At the moment there's a piece by David “The Wire” Simon floating around the web which I don't think reflects him at his best, but which does include a good statement of something I agree with:
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism — of how his logic would work when applied — kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
A friend recently commented that he has divorced himself from the political left; another friend waggishly suggested that he is still married to it but could use some relationship counseling.
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't quite claim that I'm happily married to the left, but I am committed to the marriage.
Truth to tell, I've been stepping out on the left a bit, in online forums, for some time. It's fun, and some of those other political philosophies are sexy and fun. But while the left can be annoying at times, it isn't batshit crazy like so many of those “alternative” political philosophies you meet on the internet.
So a little flirting with other philosophies has only strengthened my marriage to progressivism. It may not quite be like when I was young, but when you get older you develop more realistic expectations.
Over the last century, the conservative line on racial questions has undergone a constant flux in its particulars. The distinguishing element of conservative thinking on race is the belief that, at any given moment, the balance of actual or threatened power is arrayed against whites. The conservative line often concedes that whites may have sinned against blacks in the past, and may even continue to do so, but that at the present moment the risk lies in taking things too far in the opposite direction.
These arguments are not always entirely wrong. They often contain important elements of truth: Mandela did have some dangerous communist allies; some affirmative-action programs can have terrible side effects; and so on. For that reason, whenever it’s plausible to do so, the specifics of conservative racial thinking need to be analyzed and debated on their merits, not stigmatized as racist. And even if conservative racial arguments had been completely wrong, it wouldn’t prove they would continue to be completely wrong forever. Still, understanding the history of conservative racial arguments is vital to understanding what conservative racial thinking is.
Dissatisfied with the available handouts for players in D. Vincent Baker's brilliant, groundbreaking tabletop role-playing game Dogs in the Vineyard, I created these.
Player character sheet — The character sheet in the rulebook is oriented around character creation; this sheet is oriented toward play
One more thing: in the game I GM, I use Sacred Harp's track “Whither the Wind” as title music at the start of the game: wistful and a little bit spooky.
Two blogs at Patheos, the religion site, offer close readings of texts held as sacred and inspired by millions of Americans. I'm speaking, of course, of Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind.
These are critical readings. Very critical. Slacktivist, who writes the Left Behind blog, tells us:
I'm not a pastor, so I won't be pastoral here. These books are evil, anti-Christian crap.
Pound-for-pound, Lady Blackbird may be the best tabletop roleplaying game ever made. It weighs in at only sixteen pages (including the blank character sheet and two half-page illustrations!) but you could run a ten-session campaign grounded in its single page of setting. Or you can finish the game with a satisfying climax in one sitting. It delivers character relationships, a vivid and interesting setting, a simple game engine with a novel dice pool mechanic that plays swiftly and encourages good roleplaying, and an adventure setup that is open-ended but has a strong narrative drive. You can run it with experienced roleplayers or story game virgins or a mix of both. I have never heard of it going wrong for a player group; I can't even imagine how you could screw it up.
I love it so much that I made special dice for using the system.
Until all people abjure violence, I will regard those who fight against publicly-accountable government coercion as de facto allies of the forces of private coercion.
If you're wondering what the “Non-Aggression Principle” is:
If you're wondering what the illustration is, it is Norman Rockwell's painting “The Problem We All Live With”, depicting young Ruby Bridges attending public school, defended against the violent objections of bigots in her community by U. S. Marshalls.
(And another comment from Bleeding Heart Libertarians describes how the Principle isn't the strong argument that many libertarians imagine it is.)
A brilliant analysis for our times from Tom Scocca at Gawker. I'm serious.
But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous?
....
If you listen to the crusaders against negativity—in literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerce—you begin to hear a recurring set of themes and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined.
Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete understanding of the conditions we are living under.
Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.
What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?
It is reacting to smarm.
What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.
Malcolm Gladwell's riposte is, well, what it should be.
The case marks the first time that Europe’s role in the CIA’s controversial rendition program, which was in operation at the height of then-President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, has reached the European Court of Human Rights.
All the prisons were closed by May 2006. Interrogations at sea have replaced CIA “black sites” as the U.S. government’s preferred method for holding terrorism suspects and questioning them without access to lawyers.
Thank goodness we have ended the shameful American practice of secret torture prisons on land. Oh, except that one, though I guess it doesn't count because it isn't secret.
This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.
On September 21st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.
Ending capital punishment is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.
Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.
Ending police intimidation is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.
Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.
Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.
Ending political corruption is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.
Ending joblessness is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.
Ending poverty is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.
Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.
Ending American imperialism is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, America was at war with the world.
Ending war is our one demand.
On September 21st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We're still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.
You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.
We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.
Los Angeles County continually renewed its $3 million year contract with a firm called Wings of Refuge to place foster children, despite numerous reports of kids going to abusive homes where they were beaten and locked away for days on end.
Indiana hired IBM to run its food stamp and Medicaid programs, then bungled it and dumped thousands of residents from the rolls—including an elderly nun who was denied food stamps because she missed a recertification interview while hospitalized for cancer.
School-cafeteria workers in New Jersey saw their hourly wages cut by $4 to $6 an hour after their jobs were privatized. “[W]e use our personal sick days just to get paid so we can pay rent for the next month,” one told investigators.
Denver contracted with a Portuguese company to run a toll-road for 99 years. That firm successfully prevented the construction of a free road nearby, citing its contract. The city is stuck unable to build new roads nearby for a century unless it richly compensates the toll-road operator.
During the 2008 flood emergency in Indiana, tolls on turnpikes were suspended for travelers. The company running the toll roads, citing its contract, billed state taxpayers $447,000 for the lost revenue… and got it.
A company contracted in New Mexico to tape city commission meetings refused to make those tapes available to the public because they were "private property."
A California public transit district hired for-profit companies to run bus routes—companies that didn't do complete drug-and-alcohol tests on drivers and stranded handicapped riders at their stops.
Two-thirds of Florida's privatized prisons failed to meet the legal requirement to run at least 7 percent more cheaply than state-run jails. Half of the private jails were actually more expensive to run. But the state never set up a mechanism for punishing them.
65 percent of private prisons require the states and cities they work with to meet inmate quotas, forcing governments to find inmates to keep the jails up to a profitable capacity.
Northwest Missouri State University forked over tons of taxpayer cash to contract out most of its food, vending, and bookstore services. Rather than open up the contract to bidders, it took contractors at higher rates who were willing to donate to the university's athletic stadium fund.
It's hard to discern why [progressives] ... are so ingrained in seeing government as their sole savior in fighting against corporate Frankensteins — but they are clearly incorrect, as a legal and historical matter.
I wanted to keep this lovely reply by another participant in the discussion:
I have never denied the moral hazard in tax breaks and limited liability. I have never denied the corruption ensuing from thence in how corporations can achieve protected status from government.
I, like Theodore Roosevelt, and some of our early practitioners of government, would never have been cozy with this idea. Nevertheless, the reality is that corporations file for incorporation, pay on a periodic basis for their limited liability, but are not created by government.
More particularly, you can thank the Supreme Court for its ruling in Dartmouth College v Woodward, February 2, 1819, for first overturning the attempt by government to limit and control business charters.
How can you read these paragraphs and not see that government put up a good fight against corporations:
But the men running corporations pressed on. Contests over charter were battles to control labor, resources, community rights, and political sovereignty. More and more frequently, corporations were abusing their charters to become conglomerates and trusts. They converted the nation’s resources and treasures into private fortunes, creating factory systems and company towns. Political power began flowing to absentee owners, rather than community-rooted enterprises.
The industrial age forced a nation of farmers to become wage earners, and they became fearful of unemployment—a new fear that corporations quickly learned to exploit. Company towns arose. and blacklists of labor organizers and workers who spoke up for their rights became common. When workers began to organize, industrialists and bankers hired private armies to keep them in line. They bought newspapers to paint businessmen as heroes and shape public opinion. Corporations bought state legislators, then announced legislators were corrupt and said that they used too much of the public’s resources to scrutinize every charter application and corporate operation.
Government spending during the Civil War brought these corporations fantastic wealth. Corporate executives paid “borers” to infest Congress and state capitals, bribing elected and appointed officials alike. They pried loose an avalanche of government financial largesse. During this time, legislators were persuaded to give corporations limited liability, decreased citizen authority over them, and extended durations of charters.
Attempts were made to keep strong charter laws in place, but with the courts applying legal doctrines that made protection of corporations and corporate property the center of constitutional law, citizen sovereignty was undermined. As corporations grew stronger, government and the courts became easier prey. They freely reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution and transformed common law doctrines.
Corporate personhood was a court reporter's mistake in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Ralroad. And forever after it has become a stare decisis nightmare.
Corporations were never intended nor are now creations of government.
