You know what would be awesome?

If Obama gets elected and it turns out he really is a secret commie-Muslim-radical-terrorist or whatever. I hope he starts a black-power regime and sends millions of white Republicans to jail after taxing all of their money to give it to welfare moms and then invites his best friend Bin Laden to the White House for coffee. I can't wait!

Crazy X Insane X Lunacy

Since I'm talking about my family and politics, here's something else for y'all. I was about to blog about how this reminds me of a family political discussion and tell you about it, but then I remembered that I already did. So I'll just add some more commentary.

It is kind of funny/insane what happens when two separate propaganda campaigns collide, in this case 1) that socialism is inherently bad and 2) that whatever Democrat is running for office is a socialist. Both ideas are so detached from reality that I don't even know where to start. That old post I linked to is as good as anything I'd come up with now.

In the actual conversation mentioned, I simply asked for clarification as to what was so troubling about the policy ideas under discussion, and my followup questions on the meaningless replies made it obvious to everyone involved that the replies offered were meaningless. Which led to: "so you're a fan of Hillary, huh?" Which introduces another dimension of lunacy, which is that by passively implying that assertions should defensibly make sense, in the alternate reality we inhabit I was defending the ideas/person under attack. Of course in my own personal reality all I was doing is valuing intellectual honesty. But in America there's no such thing; there is only power. Through that lens I suppose I was indeed somehow defending Hillary Clinton and the power structures with which she is aligned simply by questioning a baseless attack against her.

If I wanted to I could probably come up with a few more levels of insanity but that seems like enough for now. I guess my point is that there are so many layers of bullshit operating simultaneously that is is almost impossible to break through them and make sense to people. These people I was talking to aren't stupid. They're actually pretty smart, but they've soaked up the bullshit that is forced upon them. In that regard, we're all victims of ... this...

who's next? looks like Syria

US troops killed civilians in Syria tonight, including women and children. Whoever is responsible will never be held accountable. What a great world.

banality of evil

I don't think I've ever recommended listening to one of these Greenwald audio interviews before, but I think this one is worth listening to. The reason I recommend it is because the of how casually evil the interviewee is. This guy is widely considered an "Iran expert" and served on a bipartisan task force that recently recommended a variety of aggressive actions towards Iran, which was given prominent display in the Washington Post. Both of the lunatics in contention for President of the US value the input of this guy, who is clearly fucking insane. Good work, America!

Teacher leave them kids alone

I have to read and grade/mark* about 250 short essays by Wednesday. I've never assigned grades/marks to people before. From the few I've glanced over, it is going to be ugly.

* - In Canada you don't "take" a test, you "write" a test, and then you receive a "mark" instead of a grade.

Chomsky on this election

Chomsky's case in favor of voting for Obama (in swing states, and "without illusions").

kill your TV!

I've mentioned this before, but I think it might be worth saying again. I love not having TV. Life is just better without it. If there's a show or two that you can't live without, you can always watch them on the internet, only on your own schedule and without (or at least with far fewer) commercials. And you avoid the giant time-suck that is TV, and probably save some money. If someone had suggested this to me 2 years ago I would have thought it sounded nice but I couldn't do it. But I would have been wrong. Consider it!

Colin Powell makes me wonder

The people who have dominated political conversations in my family are, as far as I can tell, paranoid reactionaries whose thought processes don't seem to be much deeper than "America is number one" and "abortion is bad because Jeebus told me so." They think of themselves as conservatives and loyally vote for Republicans. They also love the US Military and are racist against black people behind closed doors, which is why I thought of them right away when I heard about Colin Powell endorsing BO.

In a weird way it is a bit of a relief to think about something deeply personal in response to the orgy of insanity that is the US electoral season. If not for this family thing, I'd be thinking about how maddening it is that among the highest laws of Respectable Political Discourse enforced by the mainstream media is a bipartisan respect for the honor, integrity, and moderate sensibility of Colin Powell, all of it a huge lie. And I'd be thinking, like Chris Floyd, about how BO's acceptance of an endorsement from a blood-drenched war criminal like Powell is yet another disturbing revelation about who Obama really is.

Instead of all that, I'm wondering how they're resolving their cognitive dissonance back home. My initial assumption was that their heads must have exploded. They fucking love them some Colin Powell, and Colin Powell just endorsed a secret Muslim terrorist for President.... HEAD ASPLODE!!! Maybe they'll rationalize and figure that he knew Obama was going to win anyway, so he might as well give a meaningless endorsement to help himself somehow (which does seem like a pretty good explanation for his actions). So maybe they'll excuse him on those grounds.

But then I started to think about how the reason Colin Powell is so universally beloved is because he's black (at least by American one-drop-of-African-blood standards, cause really his actual skin tone is very light), because he's a highly-decorated military man, and because he tells people what they want to hear. Bipartisan respectable Americans love the military and are racist in the same back-room way as my family, so it gives them great pleasure to have a negro in a high place ("one of the good ones") telling them what they want to hear, especially a (4 star) general who can make us all feel like American use of force is something other than the industrial-scale imperial terrorism that it really is. So that's why Powell has such a counter-factual public image, and why my family loves him.

Now that Powell is off the Republican reservation, endorsing "the most liberal member of Congress" who has deep associations with known terrorists (as opposed to actually being a terrorist bomber like McCain was), now Powell isn't telling my family what they want to hear. So maybe they'll actually decide they never really loved him in the first place, never trusted him. Those blacks, you know how they always stick together. It is probably Powell's fault that we never caught Bin Laden and aren't doing so great in Iraq! He probably was secretly undermining Bush all along, as part of his secret liberal agenda. Now we know what he really is, an Arab-loving commie traitor who hates America and always has! I'm getting a bit loopy here, but I'm serious that I think this kind of retroactive denunciation might be how they'll respond. But who knows. Maybe I'll find out somehow.

Alright, well I'm hoping to go home for Christmas this year, and there's some (very small) chance that some people in my family might actually read this, so I should do some damage control. First of all, my level of frustration and outrage with this unending election is getting a bit out of control, so maybe that is messing with my head a bit. Second of all, all the non-speculative things I said about you* are true. Most notably for its potential controversy, you're racist. If you don't like it that I think that, maybe you should have given me a reason to think otherwise. But there's always a chance to change that. None of this means I don't love you guys. It just means that I have some very serious problems with some of what you say and do, and that these relate to the very serious problems I have with US politics.

I don't know if that was actually damage control or not, but apparently I've been needing to write something like this, so here it is.

*Note that by "you" I'm not really talking about a specific person, but kind of the average of a group of people. For example, if one or two people say or do overtly racist things, and nobody speaks up against it, everyone in that whole group gets the "you're racist" tag even if you yourself don't say racist things. By not resisting a culture of racism, "you" are racist. I think it is reasonable to see some people as more responsible for this than others, but everyone has a share. How you, the person reading this, specifically fit into all this is for you to decide I suppose. Feel free to talk to me about it.

Lastly, courtesy of Guys from Area 51:

This is you

Capitalism, it don't work

More goodies from Lenin:

EQUALS

I kind of like how his real middle name is put in quotes to make it sound as if it was actually his nickname. That's a nice touch. His turban and goofy grin look really sinister too. Definitely looks like someone we should be torturing down in Gitmo or bombing in Pakistan, not the one who should be ordering the torture or boming.

Personally, I'm looking forward to more dead fetuses, especially if they would have grown up into the kinds of people who put up this sign. And more gay weddings? That's just fun for everyone. Restricting firearms seems like a good self-preservation strategy for "Hussein."

Image via Lenin.

Another Columbus Day in the Land Without Shame

In Canada today is Thanksgiving, but back home in America I'm told it is Columbus Day. Americans should be deeply ashamed to live in a country that celebrates a national holiday in honor of a genocidal slave trader. But there are lots of things Americans should be ashamed of, like say the genocides we're unleashing right now or the slavery of the day that we not only condone, but applaud. We're a pretty shameless nation, so I don't expect anything to change.

Why I won't vote: Lesser Evilism is a sham

So I wrote a sprawling reply to a comment, only to realize that by the end I had written my way into a pretty good point that should have been more emphasized. I ought to rewrite it, but, let's face it, I'm just a lazy writer with a thinly-read blog whose audience disappeared when he stopped writing about poker. So I'll add some more thoughts here at the top.

