Ian Welsh

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

“Get Biden Elected Then We’ll Influence Him From The Left”

By

On December 17, 2020

35 Comments

This is an age old cry. It was made about Obama and it was made about Clinton and while I wasn’t following politics then, no doubt it was made about Carter.

In my adult lifetime it hasn’t worked that way. Certainly Obama had no interest in what the left thought, except perhaps as a marker of what not to do. In fact, Obama’s first steps included choking off money to left wing organizations and operatives, I know operatives whose careers were ended by Obama. He got in power, and he made it clear that anyone left wing wasn’t to be hired. BOOM. Done.

Obama not only wasn’t open to left wing influence, he was actively hostile to it.

Biden spent most of the election season bragging about how he beat a socialist in the primary.

Carl Bejier decided to use cabinet appointments to see how much left wing influence Biden was accepting. Is he being influenced from the left? An organization called Data For Progress, pre-election, put out their picks for cabinet positions. How many did they get?

Data For Progress Tracker Dec 17 2020 by Carl Bejier

Yeah…

Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order. It’s really impossible to overstate how he was there all the way, doing all the worst things. The way the world and America runs is his legacy, why would he listen to his political enemies, the people he helped destroy in the 70s and 80s, who he drove into the political wilderness with his allies who followed the so-called Third Way? (Reaganism for a different set of nasty rich people.)

 

(My annual fundraiser ends Friday at midnight. We’re about a thousand dollars short of the last tier. If  you’d like to help get us there (and can afford to without any hardship), please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

 

There’s going to be a lot of gaslighting during the Biden regime. A lot of pretending that he’s doing left wing things, when he isn’t. A lot of outright lying. Oh, I imagine he’ll do some half decent things, even Trump and Bush and Obama did, but it’s highly unlikely he’ll be progressive in any significant way.

This idiocy is often bolstered by an FDR quote, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

What fools don’t understand is that FDR AGREED. Agreed. Agreed. When he said “make me do it” he was asking for a PR and pressure campaign to give him cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, but which he didn’t have enough legislative or popular support to do yet.

Biden doesn’t want to do most progressive or left wing things. He doesn’t agree with them. “Making” someone do something they want to do anyway isn’t the same as trying to force the most powerful person in the world to do something they disagree with, indeed, something(s) they have spent their entire life fighting against.

Biden’s career is about destroying left-wingers, even very mild left wingers, then bulldozing over their bodies in the New Deal mass grave he helped created. That’s who he is, that’s his legacy and he believes in it.

Again, I expect Biden to be better than Trump in some ways (and worse in others, sorry Venezuela), but he isn’t open to left wing influence, and he never was going to be. He was, at best, the lesser evil.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

The Simple Guide to the Happy Personality

By

On December 16, 2020

19 Comments

In a lot of mystical systems, like Ch’an Buddhism and much of Hinduism, the first thing you do is a lot of meditation to realize you aren’t what you think you are.

In Hinduism, the phrase is “neti, neti,” which means, “not this, not that.”

The process is simple, put your attention on a sense object you think of as yourself (a thought or feeling in the body) and ask yourself, “If this wasn’t here, would I still be me?” Do that a lot.

After a while it becomes clear that there is no sense object that is required for you to be you. They need you to exist, you don’t need them.

One of the most important of these clusters of sense objects is your personality. Your personality is just a bunch of reflex thoughts and emotions; it’s very highly conditioned and if you spend a lot of time paying attention to your thoughts and emotions something odd tends to happen: You become very bored with your personality, because it is SO predictable.

You also realize it isn’t you.

The reason spiritual systems spend a lot of initial effort on getting to this realization is that once you realize your personality, or body, or thoughts, or emotions, or whatever, aren’t “you,” you can deal with them objectively. There’s no need for shame, or pride, it just is what it is.

With that realization, you can start to work on it.

The most important ability for changing your conditioning (and personality is mostly conditioning, the rest is the body you’re percieving, but there’s a lot of feedback between the two), is indifference or equanimity. The way your body/brain works is that if you react strongly to something, it figures “Hey, this is important, I should keep doing this/bringing this up until it isn’t important.”

React less, or not at all, and pretty soon the body is like, “Huh, guess this isn’t important, so I won’t bring it up so much or as strongly.”

If you want more of something, on the other hand, lean into it, react more emotionally and strongly. The body will decide it’s important.

To learn indifference, do a simple meditation where whenever you feel an emotional reaction you try to just observe it. Do this over and over and over again, and eventually, even fear will bore you (this is not just theory, I’ve done it, though not with everything).

Before you do this, however, let’s lay out a bit of personality architecture theory.

Assuming you want to be happy, what matters is that the personality likes itself, and respects itself. Some personalities just think they’re aces, and that they are worthy of respect. What people respect and like can be very different — perhaps it’s always keeping your word, or perhaps it’s being kind, or perhaps it is being rich or powerful or strong and taking no shit. Perhaps it’s being smart. Perhaps it’s being good at manipulating people.

Whatever it is, the problem comes in if you tend to do something, or “be” something and you don’t like or respect people like that. Perhaps you were raised in an anti-sex church but you really like sex. You can either carve your personality to like sex less or to not judge itself for liking sex. (Yes, both are possible, though you may have a stronger biological sex drive and that may make it harder. Generally, though, getting rid of guilt is wiser.)

So when you’re changing your personality, a large part is either getting rid of parts you don’t like (through indifference and pointing at something else) or you’re getting rid of not liking that part of you.

 

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

 

When doing this you have to take into account the social circumstances you live in. If the people around you despise a characteristic you are de-guilting, it’s going to be very hard for you because most of us are effected by people around us: we want them to like and respect us and if they don’t it’s hard for us to like and respect ourselves.

The three solutions are to change who you spend time with; to decide to conform; or to change your personality to not care what others think.

The last is the hardest and it also deprives you of a great deal of emotional support, support which is very powerful and useful. Generally, figure out who the people are who would respect the person you want to be and arrange to spend time around them. Or perhaps, look at who you respect and like and become someone they like and respect.

If you decide to go full iconoclast, it’s the same as any other personality change: when people disapprove OR approve of what you do, or who you are, don’t care. Be indifferent. Don’t get angry and push back or preen under a compliment, just treat their opinions, words and actions as completely meaningless.

Be thoughtful when changing your personality. The first rule of all spirituality is “know thyself” and if you don’t spend enough time doing that, you may change your personality in ways that are more harmful than good, or that you wind up not liking because you didn’t actually understand the personality you already have.

That said, with some biological exceptions (babies have personality), much of what you think is you, isn’t, and you can change it. Even things that seem biological can be tuned: for example, there’s a lot of evidence that happiness has a set point. But, yeah, you can move that set point higher or lower, it just tends to be a lot of work (most of it comes down to learning when to give a shit. Stressing is the cause of a ton of unhappiness.)

Your personality isn’t you. If your personality doesn’t like or respect itself, you can change that. You don’t have to be unhappy.

 

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Fundraising Update and Fundraiser Ending Friday the 18th

By

On December 15, 2020

1 Comment

I want to thank everyone who’s given. It’s been a bad year for anyone not in the top 1 percent or so, and I appreciate the donations and subscriptions greatly.

We’ve raised approximately (some crypto donations have made the numbers not even) $8,925. That means we’ve passed the second tier:

Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)

The last tier unlocks at $11,000:

$11,000: two more articles, these on the conditions that create good and bad societies to live in; an introduction and conclusion and some commentary and connecting text as seems necessary.

The fundraiser has been going on for almost a month, so I’m going to draw it to a close as of Friday at midnight, and go back to the little message at the bottom of the posts on Saturday.

Again, I’m thankful to everyone who has given. If you’d like to try and push us to that $11,000 goal and only if you are financially secure (please DON’T give if it would mean any hardship to you) then please subscribe or donate and we’ll see if we make it: $2,075 as of this writing. Even if we don’t, rest assured, the money helps.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

 

 

“Nice Guys” and Using People

By

On December 14, 2020

57 Comments

This is a outside what I usually write about, but I think it’s worth a bit of time. It’s a general issue, “nice guys” is a small subset.

Humans do a lot of what we do to get things. We all know that, and while we may find it distasteful sometimes, it’s part of the world in which we live and perhaps part of being human. (It’s very hard to disentangle “being human” from whatever culture we live in.)

The nice guy syndrome is where someone is friendly with someone, their reason for being friendly is sex, AND they aren’t upfront about that. They say “I just want to be friends,” then later, once they’ve established the friendship, they push for sex based on “Aren’t I such a nice guy?” The woman thought they were friends, and that was all there was to it, and feels the friendship was fake, that the person doesn’t really care, they were just trying to get into their pants. It destroys the entire existing relationship. (It is possible (and a staple of rom-coms) to become friends then develop a sexual or romantic interest. When that happens, deal with it honestly.)

This syndrome exists all over the place. Becoming friends with someone in order to get a favor from them later, or to get business from them, or whatever else you might want.

Of course it can also be having sex with them so you can get something else from them. Women may not fake friendship to get sex, but a fair number do fake sexual interest and enjoyment to get something else. When someone finds out you didn’t really want to have sex with them and probably didn’t really enjoy it, but only did it to get something else, they too feel betrayed.

