The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Civil Liberties Page 2 of 8

The Democratic Bargain, Abortion and Responsibility

The Problem With Aristocrats Is That They Inflict What They Can Never Suffer

— (someone else, can’t find the original)

The democratic bargain, or really, the bargain of all civilization that is worthy of existing, is based on the idea of resolution of conflict by means other than violence. Band level hunter gatherers are much more egalitarian than we are, and are generally better off on most metrics than anyone except industrial age humans (who they are still better off than in terms of free time, equality, dental health and female hip width) but they usually have higher levels of violence than we do.

Early civilizations were also shockingly violent and extremely cruel, both to their own residents (not citizens, residents) and to those nearby. “An eye for an eye” wasn’t even the law: punishments for crimes were often excessive, feuds were common and often lead to far more death and suffering than the original crime being avenged.

In civilizations and especially in democracy, at least in theory, the idea is that we give up our private right to determine what is right and wrong and especially our private right to take justice into our own hands. In exchange we avoid the evils of vengeance and feuds and reduce the amount of internal violence. (Native Americans might not think that British democracy reduced violence, though, note, nor did Rome’s neighbours think Republican Rome reduced violence towards them.)

In Democracy we elect people to make and enforce our laws, and to implement policy. This is based on the idea that people we elect will act largely in the interests of society as a whole, and thus that more people will be better off. Because it is impossible to make policy or laws without harming at least a few people, those who run society are supposed to be disciplined not by violence but by legal means and thru the ballot box.

However, representative democracy (not direct democracy, which has other failure modes), especially when combined with capitalism, tends to fall into oligarchy. There are multiple forms of oligarchy, an oligarchy isn’t always rich, but under capitalism those with the most money tend to form the core of any oligarchy, even if it has some sort of base in the population. There would be no right wing in America of the current sort, or the world, without the massive financial support of the Koch brothers and other extremely rich individuals.

The end result of this is governments which act against the interests and desires of the majority. The Princeton oligarchy study found that, for all intents and purposes, the opinions of most of the American population have no effect on legislation.

Oligarchies are a form of aristocracy, and aristocracies have three fundamental principles:

  1. Aristocrats are the best people and deserve their wealth, power and privileges.
  2. Aristocrats as a class should never lose their power; and,
  3. Individual aristocrats should never be held responsible for their actions unless they harm other aristocrats or their interests;

There are two issues here.

First, democracies which become aristocratic oligarchies stop acting in the interests of the majority.

Second, the members of an aristocratic oligarchy don’t suffer what they inflict.

For well over 40 years now productivity and wages have not risen together, for example, where before they did. This is a direct result of policy, both legislative (massive tax cuts and regulatory changes) and monetary, central banks acting to “control inflation” by suppressing wages on theory that “wage push inflation” is the only important type of inflation, while also acting to increase asset prices held by the rich, like stocks, bonds and real estate.

Likewise, starting in the 70s many types of drugs were made illegal, but the rich don’t tend to be arrested for doing them, either because their drugs are legal, or by simple lack of enforcement, as with the widespread use of cocaine amongst elites in the 80s and 90s.

I recently read someone claiming that Federal Reserve members had “skin in the game” because they had to live in America, which is a massive misuse of the idea, akin to saying that Jeff Bezos and workers in his warehouses both have interests in common. Well, sort of. Or that just because they are Americans Bill Gates and homeless person both have skin in the game.

Yeah, OK. And the Queen and Boris Johnson have skin in the British game, just like food bank users and people who die from NHS cuts.

In 2008 there was a huge financial crisis, starting in the US, but spreading thru much of the world.

It was caused by the actions of executives in the financial sector and as a result, essentially every brokerage and most banks were, had they taken their losses, bankrupt. If the normal course had been allowed, they would have lost all their money, and thus their power

Aristocrats, as a class, must never lose their money or power. (Money is power, in our societies.)

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury department stepped in, with some legislative help, and saved them. The cost for saving them was, at the time, for America alone, something like 20 trillion dollars.

Some ordinary people were bailed out, but the vast majority weren’t.

Later, when banks foreclosed homes because of the financial crisis’s fallout, they fraudulently signed legal documents, en-masse, stating that they had title to the properties they were foreclosing. They were allowed to foreclose anyway, and they were not prosecuted for this clear crime.

