Religious Bigotry on the Left

Published at 08:23 on 20 September 2018

This makes for a depressing read, and not being a Pagan, I’m not even in the target audience for the publication that ran it.

Religious claims are not scientific claims. As such, it is not possible to prove or disprove them according to any sort of scientifically rigorous standards. Furthermore, the majority of people have some sort of religious or at least spiritual beliefs.

Put those two factors together and you can pretty quickly take away some conclusions:

  1. If you’re hostile to any sort of religious belief, congratulations: you’ve automatically written off the majority of potential supporters for your cause.
  2. What should matter (really, the only thing that can matter for purposes of logic-based inquiry and debate) is an individual’s position and actions in the realm of real-world, non-spiritual, things that are provable via something approaching scientific inquiry.

If someone supports a freer, more egalitarian world, it should not matter whether they share your spiritual beliefs or lack thereof. Such beliefs should be basically irrelevant for purposes of forming broad-based coalitions. (Your beliefs are doubtless very important to you, but that in no way means others must share them.)

Assuming that just because someone is religious therefore they share all the very worst characteristics of any religious person is as bad as assuming that just because someone identifies as a socialist or a communist (or atheist) that s/he wants to do exactly the sort of stuff that Stalin and Pol Pot did.

Will Kavanaugh Get Borked?

Published at 08:14 on 19 September 2018

If Ford refuses to appear, Kavanaugh gets approved. Just consider the basic facts in such a scenario:

  • It’s about an alleged incident that happened over thirty years ago, when the nominee was in high school.
  • There’s only a single allegation.
  • The one making the allegation is unwilling to testify under oath about it.

Furthermore, this is today’s GOP we’re talking about. There’s very little that’s too low for them. But revisit the above list: even if that wasn’t the case, we’d still be talking about a single allegation over something that happened decades ago in high school.

Even if Ford appears and puts forth a highly credible testimony, it’s at worst a crap shoot, because the GOP’s standards are so low: it would be entirely in their character to send a rapist to the Supreme Court if said rapist seems likely to legislate from the bench in ways they approve.

Even if Kavanaugh gets approved, this is not necessarily over. Suppose he gets approved. Suppose also that Ford refuses to testify. Note that Kavanaugh has said he will testify about the alleged incident regardless. Now suppose also other allegations, later in life and highly credible, surface. Suppose one of them results in a criminal conviction. Now we have a criminal sitting on the Supreme Court who lied about his past crimes in order to get there. We’re talking about impeachment material here.

Even if no other allegations surface and it becomes increasingly clear that Kavanaugh lied to the Senate under oath to secure his approval, we’re still talking about impeachment material. Perjury is a crime.

Therefore, it may literally be years before this thing fully plays out.

Mystery Solved

Published at 13:35 on 16 September 2018

Up until the details broke today, some pieces of the puzzle that was the sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh simply didn’t fit.

Namely, why was the story broken only recently, and by Sen. Feinstein of all people? Ms. Feinstein is not an über-liberal partisan; quite the contrary, she numbers amongst the centrists that constitute the right wing of the Democratic Party. She is simply not the sort of person to deliberately sit on a story, then release an incomplete version of it as a calculated liberal political maneuver. The claims of many conservatives and Trumpists that it was the latter just didn’t make sense.

Now we know: Feinstein only released the story under duress, after it had been leaked by The Medium. And Feinstein’s claim about the source of the allegation was indeed correct: Christine Ford did not want the publicity of having her name exposed in that way, and Feinstein was honoring her preference.

B.S. from Blair

Published at 11:27 on 15 September 2018

Really, why would anyone take Tony Blair seriously? Absent any serious, honest process of re-evaluation and self-criticism on Blair’s part, that is (and there has been none).

First, Blair’s arguments are unhinged and all over the place. He asserts that for those of us in the USA: “You have a resiliency in your institutions that will pull you through.” Other than a generic mention of “checks and balances,” no specific examples of those resiliencies are offered. Instead, Blair changes the subject to the economy. Well, sorry, the economy isn’t really a political institution, and just because it’s doing well today doesn’t mean it always will (remember the crash of 2008). In fact, the public debt is exploding in the USA, and the very limited measures passed in the wake of the last crash are being undone. The road to another crash has been well-paved, and when it happens the government won’t have the fiscal breathing space to deal with it.

Then Blair starts wringing his hands about populism. When elites are puzzled by the appeal of populism, they need to take a good long look in the mirror. Despite all his lies on particular issues, in a very important meta-narrative Trump was more honest than any other 2016 candidate save Bernie Sanders. The system is rigged against the many, and has been for a long time. Ever since the 1970’s, inequality has increased. People are not nuts for perceiving they are being left behind. That goes particularly for those who have been the big losers in international trade deals, because the pain has been disproportionately doled out to them.

It goes beyond mere economics, too. Blair’s signing onto the Iraq War is a textbook example of that: being a moderate, he assumed that the right just had to be correct about things a certain proportion of the time, and one of those times was Iraq. If Cliff Mass claims 2 + 2 = 4.5, then Tony Blair was claiming that in the case of Iraq 2 + 2 = 5, because he had asserted the answer was uncomfortably close to 4 enough times in the past that it was time to up his running average.

Trump’s fascist faux-populism (it’s not really in the interests of the masses, nor does it even have majority popular support) is definitely not the answer. Thomas Frank is correct: the problem is not populism, but elitism. The nominally “left” parties in most democracies have been badly infested with it (and Blarite politics is an instance of this). Populism, an honest left-wing populism based on factual criticisms of power, privilege, inequality, and injustice, is not the disease: it is the cure.

How Wrong Can a Liberal Be?

Published at 19:13 on 14 September 2018

This article is a textbook example of just how wrong a liberal can be.

The Economist is not a leftist publication. It’s politically centrist to libertarian in outlook. That anyone could just lump that publication in with actual leftist fora and publications underscores how uninformed Zakaria’s attempt at criticism actually is. What is being claimed about The Economist is not a critique; it is a baseless tantrum, nothing more.

Bannon is not a conservative. He’s a fascist. Fascism is not conservatism, even though (to conservatism’s lasting discredit) conservatives have time and time again made the error of thinking they can enter into mutually beneficial alliances with fascists. Some conservatives know better; is, say, Rick Wilson now a “leftist” because he cheers when Bannon and his ilk get deplatformed?

Fascists don’t really want to debate. They say that’s what they want, but Rule No. 1 about fascists is that they lie… a lot. Fascists want to project strength and growing numbers, and to intimidate. The best way to battle someone who wants to look strong is to make them look weak. Mock them, marginalize them, harass them, deny them platforms, make them run whining to the state and the cops begging for protection like the pathetic weaklings they can be made into.

It is possible to believe both in deplatforming fascists and in allowing conservatives to freely debate. Of course it is, because conservatives are not fascists. See the previous paragraph. Unlike fascists, conservatives generally do want to engage in debate in an open society. I, for one, think it’s a huge mistake to drive the likes of Condoleezza Rice off campuses. Let her debate, then rip her ghoulish and dishonest premises to shreds in the Q&A session afterwards.

It all comes down to the paradox of tolerance. This is something that Hannah Arendt, a Jew and a Holocaust refugee, came up with as a result of bitter experience with Fascism v1.0. In order for a tolerant, open society to persist long-term, it must paradoxically be intolerant of intolerance itself. And Arendt was hardly a fan of left-wing authoritarianism: she was a political centrist who fiercely opposed Stalinism.

How wrong can a liberal be? When begging that fascists be given respect: very, very wrong indeed.

A Tale of Two Atrocities

Published at 08:18 on 11 September 2018

Seventeen years ago this morning, the BBC hadn’t completely abandoned shortwave for Internet audio streaming. I had a newly-purchased Lowe HF-150 (still in my possession) struggling against the interference to receive the BBC World Service on 12095 kHz, as I usually did in mornings, to listen to their hourly world news broadcast.

But something was different that day. For some reason, the BBC was airing a drama rehashing the terrorist attacks, using truck bombs in the parking garage, against the World Trade Center in 1993. Or so I first thought, until I heard them start talking about airplanes. It was then that I realized that a new and far worse attack was underway. Shortly thereafter I heard the voice announcing through the radio noise that one of the towers has just collapsed.

It felt like I had been teleported into the plot of some sort of tacky Hollywood disaster movie, just too surreal. I headed in to work. When I got there, the conference room TV had been hooked up to a rabbit ears antenna and tuned to one of the local broadcast stations, which was replaying scenes of the attack and building collapses (plural by then).

Most in the First World, particularly most Americans, can tell similar stories of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.

But what about most Iraqis? Do they remember when their nation was first attacked? Or do they remember date of the first attacks on their cities and villages more? Or maybe the dates when their friends and relatives perished in the resulting orgy of violence sticks more in their minds?

Iraq was attacked by the USA in “retaliation” for the 9/11 attacks despite that nation clearly having absolutely nothing to do with those attacks.

The Wikipedia article on the toll of that war has a variety of estimates, ranging as low as 110,600 to as high as 1.2 million. Let’s throw out the highest numbers as outliers and use 200,000 as a very conservative weighted estimate. That’s still two orders of magnitude worse than the toll of roughly 3,000 for 9/11 in the USA, and that difference has not been adjusted relative to the populations of the two countries.

Do that arithmetic, and if what Al Qaeda did to the USA was as bad as what the USA did to Iraq, over 2.3 million Americans would have perished on 9/11/2001. Maybe we should ponder that a bit more, instead of simply dwelling in our “they hit us once, oh boo hoo hoo, we’re so picked on” rhetoric.

First-world superpowers ultimately can’t do much to choose, manage, and control the means used by the desperate (and badly misled and infected by retrograde beliefs) individuals that oppose them. They can much better influence the means they inflict on other peoples (and the retrograde beliefs within their own borders that enable such means).

So Many Words

Published at 17:49 on 10 September 2018

So many words from John Bolton today. Why didn’t he just say “Israeli apartheid today, apartheid tomorrow, apartheid forever” and leave it at that? Would have been a lot more concise.

Looks Like Nichols Was Right

Published at 14:15 on 9 September 2018

Apropos this post, Orange Julius Caesar appears to be (thankfully) squandering his opportunity to launch a diversionary military action against North Korea, because his authoritarian love for dictators is getting in the way.

It’s things like this that are why I can’t take Michael Moore’s hyperventilating over how Trump is an evil genius seriously. Trump is evil, all right, but he has barely a fifth grader’s smarts. He’s so astoundingly incompetent that he’s his own worst enemy. For that, we can all be thankful.

Hitler was an actual evil genius. Within six months of taking office, he had managed to:

  • Legally acquire dictatorial powers,
  • Ban all opposition parties, and
  • Imprison his opponents.

We’re nearly two years into the Trump regime and none of the above has actually happened. I have no fear of being arrested and tortured because I oppose the president.

That’s not to say that Trump isn’t awful, or that he isn’t a fascist. But please, keep it in perspective: there is such a thing as a comically incompetent fascist. Trump is not a master at playing political chess. He can’t even play political checkers well.

A Literal Deep State Coup d’Etat

Published at 08:12 on 6 September 2018

While some degree of schadenfreude is inevitable, it is not in fact the best of news that Trump’s handlers are working to actively frustrate his worst impulses. As the subject of this post alludes, it is in fact a literal example of what may quite accurately be termed a “deep state coup d’etat.” There is simply no legal justification for Trump’s unelected, appointed handlers to usurp executive authority like they apparently have been.

There is a 100% legal and above-board means of addressing the undeniable fact that Trump is unfit to hold the office of president. Two means, in fact: permanent removal from office via the impeachment process, and temporary removal from it per the 25th Amendment.

None of this is to deny that:

  1. The Republicans are complete, sheep-like authoritarian followers so are unwilling to cooperate in such processes, and
  2. The world is doubtless a safer and better place as a result of Trump’s worst impulses being deliberately frustrated.

The problem is, as the old saw goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There’s two perils being created by the present, informal measures: an immediate one, and a more long-term one.

The immediate one is that the measures themselves rest on very shaky ground. Trump, as chief executive, is totally empowered and on firm legal standing in attempting to smoke out and dismiss his insubordinate employees. We are only a few simple executive actions from a far worse immediate crisis.

The long-term one is that unaccountable, extralegal means of governance are being legitimized. Too many people are expressing relief rather than unease at this recent news. The temptation to descend the slippery slope and engage in more such actions against increasingly less unfit presidents will inevitably present itself.

In short, the recent news is yet one more example of how the Trump regime and its enablers are normalizing abhorrent practices and ideas.