03 January 2012

Infamous Brad

# , , , ,

Brad Hicks is a blogger who writes only very occasionally, but at length, on a range of subjects, insightfully.


LiveJournal has deleted all of his writing since I originally created this post indexing some favorites of mine, so I have rescued the full text of them from the Internet Archive. One can find newer writing from him on Medium. Almost everything which follows is him writing, not me.


Christians In The Hands Of An Angry God

His best-known essay, for good reason. It is an important history, though not quite for the reasons it seems: Hicks recounts a story which historians know is in fact a lie, but the telling of the lie is itself significant. It will need its own post when I finally get around to pulling it out of the Archive, because it is long.

How did so many seminaries and so many preachers and so many authors get converted to this false gospel? What deal did they make with Satan himself, and why? What did they think that they were doing? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’ve met one of the people who “signed” that deal and helped enforce it. He was quite proud of his achievement, and years later told many of us about the meeting where that decision was made. It is only recently that I came to understand just who the other side in that deal really was, as opposed to who the fundamentalists in that room thought they were dealing with.

It’s a five-part series; click through the next entry links at the top of each page.

Review: Amy Schalet, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex.

3 January 2012

Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they’re drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they'll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.

Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it’s leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn't cooperate, nobody will make it.

Call the first rowboat “America.” Call the second rowboat “the Netherlands.”

That's the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.

It’s a glaring difference, and it has to do with what American and Dutch parents and teens “know for a fact” about teenage sexual development and maturity during puberty. American parents and their teenagers both “know for a fact” that adolescent male sexuality is dominated by hormones that completely obliviate any capacity developed, up to that point, for sexual and emotional self-regulation. The parents also “know for a fact” that teenage boys are incapable of actually loving their partners; the sons all know that they have genuine romantic emotional feelings, but all feel freakishly abnormal and different from their peers because of this, because they “know” it’s true of all the other teenage boys around them. All of them, parents and teen boys and teen girls alike, also “know for a fact” that there are two kinds of teenage girls: the “good girl” majority who desperately want someone to love them but who think that sex is icky and unpleasant, and the “slut” minority who want sex just as much as the teenage boys do, and who have no more self-control. As a result, parents and teens participate in a process of dramatization, intended to exaggerate the expected consequences of any teenage sex or romance, and that also relies on control and punishment by the parents in an attempt to prevent their teenagers from succumbing to those out-of-control hormones, punishment starting at loss of privileges and potentially (or at least threatened) to go as far as parental abandonment, as far as expulsion from the home and imposition of homelessness. Teenage girls are taught to fear rape, infection with STDs, and unwanted pregnancy by out-of-control boys; boys are taught to fear infection with STDs and the imposition of crushing child-support burdens that will drop them out of the middle class for all eternity, stranding them irretrievably among the poor. Despite this, at around age 15, teenage boys and girls assert their independence, and exercise the emotional and physical drives that will push them towards eventual independence from their parents, by “sneaking around,” occasionally re-establishing emotional contact with their parents by “getting caught,” until they are either married or “can put their own roof over their heads,” because officially, those are the minimum preconditions before any American can legally and morally be allowed to have officially sanctioned sex.

Dutch parents and teenagers, on the other hand, “know for a fact” that only an infinitessimally small number of teenagers, insultingly called “pubers,” have out-of-control hormones that they have to grow out of; every parent and most kids have at least heard, second or third hand, of somebody who once knew somebody who knew somebody who might have been a puber once, but nobody interviewed could name one. They “know for a fact” that around age 13 or 14, boys and girls both start thinking about wanting romantic and family relationships of their own like the ones that their parents have. They “know for a fact” that by age 15 to 17, all but a few really abnormally immature children just normally and naturally find a partner they genuinely love, and with who they just naturally want to be cozily together with. They “know for a fact” that through consultation and proper education, parents and society have taught them that this is perfectly okay, as long as it’s someone who’s also willing to be cozily together with, comfortable with and acceptable to, the parents. They also “know for a fact” that any normal child, having been raised since early childhood to eroticize condoms, and any normal girl, having probably gone on hormonal birth control (for free) as soon as she started menstruating, isn’t going to hurt anybody or disrupt the all-important family bond if they bring their romantic partner over to sleep with them a couple of nights a week. They “know for a fact” that children that young will make the occasional mistake, and get gently humiliated by their parents and peers for immaturity, for having shown that they weren’t really ready or that they did a bad job of accomodating eveybody in the family's needs, and that they’ll learn from that how to self-regulate their behavior in harmony with the cozy, comfortable family that they “know for a fact” everybody, including teenagers, wants. (Parents do, however, worry about their children forming relationships with people who “don’t fit in with the family,” by which they mean “poor people or immigrants.” But they express confidence, for the most part, in their ability to steer their children towards someone more comfortable for the family. There's also a grating confidence that none of their children are “asocial” enough to be homosexual or polyamorous.) And, after all, since everybody in the Netherlands has free universal comprehensive health care, incuding birth control, STD treatment, and abortion, and nobody over the age of 16 needs so much as a parent’s permission to use it, and since everybody gets a guaranteed stipend to pay for their own living expenses any time they want to move out, as long as they're still in school, everybody, parent and child alike, “know for a fact” that the worst thing that can happen if somebody makes a mistake is temporary discomfort and embarrassment. The most important thing, then, is to make sure that nobody feels any need to be “sneaky” or “secretive” about any part of their life, because that might disrupt cozy togetherness.

I am, for the second time in two years**, convinced that I live in a country full of superstitious, primitive, blood-thirsty savages.

So, what’s this got to do with rowboats?

In interviews about this book, Schalet got asked a lot about what her opinion was, what did her research show, about why we’re so different? Why did we go in opposite directions after our sexual revolutions? That’s not her speciality, although she does speculate about it, some. She points out that hierarchical domination and winner-take all are also normal paradigms for American businesses and in American politics, whereas Dutch politics and Dutch businesses are a lot more collaborative; on some level, the difference in parenting styles do a pretty good job of preparing American teenage boys to appear to submit to those above them while sneakily seeking to form their own dominance hierarchies in which they can earn the privilege of dominating others, a pretty good job of preparing Dutch boys to go along to get along, to make and expect concessions, as part of collaborative structures in the rest of their adult life. But it’s a unsatisfying explanation; both cultures changed more that way in their politics and business around the same time as they changed in their attitudes towards adolescent sexuality and child-raising, so there's more likely a common cause.

She speculates, at one point in the book, that the defining difference is this: around the time of our respective sexual revolutions, the two countries experienced radically different disasters. The Americans experienced Vietnam, which set the young against the old and corporations and their defenders against poor conscripts, in a struggle for life and death, and normalized the language of intergenerational conflict. The Dutch, who mostly stayed out of Indochina, instead experienced a series of catastrophic nationwide floods, which taught every single person in the Netherlands that unless they all cooperate, unless they all give as much as they can, unless they all move out of their comfort zone a little, they’ll all drown. Or, in my metaphor: two different lifeboats.


* The lifeboat that’s out of food is an imperfect metaphor, but I knew it would be vivid for any of you who haven't studied extreme survival. It turns out that a lifeboat at sea, after about three days, accumulates a thriving ecosystem on the bottom of the boat, making it relatively easy to fish for turtles and other sea life for food, and their spinal fluid for water. Survive the first three days, and there’s no reason to sacrifice anybody. How many Americans do you think would actually think of that? Or, not knowing that, be willing to risk it, in hopes that “something will come along” to make it possible for everybody to survive? I think maybe a few of us, but the rest of us have been conditioned to be quick to try human sacrifice, throwing some people overboard, as the first thing to try in any disaster.

** See Thomas Geoghan, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

Yes We Can Put Americans Back To Work. We Probably Won’t, Though.

28 Jan 2009

The American way of life depends, in part, on a specific illusion. It’s a lie that we tell ourselves, and tell our children. What we just did last Tuesday, an orderly, peaceful, even civil transition of power from one generation to the next, from one ethnic group to another, from one political party to another political party with a different political agenda? We lie to ourselves, and lie even harder to our children, that that is something we can count on, something we have always been able to count on, that any alternative is so unthinkable and unnatural for Americans that we need have no fear whatsoever of any alternative.

Historians know that that’s a lie. Even if one accepts the incredible claim that every US President who has ever been assassinated was killed by a deranged lone gunman, acting out of personal motives, with no political motive, and with no encouragement or assistance by anyone else, the fact remains: historians know that it can get so bad in the United States, economically, that the American people will withdraw their consent to be governed. We call one particular financial industry collapse that rippled outward around the globe (among other things, ultimately bringing the Nazis to power in Germany) not just any recession or depression, but the Great Depression, because the number of people needing work in the US rose to about 3.5 million, or about 20% of all working-age heads of households. In the hardest-hit parts of the country, it reached 50%. And it’s not a coincidence that the next several years saw three credible attempts to topple the United States government: a half-million man general strike called by Soviet-influenced CIO labor unions aimed at sparking a general uprising and Communist revolution that couldn’t quite hold out long enough to get their revolution before it collapsed, Huey Long’s astronomically-growing Poor People’s Army that aimed at overthrowing the Constitution which was only thwarted via its leader’s assassination, and an attempt by the 1930s equivalent of the Democratic Leadership Council, then called the American Liberty League, to use corporate money to bribe US military generals into placing them in power via coup d’etat. No, we know as a matter of objective fact: somewhere in the near vicinity of 20% prolonged unemployment, the USA starts running a serious risk of anarchy followed by totalitarianism.

We also know that by the same measure of unemployment that was in use at the time, as of this month the US unemployment rate is somewhere in the near vicinity of 15%. And rising. Fast. As in perhaps as much as 1% per month. No, really, trust me on this: everybody in both political parties now understands what everybody in both political parties understood as of 1933, when centrist (and wealthy) Democratic former New York governor Frank Roosevelt was sworn in as President: they were doomed if they didn’t find some way to lower unemployment. And trust me on this, both Republicans and Democrats in our own time understand that the clock is ticking on this now, too. What remains is the question: how do we do that? Nor are today’s Republican and Democratic leaders the first politicians to be faced with this question, it is the exact same question that was asked in 1933. And the political elites and the professional economists of our time agree 100% with the political elites and the professional economists of 1933. Our ruling class, just like the ruling class of 1933, believes that government by definition screws up everything it touches. That all government intervention in the economy is inherently bad, that the best it can possibly be is a short-term necessary evil. That the reason that big corporations are big is that they are lead by people who know how to make the best use of money and how to get the best work out of employees. Therefore the political elites and professional economists of our time 100% agree with Frank Roosevelt of early 1933 and with the American Liberty League of the 1930s that what we need is something like the Public Works Administration. What we need, they are 100% sure, is a public-private partnership: government identifies legitimate government needs that aren’t currently being met, and bids that work out to private contractors, and audits those programs and those contractors to make sure that not one thin dime of taxpayer money is wasted on any project that’s unnecessary or on any expense that can’t be justified. And in a sign of bipartisanship, Franklin Roosevelt appointed left-wing Republican Harold Ickes to do just that.

As Timothy Noah pointed out yesterday in a lovely pair of articles on Slate.com, “Wrong Harry: Four million jobs in two years? FDR did it in two months” (with Charles Peters) and an almost immediate follow-up piece when a news item proved his point for him even better, “CBO, Meet CWA: More evidence that Obama’s stimulus falls short,” FDR, congressional Republicans lead by Harold Ickes, and right-wing Democrats lead by Al Smith were wrong in exactly the same way that Barack Obama, congressional Republicans, and the Democratic Leadership Council are wrong right now. The Public Works Administration did its job. It did it under budget. It wasted not a single dollar. It attracted not a single critic. And it created almost no jobs. In 1933, it turned out that there just plain weren’t that many legitimate government jobs that weren’t being funded already. As Ickes took his sweet time coming up with more, lest he be criticized for wasting taxpayer money, he found out that there also weren’t a whole lot of companies out there begging for the chance to bid on PWA contracts. They weren’t crazy about the contract stipulations, and they weren’t all that interested in retooling and reorganizing their entire corporate structures to service contracts there were guaranteed to end as soon as the Great Depression ended. As an anti-poverty, anti-violent-revolution government program, the Public Works Administration was an unvarnished, absolute, indefensible disaster. Period. End of story. Nobody even tries to defend it any more; its supporters just pretend it never happened, so they can recommend the same thing the next time without anybody knowing it’s been tried before, because by their politics, it’s the right thing to do whether it works or not.

