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Month: November 2019 Page 1 of 3
Thanksgiving might be the most important American holiday, with only Christmas in competition. It’s become a very commercial holiday, and even here in Canada it seems every store has a “Black Friday Sale” sign up, which is odd, because our Thanksgiving is on a different date.
The story of Thanksgiving is that the Puritan settlers were having a hard time, and the natives helped them out, and they had a big feast together to celebrate the harvest.
Initial settlement in North America was hard. Settlements failed, and agricultural techniques imported from the Old World didn’t work well. The Puritans might well have died if the natives hadn’t helped them out.
Of course, what the Puritans and British colonists later did to the natives was basically wipe them out. And, in fact, Thanksigivng became a holiday when the scalps of natives were literally kicked around, and Thanksgiving was given for murdering them.
The… wages of charity. It’s hard to look at Thanksgiving and not think that the natives would have been better off if they hadn’t helped at all. Indeed, if they’d done everything they could to wipe out every European settlement.
But there is a twist to the story. The Puritans, of course, were religious fanatics. Their brand of religious fanaticism not being welcome in England, another brand of religious fanatic being in power (from the Reformation on, from a modern point-of-view, practically everyone was a religious fanatic), they headed off to a place where they could practice in peace and act like complete assholes to each other.
But the Puritans whom the natives helped, the Pilgrims who had that Thanksgiving dinner with them, it turns out they weren’t personally monsters.
Having figured out how to survive in North America, more Pilgrims came. These new Pilgrims became the majority, and they despised the Godless Natives. The old Puritans defended the Natives and objected to the bad treatment and were so stubborn about it that they wound up excommunicated, and excommunication, in Puritan society, was a big deal.
Charity and kindness, it appears, did work, but only with those who experienced it. And those people, alas, quickly became a minority and could not protect their native friends.
It’s hard to draw anything good from this, but I do find it encouraging that at least those who had personally received kindness were willing to fight and suffer for those who had shown them that kindness.
And that’s about as much good as I can find in Thanksgiving’s foundation myth.
As for the present, I hope American readers are enjoying their Thanksgiving, or at least the food. Whatever the past, we can try and make something good (I typed “food” originally, which seems appropriate) from the present.
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Larry Summers, 2013
One of the most aggravating things in the world, at least to me, are smart stupid people.
Think Larry Summers. IQ around 170, people who know him say he’s brilliant, and he’s been wrong about almost everything that mattered. Among his highlights, perhaps the most important was pushing to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which was perhaps the most important in causing the housing bubble and financial collapse.
If you don’t like IQ (and I understand and don’t want this to become an IQ debate) call it processing power. Some people have more of it, a lot more.
Being really smart, but being a bad thinker, just gets you to the wrong place faster. Worse it makes you more certain you are correct.
Being really smart, as smart people with a bit of insight realize in their teens or twenties at the latest, means never having to say “I was wrong.” You can almost always find a reason, a work-around, to maintain the opinion you wanted.
Oh, sometimes you are wrong about something you can’t quite deny, perhaps you predicted an election incorrectly. But in such cases you can still keep your model by finding something your model didn’t include, and shouldn’t have to. Think the bright lads and lassies behind Clinton’s campaign: “It was the Russians! They cheated! Our campaign should have won!” Never mind that they didn’t send Clinton or significant resources to the most important battleground states, which she lost by very low margins, and which their model considered “easy wins.”
Nope, they weren’t wrong and neither was their model, it was all Russians. (See “Everything Cost Clinton the Election.“)
So: Very smart means you get there faster, wherever there is, and that you almost never have to admit you’re wrong.
Bad, bad combination.
Further, our education system trains smart people to be authority-worshiping idiots. In school, you get the best marks for getting the answer teacher wants in the way teacher wants. You get kudos for being the kid seated at the front who puts up their hand first.
Get the approved answer fastest, in exactly the approved way.
So you learn models, and you execute them as you learn them. If the models are right, great, but the models are never right. (No, sorry, this is true in every social science and in the physical sciences–whenever you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t amount to engineering.)
Our educational system teaches people to be calculators, not thinkers–to run quickly through models and get the expected results from running the models. If the models are wrong, say, for example, people aren’t utility maximizers (if you could even figure out what that is) as opposed to rational decision makers, resources and sinks aren’t substitutable (think carbon sinks/aka. climate change, or soil) then running your models will run you (and society) off a cliff.
To revisit a prior analogy, processing power, or IQ, is the power of a motorcycle’s engine. Actual ability to think well is the skill of the rider. If you’re going down a freeway with no other vehicles, the only thing which matters is the power of the engine.
But if you’re going off-road, through twisty paths, with other vehicles all around, the skill of the rider becomes paramount. Without a skilled driver, all a good engine is going to do is make you crash sooner and worse (possibly taking other people with you.)
People get very confused about this. I have a good, smart friend who praises Dick Cheney for being a smart hard-worker. If even someone like him couldn’t get things to work…But Cheney was a smart person applying a number of world models. His model of how the bureaucracy and the US government worked worked with each other and how to in-fight and how to control a bureaucracy (government, or the contractors surrounding government) was brilliant and correct. His model of how the world outside that government-industrial complex worked was, well, almost completely wrong.
So he pushed to invade Iraq as part of a project to invade and remake the Middle East and it blew up in his face, because how he thought the world worked was wrong outside a narrow, but very important, area. (After all, being correct about how the world’s only superpower’s government and contractors work is powerful.)
How he thought successful societies work and are run, how he modeled what would happen in a power vacuum (when current Iraq elites were removed), and how he imagined what military force could and couldn’t do were all wrong. His larger context economic, political, and military models were all wrong.
This doesn’t mean he wasn’t brilliant. It doesn’t mean he didn’t have a lot of processing power. But in practice, in the world beyond his world, he was an absolute moron and everything he touched (that didn’t involve power in the Government-Industrial complex) blew up.
In the old days we used to call this Doctor Complex. Doctors make life and death decisions. They have a lot of authority (and had a lot more 30 to 60 years ago.) A good doctor in his field was a veritable God (surgeons have the worst cases of this complex). People hop when he or she says frog, and they save lives regularly.
So they tend to think because they are good at this, they are good at everything.
No one is good at thinking about everything. I’m not (I get electoral results wrong often enough I’m a contrary indicator). No one is.
The first part of being a first rate thinker, then, is knowing where you think well and where you don’t. The second part is knowing why. If you don’t know the conditions for your own good thought, then you don’t know when and where your models will fail. You see this all the time with “genius” traders or investors: Their model works in a particular type of market or economy, but when that changes, it doesn’t. They didn’t actually have a complete model, and, in many cases, they just had rules of thumb for which they didn’t understand the reasons.
Machiavelli made this a keystone of his political philosophy: You should change with the times, but most people won’t or can’t. When the conditions of their success go away, so does their success.
Processing power, absent understanding of how to think, including an understanding of the conditions of one’s own models, leads to disaster. You must understand what you were trained to do, as well, or like Summers and so many economists, you will be wrong about almost everything. Models exist to do things, and often what they exist to do is ideological–not to explain something, but to create something or justify something. Confusing those three functions will drive you off a cliff.
So, brains are good. Big bulging brains are wonderful. But like high explosives or big motorcycle engines, used incorrectly all they do is blow up in your face, or cause huge accidents,
Don’t rely too much on processing power. Learn how to think, and above all, learn about what you’re bad at thinking about. (Then, if you care enough, learn why and fix it.)
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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Strategic Political Economy
Mike Pompeo scorns the law because powerful men like him never have to follow it
Robert Fisk [Independent, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-19]Dylan Ratigan: The Super Rich Have No Country.
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-19]
“This is a 2 hour tour de force nailing down the failures of the media and Democrats on the GFC. Great explanation of the whole GFC too.”
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-19]
The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics
[Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-19]
“A passion for affordability” became one of the company’s new, unloved slogans, as did “Less family, more team.” It was enough to drive the white-collar engineering union, which had historically functioned as a professional debating society, into acting more like organized labor. “We weren’t fighting against Boeing,” one union leader told me of the 40-day strike that shut down production in 2000. “We were fighting to save Boeing.”
….Stonecipher, who promptly affirmed: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” A General Electric alum, he built a virtual replica of GE’s famed Crotonville leadership center for Boeing managers to cycle through….
The company that once didn’t speak finance was now, at the top, losing its ability to converse in engineering… It wasn’t just technical knowledge that was lost, Aboulafia said. “It was the ability to comfortably interact with an engineer who in turn feels comfortable telling you their reservations, versus calling a manager [more than] 1,500 miles away who you know has a reputation for wanting to take your pension away. It’s a very different dynamic. As a recipe for disempowering engineers in particular, you couldn’t come up with a better format.” ….
“If in fact there’s a reverse takeover, with the McDonnell ethos permeating Boeing, then Boeing is doomed to mediocrity,” the business scholar Jim Collins told me back in 2000. “There’s one thing that made Boeing really great all the way along. They always understood that they were an engineering-driven company, not a financially driven company . If they’re no longer honoring that as their central mission, then over time they’ll just become another company.”
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-19]
How Neoliberal Thinkers Spawned Monsters They Never Imagined
Lynn Parramore [Institute for New Economic Thinking, , via Naked Capitalism 11-20-19]
Lynn Parramore [Institute for New Economic Thinking, , via Naked Capitalism 11-20-19]
Neoliberalism thus aims to de-regulate the social sphere in a way that parallels the de-regulation of markets.
Concretely this means challenging, in the name of freedom, not only regulatory and redistributive economic policy but policies aimed at gender, sexual and racial equality. It means legitimating assertions of personal freedom against equality mandates (and when corporations are identified as persons, they too are empowered to assert such freedom). Because neoliberalism has everywhere carried this moral project in addition to its economic one, and because it has everywhere opposed freedom to state imposed social justice or social protection of the vulnerable, the meaning of liberalism has been fundamentally altered in the past four decades.
That’s how it is possible to be simultaneously libertarian, ethnonationalist and patriarchal today….
Hayek really believed that markets and traditional morality were both spontaneous orders of action and cooperation, while political life would always overreach and thus required tight constraints to prevent its interventions in morality or markets. It also needed to be insulated from instrumentalism by concentrated economic interests, from aspiring plutocrats to the masses. The solution, for him, was de-democratizing the state itself. He was, more generally, opposed to robust democracy and indeed to a democratic state. A thriving order in his understanding would feature substantial hierarchy and inequality, and it could tolerate authoritarian uses of political power if they respected liberalism, free markets and individual freedom….
We need to understand why reaction to the neoliberal economic sinking of the middle and working class has taken such a profoundly anti-democratic form. Why so much rage against democracy and in favor of authoritarian statism while continuing to demand individual freedom? What is the unique blend of ethno-nationalism and libertarianism afoot today? Why the resentment of social welfare policy but not the plutocrats? Why the uproar over [American football player and political activist] Colin Kaepernick but not the Panama Papers [a massive document leak pointing to fraud and tax evasion among the wealthy]?
….corporate dominance of elections becomes possible when political life as a whole is cast as a marketplace rather than a distinctive sphere in which humans attempt to set the values and possibilities of common life. Identifying elections as political marketplaces is at the heart of Citizens United.
These critiques of neoliberalism are always welcome, but they inevitably leave me with irritated and dissatisfied with their failure or unwillingness to mention the political philosophy of republicanism as an alternative, or even a contrast.
The key is found in Brown’s statement ” It also needed to be insulated from instrumentalism by concentrated economic interests, from aspiring plutocrats to the masses. The solution, for him [von Hayek], was de-democratizing the state itself. He was, more generally, opposed to robust democracy and indeed to a democratic state.”
Contrast this to Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison’s famous discourse on factions. Madison writes that 1) factions always arise from economic interests [“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”], and 2) therefore the most important function of government is to REGULATE the clash of these factions [“The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”
In a very real sense, neoliberalism is an assault on the founding principles of the American republic.
Which should not really surprise anyone, since von Hayek was trained as a functionary of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And who was the first secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society that von Hayen founded to promote neoliberalist doctrine and propaganda? Non other than Max Thurn, of the reactionary Bavarian Thurn und Taxis royal family.
Economic disequilibrium
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**GUEST POST By Eric Anderson**
If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.
— Wendell Berry
I’ve thought a lot about immigration in my time, and confess, I’ve never thought very highly of it. Which, of late, seems to be an extremely unpopular position among liberals. But it’s not that I’m anti-immigrant, per se. It’s that I’m militantly pro-place. I sympathize with my place.
Not being inhumane, I do empathize with the plight of the refugee. However, their plight will always remain at one remove from me. I learned this from a pretty smart fellow who once observed that empathy is a problematic emotion because it is near automatic with those who are like us, and virtually non-existent with those who are not. Whereas, sympathy is a more useful emotion because it represents the care we feel about someone else who we want to feel better. Thus, we tend to help those we care about.
That being said, I submit that a land ethic exists in applying the aforementioned insight to the land we live on, with at least equal the gravity we apply it to people. Should you disagree, perhaps you have never discovered who you are, because you’ve never stayed in one place long enough to learn to care about it.
I am my place. We are inseparable, and my love of my place insuperable. I know its wrinkles, contours, temperament and fundament as I know the same of my wife and child. And as with my family, if I leave my place, my place suffers for the knowledge and support I remove. The converse seems true as well. Should I immigrate, I become a stranger in a strange land. I become a stranger to myself, who in my ignorance, suffers and longs for my place — which contagion cannot help but afflict those around me.
When times are hard, politically or otherwise, to abandon place is to be a traitor to oneself. And as cliché as it may sound, I mean it when I say that I will stay, fight, and die for my place because I am the steward of my place. It’s my family. To run from it is to run from myself. And if I run once, I will be running the rest of my life in shame.
Such cowardice drains the life from the place and the culture it’s built upon because the first to leave are always those with the most resources to do so. The materialists. Those who don’t know who they are because all they think about are themselves – and how to enhance their self with more material. Which flight begins a spiral, enabling the further destruction of place, because those having the most resources to confront the problems facing that place, remove them when they flee.
And here we are. Take a look in the mirror at your materialistic nation born of immigrants. Daily borne by the fear of trying to replace knowing who we are, with status symbols of what we are, because to know no place is in our blood. To empathize with those like us who flee in fear is genetically encoded in our blood. It is this difference between empathy for people, and sympathy for place, that allowed us to commit genocide upon the entire Native American population. Cowardice destroyed an entire civilization that knew better than any other who they were, because they intimately knew where they were.
I’ll be forever grateful for the fact that, by some turn of chance, I got lucky enough to know who I am. Blessed in knowing that I am my place. Blessed to know that the atoms and soul of my constituent parts are of my place. So please, don’t come to my place and destroy what I am, because you don’t know your place well enough to value who you are, enough to die for it.
Heaven is getting to eternally inhabit a mental picture of your favorite place.
Hell, is transience.
Odin with the ravens Thought and Memory
A couple days ago I was thinking about the problem of surveillance states and I realized, “This problem is likely to become less of one because of climate change.”
And I started thinking about all the opportunities and good things climate change makes possible.
My grieving was done.
My pre-grieving, I suppose.
I see grieving for climate change and ecological collapse everywhere. Informed people who have done their homework know it’s going to be bad, really bad, and that they and those they care about are going to be hit by it. For a lot of people it rises to the level of trauma, even though most of it hasn’t happened yet. It’s like the moment you really know you’re going to die or that something else horrible WILL happen. You can get caught on it, and traumatized by something which isn’t here yet.
But then there’s the point at which you hit acceptance.
Alcoholics Anonymous has a prayer, ““God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
But acceptance doesn’t mean resignation. It doesn’t mean “oh, nothing can be done.” If I know there’s going to be a famine I can stock up food. If I know I’m going to die, I can write a will and say my goodbyes. If I know here is going to be climate change I can take that into account in my actions going forward.
Knowing something is going to happen, and that it can’t, or won’t, be stopped is freeing and empowering. I am now able to stop worrying about the fact that it is going to happen, and plan for it.
When I was young I used to read a lot of adventure novels. One of the criticisms of such fiction is that the protagonist’s seem to just shrug off bad events: They aren’t effected much emotionally. But what they do do is take those events into consideration in their plans and actions.
Adventure fiction thinking is a pretty good way to live your life, actually, if you can pull it off. What is, is. What will be, will be, but you can adapt to it.
Here’s the truth about climate change: It’s going to suck more ass than anything since the Black Death. That’s a lot of ass.
But it’s also an opportunity. You want change? You don’t like society today?
I don’t. I mean, I fought like the dickens to avoid climate change because the price of this change is too high. Like billions of dead too high.
But we lost. It’s happening.
And horrible as it is, it’s still an opportunity. The good will go away, but so will a lot of the bad.
The society created after the Black Death was, in many ways, much better than the one that came before.
That’s our challenge. There will be real breakdowns in how we run our society. The challenge is to replace with them with something better.
Some things better.
And because you’ve accepted the truth of climate change and that it isn’t going to be stopped, you have an advantage over the deniers. Those who act in alignment with what IS and what will be are always stronger, more nimble and more capable than those running around in denial.
Climate change is coming. It’s going to suck horribly.
How are you going to use it to make your life and everyone else’s lives better?
(See also, The Philosophy of Decline and Collapse.)
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Julian Assange (he looks far worse now, but couldn’t find any non-copyrighted images)
So, you may have read that Sweden has dropped its sexual assault investigation and charges against Julian Assange.
Now that Assange is in British custody, and facing extradition to the United States, that is.
Oh, the Swedish prosecutor says it’s because so much time has gone by, but that didn’t stop them before.
Assange always claimed the idea was to get him into custody, then extradite him to the US. Now that he’s in custody and going to be extradited to the US, the Swedish charges are moot. If the Swedes had really been most concerned about those charges they would have accepted Assange’s offer to go to Sweden as soon as he had a written guarantee of no extradition to the US.
As for the US charges, at the end of the day they are charging a publisher for publishing information in the public interest. Reporters have, in the past, discussed how to get the information with sources, and not been charged. This is an over-reach, and against someone who is not an American citizen and was not in America during any of the “crimes”.
Assange has few supporters now: Woke types figure he’s a sex offender; Democrats hate him for revealing that the DNC was conspiring to help Clinton win the primary against Sanders (that’s the truth, and if you don’t like it, it’s still the truth, and still something the public should know), and; Republicans hate him for revealing Bush’s war crimes.
As for reporters, most of them really hate him: You just have to read the Guardian’s deranged complaints about how he was messy and didn’t act like one of the club, or watch their crazed jeremiad against him. Assange did their job and did it better than most of them, and, oh, they hate him for it.
And they think because he didn’t work for an official news source that precedents set in his prosecution for helping whistleblowers and for extra-territorial US law won’t be used against them.
They won’t.
Assange may or may not be the nicest guy (the hate mail I received last time for mentioning this was quite something), but that’s irrelevant: He was acting as a journalist and publisher, and the information he released was in most cases information that the public had the right to know. Any mis-judgements are nowhere near as bad as those the New York Times made when they published the Bush administration’s lies to push the Iraq war, for example. (And remember when the Intercept burned their own whistleblower? You can’t trust the media with your identity.)
Nor does it matter if he was partisan: Most press is partisan, and no one thinks that means it isn’t press (perhaps they should, but they don’t. I can’t imagine the Murdochs want them to either).
Assange embarrassed everyone: the Republicans, the Democrats, the identitarian left and “professional” journalists. For that, he will burn, and because of that, he has no friends left.
Some money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.