On Exaggerating the Consequences

Published at 09:09 on 30 April 2022

My last post mentioned in passing exaggerating the economic consequences of the pandemic.

I suppose I can take solace in how I am hardly alone in doing so. In particular, most central bankers did precisely the same thing, which motivated them to take actions to aggressively promote inflation and stimulate economic growth. We are now starting to pay the price (literally) of those inflationary policies.

In defense of the banksters, it is actually a logical choice to err on the side of avoiding a deflationary spiral. This is because the deflationary cycle is much harder to rein in than the inflationary one. During a period of deflation, one can profit simply by stuffing a mattress with cash, since falling prices mean that cash will become more valuable over time.

During a period of inflation, by contrast, it is best to be cash-poor and invested in physical assets. Central bankers can counter this trend by raising interest rates to the point where high compound interest more than cancels out how money is declining in value over time. Note that countering a deflationary cycle via adjusting interest paid (or in this case, charged) to savers is not possible, as it would imply negative interest rates, and if there are negative rates, one can easily beat them with a mattress stuffed with cash (0% interest).

(And no, it tends not to be literal mattresses stashed with literal cash. Safe deposit boxes full of bundles of C-notes are much more common.)

Central bankers know all of this, therefore their goal is never to stomp out inflation completely, as this is just too dangerous. (Remember, they will sometimes guess wrong, because economic forecasting is never 100% accurate.) Rather, the goal is to shoot for a low but not zero rate of inflation, a rate of inflation with enough of a safety margin to make triggering deflation extremely unlikely.

During the pandemic this was all complicated even more by being in something of unprecedented economic circumstances, and deflation did in fact start rearing its head in the early months. Seeing the danger in that, it is really no surprise the central bankers floored the economic accelerator pedal. It turns out they guessed wrong (also not a surprise, given the lack of precedent), so now we have an inflationary spiral.

But as bad as that is, it still beats the pants off an out-of-control deflationary spiral. Keep that in mind when you hear the righties moaning about big government, central bankers, fiat currencies, and (the lack of) gold standards.

More on the Twitter Sale

Published at 19:44 on 25 April 2022

Liberals Need to Calm the Fuck Down

Musk is not a fascist. He’s a boorish, emotionally immature capitalist. His political views don’t neatly fit into the political spectrum, largely because they are not particularly well thought-out. It’s not good that Trump and some other big fascists are about to get their platforms back, but it’s also not as if Twitter got sold to Peter Thiel, who is planning to appoint Steve Bannon as CEO.

As I Said, Expect Chaos

Musk doesn’t fully know what he’s going to do, other than he doesn’t like the “censorship” that Twitter has engaged in. Well, guess what? Terms of service are there for a reason. If Musk wants to basically scrap all terms of service, all editorial discretion, Twitter will promptly start turning into the sort of sewer that 4chan and the likes have long been.

At that point, the exodus (a real exodus, not just a few liberal drama queens crying about taking their toys and going home) begins. Also at that point, Twitter’s value (being the market leader in short-message social networking) starts rapidly evaporating into thin air.

As soon as that happens, expect the concept of terms of service to rapidly (and, to reiterate, chaotically) be un-scrapped. Musk is a capitalist. As such, he worships first and foremost at the altar of Mammon. Any development that promises to take most of his investment’s value away from him will prompt an immediate recalculation.

That is, of course, the most dramatic scenario. More than likely, it will be less dramatic than that.

Yes, Ukraine Sank the Moskva

Published at 10:41 on 15 April 2022

No, I am not just blindly taking Ukraine’s assertion on it:

  1. The Russian claim that a fire broke out and it had to be abandoned just doesn’t make much sense. Nobody just abandons a ship, particularly a prize asset like the Moskva, because a fire breaks out. They try and fight the fire. If they couldn’t, this points to crew incompetence that is even more embarrassing than a missile strike.
  2. The Russians don’t even believe their own claim. Just look at this anthology of how the Russian state media is screeching in outrage at Ukraine over the sinking. Why all the outrage at Ukraine if Ukraine had nothing to do with it?
  3. The US Department of Defense has concluded, based on the available intelligence, that Ukranian missiles were responsible for the sinking.

Simply all of the best available evidence is pointing to it being a successful Ukrainian attack.

And it is a major loss for Russia. The Moskva was the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. This is the largest deliberate sinking of a ship since World War II. Large ships are not built overnight; it will take many years to complete constructing a replacement. In the meantime, Russia is not able to move a replacement into the theatre of combat from one of their other fleets because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to Russian warships.

Still an Anarchist

Published at 02:10 on 15 April 2022

And this most recent post basically says it all as to why.

This is totally a crisis of bourgeois politics. The radical left is a tiny and insignificant part of US politics. One bourgeois party went fascist, largely because fascism is compatible with, and is in fact a natural outgrowth of, the authoritarianism of the capitalist corporation. The other bourgeois party failed to do much of significance to oppose the fascists, because doing little of consequence (while soaking up political energy that might do more of it) is the political niche that party evolved to fill.

When the authoritarian transition completes, the USA will hardly be the first capitalist society to have gone fascist. The fascist form is merely one of capitalism’s natural forms. To be shocked at it all is to be shocked that some deserts contain cacti.

Really now, just what does one think the natural consequence of an authoritarian economic system, one contrary to the material interests of the vast majority, might be in an otherwise open and free society? That freedom is obviously a danger to capitalism, because freedom implies the freedom to pursue alternatives to capitalism.

The way to deal with that, without just throwing freedom away right off the bat, is to somehow create a culture of lies and indoctrination so as to snow the majority, or alternately to nurture anti-freedom attitudes in that majority (so that they perceive themselves to be better off if there are bosses in their midst). And once one does that, political freedom is always at risk because of the beliefs that make economic domination safe; it only takes a relatively modest additional amount of propagandizing to get to the point where full fascism becomes politically feasible.

I worked the above out decades ago, and when I worked it out, was the moment I consistently began self-identifying as an anarchist, because I knew that, if allowed to stand, bourgeois society would inevitably bring us to basically just the sort of place that it has now brought us. Unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons, the movement that I was part of failed in its historic task (at least for now).

And here, as they say, we are.

That I will, and have, when the time came, made alliance with those who are pro-capitalist but anti-fascist, does not mean I have ceased to believe any of the above.

U.S. Democracy Still at DEFCON-4

Published at 07:11 on 13 April 2022

The January 6th Committee says it has evidence that Trump willingly and knowingly broke the law during his presidency. Not only did he do that, but his lawbreaking fundamentally threatened the constitutional order, being geared towards unlawfully remaining in office after losing an election.

The January 6th Committee is also unsure about what to do next.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The political culture in the USA is so degraded that a president can directly conspire against the constitution and it still probably will not be enough to indict him.

Spare me any sanctimony about a rule of laws and not of men. In the USA, a President is god and can do whatever the hell he wants.

Don’t celebrate about the backlash against Russia being a backlash against authoritarianism. When the fascists prevail in the USA — as seems likely — democratic retreat will really shift into high gear worldwide.

I would like very much for the Committee and the Department of so-called “Justice” to prove me wrong on this, but I don’t expect it.

Putin Tries to Pivot

Published at 06:55 on 7 April 2022

With Russia conceding defeat in many battles (and make no mistake, this is precisely what they are doing), Putin’s announced intent is to concentrate on trying to whittle off the Donbas and Luhansk regions.

Now, something like this is what I originally expected Putin to do, and I originally expected Putin to succeed in doing it. That, however, was then. This is now:

  • Then, Putin would have been coming in with fresh troops, at full strength. Now, he is working with troop and materiel depleted by over a month of battles, battles that went rather worse for him than he believed they would.
  • Then, Russia was not sanctioned and isolated. Now, Russia is.
  • Then, troop morale had not been battered by over a month of combat and unexpected resistance. Now, it has.
  • Then, Ukraine had not been armed to the teeth by massive amounts of Western aid in the way that it now has.
  • Then, morale on the Ukrainian side was one of fear and trepidation. Now, there is rather more optimism, optimism borne of the reality of being able to fight back surprisingly effectively against Russia.

The trouble for Putin is: you can’t undo the past. What has been done has been done, and it makes the job of whittling off Donbas and Luhansk significantly harder than it would have been had that been the original war goal.

Whiny Canadian Conservatives

Published at 17:17 on 31 March 2022

Much whining is made from Conservatives about how unfair the world is, because the Liberals got less votes than them, but still got to form a government. And now the NDP has agreed to enter into a confidence and supply agreement, maintaining the status quo for another three years. Doubly unfair!

Not quite. First off, let us review the results (via Wikipedia) of the most recent Federal election (only last year):

Party% VoteSeats% SeatsCoefficient
Liberal32.6215746.441.42
Conservative33.7412135.791.06
Bloc Québécois7.64329.461.23
New Democratic17.82257.390.41
Green2.3320.590.25
People’s4.9400.000.00

(More about that mysterious “coefficient” column later; it’s important! But I digress.)