Having said that, I still believe with you we need to fix corporate status.
I end up spending a fair bit of time talking to radicals of various stripes, both online and in real life. It is something I enjoy, and I think it is important for an intellectually curious person to do.
Understand, I do not mean “radical” as a dismissive insult, as most Americans seem to misuse the term. I mean it in the proper sense of striking at the root. These are times that call for radicalism. Our institutions are failing us.
But we mostly have a poor crop of radicals, and one thing I find particularly vexing is radicals who only know their own radical school of thought.
An anarchist who doesn’t know who Hobbes was, or an Austrian who doesn’t understand what Keynesian economics actually says, or a leftist who doesn’t know what liberalism is, or an anti-globalist who doesn’t know what comparative advantage is has not done their homework. Conventional thinking is often wrong, but even when wrong it’s rarely just stupid; it usually emerged from smart people thinking hard and coming to their conclusions for compelling reasons. If one has not devoted enough attention to understand the best arguments for conventional solutions at least well enough to recognize and describe them, one does not have an informed opinion worthy of attention.
A friend suggests this could be coined as Korman’s Law:
if you do not understand the conventional thinking, there is no point in offering radical thinking
Aside from the fact that these silly buggers should be ridiculed publically, you mean? Because, I was trained as a intelligence officer. Because I was trained as a military leader. Nothing drives you to disaster quicker than assumption. You must know the battlespace, the failures of intelligence and assumption should be glaringly obvious to every single American in these post-911, post-Iraq days. You must know the adversary, how he thinks, how he sees the world, what matters to him. There is no substitute for boots on the ground, i.e. direct observation. Comments like those I used in yesterday’s post convey layers of information beyond the obvious opinion expressed by the commenter. Taken as a whole they show trends, memes, the spread of viral concepts though the public mind.
In a Facebook discussion of my previous post comparing the current web boom with the last one, I observed that one difference between the two was that the current boom takes place in a generally weak economy, contrary to the last one. Which creates troubling incentives: a lot of rich people have a lot of cash and very few places to put it. Dumb money is an attractive nuisance.
A friend with proper economics training had a striking reply.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, JK. There’s a lot of big, but dumb money out there. Thanks to the global “easy money” policy that's currently in effect, investors can’t get interest income, so they’ve thrown caution to the wind in order to chase equity returns. Clearly, the markets reflect that, but a lot of the big, dumb money is also going to VCs, private equity and hedge funds, and the investors have no idea where that money ends up. A lot of it is chasing presumed IPO candidates, even if their business propositions are flimsy. (To be considered an IPO candidate, no one really wants to mess around with a company unless it can get to a $1 billion market cap, even if there’s only a 5% chance of that happening, with the other 95% chance being failure. So, it’s an all or nothing proposition.) This is very similar to the dot-com era, and the business models are getting more flimsy all the time. In contrast, the businesses that are having trouble getting new or increased funding are traditional businesses that have more solid prospects, but which will never reach the size necessary to IPO. Their odds of actually providing sustained employment to, say, 100-500 people are much better than the typical VC-backed firm, but that’s not what the agents of the big, dumb money care about, as such companies do debt financing, which yields pitiful returns these days compared to what people think they can get in equity investments. The trouble is, the current equity returns are illusory, as we have the greater fool theory in full effect right now.
Conventional metrics indicate that we're in a frothy market. One that I like to keep an eye on is the (Robert) Schiller PE10. It calculates the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 using the average of long-term (10-year), inflation-adjusted earnings as the denominator. This helps to see what’s going on more clearly, as short-term noise is smoothed out. The current PE10 is over 25, which is well above a more desirable level of about 15. Sure, we can continue to go up from here, as we did in 1999-2000, be things have never gone well longer term when we’ve reached this level.
Matthew Yglesias reminds us how crazy Web Boom 1.0 was during the late ’90s. There were a lot of companies whose business plan was:
Raise venture capital money
Use that money to do a bunch of marketing to “build the brand”
Oh yeah, invent some kind of business, though it was kind of better if it didn't make sense
IPO strong because the brand was well-known
Profit
People would tell you this in so many words, with a straight face. If you told them that this was not, y'know, a business, they would tell you, “You don't GET IT. This is the New Economy, man.”
The bullshit is thick this time around, but it's not that thick.
Klint Finley at Techcrunch has an article Geeks For Monarchy about neo-reactionaries like Mencius Moldbug. Lots of good links.
It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.
James Mickens' meditation The Night Watch is a very fine example of a certain kind of geeky tech humor.
The main thing that I ponder is who will be in my gang, because the likelihood of post-apocalyptic survival is directly related to the size and quality of your rag-tag group of associates. There are some obvious people who I’ll need to recruit: a locksmith (to open doors); a demolitions expert (for when the locksmith has run out of ideas); and a person who can procure, train, and then throw snakes at my enemies (because, in a world without hope, snake throwing is a reasonable way to resolve disputes). All of these people will play a role in my ultimate success as a dystopian warlord philosopher. However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer.
....
You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist. Make no mistake, I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++. Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness ....
The Phantom is a big hero in Africa* the jungle. No, really.
* Commenter Erik catches me seriously failing to read correctly. I hereby give myself the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Award For Stupid Western Fantasies Of The “Jungle” for this embarrassingly stupid error.
A recent conversation reminds me of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s classic article about the Californian Ideology.
This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian free market model for building the information superhighway, cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the post human philosophers of the West Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.
The widespread appeal of these West Coast ideologues isn’t simply the result of their infectious optimism. Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics they want information technologies to be used to create a new ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace. However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other — much less positive — features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation. Ironically, in the not too distant past, the intellectuals and artists of the Bay Area were passionately concerned about these issues.
I have a Russian “friend” on Facebook (who on later reflection was obviously a Putinist troll farm worker) fascinated by Russian radical politics much as I am by American radical politics. We exchange a lot of lore. From him, I have learned just how weird the Russian political spectrum is. This is largely because Russian conservatives looks back to a golden age conceived as a kind of mythical version of the 1950s much as American conservatives do … but for them that means Sovietism. So the left-right axis for them is very weird. Content warning: layer upon layer of offensive politics and slurs.
So for example, they have a political party movement called the National Bolshevik Front with a flag which looks like this:
Yes, that’s a hammer-and-sickle in place of a swastika on a Nazi flag. Holy Jonah Goldberg, the mind boggles. So in that spirit, my Russian correspondent offers this astonishing propaganda painting depicting the left-right political axis.
He explains:
Notice that on the right side, half of things depicted are tools for murder (bogatyrs, T-34 tank, PAK-FA stealth fighter, etc). Hitler on the left side is in his “nice guy” image, implying “cultural imperialism”: Third Reich = United Europe = European Union. Also, note that this picture is a commentary to the Ukraine's recent pact with E.U. (the guy in the middle is Ukrainian). Kremlin wants to keep the Ukraine in its own Eurasian Union. Hence, propaganda wave: European Union = Hitler = “fags”.
Kremlin considers White Nationalists (at least Eastern European ones, yes, including Russian) to be a subset of “Cultural Marxism”, a “radical spearhead” of it. In a “first, Waffen-SS parades, then, gay pride parades” logic.
And Kremlin’s alternative is vague “pro-White Orthodox Communism” or something like that. Which is shared by Communist Party of Russia, but in more radical form.
Russian politics turns out not just to be stranger than I imagine, but stranger than I can imagine. My Russian correspondent expands on the point:
Russian politics explained
From Kremlin POV, Marxism as a political force was funded by Wall Street as a tool against old European empires who prevented the emergence of single global market which Wall Street wanted to have. In other words, the Left were the tool of banking capital against industrial capital. When the Left in Russia disconnected itself from its sponsors through the bloody power struggle known as Great Purge, it split in two: Trotskyists in the West and Stalinists in the East (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc). After the fall of USSR, Western Trotskyism evolved into Neo-Con movement, which transformed “permanent revolution” into “democracy promotion”, i.e. bombing the shit out of third world nations and stealing their resources via CIA-sponsored coups (“color revolutions”).
From Kremlin POV, Third Reich was used by the West as an instrument to weaken the Soviet Union, repeating WW1 German fiasco when British promised Germans alliance against Russian Empire, but turned against them when the war actually started. Official justification for it in the West is “Hitler’s bad, Stalin’s worse”. Modern Western democracies support Neo-Nazi movements in Eastern Europe (Baltics, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, etc) through network of NGOs, so “Hitler” isn’t some temporary aberration.
In the modern world, there are three primary powers: China, Russia and the West. Both China and Russia are post-Stalinist countries, and they are de-facto allied against the post-Trotskyist West. So, “Russian political matrix” is actually “global political matrix”, while American political matrix is a local American/Western thing that stops being relevant the moment it leaves boundaries of the Golden Billion. That being said, modern conflict is not just a product of Cold War, but a continuation of the Great Game: the global competition of Russian Empire and British Empire. It’s just now the map also has Americans (modern version of British Empire) and Chinese (who re-emerged as big player after Soviet Union killed itself, and sworn not to repeat USSR’s mistake of group suicide).
As for homophobic part of Kremlin propaganda, it has nothing to do with Christianity, but with Russian prison culture, where bottom recipient of anal sex (or anybody who touched him or things he touched) is marked as pariah. Since half of Russian male population go through prisons, and nobody wants to end up at the bottom of the food chain, Russian homophobia is shared by atheists and the Left.
Face of “Ultimate Evil” in Kremlin propaganda:
This is Marat Guelman, and Pussy Riot was his project. “Trotskyist”, “Jew”, “modern art sponsor”, “loves America”, “hates Russia”, “mocks WW2 veterans” (read: “loves Hitler”), “loves orange color” (read: “loves color revolutions”), etc. The books beneath his foot are History of Russia and Dostoyevsky’s Demons (which was about people like him). And the best part: THIS GUY IS ON KREMLIN PAYROLL. Kremlin took cues from Orwell’s 1984 and maintains its own supply of Emmanuel Goldsteins, recycling them if necessary. Kremlin even uses disempowered Oligarchs (like Berezovsky) in Emmanuel Goldstein role, which is especially effective since their crimes are real and still painfully remembered.
Aside of “Emmanuel Goldsteins”, Kremlin also maintains supply of “useful Jews” like Berel Lazar. When Stephen Fry accused Putin of “new Holocaust”, Berel Lazar accused Stephen Fry of “trivializing Holocaust”. Kremlin’s logic: “we can’t name you by name, but we can use your own ideology against you”.
As for Chinese Communist Party, it shares Kremlin viewpoint about West being run by “Trotskyist ZOG”, but isn’t as vocal about it, because it feels more secure in its position. Russia, on the other hand, always balances on the brink, and this insecurity transforms into pre-emptive geopolitical actions (like in Syria) and psy-ops (think Russia Today). In Russia/China alliance, Russia acts first, China joins second.
My Russian correspondent sharpens the point about Russian antisemitic rhetoric:
Modern Russia isn’t anti-semitic.
After Putin disempowered Oligarchs (read: “the Jews”), Russia turned from being ultra-antisemitic to being the least anti-semitic nation in Europe.
So, people who bitch about oligarchs/bankers/illuminati/reptilians/NWO/etc (read: “the Jews”) are viewed as retards. ESPECIALLY among Far Right.
The difference is that Russia is politically incorrect. Both Jews and non-Jews use words like “zhid” (“kike”) ironically or even un-ironically. My Jewish friends had to specifically ask me not to use them in Anglosphere because “us kikes sometimes find it offensive”. Real anti-semitism, like link above shows, is extremely low by European/American standarts. Russians don't feel insecure about “bankers” because Putin took them down. Russians feel insecure about Putin.
Another mind-boggling observation from my Russian correspondent:
Communists = angry old white guys and provincial vatniks (rednecks) longing for “good old days”
[They] are ethnic nationalists, and also Christian conservatives. “For white Russians, Communism and Orthodox Christianity” and against “blacks, fags and kikes”. Stalin is good because he is “true Communist, kicked the kikes out of Politburo, restored Russian Empire, resurrected Church and Tradition”. As for Hitler, Communist think that “Hitler is a good guy, too bad kikes tricked him into attacking Russia”. One problem is that Stalin is Caucasian, i.e. “from Caucasus”, i.e. black. So, Neo-Nazis love to troll Commies in “hey, you call yourself Nationalists, yet you worship black-assed highlander”. Sorry for slurs, but that kinda how they talk. Also, note, that Communists consistently on the Kremlin side, and were even used by (Jewish) Oligarchs like Khodorkovsky to press Kremlin for more de-regulation.
All modern Russians believe that [about Hitler]. They had “Hitler envy”. “It would be so cool if Stalin was actually Aryan National-Socialist”, “it would be so cool if Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wasn’t broken”. Looking at sorry state of affairs Russia is now, despite all the suffering, it’s hard to blame them for feeling entitled. And of course, if tomorrow swastika flag raises above the Kremlin, everybody would cheer — Commies, Nationalists, Democrats.