Democracies which become aristocratic oligarchies stop acting in the interests of the majority.

As for the crimes which lead up to the crisis, of which there were many, most of the bubble, especially in the last two years, they were not prosecuted, but instead they were fined for amounts less than they had made, thus immunizing them from criminal penalties.

Aristocrats should never be held responsible for their actions,  unless they hurt other aristocrats.

The one major prosecution was of Bernie Madoff. Madoff had victimized out members of the elite, not the general public.

So, the system operated to save the rich and powerful and when saving them was in opposition to saving regular people it not only didn’t save them, it allowed the rich and powerful to victimize them further.

Much of this was illegal by the law at the time, but a lot of it was legal. Aristocracies make laws that favor those in power. They create policies which favor the already powerful and rich.

And, as the Princeton study showed, they ignore majority opinion if it contradicts elite preference.

Let us now move to abortion, the issue of the day. A majority of the population wanted to keep Roe vs. Wade, by about a 2:1 margin.

Some years ago I asked my father, a very conservative guy, his position on abortion. He said he didn’t like it but believed it should be legal. I asked why. “Because I saw what happened when it was illegal. Rich women got abortions, and poor women didn’t.”

Let us say that abortion becomes effectively illegal. Do you think that the wives, sisters and daughters of the rich and powerful will still have access to them?

We all know the answer.

Aristocrats inflict what they never must suffer.

An example given by, I think, Nassim Taleb, used the Roman Republic. When Hannibal wiped out a huge Roman army at Cannae, one-third of the Roman Senate’s members were killed. They fought in battles.

What important politician or rich person of the last two generations died in any of America’s wars? Most didn’t even fight, including Bush Jr., Trump and Clinton all of whom weaseled out of the Vietnam war using dubious means.

Now let’s bring this back. One of the benefits of civilization is the reduction of violence which comes from prohibiting people from taking vengeance or justice (not the law) into their own hands. The benefit of Democracy is supposed to be that the government acts in the interests of the majority of the population, and liberal democracy it is supposed to also protect the rights of minorites against the majority.

This is what the legitimacy of civilization and democracy rest on. In exchange for these benefits, people don’t make life unpleasant for people with power, they don’t get vengeance themselves and so on.

I’ve seen the argument that protesting outside the houses of Supreme Court justices is illegal. It is. Hiding slaves was illegal. Blacks riding at the front buses was illegal. Strikes were illegal. Almost nothing that the Nazis did was illegal when they did it, because they were in power and made the laws.

What the French aristocracy did before the revolution was legal, and so was what the Russian aristocracy did.

Legality isn’t justice, even in good societies, though sometimes it approximates it.

But when legitimacy is broken: when civilization or democracy or liberalism doesn’t provide what it’s supposed to do, people stop caring so much about what is legal.

Nobody on the supreme court is going to be affected negatively by the loss of Roe. They and their friends and families, all of whom are rich, powerful or both, will still be able to get abortion when needed or when they want them. They, their daughters, wives and sisters will not die of untreated ectopic pregnancies or bleed out from back alley abortions.

And, as a commenter pointed out, the supreme court did rule that protests outside the houses of abortion doctors were constitutionally protected free speech, but protests outside their houses aren’t.

The evil of aristocracy is that aristocrats inflict what they never suffer.

If you are a member of the American elite life has never been better. You are the richest rich the world has ever known, even richer than in the Gilded Age. For over 40 years salaries, stock options, stocks and other assets like real-estate have just gone up and up and up, and when they haven’t the government, often in the form of the Fed, has stepped into to make sure they do.

Meanwhile ordinary people increasingly can’t afford houses, rent or medical care and where one salary could support a 4 person family, now 2 often can’t. (Ignore the official inflation and wage adjusted stats, and focus on reality, the stats don’t tell the picture and everyone knows it.)

Life gets better and better for the elite; the aristocrats and some of their retainer class, and shittier for almost everyone else.

There isn’t really a social contract, but there is legitimacy, and our elites have broken it. Since they have broken it, I will gently suggest that expecting those will die or suffer in large numbers due to their decisions to respect them or their laws is unreasonable.

When Jared Diamond tried to figure out why societies collapse, he dug into many civilization collapses and found out they almost all had one thing in common: the decision makers were cut off from the consequences of their decisions. Things were getting worse for almost everyone else, but everything was good for them, and often even improving, so they did nothing.

Eventually that broke. Sometimes due to environmental collapse; sometimes economic collapse; sometimes invasion; sometimes rebellion; and sometimes a combination or all of them at once.

Our aristocratic oligarchy is inflicting on others what they won’t suffer, even as they enrich themselves and pat themselves on the back about how they deserve everything they have.

That is leading where it always does, and it starts with the loss of legitimacy.

Those who protest rudely when those who will never suffer what they inflict hurt them or kill them, are minor in this context, but they are a sign of what is to come.

And that will be far worse than some judges being made uncomfortable or scared. It will be an age of war and revolution, throughout the world, and it will also be an age where some of their victims decide that if they are to suffer, their victimizers will suffer too.

This means either full on dystopian police states or an age of assassination and rebellion, and probably both.

This is what our aristocrats have sowed, and they will reap it. Alas, so will the rest of us. In the meantime, those who try and intrude on their bubbles and make their displeasure known are actually doing them a favor, offering them one last (and it is very close to last) chance to course correct.

History suggest they won’t, but occasionally it does happen, and we must hope for that occasionally.

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Losing Roe And The New Dred Scott

So, Roe is to be overturned. This has been coming for a long time. Democrats were worthless and didn’t fight, RBG betrayed those who worship her when she refused to resign when she got a cancer with a 90% death rate and Obama had a supermajority. (In the end Roe would have been lost anyway, but she moved up the clock.)

What needs to be understood about the loss of Roe is that states with anti-abortion laws are going to make them extra-territorial: they’re going to make it illegal to go to another state for an abortion. They will try and extradite people who do, and if they return to the state they live in, well, they’ll be arrested. Given surveillance abilities today, many women who thought no one knew will find out someone did: if you track your periods on your phone, or if you are foolish enough to carry your phone to a clinic. Perhaps even if you use your phone to call a clinic.

Phones are bugs and taps we carry with us voluntarily, after all.

Roe is, of course, only the start. Conservatives have a 5/4 majority for horrid things, and they will go after gay marriage, school integration, teaching evolution in schools and eventually (given Thomas is unlikely to annul his own marriage) mixed raced marriages.

I would also expect an assault on the decisions which allowed the New Deal: which is to say the right to regulate banks, to provide social security and medicare, and, of course, a further gutting of Obamacare.

Voting and demonstrations which bother no one will not fix this. If you want it fixed you’re going to have to let politicians and judges know, personally, in ways they can’t ignore, that this is unacceptable. That will entail risk to you, and may not be worth it to enough people.

There are no such thing as innate rights: all rights are political, and all of politics is a matter of force and power. Sometimes that fact is kept out of sight so as not to offend the delicate, but power is the only thing that ever matters.

Do people who want abortion rights and other civil liberties have enough power to keep them? Remember that you don’t have power you won’t use.

I hope we find out they do.

(And don’t count on fleeing to Canada or Mexico. If a Republican government puts the pressure on, there’s a good chance our government will fold. Canadian and Mexicans understand what American governments do to those who cross them.)

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Texas’s Effective Anti-Abortion Law

No abortions after six weeks, any private citizen can sue anyone who “aids and abets” a private abortion, and while there is a medical exception, no exception for rape or incest.

I remember a friend who drove his friend to get an abortion, she didn’t have a car. He’d certainly be sued under this law.

Most women don’t know they’ve pregnant at six weeks, so this is an obvious attempt to make almost all abortions illegal.

An ordinary American, from Texas or elsewhere, may now be able to seek up to $10,000 (£7,200) in damages in a civil court against abortion providers and doctors – and possibly anyone at all involved in the process. That means people like clinic staff, family members, or clergy who encourage or support the procedure could, in theory, be sued.

Turning over enforcement of the Heartbeat Act to private citizens instead of government officials likely means that – in the absence of Supreme Court intervention – the law cannot be challenged until a private citizen seeks damages.

The Supremes have refused to intervene, telling us what we all know: Roe vs. Wade is a dead letter.

I asked my father about abortion once. He was a life-long conservative, though of the old school, and he was personally anti-abortion. But he wanted abortion to be legal. That seemed…odd.

He said, “Ian, I remember when abortion was illegal. All it meant was that women with money still got abortions, and that those who didn’t have money either couldn’t get one, or had to get a dangerous one. You see one women bleed out from an illegal abortion, and your views change.”

