Current Affairs

I had somebody march into one of my Facebook comment threads and be a dick the other day.
Specifically, that person played the tired “if you don’t like it here then leave” card.
There are a whole host of reasons why that, on any logical level, is a really bad argument.
However, there is one overriding problem with it.
Anybody deploying it is being a dick, and therefore is likely to piss me off.
Now, as a general rule, it takes quite a lot to piss me off. However, the combination of lousy argument skills, plus being a dick online, is one way to do it.
The question is: if somebody pisses me off, and they want to repair the damage, what do they do?

The answer is two-fold:
1. Write an unconditional apology in the same forum that the original, dickish comment or posting was made (if you made the dickish comment in public, you owe the apology in public. Don’t be a weasel)
2. Don’t be a dick again. (an apology for bad behavior has limited value if the person making the apology then continues with the bad behavior. It’s a credibility issue).

Some people seem to have a real problem with the concept of an unconditional apology. It’s a statement of the form “I am sorry that I said/did X”. End of statement. No Ifs Ands or Buts.
Thus, the following variants don’t make it:

1. an attempted apology along the lines of “I’m sorry but…”. The “but…” is usually some elaborate post hoc justification for the original dickish statement that, when the recipient parses it, adds up to “I’m sorry but you deserved it”. That isn’t an apology. The term for it is “doubling down”.
2. the favorite construction used by politicians, “I’m sorry if you were offended”. In that latter case, the person attempting the apology is saying (in as many words) “I was right, and I don’t regret it, but that over-sensitive little snowflake over there seems to be all bent out of shape so I will throw them a rhetorical bone. There, snowflake, you’ve got your apology, now quit whining”.

Of course it would be much better if people didn’t write stuff to begin with that makes them look like a dick. Really.
There is a simple two-part rule that I invoke before I hit send on a comment or posting. The rule goes something like “am I about to send something I may regret in more than 24 hours time, and would I be prepared to say that to the person’s face, if it is a personal comment?” Sometimes I sit on contentious postings for a day or so, in order to ensure that I am not merely reacting without thinking or analyzing enough. Do I always get it right? Not always. I have had to apologize online in the past. But if you have to, you take it on the chin and move on. If the person you pissed off isn’t satisfied with an unconditional apology, there is probably something else in the relationship dynamic that is doomed in any case.

I grew up in public housing in the UK, in a decidedly ratty blue-collar housing estate.
Along the way, I was stigmatized based on where I lived, and learned the hard way how unforgiving both judgmental people and the English class system can be.
However, one thing I noticed early on was that many people on my housing estate, instead of working to better themselves, were content to live off government benefits and live an aimless life. They lacked any willingness to step outside of what they knew and what their parents did. I found the phenomenon of multi-generational welfare dependency in several households, where the parents had never worked for any length of time, instead choosing to have multiple children and game the system. That was certainly not the message that I got from my parents and immediate family members.
Now, gaming the system is regarded differently by many people, depending on where you are in the societal pecking order. For example. hiring a crackshot accountant to ensure that you pay as little tax as possible on your millions earned as a CEO is regarded as perfectly normal (required even), whereas having 2 more children to gain more income is regarded by those same approvers of high-earner tax avoidance as some heinous crime. That is a pernicious double standard that usually tells me more about the selective bubble worldview of the accuser than they perhaps intended me to understand.
However, one of the results of my experiences in growing up, escaping from blue-collar drudgery, and eventually moving countries, is that empathy and sympathy are two different things.
I can be empathetic if I come across people living in grinding poverty who are clearly struggling. (If I was not empathetic, I would be worried about whether I was becoming sociopathic). However, I may have greater or lesser sympathy depending on whether those people are trying to move on and upwards by making good decisions, or whether they are either passively accepting their fate and/or making bad decisions.
It’s like people who claim that they are always getting into trouble. When I talked to several people in the UK who complained that they had been robbed and harrassed, I soon found out that they had been going to areas of cities that were known for being sink-holes of trouble. If you want to stay out of trouble, it’s a good idea to not go to trouble spots. This is basic common sense. It’s also the same reason that every few years when I lived in the UK, we would read about some British tourist who was captured by guerillas or some other insurgent group while hiking in a country usually named something like Afghanistan. I would shake my head in amazement that somebody would think it was a good idea to hike in Afghanistan. It’s like seeing a sign saying “minefield” and setting out to hike across it, or walking out in the middle of nowhere with a sign on my body saying “Hello I am a stupid tourist who can be used as a bargaining asset. please kidnap me”.
At the end of the day, as JD Vance has pointed out in his book “Hillbilly Elegy”, we all have agency. We can sit around and play the role of victim, or we can try to move on. Vance, like me, escaped from blue-collar penury, and, like me, can see both sides of the picture.
Governments really don’t have much of an answer to the “hollowing out” trend, because it would require them to admit things publicly that call into question the integrity and effectiveness of the capitalist model of governance. They continue to trust in market forces to generate enough employment, ignoring the reality that this cannot generate enough employment, in fact the number of jobs is shrinking due to the combination of automation and offshore migration of jobs and industries, and more and more people are trapped in areas with chronic economic depression and high structural unemployment (like my home town).
A lot of the people who are angry and frustrated about their lot in the modern USA have every right to be angry. The country has become progressively more unequal over the last 40 years, with the quaint idea of “trickle down” clearly not working in practice. I personally know people who are having to work 2 jobs just to get enough spending money for modest items. However, people who decide to play the victim 24×7 and expect others to wave a magic wand and Fix Their Lives (with Donald Trump seemingly being many people’s idea of the Guy Who Will Make Everything Right) do not get much sympathy from me. They do need to show some initiative of their own.
The rigid determination of many heartland Americans to stay put in towns that have no possible means for economic improvement is, on one level, admirable, but on another level is damn near incomprehensible. In the past, humans would completely abandon towns and cities if they were no longer useful or safe places to live. Maybe that needs to happen more frequently today.

So much of the enthusiasm for Donald Trump seems to be based on a deep nostalgia for The Good Old Days, that I was reminded of this section from P.J. O’Rourke’s book “Parliament of Whores”, where he constructs a cue card to allow a hapless Congresscritter to decide what to do at voting time for yet another bill. The bill seems to me to be just the sort of bill that Donald Trump and his bunch of sycophants would have dreamed up in the current climate:

Bill Number: H.R. a billion-zillion

Title: Fiddlemeyer-O’Houligan Unbelievable Grocery Bill

Detail: Amends the federal anti-trust laws to make the price of everything reasonable, like it used to be, and includes provisions requiring kids today to listen up when their dad talks to them

Committee Action: Passed by the House Means and Ends Committee 3/17/90

Pros: Constituents will murder you in November if you oppose it

Cons: President will kill you right now if you support it

Verdict: A toughie

Prior Votes : The 100th Congress was going to pass it, but a lobbyist ate their copy of the legislation.

Recommendation: Hide in the cloakroom during floor vote

There has been a lot of comment pointing out that, prior to the stay issued this evening by a Federal judge, many of the government bodies charged with enforcing the change in regulations seemed to not know exactly what they were supposed to do. This was presented as a cross between Lack of Planning and the Law Of Unintended Consequences.
In other words, the confusion was a bug.
The cynic in me does not currently accept that more charitable interpretation. It is my belief that the resultant confusion was a feature, not a bug. The underlying purpose of the Executive Order was not to put a stop to Muslim immigration, to selectlvely profile Muslims entering the USA, or anything directly related to Muslims.
The purpose was to send the message that visitors and permanent residents are not Real Americans (TM) and that they can expect to be targeted for future discriminatory and capricious action. Remember that the underlying rationale for many of Donald Trump’s more expansive promises is nostalgic nationalism, a yearning for the days when America was prosperous, self-sufficient, and Rather White.

So, amidst all of the brou-ha-ha about the latest Executive Order, an English friend of mine who has lived in the USA for 27 years is now assessing whether he wants to continue to live here.
The message of this EO to me is very clear. Anybody not born in the USA is at risk at any point of being declared an undesirable. They are already refusing to allow legal permanent residents back into the USA since the signing of this EO. (Whether that was even a correct interpretation of the EO is unclear, since the EO was apparently not reviewed by any of the enforcement bodies before the President signed it, which, if true, is about as good an example of professional negligence as you can get).
As a rule, people don’t stay around where they are not wanted. Right now, my conclusion is that this is not the country I moved to in 1998. I am starting to seriously consider moving back to Europe, sooner rather than later.
America had an opportunity to decide what sort of a country it wanted to be when it grows up. So far the message I am receiving is that it wants to be a country governed by repressive, regressive, nationalist and nativist people who think that the outside world is some malign place that they can either shut off or control, while somehow making the country great again.
Those of us who grew up in Europe and studied History recognize that philosophy very very well. It led directly to World War II.
If you are sitting there shaking your head at what I am reading thinking “nah, that could never possibly happen here”, you need to snap out of your complacency, and fast. One of the interesting questions that Germans were asked after World War II was whether they had any inkling that Adolf Hitler was going to lead Germany into a world war. Nearly all of them said that this possibility had never occurred to them, that they simply wanted a leader who would Sort The Mess Out. The idea that Sorting The Mess Out involved dehumanization, demonization and extermination of minorities, the invasion of multiple countries, and the destruction of much of Germany in a war, was not something that they could even have imagined.
But, with hindsight, when the surviving Nazi leaders were interrogated, it was clear from their sometimes-bland post hoc justifications of their actions that they saw power as a means to an end, and any means could be justified either before or after the event as part of the end objective of making Germany Great Again. Also revealed in the German leader interrogations was the extent to which George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” would be a reflective field workbook for nativist authoritarians and demagogues everywhere.
Folks, if you are not taking what is happening very very seriously, you are suffering from exactly the sort of complacency that a lot of people in Europe suffered from in the run-up to World War II.
What I am telling you is that I have no intention of being around to witness the end results of the current path that the central government of the USA is currently walking down.

So…one of the memes I keep reading, here on Facebook and on other social media platforms, is that the lower attendance for the Inauguration of Donald Trump was because his supporters were too busy working, whereas the supporters of Barack Obama were out of work scroungers. Another variant of the meme is that the large numbers of attendees at the Women’s Marches this weekend were (again) because a lot of Regular Folks have to go work, whereas the march attendees don’t have to work.
Please.
If that really is how you are trying to rationalize reality…
STOP.
For a start, as I explained a couple of days ago, once you are rationalizing, you have admitted to the facts of the situation. Now you’re just attempting to come up with an explanation that makes sense to you.
Secondly, any explanation along these lines is what in science is called a hypothesis. More bluntly, it’s an idea for which no evidence yet exists.
In order to convert a hypothesis into something more credible, you have to provide evidence.
This requires work. Like information gathering, analysis and computation.
Memes seldom comprise any assertion based on anything that approaches a work ethic. This is amusing in this context given that the accusation seems to be that Regular Folks are busy working while the demonstrators are out sucking off the public teat or some such Bad Activity. It seems that whoever is working on these memes isn’t doing any work worth a damn either, because all I am seeing is a hypothesis presented as fact with no supporting evidence. In other words, a juvenile attempt at a smear.
If this is all the opponents of facts and the Women;s Marches have got, they are already in Zero Credibility Land.

Will I be watching it?
Hell no.
But that is not unusual. I have never watched an inauguration real-time, and I have only ever seen snippets of the ceremony after the fact in the media.
I have a day job. Plus, I am not big on ceremonies and hoopla. In 3 weeks the Superbowl takes place in Houston, and if it is left up to me, I will turn on the TV 30 seconds before the actual kick-off.
Whatever the participants say in today’s ceremony outside of the legal requirements to become the next President and Vice President is really not that important when compared to what they actually can and will do. They can set a tone for the future, but the next 4 years are what counts.
As to whether Donald Trump is a legitimate President? Well, he won the Electoral College, so that makes him the President under the current rules and laws. However, claims that he won “in a landslide” are bullshit. He also clearly did not win the popular vote. Like all would-be authoritarians, he is ignoring those facts and claiming a “mandate”. Personally I think that phrase should be treated with derision in modern politics. There are almost no politicians elected by a majority of eligible voters in the world today, unless you decide to count those mysterious elections in far off lands where the President is elected with 99% of the vote (and his opponents are mysteriously absent from the ballot).
The election result is what it is. History and electors will judge the next POTUS by actions and results. I forsee difficult times ahead for the USA, as a concerted effort is made to regress the country’s governance processes, marginalize dissent, and re-instate poor treatment of people who are not definably and obviously White and American. The election was dominated by a small but decisive group of electors for whom inclusiveness and equitable treatment for all were unacceptable when compared to what they believe has gone wrong with the country.
Like many electorates in the Western World, “throw the bums out” and “turn back the clock” are in fashion. However, time never runs backwards, and, as Pete Townshend sardonically wrote, sometimes you get to “meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”.
I will spend today donating money to media writers and organizations that need resources in order to fight the attempts that are imminent to roll back protections and rights from any number of different groups in society. These organizations will be opposing authoritarian actions, and that takes time and money.
Some organizations that will be getting my money today are:

Electronic Freedom Foundation
ACLU
Planned Parenthood
Jim Wright (mr Stonekettle)
David Neiwert (aka Orcinus)
Juan Cole (informed comment)

The rise of nativism and racism in the Western world is rather obvious, now that two elections (the EU Referendum in the UK and the Presidential and Legislative branch elections in the USA) have been won by parties and forces representing regressive, nativistic thinking.
The bigger question, which many people are having trouble with, is why those forces have risen rapidly to have the impact that they have on electoral outcomes.
Inequality in societies probably plays a part. However, that is not a root cause, it is a symptom.
My view (for what it is worth) is that the underlying root cause is that, as most Western countries move to a post-industrial societal model, there simply is not enough employment to absorb all of the people who want and need paid employment. There aren’t enough jobs to go around. This problem has existed for 40+ years in many countries. Wherever you look in Europe and North America, you can see high structural levels of unemployment in many regions and countries. The causes are (1) automation of repetitive tasks, and (2) the migration of manufacturing and assembly operations to other countries with lower employment costs.
A big clue that the problem has existed for decades is that governments have been modifying the basis for counting numbers of unemployed people for decades to reduce the headline (total) number. I watched in the UK as this was done persistently by governments to keep the headline number below the politically embarrassing number of 1 million. As a result, most government official statistics on unemployment exclude long-term unemployed people who may still be looking for work, and also fail to count under-employment. So the US number of around 5% unemployment is not accurate, and has been inaccurate for decades. This tells me that this is a long-term structural issue, and that governments either do not want to address it, or do not know how to address it within the confines of current government policy and their own governing ideology.
Part of what is known as “the American Dream” is the idea that a new generation will enjoy greater prosperity than the previous generations. This manifests itself in expectations among people that they will enjoy a better standard of living than their ancestors. Until recently that was true. Now, with recessions not leading to “bounce” recoveries, and the decline of rural employment, many people in the USA have discovered that this is no longer true. Not surprisingly, they have become angry and frustrated, and they used their electoral power to send a clear and radical signal to the world, by electing a reality-show host and carnival barker to the Presidency.
One of Donald Trump’s populist promises during his campaign was that he was going to bring jobs back to the USA. He hinted that he would penalize corporations for offshoring employment, and he specifically promised to “bring back coal” to Appalachia. This was pure populist pandering in action. He was telling demoralized and desperate people what they wanted to hear.
None of Donald Trump’s expansive promises originated in any place close to current reality.
The reality is that if we want to return offshored work to the USA, we have to be prepared to pay more for just about all manufactured products in order to achieve this. The manufacturing went overseas for cost reasons. As for coal and gas, well, I wrote about that previously. The only way that the coal mines will re-open in Appalachia is via the application of huge government subsidies. Even then, the amount of employment will be limited. Automation has reduced employment demands in extractive industries dramatically. That is why the dream of re-opening timber mills in the Pacific North West is also doomed to give disappointing results. The jobs didn’t disappear because of an end to logging. They disappeared because of automation, and will not return unless automation is banned, people are subsidized to work, or a combination of both. In the meantime, unemployment in the Northern counties of California and the Southern counties of Oregon continues to be higher than the national average. Needless to say, the loss of mass employment in many Pacific Northwest counties has led to widespread discontent with central government, and pressure for secession exists, on the grounds that government from state and federal level has done nothing except make their lives worse.
The mass market political parties in the USA have no logical or coherent answer to this issue, because they are trapped in a hole of contradiction, between their public ideological position that claims that all solutions belong to the free market, and the reality that they have been subsidizing industries for decades. For example, governments already pump billions of dollars into agriculture via subsidies. State and local governments also subsidize businesses via tax abatements and other forms of tax concessions. However, political parties routinely rationalize away these contradictions.
The bottom line is that if governments want to address structural lack of employment opportunities, they have to consider one or a combination of two strategies:

