Return of Kings, that burning internet dumpster fire of pickup artistry and Trumpian bigotry, has decided to go all grade-school on us this week, posting an essay that is basically an adult, alt-right version of the classic “what I did on my summer vacation” essay assignment.
Like a lot of Americans, whether they’re in 6th grade or in their sixties, RoK contributor Michael Sebastian went to the beach.
And there he saw … a lot of people who weren’t white. In a post with the somber title, “A Summer Beach Trip Shows How Badly America Has Declined” Sebastian reports his dire findings:
The most obvious change is that there has been a dramatic change in the level of diversity. When I was a teenager, the beach was nearly 100% white. The diversity, such as it was, consisted of a handful of blacks. Whites still comprised about two-thirds of the beach goers, but now there were also lots of Hispanics along with smaller numbers of Muslims, Asians, and Indians. Of course, there continued to be a small number of black families.
I can only assume that Sebastian, the author of a self-published book titled Staying Married in a Degenerate Age, showed up at the beach with a little notebook in which to record the presumed ethnicity of all the other beachgoers.
The Hispanics were notable because it was very apparent that they were poor. Many of the families did not have bathing suits—they were in the ocean in their street clothes. It was especially awkward for the women as a blouse and long skirt are less than ideal beachwear. While I am certain there were poor families in the beach in my youth, I don’t recall anyone so poor that they could not purchase a bathing suit.
Maybe Trump will build you a wall around the beach.
The Muslims were also an interesting addition. I noticed several women walking along the beach covered head to ankle in dark clothing walking on the beach in 95-degree heat.
At this point I’m pretty sure that Sebastian is just making things up. How many beaches in America boast such a perfect cross-section of All the People the Readers of Return of Kings Hate?
Sebastian never tells us what beach he allegedly went to, only that he lives in a “large city.” I also live in a large city, one in which white people are a minority. But even in the relatively less-segregated neighborhood that I live in, where most of the people you see out and around are likely to be people of color, I don’t normally see a crowd quite this rainbow-hued.
Sebastian goes on to complain about tattooed women, another Return of Kings bugbear, before informing us that some of the people on this Beach of Terror were on the drugs. Because Sebastian can totally tell.
Extreme diversity and abundant tattoos are one thing, but there is nothing that indicates spiritual bankruptcy like drug abuse. The most disturbing thing that I witnessed was the high number of people who were strung out on something. Everyone that I saw looked like they were intoxicated by something other than alcohol or pot. All of them were young. All of them were white.
Oh, no, not the white people!
I saw one young woman slowly rotating in circles with her hands on her temples in the middle of the day. There were small groups of people who seemed to have no awareness of their surroundings.
To be fair, I sometimes rotate in circles in the middle of the day. It’s fun. You should try it!
Adding insult to imaginary injury, Sebastian reports that while driving his family back home from the beach one night,
a car in the right lane suddenly swerved into my lane almost crashing into our car. My wife glanced over to find out what was happening with the driver. It turned out that it was a middle aged woman who was snapping a selfie as she was going through the tunnel—no doubt to post on Facebook.
This was followed, I imagine, by monkeys flying out of Sebastian’s butt.
Sebastian ends his little screed by comparing present-day America to — yes, you guessed it — the Roman empire in its final days.
With the exception of diversity, which is a weapon used by the elite to divide, conquer, and rule the population, each of the things I saw on my beach vacation indicated that the foundation of America is rotting. Ancient Rome became great because of the vigor and austerity of its people. Once Romans lost their founding virtue, the Empire collapsed. …
Barring some sort of great upheaval, it is likely that the US is headed for the same fate that befell Rome.
WORST. VACATION. EVER.
@EJ
The fastest growing natural resource seems to be humans…
@ EJ
Just shy of 1500 people a year pass the bar exams here. About 350 ultimately obtain a place in chambers (other career options are available of course, it’s still a handy qualification). I’m assuming by the 80-100 hour work week that the solicitors profession is similarly competitive.
Our current economic model in the UK requires an unemployment rate of around 5-10%. That’s enough to keep inflation low but still keep the tax in/welfare payments out balance viable.
That’s the theory anyway.
@PoM
I’m really tired and my hand hurts like hell, so forgive me for copypasting; I’ll try to adress things point by point later. Also, families are historically speaking commonly run on way authoritarian lines, especially in heavily patriarchal cultures; that’s why Marx, along with many communist theoreticians, calls for the abolishment of the family, although what they want it replaced with varies widely.
Quoted from myself, last time this type of thing came up:
These thinkers support personal rights limited only by mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, and seek an economy where business and industry are owned and controlled by the people who actually make them productive, i.e. the workers. We seek an economic landscape composed of sole-proprietors, partnerships, and worker cooperatives, where each person has a say in their own economic future. We also would like to see civic affairs managed in a consensus-based democratic manner; freedom and self-governance in civic and economic matters is our watchword. (As a note, the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy has been working on putting this into practice for quite a while, and they consistently show the highest wages and standards of living for equivalent administrative areas across Europe. IJS).
specifically, it is anarcho-communism and/or anarcho-syndicalism. I would also like to clarify at this time that a)Marxism is not the be-all end-all of communist thinking, and b) that Stalinism and Maoism bear considerably less resemblance to Marxism than they do to fascism; note the cult of personality around the ‘great leader’ and the extreme nationalism, frex. Also, in the Stalinist system the State owned everything and controlled the entire economy, which resulted in disaster and is entirely contrary to any kind of communist thinking.
TL;DR:
State run economies =/= communism.
Even though it was a repeat, that was a great comment the first time and worth the copypasta, @Dalillama. I hope your hand feels better soon!
@Axe, You’re right – though your level of rightness varies for some definitions of “scarcity”! I was mentioning it more as a “people should be less required to do jobs they hate just to eat food and not freeze to death” statement really. Post-scarcity economy is more about a mindset in my interpretation – it will happen when we value the time of other people as much as we value our own, I think. But that’s just me being all squishy socialist, I think.
@Dalillama
Sorry to hear about your hand. Your comment, though, is full of “we would like” and “we seek.” While all of that is true, it doesn’t reflect what actually happens when communists attempt to implement communism. I just can’t ignore the track record in favor of the ideal. I realize that communism hasn’t gotten a fair shake because it’s never been done “correctly,” but my belief is that doing it correctly is impossible. That’s what I said up front: that the problem is not communism per se, but the authoritarianism that is required to implement it. If you can implement communism without authoritarianism, that would be fantastic, but in the real world nobody has accomplished that yet and I don’t personally see a path to doing it.
@PoM
Now with links:
The Emilian Model – Profile of a Co-operative Economy
Learning from Emilia Romagna’s cooperative economy
http://harvardkennedyschoolreview.com/zapatista-development-local-empowerment-and-the-curse-of-top-down-economics-in-chiapas-mexico/
@PoM, Dalillama, I’ve often considered what ubiquitous high-quality automated manufacturing would do for society and how it could be leveraged into more equitable social arrangements. Once of the paths I could see a proper true-communist society forming is that way. Ubiquitous local manufacturing could take a lot of wind from the sails of the capitalist greed-machine and make the city/community much more important as a power centre; the big global transport network would be limited to rare and poorly distributed resources instead. Each city its own city-state, with the capacity to provide ample goods and materials to the people who live there, and each with its own farmland and ‘hinterland’, trading largely for diversity of foodstuffs and foreign-made exotics that couldn’t be made locally for some reason.
It’s certainly a pipe dream as the world is more complicated than that, but I can see that sort of a world opening opportunities for true-communism of the sort Dalillama describes, without the need for coercion. (This of course assumes a base level of socialist tendency in the society, as the same setting could also tend towards despotism or oligarchy, just on a more local scale)
Still, I find it’s a fantasy world I keep coming back to. I don’t really know why, I just find it a neat concept!
@Scildfreja
I’m a Delbert Downer on these things. I don’t think the majority of people will ever not hafta work to not die. How much work will they hafta do tho? I like that line of thinking better. The weekend exists. The 40hr week exists (theoretically anyway). Child labor laws exist. Social security exists. We’ve done this before. Shouldn’t be too hard to build on that. Also cooperatives. That’s me being all fuzzy socialist 🙂
@Dali
Not you obvs, but it was somebody’s thinking…
@ scildfreja
As always you’ve got me a pondering. How would your city state model work in practice?
Imagine that each state has a factory (or more likely an industrial district) that literally makes just about everything. Every make and model of TV, refrigerator and car. 3D printing on an industrial scale. Maybe you just pay for the IP licence to the company that owns the designs.
