Month: May 2014 Page 1 of 2

includes, as expected, the rise of the neo-fascist right. The UK Independence Party and France’s National Front won national elections to the European Parliament.

This doesn’t mean they would win national elections proper, the EU vote is often a protest vote, but the results are still impressive.

This the natural reaction to austerity. When times get tough, and when the “mainstream” parties have no answers which work, people will vote for alternatives. In Greece, to the Greek’s credit, this was SYRIZA, an actual left wing party (though the fascist Golden Dawn party did do reasonably well).

When I was a child, living in the city of Vancouver, I told my father I didn’t see a lot of racism. I’ve always remembered his response “wait till times get bad. People will hate those who are different.”

My father was a child of the Great Depression.

The neo-liberal left of Europe and North America offer no solutions. They cannot offer solutions, it is not possible under neo-liberalism to fix the problems neo-liberalism has created: they are a result of neo-liberalism’s genuine beliefs about how the world economy should be run.

You can not, under the neo-liberal model of globalization, tax the rich effectively: they can go somewhere else. You cannot hold wages up, because jurisdictions can always be played against each other. You cannot fix the environment and stop the mass wiping out of species and the probable death of a billion humans, because jurisdictions can be played against each other. That countries no longer produce the majority goods they need themselves, nor in many cases even the food, means jurisdictions cannot unilterally do the right thing, even if they wanted to (which they don’t.)

Because the oligarchs also control the means of ideological dissemination, you also can’t effectively communicate either the problems or good solutions. Because the oligarchs control the means of political production (ie. the process of producing and nominating political candidates), you can’t get into power the people who would actually want to change the neo-liberal political order (and if by some miracle you could, expect them to be treated as Argentina or Venezuela have been treated or destroyed as Howard Dean was.)

Neo-liberalism is an effective ideology and set of policy prescriptions: not because it produces good outcomes for the majority of people (that’s not its purpose), but because it creates a constituency (oligarchs and their supporters/retainers) who are able to maintain it in power.

All ideologies eventually come to an end, however. The oligarchs hate real left-wingism far more than they do fascism. They have crushed the left. Because no new coherent ideology can arise due to oligarchical control over the mechanisms of dissemination, all that remain are old ideologies.

Given no real and viable left-wing parties to vote for; given the failure of what they are told are left-wing policies (as with Obama being called a left-winger when his economic policy has been to give trillions to oligarchs); people will vote for the only other option: the hard right—the neo-fascists.

They are, at least, against the status quo. The UK-IP wants to leave the EU. They want less “free” trade. And so on. Given no other option for actual change, people opt for the parties actually offering it, even if those parties are noxious.

And so, the hard right rises because of the failure of the so-called center-left, which is not left wing at all, but is for more slightly less cruel neo-liberalism.

But neo-liberalism cannot be made kind. It is antithetical to one of the fundamental purpose sof neo-liberalism, which is to drive down wage rises and inflation by playing jurisdictions against each other.

And so the hard right rises.

Remember, the economies in Germany and Italy under Hitler and Mussolini, for ordinary people, improved immensely. (Unless you were a Jew, gay, a socialist, a gypsy, etc… But that’s a price those who won’t pay it, are willing to pay.)

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The Russia China Axis continues to form

By Ian Welsh

On May 23, 2014

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So, the Russians and Chinese, after 10 years of haggling, have signed a gas deal worth 400 billion or so.

The timing is not coincidental, of course: Russia needs to diversify who it sell to. The next major step, which will be years in coming, is arranging how to supply India.

The US has been pivoting against China, reassuring its allies in the Pacific, that US ocean, that it is on their side against a China which is pushing territorial claims aggressively. China knows that many in the US consider it the real enemy: the real threat, because of its burgeoning economy and its massive industrial base (shipped to it by American capitalists, selling China the rope to hang the American Empire with.)

As I have noted before, the price of the Ukraine is a firm alignment of Russia with China. Russia needs China’s goods, money and political support; China will also be happy to have a security council ally and buy all those Russian commodities.

Japan is a firm American ally, and likely to remain so. It will increase the size of its military, but Japan’s long stagnation has now turned into actual decline, with regular trade deficits with no end in sight, since it has been shipping much of its industry offshore, and not creating the new generations of the best or cheapest goods. Demographic decline, likewise, continues, and Japanese xenophobia makes it impossible for them to use immigration as a cure, while the declining economy and tight pressed quarters means there’s no reason to expect the Japanese themselves to start breeding.

