The downsides to empathy

"You have a SNP in the oxytocin receptor which may make you less empathetic than most people. 
When under stress you may have more difficulty recognizing the emotional state of others which impacts loneliness, parenting, and socializing skills 
Lower levels of reward dependence (reliance on social approval). Lower autonomic arousal while perceiving harm to others." 

Indeed, I've been told by many people that I am not empathetic enough, and I have social skills only slightly better than someone with Asperger's. 

But I object to the characterization of this as "dysfunction". It is different than the norm, sure.
Does empathy imply more morality?  Is lack of empathy a pathology? Not necessarily


Just because I can't tell how you feel from your expression doesn't mean I'm any less likely to care. It just means I need more explicit communication - which is generally a good thing anyway. 
Combined with good communication, I bet it makes for less misunderstandings: while I do worse than average on "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test", I KNOW when I'm not sure, while people who do better are often confident even when they are wrong. Therefor I'm more likely to ask. 

A study published in the journal Science by Dr. Hillel Aviezer of the Psychology Department of the Hebrew University, together with Dr. Yaacov Trope of New York University and Dr. Alexander Todorov of Princeton University, confirms my theory: "viewers in test groups were baffled when shown photographs of people who were undergoing real-life, highly intense positive and negative experiences. " (as opposed to the typical "Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test" which uses actors). "When the viewers were asked to judge the emotional valences of the faces they were shown (that is, the positivity or negativity of the faces), their guesses fell within the realm of chance. " 
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1225 
Nobody can really "mind read". But people rated more empathetic absolutely believe they can. Sounds like dysfunction... 

Reliance on social approval is a terrible thing! 
This study http://mic.com/articles/92479/psychologists-have-uncovered-a-troubling-feature-of-people-who-seem-too-nice isn't really about "niceness" as it claims, so much as about the politeness that stems from a high reliance on social approval. In other words, ASDs are a lot less likely to hurt others in order to fit in or be accepted.
The typical human will deliberately choose what they know to be a wrong answer, just so they can fit in with everyone else: http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
 Reliance on social approval is the basis of peer pressure, of group think, of failure to act in crises (if others are around), of the negative feelings of shame and low-self-esteem. And as the study above shows, it makes people more likely to be evil. I'm at a loss for what positives come from it. It sounds an awful lot like dysfunction to me. 

Lower autonomic arousal while perceiving harm to others is probably a trait you want in, say, a rescuer (USCG Search and Rescue, for example, which I am, or a firefighter or cop or paramedic) - similar as I said above, the fact that I don't have a strong emotional reaction to your distress doesn't mean I don't care. It means I can stay calm and collected during your crises, which makes me more effective at helping you. Do you really want your rescuer to be so sympathetic that they freak out or start crying when they see how much pain you're in? 
A highly sympathetic pediatrician would develop lots of stress from continually causing children pain, even though they know the shots are in the child's best interests. Again, that sounds like dysfunction to me. 

Aspys and similar folk tend to be more intelligent and better at all sort of tasks. The fact of being less common doesn't automatically imply pathology - if it did, being overweight would have to be reclassified as normal, and a healthy BMI would have to be considered disfunction (at least in the US). 
Evolution has gone from pure stimulus response to instinct behavior to emotional reactions to higher order reasoning and logic. I propose the rise of the Aspys, who are less emotional and more logical, is another step in that direction!

Walk the talk

One person asked me, upon reading my anti-capitalism pro-free market essay series, for ideas on how individuals might help contribute in daily life.

Walking the walk on two of the big points is easy: shop at independant stores instead of chains, don't buy IPOs, and if you create something (art, music, software, inventions), make it creative commons / open source / patent it but then licence it for free.

As to walking the walk on real estate: I don't really think it's applicable. There is some political momentum behind changing the corporate system after Citizen's United, and there is piracy/file sharing undermining copyright, but there is exactly zero movement behind one person one parcel.
Thats not even a phrase that exists. I just made it up, just now, as I was typing!
But there really is no inbetween. Nothing any one person does (short of the solution proposed in Manna) is going to have more than zero effect on the rest of the world.
The closest I imagine one could possibly come would be buying rental properties, and renting them at below market rent, even at cost (though with hidden irregular costs, like vacancies and major maintenance, factored in). One could opt out, but that would do as little to change the system or benefit anyone as opting out of voting does (i.e. exactly none, and possibly counter-productive, since then you are diluting your own potential influence)

For one person one parcel, I think the best anyone could do right now, even a billionaire, would be to publicize and promote the idea, because the first step would be getting the idea into the minds of millions of people. Its not quite communism, not quite libertarianism, not quite anarchy, not quite free market. As far as I know, its something no one has ever thought of before.

There is one other thing - probably the single biggest change to our system, (short of one person one parcel) would be for working hours to be adjusted downward to match increases in efficiency.
That is something we could easily do, if we were so inclined, just like we reduced working hours from 60-80 per week at the turn of the last century down to 40-50 hours today, as the industrial revolution vastly increased output per worker.

Today, computers and the internet and robots, plus outsourcing and corporate consolidation, not to mention quickly advancing 3D printing, has increased productivity far more than steam power and assembly lines ever did, yet we have never adjusted the 40 hour work week to match.  Our insanely massive income inequality, inflation adjusted income stagnation, and steadily high unemployment are all direct results of that.
I have started a petition to that end: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/a-35-hour-work-week-will
Of course, given the actual increase in output per worker since the 1940s when the 40 hour week was officially established, we should be at 4 hour work weeks by now,

 but 35 seems a bit more politically realistic as a starting point.

Unfortunately, I'm just a manual laborer with some ideas and a free blog account, not an activist or promoter, but if you happen to have a network of people who'd support the idea, by all means help me get some signatures
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/a-35-hour-work-week-will

An email response on feminism

Glad I met you, glad you followed up.
There's nothing makes me respect someone more than when they make counter-points, I have to concede some of them :)

First of all, I don't really disagree with anything you said.  I make this disclaimer cause I know that sometimes the way I frame discussions comes across as argumentative.  I mean it more as dialogue - its just that the most interesting and useful revelations generally come from hashing out the details of conflict.  Where two people agree, there isn't much more to talk about.

So, that being said - when I spoke of the woman as victim meme, I wasn't referring specifically to violence or any specific thing.  It comes up everywhere that gender is an issue.  This most recently came up in a discussion of a case where two college students were both extremely drunk, had consensual sex, and a week later the female was convinced by a older school staff member to file rape charges against her partner.  Of course, this isn't particularly unusual, but in this particular case, she had told a friend, as well as texting another friend and the male partner her explicit intentions to have sex with him just minutes before hand.  So there was actual documented evidence  a) of her intent/consent b) that she was conscious, knew what was happening, and coherent enough to write intelligible texts .  There were also multiple witnesses, including older staff, who saw the male partner moments earlier and confirmed that he was drunk enough to meet the standards of unable to consent.  The police dropped the charges, but the college's standard was that a drunk person can not consent, (therefor her consent was invalid), and at the same time that being drunk does not remove responsibility to not commit sexual assault (which it automatically was since she couldn't legally consent), and he was expelled from school.   

The problem is, by their own standards she was also guilty of raping him, but pressing charges against her for it was never even a consideration by anyone involved.

And this is pretty much the default, everywhere.  If two people both voluntarily get drunk and have consensual sex, this is almost universally seen as the male statutory raping the female.  I could be mistaken, but I am fairly certain the grand total cases of a woman being convicted of having sex with a drunk man is zero.  Ever.  Which means either men never have heterosexual sex after drinking, or we (society) has never fully let go of the deep seated assumption that every sex act is one that a man does to a woman.

You see the same thing just in our language - you don't say that food "penetrates" your mouth, or a bird "penetrating" the hand is worth two "penetrating" the bush, you don't penetrate your house or car when you go inside them.  The word penetration means something forcing its way in where it doesn't belong: a needle penetrates the skin, a spy penetrates the castle's defences.  

But there is absolutely no reason we couldn't frame the sex act as the female enveloping the male - as something she is actively doing to him.
You can see this sexist assumption in the genre of femdom porm.  Instead of the dominate female tying the guy down, blindfold and gagging him, and riding him for her own enjoyment, she invariably dons a strap-on and gives him anal.  In other words, the actual physical act of "penetration" is taken as default interchangeable with "dominant".  But this comes from culture, not from biology.

I think when we start with that as the basis of understanding and framing sex itself, that the physical, biological reality automatically implies a dominance / submission relationship, that it is inherently him fucking her, literally everything else stems from that.  All the rest of our assumptions and beliefs, about gender relations, about violence, about porn, about prostitution, about harassment, about age of consent, about intoxicated consent, all of it has that underlying assumption as its basis, and I think it is just as influential in the beliefs and arguments of feminists as it is in the most misogynistic - possibly more; at least the guy who thinks women are evil succubi seductresses assigns them full agency!

