Ian Welsh

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

How to Think About Thoughts

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On April 23, 2017

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I wanted to title this “The Thoughts Are a Lie,” but it wouldn’t be true. Not entirely. Some thoughts are a lie, some thoughts aren’t, many are half-truths.

To mangle a pair of modern metaphors, thoughts are context-sensitive help combined with auto-correct, and both are based on emotional charge and salience.

For example, my mind, on hearing or even thinking the phrase “My name is…” will automatically fill in “Inigo Montoya.”

In the 70s, when I was young, dinosaurs still—-I mean, scientists announced that cholesterol was bad, mmmmkay, and margarine became a thing. Not only was it “better for you” than butter, it was a heck of a lot cheaper.

The butter producers struck back with an ad, and as a result, whenever my brain hears “butter” it automatically fills in “tastes better, naturally!” (My search engine fu has failed to find a copy online.)

Thanks, Brain. (Also, as best I can tell, margarine is probably worse for you than butter, just like most artificial sweeteners are worse for you than just chowing down on sugar.)

This same process is at work with all sorts of stuff for everyone. (The following examples aren’t necessarily personal.)

At the personal level, we may see a friend’s face as cold if it passes over us and think he’s angry at us. On inquiry, he’s just having a bad day. A pack of boisterous young men may trigger non-verbal fear; or a black man. Or white men with buzz cuts, depending on our history and politics.

We may see someone with long hair and think “damn hippy.” Or we see a man in a suit and think “fucking suit” or have feelings of deference (or both). If you think most people don’t defer to men in suits, you’re quite wrong; I used to amuse myself by dealing with the same person dressed up and dressed down. Not only was the treatment almost always completely different, most of them didn’t even recognize that they’d dealt with me before.

The people who impressed me were the ones who treated me the same no matter how I was dressed.

Thoughts are conditioned. What has been impressed upon us in the past plays out in the present and the future, whether it is appropriate or useful. The worst of this is when the original conditioning was mixed. The word love is like this for most people. Their parents told them they loved them, then punished or mistreated them, sometimes horribly.

They love their parents, they also hate them, and they are scared, and love brings up all of these feelings and chains of thought which have nothing to do with the current relationship, and everything to do with the relationships where they learned to love.

Thoughts are, thus, best regarded as information before the senses, like any other information. The same is true of feelings. They may be true and valid, or they may be crap–prejudices or emotional battery from the past, completely inappropriate to the current situation.

The thoughts, and often the emotions, are a lie.

There’s a strain of modern “thought” which says that all emotions are valid. Well, they’re all real, they aren’t all appropriate or accurate. (That said, if you feel scared around someone, I’d generally obey that particular emotion and get the fuck away, especially if you aren’t sure you can take them in a fight.)

This is true on a personal level, and it is true on a political level. People’s political opinions are conditioned reflexes in almost all cases: They have not spent time carefully thinking them through. Someone they respect told them something, they identify with that person, they adopt that belief. Or they read it somewhere and never thought about it, or it’s the most common belief in their peer group, and if they want to be liked (and they do) they’d best say it; and after a while they believe it.

Heck, often immediately. If you like someone, you tend to accept their beliefs as valid unless you have strong reason not to. In fact, one of the core functions of being a friend is validating the other person. You may occasionally push back, but it tends to be occasional. (The sort of teasing relationships many people have don’t contradict this.)

Humans are bundles of conditioning, and we run with that conditioning most of the time, not thinking about it or challenging it. That conditioning manifests as thoughts and emotions (which are just feelings in the body), and we take them as valid–even true–most of the time, because they are our feelings.

But very often they aren’t. If they are, it’s by chance, we sure haven’t validated them.

Most thoughts don’t require us to believe them, and we’re happier if we don’t. In most cases, if we treat thoughts as if some random dude had just spewed them, we’d be more likely to judge them, or dismiss them, properly.

And, frankly, most people are happier that way.

One of the secrets of suffering is that you suffer for anything you identify with. If someone says “favorite politician is a corrupt bozo,” you only care if you identify with that politician. You’re only bothered.

You think thoughts are “yours” and you identify with them, and you suffer because of that identification, when if some random bozo said the same thing, you might well laugh it off.

Reduce your identification, don’t assume validity, and thoughts lose a lot of their power to harm you, to control you and to misdirect you. Given that most of your thoughts are just conditioned reflexes, from conditioning you did not choose, that is the correct way to treat them.

The same, in general, is true of feelings, with a partial exception for fear (if you fear someone in your life, you’re probably right and shouldn’t take the chance you aren’t, get out).

Treat thoughts and emotions this way, and you’ll be far happier, too.

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.

British General Election Called for May 8th

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On April 18, 2017

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Oh joy.

Makes sense, however, Prime  Minister May’s Conservative party is up 17 percent over Corbyn’s Labour and she must expect to increase her seat count. In addition, there’s a good chance Corbyn is out, if he doesn’t get a lot more seats than expected. He doesn’t have to win, but he does need to beat expectations. Expectations are low, at least.

Corbyn being out is good for May because standard centrist-Labour leader X will not undo most of what a Conservative government does even if it wins, whereas Corbyn will undo everything and then kick it into reverse.

I, of course, will be hoping Corbyn does well, but it doesn’t look good. Even if he does better than expected, Scotland appears to be a write-off.

I will remind you that an academic study found that 89 percent of all newspaper articles lied about Corbyn’s position. He’s an existential threat to the current establishment, after all.

This is an awkward election overall, as May is positioning it as a referendum on Brexit, but Labour doesn’t oppose Brexit, the SNP is Scottish and the Lib-Dems (who do oppose Brexit) are violently distrusted by anyone with sense after they helped the Conservatives push through some of the worst retrogressive policies in generations.

Should be fun. This is one I actually care about a bit, so I’ll be hoping the polls are off and that Corbyn gets some wind.

(Given how absolutely cruel the Conservatives are, I will judge Britons who vote Conservative harshly–not that there’s any reason for any such Briton to care…nonetheless.)

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.

Open Thread

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On April 17, 2017

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I’m rather under the weather, so please use this post to talk among yourselves, if you so desire.

Steve Bannon In (and Out?) of Donald Trump’s Imperial Court

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On April 14, 2017

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Steve Bannon

When I wrote about the Trump administration before it existed, I noted that the Trump administration would be an Emperor’s Court. Because Trump has few firm ideas of his own and is extremely easily influenced, the best courtiers would rule the roost and determine policy.

Steve Bannon, by current reports, is out of favor and may well be on his way out.

Coincidentally, Trump has missiled a Syrian airbase and dropped “the mother of all bombs.” Coincidentally, word is coming out of the White House that, hey, maybe NAFTA isn’t so bad. Coincidentally, China is no longer considered a currency manipulator.

When people started mocking Trump by calling Bannon president, I noted that it was an attack which might work, and word has also come out that Trump hated that.

Trump is defined by little more than vanity, and he puts family first.

And so Kushner and Ivanka, backed by the deep state and more traditional Republicans (of the “tax cuts and bomb foreigners” variety), have the upper hand.

There is no question that Bannon is a piece of work, but him losing so much influence is not an unmitigated good.  Bannon is a nativist.

He was the guy, along with Trump on the campaign trail, who wanted the Muslim ban, aye. But he also favored rewriting trade deals, hitting China on manufacturing (it is true that China no longer keeps its currency low, but they did for ages and it gutted US manufacturing), bringing those jobs back to America, improving relations with Russia, and, oh yeah, not getting involved in stupid Middle Eastern wars (aside from fighting ISIS).

The comment section of Breitbart, when Trump hit the Syrian airfield was nearly 100 percent dismayed–as much as the most fiercely anti-war leftists.

The practical result of Bannon’s disempowerment is that brown Americans and visitors would be treated better, and that’s good, but most of what Trump wanted to do that wasn’t Republican standard, for the good as well as bad, goes out with Bannon.

