Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 07:08 on 16 March 2019
Exhibit A is the new consensus that a sitting president cannot be charged with crimes.
Exhibit B is how the Trump Regime deferred to Boeing, grounding the troubled 737 Max series of jets days after even third-world backwaters without precisely stellar records of aviation safety did.
Published at 18:49 on 13 March 2019
First, the Leave campaign cheated. They lied, and they peddled foreign influence. Cheaters in sports get stripped of any titles their cheating played a role in. Why shouldn’t cheaters in politics suffer a similar fate, particularly given how the consequences of their cheating can be vastly more severe?
Second, decisions shouldn’t always be irrevocable. We’ve all done things we regret, only to back out as best we can and admit we were wrong for making what hindsight showed to be a wrong decision in the first place. Sure, some decisions are intrinsically hard to undo, but why should that be used as an excuse for making all decisions artificially difficult to undo?
Hold another referendum. If it fails, try as hard as possible to shit-can the whole misadventure. In such a case, it’s likely the rest of the EU will go along with Britain’s wishes; the trade disruption caused by a Brexit would hurt the Continent, too.
Published at 10:18 on 11 March 2019
It’s been a hard winter. You can see it in the patches of the Himalayan Blackberries, which were pressed flat by the heavy snows of early February (and which lost their leaves thanks to overnight lows in the teens):
In wooded areas where native vegetation prevails, the sword ferns were also affected:
“Hard winter” is of course a relative term; anyone from Chicago or Denver would laugh at the notion that a winter where for the vast majority of time it was above freezing with green lawns and a snow-free ground was “hard.” But for us, it’s unusual to have a spring where there are lingering signs of the snow we had even after it’s gone. I’ve only seen it a few times in the quarter-century I’ve lived in this ecoregion.
Published at 10:12 on 8 March 2019
Some points:
Might this all end up proving that being a somewhat bickersome “big tent” party is in the Democrats’ best interest? Consider that the resolution that was brought up and passed was nobody’s first choice: The left wing of the Democratic Party didn’t want any criticism of any one of their own, and the right wing wanted something that only went after this particular instance of bigotry. In the process of bickering and squabbling the Democrats came up with… a political masterstroke that neither faction would have come up with on their own.
Published at 11:06 on 7 March 2019
First, If your blood pressure rose at the mere mention of the phrase “left-wing authoritarianism” in the title, then I suggest it’s time for you to calm down and give this article a read; it’s likely to be particularly important.
Second, this post references one I made about a month ago. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I suggest you read it first.
That earlier post concluded thus:
So there’s my answer. Like many answers, it begs a question: what can we do about it? I could now go on to answer that, but instead I think I’ll close and let the reader think about it for a while.
Such a conclusion carried an implicit promise of a follow-up at some time in the future. It is now time to get on with that follow-up.
The 20th century’s worst tyrants called themselves socialists. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all chose to label themselves in this way. And now that the 20th century has given way to the 21st, we have a tyranny (sorry, but if you look at the full picture of all the repression there, that’s the only thing it honestly can be called) in Venezuela that has also chosen to apply this label to itself.
Yes, in many cases, particularly that of Hitler, cogent arguments can be made that the self-proclaimed “socialist” tyrants lied when they made this claim: they failed to empower the working class, instead empowering states and parties that oppressed all unfortunate enough to be living under their misrule, workers included. Also, there are plenty of self-proclaimed “socialist” or “social-democratic” parties all over the world that have had collective centuries in power without instituting tyranny.
However, tyrants have still chosen the “socialist” label, and have done so over and over again. When something happens that repeatedly, it’s hard to shrug it all off as mere unlucky coincidence.
The answer, I think, is that “socialism” is a uniquely useful fig-leaf by which to attempt to disguise and legitimate tyranny. Socialism has generally been seen in a positive light by most people. Many Americans will doubt this, but most Americans have a highly-unrepresentative exposure to what socialism means; in most other nations, the history of the label has been nowhere near as consistently pejorative.
But it goes beyond that. Socialism not only has a generally positive connotation, it denotes an ideology which often claims:
Point No. 2 makes socialism an exceptionally useful mantle for dictators to claim, as they can then claim to be wanting increased state power not for the sake of themselves and their cronies, but to liberate society from capitalist oppression. Point No. 1 then comes in to distract the public from valuing liberty, since so much ideological attention is being paid to battling economic inequality.
And that, in a nutshell, is why left-wing authoritarianism has been such a recurring problem. The solution, then, is to reject the premises that have been proven to be such pitfalls, and to replace them with better premises.
