EVEN IF THE FRIDGE IS FULLER AND THE PHONE IS SMARTER

Insight from your friendly Microsoft Co-pilot prompt by apropos.

Where life really did improve 1. People live longer—on average Life expectancy rose significantly from 1960 to the 2010s, even with the COVID dip. Macrotrends Stanford Center on Longevity 2. Formal rights expanded End of de jure Jim Crow, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s legal and economic rights—all of that is a real shift in the legal terrain. 3. Material standard of living More people have access to cars, refrigeration, air conditioning, digital communication, information, and medical technology that simply didn’t exist in the 1960s. Where quality of life clearly degraded 1. Inequality and class fracture Wealth and income are far more concentrated at the top; a Senate HELP Committee report bluntly notes extreme inequality and that over 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Senator Bernie Sanders 2. Life expectancy inequality Higher-income Americans gained more years of life; lower-income groups saw smaller gains or stagnation. Inequality in life expectancy has stopped falling and in some dimensions is rising. Congress.gov  Stanford Center on Longevity 3. Work insecurity Union density collapsed, long-term employment eroded, and gig/contingent work expanded. The “you can raise a family on one industrial wage” 1960s myth is gone for most. 4. Carceral state Since the 1970s, the U.S. built a massive incarceration machine. For Black, Indigenous, and poor communities, quality of life is inseparable from surveillance, policing, and imprisonment. So, has the standard of living improved or decreased? If you average everything: Material standard of living: mostly up Formal rights and protections: up, though under attack Security, equality, and mental load for working-class people: down Outcomes split by class and race: more polarized For a wealthy or even solidly upper-middle household, life now is objectively “better” than the 1960s on almost every axis. For a poor or working-class household—especially Black, Brown, disabled, or criminalized—life is more surveilled, more precarious, more unequal, even if the fridge is fuller and the phone is smarter.

By Apropos

SO WHAT TROJAN HORSE IS NEXT UP? By William Thorpe

The last one was, the VOTE NO ? Right. But then isn't every tick-tock of our political moments a one after the other Trojan Horse, because anytime the operative is deception, meaning when the People are so held in disdain that we must be lied to, politics then becomes that ever increasing coat of glossy veneer, the thicker the appliqué the louder and raucous the gulping noises of the swallowing of that proverbial hook and sinker, ain't it? Lest someone mistakes me for a smart alecky cynic, I'm not. I BEGIN: No one made a big deal of Samuel Alito's, comments on Americans exercising Americanness protesting governmental acts, during his confirmation hearings to become an associate justice of The Supreme Court of The United States. Again Samuel Alito, gave us a Trojan Horse moment, with his sneering condemnations of Americas' Youth protesting governmental activities. The confirmation process to assume the privilege of becoming a cog in the governmental machinery of The United States or any other jurisdictional governmental position, is opportunity for the American People through their elected representatives, to interrogate the why's and responsibleness of speech. In other words, the question isn't does one have the "constitutional" right to the speech, but does the speech comport with and advance the Declarations of The National Constituted Speech. So Alito would have had to defend why he was at odds with protest speech, which by the way is our National animating embodiment, from that incipient hurled defiance: "When in the course of human events,...",but he wasn't held to account and he subsequently marched onto the Court to perform his Trojan Horse functions. Justice Samuel Alito isn't an exception, but is the rule. What I'm doing is simply showing how there isn't one element to blame for the current social and political convulsions. There isn't corruption in a lesser degree and what I mean is simply this our National Institutions have always betrayed that incipient National Declarative. As constructive as Roosevelt's New Deal was, an entire people were left in it's wake, Yes Black People were casually and conveniently overlooked. We are constantly and consistently told that there are media that speaks with a "liberal" voice, yet who was the most strident critic of Martin Luther King Jr. when he dared call out the injustices of our National Government's behavior in Vietnam, which true to form and naturally continued into the apoplexy over Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. So when we see the Malcolm Xnesque,"chickens coming home...."of ski-mask or balaclava clad ICE agents stomping on our City Avenues and Boulevards, isn't the logical question then that of why, were those Black Nationalist theoreticians dismissed when they offered the painstakingly formulated critique of the Police behaving as occupying forces in Black American environments? Yet in the face of these current antagonisms and convulsions, there is still that impotence and its hapless illiteracy to come in from that proverbial cold of "enabling", which is what is being done, when every retort that is intended to groom the stupefied populace into the acceptance of their orgiastic violent capabilities, is treated as legitimate and responsible. In other words every retort, every utterance from cogs in the governmental machinery of a National Declarative, that categorically denounces and repudiates," No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States..."is treated as noblesse, as if a bullypulpit is sacrosanct and dare not be called to account.

By William Thorpe

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO CRITIQUE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT II By William Thorpe

In part one to this work I basically gave a narrative composite of the value realization along with terms and relations within a Social Contract, specifically our contemporary American one, as being perverted, betrayed and distorted by the political critique and analysis of a middle and center. In sum I disabused the purported analysis of having any redemptive utility, save for treachery, which I then fleshed out how our contemporary American political moment is a defacto consequence and result of that political critique work and its analysis of a purported middle and center. In this part II, the critique I present, is simply this: why isn't critique of this political moment, presented on it's terms, without dabbling into that strawmanesque theater of firstly legitimizing its incorrectness by responding to it as if it has and can claim any intellectual, aspirational and practical legitimacy, when we know that it doesn't. Our and The American Democracy as Constituted isn't a petty reduction to just the exercise of an unchallenged and unquestioned Executive "BULLY-PULPITISM", in any form and incarnation. In other words, we cannot on the one hand claim that nobility and aristocracy are discredited Social Contract terms and relations, then affirm their conservative dynamics and existence with the resulting and inevitable antagonisms by ceding our agency of critique on our terms as we purse the affirmative realization of the inexorability of progress as organic inevitability. Which is what brings me to this, contrary to the intellectual-liberalism of reaction and its idealistic impositions, violence, respect and its fear dicta have nothing to do with the aspiration and work of perfecting the unity of the people. Yes The People as organic entity can be terrorized and cowered into that state of zombie compliance along with its attendant suppositions, but what it subsequently produces (and chronicles of our existence are replete with it and the resulting labor of rebuilding the human person, irrespective of altruistic reasons) is of course that negation of the fruits of our Sapience and claimed theological, cosmological narrative in the form of creating that one-dimensional social creature, correct political critique and analysis intends and anticipates liberating. So this corresponds to this political moment in this form and fashion. The United States as Constituted is a Nation according to Constitutional Dicta right? And we experienced this logic during the reaction to Nicole Jones's 1619 Project, where the opposition and rejectionist formulations, hinged on the sophistry that the United States didn't become a Nation till 1776 and 1789 as such The 1619 Project's thesis of the political-economy of Enslavement Of Africans as dynamic of all that is Americana must be false. This work isn't responding to that sophistry save to say that what's good for the goose is most definitely excellent to the gander, because, if this contemporary American political moment is one that is fractious, extolling the supremacy of the partisan and faction, then we are not a Nation and despite the exercised police powers and organized violence of the executive, appropriating agency under the exegesis of The National Executive in pursuit of a factionalized and fractionalized politics that is in explicit enmity with the citizenry cannot then claim National character as basis for its activities, because it is at war with the Nation as Constituted and its this level and form of critique this moment demands.

By William Thorpe

MAN WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO CRITIQUE OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT? By William Thorpe

Let me begin by disabusing us of the strawmanesque charade of a political middle or center, which critique of the Social Contract typically and fraudulently purports. So let's use the simple everyday existence of interactions and its terms of value exchange, which is the only honest and practical denominator of speaking to and describing human behavior and terms and relations of a Social Contract, which to economize brain storage space, we categorize and characterize it, "political-economy". So with that said when you the reader are hungry, is there a middle ground? or when you're in a store where stuff are sold and bought, is there a middle ground on whether you have the means to acquire anything, isn't it the either or of whether you can or not? I'm positing these rudimentary and profane examples to compel clarity on what we mean by "middle", because notwithstanding acknowledging the mechanics of any decision making process," middle" as political critique is an insidious and destructive tactic, which to put and state bluntly is traitorous to that progressive motive-force of our Human Condition and its Social Contract medium and mechanism. So now let's confront what the strawmanesque charade of a middle or center as political analysis and critique has wrought. Before we as people and humans have and assume assignation, as value realization and its maturation in the terms and relations of a Social Contract and its political-economy, we are what, just The People. Then value realization and its maturation begins its inexorable compulsion and dictatorial emergence, as process of our education and functional literacy of the terms and relations of the Social Contract, we are birthed in, or in otherwords we begin to study learn, understand and attain the cognition of what we'll need in doing the business of being human, according to the gleaned, held dearly means and methods of the Society as, THE CULTURE and TRADITIONS, which by the way, again notwithstanding the approximate utility and purpose of agency or that deflective, distractive and delusional pull yourself up by your bootstrap, "meritocracy" critique, we had nothing to do with. So as we develop with and in the cognitive Cultural and Traditions, necessities for the business of being human, we begin to realize that we are now apart from the people, despite the fact that analytically we still and always are, that dynamic of THE PEOPLE, but and because of what we have come to understand and how we have come to it of the culture and traditions of the Society, its Social Contract and political-economy that we are birthed in, we begin to have a no middle ground or center with it, because we have our particular interest and along with such interest development, according to its relative attitude and effect on its realization we then critique the entire construct of the Social Contract, that, even as our Parents, members of the Society birthed us, it in turn births our realization and need of our no middle ground, interest based critique. Okay so all of this brings us to this contemporary moment in our American Social Contract, where we are specifically, not in general terms, but specifically confronted with the consequences of all of those past moments of the political middle critique and center analysis, which are now unveiled and exposed as nothing more than space that permitted, enabled and gave cover to REACTION in its most historic form to exist and maintain its intellectual-liberalism and psychosis. Because we compromised the Progressive critique and analysis for that farcical wink and nod of a delusional CENTER.

By William Thorpe