Anyhow, pay attention to the two parties that just entered into that supposedly “unfair” agreement: collectively, they got 50.44% of the vote. Barely a majority, but a majority nonetheless. Suddenly, this agreement is looking a lot less unfair. But wait, there’s more: the Greens are also a left-of-centre party, and the Bloc advocates a social-democratic flavor of Quebec nationalism. Add those votes and we are now up to 60.41% voting for centre-left politics of some sort.

But you would never realize that, given how much the Conservatives whine about how life is so unfair, because they got more votes than the Liberals did, yet don’t get to form a government. Now, they do have a little bit of a point; the Liberals are arguably over-represented. This is where my coefficient comes in; it is the ratio of the percentage of seats in the House of Commons to the percentage of the overall popular vote. A number greater than 1 indicates a party is over-represented, and a figure less than one indicates it is under-represented.

No party has a coefficient as high as the Liberals’ 1.42, so they are over-represented, no doubt about it. But the Conservatives are at 1.06, just about parity. If you want to see who’s getting the shaft, look at the NDP. A fair system would mean 60 NDP MP’s; instead, there are only 25. No other party falls so short in absolute numbers of seats, though the Greens and particularly the People’s Party fare worse percentage-wise.

There are definitely criticisms to be made about first-past-the-post, but to insinuate that it is undemocratically giving Canada a centre-left government is not one of them. A completely fair allocation of Commons seats, in line with popular vote percentages, would achieve the same basic outcome.

On Siding with NATO

Published at 07:41 on 29 March 2022

There is a subset of the Left — probably not a majority, but definitely more than just a few people — that is very “both sides” about the war in Ukraine, refusing to see either side as being worthy of support. “Why are you siding with the US empire,” they ask.

My answer is: for the exact same reason I “sided with the Soviet empire” on the issue of East Timor in the 1980’s, when I first became aware of it: because that side was on the morally right side of that issue, defending a weaker nation that had been brutally invaded by a stronger one. The US Empire was strongly backing the invading nation, Indonesia, and the Soviet one was aiding the mostly leftist rebels fighting the invaders.

Just because both empires are seriously morally compromised does not mean that every last position either one takes on any issue taints that side of the issue beyond hope. That is not political strategy, that is oppositional defiant disorder. It is possible for a morally compromised empire — and all empires are evil — to nonetheless take a stand on a particular issue that is the morally correct one.

As morally compromised as the entire first Cold War was, it was also the case that the nations of Western Europe were much better places for human freedom than the nations of Eastern Europe. If you can’t acknowledge that plain fact, then you are simply not paying attention.

Once one got outside Europe, of course, the picture quickly got a lot murkier. The USA and its allies often supported brutal and kleptocratic colonial (and post-colonial neoimperialist) power structures. The USSR and its allies often opposed these same power structures (pity that the ones they set in place were seldom any better).

That the First World media generally ignores happenings in the Second and Third Worlds worked to the advantage of the US Empire, because, to reiterate, in Europe, the confrontation was also distinctly one between a world with more freedom and a world with less.

What this all calls for is nuance over simplicity. It is possible to acknowledge that what the West is doing in response to the invasion of Ukraine is generally what should be done, without going to the level of then concluding that anything the West does anywhere must be supported.

Why Biden Shouldn’t Have Said That

Published at 07:57 on 27 March 2022

Basically, because although NATO is on paper a multilateral organization, the USA is clearly and by far its most powerful and influential member, and therefore its de facto leader. Thus, any remarks of such character by a U.S. president help make Russia’s case that this whole thing is about a confrontation between NATO and Russia.

Since NATO is clearly more powerful than Russia and its allies, that, in turn, helps Putin reframe the narrative from one in which Russia is the aggressor to one in which Russia is being threatened by a yet more powerful alliance bent on ganging up against it. And the more Putin can do that, the more secure his position becomes.

Biden said what is obviously true: both Russia and the world as a whole would be better off without a fascist like Putin in charge. But by the very fact of saying it, he made that goal more difficult to achieve.

To reiterate: with great power comes great responsibility.

Biden Shouldn’t Have Said That

Published at 17:36 on 26 March 2022

“For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.”

As much as I agree with the sentiment, the President of the United States has no business saying such things.

I can say such things… and get away with them. Biden cannot. I am just some random guy with a blog. Biden is President of the United States. As the old saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility.