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Month: April 2023
This is a post a lot of readers will misunderstand or refuse to understand, because our society requires us to do evil regularly and we want to pretend it isn’t evil.
Some acts are always evil.
To understand this you need to make the correct division between an act and the consequences of that act.
The act and the consequences are two different things.
Let’s take something which is, I hope, universally agreed among my readers. Rape is always evil. It is always an evil act. Even if someone comes up with a convoluted scenario under which some good came as a consequence rape is always an evil act.
We start here to show something simple: that some acts are evil.
This is necessary because our society has gone too far in cultural determinism. “Evil and good are completely social constructs.”
No. They are human, but they are not constructs. We understand that slavery is an evil act. We understand that murder is an evil act. We understand that torture is an evil act.
It may be that on some occasions the results of an evil act are good, but that does not make the act itself good. I don’t believe in torture for getting information, but even if it did work, torturing someone to get information which saves people is still an evil act. The act is evil, even if the consequences are good.
In debt-slavery, common in the ancient world, you would sell yourself into slavery to settle your debts and get money. Let us say you did so and it saved your family from starvation because master now feeds you and your family.
The slavery is still evil, even if some of the consequences of it are not.
This is at the heart of just war theory. All wars are evil. There are no exceptions. Sometimes the consequences of war are better than not fighting the war. That does not, however, make the war itself not evil. (I can think of very few wars which were worth the evil of the war itself. WWII is the only recent major example.)
Some years ago I wrote an article on what the Tao teaches those who want a better world.
I’m going to quote it at length here:
In the Tao Te Ching there is a famous passage, as follows:
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce orderTherefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.What is appropriate isn’t always what is good, but what is good makes up the vast majority of what is appropriate.
When one no longer knows what is appropriate, one devolves to the good and is still doing most of what should be done.
Kindness makes up most of what is good, so when one loses what is good, one devolves to kindness and retains most of what is good.
Losing kindness, one retreats to justice. The loss here is steep. Justice is maybe half of what is kind, because justice without kindness is about balance and tends to not restore people, but punish them: “an eye for an eye” and all that.
And then there is ritual, and ritual, in this context, is without any of the higher virtues, and thus leads to injustice, cruelty and evil, because it has lost almost all of appropriateness: it simply accepts that action A should lead to action B, and that will often be the wrong action, unguided by appropriateness, goodness, kindness or even justice.
I would add that when even ritual is lost; when people no longer obey the rules and are guided by no sense of ethics, that all chances of a good society and good results are lost.
The problem with “ends justify means” is that means are most of what we do. If you do evil acts all day, all week, all year, all life because they are part of how your society runs, then the amount of evil you do usually overwhelms all the “consequences”. This is why only someone who “has the Tao” should ever do evil, and since 99.9999% of us don’t have the Tao and don’t have the judgment to know when evil is justified, we should avoid evil actions like the plague. Certainly our leaders, who are the worst of us, shouldn’t be allowed to do evil.
But that’s consequence talk. You don’t not do evil acts because of the consequences, you don’t do them because they are evil. If you start engaging too much in consequence talk, then pretty soon you’re justifying all sorts of evil action.
Don’t rape. It’s always evil, no matter who does it or why. Don’t mistake whether an act is evil and with the questions “are the consequences of this act evil or good.”
And tamp down your social constructivism and moral relativism. Some things are always wrong.
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One problem with covering Covid right now is that it’s becoming harder and harder to get good stats, because governments want to pretend it’s over. In Canada, the best reporting provincial government is Quebec, so we’ll look at that and I’m quite sure this is effectively the picture everywhere, though the bumps may not synchronize. The important line is the orange one, that’s excess mortality. It’s over 35%. And these numbers are a known understatement.
Sorry. The picture above was NOT Canada's fast-reporting provinces. It was Quebec, Canada's fastest-reporting provinces and the only province that still tries to track and report COVID in a transparent, complete fashion.
More than 35% excess mortality on Dec 31/22. pic.twitter.com/bMfueZTADP
— Tara Moriarty (@MoriartyLab) April 1, 2023
This is typical of the charts I’ve seen tracking Covid—the numbers aren’t at peak, but they are as high or higher than they were for most of the official pandemic.
Meanwhile there is Long Covid. A Danish study:
As part of an effort to better flesh out the burden of long COVID, Danish researchers today reported a threefold increase in extended sick leave, defined as lasting longer than 30 days, in people who had recovered from COVID, compared to workers who weren’t infected.
Some 1.9 mln people across the UK are currently estimated to be suffering from #longCOVID, or 2.9% of the population. The figure is up from 689,000 at the start of January and 514,000 in September 2022
the number of children under 16 with self-reported Long Covid of any duration ‘increased from 77,000 in October 2021, to 119,000 in January 2022
So we decided to pretend the plague was over and stopped doing the anti-plague stuff like masking:
When you read on Twitter that #masks didn't work in schools,… you are reading a post from someone who is lying. Masks actually helped STAFF stay healthy, not just students. It is that simple. #CovidIsNotOver #maskswork #pediatrics #tweetiatrician https://t.co/Ob9sqYY5mg pic.twitter.com/2HHhko2v49
— Jake Kane, MD, MS, FCCM, FAAP (@JakeKaneMD) March 9, 2023
Covid is still a thing. What’s as bad, maybe worse, is the hospital crush. Politicians pretend Covid is over, but hospitals still have to deal with it, not just in terms of patients but in terms of sick doctors, nurses and other staff. Last year I went to a cancer clinic and had to wait many hours. I asked why? “Three of the four doctors are out with Covid.”
Oh.
Where I live wait times in emergency departments are often 8 hours, sometimes more. They were a couple hours or less before Covid and strangely, now that Covid is “over” they haven’t gone back to 2 hours.
Test times, surgery times, everything times are delayed, and as a result people become more seriously ill or die. Excess deaths from Covid are vastly overstated if they only include Covid and Covid-related damage, because patients with heart and cancer and other problems are dying due to delayed care.
The decision has been made to just live with the plague. If we want to do that, and we clearly do, then we have to adjust our society. We have to train more doctors and nurses and other hospital staff like technicians. We have to increase hospital budgets. We need more long-term care beds and we need to make support available to people with long Covid who can’t work: both financial and outpatient nursing care.
But to do that, as with doing anything, we’d have to spend quite a bit more money on healthcare, and since the only place to get money from is the rich, the poor and middle class being tapped out, that means taxing the rich, which is verboten.
The human propensity to just pretend that problems they don’t want to exist don’t exist in is full display now with respect to Covid, as it has been for generations with respect to climate and environmental collapse. The problem is that some problems don’t care if we don’t want them to exist, they still exist and they get worse (see those increases in people with Long Covid or all the fires and droughts and whatnot from early climate change.)
There is a real world, and sticking our heads in the sand doesn’t make it go away. But it does kill a lot of people and make a lot of other people disabled.
As usual, none of these problems can truly be dealt with while our current elites are in power. If we want them fixed, our elites have to go and be entirely replaced.
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.
So, there’s constant talk about the problem of declining birth rates and how much of a problem they are. There’s some truth to this, but a lot of it is based on the argument that more people lead to growing economies and that argument is terrible. The part that is reasonable is the rising increase in infertility, including plummeting sperm counts. That’s not bad because it leads to less children, precisely, it’s because it indicates how badly we’ve poisoned ourselves.
But the simple fact of the matter is that the world is well past its carrying capacity for the type of society we have. The Club of Rome predictions from 1968 have almost all tracked the real world, and we’re just past the hump: we’re into decline, but barely.
Notice that population decline happens about 30 years after the peak of food, industrial and services per capita. That’s bad and it’s part of what is going to make this so ugly. Check out the food per capita line for some real ugliness, though there’s going to be a lot less fat people.
Note that carrying capacity is not purely about population. Different global societies have different carrying capacities per capita. If we had not gone with planned obsolescence (there was a fight over near the end of the 19th century, managers vs. engineers and the engineers lost); if we did not have suburbs and exurbs but only urban, rural and wilderness; and if we had seriously started our transition from fossil fuels in the 80s instead of electing Thatcher and Reagan, our carrying cost would be much less and the world could support a much higher population. But under current circumstances, the world maximum population is probably about two billion, and once climate change runs amok it will be less.
So our population is going to reduce. It’s not “we have to reduce our population” it is “we are animals who exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment and our population IS going to drop, whether we like it or not.” That’s going to suck.
There was a window to avoid this. It is a result of our own decisions: to go with planned obsolescence, to have suburbs and massive numbers of cars, to pollute like maniacs, to destroy the forests and the swamps and the jungles, to not transition away from fossil fuels and dozens of decisions based on greed and “I won’t be here when it gets bad, so who cares?”
As for economies, high dependency rations (fewer working age people supporting people who can’t work) will be a drag. But because we have legitimately already overshot carrying capacity and because of resource and sink constraints (sinks is where we put our pollution, like CO2 and methane) reduced overall population is going to be more good than bad.
How much population will be lost is, in some sense, up to us. We left doing all the right things too late to avoid this, but the faster we transition to societies built around not exceeding planetary limits and working with and for the environment, the less people will die.
But even in a very optimistic scenario I have trouble seeing our population not winding up down two to three billion.
It is what we, as a species, chose through our decisions. That doesn’t mean you or I chose, we mostly didn’t, but at the species level, our decisions lead here.
It is what it is, and it will be what it will be.
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.
Last week I wrote an article on the indictment of Trump in New York. I argued that charging trump had broken an elite norm: there is no question Trump broke the law, but ex-Presidents don’t get charged with crimes and senior politicians rarely do, though as a couple commenters pointed out, there’s already been some erosion of that norm.
It’s important to understand that a norm is a cultural rule. It’s not a law, usually, it’s something you just do or don’t do because your social group requires it or forbids it. For elites, a norm is that elites don’t get charged with most crimes, especially non-violent ones, unless that crime harms other elites in large numbers. Every senior executive at a bank or brokerage broke fraud laws and the Rico statute (they conspired) in the run up to the 2008 election, for example, but who was charged? Bernie Madoff. Why? Because Madoff targeted other elites.
Likewise senior politicians regularly get away with breaking election fundraising rules and various other white collar crimes (like bribery). They don’t charge each other, because almost all of them do it. What they do is against the law, but it isn’t against elite norms.
We all know what laws are, but justice is different from law. A law can be unjust. Everything the Nazis did was legal by German law, as a friend of mine loves to point out.
Another principle of justice is that laws are applied equally. The same crimes that elites commit without being charged for are laws that are usually enforced against non-elites. This is not justice. Likewise fines that are fixed rather than relative to income or wealth or a combination of both are unjust—they hurt people with less money more than those with more money.
Bringing this back to Trump, he is being charged for crimes that while illegal do not violate the elite norm of elite impunity for crimes that are normal among elites. If elites wanted to maintain their norms, he should instead have been charged with treason or sedition, for the Jan 6th attempted insurrection, because that violates an elite norm.
Justice, norms and laws are three different thing and understanding the difference matters.
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.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 2, 2023
by Tony Wikrent
[Sky News, via Naked Capitalism 3-30-2023]
The Club of Rome’s Earth4All model.
The forecasts in the report are in contrast to UN predictions which show the population reaching 9.7 billion in 2050 and peaking at 10.4 billion in the 2080s.
Elite impunity
I’ve Been Waiting For This For 55 Years
wruckusgroink, March 31, 2023 [DailyKos]
Donald Trump has been indicted… I’ve been waiting for this moment for 55 years, since 1968. That was the year that Richard Nixon won the presidency by committing treason….
Johnson knew! He knew Nixon had committed treason! Why didn’t he go public? The whole gruesome story is here…
LBJ wanted to go public with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, talked Johnson out of it. LBJ’s close confidant warned that the revelation would shake the foundations of the nation.
In particular, Clifford told Johnson (in a taped conversation) that “some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have [Nixon] elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s best interests.”
In other words, Clifford told LBJ that the country couldn’t handle the reality that its president was a certifiable traitor, eligible for legal execution….
