One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.
Yeah. Ok. Go read the rest. What is surprising is that they hadn’t already rioted.
No war but class war, folks. The rich understand this, and they have been practicing it.
I recently stumbled across a book on the link between leadership and what we call madness. From the Amazon review:
Take realism, for instance: study after study has shown that those suffering depression are better than “normal” people at assessing current threats and predicting future outcomes. Looking at Lincoln and Churchill among others, Ghaemi shows how depressive realism helped these men tackle challenges both personal and national. Or consider creativity, a quality psychiatrists have studied extensively in relation to bipolar disorder. A First-Rate Madness shows how mania inspired General Sherman and Ted Turner to design and execute their most creative-and successful-strategies.
Ghaemi’s thesis is both robust and expansive; he even explains why eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made such poor leaders. Though sane people are better shepherds in good times, sanity can be a severe liability in moments of crisis. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, can leave one ill equipped to endure dire straits. He also clarifies which kinds of insanity-like psychosis-make for despotism and ineptitude, sometimes on a grand scale.
Now, I’m not depressive, strictly speaking. I don’t stay in bed all day, and so on. But the Welsh family motto, no kidding, is this:
An optimist and a damn fool are the same thing.
Ordinary people, what we call “sane” in our society, are really shitty analysts. Really, really shitty analysts. Their bias to the upside is tiresome, predictable and makes them wrong, over and over and over again. They don’t know what real threats are, they constantly are confused about what is really dangerous. They think stranger pedophiles are a big danger to their kids, while it’s their family members or their own driving. They think terrorism is dangerous, when almost no one dies from it, as opposed to crossing the street or eating too many Big Macs. They fear “Osama” when the men who are most likely to cause their death or impoverishment have names like Bush, Paulson, Geithner, Obama and so on.
I walked through Calcutta’s slums, as a teenager, by myself. I know what’s actually dangerous, and what isn’t. But my parents didn’t coddle me, didn’t think their job was to make sure I never faced any danger, no matter how minor, so that when released as an adult I wouldn’t know how to evaluate threats. They also didn’t think my self-esteem should outrun my ability.
Of course optimism is wonderfully adaptive as long as optimists aren’t your leaders or analysts, and don’t run your nuclear power plants, or plan your economies, or make any decisions about anything which if it goes wrong can go catastrophically wrong. Optimists are happier, they live longer, they’re healthier, they “get up and go”, blah, blah, blah. Optimism is good for optimists and hey, they’re generally more pleasant to be around, too. There are time periods when they’re even right a lot (say during the 50s). But basically, they’re blind. One imagines conversations between cows. “Hey, they feed us every day, we get free health care, no real responsibility! The dog makes sure the wolves don’t bother us. This is great! I do wonder what happened to Thelma and Fred, when they took them away in that truck? But I’m sure it wasn’t anything bad, and if it was they must have deserved it, and anyway, that’d never happen to me, because I’m a good cow and this is the best herd in the whole world!”
And you can tell people what will happen, in advance, and be right, over and over and over again. And what that will do is get you marginalized. “Oh, he’s so negative! Such a downer. He should make us feel good about ourselves and our future, and if he doesn’t, we won’t listen. Let’s watch some TV!”
The stuff that makes you a good everyday person, a pal at the pub, the best husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, mother or father, does not make you a good analyst or a good leader. Choosing other sheep to lead you, to guide you, gets you what you’re getting right now, good and hard.
And the medicalization of every bad mood, as if we’re supposed to never experience negative emotions is more psychotic than the “diseases” they are intended to treat. Yes, some people are so insane that they need big time help, and being drugged, but way more people than that are being drugged.
Likewise I am beyond tired of the excessive stigmatization of anger and hatred. It is appropriate to hate some people. If you don’t hate a man who has killed tens to hundreds of thousands of people (you don’t know because he refused to count) for a war based on lies, while gutting your civil rights, you are either a saint or your values are so fucked up I don’t even know what to say. You hate some people (yes, you do, don’t deny it), why don’t you hate the people who are actually doing evil on an industrial scale and who directly threaten your prosperity and your good life? And why, exactly, aren’t you angry? Again, don’t tell me you don’t get angry (unless you’re a saint), so why aren’t you angry at the people who are destroying your future and the future of your children?
Oh, right, because most people suck at threat analysis. They don’t even know what or who is really dangerous. They don’t /want/ to believe that people who look like they’d be great to have a beer with, or Uncle Fred, or driving their beloved automobile, or the food that they eat, is what’s actually going to kill them, make them sick, or hurt the kid they profess is just the most special and important person in their life, except when it comes to making sure the kid will have a world worth living in.
So folks. Hate can be awful, it can lead to awful crimes. But you’re going to hate someone, so learn who to hate. Anger can be terrible, few people know that better than I do, as my father’s temper was the terror of my youth, but you’re going to be angry, know when and with who to get angry with, and stop displacing your anger.
And screw hope. Screw optimism. Really, seriously. Hope is like pride, you should have exactly as much hope as the circumstances dictate, and no more.
But you can’t live that way. I know. You need your hope. You need to believe.
Ok. That’s fine. I understand. Variety is good.
But don’t insist that everyone else be like you. And understand your own weaknesses. Know what you suck at. Find the people who don’t suck at those things, figure out which ones to trust (that’s a whole other essay) and listen to them. No one is good at everything (I sure as hell am not), but a wise person knows what they are bad at.
Who is mad? The pessimist, the depressive, who accurately understands the world around him, or the hope filled optimists who are blind to real threats, can’t predict the future worth a damn and who select their leaders based on “wouldn’t it be great to have a beer with him?”
I don’t know, and I don’t even really care. But I do know that when I want to have good time at a party, or I need a good salesman, I look for different abilities than I do in good analysts and good leaders. That the person who runs my nuclear plants should not be Mr. Fucking Sunshine, “it’ll all work out for the best!”
Just, no.
And stop drugging your kids en-masse. Ok? Just stop.
The oligarchs are overplaying their hand.
Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
Notice some other things: Kettling doesn’t work against prepared protesters. They broke the kettling attempts with bolt cutters. Notice the masks. These people have put some thought into what they’re doing.
Next step, next riots, if they keep thinking things through, will be systematic destruction of the CCTV system, taking out police stations, and occupation of the financial district.
Another quote:
In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”
Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’
There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.
What was that quote from someone whose named started with J? Something about those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable?
Don’t think this isn’t a big deal. This is a major capital. London is one of the world’s great cities and a hub of the financial system. And the rioters are showing it can be done, that if people fight the police rather than sitting passively, the police suddenly aren’t all-powerful.
Oh, and don’t take hope, a future and respect away from young men in large numbers. Smart oligarchies/aristocracies understand that you have to keep a certain number of the violent classes employed. Not for their sake, but for the oligarchs.
Meanwhile in England, the Cameron government’s massive slashes to education hit virtually all at once, making an entire cohort of young people know exactly who just did their level best to destroy their lives. This is important, to put it bluntly, young males who don’t have enough money to settle down with a young female are extraordinarily dangerous to the state.
The Conservative austerity measures are destroying the possibility of a future for a generation of young people. There is this weird idea amongst English elites, which I encountered in person during my London visit, that the problem in England is their welfare culture. In other words,after a financial crisis virtually entirely caused by the rich, the response has been to slash spending on the poor and middle class to pay for bailouts for the rich, who, by any sane reading of the crisis, caused the disaster.
So you’re in a boat, and it starts taking on water. You grab a bucket and start bailing. What do you tell the rest of the crew?”Find the hole, and plug it.”…
… If you don’t patch the hull, if you don’t make significant regulatory changes at the same time as you are creating a bailout bill, you’re just buying time. The ship may stay afloat as long as you don’t stop ferrying buckets of money to the financial sector, but it’s still got a massive hole in the hull and it’s still taking on water.
Any bailout bill that does not have significant regulatory changes will not solve the problem. It will, at best, kick it down the road for as long as taxpayers are willing to fork over a hundred billion a month or so to keep it from exploding. It may even make the problem worse because of moral hazard—heads the financier who makes a bet wins, tails the government bails him out.
This has played out again, and again, especially in Europe, where lawmakers do bailout after bailout of banks (they’re not bailing out the governments, they’re bailing out their creditors), refusing to do what must be done, which is a massive restructuring of all the debt in the key nations (100 year bonds, paying 1%, say) or an outright default. They are making ordinary people pay for their masters sins. And they are putting the worst of it on the people who they feel are least powerful: the young, immigrants, the poor and so on.
The response to a system which refuses to do the right thing, which offers Coke-Pepsi politics (if you don’t like Coke, you can always have Pepsi!) is turning more and more violent. If electoral politics offers no solution, people will look for one elsewhere.
Our elites live in a bubble. They think that what happens on the street doesn’t really effect them. There will come a day when many of them will be wrong. They’re playing with their lives, with our lives, and with the lives of their families and loved ones.
What will happen in each country will be different. Some will get a man on horseback, some will screw in the repression and hang on, turning into aristocracies, others may find what many on the left are insisting on, a Robespierre. And maybe one or two will do the right thing, stop the bailouts, stop the reforms, and make a commitment to restructure in a way which creates a future for everyone.
Maybe.
Obama’s has 4 trillion.
Boehner’s plan also calls for a committee to find another 1.8 billion. Even with that, we’re talking 2.7 billion of cuts, still less than Obama’s plan
That is all.
20) A huge push to gut entitlements in 2009, no matter who is president. Even if the US quickly pulls out of Iraq, the deficit will be totally out of control, and hundreds of billions will be needed for bailouts. A rapid consensus will form that rather than increasing taxes significantly on the rich, or slashing expenses like the military R&D and equipment appropriations budget, that the real problem is people retiring at 65, poor people getting Medicaid and old folks who aren’t destitute receiving Medicare.
On January 4th, 2009, I wrote:
I think I got this one wrong, given the consensus forming for a large stimulus (assuming the Republicans don’t kill it.) We’ll see, but I’ve tentatively marked it wrong.
Well? Go on over, and see what you think, where does Obama rank in terms of worst presidents ever? I mean, he didn’t/hasn’t caused a civil war, so he’s probably not in first place. But…
Also a detailed explanation of how the debt limit is raised, and a good list of the worst things Obama has done. (I was going to say mistakes, but he didn’t do them by mistake.)
