Kris Kristofferson: The Last Outlaw Poet

Standing backstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York, leaning against a crumbling brick wall in the dark, I could barely see Kris Kristofferson standing to my left. Willie Nelson was in the shadows to my right. Ray Charles was standing beside Willie, idly shifting his weight back and forth. A bit farther along the wall were Elvis Costello, Wyclef Jean, Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne, Paul Simon and respective managers, friends and family. Everybody was nervous and tight. We were there for Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday concert in 2003.

Up from the basement came one of country music’s brightest stars (who shall remain nameless). At that moment in time, the Star had a monster radio hit about bombing America’s enemies back into the Stone Age.

“Happy birthday,” the Star said to Willie, breezing by us. As he passed Kristofferson in one long, confident stride, out of the corner of his mouth came “None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris.”

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” Kris growled, stepping forward.

“Oh, no,” groaned Willie under his breath. “Don’t get Kris all riled up.”

“You heard me,” the Star said, walking away in the darkness.

“Don’t turn your back to me, boy,” Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

The Star turned around: “I don’t want any problems, Kris – I just want you to tone it down.”

“You ever worn your country’s uniform?” Kris asked rhetorically.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘What?’ me, boy! You heard the question. You just don’t like the answer.” He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air. “I asked, ‘Have you ever served your country?’ The answer is, no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!” I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about!”

“Whatever,” the young Star muttered.

Ray Charles stood motionless. Willie Nelson looked at me and shrugged mischievously like a kid in the back of the classroom.

Kristofferson took a deep inhale and leaned against the wall, still vibrating with adrenaline. He looked over at Willie as if to say, “Don’t say a word.” Then his eyes found me.

“You know what Waylon Jennings said about guys like him?” he whispered.

I shook my head.

“They’re doin’ to country music what pantyhose did to finger-fuckin’.”

Am I young enough to believe in revolution? Am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray? Am I high enough on the chain of evolution To respect myself and my brother and my sister And perfect myself in my own peculiar way?
                                                                                                —“Pilgrim’s Progress”

***

Kris Kristofferson is cut from a thicker, more intricate cloth than most celebrities today: Imagine if Brad Pitt had also written a Number One single for someone like Amy Winehouse, was considered among the finest songwriters of his generation, had been a Rhodes scholar, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, a boxer, a professional helicopter pilot — and was as politically outspoken as Sean Penn. That’s what a motherfuckin’ badass Kris Kristofferson was in 1979. And now if you go online and watch the video for his 2006 song “In the News,” it’s obvious he is still very much that man.

The son of an Air Force general, Kris walked to grade school barefoot in Brownsville, Texas. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Pomona College, studied William Blake and Shakespeare at Oxford, became a U.S. Army captain, was assigned to teach literature at West Point and then abruptly dropped out of the Army to become a songwriter.

Forty years later, Kristofferson is a “unique figure in the history of American music and cinema. The late Sixties and the Seventies saw a creative explosion for American artists. Cinema and rock & roll were in a full-blown renaissance, and Kristofferson stood dead center in both revolutions. He wrote a Number One hit single for Janis Joplin, played at Jimi Hendrix’s last concert, appeared on The Johnny Cash Show with other “new discoveries” like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, won three Grammy Awards, starred in films directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky and Sam Peekinpah, and became one of the hottest male actors in the U.S. after appearing in A Star Is Born.

Then he played the lead in one of the largest commercial failures in film history, Heaven’s Gate. Kris took the bullet and was shunned from the mainstream, disappearing back into the counterculture.

Today, Kris’ songs have been recorded by more than 500 artists, and he has acted in more than 70 films. In 2006, at the age of 69, he released what is perhaps his finest album, This Old Road. I had been at Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday concert to introduce Kristofferson, whom I had directed in the movie Chelsea Walls in 1999. After both of those experiences, I was enthralled by this man who had lived through so much success and so much failure, both personal and professional, and who had survived with his dignity intact, if not actually heightened. This Old Road motivated me to pitch Kris the idea of my making a documentary about him.

“With all that’s happening in the world today, why would you want to make a film about me?” he asked over the phone. “Let me take you around to a few places I know, and we’ll find some real subject matter.”

I told him that I was aware the world was full of suffering but that I had just seen an old documentary about Woody Guthrie and I was damn glad someone made it.

“Yeah, I’d like to see that,” he said, grudgingly. “It’s just that whole hero-worship thing that bugs me. The cult of personality, you know?” (...)

***

It's an awkward thing to invite your hero to your house. Early in September 2008, Kris, 72, is seated on my red couch in his black jeans, gray T-shirt and a pair of ancient cowboy boots. As a music fan, I had dreamed of the encounter, but the unforeseen interloper is my own need to express myself, asking questions quickly and then just as rapidly answering them. Periodically, I let him speak.

“What does it feel like to survive a lifetime in the arts with your integrity intact? Why does masculine energy so often manifest itself as idiocy? Why is male sensitivity so often linked with perceived weakness?” I continue, “How do I talk about my beliefs about the war to my brother who just returned home from his second tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, when in truth I admire him so much and am actually envious of the courage of his convictions? How do you enjoy your life and at the same time stay responsible to all those who don’t have enough to eat? Who are your heroes?” For a moment, I wait for an answer, then decide to plow forward. “I mean, what happened to the great Southern-progressive Democrat? My grandfather helped kick the Ku Klux Klan out of West Texas.” I tell him this as if he’s interviewing me. “What did LBJ mean when he signed the Civil Rights Act saying, ‘I just lost the South for the Democratic Party for the next 50 years?’ Where are the voices like his? How does one be, as Johnny Cash said; ‘a dove with claws?'”

Kris just kind of laughs. I expect him to say, “I agreed to be interviewed, not to be your goddamn guru!” But he doesn’t. He takes a long beat, then says, “Yeah, that used to piss Shel Silverstein off.”

“What did?” I ask.

“That whole ‘dove with claws’ thing. He just thought, ‘What the hell is that?'” Kris smiles: He has an easy way about him, slow to speak and gentle in his movements.

“Why do you think Cash said it?”

“I think he was feeling the very thing that you’re talking about – that if people think you are against the war, that in some way you’re a pussy.”

“Your first recorded song was a pro-Vietnam War song, right?”

“Yeah, I wrote it when I was in the Army on my way to Nashville, and I came upon a protest march. I had a lot of friends over there; and I was thinking we were fighting for freedom. And I wasn’t thinking very deeply.”

“Why did you end up changing your mind about that war?”

“I was flying helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico on one of those offshore oil rigs, and I Was talking to some guys coming home. The stories they were telling me were so horrible that I think it just shocked me enough to change my thinking 180 degrees. I’m talking about things like this young vet telling me about taking people up in a helicopter and interrogating them and if they didn’t say what they were supposed to, they’d throw them out, stomping on the fingers of the prisoner holding on to the skids, you know? The guy telling me this particular story was still just a green kid when he returned from the war. The notion that you could make a young person do something so inhuman to another soldier – or even worse, a civilian – convinced me that we were in the wrong. I hadn’t been thinking in human terms of what that military action was.” He pauses, stroking my dog. “I agree with you totally about all the conditioning that makes us want to feel masculine and tough. I mean, I’m sure that’s why I went to Ranger School and Jump School. And I’m proud of that Ranger tab – still am. But the notion of bombing a defenseless country that’s never threatened us and the fact we all accepted it and said, That’s politics!’ Damn. I’m not really interested in polities. We’ve come to a place that I never dreamed and I know my father never dreamed that America would get to.

“That’s why Shel didn’t like that ‘dove with claws’ thing,” Kris goes on.

“He should have just said he was a dove and proud of it?”

“Exactly. ‘Cause people would have accepted anything from John,” says Kris. “We knew he was a man. I don’t really think anybody would have called Johnny Cash a pussy. But John was conditioned, just like you and me. You really have to get past all of that — where you have enough feeling about what’s right and wrong in the world to not give a shit about what kind of names anybody throws at you.

“Also, I had the benefit of an education,” Kris adds. “After college I got to go to Oxford. Given that, I should’ve been a lot smarter than I was, but even still I volunteered for Vietnam. Christ, I should have known better, so I can’t really be critical of individuals. Ultimately, I was really lucky I didn’t go over there.” (...)

I dig Bobby Dylan and I dig Johnny Cash and I think Waylon Jennings is a table-thumping smash And hearing Joni Mitchell feels as good as smoking grass And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey You can kiss my ass.
                                                                                                —“If You Don’t Like Hank Williams”

***

Johnny Cash described meeting Kris like this: “Kris came right into the control room at Columbia sweeping up and slipped his tape to June, who gave it to me. I put it with a big pile of others that had been given to me. I think I was guilty of throwing some of Kris’ songs into Old Hickory Lake. I didn’t really listen to them until one afternoon, he was flying a National Guard helicopter and he landed in my yard. I was taking a nap and June said, ‘Some fool has landed a helicopter in our yard. They used to come from the road. Now they’re coming from the sky!’ And I look up, and here comes Kris out of a helicopter with a beer in one hand and a tape in the other.”

The beer, Kris says, is a vintage Cash flourish. “Do you know how hard it is to fly one of those things? I don’t know how the hell I’d land one holding a beer.”

Beer or no beer, Johnny told Kris he’d listen to the music when he took the damn helicopter out of his yard. Kris said he’d take the helicopter away once Johnny listened to the track. The track was “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”

After that, Cash said, “I liked his songs so much that I would take them off and not let anybody else hear them.”

Cash decided to record “Sunday Morning” live on ABC for The Johnny Cash Show in 1970. He invited Kris backstage, and as they were hanging out, waiting for the show to start, the ABC censors approached Johnny, saying that the line “Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned” wasn’t going to work. They suggested “Wishing, Lord, that I was home.” Johnny paused and asked Kris what he thought. Kris said it didn’t mean the same thing. Changing it took the piss out of it, but he was sure Johnny knew what he was doing and would respect whatever Johnny thought was best.

Then Kris was escorted up to the balcony to watch the performance.

During the chorus — and you can see this on the tapes — Johnny looks up at Kris, and then, Jim Morrison-style, booms, “Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.”

The helicopter pilot/janitor never had to punch a clock again. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” topped the charts and won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year, edging out “Okie From Muskogee,” in 1970. That night, the outlaw hippies won.

From that time forward, Kris and Johnny were brothers in arms.

by Ethan Hawke, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Geoffrey Robinson/Shutterstock

[ed. Kris Kristofferson has passed away. I'm surprised this old essay is still available since there was some dispute as to the veracity of certain details and I thought RS might have pulled the online version. Nevertheless, it's still here and still a good read. See also: Kris Kristofferson: the soldier turned star made a tough life into tender poetry (The Guardian).]

The Pentagon Goes To School

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

The Pentagon Goes to School

Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.

In 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.

Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products. (...)

A Science of Death or for Life?

Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… ​Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: ​“A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms ​“drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”

The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.

Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity. (...)

That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.

Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.”

by William D. Hartung, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: Bold Type Books

[ed. This insanity has been a constant all my life. Obviously, there are too many interests vested in keeping the money flowing (as we see here ie., military and educational industrial complex; states and cities that rely on it). Very much like dealers and junkies. But beyond the lost opportunities to transform society, strengthen our national infrastructure, prepare for climate-related security issues, etc. our political system has been hijacked, with the military appropriating the role of Congress in disbursing taxpayer dollars for its own wasteful, destabilizing, and life-threatening purposes. See also: Militarism Abuse Disorder (TD):]

***

It’s strange when you think about it. Today, TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan offers a look at the staggering number of taxpayer dollars that go to just one major arms manufacturer in one city in America, New London, Connecticut, where she lives. It’s a company that’s focused there on creating world-ending naval vessels — nuclear submarines, to be exact. (Just what this world of ours doesn’t need, of course!) But the money that’s channeled into being a military power beyond compare (but never, it seems, beyond defeat) is hard even to take in. Consider just what it costs to support the 750 or so military bases that the U.S. still maintains across more than 80 countries, colonies, or territories on every continent except Antarctica. Best guess: approaching $100 billion annually.

And that’s your money, your tax dollars. That means you, like the rest of us in this country, are in some strange fashion — to steal an apt phrase from Berrigan — “military dependent.” Or put another way, believe it or not, the global military stance of the United States, which hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II, is distinctly dependent on you and me. Given all the money that’s gone into that military and the wars it hasn’t won from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s to the “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond of this century, if we were “investing” in anything else with similar results, there would be serious calls for us to stop.

No such luck, of course, when it comes to the ever-rising Pentagon and “national security” budget, which by 2022 had already reached an estimated $1.4 trillion annually! And with that, let Berrigan introduce you to one of the great sicknesses of our all-American age, MAD or Militarism Abuse Disorder.

Taxcast: Green Laundering and Combatting Big Corporate Tax Dodging

The first part of this discussion focuses on the notorious Apple tax case, which allowed Apple to create the fiction, thanks to a special treatment in Ireland, that it lived nowhere in the world from a tax perspective, even though its profits were managed via a hedge-fund-like operation in Nevada with the funds sitting in New York banks. 

Naomi Fowler: Hello and welcome to the Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network. I’m Naomi Fowler. On the Taxcast this month, a big victory against Ireland and Apple’s tax dodging pact which goes back years as the European Union Court of Justice rules it was against EU state aid rules. Here’s EU Competition Commissioner Margherethe Vestager.

Magarethe Vestager: I think it’s a very important step towards tax justice, I think that shows European citizens that actually once in a while, tax justice can take place. And it’s important to me as well. I’m very, very happy with this win. We won the Apple case and it’s final.

