SJA #13 - 27 August 2018 - The Parties Are Not the Same

The Rant - The Parties Aren't the Same
There are two kinds of centrists and they both piss me off. The first are the right-wing douches like Carl Benjamin and Dave Rubin, assholes who are too afraid, dishonest, and/or pig-ignorant to realize they're right wing. Benjamin might just be that ignorant, but I'm convinced Rubin is just dishonest.

But it's the other group that's got me pissed off today; the group that says the two parties are the same so there's no point voting.

How fucking blind would you have to be to actually think that?! Setting aside the people who are just avoiding stating their opinions because they're afraid to stand up for their convictions, there are people who actually think this? Unless they're all just scared.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not here to sing the praises of the Democrats; they're beholden to corporate money, they're an entrenched interest run by the upper class... in a word, they're corrupt.

But come on! The Dems at least try! They know that racism, misogyny, and homophobia are wrong even if they're not willing to actually fight them! They at least have a wing of the party that forces them to care a little about people's suffering!

The Republicans though? They're assholes! An alliance of two kinds of villains! They're the KKK on the one hand and naked greed on the other! They're every movie and TV illain for the last 40 years, at least the ones without super powers. Hell, even a few of the ones with powers!

The Republican Party openly wants people to suffer and is actively working to destroy democracy around the globe! Some of them are only in it for profit, but the rest are doing it because of their sincerely held religious belief that some people are naturally inferior and/or evil and must suffer here on Earth before getting shipped off to hell to suffer for the rest of eternity!

The Democrats are terrified of change, they're run by short-sighted clowns who are very comfortable with the status quo and wish all those "identity" people would quit rocking the boat, but at least they recognize that some things are wrong and should probably change!

And there are a lot of really fucked up things that the Republicans do that the Democrats just don't!

Like preventing people from voting! Thuglicans have packed the courts with the sort of ideological assholes even they would accept 30 years ago, activists so naked in their hypocrisy that Bork would blush, and that's why the fascists can get away with purging voter rolls without notice and shutting down polling places in Democratic districts! And they're so goddamn willing to accept a victory, no matter the source, that they've stalled a bill meant to safeguard our elections from foreign interference! And all that's on top of the gerrymandering so frozen that judges are calling them on it! Democrats try, but they've got nothing on Confederates when it comes to gerrymandering.

And Democrats don't staff government with people fundamentally opposed to the duty of their office! No pacifists in the Department of Defense, no vegans overseeing the ranchers, no antivaxxers or "alternative med" quacks in the CDC. But the Thuglicans just can't seem to help it, they've got a whole army of Umbridges in the wings ready to dismantle the oversight that prevents their bullshit. Oil lobbyists in the EPA, fundamentalist home-schooler Devocs in Education, the guy who wants to dismantle Energy (Rick Perry, who didn't even know that Energy manages our nukes) in charge of Energy, and a fucking asbestos lobbyist who's in the process of legalizing fucking asbestos! Dems just don't do this Orwellian shit!

And taxes! Forget what the fascists say, Dems haven't put a new tax in place in decades, but they're not doing the Thuglican shit. They keep cutting taxes, but only for the wealthy! Meanwhile, they have to keep the budget balanced, so they shift the burden to everyone else! That's why the middle class is disappearing and the poor are getting poorer; the rich are paying less and less! The Dems just don't do that!

And they're not goddamn Nazis! How the fuck is anyone blind to this? How the fuck is anyone okay with this?! Every other year, literal actual Nazis keep voting, campaigning, and running as Republicans! I'm not just talking about Trump and his "very fine people"! I'm talking about open, uniformed Nazis on the ballot as Republicans in 2018! I'm talking about Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who framed a journalist for attempted murder and opened actual concentration in the desert! Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was convicted of contempt of court and pardoned by Trump, who went ahead and opened his own concentration camps! FOR CHILDREN.

I'm talking about Nazis in the goddamn White House! Like Steve Bannon, who told the holocaust-denying far-right party in France that "history is on our side", who courted the same alt-right that marched and murdered in Charlottesville, who Trump called "very fine people", the Steve Bannon whose rag of a newspaper likes to bracket some names with little globes so their readers know they're talking about evil, globalist Jeeews.

I'm talking about Donald fucking Trump! The Democrats didn't elect Trump! TWICE. The Democrats aren't supporting him, aren't protecting him, aren't propping up his shit agenda and policies. The Republicans are the ones still showing up at his goddamn rallies, still kissing the ring of that piece of shit racist, misogynist, transphobic, anti-semitic, rapist thief!

The Dems are a conservative, right-wing party, but they're not Republicans, not by a long shot. Anyone who says the two parties are the same is either dangerously ignorant or a pitifully slack-jawed liar. Either way, don't trust them with anything sharp or heavy.

• Rant: The Parties Aren't the Same - 01:03
• Preventing people from voting
• Shutting down polling places
• Blocking election protection
• Purging voter rolls
• Putting Umbridge in charge of Hogwarts
• Appointing anti-cabinet cabinet
• Fox in the henhouse: Asbestos Edition
• Regressive taxation
• Literal nazis in the party
• Very fine people
• Nazis running for office
• Steve Bannon
• History is on our side
• Courting the alt-right
• Tagging Jews in headlines
• Donald Trump
• Racist
• Misogynist
• Transphobe
• Anti-Semite
• Timeline to 2016
• "Globalists"
• "Sleepy-Eyes"
• Rapist
• Thief
• Trump University
• Screwing contractors
• Bankruptcies and shells
• Trump golfing
• Secret Service Broke
• Diplomats at Trump Hotels
• News
• Kavanaugh is even worse than you thought. He's a eugenecist, a slaver, a nazi. He's a Republican. - 06:05
• Truth isn't truth - 10:16
• Prison strike - 12:17
• John McCain is dying dead, still scum - 14:08
• Amoral is the best you can hope for - 16:25
• Lindsey Graham, still a coward - 18:00
• Manslaughter for Flint Official! - 19:31
• No more period poverty in Scotland - 20:50

They Want You Tired

They Want You Tired — English


They want you tired. They want you scared.

They want you to come home at the end of the day after working hours at your second job, too tired to protest changes to society, to life, to the laws, to wages...

They want you too scared to think. They want you to focus on the object of terror, not on them. They want you distracted.

So they want you angry. They want you to direct what little energy you have left against the detested, minorities, foreigners, safe targets. The objects of fear, hatred, disgust.They want you to only look to the church for hope. The hope of a perfect life after death. The hope of justice after death. The hope of happiness after death. All good things only after death.

They want you not to resist.

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.

Is Capitalism Evil?

Alternative titles: Corporate Calumny, Evils of Industry, Venture Villainy. I like alliteration alot.

Or: Why You Shouldn't Be Surprised When a System Designed to Act Like a Sociopath In Fact Acts Like a Sociopath


A few things happened recently to spark my thoughts on this. One was that I shared this pithy piece by Avicenna over at Freethought Blogs which rightly derides alternative medicine. Why is it at all acceptable to tout alternative medicine? No one would go to an alternative dentist. An alternative dentist wouldn't be sticking it to Big Teeth; he'd just be some jackass who pulls out his own teeth.

A friend of mine responded not so much defending alternative medicine as attacking the business of medicine. I may have misinterpreted (and if so I'm sorry; you know where to find me, dude), but his argument seemed to boil down to the conclusion that "Doctors medicate too much and this is bad." I tentatively agree with part of this. Overmedication is bad, particularly with antibiotics, however I don't know that doctors do routinely over medicate or "throw medicine at the problem". If they do, that's certainly bad. A quick google search indicates this is a fairly popular view, but it's not actually what I want to talk about today, so I don't care to wade into it.

Another portion of his argument was that doctors are under pressure from Big Pharma to prescribe medication, thus explaining why it's happening (assuming that it is). That's certainly a reasonable position and presents an excellent prima facie case for investigating whether that's happening. I and many others agree with my friend that the commercialization of medicine has harmed the profession and its standards as a whole. The profit motive doesn't mix well with the health industry.

The other item that sparked this line of thought was this youtube video by jordanowen42¹, in which he takes a look at some presentations by Gale Dines, an anti-pornography feminist. FYI, he disagrees with Dines and thinks her anti-porn stance is bad for feminism. I agree; porn is pretty awesome when done right. A lot of it isn't, though. At one point he expresses some confusion by some arguments/points she makes regarding pornography's for-profit status, and specifically draws from trade magazines to attack them. The gist is that pornographers are in it for the money, they're making profit, and that's all very bad². Now, anything drawn from a trade magazine has strong potential to sound skeevy, because it's going to be discussing the business of business, and maximizing profits, which will always sound fairly manipulative on supply side, production side, or both. However, structuring business for greater efficiency and profit isn't necessarily bad in itself. For that matter, profit isn't necessarily bad in itself. And that's really the point I want to hit on.

It has long been a central thesis on the left that corporatism, capitalism, the profit motive degrade and dehumanize, that capitalism and profit are necessarily evil. Hence those apparent non sequiturs by Dines. And that's the question I want to try and address. Is capitalism evil?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Yes.

What does capitalism do? It allocates manpower, intellect, resources in order to solve a problem. In return for solving the problem the people involved get money (another resource, an external indication of value). That's not a bad thing. It's also not a good thing. Capitalism is explicitly amoral. All it does is identify a hurdle and the resources necessary to solve it (A) and compares that to the value to be gained thereby (B). If B - A > 0, then capitalism ho! This hurdle could be the problem of finding cars that don't use fossil fuels, or it could be how to murder your inconvenient wife and dispose of the body. Entirely and explicitly amoral.

So, no, capitalism isn't necessarily evil. In short term theory. In practice, we find that it is, and exploring theory in greater depth explains why.

The Sins of Abuse
You don't need high-process theory to realize that capitalism is, far more often than not, monstrous in practice. Whether you're talking about the crude barter/slave systems of the pre-industrial world, extending back through feudalistic Europe to Imperial Rome to Ancient Egypt and beyond (in both time and space), or the early era of industrialism of the early 19th-century US, the result is quite negative. People exploit inequalities of wealth, power, and information (almost always all found in a single set of hands) to take serious advantage of others, harming them financially, emotionally, and physically. This results in explicit and implicit slavery; people seriously injured, maimed, or worked to death; entire communities suffering over generations from a degrading and dehumanizing system that values them not at all and discards them when no more can be wrung from them. The systematic effects of such are still felt in the poorest areas of the United States today, and I have no doubt the same is true and will continue to be true for centuries across the world.

The Sin of Poullution
There's an additional problem in negative externalities. In a word, pollution. Large businesses, producers, manufacturers whenever possible produce as much as they can and deal with as little waste as they can. This led for centuries to the communities surrounding various businesses suffering from the air, water, and noise pollution those businesses produced, from the chemical spill-off of metal refineries and tanneries to the choking smog of coal-powered mills, to carcinogens and toxins from modern plants. These were spewed carelessly into the environment, the cost born by those who had to live with them rather than those who made them. Why should your neighbor have to put up with your stink? Why should he die from it?

The Sins of Fraud and Perjury
Then there are acts of deliberate fraud. The toxic and addictive nature of tobacco was known as early as the 1890s, yet the tobacco industry fought long and hard, and lied, to prevent the public from knowing that; it took more than a century to bring them to heel. The DuPont corporation a decade fighting standards to control CFCs (aka, the ozone-destroyer). The Ethel Corporation and the Oil Industry spent decades lying about the effects of lead on the human body, beginning a few months after tetraethyl lead began being produced and added to gasoline³, not stopping until the Clean Air Act forced lead out of gasoline, more than half a century after it was first added. These are just three examples of corporate malfeasance. All of them in the name of profit.

Is this not enough to prove it's the industry standard? How many more do you need? Enron? Madoff? Subprime mortgages?

The Failure in Feedback
And then there's the fact that capitalism is necessarily unstable. It's a system governed by positive feedback. Any engineer will tell you that a system with positive feedback is doomed to crash, that negative feedback is the proper control mechanism. Negative feedback is like a marble at the bottom of a bowl: if you push the marble (perturb the system), then gravity will pull the marble back down (feedback opposite the perturbation). Positive feedback is like a marble on top of an upside-down bowl: if you push the marble (perturbation), then gravity will continue to pull the marble away from the top of the bowl (feedback in the same direction as perturbation). Like a microphone too close to the speakers, a system governed by positive feedback will spiral out of control until it breaks. The history of the US economy is one of boom and bust, boom and bust⁴.

Assuming some business manages, through luck or shrewd practice, to escape this cycle of destruction, it finds itself in the enviable position of attempting to end the cycle by destroying capitalism. The end goal of any participant in the free market is to become a monopoly and destroy the market. The end goal of competition is to destroy all competitors, end competition, and set prices not by some measure of value, but simply by what will make the monopolist the most profit. Where monopolies can't be forced into existence, oligopolies and cartels will suffice.

But Why?
I'll give you one minute to come up with ten hypothetical scenarios where a business could increase profit by behaving immorally. I'll give you an additional minute to come up with one scenario to increase profit by behaving morally. Go.

An Injection of Morality
Nowhere will you find morality in a corporate mission statement. At no point does capitalism stop and ask, "Setting profit aside, does this achieve greater human welfare?" Profit is the beginning and end of capitalism. This is, in fact, the law of the land, going back to 1919 at least when the Supreme Court held that shareholder shareholder profits must be placed above the good of the community or of the employees. By law, the best you can expect of a company is that it will be amoral. The best you can expect is that it won't be evil. As my examples showed above, that is literally the best you can expect. And you shouldn't expect it. Centuries of history should prime you to expect corporate villainy as the default. Every business will try to duck responsibilities, to force in all ways the cost of its operations onto other people, to squeeze money from the market regardless of value, to eliminate competition by any means necessary.

And that's where we come in. That's where government comes in. Our laws, our regulations, our courts, and our press⁵ are our defense against immoral corporate practice. They are the means by which we force morality and conscience into a system that is deliberately designed to have neither. They are the only we to prevent a monstrous tyranny, a terrible, sickening (literally) system of abuse and exploitation. It's the only way to prevent tragedies and create a modicum of justice. Even the mildest of honest history lessons will expose centuries of evil, ameliorated only by hard-won battles, in the face of well-funded and often violent opposition, instituting systems of oversight and regulation. Only government can save society from the economy.

1 - I bet his name's actually Bob.[/fatuous]

2 - I get the feeling that, as far as Dines was concerned, pornography would have been damned either way. Either they're in it for the money, which is bad because they're exploiting women for profit, or they're in it for the sex, which is bad because they're deliberately with malice aforethought exploiting women! Maybe I'm being uncharitable, though. Perhaps she'd really appreciate organic, free-trade porn, or a pornographer who enthuses "I'm just in it for the sex!"

3 - Tetraethyl lead reduces engine knock, a problem of multiple detonations in an automobile's combustion chambers. It causes damage to the engine and results in a characteristic "Ping!" noise. Interestingly, the man who discovered this, Thomas Midgely, also developed CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, for use as a refrigerant. Fuckin' a, dude.

4 - Too make things worse, even that part of the game is rigged. The rich make money building the system, they default on their debts when the system crashes, then they gather the pieces and start over. Meanwhile the poor get poorer and are locked in a pattern of debt and ill health from which they, unlike the rich, cannot escape when the system crashes.

5 - Until the press becomes a corporate monopoly. Yay. "Liberal media" my ass.