"Legal Problems"

“I was legally and constitutionally appointed. Why won’t they seat me because the governor has legal problems? You know, that’s apples and oranges.”
-Roland W. Burris
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/us/01illinois.html?_r=1&nl=pol&emc=pola1)

This quote from the NY times makes my head spin around on my shoulders.

It most definitely is not apples and oranges. A person seated in the senate is a representative of a portion of a democratic nation. A representative being appointed at all is an unfortunate and necessary evil, a step taken only when such a seat has been vacated early by something like death, or someone being elected president. Because it is necessary, the power to appoint exists. Because it is evil, the power is allocated only to the governor, who is assumed to be a sane person, and himself a representative of the will of the people who elected him.

Blagojevich is clearly not sane, and I seriously doubt the people he represents wanted him to attempt to sell Obama’s senate seat. Furthermore, not only is it wrong that Burris was appointed by Blagojevich, his appointment was a flagrant exploitation of racial tension. The governor knew that blocking Burris’s appointment would be awkward for politicians and that is the only reason he made that appointment. His first attempt, representative Danny Davis (also black, which is why I say Blagojevich’s attempt to exploit racial tension to get his way is “flagrant”), had the good sense, wisdom and common decency to politely inform Blagojevich where he could stick his nomination.

This is absurd. Burris knows what he’s being handed and he’s taking it anyway. I get it. No black people in the senate today. Gotta break those glass ceilings. But this isn’t breaking a glass ceiling. This isn’t an election, it's an appointment, and Burris is attaching himself to one of the most hated men in politics. To a man who actually tried to sell a senate seat to the highest bidder. It is political suicide of the worst sort, because Burris is sacrificing his career not to do something worthwhile or good, but to do something misguided and bad.

That Burris is trying to justify accepting the nomination...

That sickens me.

That absolutely sickens me.

It’s disgusting.

JOB

Christmas is done, I am back, and while I have friends remaining to visit, those trips that remain will inspire more articles than they are likely to inhibit.

Tonight I turn my mind to the task of writing a dialog, in the screenplay style.

Lucifer and Michael stand apace from each other and the war rages on around them. Michael adopts a look of great emotion and says to Lucifer:

MICHAEL: “There's only one thing I want to know, Lucifer. How? How did you become free?”

LUCIFER: “Who said I was free?”

I remember reading JOB in a class in college named “The Problem of Evil.” The class itself was an endless collection of people pointing out, one after the other, that if you applied a system of rules, devised by humans and thus inherently flawed, to God, he didn't make any sense. What a silly concept! After all, it seems to me that the most common use of God by man is as a method of dealing with things that don't make sense. The argument “your method of dealing with the illogical is illogical and therefore illogical” is somehow both circular and inane, when stated apart from the usual protective cloud of long words and flowery language. A favorite quote of mine from Quine (though I have taken it quite out of context) puts it best: “Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space.”

I bring this up, though, because there is a story that has interested me for a very long time, and it is the story of the fall of Lucifer. The bible is vague, and so one is free to throw an amazing degree of personal inflection on the events, both those referenced by God when speaking to the King of Egypt and those referenced by the book of revelations, a book I honestly believe was inspired by an overdose of Opium.

The book of JOB seems to imply that “the adversary” must follow God's rules. But if God's rules apply to the adversary, than why is the adversary so often portrayed as a being apart from God, in opposition to him?

There are two main ways around this. Either the adversary, Satan, the Devil, is a part of God and under God's control, or he is not. If he is, then we run into The Problem of Evil, because if the Devil is part of God or under God's control, the actions of the Devil are God's responsibility and God cannot be wholly good. If the Devil is not part of God, on the other hand, we run into The Problem of Evil because God does not have control over the Devil and thus, God cannot be omnipotent.

There's a third way around this conundrum, of course, and that is that if God made a promise to the adversary similar to the promise he made man (free will), to break that promise would be impossible for a wholly good Deity. If, then, we set aside that frivolous crap and focus in on the matter at hand, it is possible that the Devil, wishing to come home, was willing to play by any rules he was given in order to make his case to God and be allowed home.

What case?