Naomi Fowler: Yep, it’s final. Apple must now pay back taxes in Ireland of over 13 billion euros, or more than 14 billion dollars. It’s a big win for the European Commission. We’re going to discuss the implications.

Also on the Taxcast, are banks claims about their financing of fossil fuel companies true, or are they green laundering? (...)

But first, the Apple tax case. Ireland and Apple have lost their appeal against the EU’s order back in 2016 that Apple must pay Ireland 13 billion euros, about 14 billion dollars, in unpaid taxes. They wanted to defend what they thought was a right to shift profits around so they could lower their taxes to pay between 1 percent and as little as 0.005 percent in taxes a year. They didn’t have that right because it’s against EU state aid rules to give selective tax advantages. Here’s economist Joseph Stiglitz of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, or ICRICT for short.

Joseph Stiglitz: Apple in Europe claimed that all the profits they made in Europe were made in Ireland. That all the economic activity that occurred all over Europe was actually due to Ireland. And then they had a quirk in the Irish law where they said that what went on in Ireland was controlled by Silicon Valley so they didn’t have to pay any taxes in Ireland. And they gave Ireland just a little bit for the service of avoiding taxes. That was the only service that Ireland provided, really, was tax avoidance.

Naomi Fowler: And the initial motivation for Apple to use Ireland was to shift their taxable profits out of the United States, too. Ireland’s been in the bizarre position of fighting against receiving billions of euros in order to try to protect their client, Apple, and presumably all the other companies who’ve also used Ireland’s jurisdiction to shift profits over the years. To discuss all of this I’m with Tove Ryding, tax coordinator at the European Network on Debt and Development, Eurodad in Europe, and Zorka Milin, former tax lawyer and policy director at the FACT Coalition in the United States, that’s the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition. We started off by talking about their initial reactions to the news. Here’s Zorka Milin first.

Zorka Milin: Most obviously, I think the EU and especially the visionary competition commissioner I think this is a big win for her, for the commission against tax sweetheart deals, especially in Europe. Um, and also paradoxically Ireland was fighting this tooth and nail, but now they get to keep this 14 billion dollar windfall in revenues!

I also want to add that you know, even though it’s imperfect and incomplete in, in, in some ways, still, I think this is also a win for civil society groups who have been campaigning for such a long time to bring greater tax accountability to companies like Apple, and I want to say that because, you know, we’re not always very good at celebrating our victories and you know, we always tend to look critically at how things could be even better, and let’s just go for the next big thing. But I think this is a really important case that shows we can actually win, even if it’s imperfect, incomplete, and it took ages, more than a decade, it is still some semblance of tax justice and still one that we should celebrate.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah, right. And I mean our EU Competition Commissioner said it brought her to tears. So yeah, maybe we should take that? Tove, what do you think?

Tove Ryding: Yeah, I definitely agree that the European Commission is a big winner. They put a lot of resources into this. If I understand them correctly, they were actually surprised themselves that they won this case because they had several tax related state aid cases that didn’t go so well. So indeed, a big congratulations to them and also to Margrethe Vestager, who has been championing this, and this is the end of her term in the European Commission.

And, as to the broader celebrations, I guess we, especially the European organizations that have been following this case for a long time, are some of the ones that aren’t quite sure that this is a moment for celebration, because a real win for us was never in the cards! I guess we won a bit of transparency into how the transfer pricing system works and that’s actually really rare because most of these things are usually secret. So we saw in this case, there’s one year where Apple’s tax payments are down to 0.005%. So you drop your jaw about how extreme the tax system is. But then when you see what this case was actually about, the European Commission has been trying to force Apple to collect taxes on profits that were generated in countries all over Europe, but also in Africa, the Middle East, and India. So for all the other European countries, but also for our colleagues in the other regions, the big question is why did all that profit only go to Ireland and why can’t any other countries tax this money, especially since Ireland very clearly didn’t want to tax it? So, we won a little insight into how problematic the tax system is, but the, the very clear conclusion is that the problem we have is more than just one rotten apple.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah, some of the countries who that tax revenue belongs to won’t get that revenue, so a lot of treasuries are not going to benefit from this. Ireland didn’t want to benefit from this, but has been forced to now by the courts. Who else are we looking at who are losing out from this ruling? Um, I guess the shareholders would be one, who have been very slow to recognize the risks of profit shifting and turning a blind eye to that. Zorka?

Zorka Milin: Yeah, I agree that, that among the losers we’ve got other countries that should have or could have gotten their share of these tax revenues. Um, and here I, I include in addition to the European countries and, you know, the global South markets, I would also include the United States, and let’s hope that this ruling will be a kick in the pants for these countries to do what they can to fix their own international tax and especially transfer pricing rules so, so they make sure they can’t be taken advantage through profit shifting going forward. Um, and then, of course, obviously, you know, Apple is the big loser, I mean, we could debate how much 14 billion matters to such a huge and hugely profitable company but there’s no question it’s material. And as you say, Apple’s investors, you know, the risk was sprung on them. They were in the dark about these huge tax risks that the company was taking because of a lack of tax transparency. Uh, and it really only came to light through a congressional investigation in, in a series of dramatic tax hearings in the U.S. Senate back in 2013 so yeah, I would say the losers are the company and some of the other governments, as you said, I agree with that.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah, Tove?

Tove Ryding: Yeah it’s a really interesting situation because for once you actually have a weird coalition of big multinational corporations and investors and governments and civil society all shaking our heads at the tax system. Of course, we have been highly concerned about the transfer pricing system for a very long time, not just because it’s open to abuse, but also because there is an unanswered question about how should the right to tax profits be allocated fairly between countries, and now that we have such a big amount of profits ending up in Ireland, you have everyone else, civil society and governments all around the world going, well, this is odd! And at the same time, now we actually have investors and multinational corporations that very clearly see an example of exactly how risky it can be to do tax constructions that are, let’s say, a bit on the creative side. And especially because this case goes back so many years. You really have CEOs and the different types of corporate tax departments that have to sit now and wonder how many of the tax arrangements that we did 20 years ago, 30 years ago are actually safe from scrutiny? And I think that’s the question that we all have now is, okay, this was one company. This was two tax rulings. What about all the others? And I think that’s the big question here in Brussels now as well.

Naomi Fowler: Oh yes, definitely. I mean, the consequences of this ruling now for other companies that were enjoying Irish sweetheart deals and, and not just Irish ones as well, but yeah, they must be quite worried, right Zorka?

Zorka Milin: Yes, exactly. As Tove said, you know, it’s not just one bad apple. There’s plenty of other companies that have historic Irish sweetheart deals, and now they are at legal risk if they are within the 10 year statute of limitations. Now, I should say here, I’m not an EU or an Irish tax lawyer, and this is certainly not tax advice to be clear, but if I had clients in this situation, if I was still in private practice, I would say they should definitely take a closer look, and, you know, strictly speaking, you could say the impact is, is going to be narrow because this exact structure, the double Irish, is no longer possible. By the way, that’s thanks to a combination of tax reforms in Ireland, in the U.S., and also BEPS, all of that was won in response to these kinds of scandals.

