You say you want a evolution, well, you know. We all want to change the world.
There can be no serious question that right-wing authoritarian structures like fascism and autocracy are on the rise around the world, even in places once thought to be resistant or impervious to them like the United States.
This isn’t merely happening within governments but also in the media, both news and entertainment.
There can be no serious question that the interests not only of human liberty but of human survival lie in resisting those structures with all our energy.
I need you to listen to me now:
The best way to fight fascism is, first and foremost, to simply not be a fascist.
To not be a fascist means doing the hard work of understanding that human thinking has been broken since day one, and it means understanding what we can do within ourselves and out in the world to fix it, as best we can with whatever resources and ability we may have.
Not being a fascist means being consistent and firm and honest within ourselves about how and what we think. It means being the voice in our own head that asks hard questions like “wait…that’s a little racist, isn’t it?” or “am I really being fair here?” and answers them honestly, even when we don’t like the honest answer.
Not being a fascist means resisting that urge to “go along” with microaggressions that aren’t targeted at you…or that may even benefit you.
It means not allowing yourself to fall into the trap of believing that your freedom lies in your ability to imitate those who enslave you by enslaving others, by declaring others less than (or greater than for that matter) by virtue of some ridiculous external characteristic like skin color, gender or gender identity, or sexuality.
It means not merely “class solidarity” or solidarity with some other identity group like our ethnic heritage, gender expression, or sexuality, but life solidarity: understanding that we are all nodes in an incomprehensible mesh of interacting interactions interacting with interactions ad infinitum, and fundamentally we *must* all work together, as best as we can understand how, to ensure that life exists and persists.
That IS the “meaning of life.” To create and propagate more life. It’s what we’re “here for,” one way or another, and as a much wiser man than I once wrote, “all things serve The Beam.” Sagan: “We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Hicks: “We are all one consciousness, experiencing itself subjectively…we are the imagination of ourselves.”
The grand procession of Life is all about keeping live alive and evolving so we can imagine ever more wonderful selves as we grow and evolve over time, always knowing that fundamentally there is no finish line to evolution. Either you keep evolving, or you go extinct. (Except you, mister horseshoe crab. Contrary bastard.)
It’s fairly ludicrous to suggest that in an effectively infinite universe, intelligent life only exists on this one backwater rock…but it’s also a non-zero possibility.
We may be IT. We and our companions here on this rock, could be the only developing intelligent life in the universe. I’d say it’s much more likely given the span of time that we’re not, but it’s possible – *someone* had to be first.
It is our duty to life, to do our best to keep life moving forward. That is what we’re here for, in whatever ways our individual lives present the possibility.
You know this, and we know this together, but we are steeped in literally *our entire history* of thinking differently. We’ve gone through all the things we’ve gone through from the caves and treetops through all manner of strife and abuse and thousands of years of struggle, and now we are here. This is the moment when humanity becomes Next. It’s happening around you, and to you, every minute.
Keep moving forward. We are breaking the chains of the past and writing the direction of the future all at once, and we owe it to ourselves, to all who came before us, and to all who will come after, to get it right as best we can.
Part of that process is eradicating fascism and the dark human tendencies that fuel it as completely and irrevocably as possible.
That starts with each one of us, in our own minds, every day.
In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.
We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.
I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?
Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“
Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.
You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up
They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)
The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.
What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.
The Eurozone
A Different Feather Of Fish
The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)
“Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.
The Guardrails
Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).
Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.
Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.
That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.
The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.
It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.
This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.
All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.
It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.
That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”
In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”
This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.
More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…
Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.
So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!
We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”
This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?
Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.
There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.
A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)
In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.
Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.
NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.
Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!
That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.
In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.
Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.
A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.
Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.
This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.
Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.
Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.
As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.
As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.
As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.
As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.
Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.
Some rolling observations I made while watching the Big Speech.
“Freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” We start off with a few bold statements praising Ukraine and sharply criticizing Russia. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause chaos.” Biden makes a good solid speech and case here, discussing work on alliances, sharing and analysis of intelligence data, and the deliberate choices to speak clearly about these things as they were happening.
It’s a good case made, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a time there’s been this clear, sharp, and immediate response from the international community to provocative events.
