Be it resolved

In that the 2020 election is far far away…

In that there is already a plethora of people jostling for the candidacy…

In that all of them, even pathetic Howard Schultz, are better than Trump…

In that there will be much campaigning in the next nearly two years…

In that I’m already sick of it all…

Be it resolved that:

  1. I shall consider each candidate, be they Bernie, Kamala, Amy, Kirsten, Pete, Cory, Julian, Elizabeth, yea, even Tulsi, on the merits of their policies as presented in the primary campaign,
  2. and that I shall vote my conscience in the primary election, not on the basis of mythical “electability” or “likability”,
  3. and upon the resolution of the primary process, I shall campaign for and vote for whoever is selected to represent me, no matter how lukewarm I am towards them personally.

Because Trump is a fuckwit, and he must be deposed.

So be it.

Sheep tumbling off a cliff

May I admit that I’ve given up on understanding Brexit? It sounds like stupid people stampeding after a stupid idea, with an ineffectual opposition making pointless motions in a parliamentary dance. I don’t get it. I’m lost.

The government has been defeated by MPs on propositions that they themselves backed two weeks ago. The whole edifice of blather and nonsense is coming tumbling down.

It’s commonly accepted that there’s no majority in the Commons for any given response to Brexit. But today it went a step further. It was inadequacy squared. It is clear now that there is not even a majority for the imaginary things MPs had only recently given a majority to. The whole British political system is imploding in on itself.

It might seem like reasonless chaos, but there is a moral message to what is happening here. You cannot govern on the basis of gibberish. You cannot make gurgled yearnings the basis for your negotiating posture. Because the lack of meaning in those original propositions means that they do not work as functional foundations of policy.

This is what the farce looks like when it’s untangled. May was defeated on her Brexit deal last month. It did not win the support of the opposition parties or her own MPs. They were concerned about the backstop, which would prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.

I’m not picking on Great Britain — it’s the same thing happening here in the US. In our case, it’s an incompetent madman who has become the chief executive, with the conservative party backing everything he does because it keeps them in power.

So we’ve got two great countries paralyzed by idiocy, at the same time. WTF? And where’s the revolution?

Lyndon LaRouche is dead!

I found him repellent, so I didn’t know much about him, except that I’d occasionally encounter one of his rabid pamphleteers, he’d sometimes appear on the news during election years, and I had a relative who was a fanatical LaRouchie. A lot of things in his obit don’t jibe well with my experience of the man.

In the late 1960s, he attracted well-educated Vietnam-era liberals who found enlightenment in his stream-of-consciousness blend of philosophy, economics and science and his purported belief that the working class was endangered by a conspiracy between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Within a few years, his vision shifted far rightward and became ultraconservative and apocalyptic, and he presented himself as the moral savior of mankind.

Mr. LaRouche denounced those he deemed a danger to his cause — a rotating list of alleged villains that included prosecutors, politicians, bankers and Zionists. LaRouche followers could be confrontational with those they viewed as dangers to society.

Through that relative, I got exposed to earfuls of LaRouche in the mid-60s and 70s, and I never got a hint of anything liberal or enlightening — but then, I was getting it filtered through that relative. Mainly what I heard was strident xenophobia, a lot of America First rhetoric, and Old Time Religion and traditional roles for everyone. The most depressing thing is that, at the time, he was considered the lunatic fringe, someone so dishonest and bizarre that he wouldn’t stand a chance in any election, yet now…he’d be a mainstream Republican. That’s how far American politics has drifted into toxic dementia during my lifetime.

Meme War @UMNMorris!

As I was walking through the halls to my lab, I noticed that the students have been waging a little meme war on the corkboards scattered around the building. I haven’t had to work with students much at all this year, so it’s always good to see a reminder of how wonderful they are.