So we don’t have this exact kind of structure, but more broadly, you know, I would say it is a sea change because it signals that Brussels can go, they have legal authority to go after the tax laws of member states in these kinds of situations.

Naomi Fowler: So, you know, if you look at Ireland, it said, we don’t give preferential tax treatment to, to companies which is found to, to not be the case, but they didn’t fight against having to take these back taxes, 14 billion dollars for no good reason, right? So the corporations, I mean, you’ve talked a bit about how they might start looking at things a bit differently and thinking, this is a bit, not only in terms of reputation, this is risky, but actually legally and financially, there are big risks here. But what do you both anticipate that perhaps the enabler industry of professionals helping companies do these type of things, governments who have jurisdictions like Ireland, who have been quite big offenders in draining tax revenues from other countries, what do you think they’re going to be doing now after this ruling as a result? Tove first.

Tove Ryding: I think we can see how a lot of the business lobby is responding, including the tax advisors. They emphasize the need for tax certainty, and of course, some of them are also still saying that there’s no longer a problem with large scale corporate tax avoidance, and that we strongly disagree with. But when it comes to tax certainty, they of course emphasize the need for certainty for business and investors.

And we emphasize the need for tax certainty for governments and citizens to make sure that there is revenue coming in. But there is an odd point of agreement here that the current international tax system is simply one big chaotic tombola, you never know what the result is going to be in the long run and everyone’s actually really uncomfortable with this. So it creates a much needed and very healthy discussion about how can we create tax certainty? (...)

Naomi Fowler: Yeah, we’re going to talk about the United Nations where we all think that they should be focusing their efforts, but let’s go to Zorka and ask her for her take on how the whole industry really, involved in these type of activities, how they’re going to react in your view.

Zorka Milin: Yeah, I mean, um, talk about enablers, they’ll keep enabling, but they’ll just find another way, and I have to say, as a former international tax lawyer, it’s been really disappointing to see the reaction from the tax profession. From what I’ve seen, there’s a consensus that this is just a terrible legal decision in the Apple case. You know, there’s been some disagreement on how big a deal it is, some lawyers think it doesn’t really matter much anymore because these exact kinds of schemes are now basically over. Although it could, as we said a minute ago, it could affect some of those previous schemes. Other lawyers are saying it’s just outrageous that the Brussels Competition Authority can override domestic tax laws but, you know, whatever the exact stakes are, the consensus seems to be it’s just a terrible decision. And while that’s not necessarily surprising, I find it disappointing because it shows that tax lawyers are still kind of trapped in their role and they’re failing to see the bigger picture here. I mean, we had a company that was setting up subsidiaries that are not tax resident anywhere at all, and they got their effective tax rate down to, what, basically nothing, 0.005%. And that kind of outcome is just so manifestly unjust. And there is no way a tax system that produces such an outrageous outcome could be defensible or sustainable. And of course, yes, Tove was talking about certainty. We need, you know, we need to have nice things like rule of law and stability and certainty. And I’m all for that, I’m a lawyer, but this is just not the way. And the Apple tax case is up there with one of the most egregious corporate tax scandals I’ve ever seen. I think it’s time that we just need a different kind of law. But I’m an optimist, I will try to be an optimist. And so I think things are going in the right direction slowly but surely, and we have so much momentum and so many opportunities for real tax reform, both international, UN is surfacing, but also domestically and unilaterally, including here in the U.S. where we focus.

by Naomi Fowler, Taxcast via Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. This seems like a big deal. $14 billion isn't exactly chump change, and there's a precedent and incentive now for global financial tax coordination and enforcement. See also: Why does Apple have to pay Ireland $14.4 billion? (Reuters); and, Apple told to pay Ireland €13bn in tax by EU (BBC).]

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Prince & The Revolution

[ed. See also: The Book of Prince (New Yorker); and, The New Yorker Prince Story (Lefsetz Letter).]

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The Feminist

If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. That was sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he’d enrolled. People always reply: Ooh la la, lucky guy! You must’ve had your pick. Which irritates him, because it implied women would only date him if there were no other options, and because he hadn’t dated anyone in high school. One classmate junior year had a crush on him, but he wasn’t attracted to her curvaceous body type so felt justified in rejecting her, just as he’d been rejected many times himself.

Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. It had been cool, or at least normal, to identify as asexual. And though he didn’t, he figured it was a better label than “virgin.” His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile he is grateful for the knowledge that female was best used as an adjective, that sexism harms men too (though not nearly to the extent that it harms women), and that certain men pretend to be feminists just to get laid. After he graduated he started to feel slightly sheepish about never having even kissed anyone. Everyone knows, though, that real dating starts in college, where nobody will be aware of his track record.

But in college, he encounters the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation. Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty led him to believe that adults aren’t obsessed with looks. This turns out to be untrue, even among his new female friends, who complain about how shallow men are. Now that he’s self-conscious, he realizes he can’t compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever. How can he hope to attract anyone with his narrow shoulders?

The women he tries to date offer him friendship instead, so once again, most of his friends are women. This is fine: it’s their prerogative, and anyway, lots of relationships begin platonically—especially for guys with narrow shoulders. But soon a pattern emerges. The first time, as he is leaving his friend’s dorm room, he surprises himself by saying: Hey, this might be super random, and she can totally say no, but he’s attracted to her, so did she want to go on a “date” date, sometime? In a casual and normal voice. And she says, “Oh,” and filibusters—she had no idea he felt that way, and she doesn’t want to risk spoiling the good thing they have by making it a thing, she just wants to stay . . . and he rushes to assure her that it’s valid, no, totally valid, he knows friendship isn’t a downgrade, sorry for being weird. Ugh!

Right? she replies, dating’s so overrated and meaningless in college anyway, and she knows that he knows he’ll find someone who deserves him, because he’s great, really great, so thoughtful, so smart, not like these SAE sideways-hat-wearing dudebros, but of course he already knows that, and she really appreciates it. Then he thanks her for being honest, because it’s proof their friendship is real, and don’t worry about him, he gets it.

He does get it. It sort of kills him, but he knows his rejector was only trying to spare his feelings, since men often react badly to “hard rejection.” So he validates her condolences and communicates them back until she’s convinced he’ll be fine. “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” he says, shaking his fists toward the ceiling, and they laugh together and hug and he walks back to his dorm just before sunrise.

