Tinfoil Hat Territory

Landscape - Ivan Rabuzin (1960)

Ready for a crackpot conspiracy theory?  I have one!  Two years ago, it was Critical Race Theory.  Last year, it was Gender affirming care and Trans Rights.   This year it's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.  It's as if every year about this time, some council decides what diversionary tactic is going to be used this year to keep the heat off of endtimes capitalism as the major culprit in its own and our society's death. That might be just a little bit nutty, but to really slather on the almond sauce, what if the same neoliberal forces of the elite that introduce these concepts to the corporate workplace and to our national discourse-- the convenient nebulous scapegoat of the populistic rightist social media bloviation machine as well as their tailers on the horseshoe left-- are in fact actually in cahoots with those who annually seek some new ruse to rile up and muddy the waters with?  What if namby pamby liberal neoliberalism is itself a plot of the far right-- the avant garde for the development and testing of loathsomely performative and transparently self-serving versions of legitimate leftist theory and concerns.  No neoliberal has to actually believe in the ostentatiously obnoxious albeit toothless formulations of social justice that they are creating additions to the C-Suite for in order to implement, just as no mouth-foaming conservative talking head has to actually believe that the latest liberal fad has anything to do with the deterioration of standards in the pursuit of corporate profit.  All that is needed is a steady supply of fodder for the diversionary spectacle of rightwing blather and an army of loudmouths to highjack the conversation with it. 

Frankly, with DEI, I think they have hit the bottom of the barrel.   DEI is being blamed on the right for the rash of safety failures on airplanes in flight and now for the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse.  In both cases, the company at fault (Boeing in the first case, Maersk in the second) has demonstrably put profits over safety -- the new American way-- explicitly cutting corners for the bottom line for their shareholders, and in each case, right on cue the right-wing talk machine has chimed in in unison to divert attention from the true cause to DEI as what is behind the decline in quality.  "What?!" you may well ask.  Elon Musk tried to explain the ruse in his recent contentious conversation with Don Lemon in the fifteen minutes of their public association before Musk booted Lemon's new venture off of his platform.  Two more perfect representatives of the bloviating right and the simpering neoliberal left respectively could hardly be imagined.  In this frustrating exchange (which I've extracted and edited for space), Lemon unfortunately interrupts Musk at the point at which his badgering questioning gets closest to getting Musk to having to put his money where his mouth is (bolded and italicized below):

Don Lemon (45:59): Okay, so listen. After the door blew off this midflight and this Alaskan airline flight, do you remember that you responded [with] a post claiming that the average HBCU grad was less intelligent than the average airline pilot and stated that it will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE? I don’t know if you… misspelled it on purpose, which should be DEI. Do you believe that women and minority pilots are inherently less intelligent and less skilled than white male pilots?
Elon Musk (46:37):  No. I’m just saying that we should not lower the standards for them.
Don Lemon (46:41): Okay. But there’s no evidence that standards are being lowered when it comes to the airline industry.  
Elon Musk (47:00):  The incentive structure I believe at Boeing changed to include DEI as a fundamental executive incentive, but in my view, it should be purely about passenger safety.
Don Lemon (48:06):  Okay, but do you understand how by saying just that standards are being lowered, that you’re implying that they’re being lowered because people are less skilled and less intelligent and you’re talking about people of color and or women?
Elon Musk (48:24): Look, I’m saying we should not lower standards, that’s it.
Don Lemon (48:33): But you’re implying that they’re lowering standards because of people of color or women because someone is not a white male. You’re saying that they’re less skilled and less intelligent, that’s what you’re saying?
Elon Musk (48:42):  No, I’m not saying that. I’m simply saying that they are-
Don Lemon (48:43): Then why would they be lowering the standards?
Elon Musk (48:45):  I don’t know. Why are they lowering the standards?
Don Lemon (49:01): Well, you’re saying that the standards are being lowered because of certain people. You don’t believe in DEI, right? Do you not believe in diversity, equity and inclusion?
Elon Musk (50:17): Like I said, my view is that the only basis for promoting somebody should be [their] skills, talents, and their integrity. And that’s it.

What Musk meant to say was that the performative promotion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a company that hires pilots or engineers who are not white males gives cover to the bigot in all of us to overlook the profit incentive as what is behind the lowering of safety and quality standards of American corporations in late stage capitalism. The beauty of the trick is taking a problem that any two observers can agree on (the decline of quality and safety in capitalist enterprises) and tarnishing a handy liberal project (the promotion of diversity in boardrooms and in the workplace) with it by eliding a spurious association.  The outrageous non sequitur nature of it demands a change in subject from the problem that can be agreed on to the spurious association that can only inspire intense wheel-spinning debate.  

Both sides of the debate are happy!  Meanwhile, actual critical race theory, actual trans rights and healthcare, and actual diversity equality and inclusion are weakened and diminished by being on the attack for the sins of the ersatz corporate versions of them.   And the swelling of corporate coffers and the decline of safety and standards continues apace.

A Good Life

I don't mean to be an ingrate.  I have a lovely wife and a wonderful daughter.  I live in a good enough house in a nice enough town.  I have a job that pays nearly well enough and that I could possibly eventually retire from if I live long enough and they don't decide they don't need me. I have a hobby that keeps me somewhat active and that could occasionally even be considered rewarding in itself. I have a nice dog and two delightful cats.  I have health.  I have a good enough life. 

But do I have a good life?  Does anyone?  Is a good life possible in our present circumstances.

Our society is such that in order for most to have a good life-- let's define it as a rich, rewarding life free of worry and care-- we have to do harm.  If more than enough money is the minimum requirement for a good life (and it's not clear that it alone is), then we either have to have more money than we know what to do with or we have to need less than most people need.  If we have more than enough money, wealth and goods, we have necessarily in this economy starved someone else to get it.  Capitalism depends on most people not having enough to live on.  In times of crisis this becomes explicit as our economic ministers openly devise policies to inflict pain at the overpopulated bottom of the pyramid so that ease continues flowing to the narrow top.  This is the gushing up reality that gives the lie to The Trickle Down Theory.  They do this by making living more expensive for the property-poor or by making ways to earn a living more scarce or more meager. 

Even in good economic times for most, when the truly miserable shut-outs of society are fewer, the cheap material effects of a good enough life in the wealthiest lands of the planet are made from the blood and ruin of the most immiserated and exploited parts of the world that we are privileged not to see. Blindness to the violence that makes even our modest comfort possible is a luxury and the prerogative of the Free. But the harm we do without lifting a finger has ways of intruding on our consciousness from time to time-- in the increase in extraordinary life threatening weather events, in the proliferation of random shootings and terror, in the massing of migrants seeking refuge at our borders, in the wars and conflagrations in distant places that we hear about on the news or that our leaders too frequently engage us in.  In this world, it's a luxury to preoccupy ourselves with cancel culture and wokeness.  But we have to preoccupy ourselves with silliness to distract us from the lie we all live: that if we are not living the good life it is by choice and not by the violence enforced  inequalities built into our system.

We seem to have strayed far afield from our original question, but I would argue that the system that depends on the misery of the many makes a good life for any but a very few out of the question.  Who are the few?  Is it those at the top who inflict misery on the rest?  Is it those in the middle who live a good enough life thanks to the meager graces of the few at the top and the invisible misery of the many at the bottom?  It is neither of these.  It is rather the unicorns who need less than most people need and have the means to get it.  For some people-- perhaps for you, dear reader if you are deeply satisfied with your life and not merely deluded or consciously unconscious about the casual harm that is required of others for you to be so-- it is a disposition.  To give an extreme example, it might be the bohemian who doesn't need to possess or consume something to be enriched by it, who somehow always has enough money to get by without selling her soul to a career or a job, who feels passionately and engages in causes and activities and creativities that give to the world.  Or it could simply be the person who has the most modest of needs that are easily met and a place in his community. 

A good life it seems to me is one that does not begrudge or preclude a good life for others.  And this is the main point I would like to make today.  In our current system of economics and politics, we do not center our concerns around the ability of people to have a good life.  In fact, too often, the inequalities of our way of life require us to lie to ourselves about the culpability that people have for their own quality of life.  We pretend that those worse off than us have chosen their misery even though if we examine our own life it should be abundantly clear that our comfort was chosen for us and that maintaining it has forced a meanness on the way we conduct ourselves and a smallness in the pursuit of our goals that is preoccupied with adherence to the shallow values of an artificially unequal society imposed from above on all of us.   

A society that is not about securing a good life for all of its citizens--not just for the "right kind" of citizen-- isn't worth a damn.  By this criterion, it should be obvious to all but the willfully self-deluded that the one we live in, as expensive and gaudy and daunting as it is is a worthless shameful sham.  We could go a long way toward redeeming ourselves by doing whatever it takes-- even increasing the misery at the top; they can afford it-- to ensure the basics for all citizens: good meaningful work in a democratic workplace when we need it at not just a living wage but a "good living" wage; health care on demand; as much quality education as we need and want; a home that doesn't bankrupt us; abundant means of public transportation; art, science and technology for all of us; bridges that don't collapse when they bump up against the forces of capitalism.   Paid in advance by each of us for all of us so it's there when we need it.  To enable this will undoubtedly take some major adjustments to our political system.  We could start with some tweaks to the current system: setting limits on the terms of all public officials; removing obstacles to democracy such as the electoral college in order to make our choices at the voting booth a reflection of the popular vote;  installing a more parliamentary form of government with more voter-responsive parties that would force the make-up of our legislative bodies to be a reflection of the vote rather than a winner-take-all farce in which the losing party gets no representation.  Or we could cut to the chase and replace our current system with one of sortition in which our representatives are selected randomly by lot from among all of us for short, non-consecutive terms.  Whatever we do, we must do something if we are to begin the road to redemption.

When the needs of the many are no longer knobs for the few to play with in order to ensure the fulfillments of their own many wants, but rather the shared concern of all, the question of what is a good life reverts to the one living it.

Pendulum Ride

I was recently watching Glenn Greenwald (of System Update) and Matt Taibbi (of the Twitter Files) talking  about :"why free speech has become a right wing issue".  I’m a masochist is why.  The conversation was occasioned by the Supreme Court's recent surprising indication in oral arguments to Murtha v Missouri that it could be favorable to letting the government freely communicate its displeasure about content on social media platforms with the Big Tech companies that run them. At first, it seemed to me that Greenwald and Taibbi were as usual eliding the fact that these platforms are not public entities, not even traditional businesses but something new entirely*,  and that the relationship of the government to Big Tech is deeply contractual. In other words, Elon Musk doesn’t need the CDC to tell him to boot someone off of X for speech he doesn't like, and if it does he’s free to ignore it, but he might find it in his interest to do so if he wants to continue to receive public funding for his ventures.  In my view there is no one to root for in this scenario.  The hypothetical anti-vax poster’s speech that is offensive to the federal agency was never free, it was always donated nonchalantly to Twitter which could always do as it pleased with it (and often did.)  (Note: I'm being hypothetical.  Any similarity to the actual case before the SCOTUS would be coincidental.)  It just mystifies me (not) how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, beneficiaries of the largesse of Big Tech billionaires, worry us with this stuff but have nothing to say† about for instance Tennessee making it an offense punishable by a $1-$5 million fine for a teacher employed by any school system to discuss race, sex or class in a classroom setting in any way that offends a white male student (read: at all).

Having now watched the whole conversation, and read the NY Times article they discuss and Taibbi’s response to it, I concede the value of the main point they want to express which has not nothing but less to do with the fact of government insinuation into Big Tech’s affairs (contra my first critique of it) than with the nature of what government officials are interfering about.  I.e., Greenwald and Taibbi are not on about the government officials (or ex-officials sock-puppeting for the deep state) leaning on Twitter executives to remove disinformation about Russian interference in US elections or about COVID health precautions and statistics-- they’re trying to draw focus on the government declaring its officials experts on  “disinformation” and arbiters of what to do with it.  Unwanted speech is protected; “disinformation” being the purview of experts is certified not to be.  

Their point about “liberals” (by which they mean not just neoliberal government officials and the deep state but also the anti-Trump left) is that labelling unwanted speech “disinformation” gives cover to allow censorship.  Liberals are all for censorship if it hurts Trump.  Trump is bad because he somehow slipped through the cracks to become president-- thanks to strategically welling popular support in just the right places-- and subverted the neoliberal agenda.  As continuous with the neo-liberal establishment as his first term wound up being,  there’s no guarantee his second term will continue to be (strong signs indicate that it won’t), and as much as I truly fear what a second Trump term portends and for that reason will do at least the bare minimum I can to avoid it (which could at this point even be just not moving to a swing state and voting against Biden), I think Greenwald and Taibbi are right to point out the troubling nature of government (and mainstream media; and citizens sympathetic to the status quo) practicing a new framework for censorship and thought control.  I don’t want to give them credit beyond this, but I think this is significant credit that they deserve. 

They mostly refer to the would be thought police as “liberals”-- at least Greenwald does.  But he also repeats that by not opposing this sleight of hand that turns unwanted speech into “disinformation” the left cedes Free Speech advocacy to the right.  He compares the state of things 20 years ago when Noam Chomsky led the charge to defend the right of Nazis to deny the holocaust against the FBI which was criticized for interfering, to today when the Twitter files are called a "nothingburger" and liberals clamor for their government to police their social media platforms into banning Trumpist disinformation.  Greenwald sees the main conflict today as being not between right and left but rather as between the separate sides of those inside or on the side of the liberal Beltway establishment (the perpetrators of this harm to freedom of speech and thought) and those outside and opposed to it.

Having conceded their point, I have swung back a bit this way on the value of this discourse -- actually I’m trying to sort out the mess.  One thing you’ll note about free speech.  The people we’re most often compelled to have to protect are basically saying unwanted, odious speech-- i.e., right wing talking points (frequently expressed as perverted subversions of valid leftist arguments), racist, sexist, homophobic, classist porn, or corporate lies.  Much disinformation is paid for by right wing think tanks expressly to mislead and obfuscate and undermine the spread of leftist ideas.  So we rarely find either Greenwald or Taibbi vociferously attacking the government or right wing media for the way it treats speech from the actual left-- basically shunting it to dark unseen corners when it’s not dismissing, mischaracterizing, vilifying, missing the point or advocating for (and often succeeding at) banning it.  Both former heros and allies are 100% of the time now critiquing the left (barely concealed behind the slur of “The Liberals”) for the authoritarianism that is actually actively being crusaded for by the most nefarious elements of the right--- many of whom fund the outlets for such critiques of the left as Greenwald and Taibbi provide.  So Greenwald saying it’s not right v left but inside v outside when he is 100% of the time attacking the left is infuriating.  

However!1  The New York Times article they were discussing was absolutely pushing a false narrative about Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files --i.e., that Taibbi found and reported no government collusion with Twitter execs to censor tweets among the Twitter files until March 2023 when he met the Trumpist crackpot conspiracy theorist (or propagandist) Mike Benz who has lately been pushing the Taylor Swift hysteria shortly before Taibbi's testimony before Congress about the Twitter files, with the insinuation that Benz must have planted the idea of government collusion.  As I vividly remember, the government collusion angle was in Taibbi's Twitter file reporting early on, in December 2022, so the NYT is just wrong about that (and almost certainly knows it).  Plus the same article, as Greenwald very capably demonstrates, repeatedly bemoans the caution with which government disinformation specialists now have to proceed since the Twitter files were exposed and the deleterious effect it has had on the government’s ability to stay ahead of disinformation on social media.  It’s actually disgusting frankly.  

Like I say, there are no good guys.  Or rather the good guys are shut out of the conversation.  But I would like to remind us that the already free don't need freedom.  It's the rest of us who could use some liberation.

~~~~~

*  YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Substack, Rumble, Racket, Bluesky, etc are not public squares where speech must not be infringed.  They are “marketplaces of ideas”-- and not in any good way.  They are at best imperfect restricted spaces where speech is heavily regulated by market forces.   (They’re actually queen bees whose users and visitors are slaves willfully creating their value for them without their having to do jack diddly.)

† Taibbi at least is happy to talk about how the right should fine tune its attack on woke education if it wants to be less buffoonish.

Room for Improvement

Another in a series of examples of facts lying around deliberately unseen...

Capitalism is often presented, even by anti-capitalists, as the system of production and distribution whose perfection was forged by centuries of progress, whose emergence across Europe from the cocoon of the pre-capitalist marketplace was a pinnacle of human discovery-- in a time of decreasing evidence of heavenly insinuation into daily human affairs, an advanced and worthy object of devotion*-- made possible by advances in human knowledge and technology that unfettered capitalism from the mere potentiality inherent in the market.  

The story that Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Origin of Capitalism tells, based as it is on a study of the facts is quite different and to my mind, far more plausible.  While the market always existed, it was historically used primarily for luxuries,  for trade of resources originating in one part of the world for resources plentiful in another, and for artisanal goods and crafts.  The explosion of mercantilism in the 17th century that brought wealth and maritime adventurism to the Netherlands was not and did not engender capitalism according to Wood.  Instead, capitalism had its origins in agriculture in England.  

The twin engines of this innovation were the two innocuous sounding concepts of enclosure and improvement.  Under feudalism, peasants lived on and worked the land for themselves.  Annually they were taxed a portion of their yield to the king or local lord for the privilege of keeping their kneecaps intact.  By the sixteenth century, this had changed as the practice of enclosure in which -- under the auspices of government and with the aid of government forces-- common lands were sealed off from the peasants who had worked them as a concept of property ownership caught vogue among the idle upper classes.  Now, the right to work and live off of arable land had to be leased from a landlord, forcing all but the most successful farmers into homeless vagrancy. In order to remain viable as tenants of the land, farmers engaged in a process of "improvement"-- literally devising ways to increase the profitability of the land through greater yields with less labor.  This drove the search for better technology, and for the first time markets for the sale of factory farm-produced crops and meat.  

The peasantry that was driven from the common lands, now homeless and impoverished was forced into cities where they were now required to sell their labor in return for meager sustenance  (procured now exclusively from the marketplace) and cramped shelter in vast tenements.  The production of food needed to live was thereby taken from the masses and given to a class of agrarian capitalist.  The locus for the procurement of food was now transferred from one's own garden to the marketplace, which became also the primary seller of all household goods, such as pottery and clothing, now manufactured in the largely urban enterprises that hired the landless masses. 

The transition from feudalism to capitalism gave England an edge in the international trade of goods that had to be maintained by transplanting the agrarian revolution to Ireland and other overseas colonies; moreover it raised the stakes on the continent to follow England's lead with varying degrees of difficulty and success. In time, the capitalist forces and relations of production, circulation and reproduction were everywhere. The priorities of the owning and political classes became centered the world over on profit, and capital "improvement".  As Wood notes at the conclusion of her history,

Then there are the corollaries of ‘improvement’: productivity and the ability to feed a vast population set against the subordination of all other considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people who could be fed are often left to starve. There is, in general, a great disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers. The ethic of ‘improvement’ in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.

Capitalists have claimed the Enlightenment for capitalism, but Wood, without going into a lot of detail puts this notion to bed, saying that although capitalist England contributed to the enlightenment (via Newton, Bacon and Locke in particular) it was basically a product of the non-capitalist continent, which is why its most salient values-- individual freedom and rationality-- have little to do with business and more to do with human progress.  In fact, the consequences and prerequisites of capitalism-- inequality, growth for growth’s sake, poverty and homelessness-- are antithetical to enlightenment values. The whole book is basically a reminder that capitalism is just a societal organization that originated as an accommodation to the particular circumstances of an insular European province, that then trended-- not the apotheosis of human history.  The trick for all of us (and it’s a tough one unfortunately) is extracting the world from the organization that capitalism requires.

~~~~~

* See The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher.