An interesting MRA argument

…and by “interesting” I mean that I’ve personally not run into it before, and that it’s actually one that deserves dissection rather than merely being laughed out of the room for sheer dumbosity. Somewhat unfortunately, this post has been incubating in my brain for so long that the blog in which I originally found the comments (No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz) seems to have moved to a new host, and now I can’t find anything there. So, this will be written from memory and therefore I can’t guarantee the full accuracy of the examples used to support the MRA’s talking point.

Anyway, the argument goes as follows:
We know that women have a higher status than men because women who “descend” into masculinity are tolerated , but men who are trying to do things “above their station” and adopt feminine things/behaviors are punished*; this is similar to the way rich people can affect the “ghetto” look and be cool, while poor people affecting upper class style and behavior are posers and fakes**; or similar to the way blackface is cool, but a black person trying to “pass” for a white one is considered to be transgressing.

The reason I find this argument interesting is because at first glance, that kinda sorta makes sense. Privileged people have more freedoms, and one of them is to appropriate things from the oppressed classes. Cultural appropriation for example is a huge problem with imperialism/colonialism/white culture***. But a closer analysis of the two claims in this argument makes it clear that that’s not quite how it works. So, let’s have a closer look at these claims:

1)The oppressors are permitted to be like the oppressed
This is only superficially true. As I mentioned, affecting and appropriating things that culturally belong to oppressed groups is certainly quite common. But there are “rules” about how you’re supposed to do that. For example, there’s a difference between appropriating/devaluing and adopting/supporting someone else’s oppressed identity. Wearing a hipster headdress is not the same as “decolonizing” and becoming involved in Native culture and society as an ally and/or as a spouse and parent to tribal members; donning blackface is not the same as becoming a student and promoter of Critical Race Theory; dressing up as a woman for Halloween, for a comedy show, or for a pride parade is not the same as living as a trans woman; and I’m willing to bet affecting a lower-class accent is not the same as abandoning your upper-class social ties and becoming a miner and moving to a working-class neighborhood. Point being, it’s ok to mock and play pretend, but it’s absolutely not ok to actually become part of, or a supporter of, the oppressed group. And in many ways, this can be seen by how the privileged classes define themselves, which is often by what they are not****. For example, pale skin was a sign of nobility when it meant that you were not a peasant; and then the Industrial Revolution happened, labor moved indoors, and suddenly suntanning became a sign of not being working class. Another example is Upper Class Etiquette (AKA “being classy”), which is basically an elaborate set of completely superfluous rules designed specifically as an artificial Upper Class Habitus setting the Upper Classes apart from the lower classes; and, sure, you can occasionally adopt what you think is a lower-class habitus, but only when it’s kinda obvious that it’s for shits and giggles; otherwise, it may well be perceived as a giant faux pas. A third, and probably the best-known example, is the one drop rule: whiteness being treated as such an endangered commodity that a single drop of black blood contaminated it permanently and made you non-white. Masculinity works much the same way, i.e. it identifies itself as what it is not, i.e. feminine. That’s why enforcement of transgressions out of masculinity and into femininity exist: they threaten the established hierarchy, and unlike in the cases of racism and classism, there isn’t even an equivalent ideology in the broader culture equivalent to “colorblindness” or “meritocracy” that would temper old-fashioned***** gender-policing the same way it sometimes does temper old-fashioned race- and class-policing.

2)The oppressed are forbidden from being like the oppressors
It is true that in order to properly maintain a hierarchy, it’s necessary to make sure the oppressed don’t just weasel out by becoming or passing for the oppressor. Further, since I just explained that the oppressor group often defines itself by what it is not, making sure that the oppressed don’t start doing oppressor-stuff is a way of preserving for oneself the permission to do these things^#. However, internalized oppression and the hierarchy itself make it so that the stuff that “belongs” to the oppressor is seen as good, moral, “classy”, etc. while the stuff that “belongs” or identifies the oppressed groups is seen as inferior. Consequently, internal hierarchies within oppressed groups emerge, which state that even while being in the oppressed group, it’s “better” (more moral, more civilized, more normal, etc.) to be more like the oppressor and shun/abandon those things that mark one as a member of the oppressed class. Colorism is one such example, in which lighter skin color is higher in a racial hierarchy than darker skin, even among people of color themselves; similarly, African-Americans who have internalized a white habitus are considered more cultured than those who have a habitus associated with an African-American subculture (it’s probably not a coincidence that the first black president of the US is a biracial man raised by white people. Or, as Joe Biden noted is his typical foot-in-mouth kind of way: a “mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”). Another one is the “normal gay” and “flamboyant gay” bullshit: gay men who are otherwise performing masculinity are seen as better, i.e. higher up on the hierarchy, than gay men who are seen to share more “feminine” attributes than just being attracted to men (incidentally, this is also where the weird thing about how it’s not “gay” to receive a blowjob from a man comes from: receiving blowjobs = manly, while giving blowjobs = womanly; and gay = womanly)^##. In the trans community, this internal (self-)oppression based on how closely someone manages to conform to cisnormative and heteronormative rules is called the Harry Benjamin Syndrome.
And exactly the same happens to gender-roles. Because men are higher in the hierarchy, masculine things have higher status, whereas feminine things have lower status. The consequence? Femmephobia: the belief that feminine self-expression and things associated with femininity are inherently less good, moral, fun, valuable, etc. than masculine self-expression and things associated with masculinity. This is why women who do traditionally masculine things can sometimes be perceived as being “better” than those doing traditionally feminine things.
It should be noted that a lot of this “it’s better to be like the oppressor” stuff is a symptom of a transitional culture: in a static hierarchy, “upward mobility” of this kind is strictly punishable and control and suppresion of it seen as absolutely necessary for the survival of society. When it occurs within segregated minority communities, it’s only tolerated insofar as it’s invisible (or useful in a divide-and-conquer sort of way) to the oppressor group; the moment it spills out into the “mainstream” (read: the oppressor-dominated culture), it will be swiftly punished. In a transitional culture on the other hand, the oppressor culture becomes a “norm” and “ideal” that becomes a requirement for acceptance into a supposedly egalitarian/democratic/colorblind/whathaveyou mainstream. And when these two aspects clash, you get the faliliar Catch-22 that is being a member of an oppressed group: if you act in ways identified as belonging to your group, you’ll be shat on because of the low status of those social signifiers; if you instead act in ways identified with the oppressor group, you’ll be perceived as “uppity”, bitchy, a trap, a poser, etc., unless you somehow manage to do this while also helping maintain the hierarchy. See also “not like other women” and “model minority”.

So, to sum it up: oppressors are only allowed to appropriate oppressed-group-signifiers for the purpose of mockery and “play”, but not actually adopt them in any meaningful way; conversely, in transitional cultures with delusions of egalitarian ideals, the hierarchy itself mandates that acceptance into the “mainstream” requires emulation of the oppressor class on behalf of the oppressed. Therefore, the fact that women wearing pants is cool, but men wearing skirts is not isn’t a sign that women are the oppressor class; it’s a sign that masculinity has higher-status than femininity, and that we’re in a transitional culture which both enforces the masculinity-over-femininity hierarchy and uses the language of meritocracy and equality, thus basically saying that women have the right to abandon their shitty, feminine qualities and exchange them for the better, more masculine ones, while at the same time assigning lower status to anyone choosing to be more feminine than masculine^###.

Conclusion: another MRA being wrong, albeit more creatively and cleverly than usual.

P.S.:I apologize for the ridiculous amount of footnotes. The topic got away from me a few too many times, and there’s entirely too many tangents kinda-sorta-relevant to this topic.

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*women wearing pants vs. men wearing skirts; the fact that trans men face less violence than trans women; etc.
**to use my own example of this, take for example British class consciousness. It’s kinda fashionable for upper class Brits to affect lower-class accents; OTOH, someone from a lower class background trying to affect an upper class accent could be interpreted as uppity, fake, a poser etc. Also, from what I understand, there’s also a thing among younger folks of “dropping” aristocratic titles to be cool; but you’d get your ass handed to you if you instead wanted to take one on when you don’t have one. So, down-classing yourself = cool; up-classing yourself = punishable
***for example, here’s an entire excellent blog about appropriations of Native American culture by whites, especially by hipster culture: Native Appropriations
****that’s actually one of the identifying characteristics of being a privileged group: being the default, the un-modified state; being defined in common language as that which lacks distinguishing characteristics. That’s why “ethnic” never refers to WASPs, even though that’s technically a kind of ethnicity, and a human figure lacking secondary (or tertiary) sexual characteristics is interpreted as male.
*****”old-fashioned” vs. “modern” bigotry is a discussion in and of itself, but basically it’s the difference between being a blatantly prejudiced and discriminatory bigot (what we traditionally call “a racist”, “a misogynist” etc.) and someone who perpetrates microaggressions. Don’t know where dogwhistles fall here; probably the former masquerading as the latter
^#and actually, it just occurred to me that of course appropriation is a way to allow the oppressor-group to do oppressed-people-stuff without losing their status and identity: Pat Boone’s career is in fact based entirely on this principle.
^##the issue with “lipstic lesbians” vs. butch lesbians doesn’t neatly fit here because of the intersectional nature of it: on the one hand, feminine lesbians are considered “straighter” and more gender-role-conforming than butch lesbians, and thus are rewarded for that; on the other, femmephobia means that a feminine form of self-expression is considered lower-status than a masculine AKA butch one.
^###while simultaneously still enforcing the old gender-roles. this intersectionality means that gender-non-conforming cis women and gender-non-conforming cis men both end up suffering along two axes of oppression while being in the oppressor category on one; and it’s also this intersectionality that synergistically ends up super-shitty for trans women, because they suffer from femmephobia (pretty much regardless of how butch their self-expression; but femme trans women tend to get more of this), gender-non-conformity (when they’re treated as supergay or superfeminine men), and misogyny.

What is an opinion?

sounds like a bit of mental masturbation, but I think it really is an important question, because we now have a discourse in which “everyone is entitled to their opinion” and “that’s just my opinion” being used as a shield against criticisms, and said criticisms of people’s “opinions” being variously titled anti-democratic, elitist, bigoted, et cetera. As such, if we want a functional conversation about pretty much anything, it actually matters what the word “opinion” means, and what it actually means to have the right to an opinion and all opinions being valid and equal.

At the most basic level, “opinion” is an expression of personal taste. I can be of the opinion that green is the prettiest color, that Johnny Depp is sexy, that Meryl Streep is a great actress, that white chocolate is nasty, that both Ulysses and Twilight are unreadable crap, etc. and it’s very hard to argue against me having a right to such opinions. Or even that such opinions are more or less valuable and correct than others, without running into issues of classism that usually accompany the judgments of tastes as high-brow, middle-brow, and low-brow. Sure, a better understanding of Jazz and modern art and coffee brewing might make me more appreciative of these things, even leading to liking it more; but not always (I understand Jackson Pollock’s art just fine; it’s still mindnumbingly boring to look at), and nor is such a refined liking objectively more accurate or more valid. My liking of Punk is not objectively worse or less accurate than someone’s liking of Jazz, and probably the sole exception to this is when the issue is one of communicating outwards, at which point pinpointing your audience’s tastes and opinions accurately is more important than your own personal tastes, and (mis)communicating in this way might well be better or worse, more accurate or less so.

At the second level, we have normative opinions. This is where it gets a bit trickier, since there are two kinds of normative opinions, and they can bleed into each other easily. The first kind is wishful thinking, and I daresay it’s impossible to reasonably claim that one kind of wishful thinking is more accurate or valid than another. However, the second kind of normative opinions is actually normative, in the sense of desiring to make something the social norm. At this point, the opinion leaves the realm of tastes and personal preferences and begins to touch on external reality, and it’s the degree to which it does so that determines whether a judgment about it’s validity and accurateness can be made. For example, if you wished that no one ever got their heart broken, that’s sort of an interesting but inarguable personal fantasy; but if you wish to create a world in which no one ever gets their heart broken… then yes, I can accuse you of being disconnected with reality, and I have the right to criticize such an “opinion” for the ways in which it conflicts with what is actually possible, for the ways in which the methods you suggest are likely to backfire, etc. Unfortunately, people rarely distinguish between wishful thinking and desire for social change, and interpret the criticism of the latter as criticism of the former.

Beyond this level, “opinions” start becoming more and more like truth claims rather than personal preferences and tastes. And the more they do so, the more criticizable they become. But as long as people keep on referring to them as “opinions”, and thus equating them with statements of personal taste, we will continue hearing about how elitist and bigoted it is to criticize people for their opinions. It’s that conflation that memorable quotes such as “you’re entitled to your opinion, but not your won facts” and Asimov’s awesome comment against anti-intellectualism* argue against. Most obviously, scientific questions about whether evolution is happening, or whether AGW is happening, are simply not ever, by any actual definition of the word, “opinions”. The answers to questions about how the world is or how it works are factual questions with generally only one correct answer. And just because even science can only approximate that correct answer as it learns more an more about the world and eliminates the incorrect answers**, you can’t just go all uber-relativist and decide that reality is a matter of personal preference. And, to go on a little tangent here, this is true as much for questions of climate science and biology as it is for questions about faith and religion: claims about gods are truth claims as much subject to science and as much not-opinions as claims about AGW, the efficacy of vaccines, and the existence of the Yeti are.

I would like, however, to also point out that shoving “politics” into the realm of opinion is equally incorrect; and dangerous. Yes, the science gets messier the closer we get to humans; yes, the democratic ideal means that everyone has a right to have their voice heard as part of self governance, and that a person should have the right to be part of decision-making in reasonable proportion to how much such a decision will affect them. But it’s because of this, not despite this, that we really need to accept that political positions simply aren’t like arguing over the best flavor of ice-cream; and it’s because of this, not despite this, that we need to value the science that we do have, because it helps us actually make the decisions that will lead to the goals we have. In other words, to have a functioning, democratic(-ish) government, we need a culture that treats politics as a science rather than as personal preference*** or as a matter of group identity. What this would mean is that people, as they participate in self-governance, would feel entitled to and understand the value of expert opinion in very much the same way we still value the expert opinions of doctors and demand the right to be informed by them as much as possible while reserving the right to ultimately make the relevant decisions ourselves(see: informed consent).

Point being: while everyone is entitled to an opinion, and taste is a personal, relative, and subjective matter, most things people label with that word are actually truth-claims, not opinions at all. And for those things, these rules don’t apply; not all truth-claims are equally valid and true, and you’re not entitled to your own facts, even if you call them opinions.

