Ian Welsh

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

Category: How to think Page 6 of 22

Groups Only a Fool Trusts

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On February 18, 2020

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Economists: The vast majority missed the housing bubble.

Intelligence Agencies: Remember Iraq? Part of the job description is lying.

Any Army’s PR: Enough said.

Life Insurance Agents: I worked back office dealing with agents. About ten percent of them were looking after their clients first.

Politicians: Yes, obviously.

Stock Brokers: As the book said, “Where are the client’s yachts?”

Media, in general: Most of them are owned by a few conglomerates. They do what’s in the interests of those big conglomerates or their job leaves. And remember the NYT and Iraq.

Private equity or hedge funders, any senior executive in any large bank: They were all in on the fraud leading up to the financial crisis, and yes, they would do it again.

Any senior executive in any large firm: They didn’t get there by being good people. Good people don’t become Senior VPs.

Central Bankers: They either missed the housing and financial bubble or didn’t care, then they bailed out the rich and fucked over the little people. No one will ever be hired for those jobs who wouldn’t do it again, and again, and again.

Etc.

(This seems like an important piece, so back to the top for those who haven’t read it or have forgotten it. Originally published December 29, 2016.)

My friend Charles Green, who co-wrote the book, The Trusted Adviser, loved to say “I trust my dog with my life, but not my lunch.”

Who you can trust depends on what you are trusting them with, and who you are. Charles can trust his dog with his life; I can’t trust his dog with my life.

Central bankers are the dogs of the rich. The rich can trust bankers to save their lives, no one else can. Perhaps if you were to fall in front of one of them and injure yourself, some of them would call an ambulance for you. You can’t trust them not take away your house, however, or pursue policies that crush your wages and make jobs scarce.

The point here is that just because someone is good in one part of their life, doesn’t mean they’re good in another part of their life. I learned this young: My father was a bastard to his family, but was respected by most of his employees for his loyalty to them.

People are not of a piece, and you need to understand what their jobs are to understand what they can be trusted with.

A politician’s job is to get voters to elect them, then to do things that rich people like, because rich people reward them both before and after they leave office; while in office, rich people take care of politicians’ families, invite them to parties, give them loans, and so on, and after they leave office, rich people reward politicians (and heir families) with lucrative positions in their companies. Rich people pay most of a politician’s salary: They work for them.

This is IMPORTANT. So if you want to know if a politician is one of the rare few you can trust, you need to see that they don’t take the rich’s money, and they don’t vote with the other people who have taken the rich’s money. And you can only really see that once they’ve been in office for awhile.

This is why I trust Corbyn. Because he doesn’t take their money; he barely even accepts money from the government for office expenses AND he has a track record of voting against or for the right things when it was against his personal interest. He has integrity. He is a very rare politician.

When I used to back-office for life insurance agents, I could tell the ones whom I’d recommend because they would sell insurance, often, that earned them less commission, if it was better for their clients. That simple.

For economists, look who they work for and look at their prediction record. Did they come out against the housing bubble early, for example? You can trust Stiglitz because he wrote a book attacking the World Bank that named names and turned other economists against him because he was more concerned about how poor people were being hurt than about what his fellow economists thought. He did something against his own interest. Plus, he’s been right on most issues. Integrity + competence.

If you happen to have a 100 million dollars or so, then you would be justified in saying, “I trust central bankers,” because they are looking out after your interests–though you might wonder if they are competent enough to do so. Still, they’ll do anything for you, they are your dogs: You can trust them. No one else can.

As for the rest: Never trust anyone on commission without doing extensive checks to see if they’re putting their clients’ interests first. If they’ll take a hit in pay to do the right thing, they’re trustowrthy. Remember, most of them work for firms which, whatever their “official policy,” strongly discourage getting lower commissions for any reason.

Intelligence agencies. Well, if you’re stupid enough or naive enough to trust an intelligence agency, I can do nothing for you. Even people who work for intelligence agencies don’t trust intelligence agencies.

With respect to the media, people are extraordinarily stupid. For example, I don’t trust Russia Today (RT) with respect to things that Russia cares about, but they’re very good on things Russia doesn’t care about. What you’re looking for is a media outlet which doesn’t care about the issue in question, which isn’t subject to pressure on that issues, whose owner doesn’t care. The US media is useful in regards to the US, of course, but it is not trustworthy.

Understand?

There are few things which will destroy you faster in life than trusting the wrong person or people, and the metrics you have for trusting individuals in your life don’t work when you try to scale them up to measure organizations, professionals, and so on–people who are not your friends, or in your social circle, or who are not being dealt with as friends and members of your social circle.

The interests of these people do not align with yours, they do not identify with you, and your well-being does not concern them in any meaningful way. Figure out what their interests are, who they identify with, and who they serve, if you want to know what they’ll do and whether you can trust them.

And if you’re looking for the rare politician, broker, or commissioned salesman you can trust, look for the ones willing to go against their own interests–and with a track record of doing so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up and You Can’t Give It Away

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On February 11, 2020

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I have a friend who is a serious meditator. For many years, when someone asked him to help them become enlightened, he would teach them a simple meditation, then instruct: “Do that for six months, every day, for one hour. Then return.” He called it “the very minimum required.”

Over the years, people have come to me wanting some of what I have, intellectually. Not a lot of people, more than five, less than ten.

In every case, I have given them a list of books to read, and said: “As you read each book, get back to me, and we’ll discuss them.”

Only one person ever did, he is the only person I ever charged money for teaching.

You can’t give the good stuff, the actually valuable stuff, away.

He read five books or so, we talked about them, and I gave him assignments and we discussed the assignments. He then stopped, because he had what he wanted, which was to learn how to learn more effectively, and he had proved this to himself by using the skills he was taught, and I was charging him enough money that it mattered to him (not a lot, but he wasn’t rich).

Back when I did some consulting, in the 2000s, I noticed something similar: When I didn’t charge people enough, or said, “Oh, I’ll help you for free,” they never took my advice. If I made them bleed, they did what I said and benefited.

You can’t give it away. I really wish you could.

Anyway, this is a winding intro to my point, which is that if you want to actually understand certain topics, you have to read. A lot.

Let’s run some numbers. From the time I was eight through to age 12, I read at least two books a day. I know this because I went to the library once a week and took out the limit, and I also checked books out of the school library, and I read my father’s books. Actually, I read more than two books a day. Call it 700 a year, so 3,500 books.

From age thirteen to thirty-five, we’ll count it at a book a day. 7,700 books.

From 35 to the end of 45 (11 years), I read two books a week, because I was blogging and reading online articles (they are not a substitute, online content is mostly trash). So 1,100 books, though the proportion of non-fiction books was higher than before.

And for the last four years, I’ve been back to one or more a day, but we’ll count it as one a day. Add another 1,400.

Total? Thirteen thousand, seven hundred books. Put it at 90 percent fiction, and 10 percent non fiction, so about 1,370 non-fiction books.

This is an understatement, at every point I have gone with the lowest estimate. It is not unusual, even today, for me to read three books in a day. Sometimes I read four. The real number is probably close to twenty thousand.

This is not meant as a brag and should not be taken as such. By most people’s standards, my life is trash and I didn’t read so much because “discipline,” I did it because I like reading books and thinking about ideas. If I enjoyed making money, working out, meditating, and eating healthy as much as I liked books and games, well, I’d have a rather different life.

But I have read a lot of books. I have thought about what I read. I have discussed what I read with other people.

Because I have read those books, I can think using the knowledge they contained. You cannot think with knowledge you do not know, and you cannot even look up most Knowledge, because you have to know what you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know.

If you want to engage in the life of ideas, you have to read. You have to read a lot.

Yes, someone like me can make it easier. I’ve read a lot of not very useful books. I can say: “These are the most useful ones!” But you still have to go read them, think about them, and integrate them into your worldview. You need to be able to restate their arguments, and you need to understand the model they are using, and you need to know the assumptions upon which they are based, and you need to know the problems with all of those things, and why it matters and doesn’t matter.

There are shorter roads, but there are no shortcuts, if you really want to know. You just have to read, and then you have to work with what you read. (If this means math, you’ve got to do the math until it integrates. If it’s about human body movements, you’ve got to do the movements. If it’s about “spirituality” you have to actually meditate enough to get the basic insights.)

Discipline is shit. Discipline is only the main tool at the start. If you don’t start enjoying what you’re doing, why the hell are you doing it? The biggest mistake I made intellectually was spending years trying to figure out how economies work because I thought, “Shit, these people (economists, policy makers) are making things worse. I’d better figure it out!”

I did, but it was a lot less fun than the topics I really cared about. (Though it all came around in the end, because it turned out that the technical details were secondary to things like identity, ideology, organization, and all the stuff I write about in “Construction of Reality.”)

Most people have the curiosity and joy of reading and learning beaten out of them by our school system, which seems designed to be one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-wonder ways of “learning” one can imagine. It makes people into machines; spewing out the answer teach wants, talking only when allowed, sitting, and hating.

I mostly ignored school and would even read books in class when I could. My grades were middling, but I was learning.

You want to learn? Find the wonder in it. Find what’s cool and interesting. Yeah, you’ll have to power through some shit, but it’s worth it if you care.

But don’t think you can skip the actual work. Reading for intellectual work is like drills for athletic work, or whatever.

Just figure out why it’s worth doing.

Again, you can’t think with information you don’t know. You cannot look information up you don’t know you don’t know. Any system for which you do not understand the underlying axioms and assumptions, which you try to use, is actually using you. You are just a machine, doing what the creator(s) wanted.

So read and think.

And find it fun!

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Responsibility in Democracies

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On December 17, 2019

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The primary responsibility for what government is in charge of a democracy rests with voters.

This is fundamental. Voters have choices, they make choices. One can make the claim that the choices are often all bad (although in systems where anyone can join a party and vote in primaries that is weak), but when it comes to the actual choice on the ballot, voters are in charge.

This is fundamental. This is the basis of democratic legitimacy.

It also has to be understood clearly, because there is an exact relationship between power and responsibility. If you put all, or the majority, of the responsibility onto leaders or elites, you are saying you do not have any power to make change.

In Britain’s election, the British made a choice. The forseeable consequences will be a lot more death and suffering. There was another option. They chose.

Perhaps Corbyn did not run as well as he could have, but people who say it’s primarily his fault don’t actually understand democracies.

This is the same as when Americans chose Reagan, or the British chose Thatcher. There was a clear choice, they made it. Reagan ran a racist campaign, it was known at the time (I remember it), and it was also clearly one based on a project of dismantling the regulatory and welfare state. That was the choice, Americans made it, and Americans are responsible for making it. They then ratified the decision by re-electing Reagan.

The same is true of the Brits and Thatcher, especially when they ratified the choice by re-electing her after seeing her policies. (Thatcher also bribed them by letting them buy council housing below price. In the long run that was a bad bribe to take.)

None of this is to say that leaders don’t have responsibilities, or more power than individuals or even groups. But they do not have more power than the population as a whole, in a democracy.

If they do, then it is no longer a democracy. If that’s the case one wants to make (and I can see making it), then fine. After all, Corbyn was lied about more than 75 percent of the time, for example, by the media.

But if the country is still a democracy, then the ultimate responsibility for the government rests with the people.

To claim anything else is to throw away the power and responsibility the people do have and to retreat into leader worship and powerlessness.

Which, actually, is what we’ve done, over and over again.

It’s either your country, or it isn’t.

Brits are about to get what they voted for. That is as it should be. (The same is true of my own country, where we have made bad electoral choices, over and over again. So be it. We made those choices.)

(Data-based aside: In most of the ridings I saw where Labour lost, the swing was usually the Brexit Party vote. Those people who think that strategy for Labour was as simple as “Go Remain” miss the point: One-third of Labour party voters wanted Brexit. Labour had a genuinely broken coalition because of Brexit and there was no obvious way to fix it.)

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How Smart Stupid People Fuck Up the World

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On November 26, 2019

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Larry Summers, 2013

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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Why Labour Unions Matter(ed)

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On September 2, 2019

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Since it’s coming up on Labour Day weekend here in Canada, I thought I’d write a basic post on labour unions.

There’s been a vast effort, funded by huge amounts of money, to discredit unions and say they’re bad for workers.

That’s simple nonsense, but as with things like climate change denial, nonsense backed with billions of dollars is effective.

So, let’s run through the simple logic.

When we negotiate to get a job, or for a raise, in almost all cases we are negotiating with a group–the people who control a company, who are more powerful than us. They have more money (d’uh), and we need the job more than they need us. There are exceptions, of course, and it’s a lovely position to be in, but the number of exceptions is minute in a job-based economy like ours.

Corporations hire workers to do something which, combined with the effort of other workers, will make money.

The amount of money they make from a worker is “what the worker produces,” or “what the worker is paid.”

In other words, a corporation wants to make as much money as possible from your work, while paying you as little as possible, because that is their profit: That’s what they make.

You want the opposite.

This is a straight up conflict of interest. There can be a compromise which satisfies both, but really, the group hiring you wants you to make as little as possible so they can make as much as possible.

And they are more powerful than you. Also, you need the job, more than they need you. Without a job, you will be homeless and probably die; without any individual worker, they can usually just hire someone else.

So there is an imbalance of both power and consequences: Your BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement) is often shit.

Now, it isn’t always shit. In a really tight economy, which most western countries haven’t had since the early 70s, you can just get another job. There are less workers than jobs. But that hasn’t been the case for a long time–except for brief periods in specific locations or jobs, for decades. Where it is the case, companies work to change that, as fast as possible because they don’t want you to have alternatives.

This stuff is important for people who are not in management (which, in the old days, included bottom-level supervisors.) It is unimportant to senior executives, who are usually the people really running the company, and who are in effect negotiating with themselves for compensation. You’ll notice that they reward themselves well.

So, people who don’t control the company, and who are easily replaceable (again, most of us, despite many people’s over-inflated sense of self-worth), need to group up in order to have power. One person, or a few, are easy to replace.

If every line worker walks off the job and then pickets to prevent any other workers (scabs) coming in, the power equation changes.

Because most of us don’t study history, we have forgotten what unions won. At the start of the industrial revolution, people worked 12 hour days, 6 1/2 days a week. The jobs were dangerous, with maiming common, and badly paid. Peasants resisted being thrown off the land because being a feudal tenant with rights to the commons was vastly better than going to a city and working in a factory job (or even most clerk jobs). You worked less, controlled your own work, were less likely to be maimed and had a ton more days off.

It took over a century to turn jobs into what they are now, with the 40 hour week, a lot less maimings, and so on.

Corporations are groups. When they negotiate against an individual they have an advantage.

Corporations almost always have more resources and power than any individual or small group with whom they are negotiating over a job. If you were richer, or more powerful than them, you probably wouldn’t be going to them for a line job.

So what corporations want is to negotiate as a group, with more money and power, against individuals.

Only a complete bloody moron would find it either smart or fair for workers to acquiesce to this. It is not in their interests. The people who control corporations (not own, control) want to make the most money possible, so do workers.

Corporate officers, notoriously ruthless, understand this. Workers should too.

As for those not in a union, and jealous: Unions raise the wages of workers around them. Plus, get in a union if you can.

Don’t be a bloody sucker. Corporations hate unions because when unions are effective, they make less money and workers make more. That is all.

And if you want to know why workers keep having shittier and shittier lives in the US, well, here’s a lovely chart for you.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Support unions. Unless you’re a greedy, asshole boss, who thinks CEOs should earn 300x more than workers, in which case, rot in Hell.

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I’ve Never Known How to Say This

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On August 23, 2019

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I’ve been writing online for 17 years or so, if you don’t include forums, in which case it’s 25 or so.

And I’ve never known how to say this.

We’re really fucked up. Really. We’re cruel to each other in ways that just aren’t needed. We have more houses than homeless, enough food to feed the hungry. More than enough.

It’s crazy. Just crazy.

We have enough resources to fix our environmental and climate problems. Building and neighbourhoods can be made into net positives. We can, as humans, make ourselves a positive for life as whole.

We can fix this shit.

There are always going to be problems. There is pain beyond imagining that is possible in human existence (visit a burn clinic if you don’t believe me. Or just believe me, ’cause I’ve fucking been there.)

But basically, we can make this into a near paradise any time we get serious about it, just by adhering to the rule of always creating more good than evil, and not tolerating those who tolerate evil.

There’s plenty of complexity to it, aye. But at its heart, it easy. Don’t let people do evil, do more good than evil.

Some of us are so totally broken we don’t–we can’t–get this, but it’s this simple.

Create more good than evil, and this place, despite being, shall we say, metaphysically shitty (we eat each other, and that’s true even if you’re a vegan), would be heavenly.

I just don’t know how to get this across to people. I just don’t.

Don’t burn down forests. Don’t be cruel. Do good. Don’t do bad. You know what such things are.

You do.

And I, and others, shouldn’t have to be screaming “Don’t do fucking evil!” as the world moves towards apocalypse.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Our Leaders Kill for Their Own Benefit

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On August 20, 2019

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Big Brother Award

Most people are terribly confused when it comes to understanding our leaders, whether corporate or political.

They think that the sort of ethical or moral constraints which hold them back, hold back leaders.

But being a leader in our society is about “extracting value” from ordinary people.

Raising the price of insulin to $300, for example. Or launching a war against a country which is no threat to you. Or throwing people in jail for 20 years for minor drug offenses.

Our leaders don’t think the same way we do. Their function isn’t to make our lives better, their function is to make their lives better–along with the lives of those people who can help them or the few people they care about. Biden, for example, goes on and on about how much he loves his family. Boo hoo. Then he supports policies like the bankruptcy bill or three strikes laws which destroy other families.

Obama and Geithner quite deliberately created a relief program for homeowners which relieved almost no one and instead made sure that they went bankrupt, so the banks would get their homes. The policy was intended, and this has been admitted, to help the banks, not ordinary people. (See David Dayen’s Chain of Title if you need the tedious proof.)

To elites, we are tools at best, useless eaters at worse. They are trained to look at us and figure out how much value they can extract: as consumers, workers, voters, and soldiers.

Then they extract the value, and if some of us wind up dead, homeless, sick, or crippled, well, they don’t lose one second of sleep over it.

Because to them, we aren’t people.

The great problem of being a member of an elite is keeping the Praetorian guard happy; this doesn’t just mean the core soldiers and cops, but the key retainers who execute policy at the highest level.

The next great problem is the mob: The tools and useless eaters sometimes get uppity, and revolt and you need to be sure you can put them down–hence the Praetorian guard.

But they’re working on this problem. Modern surveillance makes it so much easier to keep us down. Modern education trains us to be obedient (if you don’t think that’s what school, which is “Sit down, shut up, speak only when spoken to, and give me the answer I want, the way I want it,” does, you are either stupid or haven’t thought about it. Or it’s really, really worked on you.)

Meanwhile, we’re not so far out from the military bots. Get bots that can make bots and they won’t need us.

And that’s good, for them, because, man, having so many of us around is causing them huge problems. Once they don’t need us any more, once they have bots who will do what they want, don’t talk back, and don’t mind being scrapped or mistreated, well, the easiest way to deal with climate change is to get rid of six billion people or so, isn’t it?

I mean, they won’t need us. We’ll be a problem. They’ll have a solution: Climate change will kill some, the bots will deal with the rest, and they have the perfect servant class.

Dystopian fiction? Lunacy?

Well, maybe. But tell me, given that they are accelerating climate change, even though they’ve known about it since the 70s (we have the papers, we know they knew), and given their proven willingness to do anything nasty to us they want if they think it’s in their interest and they can get away with it, what would they be doing differently if this wasn’t true?

More reasonably, of course, some of them are planning this and the rest are just willing to go along when push comes to shove.

Remember, $300 insulin. You do that, you know people will die. You’re OK with it.

And your fellow elites haven’t stopped you. (And yes, yes, they could.)

Killing us for money or other benefits is one of the things our leaders do.

And that isn’t going to change until they’re more scared of us than we are of them.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Thing About Racism and Prejudice…

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On August 16, 2019

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…is the unbelievable stupidity of it.

I can understand prejudice based on culture. I can understand prejudice based on religion. I can even understand prejudice based on subculture (if you can’t, remember “Nazi” can be considered a subculture, and so can “Republican,” and I see plenty of straight up prejudice against Republicans).

I mean, in most cases it’s a bad idea to pre-judge people based on your stereotype of a group, because they may not share the characteristics you dislike and you may be wrong about your stereotype.

But skin colour? Why not hair colour or eye colour? (Well, I guess we’ve done those too, especially with regards to redheads.)

Now if skin colour is a proxy for culture, we’re still in the badlands but not 100 percent stupid, but these fools keep mistaking Sikhs for Muslims (not even close, children), and so on.

But, overall the problem isn’t judging people–we’re plenty good at that. It isn’t assigning them to various identity groups–we’re ace at that. It’s not people joining identity groups, they make us join when we’re kids, and we just keep on doing it.

The problem is that these various identities obscure the common humanity beneath them. They divide us from ourselves and make us alien to our neighbours and fellow humans, when we have far more in common than separates us.

Made alien, we treat each other abominably, and think it’s okay because, “They’re not one of us.”

And here we are, with three existential threats (nukes/climate change/environmental collapse) and we’re spending all our time screaming at each other, running around in fear of each other, when if we don’t act properly, we may drive ourselves to extinction, or at least kill a few billion of us.

Skin colour? We care about skin colour? We’re arguing over who likes to have sex with whom? Over people who’d rather be a different gender from their biological one?

Who cares? None of this is important.

Apocalypse, that might be worth a bit more attention. And in a genuine extinction scenario, we’re all equal–even the rich. (In a simply “very bad” scenario, the rich are betting they’ll be fine. If you want to hate someone, hate the people who made themselves rich by making you poor and killing the poor. Hate people for what they do and have done, not shit that they didn’t choose (like skin colour) or stuff that doesn’t effect you (like their gender or sexual preferences).)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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