For observation

It’s fun to hear Trump talk about how Rosebud somehow works, the metaphor works, “I don’t know why it works, but it works. After all, Steven Spielberg paid a lot of money for it, so it must work. Paid a lot of money, maybe seven figures, six figures.”

For psychiatrists and neurologists, at least, a tiny skerrick of silver lining to the election of the Orange Id (although it is apparently risky to point out such silver linings, however obvious, as Amanda Palmer has just discovered, because Twitter is a 21st Century Moloch of faux outrage and its hunger cannot be sated) will be the opportunity to watch how someone this profound a narcissist behaves inside the narcissism generating pressure cooker of national leadership, particularly within the utterly deranged bubble of reality-denial that is the Oval Office. Arguably, they've never not had such an opportunity, but this time I think such study will be made much easier by the flamboyantly clueless flagrancy that's about to be brought to the role.

War

...Santa's best defense is that the North Pole is—spoiler—really cold. The US Navy doesn't have any icebreakers, and the Coast Guard only has two, both of which are research vessels. (An amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act would have commissioned four new icebreakers, but that's still pending congressional approval.) And unlike the Russians and the Finns, the United States doesn't have any ground units specifically trained to handle polar climates.

... Even if an expeditionary force succeeds in taking the workshop, the elves' sheer numbers make the possibility of a post-invasion insurgency likely.

- "What Would Happen If We Really Went to War Against Christmas?" by Tim Murphy

In the twenty fifth year of this endless war, on the banks of Lake Saimaa, I finally killed my first Santa Claus. It was pure luck... honestly. Murphy's law dictated that my comrades in arms, who were all better trained than me, arrived late, were held up, or stuck in the viscous mire of some tar pit, were assailed by the cold as the heating systems of their suits started to fail. Better still, some were kicked to death by a swarm of reindeer that swooped down from the sky, like silent Furies. The few that survived had an immediate encounter with a group of elves, or were seduced by the terrible and almost irresistible offer of presents packed with our heart's desires. I don't know what happened to them. No corpses were left to tell the tale.

- "Silent Night" by João Barreiros

Praise

What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen?

"If the question is how I personally feel about the situation, I am mixed: Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally. According to our publications Hillary Clinton was the chief proponent and the architect of the war against Libya. It is clear that she pursued this war as a staging effort for her Presidential bid. It wasn't even a war for an ideological purpose. This war ended up producing the refugee crisis in Europe, changing the political colour of Europe, killing more than 40,000 people within a year in Libya, while the arms from Libya went to Mali and other places, boosting or causing civil wars, including the Syrian catastrophe. If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means".

What do you think he means?

"Hillary Clinton's election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better".

The stating of obvious truisms in the second response above from Assange's interview in La Repubblica is what the Guardian's headliners describe as "guarded praise for Trump" because apparently their grasp of the English language compares unfavourably to that of Italians.

Plan

Ah, December 2016, when we watched the section of the American centre-right that likes to imagine they are left-wing go collectively insane.

From here it deteriorates badly. Garland goes on to give his own personal account of the past few decades of U.S. and world history, in which absolutely everything is the product of a long, slow Russian master plan to bring America to its knees by encouraging the population not to trust the noble, hardworking CIA.

Ninety

Fidel Castro has died at the age of 90, Cuban state television has announced ...

... while declining to confirm the ex-President had been fatally weakened by eighteen days of laughing his ass off.

Question

Hey, apropos of nothing: is a road accident more fun to watch if it involves a clown car, or does that just make it more tragic? I'm asking for a friend.

Prevent

“A four-year-old boy described to teachers a picture he drew of his father cutting a cucumber.”

[also tviited]

A Left Defence of Halloween

This is fun, as Miéville usually is.

Choice

The Clinton campaign actively abetted Trump at every stage of the primaries, even though it meant unleashing dangerous reactionary forces across the country, because he was the enemy they wanted. Whether he knows it or not, his function was to be so vulgar that an impotent public would unite around Clinton, to make America congratulate itself on the morning after Election Day for not having chosen the worst candidate imaginable. He’s there to make it look like everything is at stake, when the worst has already happened, and nothing is at stake whatsoever.

Sam Kriss again, delivering another kicking to lesser-evilism, this time via a skewering of the empty pseudo-activism of hashtag merchandising. You should read the whole thing, if only to enjoy his description of Marco Rubio as "the depthless hologram that still manages to leave a trail of slime in its wake" - well, I guess you just did, but reading the whole thing would allow you to enjoy it in context.

Judgment

“Our first priority on every episode like that was to reverse-engineer the show to make it look like his judgment had some basis in reality. Sometimes it would be very hard to do, because the person he chose did nothing. We had to figure out how to edit the show to make it work, to show the people he chose to fire as looking bad — even if they had done a great job.”

Reality television, folks.

Civility

Just to be clear, this demonstrates one of two things about mainsteam Democratic Party supporters:

Despite months of hysterical rhetoric, they never genuinely believed Dogtrumpet* is a fascist.

or

If fascism ever comes to America, they'll roll over for it like a spaniel wanting its tummy rubbed.

(*Because he's too stupid to dogwhistle like his GOP colleagues. And a few Dems, for that matter.)

Character

Sarah Smarsh in The Guardian:

Based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

...

To be sure, one discouraging distillation – the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans – is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol’ boy who menaces those with less power than himself – running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if he’d been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color – who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures – can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in “red” America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trump’s side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Let’s be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who “they” are.

I mention in passing this article cites a Gallup poll which, among other points, notes that “[p]eople living in zip codes with greater exposure to capital income sources rather than wage and salary income are less likely to support Trump”, which counts, a bit, against my theory that Trump supporters are more likely to be petit bourgeois than working class.

Free

If you enjoyed this twitterspasm and would like to know more about the siege of Fort McHenry and the war of 1812, why not go here or here if you can't find the giftshop.

Cockburn, delighted with his recruits, noted happily that they excited “the most general & undisguised alarm” among the populace. He was certainly correct. “Our negroes are flocking to the enemy from all quarters, which they convert into troops, vindictive and rapacious — with a most minute knowledge of every bye path,” wrote an American commander in early August. “They leave us as spies upon our posts and our strength, and they return upon us as guides and soldiers and incendiaries.”

- "Washington Is Burning: Two centuries of racial tribulation in the nation’s capital" by Andrew Cockburn, in Harper's.

Ironically, while Key was composing the line "O'er the land of the free," it is likely that black slaves were trying to reach British ships in Baltimore Harbor. They knew that they were far more likely to find freedom and liberty under the Union Jack than they were under the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

- "Where’s the Debate on Francis Scott Key’s Slave-Holding Legacy?" by Christopher Wilson, at Smithsonian Magazine.

Oh dang, Snopes beat me to it.

Interpretation

Go here and have all possible fun watching Americans argue about what "hireling and slave" might mean.

Impugn

The racism of the upper class is never, ever the focus of newspaper article or thumbsucker pieces. So much is it ignored that it is as if it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, then perhaps one should ask questions about that class – but to do that is to impugn, even tacitly, the owners of the media. So … look over there, some fat white woman who works at Walmart is showing a confederate flag!

Stooges

But by far the greatest irony in all of this is that Democrats have now explicitly adopted the exact smears that were used by the Far Right for decades to demonize liberals and the left as disloyal Kremlin stooges. For the entire second half of the 20th Century, any Americans who opposed U.S. proxy wars with Russia, or advocated arms control deals with them, or generally desired less conflict, were branded as Useful Idiots of the Kremlin, loyal to Moscow, controlled by Russian leaders. Democrats have taken this script – one of the most shameful and destructive in American history – and have made it the centerpiece of their 2016 presidential campaign.

Of doubtful educative usefulness (as the fingers-in-the-ears-screaming-la-la-la self-delusion of decent neo-liberals this election season is off the scale), but a nice overview of the history of this bit of Americana nevertheless.

Codependency

This is why lesser-of-two-evils arguments are so unconvincing: there’s only one evil, it suffuses everything we see, and while one might do less harm than the other, each of its warring parts is still fundamentally the same thing. Donald Trump’s frenzied populism couldn’t exist without the suffocating liberal condescension of a Hillary Clinton; nobody would ever vote for Clinton if it weren’t for the looming threat of a Trump.

In The Baffler, Sam Kriss' neo-Kantian refutation of the witless dogma of lesser-evilism, thinly disguised as a review of Suicide Squad. Perhaps not the most fun part of the piece; although it's all good, the opening four paragraphs eviscerating Jared Leto's idiotic method approach to his three minute turn as the Joker are a particular joy.

Interference

If Trump ascends to the presidency or lays the groundwork for an even fouler creature in 2020, it won’t be because liberals have kneecapped themselves through their venality, lack of vision or mocking the youth as hopelessly naive, it will be the work of a network of corrupting agents. It is easier to assume that Trump is a foreign agent than confront the fact that he is squarely within the tradition of American politics and preying on the Democrats’ class treachery. This also nicely augments the Democrat blackmail that the left has to support Clinton to defeat not only fascism but also Putin’s evil empire.

The hysterical Russophobia that has gripped the Democrats, the policy establishment and the liberal media is a form of fetishist disavowal and a collective liberal nervous breakdown. American democracy is now said to be fundamentally under threat, not from any internal corruption but from Russian interference looking to install a puppet regime and subvert the polls in November. This affair has elicited the usual shrieking headlines from liberal HuffPo but the star of this oeuvre is Franklin Foer who, when he could not find a brown paper bag to breathe into, wrote a piece entitled ‘The DNC Hack is Watergate, but Worse’. Foer, whose analysis has been cited by the Clinton campaign, argues that the hack reveals nothing of any news value. Apparently the public should not be surprised about the DNC’s attempts to Jew-bait Bernie Sanders but be ‘appalled by the publication of this minutiae’ for the benefit of a foreign despot.

This piece by Olivier Jutel at Overland on the Democrats' regular as clockwork "It's Us or Fascism!" grift is an excellent read, despite the Lacanian debris you'll have to clamber over in the process. Enjoy! (*cough* my little joke)

Dangerous

They might not think as I do. They might not know that she has demonstrated the willingness and the predilection to go to war more quickly than her Republican counterpart. They might not believe, as I do, that money in politics and the slow transformation of this country into an oligarchy is as insidiously dangerous as the lump-headed racism of the alt-right that is drowning the Republican Party.

Michael Harriot states the blindingly obvious. Oh, boy, is he gonna get yelled at.

Exotic

The first instinct of many in the US press and political class is to treat Trump as if he’s some foreign entity, an exotic outsider who can only be referenced with regard to Less Civilized Countries. This tic was again found in President Barack Obama’s speech Wednesday night at the DNC, when he called Trump “un-American.” Several pundits followed suit, praising this sentiment as clever and effective. Trump was something foreign, without precedent, that could only be understood in the context of things outside The Greatest Country on Earth.

But, as some on the left have noted, Trump is as American as apple pie.

FAIR on the usual boilerplate, linking to Grandin, Greenwald and quoting Robin (see also.)

Social Justice Warriors

On Friday 4 August 1939, while members of the Queensland State Labor Caucus were having their morning meeting in a room in Parliament House in Brisbane, a group of 37 men, calling themselves the ‘Social Justice League’, entered, making threats, carrying batons, coils of barbed wire, hammers, knuckledusters and other tools. Barricading themselves in, they demanded a 40-hour week, lower taxes and tolls, unemployment relief, cooperative ownership of primary industry, and a ‘stabilised price’ for farmers.

It was, unsurprisingly, a dramatic scene. ‘I refuse to be instructed by you’, Premier William Forgan Smith told the group’s leader, and went on, in his strong Scottish accent, to lecture the men. ‘This is a display of Fascism and I will not countenance such an outrage in Queensland. We refuse to be intimidated by you, individually or collectively, and I ask you to withdraw’. When a leader (perhaps Richard Newton Boorman), claimed to be a rebel in the Jacobite mould, making reference to the 1746 battle of Culloden, the premier told him that if he was a rebel he ‘would have to take the consequences of being one’. In the excitement, one Minister slipped out to call the police, who soon arrived, and took everyone to jail.

This vignette about your grand-daddy's SJWs comes from Liam Hogan's potted history of the nutty Social Credit movement at Overland.

Optimism

I think it’s understandable at moments like this to long for a return to the status quo, but let’s remember that the status quo, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, was not survivable. We cannot survive an endless escalation of inequality, not even physically. Many areas that voted to leave Europe will probably within our lifetimes be forming a much more challenging union with the sea. Neoliberalism has taken a stranglehold on our societies by seeing chaotic events as opportunities. Well, maybe we should take this opportunity to do something decent. To elect a government that will retain the best parts of EU legislation and strengthen them in the direction of workers, rather than corporations. There is a reason that so many banks, multinationals and, of course, the United States feared Brexit. I think if I had to say what the most feared thing in the course of human history is, it’s probably a good example.

-//-

Remain’s leaders would have kept us straitjacketed into the EU’s current death-by-a-thousand-cuts version of corporate neoliberalism. At least now, shed of that distraction, we have our governmental elites much more clearly in our sights. How smaller, shabbier and curiously more vulnerable they look, without that EU cloak they avowed to detest draped around their shoulders. And this is as it should be, as they’ve basically put everything into play.

-//-

I’d like Clinton more if she told the truth about herself: that she is a smart, amoral and competent steward of American empire, who understands material reality and the laws of physics. And that – although it is perhaps not the most exciting case one can make for a leader – this is more than you can say for her Republican opponent. I wonder if Clinton wishes she were running in a different country, one to which she could speak frankly. She’d look it in the eye, and say: “Yes, I believe in nothing. But I’m an intelligent adult. No Rome will burn on my watch. I’ll keep us on the slow decline to which you people are accustomed. I’ll make nothing better – but I won’t make things radically worse.”

Gosh, three cites all from the Guardian; that is strange. I usually find their opinion pages as tiresome as I'm finding the bien pensant wailing wall of latter day Twitter, now spiralling into the tu quoque event horizon that presages an American election.

Post-mortem

Much of the content of this populism is, simply, nothing other than what an ordinary member of the ALP or Liberal Party believed a half-century ago. The political–media caste imagines that social-historical time flows the same everywhere. It doesn’t. The revival of Pauline Hanson’s fortunes is not a sign that the new senate system is “a disaster” or that “the genie is out of the bottle”. That’s nasty, elitist stuff. What it means is that people knew who they were voting for, and got them, rather than whichever carousel creation of insiders the ticket-voting system dished up. Hanson’s vote – about 8 per cent – is not an unusual showing for a nativist party, with the usual obsessions, in a Western society. The new system didn’t conjure her supporters into being. They were always there. Now their reasonable arguments can be debated, and their more noxious and wacky ones vociferously challenged. Finally, the 2016 election got exciting. It just happened after the voting stopped.

- Guy Rundle in The Saturday Paper

At this stage the only thing that seems clear is that Malcolm Turnbull’s days as prime minister are numbered. The Coalition may be returned in its own right, or Turnbull may be able to form a minority government. But his ability to placate the rabid right wing of his party depends on him delivering clear electoral victories. He has failed his first test. He is unlikely to get another chance. How did it come to this?

The better question is: why did Turnbull get even this close? On its record, the Turnbull-led Coalition should have lost in a landslide. But we live in a mediated age ... [and] during the 2016 election campaign, mainstream content was virtually silent on the government’s record over the past three years. Even the most trusted of outlets, the ABC, was little more than a conduit for the parties’ narratives.

- Russell Marks in The Monthly

There’s a lesson for Australian media here. Journalists need to stop seeing themselves as players. Their job is to represent the public to decision-makers, not the other way around. We don’t want them to make forecasts; we want to them to demand answers to simple questions. We want them, beyond rare exceptions, to stop reporting self-serving anonymous scuttlebutt and to insist that people go on the record.