Anyway, the point is this: if you accept the lesser-evil logic of voting for Democrats, you're basically saying that you'll support anything as long as you're convinced that the alternative is worse. And once you admit that, you become completely exploitable and hope is lost.

Given a choice between two evils, the lesser evil is better. That part of it isn't wrong. But the flaw in the lesser-evil argument in favor of supporting Democrats is that there are more than two choices. There's always another option for a better outcome, it just might be very unlikely to win. If you make it known that you'll always support the lesser evil and never opt for the risky 3rd choice, those two evils can get worse and worse, knowing that you'll have to support one of them. So at some point you have to make a stand with the third option.

When should you stop favoring the more likely lesser evil and opt for the unlikely 3rd (or 4th, etc) option*? Well I think that is a judgement everyone has to make for themselves, but I think we can agree on 2 things. First is that the more evil the two evil options are, the more we should favor the highly unlikely 3rd option. And second is that the more similar the two evils (i.e. the lesser evil isn't really that much less evil), the more we should favor the third. Much of the discussion below is about the second point, though I discuss the first as well.


* - equally important question is "what is that third option?" Here, as usual, I argue for boycotting the election. I think there is also honor in voting for 3rd party candidates, like Nader or the Green Party. My preference for boycott over that option is a topic for another time.
----
Some recent comments by David are worth considering.

Even if you recognize that both Democrats and Republicans are basically two factions of the same party, working together towards an authoritarian corporate police state domestically, and endless violent interventions internationally, all for the enrichment of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us, there is still the question as to whether one faction is preferable to the other because of their minor differences. And due to the tremendous amount of power and control wielded by various holders of public office, those minor differences can add up to be very meaningful for lots of people.

I've argued repeatedly that the best response to our sham democracy is to boycott the elections. I generally think that refusing as much as possible to interact with a system that is hopelessly rigged against my interests is the most effective and honorable way to dissent. That's my approach. But everyone has to make their own decisions, and maybe my moral calculus is different than yours.

I do believe that it is possible to construct good arguments in favor of participating in these elections. I think that if they exist, they'd look something like what David said: that these small differences add up enough to justify supporting one side over the other. But here's the thing. I think there's a huge burden of proof to be met, and I'm not at all convinced that David or people who make similar arguments have met them. For his reasoning to stand up, I'd need to be strongly convinced that these differences actually exist, considering not just the immediate short-term impact of the minor policy changes, but also the long run consequences of various decisions. By going out and voting for BO, you're casting a vote in support of a candidate who has repeatedly lied about matters of extreme importance, who fully supports the framework of the US using lethal military force around the globe in the so-called "War on Terror," who fully supports domestic lawlessness for the executive branch, who fully supports using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street lunatics, and so on and so on. In order to actively support such monstrous evil, you need to be very very sure that what you're doing really does somehow lead to a better result than your other choices.

David lists 3 commonly-cited reasons to think Democrats are preferable. (1)They make better judicial appointments. (2)They are less influenced by irrational factions (specifically Christians), and (3) there is better treatment of persecuted groups of people under Democratic leadership. First I'll make a few scattered rebuttals to these notions, then I'll argue that even if he's right, that isn't a convincing case in favor of supporting Democrats.

In regards to the first point, it seems to me that the pattern of judicial appointments is roughly like this. Under Republican leadership, the most radically far-right judges that can possibly be taken seriously are pushed through the system with little obstruction from Democrats. Under Democratic leadership, highly conservative judges are appointed, but called "moderate" by Democrats to make them sound reasonable and responsible, and yet fiercely opposed by Republicans who push for even more conservative jurists. There is no force for a genuinely liberal judiciary, just a two-pronged approach towards an ever more conservative one , that moves a little more slowly to the right under Democrats. I should note that this is 'measured' relative to public sentiment, meaning perhaps overall the courts could become more liberal on an absolute scale, but the force of the political process is to move them as far right as the public at large can stomach.

Do women and gays and minorities receive better treatment under Democrats? Well, not the ones in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia. They'll keep getting slaughtered at roughly the same rate under BO or McCain. And it seems to me that plenty of Democrat leaders would be quite willing to give up on abortion, or to turn the other way on gay-bashing. They'll maintain the policies that keep black people at a disadvantage, and keep locking up black men who turn to the underground pharmeceutical economy as an inevitable response to that disadvantage. Cause, I mean, what are the black people going to do, vote for Republicans?
Last is that under Democrats, the insane Christian Right won't have the President's ear as much. But Democrats have plenty of other insane people pulling their strings. Like who? Well how about the lunatics who got us into this economic meltdown in the first place? The insanity and influence of the Christian Right is benign compared to the murderous pyschopathy of corporate influence. And it isn't like the rabid Christian Right is powerless under Democrat rule. In fact they might work themself into such an outrage about being ruled by a terrorist Muslim nigger with a funny name that they become even more of a political force.

Real political change doesn't happen from the top down, but from the bottom up. The President doesn't dictate how gays are treated, the people do, and the President responds. BO might treat them better than McCain, but how do we know that the further outrages under McCain wouldn't be some kind of tipping point to drive people towards some kind of social revolution (the reverse of the Muslim-nigger effect on the racist Christians)? Just because the government might be more officially hostile under Republican executives or judges doesn't necessarily mean the public will be.

So those are my scattered rebutals, and you might point out that all of these objections can still be consistent with Democrats being a relatively lesser evil. The conservative Democrat judges are better than the ultra-right Republican ones, right? The Republicans and Democrats are both run by corporations, but at least the Christians are more ignored under Democrats, right? And the Democrats might be a bit less willing to stomp the queers, right?

Say that is the case. Does that actually justify supporting a blood-drenched criminal for President? Does more support for gay marriage merit participating in a system that guarantees perpetual war and suffering on a monumental scale? Does the slightly lower chance of Roe v Wade being overturned make it worth it to lend the appearance of legitimate democracy to a ruling class who privatize profits to an elite few while making risk and losses public? Does having fewer Liberty University graduates in the Justice Department make it ok to vote for a party that passed retroactive immunity for companies that spied on us, a party that passed laws to make torture legal, that has refused to impeach Bush?

David says we should support a murderous criminal party because their crimes aren't quite as bad as the crimes of their partner. But the obvious fact of their partnership means that by supporting one, you're supporting the other. Not a lot can happen in the USG if one of the parties doesn't want it to happen. Everything that we've seen happen under Bush is fully the responsibility of Democrats as well. There's not the slightest reason to think that BO will set any of those things right, and there's ample reason to think that he'll continue on largely the same path.

But David and many others want to support this whirlwind of bipartisan destruction, in the name of a few very marginal differences that may or may not even really exist. What are the long term consequences of this? It tells the ruling class that you'll accept anything, as long as you're convinced that the only alternative is something slightly worse. Stop and think about that. Say it over and over. Think about how easy this can be exploited. And think about whether a ruling class who has slaughtered a million Iraqis and stolen trillions of your dollars would be willing and able to exploit you in such a way.

Chomsky makes the important point that genuine freedom and democracy means that the use of power should be assumed to be illegitimate unless proven otherwise, and that the burden of proof should be very high. Participation in a national election to decide the holders of offices is certainly a use of power. And I don't see that David's argument has met the burden of proof for the exercise of such power, especially considering the strategic consequences of demonstrating your willingness to support evil out of a fear of slightly greater evil. It isn't clear to me that there is going to be much, if any, difference in real-world results under either option, and it is clear to me that both options are evil. So I'm not voting. Are you?

voting for democrats is ironic and funny hahahhaha

Ha, isn't it funny how Democrats have no interest in democracy at all? But that Palin woman has no experience overturning democratically elected governments, so we can't take her seriously! We must support Obama/Biden! They don't talk funny like she does.

on profanity

I'm finally getting around to starting to read Pinker's newest book, which had some introductory remarks on profanity, and then I think he will return to the subject eventually. I don't know how long it will take me to get to that part, so I'll just blurg along on that topic for a while here.

Profanity is an interesting phenomenon. Everybody knows that everybody else knows that these words exist and have meanings that can be useful, and yet we all understand that we're supposed to use various synonyms for them instead. Often there are no polite direct substitutions (for instance you can't sub in any replacement for something like "John fucked his girlfriend last night") and you have to rephrase the entire though into something more polite ("John had sexual intercourse with her"). Other times you're allowed to substitute the anatomically correct term or a less vulgar term, or whatever. And forbidden words are always about sex and excretion and religion. ("Cock! Crap! Jesus titty-fucking Christ!")

Why the hell is all of this going on? Pinker seems to be saying that it is part of the elaborate system whereby we're all acknowledging social systems and our relative places in society or something. We'll see when I get there. I'll let you know. Until then...

Myself, I'm fairly profane. If you could do a word count on this blog, I'd bet profanity levels are pretty damn high. I think I just don't have any respect for arbitrary taboo, and I derive some enjoyment from flaunting that. I said shit in class the other day, which was fairly enjoyable, and yet its stupid that I should even make a note of such, but I do. Why? Fucking profanity, that's why. Also, I like it that my advisers are loose with profanity. I pretty much like anyone who is loose with profanity. So for me, profanity is a code that gives me cues that you might be cool. For others, profanity is a cue that you're probably a terrible person.

Also, profanity can be really funny sometimes. George Carlin and whatnot. Good for a cheap laugh at least. Tickles you somewhere you're not allowed to be tickled. The Aristocrats.

This post doesn't have a point, just rambling thoughts. No end either.

The book:

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Killer of Innocents Denounces (Other) Killers of Innocents, Runs for President

Jonathan Schwarz notes:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you have any doubt that Barack Obama shares your sense of patriotism?

SEN. MCCAIN: I'm sure he's very patriotic, but his relationship with Mr. Ayers is open to question...how can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people?

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Obama says he was eight years old when that was happening.

SEN. MCCAIN: But he became friends with him and spent time with him while the guy was unrepentant over his activities...

I'd like to make some jokes here, but I don't have the heart. What a country this is.

Via today's cretinous NY Times story about Obama & William Ayers, which mentions McCain's statement while betraying no awareness of its significance.

Fair and Balanced

And to point out the insanity of the other side, I turn to IOZ:

To me the most despairing moment of the whole debate was the discussion of when it is appropriate to use military force, and Joe Biden laid out two points, the first of which was is it feasible, which sounds reasonable after the last eight years until you pause and consider just how monstrous it is. It is, in fact, one of the most explicit rejections I've heard of the quaint and never-practiced doctrine of war as an instrument of the utmost last resort, a point at which feasibility becomes a meaningless rubric because the only other choices are death and subjugation. It affirms violence as a basic tool of statecraft--of course, we all know this to be historically and almost universally the case, but it still rankles to hear it spoken without even the Cold-War-current nods to "the peace-loving American people." In the question just prior, asked if Americans had "the stomach" for Biden's expansive view of acceptable foreign military intervention, Biden was even plainer: "The American people have a stomach for success." This too is a basic truth--that people love peace only until promised triumph--rarely publicly expressed. In a sense, I suppose we owe Senator Joe thanks for his honesty.

Because I'm above it all, this is funny instead of sad.

is there a single sentence here that doesn't sound stupid?

In regards to the way I respond to what passes for politics in the USA, I'm hoping that I can make the transition from quivering rage to bemused above-it-all condescension. In that spirit, I note the following statement by Sarah Palin (pointed out by the 51 fellas):

I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are...

Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position.

Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.

What's with the GOP and idiots who can't talk good?

they both support this plan!

The US treasury secretary, former head of Goldman Sachs, who by playing both of those roles is doubly responsible for the current economic meltdown, decides to let Lehman, a Goldman competitor sink, but then bails out AIG, which, coincidentally, owes Goldman $20 billion, and he made that decision while the current Goldman CEO was in the room, coincidentally. (I get bonus points for how much punctuation that sentence had.) Then he demands to pour more gasoline on the fire, to the tune of $700 billion of taxpayer money that he gets to unconditionally pass out to his former colleagues. And everyone who doesn't understand how brilliant his plan is, they're all shit-eating retard monkeys who need to let the responsible people make the decisions. Because if we don't go along with this mature wise plan, everyone is going to fucking die a painful death in their beds. But if you just cough up a few hundred extra every tax season until you die, we'll all be safe and the Wall Street boys will be able to keep providing us with the valuable services that we desperately need from them.

Bow before your betters, America, and thank them for liberating you from your money.

This is what they do. Both of those clown running for imperial manager support this swindle. And you're going to go vote for one of them aren't you?