So, yeah, long explanation to say I wasn't speaking specifically to rape victims.  

I get what you are saying about instinct.

That part, about fighting back, is directed at anti-rape activists, not the victims themselves.  For many years (and probably still) many have actively, explicitly, discouraged women from fighting back on the grounds that they are "more likely to get hurt" by escalating the situation.  This belief doesn't stem from statistics though - the statistics clearly and consistently say that those who fight are both less likely to get raped AND less likely to get physically hurt.

I think the reason they don't want to promote that knowledge is that it conflicts with the story that "rapists don't want sex as much as they are sadists who crave power".  They want to promote that idea because its easier to say "those people over there" are sick people, to frame it as good and evil, then it is to admit that humans are animals, we are driven by food sex safety and social contact and we all have the capacity to do hurtful things. 

No different from how we universally revile Nazi's, even though the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram electroshock experiment taught us without a doubt that the same could happen anywhere, that the majority of any population will be "evil" under the right conditions.  The activists like to overlook, ignore, or explain away that rapists unconsciously target women who are ovulating, implying that there is an evolutionary force at work, or that by far the greatest drops in rape Nationwide (probably worldwide, but I don't have that data) occurred concurrently with the rise of porn (first in the 80s with the VCR, then again in the 00s with the internet), clearly implying that some form of sexual release dulls the desire - both strong evidence that rape isn't about control, its actually about sex.  We (collectively) still want to believe that humans are created in the image of God, that we are better than animals, and that sex is something spiritual and holy and meaningful.  And, of course, we also don't want to have to reconsider the core of our gender roles.

Ugh, I am getting so off topic.  The topic is just so BIG!  

OK, my point was, "No means no" is disempowering.  It means that the potential rapist has the responsibility to choose not to act.  The victim's only power is verbal, and it is the potential rapist who is supposed to abide by it.  

As troubling as that is, there is another side to it.  It is false.  In one survey some years back, more than half of college age women admitted to saying "no" when they really wanted to proceed.  Most said that it gave them plausible deniability, that it was a way to avoid slut shaming (not necessarily in those words, but very clearly the meaning).  A number explicitly said they wanted their (male) partner to ignore their words, because they enjoyed the idea of him over powering her, or being too lustful to control himself.  Of course no one wants to literally be raped - but the fantasy of it is extremely common among women (some reports I've seen suggest being dominated is one of, if not the most common fantasy scenario among women - see the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey), and many want to set conditions to make it seem/feel that way.  I know this both from reading, and from personal experience (which I found incredibly creepy, incidentally!).  But no one wants to admit it or talk about it.  I don't believe society can make any progress until it does.  Its like southern states trying to avoid teen sex by avoiding talking about it.  It doesn't work.  It makes it worse.  

It doesn't matter how many times a college frat boy hears "no means no" from public service messages, if the message he's getting from his real life sex partners is "no is a yes that needs a little more convincing".  And sooner or later he's gonna encounter a woman who doesn't mean that, and that's when the problems occur.

Re: women being valued - I wasn't saying that society does value women. I was saying society doesn't value men either.  I was saying no individual is valued by "society".  In the big picture we are all expendable.  When people say society doesn't value women, the fact of specifying, of saying it that way, implies that society does value men, so that's where I point out that every able bodied man is potential cannon fodder as soon as a country or kingdom is threatened.  Men are expected to work at jobs they hate for the vast majority of hours they are awake in their lifetime to take care of their families - it was always a source of social stigma if they didn't, but now that we have the means it is legally enforced.  Just as easily as one can say (as they often do) that women are only "valued" for their role in making and raising babies, so too could you assert that men are only valued for their role in impregnating women and providing for offspring.  After all, at least as many women want children and grandchildren as men do.  

"Society" doesn't care about individual stuff like happiness or equality.  It just is.  Its a collection of millions of individuals, with their own self-interests - and half of them are female.  

Ultimately, there is no society without both sexes, not only existing, but meeting and coupling up. One thing I've noticed recently is that while many people are actively concerned with tempering hetero male aggressive behavior in seeking sex partners (buying free drinks with a plan, being generally manipulative, hitting on coworkers in the workplace, catcalling on the street, persistence in any context in the face of initial rejection) there isn't any effort to temper hetero female submissive behavior.  What is seen as overly aggressive is just a point on a scale of assertive.  There is no universal standard, and what one finds offensive or harassing another finds flattering or seductive.  And the majority of women, even feminists and activists, still expect the man to be assertive.  They expect him to ask her out, to move for the first kiss, to be dominate in bed.  And no one seems to see the correlation.  If men all stopped being assertive, and women don't start, then no one hooks up at all, and in a few decades there are no more humans.  As long as being assertive is the only way for sex to happen, men are going to keep doing it, and as long as that is the expectation and standard there are going to be some individuals who take things too far, who cross the blurred lines and move into the dark side of the grey area.

On a mostly unrelated note: I don't subscribe to the common notion that only people who are within a particular group can have useful insight into that group.  I strongly oppose it.  I will always listen to a white person's thoughts on race relations.  I would never try to shut them up on the grounds that they haven't personally experienced what they are talking about.  That's an ad hominem argument. A statement or argument is either valid or invalid, and the same statement made by a person of different demographics is equally as valid or not.  It doesn't become more or less accurate or profound or reasonable because of the speaker.  I think that's a bullshit cop-out that people who are wrong use to try to gain credibility.  I find that argument used almost exclusively along side righteous-indignation; and I believe that the mere feeling of righteous-indignation is a strong sign that a person is being highly biased and subjective, and has closed themself off to considering contradictory evidence.  The feeling of self-righteous indignation is the most extreme manifestation of the back-fire effect - it is the mind's defense against evidence that challenges the roots of an ideology that a person has adopted so completely that it has become a part of their own personal identity.  

I think when a person accepts that argument used against them (i.e. I'm white/male/cis, therefore "its not my place"), it stems from a combination of internalized guilt (by association) and sympathy for the strength of feeling being expressed by the person saying it to them.  But the strength of emotion has exactly zero correlation with likelihood of accuracy, and I think addressing hard issues often has to mean hurting people's feelings.

That said, I totally acknowledge your point about taking the reality of emotion into account in order to maximize effectiveness.
I try to take that into account, to an extent, and what I say in the moment, in person, with a person who is going through something is different from what I will say in a theoretical political conversation.  As far as what I write in my blog, I'm not good at being manipulative, and since nobody at all is saying some of the stuff I'm saying, or even anything similar, I feel like my best role is to just put the ideas out there, direct and complete as possible.  Many people will be offended, and/or will ignore it.  Hell, most won't read it to begin with.  And maybe now and then someone open-minded will stumble across it, and even if they don't accept it at first, maybe the seeds have been planted, and maybe they will look at things differently, if only a little.  That's the most I dream of accomplishing.  I have gotten a comment that I have completely changed someone's view on capitalism.  I am getting more and more hits from google from the keywords "femdom" and "feminism".  And occasionally people even read all 5 parts of my essay on societies perception of rape and its implications for societies view of female agency.  I don't know who, and no one comments, but I can see in the back-end data that some people read it to the end.  The people who would object most strongly would never read to the end - if they did I'd be getting hate mail.  So I think I may well be influencing people, even though my style is direct and harsh and unapologetic.  

But don't get me wrong - your words gave me pause.  I need to remember and keep in mind, and tweak where I can, to stay direct but be less harsh, to acknowledge emotions, in all their illogical power.  Its hard to do, and reminders are good for me.

lastly - for future reference: if you get me started on a topic, sometimes I write really long emails.  

The most recent dramatic socio-political discourse based on infotainment (Guy goes on killing spree, people blame misogyny)

(I've been having a few interesting conversations on FaceBook lately.
I'm still processing where I want to go with several of the ideas that have been stirred up, but in the meantime I thought I'd share with yall a few select tidbits.)