- Mr Denmore.

Mr Marks' and Mr Denmore's complaints about the news media are sufficiently valid that I will forgive their usual error of imagining the function of journalists (at least those who work for the commercial side of the legacy media) as genuinely something other than to provide content for an advertising platform.

Certainty

When the economy necessarily determines policy, why waste time with conferences and branch meetings and the other rituals of old fashioned political engagement democracy? You don’t lobby the seasons to change, you don’t protest at the ebb and flow of the tides. Once the market’s entirely naturalised, what’s the point, other than nostalgia, of a trade union or a pressure group?

...

[F]or the new mandarins, the shrinkage of such bodies doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it was all to the good, since it allowed the duly qualified experts to do their thing undistracted – and they had the business of governance entirely under control.

Until, suddenly, they didn’t.

- Mr Sparrow

Since when did the primary role of government become providing “certainty” to the business community? In fact, it’s hard to read a newspaper or turn on the TV these days without some rent-seeking plutocrat whining about the democratic process getting in the way of the grubby business of making money.

...

In short, “certainty” must be denied everyone but the wealthiest and most powerful members of the community. The rest of us, through three decades of neoliberalism, have gradually been stripped of our life protectors and told to sink or swim.

...

Now, with another indecisive election outcome, the business cassandras are out in force again, blitzing the media with doom-laden press releases – each of them faithfully recycled by a media that has come to accept uncritically the message that business interest and the public interest are one and the same.

- Mr Denmore.

Amusing also to see the media cheerfully doing the (ex-)government's work for them in spreading the Mediscare lie. While serving the Coalition's agenda to delegitimise their (near) loss, for our commentariat it, like the "Howard fatigue" nonsense of 2007, serves their neverending efforts to delegitimise democracy itself, and bury any suggestion that voters might be motivated by rational views on substantive issues, rather than being gulled by the scams of the campaign, sheep that we are.

Facts

See - if people had only been informed...

Now watch... as my hands never leave my arms...

{I]t is important to keep two things in mind. First, it was Johnson himself who suggested, when he joined the Leave campaign in February, that a vote to depart could be used as a stick to negotiate not a full departure from the EU, but a better deal for the UK...

Second... the measure Britons just voted for ... is not legally binding on the government. No matter who the prime minister is, he or she is not required by the outcome to trigger Article 50. And, despite what senior figures in the EU and its other states might say, there is no way for them to force the UK to invoke Article 50.

But, by all means, let our elites not pass up this opportunity to wax hysterical about "the economy" and demonstrate their abiding contempt for the public.

Just for the record

The odd thing, of course, is that if Obama wasn't black, he would be a conservative's dream. He's opened up more offshore drilling than Bush, expanded fracking, deported more people than any president in history, killed thousands of Muslims (and is currently bombing seven Muslim countries), raised military budgets, cut federal taxes to their lowest levels in 60 years, cut social programs, spent almost 8 years trying to strike a "grand bargain" with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare (until this week when, in his last months in office, he's suddenly decided we should increase Social Security), worked hard to derail public healthcare in favor of a program drawn up by a conservative think-tank and first used by a Republican governor, put troops on the Russian border, beefed up US military presence in Asia to threaten China, supported right-wing coups in Latin America, gave Wall Street trillions of dollars in bailouts and credits, refused to prosecute any CIA officials for torture (despite admitting "we tortured some folks"), jailed more whistleblowers than any other president, pushed fanatically pro-business trade treaties, and so on.

Again with the class thing

But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like [Donald Trump’s candidacy being a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites] risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

I suspect he may be right but, without wishing to get all Marxian on you, absent any demographic breakdown of actual class, rather than income level, the claim that the working-class support of Trump is a myth (as the FiveThirtyEight post's title states) remains un-demonstrated, at least conclusively. Are Trump's supporters more likely to be self-employed, or small business types, than wage-earners (however better paid)? Do they represent labour, or capital? Because, historically speaking, it's true Trump's kind of nativist pitch does tend to play best with the petit bourgeois (in the Marxian sense). A person's class is often (yeah, yeah, not always) related to their sense of self, who they consider the In group and who the Other, and whether they have a tendency to punch downwards when feeling threatened. Confirmation that this is about the "local notables" yet again, and again giving the lie to the usual anti-worker prejudices of decent liberals, would be nice to see, but I fear we will never know. The surveys analysed do not ask the class question, of course, because the US media does not believe such a thing exists, hence the educated guessing Mr Silver must engage in based on income levels.

Virtue

Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

...

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.

This book is about Democrats, but of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they’ve got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.

...

The other great diplomatic initiative during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state was to recast the United States as the world’s defender of women and girls....

Like so many of the administration’s high-minded initiatives, this one turned out to be pretty mundane: the Hillary Doctrine was concerned largely with innovation, with foundations and private companies who would partner with us to do things like “improve maternal and child health,” “close the global gender gap in cellular phone ownership,” “persuade men and boys to value their sisters and their daughters,” and “make sure that every girl in the world has a chance to live up to her own dreams and aspirations.”

Above all, the Hillary Doctrine was about entrepreneurs. It was women-in-business whose “potential” Hillary Clinton wished to “unleash”; it was their “dreams and innovations” that she longed to see turned into “successful businesses that generate income for themselves and their families.”

...

Among other things, the Hillary Doctrine helps us understand what Hillary really thinks about the all-important issue of income inequality. Women entrepreneurs as the solution for economic backwardness is not a new idea, after all. It comes directly from the microfinance movement, the poverty-fighting strategy that has been pushed by the World Bank since the 1990s, and Hillary’s idea brings with it an entire economic philosophy...

It was all so simple. While national leaders busied themselves with the macro-matters of privatizing and deregulating, microlending would bring the science of markets down to the individual. Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.

What was most attractive about microlending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people, coming together in governments or unions. The international development community now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity. Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected people, plus cellphones, bank accounts, and a little capital, were what was required to remedy the third world’s vast problems. Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made or coal they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs, on their way to the top. The key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.

...

These ... sentiments ... suffer from one big problem: microlending doesn’t work. As strategies for ending poverty go, microlending appears to be among the worst that has ever been tried, just one step up from doing nothing to help the poor at all... It doesn’t empower women...; it makes them into debtors. It encourages people to take up small, futile enterprises that have no chance of growing or employing others...

There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, and it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the real reason the international goodness community believes that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.

You can find another extract from Listen, Liberal!, Thomas Frank's recent book on the DPUSA's transformation from a party of the working majority to that of moneyed technocrats, here, and his recent Guardian piece on Bill Clinton's crime bill also refers. Or you could just buy and read the book like I did, you cheap bastids.

The image is from here as re-tviited by Nick Mamatas. Oh, and great minds sorta think alike.

Culture

This new fad for calling anything you don't like "Marxist" reminds me of something.



I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Class

In much of the pre-modern world, ritual sacrifice was framed as necessary for the good of the society at large — the only way to guarantee, say, a plentiful harvest or success in war.

But the priests and rulers who sanctioned such killings may have had another motive, a new study suggests. An analysis of more than seven dozen Austronesian cultures revealed that the practice of human sacrifices tended to make societies increasingly less egalitarian and eventually gave rise to strict, inherited class systems. In other words, ritual killings helped keep the powerful in power and everyone else in check.

...

Lots of sociologists have theorized about this connection, the researchers say, but there haven’t been many rigorous scientific studies of how it came about...

[T]he link between the sacrifices and social hierarchies seemed to transcend [cultural] differences. The victims were almost always of low social status, and the more stratified the culture was, the more prevalent ritual killings were likely to be.

...

The [research] illustrated that ritual killings tended to precede social hierarchies, and once stratification occurred, they served to reinforce it. It was very difficult for a culture to return to egalitarianism after class differences had set in.

What's being investigated here is apparently called the social control hypothesis. In the past, whenever I contemplated addle-pated statements about the necessity of accepting moral relativism* when considering the extremes of human ethical diversity, such as the ritual human sacrifices of pre-Columbian Meso-American empires, I wondered why no-one ever considered that said ethical norms may not have been norms for the majority of the people in those societies at all, but merely behaviours embraced by a political elite and then imposed on everyone else for coercive purposes. (Which shows how little I know of the field, as this is apparently a commonplace explanation.) This would be something to bear in mind when faced with an argument that there are no universal moral norms (such as "murdering people is bad") at all: that a diversion from such universal, or widely held, ethical positions may not ever have occurred in any particular society as a whole, but was just notable among the psychopaths in charge.

*Not to be confused with cultural relativism, although every one does. All societies - "cultures" - are equally capable of atrocity, and arguing any is better invariably requires an embrace of actual moral relativism: when we do exactly the same bad thing as that other group it is actually good, or at least excusable. In fact, there are no good or bad "cultures", societies, nations, tribes, peoples or people; there are only good or bad acts. And I lean (with a concerted effort of optimism) to the position that absent the mental pathologies promulgated by ruling hierarchies, certain basic ethical positions would remain broadly held.

Generation

For the last 40 years, we’ve been preparing for this generation without a future. We’ve weaned and fed them on the idea that life doesn’t get better, that there are no plans to be made, no futures to be had. So that when that reality actually hits, when they inherit the world they’ve now inherited, they’ve been readied for the nothing that lies ahead...

Strangely, this is the generation that is now making the Bernie Sanders moment. Which, whatever else it may be, is a bid on the promise that the future can be better. Radically better. For the millennials, this is not a promise born from any economic experience. It is a purely political promise, distilled from the last decade and a half of failed protest against neoliberalism and austerity, and some strange phantom of socialism conjured from who knows where.

Progress is an idea that has died a thousand deaths, none more permanent, it seemed, than the one it suffered at the hands of There Is No Alternative. Yet here it is, brought back to life by a generation that has the least reason to believe in it.

Caucus

Such nettlesome facts count for little, though: the media tells the paint-by-numbers story of the establishment’s certain redemption in the polls because it’s the story that the media was built to tell. And Iowa is, in its twisted way, the perfect showcase for this tale because the Iowa caucus process is the most obdurately undemocratic balloting ritual this side of the Florida pageant of hanging chads and disfranchised African Americans. To tease any sort of abiding civic-republican moral from the seamy conduct of the caucuses requires some truly epic lurches into wish-fulfillment fantasy.

...

... That Iowa City caucus, like many in the eastern half of the state, went overwhelmingly to Sanders, but his commanding margin there didn’t translate into correspondingly fulsome gains in the delegate column. That’s because the caucus voters aren’t voting for candidates at all so much as for recondite formulas by which party bosses eventually allot delegates to a major party convention. ... This is all to say nothing of the outlandish ways in which caucus votes are weighted to favor past trends in a precinct’s voter participation — as if that had any bearing on anything — and the eventual nomination-rigging practice known as super-delegate apportionment.

On the Republican side, shenanigans likewise abounded. When Ben Carson announced he was leaving the state ahead of any final tabulation of returns, Cruz apparatchiks pounced to circulate the unfounded rumor that Carson had bagged his presidential run altogether. Suppressing turnout for your rivals, and opportunistically poaching their supporters in the caucus cattle call — it’s all just more of democracy’s rich pageant.

As thuggishness like this transpires, media onlookers typically wander off to play with shiny new things...

Chris Lehmann in The Baffler.

Territory

Game of Thrones — the French Baby Boys' Names Edition

Lucas has great stamina: he came to power in 2002, and still was top dog in 2011. But he is less successful at cashing in on his dominance. His reign is punctuated by two interregnums.

Two years into his shaky first tenure, threatened by Théo, it is Enzo who almost wipes Lucas off the map in 2004.

Slowly rebuilding in the southeast, Lucas enters into a strategic alliance with Nathan, who dominates the northeast, to defeat Enzo. Lucas returns to power in 2008, but notices too late that Nathan has ideas beyond the station allotted to him.

Ordos

Mongolian for something.