Archive for January, 2021

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Paying for Links

January 28, 2021

The Australian Government is proposing legislation which means that google, and Facebook, and presumably anyone else will have to pay for ‘using’ media items.

The problem for me is that Google and Facebook, do not (as far as I know) take media items and put them on their websites without acknowledgement, or steal articles as the government and its media backers allege. They put up headlines, possibly a lead image, perhaps the first couple of lines of text and a link.

Providing a link to a news media item does not seem to be stealing the product; it is linking to it – it is in effect providing a free advertisement for the content.

If a person clicks on that link they get taken to the site (unless it is behind a paywall). This then gives the publisher the eyeballs. It gives the publisher the advertising revenue and so on. If its behind a paywall then it may indicate to the clicker that the news is worth paying for.

Every article I’ve ever clicked on, on Twitter, Facebook etc works like this. Yahoo news may work differently, but I’ve always assumed they do pay- perhaps they don’t – that should be solved.

News sites who don’t want to get these free adverts can easily incorporate a piece of code into their web pages, and google, for example, will not collect the information and report it in searches. That way they easily get rid of the sense that google is stealing their news.

Most of the items, I see on facebook, are put there by people who think the articles are interesting and useful, and they, again, are encouraging people to go and read the article on the article owner’s website. This also counts as very effective advertising. It means that people I like recommend something, and that tends to be the most trusted advert.

Likewise, I can see that many online news stories use twitter posts as ‘evidence’. These link to twitter etc, but there is generally no need to travel to twitter to read them. This could be considered to be theft, and perhaps news should stop doing it. But I still think its a primarily a link, and it tells people that twitter is important and is good to use.

If I personally link to something someone wrote, I don’t think I’m stealing their work, I’m acknowledging it, or giving them some advertising.

The real problem is that if google and facebook have to pay for every item they link to, then surely every article online should also have to pay for similar links, links to evidence etc, then the sites will shut down. I cannot afford it for one.

The internet will die.

I guess Murdoch will be happy.

Endnote

There might be lots to complain about with google, such as it often does not appear to pay taxes on revenue generated in the country in which it sells the advertisements it carries. But that is a real objection. The Australian government does not seem to be interested in reality, just in stopping people from finding the news.

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The 12 steps of neoliberal problem solving

January 26, 2021

If there is a problem which disturbs the established corporate sector and their hangers on, then try and deal with that problem as follows:

1) First: deny there is a problem.

2) Scream, shout at and slur those who say there is a problem.

3) If 97% of those who work in the field (economists, scientists, medical practitioners, ecologists etc) say there is a problem, then insist that the 3% who don’t, be given equal time. Hell, give that 3%, 80% of the time.

4) Call for problem recognisers to be dismissed from positions of employment. Call for the removal of problem data from government websites.

5) Hinder any attempts to do anything useful about the problem.

6) Complain solving the problem involves socialism and tyranny.

7) If the problem is so obvious it needs to be solved, then get the solutions to the problem to involve tax-payer subsidy of established industries and tax cuts for the wealthy.

8) Insist any other solution to the problem involves insufferable limits on peoples’ personal liberty to make the problem worse. Resisting recognition of the problem is vital and radical.

9) Fail dismally.

10) Argue that the failure to solve the problem, shows the Governments are useless and should not attempt to solve any problems at all.

11) Argue that everything should have been left to the private sector that did not want to recognise the problem in the first place.

12) Keep on as if nothing had happened.

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QAnon?

January 20, 2021

This is an attempt to explore Q, and to write about Q, somewhat in the manner of Q.

First off, I’m not an expert on QAnon, so there is no need to take this seriously.

What was the Conspiracy?

Q does seem to be pro-Trump. However, Q does not seem to have had either Trump, or the Trump re-election committee, behind them, because it seems that Trump had little idea of what Q was talking about until relatively close to the end, when he could have taken advantage of it all along. He did occasionally retweet Q memes, but the memes were ubiquitous in the sources that Trump might read or see, so that does not mean he knew much about it. This is what he said when asked:

Trump: Yeah. I know nothing about a QAnon…. I know you told me [about QAnon], but what do you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know that they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it….

I’ll tell you what I do know about, I know about Antifa and I know about the radical left and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are, and I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats, not run by Republicans….

Savannah Guthrie: Just this week, you retweeted your 87 million followers a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have SEAL Team Six, the Navy SEAL Team Six to kill — cover up the fake death of bin Laden. Now, why would you send a lie that to your followers? You retweeted it.

Trump: I know nothing about it. It was retweet. That was a — an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves to take a position.

Interview: Savannah Guthrie Leads a Town Hall With Donald Trump in Miami – October 15, 2020. Fact base

Given Trump would seem to take advantage of anything popular which favoured him or attacked his ‘enemies’, there is no reason to think that he would refrain from using Q, if it was connected to him and he knew about it. Unless Trump was in deep cover; which means he would confirm nothing of Q, although him confirming nothing, does not confirm anything.

Trump’s display of ignorance could suggest that Q was trying to take advantage of Trump and his followers for some purpose. Is there reason to think this untrue? Q had more to gain than Trump did. They could influence Trump’s followers, while binding Trump to promises he could probably never carry out such as capturing and trying Hilary Clinton as she tried to escape, engineering mass suicides of his enemies, perhaps announcing that the Mueller Report had unearthed pedophilia in security agencies, get John McCain to resign, expose Pope Francis and so on. Trump was also expected to hold ‘the Storm’ and arrest hundreds (maybe thousands) of satanic pedophiles, which may well have proven difficult if he had tried to do it – which he does not seem to have done. Trump was even incapable of triumphing over coronavirus, which was supposedly not really that deadly. Did the prophecies fail, did Trump fail, or was he pushed by Q? Were the prophecies codes for something less palatable to Trump’s people? Who are the secret manipulators?

Was Q even designed to discredit Trump and his followers, by demanding the impossible, and then letting the followers see it all fail? Q could have been the deep state in action, only pretending to be against itself. Was Trump was doing this himself? If Q was Satanist running a false flag operation, then allowing 100,000s of innocent Americans to die, because no coherent action was taken, could count as a major success.

The background: ‘drops,’ and black magic

The idea was clever. Q is supposedly a person with a Department of Energy clearance for Top Secret information (why Department of Energy?). We don’t even know Q is a real person, or how many people post as Q. The people playing Q basically issued questions, random snippets of information, made predictions and let people construct their own fantasies (or do a lot of learning as they might put it), so they provided the data and fantasy to back Q’s assertions, and spin the Web Q started. This is one supposed Q drop from near the beginning:

Mockingbird
HRC detained, not arrested (yet).
Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals?
What is military intelligence?
Why go around the 3 letter agencies?
What Supreme Court case allows for the use of MI v Congressional assembled and approved agencies?
Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military wo approval conditions unless 90+ in wartime conditions?
What is the military code?
Where is AW being held? Why?
POTUS will not go on tv to address nation.
POTUS must isolate himself to prevent negative optics.
POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a first step was essential to free and pass legislation.
Who has access to everything classified?
Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy.
Whoever controls the office of the Presidecy controls this great land.
They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control.
This is not a R v D battle.
Why did Soros donate all his money recently?
Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
Mockingbird 10.30.17
God bless fellow Patriots.

