two.

What political alignment can fit the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s life of and death? I don’t think that’s a meaningful question. Doing the right thing is a personal impetus, and any political element can only pollute it. So whether you’re a socialist, libertarian, feminist, nationalist, or anything else, the indomitable spirit of peace and love that we remember in this man is a message that transcends such divisions. The universal appeal doesn’t cheapen it, it speaks to the message’s peculiarly human truth.

Ideology will set you free

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT 'EM ON.

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT ‘EM ON!

Ideology is not a system of thought that puts a distorting filter on our thinking. The common western vision of communism is that of miserable factory workers kept under watch by uniformed members of the omnipresent party. Anybody who makes the mistake of engaging in free thought is taken away to the even worse gulag. This is only what communism is from our naive, democratic, capitalistic perspective. When we put the glasses on, we can see what’s really going on. Those workers aren’t miserable, they are heroically building communism. Political officers aren’t there to oppress, but to make sure that the revolution which liberated those workers stays in place forever. And the gulags? Those are for quarantining the infection of bourgeois ideology, and perhaps we can even ‘force the glasses’ onto the incarcerated — if they are lucky. Ideology is what illuminates a dark and backwards world, and everything in this world is readily explainable by it.

A great example of the utility of the glasses is to decode the meaning of things that even we ourselves do not know we mean. Our true meaning must be decoded using the assumptions of the ideology. When I say that I want to marry a woman of a different race, the Nazidecoder glasses reveal that I actually want to destroy civilization. When I say I want to start a business, the communist decoder sees right through me — I truly just want to exploit the proletariat. By “employers shouldn’t be compelled to provide any specific benefits to their employees,” I obviously mean “I want to declare a war against women.” Compare Nazism to moderate nationalism, Communism to socialism, and radical feminism to moderate feminism. More than their positions on a spectrum, they are separated by the more radical versions adhering to ideology – they need the glasses. And where would we be without the help of the glasses? The decoder’s outputs are, of course, non-falsifiable assertions. This leaves us with curious ideas: rationalism is not enough. Rationalism is actually an enemy that obstructs the truth and enslaves us to the invisible order we are spontaneously embedded in. Democracy is not enough. Democracy is acceptable as long as the populace is willing to see the light. The webcomic Sinfest is the perfect demonstration of ideology not only to the ideologues that happen to agree with it, but to us benighted pawns as well.

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cyberpunk machine

The first conscious machines will probably be on Wall Street

We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity, and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer. In a world operating under this assumption, machines can theoretically have directed cognition, decision-making and consciousness. Even today we see supercomputers owned by financial institutions making trading decisions on behalf of the companies that own them. These are specialized machines that do something that produces similar results to cognition, and the fact that they are specialized thinking machines might lead one to believe that this precludes them from being conscious. I think the opposite is true; human beings are not generalized computing organisms. The machines in question, just like humans, are not general purpose beings, but highly selective imitation devices with an innate dedicated language system.

The financial industry is always on the bleeding edge of technological application. Always. Beyond ticker tape, the telecommunications revolution and mere computer algorithms, today’s Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial intelligence toward actual productive ends. Machine trading, which today mostly falls under high-frequency trading, (HFT) accounts for 73% of US equity trading volume, an increase from 25% of equity trading volume only five years prior. HFT machines make dozens or even hundreds of trades within a second, which far outstrips the ability of a human or any group of humans to make such a decision. The Sharpe ratio, which is used in the financial world to indicate reward against risk, is much higher with HFT than with traditional strategies. Vast profits can be made by these trades being made before others, whether it is a few milliseconds before competing traders, or executing trades before others even realize it. The supercomputers executing these strategies look for various signals, such as volume, volatility, changes in global interest rates and tiny economic fluctuations. But beyond quantitative data, news articles, tweet and other qualitative information accessed through the internet is taken into the calculations by use of natural language processing system that convert mined text into meaning for the machine. A recent example of this artificially intelligent news analysis happened when Associated Press had its twitter account hacked, making a tweet on April 23, 2013, falsely asserting that there was an explosion at the White House. The S&P Index lost $136 billion in a matter of four minutes, though it was recovered just as quickly. Wallace Turbeville notes:

