A rant on Democrats and Republicans

The Democratic party has the power to utterly crush the Republicans. Not just win the presidency in a landslide, but to make the Republicans a fringe party of Klansmen, MRAs, and fundamentalist Christians, with no more hope of electoral success than the Libertarians or Greens.

The Democratic party could, if it chose, take no only the presidency, but also the congress, every governorship and state legislature, and even every mayor, city council, and dog catcher.

For twenty years, I've been hearing that the Democrats cannot enact a progressive agenda because of those darn Republicans. That was perhaps true in the past, but if the primary obstacle to a progressive agenda really were the Republicans, the Democrats have the opportunity to remove that obstacle for a generation.

With no effective opposition from the Republicans, the Democratic party could, if it chose, enact every progressive measure conceivable. Reform police departments, make abortion available to every woman, let everyone vote, enact universal health care, raise the minimum wage, provide a Universal Basic Income, maintain and even expand Social Security, rebuild our infrastructure, break the big banks, end the wars in the Middle East. I'm not even talking about a socialist revolution, just enact every measure that most working people think constitute basic decency.

The Democratic party will not crush the Republicans. The Democrats need the Republicans. The Democrats do not want to enact a progressive agenda; they have been using the Republican party as an excuse for their inaction.

More precisely, the capitalist class does not want to enact a progressive agenda, and the Democratic party no less than the Republican party does what the capitalist class wants.

No ruling class can rule by brute force, every good ruling class needs to con the population into legitimizing their rule. So the capitalists have been playing a good cop/bad cop scam on the United States for 35 years. Note that both roles are necessary: after Ronald Reagan's elections, the Republicans could have utterly crushed the Democrats, but did not do so, because that would not have served capitalist interests.

The capitalists are definitely worried by both Trump and Sanders. Both are populists, and the one thing that both the capitalist class and the professional-managerial class who serve the capitalists agree on is that the people should not have any actual power.

Ideally, the capitalist class would use Trump as an excuse to further limit popular power: "We can't have another Trump, right? So we have to more carefully manage who gets nominated, right? You just can't trust those people to have an effective political voice."

Clinton will win this election because, well, Trump is not just batshit crazy but also stupid, and stupid is bad for business. But this election is not the real issue. The real issue is 2020 or 2024.

Clinton will govern as a good neoliberal. She'll throw a few crumbs to the working class, but will not change anything of substance. We'll still have the police killing black people. We'll still have a minimum wage below any decent standard of living. We'll still have a lot of poor women (and especially poor black women) without access to contraception or abortion. We'll still have tens of millions of people going without needed health care because they can't afford it. We'll still have massive voter suppression. We'll still have globalization, depressed wages, underemployment. We'll still be murdering brown people overseas in industrial quantities.

The Republicans will retain enough power to ensure that the Democrats have some cover for not enacting much actual progressive policy. Both parties will change their nomination procedures to make sure that no one like Trump or Sanders can get as close as they did.

However, because neoliberalism is itself cracking, the global economy is going to go tits up, likely in the next four years, and almost certainly in the next eight.

The capitalist class has for most of the last century crushed socialism, but only minimized fascism. Then they get to tell the story, "Yeah, capitalism and neoliberalism kinda sucks, but y'all need to suck it up and adjust. If you don't, you'll just end up with fascism." This is a good strategy. It's worked for almost a hundred years.

But when neoliberalism finally falls apart, people are going to say, "If the fascists are the only alternative, then better the fascists than the neoliberals."

There are two ways out of that depressing scenario, both of which could work separately or in tandem.

First, the Sanders wing of the Democratic party could make a concerted, dedicated effort to take over the Democratic party and destroy the Republican party. Sure, let Clinton be president, but make it absolutely clear she's a figurehead for a real progressive party. This means that Sanders' supporters focus their energy on congressional and state and local races. Let Clinton and her corporate money take the presidency, but make sure that the actual power of the party lies with the Sanders bloc. This effort will take serious, dedicated, and continuous effort, not just until November, but through at least to the midterm elections. Without the corporate bloc, the Sanders bloc cannot crush the Republicans in November, but they could, if they work hard, seriously weaken them before the economy crashes. If this happens, then when the economy does crash, there is an alternative to fascism.

Second, the "true" socialists can get together and make a serious effort to provide at least a coherent ideological alternative to both capitalism and fascism. Abandon the jargon, abandon the abstruse theory, abandon the petty century-long grudges, and start talking to, you know, the actual workers. Maybe, just maybe, when neoliberalism falls apart, there will be enough of a power base to resist and defeat the fascists.

I dunno. I don't hold much hope for either alternative. The corporate Democrats will crush Sanders; they want the Republicans to hold a lot of congressional and local power. The Sanders bloc would have to not only fight the Republicans, but fight their own party. Possible, but difficult.

And I have even less hope that socialists can get their shit together and actually appeal to the workers.

But who knows. Weirder shit has happened.

A rant on socialism, authoritarianism, and welfare

We socialists have to tell a story. That the story is true is helpful, but truthfulness is not the key; the key is to make the story itself compelling.

Trump's popularity (and likelihood of winning the Republican nomination) is probably not entirely due to authoritarianism, but authoritarians seem to strongly support him. A lot of (neo)liberals look at authoritarianism as some sort of aberration or ideological disease. But it's not. Authoritarianism is the displacement and reaction formation of an ordinarily healthy and respectable impulse: the idea that there should be rules and that people should follow them. Authoritarianism and fascism result from the displacement of anger from the ruling class, who are not following the rules (since condemning the ruling class is usually unthinkable) to some ethnic or other social group. Since half of our rules (if not more) are just shibboleths, we can always find "rules" that the black people are breaking (wearing their pants in that ridiculous fashion) or gay people are breaking (makeup? on men!?), etc. ad nauseam.

The most obvious and pernicious of this displacement is anger towards poor people: people are poor because they are breaking the rules — people should work hard, earn a paycheck, and pay their bills — and, instead of punishing them for breaking the rules, we are supporting them, enabling their bad behavior. Outrageous!

Socialism should appeal to the healthy feelings underlying authoritarianism. First, is directing the anger and anxiety where it belongs: the people, poor and not-quite-poor, are following the rules (as best they can; many rules are impossible to follow by design): it is the capitalist ruling class who are breaking the important rules, and we are not punishing but supporting them. It is the capitalist ruling class who are working us harder and for less, who are exporting our jobs, who are allowing our homes to decay, poisoning our water and air. It is the ruling class who are throwing people into abject poverty, and giving them no realistic choice but drugs and welfare. People have to live, and they have to work and be productive to be healthy, and without jobs, people go quietly (or noisily) crazy.

Most notably, we must tell the story that socialism is ninety-nine percent against welfare. Welfare is fine for the completely disabled, and of course people who work have to support our retired elders, our parents and grandparents, but beyond that, no welfare. No food stamps. No TANF. Yes, universal health care, but universal health care is not welfare, it is paid for* by our labor and our taxes.

*In a sense, MMT notwithstanding.

Under socialism, everyone who can do something, anything, productive (or reproductive) works. Nobody gets to laze around on the public dime. And nobody gets to pretend to work. Hedge fund managers and lawyers may spend 14 hours a day at the office, but they're not working; they're just planning their next heist, their next con. Fuck those guys. Everyone works a real job, and everyone gets paid a real paycheck. A socialist government is not going to beat around the bush: if you can work and you don't, fuck you: here's a job, whatever it takes, you will do it.

Socialism is about reestablishing "law and order"; not the pretend capitalist "law and order" which is just straight-up predators' demonization of their prey, but real law and order: people being civilized human beings. Socialism is not about putting everyone on the dole, but putting everyone to work, doing work with dignity, respect, honor, satisfaction, and human fulfillment. Not everyone wants to work. Not everyone wants to be a civilized human being. Those who don't want to work, those who want to be predators, they will feel the hammer of the state, hard enough to satisfy any authoritarian.

But the socialist hammer is different from the capitalist hammer. First, the capitalist hammer is in the hands of the bourgeoisie; the socialist hammer is in the hands of the proletariat. (And fuck the Soviet Union and China for taking the hammer out of the hands of the proletariat and giving it to the faux-bourgeois Communist Party.)

Second, the socialist hammer is that you will have a job, you will do your job, and you will get paid, whatever it takes.

Anyone, anywhere, can walk into the employment office and walk into a job the next day. Not a shit job — the shit jobs pay enough to encourage people to take them voluntarily — not a dream job, but a good, decent job that won't kill you or make you sick, and that will pay you enough to live like a civilized human being and raise a family.

If that's not enough, a police officer will, in essence, pick you up from your home in the morning, take you to your job, and stand behind you while you work.

If that's not enough, well, what should we do? I guess we have to lock you in a building and put you to work there. You won't be tortured. All you have to do to get out is get a regular job (which everyone can get) and keep it.

(We have to keep people who enjoy killing or harming people away from others, but such people have a medical condition, and we have to lock them up, not to punish them but to keep them from perpetrating further harm and to try to treat them, to try to make them productive citizens who can restore their harm as best they can and contribute to everyone's well-being.)

But but but!!! That's so totalitarian! People forced to work! Slavery!

First of all, what the hell do you want? You want to demonize people who "won't" work (even though the capitalist system intentionally creates fewer jobs than there are people), but you don't want to make people work? How does that make sense? Either it is morally right (on whatever basis you like) that people should work, and morally wrong that a person who can work does not, or it's not. If it's morally right, then we get to coerce people to do it; if we shouldn't coerce people, then in what sense is it morally wrong? What, you want to coerce other people to work, but you don't want to be coerced?

Second, who do you think you're fooling? We're already forced to work. However, under capitalism, that force is exercised by the plutocracy, the capitalist ruling class, who are entirely unaccountable to the people. You say you want democracy, right? Why, then, do you shrink from making democratic what is fundamental to civilized society.

I appreciate that you're voting for Trump against the neoliberals, but Trump is a capitalist, and he's not going to give you what you want. The "unproductive" will be off the dole, but they'll be in prison or criminals, and that'll cost you, a lot. The illegal immigrants will be sent home, cheap foreign imports will cease flooding into WalMart, and then Americans (even some white people, oh my!) will be $1 per hour wage slaves. We might get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Libya, and wherever else, but do you think Trump is going to just disband the army? (Well, he might, a little, flooding the nation with even more cheap labor). If the Army is not overseas, it'll be here; an army presupposes an enemy, and you, my gentle white lower-middle-class reader — along with all the women, black people, Hispanic people, Muslims, gays, etc. — will be its enemy.

No one will give us liberty and prosperity, not the neoliberals, not the professional-managerial class, not the bourgeoisie, not the strongman. If we want liberty and prosperity, we have to seize power ourselves, and hold it, not give it up ever, to anyone, however well-meaning and sincere.

You can stand for more of the same shit, and vote for Clinton. You can stand for a "change", and live in poverty enforced by a police state, and vote for Trump. Or you can work for justice, for law and order, for a civilized society, a society that is moral, decent, productive and wealthy: you can work for socialism.

It's your world. How do you want it to be?

Analysis of "Schlosser"

Regarding my recent post, "Professorial whining"...

In one sense, I have a little sympathy for "Schlosser." Using academic employment as a lever is, I think, a Bad Thing. Academia needs tenure. However, that the capitalist class is using students' complaints to erode tenure is not the fault of the complaining students, but the fault of the capitalist class for joining complaints to hiring and firing, and for moving from a tenure-track faculty model to a non-tenure track adjunct model. The cause, I assert, is firmly in the capitalist class; students' complaints just makes a handy tool for dismantling academic tenure and job security.

I blame academia itself too, as part of the professional-managerial class, for handing over its power to the capitalists. I will post more on this subject soon.

There's another sense, however, where I have zero sympathy for "Schlosser." When anyone increases their power vs. anyone else, we should expect that the newly more powerful will use their power in ways that the the newly less powerful will find uncomfortable, and contrary to their own ethical beliefs. Students, being closer to the proletariat, should have more power over their education. "Schlosser's" fundamental position, that students should have zero power, is absolute bullshit. With regard to the specific complaints, professors should have obligations to respect students' emotional needs. I'm not saying that that professors must unconditionally submit to those needs, but, per Thucydides, there needs to be a negotiation between parties more equal in power.

The need for equal negotiation is especially sharp when we're talking about topics and tools used to violently repress women, people of color, LBGTQ people, [ETA other historically oppressed groups,] and, of course, the proletariat. For example, the objections noted above to the Oxford debate above have merit. Abortion is not just some abstract question of ethics: restricting abortion is about the oppression of women. As mentioned above, I think having any sort of debate about abortion is as offensive to civilized decency as a debate about the chattel slavery of black people. Having two men conduct the debate just adds insult to injury.

Academia is not an institution devoted to abstract, disinterested intellectual inquiry. Academia has, from its medieval origins, ben an institution that establishes legitimacy, using particular kinds of intellectual inquiry as tools. As academics, our work is always connected to legitimacy. The underlying question is not whether some topics are too disturbing to discuss, but how how the discussion legitimizes or delegitimizes certain topics. It is legitimate (in a meta sense) to argue that the way a professor discusses, for example, rape, legitimizes rape as a tool of violent coercion against women. It's not that we cannot discuss Ovid; it is that when we're talking about Ovid's work that includes rape, not just his language but his subject matter demands critical inquiry. To blithely dismiss the subject matter of rape without critical inquiry has not Ovid (immune from our disapproval) but the professor himself legitimizing rape. In much the same sense, we can talk about Huckleberry Finn, but we have to deal critically with the slavery depicted in the book, as well as the language. How we do so legitimizes or delegitimizes not just slavery but modern racism, and it is a valid position to use one's power to ensure that our inquiry delegitimizes racism.

"Schlosser" completely ignores the role of academia in social legitimization. This omission, not just his that he actually has to take students seriously, even when he disagrees with them, is is most serious intellectual sin.

Professorial whining

Liberal professor "Edward Schlosser" (a pseudonym) is terrified of his liberal students. I'll skip the summary; you can read the article yourself. Basically, "Schlosser" is worried (I think) that we're all becoming special snowflakes, unwilling to stand even the slightest bruise to our feelings. "Schlosser" is completely full of shit.

First, he supports his allegations with only the thinnest of evidence. I don't even really understand what he's complaining about. He mentions Oxford cancelling an abortion debate, but that was primarily because it was set up by an anti-abortion organization and, more importantly, the two debators were both men. As far as I'm concerned, a "debate" about abortion rights is about as useful as a "debate" on black slavery, so preserving the "debate" on abortion on the grounds of free speech is not our very highest priority. And I see no particular reason why we should be particularly worried that some college refuses to support blatant cultural appropriation. "Schlosser" mentions Laura Kipness (JFGI), but admits that Kipness was exonerated; the big complaint there seems to be that a professor was (gasp!) investigated. Boo fucking hoo. Apart from a tweet or two, "Schlosser" just repeats the opinions of other privileged academics. I'm usually unimpressed by opinions, however credentialed; I want evidence.

But the whole thesis is stupid. The fault is not in the ideology of the "left," nor in "identity politics." People are, as always, doing the best they can with what they have. They aren't doing much because they can't do much.

"Schlosser" completely misses the real point: academia is becoming a thoroughly capitalist institution, and capitalist institutions are, well, capitalist. Adjuncts and grad students eat shit because, as workers, they have no power. For every adjunct working (especially in the humanities), there are a hundred candidates willing to eat any amount of shit for starvation wages; should we be surprised that university administrators are eager to find out just how much shit they can force down the adjuncts' throats?

I'm an academic myself, in the adjunct pipeline (applying now for graduate school). I have no illusions about my fate: even with a graduate degree, I'll be eking out a marginal existence with Medicaid and food stamps. I personally don't mind, because I like the work itself, and there are niches in academia where I won't have to eat shit, and I fancy myself clever enough to find them. I don't personally want a lot of money: I used to have a moderately privileged upper-middle-class life, briefly hitting the top 5 percent; I didn't like that life, however, so I didn't fight too hard to keep it.

I have no sympathy for academics who whine about their loss of power. For two generations, the professional-managerial class (with academia as their primary power base) held state power and a lot of economic power, and they threw it away. They promised political and economic power to the working class, briefly gave it to them, and then allowed the capitalist class to take it all away. Even more ironically, although the professional-managerial class surrendered with a whimper, the retaliation of the capitalist class against professionals has been savage and thorough.

Whatever is happening with political and social forces today, their conformance or divergence from "Enlightenment" values is irrelevant. Notwithstanding its considerable historical achievements and some good ideas, the "Enlightenment" is now bankrupt, and does not deserve slavish adherence. And any effect on the craven sellouts and privileged whiners in an increasingly irrelevant academia is, well, irrelevant.

What good is Mars?

Honji is skeptical about the Mars Curiosity mission. It probably won't bring us any information or science we plebes can use in our daily lives. Even if it did, we would probably put that information to reprehensible uses. And the money spent could be put to better uses. But Honji's analysis is too narrow, and his economic reasoning misses the point.

The space program in general is pretty easy to justify. First, the space program has more than paid for itself; it's brought us so much value — from communications satellites to GPS to Tang — that if NASA were a private company they would have earned enough money to spend a few billion dollars painting the NASA logo on the Moon. And, if you'll excuse the terrible pun, curiosity is its own reward; the day we stop being curious about the world around us, over and above what we need to find our next meal, our next safe place to sleep, and our next fuck, is the day we lose an important part of what makes us human. But a thousand other skeptics and science geeks could address the proximate value of Curiosity better than I could. Instead of extolling the virtues of Curiosity, I want to look at the project as an economist.

Honji complains that Curiosity will cost "two and half billion dollars" (which I can't help but hear in Dr. Evil's voice)*. That sounds like a lot, but for an economy the size of the United States, it's chump change. Our GDP is about $14 trillion dollars, that's $14 thousand billion dollars. Assuming all Curiosity, therefore, cost 2.6/14000, i.e. a little less than 0.02% of our national economy. In comparison, 0.02% of the 2010 median household income of $45800 is $9.7, about the cost of a movie ticket. It's also almost exactly what I earn in an hour. If Honji is concerned about the cost, I'll be happy to contribute an extra hour's pay to cover his cost, and I'll generously let him use GPS without calling him a hypocrite. Indeed, I'll contribute ten hours' pay to cover me and nine other chintzy bastards.

*According to Thom Patterson at CNN.com, the cost is $2.6 billion.

More importantly, Honji claims the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as universal healthcare and housing the homeless. In this sense, Honji is thinking about the economy exactly as the capitalist ruling class would like him to think. The truth is that, never mind the triviality of NASA's entire $17+ billion budget, not even the outright waste of substantial labor and natural resources (e.g. the Iraq war, almost two hundred military bases around the world, and all the other costs of maintaining our Imperial prestige) prevents us from having universal health care and decent housing. The reason we do not have universal health care is not that it "too expensive" in any meaningful economic sense. The reason we do not have universal health care is that we as a society have decided that poor people do not deserve health care. We have homeless people because we as a society have decided that extremely poor people, including many people with severe mental illness, do not deserve to have a place to live. We have more than 8% unemployment because we as a society have decided that millions of people do not deserve to contribute their labor to society, and it is only squeamishness that prevents us from just turning them into Soylent Green. Our social ills are not in any sense economic; they are entirely moral and political. We have the society we choose, not the society that the natural world forces on us.

We cannot be limited by money itself. Money itself is a pure abstraction, a pure social construction. Money is not itself physical; at best, money represents something physical. It represents the constraints on our economic activity: we can't do everything, so we use money in a complex system to decide what we want to do. In theory, we are limited by only three things: the amount of various kinds of physical stuff (iron, germanium, carbon, water, etc.) that has been stored by nature in the Earth and in the Solar System; the amount of physical energy available to us; and the amount of human labor available. In practice, however, none of those things actually limit us. Excluding oil, we have enough stuff stored in just the Earth to last us centuries, and there are orders of magnitude more stuff waiting for us in the Solar System. We don't need oil for energy; we have again orders of magnitude more free energy falling on the Earth every year as sunlight than all the oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground. And we have not come anywhere near to harnessing the labor available from the people who currently inhabit the Earth.

In practice, the only limitations that money represents are the limits imposed by our will and imagination. We can have globally universal health care, globally universal decent housing, globally universal food security, globally universal education, and, if we were to choose to do so, we could have them in less than a decade, the time it would take to sort out the details. We do not do so not because we cannot, but because we choose not.

Fundamentally, Honji shows the attitude of the capitalist ruling class. The capitalist ruling class would like us to believe that scraps are all there is, and the best the mass of humanity can do is fight over them. This is a lie. Like Honji, the capitalist ruling class believes that the mass of humanity does not deserve greatness; indeed we do not deserve even dignity or security, and it would be a crime against justice to provide it to us.

Micro, macro, money and politics

Microeconims "The study of economics one firm at a time," according to my economics instructor — forms the basis of most people's economic intuitions. In microeconomics, money is itself an intrinsically limited resource, a resource the allocation of which always directly entails an opportunity cost. I have only so many dollar bills in my wallet, only so much money in the bank; To spend money on one thing always entails not spending it on something else.

In macroeconomics, the study of an economy as a whole, money is no longer itself a limited resource. It is possible to have "too little money" in the economy as a whole, causing a liquidity crisis [read with caution], but "running out of money" is completely different from running out something real, such as labor, arable land, food, iron, coal or the like. Having too little money is not the same as running out of money; if we have too little money it's easy enough to print more. Theoretically, it's just as easy to make money disappear; it's a lot more difficult, though, to make it disappear fairly. Hence most economic regulators (governments, central banks, etc.) prefer to inflate money, which has a similar macroeconomic effect as destroying dollar bills while keeping prices stable.

It's illogical, therefore, to object to macroeconomic decisions on the basis of money itself. It would be obviously illogical to say that we can't build a skyscraper because it will use up too many inches. It's just as illogical to say that we can't have universal health care, or social security, or teachers, police, firemen, good roads, etc. because we don't have enough money. There are good reasons to set limits on these things, but a shortage of actual money is not one of them. In macro, the question is not the micro question of how to spend our limited amount of money. The question is: How do we want to use our real resources (labor, land, food, etc.)? Money becomes a tool — perhaps the best cognitive tool ever invented since the spoken word; much more important than literacy — to make these choices.

The macroeconomic question is how we allocate our real resources, and all resources fundamentally come down to human labor. If there isn't enough arable land, we can spend labor on irrigation, fertilization and cleanup to to make more. If there's not enough oil we can spend labor to drill for more or process the sources we already have. If there's not enough land in San Francisco, we can hire a bunch of construction workers to build taller buildings. If we feel we have a shortage of four-leaf clovers, we could send a million people into fields to hunt for them. We do have a limited supply of labor: There are only so many people and so many hours in the day. But the only macroeconomic opportunity cost worth talking about is the opportunity cost of using labor for one purpose or another.

Right now, the opportunity cost of using more labor is zero. We have tens of millions of people literally sitting around doing nothing. These people are not comatose, hooked up to life-support. They can work, and they want to work. Saying we can't afford Social Security, or Obamacare, or better education, or better roads, or more policemen simply makes no sense. Labor is wasted if not used; you might as well say you can't afford to eat dinner even though you have a refrigerator full of food that will spoil tomorrow. Not only can we afford any of those things, we can afford all of those things. The labor force participation rate is 64.2%: We could afford half again as much as we currently have.

Why would anyone ever tell us we can't afford anything right now? It's not even that we don't have enough money. There's a trillion dollars sitting around in bank reserves that no one is using. There are prominent people (cough Rand Paul cough) who are telling us we can't afford things just because they're stupid, and they're telling a population with a woefully inadequate economic education what the people think they want to hear. But there are a lot of economists, businessmen and politicians who ought to know better, who at some level almost certainly do know better.

There can be only one reason they are telling us we can't "afford" things: because they do not believe the people deserve things. We do not deserve old-age pensions. We do not deserve basic health care. We do not deserve teachers, police officers, firefighters, safe and well-constructed roads. We do not even deserve jobs, the fundamental means of sustenance in a capitalist economy. Millions of people are, to take this estimation to its logical conclusion, fit for nothing better than Soylent Green.

If you have privilege, i.e. power over other people, you will inevitably have contempt for them. You must convince yourself you have power over them because they are intrinsically inferior. The only counter to this contempt is noblesse oblige (literally the obligation of the nobility), but any study of history shows that noblesse oblige is unstable and quickly degenerates into unqualified, total contempt. When the people have some control over their own lives, they will inevitably want more. When they have some prosperity, some dignity, they will want more; sooner rather than later the ruling class du jour can no longer justify their rule. The vigorous ruling class will and must do anything to maintain its rule. No lie is too monstrous, no violence too extreme, no oppression or exploitation too egregious. A ruling class falls only when when it loses its stomach for atrocity, through weakness, excess or sentimentality.

The capitalist ruling class has been systematically eliminating its sentimentality, the sentimentality that caused them to retreat in favor of the professional-managerial class who ruled successfully for three decades (whose own sentimentality has already fatally weakened their rule). They have been convincing themselves that Ayn Rand's utter, absolute and ineluctable contempt for the common people is ethical and just. We will have Soylent Green thrust upon us, not from poverty but from wealth.

What is atheism?

This essay about atheism (via Geoff Arnold) is pretty good. Let me say it again in my own style.

Atheism is, I think, the decisive rejection of the idea that the supernatural is a good way to explain the world. Might there be some sort of supernatural being? I dunno. More importantly, what does the phrase "supernatural being" even mean? If we look at the ideas we've traditionally ascribed to the word "god", we consistently see ideas of one or more personal, teleological beings whose will and desire are explanations for observed phenomena. The pagan gods made the lightning strike and made winter occur; the Christian god performs wonders and miracles. The ideas of god historically underlie political legitimacy: The king and the priesthood rule by direct dispensation from the local deity. The ideas of god historically provide psychological comfort: In the gods, one can rely on a responsible parent, who will at least provide sustenance and justice. All of these ideas are wrong.

To reject these ideas is more than just to eliminate the statement, "I believe some God exists" from one's mind. Yes, that's the dictionary definition of atheism, and it has some use against various theistic straw men, but anything more than the most trivial, nominal atheism requires rejection of the supernatural. To the atheist, science becomes the way to explain the world (or, more precisely, the way to construct explanations). Only our own moral intuitions — as subjective, limited and labile as they might be — underlie political legitimacy. The atheist relies on himself or herself for psychological comfort. We are, in short, free beings in a natural world, free to shape that world how we will, subject only to the constraints imposed by the impersonal and uncaring laws of physics. We are as well free to fail; there is no parent who will swoop in and rescue us from our mistakes or catastrophes. To me — because I am a mature adult — such freedom is an unqualified good.

If you're religious, I'm going to ask you two questions: What fear are you unable to face? Whom do you want to oppress? If I don't get an answer to either question, I'm going to press you on how you consider yourself religious in the first place. Vague mystical bullshit doesn't count: A difference that makes no difference is no difference, and there's no difference between a stone-cold atheist like myself and a theist who relies exclusively on mystical mumbo-jumbo. (If you want to pretend you're religious to get along in society, that's your own business. But do us all a favor and don't be a hypocritical jackass; refrain from attacking your fellow atheists to get on the good side of the religious. It doesn't work anyway; they'll hate you more for lying.) But 99 times out of 100, underneath the mystical mumbo-jumbo, I'll find an answer to one of those questions.

Eight times out of a ten it'll be the last question, and the answer will be niggers, fags, sluts and/or the lazy, slovenly, dirty poor*. There will always be some elaborate rationalization, of course — few people can stomach being openly racist, homophobic, sexist, or classist — but I'm completely uninterested in how you rationalize being an asshole. Yes, 80% of religious people are just garden-variety bigots. (Most of rest are usually terrified of disappointing their (real) mommy and daddy. I don't buy the whole "fear of death" bullshit; anyone who gets in a car or crosses the street is not really afraid of death. The few remaining are just there for the show, which I will admit can be quite entertaining, if that's your cup of tea.)

The "philosophy" of theism is tiresome. The whole edifice of philosophical bullshit around theism exists only rationalize and obfuscate assholery and cowardice. I'm at the point where if you call yourself a Christian or a Muslim I'm just going to silently conclude you're a bigot and/or a coward. I might be polite to your face (unless you say something openly bigoted or ridiculous), but I'll always have a reserve of contempt for your character, intelligence and maturity.

*I can usually do it in four questions: Do you oppose affirmative action? Do you oppose gay marriage? Do you oppose abortion on demand? Are you a Republican? If you answer any of these questions in the affirmative, please remember that I'm not in the least bit interested in how you rationalize being an asshole.

It's true, of course, that one can find other reasons to a bigot or a coward; bigotry and cowardice might be the only reasons to be religious, but religion is hardly the only way to rationalize bigotry and cowardice. I'm no more approve of non-religious justifications for assholery (e.g. Libertarianism or Randianism) than I approve of theism, but I'm only one guy, and I have only so much time and energy.

Fundamentally, that's what atheism really is: science, personal moral responsibility (if you're going to be an asshole, at least be one on your own account, not a god's), and adult psychological maturity.

The great depression and the great recession

Our current economic situation invites comparisons to the Great Depression. Supposedly, the Great Depression was supposedly cured by Keynesian stimuli, not the least of which was building a metric assload of bombs and dropping them on the Germans and Japanese. But while stimulus was a necessary tool in ending the Great Depression, it was not the only tool.

The New Deal fundamentally changed the existing laissez faire capitalist system. Important steps were taken to change the social and economic relations between workers and capitalists: the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social security, high marginal income tax rates, strong labor unions, strict financial regulation, etc. In contrast, the First Imperialist War had a considerable stimulative effect on the U.S. economy, leading to the Roaring Twenties. But without fundamental changes to capitalism, the boom lasted only a little more than a decade before collapsing in the Great Depression. If we did as Krugman et al. suggest and pumped a massive ($2 trillion or more) stimulus into the economy, we'd likely see considerable improvement that might last a decade. But about 10-15 years is as long as we could expect: without fundamental changes to the system, we should expect nothing but for history to repeat itself, and another equally catastrophic crash to occur in the mid 2020's if not sooner.

The important lesson is not just that stimulus can cure even a massive cyclical downturn (and can do wonders, I think, for even structural unemployment) but that capitalism, especially laissez faire capitalism, has structural flaws which cause massive cyclical downturns, flaws that must be corrected at the structural level. And FDR's New Deal did in fact at least begin to correct those flaws. Even the most cursory study of economic history shows that the economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries behaved substantively differently than the economy in the latter half of the 20th century. Cyclical downturns decreased in number and severity; our biggest problem in the 20th century was managing inflation, which was in our case a side effect of having money coming out of our ass: not the worst problem to have.

So the question has to be: what the fuck happened? We fixed the Great Depression, we made many important structural changes to our economic system, and here we are in another catastrophic failure of the capitalist system (which will get worse after the Republicans take the House of Representatives in November). Our first house collapsed in an earthquake, we rebuilt it better and stronger... and then it collapses when someone sneezes. What. The. Fuck!? Seriously!

What happened was that we removed the structural changes in our economic relations we added during the New Deal. Financial regulation is a joke. Labor unions where not entirely absent are owned by the capitalists. The minimum wage has been below the equilibrium wage for a decade or more (and now that it's slightly above the equilibrium wage, it's routinely and easily circumvented). The top marginal income tax rate is not really 35%, it's 15%, i.e. the long-term capital gains tax rate; ultra-wealthy make most of their real money with capital gains. (It's no surprise that hedge fund managers dominate the top earners: their "income" is taxed as long-term capital gains.) Only unemployment insurance and social security remain. Unemployment is running out (and applies to only of the fraction of the unemployed) and our "Democratic" president is at least not resisting (and may be enabling) the dismantling of social security.

Look back at the history. Social security is the foundation of the New Deal structural changes to the economy, and there's been a faction of the capitalist ruling class (and the upper levels of the professional-managerial class) that has not just disliked the idea of social security, but hated it with the burning fury of a thousand white-hot suns. But why? Come on: social security is nothing but the idea that none of our old people — people who have worked all their lives — should actually starve to death. Not only that, but social security is largely paid for by the same people it benefits: the working class and lower professional-managerial class. Why should anyone even mildly dislike, much less hate social security? Does this faction just hate old people with the same intensity that they hate blacks, women and gays? I think not: there's something deeper going on.

The fundamental issue, I think, is that the Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class has the idea that they are in charge, or ought to be in charge. They are, after all, the capitalist ruling class. The government, such as it is, should do nothing else but protect their interests, their status. They will take care of the middle and lower classes directly, thank you very much, and see to their moral and economic development as they see fit. Social security deeply subverts this idea: it says we ourselves (i.e. the working and professional classes) will take care of ourselves, and we will use the government directly to provide for our own interests, without the mediation of the capitalist ruling class. The subordinate classes vastly outnumber the ruling class; once we start using the government directly for our own purposes, however benign, it's only a matter of time before we use the government to eliminate the capitalist ruling class completely. The capitalist ruling class, surprisingly enough, is not about to let this happen.

I'm very pessimistic about the current situation. In 1932, the capitalist ruling class, having ruled unopposed for generations, was complacent and unused to serious struggle: all they did — all they needed to do — to respond to the populism, anarchism, socialism and communism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was to throw money and police at the problems, or stage a great big war (a war won by the capitalist ruling classes in all countries, including Germany). Today, however, the Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class is disciplined and hardened by two generations of a largely successful struggle to regain power. They will not make the same strategic mistakes they made in the 1930's. They will take power: They will make substantial gains in November, and their victory will be complete or nearly so in 2012. (Even if Obama were to win re-election (I predict he won't), he will be rendered impotent or actively co-opted.)

I'm a communist, but I'm not stupid: I can see that the political organization of the Soviet and early* Chinese Communist Parties and their governments was... er... suboptimal. The problem is that the political organization of capitalist ruling class in the United States shares the worst features of the Soviet and early Chinese Communists: lack of transparency, severe barriers to entry, lack of popular accountability, and rigid and unreasoning ideological dogmatism**. And they have proven time and again they are ready, willing and able to use the most severe police powers without compunction to enforce their rule, Constitution or no. The capitalist ruling class and their government is doing and justifying everything we supposedly complained about the commies: torture, indefinite detention without trial, mass arrests and violence against peaceful*** protesters, counterfactual propaganda, wars of aggression and naked imperialism.

*Say what you will about them, but the modern Chinese "communist" party and government are forces to be reckoned with.

**Just look at any "freshwater" graduate school of economics, which not only reject socialism, but dismiss and demonize even "saltwater" capitalist economics. These guys (and yes, they're mostly men) hate Roosevelt and Krugman a thousand times more than they hate Lenin or Castro. Hating small ideological variations more than completely opposing ideologies is a sure sign of unreasoning dogmatism.

**Well, mostly peaceful, and the police responses (cough WTO) have been completely out of proportion to the relatively trivial offenses.

The capitalist ruling class has made a lot of mistakes: they're hardly omnipotent. They might well have grabbed absolute power under Bush and Cheney: I suspect that Bush flinched: his sentimentality and weakness was the only thing that prevented complete despotism. They were obviously not counting on the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent recession (without which McCain might have actually won in 2008). But they are growing ever stronger, toughening their will, and improving their discipline and ideological cohesion. They will not repeat their mistakes.

We're in for a long, tough slog over the next century.

Atheism, conviction and certainty

A theme that appears with some regularity is the charge that atheists are absolutely certain there is no god. I suppose there are a few atheists who really are absolutely certain there is no god, but I haven't met a single one... and I know a lot of atheists. The hardest, most "militant" atheists I know (and I'm one of them) explicitly and vociferously disclaim certainty. I'm not certain even about the conceptions of God that are logically impossible or obviously contradicted by experience: my deduction might be faulty; my experiences might be hallucinatory.

I am however convinced that there's no god, at least according to the usual notions of god, the "invisible man in the sky" sorts of conceptions that billions of people believe. I'm convinced in precisely the same sense that I'm convinced that humans and apes (and humans and bananas) evolved from a common ancestor. I'm convinced in precisely the same sense that I'm convinced the universe is about 15 billion years old, that things (near the surface of the Earth) fall when you drop them, that airplanes can indeed fly. I'm convinced: I'm persuaded by the evidence I have and the arguments I've heard that no god exists. Give me more evidence or different arguments, and I might change my mind. I don't really expect additional evidence or arguments to change my mind — I've been doing this whole atheism thing for a long time — but I've been surprised before and I'm sure I'll be surprised again.

Not just theists and agnostics but also other atheists have argued with me that we cannot and should not say we are convinced, that we know there is no god, because we cannot be absolutely certain there is no god. But I'm puzzled* by this position: in no other endeavor**, not even mathematics, is absolute certainty a prerequisite for a legitimate claim of knowledge. Am I convinced that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are true? Yes. Am I absolutely certain that no other theory will come along to supplant them as Relativity supplanted Newtonian Mechanics. Of course not. So what's so special about god that we need absolute certainty to claim the knowledge that no god exists?

*I'm not really puzzled, I'm just trying to be nice. Don't worry: it won't last.
**Well, maybe philosophy, but philosophers are just bullshit artists slightly more sophisticated than theologians.

(The flip side of this fallacy is the theists' claim that they cannot supply atheists' demands for absolute certainty about claims of a god's existence or properties. We do not demand absolute certainty. We'd like to see a case made beyond a reasonable doubt, but at this point I'd settle for probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.)

If you personally are not convinced that no god exists, then you're not convinced. I'm happy to discuss the issue with you in a friendly way. But what irks me is the argument (unless you're a big-ess Skeptic or epistemic nihilist who believes we can't know anything) that just because I am convinced that no god exists it is necessarily the case that I am being in some sense dogmatic or committing some grave epistemic error. It might happen to be the case that I am indeed dogmatic, but you have to look at the details of my actual position to discover that: you cannot tell that I am being dogmatic just because I'm an atheist.

Part of the problem is, of course, that theologians and apologists have been trying to obfuscate the issue, mostly arguing (when you cut through the bullshit) that the existence or nonexistence of god is not something that can be scientifically known. OK, ha ha, you got me: I admit that I don't know that a god whose existence or nonexistence cannot be scientifically known does not actually exist. But so what? If you have some other means of knowing whether or not such a god exists, please clue me in. And I do mean knowing; simply choosing to believe one way or another is not knowledge. If there's no way at all of actually knowing, then who cares? I just don't care that a god might be hiding behind my couch, or that invisible fairies are pushing everything towards the center of the Earth.

The problem is that every day I read this or that atrocity against human well-being and happiness — atrocities that shock my conscience to the core — being not just perpetrated but proudly perpetrated by people in name of their god. It's not just the "newsworthy" atrocities — acid in a young girl's face, the murder of an abortion doctor, the rape of a child — it's the systematic and persistent efforts of so many religious people to marginalize, oppress and exploit some large segment of the population: heretics, foreigners, homosexuals, and of course women.

All of this would be irrelevant if it were true that a god actually existed. The truth is the truth; nuclear physics is still true even if it means we can incinerate tens of thousands in a heartbeat; it's still true even if we annihilate the entire terrestrial biosphere in a nuclear holocaust.

But it's not true. There is no god. We're on our own, a microscopic speck of life in an indifferent universe that cares nothing for our happiness or our survival. Bullshit in the service of good is still bullshit; the defense of bullshit in the service of good equally defends that bullshit in the service of evil.

I'm an atheist: I'm not buying the bullshit. If you want to buy the bullshit, well, that's your problem, not mine. And fuck you! if you demand that I buy the bullshit just so you don't feel bad about your reliance on infantile fantasies.

Amorality

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: I am 100% amoral. That's right: I do not have a shred of morality in my being. Not a jot, a tittle, a soupçon, or a wee dram. None, zero, zilch, nada.

Before you get alarmed you should ask me the very first question you should always ask a philosopher: what exactly do you mean by "morality"? And there's the rub. I do not do anything, ever, only because it is the right thing to do. I act only to maximize my own personal happiness and satisfaction.

As it happens, I have a brain: I can remember the past, predict the future, and imagine possibilities. I can rationally know that my own happiness and satisfaction is greater in a world where people tend to refrain from killing each other, beating each other up, or stealing their stuff. And since I live in a world where other people also have brains and imagination, and they know too they themselves will be happier if people don't go around killing each other. So we make promises to each other, and — more importantly — enforce those promises with police and prisons, judges and jails, soldiers and the occasional nuclear bomb. Because I know that if we all make and keep certain promises we will all be better off, I have a good reason for making and keeping these promises myself: I will be happier and more satisfied.

But that's not morality, at least not as some people construe morality. Morality means doing what's "right" without regard to your own or anyone else's benefit. In fact, we know that we are acting morally only if our actions benefit no one. It just doesn't matter, for example, that women are people, with their own wants and needs, and we would all be better off — women and men alike — if they had all the freedoms, responsibilities, and benefits afforded men. The right thing to do is for women to be submissive and subservient to men regardless of the cost to men and women alike.

This is the morality that people like Vox Dei correctly argue is unavailable to atheists. It is the morality of acid thrown in a woman's face, the morality of faggots tortured and strung up on fence to die, children left by their parents to die of appendicitis. It's the morality of genocide, slavery, tyranny and oppression. Yes, that's a morality that as an atheist I'm proud to say does not apply in the least to me: you can be damn sure that I'm completely amoral.