It should also be noted that Russians are natural Germanophiles, and always were, since at least Peter The Great. National Socialism has an added benefit of being “Western” (i.e. “better”) ideology in Russian eyes. In Russian Liberals, it is represented in Reagan-worship. “Cool Aryan capitalist empire, fucking towelheads up — God bless America”.
Skinheads in Russia are basically Western fetish. “It's from Britain, so it’s cool”.
“Hitler is a good guy, too bad kikes tricked him into attacking Russia”!?! I have to laugh, else I would have to cry.
NIMBY is a manifestation of externalities. The failure to capture externalities is basically the blind spot of capitalism (both institutional and black market). Democratic governance is the backstop for externalities. Ergo, NIMBY is the tangible manifestation of our age's dialectic between the errors of capitalism and democratic governance.
This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy. Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win. This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power. (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.) It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.
So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections. If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions. All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.
The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate. Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well ....
On Facebook, my friend Miles Kurland says what a lot of people in my biz have been thinking:
As a web developer, people keep joking about Healthcare.gov to me, and I pity the folks who had to do the work on that site — given the data integration work with the large variety of providers and the overall complexity of the system.
But I think that criticisms of the site, and the ACA (Obamacare) often focus on a perceived failure of government to be able to do “big things”, and I think that's misguided.
Because the website is a synecdoche for the system as a whole, whose complexity derives from that very notion that private insurers — not government — should manage health insurance. But it's empirically been shown that Medicare is run more efficiently than the private insurance companies.
A complex, difficult to grasp ACA resulted in a complex, difficult to build website.
It would have made more sense as both policy and as technology for Healthcare.gov to have been a simple form with the instructions being: “Sign up for Medicare for All”.
I suppose that there's one good thing about this debacle: it will be an example that web developers can point to about how software tends to expose flaws in human systems.
Sarah Palin just delivered a striking example of her rhetorical style.
I strongly recommend watching the video to see and hear her delivery, even though I'm providing a transcript of most of it below.
In transcribing Palin's comments I've added a number of line breaks. This invites comparisons to Hart Seely's unforgettable setting of Donald Rumsfeld's speeches into free verse, and William Shatner's rendering of Palin's speeches in the style of Beat poetry, but that's not my intent. I don't want to laugh at this. I want to reveal the structure of her argument. Yes, there is one.
(In using this technique, I should acknowledge my debt to Mark Crispin Miller, whose book The Bush Dyslexicon demonstrates the power of looking closely at transcripts of politicians' comments.)
Responding from a report that President Obama had said that “nothing has done more damage to our credibility in the world and our standing with other countries than this recent DC fight” over the budget, government shutdown, and House Republican refusal to raise the debt limit:
what emboldened our enemies and
what empowered competitors was
his promise to
fundamentally transform America
from being
a solvent, free, exceptional country
into
something we’re not gonna recognize
also, what has
emboldened enemies is he with
doubling of our debt since he’s been elected
putting us on a path towards bankruptcy
and then
locking up pipelines and resources
that will result in us being more reliant on
foreign imports for energy
and then of course he having
left behind
his administration
left behind
our brave men
in Benghazi
to be murdered
and then of course there's
Syria
where he promised to
bomb Syria
because in that civil war
Syria was going to bomb Syria
and then we never heard another word again
about his threat to
bomb in a foreign civil war
and then of course most recently, Megyn, he
using our military
those who would fight against our enemies
our military
our vets
shutting down their memorials
and
holding them hostage in terms of budget deals
threatening to withhold paychecks
for our brave men and women
as for
economic competitors:
corporate tax rates
second highest in the industrialized world
that empowers
our competitors
You may have trouble following Palin not only because of the way her arguments jump around, but also because they are almost all incomplete. To decode them, you need to know that they are allusions to right-wing talking points. Take, for example, the allusion to President Obama's “promise to fundamentally transform America”: that's an allusion to a perfectly ordinary campaign speech from Obama shortly before the 2008 election which right wingers relentlessly quote out-of-context to claim that it reveals his sinister plans.
So how does this work? Does Palin just “get lost in a corn maze”, as Tina Fey memorably described the Katie Couric interview she quoted verbatim in one of her spoofs of the Alaska governor? Check out that segment:
That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax payers looking to bail out, but ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping tho— it's got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track, so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as— competitive— scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.
I submit that this is not just clumsiness. This is a method, if not necessarily a conscious one.
I think the fixation people have on Palin’s complete policy incoherence and ignorance is missing the point.
....
Her policy ignorance isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
....