Here’s an example. At the top, just off center, the College Republicans are advertising with the slogan, “Where women are not afraid to be women. While men are not afraid to be men.” That’s an oddly fearful concern — people are not afraid to be who they are in other campus groups. It’s already been defaced, though: someone wrote “bigotry is scarier than human rights” across it. Also they’re surrounded by an “It’s OK to be non-binary” sign and an ad for a discussion in conversational Spanish. Poor babies.

To the right, the College Republicans try again with a sad, limp NPC meme sign. That never worked, people, except in a self-referential way. Your opposition is flamboyantly rainbow-colored, while you’re the boring gray guys.

Meanwhile, in response to the trite & feeble sloganeering of the CR, we’ve got…this awesome bit of over-the-top mockery.

The Gender Binary is an Imperialist Social Construct
Support Trans People of Color

Signed by Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future, one of our many progressive groups on campus.

Yes, it’s a real organization. It’s even been written up in the Daily Caller, which seems to be aghast.

“I’m looking to start a Satanist group at Morris to address the budding conservatism on this campus — which I find abhorrent,” student Reed Larsen explained in the email.

“I’m hoping the group will have a social justice platform and further such a platform through good ol’ devilish revelry,” Larsen also said.

Larsen has christened himself as “Vold Mother” of “Queer Devil Worshippers for a Better Future.”

For the group’s logo, Larsen chose a classic, circle-emblazoned satanic pentagram festooned with the rainbow colors of the gay pride flag.

Their response is interesting — it’s an attempt to minimize the influence of the campus conservatives who put up that NPC sign, and also tack up TPUSA crap everywhere.

The “budding conservatism” on the University of Minnesota, Morris campus consists of handful of groups — a gun group, a pro-life club — which boast perhaps two dozen members combined, a source who chose to remain unidentified told Campus Reform.

That’s a generous estimate. I don’t think they take into account that it is the same handful of people signing up for all the conservative clubs, so they may be counting some of them two or three times. Also note how they are cowering fearfully, afraid to be identified…not because there is a serious threat to them, but because someone with blue hair might laugh at them.

Have I ever told you how happy I am to be at this campus? Because I am. It’s a good place. If you’re applying to colleges right now, you should consider applying.

I recommend you choose the side that’s winning the meme war, though.

You evil bastards

The US government has been separating children from their parents at the border, and at this point they do not even know exactly how many children have been torn away from their families. HHS has admitted that the number “was certainly larger than the 2,737 listed by the government in court documents”, and that they’re going through over 47,000 case files to sort out the mess that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. It’s going so slowly that they’re about to throw up their hands and give up…so they’ve got a new rationalization.

The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.

Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.

It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children, White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.

Where was your fucking concern for the children when you snatched them from the arms of their mothers, you goddamned pompous bureaucrat? If you sincerely wanted to avoid traumatizing and destabilizing children, the place to start practicing what you should have learned as a social worker was in refusing to tear apart families in the first place. If separating children from their ‘sponsor’ homes would cause them emotional harm, you’ve just admitted that separating them from their natural families had to have been devastating.

These criminal fuckers need to be burned to the ground.

Surprise! A billionaire’s favorite graph is one that justifies billionaires!

Wow. This is a capitalist miracle: extreme poverty is rapidly declining!

Except…what is extreme poverty? What about regular poverty? Is there something we could call moderate poverty? And, errm, where do those numbers from the 1800s and 1500s come from? Why is the 19th century represented with such a smooth, gradual improvement when we know that the lives of so many were ruined and suffering by colonialism (where does Rhodesia fit into this graph) and slavery? Those are charts that raise more questions than they answer.

Jason Hickel tries to answer some of the questions. The early numbers are guesswork, molded into the desired form, and the economic data are a case of applying an invalid metric to messy human reality.

What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.

In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.

So money is a convenient proxy for real wealth, which is land and resources and labor, and using it as a metric conceals the fact that a few people have seized most of the real wealth, and masked their theft by doling out pittances to the displaced billions.

As if that isn’t enough, “extreme poverty” is an arbitrary parameter chosen to hide the ongoing grand larceny by people like Gates. It had to be set extremely low so that you wouldn’t see what’s actually been happening.