I've said it before, and I'll say it again: anything that gets on the news is insignificant. You can tell by very virtue of the fact that it is on the news. It is exactly like the coverage of 500 people dieing in a plane crash, which happens once a decade, while there is exactly zero coverage of the 500 people who die in car crashes EVERY WEEK. We hear about it for months if a cop shoots an unarmed black man, but you've never heard the names of the 10 unarmed non-black men shot by cops in the first half of 2013. We pretend it is a major issue when, every once in a while, some crazy person shoots 10 people, but 30 people shoot one person each EVERY DAY in America. It just isn't dramatic news.
When something like this happens, we put all this emphasis on what that particular person was into, what must have motivated them. They were into satanism, they were into rock and roll, they smoked pot, they listened to violent rap music, they played violent video games, they were anarchists, they were backwoods dwelling preppers, they were anti-government, they were racist, they were cult members, they worked for the US Postal Service, they listened to Glenn Beck, they were a skin head - wrong. 
In all cases, wrong. 
There is no pattern. The most common reason for shooting sprees is getting fired, but even that's less than half. Thousands of people get fired every day and don't come back and kill their co-workers. 
Every once in a while, people go on killing sprees.
Killing sprees happened long before firearms existed. Look up the phrase "run amok". It is something humans do.
And then its something other humans do to try to rationalize it, and especially if they can somehow use it as an example to try to further a pre-existing socio-political agenda. But if you don't accept that mass killings of the past were indictments of (fill in the blank: marijuana, rock and roll, video games, anarchy) then you don't get to claim this most recent one is an indictment of "men's rights groups". 
This is not representative of anything, because it is a single isolated and unprecedented instance. A person ran amok. It happens. This particular one hated women. That part is a coincidence. Lots and lots of men hate women and don't go on shooting sprees. The entire thing is a non-issue.

How is it that people miss that the majority of his victims were male?

What an incredibly appropriate analogy, for the "feminist" misogyny I've been trying to point out the past couple years: the belief, even in the face of contrary evidence, that women are inherently victims, that women are weak and helpless and need protection.
You see it in the persistent belief that it is dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night in bad neighborhood - even though statistics say men are at significantly greater risk of attack by stranger.
You see it in the persistent myth of date rape drugs - even though 99% of suspected roofies turn out to be nothing but self-inflicted alcohol ingestion.
You see it in the extremely different reactions (and sometimes even laws) in sex with a minor depending on which gender was the older and which the younger.
You see it in rape laws (and statistic gathering) that defines the word rape as "penetration", which automatically means a female forcing a male is a lesser (or no) crime.
You see it in claims that "society doesn't value women" - while we ignore that men are expected (and often legally required) to go to war and die for society, while women are not only not forced to, but aren't even allowed to.

And then here, when twice as many men are murdered as women, and we all agree to pretend that it exemplifies violence against women. Um, huh?

I'm not denying that sexism or oppression exists. But the trope of woman as victim is not at all helpful in countering them. In fact, it is deeply counter-productive.
You want to end rape? Fuck giving the power to perpetrators, with the slogan "no means no". How about "fight back!" as a slogan? The overwhelming majority of attempted rapes where the intended victim fights back with maximum violence, the rape does not occur. But most don't fight back, because women are taught all their lives that they are weak and defenseless, that they are naturally victims.
It's bullshit. 

Free Market VS Capitalism: So How Do We Fix It?

[Part 10 of 10, Free Market VS Capitalism essay series.  Part 1 here]

At its root, the solution is a change in mindset.

The whole point of having an economy is to support and improve the lives of the citizens, the people, who make up society.  The economy isn't a goal in itself.  Benefiting "the economy" has no value if it doesn't benefit actual people.  There is no principal involved - any principle which does not actually make life better for real life people is necessarily an invalid principle.

There is a widespread misunderstanding of the Amish approach to technology.  The Amish are not luddites.  They simply question the value of each and every use of technology on an individual case by case.  So while they may not find that the use of tractors in general improves life for their society, if a particular farmer is disabled, he might be granted an exception.
If the entire point of the economy is to benefit society as a whole, it makes sense to question whether or not that end goal is being accomplished.  As the graphs in part 3 show, it is not.  Maximizing growth had value when the nation was young and growing, but today we are grown, and conditions have changed.

Our current system gives the biggest reward to people who do no actual productive work, thereby decreasing the pool of wealth and resources available to everyone else. It keeps employment up only by constantly growing, ensuring rapid environmental destruction and unnecessarily stressful lives for everyone but the upper 0.01%, with some people working 40-50 hours a week and others working none at all.

This would all be easy to fix - and far from socialistic idealism, doing so would require less government intervention, and more free markets.

The trick is to remove all those government creations whose sole purpose is supporting capitalism.



Stop issuing deeds for investment property.  Everyone should be able to have the opportunity to own the land on which they live - having a place to exist is as much a fundamental human need as water and air.  And, like water and air, we can choose to place limits on what an individual can claim ownership over.  No one can buy a river, and no one can claim title to a chunk of atmosphere.  If government refused to issue titles, and refused to enforce claims of ownership of property which the owner was not personally using, there would be no such thing as investment property.  Each individual could own exactly 2 parcels of land - one on which they live, and one for a business.

Stop issuing corporate charters- or at least look at them on an individual case-by-case basis, as the Amish would, and approve them if - and ONLY if - it is determined to be in the best interest of society as a whole.
Instead of issuing a corporate charter of indefinite length to anyone who applied, a charter could be (as they originally were) for a fixed period of time - say 1 year.  After a year, the corporation is dissolved.  For any time longer than that, the applicants would have to demonstrate that its existence would not just profit the shareholders, but would provide some tangible benefit to society that could not be provided any other way, and which more than compensates for it's inherently anti-competitive, anti-free-market nature.

Never allow any corporations to merge, and severely limit the ability of privately held companies to buy each other - this last is a government regulation, but it is one that preserves the integrity of competition, which is a prerequisite for free markets to operate efficiently.

Tie working hours to productivity.  If, for example, the invention of computers increases the overall average productivity per worker by 100%, then overtime law should be adjusted to begin paying time and a half at 20 hours per week.  Again, this preserves an existing regulation, but it is necessary to offset the effect that technology has on income inequality and the labor market (and it isn't a new regulation, but merely an adjustment to an existing one - does anyone really want to go back to before there was such a thing as a "weekend"?)

Instead of copyright lasting for an entire lifetime after the author dies, it could be based on compensation - once the creator has sold enough to make back their investment plus living expenses, maybe a nominal percentage profit on top (10%?  maybe even be generous, and say 25%), once that threshold has been reached, the copyright would automatically expire, and it would enter the public domain.
In the age of the internet, an investment in technology or software or media can become profitable within months, sometimes days, of going public.  There is no reason to leave technology to profit a single individual for 20 years - the moment the investment pays off, there is incentive to have made the investment.

Stop underwriting the finance industry.  Not just the occasional bailout, but ongoing stuff like free insurance and below market rate loans, give banks and investment firms a huge advantage using tax payer dollars.

Tax unearned income at a rate at least as high as earned income - in our current system, money you get just because you already have money - snowball money - is actually taxed  less than money you earn by going to a job, working hard, and producing something of tangible value to society.  Although it is not the biggest reason for income inequality, it is certainly one of the most blatant ways we have set up rules to benefit the already rich at the expense of everyone else.


All these steps would serve to level the playing field, so to speak.  If the playing field is level, then snowballs can't take off under their own weight.  No one would be limited from getting rich - people could make their snowballs as large as they want - but a person would have to roll it themselves.  We would have a true merit based society, where the rich earned not just their seed money, but every penny along the way, by producing value and contributing to society.
Economic growth would slow, but that would be ok, because we have enough already.
With all the excess wealth no longer going to the investment class, there would be plenty left over to raise per hour wages, which would allow everyone to make a decent living with far fewer working hours, which would more than compensate for jobs lost due to less economic growth.  If working hours were reduced proportionately to how much productivity has increased since the 40 hour week was instituted...

  

 ...the standard work week would be 5 hours, increasing job openings by 800% - there would be no unemployment, and the market would naturally drive up wages as employers competed for employees.
Instead of some working overtime (plus long commutes and mandatory lunch breaks), some collecting government checks, and others living on investments, everyone who could work would work, but no one would have to work more than an hour a day.

This vision is so far from today's reality that it seems idealistic, utopian, downright silly.  But the numbers work.  It only seems unrealistic because it is so hard to conceptualize just how enormously much wealth the upper 0.1%  skims off the top of the productivity of everyone else.
Eighty-five people control the same amount of wealth as half the world's population.
That is 85 people compared with 3.5 billion.  That's all snowball money.  All those resources being so concentrated is the reason everyone else has to work 40 hours a week, despite all the gains that technology have brought to production.

(What a funny coincidence, this looks just like those last graphs!)

This didn't "just happen".  It isn't the inevitable consequence of the free market. It began when government started instituting laws and policies which were, in theory, pro "business" and growth, but in reality which much more specifically pro "large corporation", at the expense of small independent business.  The citizenry has gone along with it, seduced by the claim that what is good for giant corporations is good for America as a whole.  Because the effects are gradual, and diffuse in a very complex system, most never noticed the consequences as they happened - and those who did usually jump to a reactionary opposite extreme such as anarchy or communism, and as a result get written off altogether.

If we recognize that the free market and capitalism are not the same thing, that capitalism is better for growth but the free market is better for equality of opportunity, average standard of living, the environment, and the well being of everyone (even those who would only be wealthy instead of rich, since additional money has zero marginal utility to the already wealthy, but they would live in a world with more stability and less crime) - then the solutions to the problems of capitalism are obvious.


The only question left is, how do we go about actually instituting them?


[UPDATE: A friend who read this asked me for any ideas on how, as an individual, we might work towards a free market future.  This is what I came up with: http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2014/06/walk-talk.html ]

How to get to the Top (without actually having to work for it)

[Part 5 of 10, Free Market VS Capitalism essay series.  Part 1 here]

Pro-capitalists generally take it as a given that anything someone has they must have earned, and therefor must deserve.

Of the 20 wealthiest people in the world, 1/2 of them inherited their snowballs.  At best, they get credit for keeping it rolling, for not finding a way to stop it, but they got it already large, already moving.

More to the point, nobody actually creates a truly massive snowball of wealth by their own productivity.

Nobody has ever gotten to the top 0.01% via hourly wages.  One would have to average $25,000 per hour for an entire full-time working lifetime in order to actually earn a billion dollars.

Nobody gets 0.01% rich on salary either - not even CEO or sports legend level salary. 

For the most part CEOs of successful companies are still just in the relatively lowly 1%, maybe the top half a percent.

The most reliable way to get even just to the 0.1% is setting up conditions so that you make money without having to work for it: rent, investment dividends, royalties - or, of course, just having employees.

Acquiring a disproportionate amount of world resources tends to involve one or more of the following - lending out existing capital so that other people give you a percentage of their own labor productivity, or producing something with low marginal cost (something cheap to reproduce) that can be widely distributed - music, movies, sports, software.

I'll come back to the second later.

Pro-capitalists generally justify investment returns on the grounds that the person paying the interest is benefiting from the use of capital that they didn't have to save up on their own.

But that argument is circular.

If some people weren't hoarding all the wealth to begin with, there would be more left over to go around, and people wouldn't need to borrow so much in the first place.

Imagine if a rich man moves into a tiny country and buys the entire nation's mining land. 

His miner's extract ore, it is delivered to his smelters and forges, and he builds all sorts of metal tools.

Then he opens tool rental places.  Anyone who wants to build anything has to rent all their tools from him.

He claims he deserves all the rental fees he gets, because he put down the capital investment in the mines and factories that create the tools.  But before he showed up, the metal ore was still there, the mines were a public good, and competition between lots of little tool makers kept prices competitive.  The fact that he rents the tools instead of selling keeps supply limited and his income high.

In short, if he weren't hoarding resources in the first place, people wouldn't be dependent on his capital.

Perhaps the best example of this is in land, which will be the topic of the next installment.

[Next up: Market Corrupting Capitalism Part 1: Investment Property]

Free Market VS Capitalism (What is Capitalism?)

[Part 3 of 10, Free Market VS Capitalism essay series.  Part 1 here]

When people point out the extreme income inequality, the corruption of politics, the dissolution of labor protections, environmental degradation, and all the other similar and related injustices we see occurring, they are not referring to free market economics.  These things are almost all due directly to capitalism.

The best analogy for capitalism I've come up with was during a spirited debate about the ethics of capitalism on the Mr Money Mustache forums:

A person makes a snowball.  In order to make a snowball, you have to physically go outside, scoop up some snow, and mush it together.  You produce it by your own physical labor.  Once you have it, you can put it down in the fresh snow and start rolling it around, and more snow will stick to it.  That makes it a lot easier to get more snow on your ball more quickly.  And the bigger it gets, the more it collects with each revolution.

The assumption I always made - the one that most make - is that capitalism arises naturally from the free market.  One person produces more income than they spend, they save the difference, they invest it, it earns them more income, which they reinvest. 

This really does happen, and could happen in even the most primitive and simple society.

So the extremes we see today must be the natural extension of that process... right?



But that is equivalent to saying "When I work out, I get stronger and more muscular - therefor body builders and power lifers must have gotten to where they are just by working out even harder, for more years" - neglecting that all of the top athletes have some degree of genetic gifts, professional coaches, extremely strict diet plans, and most use some form of biochemical assistance that would get them banned from most professional televised sports.

Its the same with capitalism - the extremes we see today are not just from some people working harder and investing more wisely.  There is another element being introduced.  That element is the state.
The State is the coach, diet plan, and performance enhancing drug of capitalism.

In my analogy the person making the massive snowball is still out there in the field, pushing the ball around the field with their own arms and legs.  The increases come faster, but they are still contributing to the process.

But what happens if they find themselves at the top of a hill?  Push it to the edge, and it takes off on its own.  At that point they have stopped contributing any labor.  They have stopped contributing anything at all.  If the hill is big enough, it may get enormous, gobbling up any snow in its path (and perhaps crushing anything that gets in its way - but lets not take this analogy too far just yet...) much faster than any person could possibly collect it by actual productive labor.

What the state does, in this analogy, is control the angle of the hill.

By default, the part of capitalism that is built into the market - if you earn more than you spend, you will have excess, and that excess can be invested - can tilt the field inherently. 
But what we see today is a massively tilted field, and that is due to specific policies and laws and rules that - although we take many of them for granted - are choices we, as a society, have made. Choices which we could change any time we, collectively, decide to.


[Next up: The Current State of Affairs; or: Why Should We Care?]

Free Market VS Capitalism (What is a Free Market?)

[part 2 of 10, Free Market VS Capitalism essay series.  Part 1 here]

So, what do I mean by the assertion that capitalism and the free market are different things?

The key feature of a free market is that all individuals are free to participate and make their own decisions.

We treat the term "capitalism" as if it's key feature were the same, but the real key feature of capitalism is that some people accumulate wealth - capital - and use that wealth in ways that allow them to leverage additional wealth out of existing wealth, without having to personally contribute any additional productivity. 

The easiest way to think of a free market is imagining a literal market: a flea market or farmer's market.

You have a big empty lot partitioned into more or less equally sized parcels.  A bunch of different independent vendors rent one, and sell whatever they want, for whatever price they want.  Customers wander around and buy whatever they want.  Seller and buyer can negotiate prices, and sellers with better product will sell more and/or can raise prices, but as long as each seller does better than break even, they will likely show up again next week, keeping competitive pressure on every one else and keeping variety available for the consumer.

Under capitalism any one vendor which has any form of advantage - maybe they have a better product or a more efficient process that allows them to lower prices (or maybe they just have an advertising guy with a degree in psychology, or they are friends with the market manager, or they inherited a million dollars from Great Uncle Giles, or they use slave labor; the point is it really doesn't matter what the advantage is, and there is no reason to assume it is always a better product) - can use that initial advantage to first buy 5 or 6 different stalls in the same market (but as likely as not, give them all different brand names so that customers don't know), and then 1/2 of all the stalls, and eventually all of them, so that its really just one single vendor (pretending to be many small vendors, for marketing purposes).  At that point they can set prices and lower quality, because there is no competition, and consumers no longer have any choices.

Really, in the real world that process would be simpler and more straight forward - the big empty lot that once housed the market would become the parking lot to the new WalMart, done and done.

When Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the free market, he was explicitly talking about the former scenario, and not the latter.  When people point out the efficiency of markets, how many people acting independently can produce complex things more efficiently than central planning can, whether they realize it or not, its the free market they are talking about.

Remember this the next time you hear anyone use the "invisible hand" analogy, or support the notion of the efficiency of individual self-interest in the context of capitalism - these concepts were never meant to apply to capitalism.  They are referring specifically to a free market.

There are a bunch of individual factors that are necessary for the "invisible hand" of individual self-interest to actually maximize efficiency and utility for a society:

-Virtually unlimited buyers and sellers - any industry which has seen significant corporate consolidation is out

-No barriers to new sellers opening up shop - anything which requires major investment in infrastructure or equipment doesn't count

-Complete transparency of information - the internet has gone a long way to providing this one - in the past this one made the entire idea purely hypothetical. 
So, score one for Free Markets.

-Zero transaction costs - any purchase made by credit card isn't a free market transaction.  Also all financial industry transactions, stocks purchases, loans, by definition, don't operate in a free market

-Non-increasing returns to scale - as soon as you outsource manufacturing because you can't keep up with demand, you have left the free market, and transitioned into capitalism.

