Month: December 2020 Page 2 of 4

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 20, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

America’s Survival Depends on Bankrupting the Republican Party
Thom Hartmann: [via LA Progressive 12-18-2020]

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experiments and that public health measures like masks are “un-American,” while we’re being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it’s a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city’s board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia….

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means….

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Click through to read Hartmann’s proposed six actions that can hasten the GOP’s exit from the stage of world history.

These Six Steps Can Stop Republican Treason

[Thom Hartmann, December 16, 2020, YouTube]

LA Progressive

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-15-20]

Marianne Williamson
@marwilliamson
The more I learn about the current epidemic of white supremacist groups, the clearer it becomes: we’re losing these people as children. Despair among our youth breeds vulnerability to ideological capture by psychotic forces. If our love doesn’t claim them, hate will.
12:50 AM · Dec 15, 2020

“Chris Arnade: Dignity, Poverty, Faith, & Seeking Respect in Back Row America” (podcast)

[The Moral Imagination, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-20]

“In the second half of the conversation we discuss faith, redemption, and atonement, and how the front row’s empiricist, cold, secular rationalism scientific doesn’t do justice to the complexities of human life, suffering, and the desire for meaning, dignity, and respect. Arnade argues that ‘atheism is an intellectual luxury that is wrong’ and that ‘front row’ scientism lacks epistemic humility, and has a false view of science and certainty. Arnade shows that each person, no matter our state, is a subject, and not simply an object to be manipulated or problem to be solved. And that many of our deepest problems cannot be solved by technical means alone, but are philosophical and cultural problems—not of the poor—but of the elite.”

“How race politics liberated the elites”

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On December 19, 2020

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Feel free to use the comments section to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Last Day of Fundraiser and the Role of Opinion and News

By Ian Welsh

On December 18, 2020

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Fundraising Update: As of this writing, we’re at approximately $10,430, leaving us $570 from the final goal and tier of $11,000.

$11,000: two more articles, these on the conditions that create good and bad societies to live in; an introduction and conclusion and some commentary and connecting text as seems necessary.

Again, I want to thank everyone who has given. It means a great deal to me, and I will remember. I’ll update tomorrow or Monday on whether we make the final goal.

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The Role of Opinion and News

In a properly run news outlet, news tells you what happened, and opinion tells you what it means.

I’ve seen a lot of people who distrust opinion and respect news, and that’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s often based on the idea that one can trust news, and that’s a problem.

To give two examples, much of the news leading up to the Iraq war was wrong, or, rather lies and propaganda. But it was presented as fact, and about 70 percent of the American population wound up believing that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and therefore supported an illegal war which may have wound up killing a million people or so (and which certainly was responsible for spawning ISIS).

More recently there was a story that Russia had offered bounties for dead American soldiers to the Taliban in Afghanistan. No proof, laughable on its face, and no proof has ever been presented. It was an intelligence agency propaganda op, and the media fell for it.

The problem with news is that people think it’s almost certainly true.

Opinion tends to be labeled opinion, so people know it isn’t fact, but interpretation. Further, it’s easier to deal with; if I read a columnist or blogger regularly, I know their biases, how they think, and what they want. I can know what their financial interests are, who their spouse is, and so on. I can take all of that into account.

As a result, opinion is overall less dangerous because the conflicts are clear, and it is presented as opinion, not fact.

News and Opinion were traditionally separated for exactly this reason — so that readers could (supposedly) know what they could trust and what they had to view carefully. But bad news is far more dangerous than bad opinion, because despite many instances where it has been false, people still tend to assume most of it is true. They don’t run the filters on it or assume someone has an axe to grind or may be operating in bad faith.

Be far more wary of “news” than opinion.

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“Get Biden Elected Then We’ll Influence Him From The Left”

By Ian Welsh

On December 17, 2020

Comments

This is an age old cry. It was made about Obama and it was made about Clinton and while I wasn’t following politics then, no doubt it was made about Carter.

In my adult lifetime it hasn’t worked that way. Certainly Obama had no interest in what the left thought, except perhaps as a marker of what not to do. In fact, Obama’s first steps included choking off money to left wing organizations and operatives, I know operatives whose careers were ended by Obama. He got in power, and he made it clear that anyone left wing wasn’t to be hired. BOOM. Done.

Obama not only wasn’t open to left wing influence, he was actively hostile to it.

Biden spent most of the election season bragging about how he beat a socialist in the primary.

Carl Bejier decided to use cabinet appointments to see how much left wing influence Biden was accepting. Is he being influenced from the left? An organization called Data For Progress, pre-election, put out their picks for cabinet positions. How many did they get?

Data For Progress Tracker Dec 17 2020 by Carl Bejier

Yeah…

Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order. It’s really impossible to overstate how he was there all the way, doing all the worst things. The way the world and America runs is his legacy, why would he listen to his political enemies, the people he helped destroy in the 70s and 80s, who he drove into the political wilderness with his allies who followed the so-called Third Way? (Reaganism for a different set of nasty rich people.)

(My annual fundraiser ends Friday at midnight. We’re about a thousand dollars short of the last tier. If you’d like to help get us there (and can afford to without any hardship), please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

There’s going to be a lot of gaslighting during the Biden regime. A lot of pretending that he’s doing left wing things, when he isn’t. A lot of outright lying. Oh, I imagine he’ll do some half decent things, even Trump and Bush and Obama did, but it’s highly unlikely he’ll be progressive in any significant way.

This idiocy is often bolstered by an FDR quote, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

What fools don’t understand is that FDR AGREED. Agreed. Agreed. When he said “make me do it” he was asking for a PR and pressure campaign to give him cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, but which he didn’t have enough legislative or popular support to do yet.

Biden doesn’t want to do most progressive or left wing things. He doesn’t agree with them. “Making” someone do something they want to do anyway isn’t the same as trying to force the most powerful person in the world to do something they disagree with, indeed, something(s) they have spent their entire life fighting against.

Biden’s career is about destroying left-wingers, even very mild left wingers, then bulldozing over their bodies in the New Deal mass grave he helped created. That’s who he is, that’s his legacy and he believes in it.

Again, I expect Biden to be better than Trump in some ways (and worse in others, sorry Venezuela), but he isn’t open to left wing influence, and he never was going to be. He was, at best, the lesser evil.

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The Simple Guide to the Happy Personality

By Ian Welsh

On December 16, 2020

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In a lot of mystical systems, like Ch’an Buddhism and much of Hinduism, the first thing you do is a lot of meditation to realize you aren’t what you think you are.

In Hinduism, the phrase is “neti, neti,” which means, “not this, not that.”

The process is simple, put your attention on a sense object you think of as yourself (a thought or feeling in the body) and ask yourself, “If this wasn’t here, would I still be me?” Do that a lot.

After a while it becomes clear that there is no sense object that is required for you to be you. They need you to exist, you don’t need them.

One of the most important of these clusters of sense objects is your personality. Your personality is just a bunch of reflex thoughts and emotions; it’s very highly conditioned and if you spend a lot of time paying attention to your thoughts and emotions something odd tends to happen: You become very bored with your personality, because it is SO predictable.

You also realize it isn’t you.

The reason spiritual systems spend a lot of initial effort on getting to this realization is that once you realize your personality, or body, or thoughts, or emotions, or whatever, aren’t “you,” you can deal with them objectively. There’s no need for shame, or pride, it just is what it is.

With that realization, you can start to work on it.

The most important ability for changing your conditioning (and personality is mostly conditioning, the rest is the body you’re percieving, but there’s a lot of feedback between the two), is indifference or equanimity. The way your body/brain works is that if you react strongly to something, it figures “Hey, this is important, I should keep doing this/bringing this up until it isn’t important.”

React less, or not at all, and pretty soon the body is like, “Huh, guess this isn’t important, so I won’t bring it up so much or as strongly.”

If you want more of something, on the other hand, lean into it, react more emotionally and strongly. The body will decide it’s important.

To learn indifference, do a simple meditation where whenever you feel an emotional reaction you try to just observe it. Do this over and over and over again, and eventually, even fear will bore you (this is not just theory, I’ve done it, though not with everything).

Before you do this, however, let’s lay out a bit of personality architecture theory.

Assuming you want to be happy, what matters is that the personality likes itself, and respects itself. Some personalities just think they’re aces, and that they are worthy of respect. What people respect and like can be very different — perhaps it’s always keeping your word, or perhaps it’s being kind, or perhaps it is being rich or powerful or strong and taking no shit. Perhaps it’s being smart. Perhaps it’s being good at manipulating people.

Whatever it is, the problem comes in if you tend to do something, or “be” something and you don’t like or respect people like that. Perhaps you were raised in an anti-sex church but you really like sex. You can either carve your personality to like sex less or to not judge itself for liking sex. (Yes, both are possible, though you may have a stronger biological sex drive and that may make it harder. Generally, though, getting rid of guilt is wiser.)

So when you’re changing your personality, a large part is either getting rid of parts you don’t like (through indifference and pointing at something else) or you’re getting rid of not liking that part of you.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

When doing this you have to take into account the social circumstances you live in. If the people around you despise a characteristic you are de-guilting, it’s going to be very hard for you because most of us are effected by people around us: we want them to like and respect us and if they don’t it’s hard for us to like and respect ourselves.

The three solutions are to change who you spend time with; to decide to conform; or to change your personality to not care what others think.

The last is the hardest and it also deprives you of a great deal of emotional support, support which is very powerful and useful. Generally, figure out who the people are who would respect the person you want to be and arrange to spend time around them. Or perhaps, look at who you respect and like and become someone they like and respect.

If you decide to go full iconoclast, it’s the same as any other personality change: when people disapprove OR approve of what you do, or who you are, don’t care. Be indifferent. Don’t get angry and push back or preen under a compliment, just treat their opinions, words and actions as completely meaningless.

Be thoughtful when changing your personality. The first rule of all spirituality is “know thyself” and if you don’t spend enough time doing that, you may change your personality in ways that are more harmful than good, or that you wind up not liking because you didn’t actually understand the personality you already have.

That said, with some biological exceptions (babies have personality), much of what you think is you, isn’t, and you can change it. Even things that seem biological can be tuned: for example, there’s a lot of evidence that happiness has a set point. But, yeah, you can move that set point higher or lower, it just tends to be a lot of work (most of it comes down to learning when to give a shit. Stressing is the cause of a ton of unhappiness.)

Your personality isn’t you. If your personality doesn’t like or respect itself, you can change that. You don’t have to be unhappy.

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Fundraising Update and Fundraiser Ending Friday the 18th

By Ian Welsh

On December 15, 2020

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I want to thank everyone who’s given. It’s been a bad year for anyone not in the top 1 percent or so, and I appreciate the donations and subscriptions greatly.

We’ve raised approximately (some crypto donations have made the numbers not even) $8,925. That means we’ve passed the second tier:

Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)

The last tier unlocks at $11,000:

$11,000: two more articles, these on the conditions that create good and bad societies to live in; an introduction and conclusion and some commentary and connecting text as seems necessary.

The fundraiser has been going on for almost a month, so I’m going to draw it to a close as of Friday at midnight, and go back to the little message at the bottom of the posts on Saturday.

Again, I’m thankful to everyone who has given. If you’d like to try and push us to that $11,000 goal and only if you are financially secure (please DON’T give if it would mean any hardship to you) then please subscribe or donate and we’ll see if we make it: $2,075 as of this writing. Even if we don’t, rest assured, the money helps.

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“Nice Guys” and Using People

By Ian Welsh

On December 14, 2020

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This is a outside what I usually write about, but I think it’s worth a bit of time. It’s a general issue, “nice guys” is a small subset.

Humans do a lot of what we do to get things. We all know that, and while we may find it distasteful sometimes, it’s part of the world in which we live and perhaps part of being human. (It’s very hard to disentangle “being human” from whatever culture we live in.)

The nice guy syndrome is where someone is friendly with someone, their reason for being friendly is sex, AND they aren’t upfront about that. They say “I just want to be friends,” then later, once they’ve established the friendship, they push for sex based on “Aren’t I such a nice guy?” The woman thought they were friends, and that was all there was to it, and feels the friendship was fake, that the person doesn’t really care, they were just trying to get into their pants. It destroys the entire existing relationship. (It is possible (and a staple of rom-coms) to become friends then develop a sexual or romantic interest. When that happens, deal with it honestly.)

This syndrome exists all over the place. Becoming friends with someone in order to get a favor from them later, or to get business from them, or whatever else you might want.

Of course it can also be having sex with them so you can get something else from them. Women may not fake friendship to get sex, but a fair number do fake sexual interest and enjoyment to get something else. When someone finds out you didn’t really want to have sex with them and probably didn’t really enjoy it, but only did it to get something else, they too feel betrayed.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

The general case is “Doing X to get Y without saying you want Y.” You can be clear you want to be friends AND have sex (I personally prefer to be friends with anyone I sleep with, in case it turns into a relationship).

People understand other people want things, and they understand they may have something you want. Being honest about that is usually the best path if you don’t want the relationship to blow up. You can start wanting a VP to buy something from you and over time become friends. You can even do business with a VP you are already friends with, but if that VP finds out you made friends with them so you could do business, you stand a good chance of losing the friendship, all future sales and your reputation with that person and everyone they talk to.

“Creep” is someone who pretends they want one thing, but wants another. Who isn’t honest about their desires. You can even find someone sexually attractive, elide to that, and be clear nothing can happen. That’s fine, occurs all the time, especially among honorable married people or others in long term relationships. Being with one person doesn’t mean everyone else suddenly becomes uninteresting sexually, it means you don’t partake.

In politics this is where politicians say “I want to help ordinary people”, or “I want to clean up the Ganges,” or “my passion is helping veterans” then when they get elected, serve themselves first or pursue some other project “didn’t run on cutting social security, but I’m going to spend years trying to cut a deal with Republicans” says Obama.

Politicians who pursue power saying it’s to do X, then ignore X and do Y&Z are the political equivalent of creeps and nice guys and people who have sex to get money. Dishonest users.

Anyway, especially if you think long-term, avoiding this sort of dishonesty will make your life a lot better, usually. Obama might get away with it, but most us aren’t able to cash out so much money and fake respect from other users that we never have to engage with any non-sycophant ever again.

Kindness and being friendly to get other things works best when you aren’t doing it to get other things, oddly. When it’s who you are, so people think “well, they’re always a good person” or “always tells the truth” or “always honorable” or whatever.

And be kind to people who can’t help you and you don’t think ever will be able to.

That’s the true test of who and what you actually are.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 13, 2020

By Tony Wikrent

On December 13, 2020

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 13, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

An Ominous Sign: Americans Have Begun Stealing Food To Survive

[ZeroHedge, via Mike Norman Economics 12-11-20]

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

If you’ve been waiting for a sign that things are really bad economically in the United States, here it is. Americans who never would have contemplated shoplifting before are stealing food to survive…. I wrote the other day about how the response to the pandemic has destroyed the personal finances of American families. An area that deserves more attention is food insecurity…. More than 50 million people are suffering from food insecurity in the United States right now, a number that has leaped dramatically due to the response to the coronavirus….

Twenty percent of Americans are now turning to food banks to help keep their families fed. And according to a report in the Washington Post, the shoplifting of food and other essential items is increasing significantly….

The result is a growing subset of Americans who are stealing food to survive.

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime — it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.” (source)

“Stealing to survive: More Americans are shoplifting food as aid runs out during the pandemic”

[Washington Post, via Zero Hedge 12-10-20]

“Alex graduated with a master’s degree in May and was immediately in a bind: no job, no money and, with much of the country still shut down, little hope that anything would change. She’d spent most of her $1,200 stimulus check on rent, and used what little she had left to buy groceries. Everything else — vitamins, moisturizer, body wash — she said she shoplifted from a Whole Foods Market a few miles from her apartment in Chicago. ‘It was like, I could spend $10 and get a couple of vegetables or I could spend $10 on just a box of tampons,’ said Alex, 27, who asked to be identified by her middle name to speak candidly. She has a job now, earning $15 an hour, but still struggles to make ends meet. She says she continues to shoplift — something she’d never done before the pandemic — every few weeks. She says she moves through the store mostly unnoticed. Usually, she said, she picks up a few bulky vegetables — a bunch of kale, maybe, or a few avocados — to disguise the pricier items she slips into her bag at the self checkout. ‘I don’t feel much guilt about it,” she said. ‘It’s been very frustrating to be part of a class of people who is losing so much right now. And then to have another class who is profiting from the pandemic — well, let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth.’”

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surges Past $1 Trillion Since Beginning of Pandemic — Total Grows to $4 Trillion

[Institute for Policy Studies, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-20]

Disrupting Mainstream Economics