Capitalism

You watch one clip about someone and YouTube decides to spam you nonstop with more about that person, which is how I tripped across this video where Ice T is talking about gang violence.

I have a serious medical condition. I watched about half of it, slept a few hours, watched the rest. I agree with the first half where he talks about his music and that you can't sanitize reality and solve this.

I talked on Cyburbia about the fact that Black musicians sing about their reality and that reality includes the fact that cops are the bad guys in their neighborhoods and they don't trust them, and then the White authorities have a problem with those words.

It's tricky to give someone validation and catharsis and useful information in a situation like that without making people feel you are calling for bloody revolution. And tricky to, in actual fact, help such people while actively trying to avoid bloody revolution.

I don't know how accurate his ideas are from the second half of the video. 

I am dirt poor and I wonder sometimes if that's because I don't want to take some deal with the devil and do something bad to make money. 

I once had someone contact me and say "Hey, I would like to promote your resume service and if you get any work out of that, kick a percentage my way." I agreed. 

It didn't get me any work. But it left me wondering: what is the difference between advertising and kickbacks?

Was I hypothetically guilty of something there or not? Did I agree to a legitimate advertisement or did I agree to kickbacks that could get me and him both in trouble?

If Ice T is right that capitalism is synonymous with crime and therefore all the wealthy people in big buildings in Washington DC are criminals and if he's right capitalism requires a class of poor people, we are up shit creek without a paddle.

But historically, India, Persia and Greece -- cradles of civilization -- all revered the honey bee as a mental model for business and peace and prosperity.

The honey bee provides a service to flowering plants and pollinates them and gets pollen from that interaction to feed itself without harming the plants.

Business was conceived of as a peaceable means to establish prosperity for everyone. It was conceived of as a superior alternative to going a Viking and raiding your neighbors when times were tough or starting a war when there wasn't enough to go around for some reason.

And then it somehow ended up getting a bad reputation as the cause of our social problems rather than the solution.

And I don't know what the truth is. 

But I'm reminded of this piece I wrote elsewhere.

I will note Ice T is in business and apparently makes less money as a musician than he did as a "player," whatever that word means to him. But he's still making money.

I'm mostly not making money. I would like to earn a living but I'm not actually accomplishing that to any meaningful degree at this time.

But I have to wonder does he feel all his business dealings are criminal behavior and part of the evils of capitalism? If so, why leave the gang and take a pay cut and speak out against what's going on?