-Rational buyers - the entire $44 billion advertising industry is devoted almost entirely to preventing rational buyers. Pre-Edward Bernays advertising was generally of the format: "This product exists.  These are its features.  This is what it costs."  Post-Bernays marketing is about using psychology to manipulate individual behavior; getting people to buy something which they wouldn't without the ad, even if they knew about it.

-No externalities - anything that produces pollution or draws on common goods can not be claimed to operate in the free market.

Obviously that doesn't leave much left. 

Even in the best of circumstances, its very unlikely that all of those conditions would apply.  The entire thing was a theoretical framework to begin with. But it is certainly possible for an economy to lean more in one direction than the other.  The more we set things up to encourage capitalism, the further we get from a free market.

There are a few other factors in addition to the ones above, but if you don't want to enroll in an economics class before finishing this blog post, there is one very easy and quick way to tell whether a particular industry or company is actually operating in a free market, in the original Smith use of the term:

In a free market, sellers make zero profit.

Read that last sentence again a couple times.

Think about all it implies.

Understand - this is not my own personal opinion or interpretation.  This is what Adam Smith, father of economics, wrote in his famous, oft quoted, book, The Wealth of Nations.

Perfect competition dictates that sellers will sell at the lowest possible price that allows them to break even.

This does not make being in business pointless.

Profit is what is left over after paying not just costs for materials and rent and advertising and loan payments, but also paying the employees, including management.

People are still making money.  If the manager is the owner, the money they make is not profit, it is salary.

That is the point in running the business.  There is even still a point in investing, as the company could still pay interest on their loans.  Profit is what is left over after all costs.

Any industry or company that has more than zero profit is not operating in the free market.

[Next up: What is Capitalism?]

Free Market VS Capitalism

7 years ago I wrote about how, contrary to almost universal belief, democracy and the free market not only don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but they are actively opposed to each other.

That they are two parts of a single whole comes from a extremely successful deliberate public relations campaign by US government and corporations, going all the way back to inventor of manipulative public relations and advertising, Edward Bernays.

The next year I pointed out parallels between capitalism and anarchy - but I got it wrong.  I should have compared the free market to anarchy.

I was making a similar mistake myself.  American propaganda has basically everyone assuming that the terms "free market" and "capitalism" are interchangeable.  I realized quite some time ago, in arguing with anarchists, libertarians, conservatives, and capitalists that the two meant distinct things.

But what I've realized only recently is that, just like democracy and capitalism, the two are actively opposed to each other.

You can not have a free market under capitalism.  And you can not have our current degree of capitalism without a significant amount of State power actively manipulating the market, which inherently means it is no longer "free".

Of course, even though modern America treats them as interchangeable, this idea is not new.

The person who basically invented the entire discipline of economics, the person who's words capitalists use more often than any other, Adam Smith, recognized that the two were actively opposed, and even that it was the role of the State to intervene to prevent capitalism from corrupting a truly free market.  Unfortunately, few of the people who claim to follow his model actually read his book...

In my next couple posts I'll get into explanations, examples, problems and (hypothetical) solutions.

For now let me just point out that realizing this distinction reconciles a lot of the apparent conflict between the arguments of people with various political/economic outlooks.  One side points out the (legitimate) benefits of the free market, while the other is focused on the (legitimate) problems of capitalism.  Its only because both sides assume (incorrectly) that the two are the same that they are stuck at an impasse.  I propose there is no valid reason we could not set up society in such a way to continue to receive (the majority) of the benefit of a free market economy, while avoiding (the majority) of the problems of capitalism.

[Next up: What is a Free Market?]

Privilege - its not the problem

Response to:
http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/



I absolutely love its general premise, and could not agree more - though perhaps for slightly different reasons.

I have long questioned the entire idea of "privilege", and especially the focus on it.  If you are lucky enough to be middle class, its fairly easy to see inequality in terms of having some privileges or not.  One of those privileges is being able to (pretend that you) live in an insular world where an individual being culturally insensitive to another individual is one of the worst aspects of racism.

As a African American, who has lived most (but not all) of his life in poor, high crime, high minority urban areas, the entire sub-culture of race activists has always looked very shallow and meaningless to me.  It has always seemed much more about being able to say "I, in contrast to all those other (white) people, am enlightened."

What, exactly, does white people or men or straight people or whoever, acknowledging their privilege actually accomplish?

Lets say every single European American was fully aware, fully acknowledged, and fully internalized that they have privilege relative to other people.

Would that somehow instantly, magically, cause wealth and income inequality to disappear, so that whites were proportionately represented among the extremely poor (and I'm not talking "can't make car payments" or "home foreclosure" poor - I'm talking "can't afford a halfway decent bicycle" or "choose between rent and food" poor) - or better yet, make it so that everyone who has the ability and desire to work could live (what we currently consider) a middle class lifestyle?

Would it end the dramatically different levels of violent crime victimization?  For all the talk about police brutality, young black men are murdered by young black men somewhere on the order of 100 to 1000 times more often than they are shot by cops.  If enough white people acknowledged their privilege, would that stop?

Even from within this essay - its a great suggestion to make a point of having a non-college educated person speak for every college educated person.  Of course, given the context of the essay, doesn't that take it as a given that college graduates will be disproportionately white?  Of course that is true - why not work on changing it?  How would inviting non-college educated people to speak help to equalize the education gap?  That's a much bigger problem, one that effects many more people, much more profoundly, than who gets a chance to give a talk to a room full of people.

The entire concept of privilege, of race awareness, of cultural sensitivity, it is all the masturbation of activism: it feels good for the people doing it, but it doesn't accomplish anything.

So, overall, I'm glad this was written, glad it is saying what it is saying.  I fully agree with and support the basic premise.

That said, there are some particular things that stand out to me that I disagree with.

It is repeating / reinforcing the nearly universal assumption (among activists) that inequality today is caused by "structural forms of oppression" and "systems that enable these privileges".

My response to that is much the same as my response to the idea of privilege - how would dismantling any current system actually make anyone's life better?  More over, exactly what "systems" and "structures" would those be?  This is not 1900.  This is 2014.  Racist and colonial systems have ALREADY been dismantled.  And yet race disparity still exists.
That racism is explicitly illegal does not end the problem.  But it does change the problem - yet so many people are stuck thinking in terms that are no longer relevant.
Thinking that disabling oppressive structures will solve problems is like ending slavery (with not even the meager restitution which was initially promised) and expecting former slaves and their children will simply catch up via hard work.  It would take specific pro-active steps.  If every single boss and teacher became color blind, if every prison were closed, if every nation-state were dissolved, there would still be a culture of drugs and violence in the poor black community.  There would still be massive wealth and education inequality, and it would continue to go from one generation to the next. 

There was a time when activists realized this, which is why the Panthers created preschools, economics classes for adults, free medical clinics, and drug rehab programs; its also why, more recently, the program to try to at least begin to address education inequality was called "affirmative action".  Unfortunately, now that name has been taken, but its what we need - not reactionary and destructive dismantling of existing structure, but affirmative action

Much of the specifics are concerning not racism, but colonialism.  I find the portrayal of young American's returning from foreign lands with their "insights" as absolutely spot on.  But I find the suggestion that there is no clear way to deal with it rather odd - it's simple: leave other cultures alone.  Give them access to the knowledge of technology IF they want it, and otherwise leave them the hell alone.  You don't need to go and have your personal profound experience, any more than they need you to come in and save them from their lifestyle and choices.

The portion on nation-states strikes me as having an anarchist ideology at root which makes assumptions about what a nation-state is, which are not necessarily true.

Assuming that without them there would be less violence, less fighting over land, less oppression of one group by another, shows a profound lack of knowledge of history.  The nation-state has only existed for a few hundred years, but those problems have been far worse for most of history than they are today.  This is not to say that the specific methods of action discussed are not absolutely wonderful, positive developments.  Its more that, if the community movements talked about were to expand, and eventually make the state irrelevant - that means they have become the state.  And that's ok.  In fact, it is amazingly positive, because it would have meant a peaceful revolution, which brought (real!) democracy in from the ground up.  That is what needs to happen, all over the world (including America) - actual democracy.  Not what the US calls "democracy", which really means "open markets", but the kind where the people make the decisions of how the state will run and how economic structures will be organized.  That can happen just as easily within the model of a nation as it can without discrete borders.

As far as "safe spaces", my suggestion is this: get over yourself.  These issues are way way bigger than whether your feelings get hurt.  This is stuff that actually impacts millions of peoples lives in very tangible ways, and in order to address problems, sometimes people need to be real and direct and to the point.  Sometimes that means not being "politically correct" and sometimes it means not being "culturally sensitive".  Its not about you.  Deal with it. 

The essay is right to point out that being in an oppressed group does not automatically make you incapable of doing wrong, and a structure designed by an oppressed group is not automatically "oppression free".  People are people, and if you want to form something free from inequality or harm, you have to start out admitting you are not perfect, and then make a conscious effort to recognize and correct for your own biases and assumptions.  No one is immune to them, regardless of race or sex or personal experience.

Again; "as the rituals of confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building social movements for global transformation to individual self-improvement."

Yes.  This is true. And it is a problem, because it distracts people who are aware from doing anything useful.

Overall, my criticisms are relatively minor compared to how much I support the overall point.

Privilege - its not the problem

Response to:
http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/



I absolutely love its general premise, and could not agree more - though perhaps for slightly different reasons.

I have long questioned the entire idea of "privilege", and especially the focus on it.  If you are lucky enough to be middle class, its fairly easy to see inequality in terms of having some privileges or not.  One of those privileges is being able to (pretend that you) live in an insular world where an individual being culturally insensitive to another individual is one of the worst aspects of racism.

As a African American, who has lived most (but not all) of his life in poor, high crime, high minority urban areas, the entire sub-culture of race activists has always looked very shallow and meaningless to me.  It has always seemed much more about being able to say "I, in contrast to all those other (white) people, am enlightened."

What, exactly, does white people or men or straight people or whoever, acknowledging their privilege actually accomplish?

Lets say every single European American was fully aware, fully acknowledged, and fully internalized that they have privilege relative to other people.

Would that somehow instantly, magically, cause wealth and income inequality to disapear, so that whites were proportionately represented among the extremely poor (and I'm not talking "can't make car payments" or "home foreclosure" poor - I'm talking "can't afford a halfway decent bicycle" or "choose between rent and food" poor) - or better yet, make it so that everyone who has the ability and desire to work could live (what we currently consider) a middle class lifestyle?

Would it end the dramatically different levels of violent crime victimization?  For all the talk about police brutality, young black men are murdered by young black men somewhere on the order of 100 to 1000 times more often than they are shot by cops.  If enough white people acknowledged their privileged, would that stop?

Even from within this essay - its a great suggestion to make a point of having a non-college educated person speak for every college educated person.  Of course, given the context of the essay, doesn't that take it as a given that college graduates will be disproportionately white?  Of course that is true - why not work on changing it?  How would inviting non-college educated people to speak help to equalize the education gap?  That's a much bigger problem, one that effects many more people, much more profoundly, than who gets a chance to give a talk to a room full of people.

The entire concept of privilege, of race awareness, of cultural sensitivity, it is all the masturbation of activism: it feels good for the people doing it, but it doesn't accomplish anything.

So, overall, I'm glad this was written, glad it is saying what it is saying.  I fully agree with and support the basic premise.

That said, there are some particular things that stand out to me that I disagree with.

It is repeating / reinforcing the nearly universal assumption (among activists) that inequality today is caused by "structural forms of oppression" and "systems that enable these privileges".

My response to that is much the same as my response to the idea of privilege - how would dismantling any current system actually make anyone's life better?  More over, exactly what "systems" and "structures" would those be?  This is not 1900.  This is 2014.  Racist and colonial systems have ALREADY been dismantled.  And yet race disparity still exists.
That racism is explicitly illegal does not end the problem.  But it does change the problem - yet so many people are stuck thinking in terms that are no longer relevant.
Thinking that disabling oppressive structures will solve problems is like ending slavery (with not even the meager restitution which was initially promised) and expecting former slaves and their children will simply catch up via hard work.  It would take specific pro-active steps.  If every single boss and teacher became color blind, if every prison were closed, if every nation-state were dissolved, there would still be a culture of drugs and violence in the poor black community.  There would still be massive wealth and education inequality, and it would continue to go from one generation to the next. 

There was a time when activists realized this, which is why the Panthers created preschools, economics classes for adults, free medical clinics, and drug rehab programs; its also why, more recently, the program to try to at least begin to address education inequality was called "affirmative action".  Unfortunately, now that name has been taken, but its what we need - not reactionary and destructive dismantling of existing structure, but affirmative action

Much of the specifics are concerning not racism, but colonialism.  I find the portrayal of young American's returning from foreign lands with their "insights" as absolutely spot on.  But I find the suggestion that there is no clear way to deal with it rather odd - its simple: leave other cultures alone.  Give them access to the knowledge of technology IF they want it, and otherwise leave them the hell alone.  You don't need to go and have your personal profound experience, any more than they need you to come in and save them from their lifestyle and choices.

The portion on nation-states strikes me as having an anarchist ideology at root which makes assumptions about what a nation-state is, which are not necessarily true.

Assuming that without them there would be less violence, less fighting over land, less oppression of one group by another, shows a profound lack of knowledge of history.  The nation-state has only existed for a few hundred years, but those problems have been far worse for most of history than they are today.  This is not to say that the specific methods of action discussed are not absolutely wonderful, positive developments.  Its more that, if the community movements talked about were to expand, and eventually make the state irrelevant - that means they have become the state.  And that's ok.  In fact, it is amazingly positive, because it would have meant a peaceful revolution, which brought (real!) democracy in from the ground up.  That is what needs to happen, all over the world (including America) - actual democracy.  Not what the US calls "democracy", which really means "open markets", but the kind where the people make the decisions of how the state will run and how economic structures will be organized.  That can happen just as easily within the model of a nation as it can without discrete borders.

As far as "safe spaces", my suggestion is this: get over yourself.  These issues are way way bigger than whether your feelings get hurt.  This is stuff that actually impacts millions of peoples lives in very tangible ways, and in order to address problems, sometimes people need to be real and direct and to the point.  Sometimes that means not being "politically correct" and sometimes it means not being "culturally sensitive".  Its not about you.  Deal with it. 

The essay is right to point out that being in an oppressed group does not automatically make you incapable of doing wrong, and a structure designed by an oppressed group is not automatically "oppression free".  People are people, and if you want to form something free from inequality or harm, you have to start out admitting you are not perfect, and then make a conscious effort to recognize and correct for your own biases and assumptions.  No one is immune to them, regardless of race or sex or personal experience.

Again; "as the rituals of confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted our focus from building social movements for global transformation to individual self-improvement."

Yes.  This is true. And it is a problem, because it distracts people who are aware from doing anything useful.

Overall, my criticisms are relatively minor compared to how much I support the overall point.

Quote on Consumerism from the founder of Early Retirement Extreme

"The problem is that most of us have become utterly dependent on this industrial-technological  system  for  all  of  our  needs  and  wants.  Shopping is as important as oxygen to us. Close down the malls for a few days and people go crazy. We no longer think of ourselves as citizens but as ”consumers”, a descriptive term that I've always found kind of derogatory. This dependence  is  so  fundamental  that  it  goes unseen, much like fish don't see the water they swim in. Consequentially, the only solution we can think of whenever we struggle with unfulfilled needs or wants is to ”earn more” and start a side-business, negotiate a raise, and gamble on some more education – it's an investment in your future (ha!). The only perceived way to a better so-called standard-of-living is to work harder and smarter and earn more. However, what this often results in is more environmental damage or at best reshufling money from suckers to scammers." - Jacob Lund Fisker

Porn on Seasame Street

[this happened 3 years ago, and I wrote the post below back then.  But for reasons I don't remember, I saved it as a draft, where it has been ever since, until I happened to go through my drafts folder today]

Sesame Street's Youtube was hacked, and porn was uploaded.

It seems as though everyone's reaction to what happened is either: "ha ha, too bad I missed it" or "that was the worst possible thing imaginable, the hacker is sick and should be tortured".

I feel like the one kid who sees that the emperor's new clothes don't exist.

Hey, guess what?  People have sex!
Seeing sex does NOT scar or disturb or warp children!!!
You know what does give children a lifelong neurosis around sexuality?  Sheltering and hiding them from it, which teaches them that it is bad and shameful.
No child would think that was a big deal if all the adults around them didn't make such a big production out of it.

Sexuality is not bad for children.  If it weren't for sexuality, there wouldn't even BE any children!

It has been shown conclusively and consistently that there is a directly inverse relationship between sex education and teen pregnency and STDs
Knowledge, truth, and education = GOOD
Sheltering and hiding a significant part of life = BAD

Parents are such hypocrites:  the very fact that they are parents proves that they have done the very thing they pretend to be so shocked about themselves; at least once.

If you aren't mature enough to talk to your kids honestly about sex, then maybe you weren't mature enough to have kids in the first place.  For that matter, maybe you aren't mature enough to have sex yourself.
If parent's were straight forward about sex with their kids, seeing it on screen would be a non-issue. 