He gets into bed and sighs. While he’s confident he handled everything respectfully, the girl’s praise only reminds him that none of his ostensibly good qualities are attractive enough to even warrant him a chance, which makes them seem worthless. He also suspects that her flattery was . . . exaggerated, and a bit . . . patronizing? If she didn’t think friendship was a downgrade, she wouldn’t have said she “just wanted to stay friends.” By persuading him to reject himself, was she just offloading her guilt? He stews at the familiarity of the situation: once again, he’s got to be the one who accepts, forgives, tolerates, pretends not to be wounded, pretends he has stopped hoping—all this sapping emotional labor not just to preserve his dignity and assuage her guilt, but also because he doesn’t want to spoil his chances of dating her in the future, since it’s her prerogative, after all, to change her mind.

Still, he respects her decision. He gets out of bed, feeling compelled to let her know where he stands, to check in, so he composes a long postmortem email, reconstructing everything that happened from the beginning, assuring her that he knew nobody was to blame for a lack of attraction, and that if it isn’t clear, yes, he is interested in her, but he’s not one of those fake-feminist guys who snubs any woman he can’t fuck, so, sorry if this is completely graceless and exhausting, by no means is he making his embarrassment her problem, he just wants to get everything out in the open. He hits send.

An hour later he sends a second email: Just out of curiosity, could she say a little about why she rejected him? It’d be really helpful for him. Is it because he’s narrow-shouldered? Is that a deal breaker for her? Because he can’t help that, as she knows. Or is it a specific thing he did or said, because if so, they could discuss that, clear up any miscommunications. Anyway, he’ll be fine, hopes everything’s cool—and if she ever changes her mind, he’ll be around!

Considering his tremendous effort to be vulnerable, it seems unfair when a day passes with no reply. Fearing that he might not get one at all, he writes a third email clarifying that she’s by no means obliged to reply, though if she wants to, he’d love hearing her thoughts. He is somewhat annoyed when she again doesn’t reply, though he’s glad to have given her that option. At least nothing’s been left unsaid.

This exact scenario happens four or five more times. Later, when he relates these incidents, lightheartedly, to his other female friends, they assure him he’s interesting, smart, thoughtful, good-looking (though they never say hot), that nothing’s wrong with him. “It’s so bizarre that you’re single,” they say, trying to mollify him with optimism, as if experience has made them objective. But they have no experience of having no experience. He figures that even bad relationships are better than none, since they prepare you for future relationships, and heartbreak is romantic and dignified, whereas rejection just makes you a loser. Short of outright abuse, the worst case is to be in his position.

Anyway, he doesn’t want pity; he wants not to need it. He drops hints to his friends to set him up with their friends, but for some reason they never follow through.

Lacking other options, he decides there are other ways to stand out and be attractive. He cultivates academic achievement, surmising that income and status and intellect will enhance his appeal. And they do, but not for him: the same standards prevail in his field as everywhere else. The rich, beautiful, and broad-shouldered still get all the attention.

Then again, so do the terrible and ugly! His female friends keep dating men with cratered skin, awkward manners, poor hygiene; talentless schlubs identified by their hobbies and tastes; philandering worms; controlling, abusive dirtbags. Even his awkward gay college roommate had had a girlfriend in high school, before he’d come out. Maybe they all deserved love—but surely no more than him? At a house party, one friend talks about going home with a guy the night before who said he just wanted to sleep next to her, but around 1 AM she awoke to him grunting as he completed the process of jerking off on her leg. When she cussed him out, he claimed he was “overcome by raw animal passion” and “couldn’t help it,” and she still let him stay. “Whatever, we’ll probably be married in three years,” she says, rolling her eyes.

He’s just about to insist she shouldn’t devalue herself like that, that she’s just been violated and maybe shouldn’t be out tonight, should go home and practice self-care—and is astounded when everyone, including her, starts laughing. He joins in, figuring that this is all part of the cathartic process, even though it sounds to him like a clear case of SA. He’d asked her out once before; a literal rapist is more appealing than him? But he keeps silent as another female friend says, “Men are dogshit.” And sure, fair, he understands they mean the patriarchy and not him specifically—but why’d she say that with him standing right there, unless he didn’t count as a man? Not wanting to seem fragile or impugn their judgment or center the conversation on himself, he instead files this incident away in a thickening dossier of unfairness, privately reasoning that if they’re going to keep dating assholes, what do they expect.

He gut-checks himself to make sure his concern for his traumatized friend is legitimate before texting her later: “Hey, I’m around if you need to talk about what happened. or even just watch trashy TV :) whenever wherever!”

She doesn’t reply. (...)

At lunch one day, two of his male coworkers offer unsolicited dating advice, relishing the chance to showboat their sexual proficiencies. He’s too honest and available, not aggressive enough—friend-zone shit, they say unironically. Just don’t be a fucking pussy is all! You gotta challenge them, be a puzzle for them to work out, that’s just how girls’ brains work, it’s evolution. They offer grotesquely specific advice about eye contact and hair touching. Learn palmistry, they say, bitches love getting their palms read.

Then they ask him how he makes a move; he says he just asks. “Wait, you ask if you can kiss them? My man,” one says, laughing and slapping his back, “you don’t ask.” With jagged touchiness, he calls them out, insisting that consent is nonnegotiable, that even if they’re joking, it’s textbook rape culture.

“Well, what makes you think you can speak for them,” one says, smirking. “You’re a guy too. Why do you know better than us what women prefer? Especially considering they’re dating us.”

He’s not speaking for women, he says—unsure of how he’ll answer, but certain he has something to say—he’s . . . speaking against men who’re speaking against women.

“Go ahead then,” his coworker smirks, “ask your female friends what they think.”

by Tony Tulathimutte, N+1  |  Read more:

Image: Alida Cervantes, NO TE ENTIENDO. 2018

Byron Birdsall, Anchorage 83
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From Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility

I am a 55-year-old husband, father, friend, and professional philosopher. In 1992, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, a porter found me amongst the cows in the meadows of King’s College, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad physical shape, having eaten nothing, and apparently getting water from the river. He asked what I was doing. I replied: “I’m solving a problem about stochastic calculus.” This statement was true, but did not answer his question. He took me to the hospital, where I remained for some weeks.

It wasn’t the first time that I was psychotic, but it was, maybe, the first time that anybody noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from others, and therefore from myself. What follows is an abbreviated account of how I learned—haltingly, with setbacks, over the years—to cope with chronic schizophrenia. There have been near-collapses, but I have managed to keep a job for 30 years. I have not, until recently, been open about my diagnosis (excepting my wife and a close friend).

The most important part of my story is people. The reason that I am not in prison, homeless, or dead, is a few people who genuinely respect and care for me, and I them, not least through what some philosophers call “hermeneutical justice.” Without these people, there would be no “coping,” and the rest of what follows could never have happened. I will focus on just two of the symptoms that I experience, symptoms that have not been dislodged by medication (although medication can be helpful in other ways): auditory hallucination, and two recurring delusion-like experiences.

