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Basic Complex Systems for eco-social analysis again

December 25, 2020

This is another go at formulating a list of basic systems which need to be considered for eco-social analysis. For earlier versions see here, here and here.

Introduction

As a guide to the factors involved in eco-social relations we can point to a number of different, but interacting systems. This list is not claiming to be complete, but it can be used as a set of reminders when we try to make analyses of our contemporary situation, and we may be able to make some general statements about how they interact. The order of relative importance of these systems is a matter for investigation, and the order of their presentation, in this blog post, is not a claim about their relative importance.

The seven main systems, discussed here, are

Political;
Economic (extraction);
Energy;
Waste, pollution and dispersal;
Information;
Technological;
Planetary Boundaries (geography) :

All these systems are complex systems, and it is generally impossible to predict their specific course. They are also prone to rapid change, gradual instability, and the ‘seeking’ of equilibrium.

Political System

The political system, includes:

the modes of struggle encouraged, discouraged, enabled or disabled,
the patterns and divisions (the ‘factioning’) within the State and wider society,
the differing effects of different bases of power: such as monetary power, communication power, power through violence or threat, hierarchical power, religious and cosmological power (the power to delimit the official views of the way that the cosmos works), organisational power, etc.,
who gets into positions of power and how, and so on,

Politics can affect all the other human systems. What activities (extraction, energy use, organisation etc.) are encouraged or discouraged, the kinds of regulation that apply, what counts as pollution or risk, what information is easily available, and who is to be trusted, and so on.

Political systems can forcibly ignore pollution or the consequences of energy production, economic extraction, the wage system, and so on, effectively rendering them part of a general unconscious, which eventually ‘bites back’.

Economic System

Most of the dominant economic systems currently in action can be described loosely as ‘capitalist’. The economic system involves modes of appropriation, extraction, property, commodification, exchange, circulation of ‘products’, technological systems, energy use, as well as accumulation of social power and wealth and so on. Most of which depend upon the State for their existence and reinforcement, although they may also challenge organisation and politics within the State. There is no inherent stability in current economic systems.

In many sociological theories the patterns of economic organisation and behaviour are known as the ‘infrastructure’ and are held to be determinate of most other social behaviours, primarily because the economic system seems the most obvious determinate of what people have to do in order to survive.

This organisation may have apparently unintended consequences, such as producing periodic crashes, or destroying the ecological base of the economy, and therefore threatening that organisation. They also may have quite expectable consequences, which are downplayed. In capitalism, political and economic patternings tend to be describable as ‘plutocratic’; as wealth allows the purchase of all other forms of power. However, different factions in the State can ally with different or competing factions in the economic system. For example, different government departments or political factions can support different types of energy: fossil fuels, renewables, or nuclear. The political system legitimates and enforces, allowable modes of extraction, property and pollution, and regulates economic behaviour among different social groups. Economics always involves political as well as economic struggle; politics is part of ‘the market’. ‘Crony Capitalism’ is normal capitalism.

Extraction

The Extraction system is part of the economic system, but it might be useful to separate it out from the economic system because extraction is one of the prime ways in which economies interact with ecologies and because different kinds of economies can use similar extraction systems. Extraction not only involves extraction of what gets defined as ‘resources’ (minerals, naturally occurring substances such as oil, coal or timber, and so on) but also the ways that human food gets extracted for consumption, via agriculture, gathering, hunting, industrial fishing, and so on. Ecologies are not passive, and they respond to human or other actions in ways which are often unpredictable in specific, but still disruptive. Ecologies seem to need attention, for survival to be possible in the long term.

Extraction in capitalist and developmentalist societies, often seems harmful to the functioning of ecologies, perhaps because of the need for continual growth, and thus a need for increasing extraction. Clearly, not all forms of extraction need to be destructive of the ecologies and geographies they depend upon. Extraction systems can allow the ecologies to repair after extraction, or attempt to rehabilitate the land. However, repair of ecologies can be considered an expense leading to reduction of profit, and hence is not attractive in a profit emphasising system.

As such, we can distinguish recoverable extraction, in which the ecologies and economies repair the damage from extraction, from irrecoverable extraction in which the ecologies and economies do not repair the damage from extraction within a useful time frame.

The Global Footprint network, suggests that:

Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and eight months to regenerate what we use in a year.
Global Footprint network. Ecological Footprint

If this is correct, then the current extraction and pollution systems are generally irrecoverable, and deleterious for human and planetary survival. Investigating the differences between harmful and less harmful modes of extraction may well produce useful insights.

Economies are not the only possible harmful extractive systems – cosmologies can also require irrecoverable extractive behaviour to build temples, or to show the ‘other-worldly’ specialness of humans, and so on.

Energy System

All life and its resulting ecologies involve transformation of energy. These transformations stretch from transformation of sunlight by plants, the digestion of plants, to thermal gradients in the deep sea, to atomic power. Eco-systems require a system of energy release, energy generation and energy transformation.

Transformation of energy, together with effective ecological functioning, is necessary for any human actions to occur. The human energy system powers all other human systems. Because food is necessary for human labour, cultivation of food can be considered to be part of the energy system. The energy system and its ‘infrastructure’, could seem to be as important as the economic infrastructure.

The human energy system is organised, at least in part, by the political and economic systems, and by the environmental systems available. The environmental system includes possible energy sources from plant material, animal strength and docility, fossil fuels, sunlight, wind and moving water. Human labour, and its organisation, is (and has been) part of the energy system, and while not yet, if ever, superseded completely, can be supplemented and possibly overpowered by technological sources of energy. Coal and oil power, for example, provide masses amounts more directed energy than can human labour, and this ability is important to understanding the patterning and possibilities of the economic and extraction system, and its relationship to colonial/imperial history. Modern military expansion and colonialism, largely depends on this ability to apply large amounts of energy to weaponry, movement and organisation.

Important parts of the energy system include the amounts of energy generally available for use, and the capacity for energy to be directed and applied. Non-directable energy is often wasted energy (entropy), and usually unavailable for constructive use.

Another vital point is that human production of, or using of, energy takes energy. No energy is entirely free.

The availability of energy is influenced by the Energy Return on Energy Input (EREI) or ‘Energy Return on Energy Investment’. The larger amount of units of energy applied to gain a unit of humanly directable energy output, the less excess energy is available.

Fossil fuels have historically had a very high EREI, but it is possible that this is declining otherwise nobody would be tempted by fracking, coal seam gas, tar sands, or deep sea drilling. All of which require large amounts of energy to begin with, have very high risks of extractive destruction, and fairly low profit margins when compared to the dangers.

Renewables and storage currently have a high energy cost to manufacture (and possibly a high extractive cost as well) but for most renewables, after they are installed, the EREI changes, as very little labour, or energy expenditure, is required to gain an energy output – it is more or less free – whereas fossil fuel energy generation requires continual energy use to find and process new fossil fuels and keep the power stations turning, and produce continual pollution from burning.

Social power and economics may affect the ways that energy is distributed, what uses are considered legitimate and so on. However, the energy system also influences what can be done in other systems, and in the costs (social, aesthetic, ecological or monetary) which influence choices about the constituents of energy systems The system’s pollution products, which may be significant factors in producing climate and ecological change, may eventually limit what can be done.

As the energy system determines what energy is available for use, it is not an unreasonable assumption that social power and organisation will be partly built around the energy system, and that changes in energy systems will change energy availability, what can be done or who can do it, and thus threaten established social orders. Threats to established orders will be resisted. If an energy transition does go ahead, it is likely that the established orders will try and preserve the patterns, of organisation, wealth and social power which have grown up under the old system.

One important question is ‘how do we transform the energy system without continuing a damaging extraction and pollution system?’

Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems

Transformation of materials through energy use, or through energy production, produces ‘waste’. The simplest human society imaginable (and this is an overt simplification), turns edible material into energy and human excreta, which in this case can usually be processed by the ecology – although, even then, dumping excreta into rivers may not help those downstream.

Understanding the Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems is also vital to understanding possible energy and economic transformations.

In this book we will define ‘Waste‘ as material which can be re-processed, or recycled, by the economy or eco-system, and ‘Pollution‘ as material which is not re-processable within an arbitrary useful time frame, say over hundreds of years or more. ‘Dispersal’ occurs when some essential material is dispersed into the system, and becomes largely unavailable for reuse without ‘uneconomic’ expenditures of finance or energy – as occurs with helium and phosphorus.

When too much waste for the systems to re-process is emitted, then waste becomes pollution. This is what has happened with CO₂. CO₂ is normally harmless, even required for the system to work, but too much CO₂ changes the ways eco and climate systems work. CO₂ has also been dispersed into the atmosphere which makes CO₂ extraction, which is stated to be essential by the IPCC and IEA for climate stability, difficult and costly in terms of energy expenditure.

These concepts, along with ‘extraction’, directly import the ecosystem into the economy, while pointing out that what counts as allowable waste, pollution or dispersal can change, economically, politically, scientifically and ‘practically’.

Waste, pollution and dispersal from the energy system and from modes of extraction, enter into the political system because that system decides and regulates what can be emitted, and where, and who is too valuable to be poisoned by the pollution. The political makes the laws allowing, diminishing or preventing, pollution. Often localisable pollution is dumped in ‘wasted’ zones or on poorer, less noticeable and less powerful people.

Energy and extraction may not the only significant sources of pollution, and other sources of pollution need to be curtailed, or turned into sources of waste.

Information about pollution from the fossil fuel energy system and from the extraction systems, provide a major driver for energy transformation, partly because this issue seems ‘economically’ politically and energetically solvable, while other sources of pollution seem more difficult to deal with.

However, even facing the problem, provokes a likely politicisation of the information system. How would people, in general, become aware of pollution and who primarily suffers from its effects, especially when it threatens established systems of power?

Information System

What people become aware of, what can be understood or done depends on the Information System. This system determines what feedback is available to conscious humans, about what is happening in general. The information system, in theory, could allow humans to recognise eco-feedback in response to systems such as waste and pollution, or extraction. Information is vital to social functioning, and part of social functioning. Accurate information is even more useful.

Unfortunately, information about complex systems, such as societies or ecologies, is almost always limited and inadequate. Some information may tend to be symbolised rather than literal, because of the difficulties of representing the information in a literal form (these difficulties can be political as much as in terms of human capacity).

Information systems can also hide, or distort, ecological feedback, because of flaws in their design, or because powerful people do not want it to bring the problems to general attention. This adds to confusion, and to the possibilities, that the information system primarily reflects human psychological projection, fantasy and shadow politics.

The political and economic systems also directly impact on the information systems, as politics often centres on propagation of politically or economically favourable information and the inhibition of politically unfavourable or economically information. Economic power, ownership and control of sources of information can also influence what information is collected, processed and made widely available.

Information is not so much ‘received’ as interpreted, so Cosmologies and politics which provide a framework for interpretation, play a big part in how the information is interpreted and, then, what kind of information is transmitted.

Government, Religious, Economic, or military (etc) regulation can be a further important part of both the information and political systems, sometimes affecting what is likely to be transmitted. Information systems, in turn, indicate the availability or coherence of regulation and the understanding of problems and predicaments. Regulation is based on information selection as well as political allegiance, and regulations can be opaque, or hidden, as well as easily decodable. For example, until recently it seemed very difficult to find out what the NSW governments regulations for Renewable Energy Zones, meant in terms of business, building, or connection to the wider system.

The information system does not have to be coherent, thus we can be both informed and disinformed of the progress of climate change and energy transformation by the system. Certain groups are more likely to be informed than others, even though everyone tends to frame themselves as being well informed – especially in an ‘information society’ when being well informed is a matter of status. Information does not have to be accurate to have an effect, it is also part of socially constructed propaganda – as we can see with climate and covid denial, and this can influence political process, victories and inaction.

In summary, most information distortion comes from: economic functions such as business hype, secrecy and deception; from organisational functions such as hierarchy, silo-isation, lack of connection and channels; from politics where information is distorted for strategic advantage; and from the complexity of the systems that the information tries to describe and the inadequacy of the language or approach being used.

Technological Systems

Technological systems enable the kind of energy use, direction and availability, a society can have, the kinds of extraction it can engage in, the range at which political and economic systems can have an effect, the modes of transmission of information, and the types of waste pollution and dispersion which are likely to happen. Technologies also necessarily use properties of the environment and ecologies around them in order to work, and thus interact with those environments and again cause unintended consequences.

People use technology to extend their power over others, extend their capacity, escape regulation, or render previous technologies less dominant, and hence technologies tend to be caught in struggles between groups, thus provoking unintended social consequences.

We could hypothesise that technologies, as used under capitalism (and perhaps elsewhere), tend to extract people out of their environment, and break the intimacy between humans and ecology, or shift human perception onto the technology rather than the world, therefore making it easier to regularly engage in processes of destruction.

In the contemporary world, technologies become objects of fantasy, and metaphors by which we think about the cosmos in general. For example the clockwork universe is now almost replaced by the information processing universe.

Planetary systems and boundaries

Finally we have planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries are ways of conceiving the limits and constitution of ecosystems, and are, as such, fairly abstract. These boundaries represent systems necessary for human and planetary functioning.

They do not necessarily form the one system, and can be separated out for purposes of analysis. They act as guidelines, and probable reactive limits which are essential for the consideration of ‘eco-social’ relations, and the likely long term success of those relations. Measuring the boundaries may have a wide margin of error, as due to the complexity of these systems and their interactions. We will not know for sure when they will collapse until they do, and once they start collapsing they will affect the resilience of other boundaries. So the known limits on the boundaries will change as we take more notice of them, and keep challenging them.

Exceeding the boundaries almost certainly leads to the rundown, or breakdown, of ecological functioning, and this breakdown then adds difficulties to maintaining other systems. If they are maintained ‘artificially’ then this requires extra energy expenditure, and may have further consequences. Kate Raworth’s ‘donut economics’ presents a quick and easy way of conceiving functional economies in terms of ecological boundaries and human betterment [1], [2], [3].

Any global system which does not preserve or reinforce planetary systems will probably give impetus to global ecological collapse.

The systems are usually listed as involving: climatic stability, biospheric integrity (distribution and interaction between lifeforms, balance between species, rates of extinction etc), water flows and cycles (availability of drinkable, non-poisonous water, and water for general ecological functioning), biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, dispersal of valuable materials which literally form the ‘metabolic rift’, etc), ocean acidity or alkalinity (which affects the life of coral reefs, plankton and so on), levels of particulates or micro-particulates (which poison life forms), ozone levels, and the introduction of novel entities into the global ecology and their unknown systemic consequences (new chemicals, plastics, microplastics etc.). [4]

It is the functioning and disruption of these boundary systems which make processes of pollution and extraction problematic. Thus they impact directly on society, and appear to limit the kinds of economic growth, extraction, energy and technological systems that can be deployed safely.

Capitalism and developmentalism tend to recognise boundaries only to ignore them, and claim that ingenuity and willpower, will overcome those boundaries forever without limit.

Geographic Systems

Then we have Geographic systems as a subset of planetary boundaries. Geography affects the layout of energy systems, the potential reach of political and economic systems, the ‘natural’ flow of air and water, changes in temperature, the availability of sunlight, and the kinds of extractions which are ‘economic’ or economic in the short term, but deleterious in the long term. Geography is relational, giving layout in space between spaces and constructions. Geography shapes and is shaped by politics, social activity, economics, pollution and so on.

Mountain ranges, forests, plains etc may affect the layout of Renewable Energy, or the RE may affect the land, if trees are felled, fields converted etc. Wind may be severe, putting a limit on size of turbines, or the angles of solar panels. Winter darkness, or heavy seasonal rain can affect the possibilities of solar power.

Geography constitutes the human sense of home, and transformation of geography or relations of geography can produce a sense of ‘unhoming’, or dislocation in place and in the future of place.

Conclusion and Provisional Advice

Recognition of the interactions of these systems, with their differing but interacting imperatives, seems vital to getting a whole and accurate picture of the problems and opportunities presented by energy transition.

All the systems that have been discussed here, are complex systems. They are composed of ‘nodes’ which modify themselves or change their responses in response to changes in the ‘system as a whole.’ The systems are unpredictable in specific. The further into the future that we imagine, the less likely our predictions are to be specifically accurate. We can, for example, predict that weather will get more tumultuous in general as we keep destroying the ecology, but we cannot predict the exact weather at any distance. Complex systems produce surprise and actions often have unexpected consequences. If we seek to apply a policy, we cannot expect it to work exactly as we think it should. For example, the political move to make ‘markets,’ the most important institution, did not deliver either efficiency or liberty, as was expected, almost the opposite in fact. In all cases of actions within complex systems we should seek for unintended consequences. Sometimes the only realistic way to approach unintended consequences is to realise that our theory could not predict those events, and without looking we might never even have seen the events, or realised their connection to what we did. Working in complex systems, all politics becomes experimental.

While complex systems adapt or seek balance, they do not have to arrive at the best conditions for human beings. From a human point of view, they can be maladaptive. For example, a social system can be maladaptive and destructive of our means of living. The ecology could arrive at a balance within which many humans could not live.

People involved in promoting Energy Transformation have to deal with the various complex systems we have discussed above. The complexity does not mean we cannot make any predictions, although we need to treat them cautiously.

People engaged in transition have to consider the effects of the political systems involved, and be aware that politics influences what is likely to be possible. A transition may be delayed by political action, and political patterning, no matter how sensible or affordable the transition is.
The Economic system will be entangled in the political system, and those who dominate the economic system will have disproportionate input into the political system, and this can cause problems. This recognition reinstates the economic process as both a political and a business process.
A transition has to fit in with existing economic patterns, or its supporters may have to be prepared to change those patterns.
Patterns of extraction, pollution and dispersal have to be less harmful than previous patterns or the harm will be continued, even if in a different manner.
Changing the energy system is a political problem, and may require a change in the economic system as well as in power relations.
We need to have the available energy to build the transformed system. As we are supposedly aiming to replace the existing harmful system without lowering the energy availability, this may prove difficult. Where does the energy come from to build the new system if not from the old? And we need to demolish the old system, because of its dangers.
We need to avoid using renewables to simply add to energy availability, without reducing energy from fossil fuels.
The new system and the path of transformation, has to reduce pollution and extraction damage, or ecological and climate crises will continue, and planetary boundaries will be given no chance to recover. A transition plan which does not consider this problem is probably futile.
Considering these problems may lead to conclusions about the necessity of some kind of degrowth.
Transition plans should consider diminishing the dispersal of rare and valuable materials. More of what is currently pollution and dispersal has to be transformed to waste, in amounts the systems can process.
The current information system does not seem to be functioning in favour of the transition. It seems highly politicised and does not report ecological feedback accurately, either denying crisis, or delaying the supposed arrival of crisis.
Our current information system is largely owned and controlled by the neoliberal fossil fuel based establishment, which is defending its power, wealth and ways of living in the world. Without an independent information system, it will be impossible to win the political struggle. At the same time accurate information will be attacked and dismissed as political.
Likewise, many people will see accurate information as political, because it potentially disrupts their way of living, or because of interpretation and projection issues.
At the least, people engaged in energy transformation have to be aware of the nature of complex systems and the normal arising of unintended and unexpected consequences. We need an information system that allows us to perceive such consequences, without attacking the transformation as a whole.
Geography will affect the layout and possibilities of the transition. Renewables appear to require far more land than fossil fuels per unit of energy although fracking and coal seam gas seem to require similar amounts of land and do far more permanent damage to that land.
Renewables should probably never be installed through deforestation.
Renewables should not monopolise agricultural land. They should co-exist with previous land use, or help rehabilitate the land.
We should note the capacity of any new form of energy generation, or large scale technology, to ‘unhome’ people. Fossil fuels are especially bad at this, and often also poisonous, but the information systems tend to find this easier to ignore.
The energy transformation should aim to avoid disrupting the planetary boundary systems as much as possible. They should be installed with the longer term target of restoring those systems.
Pointing to the range of boundaries will possibly remind people that climate change is not the only problem we face, and it should be clear that no energy, or social, system is going to survive if it violates these boundaries in the long term.

Tags:complexity, Disinformation, ecology, economics, Energy, politics
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Neoliberal Conspiracy 08: Is the idea of neoliberal conspiracy plausible?

December 20, 2020

[This post is a slightly revised version of the original, and now deleted, end of the post Neoliberal Conspiracy 07]

Is the neoliberal conspiracy theory plausible?

Wealthy people do have power. The more wealth they have the more power they can exert if they choose to. The fewer non wealth based sources of power that are around, or are not phrased as businesses, the more power they can exert. They can buy all the other kinds of power from political representation and legislation, through violence, to communication and information. They can buy status, because they must have virtues if they are wealthy; they must be wealth generators for everyone, and deserve special privileges. Neoliberalism appears to both increase their power and hide opposition to that power. So wealth-power and neoliberalism fit together quite harmoniously or, as in a previous blog post, we can say that crony capitalism is normal capitalism, and neoliberalism intensifies crony capitalism.

It is not difficult to find the main propaganda points of neoliberal ideology in the media and elsewhere. It is widespread, although the analysis of what neoliberals actually do, and aim to achieve, is not. This lack is also significant.

Thus it is easy to find people extolling the virtues of business, the talents of business people, the centrality of ‘the economy’ to prosperity and freedom, the importance of growth, the importance of tax-cuts, the importance of cutting regulation, the importance of free markets, the connection of free markets to liberty, the idea that governments are always useless, the parasitic nature of people on welfare, the evils of socialism and the left, the evils of ‘greentape’, the need to encourage the economy whatever, and so on. Business news is expected, even if ordinary people don’t read it or watch it, union (marxist, or communitarian anarchist) news is not. Neoliberal ideas are widely and repetitively propagated. This is hardly surprising given corporate control of the media.

Thus not only do neoliberalism, crony capitalism and increasing the power of wealth (plutocracy) fit together but the main points of the ideology are so prevalent that they can be taken as ‘common sense.’ They can be referred to and accepted, without needing justification. They must be true. They can seem true a priori.

This does not mean the wealth elites are totally united. For instance, some of them don’t like Trump, even if he is carrying out most of the neoliberal programme, doing quite well at hiding it and cultivating passionate followers to help keep the project going. It is as equally possible they don’t like him because he defrauds other businesses and his word means nothing, as that they dislike him because he is doing something mysterious to benefit ordinary Americans, as is frequently alleged. Some people in dominant groups actually believe in climate change as well, but the media rarely explains why it is happening, and it usually reports climate change in a way suggesting its not that much of a problem for neoliberalism, or we just need to act as individuals. This is the more humanistic version of the conspiracy in action. The result is much the same; maintaining elite wealth and power comes before dealing with climate.

All this implies, the idea of Neoliberal conspiracy is plausible.

Neoliberal explanations of the problems

On the other hand, Neoliberals tend to explain the current crisis of democracy in terms of ‘government,’ which they control but pretend is controlled by others. These controlling and malevolent others appear to include ‘cultural marxists,’ ‘critical race theorists’, postmodernists, socialists or whatever is today’s evil figure. The problems that we face result from some big and dangerous conspiracy of the Left, or are invented by the conspiratorial Left out of thin air (i.e. the climate fraud, the covid fraud, the Biden victory). This is heavily implausible.

I’ve no real idea what cultural marxism or critical race theory is, and I’m not sure the general public would understand the main points of these ideologies either, as put forward by their supposed proponents. These theories don’t seem as widely distributed and explained as they would be if they were important to a major power group. So, if these movements exist, they are clearly not being promoted by a particularly powerful or influential class. They are not widely taken for granted by people. And the general approach in the media, would seem to suggest that you can just say ‘Cultural Marxism,’ or ‘Critical Race theory’ and know that your audience will assume whoever is being associated with these theories must be evil, even if the audience don’t know what they are. Jordan Peterson seems to have made a career out of behaving like this.

From this alone, it seems likely that the opponents of these cultural marxists, whoever they are, have all the relevant power, or the strategy would not work.

[My initial hypothesis was the neoliberals and their supporters could not use the old horror of revolutionary Marxism, because it was nowadays so rare, and so they turned cultural criticism (which is a standard from of Western behaviour, since Plato or the Reformation, depending on your choice) into a dismissible evil, by calling it cultural Marxism. But then I remembered how a few people who got together to protect some protestors from attacks by fascists, became portrayed as a vast, violent and subversive movement who conveniently wore black clothes and supported Joe Biden. So the neoliberals could have pretended that revolutionary Marxists were still a problem, and perhaps by magnifying anti-fa they did.]

Academics, who I suppose are supposed to promote these things, don’t have much power. Universities are nowadays run as neoliberal business, with generally relatively high level business executives in charge (often such overt neoliberal ideologists as Maurice Newman). Universities nowadays aim to bring in money, not change the world. Academics frequently have to ally with the corporate classes for research money, so the days of investigative independence is fading. In Australia academics were among the only people not eligible for the highest government support if their jobs were made redundant by Covid. Again not a mark of power. So the chances are high that those who tell you academics are powerful are lying to cover their own power and give you a relatively powerless enemy to dislike.

Then I guess there are scientists. Obviously neoliberals will argue that scientists are less trustworthy than businesses or the hunches of demagogues (Trump is great at that). The idea seems to be that, if science clashes with neoliberalism, it is necessarily wrong, despite all the successful stuff it does elsewhere. I’m more than a bit skeptical about that position. This does not mean scientists cannot be wrong; they are human (just like neoliberals), but they are the best we have got at the moment, and science tends to be self-correcting. That is how it works, and it is also why scientists and doctors can seem to change their minds quite often; they are ideally persuaded by the evidence, and new evidence is always arising. Yes they defend the positions they are currently holding, but eventually those positions fade – they are not held to be true a priori, and beyond challenge, like neoliberal economics. Scientists are often persecuted by governments and businesses, who remove data from websites, sometimes from libraries, forbid them to talk, smear them when it is handy, or sack them if they don’t give the correct neoliberal response. So they don’t appear to have much that much power as a class. They often can’t even get people in power to consider the desperate state of the planetary ecology. They also don’t have political unity as a class, as there is no particular politics necessarily associated with physics, geology, biology or whatever. Science is not like economics, where neoliberalism will get you places.

There is less obvious basis for scientific power outside the corporate sector anymore, and that is likely subject to neoliberal control. This is why we should not particularly trust pharmaceutical companies, insecticide and genetic engineering companies and so on. They are less concerned with scientific truth than with profit, and in neoliberalism profit is the true measure of everything.

There are a few billionaires who run charities, like Bill Gates and George Soros, and a few tech billionaires who routinely get blamed for the crisis and for deep conspiracies. But the odd thing is that the billionaire class is generally not mentioned as a class, and most members are not named. The people who attack Gates and Soros, rarely attack Rupert Murdoch even though he is clearly political and heavily involved in determining contemporary policies and issuing propaganda. They don’t furiously attack Meg Whitman, Jim Justice, Bill Haslam, Silvio Berlusconi, Suleiman Kerimov, Gautam Adani, Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Tom Steyer, Tommy Hicks Jr, Harold Glenn Hamm, Charles Schwab, Paul Elliott Singer, Joe Ricketts, Betsy DeVos, Linda McMahon, or Charles Koch (founder of the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, Freedom Partners and the Koch Network) just to give a few names directly involved in political influencing unlike Bill Gates. Most people probably do not know many other billionaire’s names as they stay out of the media. We can conclude that while the billionaire influence on politics is pronounced, the neoliberal denunciation is highly selective.

Then of course there are those people protesting against being shot by police. This is obviously such a vast and powerful conspiracy they can’t even get the police to stop killing them, and the Republicans can just ignore them as they have such little influence, and some Republicans can support people who shoot at them, or drive into them. Not much ability for masses of evil power there, even if a few statues do get toppled.

