I have a work colleague who essentially believes all of the basic assumptions that underlie the capitalist, social darwinist world that we live in. His reasoning is essentially panglossian. I find it fascinating that he constantly engages in me conversations where it must be clear to him that I have fundamental disagreements. I don’t know if he expects me validate his statements, but of course I don’t. Normally I try to keep my answers brief, and rely on provoking thought and asking questions rather than lengthy lectures. But doing so is much more challenging, and I often feel like I’m constantly being picked at. So on occasion I carefully go through the various faulty assumptions, faulty logic, and mistruths which are inherent in the beliefs he states as truisms.

In his defense, these truisms are ones you are likely to hear in any modern media outlet. In a corporate environment they are certainly uncontroversial.

Without going into detail, today I went into a lengthy discussion citing historical evidence that contradicts the assumption that people are inherently racist. Rather than argue on the basis of facts or logic, he made the statement that it’s a question of belief. I have my set of beliefs, he has his. But beliefs are not equal. You might believe the world is flat, that light does not have a constant velocity regardless of your frame or reference, that America has a vibrant democracy, that the moon is made of green cheese. This is fine. You are entitled to believe whatever you like. But you will still be wrong. The reason these beliefs are not co-equal is that all of these things are testable.

So you can formulate your belief in a god to the point where that belief is completely untestable. Then I can’t say anything, it’s a question of opinion. To maintain a set of beliefs in contradiction of evidence, to refuse to consider the implications of your beliefs, it’s intellectual cowardice. When that set of beliefs is used to maintain a set of personal ethics based on apathy and complicity with exploitation and inhumanity against your fellow man, well, that’s just plain unethical.

As can be seen on Democracy now, Hilary Clinton gave a speech at the U.S. Islamic World Forum last week, about the struggles for democracy and justice in the Middle East. 

Today, the long Arab winter has begun to thaw. For the first time in decades, there is a real opportunity for change. A real opportunity for people to have their voices heard and their priorities addressed.

Followed by similar banalities and empty words. What’s missing from the speech are apologies and accepting responsibility. Her opening remarks should have said “Today, despite our best efforts, the long arab winter has begun to thaw. For the first time, after decades of U.S. backed dictatorship and repression, there is a real opportunity for change. As we crush the ability of people in the U.S. to have their voiced heard and priorities addressed, people in the middle east are successfully taking back their basic human dignity. What are we going to do about it?”

I was impressed that one of the major student dissident groups refused to meet with Secretary Clinton, because of her support, during the repression of the demonstrations, of Mubarak and his administration.

As Americans I think we need to demand that our government take responsibility for its wrong-headed and evil policies in the middle east (and elsewhere), to apologize for them, and stop pretending we are leading or encouraging these changes.

The tendency in America is to decompose all discussions into two contradictory positions. The dynamics of our media are such that they seek out and highlight people and movements that take the most extreme positions, as it makes it easier for them to construct their oppositional narrative. Whatever the intent, the result of this is to cartoonify everything and to reduce the discussion to some kind of football game — pick a side and root for one, or deride them both as lunatics — whichever you do, the only problems that get solved are how to fill the news hour and how to sell advertising space.

It’s hard to come up with a better example of this than the subject of abortion. Already the language is completely absurd — people who want to criminalize abortion aren’t anti-abortion, they’re “pro life”. People who think abortions should be legal aren’t pro abortion, they’re “pro choice”. Both of these are completely meaningless. I’m pro choice and pro life. That’s not an accident — everyone is pro choice. Who the hell would describe themselves as anti choice? There’s probably a deranged minority of people who might describe themselves as anti-life, but in general these won’t be people who are really anti life.

That’s one of the funny ironies in America’s retarded abortion politics. For the last 20 years there has been a strong alliance between the social/religious conservatives and the hawkish imperialists. The result of this has been that the “pro life” camp supports decidedly anti-life policies, in the hope that they succeed in criminalizing abortion. Thus they accept and support politicians who support military policies that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people abroad — young, old, children and unborn children. They support policies that result in America having the highest infant mortality and infant poverty rates in the developed world. They support these politicians because they support criminalizing abortion.

I’m old enough to remember when the term “pro life” was coined. The justification for this bit of nuspeak is the claim that pro-lifer’s are not against abortion, they are pro-life. If this is the case, pro-lifers should question their strategy — is supporting these bloodthirsty pro-war anti-social-justice politicians really consistent with a pro-life philosophy?

More importantly, is it good strategy? Consider myself — I consider abortions to be unethical, and I consider them to be harmful to the individuals getting the abortion. I am however against criminalizing abortions. I believe alternative policies will produce the best outcome.

Consider alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs. In the case of alcohol, we have learned the hard way that prohibition simply does not work. Years of experience have taught us that education, support and control of access to minors is far more successful than prohibition. Prohibiting alcohol did not decrease alcohol consumption, it made alcohol consumption much more dangerous, and removed any mechanisms for regulating access to children. It further introduced a wide host of undesirable side-effects, including violence, criminality, and widespread disregard for the law. Modern policies of education and control have been much more successful in addressing the negative outcomes of alcohol consumption (alcoholism, drunken misbehavior, and health consequences). Our society is currently learning the same lessons regarding the use of illegal drugs. With tobacco we were able to bypass the entire foolishness of prohibition and go directly to reasonable regulations and information campaigns which have been highly successfull in reducing tobacco consumption.

We know historically that criminalizing abortion does not eliminate abortion. Thus, pro-lifers should understand that elimination of abortion is simply not a realistic goal. Instead, let us get together and consider the question: “how can we minimize the number of abortions performed?”. As soon as we switch the conversation from the artificially restrictive one of “should abortions be illegal?”, to one of “How can we minimize the number of abortions that happen?”, we might be able to make progress on an important issue, and we might be able to remove the harmful polarization effect of this issue on our country.

Once we get to this point, there does remain a hurdle. The pro-lifebbbv movement has a disturbing history of focusing on denial-of-access and punitive techniques in their attempts to reduce abortion occurence. I belive that this too is counter productive. How can we reduce the number of abortions taking place?
The first step is to stop pretending that abstinence education is an effective birth control policy. No doubt that abstinence is an effective method of birth control, but hoping your kids are abstinent is a terrible way to prevent you daughter from getting pregnant. It is possible to teach your children how to have safe sex without encouraging them to do so, so let’s provide free birth control everywhere. Lets subsidize condoms and give every kid access to them.

Lets provide young mothers free medical care and a loving, supporting environment for their children to grow up in — regardless of whther or not the mother is the one who will raise the child.

But that’s the big problem with the so-called pro-life movement. It’s been hijacked by people with an extremist agenda that seems to have more to do with forcing a fundamentalist religious agenda on an unwilling America. One in which punishing young, sexually active women is more important than preventing unwanted pregnancies. Where children are to remain ignorant about the realities of sex until they married.

So I would suggest that single-issue voters ask themselves: what is really their single issue? Is it forcing religious fundamentalism on America, or is it reducing abortion? If the sanctitity of life is really your concern, ditch these war mongering religious fundamentalists who are willing to exploit your well meaning goals to pursue a decidedly anti-life agenda.

The current news cycle regarding Wikileaks parades a great many of the social mechanisms which are exploited to protect the current power structures.

In the mainstream news media, one sees far more reporting on Julian Assange.  The so-called “leftist” media focuses on the fact that he has been charged with sex crimes.  The “right” paints him as a terrorist and asserts that he should be assassinated.  By doing so they are distracting our focus from that of the issues involved — the discoveries we are making about the inner workings of our government, as well as the more fundamental issue of how much secrecy can you have in a government, and still call it democratic — and instead focusing our attention on personalities, in this case villifying  Assange rather than debating the merits of Wikileaks and the work the site has done.

That is exemplary of another tool used in the disinformation age of government control — conflating disparate issues into a single issue, making meaningful discourse next to impossible.  Being for more openness in government is conflated with being for Julian Assange, which then makes you soft on rape.  This should be resisisted.  J.A. deserves to be tried for any crimes he may or may not have commited in the same way that any of the rest of us should be tried.  This is the ideal to strive for, and his political activities should be kept separate from those trials, as much as is possible.  The same is true for his political activities.  They should be judged on their merits, and not colored by what he does in his personal life.

Another interesting tactic taken by mainstream pundits and media is the critique over the wide-bandwidth, mass dump of information.  One often sees claims that J.A., or more properly Bradley Manning, is no Daniel Ellsberg (leaker of the Pentagon Papers).  Anyone reading or writing such claims would do well to read or listen to what mr. Daniel Ellsberg has to say on the subject, which can be summarised by one pithy quote “I haven’t met either of them, but based on what I’ve read they are new heroes of mine”.    In particular I have to condemn those who (like Rachel Maddow) have criticised Bradley Manning for dumping documents indiscriminately,  including unimportant information like Quadaffi having a busty nurse.  They are missing the point, which is why, in a supposedly open and democratic society, is such trivial information classified in the first place?  It reveals a default policy of secrecy which weakens public oversight of our government, and shows us how much classified information should be unclassified.

A great deal of attention was paid, on a recent episode of Rachel Maddow’s show and elsewhere,  to a released cable which claimed, either erroneously or deceptively, that Micheal Moore’s film Sicko was banned in Cuba.  Ms. Maddow chose to focus on how this cable shows that leaked documents give a false sense of import and reliability, thereby providing a useful tool for misinformation.  Ms. Maddow declined to mention how planned leaks of misinformation are a de-facto norm of government policy, which leaves the viewer to interpret this as a criticism of Wikileaks and leaked documents in general.  There are two, far more important lessons to be learned from this cable.  The first is the level of incompetence and self deception within our government, revealed by a cable who’s author was unable to distinguish between a film being banned and a film being broadcast on official government channels.  The second follows from the first:  We need less classification of such documents so that citizens can review them, and better understand, judge, and control their government.

This leads me to the critique made against Bradley Manning for the dump of such a wide and indiscriminate swath of documents.  Bradley Manning (assuming that it is indeed mister Manning who released the documents, which has not yet been proven), sitting at a computer on a military base did not have the time to sift through hundreds of thousands of classified documents., to determine which ones were vital to our national interest, and which were trivia.  He saw enough (such as the murder of Reuters reporters by U.S. soldiers) to know that he had to do something, and at tremendous cost to himself he smuggled those documents out and sent them to the one journalistic organisation he felt he could rely on to release the meaningful information:  Wikileaks.   Wikileaks in turn has made an effort to redact those documents which might pose a risk to the life and liberty of people, even to the point of contacting the Pentagon and mainstream media channels to ask for assistance with the redaction.

Every once in a while I read some rants in the newsgroups, and find myself compelled to reply.  Below is a recent post I made in sci.skeptic.

On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:17:27 -0800, Michael Gordge wrote:

>> >> >> >> >A parasite is a person who claims he is not stealing anything
>> >> >> >> >by copying

I really get annoyed how often I see this opinion expressed.  It’s a sad testament to the power of the propaganda model of the American media.

Do you know how you can tell that copyright violation is not theft?  There are several ways.  One very simple one is that they had to create specific laws prohibiting copyright violation, despite the fact that property laws (and thereby the legal concept of theft) already existed.  They are disjoint and separate things, and someone copying a book simply could not be prosecuted under theft laws.  It was perfectly legal to do so until copyright law was created.  I.e. theft!=copyright.

Another way you can tell that copyright violation is not theft is the simple principle that theft, by definition, denies the original owner of the use of whatever was stolen.  If I steal your bicycle you have to walk or take the bus.  If I make a copy of your bicycle, we can both ride.

The reason you are so brainwashed to believe that copyright == theft is due to a very deliberate and expensive advertising campaign (which would have been called a propaganda campaign 70 years ago before the word became pejorative) trying to make an emotional (not factual or logical) connection between copyright and property laws.  It’s a very successful exercise in framing, which causes its victims, like you, to regard “intellectual property” as real property, preventing you from engaging in real and meaningful debate (internally or with others) on the subject.

If you did think about the subject rationally and free from the framing prejudice built into you by the mass media (who, not coincidentally are the biggest profiteers from copyright law), you might bother to learn about the history, the social context, and the social impact of copyright law.  You might learn that the founders of the constitution were strongly ambivalent about the copyright and patent laws.  They viewed them as restrictions of freedom of speech (which they are).  In the end they decided to implement short copyright laws as well as patents, as an attempt to stimulate creative works.

That’s a very important thing to realize:  Copyright laws are a form of government intervention in the free markets, to attempt to stimulate said economy.  This is not simply an interpretation of events, it’s an historical fact backed up by the writings of the implementers of copyright and patent laws themselves.   They should be a far more contentious and hotly debated subject than, for example, minimum wage laws, as *they are an attempt to regulate free markets through a direct abridgment of constitutional rights*.  They are virtually never discussed within the mainstream media however, as such a discussion would threaten the bottom line of said media outlets.  Thus it is up to us to inform ourselves, and parroting their ridiculous propaganda is not helpful, regardless of your political or economic ideology.

If you were to further investigate the history of copyright law, you would learn that copyright used to ~20 years, with the option for the author to renew another 20.  With increased corporatization of the media industry (almost entirely in the last century) the ownership of copyright began to rest largely in the hand of large corporations rather than the creators themselves.  Corporations are by definition amoral, immortal, and through their wealth and longevity are able to gain political clout through economic means.  They, particularly Disney, lobbied extensively to ensure that the works of long dead artists remain their exclusive property, rather than entering the public domain as they should.  In the most recent copyright extension, copyright protection was granted retroactively to cover works already in the public domain and put them in private ownership.

If you were not so effectively brainwashed you might begin to realize that the biggest parasites in this system are these gigantic and wealthy entities which profit from the creative works of others while serving no functional role in society.  If Elvis’s works were in the public domain, as they should be, rather than in private copyright, more people would have access to his music.  That we are not able to freely copy and share his music is not the worst effect of these policies.  Keeping Elvis’s works in copyright is certainly not encouraging Elvis to keep producing new work, now is it?

The real harm comes from the inability to use his work in new creative works.  The large corporations who did nothing to promote the creative work, are using their copyrights to reap massive profits while robbing our creative commons.  They are the real parasites, and I would encourage you to please educate yourself on the subject.

I’m not a copyright abolitionist, but based on scholarly work on the subject, and an analysis of how the economic situation has changed, I’m convinced that copyright terms should be growing shorter, not longer.  Previously copyrights were more useful as it might take some time for a work to spread effectively, due to less efficient manufacturing and distribution.  Nowadays a book or piece of music can be copied infinitely many times and distributed all over the world, virtually for free.  This means that media distributors need less government protection than they did previously, and indeed are becoming more and more obsolete.

Shorter copyrights mean less government intervention in free markets.  Shorter copyrights mean more material for more creativity.    Shorter copyrights mean more freedom of speech.  I would propose a return to 20 year copyrights (from the current 90+ years enjoyed by the oligarchists in the US), and after reviewing the economic and social ramifications of that roll back, consider a further reduction to ten years.

It seems inevitable when I get into a conversation with a fellow American about political issues that the other party seeks to frame our discussion in terms of left and right, conservative or liberal, republican or democrat. I attempt over and over again to convince people that the so-called two party system that ravages our country serves one primary purpose: to give the illusion of democracy. We are told by pundits “on the left” and “on the right” that if only their side had control of government we could actually solve our problems, despite all historic evidence to the contrary. Like professional sports, politics is a venue for the public to vent its frustration and to divert our intellects away from the issues that really matter.

In making these points, I find that people tend to think I am encouraging apoliticism, i.e. encouraging people to disengage from the political process. This is not the case at all. The point that I am trying to make is that voting is simply the least you can do.  I mean this in the most pejorative sense possible.  Voting, particularly voting in an uninformed manner along party lines, is lazy and ineffective.  I don’t mean that you shouldn’t vote, I mean that voting is not enough.  Our nation is rapidly declining and in the interests of our own survival, comfort, and reputation in the world, we need to break out of the mental ghettos we have constructed for ourselves.

Consider deficit reduction.  The national discussion on deficit reduction is an incoherent rambling mess, and that’s not an accident.  It’s an incoherent rambling mess because the parties who profit and benefit from the subjugation of the working class (this is generally called the destruction of the middle class in the mainstream media) are very adept at keeping the discussion incoherent.   Our two party system, and the attempt to use binary terms to describe complex multidimensional systems is a very successful divide and conquer strategy.  So people “on the left” discuss about whether or not we should worry about deficits, while “people on the right” talk about the ruinous nature of the deficits and use it as an excuse to attack important social programs.  One people on the lunatic fringes are actually talking about the real issues.

First of all, deficit spending during a recession in not necessarily a bad thing, and there’s plenty of historic evidence to back that up.  On the other hand, the American national debt is a catastrophe waiting to happen, and everyone, regardless of your political ideology should be deeply concerned about it.  But we aren’t approaching insolvency because of programs like medicaire, medicaid and social security.  We are hopelessly in debt because of our insane and destructive empire.  Among the political classes and intellectual elites, this empire is typically referred to as “American Hegemony”, and is taken by default as a good thing.  There is little discussion about the desirability or ethics of American hegemony.  In the mainstream media American hegemony isn’t discussed at all.  When our military industrial complex and adventurism around the world is discussed, it is framed in terms of “national defense” which requires increasing grand levels of cognitive dissonance to maintain.

How much do we actually spend on empire?  It’s not so easy to know , because much of the budget is hidden.  Robert Higgs has broken down the outlays for fiscal year 2006 (under Republican guidance).  For 2010 (under Democrat guidance) the figures are bigger.  Spending on empire gets bigger and bigger regardless of whether we voted in a Democrat or a Republican.  Here’s a breakdown by Robert Higgs of the Independant Institute (I’ve cut and pasted it here from an excellent article by Chalmers Johnson which you can find here).

Department of Defense: $499.4
Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7

Grand total:  934.9, about a trillion dollars a year for American hegemony.

There are several important things to realize about  “defense” spending.  First of all, very little of it is really defensive.  Most of it extremely agressive.  When was the last time America used its military for defensive purposes (i.e. responding to an attack, or genuine threat of an attack)?  I’m guessing WWII.   Rather than spinning military spending by calling it defence spending, we would be better served by accurately characterising our spending as spending on empire, and defence spending (so Homeland security could legitimately be called defence spending, while budgets for stealth bombers could not).  Empire spending increases the risk of terrorist attack by engendering hatred and ill will across the world.  Empire spending takes money and expertise away from all other forms of spending, including defence, infrastructure, civilian side economic and technological development, and of course social programs.

Can we get this under control by voting along party lines?  I encourage you to do your own research, but the answer is no.  In fact those peaceniks and advocates of social justice among us should try to reach out and find common ground with the Tea Partyers out there to get real deficit reduction by starving the real beast of America:  The military industrial complex.  A member of President Obama’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla) has recommended tha tthe DOD budget be frozen until it can pass comprehensive audits of all programs, agencies, and contractors.  One of most positive contributions to the American political debate has been from Ron Paul, the arch libretarian member of Congress, who actively talks about American empire and the egregious, unaffordable system of bases we have all over the world (somewhere between 750 and a 1000 mini-cities of American military personnel and equipment), which only make us less safe by damaging American credibility and international goodwill.  Raging leftist (and one of my personal heroes) Alan Grayson proposed a bill to force the Pentagon to conducts its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq solely on its existing budget, which is on the order of 500-600 Billion dollars -> roughly what the rest of the world combined spends on defence.