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*“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
**see also: post-positivism and falsification (as opposed to making shit up, and also as opposed to positivism and verification)
***if you have a culture that manages to treat science as a matter of personal preference, you’re fucked. Somewhat unsurprisingly, that seems to be where the slippery slope of “x is an opinion” actually, demonstrably leads. Which I suppose is another argument why one should fight back already at the level of politics being seen as a matter of opinion, because it apparently won’t stop there.

meh

The internet at my place isn’t working reliably (it cycles through phases of working, working a little bit, and not working at all for several days), I’m up to my ears in work and schoolwork, and hit another minor depressive patch which is sapping my energies. As a result, I’m not really having the energy and motivation to write or to even come up with anything coherent to say (I still owe Walton a response to one of his posts. it’s sitting there on my laptop, almost finished, staring at me accusingly *sigh*). I thought going to the “Theism vs. Atheism: Which is the More Reasonable Worldview?” debate on Saturday would help me get over the listlessness, but it really didn’t. Most of the debate was frustrating since it was just one “I don’t understand the science, therefore it’s rational for me to believe in the christian god” after another, sprinkled with “i don’t know, and god says I don’t need to know; but luckily, neither do you, so it’s more reasonable for me to believe than for you not to believe”. Apparently Occam’s Razor is another one of these sciency things Pastor Ronn Johnson doesn’t know anything about.

There were really only three noteworthy things about the debate, and none of them good.

1)He started out with the argument that maybe humans just don’t really understand what “evil” is; that natural evil (natural disasters etc) are necessary for the world to be habitable for humans. This is interesting only because it’s not a version of the “god knows what he’s doing” argument before. The oldest version of this argument I’ve actually heard in church when I was younger, and smartly enough in involved an angel doing seemingly evil things to good people, and vice versa. I’m saying “smartly”, because angels aren’t supposed to be all-powerful, so they’re in a way bound by the principle of “lesser evil” the same way people are. So anyway, here’s a new version, saying that we need certain natural features to survive, and they are accomplished by (or have as side-effects) natural disasters which harm people. ok, but that means god isn’t all-powerful, or else he could magically make it so the necessary conditions could be achieved without the nasty consequences. Also, this is the evil twin of the fine-tuning argument: it’s not that we need certain conditions, and gee, doesn’t it suck that to achieve them we get natural evil as a side-effect; it’s that we evolved on a planet that has these natural disasters and natural conditions, and we’ve adapted to them, sometimes to the point where now they’re necessary for us. the pastor used the four seasons*, which yes, many northern hemisphere plants (and by extension, we, since we eat them) need to germinate. But: tropical plants don’t need winter for anything, so winter is not actually a necessity of any sort.

2)In the section on morality, he actually managed to put in a big, fat, honking bitches ain’t shit argument! It came in two parts, the last part in the Q&A at the end, but I’ll combine this a bit. He was arguing that an evolved morality is “utilitarian”**, and that therefor rape can only be considered wrong in such a morality because it would lead to the rapist being punished by a brother, father, etc. of the rape victim. And that therefore, atheist morality couldn’t possibly construe the rape of an orphan*** as a bad thing, since “nobody”**** would know that she was raped and thus there would be no one to endanger the reproductive fitness of said rapist. Because that’s how utilitarian and/or atheist morality works: “might makes right”, “procreation is sacred”, and “orphan girls = nobody”. Wait, no, that actually sounds like Christian ethics; guess someone was doin’ some serious projecting here!

3)In the Q&A, a creationist programmer asked an interesting (in the “oh, oh! I know this one!” sense) question: he said that when he programs, even a single misplaced comma fucks up his code into unworkability, so how can nature’s mutations not do the same? This is interesting mostly because this plays right into my interest with resilience based on redundancies. Coding doesn’t do redundancies, it’s inelegant and expensive. Nature does. Hence, nature doesn’t completely break down with a single introduced fault. Yay for redundancies!

hmm…. ok, so this turned out to be a sizable post, after all. But maybe it’s a fluke :-p

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*I’ll ignore for a moment that he said earthquakes have something to do with creating the seasons; I already said the man is scientifically illiterate.
**not “utilitarian” in the sense anyone actually familiar with utilitarian ethics would use the word. The dear pastor also can’t tell an is from an ought, and so he thinks that because we say that human sense for morality evolved because it was beneficial to our ability to procreate, all secular morality has as its utility the goal of increasing procreation of the morally acting individual. Except, he phrased it as “impregnating a female”, because apparently only half of humanity are moral agents.
***the orphan was assumed to be a girl. Boys don’t get raped, you see; or they can defend themselves. Fuck if I know.
**** PZ even pointed out to him that the orphan herself would know; he shrugged that off, and repeated that “nobody would know”.

On sexism, being a sexist, and doing sexist things

First, a caveat: absolutely no one is going to use the words consistently the way I’ll be using them here; the concepts are fairly well agreed upon, but how people choose to apply our extremely fuzzy language to them varies from person to person.

With that out of the way, let me say right out that we’re all guilty of sexism, because sexism is a structural thing (sexism = prejudice + power), and since our whole society is still sexist, we contribute to sexism simply by being part of it. We do this primarily in two ways: for one, because the structure itself perpetuates sexism, and few people function outside that structure (meaning, we all pay the price for dry-cleaning assigned to our clothes’ gender(!); we all, to some degree, submit to social definitions of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine”; etc.); two, growing up in a sexist culture means we learn how to act, what to consider normal, how to interact with people, how to assess them, etc. in ways that are in some way or another sexist; hence the studies that show lower levels of respect for women, from both men and women. So in that sense, every person who hasn’t been raised by (egalitarian) wolves and/or is far enough on the Autism spectrum to be immune to social clues is a sexist. That’s however not how people generally use the word “sexist”. When people use that word, they generally mean someone who is prejudiced against women; I would say though that that prejudice should be called “misogyny*”. The reason for that is that, as I said, sexism is structural. If no power accompanies the prejudice, you can’t really have sexism. As such, “misandry” is a real thing, but it isn’t sexism since there’s no real power to enforce anti-men prejudice**.
Now, the problem is that most people who are aware of the effects of being stuck in a sexist culture also don’t usually refer to everyone as sexist. so we get the distinction between “being a sexist” and “doing sexist things”; which, if we for a moment ignore my last paragraph and use “sexism” in the casual sense of meaning prejudice, is also a sensible distinction: being a person who is prejudiced, and inadvertently doing something, usually out of ignorance, that originates in prejudice are two different things. The distinction also might make sense in the context of the previous paragraph in the sense of there being a difference between being sexist, being a sexist, and doing sexist things: the first is the default for people in a sexist society; the second is someone who actively promotes, approves of, and willfully engages in sexism (i.e. what people usually think of when they hear the word); the third one is simply an isolated act that is borne out of the first, but doesn’t (yet) imply that one is the second: it does imply that the behavior is correctable and that a single sexist act does not yet condemn a person to being a sexist.
Anyway, this vagueness of language and the difficulty of accurately and consistently describing the concepts is what causes at least half the drama whenever sexist or misogynist behavior*** is pointed out: people feel like they’ve just been accused of being hateful, prejudiced assholes, when all that actually happened was that they did something that our sexist culture taught them to do; something they now have been given the opportunity to un-learn, and thus divest themselves of one more piece of inadvertent misogynist acculturation. Something similar happens with accusations of being “tools of the Patriarchy”: that’s not an accusation of outright hatred of women; it’s a rather blunt way of pointing out that an action/behavior/state of affairs that one is defending is patriarchal in nature, and as such, the defense serves to bolster patriarchy. Most people who act as “tools of the Patriarchy” do it not out of malice (though those exist too, of course) but out of sheer ignorance of how the thing they’re defending fits into the systemic structure of sexism. But of course, due to the charged nature of the insult as well as due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people so labeled aren’t going to respond smartly to it. Especially when they’re very young, because as previously mentioned, most people under 25**** are fucking idiots who know a little bit of everything, and think that means they know everything.