In this way, symbols and short phrases are the goal, not a means (although others, such as corporations and lobbyists, are willing to co-opt the emotions these symbols generate to further their own agendas).
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
....
Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
....
The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument
....
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
Informed by that, I offer two more long quotes from the that appearance by Governor Palin shown in the clip up top.
Responding to polls suggesting that the budget crisis hurt Republicans enough that it might cost them the House of Representatives in the next election:
people who see the way that
I and Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and
a whole lot of other Americans see
that we are
Taxed Enough Already
of course
that's the acronym for the TEA party movement
we're Taxed Enough Already
and we believe that
the Constitution
that's the blueprint
that leads us
toward a more perfect Union
and
we will fight very strong
for that
so if the GOP is standing strong
on the planks and the platform
that represents
everything that I just mentioned
if we stand united
well then we
won't lose the House
and we
could even win back the Senate
I tell ya
fiscal conservatives
are
more energized than ever
after last night's bill
where
Americans came out as the losers
because
we're just going to
incur more and more debt
this
unsustainable spending spree that
Barack Obama is on
y'know
we're saying
enough is enough
and
we are energized
Asked about primary challenges within the Republican party in the next Congressional election:
here's the deal
what we're talking about right now is
the enemy of America's
economic freedom
is this
fundamental transformation of America
the enemy of the enemy is my friend
is any commonsense conservative's friend
so we do have to consider
a politician's record
truly what it is they intend to do
to stop this
fundamental transformation
and to
this stripping away of
our economic freedom
and
those who can't stand strong
to defend our Republic
to defend our Constitution
Journalists are poking fun at some duckspeaking from Donald Trump. I've included a little bracketed connective tissue to clarify the flow in the mind of the approving listener.
Look:
having nuclear
my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer
Dr. John Trump at MIT
[we have] good genes, very good genes
OK [my uncle and I are]
very smart
the Wharton School of Finance
very good
very smart
you know (if you’re a conservative Republican):
if I were a liberal
(if like, OK)
if I ran as a liberal Democrat
they would say I'm “one of the smartest people anywhere in the world”
(it’s true)
but
when you're a conservative Republican
they try
[to accuse you of being dumb]
oh do they do a number
that’s why I always start off:
went to Wharton
was a good student
went there
went there
did this
built a fortune
you know I have to give my like credentials all the time
because we’re a little disadvantaged
[because liberals accuse you of being dumb]
(but)
you look at the nuclear deal
[that Obama foolishly made with Iran]
the thing that really bothers me:
it would have been so easy [to do better]
and
it’s not as important as these lives are
nuclear is powerful
my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago
the power [of nuclear]
(and that was 35 years ago)
he would explain the power
of what's going to happen
[because the Iranians outsmarted Obama]
and
he was right
(who would have thought?)
[that my uncle was smart enough to anticipate Obama]
but
when you look at what's going on
with the four prisoners now
[Americans held by Iran]
(it used to be three, now it’s four)
but
(when it was three, and even now)
I would have said
“it's all in the [Iranian] messenger, fellas”
and
it is fellas
because
you know they don't
they [the Iranians]
haven’t figured that
the women are smarter right now than the men
[women earn more college degrees than men in the US]
[unlike the barbaric Iranians who mistreat women]
so you know
it’s gonna take them about another 150 years
[for Iran to catch up with the enlightened West]
(but)
the Persians are great negotiators
the Iranians are great negotiators
so (and)
they they just killed
they just killed us
[because Obama is a weak negotiator, unlike me]
Trump does not speak as much in winks toward rightwing media talking points as Palin does, but he does appeal to rightwing sentiments very succinctly without building an argument.
I note that both Palin and Trump are both regarded by their supporters as telling plain truths that ordinary politicians avoid.
Trump doesn't speak in full, coherent sentences, because he's speaking a different language, one his followers understand but we don't.
It's fascinating in a “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” sense. He begins a clause, and finishes it with nonsense filler words.
But his followers have already used their bias to fill in meaning.
“You look at what happened in Sweden last night, they took in large numbers, they're having problems they never though possible.”
This isn't a sentence. It's three sentence fragments strung together that only make sense if you fill in meaning.
Sweden didn't take in large numbers of anything the night before, nor did they have problems taking in large numbers. No, this is innuendo.
And none of us know what it's supposed to mean because we're trying to reconstruct logical sentences, and not filling in with our biases.
The sentence makes perfect sense to his followers. A large number of muslim refugees caused problems that the lying media isn't reporting.
This style of speaking reinforces the biases of the listener, that's why it's so dangerous. We can't treat it as if Obama is speaking ConLaw.
Trump “says it like it is” by saying the first part of a thought and letting the listener fill in the rest. Exactly as it is in their mind.
Alexandra Erin has another long tweet thread using Trump's 2017 CPAC keynote as a way to look at his rhetorical style. A taste:
He's not making points, he's hitting notes of a familiar tune. Their brain fills in the rest of the song and dance.
People on Donald Trump's side have an amazing capability to believe that Donald Trump is on their side.
They can listen to him say three different opposing things, and if they even *register* the ones they disagree with, they assume it's smoke.
“He was B.S.-ing those other people. It's all just politics. He has to say that. But he meant it when he promised me ________.”
But a lot of them? Don't even register that he's saying anything inconsistent. They have classed him in their heads as on their side.
He always talk about the “winning again” in conjunction with war. He doesn't think we've won enough wars, he wants to win some.
Most right wing conspiracies are meant to do two things. One distract and waste the time of left wing respondents. Two instill urban mythos that may be built upon and drawn upon later.
As long as the false narrative perpetuates w/o dying out it can be used. Particularly as out of nowhere rhetorical "gotchas!" Once it has ceased to be surprising or distracting, it can be dumped down the memory hole.
The false narrative is not meant to survive. They are created at high rates. Most die without ever catching public attention. Some do. It is by whatever is expedient and keeps eyes off of the real con.
There's also the facet wherein such urban mythos maybe brought up in discussion or formal political debate only to be denied as obviously false by the very same people who perpetuate it pretending they don't know what it is.
There is a kind of tactic in use where the utterance of the urban mythos is a political brinkmanship and an application of widescale, distributed gaslighting. bringing it up makes the utter seem deranged & vulnerable to be portrayed as such.
Indirectly, the mass manufacture of urban mythos in this form also serves to provide cover to the actual harebrained schemes that come out of the regressives.
Trump, the GOP, and the Russian collaboration being one such example. Which is a global industry predicated entirely on the business of just this.
In spite of its books and intellectuals, Evangelical Christianity is fundamentally an oral culture. Trumpist conservatism is built on top of it. One of the challenges conservative Christians have faced since pledging their allegiance to Trump is how to justify supporting a man who has literally no Christian virtues, and who appears to understand nothing about the Christian religion.
[...]
That’s how oral culture works: This is the story we’re in, so we should do these things. No principles of action are being proposed, so you can’t argue about it in a Socratic sense. It arises from a process of community discernment, not a process of logical thought.
I quite like that analysis because it implicitly recognizes how this kind of oral culture and community discernment does have significant virgues which we have good reasons to respect, even while we also have cause to have frustration with it and opposition to it.
Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.
Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another—how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialismcould suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalist could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country—a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN—take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.
I've heard him use this metaphor a few times, and it's intriguing. Here's him talking about it in a Wired magazine interview.
My positive view of it is that maybe we walked ourselves into the darkness. We’re consuming resources in the same way a caterpillar consumes its resources, by devouring the leaf that it lives upon. If we are part of a natural, emerging process, then maybe that process knows what it is doing. Maybe the way humans are fusing with technology is part of the growth, and we may not manage to exhaust the planet. The planet is a big thing. It has survived several massive extinctions, and still managed to come back. Of course, it’s not the planet that we have to worry about. It’s us. But we’re turning into something else, and I can see the bleeding edge of that transformation in the way we’re bonding with our communications technology.
But, you know, I’m willing to consider the bleak alternative. Maybe humans are a kind of planetary cancer, something that’s gone wrong. Maybe we’re all of us vile monsters, including our moms and the Dalai Lama. I think that’s a way of looking at humanity that came about after World War II, an existentialist, nihilistic view which has persisted for a long time, helped along by the media. And it may not be true. We still don’t know. But that doesn’t mean that we all shouldn’t campaign and do our best to use resources intelligently. That doesn’t mean we stop being political, but it should always be taken into account that self-lacerating guilt isn’t improving anything either.
I’ve been accused of encouraging apolitical apathy by some critics but they’re generally people who have no intention of getting up off their own arses to make things better anyway. I agree that oil companies should be brought to account if their plans to rape the Antarctic affect our future well-being but I have a feeling that much larger processes are working themselves out. The self-aggrandizing idea that humans are somehow different from the rest of the natural world continues to cause us no end of problems.