And along about the time that Roosevelt was about to lose his temper over this, the First Lady talked him into talking to a very successful social worker named Harry Hopkins, who only wanted a few minutes of the President’s time so he could ask one question. He showed the President figures (that he later showed Congress) showing that there were about 3.5 million Americans in 1933 who were heads of households between the ages of 18 and 64 that no employer was going to hire, no way, no how, not for any amount of money, and he asked: “Can you give one legal reason why we can’t just hire those people ourselves?” The thing is, he got that estimate of 3.5 million people by going through the state-by-state lists of people who were already on the dole, people who were already receiving some kind of charitable or government cash hand-out because they weren’t working. And what Hopkins realized was that not only did the American people deeply resent those people for taking money and doing nothing all day, the recipients weren’t any happier about it, either: they wanted to work. So FDR shoe-horned a program through Congress, first as pilot program called the Civil Works Administration, to raise about $1200 (1933 US dollars) per year per unemployed head of household: $1000 per worker per year for wages, $24 per worker per year for administrative costs, the rest for hand tools and raw materials for whatever projects he could make up. To get CWA funding, a job had to be something that no corporation was interested in providing, and that no government agency was interested in funding, and it had to be as labor-intensive as possible (see photograph above right).

Conservatives in both parties hated it. And still do. And campaigned hard against it in the 1934 congressional primaries. Al Smith’s right-wing Democrats convinced FDR that if he kept the CWA, it would cost him his majority in Congress, so he shut it down after only four months. In that four months, CWA workers had already built 1,000 rural airports, built 40,000 school buildings, built or resurfaced a quarter-million miles of roads, and laid twelve million miles of sanitary sewer lines, some of the first sewer lines laid in most counties. In four months. Right-wing Democrats and anti-tax pro-corporate Republicans screamed bloody murder about all the money that the CWA was “wasting,” but (and this is a point I’ll come back to again) we’re still using almost all of that stuff today. 75 years later, those “worthless” “make-work” projects are turning out to be some of the most valuable stuff the government had done in its first 150 years of existence. So contrary to what the right-wing Democrats in Congress were telling FDR he “needed” to do to “save” the 1934 congressional elections, terminating the CWA turned out to be the least popular thing he did as President, and as soon as the elections were over, on voter mandate, FDR brought it right back again, rammed it through Congress again as the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Only this time it had full funding, and a Congressional and Presidential mandate to try to hire every single one of the roughly 3.5 million unemployed, non-disabled, work-aged heads of household in America. And in almost no time at all, they came as close as makes no difference, getting to 3.3 million, on one simple philosophy: you tell us whatever it is you “do,” and we’ll find you a job doing it. Those jobs paid very nearly jack squat; nearly all WPA workers ended up living with their whole families in roughly 8” x 10” or so rooms in improvised “boarding houses,” spare rooms leased out by people who were house-rich but cash poor, trying to save their homes, tenants with no control over the menu of the meal plan it came with and shared use of a single bathroom (or maybe just an outhouse and an outdoor water pump) with 3 to 8 other families. Nobody lived well on the WPA, but nobody starved either. On the other hand, nobody worked terribly hard, either, and I know this one from a very personal source: my paternal grandfather was a WPA veteran.

Grampa Hicks was himself a right-wing anti-tax anti-communist Democrat of the American Liberty League school, and he hated the WPA with a fiery passion for the entire rest of his life. It was from him I first heard the joke: “How many people does it take to do one WPA job? Three. One on his way to the bathroom, one on his way back from the bathroom, and one leaning on the shovel pretending to work.” But here’s the funny thing. You know what Grampa Hicks was before the Great Depression? He was a bum. A mostly-unemployed unskilled laborer on the rare occasions he had a job, a street brawler and small-time crook, a chronic alcoholic and wife-beater who spent most of the 1920s in jail. So when he showed up in one of Harry Hopkins’ branch offices and they asked him, “What do you do?” all he could answer was, “Nothing.” So they stuck him on one of the WPA’s archetypal projects: a National Guard armory. Under the thin pretense of “military preparedness,” Harry Hopkins made up this total BS scenario whereby some day, in some foreign invasion of the US, we might end up having to retreat all the way back to any random tiny little town in America, so every tiny little road-crossing town and every suburb and every city neighborhood in America should have a solidly built, concrete-block or raw stone building that the state militia can store their weapons in until that day, and can use as a fort when we get nearly conquered. Nobody was fooled. Everybody knew it was a lie: it was building buildings just for the sake of building pointless buildings. Furthermore, the whole “fort” thing was just an excuse to make the job take longer, to build out of improbably heavy materials and as slowly and carefully as possible, so those mostly unskilled laborers didn’t run out of something to do before Hopkins and his few staff could come up with something else to do. Grampa Hicks went to his grave still mocking the work he’d done.

But you know what? There’s a funny thing about that, something I’m pretty sure Grampa Hicks never thought about. First of all, if it weren’t for the WPA, we Hickses would still be bums. Grampa Hicks was desperate to get out from behind that wheel barrow and that shovel, but was too drunk to do plumbing. So he took to hanging around when the electricians were running wire, and managed to get himself a totally useless job as a sort of human Vice-Grip. “Here,” says the skilled electrician who was himself out of work, yelling over to my grandpa because the WPA wouldn’t spring for proper tools, “you there — hold these two wires together while I tape them together.” By following that guy around and watching over that guy’s shoulder, Grampa Hicks taught himself basic electrical wiring. And when the WPA was over, he was able to lie with a straight face to employers that he was a skilled electrician, and that got him his first real job, one his son learned from him, and that I learned from my dad that paid my way through college: electrical sign erector, IBEW local 1.

But never mind how much difference those “pointless” National Guard armories made to my family, there’s something even bigger that Grampa Hicks didn’t know. We’re still using almost every single one of those buildings. I saw an article a while back (citation lost, sorry) by an architecture student who’d gotten curious about what ever happened to all those National Guard armories, so he got some grant money and went on a national tour. And what he found was that in almost every single rural town in America and even in most suburbs, those “ridiculously over-built” armories were the first truly solid building ever built there. And because they were “ridiculously over-built,” they’re still in use. A few are grocery stores or other businesses. Some are schools or community centers. Most are police stations or city halls. Almost all of them double as emergency shelters for the town during natural disasters. So the student did some math to figure out, using standard construction techniques and assuming standard maintenance costs, and assuming that we would have built something to do those jobs some time between then and now, what it would have cost some of those counties to have done without those buildings. And compared that to what it cost them and their descendants in federal tax money to support the WPA and to pay off its debts. The WPA actually made money on its most “useless” projects.

You can take almost any WPA project from the 1930s that was widely mocked as a pointless waste of money; nearly all of them paid every penny back in long-term savings to the taxpayers, in taxes paid by people who learned their trade on those projects who would have otherwise stayed on the dole, or both. In the 1936 elections, Roosevelt’s political enemies handed out campaign buttons mocking the stupidest-sounding idea the WPA ever had. See, in even the smallest towns, the WPA built the first sewage treatment plants those counties ever saw, and laid sewer pipe for them. But lots of Americans still lived in areas too rural for even that. So the WPA paid teams of laborers to ride from farm to farm, shack to shack, shanty to shanty all over America looking for private outhouses that were rickety, or worse were too close to water supplies or food preparation. Those teams were given a standardized design with a water-tight roof, solid construction that would require almost no maintenance for decades, and most importantly: clean concrete floors and toilet hole lids that could close nearly air-tight, plus ventilation stacks that were designed to be insect resistant, in order to reduce both ground-water contamination by and insect-born transmission of fecal bacteria. Many areas turned the WPA down, especially suburbs around cities, and people all over America relentlessly mocked the WPA workers who thought that the US had “nothing better to do” than to waste $17 per rural house building massively over-engineered fancy outhouses. But you know what? Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, almost every area that turned the WPA down on the outhouse project and other sanitation projects suffered major cholera outbreaks. Areas where the WPA built sewage treatment and sanitary outhouses escaped, saving tens of thousands of children’s lives, and probably millions of dollars in hospital costs and lost wages.

Some people were really determined to not even do anything as useful as pretend to dig ditches. So they claimed, when the WPA asked them “what do you do?” to be writers or actors or artists. Some of them were even sincere, and had actually studied those subjects in high school; others just made it up. When asked about it, Harry Hopkins famously shrugged and said, “Why not? Those people have to eat, too.” So the government made up make-work programs for them, too, all of which were relentlessly mocked all through the 1930s. You’re an actor? Here. You’ve got no budget for props, sets, costumes, or stage rights for plays. We’ll let you use an empty storefront and call it a “theater,” especially if you’ll bring in some WPA laborers to build a stage and some seats for you. No, wait, you can have some costumes, but not many; we have some households headed by widows who could stand to do some sewing for you at WPA wages. And you can have any public domain script you want. Now, put on plays. We don’t care what plays, or how many you do, but you will come in 20 to 30 hours a week and work on them, and put them on when you’re done ... including you, Mr. Orson Welles. Whose acting, then directing, careers are still bringing in taxpayer dollars every year; all by himself he’s probably paid back the entire cost of the WPA’s program for actors.

You say you’re a journalist or a historian or a writer? Hmm. Tell you what. During westward expansion, an awful lot of tiny little towns got founded, and the people who founded those towns are getting old; go ask them who founded the town, and why, and what it was like, and write it up as a history of the county. Take all the time you want. Nuts, we’re out of tiny little towns, and still have writers left over. Think of something. I know, go interview former slaves; we’ll give them some time off from their WPA jobs so you can write down what they say their lives were like. What, we’re still overstocked on people who say they’re writers? Fine, here, we’ll hand ‘em to the state tourism boards; we’ll send teams of ‘em to just walk around every state in the Union, get drunk in the local bars, describe the local sights, and make tourist guides. And, oh, by the way, who knew? That’ll turn out to include an entire generation of America’s most famous writers, including America’s third and fifth ever Nobel prizes for literature. Just the taxes on the movie rights to John Steinbeck’s novels have probably paid for that entire program all by itself, and are still paying taxes. Not to mention that we still have all of those books, and most of their notes towards the unfinished books, and guess what? Generations of grad students in history are extremely grateful to the WPA; they wish every generation of Americans had been as well documented.

I don’t think you can come up with a single dollar of WPA spending that actually counts as wasted, not a single WPA “make-work” project so pointless and stupid that we didn’t get our money’s worth out of it, especially if you count all the on-the-job job skills training it gave the 8 or 9 million people who went through the program. And that’s even if you don’t factor in the analysis of very serious historians who question whether or not American “G.I.s” would have fought so hard or so well to save the world from 1941 to 1945 if they had been as resentful, and as starving, as they were in 1930. But no, the blunt fact of history is that if the truth were ever told about the WPA, if the truth hadn’t been being smothered in lies by the same political factions that opposed it at the time all the way up to this very day, everybody would know what the WPA proved as inescapable facts. No dollar of government spending is wasted, if it does a job that nobody else was going to do and it builds something that lasts. Almost nobody is so greedy and lazy that they actually would prefer to be paid to stay home and watch TV or get drunk or stoned all day; there are untold tens of millions of us now that no employer would touch for any of a long list of bad reasons who would rather be working. And no matter how lazy you think they are, boredom is a powerful motivator, and so is a desire not to let down your team, and so is a desire not to look bad in front of others: bring ‘em to work, leave ‘em alone, and nearly all of them actually will work, will actually build things that are built well, built for the ages, built to last. Paradoxically, the really wasted money is the money that gets spent on government overseers determined to make sure that none of the workers waste any money: point people at jobs, give ‘em simple hand tools, and tell them to take their time and build something solid and it’s almost impossible for us to not get that money back in long-term savings.

Nor is this even all that “liberal” an idea. Ronald freaking Reagan himself briefly campaigned on it, calling it “Workfare:” if you can’t find a job, we’ll make you one, whether you like it or not. But he didn’t even get sworn in before the same pro-corporate Republicans and right-wing Democrats convinced him to drop it, to instead concentrate on cutting taxes for corporations as his only unemployment-fighting measure. No, there is now, just as there was in Franklin Roosevelt’s time, a bipartisan consensus of the elites in this country that the way to put Americans back to work is that taxes must be cut on investors and corporations. We are, apparently, supposed to ignore the last thirty years of history, which teaches us that every tax cut we pass and every subsidy we grant to big corporations will be used to hire robots or to move jobs overseas. No, this time we’re supposed to believe it will be different and this time they really will use that money to make more jobs. Trust them on this, they say. And just as in Roosevelt’s day, the exact same political coalition of big-corporation Republicans and big-corporation Democrats insist that if that won’t do the job fast enough, then what we need are even more public-private partnerships. And ironically, even Barack Obama, who very nearly lost his political career early on because he was caught on the fringes of Tony Rezko’s financially corrupt public-private partnership, one that Barack Obama had gotten for him, somehow hasn’t learned that it’s public-private partnerships and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, not government make-work programs or benefits for the unemployed, that are the real welfare cheats. Being a Harvard graduate who grew up under the steady drumbeat of pro-corporate propaganda about how evil the WPA was, he’s still talking up the need for more public-private partnerships like Harold Ickes’ old Public Works Administration.

So I figure the odds at roughly 4 to 1 that he’s going to screw up the unemployment situation in America, at the very least doing nothing to help it, and quite possibly making it worse by funding the elimination of yet more American jobs, because that’s exactly what the new President and his cabinet officers are talking about doing, lately. Sadly, these are even better odds than we would have had under either Clinton or McCain, neither of whom would have even considered anything but public-private partnerships. Obama will, I think, at least think about it. But I don’t think he’ll do anything but try to set up another PWA. Which is a damned shame. Because what we really need is another WPA.

Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder

25 May 2008

I don’t know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn’t explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It’s probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between “All You Zombies” and “If This Goes On.”

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a “free energy” machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth’s own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company’s management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn’t get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to “stop the motor of the world,” to kill 90% or so of Earth’s population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert “strike of the mind,” as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did — because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don’t consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

And that’s where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I’m whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity’s saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt’s manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that’s not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We’re looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor’s village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers’ twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

Because she died without telling anyone, it’s not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers’ science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors’ village, assuming that they’d worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they’d cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We’ll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete … Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.

Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it’s a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers’ personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt’s Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt’s strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they’re retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.

Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he’s a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland … where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.

Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don’t think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!

Nobody Will Ever Believe How We Got Here #OWS

17 October 2011 — edited to avoid deadnaming & misgendering Chelsea Manning

I got extraordinarily lucky when one particular person offered me a ride home from St. Louis’s Archon science fiction convention, and here’s why: she is a very smart person who has just spent the last year under a near-total news blackout. No internet access to speak of, news mostly restricted to sports except during (of all things) the argument over the debt ceiling. And that’s how it happened that I got asked to explain, in five minutes or less, how in the hell Occupy Wall Street even happened. Not what it was about, not what it was standing for, not what I thought was going to happen; she was interested in those things, but the one she really wanted to know was “why now and not three years ago, and how did it happen?”

I don’t think I flubbed my answer. I’ve now had a couple of weeks more to think about it, and I’d give the same answer. But the more I think about it? The more I want to write this down and send it to historians in the future. And the more certain I am that they won’t believe me.

Here’s my understanding of how it came about:

It all started with a possible US war crime in Iraq, and, more importantly, with the cover-up by people who were acting like they thought it was a war crime. A bored sysadmin at a US facility in Afghanistan, with not enough to do, went browsing through [her] users’ files and saw the video showing US air cavalry in Baghdad shooting up a journalist and the Iraqi civilians he was interviewing, then shooting up the family of four who stopped, in their van, to try to take the wounded to a hospital. So [she] did what you’re supposed to do under those circumstances: [she] took it up [her] chain of command. Who punished [her] for asking about it, for not leaving it up to the JAG officers. That annoyed [her] so much that [she] took advantage of the cypherpunk whistle-blower support website WikiLeaks, sending them the evidence that the JAG corps and [her] chain of command declined to investigate.

But WikiLeaks was already under pressure from governments around the world, including ours, so [she] gave them one more thing to use in their defense. It was a “nuclear option,” something so big that even they wouldn’t really want to release it, but that they could threaten the US government with: go after us on (what came to be called) the “Collateral Murder” video, and we’ll pull the trigger on this: over half a million classified State Department internal memos, downloaded from SIPRnet. The US government apparently thought that WikiLeaks wouldn’t do it, or thought they could stop them, or something: they put pressure on banks all over the world to cut off payments processing for donors to WikiLeaks, over the Collateral Murder video.

This was, frankly, nuts, since “Collateral Murder” was a murky and not terribly interesting story. No matter how much anti-war activists wanted to portray it as My Lai in Baghdad, it was a mistaken identity case made worse by adrenaline rush; all it had in common with My Lai was that the chopper pilots who were eager to gun down the people evacuating the wounded were guys who’d lost friends to insurgents in that area, who were gunning for revenge, but that happens in every war zone. It was a very brief news story, already well on its way to being forgotten, but the government went ahead and ordered the banks to punish Wikileaks for their part in it, just because they could. Which the banks did. And so Wikileaks pulled the trigger on “Cablegate.”

Cablegate had a lot of minor effects, most of them predictable, but nobody could have predicted one of them, because it was just that weird.

Despots all over the world have always told their subjects, “Everybody else in the country agrees with us, the despots. You’re the only one who has a problem with it. Well, you and (some much-hated minority group). Which just goes to show, there’s something wrong with you.” In places where the despots have control over the media (which is most places there are despots), they get away with this, because for all most people know, the despot-controlled media is telling the truth about that. Maybe they and their friends really are the only ones who have a problem with it; how could they prove otherwise?

One of the absolutely least interesting, least important State Department cables in the whole “Cablegate” SIPRnet dump was a routine report from the US embassy in Tunisia, that said something that would surprise nobody anywhere in the free world: as the Tunisian dictator freaked out more and more about one thing or another, and got more and more brutal about it, lots of individual Tunisians were seeking out US diplomats and saying, “hey, I’m not okay with this, is it just me?” People from all walks of life. You’re shocked, right?

Let me add something else, something that seems to have gone completely over the heads of the people of Tunisia: lots of stuff in the Cablegate dump is pure bullshit. Nothing in the Cablegate dumps should be taken at face value. There are brilliant, well-educated, deeply culturally embedded foreign-country experts in our foreign service. There are also one holy hell of a lot of dim-witted partisan political hacks who can barely read their own language at a 3rd grade level, let alone the language of the country they’ve been sent to. They both file reports to the Department of State that got dumped onto SIPRnet.

But I guess nobody pointed that out to the Tunisian people. The Cablegate “bombshell” that many Tunisians, not just al Qaeda, were angry at the Army and the dictator of Tunisia arrived right in the middle of an army crackdown, and emboldened by the (ridiculously poorly sourced) reassurance from western journalists that if they rose up against it, others would do so too, the Tunisians tried it. And it shouldn’t have worked, because the army had all the guns. But it did work, for a reason not explained in the Cablegate files: right that minute, for their own personal reasons, the Tunisian army wasn’t terribly happy with the dictator, either. So they declined to machine-gun the protesters. And the dictator fell.

Understanding little or none of this, people living under western-backed dictatorships all over the Arab world freaked out: “we can DO that?” So they tried it. In Iran, the army backed the regime, tortured and gunned down as many protesters as they needed to (which wasn’t all that many) and won. Being a dog-bites-man story, hardly anybody talked about this much. In Syria, the army backed the regime, tortured and gunned down as many protesters as they needed to (which wasn’t all that many) and won. Being a dog-bites-man story, hardly anybody talked about this much. In Saudi Arabia, the government handed out a few million dollars’ worth of bribes, and sent the religious police and the army out to crack a few heads of people who wouldn’t take the bribes, the regime won, and this being a dog-bites-man story, even you probably barely heard of it. But in Egypt? The Egyptians who tried to follow the Tunisians out into the streets lucked into the fact that the Egyptian army was also, for its own personal reasons, ticked off at the dictator; they refused to torture and gun down the protesters, and the protesters won. And now there were two, and even though the success rate was only “two for five” the world giddily declared the “Arab spring”.

Which would have meant nothing. If it weren’t for the second thing that happened because of “Collateral Murder” and “Cablegate.”

People who live and die by the internet, who think that the internet is a Really Big Deal? A lot of those people saw the US government crackdown on Wikileaks as an internet censorship story. And nobody freaks out more, about internet censorship, than Anonymous.

Maybe you’d never heard about Anonymous until recently. I knew a couple of the 2nd or 3rd-wave hangers-on even before Anonymous had even consciously noticed Wikileaks. Anonymous’ original issue was, of all things, Scientology. The Scientologists have been really angry, ever since their most-secret scriptures got dumped onto the Internet after they were briefly unsealed in a lawsuit. To contain that damage, Scientology lobbyists have been pressuring governments (and, by some press reports, Scientology black bag squads have been blackmailing government officials) to get governments to censor Scientology materials from the internet. And so a bunch of 4channers and /b/tards and Something Awful Goon Squad members got together on an anonymous chat server, and decided to protect themselves from Scientology black-bag squads by donning Guy Fawkes masks (the recent movie V for Vendetta was on their minds) and protest outside of Scientology centers. Nothing much came of it … because Scientology is a much harder target than any government, if you ask me. And, if nothing else, it’s also one that a lot fewer people care about. But that’s who Anonymous were.

When Anonymous found out that the government was cracking down on banks that processed credit-card payments for Wikileaks? And when our own government started torturing [Chelsea] Manning, the suspect in the Collateral Murder / Cablegate leaks, to (according to Manning’s lawyer) try to coerce [her] to testify (falsely) that [she] didn’t volunteer to send that data to Wikileaks, that [she] didn’t come up with the idea on [her] own, that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, put [her] up to it, so they could get NATO member countries to extradite Assange to us for espionage? Anonymous went ape-shit, forgot all about harassing the Scientologists, and signed onto an idea from the artsy anti-corporate magazine Adbusters for an American Fall following the model of the Arab Spring, calling on Anonymous’s tens of thousands of anti-censorship fans to get the word out to Occupy Wall Street the way that the Egyptian people occupied Tahrir Square.

So, here we are.

Millions of Americans have been told by the corporate media, ever since the 1980s, that nobody but a handful of dirty hippies, and evil Satanic commies, and lazy welfare bums, and illegal immigrants, and of course more recently al Qaeda, but other than those people, nobody else but you has a problem with winner-take-all laissez faire oligopoly capitalism. They’ve been told that if you’re not okay with fewer and fewer of us having jobs, or if you’re not okay with more and more of us being robbed of our savings by Wall Street fraudsters who don’t get punished (“laissez faire” means “leave us (businesses) alone,” you know), or if you aren’t okay with hedge fund managers like Mitt Romney making a thousand times the salary of the factory workers they lay off while liquidating their profitable companies for short-term gain, or if you don’t agree with all of the Republican candidates and 90% of the Democratic candidates that those are the best policies for the American people? It’s just you. You and al Qaeda and the illegal immigrants and the thieving welfare bums and the dirty hippies and the anti-Christian communists. So what’s wrong with you that you agree with those people, and not with the rest of America, the real Americans? And people meekly shut up and took it, thinking that even if they did have a few friends who agreed with them, maybe it was just them. How would they know differently?

Just like the Tunisians. And the Egyptians. And the people of Saudi Arabia. And the Syrians. And the Iranians.

We didn’t have Wikileaks to tell us otherwise. It shouldn’t have mattered if we had; we should have known not to trust the roughly-half-BS stuff that was in the Cablegate files, but maybe it would have mattered to us if they had told us, like it mattered to the Tunisians and the Egyptians and the rest. But we did have Anonymous to tell us. Which shouldn’t have mattered, because none of us knew who Anonymous were, and probably most of us wouldn’t have approved if we did know. (You took the word of cypherpunk anti-Scientology freaks from three of the most notoriously awful BBSes on the internet over the word of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times? Really?) But somehow, when they told us, even though it shouldn’t have done so, it did matter: by current polls, about ⅔rds of Americans now realize that no, it’s not just a couple of us, and a few bad people, it really is at least ⅔rds of us who have a problem with this. And it’s a month later, and the protest encampments are still going strong, and getting bigger. Pretty soon, maybe, the Wall Street regime’s hand-picked politicians will order the cops and the Army to clear those camps, like the pro-Wall-Street regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and Saudi Arabia did, and the even worse regimes in Syria and Iran. And then we’ll find out who the cops and the army like better, here, just like they did.

And in the far future, when they already know whether the police and the Army will have sided with the Wall Street regime or with the ⅔rds of Americans who aren’t okay with the Wall Street regime, if they read my account of how it all started? They won’t believe me. Because how this all happened? Is just plain nuts.

Not That the Actual Forbidden Knowledge is as Interesting as That There Is Forbidden Knowledge

14 April 2007

In my famously favorite passage from Arthur Machen’s influential short story “The Great God Pan,” just before the end, one of two amateur investigators has just uncovered the secret of what it was that was driving young, healthy, wealthy, secure young men to commit suicide on three continents, in a manuscript left behind by one of the suicides. After reading only a few words, the partner says, “Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again.” The original investigator assures him that it is true, but finishes by agreeing with the sentiment: “Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?”

I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others’ work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I’m sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I’ve discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I’m about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.

After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers … and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.

So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?

So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What’s more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother’s social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child’s birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren’t capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.

I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we’d still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.

I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don’t than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it’s that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can’t, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There’s pro-choice, I mean, and then there’s being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old … are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.

I cultivate a readership that’s willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good — I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn’t survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn’t make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because “everybody knows” that mothers don’t kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!

Opposite Extremes

25 April 2008

True story.

I’m not really close to any of my family, but I hear of one of them rather more often than the others. About once every three or four years, he makes the news locally, in some minor way, and I recognize his name: he’s in law enforcement, and he’s the officer quoted in some news story about that often. And I notice something every time, without exception. But first, some preface.

I’ve scarcely seen him at all since a family holiday event a smidgen over 25 years ago. I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he’d been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county’s vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he’d asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn’t square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn’t see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn’t at the time. He couldn’t understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I’d seen in the past year’s worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?

I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. To which, being no more mature than any other 20-something, I responded by trying to yell over him to try to ask him what he was yelling about, which, of course, only made things worse. The family began to steadily gather around us from other rooms, to see what the yelling was about, just in time for he and I to figure out exactly what the point of conflict was between us:

My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it’s never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it’s a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. If someone in authority over you tells you that something is moral, then either that settles it, or you’re the kind of criminal monster sicko that guys like my relative have sworn to protect society against. And when he got that across to me, I lost my temper even bigger than he had. I reminded him of the Fourth Nuremberg Principle, as I’d been taught it all the way back in first grade: “I was only following orders” is not a defense, it’s an indictment. I reminded him that we had sent Nazi and Japanese war criminals to long prison sentences for not exercising independent moral judgment when given immoral orders by their superiors. Within seconds, we were both screaming apoplectics, and that’s when the whole family stepped in to separate us. Both his mother and my father said the same thing: “There is no way for you two to ever talk to each other ever again, if that’s how you both feel.” And we've both stuck to it, even at my parents’ funerals; he stays over there, I stay over here. Even though he's almost one of the only living relatives I have in the local area, we never, ever interact, and it suits us both just fine.

And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person’s moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person’s moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. I can be persuaded, when no moral issue is at stake, to follow orders I disagree with, because I accept that sometimes it’s just not up to me. When moral issues are at stake but those in authority decree that there is to be no punishment for the path that’s abhorrent to me, I can usually pretty effortlessly persuade myself to suspend judgment on others, usually even mind my own business, especially in cases where the people who’re accepting the moral mis-steps are themselves the only ones being ripped off or hurt. But I can never, ever, ever judge right and wrong, especially as it applies to my own actions, by any standard other than my own moral compass.

Chalk it up as more evidence that I’m crazy, I know. But here’s the thing I notice, every time he’s in the news: he’s gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can’t even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.

Using It In Reverse

30 August 2006

I finally remember what I was trying to remember to write about last night. There was a big story yesterday on the AP wire headlined, “Sisters Were Whistleblowers in Katrina Claims Handling Case” (Michael Kunzelman, August 29, 2006). Two women who were working for an engineering firm doing claims inspections for State Farm say that they smuggled thousands of pages of engineering reports that their subcontracting firm submitted to State Farm that agreed with many homeowners that their homes were primarily damaged by wind (which would have been covered) rather than rising flood waters (which wouldn’t have been), reports that were rejected and rewritten, under orders from State Farm, to contradict the evidence and claim flood damage so they could fraudulently deny the claims. State Farm denies it, of course. Nor do the two claim that only State Farm was doing it. The only reason that we know that State Farm was doing it was that the two women had a family-friends connection to Richard Scruggs, who’d handed a prior very famous whistle-blowing case: Jeffrey Wigand and Brown & Williamson tobacco. They smuggled the documents out to him; he turned the documents over to the attorney general and is advising homeowners in a lawsuit against State Farm.

But here’s one of the thoughts that struck me. The two women admit that their careers are over. Right now they’re working for Scruggs’ firm as document preparers, helping him build the case but at a small fraction of what they were making before. And what they make afterwards will be anybody’s guess, because nobody in the insurance industry (or much of any company) will ever touch somebody who was that “disloyal.” They sacrificed their own careers to help other people get their homes back, starving their own families to try to save many other people’s families from ruin and starvation, not even knowing in advance whether they’d be successful in doing so or not. Heroic? I’m a little uncomfortable thinking so. I’d like to think that everybody knows what would happen to their own children in a society where nobody blows the whistle on stuff like this, where all companies know they can get away with it. But then, I would, wouldn’t I? My religion, Hellenism, teaches that you have an obligation to your family. But your family can’t thrive if you let your neighborhood goes down the drain, and your neighborhood can’t thrive if your city goes down the drain because you didn’t stop it, and your city can’t thrive if you fail to sacrifice for your country and your whole country fails.

But the other thought that struck me after that is that somewhere out there, some CEO is missing a bet. I read years ago that human resource departments all over the country subscribe to a database that lists everybody who’s ever been a whistle blower, who’s ever gone public with damaging information about their company. (It’s the same company, I think I remember, that also lets them look up whether or not a prospective employee has ever sued an employer, engaged in union activities, or filed on occupational safety or health complaint.) Human resource departments routinely blackball such prospective employees, to protect their employer from possible trouble-makers. But it occurred to me that if I were a CEO, I’d absolutely want to subscribe to that database … and use it the exactly opposite way the designers intended.

One of the things that every truly awful, truly monstrous boss I’ve ever had had in common was that they all demanded a very specific and very one-sided loyalty. Not to what was right, and certainly not to what was right for the company; they wanted to know that you could be counted on to always do what was right for them, personally. If they had any doubt in your personal loyalty to them, they’d find a way to sabotage your career and get rid of you, as happened to me twice and nearly happened several other times. And without exception, the managers who expected me to screw the public, screw the customers, screw the company, screw anybody necessary to protect them personally, all had something big that they needed to hide. Maybe it was some way they were cheating the company; more often it was just simple incompetence. But if I were the CEO of a company and I had managers like that working for me, I’d want to know that! I’d want to specifically staff my company with as many people as possible who did have their own internal moral compass, who could be counted on to go over their immediate supervisors’ heads if they saw something dodgy. I’d want to be able to tell potential investors that I had staffed the company with people who could even be counted on to rat me out if I was screwing the company, the country, or the investors. And who better to hire for that than as many former whistle-blowers as I could find?

It’s Not a M------F---ing “Miracle.” It’s Somebody’s JOB.

16 January 2009

First, let me disclaim something: this is probably not going to be the best writing job I’ve ever done. I know what I do best. What I do best, in writing, is a factual essay on a subject I’m very interested in, where I calmly and rationally explain relevant history and facts and where I compare and contrast multiple opinions. Some of you think I do that well enough that I should be doing it for a living; I can say that when I was well enough to work in an office environment, much of my most highly praised work was in documentation. But this isn’t going to be a documentation piece. I want to try to do something here that I’m constitutionally very, very bad at: express strong emotion. Because I keep getting chills about US Airways flight 1549, the same way I kept getting chills for days after Hurricane Katrina, only for the opposite reason. I do not remember the last time I was so proud of so many people at once. It probably hasn’t been since I found out about the nothing less than brilliantly designed, brilliantly executed management plan that the survivors at the abandoned, forgotten overflow shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center organized themselves and ran their own shelter by that I have felt this proud of so many people at one time.

And unlike Katrina, I keep wanting to freak out over the things that really should have or could have gone wrong and didn’t. For example, not being a New Yorker and not being intimately familiar with the Hudson River at that point, it wasn’t until I saw tonight’s Rachel Maddow Show that I realized that while trying to fly an unpowered jetliner at the minimum stall speed, Captain Sullenberger had to deal with the teensy little obstacle that the optimum glide path would have crashed him and his passengers into the crowded George Washington Bridge. We’ll know when we see the FTSB report, but my guess based on the physics is that he must have managed to dive for speed before getting to it and then use that speed to climb above it … so smoothly that the passengers described it as “going over a speed bump.”

But flight 1549 has something else in common with Hurricane Katrina for me. I keep getting enraged at some politicians and spokesmen for some of the genuinely awful, genuinely stupid, actually malevolently evil things that they’re saying about it. And none of them has so far affected me so strongly as New York governor David Patterson’s oft-reported description of this as “a miracle.” And yes, I know he’s not the only one who’s calling it that. So let me try to find the under-used, or perhaps over-used, vocabulary to try to explain something very, very important to me. This was no mother fucking “miracle.” This was a job. Praise one or more gods on your own time. The real reason that 155 people lived through this is that dozens, maybe hundreds of ordinary men and women with jobs to do were well-trained for those jobs, and when the time came to do so they did their jobs, and they did them right and did them well. Most of them even did the exact right thing on the first try; those that didn’t, fixed their mistakes correctly in plenty of time.

Perhaps you misunderstand why this is so important to me, so let me be pedantically clear about it. This is not about religion, not about the majority religion, not about my feelings about my religion, their religion, or religion in general. It is about something much more important than that, or at least, something much more important to me than God, whether “He” exists or not, or the gods I worship, or anything else in the world for that matter, and that is this. If we believe that survival during a disaster is “miraculous”? If we believe that it is entirely up to God who lives or who dies when something goes wrong? Then far too many of us will leave it up to God to save people.