So fuck party politics, and fuck projecting your complex and informed world views onto a one-dimensional basis.  Left and Right, a single line, does not form a complete basis for the discussion of political ideas.  Pick one, or a few, concrete issues which are pressing and important.  Learn as much as you can about those issues, and doggedly pursue repair of those issues.  Be open to new ideas.  Don’t disregard or denegrate the possible contributions of someone who has a different ideology than you do.   Feel free however to ignore all the bloated egoes, dissemblers and opportunists in our political system.   If someone is attacking people instead of discussing issues and solutions, chances are they are wasting your time.  I propose American Imperialism as being one of the most pressing issues facing our nation, as it is either the source of, or a major contributor to, most the issues actively facing America today:  Terrorism, our broken economy,our national debt, out failing educational system…

Nobel peace prize winner President Obama is in portugal for a 2 day Nato summit, in which he is trying to drum up Nato support for our ongoing invasion of Afghanistan. This goes on as we begin to introduce M1 Abrams tanks into Afghanistan. Previously we held out tanks, worrying that they would remind Afghans of the tank heavy Soviet invasion. But a senior Pentagon official says “We’ve taken the gloves off, and it’s had a huge effect.”. Another official opined that all the property damage is having a positive effect, because it forces the family, whose home has just been destroyed, to petition the governor with a damage claims. This officia stated “In effect, you’re connecting the [Afghan] government to the people”.

No, I’m not making any of that up, although I wish I were. In other news, all the oppressive airport security is finally getting on people’s nerves. Turns out they can deal with long lines, invasions of privacy, taking their shoes off and random laptop seizures, but they draw the line at being given the choice between having their genitals groped or having a 3D nudie photo of them taken.

The moral shambles that is Israeli apartheid is bad enough, what with illegal settlements adiabatically stealing land from original inhabitants, and relegating the original inhabitants to a second-class or even third-class citizen status, while simultaneously engaging in a process of ghetoization and starvation of the original inhabitants, in a cruel imitation of the European conquest of America, which led to the creation of the United States of America, who finances and provides and muscle for our Israeli friends.

Until I read this article (haaretz.com) it never occurred to me to think of the Israeli settlements as a continuance of European colonialism. The flooring thing, which is entirely new to me, is that Israelis of European descent are racist against Israeli’s of Middle Eastern descent. So take away the religious difference, and we find that the Jewish European invaders (settlers) are racist against Jewish Israeli citizens native to the area. . Apparently the Israeli high court is attempting to desegregate schools in the settlements. If I follow this right, the Israelis of European descent are “Ashkenazi”, while those of middle eastern descent, i.e. the natives, are “Sephardi”. The Ashkenazim parents refuse to let their kids be educated together with the Sephardim. The Israeli police are now seeking arrest for 22 mothers and 2 fathers who failed to show up for two-week jail sentences, for refusing to integrate their children.

According to Yair Sheleg of haaretz.com:

The issue, then, is not Jewish religious law, but rather the racist social norms that characterize the entire ultra-Orthodox worldview. (The Haredim, as we know, also discriminate against the newly religious. )

Heavy stuff (Haredim apparently refers to the ultra-orthodox Ashkenazim).

I find it entertaining to the put the situation into the framework of European Colonialism by way of zombie films. The Ashkenazim have been infected by that European cultural meme of racism and intolerance, which led to our atrocities against the natives, and mexicans, and philipines, and haitians, and central americans (etc etc), the British atrocities against the Indians (and, and, and), the French atrocities against the Indochines (and, and, and), not to mention the Dutch and Spanish, and of course the German atrocities against the Jews. The nazis bit the Jews who are now chomping away at the native populations… the palestinians, and the Sephardim.

Come gentlemen! Ghandi showed us the cure for this meme nearly a hundred years ago. Let’s get busy curing ourselves before we consume ourselves.