Putting the shoe on the other foot

Let’s play make-believe for a minute.

Pick a random country half way around the world; it’s not important who, exactly, but let’s just say Mongolia for the sake of argument. Now imagine that Mongolia has very poor relations with the United States, would like to see it’s government toppled, and influence the U.S. toward installing a more Mongolian-style government.

In order to accomplish this goal, Mongolia has started a program to arm, train and advise anti-government insurgents in the United States. Thanks to its good relations with Mexico, Mongolia has managed to traffic arms and troops across the southern border and set up bases for the rebel groups it supports in the desert of New Mexico. The anti-US rebels, with Mongolian special forces embedded among them in an advisory role, begin to carry out attacks against American troops and law enforcement. Eventually their area of control expands until the insurgents are occupying a significant amount of territory within the borders of the United States, from which they continue to attack Americans.

Eventually the U.S. government gets tired of this and launches a counter-attack against the insurgents. Thinking it would be a simple stand-up fight, the American troops are caught off guard when Mongolia launches air raids from bases in Mexico and repels the U.S. assault, killing scores of American soldiers in the process.

Mongolia then announces to the media that it has acted in self-defense, and that the Americans were being aggressive and provocative for attacking Mongolia’s special forces and it’s allies (on U.S. soil).

Would you believe that the US is the aggressor in this scenario? Would you agree that Mongolia acted in self-defense?

No fucking way.

Anyone in their right mind would reason that 1) Mongolia was openly acting in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government, 2) their special forces and proxies were occupying U.S. territory, and 3) the U.S. military was responding to attacks upon Americans and defending the sovereignty of the United States; therefore, the Mongolians were the aggressors and it was the U.S. that was acting in self-defense.

Now let’s switch things up. Suppose the actions are the same, but change “United States” to “Syria” and change “Mongolia” to “United States”.

So I ask again: why does the American (and Turkish, and Israeli, etc.) military get to invade Syria, train and arm rebels who aim to overthrow the government, carry out attacks on the Syrian army, occupy swathes of Syria and say that they’re off-limits to the country’s own government…and then claim self-defense when government forces respond to defend their sovereignty? It’s completely illogical and, frankly, fucking ridiculous.

The American military has no right to be in Syria.

It has no right to “defend” itself against the Syrian government, in Syria.

Invaders and occupiers do not have the right to claim “self-defense”.

The only reason ISIS even exists is that the U.S. and other anti-Syrian governments stoked an insurgency that could weaken the government’s authority, but was too weak to exercise any authority of its own, thus creating a power vacuum. Want ISIS to stay defeated? Leave Syria and let its government reassert its control over the country.

The prophecy fulfills itself

There’s such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belief that something is true, or the desire for it to be, can influence a person’s behavior in such a way to cause it to become true — even if it was originally false.

We’ve been hearing rumblings that the federal government may soon end public service forgiveness for federal student loans. This forgiveness is an incentive for college graduates to work for state, local and federal governments. In exchange, after 120 on-time and in-full student loan payments, the remaining balance of the student’s debt is forgiven.

Why get rid of this program? One could look at it as simple deficit-hawking: the government can’t afford to simply stop collecting this debt.

But looked at another way, we can see a self-fulfilling prophecy. For decades we’ve been bombarded with the dogma that the government can’t do anything right, and that (insert Congressman Whoever’s cousin’s contracting firm) could do any task the government could but better and cheaper. I reject this reasoning on both theoretical and anecdotal grounds, but that’s another blog post; the point is, the right wing in US politics believes this to be true regardless of whether or not it actually is.

This influences their behavior such that they tend to neglect, undermine, or put obstacles in the way of the “big” government, making it difficult to effectively operate. Many public service jobs involve doing real shit work and often (contrary to popular belief) pay substantially less than their private-sector equivalent jobs. There are likely to be a substantial amount of people who are willing to stick it out for a decade in order to get the monkey of student debt off of their back, and without that incentive, would bail. This would lead to higher turnover and more vacant positions that are harder to fill, increasing inefficiencies and hampering agencies’ abilities to do their job. And then the Paul Ryans of the world will say, “See? I told you the government can’t do anything right, and it’s actually getting worse.”

The thing is, going out of your way to make your prophecy fulfill itself doesn’t prove your point. It simply proves that you’re a malicious asshole who wants to screw people over for your own personal benefit. Not that we should expect anything less from the likes of Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

Crying wolf

There is a significantly sized, significantly obnoxious segment of the population who believes that the solution to gun violence is to have more guns, and that the second amendment means you can and should have any kind of weapon you want in any location at any time. I have a major problem with this. It’s not because I want to ban all guns. It’s not because being allowed to do a thing doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s appropriate, though I do believe that. It’s also not because a scenario in which there are too many “good guys with guns” is likely to turn into a circular firing squad and get a bunch more people killed, although I believe that as well.

It’s because this culture of “all guns, all places, at all times” is akin to crying wolf.

There was a time in my life where a person who was sitting at Taco Bell eating a Cheesy Gordita Crunch when a dude with a gun walked in, could reasonably infer that the place was going to get robbed and/or shot up and make an informed decision about the course of action to take (hide, run away, call the cops, get ready to fork over their wallet, etc.). It’s getting to the point now where you can’t do that anymore, because there are enough rubes out there who think that just because it’s their God-given ‘Murican Right to bring an AR-15 to the salad bar that they totally should bring an AR-15 to the salad bar. The natural assumption is no longer that someone is going to be threatened with the gun; we all just default to “this is some douche canoe trying to make a political statement, so I can just go about my business”. The problem is when you’re wrong and get shot in the face.

Imagine sitting in a college campus library, and you look out the window and see someone strolling across the parking lot with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. You might rightfully assume that this person was here to murder a bunch of people. You could call the cops, but the cops can’t do anything — open carry is now allowed on campus! The person with the gun is just a law-abiding “patriot” who isn’t breaking any rules or giving the cops a reason to hassle them. Until somebody actually gets shot, the police cannot deter the shooter. Never mind the fact that by then it’s too late.

“Gun Control” is a squishy subject. There’s this belief floating around that “the government” has some sort of a concrete, well-formulated plan that they would spring into action if the NRA and a handful of Republican congressman would just get out of the way. The fact is that there is no plan, and different people have vastly different ideas of what “gun control” might involve.

In my view, a good start would be if gun owners weren’t fucking idiots and handled their guns more responsibly, whether that needs to be mandated by law or just beating them with some common fucking sense. Keep your guns put away and secure. Don’t buy a bunch of stupid fucking toys that have no purpose other than 1) they’re “cool” and 2) make it easier to kill more people in a crowd. And for fuck’s sake, don’t carry your gun around with you every goddamn place you go as if everyone who sees it is going to think it means you have a huge dick. Just stop.

“Investing” is shitty for the economy; booze and women are better.

Recently, Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, summed up the GOP’s stance on why they should kill the estate tax:

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

But this raises some questions in my mind. Which is actually better — “investing”, or “booze and women”?

Grassley’s remarks fall on a moralistic concept of what’s good and bad. Obviously (in his opinion) “investing” is virtuous; booze and, I guess, women, are bad (Grassley’s misogyny is a topic for another blog post, but you might have caught his assumption that heterosexual females aren’t making meaningful economic decisions). And, apparently, the government should “recognize” the people who are supposedly virtuous. But I don’t really give a shit about whether what an individual does with their money is moral or not. I recognize the irony in the following statement, but I, a literal communist, and unlike the “small-government conservative” Grassley, don’t believe that the government should be using its tax policy as a means push a subjective moral agenda, but rather should be basing it on what’s good for the actual economy.

But what is “the economy” anyway? I looked it up in the Business Dictionary:

An entire network of producers, distributors, and consumers of goods and services in a local, regional, or national community.

So, that’s what the economy is — but what’s better for it? The estate tax as it is exempts the first $5.5 million in assets, so we are talking about people who have supposedly invested more than that amount. That’s a lot of money. What do we mean when we say “investing”? This isn’t the old days where you buy stock in a shipping company so that they can raise funds to buy a schooner and sail crates of cargo across the ocean to the New World. So what are these people doing with $5.5 million? Buying up real estate? Speculating? Putting it into some bizarro Wall Street instrument that takes money and magically turns it into more money?

None of this has anything to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. It’s just hoarding assets and doing some tricks to make the value of them appear larger than they were when you purchased them. The modern concept of “investing” is many steps removed from anybody doing any actual labor that results in a product or service. And, remember, we are talking about the estate tax which specifically applies to people who have amassed over $5.5 million in assets and just hung onto it until they died. For the most part, these people had no plans to return that money to the actual economy. Why is that supposedly virtuous?

Now consider, on the flip side, the person who spends “every darn penny”. I’m not advocating living completely paycheck to paycheck. I think everyone should have an emergency savings account, and have the ability to save up for long-term goals. But in both of those cases, the idea is that they will actually be spent, eventually. You’re going to buy that badass hot tub, or tap into your emergency account when your job moves to Honduras and you get laid off; I’m talking about saving money for an actual purpose. I’m not talking about amassing wealth like you’re trying to get the high score in a video game. I’m not talking about saving up several million dollars and just hoarding it until you die.

But that’s just me telling you not to be an idiot (and the current U.S. government has no problem promoting idiocy) with your money. It really has little to do with the economy. So if you really want to live hand to mouth, do you — it’s not my place, or the government’s place, to tell you not to. Because you know what’s great for the economy? Buying booze. The dollars you spend on booze filter through the people who work at the liquor store, drive the beer truck, work at the brewery, and so on. You know what else is great for the economy? Spending money on “women”. I don’t know if that means going out on a nice date, keeping a restaurant in business and putting tips in the wait staff’s pockets. Maybe it means that you solicit a prostitute or put some cash in a stripper’s thong, and she goes and pays her rent and feeds her kids. These are good things. You’re creating jobs. You’re putting money into goods, distribution, and services. You’re keeping the actual economy moving instead of just locking your money up in “investments”. 

This is a very Mickey Mouse level Marxist-Leninist analysis, but it doesn’t take a genius-caliber understanding of this shit to make the point. Government policy that favors “investors” over working-class consumers who actually produce and consume goods and services, and policies which accelerate the accumulation of resources on the “investor” end at the expense of working-class consumers, are bad for the economy. This is why capitalism is inherently unstable and unsustainable in the long-term. But people like Grassley fail to grasp this, because they’re so entranced by their Ayn Rand wet dreams to recognize plain fucking facts when they’re slapped in the face with them. They have to fall back on their moral-high-horse analysis where the government “recognizes” our supposed betters, because if we based our tax policy on what’s actually effective in the real world, that would pull the plug on their hoity toity Malthusian delusions and that would be a total bummer, man.

Losing Faith

Part of the narrative in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Tronald Dumpster has been that Russia “hacked” the election. This whole thing just makes me frustrated with my fellow humans.

Not because I have some sort of affinity for Russia; I think Putin’s a douche canoe and wouldn’t put interference past him. Not because I roll my eyes so hard they get stuck in the back of my head every time I hear the word “hack”, defined as “finding a way to obtain a desired result”, in a context that involves absolutely no actual hacking. Not because the United States government routinely interferes in elections around the world without batting an eye, meaning it’s kind of childish for Americans to get all uppity when someone does it to them.

I’m frustrated with my fellow humans because we fucking fell for it.

Russia didn’t literally hack into the voting rolls and change the ballot count. They selectively released (dis)information in a biased manner to influence voters against Clinton and toward Trump. Sure, they had an ulterior motive, but at the end of the day all they did is present information to us. We had to choose what to do with that information. And we chose to elect Donald Fucking Trump President of the United States of America despite the fact that there is absolutely no fucking reasonable circumstances where that could ever, ever be the correct choice. 

Everyone wants to blame Russia for Clinton’s loss, but it is not Russia’s fault that we are a country of fucking idiots. Kudos to them for recognizing that we are dumb as shit and using that to their advantage by getting us to elect the worst President ever. Well played, Russia.

Fast forward to the recent election for Alabama’s vacant Senate seat in which Democrat Doug Jones narrowly beat Roy “I like to fuck 14 year olds” Moore, the Republican candidate. Let me be very clear: Roy Moore is a fucking pedophile. And he barely lost. Why was the election so close? How did a sexual predator of literal children almost win? Because white people are fucking garbage.

I am saying this as a white person, to my fellow white people: seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? We were presented with the option of voting for a pedophile — a fucking pedophile — and we took the ball and ran with that fucker as long and as hard as we could. We voted for that molester allllll day long. We had the chance to show our support for an old man that wants to have sex with little girls and we slam fucking dunked it.

I just don’t know what to say at this point. We can go on and on trying to explain this shit away but at the end of the day, we are individuals with ostensibly functioning brains and “free will”. The information is presented to us and we are entrusted with the power of thinking carefully, considering things from all perspectives, and making the best decision given the resources available to us. And we keep fucking it up like a bunch of fucking dumb asses. 

Some days I just want to give up.