Sun and Fun in the Crimea

I sort of vaguely want to say "I told ya so!" regarding Russia and the Ukraine, but I haven't truly earned it.

In my post, Maidan, I mentioned only briefly that while I was hopeful for the future, I knew that the wheel turned, yadda yadda... and then I avoided posting on the topic, because I don't want to be the creepy Ukraine Guy of the internet or something, I do have other interests.

So, as I read increasingly optimistic news reports about the Ukraine, I avoided saying... here come the Russians...

So, no I didn't actually tell anyone so but a few friends who tolerate my sudden passions for esoteric topics.

But I did predict it, even in the Maidan Post, I knew Russia's interests in Kiev would draw them into the conflict somehow.  But I'm not an expert on former soviet republics, so I didn't know when I wrote that Crimea was part of the Ukraine, I just assumed it was part of Russia, and yes, that is the sort of general knowledge I claim.

Curiously, I have a distant familial connection to Crimea, the Crimean Dutch, who were exterminated in pogroms by the czars... (also: Does anyone know how to turn off the autocorrect? I had the preferred spelling with the Ts autocorrected four fucking times to "stars", and I have officially had enough of the bullshit!)... back around that 1850's or so, with survivors coming to america.  Now: I've seen old blurry pictures of people walking through fields of the dead in family history books, but general history books seem to... I dunno... forget this happened???   Its all very strange and mysterious to me.  So maybe my ancestors are all dirty fucking liars.

Well, I guess I sort of have some external verification in the history of winter wheat in the midwest, which came from 'germanic' mennonites out of Crimea around that timeframe, and the winter wheat story is also part of that distant family lore (stuffing in a child's doll, like some sort of Lifetime movie cliche, if you can believe it...).

Whatever. The Crimea. See, if I'd known during the time I wrote the Maidan post that the Ukraine held the Crimean I would have included that in my forecasting, but I learned a few days before Russia invaded.  At that point a military intervention was essentially inevitable. Not because it was necessary, but because we are talking Russia here.  This is their version of the Sudentenland, and the Kiev 'revolt' is all the excuse they needed or wanted.

It is amusing to see the old Media twist on their self imposed hooks, blindsided by simple calculus an average idiot could do.  I was going to comment on the naked biases towards socialist politics evident in simple headlines, but I don't want to hammer my points too often.

The world is a relatively simple place to a man willing to look and see with his own eyes.  Mysteries are solved.  This is the problem with ideology, the willingness to Believe, against all logic, anything the favors the cause.

This is why a woman can think that Anarchy is a good idea, when simple logic reveals she is among the class with the very most to lose. This is why Greens think they can stop progress by interrupting a simple means of transportation.  This... is why the old Media and the professional experts on geopolitics could not see that Russia would invade the Ukraine almost EXACTLY the same way they invaded Georgian Ossetia, and for the same damn reasons.

This is why Libertarians cheer at the thought of having a leading Feminist authoritarian as a Keynote Speaker at their conference, why they bare their throats for the fangs of the statist wolf at the door.

Now the question of the hour is if the Crimean will be divided off from the rest of the Ukraine, or Russia will try to swallow the whole country. Which, of course, leads to the question: Will Russia choke on it if they do?

Note that there is a statistically improbable chance that the US/NATO will intervene at all? I mean, its mathematically non-zero... it lies within the realm of human probability, but its not gonna happen.

So, there it is.

Serpent in the Garden II

In a previous post, I mentioned useful idiots tearing down modern society. I'd love to expand on that, so I will.

We here in the west live comfortable lives.  Those without an appreciation for history, or experience with hardships, have damn little idea how very comfortable those lives are.

That comfort comes at a cost. For the sake of brevity, let us call that cost 'Modern Civilization'.

Consider the delivery of an iPad to your door for a moment. There is an entire clockwork of cogs and gears churning, for weeks or months, to get that aluminum and glass slab of status to your door, that geegaw of geekery, that status symbol of the middle class into your hot little hands.  Most of those gears are very well hidden from you, leaving only the closest indicators of their existence, the delivery driver say, revealed.

Let me repeat that. A vast and complex clockwork of gears and cogs.

Now, clockmaking has gone out of fashion, and most people prefer digital time pieces, such as smart phones, to old style watches, so maybe the youth of today has forgotten how easy it is to wreck a clockwork device. A single gear, misaligned, can halt the entire process, a cracked cog causes things to slip, time to be lost, and the missing cog may itself jam other parts.  We still do use the phrase 'sand in the gears', do we not?

Have we forgotten what that means? I rather suspect we have, but then I suppose I am old and crotchety rather than young and hip. Alas.

Now consider the environmental movement.

Some might say that they mean well.

I'm not one of them, it goes without saying, but SOME might.

Almost universally, those concerned with the Environment have a fundamental lack of grasp on the concept of SCALE.   They, for example, worry endlessly about 'millions of trees' being cut down to make your toilet paper.

Millions of trees to make toilet paper for billions of humans. Billions. That is, at the least, an order of magnitude bigger. In purely mathematical terms, it is several orders of magnitudes bigger.

To be blunt: The world is a very fucking big place, and you, my poor deluded green friend, are a very, very small person.

That merely makes the average Green a simple idiot.  Let us discuss how they become Useful Idiots, very quickly.  Let's start with the Keystone Pipeline.

Now, if ever there was a pointless environmental fight, the pipeline fight is It.  This is not a fight over the production of oil, the refinement of oil, or even the use of oil. Its merely about the means of transportation of said oil. Somehow, forcing Canadians to ship their oil in large, fuel burning trucks, instead of simply pumping it through sealed pipes will save the planet from ecological disaster.

Because, make no mistake, Canada isn't going to NOT produce the oil just because the pipeline stalled. Once produced it will be refined, then it will be sold, and since it will be sold, it must be shipped, somehow, somewhere.  The only way to prevent this is to either stop Canada from exploiting their tar-sands or convince people to not buy Canadian Oil.

So, on the very face of it we have very stupid people protesting a very stupid and pointless part of the supply chain. Again, they are merely simple idiots at this point. Idiots who have no grasp of how the world works. No, I don't mean they fail to grasp some sort of secret knowledge of the levers of power, or some sort of conspiracy theory. They literally have no idea how things in the world actually work, and so they can be easily convinced to protest the one part of the process that simply cannot be stopped, and thus make matters worse on the simple premise that if they can stop any one thing related to 'oil' they have somehow made  difference.

For their next trick I fully expect them to start blowing up tankers carrying oil, either on the roads or at sea. Because, reasons.  If you can't see how stupid that would be, google Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizons or something.

Surely someone, somewhere, can see how pointless all this is? Protesting a pipe?

Sure. Those people have vested interests, shares in trucking companies for example. They WANT the pipe stopped because it makes them money. They know that the pipe has no impact on the environment, they don't care.

That is how simple idiots become useful idiots.

But this post is titled serpents in the garden, not 'useful idiots'.  Now, I could make it about dudes like Algore, the Manbearpig who lives in a lavish mansion, flies all over the world constantly and has made the GDP of a mid-sized European nation off of selling 'carbon-credits' to gullible companies with PR problems.  But Algore isn't really the problem.  He is, at worst, a symptom.