The State is dangerous. All of the worst genocides of the 20th century were performed by State actors. All of them. The oft-repeated quote incorrectly attributed to George Washington has proven itself true time and time again:
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Classic liberals, particularly the followers and fellow travelers of organizations like today’s Libertarian Party, are of course being two-faced here: they are typically blind to the interplay of state and corporate power, and almost always blind to the oppressiveness of corporate power. That their present-day prescriptions for society would almost certainly prove oppressive is not, however, a refutation of the claim that State power is a dangerous thing. Both State and corporate power are dangerous. Which brings us to….
The State in fact helped to create capitalism, in the U.K. by passing Inclosure Acts that destroyed communal property, using State force to drive rural peoples off their land and into the new industrial slums the capitalist class was building. In the New World, States used imperialism and genocide (conducted by armies in their employ) to drive indigenous peoples from their lands and create “new” spaces for capitalist class society to expand into.
More importantly for opposing capitalism in the here-and-now, it is a false dichotomy to assert that government and capitalism are the only possible options. Capitalism has only been around for 350–400 years; the State for 5,000. Even 5,000 years is a distinct minority of the time of human existence, and living beings in general have been organizing themselves into ecosystems (on decentralized, hierarchy-free bases, with no leaders or ruling classes) for literally billions of years.
In fact, these leaderless structures have proven themselves to be vastly more long-lasting and stable than human-created hierarchical ones, which all tend to self-destruct due to ecological collapse within a few centuries or millennia.
There are better ways, ways that are neither capitalist nor state. Just pick health care: why should capitalists or government be the only answers? They don’t have to be!
In fact, economic inequality is best understood as a special case of a deficiency in individual liberty. Those born into poverty (through no choice of their own!) have less choice and opportunity in their lives than those born into affluence. Poverty violates the individual liberty of those born into it.
Capitalism is oppressive, not because under capitalism some workers’ state doesn’t own the means of production, but because the average capitalist firm is approximately as open a society as the average fascist state. In fact, the capitalist firm served as Mussolini’s model for his fascist state, which he called the corporate state. Don’t ensure that the state owns the means of production. Instead, ensure that the workers who work in them do.
Will recognizing the dangers of the state and promoting greater liberty as a core goal be a magic bullet that prevents a self-proclaimed “socialist” government from going rotten? Probably not: there are no such magic bullets. But it offers a hell of a better chance than the more typical recipe of attempting to promote economic equality via greater state power.
Published at 07:35 on 1 March 2019
Relations have never been good between the two, but they’ve recently degraded significantly. It started when India bombed Pakistan in retaliation for a terrorist attack that India claimed Pakistan was involved in.
At that point, any sane US administration would have scolded India in a way that made the Indian government worry about the future of its trade and other relations with the USA if they didn’t cool it. But of course, we don’t have a sane chief executive, we have an incompetent fascist who sees right-wing nationalists like India’s ruling BJP to be natural allies. So of course the fascist idiots came down squarely on India’s side.
Given how both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and given how this is the most serious conflict between the two since they nuclearized, this is positively frightening. Thankfully, Pakistan seems to be acting conciliatory in recent hours (they’ve unilaterally announced they will release the pilot of an Indian military plane they shot down), but this whole thing could still easily escalate out of control and precipitate a most horrifying outcome.
Published at 11:09 on 28 February 2019
Disclaimer: Nothing in the following entry should be construed as claiming the Democrats are equally as evil as the Republicans, and that therefore it does not matter who wins the 2020 election. Clearly, both stances are false. In the short term, there is significant value in unseating the Republicans from power as much as possible. However, it is also simultaneously true that the two sides have much in common, and this in and of itself both poses a threat and severely limits the ability of the system to self-correct using its own institutions (e.g. electoral politics).
One side wants to increase state power so they can use force to maintain the traditional white, male, capitalist hierarchy. The other side wants to increase state power so they can use government action to limit the worst abuses of capitalism, and in general to pursue a fool’s paradise of utopia via the crafting of the perfect set of regulations with which to (micro)manage everyone’s lives. The scenario recently posted here of a Democratic president using emergency powers to get what he or she wants (and the resultant precedent this would establish) is all-too-possible.
The two sides disagree strongly on how state power should be used, but they both agree that it should be not only used, but increased significantly. Any support for the Democrats must be given with eyes wide open and in full knowledge of this inconvenient fact. Both parties are enemies of liberty, and both should be seen as such.
Published at 19:22 on 27 February 2019
After his first bus was cancelled before it left Seattle (Greyhound lied and claimed I-5 was closed even though the ODOT TripCheck site clearly indicated it had reopened), and his second bus was cancelled in Portland (Greyhound lied again and claimed it was so they could drive through snow areas in daylight, even though in the present cold pattern the snow zones start in the southern Willamette Valley, where his new bus will be traveling in the predawn darkness), I think it’s safe to say Greyhound isn’t reliable either.
I rather suspect Greyhound is choosing to tell lies about the weather and road conditions so they can summarily cancel lightly-booked buses.
That said, it still beats Amtrak (which won’t be resuming travel in southern Oregon and northern California until Friday) in the reliability department
Published at 17:45 on 27 February 2019
In an article penned on the eve of Trump’s emergency declaration, conservative Trump critic Rick Wilson writes:
He’s also opening a door that Republicans will regret walking through if and when executive power changes hands: When future President Biden, President Castro, President Harris or President Warren can’t get push their agenda through Congress, they’ll be able to do an end-run on the Constitution, claim emergency powers and cite Trump’s precedent to justify it.
The rub is, it goes far beyond just Republicans living to regret this ugly thing, should it survive court challenges. Suppose the next Democrat acts precisely as Wilson fears. Then what? It won’t end there; far from it! The only constant in politics is change. A right-winger will get into the White House soon enough, and with this whole “the president can rule by decree via emergency powers” business by then established even more firmly by precedent.
What happens then? Most likely, something that makes Trump look like a harmless little fuzzball in comparison. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Both that, and the earlier issue with a Democrat running rampant with unrestrained executive power, make me somewhat hopeful that the Supremes will slap this thing down. The Court does have a conservative majority, but it is mostly conservatives that predate Trump (and Gorsuch has already shown himself willing to rule against the president that appointed him).
Published at 12:45 on 26 February 2019
Sorry, railfans. It’s just not. Certainly not in the wintertime between Oakland and Seattle.
I just saw off a visiting friend from the Bay Area. He’s taking the bus back home. To get here, he carpooled. He had planned to take Amtrak both ways, but both trains were cancelled due to heavy low-elevation snow bringing down trees on the tracks.
In Europe or Japan, that would simply not have happened. Those trees would have been recognized as threatening the tracks and dealt with (i.e. either logged or pruned) a long time ago. Just in case that failed, there would have been safety procedures in place that allowed them to be promptly cleared and the flow of rail traffic restored.
That’s not how things work in the USA. First, the trees were left to grow, unlogged and unpruned. Then when they came down, there were no procedures in place for dispatching emergency track crews to promptly clear the right-of-way. Even if there had been, there were no modern regulations in place that would have allowed rail traffic to resume promptly.
And really, why should there be either? Amtrak doesn’t own any track in the Western USA. It’s all owned by freight railroads, who specialize in low-priority bulk cargo. It doesn’t much matter if low-priority bulk cargo gets delayed by weather for a day or three. If it did, it wouldn’t be low-priority bulk cargo and it would be shipped by truck.
Truck shipping actually does cost a fair bit more than rail shipping. As, logically, it should: labor cost is much higher. A crew of two can man a freight train of a hundred cars of more. Each of these cars can carry more freight than a single truck (and each truck needs at least one driver). Rail’s labor costs are thus much lower, and that’s before bringing fuel costs (also lower for rail) into the picture.
So why do people ship by truck? Simple: speed and reliability. It’s worth paying a premium for shipments that arrive quicker and with more predictability. Rail is where the less-urgent shipments go, and those tend to be large quantities of low-value-per-unit-weight bulk commodities. The two freight modes have specialized themselves to cater to two separate market segments.
And it is freight modes, because the railroads themselves don’t transport passengers. They have delegated that money-losing business proposition to the nationalized Amtrak.
In Europe, the railroads themselves tend to be nationalized, and to have a public mandate to carry passengers. They control the tracks, and maintain them to significantly higher standards than the US freight railroads do. Passenger rail in Europe is therefore a viable, reliable transport option. Plus, Europe is smaller and more densely-populated than North America, making distances shorter (another factor that works in factor of rail there).
By contrast, in the USA, rail passengers are stuck with a skeletal network typically offering only once-daily service, on lines run by railroads that view renting rail space to Amtrak as at best a necessary evil and more typically as an archaism to be discouraged by being as uncooperative as possible.
Even the much-maligned Greyhound is more reliable than Amtrak. Why? It relies on the highway network, and the latter is publicly owned and does have a public mandate to open promptly and provide reliable service to both private motorists and to motor-freight companies.
The recent snowstorms have been exceptional, and did close I-5, too. The difference is that I-5 reopened within ten hours. The delays for buses, trucks, and private automobiles were much more manageable than the delays for trains.
So, while rail easily can be a reliable mode, in the USA, alas, it is all-too-often not.