….And of course the Reaganauts then happily go on to commit one of the most blatant crimes in American history that goes by the moniker “Iran-Contra.” This scheme was so flagrant, so shameless and so horrifying it still has the power to amaze. A law was passed banning the Reaganauts from providing aid to the contras of Nicaragua. So the Reaganuts set up Oliver North IN THE BASEMENT OF THE WHITE HOUSE (?!?!?) so he could wheel and deal an arrangement where the United States would SELL WEAPONS TO OUR SWORN ENEMIES THE IRANIANS, a terrorist-sponsoring state, and then funnel that money the very Contras they were forbidden, by law, to support. What happened when this was discovered? As always, Charles Pierce, a god who graces us mere mortals with his divine presence, nails the story:
Washington decided, quite on its own, that “the country” didn’t need another “failed presidency,” so what is now known as The Village circled the wagons to rescue Reagan from his crimes. There was the customary gathering of Wise Men — The Tower Commission — which buried the true scandal in Beltway off-English and the passive voice.
….Cut to 2009. I’m sure you were as sickened and horrified by the evil thugs of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rove administration approving—actually ENCOURAGING—the torture of prisoners in Iraq (and then documenting it all, so the world could see). Here’s Richard Clarke, who was there and tried to stop them, on what they did….
….And so we elected Barack Obama! Time for these criminals to pay for their crimes, so no public official will ever be tempted to do something so outrageous again, right? Right?
NYT: OBAMA RELUCTANT TO LOOK INTO BUSH PROGRAMS ….
Nixon, Haldeman, Liddy, Reagan, Edwin Meese, Oliver North, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove…they sent Donald Trump a very clear message: “Break the law. The more outlandish the crime, the better. The punditocracy will dry-wash their hands and mumble platitudes and then protect you, because the ‘little people’ out there—so fragile!— are desperate that their illusions be preserved. Just deny, obfuscate, blame the press for spreading lies, blame the Democrats of persecution, and run out the clock.”
Bush’s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump
[The Intercept, via The Big Picture 3-26-2023]
What Trump and the Republicans Don’t Understand About the Law
Michael Tomasky, March 31, 2023 [The New Republic]
But this much is clearly true: Michael Cohen went to prison in part because of the payment to Stormy Daniels (he was convicted more on tax evasion, but campaign finance violations—the payment to Daniels—were one count in his indictment). If it was illegal for Cohen to make the payment, then surely it’s illegal to have ordered the payment, which is what Trump is alleged to have done. That’s all pretty simple.
So no, this is not “Communist-level shit,” as Don Jr. tweeted. And Joe Biden had nothing to do with this. Ditto George Soros. The Republican and right-wing reaction is just insane. Trump’s been in legal jeopardy his entire life. Read the Wikipedia entry “Legal Affairs of Donald Trump”: around 3,500 lawsuits, 1,450 as defendant; 169 suits in federal court; 100 tax disputes, with 36 liens against his properties for nonpayment of taxes; settlements in 100 cases; and of course the conviction of the Trump Organization last December on 17 criminal charges. He’s been a one-man crime wave his entire adult life. The wonder is that it’s taken this long for him to be indicted….
This is going to get seriously ugly. I watched about 15 minutes of Tucker Carlson on Thursday night. Literally every sentence he spoke was an exaggeration or a lie or a willful misrepresentation of the truth (and remember, we know from the Dominion lawsuit that Carlson said he hated Trump “passionately”). He hit the “banana republic” theme and argued that this was a purely political move designed to stop Trump from getting back into the White House.
Well, no. It’s about the law. Again, we’ll be able to make a better assessment when we see the charges. But this isn’t about what Trump might do. It’s about what he (allegedly) did. And as for the precedent this sets, it’s entirely positive. Presidents should be prosecutable. They should be prosecutable even when they’re president. If someone is breaking the law, he’s breaking the law. The idea that a president has to worry about the law strikes me as a good thing, in this case and in all future cases where the people might have elected a corrupt person as president.
So this will prove to be good for the republic—if the republic survives this episode. Trump and the pro-Trump media have succeeded in creating a parallel-universe reality that at least a third of the country buys. That Joe Biden is behind this. That it’s a stop-Trump conspiracy. That George Soros is behind this. That Democrats have weaponized the justice system. And on and on. They’re enraged. And they’re armed. If you’re not really worried about that last bit, you’re not paying attention….
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