Sully Sullenberger didn’t leave it up to God whether his passengers were going to live or die. He spent a large percentage of his professional life taking time out to practice in simulation how to land a commercial jetliner without engines. When he decided that wasn’t enough, he then went on to make a professional study, on his own time, of commercial aviation safety, so much so that telling other people what he learned from studying it turned into a second job for him. And (more goosebumps again) he decided, years ago?, that that wasn’t enough margin for safety for him, so he went on to learn to become a certified glider pilot. Nor should you call it a “miracle” that US Airways flight 1549 had someone like Sully Sullenberger at the helm, because that’s what commercial aviation is like. If you look at the records of every civil aviation disaster in history, you see the same thing in the story of the pilot at the helm of all of them: the same fierce lifelong determination to be prepared for disaster in any form, and the same calm professionalism on the rare occasions that disaster strikes. Yeah, 99.99% of the day to day job is being a glorified bus driver stuck in traffic. But the other 0.01% of the job is part of the job too, and the history of commercial aviation is chock-full of people who did it.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration have never believed in leaving it up to God whether or not the passengers are going to live through an accident. Since deregulation of the industry, airlines have gone so far as to eliminate pillows to reduce weight in their airliners in order to save weight and reduce fuel costs: you think they were crazy about carrying gigantic self-inflating rafts, or life jackets for all passengers? If those seem like no-brainers to you, let me point out that in the news over the last several months there was a discussion, initiated by we don’t know whom just yet, clearly intended to eliminate just those things. The argument went that almost never do airliners land in water. And when they do, they have to crash into the water at a minimum speed of about 140 miles per hour so the plane is going to break up and everybody is going to die anyway, it will be “up to God” who lives and who dies. But people at the NTSB and the FAA were having none of it, and you know why? Sooner or later, some airline pilot was going to have to do what Captain Sullenberg had to do the other day, and they weren’t going to leave it up to God; screw the cost, those airliners were going to have rafts and life jackets. That decision saved 155 lives.

Here’s another example. Almost all airline air crew employees retire without ever being in an aviation disaster. You could argue that it makes no sense to waste time training them for one, time that would be better served having them just do their job. But over the decades, people have studied the heck out of the disasters that did happen, and as a result we know an awful lot about disaster survival. We know that there are two things that, more than anything else, more even than good equipment and good preparation and good training, decide whether or not a group of people in a disaster together stay alive: someone in a recognized position of chain of command, even if it’s just a stewardess in a cheap imitation of a World War II Air Force women’s officer uniform, must be clearly seen to be in charge, that person must be relaying good and useful information, and most importantly, that person must remain calm and prioritize keeping everybody else calm. So even though almost no stewards or stewardesses will ever need to know how to do that, we not only train them on how to keep passengers calm during an evacuation, we drill them on it. And because they’re not at the top of the chain of command, we put even more training, drill, and intense socio-cultural pressure on pilots, the commanders of the airplanes, to remain entirely calm no matter what goes wrong, and to (if anything) quietly understate the threat. Call it American fighter-pilot macho, call it British military stiff upper lip; call it whatever you like, but that calm professionalism saves lives. Not just in this disaster, but in any disaster. Captain Sullenberger, and his flight crew, are only the most recent vivid example of this in action.

(How well did they do it? According to an interview with literally the last passenger to get off of the sinking airliner, the flight attendants managed to keep things calm and orderly while they and the passengers evacuated a passenger with two broken legs through waist-deep 36°F water, water cold enough to kill you in five minutes. And a woman carrying a newborn infant, too, but it’s the passenger with the broken legs that weirds even me out. I would dread having to do that through narrow airliner aisles on flat, dry ground; having to do it on a wet, slippery, slanted floor in water deep enough and dark enough that you can’t even see where you’re putting your feet? I’d dread that job even if there were no other passengers on the plane; whoever managed that can be proud of having had an extraordinarily good day at work.)

Nor were they the only ones prepared. New York isn’t a city with a harbor, it’s a harbor with a city, and has been since colonial times. New York’s many harbors and riverways are why they built a city there in the first place. And part of waterfront culture in New York City, as in any reasonably well-functioning port city, is the “man overboard” drill. It’s another disaster that seldom happens, and almost never during weather where it’d be a seriously life-threatening problem. So what? Practice it anyway. And so even though it was just an ordinary ferry boat captain who first pulled up to the hatch on flight 1549, “man overboard” drills are part of his job. This was just an unusually large “man overboard” drill: 155 people in water that will kill them in five minutes. So? Do it just like you did it every time it didn’t matter: use the tools we make the boat carry and the training we make you practice all the time to get life jackets and life preserver rings and hooks and ropes and slings down to anybody in the water, and pull them up. It’s just another day at work. If you know what you’re doing, if you’re any good at your job, you can even show random strangers how to do it. And that is exactly what happened. Real professionals had to do the really scary, really hard parts, like diving into the water in cold-water diving gear to rescue legitimately panicky people who’d drifted away from the floating wreck and from the rafts and who were legitimately about to drown. Being a real harbor run by real professionals who have no intention of waiting for a miracle to save those people, New York harbor has people to do that, and they got there barely in time. But by the time they’d gotten there, virtually everybody else had been rescued … not just by the Coast Guard and the Transit Authority and the Harbor Patrol, but by dozens or hundreds of ordinary people who saw a job to do and did it.

And contrary to what some deeply sociopathic people in positions of intolerably high visibility and/or authority would tell you, that so many people did their jobs when it mattered is no “miracle of God,” either. That’s what ordinary people do, every day at work, by the untold billions: they do their job, as best as they can, and when the fit hits the shan, they try to salvage whatever they can. Every job has potential disasters, from tornado strikes to building fires, to mining disasters or other industrial accidents, to random crime on the premises. And in workplace after workplace, whenever there is a disaster, real ordinary working people do what they need to do. They do it calmly, and professionally, and with a little bit of quiet pride in their work afterwards. I do not begrudge anybody the feeling that no matter how bad something went, “that could have been a little worse; I think I did good today.” No, what I begrudge is the professional sociopath, of either party and of any religion, who would rob the people who trained and prepared them of their credit, and rob the working people who did the job of their credit, to give “glory to God.” God doesn’t need the glory; he, she, it or they will be just fine without it. Pay attention to the people who did things right. Thank them, not God. And learn from their example, in case it’s ever your turn to be the hero.

And you know what? If you take nothing else away from this essay, this: Be ashamed of yourself if you think that ordinary acts of heroism are somehow unlikely enough or unusual enough to be considered “miraculous.”

Oh, and by the way, the first ten minutes of Friday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC were about just this topic, too. Because of their fierce determination to pay for the bandwidth by making you watch the maximum amount of commercial time first, I’m not sure my link to the actual story will work, but I think this is it: Rachel Maddow (with Stephen Flynn), “When Infrastructure Works,” The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC TV, 1/16/09. (I tried embedding the video, but LiveJournal doesn’t play well with MSNBC TV’s webpage. I’ll edit in a link to the transcript when it goes up on their web page Monday.) If you do find the video, be patient with the first minute or two, she’s having to “tease” or set up all the rest of the news stories of the evening. Give it especially until about the minute and a half mark, where she brings on former Coast Guard commander Stephen Flynn to talk about what real professionals do to prepare for disaster, and what we should learn from them. After hearing him, I rushed out and ordered his book, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resiliant Nation.

Weimar America?

24 March 2009

Sick as I’ve been these last couple of months, I did get one thing done that I’d been meaning to do. Quite a while back I asked my “brain trust” to recommend a good overview text on the Weimar Republic period in German history, and everybody agreed on Richard Evans The Coming of the Third Reich, volume 1 of his trilogy on the rise, rule, and fall of the Nazis. I finished it a while back, and I have to agree with the many reviews that I’ve seen that this is the essential book to start with, the one that made sense out of everything else I’ve read about Weimar Germany before and since, by supplying useful historical context. Many thanks for the recommendation, those of you who suggested it.

Now, here’s why I cared. I came by my fascination with the subject of economics when I had a teacher who was at least as good at explaining complex topics as I am, my Economics and Political Science teacher at the fundamentalist pseudo-prep private high school I was sent to against my will. The year was 1975, and especially for conservatives, the word “Weimar” was in the air, a lot. The US was still being hammered by economic sanctions from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our ability to do anything about it was crippled entirely by the hammering our military took in Vietnam, and the hammering our budget took under the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ “Guns and Butter” refusal to raise taxes, sell war bonds, or cut any other governmental expenses to pay for that losing war; they instead maxed-out our national ability to borrow, from anywhere, and left the resulting mess to Presidents Ford and Carter to clean up, neither of them shining examples of economic or political competence. The net result was double-digit unemployment, even by the heavily politicized, massively under-counted official rate, plus double-digit inflation and a Dow Jones Industrial Average in the low to mid 3 digits, and both political parties’ leading candidates were telling us that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. And because the combination of high inflation and high unemployment is rare, the comparison that economists were nervously talking about was not to the Great Depression, but the far more sinister comparison to the Great Inflation that most experts cite as the most important cause of the rise of fascism and the end of democracy in Germany. The question was being very seriously asked, when I first started studying economics in the mid to late 1970s: were we heading towards Weimar America?

Here’s the story my social-conservative Moral Majority charter member economics teacher, and other right wing economists of the time, were telling us to help us understand what they were afraid of. Weimar Germany, they told us, was hampered from the start by strong labor unions and a Socialist majority in their parliament. Those bad socialist economic policies, combined with the years of crushing and intolerably high reparations they were being forced to pay after World War I, combined with a total collapse of family values and a rise in public displays of sexual perversion not seen since the Roman Empire, so wrecked the Germany economy that the currency became worthless, people stopped working, and eventually people turned to Hitler in hopes of freeing the government from having to listen to labor unions, to free Germany from reparations, and to crush the sexual deviants that were destroying the Germany family and the German worker’s ability to work. Yep. That’s what I was told. But over the years, I’ve learned that there wasn’t a single word of truth in that whole account. Labor unions were no stronger in Germany than anywhere else, and weaker than they were in Britain in the same time period, and they didn’t collapse into fascism. Sexual “immorality” was no more blatant in Germany than it was in Paris, and barely more than it was in New York City, and neither France nor the US suspended democracy in a fascist revolution. And, and here was the big eye opener for me, Germany never paid the reparations, except for one token payment; the rest were funded via direct financial aid from, or open-ended loans by, the USA, which had opposed reparations from the beginning. So knowing those things, you can understand my curiosity when I wanted to find out: how, then, did the Great Inflation happen in Germany? How, then, did democracy die in Germany? And could those same conditions, that same situation, happen the same way here?

Let me massively speed up and oversimplify Evans’ well-documented, definitively researched conclusions. Even with economic support from the US, Versailles Treaty reparations were enough of a drag on the Germany economy that there was pretty substantial inflation. Nothing unprecedented, and not all that much higher than elsewhere on the continent, but somewhat high nonetheless. Well, when they were dictating the terms of Germany’s surrender, France insisted on a guarantee that they wouldn’t be paid back in devaluated currency; they reserved the right to claim very nearly all of Germany’s pre-war level of annual coal production. In 1923, they demanded the reparations be paid in coal. But the German mining industry had not yet recovered to pre-war levels; if nothing else, far too many workers were dead or still crippled from the war. Rather than accept that excuse, the French raised a foreign legion of black soldiers from French Algeria and invaded and conquered the German coal-mining and industrial states of the Ruhr river valley, and ordered their African troops to round up every able-bodied man, woman, or child and force them at gunpoint to mine coal until the reparations were paid, shooting anybody who refused to work, and anybody who spoke out against the invasion. The German people responded with a general strike, and this time, the level of national outrage was high enough that it stuck.

But a general strike in the Ruhr was no small deal. Over the preceding decades, Germany had basically dismantled most of its farm economy, retooling their whole economy around fabled German engineering and German manufacturing efficiency, exporting fine tools and heavy machinery to the US and to eastern Europe in exchange for food and to the Middle East in exchange for oil. With the Ruhr valley shut down, unemployment in Germany jumped instantly to over 50%, and German exports dropped to very nearly zero. As the last bits of food in the country were bid on by increasingly desperate people, the mark became essentially worthless; what good is paper money if it can’t buy food? By the end of the six month general strike, by the time the US bullied France into withdrawing, only two things were keeping anybody alive in Germany: remittances from German expatriates in the US, and sexual tourism. Everybody who had family elsewhere begged them for cash. If you didn’t have family outside the country to do that for you, then one or more of your family members had no choice but to head to a tourist city outside the Ruhr and compete with other equally desperate people for a share in the foreign sex-tourism business, children and pregnant women and mother/daughter acts and straight men competing with each other for the privilege of having sex with Arab oil sheiks or French “sophisticates” or British “gentlemen.” Remittances and prostitution brought in hard currency that could be traded to black marketeers, who smuggled that money out of the country and food in, so if a family member suddenly and mysteriously had food, you didn’t ask questions. You just quietly hoped that they’d gotten money from a friend overseas in the mail, and pretended not to think about any other ways they might have gotten it.

How bad did it get? We don’t know. That’s not a hand-wave, that’s a sentence that should shock you to the core: the Germans were so shell-shocked by starvation that they, of all people, stopped keeping records. Towards the end of the general strike, German newspapers were estimating the combined death toll from starvation, suicide, and murder by Algerian troops at 140,000. That’s very probably an inflated figure, a propaganda claim aimed at garnering US sympathy. Evans argues, somewhat uncertainly, that the few personal daily diaries we have from that year don’t show people going to as many funerals as that high of a death toll would suggest. But on the other hand, he also admits, none of those diaries are from the Ruhr valley area, where the suffering would have been the worst. What we do know from those diaries is that long, long before the French occupation and the general strike were over, your average German was eating maybe one meal every other day, was too starved to think and almost too starved to move, counting themselves lucky every time they did eat, and feeling degraded at being that happy for so little. Once the general strike and the occupation were over, the government zeroed out the currency, issued new currency, put people back to work, and far faster than you would think possible, things returned to normal.

Interestingly, democracy in Germany didn’t die of the Great Inflation. It lasted for another ten years. And in Berlin, in particular, the legacy of of a summer of rampant prostitution wasn’t crippling shame, but a fairly widespread tolerance for sexual themes in art, theater, and music that had been unthinkably obscene before the Great Inflation. Many Berliners alive during that time remembered the 10 years from 1924 to 1933 as almost a golden age. No, the irony is that it wasn’t the Great Inflation that killed democracy in Germany; it was the Great Depression in the US, which wiped out German savings that were invested in US stock market scams and which eliminated American banks’ ability to lend money still needed for reconstruction to the Germans, that ended freedom and democracy in Germany. Even though the effects were far lighter the second time, the German people could withstand one such shock, but not two of them.

So, could it happen here? It’s hard to imagine a collapse so thorough that unemployment reached 50% and US exports hit zero. It’s theoretically possible, but really incredibly unlikely. If it did happen, we would have one advantage Germany didn’t have. We’ve shut down an awful lot of agriculture over the last couple of decades to import cheaper vegetables and beef from Latin America, but even so, we’re still very nearly self-sufficient in food. Or would we? American agriculture is entirely dependent on oil, and not only are we not self-sufficient in oil (obviously), but, no matter what lies the American oil industry tells you, there is no way we could produce enough oil in this country to fuel even just the agriculture industry and the shipping of food from farm to table. No matter how stable the US dollar has historically been, if food and fuel run out because our exports stop completely, Weimar-like levels of hyperinflation are far from impossible.

As I mentioned a while back, the last time unemployment got above 20% in the US, we faced three semi-credible attempts to overthrow the government. On the other hand, those attempts all failed, and that’s perhaps less surprising than it could be. America’s supreme Founding Father and Germany’s supreme Founding Father were very different people, and they left us with radically different traditions. George Washington made all his army officers swear the Oath of Cincinattus. He sent them home immediately after the Revolutionary War, committing us as a nation to always demobilize our army between wars. Just as importantly, he intentionally stepped down while still popular, after two terms, to cure us of any temptation to elect a strong man for life. Otto von Bismark, on the other hand, elevated the King of Prussia to the Kaiser, the Caesar, of a new Holy Roman Empire, emperor for life, and set him up with a large and permanent army as the permanently most prestigious and most powerful branch of the new government. On the other hand, over General (then President) Eisenhower’s objections and fervent warnings, we trampled all over one half of George Washington’s legacy; as with Germany under the Kaisers, our army is now our largest permanent branch of government, too. But we don’t remember a military dictatorship under a hereditary strong man as our golden age (quite), and we do retain our tradition of regular change of executive.

In the first years after World War I, the Germans also did something else that I don’t think that we’d do, and it was very bad for democracy. Unemployment was high, veterans benefits were inadequate to the number of crippled and shell-shocked vets trickling back from POW camps, and the police were not back to anything like full numbers. So, to address all of those problems, all seven or eight of Germany’s political parties set up their own private militias, paying veterans’ paychecks out of party member dues: first to protect their campaign rallies, then to protect neighborhoods in which their party held the majority, and then ultimately to fight in the streets in several small civil wars. Somehow, even if the Democrats do split between the Reform Democrats and the Blue Dog Democrats, even if the Republicans split between the Evangelical Republicans and the Conservative Republicans, I just can’t see all of them plus the smaller political parties going so far as to create their own uniformed armies, nor can I see the American people or their police, however strained and underfunded, letting them descend into armed factional warfare. Also, while racism is alive in America, but I can’t even imagine Mexicans being scapegoated the way that Jews were leading up to and during the Third Reich; even Lou Dobbs and Glen Beck can’t whip us up into the kind of murderous hunger for Mexican blood that several German political parties were able to excite against the Jews. At least, I don’t think they can. And remember, when democracy died in Germany, it was less than 20 years old, not more than 200.

So, in conclusion, American democracy has safeguards, cultural and historical and political, that the Germans prior to American occupation and reconstruction never had. My impression is that, contrary to all the warnings I was given back in the 1970s and contrary to the casual way some people (myself included) throw around the term “Weimar America” all too loosely, we can probably remain pretty confident that it won’t get that bad and that, being Americans, even if it did get that bad it wouldn’t necessarily, or even likely, turn out the way it did in Germany a decade after the Great Inflation. However bad it gets, I remain more convinced than ever: it’s not going to get that bad.

No comments:

29 December 2011

The Dark Knight Returns

# , ,

When Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie comes out, I hope to take time to analyze his whole series of Batman films as a response to the odious ideas implicit in Frank Miller's watershed comic The Dark Knight Returns. But much as I hate what DKR stands for, it's a frikkin' masterpiece of the comics medium; A D Jameson at Big Other has a fascinating series describing why.

No comments:

Government monopoly on force

# , ,

Thanks to Ron Paul, I just had to explain to someone one of the reasons why libertarianism is stupid. So I'm sharing.

Libertarians will tell you that “behind every law is a man with a gun,” and I actually respect the hell out of the clear-eyed skepticism about violence which motivates this comment. But libertarians thus conclude that since violence is bad government is bad and we should eliminate it. Which is stupid.

I vigorously believe in the state's “monopoly on violence” ... provided the state in question is a liberal democracy.

The “liberal democracy” piece is key. That means not liberal in the sense of the liberal-conservative axis in American political discourse, I mean in the political science sense of Jefferson's “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, which hold their just powers by the consent of the governed”. A liberal democracy is a state constructed to protect the rights and liberties of its citizens and accountable to its citizens for its actions and institutions. Looking at our own government on those terms, it is easy to see that it is extraordinarily accountable and protective of individual rights if you compare it to most societies through the world and history, but is also well short of the ideal. I believe that it is possible to construct government institutions that deliver categorically better liberal democracy than we have now, and therefore it is more effective to work to build a better liberal democracy than to eliminate the state.

An accountable agent with a monopoly on violence is desirable for two reasons: some people are inclined to resort to violence, and some people are schmucks.

Because some people will resort to violence, you cannot eliminate the state. This is why those of us who dismiss libertarianism point to the Somalia example: in the absence of the state's public use of force, there is no check on personal use of force, which is a problem for all the familiar reasons.

Libertarians operate from the fantasy that we can wish that problem away. (And no, privately-employed security guards won't do the job as well as the state; the arguments why not should be familiar.)

Because some people are schmucks, you cannot eliminate the state. To have a functioning society, you have to make a million decisions about shared norms. Some of those norms are arbitrary: Either you drive on the left side of the street or the right. Some of them are about how you define property: Does someone own Harry Potter? Mickey Mouse? Sherlock Holmes? Hercules? Some of them are expressions of values: Do you allow advertisements to lie? How much pollution do you allow in a river?

Libertarians operate from the fantasy that it is most democratic to allow shared norms to emerge organically from a marketplace of individual actors. But in reality, schmucks can spoil the party by violating the norms that most people prefer: driving on the wrong side of the road to save a little time, publishing books they didn't write under their own byline, selling arsenic as penicillin, dumping toxic waste into that river. You need an agent of public will with the power to enforce norms, which requires the use of force.

It is right to find the use of force discomforting, but it is naïve to think we can wish it away. The solution is to make our agent of force institutionally limited and institutionally accountable to the populace: a liberal democratic government.

20 comments:

28 December 2011

Do not parse HTML with regular expressions

# , ,

Seriously, don't. The results are Lovecraftian.

No comments:

Republicans for Revolution

# , ,

On the train this morning, I read Mark Lilla's New York Review of Books piece Republicans for Revolution, on Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. As in most NYRB articles, it's really less a review than an article that uses the book as a point of departure.

Lilla is sharply critical of Robin for ignoring important distinctions between different strains of conservative thought. I can't speak for Robin's book — it's sitting on my shelf, thus far unread — but Lilla's description of Robin's thesis lines up with Phil Agre's masterful summation of conservatism, which suits me just fine. The result of this objection is useful, though: Lilla uses it as a springboard to provide a quick survey of different conservative schools of thinking and their history ... bringing us to our contemporary Republican party, with its “mainstreaming of political apocalypticism”. I like to think that I know a bit more about the history of conservative thought than a lot of lefties, but I don't know as much as I think I ought to, so I got a lot out of Lilla telling it from the perspective of a thoughtful person sympathetic to conservatism but profoundly unsympathetic to the turn that American conservatism has taken in recent years. Terrific stuff.

The ending of Lilla's essay, though, drives me bats. He has drawn a clear line from the history of conservatism to postwar American conservatism to the madness of contemporary Republicanism, and expressed a proper terror about that last. Then he concludes:

All this is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike.

Cue Rick Perlstein:

I get the question all the time from smart liberal friends: what is conservatism, anyway? They're baffled. “As far as I can tell, anything someone on the right does is, by definition, ethical. It's not about the act, or even the motivation. It's about who's perpetrating it.” It has become the name for a movement that can scream from the rooftops that every Supreme Court nominee should have an expiditious up-or-down vote, then 15 seconds later demand tortuous proceduralism when that nominee is Harriet Miers. Flexibility is the first principle of politics.

I'm trying to make here an argument not about instances, but about a structure of thought. It is the structure of thought betrayed, I think, by Ahmed Chalabi, explaining his deliberate deception of U.S. intelligence: “We were heroes in error.”

Is Chalabi, or Jerry Falwell, a “principled conservative” or a “pragmatic conservative.” That's a question I'd like to pose to you all. My head hurts just thinking about it.

This part of my talk, I imagine, is long after the point a constitutive operation of conservative intellectual work has clicked on in your minds: the part where you argue that malefactor A or B or C, or transgression X or Y or Z, is not “really” conservative. In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.

It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula--well, maybe he's a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He's certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it's William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.

As the Internet's smartest liberal blogger, Digby, puts it, tongue only partially in cheek: “ ‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.”

No comments:

26 December 2011

Federal Reserve

#
For future reference: Political Research Associates debunks canards about the Federal Reserve.
4 comments:

18 December 2011

Piracy

# , , ,

There are times when I think that the media companies have no one to blame but themselves.

Apple had to trick the music industry to save it, with their “easier than stealing, and almost as cheap” solution.

But the people who control video rights are still too dumb to take my money.

Update: The same idea, again referencing Game of Thrones, from The Oatmeal.

Update: Again with Thrones, making a joke that only fans will get.

Update: A wry commentary on why pirate DVDs are usually better than the ones you pay for.

1 comment:

15 December 2011

# , ,



Listen to Thomas Jefferson
1 comment:

07 December 2011

Hollywood, geekkultur, and Moviebob

# , , ,

Bob “Moviebob” Chipman at The Escapist has a great little video series about the history of Hollywood. Nothing in it is news to a cinephile, but if you have an idle half-hour to spare and have a casual interest in movies, it's well worth your time.

Note that the page design at The Escapist is pretty bad, so you might miss the link to the next installment; you can find it a few lines below the video player.

Moviebob is a terrific Web raconteur, using his voice plus a few simple slides to tell his story with humor, wit, and no small measure of real insight. I think of him as an example of the intersection of web culture, pop culture, and geek culture at its best, and have watched most of the videos in both his Escape to the Movies review series and his The Big Picture series of ruminations on all manner of geeky pop culture topics. Though I'm tempted to say that his occasional exclamation that comics ... are ... weirrrrd is my favorite part of his schtick, he really shines in digging into some bit of pop culture obscura and coming away with surprising and interesting insight. The signal example of that is his piece The Collar, examining the real reason why Yogi Bear wears a necktie ... which opens the door to an examination of the relationship between cartoon storytelling and the economics of the animation business. Seriously, check that one out, and maybe you'll be hooked on MovieBob too.

No comments:

03 December 2011

Ron Paul is an evil crackpot

# ,

I know a few people who have been touched with Ron Paul Fever, and it seems like new examples crop up all the time. So it seems I cannot put off any longer making the case against Representative Paul.

I get the appeal. He vigorously opposes American military adventurism and the military-industrial complex. He has pointed out how the financial industry has perversely benefitted from the financial crisis they created. He speaks in defense of civil liberties and has fought against attacks on them like the PATRIOT Act. He calls the War On Some Drugs the madness that it is. And often he says this stuff well. When we cannot even reliably expect Democrats to step up on these subjects, Rep. Paul's rhetoric can be refreshing, even thrilling.

But if you dig into him, it becomes clear that Representative Ron Paul is an evil crackpot.

He stands against bad government policies because he wants to dismantle practically the entire Federal government, which makes him against just about any good government policies you can think of, too. Including, for example, the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And Social Security and Medicare. And the Environmental Protection Agency.

Many conclude from this that Rep. Paul comes from a radical libertarian political philosophy. You have probably met folks from this school before; because Heinlein made the libertarian utopia of the lunar colony in his novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress feel so plausible while you're reading it, they think that a stateless anarchist utopia actually is plausible, et cetera. I think that kind of libertarianism doesn't hold any water, but I can at least respect its radical grounding in personal liberty, and its bullheaded commitment to philosophical integrity is at least intellectually honest.

The argument goes that Rep. Paul's opposition to the Civil Rights Act reflects his libertarian conviction that, morally wrong as segregated lunch counters may be, they are the price we should accept for a government with a seamless commitment to the important rights of private property and free association. A government empowered to meddle in who a restaurant will serve has the capacity for all kinds of other mischief more destructive to our important liberties. Such libertarians will usually argue that the free market will naturally put an end to such a restaurant as the public, repelled by the odor of racism, will refuse to patronize it.

I find that school of libertarianism unpersuasive. It's wrongheaded in part because it ends up opposed to the obvious good of the Civil Rights Act.

That's bad, but supposed libertarianism doesn't quite give us Representative Paul as an evil crackpot. The thing is, it turns out that the reading of him as a libertarian is just plain wrong. Ron Paul will tell you that his devotion to sharply limited government comes of being a “strict constitutionalist”, and he frequently references Constitutional limits on Federal power. But this “strict” reading of the Constitution has a strange flavor. It contradicts constitutional scholarship and legal precedent, which upholds the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, Social Security, et cetera. He sees no separation of church and state in the Constitution. And he does want the government doing more in one area: stopping abortion, in service of which he has introduced a bill defining legal personhood as beginning at conception and has run a bizarre anti-choice propaganda television commercial for his campaign in which he alludes to his “faith.” What kind of “strict constitutionalist” and “libertarian” is that?

Let's add some more ingredients. Representative Paul opposes the United Nations, because he's worried that it will produce a One World Government that will lead a atheist socialist revolution that will come take your guns. Ron Paul is a gold bug who wants to abolish both the Federal Reserve Bank and the Federal income tax, and return to the gold standard, a form of crackpot economics that should sound familiar.

If you know to recognize them, the signs are clear that Ron Paul is, at best, a John Bircher, the school of crackpot American conservatism which called Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent and William F. Buckley purged from the Republican party for being too reactionary even for him. I have video of Representative Paul addressing the John Birch Society as an honored guest a few years ago.

Which brings us to the evil crackpottery. James Kirchick at The New Republic has tracked down some of Ron Paul's old newsletters.

What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.

I have a few samples from the newsletters; the flavor is unmistakable.

David Weigel at Slate's article Ron Paul And The Coming Race War offers us this example from a pitch for people to sign up for the newsletter:

I've laid bare the coming race war in our big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.) The Bohemian Grove — perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress's Mr. New Money. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica. And the Soviet-style “smart card” the Justice Department has in mind for you.

There's good reason to think that Paul didn't write these newsletters himself, but the Washington Post reports persuasively that Paul must have known what the newsletters contained. So while Paul may not be in his heart the kind of virulent bigot portrayed in his newsletters, he was clearly willing to let people think he was.

Case in point: here he is giving a speech in front of a Confederate Battle Flag, saying that the Confederacy was right:

Bircher, neo-Confederate, Tenther.

Evil crackpot.



In the time since I originally created this post, I have accumulated a lot of links to resources on the web.



Analysis


News items

  • Salon has indexed coverage of Ron Paul and the implications of his ideas.
  • In a speech, Paul asserted States' right to nullify Federal law, in direct contradiction to Article VI, Section 2 of the US Constitution.
  • Apropos of un-libertarian views when it comes to reproductive rights, Paul supports the State of Texas raping women with sonogram probes. Really.
  • Ron (and Rand) Paul's stand against net neutrality demonstrates that his “anti-government” stance is, in practice, not pro-freedom but pro-corporate.
  • Video of Ron Paul making a clumsy, incoherent defense of his position on the Civil Rights Act. What, did he think he'd never get the question?
  • The Examiner reports claims that Anonymous has documented direct links between Paul and neo-Nazis. (But I haven't found confirmation or details on this one.)
  • Talking Points Memo has a story about Paul's Iowa campaign actively courting Christian theocrats who want “Biblical law” including the death penalty for homosexuals.
  • Salon has a report on his plans to speak at a conference of radical theocrats, a number of whom are unmistakable antisemites.
  • Kevin Carey at The New Republic reports that Paul wrote a book about how he's against school.
  • Wonkette has a list of poorly-supported comments from Ron Paul about the Constitutionality of various topics.
  • Elizabeth Flock at US News & World Report tells us that a 2012 report shows Paul to be one of the most corrupt congresspeople.
  • The New York Times reports on how Ron Paul just shrugs about his creepier supporters.
  • NewsOne has more links demonstrating that neo-Nazis regard him as one of their own.
  • Ron Paul speaking at the Robert Taft Club in 2007, introduced by white nationalist Richard Spencer. Referencing Taft, who opposed US participation in WWII and the Nuremberg Trials, is a far right dogwhistle. The archive of the Taft website from the day of Paul's talk offers a recording of another talk about “Race And Conservatism” with white nationalists Jared American Renaissance Taylor and John Too Racist For The National Review Derbyshire.
  • Ron Paul Tweets Anti-Semitic Cartoon and of course blames a staffer

Libertarians against Ron Paul


Neo-Confederate

  • Corey Robin comments on the pervasive defenses of the Confederacy among libertarians. One might consider this blurring of the lines between libertarians, neo-Confederates, and Birchers a sort of defense of Ron Paul ... though one that damns the libertarian movement.
  • Building a Better GOP offers a conservative's argument that Paul represents a Neo-Confederate conservatism disguised as libertarianism.
  • Edward H. Sebesta at Anti Neo-Confederate unpacks Neo-Confederate BS in a 2007 interview with Paul.
  • Sarah Posner at the UK Guardian has a review of the homeschooling curriculum Paul sponsors, noting the influence of Christian Reconstructionists and Neo-Confederates.
  • Michelle Goldberg at the Daily Beast explores Paul's relationship with Christian Reconstructionism, illuminating why Paul's faux libertarianism is winning the support of many Christian theocrats.
  • Newsone lists suggestive, but not quite conclusive, ties between Ron Paul and avowed White Supremacists.
  • Anonymous has an archive of data from American Third Position, a fascist white nationalist organization, declaring that “we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul. According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”
  • Adele M. Stan at AlterNet finds Ron Paul's creepy supporters and connects the dots from there to Paul's own Christian Reconstructionism.
  • Chauncey DeVega looks at Paul and plumbs the meaning of neo-Confederate slavery apologetics.
  • Representative Paul on his own House website supporting secessionism.
  • Progressive blogger Digby


When it was new, I discussed the original version of this post on LiveJournal. It has been linked on Reddit and a local BBS and other places.

24 comments:

01 December 2011

Jefferson on taxes

#

I just stumbled across a fascinating web resource of quotations from Thomas Jefferson talking about taxation. It turns out that Jefferson clearly favored progressive taxation.

I approved from the first moment of... the power of taxation [in the new Constitution]. I thought at first that [it] might have been limited. A little reflection soon convinced me it ought not to be.
Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.
Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.
the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings

Interestingly, the quotations give us a Jefferson who supports tariffs as the primary source of government revenue because imports are luxury goods used by the rich. I didn't know that.

Since quasiliberarian conservatives like to claim Jefferson as the great minarchist of the Founders, I suspect that this will come in handy. (Apropos of which, if you haven't seen it, dig a quote I blogged a while back about John Locke supporting redistribution of wealth.)

No comments:

28 November 2011

Chili

A disconcerting article about what tomatoes are for:

Corn and potatoes became almost immediate staples the world over, but tomatoes took a surprisingly long road to popularity.
....
The reasons given for this lag have been several: tomatoes are a secondary crop and fell in the shadow of the other New World imports; they were misconstrued as ornamental fruits and used for display (thus the golden apples, the pomodoro, of Italy); they were quickly recognized as a relative of the poisonous belladonna by peasants who refused to grow them (they are a member of the “nightshade” or Solanaceae family, along with chile and bell peppers, potatoes and eggpant) — but I propose another, more curious reason.

What's the reason? I'll give you hint: Soylent Green presumably includes tomato flavoring ...

3 comments:

09 November 2011

McRib

An unreasonably fascinating speculation about the economics of McDonald's McRib sandwich:

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes it a unique product in the QSR world and c) it is only available sometimes, but refuses to go away entirely.

If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce.

The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets.

I am now sold on this theory.

Update: Ian Bogost offers a windy attempt at a psychoanalytic explanation of the sandwich's appeal:

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other” (the a stands for autre). Think of it as a term for the thing that elicits desire. For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action.
....
Yet, the McRib’s perversity is not a defect, but a feature. The purpose of the McRib is to make the McNugget seem normal.
1 comment:

04 November 2011

My first hand account of the Black Bloc fiasco during Occupy Oakland strike, as well as the pro-violence flyer in circulation.

I didn't write this: I'm reprinting it here to help the link circulate, since the original is on Facebook, which is a lousy place to read and archive long posts.

My first hand account of the Black Bloc fiasco during Occupy Oakland strike, as well as the pro-violence flyer in circulation.

by Kallisti Partridge

Before I give my account, I'd like to request that anyone commenting actually read the entire post first, and of course, please share this. I don't mind if you disagree with me; all that I ask is that my writing ONLY be shared in its entirety, so that my words are not taken out of context.

On Wednesday, November 2nd, I spent 13 hours in the streets of Oakland witnessing what was quite possibly the most stunning display human interaction and cooperation that I've ever seen. I can honestly say that, until recently, I never thought I'd live to see the day where the people of this nation would join together in a realization that we can take our power back  and avoid what has seemed like a downward spiral crash course that this planet has been on. When I saw news reports of the people in Egypt joining together to form road blocks in their own neighborhoods, I had no idea that I would soon find myself on the port in Oakland, doing the exact same thing with people in my bay area community. I could see this same sentiment in the eyes of everyone else there as well; the people, by golly, realized, some possibly for the first time, that we are not powerless. This awe inspiring observation served to counter balance what I'd seen earlier in the day, which was far more disturbing than simply a small group of hooligans breaking windows.

Right before the afternoon march, I noticed 2 men with military style haircuts displaying suspicious looking body language. Suspicious indeed, it turns out, as they very quickly proceeded to mask themselves, and proceeded towards a group of some others that had done the same. One of them affixed a black flag to what looked like a retractable baton. At this point, they mostly fit in with the others, aside from the slight difference that all of their gear appeared to be high end, and brand spanking new right off the corporate sales rack. Their shoes had NO wear whatsoever, unlike those in the group they approached.  I decided to follow them, because my "spidey senses", to say the least, were raising curiosity with an air of alarm. I followed them throughout the entire rampage.

The two men followed the rest of the black flag group, though only appeared to talk to each other, looking around nervously while seemingly conferencing on their strategies separate from the others. They all took to the front of the march as we approached the first bank. Immediately, the windows were smashed, as they were with the next bank, and the next, only skipping, from what I saw, the bank of the Orient in Chinatown, and stopping short of citibank at the end of the march. One of the two very suspicious men I noticed earlier was one of the main window smashers, and while I did see some of the others in the masked black flag group join in, most of that groups' vandalism actually consisted of paint and the throwing of objects that stood in our way. I didn't see the second man in question smash anything at all, but rather, he put his energy into yelling out things to instigate the crowd into escalating the vandalism ("Let's go! Smash that shit!" etc.), and encourage the crowd to cheer when it happened. Just in time for video and photo being presented to the rest of the world.

This is the point when the crowd started turning against each other. An older gentleman I overheard speaking of the unions earlier was brawling with one of the masked men, and everyone was screaming. The aforementioned instigator informed everyone within earshot that Whole Foods claimed they would fire anyone that took the strike day off (a claim some say now is actually false) and everyone started marching towards the store. By the time we got to whole foods, it was total pandemonium.

Chairs, tables, paint, everything was flying through the air as some people tried to protest Whole Foods while also shielding it from the chaos.  By the time we got to the University building, a brave man was blocking the door screaming "Peaceful Protest! This is my city, and I don't want to destroy it!" He cracked his knuckles, ready to take on an attack. Behind the doors were men in badges. After all of the police brutality, even unarmed men being murdered for the apparent crime of of class or skin color, I was now watching a black man shield cops from a protest. Insanity.

The black flag group began pointing out those attempting to stop them, chanting "The peace police must be stopped", and I was, personally, rather disgusted by the strategy of comparing peacefully pissed people to police which have acted out violently against peaceful protesters. By this time, we had come almost full circle back to where we started, to the Wells Fargo that I, along with other demonstrators, had shut down earlier without incident. An individual commenced to more smashing, and a man next to me burst into tears saying "This was supposed to be Non-Violent!" A female, unmasked and without a black flag, was following around the last of the vandals, and handed the upset man a flyer saying "But didn't you get this?", extending a sheet of paper. I looked down, and lo and behold, it was the same Pro-Violence pamphlet that people have been upset about all over interweb land. All of a sudden I realized I needed to be documenting what I was seeing with the camera I brought, something that hadn't crossed my mind in all the chaos. She was unmasked while handing these out, which says to me that she doesn't mind her face being associated with this flyer, so for now I can presume that it must be okay to display her photo here with my post. If she asks me to remove it, I most certainly will. The two men I was following had now vanished. It gets worse.

[Photo removed as requested; see comments]

Today I approached the internet nervous to see what the media would say about this. What do I see? Talk of the eeevil anarchists in our midst that are bringing down the movement, "not part of the 99%" some say, and my heartbreak deepens. I'd like to ask anyone reading this to get really honest with themselves about the labels they are throwing onto living, breathing people, and their own associations with what those words mean.

Now there is debate over whether property damage is "violence" or not, and I'd like to take a moment to say this with great conviction: The most important thing we need to do right now is examine these labels collectively before using them, and most of all, get clear, collectively, about the word "violence."

Our culture is rather violent, I think it's safe to say, as there is massive profit on human suffering all across the board. Men in uniforms with guns, threatening to kidnap (imprison) other humans while robbing them of their homes; That, I'd call violence. It's endless- we've allowed death and misery to those that cannot contribute to the wealth of a health care system which, it seems in many cases, hurts more than helps as a front for drug companies. It's sick (pun intended) from my perspective, as I've had several teeth pulled at homeless clinics, and even extracted one of my own wisdom teeth in lieu of proper care I couldn't get. My father worked in a factory in Compton for 35 years, so I've had a LOT of time to observe what's been happening to the bottom of the proverbial 99% barrel in this country. I remember people in my community shooting at choppers during the L.A. riots, so I've had a hell of a lot of time to think about violence too.  I don't think that smashing objects should be put into the same category. I've broken dishes that belonged to my loved ones out of anger, and I know that these things can be cleaned up and fixed, as the Clean Up Occupy Oakland party today has shown. To anyone freaking out or anguished over some broken windows, I'd like to ask that you calm yourself and please bear with me here, because I'm about to say something that might sound totally f&%$ing crazy. Wait for it...

It's common knowledge that the most dangerous animal you will ever meet is a mother protecting her young. If you don't understand that, try approaching a grizzly bear cub in the forest and see what happens. My own cat attacked me once as a child when I attempted to touch her newborn kittens. Cops shooting unarmed men, and a window breaking are given the same label: "Violent." That means that someone attempting to rape your sister, for instance, can be labeled the same as the person whom uses physical force to stop that same rapist, should they get hurt in the process. Self defense and brutal attacks getting the same label is a problem. That means that a peaceful protester that falls under a violent attack with chemical weapons can also be called violent when, in desperation with this struggle, they decide to simply toss an empty bottle in the direction of law enforcement (whom won't be hurt by that in their robo cop style riot gear) Language is magical like that. Spellbound= bound by spelling. Anyone old enough to remember the red scare, and all the societal insanity that revolved around calling someone a commie in those days, knows what a label can do to a real person. That said, are you ready for my crazy opinion? Here it is:

Much like the mother grizzly bear, I think it's incredibly likely that some misguided individuals did what they thought was just out of love for those whom they identify with: the 99%.  A patriotic soldier can feel something similar, and it's undeniable that America, and the entire planet, may be in the throes of a massive class war as I type this. Unfortunately, the end result of their actions might have "violent" consequences to the movement as a whole in the end, not only due to the negative press, and the resulting actions of law enforcement that needs these acts as an excuse to bring REAL violence like Scott Olson received, but also in the way that it instantly began to split the people up into those who are with the evil ooga booga anarchists, and those whom are not. Don't let anarchists become the new commie style scare. That's just stupid.

I don't identify with any political party specifically, as my personal philosophy is oh so simple. My personal position always comes down to my own eternal truth which is this: Love is The Law. I think our entire political system could potentially be corrupted beyond repair at this stage of the game, and could be scrapped for an entirely new way of conducting human society as a whole on this planet. I would like to see the rule, as we currently know it, to become obsolete so that The Law (as I've defined it here) can be returned. In fact, I think we most certainly *have* to do this if we don't want to go extinct, destroying the planet with ourselves. Some people say that makes me an anarchist, or an anarcho-primitivist. Black Bloc is not a group or political party. It's a tactic of using strategic protest methods in small organized groups within the whole. How this came to mean "smash everything", I'm not sure. I definitely understand the satisfaction that would result from smashing something belonging to the oppressor, but didn't take part because I can see how it cannot be productive in this situation. It's counter productive all across the board, most likely. A broken window doesn't hurt the racket that is wells fargo, just the movement that takes the blame. Now, you're not going to like this, but it gets worse. MUCH worse.

Copwatch participants have been working hard for a long time to expose harmful and illegal activity among those we pay to protect us. I don't believe that each individual working in law enforcement is to blame for grievances against their department in general; I think we also need to recognize that Oscar Grants' murderer, along with the others guilty of police brutality make them all look bad as they serve as slaves to a corrupt organization that is costing us a fortune. Why does the department demand that their employees have an IQ that is average or lower, but never above average? Copwatch recently released a video exposing two undercover infiltrators at Occupy Oakland that work for law enforcement. Other documentarians have exposed agent provocateurs at protests in Montebello (they admitted it!), and the most disturbing footage I've seen are in an excellent documentary called "Into the Fire", where these agents are seen causing a ruckus at the G20 summit in Toronto to serve the intentions of a militarized police force that acts ABOVE the law to squash voices of dissent exercising their right of freedom of speech. Unacceptable.

If such efforts are underway, let's turn the tables. If such plans exist to harm a peaceful message, why not refuse to be stupidly predictable in our handling of it, and instead, let it backfirein a way that benefits us all. It already started today as occupiers helped reverse some of yesterdays actions. I work for an environmental clean up crew called Playa Restoration, that makes sure there is NO TRACE LEFT BEHIND after a festival of 50,000 or so people, and we spend a month or more in a brutal desert in order to do so. As volunteers. We do it out of love for our community and the land. That said, I know it's possible for people to organize big action together. The police don't protect our safety oftentimes. Let's band together to do it ourselves. How many women in Oakland get attacked/raped every year? I don't know, but why not replace the endless anarchist argument with discussion about ways to band together and protect women from this which is DEFINITELY violence? In the face of schools being closed in favor of spending in ways we don't want, Occupiers are answering by attempting to create community libraries and education. A center for outreach for the homeless, foreclosed and vacant, has been reclaimed by occupiers for these means (while stating that they welcome the re-opening of the center for it's purpose.) I was there, at the reclaimed building last night. It was beautiful. Why not exert our energy in that direction? If the city chose to attack us in the name of "sanitation" rather than using our tax dollars to clean up the park, and if the money extorted from the public is going to be put into militarizing a police force against our will, then pardon my language, but I say fuck them. We can do it ourselves.

And, my final note: As nice as it is to discuss these things on the internet, the most important thing we can do is show up for the General Assemblies. When OPD attacked the small collection of people at Oakland Oscar Grant Plaza camp, the people responded by showing up in very large numbers to agree on a strike. Now the entire world is talking about this mass action. Typing is great- but first and foremost, we need to be out there, facing each other, and addressing more constructive efforts than finger pointing. If someone is willing to physically destroy a target and risk jail or worse for a cause they love that much, why not have a goddamn NON-violent discussion among everyone with the pretense of coming to a compromise that won't damage a movement? What if people within our community are being influenced by a force that serves to keep the people down with agent provocateur actions that have been documented- shouldn't we want to protect those people in our community?!? Last night, Oakland law enforcement, along with agents from departments across the state, were sent in fully armed in response the remaining crowd, some of which appeared to be random drunk people that happened across our celebration of what we'd accomplished. I don't know who broke into the coffee shop, but frankly it's hard to be concerned when armed agents are sent in by the state with their names and badge numbers CONCEALED. That is illegal, and in my humble opinion, an EMERGENCY topic that this entire nation needs to address IMMEDIATELY. Mainstream media reported some broken windows instead. If it's safe to assume that covert opposition are present, we surely have to agree that anything destructive to our goal, however well intentioned, must be kept seperate. Indeed, that puts us in the awkward position of struggling to protect the rights of agents in our midst that oppose us, but let's just suck it up and accept that job as ours. We need more jobs everyone keeps saying, so there you go. There is a LOT of work to be done in this country (for starters.) I've worked with a collective called Food Not Bombs in the past, which operates in an anarchist fashion despite a wide range of political views among its participants. I never witnessed violence— I witnessed mostly poverty stricken individuals working via cooperation rather than under a heirarchy to feed those even more poverty stricken than themselves. I think we need our own definitions for our words, so I haven't looked it up in a dictionary, but I'm pretty sure that's what an anarchist movement does: Work cooperatively, making the 1% obsolete.
2 comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)