Santorini Dave Travel Blog Advice

Santorini Dave, a popular travel blog, is against the idea of using travel blogs as storytelling vehicles--at least if you want to make any money: 

I’m sorry, but you will not make money from travel tales and adventure stories. Or, if you do, you’re far more talented than me and you’re not reading my lame-*ss post about focusing on your brand. So stop reading and go do it. Start your blog about all your crazy stories traveling the world. (Also: good luck. There’s a place for storytelling in the world but you won’t find a blog post on it. You might as well read self-help books on how to be original. There are a dozen people in the world that will make money from travel storytelling. If you think you could be one of those twelve then go for it.)

Anyone who's read Yuval Noah Harari will initially gasp--until s/he remembers he has a tenured university post, a privilege available to less than 1% of the world's population. Lacking such security, most people will need to sell something to be able to tell a story. Consequently, social media, which relies on quantitative metrics, has turned the internet into a giant marketplace not of ideas, but visual titillation. 

To be clear, I don't mind titillation or mindless distractions, but the Native Americans, Muslims, and to a lesser extent, Jews, have been proven right in their approach against a culture based on figurative images. You may quibble that the ban on figurative images revolved specifically around religion or living things being elevated to the status of idols (God being a jealous mistress), but such categories were close to all-encompassing in olden culture. 

We tend to forget once the Bible was transcribed and translated, it became the primary book marketed by people in power. Consequently, just like any other product, chapters were modified depending on local audiences (whither Lilith?) and promises/rhetoric/advertising didn't always match reality. Regardless of the specific make and model of the book, because advertising/missionary financing was strong, and competition almost non-existent, a single book often became the way a person learned English. First mover advantage has never been disputed, but the point here is that it resulted in moving from pictures as the basis for storytelling to written words--an improvement. 

From Codex Gigas, seen in Stockholm, Sweden.

Fast forward to 2019. On the subway, most people are using mobile phones to play online games (visual, no words) or to shop (visual). Except for Wikipedia and reddit, the most popular apps and websites rely entirely on either the spoken word or visual images. 

No one doubts images are more compelling to the human brain than written words. ee cummings may have said it best: "the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter." Women have always realized this fact about human nature, so cosmetic products are always in demand, and even in periods when women's clothing lacked pockets, small jade purses or ornaments like ivory combs would be deployed to attract the wandering eye. 

Of course no one is arguing we want societies mostly of Socrates or Shakespeares--intellectuals often rely on more daring friends and lovers for inspiration, and obviously technology and buildings do not appear spontaneously--but a society that does not advertise its own individual stories properly will find itself depending on non-native and perhaps outdated stories for cohesion. The lesson? If you let marketers dictate your culture, perhaps you will soon find the underlying reason our ancestors disfavored graven images, especially ones made of valuable commodities. For some of us, it is just as easy to drown in a shallow pool than a deep one. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat 

Privatization vs. the Public Good

Marc Lamont Hill succinctly describes the liberal Democratic platform in a single page in Nobody (2016) (paperback, pp. 177): 

The problem with this approach is that it ignores government's tendency to borrow, particularly from private banks. If tax revenues and other fees do not match the cost of services, especially when new services are needed, private banks provide the loans/bonds. In short, the "liberal" anti-privatization model renders government at state and local levels dependent on private banks. (It should not be surprising, then, that many have called America's Democratic Party the party of Wall Street, and its Republican Party the party of Big Oil.) 

I suppose one could argue "deficits don't matter" and render Congress's power of the purse into a literal money tree, showering all cities and states with interest-free loans. And yet, if governance could be so simple, why not make it even simpler and have Congress give all individuals money directly? Indeed, many have suggested the latter as the basis of UBI (Universal Basic Income), but the experiment has always been directed towards the unemployed or the neglected, perhaps assuming human beings prefer meaningful work over none at all. 

We have now arrived at the true difficulty at the intersection of commerce and government: creating meaningful jobs while avoiding excessive and uneven inflation. 

From local Los Altos, California newspaper (June 2019)
Every single state executive office is run by Democrats, from Governor to Insurance Commissioner.

Even ignoring, as Mr. Hill does, commerce's complex trade/security agreements with other nations and the trillions of dollars of debt these agreements assume, nowhere in his analysis of commerce does he make room for the ambitious, the persecuted, or the minority not agreeing with his definition of the "common good." And while it is true ambition often paves its way through artifice, there we can find government's true calling: protecting common people from the ambitious while creating an economic system bringing everyone together so as to prevent persecution as well as self-segregation. 

The problems of modern commerce are vast and complex, centering chiefly around unimaginative local governments favoring the tried-and-true, leading to uneven development, de facto segregation, then the very inequality Mr. Hill abhors. Private entities are not silver bullets against corruption, but history teaches us any entity suffering from a lack of competition--such as public jails or police departments--will eventually become corrupt or deficient. With respect to privatized jails, we have learned it is possible for the private to become as corrupt as the public without sufficient oversight of necessary adjoining agencies--in this case, ICE and police departments. Finally, if corralling commercial activity were so straightforward as prioritizing the public good over the profit motive, one wonders why the mafia or black markets exist at all. 

The first step to strengthening social cohesion is trust in government, which requires not only transparency, but an understanding that modern commerce is so complex, only cooperation at both the neighborhood and national levels will create viable solutions. States like Singapore are small enough to make the gap between neighborhoods and their national Parliament a short walk, while countries like Norway have such small populations, a gap between their capitals and outlying regions can never become too great. America, like Russia and China, possesses none of these advantages and must work harder to prevent a police state from taking over completely in the name of the public good. As an American resident, I am confident most Americans favor the public good, but less so when it comes to the hard work and humility in getting there. 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2019) 

Bonus I: when academics without a direct understanding of law and economics talk about the "profit motive," almost every criticism as applied to corporations could be applied to the mafia, which operates across borders using the singular method of violence--a tactic corporations cannot use. (Unlike your local loan shark, Wells Fargo or JP Morgan cannot send someone to break your legs if you default or declare bankruptcy.) 

GQ article by Alex Hannaford (June 2019)

Instead, multinational corporations must contend with three or four layers of overlapping jurisdictions, a level of red tape making it easier for governments, whether liberal or conservative, to demand ever-escalating payments, legal fees, or bribes to do business and to bring consumers more choices. When such choices are made without any regard to long-term planning, chaos results, causing critics to blame the profit motive rather than the target government's poor vision. Thus, the better arguments against corporate power revolve around short-termism (i.e., short term profit motives) and lobbyists' efforts to insulate corporations from accountability or transparency (i.e., giving corporations the same qualified immunity as some government agents). 

Bonus II: while we're on the topic of overlapping jurisdictions, let's review why such a dynamic exists. First, redundancy. If a local police department is overwhelmed (think riots), it needs to be able to request additional personnel. A local entity prepared for all worst case scenarios will bankrupt local government or deprive cities and counties of much-needed social and other services, eventually guaranteeing a repressive police state. (Mr. Hill himself explains this exact issue in discussing Ferguson, Missouri.) 

Second, local entities represent local citizens, who may have different needs and wants than national representatives. By forcing national and multinational participants to adhere to local regulations, cities and counties can shape their own destinies--up to a point. (Justice Louis Brandeis' shorthand term for this interplay is "laboratories of democracy.") 

Third, if a local entity is corrupt (think Mississippi Burning (1988)), a local resident has no recourse but to appeal to an outside authority having jurisdiction. 

In short, overlapping jurisdictions were not designed to promote complexity for the sake of complexity, serving an unnecessary expansion of law school and academic influence, nor to allow looser federal purse strings to wedge themselves between police departments and local residents.

Bonus III: democracy is hard to successfully implement over long periods of time, and even harder the larger the geographical area. A blue collar worker in Kansas, absent some respected intermediary, may have nothing in common (except language) with a software engineer in California. The idea of a common language is to establish respected intermediaries, such as journalists (think Charles Kuralt, Studs Terkel), to bridge the gap and help form a national identity, but of course language can manufacture social dissolution just as well as social cohesion. 

It may be the case that a 5 to 7 days workweek is inimical to a well-functioning democracy by not allowing enough voters sufficient time for study and contemplation. And yet, one can be certain a majority of contemporary American adults, most of whom had ineffective public school teachers, would spend their additional free time on less-than-edifying activities. Is it any wonder, then, that America has become the land of the distracted, home of the vested interests? Why would a minority or immigrant with options choose such a place? And how have less developed areas, which preserve local agency through national neglect or capitol corruption, attained the very character wished upon us by our most educated and most sincere?