Costs Can't Easily Be Predicted For Every Decision, True, But Arguably A Lot Of Costs Can Be Estimated

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Your arguments sum to "In my perfect world, there will be no Jews, no Shinto, no Hindu, no Sikhs, no nothing other than a vaguely Christian-ish 'default culture'. This to me is a positive," and you don't understand how everyone else is appalled and taking it as a negative?

Very strange that you assume "Vaguely Christian" to be a "default culture", sounds like you have some internalised Christian hegemony to deal with!

Kaiser Health News

How Political Maneuvering Derailed A Red State’s Path To Medicaid Expansion

When Kansas elected Laura Kelly as governor, Medicaid expansion looked like a shoo-in, with seemingly broad support across state government.

The impression I have is that while the poor rural voters may want Medicaid, the land/business owners who gerrymander their states to hell and back will stonewall them, as in the article. You can blame the poor for being demoralized, but many of these people also voted for Obama as recently as 2008, so maybe they currently don't have any good local liberal/left candidates to throw their weight behind.

Your stupid villains might be on to something

It’s a genre we hated since it’s inception: the right-thinking reporter descending into some godforsaken poor white corner of rural or rust belt America in order to find out why they won’t vote like the author thinks they should. Unsurprisingly, the author finds character flaws and racism at the heart of the issue. The right finds this condescending, the left doesn’t consider the opinions of the unwashed unworthy absent intersectional demographic cover. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This Monica Potts NYT number fits the bill, right down to borrowing some racial material from someone else’s work to round out all the elements. Potts, a former Arkansan, heads back home after being away for two decades and finds the community both economically decimated and deeply suspicious of any government spending. The article is pegged on the county library, which became the subject of a local controversy when it wanted to offer a raise to a librarian. It’s a neat encapsulation of the perspective of the author: the smart ones (like her) moved away and all that remains is an angry, anti-intellectual rump who views any attempts at improvement as useless taxation.

Potts’ perspective can be challenged in two ways. One of which, she lays out clearly: Van Buren County, where this story takes place, had a natural gas boom during which it spent a relatively large sum of money on a library that it now has trouble paying for, to the point at which the sales tax had to be raised to pay for it. The librarian, though her salary would have been commensurate to her education, was far above the county median. Libraries are good, but not every library expenditure makes sense, especially to a community that just sunk a lot of money it didn’t have into one.

The second one is the Facebook group where the revolt started (see the graphic above). It got a little nutty after the article ran, but scrolling back, you’ll see one conspiracist nutter posting, but mostly it’s unobjectionable community stuff. Most interesting to anyone trying to parse the Times article is a controversy over rising water bills. Dig into the comments and you’ll find that a large water treatment plant was built for a chicken processing plant that has since closed, leaving nobody to pay for it but regular rate-payers, who are watching their bills balloon.

The library and the water bills create a pattern. Due to small populations, rural areas are much more susceptible both to the boom/bust cycle and to white elephant projects that can shred government budgets for years. Van Buren County, unlike these federal government, can’t print more money. It also has few of the fixed, immovable amenities that allows a community to make demands of richer corporations and people. Overspending during booms leads to both real constraints during busts and a “once bitten, twice shy” mentality when it comes to spending.

Urban liberals live with the notion that there is an unlimited pool of money that we could spend to solve all of our problems if we could just claw it away from the rich. The people of Van Buren county disagree.

“We train our young men to drop fire on people, but our commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

The above thread is a typical, and entertaining, mockery of crude and reactionary youth (presumed entirely male but who knows) getting shut down by calm and minimalist mods running X-box live.

But reading through it, it’s easy to forget: these are social rules for games where you run around in grimdark settings finding other players and shooting them with realistic guns until they are a bloody mess on the floor. And then you do it again ten seconds later.

I’m not criticizing that as an illegitimate form of enjoyment, but it does seem that such an atmosphere goes pretty well in hand with crude and violent jokes, particularly usernames. This one guy calls himself ObamaDeathPanel, a morbid joke about what the true all time killer is (perhaps I should claim the usertag Capitalism.) And while that might be tasteless - that seems exactly the sort of joking nom de guerre a barbarian in that situation might take. Many of the other handles and bios don’t seem that much farther off from what an adrenaline addled machine gunner would say either.

The whole thing highlights the hypocrisy and disavowal of this corporation. We want to take the money of teenage boys who love shooting their problems into oblivion, but for mods’ sakes don’t talk like someone who does that.

They fallback on the excuse “well the Live service is E because people from other games use it”, but then that begs, why are you trying to make a social experience that is inclusive of both Call of Duty and Spyro?

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

Kids are dumb and will say weird shit; of they hear this from their parents, what's the context? Is this a case of genuine conviction or edgy lower-class humor? For all the fervor over Muslims, I've yet to see any investigative journalism over how Muslims in Europe actually raise their kids to interact with society at large, and whether they use homeschooling, etc to their advantage like fundamentalists in the US. There also seems to be no concerted effort from even the right-wingers to attack Islam as an ideology/belief system anymore, which is a shame.

Even preschoolers are radicalizing in Belgium “They threaten to murder ‘infidels’, slice their necks, call classmates pigs”

A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.

An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:

“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”

Sadly these are the least frightening cases:

A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”

After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.

1, 2, 3

"Finally, we gradually eliminate all words from our vocabulary. The working classes hate words. They’re all illiterate, probably; I assume they communicate in grunts and squeals. We must learn to squeal like they do. Roll around in the muck. Hide your delicate bourgeois face in a plastic snout. Lap up corn syrup from the trough. Drape yourself in a soiled flag and grunt the name of Jesus Christ. Squeal, piggy, squeal."

-Sam Kriss

also with all due respect the main reason the left loses so much is that y’all refuse to compromise on the language and messaging you use to speak to voters. i swear if you rebranded “defund the police” as “invest in community safety from the ground up” most white suburban moderates would be like “that sounds great” and i know that because that’s how i’ve literally reframed it to white suburban moderates who think “defund the police” means we’re going to live in a scary lawless mad max world

I'd be more sympathetic to the protestors if blocking highways actually accomplished anything. At least chaining yourself to a redwood saves the tree, but what's gained from stopping people from driving down a certain road? At least Occupy Wall Street blocked a couple office buildings, which inconvenienced some business scumbags. But the only thing produced by blocking roads is bad PR at best and dead protestors at worst.

Unusually poignant example of how stupid the "blocking traffic with protests is fine if it's for a good cause" argument is:

What is "corruption"?

Both liberals and libertarians believe that too many politicians serve "big business" or "crony interests" instead of the "public".

But look at from the perspective of a politician. One group of citizens may be the majority, but they have little way of influencing you outside of letters or collective actions, which are rare, and to be honest, their opinions are often uninformed and they have no control over major social organizations, so they don't matter to you all that much.

But a small minority of citizens are very important people, who direct the majority of economic activity and control the fate of your nation or- perhaps even more crucially-your home state, because they control land and resources and can choose where to invest them to create jobs. You're going to listen to what they have to say, especially since they can afford to send specialized lobbyists to wait in your office all day with lots of impressive documents and charts.

And they don't need to threaten or bribe you to get what they want; all they have to do is to make a convincing argument on why voting a certain way on a given law or regulation will benefit them (and by extensions, your constituency) or hurt them (and by extension, your constituency).

"The public may have good intentions in supporting this higher minimum wage law, or in their campaign to resist privatization," they argue, "but with all due respect to the public, they just don't know the facts. This bill will destroy jobs and hurt your state. Look, let us take you out to a nice dinner to discuss it. If you back us up on this, we'll support you come election season. Everybody wins."

"Corruption" is not the result of personal moral failing. It is the natural, inevitable symptom of a divided society, where a small percentage of owners who control almost all property and economic activity have interests that oppose that of the property-less majority. The only way to end "corruption" is to subordinate economic activity to the democratic will of society at large via the abolition of private property and the developmemt of communism.

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

On Post-Fascism

On the degradation of universal citizenship.

The end of colonial empires in the 1960s and the end of Stalinist (“state socialist,” “state capitalist,” “bureaucratic collectivist”) systems in the 1990s has triggered a process never encountered since the Mongolian invasions in the thirteenth century: a comprehensive and apparently irreversible collapse of established statehood as such. While the bien-pensant Western press daily bemoans perceived threats of dictatorship in far-away places, it usually ignores the reality behind the tough talk of powerless leaders, namely that nobody is prepared to obey them. The old, creaking, and unpopular nation-state—the only institution to date that had been able to grant civil rights, a modicum of social assistance, and some protection from the exactions of privateer gangs and rapacious, irresponsible business elites—ceased to exist or never even emerged in the majority of the poorest areas of the world. In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and of the former Soviet Union not only the refugees, but the whole population could be considered stateless. The way back, after decades of demented industrialization (see the horrific story of the hydroelectric plants everywhere in the Third World and the former Eastern bloc), to a subsistence economy and “natural” barter exchanges in the midst of environmental devastation, where banditry seems to have become the only efficient method of social organization, leads exactly nowhere. People in Africa and ex-Soviet Eurasia are dying not by a surfeit of the state, but by the absence of it.

Traditionally, liberation struggles of any sort have been directed against entrenched privilege. Equality came at the expense of ruling groups: secularism reduced the power of the Princes of the Church, social legislation dented the profits of the “moneyed interest,” universal franchise abolished the traditional political class of landed aristocracy and the noblesse de robe, the triumph of commercial pop culture smashed the ideological prerogatives of the progressive intelligentsia, horizontal mobility and suburban sprawl ended the rule of party politics on the local level, contraception and consumerist hedonism dissolved patriarchal rule in the family—something lost, something gained. Every step toward greater freedom curtailed somebody’s privileges (quite apart from the pain of change). It was conceivable to imagine the liberation of outlawed and downtrodden lower classes through economic, political, and moral crusades: there was, crudely speaking, somebody to take ill-gotten gains from. And those gains could be redistributed to more meritorious sections of the population, offering in exchange greater social concord, political tranquility, and safety to unpopular, privileged elites, thereby reducing class animosity. But let us not forget though that the social-democratic bargain has been struck as a result of centuries of conflict and painful renunciations by the traditional ruling strata. Such a liberation struggle, violent or peaceful, is not possible for the new wretched of the earth.

Nobody exploits them. There is no extra profit and surplus value to be appropriated. There is no social power to be monopolized. There is no culture to be dominated. The poor people of the new stateless societies—from the “homogeneous” viewpoint—are totally superfluous. They are not exploited, but neglected. There is no overtaxation, since there are no revenues. Privileges cannot be redistributed toward a greater equality since there are no privileges, except the temporary ones to be had, occasionally, at gunpoint.

Famished populations have no way out from their barely human condition but to leave. The so-called center, far from exploiting this periphery of the periphery, is merely trying to keep out the foreign and usually colored destitutes (the phenomenon is euphemistically called “demographic pressure”) and set up awesome barriers at the frontiers of rich countries, while our international financial bureaucracy counsels further deregulation, liberalization, less state and less government to nations that do not have any, and are perishing in consequence. “Humanitarian wars” are fought in order to prevent masses of refugees from flowing in and cluttering up the Western welfare systems that are in decomposition anyway.

Citizenship in a functional nation-state is the one safe meal ticket in the contemporary world. But such citizenship is now a privilege of the very few. The Enlightenment assimilation of citizenship to the necessary and “natural” political condition of all human beings has been reversed. Citizenship was once upon a time a privilege within nations. It is now a privilege to most persons in some nations. Citizenship is today the very exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist nation-states, while the majority of the world’s population cannot even begin to aspire to the civic condition, and has also lost the relative security of pre-state (tribe, kinship) protection.

The scission of citizenship and sub-political humanity is now complete, the work of Enlightenment irretrievably lost. Post-fascism does not need to put non-citizens into freight trains to take them into death; instead, it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish bins that could feed them. Post-fascist movements everywhere, but especially in Europe, are anti-immigration movements, grounded in the “homogeneous” world-view of productive usefulness. They are not simply protecting racial and class privileges within the nation-state (although they are doing that, too) but protecting universal citizenship within the rich nation-state against the virtual-universal citizenship of all human beings, regardless of geography, language, race, denomination, and habits. The current notion of “human rights” might defend people from the lawlessness of tyrants, but it is no defense against the lawlessness of no rule.

Currently interesting piece written in 2000.