My father was one of the world’s biggest assholes, but he was a fair man in most ways.

I get why some people are anti-abortion; I understand the moral argument. But I’m not willing to tell someone else she has to spend nine months gestating a baby; there is a moral argument there, too, and I consider it more important.

In particular, when women can be raped and forced to bear the baby (this is the Texas law), then they are not free.

Texas recently had a huge power outage and the power providers who failed made huge windfall profits. It’s trying to get through an extreme election-fixing bill. It’s generally a regressive state with awful laws.

I would not do business there, and if I lived there and did not follow its politics, I would leave if I could. If I were in charge of a corporation I would not put any offices or factories there. (But then, this is true of much of the South, and not just the South.)

I can already hear people screeching, “Stay and fight!” but remember, people who fight when they’re on the ground and surrounded by guys with steel-toed boots get hurt bad or killed.

The main argument is just that this is the thin edge: What’s coming to Texas now will be coming to you very soon. Roe vs. Wade is doomed; Republican Trumpists are taking over the party apparatus to ensure the next coup attempt succeeds, and Democrats are doing nothing to stop any of this.

Leaving Texas probably isn’t enough.

The best case scenario is probably the US splitting up peacefully. That will be unfortunate for those left-behind, but it beats the entire country falling, or a civil war.

In the meantime, take this stuff seriously: It is the future, and not just in the US.


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Way Past Time to Leave America

I wrote this article in January of 2010. I’m re-posting it because, alas, it is STILL important. I had some hope Biden could at least put through a good economic package; I was wrong.

My errors are far more often on the side of “hope” and optimism than pessimism, which is something people who consider me a pessimist get wrong.

I have updated commentary after the piece.


The Unvarnished Truth About the US

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products, the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all, if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are available anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have ten months to do something and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and not rubber-stamp radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Add to this the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology, or anything else, and I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, along with ologopolistic markets, and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed.”

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before -— and even then, it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough, and corporations weak enough, for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this:

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US, places that have not settled for soft fascism and a refusal to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is very romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who came to to the US understood this, they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than the US, and they came to a place where they thought freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now -— it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure, if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.


I understand that not everyone can leave the US. Look within the US for places that will be least affected. I don’t know what those are. I suggest being willing to adopt “protective” coloring; if you aren’t, and things go really south, understand that the right (and a big chunk of what passes for the center in the US) is itching to do a purge of left-wingers and, indeed, of a lot of centrists (the Clintons, for example).

Next, I’m Canadian, and despite our image, things aren’t going great in Canada. We are badly infected by US-style politics, but even if we happen to win against them (not a sure bet at all — and remember my comment about my errors being errors of optimism), we are a US satrapy which the US may decide to take direct control of. Even if they don’t, Canada cannot realistically resist most US demands if the US is serious; well, not without steps Canada has refused to take, like getting a credible deterrent.

Smart Jews fled Germany to other European nations, and wound up in the camps anyway.

Canada and Mexico (a completely failing state) may well not be far enough away.

Next: Understand that the world IS moving towards a new cold war. It looks like China/Russia + allies vs. America/Europe plus allies, at least so far. There is some chance that Europe will try to go third-path, but so far it is choosing to go with the US, despite misgivings. You can see this in its rejection of Huawei 5G, after a great deal of wavering. Some countries even started to deploy 5G, and are now dismantling it.

There are some other considerations, like China now competing with Germany more than being a customer, but overall Europe seems to be choosing the current hegemon over the new rising one. This is a startling failure on the part of Jingping (who is incompetent at almost everything except controlling the Party). Other countries should be falling into China’s arms, but China now wants to be a bully, too; to reap the rights of being powerful.

So, where you settle will have a lot to do with your future mobility; which part of the walled internet you’re in and so on. Look at countries and consider which side they’ll be on, or if or how they might manage the neutrality dance. This will matter for extradition, visiting the relatives, what technology you use and much more (Russia, for example, is where people in the US really want go, not because Russia is great (it’s a mafia state) but because Russia won’t extradite).

It is, of course, possible that I am wrong, and the US will pull it out. Every great nation (“great” is not a synonym for “good”) pulls it out over and over again until they don’t. England lost an empire then created another, for example, but Britain seems unlikely to exist soon: Both Northern Ireland and Scotland will likely go, and it’ll just be England and Wales again (and even Wales may go in 20 to 30 years, which would be losing a possession conquered 800 years ago).

