Christmas is named after Jesus. What have you done to Jesus this year?
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
Notice the part about prisoners. Every “Christian” who thinks prisoners should be mistreated is not a Christian, and Jesus will not recognize him or her as such. Yes, Clarence Thomas, I’m talking to you.
The law of the Jesus of the New Testament is of love, and that love includes works. If you are a Protestant who thinks works don’t matter, only faith, you are not a Christian. If you are a Catholic who thinks anti-gay doctrine is more important than ministering to and being loving to gays, then you will not be recognized by Jesus as one of his.
Jesus did not die in agony on the cross so that those who claim to follow him could be bigots, torturers, greedy selfish bastard who want grandma to eat catfood, or people believe the sick should not be ministered to. If you want to be evil, follow the old Testament minus the rest of the Torah. If you want to be good, remember that the New Testament overrides the Old one. And understand that the Church is neither God nor Jesus.
Do unto others as you would they do unto you in the same circumstances. That is the whole of the law. All else is commentary.
I’ve waited a bit to weigh in on this, but I think it’s time.
The two most important things to understand are that gun control would reduce harm significantly, and that gun control is a palliative for a sick culture. The US does have more guns than anyone else, but countries like Finland have a pile of guns and people don’t kill nearly as many innocents with them. Likewise every military age male in Switzerland has an assault rifle, and they don’t have killing sprees.
The first point first, China has people who go on sprees with knives. In fact there was one just recently in a school, 23 students were injured. That’s sad, but not one of them died. Not one. Guns make violence far, far more deadly. Reducing gun availability won’t stop attacks. It will reduce how deadly they are.
The key points of leverage on harm reduction are reducing clip sizes, getting rid of automatics and semi-automatics and radically restricting ammunition purchases. Likewise soft-target ammunition – bullets intended to fragment, and hollow point ammunition need to go away. These bullets have no purpose but to kill civilians. You don’t use them against military or paramilitary targets because they suck against body armor. As such they have no place, even if you believe in a 2nd Amendment “fight the government” argument. If you’re fighting the government, you’ll want ammo that can pierce body armor.
The second point is that America has far more of these attacks than anyone else. This is because America:
1) is under economic pressure. The more people who are in economic trouble, the more attacks.
2) has jobs which are intensely unpleasant, with the asshole boss being the norm. Don’t tell me otherwise.
3) has a startling rise in diagnosed mental illness, and a startling rise in the use of psychoactive medications whose effects we don’t really understand. In particular, there has been a massive increase in the drugging of young children (males are who we care about in this context) with amphetamines and dextro-Amphetamines, officially starting as young as 3 years old, and unofficially, earlier. Long term use of amphetamines is associated with psychotic breaks and violence, this is not in question, we have a TON of historical evidence. You cannot keep people constantly on amphetamines and not expect these sort of eruptions.
4) The increase in mental illness and medication is in large part because life in America is extraordinarily unpleasant. You live in a militarized surveillance society with no guaranteed health care and with a job market that doesn’t provide enough jobs for those who need it, allowing bosses to treat those who do have jobs like shit, and executives to take virtually all productivity gains for themselves. The economic model is to pile debt on consumers to create rental streams, but constant debt payments put people under major psychological pressure, all the time.
5) People are suffering an epidemic of chronic physical diseases on top of this.
You cannot have a pressure cooker society which is also militarized and swimming in guns. You simply cannot.
First step, enact gun control. Second step, stop treating your fellow Americans like shit and stop medicating young children (and everyone else) with record amounts of psychoactive chemicals. There are only two possibilities: either that many Americans really are mentally ill, or they aren’t. In either case, the solution isn’t to medicate them. It is to figure out what about your society is making them ill.
Actually, the truth will be somewhere between. More people are mentally ill because of your society, but not as many as are medicated. People have to be medicated to function in American society because it requires unpleasant and unnatural behaviour, virtually all the time. School and work both require people to act in ways that normal, healthy, unmedicated individuals find hard to sustain. Add to that the fact that social ties have, over the last 60 years, absolutely collapsed, leaving most people with almost no friend or close family, and people need to drug themselves to get through their day. They are sicks, scared and lonely. And at the very edges of this, the occasional person cracks, goes ballistic and kills a lot of people.
The Reagan play, in the last period of high oil prices was this: crush the economy and bring new sources of hydrocarbons online.
This is also Obama’s play: fracking and other unconventional hydrocarbon sources are being ramped up massively, while austerity crushes resource demand. China is buying a lot less resources.
I called for falling oil prices before and was wrong about when it would happen, but I remain convinced it will happen. The hardest thing to do is to predict not what, but when.
This does not mean that hydrocarbon prices in the long run are going to drop, they aren’t. But in the mid terms, for a few years, they will.
This won’t do much good for ordinary Americans, because they won’t see almost any of the gains, their lords and masters will take most of it.
This crash will lead to challenges for many countries, most interestingly South American countries like Venezuela and Argentina which have been riding the resource boom and engaging in resource socialism. They need to diversify their economies. I doubt Venezuela will manage it, Argentina may, if the people running Argentina learn some humility. This will also hurt the oil patch up here in Canada (primarily Alberta) and upset the political calculations of our Conservative party. Russia, various Middle Eastern countries and so on will also have their problems.
All resource booms end. All of them. The question is only when. The widespread slowdown, and especially the Chinese slowdown (which is hitting S. America hard), indicates we are likely close to the end of this boom period.
My interview on Virtually Speaking is now up. If you missed it and would like to listen, it can be found here.
We talked about kindness in public policy and about the economics and politics of global warming.
I’ll be talking with Virtually Speaking’s Jay Ackroyd tonight at 9pm EST. Current plan is to discuss kindness as the base prescription for policy and then talk about the implications of Bill McKibben’s 3 numbers on global warming, but if past episodes are any guide we’ll probably cover more ground.
If there is one policy point I’d like to make it isn’t a policy point, it’s an ethical one: default to kindness.
Or try kindness first.
In policy terms, the kind thing to do is usually the right thing to do. I’d go so far as to say, almost always.
Treating prisoners with kindness nets Finland half the recidivism rate the US, with its punitive prisons gets. That is, only half as many prisoners, once released, commit a crime in Finland.
Single payer or comprehensive universal healthcare has costs about a third less than the US system, and produces better results.
Not committing war crimes makes people much less interested in killing you. Not torturing enemies means they are far less likely to torture your people.
Helping other nations improve their standard of living makes them less likely to kill us, and better trade partners.
Happy employees are more productive and produce more profit, yet we deliberately treat employees horribly in the assumption that we get more out of them that way, despite reams of evidence to the contrary.
High minimum wages do not decrease employment, there is even some evidence that they may increase employment.
Torture does not get useful information out of people compared to regular interrogation. It is extremely unreliable, this is understood by most professionals in the business. You torture to send a message, and that message is “we torture”.
The first thing you should do, in any policy situation, is ask “what would the golden rule have me do?” Most of the time, this will be the correct policy, which will produce the best results. People who are treated with kindness, in general, reciprocate and are productive. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
Further, kindness is the default position even with the worst people. If you allow rapists to be raped, you become a rapist. If you torture torturers, you are now a torturer. You do not, in the old phrase, sink to their level. That doesn’t mean being a pushover, it doesn’t mean no justice, it does mean that the State has no business seeking revenge and that the rules, which should default to kindness, apply equally the worst people and the best. This is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing to do, because the State often decides the best people are the worst people, as even a cursory examination of history will attest, and it very often makes mistakes, as the many errors in capital cases have brought to light. But, again, even if someone is the worst of the worst beyond even the shadow of a doubt, they must be treated with kindness even as they are incarcerated, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because doing anything else degrades those who do it. Torturers are always corrupted by torturing, occupying armies always become weak, corrupt and brutal. You cannot do evil and not be, yourself, scarred by it.
Be kind, and remember, what you insist on your government doing to others changes your government, and will effect its treatment of you.
is about the value of human life.
When I was a child, my father once threw some Christian evangalists off our property.
They had said, “everyone who doesn’t believe in Christ will go to hell.”
Now my father had a temper, but the way his voice dropped to a whisper, and the step he took towards them screamed incipient violence and they virtually ran.
I didn’t ask why, but he told me.
“I lived in Bangladesh, Malaysia and other Muslim countries for years. Anyone who tells me that the good people I knew are going to burn in hell, can go to hell. I’ll have nothing to do with any God who does that or people who believe that.”
I always remembered that. Truth be told my father was slightly racist himself, he was of that generation. But he was ashamed of it, he knew better, and he fought it. What he understood was something simple: every human life has the same value. Any moral system which places one life above the other is not ethical, it is evil.
We in the developed world, and in America and Israel in particular, don’t believe that. We don’t even, any more, give it lip service. And we especially don’t believe that a Muslim life is worth the same as an American life, or an Israeli life, or well, pretty much any non-Muslim life. When Madeline Albright can say that half a million dead Iraqi children is a price worth paying for the sanctions, even before 9/11, we’ve become inhumane.
Osama bin Laden once asked, rhetorically, if Muslim blood was red, and if Muslim children were worthy of life as much as American children.
Israel is doomed. The generation of young American Jews do not have the loyalty to Israel, no matter what it does, that older American Jews, as a group, have. The world is coming to see Israel as an apartheid state, which is what it is. The demographics are against it, and at some point America will cut Israel off, and Israel’s economy is not sustainable without the US.
And more to the point, somewhere, alive today, is the person who believes that losing Jerusalem is an acceptable price for wiping out Tel Aviv. That person has been created by Israeli policy, by Western policy and by Saudi policy. Israel is a small country. It will not exist in 50 years. It may be destroyed in an apocalyptic terror attack, it may be destroyed in military action, it may be destroyed by demographics, it may fall apart economically. Its military advantage is already going away. Hezbollah took away Israel’s armor advantage, straight up defeating them in their last invasion of Lebanon. The Israeli air force was unable to substantially dent Hezbollah’s missile force, despite complete air supremacy. If Hezbollah had had the good missiles, it could have wreaked much more damage.
Right now Hamas has rockets. They look like something out of the 15th century. They are pathetic. It won’t stay that way forever.
All this before we get to the fact that Israel’s military is incompetent. They are no longer the Israeli military of 68, they are an occupation military, and occupation militaries are only good at fighting weaklings, they always become corrupt, brutal and weak themselves.
Israel faces a stark choice: the two-state solution is no longer viable, there is not enough water and arable land, and too much population. It can no longer work. Israel can either become a secular single state, giving a vote and rights to everyone, it can ethnically cleanse out all Palestinians and become a pariah state, or it can cease to exist (option 2 and 3 may both occur). Its end, moral or physical, may occur through terror, demographics, war, economic collapse, military decline or more likely, some combination, but it is as close to any historical process comes to inevitability.
Israel is acting like a monster, killing vastly disproportionate numbers of Palestinians. But the grave it is digging, in the not so long run, isn’t that of the Palestinians, it is its own.
W.H. Auden once wrote the line that applies to Israel, and to the Palestinians, for that matter: Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
I can find no joy in this, no happiness, but it is what it is. If Israelis, not Israel the religious-ethnic state, want to avoid catastrophic destruction, their only solution is simple: stop doing evil, and start doing good.
People will dismiss that as naive, but it is the hardest of hard headed pragmatism, and as such, is advice unlikely to be taken.
Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.
They seem to be moving to change protected works (so called IP) laws, to make them less punitive. I didn’t expect this, but it makes sense:
1) Hollywood is a Democratic bailiwick, and IP is how they make their money.
2) Libertarians took a couple percent in a lot of states, sometimes more. Something that can peel back some of that support makes sense.
3) It’s something they can do which appeals to the young, who hate the current regime of protected works.
4) It is fairly populist, and when Dems vote against it, as they will, it will demoralize the Democratic base, again.
Republicans aren’t doing this for any good reasons, but if they do get serious about it, I’ll support them on the issue.
The Democratic party is so right wing now that left flanking the party on some issues makes sense for the Republicans. And in a sense, this isn’t even all that left, 19th century conservatives hated patents and copyright, and for good reason.
Here’s what I expect from Republicans
1) Immigration reform. They want it, they need it. If Boehner is smart (and he’s not stupid, despite what people think), he’ll tie it to the Grand Bargain. Some money for southern States and municipalities. A hard lean on Republicans in states which have passed anti-immigrant bills, a sudden rediscovery of the freedom of immigration, and a lot of talk about farmers. Latinos aren’t innately loyal to the Democrats, who have treated them awfully and Republicans need it to go back to a 60/40 split. If they’re smart they’ll have Republican legislators stand up and start making statements about how America is land of immigrants, framing it as a matter of principle.
2) No more rape comments. Many Americans don’t like people justifying rape, that much is clear. They’ll still be anti-abortion, but not pro-rape (at least, not in public).
3) The presidential candidate in 4 years will be a tea-party type who isn’t connected to the nasty anti-immigrant stuff, and who hasn’t made really offensive comments about rape. He will run on jobs, jobs, jobs (Romney tried, he wasn’t credible), and will be pushing fracking, while trying to reassure suburbanites that won’t mean flaming water for them. He will be going after the working class, hard, who will be desperate for a good economy by then.
This will represent a move slightly to the left on social issues though they’ll still be so far to the right they’re in danger of going off stage. It will not mean a move to the left on economic issues or security state issues.
Recently I had a day where I burned out on anger. Oh yes, when it comes to public affairs I’ve been angry for years, though I think rage is the more applicable word. I don’t think this rage was misplaced, and I still get spasms of it.
The reason for the rage is simple enough: we’re killing and making a lot of people suffer who don’t need to with our political policies, economic policies just being a subset of politics. The financial collapse was forseen by many, myself included and we told the powers that be what to do to avoid it. The rise of economic inequality, which is correlated with pretty much every bad thing you can imagine, from heart attacks to infant mortality to bad performance in school and crime (read the Spirit Level if you need this proved in tedious detail), has been going on since the mid 70s at the latest, and was clearly visible by the mid eighties. It was, and is a clear policy choice. It was chosen in response to a real problem, the end of cheap oil and the rise of the oilarchy rich, but it was a choice, there were other ways of dealing with the problem available. First the Brits, then the Americans, then the Canadians and then various other nations chose the policy option which would lead to increased inequality. This was combined with a concerted assault on civil liberties, in this case I believe starting in America with the War on Drugs. Society became more totalitarian, whatever the trappings, and less free, not just in government, but in every part of our lives. I find the way we treat our children today, with virtually no freedom, particularly odious (no your precious children are not in more danger than children in the 60s and 70s who were allowed to run free). Police in schools are routine now, we imprison people in stunningly cruel prisons for minor crimes and so on. Visiting Britain was like visiting a starter project for Orwell’s 1984, with CCTV cameras everywhere.
Our response to the financial crisis, a totally optional crisis which was based almost entirely on fraud, was to make the poor and the middle class pay through austerity, while bailing out the rich with trillions and trillions of dollars. We gutted property rights completely so that banks could easily foreclose on homeowners and four years in, the economy, for ordinary people, has never recovered. We are now in a depression, and if it’s not yet a Great Depression, it’s bad enough. Now when I say pay, I mean suffer. People died, wives and children were beaten, people became homeless, lost their jobs, their health and their self respect because of a completely optional crisis and the criminals who caused the crisis were not just let off, they were rewarded with a huge bailout.
This was done in a bipartisan manner, but it could not have happened in the form it did without Obama. To give just one example, TARP was going to not pass the House. Nancy Pelosi was going to let it fail if the Republicans wouldn’t vote for it in equal proportion to Democrats. This is a fact, I was following it closely at the time as it was my job to do so. Calls were running between a 100:1 to 1200:1 against TARP. Obama got down and dirty and twisted arms, and I do mean twisted. Serious threats were made. TARP would not have passed without Obama. This policy of bailing out criminals who caused death and suffering continued throughout Obama’s reign.
Meanwhile there is the drone program. The drone program is not the worst thing Obama has ever done, not even close. What it is is completely unnecessary and counterproductive evil. Bombing weddings and funerals and killing innocent civilians, including women and children, is not making America safe, it is doing the exact opposite. The next great terrorist attack on the US, and there will be one, will be done by someone outraged by the wanton murder of the drone program.
We could go on and on, the point is simple enough. Evil has been done, and it is unnecessary evil. There were other options, I’ve written of them many times, and I’m not going to bother going over it again. Obama and Dems in Congress could have instituted different policies if that’s what they wanted to do. They didn’t. Bush and his Congress could have if they wanted to, they didn’t. Clinton, well, you get the idea.
Ok then, enough about politicians. They are what they are, and with the amount of money they stand to earn in their post-political career from carrying financial interests water it would take significant incentives to change their actions. Those incentives would be primarily social, and I believe they could be applied if Americans, or Brits, or Canadians really wanted to, but that’s neither here nor there, and not the subject of this post.
The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better. I know they know his record. I know they know where this is all leading. I know because I was a professional blogger for years. I’ve met these people in person, I have corresponded with them, and I have talked to many of them. I have worked with many of them.
They know what Obama is, and they lied about him.
I know of only one rule of writing, which is that you tell the truth as you know it. I may be wrong, I may be full of shit (many people think so), but I tell the truth as I know it at the time I write to my readers.
What I have seen, from many lefties, bloggers and non-bloggers, is that they have become compromised. One needs the Supreme Court to stay as it is for his career, another works for a union think tank, and the policy is to carry Obama’s water, so he carries their water. Another got the words on gay rights he wanted, so he carries Obama’s water as he did in 2008, acting as Obama’s outlet for rumors they couldn’t plant in the media directly. A few are honest sellouts, admitting why they are carrying the water, others aren’t. Some make the lesser evil argument honestly, most don’t.
And what I realized one sad day is that most of them are limited. I am a left winger, and what academic training I have is in sociology. I believe that people are, largely, a product of their environment. If we want better people, we need a better environment. To blame the poor as a group for their own travails is stupid, if they had richer parents, they would have different outcomes and be different people The same is true of the rich, the middle class, and so on. They are products of their environment, and most people are little more than that. Nothing is more pathetic than people acclaiming their identity through the TV shows they consume, the branded clothes they wear and so on. They are simply choosing from a menu created by others. They are limited people, products of their environment, claiming they are something more.
I thought many of my ex-colleagues were more. I really did. I believed that they had some ability to stand outside society, even a little bit, and see it for what it was, and that in that detachment they could find honesty and an ability to see the world beyond the lens of their own place and their own needs. Upton Sinclair’s comment, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” is the perfect description of a limited person, intellectually and morally. If we cannot see beyond our own self-interest, or beyond our own need to feel good about ourselves, then we will never seen the world with anything even approaching clarity. If we cannot separate our interests from the interests of other people and from the interests of society, we are not fit to play any role in running society or commenting on it.
The error, in the end, was mine, I realize. I thought certain people were more than a product of their environment, more than a base need to do whatever it took to pay their bills and believe themselves still good people while doing so. I was wrong. The number is far fewer than I thought. Far, far fewer.
The consequence of a debased class of influentials, which is what we are talking about, is a debased understanding of the world. The more incorrect peoples understanding of the world, the more they will make incorrect decisions about what to do, and the more they do that the worse off they, and society, will be. When even people who know Obama’s record lie for him, when even people who understand the glide path that America is on pretend Obama is going to fix that, Americans live in a world of delusion. Of course they don’t make correct decisions, they are getting constant incorrect information. This isn’t just about what used to be called the MSM, this about the alternatives, the people who are the outliers.
I was part of political blogging when it was new, and a big deal, and intellectually exciting. When bloggers thought that their job was to tell truth both to power and to the masses. That world is gone, and the people who remain, with a few exceptions, no longer do that, no longer even believe in doing that.
Some will say this is a very self-congratulatory post, and that I’m patting myself on the back as truth teller, and oh, there are so few of us. Whatever. This is the world I see, and it is a world I lived in, worked in, was a senior member of. And this is not about self-congratulation, it is about sadness. I am saddened at the way people I knew, people I had respect for, have debased themselves for so very, very little.
If society is to function again for the benefit of all a lot of things need to be done. One of them is to fix the world of influentials, of whom bloggers are very minor members. To be an influential should be to be an intellectual, and to be an intellectual is to be able to stand outside ones own society, to see it through the dual eyes of an outsider and a member, then report the truth of what one sees.
One must be, then, more than product of one’s circumstances, more than a function of one’s personal interests.
Perhaps there is no place for such people in society today, perhaps the audience doesn’t want those people. But I don’t believe that, because I personally never had any problem generating traffic. The problem is that at a certain point, in blogging, traffic stopped paying, because the amount advertisers paid to the content creators on the web dropped through the floor, in large part because Google figured out how be the middle man and take almost all the money. So if you want to make money online you either need to exploit your contributors (not pay most of them) or you need to sell out.
But I’ve moved away from my main point. People respond to incentives like Pavlov’s dogs. If you want to be more than a dog, you have to train yourself to overcome your conditioning. It’s hard, and you won’t be able to do it all the time (and if you did, you’d be thrown in an insane asylum or be so non functional in society you’d be ostracized), but it is what is required to be an honest, useful influential. But knowing and believing something is only one part of it, you must then tell it.
A lot more people are going to suffer and die due to policies which are evil. Part of what makes that happen are the people who know better and lie, part of that is due to the people who convince themselves that evil is necessary because it is in their interests. They are not the most responsible, no. But they are responsible.
And I really did think better of so many of them.
Become more than your background, more than a function of the incentives placed in front of you. See the evil you yourself do, your society does, and stop needing to feel good about yourself.
Stop being someone else’s dog.