I have hallucinated music since childhood. Voices came later, and visual hallucinations later still. Often the voices are distant, a conversation that does not involve me, and I can ignore it. Sometimes the voices are closer, and sometimes they speak to me. These voices are commonly of people I know, but sometimes they are strangers. Sometimes they are critical. Sometimes they comment on what is happening. Sometimes they blather. Occasionally they are encouraging.

Musical hallucinations do not distress me. Voices are a different story—they are rarely intrinsically disturbing, but uncertainty about their origin is. For some time, it felt important to figure out whether the voices were coming from people who are physically present. My doctor called it “reality-check.” Sometimes reality check is easy, eg, if there is a voice whispering in my ear but nobody near my ear. But often reality check is very difficult. In a crowded place, hearing a conversation, does one ask people whether they just said anything? Does one snoop around to find the source of the talking? Does one stare at people’s mouths to see whether they are talking?

The doctor was half-right: I felt better when I was sure about the origin of voices, and anxious when not (especially when they were directed at me). But sometimes it is awkward, difficult, or practically impossible, to gain that assurance. My frequent inability or unwillingness to do a reality check caused anxiety, which makes symptoms worse, and things can spiral out of control. Once I figured these things out, I typically avoided situations where it would be a problem. There are a lot of those situations, so this solution is not great.

Some years ago, a funny situation changed my approach to hallucinations. The scene is a cold, dark, morning, in a coffee shop. There are no other customers. I order my coffee and pastry, sit down, and start working. Soon I hear a conversation. Normally I would have done my reality check, and doing so would have been easy (it’s a small shop), but I felt confident that nobody apart from the sole employee and myself were present, and the voices were not inherently disturbing, so I kept working. Then one of the voices said my name, directly to me. Hearing my name almost always gets my attention, and I turned around, although still expecting to see nothing, but there were two people behind me—real people!—and I knew one of them; he had recognized me and was saying hello.

I suppose that sort of thing had happened before, but in that moment I realized something that I had not realized before: It is not important to know where the voices are coming from. It had just been demonstrated to me that prior to turning around I did not know their origin, and yet I was comfortable having taken on the “mere belief,” and as it turned out the false belief, that nobody was there. I realized in that moment that the comfort that came from successful reality-checks came not from knowledge or certainty, but from a clear belief about the voices. In this situation, that belief, even though it turned out to be false, was enough. And after I was forced to change my belief, it was still fine. I was able to turn back around and continue working, now believing that the voices were coming from people behind me. “And what if,” I thought, “those people quietly left, but I kept hearing the conversation, believing it to come from them?” Well, I’d probably eventually discover that they weren’t there, that the conversation was no longer real, and that would be fine too.

As trivial as these events might seem, they were life-changing. A similar pattern has played out with other symptoms. Here are two examples.

The first is close to “thought-broadcasting,” and for some time I did worry that others might hear my thoughts. I tried hard to think nice thoughts, or to think nothing. After extensive self-reflection, I realized that something slightly different is going on. I realized that it is difficult to tell the difference between speaking out loud and thinking. When I’m focused, I can tell the difference by paying careful attention to my body—especially my lips and throat—but one cannot always focus in that manner, and the resulting uncertainty about what has, or has not, been said out loud can kindle anxiety. Many of my conversations are laced with uncertainty about what I have said out loud, versus merely thought to myself.

After I realized what is going on, I tried to avoid this uncertainty, either by trying not to think or say anything (which is difficult), or by frequently repeating myself (which is obnoxious). More recently, I’ve accepted that it rarely matters whether others have heard me. If I happen to mention (or merely to think?) that I’m allergic to eggplant, it matters very little whether you heard. So these days, most of the time, I just make my own determination about whether the other person heard, just as one might do after making an off-hand remark on the periphery of a conversation, and that determination is good enough. I don’t double-check, repeat myself, or ask whether you heard, unless it really matters. This habit produces some false positives and some false negatives. It turns out that most of the time, it just doesn’t matter.

The second example concerns mirrors. It often seems to me that there are cameras, or persons, behind mirrors. I used to check mirrors (and still do sometimes), but I have come to realize and to accept that most of the time, it doesn’t matter. If there are voyeurs on the other side, that’s their wretched problem, not mine. For me, the path of least resistance is to allow that there probably is something on the other side. As long as I’m clear with myself, all is well.

There is a common theme to these strategies. It’s definite belief, not certainty, that allows me to get along. It’s not that certainty, or something like it, never matters. If you are fixing dinner for me I’ll try to be clear about the eggplant allergy, and I might repeat myself. And as I do when I teach students, I’ll monitor you for a sign that you have heard and understood, and I might even ask you to confirm it. I might, in other words, be a little obnoxious about it, and I hope that you’ll be patient with me. But most of the time, just having a definite, if unconfirmed and possibly false, belief about the situation is fine. It allows one to get along.

by Michael Dickson, Schizophrenia Bulletin |  Read more:

Image: American Psychiatric Association via:

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Chris Zimmerman

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Let Me Tell You a Story

The idea that humans are fundamentally a story-telling species has become so pervasive that it has taken on the characteristics of an unassailable truth. Not only do we tell stories, the theory proposes, but our very identity is shaped and defined by them. We are led to believe that without stories, we would not even be recognizably human. Stories tell us who we are, what we believe, how we should behave. Narrative is the antidote to nothingness.

The practice of storytelling as the central defining characteristic of humanity is a theory that has leapt in relatively short order from the dry, closed circle of academic research into the meme-infested waters of popular culture. It is to be expected that those who make their living as storytellers — novelists, for example — would cast the story as the progenitor of all human thought. But many esteemed thinkers who are otherwise noted for their skepticism and unique slant on mankind have also tended to accept this particular idea without question. "Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better," writes Yuval Noah Harari. "To survive, you must tell stories," says Umberto Eco. "If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them," opines Jonathan Gottschall. Such thoughts are widely disseminated and, presumably, widely believed.

And thus an insight that a few decades ago may have seemed almost profound has now descended almost into cliché. Elevating the storytelling impulse to an organizing principle of human minds and human society is problematical, but not because we do not actually tell stories. Of course we do, and lots of them. Moreover, by showing how stories have little to do with truth and everything to do with helping us impose order and certainty on a chaotic and unpredictable world, the storytelling theory purports to explain many things: why we believe in gods, myths and the supernatural; why we make art; why we put so little effort into distinguishing truth from lies; and why our decision-making is often so irrational.

But while the storytelling story is compelling and useful, it is just that: a story we have told ourselves to explain a complicated phenomenon. When we rely upon the subject of an inquiry for its own explication, we have fallen into the consciousness trap: a subject cannot examine itself without getting in its own way. It is like taking a selfie with oneself in the foreground (obviously) and calling it, "A view of the world." The world may indeed be in the picture somewhere, but with so much of it obscured by our own unavoidable presence, how can we ever really know?

2

If stories do indeed distill the complexities of the world into digestible, bite-sized pieces, how much of the world do we actually get to know by telling and listening to stories? In "The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History", Isaiah Berlin offers a rather stark answer: very little. His comprehensive analysis of "War and Peace" explains how Tolstoy employed a 19th-century battlefield as an apt, indeed brilliant, metaphor for the impossibility of deciphering the workings of society.

A general, sitting atop a horse or standing at some distance from the fighting, may have a panoramic view of the scene as it unfolds, but can have little actual idea of how the battle is progressing. There are simply too many soldiers involved, too much weaponry, too much dirt and smoke, and too much pandemonium for anyone to be able to take it all in. The infantryman in the midst of the violence is even less capable of a wider view of the confrontation. He may know if his line is moving ahead or being pushed backwards, he may see fallen comrades and enemies all about, and he may hear shouted commands, but he could not possibly have the slightest idea if his side is winning or losing at any given time. Historically, battles involving massed armies clashing in a large field — i.e., nearly all warfare prior to the 20th century — were decided usually when one side felt that the cause was lost, and abandoned the field. (Mechanized warfare since the earlier 20th century may have changed this calculus somewhat, though total annihilation of the enemy remains an elusive objective, and has seldom been the deciding factor in a battle's outcome.) There were no casualty counts in real time, no objective analysis to determine who the "actual" winner was. If you believed you had lost, then you lost, and various protocols governing the deportment of victors and vanquished came into effect. The perspective of the commander, watching his army through field glasses on a remote hilltop, was in no way relevant to the proceedings.

In peacetime, the lessons of the battlefield are no less pertinent. The web of human interaction is so enormous and disordered that the future direction of society is utterly undeterminable. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply delusional. The dictator, like the general, knows nothing more than you nor I about what is happening today in society at large or what may happen next. Of course, this does not stop them from believing and claiming otherwise, mostly to the detriment of both subjects and soldiers. Berlin explains it this way:

"The harshest judgment is accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon, who acts upon, and has hypnotized others into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition, or by otherwise succeeding in answering correctly the problems posed by history. The greater the claim the greater the lie: Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy. This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken."

How ironic that Tolstoy, in the course of writing one of the greatest stories ever told, casts an enormous shadow on the entire human storytelling enterprise. His vast, sprawling tale, rather than offering guidance and comfort, stirs unease and concern. If no one can truly know anything for certain, of what use is the story except to deceive and confuse the reader? We read literature, like all the other stories we create and consume, to learn truths about ourselves. But Tolstoy appears to be undermining the very idea that our stories can teach us anything of value, because the world is too complex ever to be understood. Perhaps in "War and Peace" we can find the roots of the religious mysticism that dominated the author's later years, when he seemed to surrender himself to the ultimate mysteries of existence, without hope of ever finding answers in the sorry little stories that we tell ourselves.

3

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put on its shoes." — probably not Mark Twain

Why do we believe some stories and not others? Veracity would seem to have little to do with it. It has long been observed that human consciousness does not concern itself very much with truth. Lewis Wolpert wrote, "The primary aim of human judgment is not accuracy but the avoidance of paralyzing uncertainty. We have a fundamental need to tell ourselves stories that make sense of our lives." (Note: yet another excellent scientist accepting the storytelling story.) A comforting lie may therefore be more useful than a disturbing truth. Applying the phrase "an inconvenient truth" to a fact or set of facts on which one wishes to focus attention (as Al Gore famously attempted) almost guarantees the opposite effect. People will almost reflexively turn away from any attempt to be shaken from their "comfort zones", even if ignoring the truth may ultimately cause them harm.

Those of us who consider ourselves rationalists because our world view relies entirely on reason are nonetheless susceptible to wishful thinking. How many people constantly and consistently question the assumptions upon which they predicate their beliefs and opinions? It would be too time-consuming and unsettling for almost anyone to engage in a daily exercise of total skepticism. We just cannot live that way. And so we embrace those stories that confer a sense of well-being and eschew those that give us angst. Knowing that our preferred narratives are illusions may give us a sense of smug superiority over those who do not; but this knowledge doesn't actually prevent us from accepting any number of shaky premises.

Even conspiracy theories have a useful place in the spectrum of storytelling, as they confirm one's position within a stable, if implausible, sphere of ideas and beliefs. No story is too outlandish to serve this purpose. Indeed, there are those who would argue that the entire history of religion, for example, is a vast conspiracy theory, inasmuch as faith depends on an acceptance of supernatural events that are by definition beyond the realm of evidence and proof. If you could prove the supernatural true, no faith would be required.

Science is always at a disadvantage against religion because faith is unassailable while theory, by its very nature, is subject to constant revision. We see this play out constantly, as the faithful point to new scientific discoveries that upend previously held concepts in order to "prove" that science can't be trusted. After all, religion is founded on an immutable story, a solid rock upon which we can lash ourselves in any storm, while science is merely the shifting sand under our feet. From a purely epistemological view, scientific theories can of course be proven while religious ones cannot; but from a psychological view, this is both irrelevant and delusional. People follow religions because their precepts can be neither proven nor disproven; the more impermeable to reason, the better. (...)

Readers may bristle at the idea that an unquestioning belief in the supernatural is comparable to a faith in scientific inquiry, but the psychological benefits are largely the same: they help us make sense of a seemingly random world. Besides, science is hardly immune from dogma. This isn't an argument for equivalence between religion and science: in their essences and methodologies, they are not remotely the same. However, the question here is whether, in the practice of just living our lives, a true story is any better for us than an untrue one. And if not, perhaps the story is not the basic building block of human thought that we currently think it is. (...)

People still put flowers on Stalin's grave. One of history's cruelest and most prolific mass murderers is held in high esteem by millions of Russians to this day. As recently as a decade ago, a poll found that nearly half of the Russian people viewed Stalin's rule as mostly positive. Say what you will about the dictator and his legacy: that is some kind of storytelling.

Similarly, Napoleon's military campaigns brought ruin upon his own country and laid waste to a large swath of Europe; but even as the French emperor was eviscerated by Tolstoy, he is still regarded by many as a figure of veneration. More books were written about him in the 19th century than about any other historical figure. Tolstoy's compelling truth was no match for the great embedded lie that Napoleon was in fact the legendary genius that he declared himself to be. (...)

King, priest, doctor, teacher — we believe them according to our needs and desires, truth be damned. Once upon a time, Walter Cronkite ended his nightly broadcast with the phrase, "And that's the way it is." It is a bit shocking now to realize that many of his viewers took his word as the literal truth. Cronkite was in fact a serious newsman in an era of unusually serious journalism, and he certainly didn't set out to deceive anyone or to air stories without subjecting them first to a high standard of verification. But the notion that a 30-minute newscast — with commercials — represented "the truth" about the world strikes us now as frightfully naive.