So, it’s always possible that the US will pull it out. History goes in waves: There was a Gilded Age before, and it ended. That may happen again this time, either by force or luck of disaster.

That said, I don’t think that’s where the smart money is, and you’ll be gambling with more than your life.

If you do stay, remember that you have two defenses: (1) Other people who care for you and will fight with you (fight is not entirely a metaphor here), and; (2) Anonymity: Sliding along with no one really knowing anything about you and your beliefs (far harder than it once was).

All of this is complicated by climate change and environmental collapse putting pressure on systems never designed to withstand shocks.

Be well and be safe, whatever you do.


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Tech Platform Censorship & The Great QAnon Facebook Purge

So, Facebook has cracked down on QAnon, removing essentially all QAnon pages and groups.

BOOM.

Obviously QAnon is bunk. As I noted earlier it’s right in the broad sense: yes, we are ruled by pedophiles as any casual acquaintance with the Epstein case will tell you, no, Trump is not at war with them except in the sense that yeah, he’s opposed by some elite factions and some of them will be pedos. Of course, many people who support Trump are probably pedos. And it’s laughably wrong in specifics.

At one time the tech platforms mostly didn’t want to do censorship and content moderation. Of course, their algos mean they do: and there’s plenty of evidence that YouTube, for example, pushes a lot of right wing content hard, but they did it for greed, not out of any sense of political noblesse oblige or civic responsibility. Facebook played a role in at least one ethnic cleansing.

But really it was the hysteria about a possible Russian role in the 2016 election that started the censorship ball rolling.

It started with Google, who changed their algorithms. Strangely, that algorithm change hit the left much harder than the right.

(I actually noticed it myself, pages that had been on the first page of search results, like my ethics vs. morality article dropped off and never returned.)

So, you’re left wing and you hate the right (understandable) and you want them censored.

The problem is simple: once censorship gets going it doesn’t just stay with the people you want hit. Everyone who doesn’t have the power to protect themselves gets censored, and, children, people in power hate the left FAR more than the right. They can live with Fascism, authoritarianism and so on. Pinochet, Hitler, Mussolini, whoever—they were and are all good to corporations and rich people. They may be declasse and embarassing, but they don’t threaten most of the people with power or wealth. Left wingers, well, they might actually tax rich people and if you remember Bill Gates squeals during the primary at the idea of a wealth tax, well, you know that even “good” billionaires hate left wingers.

So, censorship is on the loose, the tech platforms are purging and maybe you’re happy.

But remember, it never stops with the people you hate.


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Why Actual Principled People Are Difficult (Glenn Greenwald Edition)

Glenn Greenwald

You may have heard that Glenn Greenwald, the founder of the Intercept, has been charged with cybercrimes by the Brazilian Federal Government. Glenn’s the reporter who broke the story of how Brazil’s ex-President Lula was taken down by Brazilian prosecutors. Moro, the chief prosecutor, was later rewarded by Bolsonaro with appointment as the Minister of Justice. All polls indicated that Lula would have defeated Bolsonaro.

The logic of the case is the same as the logic used by the US government to go after Assange, by the way: That Greenwald was in contact with and counseled hackers. Those people who are supporting Greenwald but don’t support Assange are hypocrites: Brazil is using the Assange precedent to go after Greenwald.

I support Greenwald, of course, as I have supported Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

Now this is the part of the piece where people (and with respect to Assange, I’ve done it) cavil a bit and say something like: “Despite Mr or Ms. X being problematic,” or some-such.

And it’s that I want to talk about, but not to condemn it. To explore it.

Because it’s almost always the case.

When Greenwald indicated he was going to oppose Bolsonaro, after the election, before he had revealed the evidence of Bolsonaro’s crime, I told him, twice, “This is dangerous.”

Bolsonaro’s so right-wing one might as well just call him a fascist. He celebrates policies of shooting political enemies. He’s a dangerous, dangerous man.

Glenn ignored me. I doubt the danger ever figured into his decision to go after Bolsonaro.

Meanwhile we have Manning, who is in jail for refusing to testify against Assange. When in military prison, Manning tried to commit suicide, she found it so unbearable. Despite that, knowing how awful it would be, she chose to go to jail rather than testify.

That’s bravery. (I note that all the Republicans refusing to testify under subpoena are sleeping at home, and haven’t been hit with fines intended to bankrupt them and cost them their home, as was Manning.)

Snowden pissed off the most powerful intelligence service and country in the world. He ran. Wikileaks helped him run, Greenwald published his revelations.

So I understand the caviling, but the point normal people don’t get is that these are all immensely morally brave individuals. They have actual principles they are willing to suffer for.

Most people don’t. They claim to have values, but they have never sacrificed anything meaningful for them, and never will. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. I’d say that even when it comes to their children, whom most people claim to love more than themselves, actions indicate that, well, they don’t.

People have preferences, not principles.

Most people.

Then you get people like Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Snowden. They are polarizing figures. They are loved or hated. They piss people off.

They piss people off precisely because they have principles they consider non-negotiable. They will not do the easy thing when it matters. They will not compromise on anything that really matters.

That’s breaking the actual social contract of “Go along to get along,” “Obey authority,” and “Don’t make people uncomfortable.” I recently talked to a senior activist who was uncomfortable even with the idea of yelling at powerful politicians. It struck them as close to violence.

So here’s the thing, people want men and women of principle to be like ordinary people.

They aren’t. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t do what they do. Much of what you may not like about a Greenwald or Assange or Manning or Snowden is why they are what they are. Not just the principle, but the bravery verging on recklessness. The willingness to say exactly what they think, and do exactly what they believe is right even if others don’t.

They don’t compromise, and they often act without regard to the risks and dangers and whether or not anyone else agrees with them.

That’s what makes them what they are, and it is very rare that you get the good without the bad.

Ordinary people judge them by their own, ordinary standards. But these people don’t live by the standards of ordinary people, because ordinary people are mostly authority and herd followers. And those courtiers who have betrayed principle over and over again to become senior journalists and editors, well, people like Greenwald, Assange, and Manning are a rebuke to them that they can never even acknowledge consciously.

People with principles and bravery enough to stand on them, even in the face of great risk and against authority and the herd, are rarely comfortable people.


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Toward a Land Ethic

**GUEST POST By Eric Anderson**

If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.
— Wendell Berry

I’ve thought a lot about immigration in my time, and confess, I’ve never thought very highly of it. Which, of late, seems to be an extremely unpopular position among liberals. But it’s not that I’m anti-immigrant, per se. It’s that I’m militantly pro-place. I sympathize with my place.

Not being inhumane, I do empathize with the plight of the refugee. However, their plight will always remain at one remove from me. I learned this from a pretty smart fellow who once observed that empathy is a problematic emotion because it is near automatic with those who are like us, and virtually non-existent with those who are not. Whereas, sympathy is a more useful emotion because it represents the care we feel about someone else who we want to feel better. Thus, we tend to help those we care about.

That being said, I submit that a land ethic exists in applying the aforementioned insight to the land we live on, with at least equal the gravity we apply it to people. Should you disagree, perhaps you have never discovered who you are, because you’ve never stayed in one place long enough to learn to care about it.

I am my place. We are inseparable, and my love of my place insuperable. I know its wrinkles, contours, temperament and fundament as I know the same of my wife and child. And as with my family, if I leave my place, my place suffers for the knowledge and support I remove. The converse seems true as well. Should I immigrate, I become a stranger in a strange land. I become a stranger to myself, who in my ignorance, suffers and longs for my place — which contagion cannot help but afflict those around me.

When times are hard, politically or otherwise, to abandon place is to be a traitor to oneself. And as cliché as it may sound, I mean it when I say that I will stay, fight, and die for my place because I am the steward of my place. It’s my family. To run from it is to run from myself. And if I run once, I will be running the rest of my life in shame.

Such cowardice drains the life from the place and the culture it’s built upon because the first to leave are always those with the most resources to do so. The materialists. Those who don’t know who they are because all they think about are themselves – and how to enhance their self with more material. Which flight begins a spiral, enabling the further destruction of place, because those having the most resources to confront the problems facing that place, remove them when they flee.

And here we are. Take a look in the mirror at your materialistic nation born of immigrants. Daily borne by the fear of trying to replace knowing who we are, with status symbols of what we are, because to know no place is in our blood. To empathize with those like us who flee in fear is genetically encoded in our blood. It is this difference between empathy for people, and sympathy for place, that allowed us to commit genocide upon the entire Native American population. Cowardice destroyed an entire civilization that knew better than any other who they were, because they intimately knew where they were.

I’ll be forever grateful for the fact that, by some turn of chance, I got lucky enough to know who I am. Blessed in knowing that I am my place. Blessed to know that the atoms and soul of my constituent parts are of my place. So please, don’t come to my place and destroy what I am, because you don’t know your place well enough to value who you are, enough to die for it.

Heaven is getting to eternally inhabit a mental picture of your favorite place.

Hell, is transience.

On July 4th as American Evil Comes Home

It’s July 4th, and I hope all my American readers are enjoying the holiday.

I’m going to be a little grim on this day and talk about the current immigration practice of separating children from their families

In context.

I am very glad that so many people are up in arms about this. It’s clearly inhuman and it’s clearly a stupid catch-22: “We won’t let you ask for refugee status at legal crossings, but if you enter elsewhere we’ll call it a crime and take away your kids.” Further, a lot of the kids will be very damaged by this, especially the youngest, in key periods where they need human contact they just aren’t getting, especially in tactile and verbal communication.

It is, however, not even close to the worst thing that the US has done in the last 20 years. The Iraq sanctions were worse. The Iraq War was worse. The Libyan war was worse. The current Yemeni genocide, which the US is helping plan and execute, is worse. Drones were worse, etc.

But all of these things happened away from Americans. They were opposed, oh yes, but never with the ethical fervour I am seeing now–with the anger, anguish, and moral opprobrium being aimed those doing the separating.

Yet my list of American deeds created plenty of orphans, took plenty of children from parents, killed far more people, and involved a lot more rape, torture, and slavery as their inevitable side effects.

These acts desensitized a whole swathe of Americans to atrocity, too. Most of those involved in the wars, and in justifying them, were made callous and uncaring. They learned how to dehumanize people, and so when this was done close to home, there were plenty of people willing to do it and to justify it.

Doing monstrous things makes you into a monster. Doing evil makes you evil. It is almost impossible to avoid this. You are what you do. You are also what you justify.

Do monstrous things abroad, and similar actions may eventually come home. It is something which must be carefully contained to avoid contamination, and a 17-year series of endless wars is not containment.

So here it is, on the border. What’s happening there is not sui generis; what Americans have been doing to other Americans in prison is abominable, and that got ramped up in 1980 under Reagan. But now it is close, and in the face, and being done to children.

Hypocrisy is a sin, not so much because you are lying, but because you are denying the person you are. You are evil, when you say that you are good.

The United States’ wars did far more damage than this immigration policy, but many Americans didn’t care as much.

Now what you’ve sown is coming closer and closer to home, and now it comes in a form you can’t ignore.

This is not good in the sense I am glad it happened. I wish it hadn’t. But it is good in the sense that it is making some Americans see what the US is.

If you defeat it. If you defeat Trump. That is not enough. To truly end the evil, you must stop treating both foreigners and residents with so much evil. You must stop the wars and make them anathema. You must find a way to mostly empty the prisons and to make those that remain more humane.

You must find a way not just to rehabilitate prisoners, but all the various police, paramilitary, and prison guards, who by doing evil routinely (no, don’t pretend they don’t) have become evil themselves–far too willing to use force and to be cruel.

You must do this, to put it dramatically, for your souls, and because it is right. And you must do it because you believe it is right. But it is also self-protection, because what the US military and law enforcement does to others, they can–and very likely will–wind up doing to you and yours.

By protecting others from the overreach of great power and cruelty, you reduce your odds of ever being subject to it yourself.

Too many Americans seem to have lost this understanding. You protect people you don’t actually care about or even like, or people you hate, because by protecting them you protect yourself.

This doesn’t apply just to the fair implementation of law, but to justice and the norms of dignified treatment that protect everyone; if they don’t protect some people, one day they won’t protect you or someone you care about.

The crimes creep ever closer to home. Many of you have already suffered from them. More of you will if you don’t stop and then actually reverse this.

And reversal means you can’t tolerate leaders like Obama and the Clintons, who were evil, and made things worse, just more slowly than Republicans. You don’t need a lesser evil, you need, at the least, leaders who are more good than evil.

Good luck.


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