I have absolutely no solution to this clusterfuck; if I were emperor of the world, I’d make everyone use these words in exactly the way I used them here, plus invent a new word for inadvertently promoting sexism, but without being prejudiced. Short of that, people will continue to (choose to) misunderstand and get pissy about being called on acting sexist or defending the patriarchy (and no, not calling them out is not an option)

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*it seems people use “misogynist” as a stronger version of “sexist”: someone who’s sexist is merely prejudiced, someone who’s misogynist is someone who actually hates women. On occasion, I also see “misogynist” simply being a subset of “sexist”, in the same way that “polygyny” is a subset of “polygamy”. Personally, I think the word is really more useful as the word for the specific prejudice that fuels sexism, in the same way that homophobia is the prejudice that fuels heterosexism. In fact, I wish there were such a distinction for racism, too, but there the systematic discriminatory outcomes and the prejudice are conflated and labeled with the same word, leading to all sorts of stupid drama. Like I said, language is incredibly, inconveniently messy.

**there is such a thing as sexism against guys: it’s that “Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too” thing: prejudice about how men are supposed to be and behave, and the social power to enforce this. homophobia is a huge example of this. This, however, is sexism against men borne out of prejudice against women (misogyny), not prejudice against men (misandry)

***since I earlier mentioned that sexism is structural, sometimes our sexist acts don’t even include any subconscious prejudice, but are merely ignorance or lack of knowledge of how to get something done without perpetuating the sexism of it; the best example was an article I read recently about a women consciously resisting from complementing a little girl on her looks, and instead asking about her interests. The woman clearly isn’t prejudiced, but does occasionally catch herself promoting sexism with small things like squee-ing at a baby-girl in a cute outfit; because it’s almost automatic, and socially expected. So, one can perform a sexist action, or one can perform a misogynist action (which would be one that did include prejudice, even if maybe only subconscious and/or unexamined prejudice). I wish there were a word for perpetuating sexism without being prejudiced, to avoid confusion *sigh*

****oh, the stupid shit I’ve said and done in defense of d00dz, for the goal of being seen as one of the “cool” girls… *groan* … and worst of all, I actually thought I was right! I wish at least I could say I was being cynical and manipulative and making the patriarchy work for me, but no: I was just stupid.

Against optimism

It occurs to me that I shouldn’t write this post before reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided“, since she probably addresses the same points, much better and more thoroughly than I can right now. But it’s still something that bugs me, on so many levels.

Mostly, it bugs me at the fundamental level of things HAVING to have some positive outcome, as if it was some physical law that on balance, things must work out positively in human terms. The three versions of this that I run into most often are “I believe in America”*, “but still, life is/people are still good”, and the belief that progress is inevitable.

By virtue of living in the US and spending a lot of time on US dominated internet forums, I most commonly encounter the “I still believe in America” version. It seems most often to crop up as a last-ditch rebuttal of the problems people in the US are facing, as if it somehow is capable of refuting just how shitty America actually is, compared to other Industrialized countries (which is especially sad considering they came into the 2nd half of the 20th century well ahead of everyone else, by virtue of not having had a war fought on their soil, and therefore having some spare cash for investing into the future, rather than rebuilding from a pile of rubble). For example, some while ago I was arguing with someone on Pandagon about social mobility. Their argument was their son who, despite not having a college education, has made quite a life for himself in IT. I and others shored up a long list of reasons why this experience was exceptional and cannot be used as an example of American social mobility, while giving evidence for how social mobility and social wellbeing in the US is very low especially compared to many European countries. And that person’s last response in that thread? An indignant whine along the lines of “well, excuse me for still having faith in America”. My response was a rather snarky comparison of theoretical opportunities available to me in the US as compared to Germany, in which the US did not end up looking pretty.

The “but still, life is/people are still good” is very similar to the “I believe in America” thing, but can be used both more broadly (i.e. when talking about non-American things), and more narrowly (i.e. when talking about a specific group of people/situation, American or otherwise). Mostly, I’ve seen it used when talking about something atrocious, like abuse in the military or even systemic problems caused by same(“but still, most soldiers are good kids”), or about the effect Western-centered capitalism has on the non-western part of the world. I’ve seen a combination of these two on an essay on ZNet by a soldier’s mom who first made an extremely long list of epically shitty things the U.S. military, the USA as a whole, and Capitalism caused (torture, war, environmental damage, etc ad nauseam)… and then she did a 180 and started talking about how, despite all that, life was still good, because she got to meet for coffee with neighbors, and a lot of other “little things in life” that were going well for her (and nevermind that because of the things in the first part of her essay, a very large portion of humanity did NOT have access to the stuff in the second part of the essay), and how that meant… something.

The third type is more a (subconscious?) attitude than an actual, formed argument, and it presents itself in many different, often very small and barely noticeable ways. A very obvious variant is the “technology will save us” response to AGW, but it’s generally the conviction that the future will definitely be better (or at least not any worse) than the past. This manifests either as the conviction that, in currently raging battles of the culture wars “time is on our side” and that we’ll automatically win given enough time**, or that the things that have already been achieved (8hr workdays and worker safety, abortion rights, gains in environmental protection, you name it) can’t possibly be undone.

I’m not quite sure why these self-delusions are so prevalent, but it seems people need them to function just as much as many people seem to need religion to function. I vaguely remember reading some article that said people with depression were often better at predicting their chances of succeeding at something, but I can’t remember what causal link they posited (or if they bothered at all), but no matter which way things go, it seems being positively self-deluded about one’s own chance at success is correlated with happiness, and being able to realistically predict ones chances in life is correlated with depression. Anyway, what I have noticed when people show these signs of unwarranted optimism is that they primarily do it to deflect acknowledging being part of a problem (pretty much anything environment- and/or capitalism-related) or someone else one knows being part of a problem (any single comment ever that defends the military by saying that soldiers aren’t evil***), or simply try to protect themselves from being crushed by the enormity of the problem (because, let’s face it, short of moving to a hippy eco village, pretty much everything I (and everyone else in the Western world as well as many people in other parts) do on a daily basis is making things worse: the electricity I use while typing this, the starbucks food I’m snarfing (mmm….cheesecake…wait, what was I talking about…?), the gas I used to drive to Bismarck, the plastic my grocieries come packaged in, etc.), and secondarily to give themselves a reason not to do anything much about the discussed problems. I suppose it’s just not human nature to want to go radical, so people instead react defensively (again, probably subconsciously) by either elevating the small things they do in the right direction to actual problem-solving *coughpriusdriverscough*, or by figuring the problem will solve itself given enough time (or if not itself, then at least with the number of people already being engaged being enough), or by simply erasing the magnitude of the problem.

People (and btw, that includes me, in case someone feels like complaining that I don’t do much either) seem to have an extreme need to be “normal” and not be radical too much and on too many things and in too many ways. And sure, it’s not physically possible for any one person to be part of a (radical or otherwise) solution to every problem facing humankind right now, but most people don’t even do what would be within their possibilities. And where this isn’t caused by sheer ignorance, it seems to be caused by fostering this sort of extreme, unwarranted optimism. So, i’m against this optimism that prevents people from realizing that things really could go to shit, and hope for maybe a bit more pessimism and realization that a good future needs to be vigorously fought for and defended against the assholes and idiots of the world.

P.S.:holy shit, this post is difficult to read. waaaaaay too many brackets. sorry :-p

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*I should note that there’s a difference between a “believing” in America in the sense that it’s salvageable and worth fighting for and needn’t be run away from just yet, and a believing in it in that magical-thinking sort of way that seems to assume some magical properties for America that protects it from the historical fates of every other civilization past and present. I don’t necessarily agree with the former either, but it’s a perfectly rational position to take, and even has a certain bravery to it that I just don’t have in me. The latter is just complete bullshit.

**Most notably in the fight for LGBT rights, where the demographics do show that younger people are more ok with gay marriage than older ones; but these demographic changes aren’t “natural”, they’re the result of hard-fought battles for social acceptance fought in the past. and they’re no reason to stop fighting, since a trend like that can be reversed just as much as it can be created in the first place.

***Interestingly enough, only soldiers in the US military are not evil even if the military does bad things (they’re feeding their families who depend on them and that’s why they can’t desert; or they’re doing the best out of a bad situation; or they were duped into joining by the “defend your country” trope and had to stick it out because desertion would have landed them in prison; or a million other reasons), but it never ever applies to German soldiers in WW2, even when they’ve never been within sight of a Concentration Camp and their reasons for joining/not leaving were the same as the reasons American soldiers often give now. But that’s a subject for a much longer stand-alone post which I may even write someday.

Cooperation vs. Competition

****I’m fully aware that this entry is entirely passive-aggressive. I’ve decided that some people just aren’t worth arguing with, but their mad ravings still sometimes touch on issues that are at least worth talking about. So that’s what I’m doing****

Humans seem a species of extremely contradictory impulses: we cooperate and help each other, but also compete in the most brutal, violent ways with each other. Part of this can simply be explained by in-group vs. out-group behavior, since all social animals behave more cooperatively with their own, while at the same time fiercely fighting other groups. However, to my limited knowledge, animals are usually consistent in how this plays out. For example, bonobo groups seem to consistently be “tolerant”, cooperative, and relatively non-hierarchical, whereas chimpanzee groups seem to be consistently combative (though this seems limited to threats rather than real violence), and strongly hierarchical. Humans on the other hand seem to be able to form both kinds of in-group behavior, to different degrees, and in different combinations. I’m not going to speculate right now why humans have more plasticity in this regard, but I do want to look at what circumstances cause (ohhh fine, “are correlated with” ;-) ) such differences in in-group interaction styles.

For starters, let’s get the racist trope out of the way and admit that the type of interaction doesn’t seem to be genetically correlated; rather, it seems a cultural meme, but one that is extremely deeply ingrained in us, possibly from very early on, and possibly one of the most difficult to alter once it’s taken root. Further, it seems a cultural meme correlated with socioeconomic systems***, as well as the cultural narratives that go with them (for example, the Dutch narrative of “being in it together”(because it they don’t cooperate, they get flooded); vs. the USAmerican narrative of “rugged individualism” and stories of “rags to riches”).

And how precisely do the narratives correlate? Let’s just say that “it’s complicated”¹*: human societies aren’t monolithic, static “cultures”, but rather complex webs of more or less dominant and predominant subcultures, with different socio-economic situations and different combinations of narratives. However, most societies do tend to have a dominant narrative that permeates most, if not all, subcultures. And it’s these dominant narratives I want to look at right now**

As I said (and as the link in the last paragraph says), the dominant narrative in the States is that of individual achievement. This doesn’t automatically mean that it’s ruthless, violent, unfair, or whatever, but the focus of the narrative is on hard work and on earning all one’s achievements. Rights and entitlements are limited to the freedom to do something, and the “equality of opportunity”, i.e. freedom from being discriminated against in comparison to others. As I’ve written before, this results sometimes (and especially in subcultures with white, male, middle-class privilege) in the disappearance of systemic explanations. From this is born the perspective that everything that interferes with individual equality is unfair, even if it exists to fix systemic imbalances. Similarly, it is only considered fair to have gotten something by earning it****, and any sort of support from the government is considered cheating others². IOW getting something with assistance for which someone else had to bust their ass is automatically considered unfair. This creates the paranoid narrative of slashing social programs because somewhere someone will be cheating the system.
It doesn’t help of course that individual achievement, in the context of capitalism, means competing with absolutely everyone else for everything. Again, the only rule of fairness is “freedom from discrimination”; beyond that, it’s every person for themselves. The cultural empathy begins to break down at this point, and people with whom you were previously merely in competition within the hierarchy of your in-group begin shifting out and becoming more and more members of an out-group. I’m not even going to contemplate the degree of sociopathy possible in a situation when virtually everyone you see in your daily life is a “them” rather than an “us”, but the virulence of the teabaggers and of USAmerican religious groups aren’t what I’d consider a sign of a healthy society.

On the other hand, certain European cultures (most notably the Scandinavian ones, but it varies) have, to varying degrees, narratives of cooperation. Because they are still capitalist countries, these narratives are somewhat muted, but they do show up in regards to issues that are not part of the market economy, such as education, healthcare, and welfare provisions (and in some cases even law enforcement; a contrast between the way the Swedes approach this issue and the way the States do makes that pretty damn clear, I think). In such narratives of cooperation, all people are considered to be equally entitled to a certain level of service as an inherent right. As such, they are provided on a collective basis (taxes), and those who are disadvantaged are expected to receive extra assistance, so that they can take advantage of these services in the same way and to the same degree that the already privileged do. The sense of fairness is not violated by this, because everybody expects that they would receive the very same assistance if they found themselves in that situation. On the other hand, refusing to contribute one’s fair share is seen as unfair, and will result in hostile feelings or actions against those who are perceived as cheating (this is also why these systems only work with taxes, rather than voluntary donations: voluntary participation always leaves behind that sneaky feeling that others aren’t contributing their fair share)
This collective narrative of “we’re all in it together” can provide bridges between disparate groups, or at least weaken the competitiveness between subcultures within a society (the existence of violent subcultures is a pretty damn good sign that something somewhere failed in the system, as far as I’m concerned). Even if a particular individual may not empathically identify with their society and the people they share that society with (in the sense of feeling part of a real community), they still will not see others as their competition, as part of “them”. The othering only happens when, like I said, some people are perceived as not contributing a fair share to the common good, hence the occasional outbreak of the “Tall poppy syndrome”, and general hatred of people who use tax havens and cheat on their taxes.

And now, finally, to the point: the clash between these narratives of cooperation and competition is what causes certain people to starfart about “leeches” who are trying to steal other people’s spots on the employment ladder by wanting (or worse yet, feeling entitled to) advantages others didn’t get. When in reality, there is no “wanting advantages others didn’t get”, but rather the feeling that everybody is entitled to these advantages, according to their needs, which of course includes oneself.

Besides, I couldn’t give a flying fuck about climbing the employment ladder. I already have a job, and one which blissfully avoids the need for ladders and bosses and co-workers. The reason I want that university degree is because I want a job in which I can actually help make the world a bit better. My current job, as nice as it is, is completely meaningless and useless. I’d like to do something constructive, to basically make people better, not compete with them. Competition is stressful, and therefore not good for my mental health. Fuck competition.

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*this one is from a book, so it’s long and it’s missing 4 pages due to preview restrictions, but it’s very interesting; also, pp. 85-92 have a discussion of the terms/concepts, but there’s two pages missing there, too. Also, I so need to buy that book someday, I think!

**though, thinking about how dominant narratives combine with alternative ones to create some truly fucked up combinations made me think about the teabaggers (the ones that aren’t just plain old racist assclowns, that is); but I’ll write about that tomorrow ( or the day after :-p), because it’s already late, and I haven’t gotten any work done yet.