Most trading of securities and derivatives is accomplished using supercomputers wired directly into exchanges and other venues. They operate at trading speeds well below milliseconds so no human is involved. The trades are dictated by artificial intelligence software… pattern recognition software that infers motivations and other characteristics of other traders in the markets to pick which ones to exploit. Another element of the system is software that reads data, including Twitter traffic, for key word combinations so that the supercomputers can fly into action within, let’s say, one ten thousandth of a second of the appearance of the words. I am going to go out on a limb, here – I suspect that a tweet that comes from a “verified” Twitter account and includes “Obama”, “White House”, and “bombs” might qualify as a sell-triggering word combination.

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The Turing-Poe test

With the rise of the internet radicals and internet trolls, it would be an interesting exercise to apply the Turing test to Poe’s law. Is that person posting that stuff an idiot? Are they just pretending to be an idiot? Or is it idiots tricked into looking like even bigger idiots by a loose group of people pretending to be idiots? Because that’s exactly what happened with #EndFathersDay on twitter.

straw feminist

This prank originated on 4chan’s news and politics board, /pol/, a board known for its radicalism, offensiveness and free speech, and it’s clear that it was success. What’s more interesting is that this isn’t your typical black propaganda, because it actually fooled the people that it was satirizing into joining in. The hashtag topped twitter’s trending lists, sweeping up thousands of bona fide feminists in the apparently empowering anti-holiday frenzy. Plenty of savvier feminist tweeters pointed out that such tweets needed to stop – not because the rhetoric is fucking crazy, but because of who is originating the hashtag, since the internet is public and any group of people planning such thing will be uncovered with a little digging.

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eyeswide

The end of the rainbow: Eyes Wide Shut analysis

Eyes Wide Shut is probably my favorite film, but it didn’t acquire this distinction until quite a long time after I had first watched it. A second viewing was followed by the nuances of the film creeping up in my mind and demanding a share of my daydreaming. When I watched it a third time, and the rest was history.

I am in some pretty good company – Stanley Kubrick considered it to be his greatest contribution to the art of cinema. Before the film was released, Kubrick died, leaving this enigmatic film for viewers to ponder without its creator to chime in. But the film was not a sudden act of inspiration that came to the auteur, but a culmination of decades of meditation and influence that provided Kubrick with a capstone that ultimately summed up his vision as a filmmaker. Kubrick had been envisioning a film about sexual relations since early in his career, and upon reading the early 20th century novella Dream Story, he decided to buy the rights to it in 1971. For almost 30 years Kubrick held the rights, and the ideas that were to become his final masterpiece took shape throughout that time.

Kubrick’s exploration of the dream world of the film that the audience is part of is ultimately manifested in Eyes Wide Shut. The diegesis of Kubrick is a dream in which the audience is invited to take part in. Kubrick stated early in his career,

The representation of reality has no bite. It does not transcend. Nowadays I am more interested in taking up a fantastic and improbable story…. I always enjoyed representing a slightly surreal situation in a realistic way. I have always had a penchant for fairy-tales, myths and magical stories. They seem to me to come closer to our present-day experience of reality than realistic stories, which are basically just as stylized.

To this end, Kubrick’s films walk the line between the dream and the reality even within his films. Mixture of the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds are a tool used throughout his filmography, at least since 1957’s Paths of Glory, over four decades before his final film. We hear a non-diegetic percussion piece when the soldiers are sent into No Man’s Land from the trench. Later, when being executed, a percussion piece plays again, only this time, we learn that the drummers are in the reality of the film. In A Clockwork Orange, the main character Alex is both the main character and the narrator; he is both the gaze and the object of the gaze. By walking this line, Kubrick recognizes that dream-state of film that always exists in the medium whether creators intend or address it or not. Films are necessarily believable and internally consistent absurdities that echo the mental filtering of reality. In a film, characters are funnier than reality; the passing of time is more perfect than reality. This is because our gaze is restricted to the narrative that is relevant to the auteur’s vision. In real life, our idea and memories of our friends are funnier than reality. Our idea of Christmastime is more wonderful and cozy than can be. Our real life gaze conserves details by only cataloging those details that are relevant to our personal narrative.

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