 

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

 

The general case is “Doing X to get Y without saying you want Y.” You can be clear you want to be friends AND have sex (I personally prefer to be friends with anyone I sleep with, in case it turns into a relationship).

People understand other people want things, and they understand they may have something you want. Being honest about that is usually the best path if you don’t want the relationship to blow up. You can start wanting a VP to buy something from you and over time become friends. You can even do business with a VP you are already friends with, but if that VP finds out you made friends with them so you could do business, you stand a good chance of losing the friendship, all future sales and your reputation with that person and everyone they talk to.

“Creep” is someone who pretends they want one thing, but wants another. Who isn’t honest about their desires. You can even find someone sexually attractive, elide to that, and be clear nothing can happen. That’s fine, occurs all the time, especially among honorable married people or others in long term relationships. Being with one person doesn’t mean everyone else suddenly becomes uninteresting sexually, it means you don’t partake.

In politics this is where politicians say “I want to help ordinary people”, or “I want to clean up the Ganges,” or “my passion is helping veterans” then when they get elected, serve themselves first or pursue some other project “didn’t run on cutting social security, but I’m going to spend years trying to cut a deal with Republicans” says Obama.

Politicians who pursue power saying it’s to do X, then ignore X and do Y&Z are the political equivalent of creeps and nice guys and people who have sex to get money. Dishonest users.

Anyway, especially if you think long-term, avoiding this sort of dishonesty will make your life a lot better, usually. Obama might get away with it, but most us aren’t able to cash out so much money and fake respect from other users that we never have to engage with any non-sycophant ever again.

Kindness and being friendly to get other things works best when you aren’t doing it to get other things, oddly. When it’s who you are, so people think “well, they’re always a good person” or “always tells the truth” or “always honorable” or whatever.

And be kind to people who can’t help you and you don’t think ever will be able to.

That’s the true test of who and what you actually are.

 

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 13, 2020

By

On December 13, 2020

25 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 13, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

An Ominous Sign: Americans Have Begun Stealing Food To Survive

[ZeroHedge, via Mike Norman Economics 12-11-20]

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

If you’ve been waiting for a sign that things are really bad economically in the United States, here it is. Americans who never would have contemplated shoplifting before are stealing food to survive…. I wrote the other day about how the response to the pandemic has destroyed the personal finances of American families. An area that deserves more attention is food insecurity…. More than 50 million people are suffering from food insecurity in the United States right now, a number that has leaped dramatically due to the response to the coronavirus….

Twenty percent of Americans are now turning to food banks to help keep their families fed. And according to a report in the Washington Post, the shoplifting of food and other essential items is increasing significantly….

The result is a growing subset of Americans who are stealing food to survive.

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime — it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.” (source)

“Stealing to survive: More Americans are shoplifting food as aid runs out during the pandemic”

[Washington Post, via Zero Hedge 12-10-20]

“Alex graduated with a master’s degree in May and was immediately in a bind: no job, no money and, with much of the country still shut down, little hope that anything would change. She’d spent most of her $1,200 stimulus check on rent, and used what little she had left to buy groceries. Everything else — vitamins, moisturizer, body wash — she said she shoplifted from a Whole Foods Market a few miles from her apartment in Chicago. ‘It was like, I could spend $10 and get a couple of vegetables or I could spend $10 on just a box of tampons,’ said Alex, 27, who asked to be identified by her middle name to speak candidly. She has a job now, earning $15 an hour, but still struggles to make ends meet. She says she continues to shoplift — something she’d never done before the pandemic — every few weeks. She says she moves through the store mostly unnoticed. Usually, she said, she picks up a few bulky vegetables — a bunch of kale, maybe, or a few avocados — to disguise the pricier items she slips into her bag at the self checkout. ‘I don’t feel much guilt about it,” she said. ‘It’s been very frustrating to be part of a class of people who is losing so much right now. And then to have another class who is profiting from the pandemic — well, let’s just say I don’t feel too bad about taking $15 or $20 of stuff from Whole Foods when Jeff Bezos is the richest man on Earth.’”

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surges Past $1 Trillion Since Beginning of Pandemic — Total Grows to $4 Trillion 

[Institute for Policy Studies, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-20]

Disrupting Mainstream Economics

Read More

You Can’t Buy Anything That Matters When It Matters (Covid Vaccine Edition)

By

On December 12, 2020

12 Comments

… unless you have control over the production facilities.


I think this map is a little inaccurate, but it makes the point. Money matters, yes, but having control over vaccine manufacturers and R&D matters more.

This is true of everything. Oil is not a global market if there are ever shortages decision makers care about. FOOD is not a global market if there’s ever a worldwide shortage, and countries which net import will find that out. (The Irish famine, where Ireland, then an imperial colony, continued to export food even as its people starved, underlines the word control.)

Global markets are OK for things that don’t matter. For anything that does matter you want manufacture, R&D and supply lines concentrated in your own country or that of true close allies. In those cases, you want mutual vulnerability. If country A has it all and is a close ally, that won’t work when they’re desperate, you have to have part of the dependencies.

Even this doesn’t work completely. It was very popular before WWI to state that a big European war couldn’t happen because of how interdependent the economies were.

Yeah.

 

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

 

Industrial policy means that if you can, you make it at home, and if it costs a little extra, too bad, slap on a tariff. If you control natural resources, you NEVER sell them raw if you have any choice. The history of England’s economic development leading to the Industrial revolution starts with a ban on selling English wool to mainland Europe, allowing them to build their own textiles industry. Of course, those textiles were worse than what Flemish weavers would have made, and less efficient to start, with higher prices. The English, correctly, did not care. They had the wool, and there wasn’t a huge surplus of wool. Buy the clothes from us or no one.

Food, water and essential goods: if it is at all possible you want to be self sufficient in all three. In sensible countries a great deal of geopolitics is driven by this when a country can’t do it all internally. China knows, for example, that the US can shut down the Strait of Malacca any time it wants, crushing their oil supply and that is a major reason why they are creating a huge land route all the way across the Asian continent, and getting snuggly with the Russians (who can supply oil by land.)

Chinese economic policy, letting Westerners get super rich by producing goods in China, was also driven by this. The Americans aren’t wrong, the Chinese were super-aggressive about technology transfer. The deal was often that in order to get access, you had to give them the tech. If you wouldn’t, they would try and steal it (Americans stole a ton of British IP back in the day, don’t get all pious, everyone does it.) There was also technology-arm breaking creep. Sure, you gave us a tech a few years ago, but what have you given us recently, and why should we allow you to stay in our market today?

Foolish nations, like Canada and the US, let key industries go overseas, or sell raw materials without processing. Wise countries don’t, unless they’re getting something very worth it in return. Getting a bunch of new rich people who made their money by selling your country out isn’t “worth it” to anyone but the rich people and the politicians they bribed.

Money doesn’t cut it. Per capita Canada bought more Covid vaccines than anyone else, but notice that Canadians won’t be in the first wave to get mass vaccination. This is a “white, 1st world” country, and it can’t buy its way in. (The case is a bit more complicated than that, because the government are incompetent, but we’ll leave it there for now.)

If it isn’t on your territory, where your people with guns and your bureaucrats have power, you don’t control it and when it matters, you can’t buy it.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Disney Setting A Precedent For Not Paying Writers

By

On December 11, 2020

18 Comments

Back when the original Star Wars came out, an author named Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelization as a ghost-writer, and wrote the first other Star Wars novel, “A Splinter In The Minds Eye.”

Disney isn’t paying him for those novelizations any more (authors of books which do well get payments long after the initial sale, it’s how they stay afloat.) They assert that when they bought the books they gained the privilege of paying him but not the requirement.

Obviously the amount of money involved is trivial to Disney, if not to Foster, so they aren’t doing it to save that amount of money. They’re doing it to set a precedent that whenever a piece of IP is sold, they aren’t bound by the original contract.

Since any company could set up another company and then sell their IP to it, this threatens all authors and very quickly all artists and so on.

 

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and has been lower this year, for obvious reasons) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

It does help.

 

Disney is engaged in outright theft, and an attempt to set a precedent that theft is legal. They’re betting Foster can’t fight this in court: that he can’t afford it. As authors go, he’s relatively well off but compared to Disney he’s a pauper.

Writers are one of the few sets of workers left who retain any right to profit from their work after they’ve done it. This right should be extended to more workers: profit sharing of some variety should be the norm, not a rarity.

At any rate what Disney is doing is deeply wrong and unethical. I like a lot of Disney media, but I won’t be spending a cent on anything Disney till this is resolved for Foster and if it isn’t, Disney stays on my permanent shit list (and I’ll be doing more than boycotting.) I don’t expect anyone else to do anything, this is where my bread is buttered after all, and there are more outrages than anyone can keep up with, and more companies worth boycotting than anyone can boycott. But I won’t cooperate, at least, in cutting my own throat (since I’m a writer.)

Not the worst thing in the world, but bad. If you’re not a writer or other creative who gets to keep some ownership rights and share in profits, remember the key point for you is that more workers; the people who actually produce things, should share in profits and ownership.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Open Thread

By

On December 10, 2020

73 Comments

Had some computer issues today, so no post. Feel free to use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

I’m doing my annual fundraiser. If you like my writing and can afford to, please consider giving.

Page 240 of 532

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén