Category: Miscellaney Page 12 of 13

Why Ebola is a threat

On October 9, 2014

The risk from Ebola is greater than it seems. Not only is it out of control in Africa, there is no reasonable chance it will be brought under control in Africa: it will have to burn itself out. This is because the countries simply do not have the administrative capacity to handle it: not enough beds, nurses, isolation suits, money, etc… The best plan I’ve seen for helping them is Vinay Gupta’s suggestion to use survivors are the primary care givers in community centers. (Note that community centers not run by survivors would likely increase the spread of Ebola, not decrease it.)

Fundamentally, however, the decision point for handling Ebola properly passed in the 70s and 80s, when neo-liberalism, the IMF and Western bankers conspired to reduce the growth rate of Africa from its post-colonial high to below its population growth rate. The governments in question do not have the capacity to handle Ebola, and no one is going to send over enough nurses, doctors and equipment to make a difference. Even if they did, the administrative problems of these countries, lack of infrastructure and distrust in Western medicine mean they would be less effective than you think.

Poor people with inadequate health care, nutrition and sanitation are resevoirs for disease to develop. They always have been. Attempts to explain this to the rich, both the global rich, and the American rich, have been in vain for the past half century or so. What happens in Africa, or India, can come back and kill you, just like what happens in the Middle East (half a million dead kids, and so on) can turn out to be very bad for Manhattan.

So much for Africa. But other nations are at risk as well. The widespread waves of austerity and the destruction of countries have left gaping holes in the medical infrastructure of the first world. Does anyone think Greece, for example, could handle Ebola? Spain already fumbled a case, leaving a nurse who said she probably had Ebola in a public waiting room for hours, while she was symptomatic.

Austerity, cheapness and incompetence kills. America has about 40 million uninsured. The initial symptoms of Ebola look a lot like the flu. Think about what most uninsured are going to do if they get a bad flu? Best case is a trip to the clinic to get some antibiotics. The same is true of many insured. Going to the hospital for a bad case of the flu is overkill, and hospital stays are expensive. Bankruptingly so.

And imagine you are poor, uninsured and have no paid vacation days, then come down what looks like a bad flu? I imagine you might still go wipe old people’s bums, or clean rich people’s houses, or go to work in retail. Sure, soon enough you’ll be too sick to continue, but for a few hours…

Many other countries are in no position to do the sort of contact tracking that is required to stop something like Ebola. Think of Mexico, America’s southern neighbor. Entire cities, indeed provinces, are beyond the writ of the government, essentially controlled by drug gangs.

I don’t see Ebola as an existential threat unless it mutates. It’s still fairly hard to pass it to another person; it isn’t communicable when it’s asymptomatic, and so on. But if it goes airborne, or if it becomes communicable during the incubation phase, it could turn into something truly horrible. And the more people who get it, the more likely a mutation is to occur.

There are some threats where we’re all in it together. Money and position may buy us some immunity, but they cannot buy us total immunity. Climate change is one of those threats; another is communicable diseases. We can only, so far, be grateful that this isn’t the super-flu many scientists have been worried about. Ebola may kill in a particularly nasty fashion, but the last great Flu Epidemic killed more people than World War I.

In the meantime, my sympathies go out to West Africans, who will largely suffer this without meaningful help. And I warn the Europeans that they are far more vulnerable than they think: the lack of internal borders, the near-failed or failed (Greece) States and austerity means that if Ebola gets a foothold it may be far harder to contain than they believe.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

On Truth and Burning Bridges

By Ian Welsh

On September 10, 2014

Comments

Over the last few years, I burned a lot of bridges: first on private e-mail lists and second on twitter (and a little bit with unwelcome posts here.)

After Obama got into office and made it clear that he was going to ramp up drones (which I knew and could not publish); and that he was going to drive the West into permanent depression (which I knew and wrote repeatedly); and my compatriots, by and large, fell to their knees and lauded him, even in places which later turned on him, I became, not angry, but enraged.

There were three camps on this:

1) Those who knew Obama was going to be a disaster and would not say it, because he was popular and speaking against a popular president who had just bought the Netroots and who most netroots citizens believed in, seemed like a way to lose readership or followers.

2) Those who believed that Obama was the Panglossian choice: this is the best we can get, the best of all possible worlds. That didn’t mean good, that meant bad, but better than terrible, so suck it up. Billmon falls into this camp on economic policy (the bailouts were the only politically possible policy and this is the best of all actually possible worlds), and I had a huge blowout with him last year about on twitter. He’s brilliant, but…

3) Those who believed and many of whom still believe that Obama was just swell; FDR reborn, who would (and has) accomplished more than FDR every did!

We all have our own truths and determining truth is a problem. I thought then that Obama might well be a one term president, and was wrong. But on the economics I was exactly right; and on foreign policy I was generally right: I knew that foreign policy was going to be a fiasco when he put Hilary Clinton in charge, because the one major area Hilary was to his right on was foreign policy. (Plus the whole drone thing. The only major candidate to say he didn’t believe in the war on Terror was Edwards, but when the unions decided not to back him (largely from gutlessness, in my opinion) he was done.)

I also predicted, following Stirling Newberry, that on civil liberties and constitutional issues he would institutionalize Bush. He was not the anti-Bush people imagined, but Bush’s heir, despite being a Democrat.

I got into blogging to, as the terrible cliche goes, change the world. I did not get into blogging to be a courtier to power, kissing the feet of those in power when I knew they were doing or going to do terrible things.

Add to this significant undiagnosed health problems, and I spent years angry.

I’m not someone who thinks that anger is always bad: often it gets people up off their asses. In the same way that hating your job means you should change jobs, and being unhappy may be a sign that something is wrong with your situation not with you, and you shouldn’t self medicate (you cannot explain the massive increase in depression and many other mental illnesses over the past century using individual factors, it is clearly a social problem, with social causes).

And so, for years, I cut people dead, and cut myself off from much of my old network (though certainly not all.) I look back now, calmer, and wonder “were these fights I needed to engage in?” I think—probably not, and yet, and yet: we lost and too many people just wouldn’t admit and made excuses for terrible policy.

We got a president who is worse on civil liberties than George Bush, who is still destroying countries, whose policies in combination with the Fed have lead to more than 100% of all gains going to the top 10% (and really about the top 3%); with a decrease in wealth and income for the majority of Americans and a ton of Europeans.

Obama may have given Americans a shitty version of universal health care (sort of), but in virtually every other way he is an unmitigated disaster.

And it was obvious way back, or it should have been. And people didn’t say who knew it; or didn’t know who should have because, let us be frank, they wanted the first African American president, no matter what, even if he was a right authoritarian and they wanted to live in a fantasy land where just electing a Democrat, any Democrat would fix things.

The simple truth is that the baby boomers are done. Their positive legacy is the improvement of women’s rights and gay rights (African American rights were won by the Silent and the GI generations.) Their negative legacy is an erosion of every other type of civil liberties that matters, right back to the Magna Carta; the vast erosion of America’s real economic power; the end of American egalitarianism and huge numbers of needless wars and deaths that have made America hated in large parts of the world.

As usual, some of my readers will object to this broad brush, but take it another way: old and middle aged people (Gen Xers too, a noxious generation politically); have had their days at bat, and those of us on the left have failed and failed and failed.

So it’s going to be another generation’s job to fix the huge mess that has been created: politically, economically and environmentally. That doesn’t mean there’s no job for older folks: but the young people will choose which older folks to learn from, follow and emulate. The job of those of us who are older, who lost, is to prepare the ground for the next war; the next battles.

If we do so, maybe we can keep the death toll from what is coming as low as a billion people.

Maybe.

So be it.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Equal Rights to Profit from Impoverishing People and Causing a Great Extinction Event

By Ian Welsh

On May 16, 2014

Comments

The New York Times makes its money making sure that the ideological justifications for whatever the establishment wants to do are in place.

The NYT was a key part of selling the Iraq War. Their columnists, with only a couple exceptions, are intellectual mediocrities like Ross Douthat, whose job it is to be stupid on cue. They buried the Bush surveillance story until after the election of 2004 because they were scared that if Americans knew, Kerry might win. They have buried other stories because the White House or Pentagon or NSA did not want Americans to know.

The firing of Jill Abramson has made it clear that she, a woman, was paid less by the New York Times than a man would have been.

(Her real offense is probably that she was against the continued erosion of the barriers between advertising and editorial.)

Abramson was, to put it simply, not treated fairly, almost certainly because she was a woman.

I do not care.

It is not in my mandate to care if the Duchesses of Hell are treated as well as the Dukes of Hell.

Too many people in the West want only one thing: they want in on the evil gravy train. They see that there is a scam going on, a scam that impoverishes millions and helps create and maintain rape factories like in the Congo, and their response is “I want in on that gravy train! Why are women, and African-Americans and the working class and (insert discriminated class here) not on the gravy train too!”

They look at what CEOs make, or the banker bailouts, and they want the money; they want their own bailouts.

But what they don’t want to do is drain the swamp. They don’t want to change the way the world works so that having an iPhone doesn’t mean men and women in the Congo are being raped and murdered in a systematic fashion. In the Congo they will take their rape victims, bend them over and have every man in a military unit rape them. The blood flows like water.

A choice was made in the late 70s to 1980, not to drain the swamp. In fact, the choice was made then to increase evil and poverty in the world an the only reason one can say that it has decreased is China, who didn’t go along with the IMF/World Bank prescription.

This was a choice: as problematic as Carter was (and he was very) he suggested a different way: Americans resoundingly rejected it. The Brits elected Thatcher.

These acts of greed and selfishness; these acts of “I’ve got mine, fuck you Jack” had consequences.

Institutions like the New York Times exist to control the acceptable range of political and social discourse: they are ideological bodies who help ensure change occurs largely within the spectrum amenable to current elites. That is their job, and they are very very good at it.

If you are a member of these institutions and you do not do your job, you are gone. The problem with Abramson isn’t about pay, it’s that she wanted to try and keep editorial and advertising separate. I’m sure that being an “uppity” woman helped get her fired, to be sure, but it was the small bit of good she wanted to (or evil she wanted to prevent) that the publisher hated, that is far more problematic.

After the Iraq war invasion, the mainstream pundits who were against the war were fired, let go, or demoted. The ones who were for it (and who objectively were wrong about in terms of its success and costs) were promoted.

The system is designed to do something, and it does it. Those who do not play are gotten rid of.

Abramson mostly played, she’s no martyr. Even with what remains of the siloing, the NYTimes was still doing plenty of evil.

But even the royalty of Hell sometimes have twisted notions of honor.

If what people want is equal rights to profit from a system which is profoundly evil, and whose function is to enrich a few people by impoverishing many many more while maintaining rape colonies, I’m out. I’m not fighting for fairness in the neo-Imperialism business. “The best people at maintaining our project of impoverishing people and screwing up the world, causing a great extinction event, should be chosen objectively, without regards to ethnicity, gender, age or sexual preference” is not a hill I’m dying on.

Rivers of blood from the victims, dead and alive, have priority and all I want for the class of senior retainers whom Abramson is one of, and the oligarchical class whom she worked for, and who treated her unfairly (only half a million), is for them to have all their power and all the money and influence that buys them that power, taken from them.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The 90/10 rule as applied to medical practitioners

By Ian Welsh

On December 11, 2013

Comments

I’ve spent a lot of my life sick, and a fair bit injured. In my twenties I spent 3 months in the hospital all in one go. When I left I weighed 90 lbs and could barely walk. (Full details here.) I’d had back issues in hospital (sacroiliac joint) and about 6 months later, I picked up some boxes and moved them about 50 feet. No big deal. Went to bed, woke up next morning, and the least movement would cause my lower left back to clench in the most excruciating way. It wound up that the fire department had to break down the door to my room (I was living in a moderately unpleasant rooming house), sheet pull me and take me to the hospital.

