Month: August 2022

Trial of Titus Manlius’s Son

The Roman Consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus was at war with the Latins. He instructed that anyone who disobeyed orders would be executed. His own son, and some companions left their sentry posts to skirmish with some enemies, defeated them, and returned to his father with the spoils. Seeing that his son had left his post (leaving a sentry post is particularly bad), he had him executed for disobeying orders.

Now, if you think Manlius did the wrong thing, we disagree.

“If you would do it to your son, daughter, spouse, or parent, you should do it to anyone.”

This is a fundamental rule. If someone random does something, and you would punish or reward them, then if you don’t act the same to those you care about, you are unsuited to have any authority, private or public.

Everyone has a father and mother. If you’d kill someone else’s child, or imprison them, or otherwise hurt them, then you must do the same to your child in identical circumstances. The same is true of reward: If you’d reward your child, and someone else is under your authority, they must be rewarded the same.

This is true beyond immediate authority, though: If you believe that people should be killed if they murder, you must support that for those you care about. If three crimes, no matter how petty, means 20 years in prison, then if someone you care about commits three crimes, they, too, must serve those 20 years.

Anything you would not do to someone you love in terms of punishment or reward, you cannot do or support doing to anyone else. If Manlius would have executed anyone else for disobeying orders, he had to execute his son.

The application of this to larger issues, like those who vote for war not sending their children, and those who will never be affected by a law voting for it are left, for the moment, to readers to work through.

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When the Profit Motive Is Unnecessary or Harmful

By Ian Welsh

On August 3, 2022

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Markets are good for some activities, but for others they are actively harmful. There are a lot of jobs that people want to do, and all you have to do is give them a decent salary and whatever tools are necessary, and they’ll work hard. A good example is curing cancer, or, indeed, most medical research. People love the idea of helping people and saving lives. As long as they know that, if they do cure whatever it is, they can move on to curing something else (i.e., their economic welfare is not dependent on not solving the problem), they’ll bust their asses.

On the other hand, if the profit motive is involved, some problems don’t get solved. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, you don’t want to cure diseases: You want to sell a pill, shot, or treatment that people have to take over and over again. You want to develop palliatives, not cures. Using for-profit companies to try and cure something, including Covid, is deranged. It would cost them hundreds of billions of future profits if they actually cured the plague or cancer, or anything else.

This is also why, when they do come up with actual cures, they price them massively high. After all, you only get to sell a cure once to each patient.

People like doing useful work. What you have to pay people for is to do bullshit work, and the more bullshit it is, or the more harm it does, the more you have to pay them. Meanwhile, work that is good and useful is underpaid, or not paid for at all, because our economy tries to free ride on the fact that people will do that work for less or nothing.

Doesn’t quite work — because no matter how idealistic you are, you need to eat, pay rent, and sock away some savings, and so work that is genuinely important goes undone, and Wall Street pays multi-billion dollar bonuses.

Capitalism thus often optimizes for activities that are actively harmful, or unnecessary, and actively makes it hard to work on what is important and good.

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Spring Of A Down, By Stirling Newberry, Chapters XIII-XV

By Stirling Newberry

On August 2, 2022

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Невідомі води[lv]

They watched the world wake-up from history, there was no place they wanted to be.[lvi]

Pockmarks over the sea air. Wisps and black cinders grew up, up, up to the air billowing мистецтво. The mill was the last refuge of Ukraine. Junk was the line. Z Goliath lined up tanks and self-propelled rocket launchers for rent, while the David took the underground. Close to the unknown waters the day the music died.[lvii] Spires multiple of factory smokestacks rising towards the tumble rubble dark air in space.

From above the destruction is immense: metal roofs shattered, cars dispersed as toys across the parking lots, all burning on the streets all mimsy were the borogoves.[lviii] Brick walls stand with nothing to guard. White dross of paper and wooden chaff of some blown maze where all of the denizens lie in wait. Cradles of the new dying fur and an aerie of fluttering wreckage.[lix] Even now, bands of irregulars hurled Molotov beer at the Russians in the corner of the Azov Iron Works. Judge Dredd might know this place: a riptide of industrial destruction next to the seashore with salt wind. The wind blew away the smoke of shells.

It was in these warrens that a few boys waited by the earthen trenches, at a point that was no more than single file dug, opening the sky and slithering in the mud. In the open warehouse, pipes ran everywhere – some drops combed off from somewhere, 20 meters up.

In the clouds a ray of moonlight pierced through. And one of the soldiers stood in the bask of it. With arms like a mother cross. Gentle and serene.

Краплинка.[lx] Pause. Краплинка. Pause. Краплинка!

It was Borysko the first to itch.

He felt the oil on his sweater.

“I needed a parasol every day.” He played with an unlit cigarette and then put it down.

“It is the Champs-Élysées here all the time.” Neither Borysko, nor anyone else, had seen the boulevard in Paris. Though Borysko had tasted Gauloises, then made in France.[lxi]

Краплинка. Pause. Краплинка. Pause. Краплинка!

“It could be the Styx, or the paradise theater.”[lxii] Everyone looked over at Kostyantyn.

But it was Maksym that replied: “Nothing ever goes as planned.”[lxiii]

Borsyko laughed: “Just ask the other side.” There was nothing jovial in the way he said it. Then a wail peaked. His voice was annoyance, or perhaps his annoyance found an outlet.

Краплинка. Pause. Краплинка. Pause. Краплинка!

They all moved out from under the pipe making a bit of noise as they did so. Any awareness of the droplets erased from the boys’ minds. Boys will be The Boys.[lxiv]

Then another figure came up the tranche. He was bolder, once beefier, and bearded but spatter with grime. His name was unimportant, for all called him Starshyna. The boys shivered. The old man softly said: “Do you want to see the блакитний?”[lxv] All agree that they want to see the heavenly blue. Just. One. More. Time.[lxvi] Each one a siren sound, when each one may be your last. “Then keep quiet.” he added in a controlled tone of voice. He then thought a bit and lined them up, but quietly: “First. Second. Third.”[lxvii]

They lined-up, but grumpily.

The man they called Starshyna, old rank for Master Sergeant, was Bohdanko Petrovitch Mikhailov. He was born of a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father, back at a time when which language you spoke was seen as an indicator of your political leanings: Ukrainian was said to lead towards Kyiv and Russian meant towards Moskva. It was horseradish at the time, but much stronger horseradish. As a young boy, he burned at the insults, especially “Ублюдок” which was the equivalent of “Bastard.” He could not even make his mind up, in utero. But he never said “All Apologies”[lxviii] for the mixed-up tongue even over Pennyroyal tea.[lxix] Give Bohdanko a Cohen world every single time not a box of chocolates.[lxx] Everybody knows the dice are loaded with nirvana.[lxxi] He burned, and that is why he joined the far-right to expunge the sound, the sound, the sound of everyone else being gay. Then it was a natural expansion to the Patriot Ukraine to the Azov Regiment in 2014. All-natural and pure. It was the purity of essence that drove Bohdanko because there was so little of it around.[lxxii] A tourniquet of expiry.

Bohdanko looked back one more time. What he saw were kids who probably were not going to see daylight. He saw ghosts in their faces, turned in shades of grey with shrapnel sucking out the blood. Then he went off into the darkness. The trees denude, walls denuded, bodies denude, all along the bomb out streets.

Once he started to leave the boys whispered under their breath: “First. Second. Third.”[lxxiii] Once again, the insults came Bohdanko’s way.

Then 50 meters or so away Bohdanko looked back one more time. What he saw were kids who probably were not going to see daylight. He saw ghosts in their faces, turned in shades of grey. Then he went off farther into the darkness. He watched the plumes from the ships at sea torrenting the coronets skyward in a nascent display streak strophe splendor. He watched every burst, realizing one day he would be in the target zone.

He began talking to himself. “You should not be hard on them. They probably do know the feeling of being a father. Not the way you do. Remember holding up the soft flesh for the first time. So delicate and pure of essence to the core.

He looked out over the sea. Old man was now thin as he was once undefeated but now broken on the inside. An open door was waiting. A harpoon was aiming. He looked around because somewhere he knew a sniper was taking aim.

He knew that it was not him. He remembered the pouch of tobacco. Red was the glow of the match. The first light would be too short. The second light the sniper would aim. The third light – never three on a lucifer.

The shot called true. But it was a RAM grenade. Piercing slicing shell shock. Then all of them were dispatched. At least there was no agony or painpainpain.

Up above the oil went from a dribble to a spurt.

It was a lesson that you learned whatever your persuasion: you think you will live forever, when you’ve done a line or two.[lxxiv] They drill that out of you in basic but, for whatever reason, it crepts back in. It was a warning of universal application: quiet gets one killed last.

Pretty lights, beneath the stars and sea.

Are Our Elites Starting to Get It?

By Ian Welsh

On August 1, 2022

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Back in May, in Sri Lanka:

Recently, they also burned down the President’s home.

Meanwhile, the Canadian government:

The tax will apply to new cars and aircraft with a retail sales price over $100,000 and to vessels over $250,000. It will be calculated at the lesser of 20 percent of the value above a set threshold ($100,000 for cars and personal aircraft, and $250,000 for vessels) and ten percent of the full value of the item subjected to tax.

And the US Senate’s Climate bill, which Manchin approved:

The bill includes $60 billion to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing, including $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical mineral processing. It also offers lower- and middle-income motorists a $7,500 tax credit for clean vehicles, while states and electric utilities would see $30 billion in grants and loans to expand clean energy. The bill also includes $60 billion for environmental justice communities and a fee on methane emissions that will rise to $1,500 a ton by 2026.

All of these are what I would class as “good news,” though insufficient. Adam Smith once quipped that “there is a lot of ruin in a nation,” but a country like Sri Lanka has less ruin than many others. England’s decline could be considered to have begun in 1914, and it’s only this decade that they’re likely to lose Scotland — and it’ll be a while yet before Brits start burning down toff mansions wholesale.

The problem with Sri Lanka is that almost all of the debt which is crippling it is to Western institutions, not to China (which is at about ten percent), but China is the country which will wind up bailing it out after the initial IMF stopgap, because China needs a stable country to have a naval base in. If India was smart, they’d step in instead, to deny the Chinese the base. As for the West, they don’t care and just want their money. China is likely delaying in part because they’d rather not send a ton of money to the West by paying for Sri Lanka’s debt.

Elites finally seem to be starting to understanding that climate change is serious, and that the rich are out of control. I think that the rich will come to regret the Russian oligarch sanctions hunt, because it taught everyone how easy it actually is to take everything from rich people, a lesson of the post-war era which has been forgotten because most who remember it are old or dead.

This is all very slim “good news.” With respect to climate change, I am of the opinion that we will not hold it at two degrees C, though some climate scientists disagree. I have found that the more “pessimistic” forecasts have consistently been more reliable, and I believe that self-reinforcing cycles, such as methane release from permafrost and swamps, and the destruction of most of the world’s remaining great forests, have been triggered. We can and should mitigate climate change by reducing emissions, but we have left it too late to contain catastrophic climate change. (I also expect a couple of marine inundations this century (colloquially, great floods) — and earlier than most people think likely.)

As for the rich, they’re still in control, but that control is unlikely to remain as firm as they expect. They were warned of this many times; that they couldn’t allow rampant inequality, poverty, catastrophe, and gouge on necessities like water, food, fuel, and life-saving medicines and expect to escape unscathed.

They key variable to watch is food, or rather, hunger. When people can’t eat (or drink), social controls break down. The Chinese understand that; every dynasty has known that if they didn’t feed the people, they were in great danger, and the Communist dynasty (that’s what it is, and it’s still essentially “rule by bureaucrats”) understands it as well. The Indian government, on the other hand, obsessed with fucking over non-Hindus and cleansing the country, seems to have forgotten.

The West, as a whole, has a great deal of agricultural surplus, and it will take some time for hunger to really hit, unless neoliberal ideology blinds politicians to the danger of continuing to allow rampant food inflation. If people can’t afford to eat, it’s the same as there not being enough food for them, and hunger leads to people with little to lose.

Interesting times, etc. Might as well enjoy the show as best we can, because we’re going to suffer through it as well.

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

Month: August 2022

What Is Right for Those You Love Is Right for All

When the Profit Motive Is Unnecessary or Harmful

Spring Of A Down, By Stirling Newberry, Chapters XIII-XV

Невідомі води[lv]

Are Our Elites Starting to Get It?