But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.

Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.

So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away.

You know, if Bill Gates set a Universal Basic Income of $3 a day, he could set “extreme poverty” in the US to zero. What a triumph! I’m trying to imagine what I could do on $3 a day. I know I could live cheaply on a diet of rice and beans for that, but, well, just my mortgage is 10 times that, and it was -36°C this morning. Forget about owning a car. Or having electricity. Or getting sick. Right now, on an income considerably greater than that, one debilitating illness could wipe me out.

Shorter Bill Gates: Relatively fewer people are dropping dead in the streets of starvation or cholera today, so therefore concentrating billions of dollars into my hands is good for everyone.

Reagan Redux

Donald Trump has been telling this story about souped-up cars driven by bad guys who run the border with women tied up (with blue tape!) in the trunk, and finding prayer rugs in the desert left by terrorists. It’s all a lie. He’s making shit up. Where did it come from?

…there’s a movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was released last summer, and which included a woman being tied up with tape, smugglers driving vast vehicles, and officials finding prayer rugs in the dirt near the border.

Again, just so we’re all clear, the movie is real, but the story is fictional. The script was written by screenwriters, not documentarians. The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.

As Rachel added, “In a normal administration, it would be insane to suggest” the president of the United States saw stuff in a movie and maybe thought it reflected reality. And who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence.

We’ve been here before with a president who can’t tell reality from fiction.

It was Reagan, you might remember, who told an annual meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about a World War II B-17 commander who elected to stay with a wounded crewman rather than bail out of his stricken plane. “He took the boy’s hand and said, ‘Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.’ Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded.”

Actually, Congressional Medal of Honor never awarded. There’s some dispute about where Reagan got the story. Some said it was from the 1944 movie “A Wing and a Prayer” while others cited a Reader’s Digest item. Whatever its source, Reagan’s account was not true.

We have a madman at the helm, and he’s forcing us to ride it down together.

Trump has to have been informed that his story is false. Next time he tells it, someone tackle him, put him in an ambulance, and take him to the nearest hospital for a thorough neurological examination.

I do enjoy a good Pinker-dunking in the morning

Did you know that Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is full of misleading claims and false assertions? It is! And this article takes an interesting approach to documenting it: the author focuses on one chapter, on a topic he knows well, and contacts a bunch of people Pinker references and asks them if he represented their views correctly. A surprising number say no, and explain why.

I am not a fan of neo-liberal techno-optimism, as you might guess. It’s always just some well-off dude trying to persuade people that we can ignore systemic injustice because he’s doing just fine.

Those wacky billionaires!

Michael Dell, the billionaire, was asked what he thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to increase the marginal tax rate to 70%. He didn’t like that at all. His reasoning was mostly skewered by a competent economist on the panel, who pointed out that the US had that rate for quite a long while during a period of strong growth.

But I was amused by another point. He claimed he donated more to his charitable foundation than the increased rate would take from him.

My wife and I set up a foundation about 20 years ago, and we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70 per cent tax rate on my annual income.

That seemed unlikely. So I had to look it up; my source is Forbes, which is going to be biased in favor of billionaires. I am aware that the 70% would be taken from his earnings for a year, and this number is apparently as a fraction of his lifetime earnings, so there’s a bit of apples/oranges comparison going on here, but as I suspected, he’s not giving away as much money as he implies.

I’m pretty sure 5% is a lot less than 70%.

Not covered in just the bare numbers is the way billionaires use philanthropy as a tax dodge, and to manipulate the target population in a way that benefits them personally. For that, I’m going to recommend this podcast, “The Neoliberal Optimism Industry”, which explains the game these arch-capitalists are playing.

We’re told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times’ Nick Kristof explained “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates’ favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by – who else? – Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media… bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it’s actually the opposite.

For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true – just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be “measuring” improvements in society?

On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything’s going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.

All those names really do have to be among the first lined up against the wall when the Revolution comes.