Then there are the socialists. Well the Right fusses about them, but I haven’t seen nationalisation, as opposed to privatisation, of an industry for quite a while. In the US getting a general basic wage that people can live on, has not happened, and does not seem to have much hope of success. The US can’t even get a health system which does not bankrupt sick poor people, no matter how much Trump promised he would fix it easily. Furthering control of government by the working classes rather than the corporate class seems to have failed all over the Western World. ‘Socialism’ seems generally used as a swear word, and calling some idea socialist is the supposed end of many arguments. Again this could not happen if socialists had any power.

Not surprisingly because the corporate sector control the media, ‘left wing’ thinking and action, is passively censored; it is hardly mentioned, other than by its opponents, who are not always that accurate in their descriptions. If you want to find out what the Greens stand for, for instance, then you have to go to the Greens, or perhaps approach some lonely person selling a weekly or monthly newspaper on a street corner. The Left does not control the mainstream media or normal talk, so this takes effort and most people cannot be bothered. Why would they be? they are constantly told the Left is evil and idiotic. To most people this is just the way things are, even if they think they have worked it out for themselves.

At the end of all this, we can see that according to neoliberals, the enemies of liberty are a few named billionaires (Gates and Soros) who don’t fully subscribe to neoliberal theory (the huge majority of billionaires can be ignored as they support the establishment, or at least don’t overtly attack it), a few largely disorganised protestors and a bundle of academics who have next to no power in a system devoted to promoting fake news. These people have little in common, other than being despised by neoliberal followers. They do not seem a plausible danger, and if they form a conspiracy it seems extremely badly run and powerless.

Conclusion

Comparing the two ideas, it seems to me, that the idea of neoliberal conspiracy easily wins the plausibility stakes.

Tags:Disinformation, neoliberalism, politics
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Praxeology, Culture, Ecology

December 20, 2020

This post continues to explore the apparent lack of consideration given to context in the basic axioms of Austrian economics; in this case culture and ecology.

Not Recognising ‘Culture’

Discussing purposeful action, which is supposedly basic to the economy, Rothbard goes on to argue that a human must have certain ideas about how to achieve their ends. Without those ideas there is little in the way of complex human purpose.

However, this sidesteps the issue of where does this person get the ideas from, as well as the language to think about those ideas? The ideas are unlikely to be purely self-generated, with no precursors. In reality, ideas arise through interconnection with other people and previously existing ideas. This of course does not mean people never have original ideas, but without interacting with other people it is doubtful they would have complex ideas or language at all. Indeed, the people they interact with may have a massive influence on the ideas, and approaches, available to the person. Ideas are socially transmitted.

Even our individuality is based in the groups we have encountered, the ways we categorise our selves in relationship to others, and the child rearing we experience. It is not as if we are born fully conscious and evaluative, able to deduce everything all by ourselves from first principles….

However, in response to criticism, Rothbard states: “We do not at all assume, as some critics of economics have charged, that individuals are ‘atoms’ isolated from one another.”

(Note the way that his economics becomes all economics as opposed to ‘my economics’ or ‘our economics’).

Where is the evidence of this recognition in the initial axioms, from which all else is derived? Its certainly not clear to me that this recognition exists, other than to be wheeled in to get rid of objections. “You think people are isolated from each other” “No we don’t. I mention this in a footnote.” This recognition seems an add on – whereas it seems more likely that humans are both individual and collective from birth onwards. To some extent we can even say that humans have the capacity to learn to be individuals, to individuate, but it is not always easy.

I suspect that if we included culture’s (and social organisation’s) effects on exchange and economic action, then we might not be able to perform a supposed universal justification for capitalism, and its exemption from attempts to control it or regulate it to be less harmful. And this justification and protection, seems to be the purposeful action of Austrian economics from its beginning.

Ecologies

All action takes place within a web of actions – which is sometimes known as an ‘interactive network,’ or a ‘set of complex systems’ and sometimes, in Austrian economics, as a catallaxy, or as Hayek says “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.”

It is possible that, with this term, Hayek is pointing towards what is now known as “emergent order,” which involves far more than just ‘individual economies,’ adjusting in a ‘market’ – as markets cannot be separated from other processes, including social and ecological process which also adjust to each other.

While it is often assumed to be the case, it should be noted that the ‘order’ which emerges from a complex system or ‘catallaxy’, does not have to be hospitable to humans. Historically we can observer that the ecological order is often changed by humans disasterously and, as a result, humans can no longer flourish in those new ecological orders.

Sometimes this ecological collapse occurs because some form of behaviour which once helped survival has been intensified to a level at which it:

becomes destructive,
blocks information flow and perception of danger which challenges the behaviour, or
simply prevents change through entrenched power.

Hayek’s formulation uses the cultural assumption that order is ‘good’ for humans, to imply the market always brings ‘good’ results, when it may not, even if the ‘order’ arises ‘spontaneously’.

Economies occur within general ecologies: they can be said to be context dependent. An impoverished ecology is likely to produce an impoverished economy for most people, even if the wealthy are very wealthy and well provided for.

[Rothbard uses the term ‘catallactics‘ to refer to the “the analysis of interpersonal exchange”, or “study of money exchanges” which do not seem to be quite the same things as not all interpersonal, or intergroup, exchange involves money, although it is interesting that Libertarian economics tries to reduce all exchange and interaction to money. Neither does this usage seem to refer to the same kind of process as Hayek’s catallaxy].

Rothbard states on page 4: “With reference to any given act, the environment external to the individual may be divided into two parts: those elements which he believes he cannot control and must leave unchanged, and those which he can alter (or rather, thinks he can alter) to arrive at his ends”.

Earlier he talks about rearranging elements of the environment…

All this suggests that Rothbard thinks of the environment as a largely passive backdrop to human action, not a participant in that action, or even likely to react to that action. The environment is portrayed as essentially passive or dead, or humanly controllable, neither of which seem to be the case. Again the aim seems to be to reduce everything to the human individual, who determines what is to be done.

The approach not only does not recognise the importance of groups but appears to be anti-ecological, or anti the recognition of the necessity, and force, of ecological processes. This could be accidental, but perhaps it occurs because neoliberalism grew up to be anti-ecological in the roots of its thinking (thinking that humans are detached from each other and the world), perhaps because social movements recognising the importance of ecologies were seen as a threat to corporate profit and liberty, or perhaps it is just their overconfidence in the culturally backed idea of human specialness and isolation.

Rothbards adds that acts involve means, and this involve technological ideas. Both true, but forms of government and organisation can also be thought of as technologies. It is easier to hunt with hand weapons if we organise to hunt together, and use strategy and planning in that hunt.

“In the external environment, the general conditions cannot be the objects of any human action; only the means can be employed in action.”

I’m not sure what this means, but it seems to be suggesting that we cannot work with environments….

However, economies are enmeshed in environments. Economies do not exist without ecologies and, at the moment, without naturally livable ecologies. (Possibly in the future large numbers of humans may be able to live in purely constructed environments, but not now).

We have to grow food, we have to survive climate, we have to survive in the atmosphere, we need drinkable water, we need ‘raw materials’, we need energy supplies (more than just food and water if we are going to survive with any technological complexity). We need functional waste recycling systems and pollution processing, and so on.

If ecologies are destroyed then economies are highly likely to collapse, and in any case the aim of the economy becomes reduced to survival, and radically simplifies. Social support and social action is still vitally important.

Economies are also enmeshed in environments of social and political life, as people attempt to use rhetoric and persuasion and sometimes violence to protect their markets, regulate and structure the markets and so on. Wealth, earned on markets, gives power and that power is used to ensconce and intensify the position of the wealthy. At the least, all economies are political economies, in the sense that economic action involves politics and vice versa.

It seems to be the case, that extracting something called an economy from both social and ecological life, is a massive and probably dangerous over-simplification.

More Accurate Foundations

In these last two posts on praxeology, I have implied you cannot ignore history or social studies to formulate a study of economics, because that forms the conscious (or unconscious) data you draw your a prioris from. I’m not asserting that a prioris of any kind do not exist, they may, but it seems unlikely that social science a prioris exist, and that the a prioris of Austrian economics are inadequate and dependent upon unacknowledged (or unconscious) cultural foundations.

Let us reformulate the initial propositions as simply as possible, from the discussion above.

Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.

Purposeful action almost always involves humans acting with or against other humans, human groups, and environments – often several at the same time.

Most human motives and means are learnt from, with, or against, other humans and the environment (often through trial and error).

Purposeful action often involves trying to influence, or sway, other people’s action and/or gain approval in some other humans’ eyes.

People are not always aware of the origins of their purposeful action – they can be unaware of their true purpose.

Human action normally results in unintended consequences.

What we interpret as disorder is as normal as what we interpret as order, and vice versa

Human being is social. People act in groups all the time, and belong to groups. Without some group backing, most humans would die when young. It may be easy to say people are individuals but it is not entirely correct, and so will take us to incorrect conclusions.

A group acting together is not just the sum of the individuals acting – this is one reason why humans act together.

Human groups tend to regulate, or govern, themselves, so as to act together. They team up to achieve individual and group objectives – which may just include company and conversation, or it may include world conquest, acquiring new resources through violence, teaming up to get governmental policy which favours the group, overthrowing the state or the lack of a State and so on.

Government is normal. Corporations and business involve forms of government both ‘internally’ (in relation to themselves) and ‘externally’ (in relation to the government of others). Like other forms of government, they can use threats and violence.

Corporations and businesses may attempt to influence the government of others.

Market action involves politics, persuasion and building of trust – it is based in social life.

Markets involve interaction with ecologies for food and resources. They can destroy the ecologies they require to function. The orders which arise from market/ecology interaction can be hostile to humans. That is, markets can suffer from unintended consequences. It is magic to expect that the order which emerges will always be ‘good’.

Interpretations of other people’s actions and ideas, can be false, but are generally based on cultural expectations. Economics is a tool of interpretation

Economics cannot be isolated from social, political, ethical, and ecological life.

Economic functioning depends on social and ecological functioning.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, neoliberalism
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Praxeology as Purposeful Politics?

December 20, 2020

This post starts to look at praxeology as politics, with the hope of making some more accurate starting points in a second post about the left out background of Austrian economics. In these two posts, I move on from Mises to the first few pages of Murray Rothbard’s Man Economy and State – to show that Mises was not an aberration.

Human Purpose

On page 1 Rothbard begins his recapitulation of Austrian praxeology by stating: “Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior”.

We probably should add, as necessary and fundamental and relatively well known, that the purpose can, but may not, have much to do with the result. The world is not easy to control (which is a point free market people often make), although people do often attempt to control it. We cannot deny attempts at control exist and are normal or routine, and that they often fail or apparently make things worse.

Unintended consequences are normal.

If people do have unconscious processes, then they may well be unaware of the real purpose behind their action, and suggest something socially appropriate instead as their purpose, as can happen with post-hypnotic suggestion.

A purpose may include targets such to make more profit, or to control the market (or people in the market), as well as possible. Purposiveness can also include lying, or mistaken ideas.

People often have the purpose of trying to influence, or sway, other people’s behaviour – which is one mode of attempting control.

Markets also involve the building of trust and connection, as the more likely people feel connection and trust the more likely they will purchase, and pay back. So markets involve purposive social action.

Everyone may know these factors already, but let us put them up front.

Interpretation

“Human action… can be meaningfully interpreted by other men.” The interpretation by those “other men” does not have to be correct, but there will be some shared (although not uniform) cultural ways of interpreting behaviour, and similarly shared, but not uniform, expectations about human behaviour, which people can use to make interpretations.

Different people, in different groups, may interpret observed behaviour differently. This is clearly observable in the way different groups interpret Donald Trump’s behaviour. Some people almost always excuse it, say he is doing wonderful things, that his statements are not literal (or are aimed at owning liberals) or claim that much of the information about him is fake news, and some people see the behaviour as constituting a selection of abominable, corrupt, incompetent, conflictual and self-seeking or self-pleasuring behaviour.

Is it possible to suggest people respond to their interpretation of other’s behaviour more than they react to the behaviour itself? Economics (amongst other ideas), provides tools for interpreting human behaviour and human actions. Inadequate tools will probably produce inadequate interpretations, and the strategic ignorance of certain facts. As such economics can risk becoming a part of political rhetoric, rather than a quest for testable knowledge – especially when it denies that its axioms need no testing for accuracy.

So, do we understand these processes of purpose and interpretation properly, and apply them to what we are doing, or do we pretend we always have direct, and unmediated, access to truth?

Individuals and Groups

Means and motives, are not purely individual constructions. They may well be culturally specified, or limited. People are ‘thrown’ into an environment not entirely of their own making, or resulting from forethought. This is important. Not everyone may want to make a fortune, or be able to make one, and that realisation is probably needed for some kinds of economic analysis. It is unclear what ‘profit’ might mean to everyone, and I suspect that Austrian economics would admit that, but make it secondary.

Economic actions blend into other actions.

Rothbard tells us the “fundamental truth” of Praxeology is that people act. Fair enough. However, this statement that people act, is then shifted into a more dubious proposition.

“The first truth to be discovered about human action is that it can be undertaken only by individual ‘actors.’ Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them.”

Indeed individual actors can and do act. People can act to undermine the groups they belong to. No question of that. But can we really dismiss social groups, and the social background, as of no fundamental, or a priori, importance?

Do groups of people never decide to act together for certain ends? The answer to that would seem to be ‘Yes. It happens all the time.’

Recognising that people make decisions in groups, and act together, does not mean that everyone is necessarily submerged in some kind of immaterial group mind, or that people think the same thing and have the same abilities. Or that individuals always get pushed into doing things. It means they cooperated, and supported each other, to a degree. Neither does it mean that people only belong in the one group at the one time….

On page 3 Rothbard asserts “‘groups’ have no independent existence aside from the actions of their individual members.” Yet the coordination of groups gives the possibility of an effect greater than the sum of its parts, and which sometimes changes the possibility of action considerably. Indeed the reason why people act together is known to Mises; acting together has the potential to produce greater effects, or even previously impossible effects. The buzz term nowadays is ‘synergy.’

Groups also can have existence beyond individuals. Groups frequently continue to exist, or manage to maintain some kind of continuity and identity, despite an ongoing slow and complete change of membership. If a group is just individuals, then this happening should probably not be quite as common as it appears to be.

It is commonly remarked that people do ‘bad actions’ when in groups they may not have done alone. If so, then the group is changing their behaviour; the individual’s action may go into a different ‘dynamic’, or the groups produces different motives and means of action for individuals.

A useful and relatively accurate economics should probably involve the study of some of these group effects and group dynamics, as well as individual effects and dynamics.

It would seem to be a possible a priori that humans are both based in groups and individuality, so the analysis needs to go in both directions, to groups and to individuals.

Purposeful behaviour almost always involves humans acting with or against other humans, human groups, and environments – often several at the same time.

As said earlier, studying this bifold nature of action (individual and collective), is often difficult to analyse of describe, but difficulty does not mean that the fact is not real, or should be abandoned at the base of analysis.

Politics?

It seems to be that the idea of Austrian economics, is to eliminate consideration of these complex effects, on the grounds that simplification is not just distortion, and that the complex effects and uncertainties can be explained purely through considering simple units in combination.

The political consequences of this step just happen to favour corporate and business groups, by ‘pure accident’ (actually this political consequence will probably be denied).

I suspect that one idea underlying all of this apparently oddly deficient thinking, is to make formal ‘government’ something unnatural, rather than something people do all the time.

As implied above, many groups exist with some kind of decision making process. They have some expectations of loyalty, some purposes, some social control? Probably most – especially those important to an individual.

Corporation and businesses rarely exist without some mode of organisation, and some mode of government. They have ways of making decisions about action, about what people lower down the hierarchy should do, about motives, about ends that affects the individuals involved which may change those individuals.

Indeed, I cannot remember ever seeing a free market person, no matter how hostile to government, who objects to a corporations governing its members – even if there is not the slightest attempt at democracy or representation.

Teaming up amongst the lower orders is to be discouraged, especially if it is team-up against the true elites, while it appears that team-ups amongst the hyper-wealthy is to be ignored, or blamed on ‘the government’ which is defined as having nothing to do with, or no dependence on, those hyper-wealthy people and their organisations.

Attempts at organising to achieve group and individual ends seem pretty fundamental, and it is questionable if the effects of this organising can always be reduced simply to individual motives.

The proposition that groups can be methodologically (?) reduced to individuals has the function of making it non normative for people to think of teaming up together to combat the real power of corporations, as all ‘real ethical people’ are pure individuals – even the corporation is just individuals and does not exist, and it has no drives of its own.

This psuedo individualism allows a person who goes along with neoliberalism to think they are proudly individual by going along with it – which in Rothbard’s society is great praise. “I’m an individual because I’m a free market person.”

We could hypothesise that people who believe people are naturally self focused, or have a limited range of sympathy (say limited to their family) might tend to behave more selfishly like they think everyone else does. It becomes a mode of interpreting what others do, which is self reinforcing. Given these assumptions, we have to defend against the self-focus of others, and can’t expect help from others in our groups.

This brings forward the issue that by prescribing how people act, economics is also making ethical claims as to how people should act. It is becoming a primarily political tool. I’d expect all social theory to act as a political tool, as well as a tool for understanding, but it should probably not deny this, as it should not begin by lying, and it should not make lying its end – the end is to be as realistic as possible. But, as ethical statements, these point have no, or carry no, compulsion.

Thus Austrian economics claims people should act as individuals, should shun government, and should leave life to both the market and those who attempt to control the market to benefit the corporate business sector. Established profit is the only good. People who fail, in a free market, are inadequate and deserve only what they get. People who help other people for no return are stupid or corrupting those people, so it should not happen. Free markets do not emphasise virtue, just abstinence from protest. That appears to be the Austrian ethical life.

It might be a bone fide political or ethical objective to convince people that they are individuals living purely in contractual agreements (even if they have never agreed to a contract in their lives), but it is not necessarily descriptive of a priori ‘human nature’. It is also a political act, so it is situated in relationship to other people from the beginning.

We would expect the neoliberal abolition of the recognition of groups as a basic form of life, would mean that they would disapprove of corporate personhood, and the effective diffusion of responsibility in corporations. That is, they should insist it is not the corporation which makes decisions and which takes responsibility, but individuals; from the deciders in management, or on the board of directors, to the people who carry out the instructions, and to the shareholders who provided the capital and who aim to profit from the companies decisions. If a company commits harm, then people should not be able to hide behind the company, or the excuse of obeying orders. They are, and should be, responsible for their actions, and be held to account. However, as we cannot ignore the company structure, the higher the management that approved the action, or ignored the action, then the more responsible the people should be.

I personally do not know what the free marketeer position on this matter is, at the moment. Hopefully I will find out. If the movement is primarily about benefitting corporate power, then it will protect those who benefit from that power and wealth, and shift responsibility away from them, or downwards, perhaps even to those who are hurt or harmed.

Ignoring voluntary and compelled co-operation between people might lead to as fundamentally a wrong set of assumptions and governance, as those which ignored voluntary (and compelled) competition.

Conclusion

Ignoring the power of groups, the basis of human life in social groups, and reducing human life through methodological individualism does help simplicity, but it does not help accuracy. We have to be aware of the background to the existence of individual action if we want to understand a collective process like the economy or social life.

In the next post I will further discuss the missing social and ecological background in more detail, and then propose some new starting points.

Tags:Disinformation, neoliberalism
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Neoliberal Conspiracy 07: Summary

December 6, 2020

[20 December 2020 – the original blog post has now been broken into two posts. The part here can be considered the summary of the argument, The part now placed here is a consideration of the plausibility of the argument]

What is the theory of Neoliberal Conspiracy?

The idea of ‘neoliberal conspiracy’ is simple. It is that many of those in the wealth elites, or working for them, have acted to increase established corporate power and wealth at the expense of the general public, while pretending that ‘free markets’ result in liberty and prosperity for all.

Neoliberalism has been the dominant real politics in the English speaking world since Thatcher, Reagan, and Keating, although (in the conspiratorial mode) it often presents itself as a minor oppressed player, that is struggling valiantly against government and socialists.

Effects of the Neoliberal Conspiracy

Neoliberalism’s effects are most clearly shown in the decline in the share of wealth going to ordinary people over those last 40 years.

Over the last four decades since 1979… those in the top 0.1% had wages grow… 340.7%. In contrast those in the bottom 90% had annual wages grow by 23.9% from 1979 to 2018.
Top 1.0% of earners see wages up 157.8% since 1979. Economic Policy Institute, 18 December 2019

People are also less likely to increase their wealth class than they used to be. Some even claim that in the US and UK life expectancy has recently begun to decline [1], [2], [3] (possibly due to suicide and drugs) and hunger appears to be increasing in the US [4] (the pandemic response does not help) and elsewhere.

After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise, affecting 8.9 percent of people globally. From 2018 to 2019, the number of undernourished people grew by 10 million, and there are nearly 60 million more undernourished people now than in 2014
World Hunger; Key facts and Statistics

Wealth seems spread so that while the top 10%, or so, of the population can be said to be comfortable, or extremely wealthy, the bottom 90% (especially younger people below 35) are heading towards a precarious existence, while the middle class is shrinking.

there is a recognition amongst these people of the novelty of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus frustration and disquiet at the nature of these circumstances. The ‘new normal’ is in fact recognised as abnormal.
[However] they focus on how they can succeed within this inherited structure rather than on pursuing structural change. There is a degree of resignation to a situation wherein precarity is deemed largely immutable…. many young people understand the prospect of improving labour market outcomes in terms of personal development and their ability to successfully navigate this more competitive environment
Craig Berry and Sean McDaniel Young people and the post-crisis precarity: the abnormality of the ‘new normal’ LSE BPP 20 January 2020

Neoliberal media, rarely suggest an approach based on structural or economic change, that might challenge the dominant power relations, or they aim to misidentify those power relations. Another important marker of neoliberal effect, is that there appears to have been growing concentrations of economic power, with higher profits going to fewer people [5].

We used to think that high profits were a sign of the successful working of the American economy, a better product, a better service. But now we know that higher profits can arise from a better way of exploiting consumers, a better way of price discrimination, extracting consumer surplus, the main effect of which is to redistribute income from consumers to our new super-wealthy.
Joseph Stiglitz “America has a monopoly problem – and it’s huge” Pearls and Irritations 15 November 2020

Corporations are now as wealthy as nations: “Of the world’s top 100 economies, 69 are corporations.” This implies they easily have the powers of wealth to buy States, especially if they ‘crony up’.

I probably don’t have to remind people, that the neoliberal response to almost every problem involves tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporate sector, possibly mixed in with some taxpayer subsidies for established big businesses not doing that well. It would seem obvious that this might help boost the wealth differentials, and gives the wealthy even more money to invest in political control. Of course they say this boost to the wealthy helps the lower classes, but the wealthy always make that argument, and it never seems to work. One study of 18 OECD countries, simply remarks:

We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.
Hope & Limberg 2020. The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich. LSE Working Paper 55.

Let us be clear. It is a reasonable hypothesis that distribution of wealth results, not from the nature of life, but from deliberate social struggle, or social engineering. In which case, the way wealth is being distributed now, as opposed to 50 years ago, marks the triumph of class war against the people. As Warren Buffett said in the context of a discussion on taxes:

BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this country. I mean, we never had it so good.
DOBBS: What a radical idea.
BUFFETT: It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.
Buffett: ‘There are lots of loose nukes around the world’

He is also reported as saying in an interview with the New York Times “There’s class warfare, all right,…. but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Part of that class war undoubtedly involves the attack on, and the decline of unions, which gave workers the power to organise and challenge employers who were richer than whole countries, and who cronyed up together with other employers. Unions also meant that workers had direct input into party politics, as opposed to mainly business having input.

The period is also marked by growing ecological crisis, as capitalists and developers abandoned restraint, found profit in attacking science and in locking people into expanding fossil fuel use.

Neoliberalism appears to have generated a growth of alienation from politics experienced by ordinary people, as the political system consistently ignored their interests, no matter how large the protests (such as those against the second Iraq War, or against climate inaction). This alienation seems to have lead to an increase in culture wars, and polarisation, as the neoliberal Right sought to retain support and votes by whipping up an identity politics of self-justification and hatred against ‘out-groups’. For example, making claims that the left says you are racist simply because you are white (no other reason is possible), and that the only real racists are active black people, the only sexists are feminist women and so on. This leads to the part of the neoliberal conspiracy I will discuss later in this blog.

We don’t need to look so much at what neoliberals claim they believe, some of which might be well intentioned and genuine, but look at what neoliberal politicians actually do.

Neoliberals and the Government takeover

With the mixed economies, Keynesian interventionism, and union power, of post-world war II Europe, US, UK and Australia we had a steady rise in living standards, working conditions and increasing levels of political participation. This was alarming for the corporate elites. We could have ended up with a participatory democracy. This situation has now changed.

The first part of the current version of the neoliberal conspiracy has to be to negate the obvious point that “We’ve had forty years of free market boosting, and the world is not getting better.” As we might expect, the main idea that neoliberals want to promote is that we need more neoliberalism, and more of their ‘free markets’ to fix the mess generated by neoliberalism and their ‘free markets’ – truly what you might call ‘positive thinking’: lets ignore the counter evidence and persist in destruction as long as it pays us off. Thus almost their first effort is to convince people that most of the problems we currently observe, do not stem from neoliberalism, but from the ‘fact’ we have “too much government”, by which they mean too much government which might attempt to be responsive to the people.

Now they have a point. Governments can, and often are oppressive. Sometimes this is because of “one size fits all policies” which don’t fit all (like ‘free markets’), sometimes it is because the governors want total order and rule of one principle alone (like ‘free markets’), sometimes it is because they want to build things or go to war (say in favour of protecting investment and ‘free markets’), and sometimes it’s because they govern on behalf of a particular class (like neoliberals do). Scrap the last point, we are not meant to think about the last point, we are meant to think neoliberals are against government, not trying to commandeer it, away from you.

Neoliberals tend to pretend, that in a free market, business and the State (‘government’) have nothing to do with each other, rather than that they interact all the time. In neoliberal rhetoric, government and business are somehow completely different, or their intersection is of no consequence. Thus I can be told, by quite a few people over the years, that obviously crony capitalists only have an effect because of the government, and not because of the existence of cronyism, or the intersection of business interests with the State, or business influence over the State. This argument occurs while neoliberal politicians are overtly trying to win over the State completely so they can change it, and change the regulations of that State to benefit them.

Pretending to roll back the State is part of the strategy of increasing corporate power. Rollback of the State under neoliberalism is not remotely anarchistic. It is about rolling back those parts of the State that were moderately helpful, sensitive or responsive to the people, while keeping the parts of the state which are helpful to maintaining corporate power, and providing taxpayer subsidy to that power and suppression of protest. This is one reason why government size, regulation and ‘heaviness’, has not decreased, despite the years of neoliberals apparently pushing for a smaller State. At best it has just increased the powers of bosses, in general, over their employees.

As part of the process of increasing their power, Neoliberals attempt to remove any regulations which hinder corporate ability to freeload on the public; such as regulations which impose restrictions on their ability to injure and poison people, or pollute and destroy ecologies. Trump and other hardline neoliberal politicians have been extremely helpful in removing these kinds of regulations. Such regulations can diminish profits, although they may increase the possibility of prolonging people’s lives and physical comfort. Neoliberals think that if people want prolonged lives or comfort then they should pay for it, not rely on nature.

It is fundamental to neoliberalism, being a politics of established wealth, that any living being should only get what they can afford, and if they cannot afford to live, or fight against action that harms them, then they should suffer as the judgement of the market, is against them, and they are of no worth. Neoliberalism considers protecting established capitalism more important than protecting life.

Neoliberals buy government policy which benefits corporate power, and then, when it turns out badly for people in general, claim that the situation would be much better if, rather than supporting the harmed, we did not have any government intervention at all and we just left everything to the corporate class to sort out – as if benefits inevitably flow through to those who don’t participate, and the people who caused the problems will necessarily fix them by accident.

The great thing about the strategy of pretending to be anti-State while using the State to enforce their rule, is that whenever the neoliberals use the State to shaft their supporters they can claim they could have had nothing to do with it. It was the dreaded socialists of the ‘deep State’ that are to blame. And they get even more leeway to rollback the State useful to others and build up the State useful to them.

It is common sense in neoliberal land for corporate lobbyists, or ex corporate executives to write legislation or even occupy positions in government departments. Despite his claims of employing outsiders this is what Trump has done in a big way [6], [7].

Steve Mnuchin from Goldman Sachs became the first Treasury Secretary. Gary Cohn president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs was picked to head the National Economic Council and manage economic policy. Steve Bannon once worked for the same organisation, before becoming a Breitbart executive chair and also obviously worked for the administration. Jay Clayton, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, was a partner with the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and Goldman Sachs was a client. ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson was made Secretary of State.

At the EPA, nearly half of the political appointees hired by the Trump Administration have had strong ties to industries regulated by the agency industry, according to research by the Associated Press. About a third of these EPA appointees – including the current acting administrator – formerly worked as registered lobbyists or lawyers for fossil fuel companies, chemical manufacturers, or other corporate clients….
The Administration has been pursuing a de-regulatory agenda that benefits many of these same industries by rolling back air and water pollution control regulations. This inverts the purpose of the agency, which is to protect the environment and public health, not industry profits.
Who’s Running Trump’s EPA, EPA Conflict of Interest Watch. Environmental Integrity Project nd.

The number of lobbyists Trump appointed was quite extraordinary

A lobbyist for every 14 political appointments made… The number of lobbyists who have served in government jobs is four times more than the Obama administration had six years into office. And former lobbyists serving Trump are often involved in regulating the industries they worked for….
It’s a “staggering figure,” according to Virginia Canter, ethics chief counsel for the D.C.-based legal nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Update: We Found a “Staggering” 281 Lobbyists Who’ve Worked in the Trump Administration. ProPublica, 15 October 2019

A report from early in Trump’s administration states:

The president-elect, in filling out his transition team and administration, has drawn heavily from the vast network of donors and advocacy groups built by the billionaire industrialist [Koch] brothers, who have sought to reshape American politics in their libertarian image.
From White House Counsel Don McGahn and transition team advisers Tom Pyle, Darin Selnick and Alan Cobb to Presidential Inaugural Committee member Diane Hendricks and transition-team executive committee members Rebekah Mercer and Anthony Scaramucci, Trump has surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs….
many more Koch-linked operatives are expected to join Trump’s nascent administration in the coming weeks, according to Trump transition-team sources.
Vogel and Johnson Trump’s Koch administration. Politico 28 November 2016.

This network of lobbyists appeared to influence the taxpayer handouts to business during the Covid response:

lobbyists with ties to the president have successfully secured billions in aid for their clients—and several lobbyists may be violating President Donald Trump’s own executive order on ethics in the process.
Trump-Connected Lobbyists Are Getting Billions In Federal Coronavirus Aid, Report Finds, Forbes 6 July 2020

Instead of staring down “the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests” as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.
Trump’s Cabinet Has Had More Ex-Lobbyists Than Obama or Bush. Fortune, 18 September 2019

No clearing ‘the Swamp,’ but a lot of importing alligators.

Neoliberalism deliberately tends to ignore how much government intervention there was in the economy in the years of rising prosperity for everyone, or tries to portray these years as some kind of disaster. They buy revisionist history, so that we can argue the Great Depression was actually caused by government and that the recovery was hindered by the New Deal. The point is that capitalism depends on a State, and capitalists attempt to control the State, so there is always state action which can be blamed, and used to direct attention away from how business was behaving, or what it was attempting to do. For example, if Hoover’s trade embargos and tariffs were the only factors causing the Great Depression, then what businesses was he defending, and why are Trump’s tariffs not going to be equally destructive?

The question about governments really should be, “Who controls the rule making and enforcement, that allows the market to be maintained?” And the answer to that, is the established corporate sector and not the people. So the market is structured and regulated to benefit the established corporate sector and not the people. That is why the proportion of wealth distributed to the people is going down, and the proportion of wealth going to the wealth elites is increasing.

Ronald Reagan was a classic example of neoliberal action, cutting taxes for the wealthy, cutting back social security and making welfare more onerous and expensive, while massively increasing military spending which benefitted corporate arms manufacturers, and increased the deficit. The idea was that the deficit should eventually be curtailed by ‘reluctantly’ cutting ‘helpful-to-the-people’ spending. Reagan’s ‘free market reforms’, not only crashed the S&Ls which severely impacted many ordinary people, but it allowed much of US industry to be asset stripped and destroyed. This helped produce the US’s current manufacturing problems and rampant business oligopolies, as small scale business was harmed. Neoliberals may say they are in favour of small business, but their actions nearly always help destroy small business, as do the actions of Wall-Mart and the other large retailers who they support.

The big difference between US Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans are hardline neoliberals who pretend to like rightwing Christians, while Democrats are more humanistic neoliberals who are suspicious of Rightwing Christians being Christians at all, and who think that people don’t need to be suppressed and persecuted by big business all the time. For example, Obama thought that bailout money given to established financial institutions should be paid back, and should not explicitly pay for parties and executive bonuses, unlike his predecessor. He did not, however, think bailout money should go to people who were going to lose their home through financial institutions calling in misleading loans, as a democratic socialist might do.

Neoliberal Media

On the whole the media is pro-capitalist, as it is largely (if not totally) funded and controlled by corporations or billionaires. Who else has the money? Most of it is hardline neoliberal, taking neoliberalism as the only position possible – especially media associated with the Murdoch Empire (like Fox, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Post in the US, or Skynews in Australia, The Sun and The Times in the UK), other Trump supporting media is similar, but it also includes Facebook and Twitter, who helped Trump win the previous election because they happily sold data to neoliberal conspirators like Cambridge Analytica, and gave them a free playground. Social media (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter) also keeps channeling people into more extreme forms of the neoliberal conspiracy if they show any interest in going along with it – so they act as advertising channels for this material. There is little escape – the internet, as currently organised, does not widen the opinion and news people are exposed to; it narrows it.

The basic principle for any analysis, given the neoliberal environment, is that no media should be trusted, and that includes small media. Small media can as easily be funded by billionaires as large media; it requires less capital and is more disposable when it has served its purpose, so it may be a better investment. Some big-billionaire-media like Breitbart or Skynews may pretend to be ‘alternate’, but they are just heavily controlled neoliberal propaganda channels – which sometimes seem coordinated in their decisions about what counts as news and what does not. They are certainly not going to portray the situation accurately or impartially.

Neoliberal Science

It is a remarkable co-incidence that nearly all science which might cause constraints on corporate action is attacked by supporters of neoliberalism, while science which allows corporations to build or manufacture products is not. Thus climate science has to go. Ecological science has to go. And the idea of pandemics has to go, even it pharmaceutical companies can make money out of vaccines.

Neoliberal Covid

Covid-19 policy and responses can be analysed in terms of their support for neoliberal principles. The main aim of neoliberal government is to keep the economy going, and keep the power relations of the established economy intact. If it cannot do that then the aim is to protect and subsidise the wealth elites during the crisis rather than the people. It is a response based defending corporate power and liberty to use workers, even if it hurts the workers. If quarter of a million, and now many more, die to keep the economy roughly intact, then that is surely a small price to pay for corporate comfort?

Neoliberal responses may not have caused redistribution of wealth, but it is clear that in the US those responses have been used, under Trump and the Republicans, to further redistribution of wealth with massive subsidies and tax breaks going to wealthy people and wealthy organisations. Some of this going to oil and fracking companies, who were already doing badly without Covid [8], [9], [10], [11]. It is well known that many billionaires have increased their wealth substantially during the crisis, as you would expect of such a pro-established wealth based response [12], [13], [14].

Interestingly I have noticed amongst Republican friends and news sources a marked hostility to the increase in the wealth of info-tech billionaires in particular, without much protest about the increases in the wealth of other kinds of billionaires. I’m not aware of any subsidy, regulatory favours, tax breaks etc, which were specifically, or only, aimed at Info tech, or at Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg etc. However, this kind of thing tends not to get reported in the mainstream media, so if these special government aids exist, then I would welcome being informed about them, as it would add to the evidence about how the system works.

However, that some industries flourish and get ridiculously rich while others suffer and decline, would seem to be what we would expect from the free market in action. This is how the market supposedly works, and how it is meant to work, culling inefficiency, bad management and unwanted products and massively rewarding services that people need. So I’m not sure why this should be praised in some circumstances and damned in others. My current hypothesis is that the Republican party and its elites are owned by established industries and big business, and are hostile to newcomers, but I have no real idea if that is correct.

Surprisingly (?) it does not appear that many of these billionaires (tech or otherwise) have used their increased wealth to protect their workers, or make sure they have good health leave. Indeed:

One in eight workers has perceived possible retaliatory actions by employers against workers in their company who have raised health and safety concerns during the pandemic.
Black workers are more than twice as likely as white workers to have seen possible retaliation by their employer.
National Employment Law Project Silenced About COVID-19 in the Workplace

Well it might lower profits, and if some people get really ill and have lasting consequences, or some people die, its for a good cause.

The Republicans, in the US, are also demanding protection for companies from any liability law suits which claim they not properly looking after workers [15], [16], [17]. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the US Senate, said:

as the Majority Leader I can tell you no bill will pass the Senate that doesn’t have the liability protection in it…..
Republicans almost to a person support the liability reform and that’s not about companies. It includes companies. It’s about hospitals and doctors and nurses and teachers and universities and colleges and K-12. This is not just liability protection for businesses. They’re included along with everyone else dealing with this brand new disease. Unless you’re grossly negligent or engage in intentional misbehavior, you’ll be covered. And it will be in a bill that passes the Senate.
McConnell on CNBC’s “Closing Bell”

Strange to protect companies from being sued over a condition which Republicans apparently claim is not real, or not that harmful.

This reminds us that the majority of times we are censored, or self-censored, or forced to do unpleasant things it is not because of the government, but because of our employer. Neoliberals want most people to be subservient to bosses. Again neoliberalism is not anarchism or the activation of liberty.

Discouraging social distancing, has the side effect of boosting pharmaceutical company profit, just as Trump’s promotion of unproven drugs helped boost their profits, and as will reliance on vaccines. However, this result may not be entirely deliberate, only a ‘fortunate’ consequence of the general approach to business.

To repeat, neoliberalism has no concern over whether ordinary people survive, or not. It holds that if people can’t afford to survive, they should suffer.

What I hope is the final part of this ‘Neoliberal Conspiracy’ project, will be a simple consideration of whether the Neoliberal Conspiracy is plausible.

Tags:Disinformation, neoliberalism
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Is coronavirus engineered? The case for Intelligent Design

December 3, 2020

Paranoid time.

Points in favour of design:

1) Conoravirus is amazingly contagious.

2) Most people who get coronovirus will not have symptoms but they will spread the disease, increasing the infection rate by stealth – other people will not engage in protective behaviour around supposedly healthy people, and supposedly healthy people will be less likely to protect others from their unknown sickness.

3) Minor quarantine/hygene efforts can slow the apparent infection rate down, while the disease keeps spreading secretly. Then the bang hits.

4) Coronavirus looks like flu, heart attack, stroke, lung embolism, lung failure, liver failure and so on.

5) Coronavirus looks like other diseases, because it often damages the organs it lodges in – it appears to stop cells from doing what the cells are supposed to do.

6) Therefore it is really easy to mistake Covid-19 for something else.

7) If you are not looking for it, then deaths will often just be recorded as something normal, and the disease will keep spreading.

8) It would be normal to undercount the fatalities from Covid-19 for a long time, until someone wonders why so many different illnesses are off the charts. Then people might start looking for a common cause. They might not see it until too late.

9) Some people, getting organ or muscle damage, get what is now known as ‘long coronavirus’ – the disease effects last for months after they are supposedly healed. They consume medical and social resources long after they have supposedly recovered, which lowers resources for other people. We as yet do not know the average length of long coronavirus.

10) There is dispute about how long immunity lasts, however, it does seem pretty likely that some people who healed have got it again, thus becoming new sources of vulnerability.

11) This possible lack of long term immunity, may undermine vaccination efforts.

12) Anyone who now tells you Covid-19 is flu, or like a flu, is misinformed or lying. They may even be part of the war team – assuming it exists. After all the war team would want to downplay the severity of the disease, and persuade others it was not dangerous, so as to maintain its spread.

13) The death rate is quite high; not so high that its immediately noticeable, and so again deaths will appear minor until they start accelerating by the normal processes of exponential contagion. Deaths seem to have started to accelerate badly in the US since October.

14) Some of the acceleration has occurred because the President and his supporters have consistently played down the danger, and played at being positive (engaging in hype) – because that’s how business works. At the moment, the President is preoccupied with casting doubt on the election result (as he promised he would, if he didn’t win), the disease has even less organisation acting against it, at a time in which many US citizens have family celebrations and effectively will spread the disease. His most recent comment, which shows his focus:

The Democrats had this election rigged from the beginning. They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus; where it originated; as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud.
Speech: Donald Trump Makes an Unscheduled Pre-Recorded Speech on the Election – December 2, 2020

Or, trying to keep people safe is part of a plot, and:

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump·Nov 17
European Countries are sadly getting clobbered by the China Virus. The Fake News does not like reporting this!
twitter

Obviously he does not read any decent news and I guess that is possible in the US, but given it is ‘clobbering’ Europe, which it is, then the virus is not fake news itself. It is not a hoax, or something which should be ignored…. None of this helps people survive.

15) Further, many states want to keep the labour and the profits going, and neoliberalism is about sacrificing people for profit, so if people die for the economy that is ok.

16) We could suggest that the more unequal and authoritarian the State, the more likely it will fail to deal with the problem, as the elites think they can escape – until they realise otherwise.

Other remarks

The disease seems to have been around in Europe since at least November last year (2019). There is a suggestion it was in Italy as early as September 2019, but this is not confirmed.

The first time it was identified as a new disease was in China in December 2019. The first case confirmed in Australia was announced on 25 January 2020. The first US cases confirmed on 21st January.

Let us be clear without the Chinese efforts to identify the disease, and let people know (however slowly, although a month or so for a new disease is not slow), the world would be in a much worse situation than it is. The disease could have spread with little check. There would likely be no relatively safe spots anywhere.

Real explanations?

So given it is the kind of disease we may not have noticed until the deaths were so high that societies could not function, is Covid-19 engineered?

The US informally accuses China. China accuses the US, as do Iran and Russia.

There are problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, any sensible person should have realised that with the amount of global air traffic we had pre-covid, that any camouflaged disease would be worldwide in a month at the most, and coming back into their own country very quickly. So they would need vaccines before launching it – and even then that might not be enough. They might of course think God, or destiny, was on their side and therefore be committing unintentional suicide.

Any sensible regime would not engineer bioweapons in the first place. And particularly would not engineer something potentially uncontainable like Covid-19.

Having said that, there are a few non-sensible regimes in the World. Trump’s US for example. But there are other places which you can probably guess for yourselves. Some of which claim remarkably low infection rates. I don’t think China is likely to have done a deliberate release, because why tell everyone else?

The other possibility is that the disease escaped before protection was ready. This could have happened anywhere, but again we are assuming people would have generated a bio-weapon which could wipe themselves out. I don’t see any sensible State doing that either.

The final and most plausible possibility, is that viral evolution now functions amidst human protective regimes, and that diseases will evolve to spread despite those regimes – or even through those regimes.

Global interconnection acts to spread (and incubate) diseases very quickly after they have hit people who travel.

Given the contemporary ecology of human prevention, it was probably only a matter of time before something like Covid-19 developed to look like intelligent design, through the processes of interaction, random mutation, survival and replication.

Tags:complexity, Disinformation, evolution, pandemic
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Directed Skepticism Summarised

December 2, 2020

I want to return to a form of skepticism, which seems common in the contemporary world, which does not seem skeptical at all to me, and just summarise the other rather long articles on this blog [1], [2], [3], [4].

I’ve called it ‘directed skepticism’.

in its simplest form it appears as “I am a real skeptic. I am skeptical about everything, but I cannot speak to anyone who is skeptical of my positions, as those positions are true, and any skeptics of those positions are stupid and immoral.”

Another possible way of phrasing this view is:

“I do not like this information. It is unpleasant. It comes from someone I justifiably do not like or am suspicious of. I am very skeptical of it. I’m a real skeptic.”

The above statement then often seems to be followed by another implied statement of the form:

“This information I do like. It supports my side of politics. It is reassuring. It comes from someone I like. Therefore it is probably true. I’m still a skeptic, because if I can be convinced its false, then I never really believed it in the first place, even if I’m likely to believe it again if I hear it from another source I like. I’m always skeptical of its refutation, or of the good intentions of those who disagree. I am a real skeptic.”

In general, people might say they are skeptical because they use their senses but, in effect, often what they are saying cannot come ‘directly from their senses’ as the subject being discussed is too big for overall perception, and too slow for the changes to be perceptible, as with climate change, pandemics, the cause of wars etc..

In these cases, our perception is likely to be mediated by what we have heard from others, no matter how much we insist on our independent thinking. That is, what we think is opinion, not knowledge to use an old (and probably largely invalid) distinction. We only have hypothesis.

This might all sound like caricature, but lets look at a few situations….

Climate change.

It seems common for people to say that they are skeptical of climate change. They may even allege that it is obvious that climate change is not a problem, or that climate scientists are lying.

We could allege that the idea that one’s own ‘side’ is undermining one’s life and the life of our children is difficult. It is far more comfortable to believe climate change is not real, than that our imagined allies are killing us (deliberately or not). However, a skeptic might be skeptical about the idea that our side cannot be harmful to us….

I personally do not know how the fakery and harmlessness of climate change could be obvious. Climate change is a big phenomena. No one can observe directly everything relevant that is happening, so it seems odd for a skeptic not to accept even the possibility that climate scientists may be persuaded by the evidence, or the cumulation of evidence, even if they are still mistaken. Whether it is wise to assume they must be mistaken is another question.

However, those people skeptical of the information and motives presented by climate scientists often appear to have little skepticism about the information and motives of the people on youtube or in the ‘mainstream media’ or in their favoured political party who tell them there is ‘no problem’ or that it is ‘not that bad’, or that ‘we can solve it through [imaginary??] technology’.

The ‘skeptical’ person may argue that the consequences of climate change are bad for the economy, and we should therefore be skeptical of those actions and keep the economy going as we need it, and let the free market sort it all out. With this argument, there is no obvious skepticism directed at the idea that the free market will be able to solve all problems. This is not obvious. It would appear to be a dogma. IThe skeptic is showing no skepticism of the idea we need an economy which is destructive to us, or of the motives of those promoting this idea.

It may be that the people telling the ‘skeptics’ there is nothing to worry about are not climate scientists, and have no apparent long-term experience with the issue. These people may still be right, and climate scientists wrong, but it is not inherently likely that this is the case. It is possible, but are non-climate scientists the best people to trust? Can we be skeptical about deciding that people who are not climate scientists must know much more about climate than all those people who have spent years studying the subject? This is skepticism of non-climate scientists is generally not allowed by climate skeptics.

Acceptance of the ‘no case’ case also tends to demand acceptance of the idea that climate scientists are conspiring, or that science is now completely corrupt (when it conflicts with the skeptics dogma). Is it clearly the case that a world wide conspiracy of climate scientists and leftist politicians is more plausible than a conspiracy involving some fossil fuel companies (who directly benefit from ignoring climate change), and some rightwing media and politicians. If it is not clearly the case, then this could sound like choosing to believe what is comforting.

In my experience, directed skeptics may refer to scientific papers as evidence for their view, which they may not have read, as often the papers do not appear to say what they say they say, or perhaps they just wanted to hear something nice which confirms their skepticism.

The skepticism appears to be entirely directed at justifying a particular point of view. It is not applied evenly to the person’s own positions.

Covid

The same appears to be true of Covid. I, at least, met many people skeptical that Covid is real or dangerous. Diagnosing a new disease, and predicting its trajectory, is difficult. It is another process which seems beyond our direct sense perception – we cannot perceive every virus, and every infected person, all over the world as these develop. So there is every reason for being skeptical of the proposition that we know everything we should know, or need to know, about the disease. It could be something we can adapt to painlessly after a while.

However again, these directed skeptics seem largely unskeptical of people who say its a hoax, or a summer flu, or that the death figures for the US are made up, possibly by doctors to get money or to allow Joe Biden to form a dictatorship. Why should we not be equally skeptical of Trump’s claims that covid would just go away, and that it would disappear after the election, when there was no evidence of this at the time.?

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump·Oct 27

ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID. ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!
Twitter

These people may quote doctors worried that long term lock-down will probably have some bad psychological and health effects for some people, as being evidence that Covid is not really a problem, or that dealing with Covid is worse than ignoring it. Another conclusion might be more like recognising that doctors may well be right that there are problems with lock-downs, and these problems should not be ignored.

Again the skepticism seems to be directed at a particular and reassuring result – we are safe all of our family is safe, and the people we support are not sacrificing us.

News

I often seem to be being told that I should not rely on ‘mainstream media’ for political news. This seems good advice as again I cannot observe everything that happens politically as it happens (and I would need to interpret what is happening anyway, direct perception is limited), and the mainstream media has similar limited perception and comprehension. It also probably displays political and other bias, most likely in favour of its corporate or billionaire owners and advertisers. However, it then seems these people assume that Fox or Breitbart or some youtube channel, that appear to have noticeable political slants, can be trusted most of the time and despite their size and influence are not mainstream, corporately controlled media. This is odd. Surely these news sources are at least equally worthy of skepticism?

Elections

We are currently being told at great volume that we should be skeptical of the US Presidential election results (not the House or Senate results, only the Presidential election results). This is also worthy of skepticism.

Election results are often not representative. Electorates can be gerrymandered. Attempts at fairness, or unfairness, can mean particular parts of the population get more representatives than other parts of the population, as when smaller population states get to elect more members per head than do large population states. Small margins in some electorates can change the result of a whole election, which might otherwise have gone another way. People can be turned away from polling booths, some sections of the population can be disenfranchised by what could look like reasonable political action, voting machines could be hacked. There may be attempts to stop mail in voting, or pre-poll voting. ‘The people’ may not be as binary as the major parties claim. Voters can be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘socialist’ and not support all the policies of the party they vote for. There is even a social theorem which states that a fair and rational voting scheme is impossible.

The idea that political parties in government always represent the ‘general will’ (or something) and have a ‘mandate’ to do whatever they like, deserves skepticism as few people are likely voting for everything the party has proposed or might propose in the future.

However, in this current case, we are just being asked to be skeptical about the voting system being accurate, and policed, enough to award Donald Trump the victory.

We are furthermore being asked to be unskeptical of a person who argued that he could only loose if the other side cheated. We are to be unskeptical that this person has good evidence of cheating which they have so far refused to present in court, where it can be tested, and perjury can be penalised. We are asked to be unskeptical of claims that the majority result of the vote must be wrong by close to 8 million. We are being asked not to consider whether the known frauds were equally, or even majorly, Republican attempts at cheating. We also have recounts which have not changed the results, and the Attorney General, who appeared to have misrepresented the Mueller report in favour of the President, also states there is no evidence of fraud. But we still have to remain unskeptical of a person who does not have a reputation for peacefully going down, or telling the truth.

At the moment, given who is alleging the claims of truly massive cheating, it would seem ‘rational’ to be skeptical of those claims. Especially given that he appears to want to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands (to millions?) of voters by not counting their votes, in order to win.

Conclusion

These directed skeptics, do not appear to have a sense that skepticism which is only directed in one direction is not skepticism – it is a form of belief which refuses to test its own desired truths.

In this case, directed skepticism seems to be being used to further particular dogmas.

Tags:climate change, coronavirus, Disinformation, pandemic, skepticism
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Trump and the deal

November 15, 2020

One of the things that has surprised me about Trump, is that I thought he might do deals – that is what he is supposedly famous for, and people keep telling us he is not a politician and he is always open to a deal. His famous book is The Art of the Deal

But he seems incapable of doing what normal people might call deals.

In normal business, my understanding is that a ‘deal’ leaves all sides relatively happy. In Trump world a deal seems to be an agreement in which Trump wins. Or as the co-author of the Art of the Deal remarks:

To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it — as he thought his older brother had….
In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration. Many of the deals in “The Art of the Deal” were massive failures — among them the casinos he owned and the launch of a league to rival the National Football League — but Trump had me describe each of them as a huge success….
From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.
Tony Schwartz I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past. Washington Post. 16 May 2017

The above is, of course, opinion from a person who listened to Trump for a long time, but there are plenty of people around, who allege that in their direct experience of him, as a business person, Trump’s idea of a deal was to not pay contractors or suppliers, and threaten them with legal warfare if they complained.

Obviously I don’t know how true any of these assertions are, but it seems characteristic of his visible politics, and he supposedly was involved in over 3,500 law suits before entering politics (see here for for an expanded list) – and some of his frauds like Trump University [2] and the Trump Foundation [3], [4] are quite well known – so its not implausible. It also appears that he took money from his presidential campaign funds and transferred it to his own businesses.

One example of the failure to make a deal is that, despite the Republicans controlling the Senate and the Reps for two years, Trump was unable to get a deal to improve Obamacare. He kept promising that one will turn up in the next fortnight, but it never happens. He could not even get the Republicans to fund his fence with Mexico. He even threatened to close the government over it towards the end of 2017, without any one yielding to the deal. He blamed Democrats, despite having Republican majorities, but he did not, would not, or could not, do a deal with Democrats. He had to take the money from other programmes. I quote from wikipedia to save space:

Trump signed a declaration that the situation at the southern border constitutes a national emergency.^[101] This declaration ostensibly made available $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, $2.5 billion from the United States Department of Defense^[b] (including anti-drug accounts), $3.6 billion from military construction accounts, for a total of $8 billion when added to the $1.375 billion allocated by Congress.^[103] Around February 21–22, it emerged that more than a third of those funds had already been spent for their original purposes, and were therefore unavailable.^[104][105]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_wall#cite_note-105

When both the Democrats and Republicans passed a motion to stop the US participating in Saudi Arabia’s war with Yemen, Trump did not deal, he vetoed it.

Some people say he has sabotaged two peace deals with the Taliban – but he has carried out his threat to bomb the shit out of them, apparently dropping more bombs than were used in all Bush Jr’s wars.

But then he has apparently carried out more attacks on Somalia than any other US President – and Somalia is not exactly a threat.

And the US is no longer required to report how many people it has killed through drone warfare – an achievement, but perhaps not a deal.

He did not do a deal in Syria, he just abandoned the US’s Kurdish allies, even while he kept troops there. He did not do a deal with the Iraqi government when they insisted he remove troops, he just kept the troops there.

He did not do a deal with Iran, he just withdrew. He seems to have deliberately destabilised a peace agreement and pushed Iran towards nuclear weapons. He could be looking for a war there. That is one reason he could be stacking the Pentagon.

He did not manage a deal with China. China is still pressing in the South China Seas, and suppressing democracy in Hong Kong. The Trade War with China, which he thought was easily won, is still going, with no obvious advantage to the US – although lots of taxpayers money has been used to prop up big agribusiness. It might be possible to think this is a good thing, but its not a deal.

He failed to get a deal with North Korea, and testing nukes continues.

He did not improve the deal with Paris agreement. He just withdrew.

The usual impression I get from international meetings is that few world leaders think Trump is great at making deals, and they seem to have little evidence he is any good. He appears to spend most of his time at such meetings saying how wonderful he is, how bad everyone else is, and talking with Putin in secret.

I don’t know of anything the US has got from his deals with Putin, but perhaps he benefits a bit.

The only deal I know that seems decent was the economic treaty between Serbia and Kosovo. I don’t know how much he had to do with that. I have read that he claimed he was ending centuries of bloodshed, in a war which ended 20 years ago, and Serbia still does not recognise Kosovo’s right to exist.

The middle East treaty seems to have been about giving Israel what they wanted, abandoning the Palestinians and getting signatures from people who were not at war and shared no common borders.

He seems to have even refused to talk with people in the US who were protesting about black people being shot and beaten up by police. Instead he seems to have encouraged the police violence that started the riots, and praises white guys for shooting bullets and paint pellets at rioters. No deal there. He seems to have decided it was to his political advantage to keep the situation tense, rather than to do a deal.

Likewise rather than deal, he seems to have overridden States’ rights, so as to push higher pollution levels on States that wanted to make their own laws about what was acceptable.

So he does not deal that well.

Most politicians would probably not insist on total subservience and loyalty to themselves. That seems to be Trump’s idea of a deal. Consequently it is not really a surprise that after years of FoxNews’ unswerving support, and the kind of lovey-dovey interviews he can cope with, he threatens to destroy them after they reported he lost.

To most people this could seem like a political attack on free speech – but hey its Trump and he is not a politician.

I don’t know of any deals done with the Democrats, but his 4th July Speech seems to reveal his attitude to deals again. This is traditionally a speech in which Presidents try to draw Americans together. Trump used it to blame the ‘the left’ (which to his audience would mean Democrats) for everything that was wrong. He tried to make them appear Unamerican.

as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure.
Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children…
In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us….
That is why I am deploying federal law enforcement to protect our monuments, arrest the rioters, and prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law….
The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions….. [and so on and so on]
Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration | Keystone, South Dakota. White House 4 July

Yet again, it appears that if you don’t completely admire and agree with Trump, you are evil and his enemy – there is no deal. There is certainly no attempt to understand what is going on.

That seems to be his main political strategy: Don’t deal, and stir up the conditions for civil war, to stop the other side from winning.

And now he won’t go, and personally I worry about what might happen next.

And he is ignoring Covid, so it will get worse and at best make Biden’s job harder. Biden has to deal with the Republicans, misinformation, and the disease, plus handle climate change.

It might be suggested that aiming to win, or stop the other side from winning, all the time, is not compatible with Democracy or dealing. Democracy needs people to be able to win, lose and share with other citizens.

****

For References for the “Trump at war” section see:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/donald-trump-defense-contractors

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/record-7423-bombs-dropped-afghanistan-2019-report-200128142958633.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/28/us-afghanistan-war-bombs-2019

https://ips-dc.org/ending-the-myth-that-trump-is-ending-the-wars/

https://ips-dc.org/remember-trumps-choices-war-walls-and-wall-street/

https://upstatedroneaction.org/wp/trumps-military-drops-a-bomb-every-12-minutes-and-no-one-is-talking-about-it/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/obama-drones-trump-killings-count/

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/trump-yemen-war-civilian-deaths/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/02/trumps-plan-to-withdraw-from-somalia-couldnt-come-at-a-worse-time/

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The US Election

November 7, 2020

There is so much information coming in, I could be mistaken about anything at this moment, but that is the situation that we live in, so let’s go on anyway. The talk is of fraud, and it is probable someone is being fraudulent.

If there was widespread evidence of fraud coming from independent sources, then it would be vital to challenge the election result. However, the challenge is largely coming from people who don’t seem to have much regard for the truth, who have spent months beforehand preparing to challenge the results, who tried to make pre-poll voting as awkward as possible by limiting booths, who tried to stop mail voting, who tried to stop the post office delivering mailed votes, who tried to stop the counting of mail votes, who have argued that no votes should be counted after election day, who regularly try to disenfranchise large sections of the population, who have essentially threatened not to leave power, who alleged the results of the last election that they won were fake because they did not win the popular vote, who threatened that they would only accept the results of the previous election if they won, who ‘joked’ about staying for at least three terms, who seem unconcerned about foreign states intervening in the election on their behalf, who actually asked supporters to vote twice, who never seem to worry about how easy it is to hack voting machines, and so on. Coming from those people, it simply seems a way of potentially avoiding loss.

For some strange reason despite the claims of fraud, the Republicans have managed to keep the Senate, and it looks like they managed to take seats in the lower house, but they managed to lose several ‘Republican States’ in the Presidential vote. This seems to be being forgotten – so its an odd set of election frauds.

It is also odd, because, previously, Republicans fought hard and successfully to prevent a recount in Florida in the Bush/Gore Election, so their current concern with voter fraud, and preventing a miscount, is a bit weird at best. Even more weirdly, they have not yet lost the Presidential election, and they seem to be asking for counting to stop because the results are not going their way – not to examine fraud. This could change of course.

That a party wants to win, or thinks they should win, is not evidence they have won. That they think the votes should not change when absentee votes are counted is not evidence either.

True, votes need to be held up to scrutiny. People from both parties need to watch the counting (which as far as I can see is happening, despite allegations otherwise), although crowds of unofficial observers are not being let in, for what seem like obvious reasons to me, unless you want vote theft to occur. So its fair enough that people outside observe through binoculars if that makes them happy, although a video link would be easy to maintain.

All votes need to be counted, unless there is evidence which suggests particular votes are fake – such as two postal, or booth, votes supposedly from the same person. With postal votes, it is easy to set the votes aside for investigation before counting. We need to find out how many people, if any, appear to have voted twice. We could even ask which vote the person wants to be accepted, if the person wants to comment and we cannot prove they voted twice. Checking votes for legitimacy, should be easy to do – otherwise the system needs changing.

Recounts need to be routine, not special, especially if the vote is close. Anyone can make mistakes. However, votes should not be discarded because they are votes for the ‘wrong person,’ and parties should not be able to stop a recount when the result is close.

Democracy depends upon conventions. If the conventions become routinely broken, then democracy becomes broken. President Trump has destroyed conventions repeatedly. His party even refused to listen to the evidence in his impeachment case. He lies repeatedly. He lies to such an extent, that any sensible person would think that any assertion Trump makes which appears to benefit himself, is likely to be false, unless proven otherwise.

Democracy, of any type, depends on the assumption that your opponents are honourable. Unfortunately after this election it seems impossible to assume our opponents are honourable. It does not matter what side you are on, Donald Trump has now disrupted that sense of honour for everyone , and this will almost certainly not be fixed easily. Whoever wins, significant numbers of the other side will feel they have been cheated, and will likely feel any future cheating and dishonesty by themselves is justified by this.

Democracy is fragile. US democracy may never recover from what has happened, because Trump has set a precedent for ignoring conventions and for discovering that abuse of power can be hidden by assertion, party support, repeated fiction and what looks like a dedicated networked propaganda machine of youtube videos, internet rumour, and minor stations. Every unscrupulous politician in the world will have learnt how easy this is.

Trump will probably not stop the destabilisation. There is a story told by Richard Branson, from before the 2016 election, which possibly illustrates Trump’s behaviour. You don’t have to trust Branson, for it to be relevant, but what did he gain from this?

Some years ago, Mr Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.
He didn’t speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn’t think it was the best way of spending his life…..
I was baffled why he had invited me to lunch solely to tell me this. For a moment, I even wondered if he was going to ask me for financial help. If he had, I would have become the sixth person on his list!
Branson. Meeting Donald Trump. Richard Branson Blog. 21 October 2016

One story is not evidence of anything, but it fits with what we know of Trump’s continual vindictiveness against those he perceives as opponents. We also know he blames others for his failures.

According to USA Today back in 2016:

the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits….
since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in seven weeks….
The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.
As he campaigns, Trump often touts his skills as a negotiator. The analysis shows that lawsuits are one of his primary negotiating tools. He turns to litigation to distance himself from failing projects that relied on the Trump brand to secure investments.
Penzenstadler & Page. Exclusive: Trump’s 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee. USA Today 1 June 2016 – update 23 October 2017. [emphasis added]

This is unsual, even for an ‘important’ business person.

Trump does appears vengeful, and probably will continue his denial of loss and use the courts in an attempt to prevent loss. It seems improbable he will concede defeat and he will cling on in the hope that he can make any Biden victory be the subject of suspicion and contempt – wrecking things for others might be pleasurable for him. He has until mid January to wreck as much as he can – it is only convention that stops sitting presidents from doing this after they are voted out.

Whether he needs to be successful or not in persuading his selected judges to decide for him, we are all probably set for an even greater run of authoritarian and non democratic power, whatever the declared result of the election.

We should also remember, that should he get in, Biden will have to work with a hostile Senate, particularly if they stick with the view he is a fraud, that attacking him as a fraud is popular electorally, or with the view they had of Obama that they need to destroy him. Then it will be awkward to get anything done.

Likewise, there is probably no solution to the Covid problem, now the disease is so established, and now the anti-vax movement will feel free to protest against Trump’s vaccination solution given that Trump is not proposing it.

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Media and Social Research

November 5, 2020

This is a description of how I try to sort out the highly politicised from the less politicised information. It cannot be definitive and other people may well do a lot better in smaller space.

Its important because almost all research into, or attempts to understand, contemporary social phenomena cannot avoid politicised information or the media – it is the sea we swim in, the air we breathe etc.

Video evidence

First off, never trust 5-10 second clips on youtube, or elsewhere, of someone saying something.

This technique of extraction is frequently a deception, or at best aims to give a false impression. Some tapes are edited so that the subject of the comment is provided by the narrator/presenter rather than the person speaking, which makes distortion even more likely. “Here is Bill Gates laughing at the State of world economy” Shift to Bill Gates saying “We are stuffed” nervous giggle. Everything is being framed, or given meaning, by the commentator providing context, not by the person being ‘quoted’ or their conversation.

Meaning does not inhere in words alone, but in words and context together. Giving words a completely different context can change the meaning of the words radically.

Consequently, you always need a considerable amount of the actual interview before and after the particular clip, to figure out what people are trying to say. Often people fail to say what the context makes clear they are trying to say – live language is messy and often badly formed. The short clip usually depends, for its political effect, on people not bothering to check up the actual context.

It is wise to be even more distrustful of clips which slow down a person’s facial expressions or freeze them.

If there is a facial close up, then we need to check whether that actually has anything to do with what is happening. For example, there was a video of Trump’s expressions when he was asked to condemn white supremacy in the last debate. His pain, reluctance and dilemma seemed obvious. However, the close up had no context that could not have been added by the editors. Did his expressions have anything to do with the questions he was being asked in the background? Were the shots from somewhere else in the interview? In other words the presentation could be perfectly real, but we were not given the evidence to make sure it was real. If we took it at ‘face value’ then we were trusting the video makers and allowing them to manipulate us, if that was what they wanted to do.

Likewise a couple of days ago I saw a video of people being beaten up at a Trump Rally and a cut back to Trump saying something like “We are having a really good time here. USA, USA, USA” – how do I know Trump’s comments had anything to do with the beating without more context? Before I would comment on his facial expressions, or the sayings, I would need to check other videos, full transcripts etc.

Videos are easily edited nowadays, and some people can construct fake videos of people saying things they did not, completely from scratch.

Believing with your own eyes, can need caution, but believing a short and obviously cut video is leaving yourself open to manipulation.

The research principle is simple. When you are using someone’s words against them then always start with the best and most complete source, and make the context visible. Be aware that some people will chop up and misquote sources, so you always need to check.

Go to the full source, if possible

Consequently, when someone shows me or tells me of something particularly stupid, ignorant, incoherent or vicious that Trump has said. I refuse the 5 second youtube clip and go to the whole transcripts (when possible – the WhiteHouse and Rev.com seem good sources) – or to his tweets (there is also a search engine for his tweets). If there is a real issue as to what he said, then transcripts with video are good, as its easier to get body language as a context as well as other words, situation and what he is responding too, if necessary.

Tweets are useful because they can show you how some Trump supporters are reading what he has written. This helps reveal ‘dog whistles’ and makes it easier take note of fake corrections (when he has officially doing as his advisors advise but which he does not believe). But even that does not necessarily tell us what Trump himself thinks. For that you need to look at the surrounding Trump tweets to get the context.

Repetition helps resolve meaning and intent

Repetition says a lot. Anyone can say things they would rather not have said in a moment of passion, but if they say it repeatedly then it is telling. For example, if we get repeated messages from Trump telling police to be violent towards protestors, or telling supporters to beat up protestors, or giving support for people who hurt protestors or offering to pay their legal fees, or supporting people who do armed protests and occupations, then we can more sure that this is substantial part of his politics. Whether you want to call this ‘fascist’ or not is up to you – that is an interpretation.

Likewise if a person repeatedly says they know more about ‘blah’ than people who work in ‘blah’ for lots of different ‘blahs’, then we can hypothesise that they really do think they know nearly everything, and are not smart enough to recognise their incompetence in fields they have no experience in. Thus we can be less inclined to take their pronouncements in those fields as being accurate or automatically trustworthy.

Again if a person repeatedly contradicts what they said less than five minutes ago, then that is also part of their modes of operation.

These are reasons why some of my blogs about Trump go on and on. I’m just trying to use lots of his words to show that what he is saying, or how he approaches a problem, is not a momentary aberration. I provide lots of context, so it is easier to conclude that he actually does seem to think in that way….

The same with anyone, I go to a decent whole source, not a hostile newspaper, TV channel or a person on Youtube, if at all possible.

Confirmation from the person

If I can’t find any official source for some widely alleged process, such as for Trump’s supposed war on child rapists, I check what is available and look at how plausible it is. Has Trump tweeted about this a lot (before recently, when he may have heard its popular with his voters)? Has he spoken about it a lot (before recently)? Are there any of the results being claimed, being reported or used by the Republican party officially in a tight election campaign when it would be useful? Given the lack of any supporting evidence of material which we would not expect to find under any President (checking what past presidents have done or said), this war does not seem remotely plausible.

