Moderates United

Remember this: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-now-spends-125-billion-per-year-on-riot-gear-and-stability-maintenance-2013-5

The country is estimated to have more than 180,000 protests each year and the ruling Communist Party spends vast sums on ensuring order — more even than on its military, the largest in the world.

I will repeat, as I do from time to time, that  China is formally a Fascist nation, which is ironic given all the anti-Fascist rhetoric one sees from  Communists.  The only important different between Communism and  Fascism is that Fascism is an almost viable economic system.  It only truly works when conquering other nations, as Hitler did with the Ukraine, and China did with Tibet, but it works much better than pretending that people are automotons who are indifferent to their environment, treatment, pay, and autonomy.

Fascism is great for enriching oligarchs, and has been a great boon to the ruling Communists, who live lives of luxury, and are exempt from most of the laws which control everyone else.  They are their own class, and one can see why they would institute such repressive measures to protect their class status.  One can see, that is to say, if one is amoral, crass, materialistic, and GROTESQUELY hypocritical.

The issue is not black or white–that is a propaganda meme being used by the usual suspects for the usual purposes–but rather a nearly complete lack of accountability on the part of police for incompetence.  As he notes, with regard to his own State: “In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified.”

Here are the stats on the FBI: “from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.”

Nationally, officers are cleared of any wrong-doing about 400 times a year in the shooting deaths of suspects, but NOBODY seems to track how many are charged.  I would guess based on the fore-going stats, the number is very close, or AT, zero.

Here is the thing: we have professional standards for doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, electricians, and many others.  If an electrician fucks something up and causes a house fire which kills someone, they can be charged, at minimum, with criminal negligence.  If a doctor does something stupid they can have their license revoked and sued for malpractice.  Egregious cases can still warrant  criminal charges.

There are best practices in police work.  The choke hold used on Eric Garner–and don’t give me any bullshit that an arm targeting the caratoid, and it looked like the windpipe, as they moved, isn’t a choke–is WORST practice.  It is banned.  Cops know this.  They are trained in it.

THEREFORE, using a choke hold is at a minimum prima facie evidence of professional incompetence/malpractice, and in this case what I would call clear negligent manslaughter.  This applies particularly since he was not attacking them, and they had AT LEAST 4 offers present, and based on how many people were moving around afterwards, more like 5-6. If you have me a week to design and test strategies for dealing with large men without choking them–including the most basic use of interpersonal skills to calm him down–I have no doubt I could do it.

There needs at a minimum to be a police equivalent of being disbarred, of being deemed unfit to do police work of any sort.  More generally, though, it seems ABSURD that police are trusted to investigate their own.  I would suppose it obvious that people who hate cops could be relied on, if trusted with full authority, to commit any number of atrocities against justice.  The cops in the Rodney King case never should have gone to jail (that’s another matter I won’t deal with here).

At the same time, though, a lack of accountability means that INNOCENT PEOPLE die.  Cops have rights: so too do the people  they shoot and kill.  If you are a SWAT Team and hit the wrong house because you are having a bad day, and kill someone–which has happened several times at least in the past few years–guess what?  You go on the fuck up list, and you get to work somewhere else, like McDonalds, and your pension is revoked.

You say “but cops make mistakes, too.”  When you are serving a warrant for something like unpaid student loans–this is an actual case I read about–then FUCK YOU.  You stupid sons of bitches need to do your goddamned homework, and if you can’t be bothered, then I repeat: FUCK YOU.  Go pollute some other job, using money from someone willing to tolerate your stink.  No retirement, no severance.  This, in lieu of jail, which I think overgenerous.

This argument is like architects saying ” but my job is just so HARD”, or engineers saying “But my job is so COMPLEX”, or an ER doctor saying “But I have so much STRESS.”

Can we not stipulate as basic elements of the policing process that you not default to banned worst practices?  Can we not stipulate that at a minimum?

I want to be clear: this is not a rant against cops in general.  I recognize the value and inherent risk in what they do.  This is rant against BAD, INCOMPETENT, UNPROFESSIONAL cops who give everyone else a bad name.

I will share one story.  I know a woman who got drunk one night with her boyfriend, and the next day went down to Barney’s neck of the woods, and got lost. They asked a cop for directions, and he smelled alcohol on the boyfriends breath, and promptly arrested him.  While this was going on, she was carrying their baby, and she was getting freaked out and scared, so she asked if she could go into the gas station (where they were stopped), and he ignored her.  So she went in.  He followed her, took the baby out of her hands, and handed it to the clerk, and then punched her so hard she woke up in the hospital.

She sued.  I don’t know what happened, but these people ARE ON THE STREET.  What he did was not policy.  It was not legal.  It was an assault, pure and simple, but five gets you twenty he is or soon will be back on the street, with no charges, and that the case will settle out of court for not much money.

Some cases are OBVIOUS.  This was all caught on camera.  Such cases need to be subjected to criminal prosecution.  Cops need to go to jail.

I was dreaming last night I was driving, and construction kept interfering with my path.  I was trying to go somewhere, but endless concrete loops and dead ends were in my way.

So I got out, grabbed my car, and climbed up a steep rock embankment–using one hand to get handholds, since the car was in the other–to get myself back on the highway I wanted.  I have never carried a car before.  That was new.  It wasn’t that heavy.

I really want to break through some old limiting behaviors, and feel I have found some good strategies for doing it.  I will have more to write on the specifics once I hit some behavioral benchmarks I have set for myself.  It’s far better to speak of what worked than what might.

Not only was this law put on the books–for the alleged good of New Yorkers–but the Chief of Police gave it priority and strongly encouraged beat cops to make arrests.  This is idiocy.  This is taking the War on Drugs to its absurdist extreme.  If they wanted to punish him, fines would have been quite sufficient.  It is not a big deal one way or the other.

And I can totally relate to why he was pissed with them.  I would have been pissed too.  He had figured out a way to make money that, at worst, led to New York collecting slightly less in taxes.

Now why was Garner doing this?  TO FEED HIS FAMILY.  How complicated is that?

And why were people buying from him?  Simple: Socialists ALWAYS create black markets by charging such high taxes that avoiding them becomes profitable in and of itself.  As I noted the other day, utopian Denmark has a thriving black market, with half of Danes admitting they buy things under the table to avoid taxes.

So you have on the one hand an idiot law, passed by idiots for idiots, and enforced by a combination of drones and idiots, and at least one man dead for it, and children who NOW will either go without or be forced to USE some of that tax money these jackasses are collecting to make ends meet, in the form of social welfare benefits.

Dumb top to bottom, side to side.

And I can’t resist adding that this overall war on Tobacco is another source of irritation to me.  If people want to smoke, and they tell their insurance carriers the truth, they are COVERED.  It’s nobodies fucking business. It’s something many people like because it calms them down.

And I have long felt that these stats on second hand smoke exposure among adults are BS.  Yes, people should not smoke in malls or at work, but a few whiffs here and there is not going to affect anyone.  No, you should not smoke around your kids, but if they get a whiff every now and then, that’s not going to hurt anything either.

Did you know chronic smokers only have a 1 in 20 chance of getting lung cancer?  The rate for the population as a whole is 1 in 100.  This makes smokers 5x more likely to get lung cancer, but only 5% of them actually will.  My own guesstimate is that roughly 1 in 2 smokers never suffers anything more serious than a smokers cough.

Selling cigarettes is something you issue a citation for (or, according to the person making the recording, breaking up a fight), not something you use a choke hold for.  And aren’t chokeholds something from the fucking 70’s?  It is KNOWN that unless they are used carefully, they kill people.  You can cut off oxygen too long, collapse the wind pipe, or–as appears to have happened in this case–trigger a heart attack.  That’s why cops have been carrying tasers for 20 years.

Police, when they take the job, understand they are granted both power AND responsibility.  This is no different in principle than a surgeon fucking up a heart surgery.  They are paid to do it right, and there need to be consequences when they do it wrong.

An issue that is becoming increasingly obvious with cameras everywhere is that some cops seem to view all resistance to their authority as a pissing contest which they refuse to lose.  This guy was mouthing off at them, but likely because they have hassled him many times.  They arrested him basically because he wasn’t sufficiently obsequious.  I worked for a police department in college, and repeatedly saw “Arrested for Resisting Arrest”.  I was never able to work out the logic of that.  A more accurate phrasing might be “pissed me off.”  I would suspect that some cops make this particular arrest much, much more than others.  The others are the ones to be trusted, in all likelihood.

This is very different from the Michael Brown case. There were plenty of cops, and Garner did not offer resistance.  Even when they were taking him down he didn’t try to hit anyone.

In my view it is BLACK people who need to start asking: what the HELL have all these people allegedly crusading on our behalf actually DONE for us?

Nobody is looking out for blacks in this country, least of all their supposed leaders, and supposed advocates.  That is why failure continues to be widespread, and unchanging.

We don’t need to have ghettos.  We don’t need to have areas of concentrated poverty.

Much of this will require fixes in monetary policy–a full solution certainly will–but much can be done even within political policy.  Charter schools and vouchers are the most obvious place to start.  They WORK, which is why Democrats oppose them.  What happens to their constituency, when they no longer need look to the government for assistance?  This is why ending schools which were generating MUCH better results, particularly for minorities, was one of the first things De Blasio did.

Here’s a link: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2014/03/bill_de_blasio_vs_charter_schools_a_feud_in_new_york_city_has_broad_national.html

De Blasio also finds himself in a pretty lonely situation: By going after the charters, he is attacking one of the most promising urban school reform strategies available to Democratic mayors across the country these days, and he’s doing it without offering a clear alternative. 

Among the 870 Success Academy seats blocked was a modest 194-student expansion for Success Academy students in Harlem to move into a new middle school. That triggered days of searing presscoverage pointing out that those 194 students, all low-income minorities, were coming from a school, Success Academy 4, that killed it on the new state test scores, with 80 percent of the students passing the math test, and 59 percent the English test. The co-located middle school the mayor is protecting and where many of those 194 charter students would end up: P.S. 149, where 5 percent of students passed the math test, and 11 percent the English test. 

Wasn’t de Blasio supposed to be the champion of improving education for have-not children, his critics asked? 

They have a reproduction of the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook.  Seeing this brought a wave of nostalgia through me.

There was a time when being a Boy Scout was an honorable thing, when young boys were brought up to value integrity, preparedness, alertness, diligence, and practical knowledge.  This was a widespread and pervasive ideal.

It seems to me we are not only primed for, but seeing, a strong cultural resurgence of the basic Liberal ideals which informed American politics for most of history.  Self reliance, kindness, honesty: all of these work to produce an informed, active, responsible public.

Ponder for a moment the obvious success of the Art of Shaving stores across the country (I travel, and am seeing them everywhere).  Could one not readily correlate this with the Republican wave in the most recent election?

Life is uncertain, but it is much more uncertain when the basic ideal which have made us successful are daily attacked and denigrated–directly, or through being ignored.

I think we have reached a tipping point where there is too much confusion, where the desire to do right, to tolerate things we don’t like, has passed into anger, and an open willingness to call for returns to old ideas.

Goodness, as I define it, is being able to live happily on your own, and to be happy for others in their own successes, to take pleasure in them.  It is the opposite of Schadenfreude. It is the opposite of self righteous anger on behalf of people who have not even asked you to help them.  It is the opposite of intentional divisiveness, bitterness, anger, vitriol.

What we might term the Golden Age of the Boy Scout no doubt covered up much that was bad.  It did not make enough room for including women as cultural equals (or superiors).  It did not make room for inclusion of blacks, who I suspect may have been banned outright in some areas.

Boy Scout culture converted easily to militarism.  I personally think it was vital that we battled both the Nazi Fascists and the Communist Fascists.  Anti-Communism was vital throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and remains important.  Our colleges are filled with people who would end our freedoms if they could, returning us to earlier ages of cruelty and barbarity, as seen in Cuba.

Now, though, I am with Rand Paul that enough is enough.  Let us combat direct threats to our nation, but not try and guess 15 moves ahead as to who might threaten us.  We need, as one example, to let Iran know their civilization will end if they attack us with a nuclear weapon.  North Korea will cease to exist, as a socialist paradise or anything else.

Beyond that, though, I would support large increases in National Guard participation, and a substantial draw down of our standing military.  We do not need to patrol the worlds oceans for free any more, even though we need to retain strike capabilities.

Ideals remain ideals even within conditions of change.  The whole world was racist in 1776, and less than a 100 years later some 600,000 Americans died trying, in no small measure, to redefine them as human beings just like white people, with equal sufferings, equal wishings, equal rights. 200 years later it is self evident to nearly everyone that racism as an institutional creed is anti-Liberal and wrong.

People can change, and institutions can change, without altering their guiding ideals.  You do not attack ideals: you attack ideas, and the behavior they support.

This is my foundational objection to Leftism: it does not in fact contain ANY ideals. It is a purely destructive cultural process.  I have argued this at length.

And I want to be clear that I make no foundational distinction between the soft version, which I call Sybaritic Leftism, and hard Leftism, which I call Cultural Sadeism.  The first LEADS to the second, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, because it rejects IN PRINCIPLE all ideals other than leveling, other than bringing the high low.  All socialisms are bad for this reason.

It is a perfectly acceptable ideal to want the poor fed, clothed and housed.  But this is not the ACTUAL ideal of socialists.  Everywhere this awful creed is implemented standards of living go down in aggregate, chronic unemployment becomes endemic, and anger builds.

Now, obviously there are continuums.  I speak to the principle of egalitarianism as a primary goal.  Slaves are equal, but they do not thereby become happier or more enlightened.

No society can be better than the aggregate average of the individuals in it. That a society as a whole can be a target of moral improvement is the great lie that leftists tell over and over, in no small measure, I would argue, because by invoked the General, they exempt themselves in the particular from cultivating virtue.  France’s Msr. Hollande hates poor people.  John Kerry doesn’t like paying taxes. Neither does Al Sharpton.

And returning to an article by the strongly Left-leaning Guardian, the Danes seem to be living on credit cards: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/scandinavian-miracle-brutal-truth-denmark-norway-sweden

Why do the Danes score so highly on international happiness surveys? Well, they do have high levels of trust and social cohesion, and do very nicely from industrial pork products, but according to the OECD they also work fewer hours per year than most of the rest of the world. As a result, productivity is worryingly sluggish. How can they afford all those expensively foraged meals and hand-knitted woollens? Simple, the Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.

Perhaps the Danes’ dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. Those offshore windmills may look impressive as you land at Kastrup, but Denmark burns an awful lot of coal. Worth bearing that in mind the next time a Dane wags her finger at your patio heater.

Most seriously of all, economic equality – which many believe is the foundation of societal success – is decreasing. According to a report in Politiken this month, the proportion of people below the poverty line has doubled over the last decade.Denmark is becoming a nation divided, essentially, between the places which have a branch of Sticks’n’Sushi (Copenhagen) and the rest. Denmark’s provinces have become a social dumping ground for non-western immigrants, the elderly, the unemployed and the unemployable who live alongside Denmark’s 22m intensively farmed pigs, raised 10 to a pen and pumped full of antibiotics (the pigs, that is). 

My point: problems have solutions, and humankind has been on this Earth long enough to know what works and what doesn’t.  As I have said Conservatives can certainly be anti-Progress.  But they can also be anti-Regress, and we have reached the point where that is their primary mission.  Whatever benefits may have accrued from asserting the rights and importance of women and minorities have been achieved.  They are our (middle aged white men, in my case) equals (or superiors: my world view has no need to assert equality as a necessary given, in either direction) legally and socially, to the extent they work to do so.

But Boy Scout virtues continue to be relevant.  They are the path to creating and sustaining freedom, and freedom is in my view the sine qua non of human advancement.  Everyone who claims otherwise is peddling a lie, normally in pursuit of a totalitarianism which they seek because of their own moral inferiority, their own inability to grow as people, to learn to process anger, grief, and LIFE itself, in all its ugliness and beauty and ordinariness. 

Let’s drive this hopelessly into the realm of abstraction.  Let us say that your current Happiness Quotient is 1.  Let us say that if you lose your job and decline in status, it will go down; and if you get promoted and advance your career, it will NOT go up permanently.  Most successes have short shelf lives.  It will stay at 1, perhaps advance to a 1.1 or 1.2 once you get a corner office.

If you work your ass off and get your dream job, and your dream S.O. (S is Significant), then you advance perhaps to 1.5, with the same risks of decline if status or relationship change negatively.

Posit, however, that you invest money and time directly on the “happiness process”.  Let us say that you are a 1, but with work and time advance to a 2 that is NOT TIED directly to external validation.  Let us say that you learn to keep the 2 even if you wind up living in a yurt in a rural county next to a pig farm.

Is this not smarter than pursuing happiness indirectly?  I think it is.

Being a modest, unassuming soul, I plan to write a book entitled “Saving the world”, or perhaps “How we do it (survive)”.  One core point I want to make is that consumerism, conspicuous consumption, greed, excess: none of these are NEEDED for human happiness.  There are groups who want to use FORCE to make us live lives which require less material stuff.

But why can we not reach such states voluntarily?  As one example, I proposed perhaps 4-5 years ago that it would be INTERESTING if the primary determinant of house status was not size, but how cleverly it was constructed, how cleverly it was built, how well it blended with its setting.

And to that end I proposed many things.  Paints that change color.  Pipes running through the house showing if it is raining or not.  Smoke in tubes that gets disturbed when wind is present.

And of course all SORTS of possibilities exist in the external structure of such houses, which are very small inside.