Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 21:19 on 10 May 2022
I will post in a day or two about what it would take for me to revise any of these assumptions.
Published at 00:55 on 6 May 2022
Get it straight: RBG is a big part of the reason why we are where we now are!
Oh, yes she is. Obama tried to drop hints to her that it was time to retire, but she would have none of it. You see, it had been a lifetime goal of hers to serve until age 90, and she wasn’t going to get a little thing like a cancer diagnosis — pancreatic cancer, mind you, one of the worst kinds — dissuade her.
By any measure, such behavior should be regarded as short-sighted, unstrategic, and selfish. That doesn’t make her evil or anything, just deeply flawed and complicated, and clearly unworthy of being lionized as some sort of judicial demigod.
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.
Published at 08:39 on 30 April 2022
I basically predicted something like this would happen back in April, 2020, although as part of a post that exaggerated the total amount of coming economic disruption. I bet the same trend is happening in Canada, too, which is yet another reason (as if one is needed) to play it slow on any decision to purchase real estate anyplace in greater Vancouver.
One wrinkle I hadn’t completely foreseen (but probably should have) is the disconnect between commercial and residential real estate costs. It will be interesting to see how that one plays out. Hopefully, it will prove not too difficult to repurpose office buildings into residential ones, though the possibility of both regulations and architectural constraints largely preventing that cannot be discounted.
In the latter department, ultimately it wouldn’t stop the conversion any more than de-industrialization and just-in-time manufacturing stopped the conversion of vacant warehouse spaces to lofts, and the end result would, like lofts, be quirky spaces that initially appealed to artists and other creatives. Ultimately, however, can take a long time, so there may well be a prolonged period of high office vacancy rates coming.
Published at 19:44 on 25 April 2022
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.
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.
Published at 14:11 on 25 April 2022
He has said he intends to give fascists a platform on it, there is no good reason to doubt his intent to do that, and he now has (or soon will have) the power to do it. The conclusion here seems inescapable, at least in the short-to-medium term.
I won’t say exactly what chaos to expect, but expect it. And don’t expect it all to be easily predictable chaos.
Musk has more money than sense, and he has burned himself before. This is one reason why I expect chaos. Musk will act impulsively, this will bite him, then he will act impulsively in an attempt to counter the harm his earlier impulsiveness caused him.
This may even play out in ways that the fascists haven’t thought through: what if he decides climate change denial is a threat (it runs counter to Tesla’s business model, after all) and bans it from Twitter?
Published at 10:41 on 15 April 2022
No, I am not just blindly taking Ukraine’s assertion on it:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.