Qposts 29-Oct-2017

There is no ‘secret information’ here, just questions with no answers. It is all references to things people would already have heard of, if they watched Alex Jones or similar parts of the Right0Sphere – Huma, for example is a close associate of Hillary Clinton, who is supposed to have peeled faces off children in a Satanic ceremony – is there any evidence of this? It doesn’t matter as she is not being accused of anything; people are just being told to watch her.

Here is another drop. Note the repetitions between posts, which might build up truth (‘What I tell you three times is true’):

Some of us come here to drop crumbs, just crumbs.
POTUS is 100% insulated – any discussion suggesting he’s even a target is false.
POTUS will not be addressing nation on any of these issues as people begin to be indicted and must remain neutral for pure optical reasons. To suggest this is the plan is false and should be common sense.
Focus on Military Intellingence/ State Secrets and why might that be used vs any three letter agency
What SC decision opened the door for a sitting President to activate – what must be showed?
Why is POTUS surrounded by generals ^^
Again, there are a lot more good people than bad so have faith. This was a hostile takeover from an evil corrupt network of players (not just Democrats).
Don’t fool yourself into thinking Obama, Soros, Roth’s, Clinton’s etc have more power present day than POTUS.
Operation Mockingbird
Patriots are in control. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Qposts 30-Oct-2017

This primarily states that Trump will not say anything about what Q is saying, so overt confirmation is not to be expected. Is silence confirmation? Trump is also not a target, but a target of who? Perhaps that means he is a target of Q (because it is denied). Of course both these posts could be fake, but they show the style…. it seems like a textual Rorschach blot. We might wonder if, like Trump’s speeches, whether the ‘drops’ interrupt and disrupt ‘rational’ (Mind 1) thought processes and critical thinking? Why do they make so few connected propositions which can be challenged? Could they be acting as incantations, black magic, hypnotic effects, replacing rationality, with repeated phrases about how great we are, how persecuted we are, how we can overcome everything, how those who disagree with us are traitors? How better is life, if we just hand over our will and our trust to the black magician? To the Satanist who pretends to expose Satanists, but never does. Mind 2 finds the patterns which are hinted at within the hypnotic suggestions, and that becomes hypnotic truth…

Q as liar? Fantasy and community?

Q also claimed that sometimes they would issue false information deliberately, some say to misguide the real criminals. This admission protects everything Q says. False information could be said to not really come from Q, or was a deliberate deception for some reason. This meant that any vaguely clear statement which turned out to be so obviously wrong, that even Q followers could not believe it, was easy to explain away, or forget. If Q says straight out sometimes they lie – who knows what to trust? This is just like Trump. People no longer know what is intended to be true, what is just ignorance and what is deceit. How many times does Q have to lie, before it all seems untrue, more untrue than not, only accidentally true on occasions, or people bed down with a hypothetical truth that they will protect from challenge?

The end result is that whatever takes off amongst readers is what what they elaborate, what people need to hear to make sense of the world, and which gave them a sense of accomplishment – people issue youtube ‘news’ videos – “You are the news now,” “Do your own research,” “Have faith in you own research”. While this further engages the participants, it could lead to a situation where if a source disagrees with Q on anything it seems obviously false, and cannot be trusted. If you don’t hear anything that Q is talking about in the mainstream media, that is because that media is part of the conspiracy and is actively suppressing the information. If you do hear something that confirms, or makes sense of, Q it must be true. So QAnon the movement became, more or less, completely self-referential and self-reinforcing. What was true would be what other Q followers said was true. And some of them might think “disinformation is necessary,” and just lie for some higher purpose – whatever that was? Supporting Trump? Supporting the swamp Trump cultivated? Supporting the take down of Trump?

These processes of trust and distrust build community and closeness amongst those who hang out for more drops from Q or who attempt to make sense of Q. The community builds up the sense that something important is happening here concerning the future of the USA, and ‘we’ are participating. People accepted what they were told because others they respected did, while saying that was only something that happened to those outside their community. Sadly, what is to say we cannot be conditioned by any media/information, unless we are critical of it? As they say “where we go one, we go all” or “WWG1WGA,” which sounds a bit like the sheep they condemn others for being, but let’s assume that is not true, and it just indicates following where the ‘evidence’ takes them, as long as it does not invalidate Q.

Satanic pedophiles

Opposition to Q, further proves Q had something, because wouldn’t the Satanic pedophiles oppose Q in all possible ways? “Many in our govt worship Satan.” “These people worship  Satan_ some openly show it.” Although Q mentions Satan relatively little, it seems to be elaborated by followers; its a meme they magnify.

Q promises action is being taken, even if we don’t see it:

The pedo networks are being dismantled.
The child abductions for satanic rituals (ie Haiti and other 3rd world countries) are paused (not terminated until players in custody).

QPosts 1 Nov-2017

It certainly attracts attention, and I’ve certainly met people who think Trump is warring against organised high level pedophiles, despite the fact the only publicised arrests have been of friends of his, who previously escaped because of friends of his.

The elite pedophilia thing is not impossible. Organisations like the Catholic Church have behaved as if they were run by pedophiles to protect pedophiles and other rapists, so we cannot assume that no other high level organisations would be run in the same way. We also know that hidden pedophile rings do exist online. Online, anyone can find anything if they search hard enough, and police do break some of them. This is reported in the mainstream media, easily.

The odd thing is that Donald Trump could be seen as the person fighting pedophile rapists. That is hard to believe. He is a person who reveled in sexual assault, even if it was largely imaginary. Many women allege he behaved ‘inappropriately’ towards them. He seems to be a serial adulterer and user of prostitutes. He not only at one time had largely unreported, but real, charges against him of raping a thirteen year old girl. These charges were dropped as he became president, because the woman involved received death threats. He was a friend of Epstein’s who knew about Epstein’s tastes and did nothing about it, not even break off friendship, for years. He also knew, and hired, various other people who favoured Epstein. He specifically shouted out to Maxwell, when she was arrested, to wish her well. He deliberately had a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child unnecessarily executed for murder. We might as logically expect him to run a pedophile ring as be against it. Perhaps Q provides cover for this? Do the research….

The ‘Secret of Media’, is hidden

Some of Q, is not unreasonable:

What happens when 90% of the media is controlled/owned by (6) corporations?
What happens when those same corporations are operated and controlled by a political ideology?
What happens when the news is no longer free from bias?
What happens when the news is no longer reliable and independent?
What happens when the news is no longer trustworthy?
What happens when the news simply becomes an extension/arm of a political party?
Fact becomes fiction?
Fiction becomes fact?
When does news become propaganda? [more]

Qposts 22-Nov-2019

‘Of course’, there is no analysis of the normal process of monopoly, oligopoly and control in capitalism. The post relies on the standard uninvestigated rightwing meme that the US media is ‘liberal’ or pro-Democrat, rather than pro-corporate, or biasedly pro-Republican and geared at benefitting its owners and advertisers. Q does not suggest Right wing media bias. News could equally become propaganda when it belongs to Murdoch, or other ideologically committed billionaires, who stack their media with propagandists who promote the idea that any news which disagrees with their position is both lies and politically motivated. Q suggests that bad news stories about Trump, no matter how well documented, show there is a conspiracy against Trump and against decent Americans, not that Trump might be bad. Q people have to stand outside the supposed group-think of those who think Trump is a problem, and join the group-think of denying that Trump is incompetent, corrupt, not clearing the swamp, etc. – no matter how clear Trump’s failings would seem if you investigated him with an open mind. By all means, “do your own research,” but don’t assume that only pro-Trump sources are genuine, lest you want to be mindwashed.

Just remember the lamestream media could not be bothered to report the charges of Trump raping adolescents or many of his war actions, before thinking it is inherently anti-Trump.

If Trump was a Satanist, we might ask, does Trump enjoy other people’s deaths? Is this why he had people executed on his way out? Is this why he pretended Covid would not kill many Americans, even now when over 400,000 Americans (current figures, likely to get bigger) have died? Is this why he ignored Covid after the election, to pay people back for not voting him in? Is this why he allows companies more freedom to pollute and poison people? Is this why Trump media also pretends the virus is not real? It is sacrificing its watchers to some ‘higher cause’?

Did Trump pardon those who entered the Capitol Building for him, or did he pardon politicians who were convicted for defrauding people for money, or convicted of tax or financial fraud, people who committed war crimes, or high level people who were convicted for illegal acts protecting him? Is this defending the swamp and casting aside the principled? What does your media say?

Q is dead, but Q is not dead

That Q was, at best, largely fake, should be relatively clear to everyone by now. The Storm never happened. There never were any mass arrests carried out by Trump, even at the last minute. There never was any outside evidence of the plots that Q generated awareness of. There were no trials. Three years of promises with nothing to show, except winding up support for Trump. But who knows, perhaps Q can be saved by pretending the failure of the prophecies was a necessary step towards later success, that so many good people could not have been sold a line so it must be true, or that people misread the drops (not hard) and that Q did not bother to let anyone know…. In which case Q is at best unreliable, and we still are not certain Q was other than a complete fake.

Acknowledged failure does not mean Q will not start up again, or that people who are dedicated will not keep it going, but it needs a new rationale. And that may take a while to get going…. So don’t give up on it yet, only 4 years till the next attempt (at best).

Because QAnon was so widespread in the ‘Right0sphere’, the domain of dedicated Right wing theory and propaganda, people who frequent that zone are almost certainly influenced by Q memes and Q provoked fantasy, even if they have never knowingly directly engaged with the Q community, and even if they thought Q was loopy. They share some things in common to begin with, so increasing that sharing may not be hard. In that case, is the spread of Qdom limited by the presence of Q, any more? It may have its own self-generating base, and so will probably continue, even if it drops in popularity, and it may well resurface later on, when all the disproving factors have been forgotten.

Q and real politics

Part of Q’s success involves what I have called ‘shadow politics’. That is the ability to displace evil on to outgroups, or the ‘other side’ in a binary political system. Because the other side is not us, and we are good, they become the repository of all our suppressed, or unacknowledged desires. Through this thoroughly human process, we are able to truly identify the evil and fight it. Fighting that evil, and hopefully expelling it, bonds us together in community, while also making the separation between the groups sharper and more intense.

As it is harder to talk across groups, it becomes easier to believe they are deluded and evil. Because this separation is so involved in fantasy, there is no limit to what can seem to be true, in terms of their evil and our good. You can see this in action with people condemning those others involved in QAnon, almost as much as you can see it in the QAnon movement itself.

Politics and economics also tend to become caught in fantasies and projections which are collective and cultural, and indeed even make collective culture. It might even be the case that effective politics is about the creation of effective fantasies – which can then obstruct people from attending to the reality they are dealing with, and lead to destruction – because they seem so true, and they are so easy to communicate. One important thing in research is to attempt to prove you are right, the other is to explore how much you can be wrong. This is difficult when fantasies are involved, and is almost never encouraged by leaders, whose power often depends on you accepting their truth.

What Q does indicate, and what should be taken seriously, is the shear amount of alienation in the US population, and how deeply uninvolved, or frightened, at least 30% or so of potential voters feel about political process. How they feel the ruling elites do not listen to them, the intellectual elites despise them, and the media is untruthful – and, sadly, there is real point to that feeling. This is significant. For many people, it feels as if the current world is being run by evil geniuses (or evil morons), who have no morals at all.

We can assert that the ideologies of capitalism have let people down, because those ideologies have no capacity to explain what is happening to people, or give consolation. People have little hope – nothing indicates that doing what they are supposed to do (like ‘work hard’) actually works for them. They are losing money and life chances. Life is going downhill, for them and their children. It shows they feel they are the victims of forces they cannot control – and this is probably correct. It may also show they feel that God has abandoned them, or needs a lot of placating to be on their side.

QAnon also shows people’s own heroism, they were prepared to stand up for change, if they thought that change was true. They were prepared to separate from families and community for this truth. That it may not have been true, does not diminish that heroism, or their determination to find things out and take the consequences.

Do Q’s satanic pedophiles exist, at any really important level, any more than the Pizzagate ring existed? Probably not. However, it is important symbolically, as it again could represent the idea that people experience themselves as being at the mercy of predators in their daily lives, which could well be true – they are all subject to the forces of predatory capitalism, and a system which sacrifices normal people for taxcuts for the wealthy, fossil fuels, run down housing, and subsidies for the hyper-wealthy.

If this alienation from politics and from social life, is not taken seriously by people in politics (and religion) and they do not work to fix it, but continue to work to take advantage of it, or dismiss it, then the US will continue to head for tyranny, persecution of innocents and collapse. Everything may well unwind. If steps are not taken, the future could be every bit as horrific as Q suggests.

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Summary of Mirowski’s thirteen Commandments of neoliberalism

January 17, 2021

See The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism and Mirowski Road from Mont Peleron, pp. 434-40 (slightly shorter list). The originals are much better of course. My comments are in ‘>>’ marked paragraphs.

I’ve changed the names of the commandments, Mirowski is even less pithy than myself….

1) Neoliberal markets have to be constructed.

Neoliberal markets will not arrive naturally. They have to be constructed.

As Michel Foucault presciently observed in 1978, “Neoliberalism should not be confused with the slogan ‘laissez-faire,’ but on the contrary, should be regarded as a call to vigilance, to activism, to perpetual interventions.”

Neoliberalism is not Conservatism, or liberty in action, but a mode of authority – whatever it pretends. Society and the State have to be transformed to build the right conditions for, and maintain, their kind of ‘free markets’, and the kind of power they prefer.

2) The Market is a paradoxical God

The ‘free market’, is more or less a holy non-describable object – which has to be protected and constructed, but which has existed since the dawn of humanity, and in Mises’ arguments can be deduced from a priori principles. For Hayek, the market is the ultimate information processor – it could be seen as an abstract (perhaps all knowing) brain – no humans can understand it, influence it, or plan for it – other than to set it up and enforce it. [This sets up a paradox, how do you enforce the rule of something you cannot understand?]

Despite these difficulties, the aim of neoliberalism is to make society subordinate to the market. This will supposedly bring liberty and, in popular presentations, prosperity for all.

  • It appears to me, that neoliberals use a really naïve Marxist argument to assert that society is totally conditioned by economic structures, ie. the market. So if the market can be defined as “free”, then people will be free. They conveniently ‘forget’ that groups of people in markets exert power through the market, especially with enough wealth. We need to remember that determinism can be confused, and multi-factorial, in complex systems.

3) Markets make a virtuous spontaneous order

Neoliberals assume ‘free markets’ are adaptive evolutionary forces, and always produce the best adaptations for humans. Markets are the natural, and dominant, condition of human existence.

  • They don’t allow the idea that (free) markets, like other evolutionary systems, can be maladaptive from the point of view of some of the creatures participating in the System. Many creatures die out through evolutionary processes. Humans could be one of those creatures that die out in markets, for example, when profit unintentionally undermines the conditions of planetary existence.

Neoclassical, and most other forms of, economics can admit that markets fail, are incomplete, or produce strange and harmful results. Neoliberals cannot, because if we believed maladaptation was possible, we might be tempted to try and prevent harmful behaviour by corporations, and impinge upon that corporation’s liberty to do whatever it liked, even its its actions destroyed the possibility of healthy relatively stable life.

Neoliberals conventionally reject all such recourse to defects or glitches, in favor of a narrative where evolution and/or “spontaneous order” brings the market to ever more complex states of self-realization, which may escape the ken of mere humans. 

  • In other words, market perfection becomes an article of faith. There is no argument, or evidence, which could, even in theory, be used to convert neoliberals to reality. All problems in the Market are, by fiat, laid at the feet of government, no matter what business people do, or how much business organisations have bought the government in the market.

4) Keep the State, but pretend otherwise

Whatever they might say, Neoliberals do not want to abolish the State. They want to make a strong State exist solely to protect the ‘free market’ and its players. The State establishes the conditions for neoliberal markets, and attempts to prevent disruption of those markets by ordinary citizens, or politicians, calling for equity or fairness.

Under neoliberalism, the State becomes subject to, and judged by, auditing and financial accountability processes. Financial accountability is more important than moral accountability, or responsibility for the effects of policies on citizens. Citizens become customers, with no impact on how they are governed. All possible Services become contracted out to the private sector, including services which monitor the market for possible corruption, and the bad decisions of large companies which are overly risky for the whole market. This renders these monitoring services open to corruption and misinformation. While deficits are bad, in practice deficits which arising from subsidies to big business can largely be ignored.

The neoliberal State does not shrink, whatever they claim:

if anything, bureaucracies become more unwieldy under neoliberal regimes…… In practice, “deregulation” always cashes out as “reregulation,” only under a different set of ukases [or arbitrary strict commands].

  • In particular the State exists to protect the big players; oligopolies and monopolies. Small players are of little interest.
  • The State keeps property in the hands of the deserving, and enforces contract.
  • In neoliberalism, ordinary citizens are to have no impact on how they are governed. This is neoliberal liberty.

5) Treat politics as if it were a market.

The abstract “rule of law” is frequently conflated with or subordinated to conformity to the neoliberal vision of an ideal market…. there is no separate sphere of the market, fenced off, as it were, from the sphere of civil society. Everything is fair game for marketization.

  • This time we get bleak Marxism. There is nothing safe from the market. Every single thing or process, and all values, should be monetarised.
  • However, you must never admit that markets are political, and involve political action by companies to get the best regulations for themselves, and to gain subsidies for themselves.
  • In this set up, any action that makes a profit is good. There is no responsibility outside of making a profit. Hence all political and legal acts and decisions are likely for sale. Corruption is the norm.

6) Labour is unimportant

Classical liberalism identified “labor” as the human act that both created and justified private property. Neoliberlism:

lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts…. Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. 

Mirowski argues that individuals are not important to neoliberals. Individuals are just conglomerations, projects, ready to be broken up when needed. The corporation is a person, the person is a corporation. No one has any interests

  • I’m not sure I entirely agree with this. I think is is possible that this is what neoliberals aim for, for the plebs, or the workers. You are what you are paid for, no more, and you are subject to the flows of the market, and if you cannot cope with that, or object to that, then tough. I suspect individual interest exists at the managerial and stockholder level, where market power exists, provided that personal interest is submerged in the corporate interest, or the owners’ interest.
  • The problem for me, is that, it seems that for neoliberal rights come directly out of ownership. You have the rights of ownership of your body, for example, and no more rights than that. Which in practice means you can be bought, polluted, disposed of, paid off, and so on. If you cannot defend your property or cannot protect yourself against disposability in a court case, you have nothing.

7) Liberty has nothing to do with politics and democracy

Freedom is hard to define, but it has nothing to do with democracy, and absolutely nothing to do with cooperating in acts against the ruling class, or the ruling market.

Hayek feels he must distinguish “personal liberty” from subjective freedom, since personal liberty does not entail political liberty. Late in life, Milton Friedman posited three species of freedom — economic, social and political — but it appears that economic freedom was the only one that mattered. 

In neoliberal theory, coercion can only come from governments, never from markets, corporations, or lack of money. There is no form of human freedom which might require support, help, or a useful context. Freedom is simply the absence of any restrictions, other than market restrictions – which are considered to be natural.

They suggest that resistance to their project is futile, as going along with it is the only freedom that exists.

  • As suggested by Slobodian, the only real neoliberal freedom is submission to the market, as constructed by neoliberals, and to the results it generates. Again they pretend the results of human action are as inescapable as the ‘laws’ of nature – indeed the laws of nature are apparently far more flexible than the market, which is one reason why they do not worry about market effects on the planet.
  • Freedom usually becomes a choice between priced options, or products.

7a) Knowledge is limited

Knowledge is limited, except for knowledge about how good the market is. There is no real information outside the information processor of the market. We could never effectively do anything knowledgeably other than act in the market. “Knowledge can be used to its fullest only if it is comprehensively owned and priced.” Education is not aimed at being transformative, or cultivating a personal good independent of the market, but to be geared at fitting into jobs and subservience to the market.

I don’t understand the following sentence but here it is anyway:

Meditation upon our limitations leads to inquiry into how markets work, and meta-reflection on our place in larger orders, something that neoliberals warn is beyond our ken. Knowledge then assumes global institutional dimensions, and this undermines the key doctrine of the market as transcendental superior information processor.

  • The fact that, if there is such a thing as a universal information processor, it is not the market but the global ecology (which gives severe feedback to people who act contrary to its dynamics), is irrelevant. In neoliberalism, markets rule over everything and this is not only supposedly a fact, but supposedly a moral good.
  • Everything, and everyone, is only worth the price it can command on the market. Free stuff (like air) is only good if it can be made saleable.

8) Capital must flow globally.

No government has the right to stop the flow of its countries’ money or products. To support this lack of rights, neoliberals invented non-democratic institutions “for the economic and political discipline of nation-states.” That is, they made national attempts at financial sovereignty, or market governance, weaker still. The idea was to impose neoliberal political principles on all people engaged in trade.

  • Neoliberal institutions enforced lowering of social security and social safety nets, attempted to prohibit any attempt to favour local producers or entrepreneurs. They favoured paying back debt to overseas lenders above local prosperity. They favoured the resources of small, or ‘underdeveloped’, states being plundered by overseas companies, as that is what happens in an open market. They appeared to want to free the market up for the biggest players, which would remove the smaller players who did not have the economies of scale.

This series of action probably also furthered “the growth of shadow and offshore banking”, the growth of tax shelters and so on.

  • This development is helped considerably by the development of the internet and communication networks.
  • This development also furthered the neoliberal protection of corporate monopolies. The bigger the company, the more effective it can be at suppressing other commercial developments throughout the world. Of course, ‘the market’ may lead to incompetent monopolies collapsing, but that is not evidence that the monopoly was great, or satisfying its customers, in the first place.

9) Massive inequality in wealth is entirely natural and beneficial

If some people starve or stagnate while others accumulate sizable proportions of the world’s wealth, it is not a failing of the market. This result is all about ability and shows the vibrancy of capitalism. Massive inequality is supposedly a force for progress, not a force for oppression; “the rich are not parasites, but a boon to mankind.” They, and only they, generate wealth. Demands for greater equality, or constraints on inequality, are just the result of envy, and come from people who are sore losers. Neoliberals pretend that inequalities of wealth do not lead to inequalities of power, life satisfaction or survival. If they did admit this, it would not bother them.

“Social justice” is blind, because it remains forever cut off from the Wisdom of the Market. 

  • Indeed, any residual attempts to support ordinary people are going to be blamed for economic hardship and market collapses. In practice, the State exists to bail out the already hyper-wealthy from their mistakes and hardships. This shows the real politics of the “free market”.
  • Neoliberalism insists on inheritance of wealth, but does not factor it in to its analysis of the workings of the market and the concentration of wealth. Everyone supposedly has equal opportunity to participate.

10) “Corporations can do no wrong, or at least they are not to be blamed if they do.”

starting with the University of Chicago law and economics movement, and then progressively spreading to treatments of entrepreneurs and the “markets for innovation,” neoliberals began to argue consistently that not only was monopoly not harmful to the operation of the market, but an epiphenomenon attributable to the misguided activities of the state and powerful interest groups. 

As corporations can do no wrong, it was also argued that Corporate heads needed bigger salaries, share options, and bonuses, together with golden handshakes when they stuffed up and were asked to leave.

  • This excess wealth acted as a signal to the market that the firm was hiring the very best possible, while the wealth the high level executives earned showed how good they were and, by comparison, how useless ordinary workers were. It was a way of transferring wealth away from the workers, and legitimising that transfer.
  • Corporate success indicates corporate virtue. They worked with the market, which is the measure of value

11) Markets always supply the best solution

“Any problem, economic or otherwise, has a market solution, given sufficient ingenuity.” In effect this means transferring power and solutions to those who are successful in the market and wealthy, and as pointed out earlier, ignoring any suggestion that systems are not always beneficially adaptive for all participants.

pollution is abated by the trading of “emissions permits”; inadequate public education is rectified by “vouchers”; auctions can adequately structure exclusionary communication channels;  poverty-stricken sick people lacking access to health care can be incentivized to serve as guinea pigs for privatized clinical drug trials; poverty in underdeveloped nations can be ameliorated by “microloans”; terrorism by disgruntled disenfranchised foreigners can be offset by a “futures market in terrorist acts.”

This tends to make financial securitisation even more complicated – as was seen in the 2007 financial crash. And it does not matter if no one understood what they were doing as the market would sort it out for the best. If the market collapsed with massive pain for those who were supposed to be served by the market, that was acceptable, as long as those who profited from the market were helped out. Thus in the financial crisis, many American Citizens lost their homes, because banks called in the loans which were geared to be unpayable. The banks then put the houses on the market and the house market collapsed, which threatened the banks, and the bank executives were looked after, not the home owners.

Neoliberals argued that:

the best people to clean up the crisis were the same bankers and financiers who created it in the first place, since they clearly embodied the best understanding of the shape of the crisis. 

  • Taxpayer’s money could have been given to home owners to help pay off the loans, and the loans made less penalising. This would have prevented homelessness and kept the banks in business, but that was not even a visible option. Money had to go directly to the bankers, and many neoliberal politicians complained when Obama insisted that the money was merely a loan, not a gift which could go straight to executive bonuses and parties.

12) Expand the prison system

[N]eoliberal policies lead to unchecked expansion of the penal sector, as has happened in the United States…. [I]ntensified state power in the police sphere (and a huge expansion of prisoners incarcerated) is fully complementary with the neoliberal conception of freedom. In the opinion of the neoliberal Richard Posner, “The function of criminal sanction in a capitalist market economy, then, is to prevent individuals from bypassing the efficient market.” In other words “Participate in the market, or else!”

Criminal law applies to the people. Tort law, or escaping the law, applies to the wealthy (unless, perhaps, they have defrauded the wealthy). The poor or dispossessed need to be ordered and punished, to protect the market.

economic competition imposes natural order on the rich, because they have so much to lose. The poor need to be kept in line by a strong state, because they have so little to lose.

Again, amongst the commercial class, nobody was found guilty of any fraud or crime in the financial crisis, despite multiple appearances of deceptive behaviour, but thousands of ordinary Americans were found guilty of being behind on their mortgages and thrown out of their homes.

  • Private prisons have no profit incentive to rehabilitate prisoners. They have an incentive to get repeat custom, and thus make more money, or at least stay in business. They increase crime for profit
  • They also have an incentive to use prisoners as cheap slave labour, and thus compete with normal workers, to lower wages.

13) Tolerate Supportive Authoritarian movements.

Neoliberals will support whatever will support the authority of wealth and corporate power. Hence, neoliberals developed a deliberate policy of courting the religious Right, so as to justify the ‘morals’ of the market and keep votes.

  • The ideal religions were those who asserted that wealth was good, that God rewarded the virtuous and ‘the saved’ with wealth, and that those without wealth were without faith, otherwise immoral, or being tested by God.
  • This has now morphed into an acceptance and support of authoritarian fascism, as with Trump and the promotion of white power, to support corporate power. This will have the same consequences as it did in Nazi Germany. The initially controllable will prove not to be controllable, and wealth will be preserved by accommodation to the fascism and murder.

Conclusion

Neoliberalism provides ersatz liberty, bounded by mass imprisonment. It promotes faith in the “free market”, and denies the possibility that free markets can ever have, or do have, destructive results.

Destruction only arises through government acting on the market to make the market fairer.

Liberty is defined as having nothing to do with political participation for ordinary people. It ignores the participation of the wealthy in the State.

It pretends corporations cannot, and do not, have political power.

It disciplines workers, and rewards executive incompetence, through the State.

It is a political movement which exists to support corporate power, and plutocracy, acting within the market and the State.

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Trumping peace

January 15, 2021

As we know the Republicans are calling for Trump to be left alone, to make peace and not dangerously rile his followers.

By this we know two things which should have been blindingly obvious for a long time.

Republicans, as seen in Congress, not ordinary American members of the party, are:

  • not the party of law and order and
  • not conservatives.

The are the party of law and order for everyone other than themselves. They seem to think they are the sacred elite who can do anything and never have to face up to responsibility for their actions.

They spent years upon years chasing the Clintons and failing to get anywhere, but with one of their own who is blatantly and repeatedly corrupt they are prepared to look the other way to “make peace”.

With the last impeachment, they decided not to hear the evidence and not to bring Trump before them to testify; well he might have perjured himself out of habit and that would have been bad – for them.

There would be screams if the Democrats had done this with either of the Clintons, but the Democrats believed that law applied to everyone. So the Clintons stood before the bar and the committees to answer questions. Republican elites apparently don’t have to do that.

It also seems perfectly ok to these Republicans to demand long prison terms for BLM rioters, but to excuse Trumpists and neo-fascists. Is this a surprise, or is that the normal policy of privileging their own side?

We know these Republicans are not conservatives as they have spent the last forty years ripping down the checks and balances that protect ordinary people from capitalism and the misfortune which can affect anyone, while making sure the wealth made by workers goes to the hyper-wealthy in a truly vast piece of social engineering. We can also note that because of their media, they have been able to use the justified discontent of majority America at the results of these policies, to get support to do even more of this social engineering.

Here they seem to be simply demonstrating they have no respect for truth, impartiality, tradition, responsibility or anything other than their victory, and the victory of the hyper-rich they represent. Victory is all. Obliteration of opposition is all. This is not Conservatism.

It is true that Republicans would face difficulties if they impeached Trump for lying about the election to overthrow the result and for his stirring of ‘insurrection’ to impose more neoliberal dominance. If Trump is impeached for this, then what do they do about the 130 or so other Republicans who also lied about the election and attempted to overthrow the result, or at least cast doubt on the result? Should those Republicans be cast out of office as well, with fresh elections for their seats, or should we just go along with the idea that Republicans can do anything and its ok?

Its clearly a moral quandary.

Given this lack of respect for law and tradition, the Republicans do appear to be a party of proto-fascists. That could well be why they don’t want to offend those neo-fascists who support Trump, as those people could form Republican shock troops.

The real question remains whether Republican Elites will bring peace by standing up for principles, and making sure that the message is given that it is not acceptable to lie, cheat and threaten violence, or whether they will just protect themselves, and declare anything is ok if it could bring Republicans more power to oppress everyone else.

The request for peace, is a request to let their bygones and failures be bygones, so they can keep steaming ahead to more of the same.

Anyone who was conservative and in support of law and order, should recognise this.

*****************

Endnote:

There are people commenting that some Republicans want to impeach Trump, but their and their families lives have been threatened if they do [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. I clearly don’t know the truth of these allegations, but they are not improbable. We should remember that Trump was refused the rights to a Sydney casino because of his ties with the NY mafia. We should also remember the Right’s Stochastic Terrorism, anyone could be being threatened, when news commentary says “if we don’t stop the impeachment of Trump, then people might get hurt” – rather than “we should stand up to intimidation”.

Sadly this shows where Trump has led the Republicans. While it is easy for me to say, it is probably true that if you yield to terrorism and threats of terrorism, then you will face more terrorism, and the demands will get more and more intense.

You have to stand up for principle, or you will be chained by violence.

It is also true that a Republican Party which was in favour of Rule of Law, and was Conservative, would publicize the threats, and their stance against them, to show they could not be swayed in this manner.

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Zogopolitics

January 15, 2021

Let’s just pretend that the media was nearly all owned and controlled by one slightly divided faction – lets call them zogopolites.

Zogopolites only report news and opinion which they like. There might be a little difference between the Sydney Zogopolite and the Australian Zogopolite, but not that much. The one on the far up pretends it is sensible and centre and that the other media is far down, but they both ignore the down who don’t have any media at all, expect the papers they publish in their back sheds.

If the down have policies, ideas and information, you won’t get to hear it, but you might be told that all you hear outside the Australian Zogopolite is filthy downism, and you may get some vague distorted idea of how evil the down are.

The zogopolites distort and lie about ‘opinion’ and science they do not like, or which might cause followers to think about whether the zogopolitism was actually survivable. The media calling itself centerist, spends a lot of money hiring people who scream and shout a lot, because the point is that people should be angry and contemptuous of the down – that way they won’t listen to them, in the unlikely event they were ever to hear any.

Zogopolites all protest strongly if anyone on the up gets ‘censored’ – even if that person has access to other news media, or even their own news media – but it completely ignores censorship of the down. So people might even think zogopolitism was “fair and balanced”. What you don’t hear won’t bother you and you won’t notice it, and they more or less never report on the Down except abusively or falsely , so it seems normal. They may even deny that zogopolites exist, their ideology is commonsense after all. You must be deluded to disagree.

The up think that you should have to hear them and nothing else.

If we were living in this world we might think we have non-zogopolite media on youtube or something, but somehow most of it runs with the same kind of line; we must ascend! we must ascend! descent is bad!!!! We might flatter ourselves that we do research, when all we do is look for stuff that confirms our feelings, which have been cultivated by zogopolites – remember the shouting and lies?

Given that zogopolite media will largely not report the truth, or let other opinion in, and it is close to impossible to set up competing media, what should people in this world do?

Should they just say that is the way it is, and we will believe zogopolite reality because its there, and it owns and controls the media? or is there some other solution?

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Calls for Unity in the US

January 13, 2021

Like the Republicans say, we need unity and harmony at this moment of national upheaval and sorrow. We need unity in standing up for Morals and Truth, and we need unity in declaring that Trump is a continual and unrepentant liar, and morally unfit to hold the position of President ever again, even for a day.

We need to admit that neo-fascism is a danger and that the riot involved neo-fascists, who declared their presence and praised their own actions.

We need to admit that even if Trump did not deliberately incite the riots, and was used by other sinister forces for their own purposes, he did nothing to try and stop those riots. He approved them by inaction.

We also need to truthfully reaffirm the integrity of the electoral process and the result of the election. Although having an inquiry into gerrymandering, voter suppression, intimidation of officials and so on, might be useful.

We may also need to investigate whether the defense of Capitol Hill was deliberately weak, whether the National Guard was held back, and whether rioters received inside help.

Americans may need unity in finding out why police reacted so strongly to BLM riots with weaponry and assault, and seemed so unprepared for the Trump riots, despite weeks of warnings.

Americans certainly don’t need to gain unity by ignoring the problems they face.

This might be difficult for some Republicans, but whoever said virtue was easy?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Endnote – uncertainties

I’ve read that the March for Science with Bill Nye had a bigger and heavier armed police presence than the Save America March. I don’t know if that is true, but it may need checking.

Normally in approved US demonstrations you are not allowed to bring weapons, poles, body armour, backpacks which could store weaponry, and such. At this protest there were no attempts to stop people from being equipped for violence.

If this is true, this also needs investigation.

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Nuclear Energy and the Greens

January 11, 2021

The issue

Nuclear advocates in Australia often blame the Greens for the complete lack of nuclear energy in that country. They may argue that the Greens are obstacles to climate action in general, and try and prove this by saying the Greens opposed the first Carbon pricing scheme.

A1) Greens are not that powerful

The main problem with this argument is that the Greens are not that powerful.

While the Greens do oppose nuclear energy, because they think problems with it (such as waste, rare but massive accidents) have not been solved, if the two major parties wish to ignore them, then the Greens are ignored, as is the case with economic policy, or coal mining.

The Greens do not own or control any media, they don’t have regular spots on media, and generally cannot even get their policies reported, other than with denigration and inaccuracy. They have close to no public propaganda force, they can use, unlike the other parties (particularly the Coalition).

Neither the Coalition nor Labor have a pro-nuclear policy which is disrupted by the Greens. The Coalition has been in government a long time, and nothing has happened. During their time in power there has been zero levels of research into nuclear energy generation, zero nuclear energy generation, and zero plans for nuclear energy generation. Lucas Heights does not count; it primarily exists for small experiments and medical isotope generation. The Greens cannot be blamed for this ongoing situation. If either of the major parties wanted anything different, then it would have happened.

If you want to blame anyone blame the Coalition or Labor, or the electorate in general for worrying about where the reactors would be placed.

A2: Carbon Pricing

Greens also get blamed for the failure of carbon pricing in Australia. This story is not entirely accurate. Again the Greens where the minor party. If Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Turnbull could have agreed on a carbon trading scheme then it would have gone ahead. They did not. Turnbull lost the support of his party, probably because of its cheerful connection with fossil fuel companies. Can’t blame the Greens for that.

Rudd refused to negotiate with the Greens. He just told them to take it or leave it. Can’t blame the Greens for rejecting that strategy either.

Even so, the Greens also took note of Treasury modelling which implied the Rudd policy was extremely expensive and would not reduce carbon emissions for a long time. Given Rudd’s failure to get the Coalition to support a policy similar to the one the Coalition went into the election proposing, the Greens cannot be blamed for his failure. The Coalition was the obstacle.

Furthermore, the Greens worked with Gillard to get a system which did not rip off ordinary taxpayers and which lowered emissions almost immediately. It was not perfect, but it was much better. It also shows what Rudd could have achieved, if he had chosen to work with the Greens, rather than against them and with the Coalition.

The Gillard scheme was destroyed by the Coalition. Not the Greens. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that the Coalition would not have destroyed any form of carbon pricing, given their love for fossil fuel companies.

Again the Greens cannot be blamed for this.

Failings of nuclear Advocates

It may be personal experience bias, but I more often read nuclear advocates arguing against renewables than I read them arguing against fossil fuels. Just as I read them opposing declarations of climate emergency or emissions targets. So I’m not sure I agree about the innocence of nuclear advocates. There is certainly no attempt to win allies in the Greens, just lecture them and blame them.

It is also extremely hard to evaluate nuclear plans that do not exist in reality, which almost no one has any enthusiasm for, and for a kind of truly enormous project which Australia has no commercial experience with. Current total energy generation in Australia is about 265 TWh per year; Hinkley Point in the UK is supposed to be able to generate 3,260MW (not sure over what time period, the text is ambiguous, but I presume a year). That is a reasonable number of reactors to build from scratch, in time to mitigate climate change, and there are no local companies which could be expected to carry out such a project.

Conclusion

Green obstacles to climate action are trivial when compared to the Coalition. It would be more practical to try and get the Coalition onside for nuclear climate action if anyone useful was really serious about nuclear power, but we all can be pretty sure that is not going to happen. And I’m reasonably sure there is no real attempt by anyone with any capacity to build nuclear power, to get it going.

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Stochastic Terrorism

January 10, 2021

I generally don’t like memes, and I’ve no idea where this originates, but its a useful idea.

Image

The Idea

The earliest account I’ve seen, and some of the wording in the meme comes from this source is an anonymous article in the Daily Kos from January 2011: Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist.  The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion.

While [the ‘terrorist’] action may have been statistically predictable… the specific person and the specific act are not predictable (yet).

We can think of this as complexity in motion. Just as we know climate change will produce storms that will destroy something valuable and important, we don’t quite know what. Its a dangerous weapon, in that it could bite the person who uses it, but I guess the media is used to direct the actor to hit someone who the stochastic terrorist does not like and has (along with other people) been denouncing.

The Problem

The stochastic terrorist then has plausible deniability: “Oh, it was just a lone nut, nobody could have predicted he would do that, and I’m not responsible for what people in my audience do.”

The expectable ‘missile’ gets arrested or killed, and the stochastic terrorist keeps their position, and possibly gets to tut-tut about how violent their opposition are, and thus encourage more missiles.

The author explains that because the missile could be a ‘lone wolf,’ they are extremely hard to pick up in advance. There is almost no trail and nothing to draw attention to them: “They are law enforcement’s and intel’s worst nightmare.” They are people who are unstable, and just need a small nudge to start planning something that will make an impact and give them notoriety. This is almost a normal part of everyday life in capitalism.

Anyone who is familiar with marketing and advertising knows how this works, and advertisers often target their messages to people who are “ready to buy” and just need a little persuading.  

Perpetrators seem inherently excusable. There is no direct link between them and the result, AND there are so many of them doing this, it becomes hard to assign any individual responsibility.

Bias as entertainment?

Many politicians and political commentators know they are not trying to convince the people on other sides. They are just trying to get their own people worked up, in a lather, vote for the right people, and keep tuned to the show (purely commercial truth distortion). But sometimes this is going to result in a missile, even if they are not being deliberate about this. Listening to the rhetoric, as when Alan Jones talked of someone killing Julia Gillard, it is hard to think they are entirely innocent – for them to be entirely innocent they would have to be entirely ignorant about people and what they are doing, which seems unlikely – but it is possible…

Some people will take talk about Democrats taking away their guns, putting Republicans in concentration camps, wanting to destroy America, injecting them with micro-chips, having health care death panels, taking away their jobs and giving them to blacks, engaging in a coup, inventing Covid and fixing the election as being true, and act appropriately. The more this kind of fantasy is repeated from show to show, and politician to politician, the more likely people are to believe it. The more it is fantasy, the less it needs anything to do with reality, the more profound and hidden it can seem, and the more it is likely to mesh with someone’s prior beliefs.

While Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, and O’Reilly (or Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin etc.) don’t (or didn’t) do non-verbal violence themselves, they give an unstable someone else all the ‘alternative facts’ and conceptual violence, they need to suffer fear, gain a grudge and take action. They reinforce each other’s effect, as if people hear similar things from others they classify as similar to themselves (“Republican”) then what they hear tends to be taken as true.

Even if Trump does not know what he is doing, he picks the technique up from the media he watches.

The Advantage

Stochastic terrorists also have a great advantage. They don’t have to be reasonable, logical or coherent in their arguments. They don’t have to care about the truth, or accuracy, of what they say. They don’t have to even attempt to specify what is known and what is supposition. They can pretend they are comedy or satire and they can pretend they are 100% true at the same time. They can say whatever they like as long as it’s passionate and resonates with their audience and keeps that audience listening. They can change their mind in nothing flat, as long as the target remains the same. They can be ambiguous and say that what you think they said is not what they said.

For example:

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick –if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.

Speech: Donald Trump in Wilmington, NC – August 9, 2016

Many people took this false statement (Clinton did not want to abolish the Second Amendment, ‘essentially’ or otherwise) as an invitation for gun lovers to kill her or ‘her judges’ in advance of her getting “to put her judges in.” But a person from the campaign said:

It’s called the power of unification – 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power.

Trump Campaign Statement on Dishonest Media

Note the press release title. Always say the others are lying, they have to be evil, that is part of the strategy.

More recently Trump has cast serious aspersions on electoral office workers, Democrat scrutineers and fellow Republicans who would not go along with his attempt to fix the election vote. He has denounced them furiously. Some of them seem to have been stalked and received death threats. This was to be expected. So far no one has died or been seriously assaulted (as far as I know), but it is possible. The big problem is whether this will scare off those who consider that they should be making sure the election is safe and legal, and only encourage those who are sure their job is to make sure their side wins. In any case Trump would deny he was encouraging terror.

This procedure becomes almost impossible to argue with, and the impossibility of arguing against the stochastic terrorist, then shows their followers how true the arguments are. And if you care about ‘free speech’ how could you stop them, whether they know what they are doing or not?

Right Wing Terror?

The foaming at the mouth, abusive, anger raising news commentary originated with the Right and still comes primarily from the Right, so we could expect that this would increase Right wing violence.

American ABC wrote in May 2020 that:

a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault…..

in at least 12 cases perpetrators hailed Trump in the midst or immediate aftermath of physically assaulting innocent victims. In another 18 cases, perpetrators cheered or defended Trump while taunting or threatening others. And in another 10 cases, Trump and his rhetoric were cited in court to explain a defendant’s violent or threatening behavior….

the vast majority of the cases – 41 of the 54 – reflect someone echoing presidential rhetoric, not protesting it.

Levine, ‘No Blame?’ ABC News finds 54 cases invoking ‘Trump’ in connection with violence, threats, alleged assaults. ABCNews, 30 May 2020

This number of cases may be trivial. But Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), reinforces the general impression, by saying:

The greatest threat we face in the homeland is that posed by lone actors radicalized online who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons. We see this lone actor threat manifested both within domestic violent extremists (DVEs) and homegrown violent extremists (HVEs), two distinct sets of individuals that generally self-radicalize and mobilize to violence on their own. DVEs are individuals who commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and anti-government sentiment. HVEs are individuals who have been radicalized primarily in the United States, and who are inspired by, but not receiving individualized direction from, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs)….

the underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism—such as perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach, sociopolitical conditions, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and reactions to legislative actions—remain constant. 

the FBI is most concerned about lone offender attacks, primarily shootings, as they have served as the dominant lethal mode for domestic violent extremist attacks. More deaths were caused by DVEs than international terrorists in recent years. 

Worldwide Threats to the Homeland, FBI.gov 24 September 2020 [emphasis added]

The UN claims “a 320 per cent rise in attacks conducted by individuals affiliated with [right wing] movements and ideologies over the past five years” (emphasis added).

The University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database states that in the US between 2015 and 2019, anti-government types killed 64 people, anti-semites killed 17 people, incels killed 13 people, neo-nazis 12 people, white supremacists 64 people, and jihadis 84 people (p.6). [Glen Beck and his ilk can perhaps be excused the jihadis, but the principle remains, no matter who does it. ]

the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the United States in 2019 were non-lethal (84%, excluding perpetrator deaths), and these attacks were also motivated by diverse ideological influences, including antifascist, anti-government, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-white, left-wing, pro-choice, and white supremacist/nationalist extremism

Global Terrorism Database p.3.

The Centre for Strategic Studies says:

Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.

right-wing terrorism not only accounts for the majority of incidents but has also grown in quantity over the past six years.

The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States, CSS, 17 June 2020

I would suspect that ethnonationalists tend to be of the right, just as the neo-nazis and white supremacists tend to support Trump, so that is 60% of all attacks.

For those who need to be told these things, I am not saying right wing terrorism and assault is the only form terrorism, assault, or riot. That would be stupid. This is about the ways the terror can be ‘organised’ through apparently random events, and that can apply everywhere. I merely assert that it is likely to be more common on the right, at the moment.

To be even clearer. The 316 deaths from ‘terrorism’ between 2015 to 2019, is far less than other deaths. For example its less than 10% of the official deaths from Covid-19 in 2020. In 2017 alone US police shot and killed 987 people (a relatively bad year). In 2019, 793 workers aged 65 years and older died due to an occupational injury, obviously far more workers died because of injury at work in total – the death rate is about 3.5 occupational injury deaths per 100,000 employed workers. Given there are about 130.6 million full time workers in the US in 2019, then that is a large number of deaths from work.

It is far more sensible to be terrified of US police and US employers than of terrorists.

There is no Conclusion

Obviously it is easy to accuse people of working up terrorism stochasically. In a zone of free speech it is hard to ban speech or writing on the grounds it may induce harm (even if it almost certainly will), although conspiracy laws and incitement laws exist. My guess is that it will also be impossible to curtail this kind of ‘news’ and incitement as it is now standard – especially in Mr. Murdoch’s empire. We also cannot expect people to dismiss hysteria and lies as showing that these opinion hosts and politicians have no good ideas or no valid arguments. Indeed it is likely that because this way of emoting is successful, and generates the hatred which justifies its use, it will spread even further.

It is likely more people will die, and more people will believe comforting lies (“we couldn’t have really lost!”) and discussion between groups will continue to lessen and break down. As I’ve said before, there is a case that this politics of abuse and culture war started as a deliberate neoliberal strategy to protect a Right wing politics of further entrenching wealth and the power of wealth, but it now perhaps has consequences which were not originally intended.

If people become terrorised that they might be killed or beaten up for expressing a view, or a researched finding because others will hate them, then society will die, because the information about the world that we use to steer it as best we can, will no longer be accurate, and we will flounder before our problems.

This already seems to be the case – see ecological destruction.

The author of the Daily Kos article quotes an article which says:

“It’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show.”

and responds:

I say it damn well is fair to blame them when it happens again and again and predictably again.

Once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.  

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Nuclear Energy in 2021

January 10, 2021

1) After about 70 years of building, nuclear is at about 5% of the world’s total energy supply according to the IEA.

2) If nuclear energy is going to be our saviour, then it needs the same exponential growth that renewables require. A growth it has never sustained in the world as a whole over those 70 years.

3) At the moment there is almost no serious agitation in Australia from politicians or business for even one nuclear power station, never mind the number we need to replace all use of coal, gas and oil.

4) On the other hand, there is agitation from business to build renewables, despite the best efforts of the Federal government to discourage this and promote a “gas led recovery” as the alternative to renewables. The government is not promoting nuclear as an alternative.

5) Avoiding declarations of climate emergency and the setting of emissions targets, as seems common amongst nuclear proponents, does nothing to help energy transition or nuclear energy. Indeed it resists recognising the need for such transitions. No one is going to transition to nuclear for the hell of it.

6) For nuclear energy to work, just as for renewables to work, we need to encourage electrification of all energy use, and the construction of a decent electrical infrastructure. This agitation, again, seems rare amongst nuclear proponents.

7) We could argue that nuclear proponents appear to aim at slowing and hindering transition to renewables, and hence any realistic energy transition at all. Therefore it is possible to suggest that they are inadvertently(?) assisting fossil fuel companies to stay in business.

8) Nuclear proponents in Australia don’t have to behave like this. They could argue for a transition which simply requires:

  • a) recognition of climate emergency, to help boost action,
  • b) emissions targets (perhaps with the addition of a carbon price) to help boost action,
  • c) general electrification, and construction of a new electrical infrastructure to cope that electrification,
  • d) complete phase out of coal, gas and oil for use and export,
  • e) money for research into energy sources with high energy return on energy input (EREI) and low greenhouse-gas emissions, and
  • f) nuclear as one of the energy sources we might need along with renewables or other possible sources.

But sadly this seems rare. They are generally more interested in slapping the Greens, as if with the Greens blamed, transition will just occur by itself.

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