Monthly Archive: April 2017

I found this rant posted on my Facebook wall today.

It is a classic example of a user seeking validation. There is no explicit or implied attempt at discussion or analysis, which is just as well, since most of this rant contains assertions that are flat-out unsupported by facts or evidence.
Rants of this type usually have a predictable structure:

Part 1 – List a number of fear-inducing, dystopian assertions with little or no supporting evidence (in this case, opening with an ominous and doom-laden statement like “RIP America” gets you bonus FUD points)
Part 2 – Make a claim that the assertions prove X, where X is something that they consider to be Very Troubling and Dangerous
Part 3 – Implore readers to pat them on the back via Amen or some affirmation that They Are Right, plus Please Pass It On.

Part 2 is the Compelling Statement. In this particular case, the author makes the claim that young people are disrespectful brats. Etc. Etc.

Now, I want to reminisce up to and including the present day.
When I was 16 and in school in the UK, I read and listened to people the same age as my grandparents complaining about how “the youth of today” had no respect for their elders, dressed terribly, behaved badly etc. etc. Some of the complainants (usually military veterans) were of the opinion that “a spell in the armed forces” would sort these reprobates out and magically convert them to that generation’s idea of “responsible adults”. They would write their complaints in letters to the BBC and newspapers, usually signed with bylines like “Yours, Disgusted, Godalming”.
(Nobody ever did get a good answer whenever they asked the “put them in the military” proponents whether it really was a good idea to take immature, borderline nasty jerks who already knew how to engage in vandalism and assault, and teach them to, you know, really be effective in using handguns, military weapons and other mechanisms of mass destruction.)
When I was in my 30s and making my way in the world in London and elsewhere, I read and listened to people the same age as my parents complaining about how “young people” had no respect for authority, behaved badly etc. etc. This time, instead of the “put them in the army” panacea, they apparently needed “a good dose of discipline” or “tough love” or the irresponsible parents needed the discipline. Once again, they would write to newspapers and the BBC and huff and puff about the imminent threat that this posed to The Future of Civilization.
This was the era of the infamous “short sharp shock” cure being touted by the Conservative Party, which was quickly abandoned as its proponents discovered that it made no difference to crime and recidivism rates. This law and order thingy is really a lot more complicated than most politicians think it is.
Now I am turned 60, I am reading and hearing people my age complaining about “young people”, “Millennials” etc. Apparently they are over-privileged little shits who have had way too much handed to them on a plate, and need a good dose of Reality or some such. See the rant above. Since we are now in the Age of The Internet, this generation rants on Facebook, and any other social media platform they can find, preferably where people will pat them on the back and say “yes, you’re right, we are indeed Doomed”.
Do we see a pattern here?
Every generation complains about successive (younger) generations, unfavorably comparing their behavior to their own (remembered) behavior.
This, folks, is a variant of what social scientists call the Golden Age fallacy, the idea that there was a time, that we can all remember, when Everything Was Better. It is usually that time when children were always well-behaved and respectful, the law was respected and obeyed without question by everybody, people worked hard etc. etc. (With the more, exclusionary or class-focussed, one usually finds more sinister phrases like “people knew their place” entering the conversation, often in whispers).
We are good as a species at forgetting all of the Bad Stuff that we did or which happened to us, and burnishing the Good Stuff in our mind. This is actually a good thing in many ways, since it makes us more able to put bad events in the rear view mirror and retain a necessary sense of optimism. However, it has a downside, the downside encapsulated in the old phrase “rose-tinted spectacles”.
If you want an illustration of how selective memory of the past works, try engaging a mother who is attempting to protect her daughter from under-age sex, and ask her when she lost her own virginity. I have done this. The results are instructive, hilarious and bizarre in equal measure. The responses prove that amnesia is not just for Iran-Contra suspects.
My conclusion: none of this complaining is new. I find it more amusing than anything else. It is also pretty much unserious. We live in an age where we have never been safer. There has not been a major war in over 70 years. Life for many people is a damn sight better than that of our grandparents. At least 2 of my grandmother’s siblings did not reach adulthood. And try asking the descendants of the World War II combat veterans who did not make it back about the Good Old Days.
So when I hear and read very old people talking about “The Good Old Days”, part of me nods sagely and smiles. No, the Good Old Days were, for many people, not at all good. There is a good reason why it is called the Golden Age Fallacy.
Rants like this one are not new, and are no more compelling to me, even as I get older.

By now many of you will have read or seen the story of a paying passenger who was physically removed by law enforcement from a United Airlines flight. The underlying cause of the issue was that airlines routinely overbook seats on flights, in order to take account of no-shows and people who fail to arrive at the departure zone on time for other reasons. In this case, passengers did not volunteer to give up their seats in order to address the overbooking situation, so the airline arbitrarily decided to bump a passenger who, since he had paid for a seat and was a medical doctor with patients to see, declined to be bumped. At which point United had him removed from the plane by law enforcement in a way that caused him bodily injury.
The United CEO has, inexplicably, refused to issue an unconditional apology and has instead chosen to defend the airline publicly.
There are a bunch of different backdrops to this issue, but here are a few that spring to mind.

1. United Airlines has a worse reputation than many airlines for customer service, in an industry that has a lot of deep-seated dysfunctions when it comes to customer service. There was a good reason why a disgruntled passenger started the website untied.com a few years ago. (This site is now being subjected to a campaign of lawsuits from United Airlines in order to shut it down.)
2. The airline industry routinely overbooks planes and (mostly) gets away with it. The strange thing in all of this is that buying and paying for a ticket does not automatically give a passenger the right to be carried on the flight that they booked. This is definitely at odds with most other industries, where if you book a service, you expect to avail yourself of the service at the specific date and time, and you can sue the provider for breach of contract if that does not occur.
3. Airlines continue to get away with these sorts of behaviors because, at the end of the day, their stock prices and business performance do not suffer. As this article makes clear, consumers are not willing to punish airlines sufficiently for poor attention to customer service to get the attention of airline leaders and stockholders.
Another article makes the same point using stock price diagrams. Bad treatment of customers pays off.

The bottom line is that airline behaviors will only change when consumers refuse to buy airline tickets from airlines who provide bad customer service, or who engage in devious business practices. So it is up to We The Customers.

Back in 1992, I watched from the UK as Ross Perot came from nowhere to capture a significant share of the vote in the Presidential Election campaign.
While I liked a lot of the overall approach of Perot, it was very easy to see, even from 5000 miles away, that he would have made a poor President. Like many entrepreneurial builders of corporations, he saw government as just like a business, only bigger, and relished the chance to impose his own brand of “business discipline” on it, not realizing that the US governmental system is not built to facilitate command and control by a single person. He would have been a miserable, frustrated POTUS.
Now we have an even more extreme example as POTUS, and it is every bit as bad as I feared. Donald Trump makes Ross Perot look like a genius every day.
However, Donald Trump is not some left-field aberration. His appearance on the national political scene is the end result of over 40 years of progressively more strident resentment politicking from the GOP.
Which brings me to a more detailed consideration of what is known as “grift”.
A lot of the promulgation of resentment politics has been via talk radio, and other forums dominated by aggressive, contentious commentators at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Those kinds of channels require money to operate, and there is plenty of money fuelling that communications process. Some of it comes from rich donors, some of it comes from advertising, but some of it comes from old fashioned grift. Call it begging or pleading, or call it the selling of snake oil, asking for money is as old as the hills, as organized religions show us.
The history of grifting by authoritarian groups affiliated with the GOP and other organizations in that area of the political spectrum is a long and sometimes sordid one. Almost every crackpot website that I read by End Times proponents, and SovCits, contains some variant of the crawler at the bottom of the browser window saying “send money”.
In some cases, the money is not going to any useful political activity. There is an entire infrastructure of web sites and movements whose leaders are living off of grift, just like the televangelists, whose tactics they often adopt. They trade in FUD and demand money to “protect the USA from evil”.
Unfortunately, as we have seen in the USA since 9/11, fear sells.
The obsession with persuading supporters to cough up money is interesting on another level however. It shows that authoritarians, unlike many progressives, realized a long time ago that if politics runs on money, they should be collecting as much of their own as possible. In politics, money is always very useful.
A lot of the issues that the progressive end of the political spectrum has with messaging are due to lack of money, which is in turn fuelled by a conviction that politics ought not to be driven by money, so they will refuse to go grubbing for dollars.
This is somewhat self-defeating.
The current alternate universe information dissemination echo chamber in the authoritarian area of the internet has become pervasive due to the application of large sums of money over a very long period of time by rich individuals and PACs. The contrast with progressive communication channels is an instructive one. There is no progressive talk radio infrastructure worth a damn in the USA since Air America ceased operations. At one time, by virtue of having progressives in the IT innovation space, progressive organizations knew how to use the internet better, but those days are gone, and there is a lot of evidence that outside authoritarian entities have learned how to manipulate the online world in order to distort messaging and simulate popularity.
The reason for a lack of progressive channels has a lot to do with both lack of money, but also the lack of a progressive power structure that matches the networks of authoritarians. Authoritarian followers are always more cohesive than progressive followers, since many of them are happy to be told what to do. Progressives are, almost by definition, mostly freethinkers. Think “herding cats”. Many of them also believe that money is grubby and that ideas should speak for themselves.
There is a somewhat complacent worldview in many progressive groups that believes that America is undergoing a demographic transformation which will see the regressives die off. This is a flawed analysis. It assumes the continuation of a level electoral playing field, and as we are seeing, the GOP is not interested in a level playing field. It wants to tilt the playing field in its favor, distorting the electoral process at all levels to enshrine a permanent GOP majority. (The ends justifies the means as far as the GOP is concerned, since they see progressivism as an existential threat, and are often unable to distinguish between dissent and disloyalty).
The 2016 election should have been a wake-up call to progressives in the USA. I fear that the message has still not been properly absorbed.
In order to avoid the permanent distortion of the electoral process, which will lead to decades of authoritarian rule, progressives need to be able to do several things that they have shown themselves to be poor at doing in the past:

1. Organize around a simple set of coherent, short, appealing messages
2. Repeat the messages and not get trapped into using the other side’s terminology (see Lakoff, George)
3. Be prepared to FUND FUND FUND. Call it grifting if you must, but money makes the political process go round.
4. Be prepared to use economic power in other ways such as boycotting corporations who align themselves with their opponents, or do not behave equitably. If there are 60 million progressives in the USA, and 6 million of them stop buying goods from a major corporation, that will have a significant impact.

Folks here is one of my lessons in practical US governance.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have no real interest in requiring any POTUS to get permission before committing US forces to action around the world. Never mind what some elected representatives might talk about or proclaim as part of their regular public strutting, watch what they actually do (HINT: Nothing of consequence).
Part of the reason is that many specific operations are covert, and so cannot be disclosed or debated in advance.
However, the main reason is that if the HoR or the Senate does not intervene, they get to have it both ways. If the military action is seen to be a success, they get to pass motions congratulating US forces, attend parades and homecomings in their states or districts, and generally bathe in reflected glory. If the action is perceived to be a failure, then they get to walk away and blame the POTUS for “misadventure” or some such, while burnishing their credentials as Real Americans (TM) by attending funeral and memorial events.
Cynical, moi? On this subject, yep. Very.