That old trick again

I sometimes think about the development of the "social movements" that seem so cohesive today: anti-abortion activism, anti-gay activism, anti-science activism and I try to imagine a few decades ago, when these discussion topics were being dreamed up. I am inclined to imagine a conspiracy theory when I see this development of groups who expend so much energy for things which cannot adversely affect them. Surely many feel odd about homosexuality, but is it really necessary to castigate the gay? Surely abortion is distasteful, but why do so many people care that a few thousand people get abortions? (They just would have raised atheist children anyway.) Sure, it's confusing stuff, but how can so many people disavow the entire discipline of biology, and also be on blood pressure medication simultaneously? It must take a lot of effort to maintain such strong beliefs.

Much more satisfying to me is to imagine that these movements are the result of organized efforts to rouse people who would not otherwise care particularly. In fact, it occurs to me that an it might be advantageous to specifically seek out people who wouldn't care, and to encourage them to care.

I think an argument can be made that a political group which had an agenda which would not be in accordance with common values would do well to seek out and court constituents with unexamined prejudices. I should say unexamined prejudices which are of no consequence to that groups main goals. The beauty of unexamined prejudices is that they work on people without the people knowing why.

If you were in a group that wanted to, for instance, reduce taxes for themselves at the expense of social programs you didn't use, since you are rich, but at the same time wanted to maintain high government spending on, say, military weapons manufacture, oil development or cattle ranching, because you are invested in those businesses, you might have trouble getting poor people to support your cause. You're basically fucking them over, after all, and they're bound to notice that at some point. So you need to develop some outer hull of political philosophy, if you will, a streamlined set of ideas that will strike at the heart of normal people. And that's where it would be handy to recognize the unexamined prejudices of your target group.

Religion is the major unexamined prejudice which people typically harbor. To the degree that it is possible to do so, it is always a good idea to attempt to equate the work of your group with the dominant religion. If there isn't a dominant religion, per se, then seek to be as vague as possible about the actual details of the religion, except where it aligns with other unexamined prejudices.

killing babies is something that you will be likely to get people to disagree with. In fact, infanticide is so universally despised that almost no one ever does it, which if you've ever spent much time around little kids will probably strike you as unlikely. Killing babies is universally frowned upon, so no one does it, so the next-best thing is to equate abortion with baby killing. Abortion doesn't kill babies. Here's how I know. Babies have birth certificates. It's how you prove they were born. Fetuses don't have them, so they can't be killed. But, fetuses turn in to babies when they're born, so they're pretty similar. That's good news, because according to wikipedia, 50 million abortions have been performed in the US since 1973. This is an enormous number! in that same stretch of time, about 130 million people have been born in the US, so, like a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion. If those fetuses are the same thing as babies, then that's baby killing on a scale that would make King Herod envious. Get a few religious leaders to do some pulpit work, and you'll have a nice big group of people who will let you do whatever you want, so long as you also try to stop the baby-killing.

Suppose you were from another planet, a non-human, but intelligent and rational. Imagine you came to the American civic debate without any context, and somebody appointed themselves as your Virgil and was giving you a little primer by walking you through the circles of US politics so you can go back to your planet and write an epic poem about Your visit. Imagine they were trying to explain the way things are, and you, completely ignorant of the ways of Americans, but with some basic familiarity with animals, are trying to connect the dots.

Spose that your Virgil gets to the part where they describe that there are two groups of people who experience a fair amount of enmity. One of the groups has major problems with the mere existence of the other, and the other group mainly objects to the efforts of the first group to oppress and marginalize them. Your Virgil mentions their names to you, but honestly you think most human names sound almost exactly the same, and you're always losing track of which group is which. So you get this jumbled collection of facts about the two groups, and you try to apply a little logic to the situation to parse the pile of attributes to give two coherent groups with these facts nicely divided among the two.

