Clockwork Millenium Bug

frogs! thanks to tumblr's own @markscherz and others, we keep finding new frog species!

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

i am scouring the internet like the victorians scoured and destroyed all trace of joy and color from stolen relics for the LOST NAME OF THE ANCIENT PROCESS of textile-creation akin to knitting/crocheting/nålebinding that at least one academic/crafter used to recreate the leggings on this Glorious Motherfucker:

Archer statue from the Temple of Aphaia (ca. 480 BC) next to a reconstruction of its original paint job:

The leggings and sleeves would have created using a method called SPRANG which predates knitting and is over 3,000 years old. What's even sexier is modern artisans managed to recreate the entire outfit using the original method!

Mmm-HMM, love me a shapely thigh in harlequin hosiery. Put👏men👏in👏clingy-ass👏clothing👏again👏👏👏

Unfortunately english sources are hard to find, partly because Google's a shithole, but also because this textile project comes from a German museum, in Germany, where people tend to speak (and publish) in German. That said, the original link is to a short-but-sweet article I would have had no problem finding in 30 seconds a mere few years ago. fortunately i have clever beautiful insane people following me, but alas not everyone has such luxury. thanks to everyone in the notes who shoved themselves down this rabbithole with me!

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

Some of these I was able to find specific artists and many people were kind enough to credit the artists and send me their names as well! I found the images provided in facebook group that had no credits, so I’ll be sure to add them onto that post, and if you see any of them on an uncredited posts, inform the op like all of the lovely contributors have for me!

Original Art Credits:

1: Malcom Evans, political cartoonist

9: gigis_lab on Instagram

16: @victoriaskeller (site unknown)

Redraw Credits:

2: Alicetrijjet on twitter and instagram 

3:   fluffysmolcloud on twitter

4, 9, 15, 16: destineytomoon on twitter and tumblr

5: napstachill on twitter

6: mrs_ponytails (AKA ms pigtails) on twitter

7:  nomsikka on twitter

8: sortimid on deviantart (⚠️‼️WARNING THIS INCLUDES NUDITY, SEMI-NUDITY, BODY OBJECTIFICATION, FETISHIZATION, AND OTHER GRAPHIC CONTENT‼️⚠️)

10: tokimekiwaku on twitter

11: joanashino on instagram

13: @CinnaBani twitter and tumblr

14: Peachy-Milk-Tea/ on reddit

18: charoitea on twitter and tumblr

Check out these amazing artists! Like and follow their pages to show your support!

Special thanks to bizzarczar, loren-an-or-loren, soup-bastard, guyghoul, justsomeimpressions, and everythingsamood for sending me artists names and links, or taking matters into their own hands and putting credits on the original!

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

I think motorsport often does a really, really good job of hiding How It Is. I mean, all sport does this to a greater or lesser extent but motorsport in particular is all wheeeeee we're brand new high tech all go look at these literal children we have signed to race our cars fweeeeeee!

and that hides the fact that, at the back of it, there is a deeply, deeply restrictive and conservative world that's very strictly governed by class and race and specific rules about behaviour. which is all, in itself, a fairly recently constructed thing anyway; the very early days of motorsport saw a much more diverse group of people competing, all-women races happened as early as the 1800s and a lot of the early drivers (including Hellé Nice, who was done the most wrong by men of maybe any woman in motorsport) were burlesque dancers.

hell, even all the daft mindset shit people come out with about the psychology of a champion or whatever is almost entirely post-Schumacher. you're not telling me Mr Short-Shorts And Free Love himself James Hunt wouldn't have taken a drubbing off the SkyPad about his obviously gone brain every week despite being largely cited as one of the icons of the sport's masculinity.

not to like, get out my rocking chair and tell everyone to get off my porch but back in my day it were well 'ard to be fan of F1 if you weren't the audience of middle aged, either actually rich or would like to be straight, white, western european men it was advertised to and framed for. like what on earth was this doing being the opening credits in 2008???? I remember like, deliberately switching the telly on late so no one caught me watching it because it was so embarrassing, as a 22 year old woman.

F1's spent decades framing itself around sexual fantasies, with very strict rules about what they could be about and who could have them. this is a highly sexualised sport where, yes, the drivers' own sexuality is a part of the mystique its tried to wrap itself in. same as with other motorsport; there's an element to the spectacle that's only really being put away now but which amounts to bloodthirst, to see these beautiful, virile young men shattered and broken in pursuit of a all-consuming dream.

it's why you get all this mumbling about how you can't have V10s anymore because of woke (they were hopelessly unreliable and quite shit actually) and the drivers aren't real blokes anymore are they, no balls going out in all these safety features (even though no reasonable person wants to see them hurt) and they're all a bit boring now, aren't they? not like the proper studs of the past.

all of that aesthetic was basically invented in the Marlboro era and totally untrue even at the time. but it worked to sell Rolexes to middle management men who'd made their way into hospitality to get served complimentary drinks by a girl in a leotard no one would stop them feeling up.

and no matter how much F1 externally changes the way it portrays itself, gets good at TikTok and learns memes, appeals to an audience far from that cigar-choked balcony, in the backrooms this is who they think is really important. this is who the F1 media (who are almost all from this era think are really important.

I taught myself these things. If you live in America you will probably not get much out of the average politics course bc they’re meant to train campaign managers and bureaucrats rather than to educate insightful political theorists. I’ll make a course to teach what I think a beginner should read and why below

Introduction:

Modern Politics (1960) by C.L.R. James

Explains the basics of political theory and traces the history of democracy in Western politics from the Ancient Greeks to the 20th century workers’ movement.

Basics:

Han Feizi (200s BCE) by Han Fei

One of the earliest works of political theory that gives advice on how to rule a state, explains the concept of authority, and argues that political power is based on force and manipulation instead of being virtuous or following the course of things.

Plato’s Five Dialogues (400s-300s BCE)

Goes through the basic concepts of political theory in Ancient Greece and gives accounts of Socrates’ doctrines as interpreted by Plato.

Politics (300s BCE) by Aristotle

Shows how politics begin with addressing and defining the common good of the citizens. Argues that a polity is made up of the nature of each citizen taken together, although you’ll see that Aristotle’s concept of nature is not as simple as later interpretations assume. Identifies different kinds of governments and how they transition between each other. Unlike Han Fei, argues for the role of virtue in politics.

Works of Mengzi (300s BCE) by Mengzi

Argues that an authority’s legitimacy rests on their ability to care for the common good of their people. Explains the concept of the Mandate of Heaven and argues that people can overthrow their governments and replace them with new ones if they lose their legitimacy. Explains how our natural tendency to mutual cooperation and recognition, including the use of shame, makes virtue precede and supersede the existence of the state.

Modern Political Philosophy:

The Prince (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli

Similar to Han Fei, but gives much more detail about how states compete over space. If you like this book you should also read his Discourses on Livy where he argues that society (“the multitude”) is what keeps the state alive and that for that reason the many are more important and creative than the aristocratic few, even if he thinks the conflict between both is necessary for a republic.

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577) by Étienne de la Boétie

Explores the issue of why people submit to authority even when their conditions are unbearable and argues that people can free themselves from tyranny if they stop submitting, disobey, and learn to choose for themselves.

The Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes

Explains how a state develops out of society’s need for peace and security. Explores how and why a state makes up a single entity. Argues that “the multitude” (society) enters a contract with authorities in order to preserve their own lives from each other and to make the permanent ownership of property possible, which forges them into a people/nation/polity where they no longer have any right to resist the will of the state. Supports a monarchy on the basis of seeing authority as maintained through patrilineal descent, which he traces back to Adam. One of the most important works of political philosophy in modern history.

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689)

Unlike Hobbes, argues that every social association begins with people wanting to protect their already-existing claims to property, which they secure through changing the world around them with labor. As a bourgeois liberal, makes the sovereignty of the property owner (including the enslaver) the basis of all states, and argues that the legislature is superior to all other branches of government for this reason. Argues in favor of a revolt of civil society if the state authorities infringe on the rule of law. You could probably get away with skipping the first treatise because it’s a polemic about how our descent from Adam doesn’t justify the state being a patrilineal monarchy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (1755)

Repeats a lot of what Hobbes says about “the state of nature,” that people are born equal, free, without the concept of property, but goes a different direction with his argument. Shows how the development of civilization and the state leads to unhappiness and unfreedom and at the end begins arguing for a democratic republic as the way to reclaim the original freedom of association in the higher form of a social contract where each participant becomes part of a single, general, national will.

Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791)

One of the best works of the liberal revolutions. Defends the French Revolution and the right to revolt against undemocratic states. Usually treated as just summing up the ideas of John Locke and others, but has a lot of original concepts, including arguing that society is so superior to the state that as people learn to cooperatively take care of their needs for themselves the state bureaucracy will wither away.

Critiques of Modern Political Philosophy:

The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Should be read in the context of the liberal and democratic revolutions (1776-1848) against monarchies and aristocracies. Think of Marx and Engels as the “ultraleft” of those democratic revolutions and you’ll get a lot more out of reading this as a critique of even the progressives in history and a call for a universal social revolution.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920)

Explains the implications of his concept of the “color line” between the white world and the dark world. Shows how Europe has been built through the exploitation of the dark world. Argues for a global socialist movement as the only thing that can emancipate people from racism and colonialism.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) by Muhammad Iqbal

Argues that many of the concepts people attribute to modern European philosophers already existed in Islam (and those people were almost all influenced by Islamic philosophers like Ibn Rushd or Ibn Tufayl). Demonstrates how Islam endorses a kind of “spiritual democracy” of the community of believers.

The Sexual Contract (1988) by Carole Pateman

Critiques classical contract theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) for ignoring the fact that the patriarchal family precedes the formation of a state. Argues that this means that the formal equality of all citizens in a modern liberal state, even in a democratic republic, actually veils the real inequality between men and women and the arbitrary authority of the men. Explores all the consequences of this in everyday life.

Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power, Righteousness (1999)