1. (if you accept that people have to work) Subsidize employment
2. (a different approach) Give all people a Basic Income that will allow them to at least live above the poverty line

When a previous strategy no longer works, you need a new one, or you are condemned to slow decline. Political parties can continue to throw money at structural employment issues on an industry by industry or a regional basis, dressing it up as “relief”, “competitive investment” or any number of BS doublespeak phrases. That probably will not work in the medium term as de-industrialization and automation continue to advance. The cracks between rhetoric and reality will widen, and the contradictions will widen to the point that the political party credibility drops even lower. Or they can accept the new notion that not everybody can, must and should work.
Libertarians have been wrestling with this issue for a while, and in the Libertarian movement the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been a topic of discussion for a long time. It is a radical and different option to address a problem that is not going away. It was tried by Canada in the 1970s, so it is not totally unproven.
The Western world is at a crossroads with respect to matching expectations to reality for its electors. If political parties continue to try and paper over the cracks, we will have more wild and wacky election results, more instability, and possible world conflict. It really is that serious.
The time for visionary ideas and solutions is now.

Folks, some of you are posting links to stories on websites that assert that 95 million Americans over the age of 16 are not in the labor force i.e. they are not working. This is being used as information with which to claim that the US unemployment rate is far higher than the claimed figure.
Now, like most people who didn’t come down from the hillside with the last rainstorm, I know that unemployment numbers are not aligned with practical reality. I have written about this in the past.
However, the “95 million not working” claim is an example of a fallacious assertion, in that it (deliberately in my opinion on many websites) omits crucial information and analysis. A less polite summary would be that it is BS.
Politico analyzed the claimed number a few years ago when it was around 90 million. Their analysis shows how the real number of people who should be working but are not is a whole lot less than 95 million.
I would also note that the websites trumpeting this finding fall into two groups:
1. Headline clickbait sites run by popular media outlets (including the tabloid newspapers)
2. Fringe authoritarian sites specializing in bullshit stories about the Democratic party, including all manner of conspiracy theories and general all-purpose nonsense (World Net Daily being a good example)
There are no serious, analytical web sites pushing this story, for the simple reason that once you strip away the hyperbole, there aren’t 95 million people sitting on their hands doing nothing. That headline number, quite simply, does not pass any sense check or smell test. If there really were 95 million employable people in the USA unable to find work, we would have seen riots in the streets and towns a long long time ago.
If you fasten on to big numbers just because they match your preconceptions, and don’t bother to ask “how is that number comprised”, you are guilty of engaging in confirmation bias, and quite frankly, you deserve to be duped. Some of you need to wake up and engage your critical thinking skills.