Over the next six months I saw plenty of doctors. One thought I was faking (and to this day I hate him with a blinding passion—I could barely walk, couldn’t sit down, couldn’t get out of bed without excruciating pain), the others gave me a variety of anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants, none of which had an noticeable effect. Finally I found a doctor who wasn’t paranoid about pain killers and at least gave me a prescrition: she was 7 months pregnant.

I was amused, but not happy.

Over time it fixed itself. After about 6 months I could get out of bed, bend over, sit down, put on shoes, etc… without the expectation of major pain. Still inadvisable to do any manual labor, but I did some, because I needed the money, and I paid for that money with agony.

After a few years, it resolved itself.

About three weeks ago, the day after a heavy lower back workout in the gym, I was out for a walk. Stepped off a curb, twisting slightly as I did, and felt the left lower back go: felt it clench up agonizingly, and my left leg lost almost all its strength. I dropped into a squat with my feet together, to take pressure off my back, steadying myself against a lamp-post. Gingerly stood up. Found that I could barely walk, but that I could barely walk. Found that the least jostle or bump would cause the muscle to clench agonizingly.

I was about half way to the local farmer’s market. Because I’m cussed I walked the rest of the way, then walked home. That night I went to bed with codeine, a phone, and a book next to my bed, in case I couldn’t get out of it.

I could, but it was a long and painful operation.

I suffered for about a week, then I had an appointment with my naturopathic doctor. He said, “I have no idea what’s wrong, I want you to see this sports therapist.”

Next day I walked in to see that sport’s therapist, who has worked for multiple professional teams. Within 5 minutes of meeting me, he said, “the muscle in your lower back which attaches to your lower spine on the left side is in spasm, protecting your spine’s curve.”

A diagnosis! I went to a pile of doctors in the 90s—not one of the diagnosed what was wrong with me. Not one of them sent me to a physiotherapist, sport’s therapist, chiropractor or even a decent massage therapist. (And one of those doctors was a rheumatologist.)

The sports therpaist does some massage, using elector-accupuncture to try and tire out the muscle so it’ll relax so that magnesium can get into it so it can relax more.

Minor results: I felet a bit better. Second session didn’t seem to do anything.

So I lookedup a chiropractor, searching online till I found one who seems to deal with such problems and sounds competent. Dr. Kevin Ho. I go in, he looks me over, he tells me my hips are misaligned, so the muscle is, in part, in spasm to protect the spine from my right hip pulling it out of alignment.

He goes to work, tells me to see the sport therapist to wear out the muscle: next day I don’t feel much better. I go see the sport’s therapist, he does his thing.

The next day (today) I feel vastly better. I can put on shoes and pants and underwear without the expectation of agony! I go see the Chriopractor again, I ask him how much of the hip alignment he had corrected in the first session.

“Oh, about 50%, but you’ve lost 15% since then.”

Now this is interesting to me, because some time ago I saw a chiropractor regularly, for about a year. In that year, I do not recall him making as much progress as Dr. Ho has made in, oh, one session.

He works away, by the time I leave, I can bend over more than twice as far as when I came in.

Now what’s interesting to me about this (other than not being in so much pain, which is of great interest to me, but probably much less to you) is that these guys, between them, appear to have diagnosed what is happening and why, and gone a long way to fixing it when a pile of doctors before couldn’t even diagnose it, let alone fix it!

(And I left out the massage therapist on Sunday who made it worse.)

But this does accord with my experience with doctors: most doctors are mediocre. They do what they do, which is hand out prescriptions for a few problems they see regularly, they are horrible diagnosticians, and they do not care. As with most people working in any field, about 9 out of every 10 is a drone, barely competent, doing the bare minimum not to be charged with malpractice.

About 1 in 10 is actually good, knows what they are doing, and doesn’t work by rote, but can actually diagnose and fix problems.

(And about 1 in ten of the good ones is more than good, is brilliant.)

This seems to be true of healthcare practitioners in general. Over the last few years I’ve had maybe two dozen massages. One of those massage therapists was brilliant, a couple were good, and that’s it. The brilliant one was taught by her father, a blacksmith, and at age 50, as part of her two hour fitness routine, started with 20 pull ups (most marines in their 20s can’t do 20 pullups.) If you had, say, a headache, when you left it was almost gone and two hours later it was gone completely: guaranteed. She regarded your problems as a personal affront to be healed.

When I was young, to me a doctor was an M.D., and if I needed to see someone else, I figured the M.D. would refer me. As I’ve aged I’ve learned that for body mechanics issues most M.D.s are worthless, and that most physical therapists are mediocre, but the good ones are amazing. I’ve learned that, in fact, alternative medicine often has the people who can actually make you feel better, but that most of them are mediocre too. I’ve learned that if you want a doctor to actually sit down and listen to your symptoms and history, you’re going to have to pay for that out of pocket, even in Canada. Traditional Chinese Medicine is FAR better for something like Eczema than anything western Medicine has, and so on.

We have, for one thing, too few doctors right now. They are actively scared of seriously sick people, because they have to push you out the door in fifteen minutes. This is supply and demand, we need to have more doctors, they will also cost less. We have systematically chosen doctors for their cold manner for decades, because people who cared would “burn out”. Going to a TCM doctor from China was a shock to me, he looked at my skin and made what sounded like genuine sounds of sympathy: he seemed to understand it was painful, and care, in a warm, human way. I can think of maybe two M.D.s who have ever given me that feeling.

The Skeptics movement are a bunch of authority worshipers. A lot of alternative medicine does work, and they do not apply their own skepticism to standard medicine: where if you get all the studies for many medicines you discover they are little better than active placebos in many cases, only work for a minority of the population when they do work, and have nasty side effects besides. For many illnesses regularly treated with powerful neuro-active drugs, exercise is as effective, or more, and does no harm, besides. We should be prescribing a lot more exercise, for those who can stand it, and a lot less drugs, and we should be looking at drug trial results with a great deal more skepticism because many of them are badly designed and the ones which fail are generally not released to the public.

We should also be doing far more research into why some drugs are very effective only for a minority of people with the condition. What are the markers that determine such effectiveness? And we should be completely cleaning up our food system, because the reason we have so much illness is bad diet and no exercise in far too many cases (plus various forms of pollution.) Healthy food costs more, but we are subsidizing unhealthy food, and paying for it on the back end with illness and the costs of illness.

But to bring it back to the first point: most healthcare practitioners are borderline competent, and only a small minority are actually good. Throughout my life I’ve seen that this is the case. When you’re looking for a competent one, look for one of two things:

1) someone who takes your disease or injury as a personal affront, to be defeated at all costs, because Goddamn It, no fucking disease is going to beat them; or,

2) someone who manifestly cares and wants you to be better, because they hate seeing you suffer.

Absent caring in one of these two ways, very few healthcare practitioners are any good. They fall quickly into a rut, giving out prescriptions or doing treatments just to get through patients, through the day, and back home.

If your doctor or therapist doesn’t care, either about you or their own pride, get the hell away from them.

Deserve: the deadliest word

By Ian Welsh

On July 4, 2011

Comments

I hate the word “deserve” because lord save us all from what we “deserve”, but lately I find it hard to remember that one good person is worth saving, or that most people are just weak, not evil. The world will burn, in war, and famine, and revolution, and climate change and it will burn because we are so contemptible we refuse to do anything to stop it from burning. And maybe that we now includes me, but I’m so very tired of dealing with stupid, cruel, selfish people. Heck, forget selfish, people who won’t even look out after their own self-interest, or even understand what it is.

I fear I’ve come full circle. As a teenager, subject to constant cruelty, I hated humanity. Contemptible. The human love of cruelty was clear to me, the way we encourage it, the way we nurture it, the way we inculate it. The way group dynamics require scapegraces and outsiders, the way most people, to feel good about themselves, like to watch others squirm, how they enjoy tormenting the weak, how they secure their own position in whatever little pack they belong to by showing that someone is below them. They make those people into something less than human, or worse, the truly evil know they’re human and derive pleasure from the ability to inflict and relieve suffering as they choose.

As I grew older, I learned how to defend myself, learned how to make those who would hurt me, hurt instead, so they would find their prey elsewhere, would prove their place in the hierarchy by humiliating someone else. And I learned that some people are good, that some people will do the right thing even when there’s nothing in it for them. I learned, also, that most people are of weak character. In their weakness they will do what they think the group approves of. A few good leaders I saw made of those around them good people, by expecting nothing less. Oh, the pettiness never goes away, but the deeper cruelty was not tolerated, and it was not tolerated by even the lower ranking members of the packs, for so they had been trained, so it was expected, and they knew that disapproval would come from the pack, and the Alpha, for cruelty, not kindness.

But we have selected, to rule our societies, sociopaths at best and psychopaths at worse. They have contempt for those they rule, do not see them as even truly human, and enjoy hurting them. They feel tough when they make the hard decisions, which are somehow always hard for others, but never for themselves. They encourage cruelty in society, from the ground up, and routinely subject the population to humiliating surveillance, force them to abase themselves to the least appearance of authority, whether legitimately used or not, and condone murder and torture and routine humiliation. They don’t do these things to themselves, of course, the rich, for example, don’t get groped in airports, but they routinely do it to those below them.

And in so doing they teach those below them, to do it to those below them, and below them, and below them, and so on. The sickness comes from the top, a rotten poison which has altered the character of nations. But it came from the bottom, first. It came from a population who became lazy and complacent and thought they had rights they didn’t have to guard like a dog with a bone; who thought they could just live their lives and leave politics to other people except for pulling a lever or marking a ballot every four years. It came from people who felt “I’ve got mine, who cares what happens to anyone I don’t know?” Unable to see themselves in others for longer than the gossamer blink of an eye, they were also unable to understand that what was done to others would also be done to them.

We have become contemptible. Our leaders, perhaps, are most contemptible of all, but we continue to consent. Oh perhaps polls might say we’re not happy, but who cares what polls say? We do nothing, we let our leaders do as they will, and we take on their mores, becoming cruel and debased and uncaring of what happens to our fellows, not even the care of enlightened self interest, the clear understanding that what is done unfairly, cruely, to someone else, could, probably will, one day be done to us. We pretend to care most about our children, making such a fetish of it that allowing children to roam unattended is virtually treated as a crime, yet we are creating a world in which they will suffer, unimaginably, a world in which hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of our grandchildren will die.

Lord save us from what we deserve, because what we deserve is what’s going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don’t understand.

Moral Monster Test

By Ian Welsh

On June 3, 2011

Comments

If you support this, you are one:

Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park.

Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan “Keith” McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry is a co-founder of the international Food Not Bombs movement, which began in the early 1980s.

The group lost a court battle in April, clearing the way for the city to enforce the ordinance. It requires groups to obtain a permit and limits each group to two permits per year for each park within a 2-mile radius of City Hall.

Arrest papers state that Cross, Markeson and McHenry helped feed 40 people Wednesday night. The ordinance applies to feedings of more than 25 people.

“They intentionally violated the statute,” said Lt. Barbara Jones, an Orlando police spokeswoman.

Just doing their job doesn’t cut it for the police, prosecutors or Lt. Jones, the Orlanda police spokesperson, either. But hey, this is a world where “first responders” do nothing while a man drowns, citing “procedures”. There isn’t anything most Americans won’t do, or not do, if it’s their job. I mean, it’s nothing personal man, it’s just a job.

Stop treating monsters as reasonable people

By Ian Welsh

On January 17, 2011

Comments

Over the last few years, and in particular in the last couple, I’ve noticed something about myself: I’ve become a lot more rude in my political dealings, including with many people I used to consider allies. At first this worried me a bit, because I couldn’t quite pin down why, beyond the fact that I was angry.

Now I’m not someone who believes anger is always a bad thing. I think certain things should make you angry, and if they don’t, something’s wrong with you. When people are dying, being raped, being tortured, being denied basic rights, being beaten and so on, you should get angry. You should use that anger as a weapon and as fuel for the fight.

Still, anger isn’t a strategy, or even a tactic, and one has to be careful, because anger can blind you and turn you against those who should be your allies.

And that’s the crux. Allies.

What I’ve come to realize lately is that I’m not on the same side as a lot of people. If you’re for the Afghan war, aka. for eternal war, I’m not on your side. If you believe in indefinite detention or the President’s right to assassinate whoever he wants, I’m not on your side. If you believe that Wikileaks is evil and that citizens should be kept in the dark as to what their governments are doing, then I’m not on your side.

Through the Bush years opposition to Bush made a lot of people seem like friends, who weren’t. Sure, we all hated Bush (yes, hated. I hate people who torture and engage in aggressive war, and I think that’s the appropriate response), but that hatred, that opposition, concealed the fact that a lot of people didn’t really object to what Bush was doing, they just objected to the fact that it was being done by a Republican, or that it was being done incompetently. They would have been ok with the same policies if they’d worked out, as with all the “liberals” and “progressives” who were pro-Iraq war until it turned into a clusterfuck.

The Wikileas imbroglio was a real turning point for me. At least half the “progressives” I know revealed themselves as, simply, supporters of authoritarianism; revealed themselves as mushrooms who wanted daddy to keep them in the dark and feed them shit. Revealed themselves as fools who didn’t either understand or, worse, believe that government exists to serve its citizens, who have a right to know what it’s doing in their name.

But while the watershed, it was merely the latest in a string of horrible behavior from the “left”. Whether it was teacher’s unions stealing food stamp money to pay for their raises, unions selling out their own members to support Barack Obama’s health care bill, which was bad for most union members or whether it was the progressive caucus promising to vote against any HCR bill without the public option, then folding like wet cardboard, it was clear that there was no spine and no solidarity on the left. Every little interest group was always willing to sell out everyone else, sometimes for their own interests, but often not even for that: the leadership of organizations was so corrupt that they would sell out their own members interests so they could feel like members of the DC Village.

I have no time for these people. I have no politeness or kindness for them. They are traitors and in many cases cowards, and their actions or lack of actions are, objectively, killing or impoverishing people, both in America or abroad.

So screw politeness, and screw reasonableness. Reasonableness in the current political environment means “willing to sell out the people whose interests she or he is supposed to care about.”

So count me out. I’m not interested in being reasonable, if reasonable means “a spineless sell out”. I’m not interested in being pragmatic, if pragmatic means “understands that nothing can actually be done to fix any problem”, and I’m not interested in being polite to people who make their living by destroying lives or apologizing for those who destroy lives.

America is going down, and the world is spiraling into an age of war because everyone wants to be “reasonable” rather than do the right thing for their own people. Everyone who matters wants to pander to the rich, rather than care for the masses. And as for the masses, they have treated politics as a spectator sport, allowed themselves to be lied to and made fools of, and have and will continue to reap the bitter harvest.

You not only have only the rights you are willing to fight for, you have only the economic livelihood you are willing to fight for. Americans, being unwilling to fight for either, will soon have neither.

And I have nothing but contempt for those who have led them to this impasse, and with them, much of the world.

Dear Software Writers

By Ian Welsh

On January 16, 2011

Comments

Please don’t set your program to auto-update my drivers without telling me. Because, no, your newer drivers are not always better, in fact they often break something, which is why I NEVER auto-update drivers (or much of anything else).

Thanks for wasting a good six hours of my life fixing your screwed up driver problem.

Signed,

a massively frustrated customer.