Why the stupid?

Regular readers will note I've been posting a lot of The Stupid! It Burns! articles. Besides the pure entertainment value, there's a method to my madness.

One way or another, I've been talking and writing about atheism and religion for about 10 years. I started all sincere and engaged; I really wanted to discuss all the philosophical and scientific issues and figure out what was going on. But the problem with religion is: there is no there there. The arguments for religious belief aren't just mistaken, they're at best not even wrong. At worst, they consist of most egregious logical fallacies: Straw men, outrageously uncharitable interpretations, equivocations, elementary misuse of logic, begging the question. And I'm not just talking about the amateurs on message boards: William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for example, couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag if you gave them a squirt gun and a starter hole. But they're credentialed academics, so they can't possibly be making elementary errors, right? Sadly, they do. (Egregious misuse of logic and bad argumentation is pervasive in the entire academic philosophical community, not just among theologians and apologists.)

Atheists are chided for not engaging with the "sophisticated" theological arguments. The problem is, there aren't any. None. They all come down to: we're not absolutely certain about anything, it makes me happy to believe that my preferences, biases, and prejudices are objective truths about the universe, therefore God exists. All of theology and apologetics consists of wrapping this core position in as many layers of bullshit and doubletalk as possible, and quite a few very clever people have engaged in this activity.

It doesn't do any good to confront the religious with the facts, because they don't care about the facts. They'll just make facts up out of thin air, and deny the truth of any other inconvenient facts. It doesn't do any good to confront the religious with logical, rational arguments, because they don't care about logic and rationality. They're happy to use the forms of facts, logic and reasoned argument, but when those forms don't suit them, they'll abandon them without a second thought.

This unconcern with facts and reason is obviously illustrated in one tendency in apologetic writing: the religious argument for agnosticism. (There are a few examples in the most recent TSIB articles.) If agnosticism were compelled by the facts, then why are you a believer? The position is nonsensical. The outright lies too are not just exceptions, they're the rule: atheism claims certainty; there are no transitional fossils; the origin of life requires that DNA popped out of nowhere; the list goes on, and on, ad nauseam.

After a certain point, I realized that simply pointing out errors of fact and logic had no more effect than point out to a CEO that he has more money than a worker. He doesn't care that he has more money; in just the same sense the religious apologist doesn't really care that his logic is faulty and his supposed facts are in error.

The "debate" about religion and atheism isn't really a debate. It's not a dialectic between facts and theories, or between conjectures and proofs. It's fundamentally an ethical debate: how should we go about finding the truth? Should we come up with a position and find reasons to support it, or should we discover the actual facts and try to come up with the best explanation for those facts?

My nose wouldn't be so far out of joint if the religious explicitly took the first approach. This is our faith, we believe it before rational investigation, and we enjoy the intellectual exercise of exploring this faith logically. (To his credit Plantinga does explicitly take this approach. Paraphrasing from memory, he says that the best we can say about religion is that it's not internally contradictory.) But, by and large, religious apologists don't take the former approach. Instead, they secretly change the rules of finding and explaining the facts, and then appear to argue that the ordinary rules of scientific inquiry support their theological prejudices. The enormous prestige of ordinary scientific and rational inquiry almost forces them to do so.

Even when they're saying that science and religion are substantively different, that scientific inquiry simply has nothing to say about religion, they're still being hypocritical and disingenuous. The issue goes beyond one particular way of knowing things: religion goes to the heart of what it means to say you actually know something, and, more importantly what it means to say that something is true. Only the most vacuous deists and fideists come right out and say, "Hey, I have no idea whatsoever whether by beliefs are true, but I believe them to be true anyway," and even these fideists are misusing true.

What's true has to be true for everyone; if I say something is true, and you say the same thing is false, at least one of us has to be mistaken. And if I say I know something, then everyone has to be able to know it. When we're not talking about what's true for everyone and what everyone can know, we're talking about preference.

And fine: if you yourself prefer to believe, for example, that gays are icky, women should be subservient to men and babies, then say so. Take ownership of your own preferences. I have at least some respect for a person who says, "I myself just fucking hate those goddamn faggots," than I do for someone who tries to pawn of his own prejudice on God. It goes both ways too: I have a lot more respect for someone who says, "I myself want gay people to be happy, fulfilled and have all the civil rights and privileges enjoyed by straight people." If you say to me, "God loves gay people as much as straights," my first reaction is, "So, what you yourself think isn't relevant? If God told you to hate and oppress gay people, you'd just as happily do so?" I don't care what you think God thinks about gays, I want to know what you think about gays. I can talk to you about what you think.

Once you push any sort of belief onto God, I just can't talk to you about it. How can I change God's mind? I can't engage your reason, because you're not arriving at your beliefs by reason. I can't engage your compassion, your empathy, your sympathy, your fellow feeling, because the minute you push your ethical beliefs onto God — even an ethical belief I agree with — all of your emotional and empathetic connections to other people become irrelevant, in just the same sense that my empathy for someone who falls off a cliff and is terribly injured is irrelevant to my opinions about the law of gravity.

The facts don't matter. Reason doesn't matter. Knowledge doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. Religion is nothing more than at best infantile fantasy and at worst a justification for sadism and oppression. You can't reason someone out of an irrational belief. All you can do is praise and condemn, or point and laugh. If enough people choose to condemn religious thought, it will go away (or at least become marginalized). In exactly the same sense, enough people chose to condemn slavery and rape, and these ideas have become substantially marginalized.

After ten years of looking, I'm convinced that there's no gem of truth hidden in the enormous pile of bullshit that is religion and theology. If there were, some clever apologist would have found it. Instead I see the mound of bullshit being piled higher and deeper, so the religious can say at least, "You haven't investigated everything, so you can't be certain there's no truth there." This position is itself patent bullshit. Show me the truth, and I'll change my mind. Until then, I'm going to look at the bullshit, call it bullshit, and condemn the bullshit artists for trying to hide the truth, whatever it might be.