Trump is being trained, well. Firing missiles and dropping bombs has gotten him the best media coverage of his presidency so far.  The “serious people” love killing (the right) foreigners, and the foreign policy elite which was threatened by Trump/Bannon nativism is rushing to praise Donald.

Not coincidentally, I think that Trump and Republicans will suffer for it electorally.

This version of Trump might be as bad as Hillary on foreign affairs (remembers she called for the missile attack, and watch North Korea), and while he lacks her saving graces on social affairs, as Kushner and Ivanka gain influence, they may make Trump a lot better on social civil liberties.

Though very competent in his way, Bannon was never quite a Svengali (as with his fumbling of the immigration order), but he is the only person in the administration genuinely angry about what happened to the working and middle class in America, and how the financial crisis was handled by bailing out banks and fucking ordinary people.

If Bannon loses this fight completely, Trump will be little more than an overly capricious, yet standard, Republican President.

And, folks, Trump was never going to be Hitler and not improving relations with Russia is a disaster, whatever the propaganda machine may tell you. (And that Syria attack would not have happened if improving relations with Russia were still important.)

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.

Quick Hit: France Is Just a Giant Greece

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On April 13, 2017

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(POST BY MANDOS)

If you thought that France could elect a right- or left-wing populist and then dictate more favorable Eurozone terms in a manner qualitatively different from Greece, you should maybe hold off on making that judgement. Size ain’t everything: It’s the relative size of your interdependency that matters. And France is, to put it mildly, rather interdependent.

Seeing the rapid rise in popularity of a more left-wing alternative in the French presidential elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Olivier Blanchard (yes, that Olivier Blanchard) just published a fictional scenario of the first 100 days of a Mélenchon presidency. It’s in French in Le Nouvel Observateur, but there’s no need for me to translate it for you: It’s the summary of the instruction manual for Syrizifying France. It’s totally believable, starting with an absolute German rejection of Eurozone reform demands from Mélenchon, the intentional and perfectly designed Chinese finger trap of deliberate fiscal crisis will ensue. As the French are still not ready to accept mass immediate suffering for departing the Eurozone, Mélenchon will end up inevitably, not merely like Hollande, but like Tsipras. What Blanchard is telling you is that they’ve already charted out, in great detail, what to do to bring an anti-austerity French leader into line.

The heart of this problem resides in German politics. The German public was promised and continues to be promised that the goal of the Eurozone is to make orderly, competitive export-manufacturing economies out of Southern European Urlaubsländer (vacation countries), with the salutary side effect of costing the German taxpayer nothing (they think). A grand favour that can, in fact, only work if Germany pays (appears to pay) nothing for it.  Paying no transfer payments is the virtue, the moral soul, the charity in this deal. German politicians have invested too much in this illusion.

Or Blanchard could be wrong, and the French public is willing to endure the Chinese finger-trap. Merkel and Schäuble could have a change of heart? Again, my willingness to give the benefit of the doubt may be excessive.

(Scorn) So, You Read It in the Newspaper

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On April 11, 2017

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Picture of Jeremy Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn

Commenter Mark From Ireland once relayed that, for an older generation, the idea that newspapers or the media were honest was greeted with scorn.

A study from last year found that only 11 percent of newspaper articles presented Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s views without alteration.

I hope you’re shocked by that number. It means that newspapers were lying about Corbyn’s views almost 90 percent of the time.

Cases like this are common, though rarely this extreme. When people talk about how the Fourth Estate is essential to the functioning of democracy, I laugh. A media which lies 89 percent of the time is worse than no media at all.

72 percent of Americans didn’t wind up thinking Iraq was behind 9/11 in the run up to the Iraq war because the media called out the Bush administration’s misleading statements, but because they amplified them.

The media has its own agenda. If it agrees with a politician, it will amplify his voice; if not, it will attack savagely.  You can see this with Trump, in highlight. The media savaged Trump for his Muslim ban, but they cheered on his missile attack on a Syrian airbase.

Someone like Corbyn is far more of a threat to the powers that be than Trump could ever be. Corbyn wants to re-nationalize vast chunks of the British economy. Trains are a good example, and before you get on your privatization high-horse, the facts are simple: Privatized trains cost more, have higher debts, still require government subsidies and have worse service. They are more expensive and worse on all significant metrics.

Much like privatized medicine, which, by the way, has been proceeding under the Tories per the usual plan: De-fund public healthcare and invite in “private partners” to help. Richard Branson, for example, who bought and fucked up British trains, is involved in health care in the UK.

Corbyn also, as Mandos pointed out, doesn’t believe in bombing people.

Horrors! He is against using nuclear weapons and has said he would never do so.

This man is a serious goddamn threat to how things are done. My God! He wants to build huge amounts of council housing, so that ordinary people don’t have to pay usurious prices and service mortgages.

What would the UK economy be without peons servicing overpriced mortgages?

A UK economy with a lot less fat bankers, anyway.

So, if it is necessary to lie about Corbyn 89 percent of the time, well, that’s what the media will do. They are owned by a very few people, and they do what they’re told. Heck, at this point, most of them even believe in it.

As for Trump, I disagree with a great deal of his platform, but notice that he is being rewarded when he sticks to the Washington consensus (massively favorable media coverage for going after Assad) and gets negative coverage when he acts against it.

You may think that the Washington consensus is better than Trump on some things, and worse on others, and still notice what is happening and judge it to be a negative that the media and deep state (who are together on this) are working so hard to stop a President doing what he was elected to do.

The media campaign against Corbyn has worked. I judge this not by the poll numbers, though they are bad, but by the fact that “casual left-wingers” think he’s a dud. Whenever I interrogate them, their reasons are weak, even wrong. But for a normal consumer of news who isn’t digging, who assumes that the news is essentially correct, the impression is terrible. It’s one fuck up after another.

For example, a little while ago Corbyn released his taxes and the coverage was that he had cheated.

He hadn’t. Some outlets corrected those stories (which no one sees) and most didn’t, and the damage was done.

Lie. Lie. Lie.

And so a man whose policies would cost billionaires massively, who would fund health care, and give wheelchairs back to cripples, is unpopular in the face of someone as monumentally as incompetent and vile as May.

Break them up. Shatter them into a thousand pieces. Enforce ownership rules. Make many of them into cooperatives. And drive their owners into the ocean, wailing in terror. It is what they have earned.

And it will be nearly impossible to have a good society so long as they retain their power.

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.

 

 

Syria and the Cult of the Tough Decision

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On April 8, 2017

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(POST BY MANDOS!!!)

The chances were always high that regardless of who was elected, Trump or Clinton, there would be some kind of American attack in Syria.  However, the chances were always higher with Trump than Clinton. Yes, you read that right: It was always a lot more likely that Trump would attack Syria than Clinton would. The reason for this is that Clinton took a more hawkish position on Syria before the election. Trump took a right-populist position of focusing on domestic politics and telegraphed a Russia-friendlier course. This more or less convinced me that he was going to attack Syria at some point. Likely, Clinton would have too — but with Trump it was basically inevitable.

Running a complex industrial and military power requires a highly technical bureaucracy. That bureaucracy therefore has an ultimate veto on what is possible to accomplish that is necessarily beyond democracy. That bureaucracy has made it clear that it won’t implement policies by people it doesn’t consider to be “serious.”  The hallmark of seriousness is the ability to make the Tough Decision.

(DID I MENTION THAT THIS WAS A POST BY MANDOS? BEFORE YOU COMMENT…)

The complaint by the technocratic class against what it denigrates as “populism” is — among other things — that populism is ultimately the rejection of the Tough Decision. Left-wing populism holds that there are a lot of win-win situations where the benefits to (most) stakeholders far outweigh the costs of participation. Right-wing populism does not believe in win-win propositions, but rather that in a win-lose situation it is effortless to identify who should be on the losing side of the equation and to practically shove the loss onto them. Either way, left- and right-wing populism deny the centrality of the Tough Decision in leadership.

Clinton ran as the anti-populist candidate, presenting herself as the one who would preserve an already-great America through her ability to make Tough Decisions that distributed costs in a way that her supporters wouldn’t always like. Trump ran as a right-wing populist, explicitly riding on the feeling that there were designated “winners” who weren’t winning and designated “losers” who weren’t losing, and proposing solutions whereby this state of affairs could be effortlessly corrected. Insofar as he has attempted to make good on this aspect of this program in a public way, the system has acted against him, because all of the other entities, and that includes the House “Freedom” Caucus, believes in the Tough Decision.

Foreign policy is always the domain in which the right-wing populist can most easily exercise the Tough Decision and win back some loyalty from the managerial class. That is because, in the short run, breaking a promise on a foreign policy or military point is often the one that is lowest-cost to his principal support base. By attacking Syria, Trump proves that he can make a Tough Decision and that he can be “brought to reason” by the policy elite. Clinton would not have had to do this so soon, at least, and would thus have had the confidence of the policy elite that she would “push the button” but would merely be holding off until a strategically more optimal moment. The policy elite seems to have been afraid that Trump would never push the button. That concern has been proven unjust.

The cult of the Tough Decision is killing the world. It is not merely a fetish of a generation of technocrats but deeply engrained into the psychological structure of our society. It stems from a couple of inoffensive common-sense pillars:

  1. There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
  2. You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Both of these are narrowly true. Every “free” lunch requires at least some effort to go and obtain it. (1) is merely a recognition that all things have an up-front energy cost. (2) is merely a recognition that once you’ve made a choice, the world changes such that the very same choice is not available a second time in its exact original form. In present-day psychology, we exaggerate these to mean that not merely is there an up-front cost to everything, but it is highly likely that most up-front costs outweigh the benefits — and that there are no win-win situations, because the up-front cost of most choices must result in a major stakeholder losing out.

This exaggeration of common-sense wisdom has come in its most exaggerated form of the fetishization of abstract intellectual exercises from economics and game theory. These exercises are concentrated in the political and managerial elite, but they are constantly reflected in popular discourse and media culture. It is propagated by often very well-intentioned people who would like to make the world better.

Its results are particularly damaging to left-wing populism, because left-wing populism is founded on the existence of low-cost, self-replenishing free lunches — repeated win-win situations. (As opposed to, as I said, right-wing populism, which rejects either the low-cost or the self-replenishing part.) The existence of these free lunches probably sounds like an absurdity even to readers here. Admittedly, they seem to be vanishing quickly, but they are not all gone. Single-payer universal health care in a developed country is one of these free lunches, where the principal payers of the monopsony cost (medical services providers of various sorts, including large organizations) can afford the cost without true suffering.

In a twist of fate, Trump was one of the popular purveyors of the Cult of the Tough Decision in his reality show career. Reality TV, of the “voting off the island” genre, is all about making someone cry in public as a designated loser, and then self-back-patting that it was a responsible or necessary or realistic choice. It is a genre that is emblematic of our era. So it should surprise no one that Trump returns to the ontology of public action that worked out so well for him.

Trump Fires Missiles on Syrian Airbase

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On April 7, 2017

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Sigh. This is not smart. Let us hope it does not escalate. The administration has said it is a “one-off,” but if any allegation of chemical attacks can cause the US to strike, there will be more chemical attacks.

Of course, many people usually critical of Trump are now “rallying around.” Nothing like blood to get Americans to support a President.

Syria is not a good place to be playing games, given that Russia is already there. (An agreement on coordinating flights between the US and Russia has been cancelled by the Russians.)

That Trump is getting really good media on this, especially on TV, is particularly bad. Trump craves approval, and he is being trained, right now, to be violent. The consequences of this are potentially catastrophic.

Update: No, this is not about Trump being worse than Clinton on this issue.

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.

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