Europe has firmly aligned with America, indicating willingness to cut its own throat with trade sanctions against Russia, if necessary. South America and central America is unlikely to align en-masse with America for obvious historical reasons: America has been the enemy of most states there for over a century, with its willingness to attempt to overthrow any government it doesn’t like.

The Middle East grows less important as solar and alternative sources for oil come on line, and as their own reserves deteriorate. To be sure, it will matter for decades yet, but it is no longer the most important region on the earth. Sub-Saharan Africa, sadly, is largely irrelevant: they will sell their resources to whoever pays for them.

This leaves India s the last major country in play. But for them, the smart play is to stay out of it, keep good relations with both sides, and let China and the US slag each other, coming up the middle to be the next hegemonic power.

To be sure, many will say that China and the US can never seriously fight: they need each other too much. Such people are fools: American consumers grow weaker, US treasuries are a sunk asset, and China will have to move to a domestic consumer society at some point: raising the income of their own citizens and selling the goods to Chinese.

The game of empire never ends, it only changes. The Russians are now aligned with the Chinese because of European and American stupidity: Putin and the Russians, for many years, longed to be Europeans and it would have required only a little respect to keep bring them into the Western camp.

Such strategic mistakes often seal the fate of Empires.

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Choice vs. Predestination

By Ian Welsh

On May 20, 2014

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1) There is no one who can be blamed or credited for the situation humanity finds itself in, for good or bad, except humanity and nature. If you don’t like the way the world is you can either rail against nature (our biology, limited resources, etc…) or you can rail against ourselves—what we have done with the hand nature dealt us. (You could also blame God or Gods, but this amounts to blaming nature.)

Humans are responsible for human society

2) Some humans are more responsible than others. Duh. Nonetheless, as a group, we are responsible. If the 99% rose up against the 1% tomorrow, it’d be over for the 1%.

Some Humans bear more responsibility than others.

3) Unless you posit a universe without free will (an entirely intellectually respectable position), you must allow human agency. Technology changes the optimal strategies, but within each technological framework there are kinder and less kind options. Looking through the vast varieties of agricultural societies, one would have far rather been alive in early Tang China or certain long stretches of Roman history, even as a member of the lower classes, than in Early Norman England.

Technology and Nature Constrict our options and set up incentives.

We choose how we respond to the incentives created by technology and nature.

4) Humans are neither innately hierarchical, nor innately egalitarian. They can be either. For most of human existence, the best evidence is that we lived in very egalitarian societies. For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.

5) Character is created by circumstances, and circumstances constrict what character types are successful but we have a great deal of control over circumstances, especially those who are most powerful. The men and a very few women who voted to get rid of Jim Crow were almost certainly mostly racist themselves: it was virtually impossible to grow up in that society and time and not be racist. They voted against their own racism. You can look at your own character, find it lacking, and act in ways that are contrary to it. I may want to beat someone to a pulp for an insult and figure I can, yet decide not to do so. We could have decided to allow developing states to keep their agricultural sectors and food subsidies, we chose not to, for what amount to trivial gains in money which are offset by larger losses in markets in the not very long run (poor people, as has been observed, are shitty customers.)

We Can Act Good Even if Not Good.

We can change the circumstances people grow up, changing the character of the people.

The argument of free will versus pre-determination is ever-ongoing. To deny the effect of circumstances is to be inhumane: to be the type of fool who blames poor blacks for being poor blacks and not pulling themselves, en-masse, out of poverty thru sheer willpower. It is to blame Bangladeshis for being born in Bangladesh, stupid people for being born stupid or getting inadequte nutrition as children; many psychotic adults for being sexually assaulted as children.

There are injuries and circumstances which most of us will never rise above.

But to assume predestination is all is to deny any hope of improvement that is not determined by what amounts to blind fate: it is to deny human agency. It is to say that if we invent a weapon (like effective ground combat robots – about 10 years out) which tilts the playing field towards a small elite oligarchy (or does it?) then there is nothing we can do about it. It is to say that because monopolies and oligopolies naturally form, there is nothing we can do. It is to say that we can’t choose to create the circumstances in which racism, neo-imperialism, and sexism don’t harm billions.

If most of us assume predestination, assume, in effect, that we can’t make things better, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy for those people.

Either we are responsible, or we aren’t. If we aren’t, then we admit, in effect, the impossibility of any change which wasn’t already predetermined; wasn’t already going to happen.

In some ways that’s a comforting world to live in. It allows us to say “not my problem” and go about our lives–building our McMansion, trying to snag the Homecoming King or Queen as our mate; doting on our children, and ignoring the world beyond the reach of our arms.

The choice, really, belongs to each of us. As the years go by, more and more I am inclined to shrug. People complain, but are unwilling to do what it takes to live in a different world, a kinder world. That might be predestination, that might be choice, but either way it is what it is.

The rule for living in a better world is simple enough, and virtually every sage has told us what it is: to love others as we love ourselves, or at least act like it even if we don’t.

We might start by feeding the hungry, since we throw away far more than enough food to do so, and then go on to house the homeless, since we have more empty homes than homeless people. But you know, and I know, that we won’t do either of those things.

Predestination? Choice? Some of both?

It doesn’t matter to the people who are starving and dying of exposure; it doesn’t matter to the men and women being systematically raped in the Congo; it doesn’t matter to all the children in Iraq being born with birth defects due to American weapons, nor to their despairing parents.

Predestination? Choice?

Shit either way.

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Doing Well by Doing Good

By Ian Welsh

On May 16, 2014

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A simple formulation of how to create good society is summarized as “doing well, by doing good.”

When someone gets money for doing something, it sends a message: do more of this.

This is the fundamental money feedback loop. If your feedback loop is telling people to do things that are bad, rather than good, the world will get progressively worse.

If you want a better world, you’d best be making sure that the people being told “do more of this” and the people being told “do something new” are being told “do good”.

It’s really that simple (and that complex.)

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Equal Rights to Profit from Impoverishing People and Causing a Great Extinction Event

By Ian Welsh

On May 16, 2014

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The New York Times makes its money making sure that the ideological justifications for whatever the establishment wants to do are in place.

The NYT was a key part of selling the Iraq War. Their columnists, with only a couple exceptions, are intellectual mediocrities like Ross Douthat, whose job it is to be stupid on cue. They buried the Bush surveillance story until after the election of 2004 because they were scared that if Americans knew, Kerry might win. They have buried other stories because the White House or Pentagon or NSA did not want Americans to know.

The firing of Jill Abramson has made it clear that she, a woman, was paid less by the New York Times than a man would have been.

(Her real offense is probably that she was against the continued erosion of the barriers between advertising and editorial.)

Abramson was, to put it simply, not treated fairly, almost certainly because she was a woman.

I do not care.

It is not in my mandate to care if the Duchesses of Hell are treated as well as the Dukes of Hell.

Too many people in the West want only one thing: they want in on the evil gravy train. They see that there is a scam going on, a scam that impoverishes millions and helps create and maintain rape factories like in the Congo, and their response is “I want in on that gravy train! Why are women, and African-Americans and the working class and (insert discriminated class here) not on the gravy train too!”

They look at what CEOs make, or the banker bailouts, and they want the money; they want their own bailouts.

But what they don’t want to do is drain the swamp. They don’t want to change the way the world works so that having an iPhone doesn’t mean men and women in the Congo are being raped and murdered in a systematic fashion. In the Congo they will take their rape victims, bend them over and have every man in a military unit rape them. The blood flows like water.

A choice was made in the late 70s to 1980, not to drain the swamp. In fact, the choice was made then to increase evil and poverty in the world an the only reason one can say that it has decreased is China, who didn’t go along with the IMF/World Bank prescription.

This was a choice: as problematic as Carter was (and he was very) he suggested a different way: Americans resoundingly rejected it. The Brits elected Thatcher.

These acts of greed and selfishness; these acts of “I’ve got mine, fuck you Jack” had consequences.

Institutions like the New York Times exist to control the acceptable range of political and social discourse: they are ideological bodies who help ensure change occurs largely within the spectrum amenable to current elites. That is their job, and they are very very good at it.

If you are a member of these institutions and you do not do your job, you are gone. The problem with Abramson isn’t about pay, it’s that she wanted to try and keep editorial and advertising separate. I’m sure that being an “uppity” woman helped get her fired, to be sure, but it was the small bit of good she wanted to (or evil she wanted to prevent) that the publisher hated, that is far more problematic.

After the Iraq war invasion, the mainstream pundits who were against the war were fired, let go, or demoted. The ones who were for it (and who objectively were wrong about in terms of its success and costs) were promoted.

The system is designed to do something, and it does it. Those who do not play are gotten rid of.

Abramson mostly played, she’s no martyr. Even with what remains of the siloing, the NYTimes was still doing plenty of evil.

But even the royalty of Hell sometimes have twisted notions of honor.

If what people want is equal rights to profit from a system which is profoundly evil, and whose function is to enrich a few people by impoverishing many many more while maintaining rape colonies, I’m out. I’m not fighting for fairness in the neo-Imperialism business. “The best people at maintaining our project of impoverishing people and screwing up the world, causing a great extinction event, should be chosen objectively, without regards to ethnicity, gender, age or sexual preference” is not a hill I’m dying on.

Rivers of blood from the victims, dead and alive, have priority and all I want for the class of senior retainers whom Abramson is one of, and the oligarchical class whom she worked for, and who treated her unfairly (only half a million), is for them to have all their power and all the money and influence that buys them that power, taken from them.

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And the Ukraine Sanctions heat up

By Ian Welsh

On May 14, 2014

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Russia supplies the engines used to boost to the International Space Station: and will now stop doing so unless the US agrees to not use them on military rockets. NASA hopes to restore service to the ISS by 2017. The Russians note, sardonically, that they will still be able to use the ISS, but the US won’t.

Russia wants GPS sites in the US, and if the US doesn’t agree, they will shut down GPS sites in Russia.

And, most interestingly, the Russians are moving ahead on replacements to Visa and Mastercard, whom they do not trust not to cut them off at DCs behest (I think the Wikileaks cut-off was the warning that the credit card companies were instruments of US policy.) This is the first step to creating their own domestic payments system. China has a national payments system, and were they to link up with the Russian one and export that to other countries, there could finally be a real alternative to the SWIFT system controlled by the West.

Russia will be hurt worst in any sanctions tiff, of course, but this isn’t cost free for the US and West, even in the short term, and in the long term it teaches the rest of the world that they can’t use Western systems and must have their own alternatives. That reduces Western profits and power faster than it would have been reduced otherwise.

And, over the Ukraine? This is worth it?

That said, every since Visa, Mastercard and Paypal misused their power in the Wikileaks case, I have been itching to see them taken down, so I consider this a good thing. The US and the West have terribly abused their power over the payments system (ask the Iranians about that) and it’s time for that power to be taken away.

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What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World

By Ian Welsh

On May 12, 2014

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In the pantheon of political philosophers, by influence, Confucius is of the first rank: the most important political philosopher in China, arguably the most important chunk of the world for the majority of the last 2,500 years. After a time of persecution by Mao and the Communist party, his influence rises again, as the East seeks a different model than the West to sanctify non-democratic rule.

It is easy to look at Confucius, as at many other ancient philosophers and judge them entirely on our own beliefs. With Confucius, this means we look at how Confucius ignored all relations with women except marriage and motherhood, and how his indifference was used to justify stripping women of rights in most heavily Confucian societies. This is, to be sure, a real flaw: a philosophy which reduces the rights of half the human population can never be truly just or kind.

But it is also important to look at Confucius in the context of the times. The Confucian relationships were all hierarchical relationships: father to son; husband to wife; older brother to younger brother; lord to subject, and so on, but they were also all based on kindness and care: the lower ranked individual owed the senior ranked individual obedience, but the senior ranked owed the lower ranked one kindness and care.

If a king failed in this duty to care for those who owed him loyalty, Confucius argued that he was not, actually, a King. Rectification of terms meant that you couldn’t call someone who ruled without care a king: such a man was a tyrant, and your duty to him was not loyalty, it was rebellion. If a son did not act as a son should to his father, Confucius believed the fault lay as much, or more, with the father: after all, the father had raised the son, who else could have failed to inculcate loyalty, probably through lack of care?

You can see why Confucius hardly ever held office during his own lifetime: why the Princes of his age did not wish to employ him. He died convinced his way, his Dao, had failed. Mencius, the next great Confucian philosopher was even less successful in his lifetime.

Confucius also believed, deeply, in ritual and music as means of ethical and moral improvement. For Confucius proper behavior came from proper emotion; proper sentiment. You spent three years in mourning for your parents because you were genuinely sad and bereft. Why eat good food, or wear fine clothes, when such things were as ashes to you in your grief?

Rituals work. They are relatively reliable ways of inculcating emotion, and attaching emotion to symbols. Once you have spent enough time going through Christian rituals, Christ on the Cross has powerful meaning to you, meaning you can bring up any time, just by thinking on the cross. If you are determined enough, and meditate enough, you can manifest the marks of the crucifixion, so powerful can the symbol become.

Spend enough time in particular rituals, and they change who you are.

We moderns often think of rituals as empty, meaningless: but done right, with belief and intensity, ideally at first with other humans, with synchronized movements and they are extraordinarily powerful. Modern rituals such as our great concerts are still very powerful. Rituals involving the nation state have also evoked great belief: many, many men have died for their nation believing it was a good thing to do, along with the nonbelievers.

Any system must be run by men and women. Some will have more power, others less, all are participants. When they come not to believe in the system, when they no longer believe in free speech, or privacy, or equality, or justice, the society will cease to display those categories.

This isn’t just about institutions: it is about people, and what sort of people are produced and selected and promoted by a society.

Confucius wanted harmony, and he wanted benevolence. He saw a hierarchical state as natural and necessary, and asked “how do we make this state good for everyone?” And he did mean everyone. When one of his students was involved in raising taxes on peasants who could not afford it, he was so distressed he cast him out and metaphorically told his other students to beat him.

So… obedience to those above, benevolence to those below, and if the benevolence fails: revolt. If the obedience fails, en-masse, however, Confucius did not blame those below, he blamed those above: they must not have the ethical characters which deserves obedience.

Ritual and music (which also inculcates emotion, as we all know) was meant to create the people who could create this society.

Did it work on those occasions it was put into practice?

In some places, for some times, I think so: or better than the alternatives, like Legalism, which was incredibly harsh. All things created by mortals fail, and even those that are successful are successful in cycles. But Confucius had the horns of the dilemma firmly in his hands, and he gave answers which answered important questions. Billions through history felt his answers were good ones. Often, as with all political philosophers, his ideas were twisted to tyranny, but yet, he had asked correct questions, and he had given answers meant to actually answer them.

What sort of society is best for those who live in it?

How do we create the people who can make that society work?

What do we do when those who rise to power are not suited for it and how do we know when they are not suited to it?

Confucius died, bitter, but his questions and answers helped create the greatest most prosperous civilization for most of the last 2,500 years. And while we might not accept his answers exactly as he gave them, they still have merit, and his questions still stand as a guide to those who would try to create the ideas which will create a better society for those who live in it.

Oh, and all philosophies age. It is the duty of the philosophers who come after a great philosopher to fix his or her errors. Confucius erred in his treatment of women; it is for modern Confucians to correct the master so their philosophy may continue to promote benevolence.

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Human Nature for Ideology

By Ian Welsh

On May 7, 2014

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All ideologies, including all economic ideologies like the modern discipline of economics, are theories of human nature in drag. If you believe that humans are innately selfish and greedy, for example, you will believe that monetary incentives are the best way to allocate resources and permission to do things in an economy. If you want more of something, you’ll arrange for people who do it to have more money.

If you believe that greed leads to the best outcomes, that the invisible hand takes selfishness and turns it into public good, then you will argue that most of what people do because of greed is good, and should not be disallowed, but, indeed, encouraged.

To a remarkable extent, this is how we run out economic affairs, and it is not an ideology that most of humanity, for most of history, would have agreed with. Even if they thought that humans were greedy and selfish, they would have thought that greed and selfishness should be restrained, not rewarded.

Human nature is tricky to discuss because the specifics of human nature are remarkably twisty. All humans don’t want almost anything: to live, to procreate, to be rich, to be admired, even to be safe. Whatever you think all humans want, all humans don’t.

You can fall back on “the vast majority of humans,” and use the standard trick of economics “as if”—humans aren’t all greedy, but you can act as if they are and your models will work.

But they won’t. Humans aren’t rational, they aren’t utility seekers except in the most metaphysical of terms (because nobody can give a definition of utility which applies to everyone except “whatever people do/revealed preferences,” which isn’t a definition.)

Humans have a biology: We have bodies that are much alike, brains that are much alike, and if we wish to continue living, some needs that are much alike (food, water, and internal homeostasis.)

But humans are less defined by their biology than any other animal of which I am aware: We have culture, and our culture adapts and changes far faster than our biology does.

So, if you’re creating an ideology, you’ve got a problem; Humans are so plastic that anything you say about them will be wrong for some of them.

The solution, first, is to make this part of your definition of human nature.

Most humans are malleable. Change the circumstances in which people live, change the way they are raised, change their education, change their technology, change the means of production and what people believe and how they act will change. We become what we do and what we believe and we interpret everyday activity through a lens of belief, language, and ideology.

Humans are neither good nor bad, ethical nor unethical, moral nor immoral. They are, instead, easily led. Peer groups and authority figures can get humans to do almost anything: rape, mass-murder, torture. Feed the hungry, heal the wounded, work together to build great projects of which no small group could even conceive.

Humans have drives. Humans want to eat, to have sex, to belong, to feel safe, to be respected, to have meaning in their lives, and so on. But there are many many different ways to feed oneself, feel safe, get sex, and be respected. The Maslovian hierarchy is a good guide to people’s drives. But—

Not everyone has the same drives to the same extent. Some will starve or die for honor. Others will die rather than kill. Some will dedicate their lives to saving other humans or even non-humans. The Maslovian hierarchy is not a hierarchy for individuals, only for large numbers of people. People will go without food to self-actualize, for example, as the many ascetic traditions of the world should attest.

A few people are rigid. There are some people who you can’t get to torture, no matter what. There are some people who will never kill; and so on. There are people whose moral codes are so strong they cannot be coerced into breaking them. Even those people are products of their culture, but once set, they are stone.

Kindness is as innate as cruelty. Empathy is a function of the brain. When we say “I feel your pain,” we are talking literally, as mirror neurons dance the same dance as the person suffering. Humans have died trying to save drowning animals, other humans they don’t know, and so on. We see someone suffering, and if we’re neurotypical, that suffering hurts us.

Cruelty is innate, too. Some people really get off on cruelty, on hurting other people. As with the rigid moralists, there is a core of people who are like this pretty much no matter what, but in most people it is a question of circumstance and conditioning; treat someone cruelly and they will become cruel. Virtually every abuser was abused. Those to whom evil is done, do it to someone else entirely.

Humans are band-based: We are wired to live in bands of about 150 people. Those people are the people we are likely to treat well, whose concerns concern us. While we may be kind to those outside the band, we are far more likely not to be, and the first job of any leader who wants war and cruelty to the outsider is to convince the band “they aren’t like us.”

We can expand the band: Ideology of various types can expand the band. All Christians are brothers, all members of the same nation; all sports fans of the same team, all people who believe in Democracy, Human Rights, or Communism. Everyone who has the same totem animal. We expand the bonds of the band outwards: “This person is like me and deserves my help and sympathy”.

Humans are malleable, twisty, and strange, wildly adaptable, and able to believe almost anything. That malleability has often been a matter of despair, and we have lamented how easy it is for leaders to take us to war and to convince us to commit atrocities.

But it is also a matter for hope: We can change, and just as cruelty begets cruelty, so kindness begets kindness. Both are self-reinforcing cycles, and in that lies hope. As easy as it is to lead most of us to evil, so too most of us can come to do good. Expand the band, create a universalist ideology which rests in kindness, and an allowance for multiple paths to the same end, and human nature can just as easily work for us as against us.

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: May 2014 Page 1 of 2

The Result of Austerity and Neo-Liberalism is the Rise of the Neo-Fascist Right

The Russia China Axis continues to form

Choice vs. Predestination

Doing Well by Doing Good

Equal Rights to Profit from Impoverishing People and Causing a Great Extinction Event

And the Ukraine Sanctions heat up

What Confucius Teaches Those Who Want a Better World

Human Nature for Ideology