That’s not completely implausible. Rival car manufacturers already share production facilities. Just look at the Citreon C1, Peugeot 107 and Toyota Yaris for example (and bonus points for anyone who knows how LEXUS originated)
But where do the raw materials come from? That’s down to where they’re to be found. Very few oil reserves in Manchester. And what about energy? It’s not just about production, distribution and load spread are often underlooked factors. That actually militates against localism. There are sound technical reasons the UK and France have linked their national grids.
So we’re still going to need a massive transport infrastructure as before. And the energy costs of moving all the raw materials means you’ll probably be just as better off having your ACME factories in one place and enjoy the economies of scale and avoid the wastes of duplication.
Interesting idea though and I do think as technology improves you’ll see a lot of stuff just manufactured in the home. Browse for the latest trainers then buy the license and download to print them on your own 3D printer. Or get your robot to knit them for you.
Some ideas to consider for sure.
@Axe, you’re right, we’re on the same page here. You’re describing the trend line whereas I’m describing the asymptote, that’s all. Let our functions be exponential towards that golden line.
@Alan, you’re also right! The idea as I described it really wouldn’t work today as-described. We just aren’t there with automation yet. However, having that sort of ubiquitous automation implies a certain level of sophistication, suggesting things like
– bioplastics or (ideally) lithoplastics, to convert ubiquitous materials into useful stuffs. Not perfect (especially in the bioplastics area) but if I can fill a tank with sewage and add a bacteria that eats organics and poops out some sorta useful bio-polymer…
– shifting away from metals towards high-tensile/thermal plastics for many jobs
– carbon batteries
etc, etc. You’re totally right in that the idea doesn’t work with our current fossil-fuel infrastructure that’s dependent on poorly distributed, relatively rare materials like copper, iron, nickel, cadmium, etc.It really only works if your ubiquitous automated manufacturing takes local materials as input, too.
So, yes! Sort of science fiction. But it’s not that far from what we’ve got right now
(I may or may not be working on a video game that uses this concept right now)
@Scildfreja
Bah-lah-lah-lah
@ scildfreja
I’ve mentioned before the wonderful NASA briefing document for Apollo that’s full of references like:
“To be made of a material (that will need to be invented)…”
(There was also a brilliantly optimistic engineering project in Scandinavia where they built a bridge starting at each end on the assumption that they’d have figured out a way of joining it up by the time they got to the middle.)
@Dalillama
A state actor is always fundamentally different from a non-state actor. A communist commune within the US can’t become totalitarian. At worst, a commune (of any kind) becomes a cult of personality and it can become very bad, but the state is always there to step in if it finds out. And it will step in if it finds out. That constant threat of intervention has effects. Let’s not pretend that it doesn’t.
Maybe I should have been more clear: I am referring to communism on a state level. Comparing regional communism to state communism is apples to oranges. And, as I said at the beginning, there are smaller examples where everyone buys in where communism can work, but its track record on the state level is not good. I can’t ignore that.
Maybe I didn’t make myself understood, or maybe I am the one who is not comprehending. What you’rr describing is exactly what I said is the level of equality that CAN be achieved and should be achieved. In this possible and productive society, everyone has the basics covered and competition is fair, because everyone has access to plenty of food, decent housing, clothes, safety, transportation and the same access to education (schools and unis must be exclusively public, no exceptions). But there are still things such as different salaries and with them luxuries, such as Ferraris, designer bags, whatever, and therefore, competition. So you are TRULY free to pursue whatever career you really want, IF you want any, and rest assured your family will have everything that is necessary, as well as the same opportunities as Trump’s family. But certain professions that have higher need than people passionated about them, have an additional plus, which is a high salary that will let you buy luxury goods, giving you another reason to pursue them. This is the society I personally find possible and even very close to reality in certain countries.
But what I don’t find possible or fair, is a society where everyone, independent from profession, has the same exact income, because in that society, we will lack people in certain professions.
Let me try to explain in a metaphor: imagine economic success is a race. Your ability to run is directly related to how much you like running independent from prize (aka working at rentable professions for just passion) and to how much you want or need the prize (economic success).
In the world as it is nowadays, the run already begins rigged. Trump’s son begins waaaay ahead of me and I have to jump through a lot of obstacles he won’t have. And as it is nowadays, the “winners” get ridiculously rich, the losers get homeless and go through hunger. I want my children to start off better than me and never worry about the basic stuff iIhave to worry about, so I have to run much faster than I actually like and want to.