***this may be true in different ways. For one, there’s a strong correlation between inequality and competitive interaction (most noticeably physical violence, but also predominance of libertarian and/or macho attitudes, as well as punitiveness), and inequality itself is obviously caused by the proportions of socialism and capitalism in any given mixed economy; but it is also possible that cultural narratives shape both the type of interaction AND the socioeconomic model.

****but of course not being aware of one’s own privilege makes it difficult or impossible to perceive the advantages one got a priori, without having earned them.

Individualism, take two

My last rant about individualism was about systemic problems being framed as “personal responsibility” (usually of the affected themselves, sometimes in the form of charity directed at individuals), which leads to various problems, like perpetuating or creating new TotC’s, putting the burden on the shoulders of the poor, disabled etc. who are least likely to have the resources to act, and so on.

This time, I want to make a sort of reversed rant: that placing responsibility for change on an amorphous “them” doesn’t help either.

I see and hear this all the time, usually in the form of “well yes, it’s a big problem. I really wish [insert name of public agency here] would do something about it! oh, well, what can you do.” Which is a way of allowing oneself to do nothing at all, ever. But it just doesn’t quite work like that, since a government/public agency can’t do shit by itself. It’s not a living, cognate thing with its own will, it’s a tool to be used by people. It’s very specifically a tool to deal with those problems that can only be addressed at a system-wide level, but in the end, it can and will only do whatever the people that engage in it/use it are telling it to do. And if you aren’t using and maintaining it, it will either rot away, or be used by others in ways you might not like.

I’m thinking part of the problem is with the idea that the people in government are “leaders”. Except in the very short-term and especially emergency situations, they usually aren’t. I suspect the naming was historically more accurate, but on most issues a government and its agencies are usually more conservative and inert than the society in which it resides*, which means that people always need to drag their government kicking and screaming to where they want it to be, rather than expecting, as we now often do, for the government to literally lead the way (which is especially stupid considering this works like a Tug o’ War, and if you’re not pulling, your government will actually move AWAY from your position, rather than leading in the desired direction).

Another reason for this attitude might be the unexamined wrong assumption about how to make a government agency act on something. People in their everyday lives are used to “voting with their wallets” in restaurants, shops etc. (usually about relatively trivial matters, or matters that can be supperficially patched up. But that’s a topic for another post), in which a simple announcement that you won’t do X at place Y anymore unless they correct problem Z can be a motivation for place Y to fix the problem, and similarly stating “if only place Y would fix problem Z, we’d definitely go there more often, but unless they fix it, we’ll stay away” can lead to the desired change. This does absolutely not work in government. It’s especially bad in a two party system, where the “choice” for participation is limited anyway and the parties really only care about a small subsection of voters in the middle, and therefore often cluster relatively close together on the overall spectrum; but to declare that you’ll stay away from a governmental agency entirely just renders you irrelevant to their decision-making process. The only time political parties care about whether someone will vote or not is when these potential voters already agree with them, and now just need to be coaxed into validating them. Otherwise, they only care that you do not vote for the other side, since they win if they have proportionally more than the other side, while businesses win both when they have a proportionally larger share, but also when they simply have more people “voting” for them, since the all-important growth can be achieved in both ways (conversely, the political parties don’t care if the total number of participants shrinks, as long as their slice if the smaller pie is still larger than the other guys’; businesses OTOH don’t handle the shrinking of their customer base well, even when their share of the market rises).

So anyway, a government agency isn’t going to change itself to “win you as a customer”, and a political party is only going to try if otherwise you’ll support the competition. So, participation is essential. And equally essential is vocal and highly visible participation, since government agencies cannot follow your lead if they don’t know what the fuck you want. And so it’s not just about voting, but about making it loud and clear why you’re voting, and why your vote should matter: because you have many friends you can take with you to the other side; because if they listen to you, you will give them your time and money to help them convince others to support them; etc. For that reason, building, supporting and joining interest groups and relevant public organizations for the issues that matter is often more useful and more important than just voting (though, without the voting part, the rest won’t carry enough weight).

And how does this square with my previous complaints about how problems cannot be solved by individuals? Well, the problem is that I wasn’t quite specific enough previously. The highly privileged can, as a matter of fact, solve the majority of their own problems; but the less privilege you have, the more difficult this becomes, because on the one hand you have to address fewer problems less thoroughly because you have fewer resources at your disposal, and on the other you’ll be more affected by more problems. But if the problems are being addressed in a collective manner as described above, then “from each according to his ability” actually can amount to enough to make the systemic change happen, which then will make it easier for people to address their problems**, leaving them with further resources to address the other problems, and so on. But this only works if even those participate in the group solution who could have managed to solve the problem individually, as well. It’s similar to the insurance principle, where those who won’t use it subsidize those who will, so that all remain taken care of. Looked as a whole, this will benefit everybody, since only the super-rich and super-powerful can solve all their own problems by themselves***; and therefore, pooling resources to address everybody’s problems means that your problems will be addressed, too, to a degree that you couldn’t accomplish individually.

So, while “acting alone” won’t solve problems, depending on others to act for you won’t, either. Participation and cooperation is essential. On life-or-death issues, this is so important that it needs to be universal and mandatory (healthcare most notably), but really almost all systemic problems require widespread and hopefully universal engagement, lest they become TotC’s in which cooperation unravels at ever-increasing rates, as is now happening with education for example.

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*and this is true regardless of whether the society is moving forwards or backwards. Reactionary elements may be more common in government, but government rarely leads in that direction, either. as fucknuts as some Republican politicians might be, they’re not nearly as reactionary as the Teabaggers as a whole, and certainly they aren’t their leaders; rather, they’re hanging on to the movement as it drags them violently to the right.

**for example, walking instead of driving requires either a lot of free time and a very convenient location of your choosing, or: all useful things to be closeby, everywhere; infrastructure and maintenance thereof (only a masochist (*cough*) would stomp through 2 foot high snow on the unplowed sidewalk instead of getting in the car and driving on the cleared road); community moral support (if it’s seen as a virtue, more people will do it than if it’s considered something only fucking weirdos and poor people do). Once those systemic problems are addressed, the treshold to doing it becomes lower in terms of willpower and physical resources, so that for one more people can start doing it, and two the people who used a lot of effort to do it before can now redirect that effort & resources into addressing other problems.

***though they often solve them by using the same sort of systemic tools available to us, they don’t need them. If there was no government for them to use to bully the populace, they could do it directly, and easier to boot. But other than that, even such systemic problems like bad air quality can be addressed with enough money for a state-of-the-art air filtration system. the rich will survive most of the disasters, unless they get killed off in a revolution. And even then any individual rich fucker has a higher likelihood of surviving than any individual revolutionary does. Private armies can do that.

Functional redundancy, “success-oriented planning”, and the global economy

I’ve been working on this post for a while, and it still doesn’t feel quite finished, but because of the Iceland volcano outbreak, I’m gonna post it anyway, since it’s relevant. Maybe there will be a part two if this version ends up needing too heavy revision/expansion.

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Functional redundancy is a term used in biology and ecology mostly (and in software engineering, too); it refers to different components of a system performing similar functions, so that in case of disruption, they can take over each others’ functions(in ecology, that would be the ability of another species to fill a particular, suddenly empty niche that is necessary for the functioning if the whole ecosystem). Having a lot of this functional redundancy is usually seen as a sign of the health and resilience* of a system¹, ².

A similar concept exists in engineering³, where critical systems usually have multiples as fail-safes.

In both cases, the redundancy is “expensive”, i.e. it uses more resources/energy than a system without it would. This means that in ideal and/or stable conditions, a system with redundancy functions at sub-optimal levels, because the redundancies reduce efficiency. What this generally means is that every system must balance resilience against efficiency.

