Here’s a fascinating development in supply-chain security. Toyota is trying to prevent their vehicles from ending up being used by extremists (a very old problem) by creating an explicit agreement with their buyers.
With over 22,000 pre-orders for the new 300 Series, Japanese publication Creative311 reports that Toyota Japan now requires that an agreement be signed, confirming that any new Land Cruiser purchased will not be resold.
The other argument made is not about militants; allegedly Toyota also is trying to prevent artificial scarcity from hedge buyers soaking up supplies to spike prices.
Although, to be fair, financial extremism is still a form of extremism. Both forms of extremism could be seen as criminal or even terror.
Margaret Olivia Sage was a school teacher who married into wealth. After being widowed she rapidly dedicated her inheritance to the betterment of others.
If you think charity spend by billionaires today is controversial, just look back at the early 1900s during industrialization. Let’s start in 1907 when Margaret Olivia Sage invented a new level of charity, by setting up the first private family foundation (causal analysis to alleviate poverty) with a unprecedented and whopping $10 million.
In the 37 years of their marriage, Russell and Olivia Sage were to make only three major donations: to the Troy Female Seminary, the Women’s Hospital, and the American Seamen’s Friend Society, totaling approximately $220,000. In the years after Russell’s passing, however, Olivia made up for lost time. […] When Russell Sage died in 1906, he left a fortune of $75 million to his wife. She proceeded to give away approximately $45 million in the next dozen years before her own death in 1918.
John D. Rockefeller saw Margaret’s genuine acts and smelled a loophole. He soon after applied for his own charter for a completely open-ended grant making foundation (the genesis of American “think tanks” for political sway).
No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.
In a 1910 speech (penned by Gifford Pinchot) from the hallowed ground of John Brown in Kansas, to an audience estimated at 30,000, he went even further in his advice:
Ruin for our democracy, he warned, will be “inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.” […] A fortune “gained without doing damage to the community” he added, deserves no praise. Americans needed to set a higher standard. We should permit fortunes “to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”
More to the point, William Jewett Tucker pointed out Carnegie unjustly cut wages of his workers to enrich himself, using charity acts to obscure it. Tucker wrote:
There is no greater mistake… than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice.
80% of people surveyed did not trust Gates in 2004 when he announced that spam would be gone by 2006.
Guess where Silicon Valley today gets its ideas about big false promises from.
Gates’ absolute stance on ignoring safety and security in a dangerous rush to market, combined with infamously predatory tactics, birthed the crisis of malware and ransomware millions of people suffer from even today. Spam still isn’t gone.
He recanted somewhat in 2001, arguably admitting his wealth accumulation had been immoral for two decades, yet… damage was done and he’s not spending his billions on fixing the global catastrophe he created, nor surrendering it to people who need it most (e.g. working on accountability and reparations let alone justice).
Sean J. Kelly intelligently examines, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, the aesthetic effects of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845), specifically those effects produced by the poem’s sublime architectonics of present-absence. While critics have examined the role of the sublime and uncanny in the poem, most of these studies have focused on providing an historical context for Poe’s aesthetics or establishing cultural sources for the poem’s symbolic imagery. By contrast, Kelly aims to demonstrate that both the form and content of “The Raven” anticipate the psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian-Lacanian, concept of das Ding—the mythical “Thing”—which Jacques Lacan, in Seminar VII, argues is the lost object “attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.” Because, according to Lacan’s theory, this concept names the void around which human subjectivity forms and all subsequent desire turns, art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.”
An interesting perspective on disinformation comes from a history teacher, quoted in a Florida opinion piece:
Maybe white students deserve more credit than they get. Maybe — apologies to The Who — the kids are all right.
Leo Glaze seems to think so, based on a tweet I chanced upon last week. In it, he described himself as an educator who has spent his career in predominantly white private middle schools. “I think I teach … history about as hard & honest as any teacher in America,” he wrote. “And when kids learn the truth about this country, they’re shocked and pissed off they’ve been lied to. Not uncomfortable.”
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