Talking about going after the oligarchs. Wish our leaders in the Democratic Party were as enthusiastic about mitigating the power of oligarchs here in the US.
Biden reinforces that they’re not moving US forces “to fight Russia in Ukraine,” right before listing off all the countries where US forces are being moved and readied for conflict the minute one of those borders is crossed by Russians fighting in Ukraine.
Announcement of release of some oil reserves, 60Mbbl total.
“Iranian” instead of “Ukrainian,” and someone shouted something. We’ll see how the right-wing punditry handles that in this new era of anti-Russian sentiment.
LOL boos from the right as Biden mentions “unlike the two trillion from the previous administration that went to the top one percent.”
Economics. Lots of slogans and so forth, will there be any kind of solid announcements for any kind of relief? Applause line for infrastructure plan. Hearing more details on how that money’s being spent specifically, all of which is cool or cool-ish at least.
Passing econ bill with sales pitch including promise from Intel to drop $100Bn on manufacturing growth. Lots of revitalizing manufacturing talk and so forth. I think it’s short-sighted to continue focusing on “creating jobs,” but most of the world isn’t on that page yet.
Inflation and price conversation, lots of nativism in this conversation, but it is what it is. “USA” chant like we’re at a wrestling match. Validating the economic plan. Reducing prescription drugs, arguments in favor of reducing prices, political rhetoric but not ineffective, shout out to the kid in the audience, lots of well-used crowd-pleasing techniques here. Proposes capping cost of insulin at $35 a month. Let medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. Next up cutting energy cost & climate change. Tax credit for weatherization. Hints of subsidies for EVs and similar tech, but no specifics. Cutting child care costs, which is very popular and not a bad thing, but it’s not an issue super close to me as a single adult.
Not hearing anything to strongly disagree with here or be terribly cynical about so far, other than continued bleating about “back to work” and “continued economic growth.”
Discussions of fixing tax code and so forth, as well as a shot about confirming his fed nominations.
Watchdogs are back, the Justice Department “will soon be naming a chief investigator for pandemic fraud.”
“I’m a capitalist.” I’m not impressed, but that’s the frame we’re in. He’s not wrong about anything so far, staying within that framework.
Lots of pitching for some leftist favorite ideas, and some discussion of Covid impact.
Eh. Fund the police. Blugh. They’ve got funding; we need funding for everything else that feeds in to criminality.
Right to vote. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the DISCLOSE act, etc. All good things, nothing particularly new here though.
Shoutout to Justice Stephen Breyer, which naturally goes to a pitch for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Border security and immigration reform, some idiot – probably Boebert or Greene – trying to get a “built that wall” chant going that died quickly. More generally well-known talking points on that issue.
“Preserve a woman’s right to choose,” Equality Act and addressing the LGBTQ+ population with supportive statements that appear to be aimed not so subtly at some state-level oppression that’s been happening there.
“Unity agenda”
beat opioid epidemic, including the usual details
mental health, particular for kids
“hold social media companies accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
support veterans
end cancer as we know it
This section of the whole thing seemed pretty cookie-cutter and not holding any gigantic announcements or headlines, but also nothing terribly objectionable or obnoxious.
Ah, here we go, ARPA-H, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. I like this.
“The state of the union is strong because you the American people are strong. This is our moment to overcome the challenges of our time, and we will.”
Overall a solid performance, nothing to give progressives any huge enthusiasm, but some support for those priorities with a much heavier dose of status-quo dogwhistling…which isn’t unexpected. As a speech I’ll give it a B+. As a matter of hearing what I wanted to from a standpoint of advancing progressive priorities, C+.
Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.
BREAKING: Nazi Texas Governor Greg Abbot Orders State Agency To Kidnap Trans Children From Parents, Force Misgendering, Corrective Medical Procedures Outlawed.
First, They’re Coming For The Trans Kids
Image of original letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, ordering state child welfare agencies to prosecute parents and physicians of any trans kids who are actively attempting transition for abuse.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott yesterday ordered the state child welfare agency to immediately begin investigating and prosecuting any parent or doctor of a trans minor who has taken any transitional steps e.g. hormone therapy.
In the letter, Abbott notes that “it is already against the law to subject Texas children to…elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”
He goes on to remind people of what “mandated reporter” means, thus making clear without stating it outright that as of now every single doctor, teacher, psychologist, or whomever else in Texas is aware of a child transitioning and does not immediately turn in the parents for abuse investigation, will themselves be sanctioned with the possibilities including loss of license and jail time.
Of course there are already plenty of state hotline numbers to call in “anonymous tips” and so forth.
This not only flies in the face of medical science and psychology and human rights and every other decent thing, it is a textbook execution of Nazi policies of identifying and scapegoating already-targeted social outgroups in order to encourage the more venal, ignorant, evil, and insane among the population to become even more aggressive and violent toward the scapegoats, and hiding behind the cover of abused authority in the form of oppressive, targeted regulation and cooperative lickspittles and lapdogs in the constabulary and judiciary.
Houston, We Have A Problem
There is simply no valid reasoning that supports the ongoing delusion we don’t have a fascism problem. A *Nazi* problem. This absolutely can not stand, not even for a day. Every activist in Texas needs to focus on ending this immediately and making damned sure nobody can try it again.
Greg Abbott is a Nazi. Not a Nazi-like thing, not an almost Nazi, not a wannabe Nazi. Everyone involved in making this possible is a Nazi.
The entire system and set of values and regulations described in his order are Nazism. It’s a whole good old boys’ system where anyone with a grudge can destroy lives under the auspices of obeying the law, and where even attempting to do the right thing is a criminal act. No different than encouraging schoolchildren to report parental disloyalty to the Nazis, or the USSR, or Big brother.
It’s meta-coercion, an entire new layer of abused power and oppression. Abbott and his fellow Nazis are sending the message loudly and clearly that not only will there be no tolerance for non-binary sexuality and identity in Texas, there will be no tolerance for any attempt to change that odious condition. If you’re a parent accused of abuse, your parental rights can be terminated and you may never get them back. Your kid will be shuttled into the foster system – or worse the shadow foster system – and subject to whatever “treatment” the state deems necessary to force them into “normality.”
In their confidence that a majority of Texans will support this behavior, the Nazis are sending the message that if you are trans, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are the parent of a trans child, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are a physician or psychologist treating a trans or intersex minor in any way the state of Texas concludes to be an attempt to help a patient physically transition, or if you even hear about it and fail to tell the authorities, you are defenseless and a criminal and legally forbidden to practice your profession.
When an abuse charge is levied, this immediately puts the option on the table of taking the kids out of their homes and putting them in foster care or some sort of state-mandated “correction” program like gay conversion therapy, as if electroshock and bullying and trauma are going to make these kids not who they are. The mere presence of this option in this instance is ludicrous, evil, and outrageous.
There is only one word for any of this.
Yes, Nazi.
You may now end your internal dialogue; this is what Nazism looks like
This is where that whole difficult discussion comes from about whether antisemitism is required for Nazism. (This discussion is largely made difficult by shallow, slow thinkers who can’t tell the difference between noting Nazism isn’t ONLY antisemitic, and claiming it’s not so at all.)
Antisemitism was waiting for a Hitler to show up and exploit it.
Racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia have been waiting for a Trump to show up and exploit it – or more to the point, waiting for a Trump to show up who’s so mendacious and narcissistic any one of several dozen fascists and Nazis and autocrats can control him easily with threat or bribery.
It’s the same Nazism, folks, it’s just different targets. The targets now are the ones you see scaring bigots in the news – trans people, especially kids; the LGBTQIA+; the educated; the compassionate; black people who insist their lives matter; people who get angry when police keep murdering the innocent and getting away with it; the increasingly desperate, hostile, and populous ranks of the poor; and as always the anti-fascists who would stand in defense of all of those targets and indeed take the offense against fascist or Nazi or other autocratic/totalitarian power grab.
This is openly flaunted fascism, totalitarian autocracy that’s not merely autocratic and totalitarian but smug, laughing in your face as if to say “look how many stupid evil people there are, that we could so easily con them into giving us power, and you think you can stand against us? Please.”
They think we’re going to sit back and let this happen. The whole point of this is to terrorize us into sitting back and letting this happen.
Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Not.
What To Do About It
Due to my public profile it would be foolish of me to make any specific recommendations for direct action. If I said “it’s time to hit the streets,” one of the Nazis would find a way to make something bad happen on the streets and then hold me responsible. So I can’t tell you that you should be marching or protesting 24/7 in front of the Governor’s mansion or what have you.
I can say that whatever you choose to do, be careful. Consider your actions to avoid setting yourselves up to get hurt or have someone else’s crimes blamed on you.
But stand. Now. Activate your networks, be smart, work together, get on the phones, get on the TV stations, get on social media and END THIS, immediately. The ACLU / ACLU of Texas should already be in court.
Aside from covering my own backside legally, as a tactical matter I don’t advise creating a situation that could be exploited by inauthentic actors, for instance a large raucous march on the Capital. We have learned time and time again that this is most often the outcome the fascists and Nazis of the world hope for because it gives them cover to be even more violent, to actually hurt and kill people and imprison them under false pretenses and seize their assets and destroy their lives.
We have learned time and again that any time the Nazis and fascists – be they calling themselves the “Patriot Front” or the “Proud Boys” or the “Oathkeepers” or “Prayer Warriors” (a common phrase in evangelical and charismatic Christian sects that has been co-opted by white supremacists other fascist types because it’s about impossible to tell at a glance whether you’re looking at “prayer warriors” or “Prayer Warriors”) or whatever – believe they have a decent shot of getting away with it during antifascist demonstrations, they will absolutely murder, and their traitorous minions and lapdogs in law enforcement and the judiciary will do everything possible to facilitate oppression. One need look no further than Kyle Rittenhouse to validate that the American legal system has fully established a pathway to the open murder of antifascists during street protests.
Fortunately for the sane and decent among us, there are other tools in the box. Not every legislator and judge supports this and those who don’t need to know we’re behind them. The ACLU and other civic groups have active chapters in Texas who should already be activated on this. If you are a Texas citizen you have local legislators you can contact. This list gives you the phone contact information for every state representative. This one has your state senators. Some of them also include e-mail contact, but this is definitely more of a phone call situation anyway.
You may consider saying something like “The oppression and targeting of trans children and their families is not just scientifically and morally wrong and a direct assault on the fundamental rights of humanity which are the basis of our democracy. This order is an unquestionable attempt to employ tactics of persecution, and terrorism intended not only to oppress trans people but to intimidate their allies into silence and criminalize those allies who are medical, psychological, or psychiatric professionals, as well as the parents and other family and friends of trans minors in transition. The people of Texas will not stand for this, nor will we support anyone who does, regardless of party.”
You may consider reaching out to companies in the state encouraging them to do business in a less fascist environment, but don’t expect a great response there; fascism and Nazism are great for business. Maybe an approach like refusing to participate in SXSW would be useful; maybe it would be more effective to triple the size; that’s not my decision to make, but certainly activists and citizens in Texas should be having these conversations right now.
We’re not in the 80’s and 90’s anymore, when we should have been taking all of this kind of behavior more seriously and putting a stop to it before it got out of hand. We can’t keep pretending that if we just ignore it, it’ll go away. We can’t keep pretending that as long as it’s not us personally being persecuted, that this hasn’t gotten out of hand. We did that for decades.
Now it’s out of hand, and the good people of Texas are going to have to figure out how to get their state back from the Nazis when it appears half the voters in the state, at least, don’t want the Nazis to go away because they are Nazis.
It’s not up to me to tell y’all what to do…but you damned sure better do something, fast.
Because even if you’re not trans yourself, nor a parent of a trans person, or even know a trans person, two things are certain: that trans people are human beings, and that if these human beings can be treated this way, so can you.
While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.
When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.
As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:
The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook
I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.
What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”
That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.
This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.
But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.
This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…
The Game
The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.
The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.
We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.
More Of The Same
Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.
You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.
Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.
We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.
We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.
Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”
Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.
That has to end.
The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.
That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.
But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.
Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.
In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.
Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.
(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)
By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.
So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.
The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.
