Monday, March 26, 2018

I Kind of Hate the Democrats

I Kind of Hate the Democrats — English


Not because they don’t mean well. But the Republicans mean well, too. Intentions aren’t magic. They can mean well all they want. The results of their actions are what matter. The Republicans want to take us into a fascist corporate Christian nightmare (don’t get me wrong, I think I’d make a damn good terrorists, making explosives out of piss and the walls of your house, but I’d rather just hang out and play with my cats), but they’re pretty honest about it. “Corporations are people, friend.” “We need god in schools.” “FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.”

The Democrats are really annoying. They keep saying they want to fight for justice, fight for people’s rights, and then they keep not doing it. Women, brown people, queer folks, or immigrants, anyone’s suffering is open for negotiation. Who will the dems throw under the bus this week? Will women lose access to abortions, health care, or protection from domestic violence? Will disabled people lose the ability to force employers and building owners to make their properties accessible or will they just lose another 10% of their income? Will poor people lose their homes and their food or just their food? Will brown people lose their lives or their children?

Every goddamn time, the democrats look at the table and either fold their hand or assume they’ll win without having to fight. They can’t seem to get it through their thick fucking skulls that Republican voters don’t give a shit if the candidate is a hypocrite or a liar or a thief. Look at Trump! He’s a hypocrite, a liar, a thief, a racist, a rapist, a bully, a thug, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, a complete failure as a moral human being, an incompetent narcissist who can’t even speak in coherent sentences, and they fell all over themselves voting for him! Why? Because they agreed with the worst of what he said and didn’t care about the rest because they knew he’d appoint the fascists they like!

The Democrats don’t even bother to compete in half the districts because they think they can’t win, they don’t compete in a quarter of the districts because they think they can’t lose, and they barely compete in the rest because they think the other guy’s a clown! And when they get in office, they keep not fighting! They don’t fight for their causes, they don’t fight for their constituents, they don’t fight for their beliefs, they just don’t fight! They open with the compromise position, compromise further, and then get stabbed in the back because the Republicans are lying, thieving assholes.

Monday, March 19, 2018

The Amorality of Capitalism — English


The very best one can expect from capitalism is amorality. Very often, however, the system falls far short of that.

The capitalist system's sole purpose is to maximize profit and concentrate wealth and power. That's it. Any task that achieves those ends is to be undertaken. Any task that doesn't do so is ruthlessly quashed. This is both the theory and practice of capitalism. And we also know that this never leads to a moral outcome. Hell, the fact that people are willing to be absolute dicks about getting revenge on cheaters is the only reason the system even maintains neutral morality as a best practice.

But whenever there aren't strict standards in place that are constantly enforced by careful and neutral watchdogs, then the results are absolutely disgusting.

We knew that tobacco causes cancer in the 1890s. You heard that right; we knew about the link between tobacco and cancer before the invention of radio. That information was immediately covered up and the tobacco industry spent decades lying about it and spreading propaganda. Only a hard-fought campaign by underfunded humanitarians managed to curb their lies at all, and it took decades more to start punishing them.

Thomas Midgley developed the lead additive for gasoline in the 1920s, and production was immediately plagued by deaths and toxicity due to lead poisoning. And Midgley, DuPont, and General Motors immediately lied to the public about it, claiming that lead is perfectly safe. They spent decades poisoning people by spewing lead into the environment and then fought for years against the Clean Air Act, which mandated the use of catalytic converters and the elimination of leaded gasoline.

For an encore, Midgley went on to develop chlorofluorocarbons as a new, safe refrigerant. And they're remarkable chemicals! They're non-toxic, non-reactive, non-flammable, with properties that can be carefully tuned to suit your temperature needs. The only problem is that they're so non-reactive that, unlike other chemicals, they survive in the atmosphere long enough to reach the lower stratosphere, where ionizing radiation breaks off chlorine radicals that attack and destroy the ozone layer. The DuPont corporation swore on a stack of Bibles that they'd stop producing CFCs as soon as that was proven, then spent decades lying about it and fighting the legislation that would ban the use of CFCs. They still make CFCs and sell them where they're not banned, by the way.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Community — Left and Right

Community Right & Left - English


Just casually glancing around at the world, it seems that everyone agrees that community is a valuable part of the human social world. Even capitalism agrees that community is valuable. Well, profitable, anyway. Companies like to sell identities and get people to latch onto them and defend them. The organic industry has done a pretty good job of that. The NRA has done a phenomenal job of that.

Taking a step back from the economic sphere, we can see that the left and the right, speaking sociopolitically, also value the idea of community, but approach it from very different perspectives. It appears to be the same old differences: collectivism on the left versus hierarchism on the right.

The left favors a stateless approach, a non-governmental approach. This doesn’t mean there’s no organization, no structures in place, though I don’t fully understand this approach yet. However, that’s the anarchist model, and there are other leftist models that don’t abandon government (though most seem to dislike the idea of nation-states). In the end, the leftist approach treats all people as equal, and all authority or power as temporary and provisional. The left is fundamentally democratic in its approach to social organization and planning.

The right is very much not these things. In many ways, the right is opposed to them, especially as you get further to the right. The right-wing approach to community is hierarchical and authoritarian. At the top of the social pyramid you find the strong-man, the leader, the god-king, the authority figure. From there you have a series of steps down the pyramid, with each rank having more prestige, money, privilege, and power than the ranks below. Indeed, each rank has direct authority over all the ranks below. Then, at the bottom, you get the slaves. Or serfs, or peasants, or help, or whatever they’re called in that time and place. They’re the people who have little or no power or hope to change their status for the better.

Perhaps I’ve made my preferences clear. Perhaps not.

It seems each of us has moral emotions driving us toward both of these worldviews. We have the moral emotions that drive us to empathise with other people, to take their pain and desires into account, to consider them as equally worthy to ourselves. We also have moral emotions that tend toward hierarchy, bowing to authority figures, and dominating our inferiors. It may well be that we can’t escape some form of hierarchy even as/if we move toward a more socialist democratic system.

Monday, March 05, 2018

I'm an Atheist

I'm an Atheist - English


I’m an atheist.

The bare minimum to be an atheist is that you aren’t convinced that some kind of god exists. That’s it. You don’t need any more than that. Theism means being convinced there is a god, atheism is the lack of that conviction.

I take it a step further. I believe no god exists. Every religion describes a being that is active, intercessory, involved, participatory. Every action requires a response action. Every act leaves evidence. All changes create history. Any of the gods described by the world religions should be evident, they should all be in some way visible.

And there is no evidence. That’s why we have religionS, and not just a religion.

There’s no Christian Chemistry, Buddhist Biology, Muslim Math, Hindu History. There’s just chemistry, biology, math, and history. In the pursuit of knowledge, we follow where the evidence leads and greater amounts of evidence lead to a single conviction. Our learning always proceeds from mystery to certainty, not the other way around.

Contrast all our fields of knowledge with all of our religions. Christianity began as a crowd of conflicting cults; one cult dominated only because it got lucky in latching on to the mother of an emperor. Even that dominance didn’t last; the church splintered as soon as the empire did. Today there are tens of thousands of branches of Christianity.

If there ever was a historical Muhammad, then his lifetime was the only time Islam was unified. Their own texts tell us that they split as soon as he died.

Judaism was just one of many polytheistic religions among the Canaanite tribes, and one particularly unpleasant cult came to dominate there. Even then, Judaism has never been a single, united religion. From the Maccabees to the orthodox Jews of today, from the Tabiades to the secular Jews of today, Judaism has been as splintered and factionalized as every other.