The average Green lives in some place like New York City, Boston, Seattle, Portland. Generally urban enclaves, and shockingly, often in cooler climates. Something about an excuse to wear all those natural fibers and generally skip personal hygiene, I suspect.  You don't find too many die-hard environmentalists in Miami, and fewer than expected in LA... places where going green might not actually kill you.

Odd.

Anyway: the modern Green has almost no experience in the broader world of 'flyover country', which is still pretty civilized, much less the facts on the ground of, say, Kyrgyzstan.   He or she (and many, many are girls. I suspect most male Greens are in it for the (hairy) pussy...), probably has an iPad, a laptop and a host of other conveniences that they consider necessities. A tiny handful do attempt to live off the grid (like, in California... which is why you find ANY in LA at all, I suspect), generally in communes around existing farm buildings, and they generally survive to any great extent by selling shitty handcrafts to people driving down nearby roads so they can buy food to supplement their generally pathetic gardening attempts.

Naturally, to these vast and morally smug urbanites, civilization is a plague upon the land, and their credo seems to be Agent Smith's rant from the Matrix.  Well, I suppose if I lived in New York City I too would find humanity to be just a little too... human. Time to thin the herd, bitches! That's what you get for cramming twenty seven million people onto a couple of small islands, forcing them to live piled on top of one another like rats, day in and day out.

What they fail to grasp is that were they to succeed in even one of their modest environmental goals (say... 10:10 cutting the electricity use of modern civilization by a mere ten percent... Which they never, ever point out is merely a 'tiny' first step!), their rather comfortable, white-guilt ridden lives would come screeching to a halt.

Remember what I said about clockworks and gears?  Now I make it relevant.

See: If you merely FROZE energy output at current levels, the world would adapt. It would be ugly and painful, and eventually prices would skyrocket as the wealthiest paid premium prices to increase their allotments, leaving the rest of us in the cold, but that would take a little time to set in.  Some emergency power output would undoubtedly remain to keep basic infrastructure running.  It would also force society to shrink, mostly through die-offs, until they were no longer draining as much power.

This, by the way, is an interesting metric for tracking the health of any large group of people: As healthy groups expand and grow... even if merely in complexity... they use greater amounts of resources, such as electricity. When demand for such resources begins to shrink naturally, you may wisely presume that the community is likewise shrinking, and therefore unhealthy.  I have no doubt that modern Detroit uses less electricity than it did twenty years ago, despite the rise of big screen TVs, gaming platforms and other frivolities of the urban poor, the modern version of the Roman Circuses.

When you abruptly CUT production of electricity, shit gets real, and fast.  Remember how I said all those video games and TVs were the modern equivalent to Roman Circuses? yeah, the poor will find their opiates cut off overnight, and they will take that about as well as you expect.  Businesses will fold simply because they aren't powerful enough to demand sufficient electricity to function.

Now, I know some asshole is about to point out that 10:10, despite the creepy child-murdering, was only about 'voluntary' cuts, like using less lights and so forth.  Well, yes, that was stated often enough, but the actual goal was to cut electrical consumption nation wide, which means also cutting PRODUCTION, as one does not produce in excess of demand. And once consumption levels were reduced, they would be fixed by law, regardless of how society grew or developed.   Notice how 'voluntary' the cuts were, in the video.  Even being insufficiently pro-cuts, as Gillian Anderson was as the end, was grounds for summary execution.  She was actually in favor of the movement, and they "killed" her anyways for not being quite as active as they'd like.

In short, all those hip, wonderful, white-guilt Greens in their hip, wonderful urban enclaves, and all their wonderful modern conveniences, will be among the first people to feel the pain of success. Most of these people have very few skills, the ones they have are all tied up in decadent, civilized make-work. You know, protesting, writing 'journalism' and bad poetry, art of some form or another. Hey, I like art as much as the next dudebro, but you can't eat it. Or, most of it.

Without energy, the trucks won't deliver the latest iPad to the store, then the factories that make the iPads close down. Without energy, you can't have air conditioning to offset the heat produced by twenty million rats, and you can't run heat to escape those bitterly cold New England winters.  Good thing you have armpit hair, right?

But its actually worse than that. Modern Farming is largely predicated on turning stored energy (Petroleum) into 'food energy', meaning one man driving a tractor can feed a hundred men from the produce of one acre of land, instead of having ten men on that acre feeding twelve.  That food is generally grown... not in New York, which means shipping, by land or sea. Since we have a real shortage of draft horses and galleons, that means gas and diesel, both of which are being protested as 'evil' by the average Green.

In other words, we have a massive number of people who foolishly are attempting to knock out the pins holding society together, despite the fact that they, themselves, have no real means of surviving the barbarism that comes if they succeeded. People who are utterly welded to the toys that said society makes possible, unreflective and deeply stupid, foolish people.

I'll skip the nakedly Evil environmentalists who wish to exterminate the human race. They always claim they only want it to happen painlessly, but extinction is extinction.  These people are nihilists, who dress up their bleak philosophy in positive, hopeful messages about unspoilt nature and shit, but they are evil... and for the most part they are also deluded fools, since the prophets of their creed simply want to reduce the population drastically out of some selfish notion of having more land (plantations?) for themselves, or getting rid of the undesirables (Margret Sanger, anyone?).  I mean, at least the nihilists have a certain consistency to their plans that the average idiot green lacks.

The worst Irony is that the greens are their own worst enemies.  By impeding progress, by restricting energy in every way they can, they force us to rely on old, proven technologies that are cheap, reliable and, yes, dirty.

Roughly two hours drive from my house are two large concrete structures that almost anyone would recognize as the stacks of a nuclear power plant.  It was never completed, though the builders passed every regulatory hurdle and examination.  It wasn't completed because the Green movement engaged in a deeply evil process of law fare to drive the price of construction up, to create unnecessary and expensive delays, to drive the company out of business and stop the plant by any means necessary. They, of course, succeeded in this mission. As a result, instead of clean steam pouring from those stacks, and cheap, clean power lighting out homes, we still burn coal and oil to run our power plants.

In other places they fight the constructions of dams, preventing clean hydrodynamic power from replacing coal and oil in those areas.

So we keep burning our petrochemicals. We keep polluting, and they keep protesting. Progress stalls, halts, dies, and we remain in a perpetual twilight of our own thwarted progress.

All so a bunch of smug children with too much time and too little sense can alleviate their vague sense of worthlessness and entitlement.  All so they can dream of a Rousseau-ean Noble Savage existence for  themselves (complete with some sort of Flintstones version of the iPad, I imagine...), where they will be venerated for their holy leadership in their great crusade.

They are the serpents, despising the very garden that has provided them shelter and succor, leeching their poisonous words into it, hoping to spoil it, to tear it down.

At least the barbarians want to pillage before they burn. 

Just dream a little dream

I can excoriate feminism's positions quite easily. With a rudimentary knowledge of biology and a little bit of logic, its not hard.  Getting people to listen is hard.  Women have a distinct knack for avoiding direct confrontations, and they've taught that skill to their male supplicants, so getting a feminist to even agree to a debate is nearly impossible. 

Of course, even if you tore down each and every lie of feminism proper, they'd merely deflect. That is less a feminine technique than a socialist one, this idea that you are somehow not responsible for the various positions, and the consequences of those positions, held by your side unless you, personally, can be quoted as promoting them in some exacting language... which of course, socialists are trained not to do.  Redefine terms, use broad language, and deny, deny, deny. 

I'm rather more familiar with that technique than I would like, having discussed rather non-political positions with self professed socialists and communists, and discovered first hand that they refuse to be held to even the simplest of terms. 

I have, on occasion, found myself pondering the roots of socialist thought in the ancient debates between rational and teleological thought, which was officially won by the Rational philosophers.  Alas, teleology seems to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, while rationality must be learned, and thus it ever returns.  I myself have been guilty of it in the past, but when I was a child I may be excused for having thought as a child. 

As a geek, I have a rather curious perspective on the matter in the form of gaming products from White Wolf.  It is undeniable that White Wolf's writers and designers were quintessential college liberals, men and women with liberal arts degrees, degrees in the humanities and so forth... not one scientist or rationalist among them.  Their rules systems were simple and reasonably robust within the limits of their early goals, but were not grounded in mathematical or statistical models... and when their grasp exceeded their reach in 'higher level' gaming... that is to say the demigods of Exalted, the actual Gods of Scion, and the mortal gods of Aberrant, the limitations of the system were vastly exceeded, and the rules began to fray and fail, though one may track the efforts to address these flaws, these inherent limitations, through the evolution of the rules across those game lines, and so of the three Scion, the last designed and released, works the best. Of course, the irony is that it works the best because while the player characters are actual Gods, creatures of Divinity, traversing the heavens and the realms of the dead with impunity, they have the most modest power sets of the three game lines mentioned.

But we were talking about teleology versus rationality in their games, which cannot be found in the actual rules nearly so much as the settings.  The most obvious example is Mage: The Awakening, where all of reality is nothing more than a consensual illusion, and if enough people believe something hard enough, all of reality changes.  This is a world where a meme-war is enough to erase your enemy from existence.  Wishing something hard enough makes it true. 

And that is fundamentally the heart of teleological thought. 

And not coincidentally the heart of all socialist thought, not merely the more formal schools of socialism we recognize as actual philosophies, political or otherwise.  This is the heart of modern leftist, progressive thought, that if your intentions are good enough, if you believe hard enough, then things will work out. All oppositional ideas must be rejected outright, regardless of how sensible they are, since they are tainted by lack of devotional purity. It doesn't matter that lowering taxes will improve the economy, its an idea supported by those dreaded, evil, vile Tea Partiers, and therefore cannot work... because reasons.  

Prove that the Tea Party is not rife with racists? Well, that doesn't matter, they are still secret racists because they lack the purity of liberal belief, and thus must be corrupt. 

Government has never, in the thousands of years of human civilization, created jobs or improved peoples lives? Well, the right people, with the right beliefs, simply haven't had enough power yet. 

Now: At some level a number of bad actors do exist, people who don't actually believe, who don't actually think this way, who have merely ridden the coat tails of leftist, progressive indoctrination of school children for the power, but that can't explain everyone else.   It can't even explain Obama and his administration.

If Obama were one of these bad actors, only after Power, if he was not in fact a true believer, we would be better off.  This 'evil Obama' would, after all, move to ensure America remained powerful on the world stage, to better grow his own power. This Evil Obama would reinforce the Pax Americana, would bolster the navy and the army. He might start a few needless wars, cause countless deaths for nakedly political reasons... but the real, True Believer Obama has plenty of blood on his hands as well. Libya, Syria, Egypt... the doubling of the death toll in Afghanistan since his election, the drone wars and kill lists. 

But at least we, at home, under the oppressive boot would be more safe, in the long run, from our enemies abroad.  And make no mistake, we have enemies abroad. Every successful nation has, throughout history.  

At least the violence of the police would not be capricious, could be avoided. 

Its a terrible thing to recognize that a malicious, deliberately evil man would serve us better than the ideologue currently at the helm.  The Ambitious Man would want the economy to grow, and might take even a few steps to see it happen, the Ideologue wants us reduced to hapless savages for the good of the world, in abstract. 

I don't fault Progressives for being wrong. Everyone is wrong some of the time. I fault them for being willfully, deliberately wrong, for blinding themselves to the obvious. I fault them for being impervious to the lessons laid out before them.  Only a fool doubles down on every failure, and only a madman repeats his failures exactly, while sure that this time will be different.  Thus we know the Left is full of fools and madmen, and I weep for the voters who simply cannot be bothered to open their eyes and see for themselves.

I don't want to persuade. I don't want to educate. I want you to look for yourself, for once, and see for yourselves what is true.

I want you to realize that you have been lied to, are lied to, every day.  That these lies are not casual, are not accidental, that they are coordinated, deliberate, and planned. 

Gramsci's Long March began with the Journalists and moved rapidly into the schools. From there, every other institution falls quickly into line, because we can see only what we have been taught to see. 

Maidan

When things happen, I suppose they happen quickly.  

One might pray, if so inclined, that the world hangs like a pendulum's weight, and when it swings, the world swings with it. 

Chavez is dead and his successors have inherited a mess they cannot hope to contain, and socialism once again fails.

Yanukovich has fled Kiev and the protestors have taken his home, the government has released the leader of the opposition party from jail. 

The might of Russia, a modern powerful nation, has been shown in no small part to be nothing more than a myth, a paper tiger that cannot even provide working toilets for the Olympics, shaming themselves on the world's stage...

The pendulum swings, tyrants fall and false idols are cast down. 

And yet...

And yet, the world does not hang like a pendulum's weight. The future is not yet written, and too many people still believe in the dream, that the man selling you a life of ease and prosperity, if only you give him more power, can actually provide it. 

The Future is unwritten, as it always has been.  Today the Tyrants are on the ropes, but others remain. 

Tomorrow there may be blood and fire. Tomorrow the Iron Boot may come down.  

For the people of Kiev I have only hope.  For the people of Venezuela I know that there is more blood to come, their fight is not over.  For Russia, they have merely suffered the indignity of their incompetence, their dreams of power and control have not yet died. 

And for us? 

We still believe the man in the pulpit, the liar who sells us our dreams as if they were mere baubles that had been kept from us by greedy children. 

I know in my soul I want the blood. I want the fire.  Justice demands it. The suffering their lies cause cries out for vengeance, it cries out for blood.  I would make such an object lesson of them that the world would tremble, that all would be tyrants, great and small, would know what waits for them.

But I am just a man. 

No. 

I am not even that. I am a shadow, an electronic ghost, invisible. 

Today, I am content.  Today it does not matter. 

Today there is still hope. 

Kiev

Yesterday I suborned my regularly scheduled posts with a heartfelt, if somewhat narcissistic, post on the Ukraine.  Today I continue the trend, because I care about you, my imaginary readers. 

Obviously I am not on a plain to eastern Europe right now, though perhaps less obviously, I am not in an airport waiting for the flight either.  I feel I should be, but perhaps my lack of belief in God means I just can't abandon the wreckage of my daily life to go based on impulse and feeling... 

Since you only exist in my mind, dear readers, I chose to imagine you listened to the podcasts we originally started with, and thus have heard Burke speak, the one podcaster who is deeply religious and deeply involved with his church (Methodists, which is funny if you recall Blazing Saddles like I do...). So, while we disagree about the existence of God, he is a fine friend to call on when you are troubled by matters that extend beyond mere intellect. Call them spiritual, for that is as accurate a word as any. 

So I called upon Burke, not to talk me out of going, or into going, but because I needed, perhaps still need, spiritual advice. Like all men I needed, in that moment, someone to talk to. 

So here we are. I am still not convinced that staying here, following the roller coaster news reports, is the right choice, but I am at least convinced now that going is not necessarily the right choice either, which I suppose is progress of a sort. 

You see: It isn't so much that I care about the outcome of the protests, per se. It isn't that I have objective knowledge that one side is right or wrong... though unlike Vox Day, I find myself singularly untroubled by the fact that the protesters are armed and have reputedly taken 'hostages' from among the riot cops. 

My reason, perhaps my sole reason, of interest is that the people of Kiev, the protestors, are doing what Americans are content not to do.  As I explained yesterday, we are far more likely to see mass protests over the price of an iPad than the continuing failures of our self-appointed Philosopher-Kings in DC.  People protest out of envy and spite, not because the police are shooting random people in the streets.  

Mind you: I find this worse than what is going on in Kiev. The riot police there are shooting protestors, they are fighting according to sides. One can avoid the violence quite easily by simply choosing to, well, avoid it.  Here in the states, however, you are far more likely to be shot by accident by the cops simply because some asshole read an address wrong, out of malice and personal animosity, or simple incompetence. 

How the fuck do you avoid that?  The police have become lightning strikes, impersonal and deadly and almost entirely unpredictable, and just as unstoppable.

But they are just men, and unlike lightning they can, and should be held accountable for their actions. We simply chose to turn a blind eye and ignore it, however.

So that is why I care about the Ukraine all of a sudden. 

I care because THEY care, and you do not.   I am tired of waiting for Americans to wake up, tired of hoping that we will one day realize that while there is no boot physically grinding your face in the dirt, the boot is there and it is making you miserable in a thousand tiny ways.  Can't get a good job? Thank the government regulations that keeps employment low. Can't afford a doctor? Thank government regulations that mandate your insurance cover things you have no interest in, like gender assignment surgery.  Lost your mother to icy roads in New Jersey (surely an act of God!, not government!), thank the rules that have held up 40 thousand tons of road salt in Maine, a mere few hours drive away.  

It isn't my point that government is always bad (well.. it is always bad, hence the term 'necessary evil'...), but that you simply don't care to trace by the source of whatever your woes are to continuing government malfeasance and corruption, and I am tired of waiting for you. I am tired of raging against the dying of the light, but I do it anyway. 

I don't want to rage, I want to fight. 

I want to stand with people who care rather than stand uselessly alone because no one else does. 

Probity Redux

In the Law they express two concepts, though in Latin to keep the rubes like me out, that can be summed up in 'The Guilty Act' and 'The Guilty Mind'.  In traditional formulations, both have to be present for a criminal act to have been committed.

Example: You shove your friend and he stumbles into traffic, is hit by a car, and dies horribly. 

The Guilty Act is that you killed your friend. There is no real debate, in this case, that you did so.

The Guilty Mind is your intent. If you wanted your friend to die horribly, it is murder. If you were just playing around and accidentally killed him it is not.  Of course, since we like putting people in jail, we came up with Negligent Homicide, and everyone except you and your dead friend, is happy. 

Make sense so far? 

When you are forced to denounce yourself for some trivial sin you are admitting to guilt, the Guilty Mind, you did not possess.  Let us review it in the sense of our story from the last post:

The young man's Act was to post a joke .Gif of President Obama kicking a door. His Mind was 'Midterm's suck, even the president agrees'.  Not really a thought crime, yes?  Surely, President Obama, a former professor (who taught no classes?) would not actually agree with that sentiment, but that is neither here nor there. 

However, despite any racial animus to his act, he was forced to apologize for committing a racist act, taking on the mantle of a Guilty Mind, making his .Gif, post facto (another legal concept, in Latin), a Crime of Racism. 

Why harp on this? 

Well, first to assuage my own mind that, in his shoes I would never have allowed myself to be tarred with the crime I hadn't actually committed.  My history shows quite the opposite: I'm quite skilled at evading guilt for crimes I DID commit, sadly, so I can't see pleading to a greater charge as an option I'd take. 

I've got too many skeletons to go around getting in trouble for shit I didn't actually do, in other words. 

Second I want you, any of you, to have that thought in your minds if you even find yourself in his shoes... without my own 'armor of sin' protecting you.  He may have bought himself a few moments of peace, even the ability to remain in school, officially... but he is now forever more 'That Racist Bastard' to all the people who believe in thought crimes.  I doubt he has honestly preserved his academic career in any meaningful sense.  Pleading guilty to "Lesser" charges may seem the right choice, but it means you'll never be free of the guilt in the public eye.  It is a devil's bargain, and we all know how those turn out. 

In this I disagree with many in the Men's Rights movement, from Price at the Spearhead to the guys at a Voice for Men. They sympathize with men who chose not to sacrifice years of their life for honor and dignity, who plead to lesser charges in return for clemency.  I have no sympathy for cowards and spineless men.  Pity, certainly, but not sympathy.  

And let me explain why: Every man who takes the cowards path makes it harder for the rest of us.  I used to jump out of planes, static line jumps. It was never your mistake that would hurt you, would kill you, but the mistake of the man in front of you.  His weak exit, his moment of fear at the open door and the empty sky, meant his static line was low on the door and would catch you by the arm (if you were lucky) or the neck (if you were not).  His failure was your pain, and your failure was the pain of the man behind you. 

It is the same here. Every single man who pleads to sexual assault to avoid a rape conviction instead of fighting a false accusation merely makes it that much easier for the next man to be charged. Every man who admits to racism in thought and deed when there was none, makes it harder for the next man to stand on his dignity. Every.Single.Man who refuses to fight domestic violence charges when it was his wife throwing the punches, as loudly and aggressively as possible, just so the legal problems will go away makes the next man so charged his fault. 

There is a reason more vigorous societies hated cowards.  The coward always buys his life at the cost of the men around him. Always.  He has blood on his hands. The blood of better men, worthier men, and the blood of women who pay the price for his failures.

We have forgotten that, in our race towards eternal childhood.  We have forgotten that as we try to turn men into women. Bravery is not a feminine virtue, though we laud those women who possess it, so we reject it as too macho.  We fear if we celebrate bravery we encourage men to prove theirs through violence. 

And since we have forgotten the price of Cowardice, it is not enough to merely mention it, to mock it... I must explain. 

Defend your honor as if it were your life.

No.

Defend your honor as if it were more important to you than life, for it is. 

Probity, Lies and Politics

When I mentioned probity in my last post I didn't expect to find a reason to follow up a mere hour or so after I mentioned it.  Courtesy Ace of Spades.

What is Probity?  The word means nothing more than having strong principles, but the concept is somewhat deeper than that. Probity implies a strong sense of self, of empowerment. Someone who has 'probity' is in control of themselves, is a moral, principled actor.

So what does this have to do with the post I put up, and my reference in the earlier post?

Well, several years ago I stumbled across a description of how communist meetings tended to go. People were accused of 'Thought Crimes' and had to stand up and denounce themselves, then others were invited to stand up and denounce their own thought crimes to the group. Failure to denounce oneself, even to the point of having to lie and make up things to denounce, was cause for the entire group to turn on the offending party (who, ironically, was the only person NOT claiming to have offended...), putting huge amounts of peer pressure on them to force the offender to conform.

The actual description was tying this behavior to various progressive groups, including Feminism and so forth, which in and of itself was fascinating and insightful. So much so that I regret that I didn't bother to keep the link to share with you all.

However, the real insight for me wasn't the way modern progressive groups were acting almost exactly like their communist fore bearers did, but WHY communists and progressives did this.

And the word they used was Probity.

See: When you are forced to lie about yourself, even in small ways, you lose your sense of Probity, your sense of being a principled actor. By forcing you to lie, constantly, you lose your sense of morality. You conform to the group ideals, loosing your own in the process. It is, essentially, a form of brainwashing.

Now look at that story again.  The young man's sin, such as it was, is not that he was a racist asshole but that he was insensitive to his own potential racism.

Which is, of course, a lie.

His true sin was that he...

No. He didn't sin. He made a joke about midterms. We can even argue that his own act was sort of the opposite of racist. He didn't even THINK about the color of a man's skin, just the content of his character and the actions that demonstrated the same.  Martin Luther King should be proud of this young man, and what he says about the youth of today.

For this he was forced to denounce himself. The actual 'sin' he committed is irrelevant, even to those who persecuted him. He is an object lesson, he is Winston.  His own sense of Probity has been irreparably damaged by his forced confession, and everyone who witnessed his public shaming has likewise seen the consequences of being a white man in today's society, of insufficient piety for the platitudes of the era and the dignity of the powerful.

Think on that. By simply showing an image of a very public act he is accused of shaming the actor, he is accused of promoting a false idea of black males (young black males at that, despite the fact that Obama is, what, fifty?).

It is a fact, a matter of public record, that Obama kicked a door.  Any harm to Obama's reputation, any shame to 'young' black males as a result is Obama's fault. HE acted.*

But merely repeating that image, in a humorous context that had nothing to do with shaming or mocking Obama is still viewed as an act of disrespect that must be punished.

And since this young man was in their power, a student at a school, pursuing a degree, they have the power to punish him, to shame him, to make an example of him.

Now that puts me in an awkward position. I am, in fact, going to school. I am, purportedly, in their power as well.  Do I duck my head and pretend to conform? Do I harm my own Probity by avoiding actions that might lead me to being made an example of?

Well, I suppose I do.  On the other hand, I have made it this far in life without a degree, and god only knows I could use a little publicity at this point, so I can say that were I in his shoes I would defend myself rigorously, no matter the cost.

What, exactly, have I to lose?

But I am old and tired and sick of it all. Its not my future I concern myself with, but the failures of my past.  Were I a young man I might have done as he did, and never regretted the denouncement, but the original, harmless, innocent act.











*Obama did not kick the door.

Lo, came there a light upon the darkness, and shadows birthed

It is curious to me that I must define the very essence of civilization as sacrifice and dominion.  In the Podcasts we started with I mentioned that I am, fundamentally, a libertarian at heart.  What I want from 'Government' is decent roads and a strong, if mostly useless, military.

Nothing more.

I don't want government to provide me healthcare. I don't want government to provide me food or shelter.

I want it out of my fucking way.

But you see: Civilization and Government are not synonymous.  Government is little more than an organization we 'contract' to provide certain services we cannot reasonably do for ourselves, at least not effectively.  But because one of those services is the inherent monopolization of force, it tends to grow fat and greedy, Hobbes' Leviathan, devouring all that is set before it.

Contra: Civilization is the behavior of men towards one another that emphasizes the success of the group over the individual, cooperation over competition, and above all else, peace and order over violence and chaos.

I may want to refine that definition a bit more, but it will do for now.

Curiously, one does not need civilization to have Government.  Would we call Papa Doc Duvalier's Tonton Macoute based government 'civilized'?  In truth, would we label Haiti as civilized at all in living memory?  It has been relatively quiet from time to time, I will grant you, but the last time it came close to civilization was when the French kept it bound in chains of slavery.... hardly a state of affairs to look back at with piquant nostalgia.

That is a gloss of Haitian history.  They have striven mightily and failed time and time again, but no doubt there were moments where they grasped the golden apple, only to have it slip from their grasp.

I can hear criticisms now, protests and cries of 'raciss', because it happens that Haiti is populated by Persons of Color, as if it were my fault that european whites seem so preternaturally good at civilization that very few good examples of barbarism exist.   I'll ignore those, but let me imagine for the moment some of the other protests.

Bob Marley. I mean; Obviously Haiti is civilized since they make just great music, right?

I hope no one would actually think the two are related in any way, but I suppose someone might impulsively reach to defend something they like from a perceived slight. Art and Civilization are not co-dependent.  No doubt there are those who find 'savage' music much better than the rarefied heights of 'civilized' music, that thinks the fevered pounding of drums and deeply emotional wailings are far more evocative than the precisely ordered and mannerly music of Johann Sebastian Bach.   That, however, is merely a matter of taste. The point remains that art is not indicative of civilization.

A better argument might be to discuss the bloodshed of the Nazis and other white european nations in the last century. Why not?  Surely that is barbarism instead of civilization, yes?

A dangerous thrust that leaves the attacker exposed, for I imagine most critics of my point of view are modern leftists, progressives and socialists.  Shall I point out that a good portion of my perspective is that progressive socialists are so busy importing and recreating Barbarism in place of civilization that referencing previous progressive, socialist governments as a refutation of my point that europeans are preternaturally good at civilization is... making my case?

Yes, virginia: The nazi's were socialist progressives, not republican conservative types.

But then too: Can we make the case that National Socialism, for all its murderousness and evil, was in fact a perverse expression of Civilization gone wrong than Barbarism?

Could we not also express that the very evils perpetrated by the Nazi's were Governmental programs rather than social mob justice? In short, Government (the organ that grows fat and greedy on its own power) is not Civilization. We could. We have.

Still, I won't, I shan't dwell on it. Make your case, imaginary reader, and I will respond to that, rather than attempting to make it for you, then knocking down my straw man.

Charity

The United Way is Evil.

When I was seven or eight, the United Way 'came' to my school and hit us all up for the sweet sweet cash. 

Maybe my teacher did it wrong, or maybe I simply misunderstood, but I didn't exactly bring cash from my parents to pay them off, so the few coins I stuffed in the little manila envelope came from my own very meagre allowance.   So instead of getting generic 'feel goods' from my giving, I instead resented the adults for asking me, a small child, for money.  I was, after all, only a year or two removed from saving up for weeks to buy a three dollar box of legos, and my allowance hadn't changed in the interval.

Now that I reflect back on it, it is clear that the intent of these yearly exercises are to build a habit of reflexive giving, unhampered by thought, and starting with other people's money.  You don't ask seven and eight year olds for their allowance money if you want to create a lifetime giver.  I can't see how this is anything other than extremely gentle extortion. If the parents don't provide the (to them negligible) donation, its the kids who feel the pressure to contribute and the shame of failure. Most parents would happily sacrifice a dollar to two, even way back in the early 80's, to save their kids that sort of trouble... especially in the name of a good cause.

But since it WAS my money that I was giving up I always had to wonder about it.  I mean, when they wanted me to buy books from the book club, I got something for my money, but what happened to the change that I stuffed in those little envelopes?  For all I knew (back then) the teacher kept it for herself. 

Oh, I knew it was supposedly going to Africa to feed starving, underprivileged children (but I ask you? What was I in those days?), but how did I KNOW that?  Year after year things seemed to get worse in Africa, not better. Year after year, more and more charities seemed to spring up, demanding more money, more effort.  My cartoons were interrupted by please for 'For as little as ten cents a day'... or whatever the going rate was back then... and by Sally Struthers, looking like she'd eaten all the food donated before going on the air demanding more, for the children.

I must not have been the only one asking 'how do I know that my donations are actually going to underprivileged kids?', because it wasn't long before they started sponsorship packs, where the one kid you were paying for would send you pictures and letters and shit. 

This was, to my young eyes, a monumental failure of an idea. 

As 'proof' went it seemed entirely inadequate to me, to easy to fake in the short run.  As a charitable idea it was lacking as well. At what point do you stop paying for this 'one child'?  

I had a dozen ill formed ideas about how silly it all was, but I simply shrugged and moved on.  For decades the only charity I have given is to bell ringers at christmas from the Salvation Army, and of my time and labor for local causes. 

Now, courtesy of Ace of Spades comes a story that warms the dark tarry cockles of my shriveled and useless heart. 

For those of you too busy to click a link, let me sum up: This journalist from... Australia?... has been sponsoring a child for ten years and in ten years the quality of the letters and art haven't improved at all, and actually gone down hill. A seventeen year old child is still drawing simple, off-kilter boxes and triangles with crayon to represent a house.

What I like is the never-stated subtext... that it is in fact unstated subtext... that there is some sort of fraud going on here.  The closest the story gets is to ask 'Hmm... that's curious', and a brief reference to another journalist who actually travelled to Africa (country unknown) to find the child she had been sponsoring, only to find said child had only dealt with the Charity* when they'd taken her photograph.

But even in that case, the term 'fraud' is never used, never alluded too. At worst, the Charity* merely used the money to do better good communally than the individual promise they offered.

Umm...

That's a lie. That's fraud. If I had sent several hundred (thousand?) dollars to support some named individual, I would expect THAT INDIVIDUAL to have received the money, or at least the goods and services it bought. Not some generic 'community' that in turn may or may not include said individual. 

By way of analogy: If I wanted to get my cousin Tim** off the streets of Detroit, so I sent him a few hundred bucks, I would be extraordinarily peeved to find that instead of going to Tim, the city of Detroit took that money for 'improvements' for 'all the Tims of the city'. 

I didn't send Detroit the money, did I? I sent it to Tim.  It doesn't matter if Tim is actual family, or just a name and a photograph that tugged at my heart from a book or commercial. I sent the fucking money to fucking TIM, and TIM better be the one who gets it!

But we musn't question the saintly nature of our charitable organizations. 

Bullshit. 

I've got a lot to say on charities, but instead I'll let you ponder this one case, and what no one seems to be saying... at least no one official, and not out loud. 

* by this I mean the organization World Vision, the charity involved in this case, and somewhat facetiously the idea of these groups being actual charities. They are large businesses with excellent PR, and what they sell are remittances. 

** I do not have a cousin named Tim that I am aware of. Likewise, while I have a number of friends from Detroit, I don't actually know anyone that lives there. If I did, the last fucking thing I'd do is send them money. I'd rather drive to Detroit in a truck and help them move out than send them ten bucks for gas. 

The Death of Civilization

I had a thought today.

Our civilization is already dead. Think of it like a tree, standing there all tall and proud, home to squirrels and birds.  Dead as a stump.

Its actually been dead for some time. Decades probably. It, we, have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since.    We keep expecting the end to come quickly, suddenly, and violently.

Have you ever seen a dead tree rotting away? Sometimes they don't fall over. There is no grand moment of violence, just a never ending series of minor collapses, and no recovery.

Now, by itself that is a slightly dark, but not terribly persuasive thought exercise. But of course, I haven't actually explained WHY I had this thought.

You see, once upon a time people valued ability, skill... hard work. They did things with their spare time that required significant practice, learning and were generally useful to a large number of people.

We play video games. Sure, if you play them long enough you eventually develop something resembling a skill...

... but let me back up. We'll touch on our free time in a moment.

Convienence isn't really the explanation for what changed. By the time of our grandfather's generation the industrial revolution had been going for generations, and all manner of mass production, labor saving and so forth had already been invented.

It starts with the Boomers.

No. I think it starts earlier. I can't prove it, not in time for a simple blog post, but I suspect that a large number of the progressive minded elites in this country, the ones who didn't go to war (I or II), were already showing signs of the decay, masked by robust and living body of the ordinary people.

But with the Boomers we see it clearly for the first time.  Ask any Boomer to sum up the zeitgeist of their generation, their era, and you will inevitably hear about Woodstock, about the Civil Rights marches and the Vietnam protests.

Those aren't accomplishments. At best they are participation merit badges, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of boomers didn't really do any of those things.

If you ask a little more, you'll probably hear about Fighting the Man, Free Love and 'sex, drugs and rock'n roll'.

That's not to say that great things weren't done, often by skilled and talented people of their generation. We put men on the moon, invented the Internet and the home computer. We put the power of a million minds on your desktop for you to watch elf ass wriggle across your screen before you got bored and switched to porn.

But for the first time in our era, our civilization, we stopped caring about the great creations of the age, the masters of science and industry, the creators and workers and shapers. We began caring more about rejecting the rules, fighting the man. We didn't care about success, we cared about the Revolution for its own sake.

And most of it was a lie.  Woodstock was, by all accounts, a miserable experience created by its own propaganda. Even the music was second rate due to shoddy preparation and planning. Even the best stars struggle under the conditions they were forced to play in.  The Vietnam protest didn't really do much to end the war, which lasted twenty years. Its more probable that the US government finally asked itself what it was doing there, unloved by almost everyone, and just gave up.  Twenty years from now we'll hear how Cindy Sheehan single handedly brought the Iraq War to a close by that logic.

And the Civil Rights movement? Well... lets just say that things haven't exactly gone as planned and leave it at that, for today.

There is a theme here, not just in the lack of accomplishment required to take pride in being a boomer, but in how all the things they prize are effectively anti-establishment. The word "anti-establishment" has become something complimentary, hasn't it?  But think about it for a moment. Do you like having roads to drive on? Establishment built that. You like having relatively crime free neighborhoods? Establishment.

The Establishment, for all its flaws, is something of a defining characteristic of Civilization itself. Civilization is far, far preferable to Barbarism, which is also Anti-Establishment.

The curious thing was that this sort of attitude began manifesting everywhere.  The very tale end of the Boomer Generation holds power now, and yet they'd rather use that power to tear down the very country they rule, to destroy the last vestige of The Establishment, The Man, and remake it in their own image.  What of Art?  Have you seen most modern art? It doesn't require a heck of a lot of talent to create most of it. The irony is that the real artists, the craftsmen with skill and vision, all seem to work in the corporate sector doing 'visual design' pieces or as 'hobby artists' working on the web for bux.  The guy getting the grant is more likely to shit on a plate and garnish it, selling it for forty thousand dollars in the process.  Since skill and accomplishment mean less than marching for the Cause, than Fighting the Man, the shit-plate gets the money and the praise, while the guy painting a mural on the wall of a chain restaurant gets to eat the plate.

The ultimate expression of this is schools. Teachers have the easiest degree of all college degrees, and they have the lowest IQ of any credentialed profession. They give out awards for participation to students, they reject thousands of years of math to teach 'fuzzy math', where just trying really hard make the answer right.  And yet, because it is 'for the children' they are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Not that you'll ever get them to admit it, of course.  They wail and complain about long hours, about being underpaid and under appreciated...  then they call a six year old a rapist for kissing another six year old. They throw a kid out of school for eating a poptart the wrong way (so that it looks vaguely like a gun).... the litany of indignities they inflict upon our young seems endless.

And when they finally go to far, when their utter lack of professionalism, accumen or ability is revealed? They aren't fired, they are made administrators, which is why there are now schools with more administrative staff than teachers.

Participation and believing in the right things is far more important that actually accomplishing anything.

As an indictment of the Boomer Generation, I think that would be far more than enough to see the lot of them tossed out to make their own way, without vampirically bleeding the young dry so they can have a few more years of living it up.

Unfortunately, that isn't the goal of this post.

No.

Its to point out that my generation, by which I mean both the Generation X crowd and the Millennials (hey, the Boomers claim nearly 30 years of people in their generation, why have they divided up the following generations into mere decade lengths?), have been raised by people who are merely squatting in the carcass built by better men in better times.  Far fewer of 'us' are interested in hard work, in craftsmanship, in anything that takes years to master than the Boomers were.  We worship celebrity, even of the most crass and pointless sorts. Make a fool of yourself on the Internet, make a million dollars. Film a dog doing dog stuff, make a million dollars.

I'd like to say the Nadir of this movement is Girls, a show that is a crappy rip-off of an older, marginally smarter show, with less attractive people and far fewer fans, but all the critical praise due a great, moving peice of Art.  Lena Dunham is the new model Sexy for our age, the goddess of beauty our debauched and worthless age deserves, but I'd be reaching.

The Tree is dead, but that just means things aren't going to get better, just slowly worse. Girls is merely a vanguard of the new depths we will sink to.

Idiocracy was Prophecy,  our Cassandra.

All Hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

The Bechdel Test as Microcosm

In the last year or so there has been increasing fervor for applying the Bechdel Test when discussing movies. For those of you who have never heard of the test, congratulations on being a normal person with an exciting and active lifestyle.

Oh, fine... I'll explain.

The Bechdel Test is a feminist ideal that any given movie should have at least two named women characters who have a conversation in the film that isn't about a man.

If a movie passes the test, it is acceptable for feminist viewers, or something.

Of course, rather amusingly, it can be hard to determine if a movie passes the test, as if it isn't really adequetely feminist then all manner of excuses can be used to force it to violate one of the rules. For example, the Book of Eli passes the test on its face, as the female lead talks to her mother about their captivity (at the hands of men!), and the mother (Claudia... so officially a named character) only has two or three scenes in the film, yet is incredibly plot relevant.

The Book of Eli is almost entirely built around the male characters, yet passes the test, so women have to come up with marginal rulings to exclude it, you see.

There is a good reason for it. The only thing the Bechdel Test actually tests for is, in fact, itself. It literally has no relevance to the quality of the film, its relative merits as entertainment or feminism or pretty much anything.  At best it can tell you that, yes, two women have a conversation on screen in the film.

Compare that to the much simpler 'how much did it make' test.   That test is measuring only one thing, the actual number of tickets sold, yet it can give you a lot of relative information that is actually objectively useful for evaluating a movie. Not perfectly, of course, but still far more accurate than the test.

Let us explain by way of example.

Assume a movie that only includes a single character, a woman. This film is a deep meditation on the human condition, and follows the premise that a feminine perspective is more accurate and relevant than a male perspective.  Deep, meditiative, insightful and undeniably feminist.  Possibly even good and entertaining.

Fails the test on two points at a minimum, and all three on a technicality (with no other characters, we have no reason to expect the sole character's name to be relevant or revealed).

Assume a movie in the vein of Birth of a Nation, only from a manospherian/gorean point of view. THe main character is still a woman, modeled after Sarah Palin. She spends the entire movie chasing down, capturing and brainwashing other women characters to be little more than meek servants and slaves.  For the sake of argument, we'll assume that any number of conversations with the movies antagonist (a free, liberal feminist woman) do not, in fact, even mention men, but instead talk about what it means to BE a woman.

Passes all three elements of the Bechdel Test.  It might be entertaining, but probably not to people who actually tend to evaluate movies with "the Test". It is undoubtedly misogynistic, possibly even exploitative. We still don't need male characters, but we could assume that this is only a significant subplot to a bunch of men capturing and raping women and it would STILL pass the test with flying colors.

Hell, I don't even have to imagine that second film.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the whatever (There were some three or four of these) passes the Bechdel Test. True, most of those conversations would be about torture and pain and so forth, but again... not about a man.

Not that I expect anyone to actually put that film on the Bechdel Test website any time soon. They may be willing to admit that the test is flawed, but I somehow suspect that such an obvious counter-example would break them.

Because, ultimately, the Bechdel Test is a tool... not for evaluating movies, which it singularly fails at, but for political power.  The strength of the test, in many ways, is that it is utterly unconcerned with what the movie is about.  Lots of movies beloved of women include multiple female characters talking about what so many women already love to talk about... their love lives. And these films fail the test.

Think about it: A genre of films that is made for women, catering to their tastes, and employing far more actresses than any other genre is just as likely to fail the test as a film like Riddick (or for that matter, Alien, which famously passes!), which is more or less a 'guy flick' from the word go.

Not that anyone is seriously attempting to evaluate Rom-coms and other 'chick flicks' with the test. I note that most, if not all, the Harry Potter films fail, despite being written by a woman, and with the female character (hermione) being the most competent and capable character of the trio, to an almost insulting degree, simple because all the scenes involve people talking to, or about, Harry Potter, and not about, say... their hair.

It is also notable that Allison Bechdel, the creator of the test doesn't actually think much of it. She created it as a punch line in a cartoon in 1985, and noted in that very punchline that only Alien passed the test (at that time), and the women are talking about the monster (technical foul: The monster is clearly a man! Penetration, phallocentric, yadda yadda, rape analog beast!)

Which brings me to the post title.

Here we have a test that measures nothing but itself, can be easily subverted to produce the opposite of its purported intent, was a punchline to a comic strip and is essentially disavowed by its original creator, yet is used and protected, as a bludgeon for political purposes.

It is essentially modern progressivism in a nutshell. Not just feminism, which is merely one facet of modern progressivism (and in fact may be described essentially the same as the Bechdel Test, as I just did...).

Modern Progressivism is literally about nothing but itself, though it purports to be about a great many important and good things. Civil Rights? Only useful as a tool for more progressivism. Feminism? Only  useful to shut down debate and quash the opposition... national health care? Only important in that it forces you to come to the Progressives to get life saving medicine, making you dependent upon them.

Progress? Don't make me laugh. The Progressive Elite would much rather rule over a village of dirty, dark age peasants than a vast space empire. The Global Warming Fraud is proof enough of that. So long as they have marginally better stuff than you, they're happy.

In short, we have a political ideology that describes nothing but itself, has been entirely subverted to produce the opposite of what it claims, is a punchline to one grim, dark joke on humanity, and would be eagerly disavowed by most of its original adherents if they saw what had become, and yet it continues to exist as a useful bludgeon for political power.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Those Damnable Unions

As a general rule, I despise labor unions.

If you happen to be pro-union, by all means do not click away in disgust just yet, I may surprise you. Conversely, if you agree with my opening statement you too may wish to read on, rather than simply nodding in agreement and assuming that everything is jake.

The current wrangling over Boeing's 777x contract is, to my eyes, a particularly galling example of WHY I hate unions.  Boeing is a massive employer in Washington State, and where I live I scarcely go a day without meeting some new person who either works for Boeing, or has a family member who works for Boeing.  Its not just a massive employer, but a rewarding employer.  Just this week someone was telling me about a friend of theirs who got a job with Boeing some thirty or forty years ago, fresh out of the Navy and wound up becoming one of their primary electrical engineers before finally retiring, despite not having a degree when he started.

The Union is not helping the employees of Boeing, or the people of Washington by making ludicrous demands. Boeing can, and will, simply set up shop somewhere else. Pressure them hard enough, and they will move everything out of state.

Oh, maybe not this year, or the next. After all, the current political climate is pro-union to an unprecedented degree, even while the public has been souring on the concept for well over a decade. The entire debacle with the... was it South Carolina?... factory is proof of that.  No jobs were lost, or even threatened in Washington, but the new factory was in a Right to Work state where the Union had no power, can't have that!

So five thousand people wound up not getting jobs, because the government, at the behest of the Union, shut down the move. Boeing simply didn't expand. Who won?

Well... the Union won, after a fashion. A hollow victory, to be sure. They made a statement, earned a little street cred as bad motherfuckers, and that was it.  In the end all they did was delay Boeing's factory, not kill it.

So their current shenanigans are simply more of the same. Obstructionism for the sake of making a point, damn the workers, damn the business, damn the economy.

The hell of it is: in the current economic environment, the duties and purposes of a union are more necessary than they've been for a hundred years.  Not that any of our current unions are actually doing their jobs...

See: We have pushed technology to an interesting point, the point where a tiny handful of people can do the work of dozens, even hundreds.  Every few years a new job is rendered obsolete. Next on the chopping block might just be delivery men, if Amazon has its way.    Companies no longer need to employ thousands of workers, and even service work is disappearing as automation takes its place. Next up: wait staff at restaurants, replaced by the Ipad.  Movie ticket agents have already been cut in half by ticket ATMs, and I could easily see most of the rest going away as they build buildings with turnstile access and new vending machines to replace the concession stands.

Now: This is a very good thing, or rather it could be. Most people are unaware that we actually work longer and harder than our ancestors did to make our way. Our jobs are less physically demanding, perhaps, but we've created a world that seems to require a forty hour work week to just get by.  A stone age hunter spent maybe eight hours a week at his 'job', and a medieval farmer could never work, as a practical matter, longer than the sun was in the sky, where modern man can burn the midnight oil and never think twice.

There is a second aspect, a second boon to this sort of labor-free world: Anyone could, in theory, compete with established businesses. You no longer need to assembly massive infrastructures, factories or people. One guy with a vision can change the world!

Or he could.

See: while the progressive left likes to talk about the gap between rich and poor, they also like to reinforce it. They are, fundamentally, elitists who come from upper class families. They don't want to rub elbows with Joe the Plumber, they want to rule him.  There is a powerful disconnect between what they say, and what they do.

This is not, however, to say that they are entirely deliberate in placing obstacles. They have inherited a legal system that thinks putting 60 new laws on the books each and every year is far too few!

Too few?!?!?! Do me a favor, dear reader: Right now I'd like you to try and name sixty people... any sixty people you like... right now. Name sixty illegal acts, or sixty video games.  Chances are you're going to stumble and stop in the twenties. You might get to sixty, eventually. Great: You just covered...oh... 1979. Now lets try 1980 through 1999 before we move into the new millennium!

Not to belabor the point, but even one year of passing 60 new laws is too-the-fuck many laws. The primary purpose of most of these laws, or the result anyway, is protectionism for the established. They are obstacles and barriers in the path of making your own way in life. You can't start a business these days without a lawyer to guide you through the paperwork, and to protect you from litigations. And the lawyers like it that way.

So we come, at last, back to Unions.

See: You, the guy reading this, probably won't start competing with Amazon any time soon. Jeff Bezos has already paid his dues to ensure you can't afford it. Now he doesn't have to hire you to deliver his packages either, or work in his warehouses. Soon enough he won't need you to drive the trucks that bring product from the factories or boats.

I mean: He does have to hire SOME people. But since there are so very, very many of you, and so very few job openings he can pretty much make any ludicrous demands he wants of you... if you want that job. He can pay you peanuts, make you do absurd things like sing karaoke for his amusement and so forth. And he can fire you for simply not plastering a fake smile on your face every day and pretending to be grateful for the opportunity to be his personal bitch.

A little over a hundred years ago the Rockefellers (democrats and progressives from the beginning, if you like to pay attention) had all the coal mines.  And since they had all the coal mines, they decided they didn't need to pay the miners enough money to live on.

Logic fail, right there. See, in a large enough group of people you'll find some moron who is willing to work for less money than he actually needs, just so he gets SOME money... thus making sure no one can afford dinner.  The miners didn't like this, of course, so they went on strike. Now... those early, pre-union, strikers were actually wrong. Not for going on strike, but for occupying the lands and mines and preventing anyone else from getting hired, but thats a debate for another day. Anyway: Rockefeller hired the Pinkertons, who when in with guns. People died, and the government officially reckognized the rights of people to organize to negotiate against management.  How they managed to then align themselves, politically, with the very people who helped spur their creation is a story for another day.

Without a side trip down the rabbit hole of defining capitalism and the invisible hand... Unions served a useful and noble purpose when all the cards, politically and economically, fell with the moneyed elite, with big business.  It didn't take too long for them to become corrupt, self serving parasites prone to extortionistic behavior, but that is neither here nor there.

We've come full circle: with all the power once again falling into the hands of big business, with a decreasing need for people in jobs, a union is a vital counterweight against exploitive behavior on the side of management. A good union, rather. We DO need organized labor until the economy learns to adapt to this new world we've created.

The unions we got ain't it, but you play the cards you're dealt.

On Time and in your interwebz, stealin' your bits... its the friday podcast!