The Pandemic and the Democratic Party

The Democratic party should be screaming at the TOP OF THEIR LUNGS against Trump's and Republican governors' mismanagement of the pandemic response. They should be proposing bills, even if the Republican legislators block them and executives veto them. They should be filing lawsuits in every available court. They should be aggressively organizing whatever protests can be safely conducted during the pandemic. They should be in the news media EVERY DAY with op-eds and articles saying that this or that must be done and must be done right fucking NOW to control the pandemic.

And, as a major political party, they should have the organizational ability to do all of the above.

The Democratic Party should do all of the above because it is their patriotic duty to do so. I'm not a big fan of patriotism, but if anyone has a patriotic obligation, a major political party that (supposedly) wants to govern is at the top of the list.

More importantly, the Democratic Party should do all of the above because it would be incredibly politically successful. They could, if they chose, completely destroy the Republican Party, and secure decades of Democratic Party governance. Machiavelli is spinning in his grave at the Democrats' basic political ineffectuality.

(All of the above applies also to the mounting protests against egregious police violence.)

It's not like I'm some great political genius, and it's not like the Democratic Party employs only exceptionally stupid people to enact its political agenda. This is not rocket science or brain surgery.

Instead, the Democratic party has decided to just let Trump and the Republicans do their thing and kibbutz from the sidelines, letting the Republicans twist in the wind. Unfortunately, it leaves hundreds of millions of Americans twisting in the wind.

This strategy might just win them the Presidency in 2020, even with all of Biden's handicaps. But it won't win them a veto- or filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and it won't destroy the Republican party. Instead, it will leave the Republicans strong enough to resist the Democratic party agenda in the 20s.

It might be that the Democratic party really is that incompetent or stupid: Hanlon's razor, n'est ce pas? Or it might be that part of the Democratic party's goals is the preservation of the Republican party, because the Democrats' ideology and policy considerably overlaps the Republicans: the Democrats cannot destroy the Republican party without abandoning the overlap. Either way, stupidity or malice, the Democratic party refuses to aggressively further the interests of the majority of the American people.

But I think it is malice: the Democratic and Republican parties both actively endorse the power of the billionaires.

The billionaires at best do not care about — and at worst approve of — the deaths of millions of working Americans and the permanent damage tens of millions more have and will suffer.

Therefore, the Democratic party does not care about these deaths and suffering, except that they make Trump look bad.

If Biden wins, he will at best have a narrow majority in the Senate. The pandemic will still be raging in the U.S., and the economic effects will start spiraling out of control.

I predict that the Biden administration will undertake a few token and largely ineffectual measures to address both the health and economic effects of the pandemic, not out of any real concern for American workers, but to establish a trivial differentiation from the Republican regime. Otherwise, the Biden administration — like the Obama administration — will continue to transfer wealth and political power to the billionaires. A continuing pandemic helps that effort, so the Biden administration will not take effective measures against it.

Regardless of who wins, the next four years are going to be a real shitshow.

George Zimmerman and reasonable doubt

Sigh. I'm hearing that Florida prosecutors did not prove their case against George Zimmerman beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, BBC News reports that "Alan Dershowitz told BBC News that there was "reasonable doubt" about the facts of what happened." Dershowitz should know better: reasonable doubt is not an issue in the case, and if it were, Zimmerman would have been convicted.

The part of the case which the state's burden to overcome reasonable doubt would apply is as to whether Zimmerman actually shot and killed Trayvon Martin. However, this part of the case is not in doubt; Zimmerman admits to killing Martin. That's all there is for the prosecution's reasonable doubt.

Zimmerman did not try to raise reasonable doubt; instead, he raised the affirmative defense of self-defense. (Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which establishes that a person can claim self-defense even if he or she refuses to retreat, does not apply, because Zimmerman claimed that Martin had restrained him and he was unable to retreat.) An affirmative defense requires the defense, not the prosecution, to bear the burden of proof. The defense's burden is typically lower than the prosecution; the defense has to establish an affirmative defense not beyond a reasonable doubt but by only by the preponderance of evidence. The defense successfully argued that Martin attacked Zimmerman, and Zimmerman shot Martin in self defense.

It is possible that Martin really did attack Zimmerman. However, whether or not he did so is completely irrelevant. The relevant facts, which are not in dispute, are that George Zimmerman armed himself with a pistol, and went out of his way to intentionally create a situation, stalking and harassing Martin, with a strong likelihood of a violent confrontation. George Zimmerman could have prevented Trayvon Martin's death: he knew that his actions could cause Martin's death, he knew that by not intentionally provoking him he could have prevented Martin's death, he knew that he had no good reason to intentionally and deliberately create a situation that might lead to Martin's death, and he did so anyway. That, in my mind, makes Zimmerman an evil bastard guilty of the murder of a child, and our society complicit in that evil by exonerating him.

Why is Dalkey Press doing this?

The pool of candidates for positions will be primarily derived from unpaid interns in the first phase of this process, although one or two people may be appointed with short-term paid contracts. . . .

The Press is looking for promising candidates . . . [who] do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.) . . .

Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.

I don't think it's just because they're exceptionally assholy. They're doing this because they can. All of the neoliberal policies of the last 30-40 years, as Corey Robin has made a career of describing, have increased the near-absolute power employers can wield over their employees.

(via PZ Myers)

Feel the LOVE!

16-year-old Jessica Ahlquist won her lawsuit removing from her public school a banner containing a prayer.

Here's what Christians have to say in response.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the love?

A Republican strategy

Peter Dorman speculates about A Game Plan for Rational, Self-Interested Republicans

Let’s suppose for a moment that all this talk about ideology—about the evils of big government, the flood of debt that threatens our moral and economic collapse, and of course the line that must be drawn in the sand against any new taxes of any kind on anybody—is simply a fig leaf, and that Republicans are pursuing their own partisan advantage without any scruples whatsoever. What would such a strategy look like?

As an unpaid advisor to Boehner and company, here is what I propose

Read the rest to discover Dorman's cunning and ruthless plan.

A dirty little girl, her head hanging in shame

A dirty little girl, her head hanging in shame

Catholic childhood religious indoctrination is chillingly effective. Its most powerful weapons are guilt and the fear of a literal hell. When a child is taught that the simple act of doubting or questioning any of the Church’s teachings is a sin, and that even the tiniest of sins can result in an eternity spent in a literal hell, they quickly learn to suppress those doubts and to feel intense shame, guilt, and fear when they fail to do so.

Think for a second about how cruel that is. To ensure that the Catholic mind virus is passed down through the generations, the Church is willing to crush children’s curiosity and to stifle or completely destroy their ability to think critically.

Right wing terrorism: It works

Right Wing Terrorism: It Works.

The Infamous Brad makes the case that the right is beginning to employ the same terrorist tactics against the Democratic party that they have successfully employed against abortion.

I'll have to read the report Brad cites, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment

6 Killed, Congresswoman Injured In Ariz. Shooting

Only 16 left to go now, eh?

Britain's child slaves

Britain's child slaves:

The tunnel was narrow, and a mere 16in high in places. The workers could barely kneel in it, let alone stand. Thick,choking coal dust filled their lungs as they crawled through the darkness, their knees scraping on the rough surface and their muscles contracting with pain.

A single 'hurrier' pulled the heavy cart of coal, weighing as much as 500lb, attached by a chain to a belt worn around the waist, while one or more 'thrusters' pushed from behind. Acrid water dripped from the tunnel ceiling, soaking their ragged clothes.

Many would die from lung cancer and other diseases before they reached 25. For, shockingly, these human beasts of burden were children, some only five years old.

19th century Britain was hardly a backward country; it was at the time the acme of capitalism. Is it any wonder that Marx believed we could do better?

James Kilpatrick

James Jackson Kilpatrick (November 1, 1920 – 15 August 2010)

This precious right to discriminate underlines our entire political and economic system... [The Negro] is still carrying the hod... still digging the ditch. The hell he is equal.... He has no right... to favored treatment in employment, promotion, or anything else.

You'll be as sorely missed, Jim, as that nasty case of anal fissures.

(via Brad DeLong)

Billy Graham is right

Billy Graham said, "a true atheist has no real reason to believe in right and wrong or to behave sacrificially toward others." He is correct, although being — like all Christian leaders* — a lying sack of shit, he leaves out important qualifications. A true atheist** really does have no real reason to believe in objective right and wrong, and has no reason to behave sacrificially without any compensation in this world towards others.

*Christian followers, in contrast, are usually ignorant dupes.
**With some additional qualifications that follow from a skeptical, empirical metaphysical system.

Objectively true propositions are by definition true without regard to the subjective preferences of people evaluating the truth of the proposition. Even if everyone thought it was completely terrible that people got cancer (and they do), even if everyone thought it was absolutely impossible to get cancer, people would still get cancer. "Cancer exists" is objectively true, whether we like it or not, and whether we believe it or not.

What Billy Graham would like you to believe is that there are reasons to believe in objective right and wrong, moral beliefs that are true regardless of anyone's subjective preferences. If, for example, homosexuality were* objectively wrong, then it would simply be irrelevant that a substantial portion of the human race finds homosexual activity pleasurable and satisfying, and that homosexuality** does no one else any material harm.

*Updated 8 Mar 2012 from "is" to emphasize the counterfactual subjunctive.
**With the uncontroversial conditions of safety, sanity and consent that apply to all sexual activity.

In contrast, we consider stealing to be wrong because we subjectively want to keep our stuff: we all mostly agree there is considerable subjective benefit to having stuff immediately at hand, and there is considerable subjective harm when our stuff goes missing. We don't need any sense of objective right and wrong to object to stealing: we can rely entirely on our subjective preferences. (Note that communism, which tends to be "anti-property", is not about not having stuff immediately at hand, it is about particular ways to more efficiently allow more people to keep more stuff immediately at hand.)

One could, of course, make a purely subjective case against homosexuality: one could argue that just the thought of other people having buttsecs causes him severe subjective distress. While this is a valid subjectivist argument, it's not going to be at all persuasive: the response is just going to be, "Get over yourself, you bigoted asshole, and mind your own damn business." The only way to avoid this obvious response is to claim not just that one personally dislikes homosexuality, but that homosexuality is objectively wrong, without regard to anyone's subjective preferences, "If it were up to me, I wouldn't care, honest! It's just that God doesn't like homosexuality. Yeah right.

(To be fair, the process of legally and socially privileging some preferences a posteriori is non-trivial, and beyond the intellectual comprehension of even most atheists and skeptics; religious people, who tend to be either profoundly stupid or capable of amazing feats of self-deception, don't have much of a chance. C'est la vie.)

Similarly, Graham wants his followers to make sacrifices without any compensation in this world. There are sacrifices and there are sacrifices: I'm happy to "sacrifice" my ability to arbitrarily take other people's stuff without fear of reprisal for the larger compensation of keeping my own stuff immediately at hand. But Graham wants his ignorant sheep to sacrifice their material well-being and their happiness, to receive nothing in return, at least not in this world.

There is only one reasonable underlying motive for promoting such a view: to allow a "boot in the face" morality, to justify actively oppressing and brutalizing at least some people. We do not need God, indeed we do not need any conception of objective morality to justify wanting to be happy, and it doesn't take all that much brain power to realize that (apart from a few sociopathic or sadistic assholes) each of us will be happier if all of us are happier.

Billy Graham is indeed correct: an atheist has no reason to believe it's objectively true that Billy Graham and his bigoted followers should deny happiness and fulfillment to millions of homosexual people. An atheist has no reason to believe it's objectively true that a woman should be a slave to her husband, her father, and her uterus. An atheist has no reason to believe that millions of working people must sacrifice their material well-being for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class and their parasitical apologists.

And an atheist has no reason to believe that he or anyone else must sacrifice his happiness so that Billy Graham can go to bed satisfied that he has made someone unhappy.

Dirty Medicine

Dirty Medicine:

How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.

(via Yves Smith)

Ein volk, Ein Reich, Ayn Rand

The Bitch is Back:

2009's most influential author is a mirthless Russian-American who loves money, hates God, and swings a gigantic dick. She died in 1982, but her spawn soldier on. And the Great Recession is all their fault

Some juicy quotes:

"From almost any page...[' says Whittaker Chambers who reviewed Atlas Shrugged for the National Review, ']a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber—go!"'"

"One day you've got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he's got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become... an insufferable asshole."

"[N]one of us can escape the shadow of the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building tumescing in the distance."

"'As a fiction writer, she's absurd,' says author and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens, who is arguably the most opinionated Homo sapiens since Rand herself. 'But if you're young and not particularly wanted and not particularly brilliant, reading Atlas Shrugged provides all the feelings of compensation one might need for any period of terrifying inadequacy.'"

"'No matter what you think of Rand,[' says Nick Gillespie, ']there's no denying that the woman just swings a really big dick.'"

The United States is a fascist police-state

The United States is a fascist police-state.

[Y]esterday’s Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project decision of the Supreme Court, coupled with last week’s Arar v. Ashcroft denial of certiorari, [made] the case for claiming that the U.S. is a fascist police-state... a whole lot stronger. ...

The U.S. government can decide unilaterally who is a terrorist organization and who is not. Anyone speaking to such a designated terrorist group is “providing material support” to the terrorists—and is therefore subject to prosecution at the discretion of the U.S. government. And if, in the end, it turns out that one definitely was not involved in terrorist activities, there is no way to receive redress by the state.

Sounds like a fascist police-state to me.

The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

(via PZ Myers)

Goldman-Sachs

If more businesses operated like Goldman Sachs

A Libertarian theorist

Q: What do you get when you cross a fundamentalist Christian with a Nazi?

A: A Libertarian

Libertarians are of course neither fundamentalist Christians (most profess atheism) nor Nazis (few wear toothbrush mustaches). But there's a similarity in spirit. The similarity to fundamentalist Christianity comes in the reliance on scripture "theory":

By theory I mean a proposition whose validity does not depend on further experience but can be established a priori. This is not to say that one can do without experience altogether in establishing a theoretical proposition. However, it is to say that even if experience is necessary, theoretical insights extend and transcend logically beyond a particular historical experience. Theoretical propositions are about necessary facts and relations and, by implication, about impossibilities. Experience may thus illustrate a theory. But historical experience can neither establish a theorem nor refute it. [emphasis original]

As to the similarity with Nazis, well...

[A] natural order is characterized by increased discrimination, segregation, spatial separation, uniculturalism (cultural homogeneity), exclusivity, and exclusion. In addition, whereas states have undermined intermediating social institutions (family households, churches, covenants, communities, and clubs) and the associated ranks and layers of authority so as to increase their own power vis-a-vis equal and isolated individuals, a natural order is distinctly un-egalitarian: "elitist," "hierarchical," "proprietarian," "patriarchical," and "authoritorian," and its stability depends essentially on the existence of a self-conscious natural – voluntarily acknowledged – aristocracy.

Seig Heil!

(And the difference between a right anarchist and a left anarchist is that a right anarchist is sincere and up-front; a left anarchist (at least one with a triple-digit IQ*) will pretend to be sad when he's enslaving or killing you.)

*It's possible that db0 is literally** a bird-brain.
**Irony: Learn it. Use it. Make it your friend.

(via Brad DeLong)

Screwing with unemployment

Capitalists find a new way to screw workers. In other news, Earth orbits Sun.

(thanks to an email correspondent)

On the necessity of a revolution

A reactionary commenter at Comrade PhysioProf opines:

I am absolutely a violent threat. I despise the arrogant, elitist scum that post here. I would happily choke you until the life left your soulless carcass. If we were to share the same room in a physical sense you would and should be fearful of your well being. You are the enemy, a threat to the well being and happiness of myself and my children and grand children. Your danger is in your self righteous ignorance. Should we have the misfortune to continue farther along the path of the statist progressive oppression, then I for one will welcome whatever necessities may be required to remove the tyrannical elitists from power.

You claim that I am uninterested in reason or logic, yet you are the one that refuses to acknowledge the documented failures of your ideology. You claim that I am the one who wishes push my opinions on others while in fact it is your ideology and the leaders that you support that wish to push their thoughts and programs upon the rest of us, actually must push them on us, “for our own good” in your not so humble opinion, no doubt. ...

I am not the one pushing anything on anyone. I wish only to be left alone to live my life how I choose, not how some elitist bureaucrat chooses. That freedom is important enough to me to defend it with my life, or yours. So yes, my progressive enemy, feel the threat, it is real.

Anyone who is familiar with RaptureReady, Stormfront or the general eliminationist rhetoric even in the mainstream "conservative" venues can call this attitude aberrant or idiosyncratic: it is typical of the reactionary, Randian, eliminationist right.

Even if our goals were no larger than merely keeping the relatively liberal version of capitalism established in the early- to mid-twentieth century, we would be facing determined violent opposition. But the liberal democrats have proven time and again that they do not want to acknowledge or meet this threat while it is still relatively weak. No, these violent, eliminationist, "fascist" bastards are going to take over; the only question is: who will lead the resistance?

Three cheers for slavery!

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up? [emphasis added]

— Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ)

(via Brad DeLong)