In the world I think is fair, wonderful and possible, me and Trumpy begin side by side, equal education makes the run very fair. The winners don’t get so stupidly rich, but the losers don’t get homeless and hungry. So, hey, I’ll definitely run, because having shiny things is nice and running feels good, but I won’t have to run until my lungs explode and my feet are bleeding. But who really wants to be rich has incentive to run harder, which is great, you go, buddy! And if, for example, we have fewer doctors than needed, you just make the prize higher so people feel more motivated!-This situation is what I understand as a social democracy, it’s what I understand certain first world countries are trying to do.
In the society I’m saying is not possible or desirable or productive, the race begins equal and ends equal. There are no losers, there are no winners, there is no prize. You can stay still, run backwards, run really fast, there’s no difference. BUT humanity needs a certain number of people who, for whatever reason, runs really fast, and I feel that with no prize, very few people will feel like running, because very few people really like running. Some people argue that this is the only way the run could be fair and enough people will want to run really hard, to which I say… Okay. I disagree, but ok! – This last situation is what I understand as full blown Communism.
Am I making any sense? You may notice my lack of technical words, that’s because I have none. This is just based on my personal beliefs, and it’s 90% possible I’m speaking a loooooad of bs. And some people argue that if I just comprehend the last situation better I’d agree with it, which is why, among other reasons, I want to learn. So I at least know what kind of society I vote and strive for ^^
Wow, starting at Dalli’s comment, I am understanding like… 2% of what you all are saying. But uh, you go, I’ll just take a sit and watch. :p
You are so smart :3 I hope we can talk in degree of equality someday.
@Dalillama
I’m sorry to hear about your hand! You might want to discuss the following another time.
I don’t know a lot about economics, but like many people I know more now than I did in 2008 (shudder).
Are you familiar with Richard Wolff? I hear him sometimes on my community-supported radio station on the Pacifica network. What do you think of him?
He’s all about cooperatives, and talks about a large, well-established one in Spain a lot. According to Wolff, cooperatives are “democracy in the workplace.” I’ve loved cooperatives for forever, not to mention fair trade. What do you think? (Oops I just refreshed my memory — you’ve got a link about co-ops!) I’d still like to know your opinion.
Anybody else have opinions on this?
http://www.truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/44661
@Dalillama
Sorry, I can see that you’re all about the cooperatives. (Doh!)
My takeaway: Read before commenting.
@Kat
Wolff fan here. His intro to Marxism video series and Orwell’s Animal Farm a few years earlier made me the degenerate ‘leftist’ I am today!
@Axe
Congratulations!
@Kat
Yup, the Mongragon co-ops. I prefer to use the Italian ones as examples for a few reasons. I’m not familiar with Wolff, but eill look into him. Does he write at all?
My experience with Maslow’s hierarchy – apart from it missing some areas – is that if someone has suffered a serious disruption to safety or love, physiology begins to collapse even if all the building blocks for it are there. Your health dives.
And sometimes people can end up with self-actualization while undergoing physical collapse, because nothing really says that any state exists for any length of time.
And, fuck it, ‘sex’ is always listed at the base, but asexuals are going to find that they are unhappy if people are always nagging them about it.
I just have so many issues with it.
@Dalillama
Here he is:
http://www.rdwolff.com/media
I like him because his discussions are very down to earth and clear.
I’ve been arguing with some jerk who thinks that women are trying to get out of paying their fair share in the taxes that go towards schools, infrastructure, and other government-budget-things by pushing to eliminate the sales tax on tampons and pads. We’re buying a lot of the same essentials and paying the sales tax on those, but for some reason he doesn’t get why it’s an issue to be paying tax on an ESSENTIAL for all women of menstruating age and not yet in menopause that men do not have to buy.
At this point there should just be a bunch of menstruating women showing up at his house to bleed on his furniture and whatnot. Yes, I am beyond frustrated.
@dalillama
Here’s Richard Wolff being interviewed by Bill Maher. It’s only 8 minutes long. Of particular note is his discussion about how capitalists chase profit across the globe. They have no loyalty to the country that they live in. So now that travel and telecommunications have gotten much easier, they’re picking up their industries and taking them to poor countries, leaving devastated workers, families, communities, and economies behind them.
It’s enough to make a revolutionary out of my late Republican mother.
@msexceptiontotherule
He gets it. He’s just flirting with you.
Nothing attracts a woman as much as a guy acting stupid or stonewalling her or gaslighting her.
Or at least that seems to be the theory.