Category: How to think Page 21 of 22

Since we’re on basic ethics, let’s take another basic ethical principle.  It is impossible to have a good society if you do not punish and reward people for the forseeable consequences of their actions.

Let us take the most simple: in a war people die, they are injured, many rapes are committed.  Disease runs rampant, infrastructure is destroyed and people die to to the loss of that infrastructure, such as having sewage mixed in to their drinking water.  If we put sanctions on a country, people will die as a result of the lack of medicines, or food, or jobs.  Even without actual death, people will suffer who would not have suffered otherwise.

These consequences are forseeable.  When we implement the policy, we KNOW people will die. We are responsible for those deaths.  That does not meant that war is never the right thing to do, nor sanctions, but it does mean that the bar is high.  This is why the Allies hung Nazis at Nuremburg, because they started a war from which all the other deaths and rapes and hunger and so on flowed.  Those deaths, that suffering, was the foreseeable consequence of their actions.

The idea of forseeable consequences is fundamental to reasoning about ethics and morality.  It is especially important in reasoning about public policy.

It also applies to things like the subprime real-estate bubble, the use of derviatives, the piling on of leverage, the policies of neo-liberalizing money-flows first, trade second and immigration third.  All of these things have, and had, forseeable consequences.  People have died, lost their jobs, lost their houses, been beaten by their spouses, gone without meals, had their countries erupt in revolution because of the financial fraud and manipulation engaged in by bankers, brokers, central bankers and politicians in the run-up to the financial crisis on 2007/8.  The consequences were forseeable, they were forseen by many people (I did, and am on the record as having done so), and the actions taken by bankers and their compatriots were fraudulent on the face.

Entire countries have gone in to permanent depression as a result of the forseeable consequences of their actions.  Then various countries, especially in Europe, doubled down on austerity. Austerity has never worked to bring an economy out of a financial crisis or depression, and it never will.  It does not work, and this is well known.  Engaging in austerity has forseeable consequences of impoverishing the country, reducing the size of the middle class and grinding the poor even further into misery.  It also has the forseeable consequence of making it possible to privatize parts of the economy the oligarchs want to buy.

It is done, it has been done and it will be done because of those forseeable consequences.  They are all either desirable to your masters or, if not desirable, irrelevant compared to the advantages austerity offers them.

These are, if not criminal acts, then unjust and evil acts, done to enrich a few at the expense of the many, with disregard for the consequences to the many, including death, hunger and violence.

One of the reasons I write so little these days, is that there is so little point.  Basic ethical principles are routinely ignored even on the so-called left.  Basic principles of causation are ignored.  Basic economic reality is ignored.  And virtually everyone in the so-called democracies is scrambling to pretend that they have no responsibility for anything that has happened.

If someone does something with forseeable consequences they are responsible for those forseeable consequences.  Just because an act has bad forseeable consequences doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken, the alternatives may be worse, but whether the action should be taken or not, the decision has consequences.

I will, if I continue being irritated, deal at some point with the idea of alternate scenarios.  Too often we pretend that there are only two options, say “bailing out bankers” or “doing nothing” and ignore that there were other possibilities, like “forcing bondholders and shareholders to take their losses, nationalizing the banks and breaking them up.”

As a society we have in the last few decades and are today making decisions with entirely forseeable consequences (as with climate change) that will kill a few hundred million people to well over a billion people.  We know it will happen, and we’re doing it.

We are monsters.  And we tolerate monsters.  And we get worked up over exactly the wrong things, “ooh a single soldier was killed”, rather than what is going to kill the children we care about, like global warming, or the people who have or will kill hundreds of thousands, like George W Bush, or Putin or people who are engaging in ongoing serial murdering like Barack Obama.  We ignore financial fraud, we ignore… well, why go on, the list is endless.

Forseeable consequences.  We’re awash in them, and we don’t care.

Let me respond to the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening to America, especially poorer Americans.

No.  Sorry, but no.  Sure, their guilt isn’t as great as that of the liberal class, or the financiers, or various other folks, but they are still responsible.  It was a democracy.  There were ways to stop it from getting to this.  In a democracy, the PEOPLE are held responsible.  Yes, there were forces working to stop it from being a democracy, but they voted for people like Reagan and the members of Congress, and so on.  Whether you think the 2000 or 2004 elections were stolen (yes on the first, maybe on the second) they let it get to the point where it could be stolen.  They didn’t riot in 2000.  They reelected George Bush after everyone knew he was torturing scum.

I’m not letting them off the hook.  Sorry.

The pathetic attempts of Americans to pretend they’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to them are just that, pathetic.  Yeah, some of them are good, but not enough.  It’s just that simple.

Take some goddamn responsibility.

Until Americans get that they are responsible, they will not also get that they can change things.  If Americans are powerless, if it’s “not their fault” that also means they can’t fix it.

This is basic, like everything else I have to explain these days, it seems.

Sadly America is no longer the issue.  While it is theoretically possible it could be saved, the odds are so low the fight is pointless for anyone not an American (and even there, if you can leave, you should).  We are now in triage, trying to save other nations.  The center did not hold.  So be it, the provinces are on their own, and must do what they can, for themselves.

And the people who continue to apologize for the American public, pretending that Americans as a group are not complicit… yeah, well, whatever.  Doesn’t matter now.  But that sort of “it’s not your responsibility” BULLSHIT is part of why America is going down.

“It’s not your responsibility” means “don’t pay attention, don’t try and change it.”

Newshoggers has a roundup of Hitchens posts.  Most of them are generally positive towards Hitchens.  For example:

But I guess all that is why I want to put down for the record that in addition to all those things, Hitchens was incredibly kind and giving with his time. Every time I met him over the past seven years he greeted me like an old friend, and as far as I could see, every fan he met got his full attention. Even when he was dying, he had time to sit down with a little girl to figure out what books should be on her reading list.

Or:

Sometimes, Christopher Hitchens was a fucking asshole, and said and wrote things that were beneath him. Most of the time, he was brilliant. I’m deeply sorry that I never met him.

Or Dawkins:

Every day of his declining life he demonstrated the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch was in a foxhole, and he dealt with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he showed himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love.

He helped get over 100K people killed (that’s the very conservative #, it’s probably over 500K). He worked really hard to do that. That is more than being “an asshole”. He could personally be an asshole, and I would not give a damn. He was a public figure, a public intellectual, and I do not judge public figures based on whether they are “nice” in person or died a good death or had beliefs about the supernatural which match mine. Anyone who does so is morally defective. That sort of “I’d like to have a beer with him” reasoning led directly to George Bush, Jr.

You get the pundits and leaders you deserve, example 5,242,176.

I don’t, personally, think Hitchens was brilliant most of the time, but let’s say he was.  So what?  He helped commit the same war crime Nazis were hung for.  In a just world, he would have been hung or locked up for life, alongside Henry Kissinger, whom he hated and George Bush, whose policies he helped push.

Contemptible.  If you knew him personally, I can forgive your love of him, I have loved evil people.  But an intellectual has the responsibility to separate those personal feelings from judgement. Hitchens was an evil man.  Helping kill large numbers of people in an unprovoked war is not just a war crime, it is, as was noted at Nuremburg, the crime from which all war crimes come — every rape, every death, every person who lost their home, every person tortured with power drills in Iraq, every dead child—those are Hitchens legacy.

The refusal to hold people responsible for the entirely forseeable results of policies they work hard to enable is also evil.  It is at the root of why you no longer have functioning democracies.

Hitchens was a bad man whose legacy is enabling a war crime.  If you do not think so, you are part of the reason why things like Iraq happen.

I was going to keep my mouth shut, but the hagiography is making me hurl.  Yes, he was a good writer.  Yes, when he was young he seemed to want atrocities to stop.  After 9/11, however, he realized that people like him could die senselessly and became an apologist for an unprovoked war (the same war crime the US hung Germans for) and for torture.  Atrocities were ok to protect lily-livered upper class white people like himself.

Christopher Hitchens helped make the world you live in, the one most of my readers spend time complaining about.   As a prominent ex-lefty he was very useful to the powers that be in excusing their policies.

Also a quick note to my atheist friends.  Because someone is an atheist does not mean they are in any way, shape or form a good person or someone who has made the world a better place.  Richard Dawkins is a noxious human being and was before he defended an inappropriate pass. Hitchens was a war crimes apologist.

If there is life after death, I hope Hitchens is treated kindly, because I don’t believe in torture.  But for the last 10 years of his life he was a profoundly bad man.

– Frederick Douglass

In our current age the word demand has been debased.  A day does not go by without some person or organization “demanding” an apology or retraction or that someone do something.

These are not demands as a prior generation would have understood them.

Why?

Because there is no “or else”, not even an implicit one.

When I was a child if someone demanded something of me I always understood that they meant “or else”.

A demand which does not have a threat or a promise behind it is hollow.  It means nothing.  It is not, in any meaningful sense, even a demand.

A request is very distinct from a demand yet we use the word demand when we are really requesting something.

We have grown infantile in our relation to power, in our understanding of power and in our use of the language of power.

Sometimes the powerful will give something that is requested.  If they do, it is because they were already considering it, because many amongst them think the benefit exceeds the cost.

But power concedes nothing that matters to the powerful without a threat, it never did and it never will.