You know what does give children a lifelong neurosis around sexuality?  Sheltering and hiding them from it, which teaches them that it is bad and shameful, (regardless of what you say explicitly).
This is exactly why America is so screwed up when it comes to all things sexual.  Not that kids sometimes see people having sex.  The fact that so many of you react as though there were anything wrong with that.
Hey, guess what?  People have sex!  We are animals.  All animals have sex.  That's how we produce new people.  No child would think that was a big deal if all the adults around them didn't make such a big production out of it. 

If you want to tell your kids that its only for grown-ups who love each other, that's fine, but there is no reason for them not to see "hardcore" - that's actually how it works!  Its not like the hacked video was full of BDSM or fetishes.  It was just people having sex.  Get over it.

Why OWS and the 99% is THE fundamental issue, which lies behind all others:

[This is another of those things I wrote years ago, and has been lost in draft form.  I think I originally planned to add more list items, and elaborate further on all of them, but of course I don't remember what exactly I had in mind]


-War: Some of the largest corporations, (Boeing, Lockheed Martin), profit enormously from war

-Civil Rights: Corporations are not citizens, and therefor should have no civil rights - they are granted right anyway.  They violate the rights of individuals without consequence.  Income and wealth inequality are the single largest factor for the different life experiences of American whites and blacks, and wealth inequality is a direct result of our economic policies.

-Gay rights, abortion, etc etc: Directly mutual relationship between corporate political power and the religious right, as they are both "conservative".  The only reason the religious right is taken seriously is because they support the politicians who are funded by corporate money.

-Environment: EPA doesn't work on shutting down your backyard BBQ.  It is corporations which cause massive pollution.  Corporations decide which power sources to tap into and what type of cars are manufactured.  It was corporations which deliberately destroyed public transit across America.

WTO / NAFTA / etc: this should go without saying

Quote from unknown poster on homophobia and its relation to sexual assult

"Oh and while being a straight man myself I've never understood the apparent belief that many straight men have that they are apparently irresistible to homosexuals and that given half a chance all gays would pounce on them and have their wicked way - I often suspect that this reflects their own attitudes towards women. I'm not sure that I find that a pleasant idea but it would go some way towards explaining the truly awful male on female sexual abuse statistics that US Forces seem to suffer from."

Quote from unknown poster on a military forum titled "The Gays won, There goes the military"

Invasive specie continues to cause massive ecological damage after nearly 500 years

By far the most destructive invasive species to North America has been the Western European Homo Sapiens.
Introduced between 1500 and 1600 by Spanish, German, and English settlers, this large hominid almost entirely eradicated the native breed of their own specie throughout the continent, and then went on to do absolutely massive destruction to nearly every aspect of the landscape with their natural instinct to modify their surroundings, ultimately affecting literally every ecological niche extending not only across the land but even well into the oceans on both coasts.

In order to restore the damage done by their introduction, a two part strategy may be most effective: a massive catch, spay/neuter and release program coupled with relaxed or even eliminated hunting restrictions.  This may take lots of time, but would surely be more cost effective and humane in the long run, compared with any attempt to directly euthanize the entire population.

Freedom VS democracy

[I wrote this some years ago, I don't remember exactly when. It was lost in the drafts folder.]

Some people condemn all government as authoritarian.  They take the government we have today as an example of "democracy" and condemn democracy as just another form of government control over people's lives.  But the word "government" doesn't mean "authoritarian control".  Democracy is a form of government.  And democracy isn't about legislatures interfering into private peoples lives.  Democracy is about private people acting as legislatures. 

The United States of America has corrupted the word democracy.
The USA is not, and never has been, a democracy.  It was never intended to be.



What we have is a republic.
Under a republic people or localities designate representatives, and those representatives make rules and jointly form the government.  People vote for congress members by county or city (more or less), states elect senators, and party electors vote for presidents. A citizens participation consists of about 20 minutes every four years or so.  Congress makes all the laws.  The president designates people to run government agencies.

Democracy is government of and by the citizens themselves.  In a true democracy, instead of passing legislative and executive responsibilities to someone else, the responsible citizen participates in the process.
 In the state of California we have a partial democracy.  Any citizen can propose a new law.  They can go out and try to collect signatures, and the people they stop take a moment to read the proposal, and then sign it (or not).  If the citizen gets enough support it appears on the ballot, and everyone has one vote.  If it passes it is as legally binding as a law written by the legislature.  That's an example of democracy. 
In a large scale democracy the function of government officials is just to file paperwork, run elections, implement what the people decide.  In a true democracy the people who work in government have no power.  They are bureaucrats, not decision makers.  The decision makers are the citizens themselves.  In a democracy people have both a right and a responsibility to participate in the process of deciding how society and the economy will be.


Many people are very concerned about government abuses or authoritarianism.  People hate being told what to do - even when it really is what's best for them.  People want the freedom to not wear a seatbelt and become disfigured or die in a car crash.  Personally, I find this more than a little immature.  It reminds me of the rebellious teenager who goes against what their parents say just because they said it - ignoring that the parents probably learned the hard way the lesson by doing the same thing themselves.  Maybe that is something most people have to go through; but one would hope we all grow out of it...  But I digress.
Some say democracy is a "tyranny of the majority" and that no one should ever be coerced to do anything.  They suggest that all group projects (i.e. everything which is "society") be done on a unanimous consensus basis.
But remembering that democracy does not have to have an authoritarian ruler or hierarchy, there is no reason to assume people are being "forced" to do anything.

Consider this example:
Four students are assigned to be in a group together, and complete a joint project which will be a significant portion of their grade.  The teacher allows them to decide on the topic themselves, but they must all contribute to one narrowly focused paper.  Chances are not all 4 will agree on what to do it on.
Maybe two people agree, but two others have different ideas.  Each person argues their case, and in the end, if no one has changed their minds, it goes to a vote and the idea with 2 supporters gets done.  The other 2 go along with it - not because they were forced to (nor any threat of force) but simply because they need to work with other people to accomplish their own goals. Sometimes working with other people means not getting your way. 
That is democracy.

In this example their is no hierarchy.  No one has any more power than anyone else.  There is no tyranny, no authority, no coercion. If one person was absolutely not ok with the chosen project, no one is stopping them from dropping the class.
Having 100% consensus 100% of the time, even in a group of 4 like-minded people is perhaps a noble goal, but is totally unrealistic.  Having 100% consensus on a national (or even neighborhood) level is simply a joke.  But the fact that a rule is made that not everyone agrees with does not imply some outside authority or threat of force.
In any free country, citizens are allowed to leave anytime they like.  Although it isn't an explicit "right", anyone can immigrate to another country if they prefer the rules somewhere else.. 
In a commune, where a number of adults all live in one shared space, if one person refuses to do any chores, doesn't contribute to rent or food costs, makes noise while everyone is sleeping, and generally ignores the rules everyone else collectively agreed to, I doubt anyone would argue the group is overstepping its bounds in asking that individual to leave the shared space.
Following the rules that the people collectively decide on is a reasonable condition of living in a country and enjoying its benefits just as surely as it would be in any commune. 
Because of this, simply staying is giving implicit consent.


Freedom is an extremely popular idea.
Conservatives argue for economic freedom.  Liberals argue for social freedom.  Libertarians argue for freedom of both, so long as one person's  doesn't infringe upon another, and private property and national boundaries are respected.  The constitution guarantees freedom of speech, religion, the press, and to assemble.  Anarchists argue for complete freedom for everyone, all the time.

Freedom is contrasted with a monarchy handing down proclamations, fascism (and the implicit connection with nazi's),  brutal and oppressive dictatorships, government abusing power and taking advantage of people.

Whenever an idea becomes so obvious to a people that it is taken for granted by all sides, when a philosophy or theory becomes an axiom, its a good idea to take a step back and question it.  The idea of freedom, of self-determination, of autonomy, has not always been seen as the most valuable or basic of human rights.  We have gotten to a point where the only thing debated is how best to achieve it, instead of asking why it is even the goal.

Why is freedom inherently valuable? - even beyond extent of improving human condition or increasing individual happiness.  If it "just is" then it is no more than dogma, an axiom based on faith.

In context of a repressive dictatorship, relative freedom has value - because it can improve the state of human happiness and equality. 
But beyond that, it becomes a religious conviction, which is repeated until it is accepted.

The insistence on freedom, whether it comes from an anarchist, a libertarian, or a conservative, is for the most part a straw man, a red herring - it is a retort to an argument which nobody was making in the first place.
Even within the most repressive dictatorship, (outside of war, prison and slavery), people are - and have always been - free to live their lives as they choose.
Citizens are allowed to choose where they live, who they associate with, what they do for a living, when to eat dinner, what to eat for dinner, who to marry (family may have a say, but that's a whole separate issue).  For the most part - outside of religion's influence on government - governments make no attempt to control those actions which affect no one but the actor himself, or other consenting adults who choose to associate with them.
What governments do regulate is all the actions which affect other people involuntarily.
If someone wants to go out into the wilderness and be totally self-sufficient, no one is stopping them.
The reality is humans are a fragile and social specie, and almost no one would be capable of doing that if they wanted to, and almost no one wants to.
The reality is that, since we live in society, the vast majority of our choices DO affect others around us.

Consider the statement: "I think its great that there are many choices of high mileage cars for sale.  Personally I drive the most efficient car I could get, and it saves me a lot of money.  But what's even greater is that everyone has the choice to drive whatever they want, even if its a big SUV".
Obviously there is the environmental impact.  There is also the fact that the SUV will do much more damage to a victim should the driver accidentally crash.  And since gasoline is a supply and demand commodity, the fact that one person wastes gas by driving a bigger car than they need means that the price is driven up just a little more.  Whether its breathing clean air, being able to afford gas, or being able to travel safely in the streets, one person's decision does not just affect themselves, it affects everyone.

In a global economy, each and every economic decision which any person makes ultimately affects everyone else.  And while that affect is very small when it is just one person out of 6 billion, an entire nation of people acting selfish together can really add up. 
Enter the tragedy of the commons.


To a large extent "freedom" is an illusion anyway.  Those who can afford access to distributing mass media have spent the past century refining ways to manipulate people.  Psychology is employed in advertising and in politics, and we are indoctrinated from the time we can talk in regards to what we should value and desire. 
The very ideal of freedom and self-determination itself is the best example of this: we are bombarded with it from all angles, the rugged self-made individualist American Dream on one side, and the rebellious non-conformist activist on the other - supposedly at odds with each other, but both playing into the ideal of 'individual freedom' which, ironically, was invented by and supports the one thing they both can agree to hate:  the government.


Democracy, of course, requires a certain degree of cohesiveness among citizens, and a willingness to make (small) individual sacrifices for the overall good, knowing that oneself is a part of everyone, and everyone does better when everyone does better.  It is a bit like a union - if you cross the picket line you may get your individual check, which is good for you - but if you sacrifice that extra pay for yourself now, everyone ends up with the health plan and vacation time (and "everyone" includes you).  The citizen cuts back on luxuries when their nation is attacked, and pays taxes willingly.  The individualist buys the SUV and crosses the picket line.
Problem is, once that one person crosses the line, the workers collective loses power.  That power is taken back by the company.
Citizens vote.  Consumers don't waste their time.  As citizens become more and more focused on themselves, they lose unity with other citizens, and in doing so give up their power.  Which leaves a vacuum which politicians and the wealthy move into without resistance.

Nothing undermines democracy more than a populace who feels morally entitled to self-determination and believes deeply in individualism, and nothing supports government abuse of power more than the undermining of democracy. 
The irony is that the ideas of freedom, self-determination, and lack of authority came largely from government itself, as a method of limiting democracy - thereby giving itself more power.  The irony is that the groups most antagonistic to government - anarchists and libertarians - are those most enamored with the very concepts which prevent government from being effectively run by the people, leaving a void which the elite class fills.

Regardless of what one believes in theory, this is the reality of what has happened in this country over the past century.
It was a deliberate push by both corporations and government to change the psychology of Americans from being citizens (which are a part of something larger than themselves) to consumers (who are beholden only to "I, me, mine") and it had the intended effect.
Today people have a rearrangement of priorities: lots and lots of material goods, comforts, and conveniences, and they are loath to give any up. 
They do not feel they should have to make any individual sacrifices to the greater good.  In fact, that concept (rightfully accused of being "socialism") is equated with communism (where the government owns literally everything, and makes all macroeconomic decisions), fascism (which promotes total devotion to a monoculture and essentially worship of one's own country) and even evil.


Another axiom is that production of wealth is inherently good. 
Consider an extreme example -a sort of monarchy in which the king gets benefit of 100% of wealth creation.  Every time any citizen goes to work, they get compensated enough to afford basic necessities, but the rest all goes to one man.  If GDP goes up, whether by the invention of new technology or by people working harder or longer hours or by a decrease in waste and increase in efficiency, all the additional wealth that is generated goes to the king, and the king alone. 
In this example while it might look good on paper to do something which "supports the economy", in reality this doesn't help anyone.  Hundreds of millions of citizens get literally no benefit at all.  But really neither does the king, since he already has more than enough wealth as it is.  In this extreme scenario there is nothing particularly good about increasing economic activity or wealth generation.

 Now consider a slightly less extreme example: a small aristocracy.  Instead of going to one man, all increases in wealth go to a small subset of the population, which stays almost entirely along family lines from one generation to the next.
This less extreme example is... exactly what has happened in reality over the last 3 decades or so in America.  There has been no real income increase for the working or middle classes after adjusting for inflation - while the highest fraction of a percent of the population's wealth has skyrocketed to absolutely unprecedented levels.
Increasing GDP is useless in terms of impact on average person.  What we all too easily seem to forget in that the purpose of the economy is to support people, not the other way around.

Consider the sort of sacrifices the average person is supposed to accept on the grounds that its good for business: outsourcing, mergers, union busting, tax cuts on investment income, tax payer funded corporate subsidies - things which directly support the upper class while hurting everyone else.  Notice that no business suggests cutting off stock holders or paying all executives a no more than what the average employee makes as a method of "remaining competitive in the global marketplace".
Giving all the money to the king does not create more jobs.  If that newly generated wealth were spread around evenly, people could work less hours for the same pay.  If people with jobs worked less hours, then to maintain productivity, companies would need to hire more people.  Instant job creation, nobody has to spend anything, everybody wins.  The super wealthy fail to get super-duper wealthy, but that's really ok, because once you have 10 million dollars, another billion or two does not appreciably increase quality of life anyway. 


The idea of the free market taking the place of government in terms of making the economic and production decisions of a society is that it naturally matches the desires of the people, and that a more accurate and fair valuation of the value of goods and services will be settled upon by the "invisible hand" of many peoples individual, independent, and self-interested negotiations.
In theory, this is better than democracy, with its potential to become a "tyranny of the masses"
This is summed up with the phrase "vote with your dollar".
Another way to say that would be "money is power".
And unlike the democratic principal of one person / one vote, the more money you have, the more influence you have over the direction the invisible hand takes.
And this takes us again back to the aristocracy - rule by a wealthy and powerful elite - the opposite of democracy, and the opposite of what any of us outside that elite actually wants.



Yet another common idea is that rational self-interest will tend to increase productivity, as people search for ways to be more efficient or ways to get investment returns, which ultimately make society work like a machine and benefits everyone.

Tax rates should be low (or non-existent) because people will work harder if they can keep what they earn, and it shouldn't be progressive because then the wealthy will stop working altogether.  People can be as selfish as they like - in fact, can be encouraged to be selfish - because in the long run the effect they have on the economy will improve it in general.  Wealth will be created, re-invested, and that will help to create jobs.

In the real world:

-people already work far harder than there is any real need to.  Productivity per worker has increased by the hundreds over the past century with the advent of assembly lines, gas and electric powered machines, robots and computers.  Yet we still work 40 or more hours per week.  Instead of using that efficiency to allow for more leisure time (which would actually increase human happiness) it has gone to generating ever more wealth (which, as has been established, has gone primarily not to the workers themselves, but to the upper class who don't actually work)

-The only people who high top tax brackets might encourage to work less are the very people who do the least work.  One of the primary definitions of rich is "anyone who makes enough income from investments that they do not need to work".  Collecting stock dividends, capital gains, interest, or rent, is not working, and it is not contributing to society.  It is leaching from it.

-Investors can not take credit for economic production.
It's as if one person hoards all the hammers in town, and rents them out to people, then wants credit for the houses other people built with them. If they weren't hoarding the hammers, the hammers would still exist. If they were distributed equitably, no one would need to rent them; therefor building would be cheaper, and more would get built.
In this way the fact that someone is hoarding and charging interest actually depresses economic activity, because those hoarding the cash skim a little off the top of every financial transaction thereby increasing its cost.

Just like we tend to assume freedom and democracy go hand in hand when in fact they are in some ways at odds, capitalism and the free market are generally assumed to be interchangeable as well.
It ain't necessarily so.

A free market - ideally - works much like, well, a market...

[I stopped writing here. I'm posting it as is, as where it was headed happens to be the focus of my next series of posts.]