“This society does not honor vulnerability. In fact it kind of shuns it (you being weak).
How many times have you been told don’t be so sensitive?”
Audience member: Hundreds
“Now what color is your hair? “
Audience member: Reddish black dyed, but I have green eyes
“Okay, people might as well have told you don’t be so green-eyed. It’s just your nature. Now nobody ever told you not to be green-eyed, but they told you not to be sensitive, which is as much part of your nature as your green eyes are. So, in this society, sensitive people are hurt. Now how you prevent it is if the parents had the wherewithal and the awareness (& the teachers) to recognize sensitivity and to actually honor it, because in traditional societies the sensitive people were the shamans.”
September 13th, 2022 - Anchorage, AK- Issue 15
Game theory as defined by Liv Boeree is “basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation.”
A complaint is defined as “an expression of grief, pain, or dissatisfaction.”
If living in a modern society is a game, there are certain players for which the game (just based on circumstance) is much easier. These players tend to be upper class people, those who do not belong to racial minorities, men who perform traditional masculinity, as well as cisgendered, straight, and abled people. (Fact sheet linked for anyone- though demographically improbable- who is lost here)
“One of the cornerstones of feminist theory, in all its varieties, has been its challenge to positivist notions of objectivity and truth. There is a large variety of positions among feminists concerning these issues, starting from— in Sandra Harding's term—"feminist empiricists" (Harding 1993, 51), who do not intend to challenge or reinvent the framework of "science” as such but rather to do a better job in the existing one, up to post- modernist theorists like Jane Flax (1990), who rejected any notion of objectivity and "truth." Despite their differences, they have all challenged "the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere" (Haraway 1991, 189) as a cover and a legitimization of a hegemonic masculinist positioning.”
-Nira Yuval-Davis, “Dialogical Epistemology, An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”
The characteristics of the players for whom the game is easy include uncritical acceptance of the rules of play (demonstrated by the trust these players put in the current institutions, which they see as moderating cooperation), blindness to privilege, and an attitude of inevitability towards ongoing inequality, war, and suffering.
What to one player is phenomenologically evident as a barrier to the fair play of the game, another player (due to bias) attributes to nothing more than a complaint and, therefore, confirmation of their opponent’s inferiority.
Ideally, a government justifies itself by its capacity to moderate; it decides how economic subsidies will be distributed, which parenting norms will be legally imposed, what the public education goals will be, how consumer and privacy rights will be protected, provides a legal framework to preserve social order, and determines how resources for the impoverished will be made available. A government assumes its people’s loyalty, but in recent years has done little to secure it.
Not only do modern governmental institutions, not moderate cooperation, they intentionally and authoritatively perpetuate systems of non-cooperation.
Ways that modern governments perpetuate noncooperation:
-Deregulation of monopolies
-The legality of stock trading by those in public office where they have the power to influence legislative decisions such that they profit
-Fanning the flames of division through state-sanctioned media narrative manipulation
-Criminalization of drugs
-Open corruption in the form of financially motivated campaign donors
-Failure to ensure access to basic resources for survival for all citizens
-Exclusion of Indigenous leaders and thus Indigenous ways of thinking and knowing from positions of authority on already unrightfully occupied lands
-Rampant privacy invasion, violence, and racism in law enforcement agencies
-Racial disparity in mass incarceration and mass incarceration in general
-Bureaucratic inefficiency of the last remaining services
Current institutions in Western society are not structured in a way that accounts for the scientifically proven way that decisions made within competitive situations are connected to the sense of safety of the humans that comprise it.
True maintainable cooperation would involve a collective override of the ability of government to oppress anyone through active treatment of each other as human beings, such that all may be able to operate with a bit more executive function. Just because some human intersections of privilege among us are able to dissociatively survive the violence they perpetuate while maintaining denial about this, does not mean that they should be enabled to continue to do so. Instead, on an individual-to-individual level, it is time to adopt some intentionality.
We must come to a social Nash equilibrium.
“On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.”
-Foucault, February 21 1979, Collège de France
& for another example of a vision for an alternative to the current rigged game, see Nira Yuval-Davis on Patricia Hill Collins’s aspirational contribution to transversal political theory through dialogical standpoint epistemology:
-Nira Yuval-Davis, An Intersectional Resistance to the “Oppression Olympics”
WWADWWAD (?) Featured Curiosities:
-A gem of a definition of beauty:
-An effective rendering of the common enemy (mechanistic consumption of humans to get more power):
-The Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute
-Extremely important read on the grim pseudoscientific botch job that has been the “scientific innovations'“ that enable such a thing as a death penalty
Upcoming Events
Online/Worldwide:
Gabor Mate’s book, The Myth of Normal Release Date- September 13th, 2022
First ever Abolition Transmission radio show - October 20th at 1PM AKST www.abolitiontransmission.org
Local, AKST Time:
KPJR Films: Resilience; The Biology of Stress & The Science of Hope- September 15th at 5:30PM at Beartooth Theatrepub
Van Gogh exhibit yoga by @raqpaperfeelings on Instagram - September 18th 8:30AM, link to purchase tickets in bio
Community Action Night- October 10th at 6PM, message @baileywwadwwad for details
Autumn Clothes Swap/Collection - October 15th clothes swap with the ulterior motive of gathering warm clothes for distribution to the community as the weather gets colder. Time, location, & other details TBD, message @shitwicki for early details
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Transcription of Yanis Varoufakis’s talk entitled “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?” speaking to Google in 2016:
“But the investment game that I just described is precisely that, it is a game. And what is a game? It is a situation where the outcome does not depend on what you do but it depends on what others do and what you think that they think that you think that they will do. That’s what a game is, like in chess, like in the stock exchange.”
“So suddenly, whether you invest or not depends on your belief or optimism that the level of aggregate investments will exceed a certain threshold because only if it exceeds a certain threshold only then will there be enough demand to make your investment profitable. So the way I, when I was still a professor, the way I tried to explain this to students, especially MBA students, who are cutthroat and try to undermine each other like there’s no tomorrow- okay, I remember I used to love doing that, this was great fun for me, not for them. I used to say to them, ‘you know what, I hate marking scripts, so I’m going to give you your grade now, day one, first lecture. I’m going to give you the semester grade now and then we can meet for the purpose of your education and mine. Just take a piece of paper out, write your student number, and I want you to write, to add a number, a digit between one and nine including one and nine. And your grade will be as follows, I will pick up these pieces of paper. I will find the piece of paper with the lowest integer choice, that will be the common factor for all of you I will multiply this by eleven, and for each one of you I will subtract from that eleven times the minimum, your own choice, and that would be your grade. Which means that if everybody chose nine the minimum would be nine. Nine times 11 will be the common factor for everyone minus nine their own choice 90% for everyone. If everyone chose eight, 80% every one. If everyone chose one, 10% everyone.’”
“Now I can tell you every single time I did this the vast majority chose one and everybody failed. And this is not a prisoner’s dilemma. It’s not a free ride. It’s not a situation where you want to cheat, you want others to choose a high number and for you to choose the low number, why? Because if you choose low number then the minimum goes low then you lose too. So here is a typical coordination problem. Everybody’s trying to do the following (the optimal strategy by the way in this game is to choose what you think the minimum will be amongst the rest) and choose that. So if you think everybody else will choose nine you’re best off choosing nine because if you choose eight the minimum becomes eight… So it’s a guessing game. Everyone’s trying to guess the minimum. What will be the minimum depends on the average degree of optimism. If the class is optimistic that people will be optimistic that everybody else will be optimistic then they all choose nine confirming the optimism that they imagined would be present. But if they are pessimistic they will all choose one, the only thing I remember, I would pick out one of those students and I’d say to them ‘you’ve chosen one, why did you choose one, don’t you you realize that you choose one you fail and everybody fails?’ The answer is, you know what, it is a natural belief to think that there will be at least one other person that who fears that there is another person in this room who fears that there is someone in this room who will choose one. Because then one will be the minimum choice and then I’m best off, given that one would be the best choice to choose one because if you choose more than you will be subtracting more than one from the common factor, okay? Now that is the conundrum of investment. If investors fear that the level investment will be low then the level of investment will be low. And their pessimistic expectations are going to be confirmed. And they will turn around and say ‘see, I was right’. But that doesn’t mean that they were right, it means we live in a world of multiple equilibria some good, nine eight seven, in the example I gave some awful, one two three. And courtesy of being equilibria, there’s no one one outcome which is more equilibrium over the other, we are all equilibria, some are better some are worse. And whether we go to the good to the bad and vice versa? Average optimism.”
“But the reason is very simple. There can be no such thing as a gold standard. There can be no such thing as apolitical money. And I’ve already explained that story about optimism. Because the moment pessimism prevails, and it can prevail for any reason, any reason. It can be some earthquake.”
“My message to you is that money is not just a quantity, it also has a quality which has to do with human sentiment. The optimism I was earlier referring to, the game I was playing with my students or was forcing on my students, remember the game does not have a solution, it has multiple solutions. And when everything is possible, when every outcome is a potential solution to the mathematical model then the effect is as if you don’t know.”
-Yanis Varoufakis