Trump has not acknowledged it, until it became useful. The charges which are supposedly being made against major ‘enemies’ have not been laid. He has not confirmed them, or the evidence against his enemies. Just vague assertions.

What reasons do we have to think that ‘Q’ or their followers are not false flags? are not part of the ‘Re-elect Trump committee?’ are not lying or directing us to false sources, and so on?

Looking for overt bias

If a youtube or media, presentation continually and casually slams one side of politics and avoids important parts of the question which could throw a bad light on their side, then I assume they are probably so biased as to be ‘fake news’, and only to be taken seriously as ethnographic studies. Even so, one should never dismiss the possibility that they could be right on occasions. There is always the joke about the stopped clock.

I generally save myself time by assuming that the Murdoch Empire lies and abuses people for political reasons. They seem to attempt to generate anger and contempt in their audience against their enemies. This generally shuts down curiosity and investigation in that audience – these enemies are not worth checking up on. Everytime I’ve ever investigated something the Murdoch Empire have been plugging, which sounds off, it has turned out to be wrong. However, I still quote Murdoch stuff because sometimes it is a useful source for what people believe, or which creates what people believe. Again, they may sometimes be correct, just remember the hypothesis that their prime function is to please their owner and boost his power.

However, if someone in the Murdoch Empire reports something that happens to slam those that Murdoch normally supports, then that is probably worth investigating, as possibly accurate.

Mainstream media

A frequently used argument takes the form of “you rely too much on mainstream media.” Or you don’t do research because you rely on mainstream media.

Let us be real, mainstream media is not always accurate. Some media is more biased than others. Often I find people who say this tend to trust highly biased mainstream media, that appears to condemn other media as part of its marketing campaigns – to manufacture trust for itself.

However, the bias of mainstream media does not mean that a person on youtube who reports the news you want to hear, is necessarily unbiased, nor attempting to manipulate you, or not financed by those attempting to manipulate you. Exactly the same tests should be applied to them as you might apply to mainstream media. To repeat: if they casually nearly always dismiss one side of politics, then the chances are high they are not doing their research.

However, you define mainstream media, (some people appear to say that Fox or Breitbart are not mainstream, which almost certainly shows they are likely to have been manipulated), it does not mean that everything which is reported as mainstream is necessarily untrue. I’ve said before that if the mainstream media tells me that it is likely that a 200m fall without some form of safety equipment will kill me, then I don’t have to disbelieve it on principle. Again the problem is that I am likely to accept what I, or my friends, assume is true without bothering to check. It is also not the case that because most of the mainstream media do not always flatter Trump, that I have to think he must be a good guy – the media might be correct about that. There might be some media owners who legitimately think Trump is a fraud, because they have business experience with him, or something.

Many people seem to think that research simply means trying to confirm or elaborate what you already think you know. Or they might think that by looking at ‘underground’ news or youtube videos, or self-proclaimed ‘alternative news’ they are getting the truth. This is not necessarily the case. It may even be that many of these sites are even less concerned with accuracy and responsibility than the ‘lamestream’ media.

It is also worth looking at the emotional context of the ‘news’. If the main context is the host’s anger, contempt, mockery or shouting, then you can probably assume the station is not unbiased, and may well be aiming at replacing accuracy with manipulation. The show may not want you to be curious and think, it may just want to get you stuck in a ‘frame’ in which you always see whoever they define as the ‘bad guys’ as bad, who are not worth checking up on, to see if the reports are coherent, consistent or correct. Again, this does not mean everything they report has to be wrong, but it does imply that it needs to be checked up. Was what they were saying or implying actually real, or confirmed by better sources?

If one is going to be skeptical about media sources, which is clearly a good thing, then don’t only be skeptical towards media that reports things you would prefer not to be true. This is directed skepticism, which often functions as a form of dogma, misdirection or manipulation.

Accounts of what evil people do

If a book or document is supposed to show how corrupt the writers are, I read the text, just as I would go to the original words of the a person who is supposedly saying something that admits they are corrupt. This is yet another instance of how research involves going to the best original source. It is way too common for political writers to distort the words of others, either deliberately or not – knowing that most people will never check, they will just assume the pre-defined ‘evil people’ are ‘evil’. One of the major aims of political parties is to stop people reading the other side – hence read the other side as a matter of principle, you may well be pleasantly surprised.

Same when a movement is being dismissed as white supremacist, socialist, or violent. Don’t assume it has to be true.

Media Silence

If something is not talked about in the media, that is significant. Thus I find the lack of discussion, during the previous election, about Trump being charged with child rape interesting. I wonder why Trump’s business crimes have such little media traction, or why there is so little interest in his promotion of pollution and wilderness destruction. I wonder why Trump’s military activities get such little reporting, that many consider him a peace president, I wonder why most people don’t seem to know about the Republican’s efforts to shovel taxpayers’ money at the corporate and billionaire sector, rather than the people, as part of their Covid response. I wonder why the media accepted Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, when any sensible person would have wondered about Barr’s accuracy. I wonder why the ecological crisis is so under reported by most news media, and the work of denialists and delayers is so widely reported.

I also find it interesting that despite what seemed to be massive amounts of twitter video showing what seems like unprovoked police violence at protestors, bystanders, or even against black people trying to drive away from the ‘riots,’ this seems to be ignored. Even though some of the people being harassed were journalists. When I also come across twitter reports of white guys looting and burning, with the police just standing by and watching, I wonder why this is not news? I also wonder why police where allowing armed white folks to wander around through a disturbance even when this was also obviously being filmed. I then wonder why Biden’s condemnation of the violence was so under reported, while him supposedly not condemning the violence was being widely reported.

This silence does seem pretty coherent.

What does it say about the media?

A sample argument

Recently there has been an argument about doctors receiving extra money for Covid treatments. I had always understood that hospitals received more money for serious diseases in the US. There was a lot of discussion about this payment in April or earlier, before it exploded again in November. This extra money is not surprising or unreasonable as some Covid cases are dangerous and require extended treatments, although I understood the payment was for Covid patients on respirators, not general Covid patients etc.

My understanding of the current (November 2020) scuffle is that Trump said

Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid’ .
Donald Trump Rally Speech Transcript Waterford Township, Michigan October 30. Rev.com 30 October 2020

So Trump was accusing doctors inflating covid deaths to get more money for themselves personally.

Trump presents no evidence, which is not also simply evidence of how he thinks (“people claim false stuff for their own advantage all the time”). I don’t know if doctors also get money for individual cases they are treating, they may not. Without direct evidence to the contrary, I assume that most doctors have some professional integrity. They are not politicians trying to to keep the economic figures good by persuading people that a disease is less dangerous than it appears, not wanting to count cases, or pretending that people really died of other causes, or claiming to know the results of elections before the votes are counted.

I have not found any evidence in favour of that proposition about doctors inflating cases to get money. My understanding is that doctors and other people, were denying that doctors fixed results to get payment, not the assertion about payment itself, but I can’t read everything – it is possible that someone did argue that hospitals do not get paid – but that is not evidence of a general position.

It seems quite common for people to take an attack on a dubious statement, and turn the attack into an attack on something less dubious and triumphantly refute the made up allegations about the non-dubious part. In this case they might say that Doctors were denying there was extra payment for Covid cases, when the Doctors were denying this led them to rig Covid figures as a matter of course.

This commonness of this process implies that it is a good idea to actually read the attack and get the full message to see if they were attacking what they were said to be attacking.

As a matter of interest I note Forbes is claiming that “More than 20% of U.S. physicians have experienced a furlough or pay cut as financial hits from the coronavirus strain COVID-19 batter the healthcare industry, a new analysis shows.” Which I guess by the same kind of logic would imply that physicians and surgeons are more likely to dismiss the dangers of covid to restore their incomes. But that does not seem to be reported widely.

If I did want to find how the payment system works, there will be a government website somewhere that has hospital payment figures on it (unless Trump is having it suppressed, which seems unlikely) and I would use that to find out if individual doctors, as opposed to hospitals, get paid. A good news article will reference that source – if they are attacking doctors and they don’t, they are problematic.

Likewise if I want to find out how much the death rate seems to have increased through the disease I will look for figures on excess deaths. If those figures suggest there are less deaths than normal, then it may be the case that coronavirus helps people survive with other diseases. If the excess deaths is still excessive when Covid deaths are subtracted I will probably assume we are underestimating Covid deaths, or there is something else majorly wrong, such as another unknown pandemic. I would also like to know how many people are long term sufferers from the disease or who receive what looks like permanent damage from the disease, as that seems anecdotally commonplace, but so far no luck.

Another Sample

Earlier in this blog I investigated the common allegations that Trump told people to drink bleach to combat Covid-19. He didn’t. He responded to announcements that forms of light and disinfectant killed the virus quickly outside the body, by suggesting research should be done into the possibilities of killing covid inside the body with similar techniques.

This may not have been that sensible, but was understandable.

However, after the fuss developed, rather than saying these were suggestions for research and people should not do this at home, Trump appeared to claim he was being sarcastic, possibly to expose journalists. There is no evidence of sarcasm either. But it does seem evidence that taken with other evidence, suggests he does not generally respond well to criticism.

Final sample

In the week before the election the Trumpsphere, was full of a video clip of Joe Biden which was used as ‘evidence’ that Biden was fixing the votes. It had Biden saying

We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.

Now this is suspicious, because:

All the versions of the video I have seen provide no context, other than condemnation. They just give that statement, non of Biden’s surrounding words at all, or the questions he might have been responding to.
They don’t report where the statement was made, so its difficult to check.
They are implausible, as who is really going to say that they are going to defraud the electorate in public?
Biden is known to mangle words on occasions – not whole paragraphs like Trump, but sentences, so maybe he meant something else?
We have Police Vice squads, major crime squads etc. While we may be cynical about their effectiveness, we don’t expect them to officially promote vice and major crime. So, without the hostile framing, Biden used a normal linguistic construction meaning an ‘extensive organisation against voter fraud’.

These kinds of issues should have made people suspicious, especially given that it seemed to be used by, and possibly originate with, the Trump campaign. We should not expect the Trump campaign, or any other campaign, to be 100% honest. So we need to find the original. This is not that hard, if you were really doing research as opposed to looking for what you want to find. This is the context. I quote it at length simply to demonstrate the importance of context. I’ve italicised the excerpt to make it clear.

one of the things that I think is most important is those who haven’t voted yet. First of all, go to iwillvote.com to make a plan. Exactly how you’re going to vote, where you’re going to vote, when you’re going to vote. Because it can get complicated. Because the Republicans are doing everything they can to make it harder for people to vote. Particularly people of color to vote. So go to iwillvote.com. Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama’s administration before this, we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics. What the president is trying to do is discourage people from voting by implying that their vote won’t be counted. It can’t be counted. We’re going to challenge it and all these things. If enough people vote, it’s going to overwhelm the system. You see what’s happening now. You guys know it as well as I do. You see the long, long lines in early voting. You see the millions of people have already cast a ballot. And so, don’t be intimidated…..
Thirdly, for those who’ve already voted, it’s not enough, God love ya, it’s not enough that you voted. You got to go out and get your friends. You’ve got to go out and get your family. You’ve got to go out and get people. There’s so many people like the old days when we used to be it used to be a lot easier. There’s so many people when you get over that, were you able to knock on doors and know Mrs. Smith didn’t have a vehicle that you drive her to the polls. You make sure that you get your friends, your family, because, look, you know, as John Lewis said before he passed away, you have a sacred right and it’s a sacred obligation to vote, particularly young people.
“We got Joe!” Pod Save America, 24 October 2020.

So yes, it seems like Joe Biden was worried about Republicans trying to encourage people not to vote.

Use of Media

Let’s be clear, newspaper articles, news site articles ,youtube videos, etc are at best a starting point, or something that can be quickly used to point in a direction for research. Nowadays, articles or stories are written and produced quickly, with the best information the person can get at the time or, in the case of the Murdoch Empire, the best guess at what Rupert wants to said (This is massively documented by the way). There is lots of media analysis, which explains why time, advertising and financial pressures make media not as good as it was 20 to 30 years ago. Although its now old, Nick Davies Flat Earth News was a good starting book – and since then it has got worse.

I have found the Guardian to be generally, but not always, accurate. More importantly I have found them willing to correct articles when they have made a mistake, and to acknowledge the mistake. This is heartening, although clearly what is a mistake can be disputed. The only time the Murdoch empire seems to correct a mistake is if they are threatened with legal action and think it is libelous and they cannot get away by pretending it is opinion – and the correction is often not connected to the original article at all.

If a media source does not check out, then I don’t use it, or retract the use. I don’t just pass on to the next source.

There are always better sources.

Hopefully this at least gives the reader some idea of what is involved in trying to find truth in the world. It takes a bit of work.

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Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

Introduction

Political System

Economic System

Extraction

Energy System

Waste, Pollution and Dispersal systems

Information System

Technological Systems

Planetary systems and boundaries

Geographic Systems

Conclusion and Provisional Advice

Is the neoliberal conspiracy theory plausible?

Neoliberal explanations of the problems

Conclusion

Not Recognising ‘Culture’

Ecologies

More Accurate Foundations

Human Purpose

Interpretation

Individuals and Groups

Politics?

Conclusion

What is the theory of Neoliberal Conspiracy?

Effects of the Neoliberal Conspiracy

Neoliberals and the Government takeover

Neoliberal Media

Neoliberal Science

Neoliberal Covid

Points in favour of design:

Other remarks

Real explanations?

Climate change.

Covid

News

Elections

Conclusion

Video evidence

Go to the full source, if possible

Repetition helps resolve meaning and intent

Confirmation from the person

Looking for overt bias

Mainstream media

Accounts of what evil people do

Media Silence

A sample argument

Another Sample

Final sample

Use of Media

Pages

Archives

Categories