Since the last open thread has filled up, please use this one.
Month: October 2018
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. — Joseph Stalin”
So, one man, Jamal Khashoggi, gets tortured and killed, but he happens to be a man elites know and like, and suddenly…
Who in the Senate would vote against this? Very few. #SaudiArabia in trouble. No matter who is in MBS pocket in White House. https://t.co/aSPcpIAkyv
— Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) October 12, 2018
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a genocide in Yemen. Of course, the US has been aiding that genocide…
It’s not that Kashoggi’s death isn’t a crime, but that any number of nameless people can be killed, raped, and tortured, and elites don’t care. It’s only when it’s one of them that they care.
Normal people are nothing–less than nothing–to our elites.
But they take care of their own.
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You may have heard that Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi recently went to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and hasn’t been seen since. The Turkish government claims that he was killed, cut into pieces, and those pieces were smuggled out of the country.
The BBC has published a short, off-the-record interview with Jamil Khashoggi, which is worth listening to.
According to Jamil, the country’s internal environment of fear is much greater than it has been in the past. People are arrested for what they say, for example, at a private dinner party; people who aren’t even dissidents, they may criticize privately, but not publicly.
He also mentions an economist who was arrested who was close to the royal family.
The result is an environment of fear: Khashoggi said that he didn’t expect to be able to go back to Saudi Arabia. It is also, and this tracks with everything else we’ve seen, an environment where only one man is making all the decisions: The Crown Prince.
Disagree with him, even in private, and you risk arrest, and possibly much worse.
Mohammad Bin Salman wants, it is clear, to be a dictator. He wishes to be the only center of power in the country. This was clear when he did his sweeping hotel arrests last year, which included important officials and even family members. The richer members are reputed to have had to pay ransom to leave. Others are said to have been tortured to death.
Of course, such accounts have not been corroborated, but I find them credible.
So Khashoggi, in this clip, complains that every couple of months there is an announcement of a multi-billion dollar project and it’s never been discussed by anyone except the Crown Prince.
One-man rule.
I don’t have a mandate for Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t run well before this, in my opinion (sitting on that much oil meant it didn’t have to be), but the actions Bin Salman is taking, quite irrespective of his despotism, don’t appear to be very smart. He’s selling off income producing crown-jewel state organizations, he failed to bring Qatar to heel with his siege and pushed it into the Turkish and Iranian camps, and his Yememi war is a bleeding ulcer and terrible war crime which has accomplished little to nothing.
The Saudis know there is a transition off oil coming, and they’re trying to deal with it, and frankly, Bin Salman appears to be fumbling it. He is even less competent than the people who came before him, but wants all the power.
I said some time back that I expected Saudi Arabia to collapse within 15 to 20 years. I see no reason to change that forecast.
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One of the most important ethical practices is to know where your red lines are.
What won’t you do? What won’t you accept or let go?
If you don’t think about this in advance you risk doing abominable things and then realizing you have gone too far.
This is true in personal life, and it’s true in political life.
Two simple personal lines I have are that I won’t rape, I won’t torture, and I don’t approve of those who do.
Those don’t seem, to me, to be lines that should be all that controversial, but if often seems like they are. A lot of people, especially, are willing to excuse torture, and a lot of people rape.
22)The Proud Boys are a classic proto-Brownshirt operation in the formative stages. Look at the shirts their members have been wearing to the “free speech” events they organize with the intent of provoking a violent response. pic.twitter.com/tOu3HWscpw
— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) October 7, 2018
Heck, a lot of people excuse rape. I recently saw a picture of the “Proud Boys” wearing shirts proclaiming that Pinochet did nothing wrong. Pinochet had dogs trained to rape women.
If you support Pinochet, you’re unutterable scum. No exceptions.
One of the simple rules for living in a good world is taking certain actions off the board. There are some things, which if you do, you lose the right to call yourself a good person, or the right to the good will and opinion of other people.
In geopolitics, aggressive war, like Iraq or Libya or the current Saudi attack in Yemen, mark a country as beyond the pale, because war always includes a myriad of evils, and should be engaged in only, truly, as a last resort.
If you violate hard, red lines you morally destroy yourself, and it’s a hard thing to come back from. Part of it is the human need to justify ourselves: If we do something bad, we like to pretend it wasn’t “so bad.” Part of it is that we normalize whatever we do.
Doing evil, to put it poetically, stains our souls, and getting them clean again isn’t easy. Most people never really manage it, not if they’ve done true evil.
Then there is the issue of hypocrisy. When our people do it, somehow it isn’t as bad as when their people do this.
I see this with a lot of the opposition to Trump. Oh, Trump’s evil. He was always clearly evil, as when he endorsed torture. But Obama engaged in the Libyan war, which, of course, led to mass rapes, murder, torture and open air slave markets.
The same people screaming about Trump’s evils, which are certainly real, somehow said little about Obama’s evils.
Because Obama was their guy.
Nor, of course, is it only Democratic partisans who are hypocrites this way.
We all have our tribes: The groups and beliefs and symbols we identify with. And when they do evil, well, somehow we just don’t find the outrage in ourselves that we find for our enemy’s evils.
Trump may yet cause a war. He’s sure trying with Iran. If he does, he’ll wind up worse than Obama, odds are (since a war with Iran will do even more harm than the Libyan war). But he hasn’t yet.
Domestically, of course, he’s been worse, and is due criticism. But absent an aggressive war, well…
Be careful who and what you justify. Think about your own red lines. Do it for your soul, and do it so the actions of your tribe, your country, don’t cost you your soul.
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Please comment here if you wish to make comments unrelated to recent posts. Kavanaugh conversation should go here, in particular.
I’m also noting an up-tick in ad-homs and nastiness in comments. Tone it down please.
The bottom line, then, is that it’s more overbought than it was in 2008.
If the government had not intervened to keep it over-inflated, it would likely have reverted to mean, but trillions of dollars were spent, and many laws were bent and indeed, broken, to keep house prices up.
Indeed, 2008 was used as a buying opportunity: Distressed homes were bought up at cents on the dollar, then rented or sold at inflated prices.
The entire economy is crooked: It is designed to favor the rich no matter who else that hurts.
There are little people who win, but they are fewer and fewer. And virtually no one below the age of 40 is a winner in this unless they are professionally involved, i.e., in on the scam.
Housing should never have been thought of as an investment. Houses should be for living in, and people who own them to flip them should be heavily penalized. Those who own them and leave them empty should have them seized by the government and auctioned. And, yeah, some form of rent control is needed in most places.
Of course foreign buyers must be kept out of the market. Housing is for people who live in the country; foreigners can rent.
As for mortgages, they should be dead boring; for most people fixed rated mortgages of 20 to 30 years fit.
None of this should be objectionable. But there are people making a lot of money out of the misery of other people, and parasites don’t like letting go of their hosts.
Parasitical economies–and most developed countries have one–exist by immiserating people.
This is the real reason for the current push for basic income: The parasite class is scared they may be about to kill the host, and want a government infusion to keep the poor and the (reduced) middle class stumbling on.
I don’t oppose a basic income, but understand that billionaires aren’t supporting it out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect to take every cent the government gives you.
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.