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As a junior doctor working in the coronavirus wards, I have witnessed socialism in action. Health workers of every grade have worked to exhaustion to save other people. The workers of the National Health Service, whether in crisis or in times of greater calm, were not motivated by profit or individual gain, but for the highest human principle the fight for life.

This historic crisis has also exposed the dark side of our system. From Boris Johnsons dishonesty to our health systems reliance on grubby corporate profiteers to deliver life-saving equipment, it couldnt be clearer that things should not go on like this. Our country has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world. That is a result of not only our governments appalling decisions, but the neoliberal political system that has been the norm for all my life.

Working in the NHS, I have been desperate for Labour to expose the full extent of the crisis our health system is under a systemic failure that has left my colleagues doing their best to save lives with decaying infrastructure and out-of-date PPE. Our party has been far too willing to go along with government policy, and not willing enough to present a courageous alternative.

Many young members are disappointed and angry. I have been persuading them with all my heart to stay in the Labour Party, but we have to prove that were worth sticking with. Tony Benn spoke of the two flames in every person: the flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope in a better world. I feel both of those flames burning in me, and this is why I am once again standing to represent young members on our partys national executive committee (NEC).

In the midst of a global crisis, nobody should be too keen on discussing internal elections. But the two things are closely linked. Soon, well be entering one of the greatest recessions in history. When that crisis will be handled by a hard-right Tory government propped up by billionaires and corporate conmen, we need a party that wont accept their plans to reshape society in their interests but will resist with all its might. All too often, it feels like Sir Keir Starmers leadership is doing quite the opposite.

When asked by angry members about why they should stay, I remind them of the socialist heritage in our party. The left-wingers who ignored Labours leadership and confronted the Blackshirts during the struggles of the Thirties. The stalwarts like Bernie Grant and Diane Abbott, who fought racism and sexism when these issues were embarrassing to the party establishment. The Tribune group and union-sponsored MPs who resisted attempts to water down our commitment to workers rights when we were in power, and figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Dennis Skinner who spoke out against the War on Terror and the demonisation of Britains Muslim community.

This is the red thread of Labour I proudly identify with. And organising with the oppressed must remain at the heart of our path to victory. When a young, multiracial movement in Bristol tears down the statue of a slave trader, Young Labour should be on their side, proudly and loudly saying that Black Lives Matter. From the oppression of the Kashmiris and the annexation of the West Bank to the murderous counter-offensive against socialists and social democrats in Latin America, Young Labour must stand with them.

When trans people face horrific levels of discrimination for simply existing, Young Labour should stand in solidarity with them, whether that bigotry comes from street harassment or government legislation. When Boris Johnson tries to force teachers and carers to work in potentially lethal conditions during a pandemic, Young Labour must be unconditionally with those workers and their unions, not invested in petty parliamentary games.

This is the Young Labour Ive helped to build over the past two years, and one we must keep on building. As our generation faces Tory rule, a resurgent far-right, living and working at the mercy of bosses and landlords, and a looming climate breakdown, we need an organised, fighting youth movement.

I am proud of the last two years. At Labours 2019 party conference, Young Labour wrote and passed a comprehensive housing crisis policy. It demanded rent controls, the end of Right to Buy on day one of a Labour government, and for legal powers regarding the public ownership of land, so that Britain can finally build genuinely affordable housing on a mass scale.

I organised a National Political School, which brought together young members with council leaders, trade union militants, Windrush justice campaigners, socialist economists and veterans of the underground struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Our conference Youth Days have also seen similarly fascinating discussions between young people from all over the world, coupled with inviting socials that strengthen the bonds and friendship of the whole movement.

And after the era of New Labour contempt for our unions, Ive used my time as an NEC member to maximise the voice and role of organised workers. I lobbied successfully for all Labour Party employees to be paid at least a living wage of 10 an hour. After years of what seemed like a hopeless struggle, I was delighted to begin the process by which Young Labour members have the open, democratic student wing they deserve. All student members can now elect their representatives for the first time.

All these things and more met with organised resistance. Looking at the relationships we built with the Norwegian Labour Party, the Austrian Social Democrats, and the Workers Party of Lula who we made our honorary president in a gesture of international defiance and solidarity we saw that Young Labour lags far behind our sister organisations elsewhere. Unlike in other countries, young democratic socialists in Britain lack the institutional resources and autonomy to run mass campaigns that speak directly to young peoples concerns and hopes.

Under the previous leadership, even the democracy review proved to be a huge disappointment, despite Young Labours best efforts. Given the ugly internal culture of unaccountable power and prejudice unmasked by the leaked Labour report, greater transparency and democracy is still the watchword.

Labour frustrates us all sometimes. I campaign to make it better because I love this party and desperately want a Labour government. We cannot win with young people alone, but we cannot win without my generation either. From Jeremy Corbyns leadership to the Black Lives Matter protests, we certainly wont win by delegitimising visions of a better world that galvanise the youth. They are movements, not moments, and our party cant afford to ignore them.

We cant forget that this Tory government went hard and won big on false promises of radical change to left-behind communities. There cant be any real return to the false comfort of business-as-usual politics. We need a Labour Party that is serious about a socialist alternative that takes us from anger to hope and victory. I desperately want Keir Starmer to be the next Prime Minister, but we have to be honest that wont happen unless Labour goes into the next election staying true to the radical principles on which he was elected to lead our party.

These are my truths, and if you lend me your vote to send me back to the NEC, I will fight for them with determination. I will do all I can to build a Young Labour that leads the way. I dont take no for an answer, and I dont stop until we win.

Original post:
Lara McNeill: Why Im standing again to be Labours NEC youth rep - LabourList

4 July 2020

Today marks the 244th anniversary of the public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776, which established the United States of America. By the time the Declaration was issued, the American colonistsand especially those of Massachusettshad already been at war with the immensely powerful military forces of Great Britain for 15 months. Though the final decision for independence had not yet been taken, the drafting of a Declaration was assigned on June 11 by the Continental Congress, assembled in Philadelphia, to a Committee of Five. It consisted of Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

After agreeing on an outline of the document, the Committee decided that the first draft should be written by the 33-year-old Tom Jefferson, whose exceptional intellect and remarkable literary gifts were already widely recognized. On June 28, he completed his draft, which was then reviewed by members of the Congress. Various changes were made in the course of the editing process. The most substantial change was the removal of Jeffersons indictment of Great Britain for having imposed slavery on the colonies. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution that authorized the break with Great Britain. Two days later, on July 4, it approved the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

The immediate political consequence of the documentthe formal break with Britain and the initiation of a full-scale war to secure the independence of the United Stateswas, in itself, sufficient to impart to the Declaration immense and enduring historical significance. But it is not only the direct political impact of the document but, rather, the principles it proclaimed that determined the world historical stature of the Declaration.

The document begins with the words, When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another What these words meant was that governments, and the political and social relations upon which they were based and which they defended, were not timeless and unalterable. They were the creation of men, not God. This assertion exploded the essential justification, sanctified by religion, for monarchy, aristocracy, i.e., for all forms of political power based on obscurantist veneration of bloodlines. What was created by man could be changed by man.

The Declaration then proceeded to a remarkable assertion: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In a strictly empirical sense, there was nothing self-evidentthat is, so obviously true that it hardly required further argumentabout any of these truths. Reality, as it was to be observed in every part of the world, including the colonies, contradicted what the Declaration claimed to be self-evident.

In the world of the late eighteenth century, most human beings were treated like beasts of burden, if not worse. Where in the world did existing conditions substantiate the claim that all of humanity had been created equal? The monarchies and aristocracies were based on the unchallengeable legitimacy of inherent inequality. The place of people in society, even where there had been a slow erosion of feudal relations, was a manifestation of a divine design.

Where was Life, for the great mass of people, honored and protected? In advanced Britain, children as young as six could be hanged for pick-pocketing a wealthy persons handkerchief. The great mass of people lived in wretched poverty, enforced by strict relations of feudal and semi-feudal hierarchy. There was little Happiness in the lives of the general population, let alone for the millions throughout the world and in the Americas who were enslaved and hardly considered to be human.

The truths invoked by Jefferson were not self-evident in a crudely empirical sense. They were, rather, truths that were obtained through the application of scientific thought, i.e., Reason, as it had developed under the influence of the physicist Isaac Newton, materialist thinkers such as John Locke, and the great French philosophes of the Enlightenment, to the study of history and human society. It was the application of Reason that determined what was, and was not, politically legitimate. It was science, not the irrational and unsubstantiated invocations of a divine order, that determined what must be. It was in this profound sense that the equality of man and the unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness were self-evident.

Jefferson and his comrades in arms were well aware that empirically existing political and social conditions did not conform to the self-evident Truths asserted in the Declaration. From this fact, the following conclusion was drawn: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Therefore, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thus, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed revolution to be a legitimate and even necessary means of removing from power governments that had become oppressive and injurious to the Happiness of the people. Jefferson adhered to this principle and displayed not the slightest squeamishness when the masses of France, inspired by American Revolution, took bloody vengeance against King Louis XVI and the aristocracy. Louis, declared Jefferson, ought to be punished like other criminals. Rather than witness the defeat of the French Revolution, Jefferson wrote to a friend, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now. He expressed unmitigated joy at the prospect of the revolutions victory, which would bring at length kings, nobles and priests to the scaffolds which they have been so long deluging with human blood.

It is, of course, an undeniable historical fact that Jeffersons personal ownership of slaves and his compromises with slavery represent the great irony and even tragedy of his life. They were the expression in his personal biography of the existing social conditions and contradictions of the world into which he was borna world in which slavery, serfdom, and numerous forms of indentured servitude flourished and whose legitimacy was hardly questioned. No doubt, the moralizing philistines of academia will continue to condemn Jefferson. But their condemnations do not alter by one iota the revolutionary impact of the Declaration of the Independence.

The American Revolution of 177583 did not solve the problem of slavery. This is not because the solution was blocked by Jefferson or other revolutionary leaders, like Washington, who owned slaves. The incomplete character of the first stage of the American bourgeois democratic revolution was determined by the existing objective conditionsand not simply those that existed in North America. Mankind, as Marx was later to explain, always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. The conditions for a decisive settlement with slavery did not yet exist. That still required several decades of industrial development and the emergence of an economically powerful capitalist class in the North. Moreover, that class had to develop a democratic political movement capable of mobilizing masses and sustaining a long and bitter civil war.

This essential social and economic process unfolded rapidly in the decades that followed the American Revolution. The capitalist development of the North became increasingly incompatible with the political domination of the United States by the Slave Power. This objective incompatibility found its ideological expression in the ever more intense awareness that the ideals of human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence could not be reconciled with the horrifying reality of slavery.

However, it must be stressed that the process of historical causation that led up to the Civil War was not driven in a one-sided manner by socioeconomic factors, with the ideological conflicts a mere reflection of the former. The influence exerted by the principles articulated in the Declaration played an immense, almost independent, role in influencing mass political consciousness in the North and preparing it for an intransigent struggle against the Slave Power.

Abraham Lincolns intellectual and political development epitomized the influence exerted by Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration that he authored. Again and again, in numerous speeches, Lincoln invoked the political legacy of Jefferson. For example, in a letter written in 1859, Lincoln stated:

All honor to Jeffersonto the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Following his election to the presidency in 1860, Lincoln declared: I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

And on his way to Washington to assume the presidency, Lincoln explained:

It [the Revolution] was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the motherland, but [of] that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence, which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson was the author of the great revolutionary manifesto that provided the ideological inspiration for the Civil War. Under Lincolns leadership, the Union armieswhich ultimately mobilized and armed tens of thousands of slaves in struggle against the Confederacydestroyed slavery.

Of course, the United States that emerged from the Civil War soon betrayed the promises of democracy and equality that Lincoln had made. The new birth of freedom gave way to the imperatives of modern capitalism. A new form of social struggle, between an emerging working class and an industrial bourgeoisie, came to dominate the political and social landscape. In this new class struggle, the northern bourgeoisie saw the benefit of an alliance with the remnants of the old slave-owning class. Reconstruction was brought to an end. Racism was incited and utilized as a potent weapon against the unity of the working class.

Intransigent opposition to this specific form of political reaction became a central task of the working class in the fight for socialism. Only though the establishment of workers' power, the ending of capitalism, and the building of a socialist society on a world scale can the scourge of racism and all forms of social oppression be overcome. And in this fight, the words and deeds of both Jefferson and Lincoln will continue to inspire. All that was historically progressive in their lifework lives on in the modern socialist movement.

David North

Here is the original post:
The two American Revolutions in world history - World Socialist Web Site

In February it came as quite a shock to many that Jordan Peterson was going through detox at a clinic in Russia after developing a dependency on benzodiazepine. At the time, Petersons daughter Mikhaila said he had nearly died several times but she suggested he was finally on the road to recovery.Theres some indication that he is indeed back at work now. Last week his website put out a call for new illustrations for the sequel to his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life.

I am currently in the process of writing my next book, and am searching for an illustrator to produce 12 images. Each chapter of my previous book, 12 Rules for Life: The Antidote to Chaos, was preceded by one line drawing, which was placed on its own page

I am planning something similar with the book I am working on now. The new illustrations must be line drawings, in black and white (because the book will not be printed in color). They will occupy a page at the beginning of each chapterjust as indicated, above. They also do not have to precisely duplicate the style of the previous illustrations, although they should bear some relationship to them, as the two books are companion volumes.

Peterson writes that he is specifically looking for an illustration for a chapter titled Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement which should be based on this tarot image of the fool:

In addition to this blog post there have been several recent updates to Petersons Instagram account. This one links to the call for an illustrator and includes a photo of Peterson working on the book, which will apparently be titled Beyond Order.

I also noticed this one from last week which includes a video of Peterson playing with a remote controlled car, apparently at home. His daughter wrote, Spotted@jordan.b.peterson actually enjoying himself. Hope you guys are finding time to do the same.

My initial reaction when I learned of Petersons drug dependency and near-death experience was that his career in public was over. After all, many in the media have been eager to see him fail for the past couple of years and it seemed like he had in fact failed in some sense. I was expecting most of the media to take a see, we told you so approach.

That may still turn out to be true, but I have to say Petersons timing may also turn out to be excellent. The next book is reportedly about chaos in the way the former book was about order. Its not hard to imagine that Petersons own experience of chaos in his personal life might become part of telling that story. If nothing else, he suddenly has a very new story to tell and one that is relevant to millions of people in the U.S. alone where deaths from drug addiction in recent years have far outpaced deaths from the coronavirus thus far.

The chaotic state of the world right now might also provide a perfect moment to say something about chaos more broadly. After all, there are no shortage of progressives suggesting now is the moment to capitalize on this crisis to build a new world. Even if you dont like their socialist solutions, its a timely idea.

I hope Peterson is able to recapture his footing and once again go toe to toe with his critics. He was a helpful corrective to a lot of progressive nonsense on the world state. It would be nice to have him back.

View post:
Jordan Peterson is back at work on his next book

(Jordan Peterson)

However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

I have a problem: My interests are esoteric, and most people are simply not very interested in the things that get me going. I do not often have an opportunity to discuss deeply the ideas that I am passionately interested in. So I was excited when Jordan Peterson announced his backing of the social networking website Thinkspot in June of 2019. I hoped that Petersons involvement would attract enough people who were Maps of Meaning (Petersons earlier and more involved book) readers, as opposed to say 12 Rules for Life(his more recent and popular work) fans. I hoped this would be a place where I might find the types of discussions I was looking for. However, satisfying my personal desire for stimulating conversation was not exactly why Thinkspot was created in the first place. All of the articles that I have read about Thinkspot make many assumptions and usually start with an ill-defined, sweeping gesture towards free speech. However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

The In Crowd

In 2006, crowdsourced user-generated content was the rage. Times Person of the Year was You, alluding to those individuals creating the content for Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, and countless other sites that would be empty, uninteresting deserts were it not for the content created by users themselves. Around that same time, a group of art lovers was creating a website called Indiegogo to crowdsource fundraisingor, as it soon became known, crowdfunding.

By 2013, seven years after Googles $1.65 billion acquisition of Youtube, user-generated content was becoming nothing short of big business. And Youtube was accounting for $3.5 billion in advertising dollars being collected by Google. So, for some creators on Youtube, things were getting increasingly serious. Youtube was no longer about a teenager sitting in his or her bedroom talking to the camera; creators such as Jack Conte were raising the bar on production values, creating full-fledged short films. At this point, Indiegogo (and other crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter) was becoming aviable option for well-known artists to seek funding for specific projects, such as the $5.7 million raised to create the 2014 film Veronica Mars or the $3.1 million Zach Braff raised for a film sequel to Garden State, the 2014 film Wish I Was Here. However, there was still no platform for artists to seek an ongoing stream of revenue: basically a salary. So Cone created one, Patreon, and he announced its creation in one of his Youtube videos.

The idea behind Patreon was a modern take on one of the oldest business models in the world: patronage for artists. For centuries, great artists, who were not independently wealthy, survived by securing the patronage of someone who was. Essentially, they were given an allowance by their patron (a salary, if you will) to ensure that they continued to create, and, in turn, the whole world benefited from the art they created. Patreon gained users and subscribers rapidlynot least because in 2016, Youtube began, in the words of Peter Kafka, demonetizingsome videos because its software thought the content was unfriendly for advertisers. So thanks to the demonetization trend, more and more creators needed to find alternative sources of revenue for businesses they had spent significant effort building, businesses that in some cases disappeared nearly overnight due to demonetization.

Release the Hounds

On December 17, 2014,Slatedeclared 2014 The Year of Outrage, and, six days later, Bloomberg published a response: an opinion piece entitled Sadism and the Online Mob: The Internet and social media make it easier for people to engage in vicious behavior toward one another.

The outrage mob was already a well-established phenomenon at that time, with Justine Sacco, a media publicist, making headlines as the poster child for Twitter mobs delighting in ruining lives over moral transgressions. The Twitter mob came to realize that it had significant influence, given that large corporations were willing to fire people just to placate these mobs. After Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, caused a stranger to be fired from his job with just one tweet, the mob turned on her, and she was soon fired herself. Once companies started caving to that kind of pressure, no one was safe.

Over the next couple of years, as Youtube demonetization became more aggressive, more creators sought relief with Patreon. By 2017 the service processed$150 million worth of payments to content creators. Some of the biggest recipients of these payments were Youtube content creators who had been demonetized because of the outage mobs reaction to their political views. However, Patreon eventually started showing signs of being co-opted by the trend towards censorious behavior, and it began to make decisions about who could (or could not) use the platform based on moral judgments. The consequence was the defection of a few of its highest-profile creator members: Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, and Jordan Peterson.

Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater

There had been a few controversies at Patreon since the censorship began in 2017; however, the tipping point for Harris, Rubin, and Peterson was the banning of British social commentator Carl Benjamin. Harris had already come close to leaving the year before over Patreons first high-profile banning: of Canadian filmmaker and journalist Lauren Southern based on the view that she was raising funds in order to take part in activities that are likely to cause loss of life.

With Benjamin, Patreon went a step further, however, by banning him because of words he used in a discussion on somebody elses Youtube videoin other words, for an opinion expressed on someone elses creative work. Bearing in mind that Patreon had up until that point been perceived as a neutral safe haven for creators, the banning of Benjamin was widely viewed as a betrayal of the long-standing Western value of free speech. Only social justice true believers felt that Benjamins speech rose to the level of clear and present danger (the doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States to determine under which circumstances limits can be placed on First Amendment guarantees). Most others felt thatas unfortunate and offensive as Benjamins speech wasbanning him from the platform was overreaching.

So this was the proximate cause for establishing Thinkspot: looking to create a free marketplace for ideas, where content creators could seek financial remuneration for their content without fear of having their business pulled out from under them because of the whims of the platform provider. Thinkspots answer to this was to combine the content presentation platform with the funding mechanism. Thus, Thinkspot was poised not just to be a Patreon Killer but also a Patreon, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter Killer.

Of course, the Killer characterization is hyperbole. I do not really think that Thinkspots founders sought to displace Youtube as the worlds premier purveyor of cat videosor to unseat Twitter as the worlds premier home for inchoate rage. The idea was to rely upon the reputations of Peterson and Rubinnoted free speech advocatesto assure creators that the platform would remain ideologically neutral, while ensuring that the voices of controversial content creators would not be financially starved-out of the marketplace of ideas. Simply put: Thinkspots original and primary objective was to provide content creators with a reliable revenue stream.

Jordan Peterson and the News

Much has been made of Petersons involvement with Thinkspot, and why not? He is the visible face of Thinkspot and a figure of international acclaim. As such, googling Jordan Peterson launches Thinkspot returns just over 30,000 results. However, in reality,there has been little visible evidence of Petersons involvement. It is difficult to say what would have happened were it not for Peterson and his wife, Tammys, recent serious health issues. So we can only know what actually is. Anyone joining Thinkspot with the hope of interacting directly with Peterson is likely to be seriously disappointed.

As for those 30,000 Google hits, many are articles expressing varying degrees of skepticism and condemnation of Peterson and/or Thinkspot, as well as misapprehensions regarding Thinkspots primary purpose. Perhaps I am reading something into them that is not there, but they do seemon the wholerather eager for Thinkspot to be a failure. I will simply remark that very few of these reviews or articles bear any relation at all to my actual experiences on the platform.

The Nuts and Bolts of Thinkspot

I submitted my email address to the waiting list for the Thinkspots beta edition on July 13, 2019 and received my invitation about five months later on December 11th. I believe I was one of the very early members, having signed up just two months after the very first Welcome post was made by the Thinkspots administrators on October 17th.

The platform was advertised as being in beta, but little further information was available. New users were left to explore on their own. The user interface takes some getting used to, which is a polite way of saying that it leaves much to be desired. The interface is somewhat complicated and definitely unpolished. The biggest problem is nested comments. They are not easy to keep track of, and I cannot count the number of times I have received a comment intended for someone else.

Every member of Thinkspot is called a Contributor, in Thinkspeak. All contributors are equal, however, some are just a little bit more equal than others. Featured Contributors get to set pricing and charge for access to their content, and they can create Events, Media, and eBooks. It is not that there is really anything wrong with this; it is entirely in keeping with the original mission of Thinkspot. I have heard mentions in various conversations that eventually all contributors will have this option once the website is out of beta testing, but I suspect that only a small percentage of contributors will end up taking advantage of this. One has to build up a fairly large, devoted audience before one can successfully charge admission, and it is not easy to build that audience.

There is definitely an eeriealmost neglectedatmosphere at Thinkspot. It makes me think of Lord of the Flies. I feel like we, Thinkspot users, are abandoned on a deserted island to fend for ourselves.

But, enough about the container, what about the content?

Personally, I am drawn to only about four or five of the Featured Contributors out of the 44, so no more than 10% of the content on Thinkspot interests me much. My perspective on the other 90% is that of a tourist, someone who visits but does not stay. I have no idea how well my experience in my little patch of Thinkspot translates to the restat least no subjective idea.

What I can do, instead, is provide some objective statistic on the contributors and how they interact with the subscribers. For example, half of the Featured Contributors have listed Culture as an interest, and almost half have also listed Society, Philosophy, and Politics. I believe, though, that these choices actually say very little about the authors. After all, we all agree that taking candy from babies is bad and helping little old ladies across the street is good. What self-respecting intellectual would not be interested in those things? So it is much more revealing when a contributor lists an interest that nobody else does. Then, we know something interesting about that contributor. Gratifyingly, there are 33 Featured Contributors with unique interests.

Readers might be interested to note that from a political point of view, there is only one Featured Contributor listing Conservatism as an interest and just one other listing Progressivism. It would appear that Thinkspot is not quite the hotbed of extreme political partisanship that many articles would have you believe. In fact, the distribution of interests is fairly evensomething for which the mysterious curators of Thinkspot must be commended. Here is the full list of interests showing how many contributors have selected each one:

I can also provide some more quantitative data:

The top contributor in terms of content creation is philosopher Stephen Hicks who postson average nine times per week for the past 45 weeks he has been on Thinkspot.The leader in terms of average number of views per post isquite predictablyJordan Peterson. The runner-up is less obvious: Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Rated third and fourth, respectively, are the publications Merion West and The Post Millennial. Now, let us take a look at which users receive the most recommendation tags (Think: Facebook likes). The content creator whose posts most motivate readers to leave a tag (Recommend, Like, Agree, Insightful, Provocative, or Disagree) is Carl Benjamin, the source of the aforementioned Patreon controversy. He is followed by PragerU, the contributor who listed Conservatism as an interest, and then by Jordan Peterson.

The posts that generate the most user commentson averageare written by Marshall Herskovitz, the contributor who listed Progressivism as an interest. (Herskovitz is a writer, film producer, and director, who is committed to the cause of fighting climate change.) Herskovitz is followed by Jonathan Pageau, a Canadian artist and carver focused on Christian iconography, and then by Carl Benjamin.

Thus, the picture that emerges is very different from what most articles about Thinkspot would have one believe. The Featured Contributors are, for the most part, surprisingly heterogeneous, representing an eclectic mix of interests. Some are political, some apolitical, some theistic, some atheistic, some artistic, some scientific, some establishment, some anti-establishment, and so on. The top viewed contributors are not the top commented upon, and the top posters (in volume) are not the most recommended. The heterogeneity in Featured Contributors draws an equally heterogeneous audience, and so the user base of Thinkspot makes for a very mixed bag.

There is one trait the Featured Contributors largely share: They do not interact very often with anyone elses content. If we keep in mind the original mandate of Thinkspot, this should hardly be surprising, yet a great number of people seem to have subscribed with the expectation of engaging in discussion with the Featured Contributors. Certainly, many unfavorable reviews were based on this premise. Nevertheless, I have had many engaging discussions on Thinkspot, despite the dreadful user interface. I have learned a lot, and I have worked through much thinking in discussions with others. I am a mostly satisfied customer.

The Future

The management of Thinkspot is rather opaque with regards to the future. I invited its leadership team to engage with me for the writing of this article, but I received no response. This leaves me free to speculate.

I would say that Thinkspot has a lot of potential. Its heterogeneity is probably a positive portent. The world desperately needs social media that is not just an echo chamber and, consequently, there is a window of opportunity. I would also say that the segment of the community that I interact with comes to the website for discussion among ourselves. This is the case even if this was not the original intent or focus of Thinkspot. If Thinkspot fails quickly to improve the group discussion experience, something better will come along, and the website will lose a substantial part of its community. This is the most obvious threat I see. Finally, there is the issue of critical mass. Thinkspot seems to have about 63,000 participants at the moment, and the statistics that I have pulled together suggest that any given creator could not hope to appeal to more than 10% of the Thinkspot population because of the diversity of taste among its users. Then assume a (very optimistic) conversion rate of 3%, and we have 189 paying subscribers. Even at $240 per yearwhich most people find very expensive (even the wildly-popular Ben Shapiro cannot charge more than that)this works out to only $45,360 per year, not a particularly lucrative gig.

Youtube has cat videos; Twitter has outrage; and Thinkspot will have to find its drawing card: the thing that will pack em in to the rafters. Otherwise, the content creators the system was originally designed for will simply ignore it as irrelevant. 63,000 potential subscribers is not enough for even one content creator to earn a living. Without a flourishing community (because of user interface issues) to provide a sufficiently large audience pool for content creators wishing to commercialize, Thinkspot faces a dual threat that it must move quickly to overcome.

I wish Thinkspot all the best; it is a worthy endeavor.

Adam Wasserman has 30 years of IT management experience and is the author of The Chaos Factory.

See original here:
What Is the Real Deal at Jordan Peterson's Thinkspot? - Merion West

Miriam Lord captures well how the loud complaints from Fianna Fil TDs who did not get the nod for a ministerial seat, with the headline:Martin sparks Olympian levels of whingeing in Fianna Fil (shes worth a subscription to the paper alone).

Two thoughts strike me in response. One is that those complaining that the west wasnt represented well enough ought to reflect on just how ineffective the method of putting in TDs who physically represent western constituency has been over the years.

The flow of voters in the west leaving the big two continues so that despite the fact that this convention has been in place almost since the founding of the state, it isnt working. Something the two larger government parties surely have to recognise by now.

It may feel fair sitting in Government House, but the voters of the parish just get angrier and angrier with the trickle-up economics that feeds Dublin and the cities of the seaboard. So, first, they defected to the independents, now to Sinn Fin.

The truth is that both parties are so depleted neither of them can form a government without the other, so the picks are limited to whomever they think has the talent and/or the loyalty to turn things around. And in loyalty, it is Martin who has the problems.

Many of those now unhappy with Martins arrangements believe that throwing their cap in with the old enemy is a political third rail, and believe the better longer-term option for the party was to sit this dance out and take the damage in a new election.

In any near run result, having so openly Fine Gael rejected the party would come under huge pressure to choose Sinn Fin as leaders of the next government with themselves either as juniors or supporting them from the opposition benches.

Having just spent four years in the latter space, and having witnessed just how profoundly it helped to further hollow out their historic brand, the former would have been the only realistic option. No party in NI has ever prospered in such circumstances.

You only have to see how the west Belfast leadership overrode the common sense of rural folks like Conor Murphy, Michelle ONeill and even the Gaoth Dobhair based Pearse Doherty who must have known just how it would go down with rural voters.

Democratic centralism means they must follow orders even for someone unknown to the public but to whom that leadership had debts. A man who knew how to use his height and weight (if not with Mairia Cahills late but fearless Cork-born grandmother).

Getting close to Mary Lou (or in NIs case, Martin McGuinness if were to look at established records) is of no strategic use if neither operates autonomously at the top of Sinn Fins internal chain of command.

The other line, which arises from the media if not directly from party colleagues is that Martins tenure in office is everything to do with personal ambition. Ive met a fair few ambitious politicians in my time, few of them look or sound like Martin.

He may be criticised for modesty, lack of fire, snark or spike. An inability to smile for the opportune selfie, maybe. A personal distaste for the shallow reality show search for the beauty/uglyness of human authenticity (even if the set up is evidently fake).

If you dont believe me, try Jamie Barletts new BBC Sounds series (all of it, but the last episode in particular on how Trump, the new standard how-low-can-you-go, populist, was made by reality TV)

The Trump standard offered by leaders like Mary Lou and Michelle who arent really mistresses of their own houses is not a road any mainstream party should seek to go down. Innocents get hurt, and as Dennis Bradley says, the promises made are never paid.

Yet, as alluded to at the top some of the reasons for the advance of populist projects like Sinn Fin, Five Star, and whatever the current Le Penn vehicle is called in France these days lies at the feet of the centrists like Fianna Fil and latterly Fine Gael.

As Eric Lonergan says in Angrynomics*, these parties and their analogues elsewhere treat tenure in government as some class of managerial test, when in fact the whole point of voting people into government is in order to change the conditions we live under.

As Eric notes towards the end of the book, the price paid, even in a country of relatively equal like the Republic has been ruinous for the rural west. He writes, we need fundamentally new ideas about who owns what and who gets the returns to assets.

Reconnecting with the parish in one thing, but if this administration is to make good it has to make a huge difference to the lives of ordinary citizens regardless of where they live. Hard when you feel you dont deserve to be in the hard place you find yourself.

They could worse than heeding rule number one of Jordan Petersons 12 Rules for Life, An Antedote to Chaos, which is that

to stand up straight with your shoulders back means building the ark that protects the world from the flood, guiding your people through the desert after they have escaped tyranny, making your way away from comfortable home and country and speaking the prophetic word to those who ignore the widows and the children. [Emphasis added]

Or as one senior member of the Northern Irish press corp said this week, wise up. To which Dr. Petersons younger alter ego might add, and grow a pair

If the country needs fixing, help get it fixed. Or get out of the way of it being fixed in a way that treats all the children of the nation equally. That, as Elaine Byrne rightly notes in the Sunday Business Post, also means strengthening local democracy.

After 20 years of failed government in NI, betting Sinn Fin, be they Greens or Fianna Fil rebels will do anything it promises is not even a long shot. As one northern friend said, however tough it is if Fianna Fil is not a party of government it is nothing.

The cards have been played.

*If you havent seen it already this weeks podcast interview with Eric on #Angrynomics is below. Do give it a listen:

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Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

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Time for Fianna Fil TDs to stand up straight, with shoulders back and make the impossible leap - Slugger O'Toole