And this is where “success-oriented planning” comes in. You see, in business, redundancies are almost always considered wasteful, and are cut out. Overstaffing, overequipping, overtraining etc. are all seen as flaws, as things that cut into the bottom line. And so, they are removed as much as possible. But of course this only works in ideal conditions, so doing this means you’re planning on succeeding, and are not making any contingency plans. This, on paper, generally looks significantly more efficient in both time and money. In reality though, every fuckup (and there always are fuckups) costs more time and money, because there are delays in acquiring the extra resources required to fix the problem**. Sometimes, the fuckups are so many, or so huge, that they destroy the plan altogether, when a less efficiently but more pessimistically designed plan might have survived.

And what does this have to do with Iceland’s volcano? Well, the volcano shut down Europe’s most popular, cheap, and least subsidized for of transport. Stories about people stranded on vacation were abundant; usually further down were stories about suddenly overfilled trains and ferries, even though often both have additional trains/boats in service. Similarly, even though there was squeaking about possible future food shortages in stores, there really weren’t any, partially simply because a lot of stores are replenished once a week, but partially also because not all foods have to be transported from very far away, thus risking spoilage.

Those things are all symptoms of functional redundancy, maintained almost entirely by state-funding/intervention: the rail is state-owned in most European countries, and so are many ferry services. Even road maintenance, for all those newly rented and now hard-to-come-by cars, is state funded. Similarly, the existence of spare vehicles and crew, which was mobilized to deal with the suddenly increased demand, is a sign of maintained redundancy. So is the existence of the vast majority of European agriculture.

If transportation would have been left to capitalist competition, there wouldn’t be this multiple redundancy in transportation. The buy-off and deconstruction of America’s public transport in those cities in which it was sold to private interest is pretty good evidence for this: in LA for example, there was an excellent network of trolleys within living memory of some of its senior citizens; now the only way to get around is to drive. And additionally, even if additional systems existed, they’d be just as understaffed and under-equipped as many purely for profit, non-subsidized companies are (for example, ancient undermaintained airplanes, and overworked long-distance truck-drivers), so they would hardly be equipped to shoulder such a sudden shift in demand.

Similarly, if the flight-stoppage had lasted longer and Europe had to subsist on its own food reserves, even this early in the year, it wouldn’t have been a disaster, because food is still produced in Europe. This is almost completely a question of functional redundancy, since according to free marked principles, virtually no food should be produced in Europe at all, and it all would have to be shipped/flown in from overseas,*** from cash-crop producing cheap-labor countries. This would have spelled a disaster for Europe, as well as the supplier countries, since they wouldn’t be able to sell.

Now, a volcano eruption disrupting flights is a bit of a freak-event. But it’s not like were not facing a similar, more predictable and also more permanent disruption in the near future. Peak oil is looming⁴, or might have even passed, and transportation and agriculture will be likely its most notable victims.

The Green Revolution for example is entirely fossil-fuel based, and so is its descendant, the GMO revolution****; neither will successfully continue to function in a post-cheap-oil world. Fostering small scale, local agriculture could provide some functional redundancy (Yes, small scale, local agriculture is capable of feeding the world; Victory Gardens provided as much food during WWII as large-scale agriculture did. Thanks for asking), but modern subsidies, especially in the US, do precisely the opposite, subsidizing monoculture on ginormous scales. This is entirely counterproductive. So is the continued push for agro-fuels, which will die the moment fuel-intensive agriculture does.

Transportation is in a similar and partially worse pickle. I’m not aware of oil-free kerosene-alternatives at all. Cars may well be turned into all-electrics in the next decade, but then they’ll still run on fossil fuels everywhere except in France maybe, and that would mean more CO₂ emissions, which we can’t afford for obvious reasons. The current flight-crisis is showing that trains can barely handle having to pick up the slack for a short-lived temporary flight outage. What will happen when both flying and driving suddenly become non-existent or heavily reduced? What will happen in the US, where the train map has a rather HUGE holes in the middle⁵, and most the trains run only once a day as it is (oh, and they regularly get stuck in the mountains in the winter, and no trains cross the Cascades and Rockies for days, even weeks then)?

As far as I can tell, the USA has lost the ability to create functional redundancies in the 80′s, when every politician seems to have run on the “running government like a business” platform, and the only subsidized business, agriculture, has been subsidized in entirely the wrong direction, i.e. away from diversification and towards monoculture and specialization. It’s an entire country build according to “success-oriented planning”, i.e. this idiotic, powerful American optimism and exceptionalism that keeps on fueling its economic bubbles***** and that eschews even thinking about a Plan B, and which, as a result, has pretty much only one solution for every problem, and often it’s already a pretty jury-rigged one. There isn’t much resilience in the system.

Europe is somewhat better off, especially because they already have a lot of this infrastructure in place and because new non-fossil-fuel infrastructure is being created that might make transitions easier. But for some unfathomable reason, quite a few European governments seem to want to become more American: more car-dependence, more “tax-rebates”, more “business-friendly”, and more useless agricultural subsidies that only prop up existing agriculture, rather than providing a non-fuel-intensive alternative.

And the rest of the world? Australia has never had much in the way of natural resilience; there’s a reason agriculture never developed there, and it’s on it’s way to its natural death now with more stress, and more irregular weather and less rain.

And the entire developing and undeveloped world has virtually no resilience left at all; domestic agriculture has become nonexistent, while export agriculture will become non-existent when transporting food across the world will become too expensive; and this is in the areas that aren’t being fucked over by global warming, and industrial erosion and poisoning.

On the whole, it seems the global economy is one big exercise in “success-oriented planning”. It’s time to fess up that that was probably a really dumb idea, and start building (and allowing other countries to build) some resilience into the most important bases of our systems (I mentioned agriculture and transportation, but electricity in general as well as communication are other important examples). I suspect it’s a wee bit late to prevent all disasters, but better late then never, I’d say…

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*resilience being a measure of how much you can fuck with a system until it finally cannot compensate, collapses and becomes a completely different system

**the new “solution” to this faulty planning is the creation of the disposable human. Temp agencies for example provide insta-experts/workers/whatever to companies. This precarization of labor creates fucktons of problems for the workers, especially in places like the U.S. where temp-workers don’t get benefits and get paid less than the equivalent permanent employee would, but it works just awesomely for the companies. ugh

***incidentally, there’s already been reports of some exotic and out-of-season foodstuffs spoiling because there was no way to deliver them from the countries in which they were grown to Europe; this has serious consequences on the countries where these crops are grown, because they usually lack diversification and functional redundancy, either as a consequence of colonial history, or as a consequence of World Bank and IMF blackmail that destroyed localized, non-cash-crop agriculture and various state-subsidized industries.

****both the high-yield agriculture of the Green Revolution, and GMO crops, are fertilized and pesticide/herbicide intensive, as well as labor-intensive, and therefore only profitable when economies of scale come into play. They also both lack in genetic diversity within and between varieties which would supply the plants with some of that flexibility and resilience to change.

*****probably best exemplified by the massive pre-financial-crisis hubris of “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

What’s in a name?

I’m currently reading a book which deals a lot with how words shape actions. It’s a bit like Orwell’s description of how the way words work in newspeak makes it impossible to even form seditious thoughts based on the language (since such thoughts are usually verbal rather than visual or mathematical or whatever). The first part of the book dealt with the way translation can change the meanings, and therefore the discussion, understanding, and application of concepts. Basically, all instances of “human rights” ended up being translated as “freedoms of individuals”, which isn’t anywhere near the same*. This narrowing of the meaning of human rights then affects what sort of things are considered within the purview of “fighting for human rights”, and it entirely excludes any claims to positive rights, as well as collective rights/freedoms.
Similar problems with the meaning of words are everywhere. The fight over the word “believe” should be pretty well known to everybody even remotely involved in the evo-creo wars, so is the meaning of the word “evolution”**; the “it’s colder here, therefore there is no Global Warming” nonsense; the hideous anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-disconnect-the-permanently-vegetative-and-the-braindead-from-life-support arguments hiding behind a ridiculously broad and factually meaningless meaning of the term “sanctity of human life”; etc.

Right now, I’m particularly interested in the way the words “politics” and “democracy” are thought of and used, and how they’ve become narrowed and hollowed out in very interesting but damaging ways.

Politics are defined by wikipedia broadly as “a process by which groups of people make collective decisions”, and in this broad definition they’re used to describe all sorts of interactions with others, about all sorts of issues, by all sorts of means, at all sorts of levels within a hierarchy/organization (see: “office politics”); but when it comes to the area from which the term originally came, i.e. issues of state and government, suddenly “politics” ends up being far narrower in meaning, and becomes almost inextricably linked to professional politicians and partisanship, thus creating the absurd notion of “apolitical” social engagement. This is the arena in which NGO’s, charities, community organizations, churches, scientific organizations, etc., as well as members of all of those are supposed to operate. On first glance, this seems like a good thing***, but in reality creating this fictional divide between “political” and “apolitical” social engagement results in a host of problems.
In the book I’m reading, for example, a charity that conducts “civil education” is described as absolutely obsessed with remaining “apolitical” even though they deal with issues of political engagement and decision-making. Because of this, their education attempts become worthless and meaningless, because they cannot address the issues that people actually want to know more about and learn to act about. They end up serving cookie-cutter speeches on highly abstract topics (like the Greek roots of democracy) which have no connection to the real lives and issues of the people who are receiving this education, because those issues are “political” and therefore cannot be addressed. A similar thing happens in American politics. Any entanglement with “politics” is seen as inherently negative (and as breaking the rules of society, by entering the arena of politics when it’s supposed to stay “apolitical”), and entanglement can simply mean having a point of view that closer resembles the stance of one political party on any given issue. And when “reality has a liberal bias”, reality itself becomes either vilified and discarded****, or it gets “balanced out” by a counter-factual view, just to avoid the appearance of taking sides and becoming “political”. Something similar happened with the stupid ACORN drama: simply because “voter registration drives” are something the Democrats support more than the Republicans, and because the people that were being registered were part of the demographic more likely to vote for Democrats, ACORN is being marginalized, vilified and attacked for having crossed the imaginary line between “apolitical” and “political”. And in an extra special case of vileness, the same people who jump on others for being “political” will engage in very similar things, but as long as they can hide them under the umbrella of something (in American society) undeniably “apolitical” and untouchable like religious freedom, they are considered safely “apolitical”. Something similar is happening with the Teabaggers who are claiming the umbrella of libertarian anti-politicism (ha!) to protect themselves from the “taint” they themselves see in those who engage in issues they oppose. It’s hypocritical, and extremely detrimental to real, honest political and social engagement.

Something very similar is happening to “democracy”. It’s supposed to be a political (as per original definition of political) system in which citizens govern their society themselves. One tool of democracy is a republican government, but it is not the only available tool, nor is a republican government the only kind of government a democratic society can have. Recently though, I have begun to notice that “democracy” is now being used almost exclusively to mean “a government you can vote for”. Voting in elections seems to have become the sole meaning of “democracy”. The crassest example of this I remember were the events in Honduras. There’s been an illegal coup followed by martial law and deconstruction of constitutional rights of the people. But the international community seemed not to care about that, and was fully pacified when the illegitimate government staged elections, and claimed that as a “return to democracy”. How absurd! There’s nothing democratic about the situation, but the symbols of democracy have now become its entirety: as long as people get to cast a vote, it counts as democracy. I noticed a similar effect in the USA when in a conversation about state-run healthcare it came up that the Californian government instituted something-or-other (I have only vague recollections of that conversation, sorry), which politicians then fucked up and stripped bare and it didn’t work, and that’s why government healthcare would be a bad idea. Someone from Europe then immediately answered with surprise why there were no protests, no boycotts, no calls for resignation, no outraged citizenry demanding that the situation be rectified. And indeed, why weren’t there? These are essential for a society to continue functioning democratically. But when democracy just means voting, then these other actions don’t occur to people, and in some cases are even seen as undemocratic (calls for resigning are seen like that, but since Americans also often confuse capitalism and democracy, actually democratic actions against businesses can also be seen as undemocratic and unAmerican).

Basically, when you reduce “democracy” to “politics”, you end up taking away a lot of tools for people to actively and meaningfully participate in their own societies, and create false, “balanced” realities that hinder people’s ability to know what to act on.

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*for example, the difference between “the freedom to receive legal counsel” and “the right to receive legal counsel”: the former only deals with the negatives, i.e. that you mustn’t be prevented from acquiring legal counsel; the latter goes further and deals also with the positives, i.e. not just not being hindered from acquiring counsel, but also being provided counsel when you cannot acquire it by your own means

**you know… differences between evolution and The Theory of Evolution, the misapplication of the word to describe the development of stars, the even worse misapplication of the word by creationists to describe All Science That Disagrees With My Faith and their consequent unwillingness to accept the very narrow and unspectacular meaning of the term (i.e. descent with modification), etc.

***an effect of the “ghettoization” of politics as the sole purview of professional politicians and political parties and their often nasty public battles; because of this, politics are seen as something dirty, corrupt, non-grassroots and entirely undesirable, from which it’s good to dissociate oneself

****best example is AGW: it’s science, so it’s supposed to be “apolitical”. But in reality there isn’t such a thing as apolitical, especially since this particular scientific is caused by human actions, and will need more human actions to be rectified. But this fake separation of issues into political and apolitical has resulted in a lose-lose situation in which the science can remain “pure” and “untainted” by politics by not drawing the necessary conclusions and thus failing to solve the problem; or it can commit the sin of becoming “political” by suggesting necessary actions, at which point it becomes tainted, motivated by political agendas, and just another political stance to be accepted or rejected at will.

short thoughts

1)There is only one reality. Really. It may be very complex, or hard to understand, or not yet fully understood so that there’s competing and incomplete ideas about it. But really, in the end, there is only one version of it. There’s no such thing as “this is truth for me”. reality just does not work that way. And me saying so does not make me a fascist or a fundamentalist or a bigot. If you’re wrong; learn something from it, don’t go running to mommy because you think I’m being mean to you :-/

2)I’ve finally figured out why, despite probably not having synesthesia, numbers have colors for me: d’oh!. Except that my 4s and 7′s are greenish, not pink/purple. hmm….

3)I watched “Invention of Lying” the other day. funny idea, but it bugged me to no end that for some reason the movie assumes that being always honest makes people shallow and coldhearted and calculating. If you can’t lie, even by omission, then you can’t lie to yourself either, so “social conventions” wouldn’t work, because people would honestly say what bull it all is. And therefore she would have never picked the snooty hot guy over the nice dorky one. She would have told him “you’re hot and I want your babies. But you’re boring and I don’t like you. So, let’s make some babies, and then get lost, please.” That completely ruined what could have been a good movie otherwise.

4)there was something else I was gonna write, but I forgot what. I distinctly remember there being four things I was gonna write about. Crap. Note to self: make more notes to self on paper.