Here are the facts, which for your benefit I will construct as a series of "us" and "them" statements which one group might make
1. We hate them because we feel that their existence threatens our existence.
2. We believe that they choose to be the way that they are.
3. We believe that they are wrong to choose to be the way they are.
4. We dislike that they choose to openly express something which is private and which they could conceal if they chose.
5. Many of them are secretly us.
6. They are misled, while we possess the truth.
7. they use lies and prejudices to malign us publicly.
8. We have a history of being oppressed.
9. We are just trying to live our lives, but they won't let us.
10. They recruit children to live their lifestyle.
11. They have an organized agenda.
12. They are aberrant and unnatural.
13. We must eradicate them to preserve our lives.
14. They actively seek positions in government to further their aims.
15. We are normal, they are not.
16. We are a group because of our common beliefs, while they are a group because they are collectively deceived.
17. We are a group because of our common nature, while they are a group because they are collectively misled.
18. We are Christians, they are Satanists.
19. We are gay, they are bigots.

I think you would find this to be an inconvenient set of facts to separate. I think you would be liable to make errors when you went to write your poem, because it wouldn't occur to you to think that a group which identifies itself by a religious philosophy, which must be acquired from other people, are the people accusing the group who is identified by a sexual orientation, which is largely determined by an individual's biology, recruits children. Surely, you might think, a group that must necessarily recruit to spread, a group which organizes countless Summer camps, Sunday Schools, etc. wouldn't accuse a group that occurs naturally throughout the animal kingdom of recruiting children. That would be simply too rich. No one would attribute them with any credibility at all, if they went around saying that.

Surely humans cannot have such poorly formed thinking organs that they would imagine that another group would voluntarily take on the personal attributes which other people would lynch them for displaying. You obviously hide those traits that are similar to those you have witnessed be persecuted. That's as natural to a social animal as being polite to those who are bigger and stronger than you.

This is why I say we are doomed. It is easy to prey on the stupidity of people, but it is very difficult make people less stupid. To some degree it is impossible. So the bad folks will be able to control the agenda forever, and there's not a lot to be done about it.

my dogs are old as fuck

I was walking around the dog park with my dogs today and I was sorta ruminating as I do more and more these days about how they're old. They're 13 now, and they're getting creaky. It's clear that they aren't going to live forever. I figure they're around 85% through their life cycle if things continue to go well.

That sucks. I don't like the idea of my dogs senescing and dying. it's lame sauce, as the kids recently stopped saying. I remember when these dogs were annoyingly young. Now they're getting infirm.

I've been trying to find a perspective that allows me to make peace with the idea. The best I've come up with is that they are, at this moment, older than they would have lived to be if they'd been wild dogs.

I figure a wild dog has ten years on the outside. Barring unfortunate events, a dog in a pack of dogs without human supervision and medical procedures is liable to snuff it by then at the latest, because they'd start to slow down. A younger dog will take an older dog out sometimes, because the older dog seems sick or something.

By this metric, my dogs aren't 85% through their life cycle, they're actually 130% through their life cycle, and they've got another good year in them anyhow. Surely that's worth something.

But the idea doesn't really give me the peace that I want it to. What I eventually realized, walking through the dog park and thinking it over, is that it doesn't help because I object to the idea of getting old and dying completely. It's not that dogs don't live an adequate amount of time, it's that nothing does (except Dick Cheney, who really ought to have died in 1984).

Bring on the immortality, I say.

Being Christian is awesome

Richard Brautigan would have been a terrible Sci FI author

Richard Brautigan wrote this poem in the mid 60s.  I like this photo since it shows that the poem, like William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, was composed on a typewriter.  

Why do elephants hate us?

Kenya, January, 2010- an elephant charged out of the brush at a group of hikers and trampled an American woman and her infant daughter, who may also have been American. The hikers were just out enjoying the day, when an unprovoked attack on their freedoms changed the world forever.

American news outlets quickly responded to the trampling by showing video of the attack, over and over, even backwards, continuously for about a month. “The elephants hate our freedom” wrote Bonnie Hedless of Newsweek. It is not clear if she was quoting an official or directly divining the intent of all elephants everywhere by means of some clairvoyance.

“This is the most vicious and brutal attack on an American citizen by an elephant that has ever been perpetrated,” said White house spokesman Jake Jakers. “We have formed a coalition of nations who will answer this outrageous provocation appropriately.”
It is generally expected that the US-led coalition will retaliate against the country of Kenya for abetting these attacks. “Kenya aids and harbors rogue elephants. You are either with us or you’re against us,” Jakers added. “We know if you’ve been bad or good.”
The US –led coalition is known to include the country of Great Britain, which is still collectively pissed for a 2006 incident in which a former girlfriend of Prince William was mauled by an elephant and received an insulting 800,000 British pound settlement against the landowner. Pedestrian and shepherd Ollie Wrinklesby of Stropshire commented “It isn’t right that hot women should be stepped on by animals. If that had happened on my land, I would have cut out my own bowels to make amends.” He then quickly added “But of course, sheep aren’t dangerous like that.”
“We’re gonna smoke them out of their caves, or whatever habitat they have.” Jakers said.

Quick thoughts about Julian Assange and his arrest

Julian Assange is approximately the leader of wikileaks.  He was recently arrested in London, when he submitted himself for questioning.  I think he's probably in trouble. 

Wikileaks had been a public embarrassment to various governments for about three years before they posted a video of an American Helicopter crew killing a journalist.  At this point, they suddenly became high-profile in the USA.  Then they published some US diplomatic cables last month, and over the course of about a week, the organization was removed from several DNS servers, their paypal site was shut down, their finances were frozen, and Assange was arrested in connection to a very fishy-sounding sexual misconduct charge.

The pace of this sort of mounting of challenges for Wikileaks is intentional: it's there to indicate to the world that the US doesn't enjoy having it's secrets revealed.  It's not that the secrets were particularly damning or anything like that.  It's just that the Government doesn't want it to get worse.  This high-visibility attack of the site and it's principal human being are meant to be a message to those who might do what Wikileaks has done.  This is to discourage the dissemination of US secrets, not because they compromise military operations, but because they undermine American hegemony.

If they wished to stop Assange, the American military could probably have made him disappear.  But they didn't do that.  They appear to have contrived to have him arrested, and then they found a guy who appears to have actually stolen the secret information, and they disappeared him.  But they did it in the most public way possible, putting out his name and story, providing details of his means of stealing the information, and then making it clear where he was being held incommunicado, off US soil, where we are encouraged to believe that he is being tortured and humiliated. 

We are being sent a message with this entire chain of events.  The message is simple: don't you even think of messing with us, or we'll crush you.  We are meant to see this information and be terrified.  The US government is using this event to terrorize the world.  Just thought you might want to know.

I get all socialist

Something's been bothering me.  It's my neck.  I hurt it a  while ago, and I keep reinjuring it.  It's lame when you have a neck injury because if somebody's like "Hey do you want to fight?" you have to be like "Well, I do, man, I really do, but..."  So it really cramps my style.

This looks so good because I used a Wacom board.

Another thing that really bothers me is politics.  American politics is like being a bee in a hive and watching two teams of Japanese hornets descending on you that then start to fight over which team gets to kill you and your family and you notice that one team is lamer than the other so you hope they win because they won't be as effective at slaughtering your hive but then they lose and you know you're fucked.

Our most recent election has been widely said to have been a referendum on the performance of our president.  I want to make a couple of quick statements about that and then talk about taxes, because I know that's mainly what kids are interested in nowadays.

First off, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of a Blue Dog Democrat before, but those guys are "fiscally (and

Vote for me and I'll kill you last.

often socially) conservative," generally hawks in terms of military activity, and half of them in congress that just got voted out in the last election.  They were running as democrat incumbents, and they were all replaced by Republicans.  That's a pretty ambiguous result, but I think that a factor in their tremendous defeat is that democrats didn't want to vote for them because they're basically Republicans, and Republicans didn't want to vote for them because they're technically not Republicans. 

The blue dogs hold as a common point of view the notion that lower tax rates for the wealthy lead to higher tax revenues for the government due to economic stimulation, and that a higher percentage of the tax revenue comes from the wealthy.  Now let's just take a tiny peek at that idea for a second.  If the rich are being taxed at a lower rate AND bearing more of the tax burden, it can only be because they're the only ones who have any fucking money.  You'll note that taxes for the poor (which is to say, all the actual people in the country, more or less) don't have to go down in order for the above two circumstances to be true. It does mean that the poor aren't earning more either. This would indicate that most people would see no significant financial improvement from the upturn in the economy, and that's even taking into account that unemployment would be predicted to drop under these circumstances.   

What this indicates, is that the wealthy get wealthier when they are taxed less, and the poor do not proportionally do so.  By the conservative argument, therefore, lowering taxes for the rich increases the inequality between rich and poor.  It should also be pointed out that our political system has been completely arranged, now more than ever, to allow elections to be influenced by money.  So wealth inequality equates directly with political inequality.  

This is actually perfectly in sync with the philosophy of certain founding fathers, such as John Jay:

The people who own the country ought to govern it.

...But it is clearly a major obstacle to democracy, which is why Aristotle said things like:

Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant. Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme - either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy; but it is not so likely to arise out of the middle constitutions and those akin to them.

But let's just ignore the inequality issue for a moment.  Let's just look at the argument that lower taxes is for the economic greater good.  Here's a little history of tax cuts in America, which is adapted from an essay put out by the Heritage Foundation.  I don't make a habit of quoting the Heritage Foundation, because they're wrong about everything, but I did want to point out the glaring and selective bits of information they put into their essay in support of tax cuts for the rich.  I'll put the Heritage essay in regular text and my brief additions in red, to indicate that it should be read in the voice of Satan, The Accuser. 

The tax cuts of the 1920s
Tax rates were slashed dramatically during the 1920s, dropping from over 70 percent to less than 25 percent. What happened? Personal income tax revenues increased substantially during the 1920s, despite the reduction in rates. Revenues rose from $719 million in 1921 to $1164 million in 1928, an increase of more than 61 percent. Then there was the great depression in 1929, which plunged most of the world into a decade of abject misery while increased taxes and social spending slowly fixed shit up again.

 The Kennedy tax cuts
President Hoover dramatically increased tax rates in the 1930s and President Roosevelt compounded the damage by pushing marginal tax rates to more than 90 percent. Recognizing that high tax rates were hindering the economy, President Kennedy proposed across-the-board tax rate reductions that reduced the top tax rate from more than 90 percent down to 70 percent. What happened? Tax revenues climbed from $94 billion in 1961 to $153 billion in 1968, an increase of 62 percent (33 percent after adjusting for inflation).  Then there was a recession in 1969.  The maximum tax rate was reduced by 20% earlier in the year and appeared to do nothing to prevent the recession

The Reagan tax cuts
Thanks to "bracket creep," the inflation of the 1970s pushed millions of taxpayers into higher tax brackets even though their inflation-adjusted incomes were not rising. To help offset this tax increase and also to improve incentives to work, save, and invest, President Reagan proposed sweeping tax rate reductions during the 1980s. What happened? Total tax revenues climbed by 99.4 percent during the 1980s, and the results are even more impressive when looking at what happened to personal income tax revenues. Once the economy received an unambiguous tax cut in January 1983, income tax revenues climbed dramatically, increasing by more than 54 percent by 1989 (28 percent after adjusting for inflation).   Which helped hide the fact that a (world record) recession began in 1987, which continued on into the first Bush presidency, crippling it.  He raised taxes for the rich in 1990, and the recession ended around '91.

So basically, the tax reduction argument is bullshit.  It clearly destroys the economy in time, because most people run out of money.  I think it would be more reasonable to suggest that the periodic lowering of taxes is a kind of culling of excess capital from the general public to the rich, but that it clearly can't go on indefinitely.