The events of 1960s and 1970s effectively and permanently eroded our trust in institutions generally, news reporting included; but a long, subsequent era of skepticism and rebelliousness did nothing to diminish our need for the comfort of a warm story. The much-bemoaned bifurcation of society along ideological lines may have split our preferred stories onto divergent paths, but hasn't rendered us any less credulous. Millions of people who don't believe a word of what is reported in newspapers or on broadcast television will nonetheless believe the word of unknown or, worse, disreputable voices on the internet. We wonder how, in a world overflowing with easily verifiable information, we are so vulnerable to lies and innuendo. But perhaps what we dismiss as naivetë in generations past was in fact merely our eternal craving for reassurance. There is hardly an instance in which the question, "How could they have believed such nonsense?", applied to our ancestors, cannot be countered with innumerable comparable examples of our own gullibility.

by Barry Edelson, The Pursuit of Worldliness |  Read more:

Image: HBO Max via

Mt. Hood and Farm
Image: markk

There's A Place For Everyone

Someone once asked me, “What’s something you believe in, despite not having any evidence for it?”

Without thinking, I said “There’s a place for everyone.” As in: every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

This is, I think, the unspoken fault line that divides all ideologies. If you trace arguments about marginal tax rates or soybean tariffs or whatever back to their origin, you will usually find a disagreement about whether our ideal world contains all of the inhabitants of our current world, or whether reaching Utopia will require us to toss some folks overboard. [ed. An excellent observation.] We don’t talk much about this, because if the people on Team Overboard were honest about who they plan to purge, none of their intended victims would be friends with them, let alone vote for them. 

I’m on Team Nobody Goes Overboard because I believe every human has equal moral value—that’s the axiomatic, “no evidence for it” part. But I don’t just believe that there should be a place for everyone. I also believe that there is a place for everyone, and there’s plenty of evidence for that belief, and there are some unfortunate reasons why not everyone believes it, all of which I present to you now.

A Species of Weirdos

Evolutionary biologists say that humans occupy the “cognitive niche”—we stay alive by using our thinky bits. But the cognitive niche isn’t just one pocket in evolutionary space. It’s an infinite honeycomb of niches, because our brains allows us to customize ourselves in ways that other animals can’t. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian leopard or an alt-right penguin, but humans come in all varieties: some of them like partying on boats, others like painting Warhammer figurines, some think it’s immoral to eat garlic, and others want to live as dogs. (...)

We don’t have a good way of talking about all this diversity because we don’t have good ways of categorizing people. But here’s one way of looking at it. According to an analysis by my friends Slime Mold Time Mold, if human minds differ from each other in even 100 ways—which is not that many!—and those differences are normally distributed, then 99% of people are extreme in at least one way. Which is to say: statistically, everyone is special.

That’s just looking at traits, which we might assume are more nature than nurture. People’s experiences specialize them even further—two equally conscientious people can end up obsessed with locomotives or Zen gardening, depending on where they grow up, what classes they happen to take, who they date, and whether, at a critical moment in their development, they watched the scene in Spiderman 2 (2004) where Tobey Maguire stops a runaway train.

Stop Pushing Paper, Start Pushing People

Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand. All those odd people want odd things, creating odd jobs for other odd people to fill. Here are just a few of them:

• Professional bridesmaid
• Person who crams people into crowded subway cars
• Underwater pizza delivery guy
• Dog chef
• Trash detective
• Teeth designer
• Fire watcher
• Bovine reproductive technician

You can read that list thinking to yourself, “Which of these jobs might I like to do?” But the better question is: “Which jobs are still missing?” There is no Central Occupation Authority that decides which jobs should be created. You can get a pizza delivered underwater because someone saw an opportunity and took it, and the infinite and ever-changing weirdness of humanity means there are opportunities yet to be taken.

And that’s just thinking of niches in the dumbest sense possible, which is “things you can do in exchange for money.” People’s needs are so dire and so diverse that there are niches upon niches crying out for someone to fill them.

In high school, my sister was the Breakup Whisperer. Even her most distant acquaintances would seek her counsel on ending their relationships, or her comfort when those relationships had been ended for them. (“Breakup Whisperer” sounds better than “Dump Consultant”.) Although her paycheck at the time said “Subway Sandwich Artist,” the real place she fit was on our front porch, trying to talk a 16-year-old boy through his first emotions.

We need a whole lot more than just Breakup Whisperers. We need D&D Group Conveners, Last-Minute Babysitters, People Who Write Articles Online Explaining The Confusing Endings of Certain Movies, A Cappella Concert Attendees, Wikipedia Editors, Phone Fixers, Local Historians, Post-Tragedy Casserole Providers, Yelp Reviewers, Field Trip Chaperones, and on and on, forever. Roll a few of those together, and baby, that’s a niche.

Flaming Chickens

If there’s an abundance of niches, why does it seem like so many people fail to find theirs?

Three reasons. The first: most niches are local, and that isn’t where people look.

When I grew up, everybody was talking about “globalization,” which always seemed to be about how we can get Tamagotchis from Shanghai to Scranton in 24 hours or whatever. Maybe I missed this because I was, like, eight, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the globalization of attention. We can move electrons even faster than we can move Tamagotchis, and the result is that everyone from Shanghai to Scranton is largely looking at, listening to, and talking about the same things. You can see this in the demise of local news, the consolidation of the internet, and all other forms of oligopoly.

The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president.

Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter. When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.

The Tragedy of Nicky 

The second reason why people end up without a niche: we act like finding one is personal, private, and painless. It’s not.

If you’re trying to figure out which car to buy, which person to date, or which taco place to try, there’s are whole industries waiting to assist you. But if you want to figure out where you fit in, you’re on your own. The education system won’t let you leave until you can add, subtract, read, and write, but they’ll give you a diploma even if you have no clue who you are or what you want.

We assume that everyone falls into the right slot just by knocking around the world like a human-sized Plinko chip. But niches can be tiny, peculiar, and hidden away, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find yours without a heave or a shove.

I once ran into an old classmate—let’s call her Nicky—who was trying to choose between competing offers from consulting firms. Nicky was having a hard time, and it soon became clear why: she didn’t want to be a consultant at all. “What do you like to do?” I asked. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” For her, consulting was the default option, an industry willing to take someone with brains and grit but no particular interests, and at the end of college she was surprised to find that was her.

That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.

When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.

That’s why “where do I fit in?” is not a private question, like the password to your bank account or the color of your underwear. We all have a stake in you finding your place, because we’re all better off when you like your life. Well-slotted people make good neighbors, bosses, partners, and parents. Unmoored, detached, disaffected people end up trying to figure out whether 10-year-olds prefer vapes that taste like cotton candy or blue raspberry.

Plenty of Openings on the Millet Farm

The third reason is the opposite of the second: some people think that finding your place is impossible.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History | Read more:
Image: author's father

[ed. This is a great post. Be sure to scroll to the end and read his great-grandfather’s World War I draft registration card from 1918.]