Where did September go? It was around here a moment ago.
When is a democratic election not a democratic election?
When Democrats don’t like the results.
I guess Biden isn’t worried about upsetting our supposed ally Italy, either – see this recent Biden speech (which, by the way, also features a repeat of the Charlottesville “fine people” accusation, one of Biden’s favorite attacks on Trump, as well as this other favorite of Biden’s about January 6th, “ultimately several police officers dying as a consequence”).
Here’s the portion of the speech referring to Meloni’s election, democracy, and Xi:
Well, folks, you know — and I mean this sincerely; you’re going to think this is a little out of whack what I’m going to talk about — but, you know, democracy is at stake. Literally, there’s a — there’s a case being made around the world, not just here, because democracy and autocracy. And there’s an awful lot of folks who believe that democracies can’t be sustained in the 21st century because there’s — problems are so — so much is changing in science and technology, the environment, a whole range of things, that it’s awful hard to reach a consensus in the short amount of time you have to reach.
And so that’s why I have these constant arguments. So I’ve had — I’ve met with Xi Jinping over 78 hours, 68 of which are in person, over the last 10 years. And he makes the case straight up that democracies can’t be sustained in the 21st century.
You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election. You’re seeing what’s happening around the world. And the reason I bother to say that is we can’t be sanguine about what’s happening here either. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but I don’t want to understate it. And it’s the reason why I’m so concerned about and so interested in and so committed to seeing that the governors — Democratic governors are elected. Because, literally, the outcome of an election is going to be determined by how well the governors run their states, who’s in charge at the time, whether or not things are going to be — how we count the votes, whether or not it’s transparent, and a whole range of things.
A whole range of things, indeed – including “how we count the votes.”
FBI whistleblowers report an ideological purge
Jim Jordan says that FBI whistleblowers are saying the FBI is conducting a political/ideological purge of the conservatives in its ranks:
“During the course of this investigation, we have received protected whistleblower disclosures that the FBI is engaging in a ‘purge’ of employees with conservative views by revoking their security clearances and indefinitely suspending these employees,” Jordan wrote, noting that “many of the formal notices” for those personnel actions had been signed by Moore [assistant director of the Human Resources branch].
Jordan also wrote that he has information suggesting Moore has “retaliated against at least one whistleblower who has made protected disclosures to Congress.”…
Jordan said that under Title 5 of the United States Code, once a whistleblower makes a protected disclosure, an agency is prohibited from retaliating against the employee for that disclosure by taking or failing to take a personnel action.
Jordan said that “the law is clear.”
The FBI of course has denied the charges.
What will Jordan and company be able to do about this? Nothing at the moment; they’re not in power:
“All we can do is highlight it, and if we get the majority, we’re going to do more investigations, where we can actually subpoena people to do depositions,” Jordan said, adding that he is sending letters to FBI officials now to let them know to “preserve documents, preserve information.”
He added: “If in fact the American people put us in charge, we’re going to want access to the information.”
If Republicans end up “in charge” of Congress, they will hold hearings. But what effect can that have, when the DOJ and much of the judicial system – in particular, in Washington DC, where legal action and remedies would often be sought – have already undergone their own ideological purges?
Voters on the right often say that the Congressional GOP has no real interest in changing things, no fighting spirit. I agree that’s true of some. But certainly not all. And even if more and more Republicans are actually determined to change things, undoing the institutions’ strongly leftist ideological makeup is an extremely formidable task.
Obama the racial healer
President Obama could really have been a positive and healing force in America, and he presented himself that way. Some people even believed that he fit that description, and continue to believe it.
They weren’t paying attention then and they’re not paying attention now.
One of the earliest things I noticed about Obama during his 2008 campaign was the way he called Republicans racists. The accusation had a regretful tone, as if he really didn’t want to have to say these things about what bigots Republicans are but circumstances forced him to do so. He played this theme early and often. My first post on the subject was in June of 2008:
Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:
“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.
Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.
But in this speech he appears to attribute—or to encourage his supporters to attribute—these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks—and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list—from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.
In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism.
I wrote a second post on the subject about a month later because I noticed Obama continuing in the same vein:
The Obama camp says the McCain campaign is wrong to accuse him of playing the race card in the following remarks Obama made while addressing a crowd in Missouri yesterday:
“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’”
Yeah. You know.
It’s not that Obama can cite anyone officially connected to the McCain campaign actually making such a statement. Apparently. Obama doesn’t need to back up his accusation; it’s just a prediction, you see. He just needs to say that they will—and some people will nod sagely, just as some people consider any criticism of Obama to be racially motivated.
Ah, but it’s not about race at all, say Obama’s spokespeople. Not in the least; how could John McCain think such a thing?
And then of course there was Obama’s grandma, the “typical white person” who supposedly had a kneejerk, “inbred” fear of black men.
What a healing force he remains. Last Sunday he had this helpful comment to make:
“Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here,” Obama told moderator Gary Acosta, the co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.
“I wish I could be more euphemistic about it except (they’re) not that subtle about it — they’re just kind of saying it,” Obama said. “You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’ — I mean, this is not subtle. Unless we’re able to return to a more inclusive vision inside the Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to get a bill done.”
Same modus operandi, same regretful above-the-fray tone, same everything. He so very much wishes he could be more “eupemistic” about it, but those darn Republicans are just kind of saying it. Not actually saying it, you know, but kind of.
Here’s the sort of thing Obama is referring to:
Three weeks ago in Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with millions of immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.” A few days later in Missouri, Senate hopeful Eric Schmitt, the state attorney general, said Democrats were “fundamentally trying to change this country through illegal immigration.” And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”
Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
None of these candidates gives a rat’s patootie what color these “immigrants” (that is, illegal immigrants/aliens) are. It is crystal clear that the demographic they are talking about is a voting demographic: the Democrats’ calculation that these are people who will (or whose offspring will) ultimately keep voting for Democrats. Thus, they are being allowed to enter illegally and even encouraged to do so in order to increase the Democrats’ voter rolls.
It may not work out exactly as Democrats have planned, but that is certainly the plan.
NOTE: The word “demographics” is defined this way: the statistical characteristics of human populations (such as age or income) used especially to identify markets.” Race or national origin is just one of an enormous number of variables that constitute a population’s demographics, and political affiliation is certainly another. This is about political affiliation and predictions about political affiliation made by the Democrats themselves.
Open thread 9/30/22
The Webb, the early galaxies, and the Big Bang
“Science deniers” is a phrase that’s anti-science, because scientists are always supposed to entertain disagreements and answer them with facts and proof – unless you apply “science-denier” to those people who literally say that all science is bunk and must be ignored. But that’s something very few people actually say. The rest of “science denial” is usually disagreement with and challenge to science orthodoxy, and it’s part of the manner in which science has always advanced.
This article about science denial, the Webb telescope, and the Big Bang theory focuses on the word disproven. But discoveries that don’t conform with the predictions of a theory- therefore representing at least somewhat of a problem for that theory – either have to be resolved and reconciled with the theory or it’s generally back to the drawing board for that theory. The Webb has indeed presented some problems for the Big Bang in that regard, particularly about early galaxy formation, which is both fascinating and exciting. Its findings have certainly not disproved the theory, but they certainly haven’t confirmed all of its predictions either.
Here’s an article in Scientific American about the Webb’s findings concerning early galaxies:
…[I]nitial projections [for the Webb, here referred to as JWST] estimated the first galaxies would be so small and faint that JWST would find at best a few intriguingly remote candidates in its pilot investigations. Things didn’t quite go as planned. Instead, as soon as the telescope’s scientists released its very first images of the distant universe, astronomers like Naidu (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started finding numerous galaxies within them that, in apparent age, size and luminosity, surpassed all predictions. The competition for discovery was fierce: with each new day, it seemed, claims of yet another record-breaking “earliest known galaxy” would emerge from one research group or another. “Everyone was freaking out,” says Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. “We really weren’t expecting this.”
In the weeks and months following JWST’s findings of surprisingly mature “early” galaxies, blindsided theorists and observers alike have been scrambling to explain them. Could the bevy of anomalously big and bright early galaxies be illusory, perhaps because of flaws in analysis of the telescope’s initial observations? If genuine, could they somehow be explained by standard cosmological models? Or, just maybe, were they the first hints that the universe is more strange and complex than even our boldest theories had supposed?…
…“You build these machines not to confirm the paradigm, but to break it,” says JWST scientist Mark McCaughrean, a senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. “You just don’t know how it will break.”
The whole article is worth reading.
This quote in particular caught my eye: “were they the first hints that the universe is more strange and complex than even our boldest theories had supposed?” The first hints? Hardly. Shakespeare had Hamlet say it long, long ago: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Here’s a thread for discussing Hurricane Ian…
…as more stories emerge.
Teaching Zinn: Part II
[Part I can be found here.]
Some people regard Zinn’s work as so eye-opening it hits them almost like a conversion experience. Many of these people turn out to be teachers, exposed to Zinn at some point during their training. Some were already onboard with the ideas, but some take on the zeal of a starry-eyed convert to a newly revealed truth, eager to pass it on to the young people in their charge.
You can find testimonials from teachers about the Zinn approach at this site. I copied some down almost a decade ago when I first wrote the draft of this post. I haven’t gone through them again to see if these particular ones are still there, but they were there in 2013.
Here are some excerpts. The first is from an education professor at the University of Nevada:
When I first started teaching in multicultural education in a teacher education program in the college/university setting, I realized quickly that much of the resistance I experienced from teacher education students to the multicultural paradigm was a function of the face that few, if any, really knew United States history – that is, they resisted the sociopolitics of multicultural education because they believed in a whitewashed version of United States history – in essence, that “America is and always has been a just nation.”
I decided that to get my students to engage with the multicultural education subject matter, I needed to start with a multicultural history lesson. Naturally, I turned to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Of course, reading this history changed my students’ lives in profound ways – while it was painful for most of them to have their image of the United States changed, for the most part, for the worse (to be compellingly confronted with the atrocities committed by the United States’ government and related power brokers in the past that have continuing impact today), it was also finally affirming for some of them to have progressive multicultural education as a place from which to build a different, better, truly socially just present and future for themselves and their students.
This next one is from a Special Ed teacher in Washington state:
I came to teaching in a round about fashion – wanting to change the status quo in the world, I wanted to do anything but be stuck in a small classroom in a small town somewhere, teaching just a few students. The environment seemed too small, the impact too limited. Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
When I came to this quote in the first chapter, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, sing it to the choir and put it on a billboard – it simply struck me as being deeply true and it gave me insight into how the classroom could be the beginning of enormous change. “The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” This quote spoke to the importance of getting another history, the people’s history, into the classroom.
From a social studies teacher in Oregon:
I first started teaching because I wanted students to get more viewpoints than the traditional white male version of history. A People’s History was a big part of that initial inspiration…On the one hand, I felt compelled by political circumstances and a certain sense of responsibility to present historical events “objectively” and dispassionately. On the other hand, I could see that such an approach would undersell the importance of ordinary people who heroically struggled against oppressive institutions like slavery, while giving equal moral weight to the slave owners themselves. Reading about Zinn’s own experiences as a teacher and activist during the Civil Rights era made me realize that it is cowardly to back away from controversial issues, or to present them “objectively” with two morally equivalent perspectives. As humans, we make judgments by our very nature, even when we think we are being even-handed. I learned from Zinn that it is far better to make our views public and sincerely invite students to question them than to create the illusion of unassailable “objectivity.”
From another Oregon teacher:
Zinn’s materials seem to be most commonly used by middle and high school students, but even elementary-aged kids benefit from his work. I spent last year as a student-teacher in a second grade classroom, and Zinn’s approach to history informed almost all of our social studies content. Our textbook and materials called North America the “New World” and portrayed the continent as an untouched, largely people-less expanse of land just ripe for European settlers. And, of course, there were Indians interacting with peaceful pilgrims, nary a conflict mentioned.
My mentor teacher and I expressed our concern with portraying the past in this fashion and talked about the violence, how native peoples were treated, and the way most early settlers thought about the natives. You could see their little minds wrestling with ideas, asking things like, “Why couldn’t they just share?” or, “It’s not nice to kill people. Why would they do that?” I knew it would have been a lot easier to dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and reenact the first Thanksgiving, but we’re all exposed to that narrative in our lives. When given the opportunity, even second graders have the capacity to think critically about our past and become active participants in understanding history from a variety of perspectives.
I was worried that there might be pushback from parents, administrators, or fellow teachers, but I had the courage to try out some of Zinn’s work in the classroom after reading the intro of A Young People’s History of the United States, particularly this quote: “It seems to me it is wrong to treat young readers as if they are not mature enough to look at their nation’s policies honestly. Yes, it’s a matter of being honest. Just as we must, as individuals, be honest about our own failures in order to correct them, it seems to me that we must do the same when evaluating our national policies.” Thank you, Howard, for all of your work and inspiration.
From a high school social studies teacher in Mississippi:
I immediately went out and bought his book and my life as a teacher, as an American, and as a human was changed forever. A year later I was meeting a friend from out of town at a small pub for a cocktail and as I waited I met two young youth ministers from one of the local churches. After introductions I starting talking about Zinn’s book and they looked at me and said, “You mean you actually spoke about Howard Zinn to public school kids in Mississippi!” I told them my kids are truth seekers and Howard Zinn has debunked so much of the trash our textbooks have that my little anarchistic 11th graders were enchanted with any time spent on fighting the man.
Remember, these testimonials were already out there by 2013. These teachers were not teaching Zinn as merely a different point of view, an additional one to be pondered by students who were already well-grounded in American history, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution. They were teaching it as a cause that gave their own lives and careers new and deeper meaning – and as that last teacher wrote, his “little anarchistic 11th graders” were “enchanted” with it, even in Mississippi.
Currently I found the following at the Zinn Project site:
Tens of thousands of teachers, in every state in the United States, access people’s history lessons from the Zinn Education Project website. An average of 20 to 30 more sign up every day. They find classroom lessons (most are from Rethinking Schools) and support. They join a network of teachers committed to teaching outside the textbook. Below is an overview of engagement with the Zinn Education Project website, as of January 2022 with some more recent updates.
If you scroll down on that page, you have more testimonials under “Teachers Report Back”. You can also find a graph of the growth of the number of teachers registered for the Project: “from 4,000 in 2008 to almost 150,000 today.” There is also a map with the number of teachers in each state signed up for the lesson plans.
Of course, Zinn is hardly the only path to this sort of education nowadays. He’s almost quaint, really, compared to The 1619 Project and the various varieties of Critical Race Theory. But he’s still a big force, and getting even bigger all the time, and his work has borne much fruit over the years.
Open thread 9/29/22
The new and not-so-new Fascism: have you noticed, re the Meloni election…
…how “God, country, and family” has become the very essence of Fascism?
But here is a cataloging, as best as I can pull together, of the claims used to portray Meloni as fascist:
Meloni “bemoans” the chronically low birthrate in Italy and wants to implement pronatalist policies…
Meloni defends Europe’s “Christian identity.” The American left acts like the mere mention of “Christian” is xenophobic and fascistic. People get furious when this atheist points out that nearly every Christian-majority nation in the world can boast of democratic institutions and high levels of freedom—with a few exceptions of a few places like Russia—while most non-Christian-majority nations can’t. There are thorny ideological and historical reasons for this reality, but reality it is…
Meloni opposes gay marriage, which isn’t legally recognized in Italy. (Nor is gay adoption.) Instead, there are same-sex civil unions, which offer gay couples nearly the same legal protections as marriage—laws that Meloni does not propose overturning. Recall that most Democrats, including Barack Obama, held the same position on the matter until 2012…
Meloni opposes abortion and euthanasia. Every story mentions the protection of life as an evident sign of democratic backsliding. It took some digging to ferret out the official right-wing coalition’s position. Outside nebulous language about life, Meloni promises to fund “alternatives to abortion.”
The Overton window has moved very far in the last decade, hasn’t it?
But cries of “fascist” to refer to just about anything on the right have certainly preceded the last decade. I recall having heard them for much of my lifetime:
Last week, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, tweeted, “Just wondering if ‘DeSantis’ is now officially a synonym for ‘fascist.'” Later in the week, President Joe Biden, once touted as the great unifier, referred to former President Donald Trump and his supporters as “semi-fascist.” These words are just the latest in a long line of Democrats falsely accusing Republicans of being fascists, a disgusting practice that began in 1964.
Aside from being old, foolish, and completely untrue, this trope is nothing new…
Democrats began to describe Republicans as “fascists” in 1964. While campaigning for president, Barry Goldwater was targeted by Pat Brown, then California’s left-wing governor. Of Goldwater’s candidacy, Brown said, “The stench of fascism is in the air.”
A few years after that, the target was Richard Nixon. Nixon’s reputation is forever tarnished in history because of the Watergate scandal. Yet, until then, he was viewed as a political force. In December 1973, theCall published an article titled “Dump Nixon! Stop the fascist tide.” One does not have to go into great detail about its contents to describe the editorial.
More at the link.
Actual Fascists in their heyday between the 1920s and 1940s sometimes did talk about or use some of these ideas, in particular nationalism. Fascism used certain concepts (including the family) to promote itself, but these things were not its essence and what’s more they existed quite strongly at the time in society as a whole.
I wrote about the European opposition to nationalism and its roots in two world wars in this post; it’s relevant. The left has long opposed nationalism for obvious reasons, because leftism is a globalist movement. Religion, especially Christianity in its traditional form, also is a force that leftists decry, although Christianity’s modern “woke” form works in tandem with leftism. Family is another traditional and individualistic force (if you consider a family an individual) which leftists have long opposed. Calling any manifestations of or calls to religion (especially Christianity), nationalism, and/or family “fascist” is ridiculous but serves the purposes of the left quite nicely. It makes many people on the right afraid of appealing to those ideas – but Meloni is apparently uncowed.
And at the moment, victorious.
Richard D. Wolff and the ice cream cones
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]
Here’s an interview that includes some remarks by a leftist academic named Richard D. Wolff. Wolff’s credentials are impressive, if you’re impressed by this sort of thing:
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne)…
BA in History from Harvard College (1963);
MA in Economics from Stanford University (1964);
MA in History from Yale University (1967); and a
PhD in Economics from Yale University (1969)
Published work
Now that we’ve established that, here is a paragraph from that Wolff interview that especially caught my eye:
We don’t need and we don’t want — because it’s socially destructive and socially divisive — to have one group of people who work and another group of people who don’t. Give everyone reasonable work, and give everyone reasonable pay.
Work and money—doled out by a bunch of overseers who “give” people these things—perhaps from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.
More:
Our societies are being torn apart by struggles over redistribution. Do we take [there’s that “we” again], and from whom, to give to those less fortunate — as if it was a matter of fortune, rather than an economic system that doesn’t work.
To translate—taxation and the social welfare benefits that come from the proceeds are a form of “redistribution” that is just a bandaid on a suppurating sore. The wound is the entire economic system that “doesn’t work.” I wonder who decides what’s working? Obviously it would be Richard Wolff, for starters.
But here’s my very favorite part:
Redistribution tears societies apart, it’s— here’s the parallel: you’re going into the park on a Sunday afternoon, you’re a married couple, you have two children. One is six and one is seven, and you stop because there’s [a] man selling ice cream cones. And you give one of your children an ice cream cone, it’s got four scoops. And the other one, an ice cream cone with one scoop. And you continue walking. Those children are going to murder each other. They’re gonna struggle. What are you doing? And don’t then come up — ‘okay, you’ve had — you’ve eaten this part of your scoop, so give the other part of your scoop to your sister, or your brother,’ — stop. The resentment of the one who hose [???] his ice cream or her ice cream — you see where I’m going? Every parent that isn’t a ghoul understands, give each child the same damn ice cream cone—two scoops each. You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally
I find that passage quite fascinating. First of all, because it uses an example we all can understand: being a parent and getting your kids ice cream cones. And secondly, because it is such a piss poor analogy it shouldn’t be acceptable even from a freshman in an econ course. And yet this is a professor whose credentials seem impeccable. And I bet a lot of people nod in agreement when they read it, thinking yes, I understand that; that’s just the way it works.
Perhaps Wolff is aware of the absurdity of his analogy and hopes his readers and listeners aren’t, and assumes that they will nevertheless find it a convincing argument. We are generally trained in school to take down what teacher says without thinking about it overly, just accepting it and learning it for the test. Perhaps he’s used to being listened to with great respect and acceptance.
Or perhaps he himself thinks he’s made a very good analogy between parents, two kids, and two ice cream cones; and a country’s economy. I don’t see into his mind, so I don’t know.
But if you think for just a moment about what Wolff said there, you can’t help but notice the following problems, which are not difficult to spot:
(1) Manipulating an entire society by any means, including that of a guaranteed Universal Basic Income, is completely and utterly different in scale, scope, intent, and almost every single other way possible from buying your young kids ice cream cones.
(2) Among other things, the parent is an adult and children are children, and the parent or parents control the entire economy of the children (in this example, two children). The parent is in charge and—unless a child is remarkably entrepreneurial—all the child’s income and possessions ordinarily come completely and directly from the parent[s] and a fairly small number of relatives and friends of the parents.
(3) An ice cream cone is an extra, a gift, a treat. Sometimes it’s even a reward (I’ll return to that thought in a minute).
(4) No one would be able to take a society and ensure equality without an amount of control that is unconscionable. It’s been tried, too, and that’s the way it ends up: a horror show. It cannot be achieved even with the best of intentions (which are not often present, and certainly are never present in more than a percentage of the people in charge). Some people will always manage to get more than others, a la Orwell’s great parable Animal Farm. The history of every supposedly or actually Utopian-inspired leftist society, from the small ones such as communes and kibbutzim, to the large ones such as the the USSR, is one of breakdown and/or inequality at best and terrible brutality at worst. Human nature will out, and no amount of social engineering from the likes of the Wolffs of this world will change that—as history has amply and continually demonstrated.
Ah, but this time it will be different.
(5) An ice cream cone is a treat bestowed on a child by a parent, and completely at the parent’s discretion. Some parents might choose to give a child a cone as a reward, however, for something—chores done, grades achieved, something of the sort. If there’s a sibling who didn’t do his or her chores—didn’t fulfill his or her end of the bargain—should that child also get the cone? The same size cone? Not just a smaller or lesser cone than the other one, but exactly and precisely the same cone?
What sort of resentment would ensue then, I wonder? I bet it would be formidable, and rightly so. And next time the parent asks the children to do a chore or improve their grades with a cone for reward, what will be the result?
Now it’s probably best not to use bribes such as cones for efforts like that. But we’re talking cones here. And a salary is not a bribe or a gift from a benevolent parent, it is a payment for services rendered. If it doesn’t reflect the quality of the work done—well, then you get the old Soviet system, where “so long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.”
And we all know how productive the Soviet Union became. Why, the Five Year Plans said so!
Perhaps my favorite part of that quote from Wolff is this part:
You don’t need redistribution if you don’t distribute it unequally in the first place. Capitalism is congenitally incapable of distributing equally.
And socialism is capable of doing it? It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically horrific—that a supposedly intelligent person can still believe this, and is treated as some sort of sage.
One last thing—did anyone notice the number of scoops in Wolff’s little example? I think it’s telling. The parent who is fostering inequality and resentment gives one kid four scoops and one kid gets one. The total is five scoops. But when he makes it equal, they each get two scoops. The total is four. What happened to the other scoop? Couldn’t they each have gotten two and a half? Or maybe even three? It reminds me of Margaret Thatcher’s famous moment:
Zelensky’s message: Surrender, Conscripts
Given the unhappiness of many of the Russian conscripts, this appears to be a clever approach:
In his video address, President Zelensky, made 3 promises to Russians who were forced into conscription and surrender to Ukraine:
— Sid Chambers, PhD ?? (@ArtfulTakedown) September 25, 2022
2) Due to Putin’s new laws regarding elevated punishment for dissection and surrender – all surrender will be held in secrecy. Russia will not know that they surrendered voluntarily as prisoner exchange operations happen.
— Sid Chambers, PhD ?? (@ArtfulTakedown) September 25, 2022
3) If prisoner requests to not return to Russia, the request will be abided.
— Sid Chambers, PhD ?? (@ArtfulTakedown) September 25, 2022
This is also an interesting observation, if true:
…[T]he Putin regime could stop the mass exodus if it wanted to do so. This flight to avoid mobilization is allowed, I believe, because the men running away are those with education, means, and social standing. Just as our draft riots in the mid-1960s started at elite universities and spread outward, the men absconding to Georgia and Armenia have the potential to form an effective resistance to conscription and endanger the regime. Unfortunately for Russia, most of the men who flee mobilization will be lost forever. The men conscripted are generally poor, poorly educated, powerless, and ethnic minorities. No matter how mad they get, it will never be a threat to Putin’s regime.
Also there’s this:
Russians are calling Ukraine to surrender before even being drafted into the military as moral within Putin’s ranks collapses, Kyiv has claimed.
Andrii Yusov, spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, said men who are fearful of the draft have been getting in touch with a surrender hotline to check how to give up safely before they are called to the frontlines.
Meanwhile videos have emerged showing a newly-recruited tank commander who has been told he will deploy to the Kherson frontline in just two days without so much as firing a shot on a training range.
Ukraine is certainly not above giving out “disinformation” – otherwise known as propaganda – on this. But it makes a certain amount of sense. The morale of a fighting force – as well as its training and experience – is a very important element of warfare. Russian forces appear to have a significant morale problem.