That man is as corruptible as the Devil, and that if man is permitted redemption, so too must fallen angels be permitted to redeem themselves.

The specifics are neither here, nor there. Really, the question itself is interesting. Why not?

LUCIFER: “I am no more free than you, Michael. I perform my function.”

Let us presume that free will divides man and angels. This seems reasonable. After all, the bible never explicitly grants free will to Angels and they never seem to make use of it until the final chapter, revelations. If angels have no free will, this also in some capacity explains the necessity of mankind. God created us to worship him, because the perfect worship of the angels was meaningless. They did not have free will. Their worship was an empty crystal chalice. Pretty, but not terribly successful at slackening anyone's thirst.

If this is the case, revelations itself takes on something of a sinister overtone. God once flooded the world to rid it of the unfaithful, and then promised never to do it again. What, though, was the nature of the flood? If the promise was meant in simple literal terms, God has many other options for wiping most of humanity out. He could cleanse the world in fire, for instance. But presuming God isn't in to cheap tricks, and I suspect he's not, it seems safe to presume his intention was to promise that he would never do anything like the flood again.

The essential component of the flood, it seems to me, is that it is like a dog being beaten for pooping on the rug a week prior. There is no connection, to the dog's mind, between his sin and his punishment. He learns nothing from it. The flood made learning irrelevant, because it killed all the sinners outright, but in God's estimation, perhaps this was a ham-handed way to go about it. Reasonable then, to say to man “look, I don't really regret what I did, but in the future, we'll handle this sort of thing differently.”

MICHAEL: “How do you go against God if you are not free?”

LUCIFER: “Who said I was going against God?”

Revelations is about sorting. The bad from the good, the wicked from the pure, the Christian from the otherwise inclined. It isn't, however, a random sorting. People are allowed to take sides. Then, there is a war, and one side wins outright. According to the bible, God's side wins. The ending is already predetermined.

If the ending is predetermined and Lucifer is aware of this (as he must be) then why even bother? What would he gain? What would anyone gain?

To me, the answer is obvious. Lucifer gains nothing. Lucifer is a tool. God is flooding the world, but this time he wants the side flooded to know why and to understand their sin in very tangible terms. He is directly connecting their sin with their punishment. He even warns them, if they happen to read the book “look, the ending of this thing is preordained. There's a right side and a wrong side, and you'd have to be pretty stupid to be on the wrong side of this one, but if you really, really want to, you can be.”

He lays out a series of appropriately vague indicators that the apocalypse is approaching, sits back, and lets people squirm around trying to figure out when the fight is gonna happen. He waits.

There is no incentive for God to bring about the actual apocalypse. Not yet. As long as people keep trying to figure out when it's going to happen and keep coming up with dates, there will be incentive for people to clean up their act in preparation for the inevitable. When the incentive from that is clearly not working anymore, that will be the proper time for God to show up and say “reminder time, folks, I hope you've read up on the good book” and have Lucifer knock 1/3 of the stars out of heaven.

Lucifer will round up an army of the unfaithful, and God will smite them down. It's a ruthless method of cleaning house, sure, but God never pretended to be a fluffy bunny kind of guy, and his only use of a rainbow, ever, was as a lame apology for a genocide he was already planning to repeat. Let's face it. God, according to the bible, is a hard-ass.

MICHAEL: “But if you're his tool, surely he will spare you!”

LUCIFER: “Does man spare a hammer that has been spent, a saw that has been dulled, or a spoon that has been bent?”

Of course, Lucifer must see this coming. If nothing else, he's got the book to go by. So he knows he's going to be used in this fashion. Without free will, he has no choice, but surely this must wear on his nerves! He must be looking, even now, for any way at all that he can break away from his dismal fate, betray God by not betraying God or by betraying God in a different way. Yet every such thought feeds the fire and makes him more the tool that God needs – a tool which genuinely despises his own master. A convincing, but powerless enemy. An unwilling scalpel.

But like a scalpel, the telling of Lucifer's story humanizes him, which may in itself be an error. To humanize a scalpel is to give it emotions the scalpel cannot feel, and thoughts the scalpel cannot have. Much as observing an electron changes its behavior, attempting to get at the essence of a fallen angel through logic might be the wrong way to explore the subject's essential properties.

Welcome to our Newest Author

Michelle (Preciousthings) is a good friend of mine with a bit of a rocky history and a bone to pick, and her area of expertise (and her perspective) varies so widely from my own and from that of Tiro that she's a natural pick to expand our collection here. I'm not sure how frequent she'll be, but her first post coming up is a sales-pitch for her foundation, the Reframing Life Foundation.

All the legal documents were submitted recently and so status is pending, and she has to start raising funds. Since there's no such thing as bad publicity and the cause is one I believe in, I figured she might as well get the word out here as well.

If you're looking for something to throw money at, this one won't be a waste of it. Michelle's as reliable as a rock, and if she says she's going to do something, god help whoever gets in the way.

I have taken the bookmark to a higher plane

In case you're wondering what I've been up to, here's some samples from the line of bookmarks I'm putting out. The process of producing them is time-consuming and error prone, but the finished product is an archival-quality print with a protective coating on the photo's side (full-blown lamination made the bookmarks slightly too thick for my preferences and cheapens the look and feel, so I found an alternative... it takes more work on my part and results in a greater error rate, but the product is worth it). On the reverse there's a small explanation of where, and how, each photograph was taken, but they're not that interesting so I won't upload the backs here.

Just a slight additional fyi, none of these images are uploaded in original quality, and none are in the public domain, but if you wish to use them for educational purposes, be my guest. There may even be a law about that somewhere, but it never hurts to clarify.


In the end, what I wanted to accomplish was for each bookmark to seem like a window through which you were viewing another part of the world. From Versailles to Marseille, from Lake Superior to the suburbs and truck stops of the midwest, each image I produce is printed so exquisitely that I challenge a human eye to find even a speck of a flaw to betray the printer. If the print doesn't make that standard, if a single piece of dust sticks to the ink or gets under the coating, I may give it away, but I will never sell it, and every bookmark that meets my standards I sign in ink to prove I inspected it personally.

I don't think there's a point to doing a thing if you're not going to do it right, and these are done right. I'm damn proud of them, and of the fact that I produce them efficiently enough to sell them for the same wholesale price bookstores buy cheap pieces of cardboard with puppies printed on them at 300 dpi.

Updates will probably resume regularly after Christmas, as until then my main focus will be trying to get these in stores, preparing presents of some variety for family and friends, and visiting relatives in other states.

They smell good too. (erm, the bookmarks, not the relatives. Happy accident of paper and ink. I only use Epson ultrachrome K3 vivid, if you're wondering, in a stylus photo R2880, Red River Paper's two-sided .13mm gloss paper. You won't find better results without mortgaging your home, and even then you won't get any guarantees.)

And if you happen to own a store and want to stock my bookmarks, I can sell them to you for $1.50 each, plus shipping... but I honestly have no idea what the shipping charges are going to look like yet, I'd have to get back to you about that. They do come in individual hanging-bags, so you don't have to worry about packaging them on site.

If you're local to the St. Louis area, I can also sell on commission. I have full confidence that my product will sell if displayed.

The Error of Intellectual Arrogance

Yes, yes, I realize that the title of this piece seems to conflict with the theme of the rough I threw up a few days ago. No, I’m not schizophrenic. I’m writing my own oppositional argument for the hell of it. I also happen to believe strongly that both sides of the argument presented are simultaneously valid.

A friend of mine, heretofore “R” was not as fortunate as I was when she graduated high school and moved on to college. She was unfortunate on two fronts. On the one hand, her parents didn’t believe in her, and weren’t willing to fund more than one shot at a minimalist college education. On the other hand, R cared more about other people than she ever would about a grade.

People used to joke that R was everyone’s mommy... she’d gather messed up kids around her like a whirlpool and take care of them no matter what they did (to others or to her), and they’d all fall in love with her, every one. She was always willing to cut class, to skip a homework assignment or even skip an exam just to “be there” for someone.

But looking back, almost no one was there for R. It wasn’t anyone’s fault in particular... people tried to be there for R, but everyone’s R was a different R, and so no one really knew what was best for her, and their attempts often collided in a confused mess. R was like an onion. The longer you knew her, the more layers you could peel off, but no matter how many layers you got through, what you were looking at was a layer.

Those who understood her best were those who stopped being offended when she lied to them. One story or another, one version of events or another, one reason or another for whatever she was doing, it didn’t really matter so long as you trusted that her intentions were good. R’s intentions were always good.

She was then (and is now) a brilliant girl, and honestly I think her first attempt at college failed because it bored her. She went to a state college and found herself in a curriculum that wouldn’t have made the honors track in the high school she just graduated from. She almost didn’t graduate, because she was as willing to skip detentions as she was to skip classes, and this had somewhat of an exponential effect on the discipline problem. Fortuitously the disciplinarians of the high school knew her well enough to make allowances.

She took a year and a bit of that mess, made a whole mess of Southern Baptist friends and then dropped. She made a few other forays into the world of education after that, but mostly they ended the same way. The colleges that would have given her what she needed wouldn’t accept her, because she didn’t have the grades from high school or the “extracurricular activities” to make herself look like the prize she was.

In other words, the system screwed her, and in a roundabout way, screwed itself. She’d have been one hell of a basically-anything-you-can-think-of.

Right now, she’s working for a law office doing their payroll and (if I know R) proofreading their cases, doing their paperwork, crunching their accounts information and otherwise rendering the office in question entirely dependent on her presence to maintain functionality.

I guess my point is this. The system looks for specific things, and rewards them. But those things can be (and are) manufactured in kids, or not. Musical instrument? Either your parents started you on one or they didn’t, and (I’ve played the cello since I was three and I teach it now, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) it probably won’t impact your ability to perform mathematical calculations. But it will impact your chances of getting in. Sports? Clubs? Same deal. GPA? Christ, I graduated with a 4.0 from high school without doing a lick of work and without learning a damn thing. R graduated with something far lower doing exactly the same thing. I went on to a bachelors in History, she went on to an office job.

Trust me, she deserves my degree more than I do.

Incidentally, I graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a 2.99, and I learned more in my time there than I learned probably in the rest of my education combined. I certainly retained more there than some of my co-majors who graduated with 3.5's and above. I went to college to learn, and I dedicated myself to my classes to exactly the degree possible without them getting in the way of my studies.

My grandfather never got a college degree. An employer at Hughes aircraft happened to be a strong believer in IQ scores, and he hired him despite this lack. My grandfather ( C. H., and I really do hope he’s resting in peace) ended up Vice President for Business and Finance at Duke University. My father tells me he was always self-conscious of the holes in his education... he was self-taught and well-read, but there are advantages to having a hand guide you to the best sources of information and culture. Time spent finding is time not spent reading.


I guess my point is that a university education, while nice, is not in the cards for everyone. People who had other priorities besides primping and priming themselves for the great annual dog-show (applications season) will find their options limited and unappealing. People without financial backing or scholarship assistance just won’t be able to afford it. The single most common reason people don’t make it through college is, in other words, luck.

Luck.

Which means that in terms of evaluating your value as a human being, whether or not you have a college education should probably not be factored in. What have you done? What are you doing today? Who have you helped, and who have you hurt?

There are so many other ways to measure ourselves against each other that have so much more meaning than our grades and our education level. To most companies, an employee’s education level matters far less than the degree to which they can be trusted. You can teach them to do the job, after all, but you can’t teach someone to give up kleptomania.

So much of it is in how we’re raised. From a very young age I was bombarded by challenges, creative and otherwise. I was offered opportunities for which my parents sacrificed immensely. R had a very different upbringing (she was the left-over consequences of a broken marriage, both of whose halves had remarried with new kids into the equation), and she paid the cost her parents weren’t willing to pay for her.

So the next time you find yourself walking down the street feeling like the world is on your plate, and you pass by someone bitching about the menial, un-fulfilling, redundant job they have to do every day for eight hours because they don’t have your degree...

Feel lucky, not holier-than-thou.

The Error of Anti-intellectualism

{In the interest of keeping a rate of content happening, you can expect some of these longer, unfocused articles for awhile - I'm attempting to get a product out in time for the Christmas rush, and that's occupying most of my attention. Editing and proofreading is taking a back-seat. Ironically, this means that any comments you make on these articles may actually be integrated into the articles as ideas (with references, of course) before they are finalized. Enjoy the roughs.}

I would like to say that the 2008 campaign marked the death-throes of the American anti-intellectual movement... but I don't really believe it. The problem is partly that for all that University-goers feel that the hatred leveled their way is unjustified, the reasons for that hatred are not entirely without merit. The argument gets a little confounded, however, because the people who hate intellectuals also happen to lack the educational grounding necessary to understand the reason they hate who they hate, and the people they hate aren't actually the people they should be hating, because the people they should be hating don't exist.

The example I feel like exploring today is family values. There's been this tug-of-war going on between intellectuals and "family values" for years, and neither group is making much progress because the arguments used by both sides are irrelevant to the issue at hand. The right says "You hate families!" the left says "you're a liar!" and both groups are technically in the wrong. The right isn't lying, they're just mistaken. The left doesn't hate family values... far from it! The left longs for family values in a powerful, visceral way. We all do.

The only way to really understand what I mean is to go through university yourself. In your first year, you are torn (if you're part of the majority) out of a relatively comfortable home, one that probably has functional heating and cooling, a stove, and a bedroom that isn't doubling as the living room, kitchen and dining rooms. You are torn out of a family which, even if they fight a lot, at least understand each other and have grown accustomed to living with one another. You tell yourself that this is what you want, that "getting away from X" is the order of the day.

Then one day, you wake up and realize that you're living in a forced triple with two other men, both of who work out more regularly than they do laundry. Your life is mostly confined to a two-foot-square plot of land (where your desk chair is) and a repugnant cot you never take the sheet off lest you discover exactly how many generations of students bled, fucked and pissed in their sleep on that mattress before you came to town. You're never alone, the people around you are still acquaintances at best (though friendships form fast in that sort of arrangement... it's hard not to get to know people you live that close to), and you share a bathroom with twenty people, only some of whom flush.

You are surrounded by people, and totally alone.

The backlash reaction is interesting to watch. People start forming "family" groups among their peers, and I'd bet my left big toe that if you did a study of students who felt like they'd found "close friends" in college and graphed their academic performance against those who felt "alone," you'd notice a drastic correlation. Either way, however, by the time you graduate, you have become accustomed to separation from your family for extended periods of time. Siblings graduate and settle down thousands of miles away from each other and their parents. Everyone in a family might end up going to a totally different school in a totally different part of the world. They connect at holidays and chat sometimes over the phone. The family bond is still there, usually, and sometimes familial relationships even become more pleasant (it's harder to find things to fight about when you're distant and your daily activities can so easily be lied about). But they do not become more close. Distance increases.

The University system is the bane of traditional family values. But it has nothing to do with intent, and everything to do with an accident of design. It is simply the case that people going to University to obtain their education are consciously making a trade. The place where they grew up is being given up in favor of a brighter future, or in trade for knowledge they need to do whatever it is that they want to do. "Roots in the community" are great assets for a politician, but for an Engineer, teacher, Physicist or Economist your birthplace is about as relevant as your astrological orientation. Ever seen a "we hire only Cancers" sign? Didn't think so.

That exchange is more unpleasant than you can possibly imagine, and some students compensate by joining up with Fraternities or Sororities which give them a structure that college intrinsically lacks. Other students dedicate themselves obsessively to clubs or sports or other activities where they spend enough time around a specific group of people to form close bonds. Some students isolate themselves, and these usually wash out.

Students by and large have a few things in common. At any respectably ranked University, the majority of the students are all living in generally slum-like conditions for four (or more) years, racking up enormous debt and slaving away 60+ hours per week for zero pay. Meanwhile, they are constantly tested, criticized, bullied (not all professors are good professors, and not all students are friends), robbed (meal plans are essentially high-class pickpocketing and monopoly profiteering in one go), and generally treated like human chattel, the theory being that this kind of abuse builds character. In reality I'm fairly sure it's one of those "well, I put up with this when I was your age, so bend over and pick up that soap" things, but what do I know.

My point is that anti-intellectualism is cruel. These kids are not (mostly) sitting around in delux, furnished studio apartments with catered bars and slaves to do their bidding. They're sitting around in student tenement housing, crouched over a bunch of paper-work trying to draw Ven diagrams around the pot they're using to catch the water dripping through the ceiling. At night, the squirrels fight with raccoons in their ceilings, and if you can hear yourself over the heater's clogged fan, you're probably about to lose your voice.

I lived like that my last year, and let me tell you... I will take that over a dorm any day, any time. Besides... we got what we paid for and the roommates were amazing.

When people finish undergrad and move on to graduate school, they discover that their circumstances have not improved in any meaningful way. They may be receiving a stipend, but an annual stipend tends a) to have tuition taken out of it and go into the negatives (you still have to pay taxes on it) or b) be equivalent to waaaaaaaay under minimum wage. Living conditions tend to improve slightly (after all, you may be earning zero, but at least you're not earning negative forty thousand), and if you're working a side job you might even be able to split an apartment with only one roommate and still have a roof.

When someone graduates from these circumstances and goes on to get a job, they expect two things. First, they expect that the last however-many years made them a better person than they would have been had they opted to not undergo that particular brand of torture, and second, they expect to be paid more than someone who opted not to undergo that particular brand of torture, mostly so that they can pay off the several hundred thousand dollars of debt hanging over their heads. Incidentally, barring engineering and computing students, graduates generally end up making pretty shitty salaries for quite a few years after graduation. It makes you wonder why we do it.

Why do we do it?

Well, the answer to that is complicated. We do it to learn stuff. We do it to better ourselves and our understanding of the world around us. We do it because our minds do not fare well without a challenge. We do it because we're smart. We do it because we like to associate with certain kinds of people and college is a great place to meet them. Some few do it for the money, but much fewer than you probably think.

Many of us do it because our parents did it and believe it made them better people, stronger people, and smarter people. So they want us to do it to. Now that I've done it, I honestly do think it made me better, stronger and smarter myself.

I'm broke, mind you, and pretty soon I'm going to be broker as the student loans start coming due, but I had a free ride, so those mostly covered living expenses and are consequently manageable. But I honestly believe that my life is better, more manageable and more enjoyable for having done it. The people I call friend are better people, stronger people, and smarter people for having done it. The things I read are more complicated and the rewards they offer deeper. The intellectual resources I have to draw upon are vast, and most of them are even legal. I speak two foreign languages, one poorly, one terribly, but enough to find the bathroom, order coffee and ask where the nearest police-box is.

But still, you sometimes run into people who see the pride of having made it and think they're seeing arrogance. These people make me slightly ill. They remind me of the people who roamed the hallways in middle school beating up anything that looked like it might not have failed the last math test.

Intelligence has always been a liability. It is not human nature to easily comprehend that someone might literally be smarter than you.

I can personally list at least four people I know personally who I know are smarter than me, and I found this out through observation and conversation. Tiro is one of them, incidentally. My sister is another.

The ability to identify minds that are superior to your own (in one way or another) is an important skill and one you can only obtain by pushing the limits of your own abilities and keeping an eye out for those whose limits are farther out. If you've never found the outer limit of your capability, you will find that admitting to yourself that someone you know is smarter than you is hard. It is really, really hard. You will always find yourself thinking "if ____ I'd be ____ too," and it might even be true. But ____ didn't happen and you aren't ____ so you'll never know.

Actually, that might be the purpose of colleges and universities, really, when you get down to it. Pushing your limits and seeing how far you can go. If you find those limits, even if you're disappointed with what they are, then you have gotten out of higher education exactly what you needed to.

You may not like your place, but you learned it.

Shame on you, Charter Communications

Charter Communications is now throttling BT traffic by blocking user connections to seeds. Their tech support staff is unaware of this because they and their supervisors have not been informed.

How do I know this? Because I tested several torrents twice, first unencrypted, then encrypted. Since the torrents identify possible seeds but cannot connect when unencrypted, and can connect when the data is encrypted, Charter is likely using the same (idiotic) choke software used by Comcast, as of a day ago or thereabouts.

Shame on you. I'm a paying customer. You did not notify me that you were changing the product you were selling me.

Unfortunately, you're a local monopoly, because despite the fact that the government paid for your infrastructure, you still (for some reason) have managed to obtain legal ownership of it.

So I'll keep using you, because I have to. But I'll be damned if I won't do absolutely everything I can to make your existence a living hell.

To everyone else out there, in the interest of saving you a few seconds on Google:

Basic instructions for encrypting BT traffic:
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-BitTorrent-traffic/

Azureus (now named Vuze):
http://www.vuze.com/app

On my part, I'm going to load up my torrents at night and max out my bandwidth with encrypted torrents in order to drain as much resources from Charter as I can. I suggest anyone else in the St. Louis area who is reading this do the same.

Charter may, however, choke your bandwidth if they feel that you're using too much of what you paid for. Sometimes I wish I was rich enough to use the U.S. legal system to sue.

huh. Come to think of it I know a bored intellectual property lawyer, I wonder if he's still unemployed and looking for a break. Maybe he'll take percentage-of-winnings.

American Communism

This may ramble a bit. I’m more or less thinking out loud.

It is also subject to editing without notice, I’m mostly putting it up so Tiro can get cracking on what I anticipate will be one hell of an oppositional article.

If you’ve read my blog regularly, you’ve probably run across the “Mixed Heritage” article wherein I discussed the mixed nature of our government. We are, as I have stated, a mixture of many different ideas about how to run a place, and this is a healthy way to be. If you haven’t read the mixed heritage article, you should do so, because I’m writing this on the assumption that (having read the mixed heritage article) you’re not going to assume I’m making an argument for the Stalinization of our nation.

Communism is a word being bandied about quite a lot these days, mostly in ALL-CAPS AND WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO HATEE BARAK HUSAIN OBAMA for no apparently logical reason. I should like to spend this second paragraph warning any of these people who happen to be reading this that they shouldn’t be here. Finding out what Communism is might lead them to have to reevaluate their position on something, which I gather can, in some individuals, cause seizures or spontaneous combustion. If “them” is you, please go somewhere else.

I will now proceed to strip several ideas down to their core principles. You may disagree with me if you like, but you’ll probably be wrong.

Capitalism: In the presence of a government actively ensuring competition and punishing unethical business practices (false advertising, theft, murder), The Market will produce the best possible outcome.

Socialism: Intrinsically, people have equal value, and society should pursue a more level distribution of wealth. (Suggested methods vary)

Libertarianism: In the absence (or minimized presence) of government, The Market will produce the best possible outcome.

Communism: Public ownership of the means of production is the best method by which to achieve a socialist utopia.

Anarchism: cops iz always takin’ my weed. Wtf man. Down with the man. (You think I’m kidding, and I’m about to say I’m kidding, but I’m not. I honestly believe this is the core belief of anarchists everywhere, in some form or another.)

So, with the exception of Anarchism (I’m kidding L, don’t kill me), I think we can agree I’ve been essentially fair to all viewpoints expressed above. Libertarianism and Capitalism (as core principles) differ in the degree of tolerated government interaction with the market, communism is a particular brand of socialism which seeks to produce the socialist ideal through a very specific course of action.

Now. You might be wondering what my point is. After all, Socialism and Communism are two great evils that have been put down like the dogs they are, right?

Not sure where to start, but China seems as good a place as any to get where I want to go with this, so let’s start there. China’s system is based on communism, and attempted very strenuously to hold to the communist party line through the tenure of Mao. After Mao, however, the system has integrated capitalist and (other) socialist elements at a cautious pace until now we face China across the table as our major economic (and military) rival.

Conversely, our system was based on capitalism, but we have included more and more socialist and communist principles along the way in order to prevent or repair holes torn in the market by reality. Examples? Anti-trust laws, welfare, social security and (here’s where people start shouting at me) stock options.

That’s right. Stock options.

Stock options are employees being paid, partly, in percentage ownership of the company they work for. What does that sound like? That sounds like communism. Does it work? Arguably pretty well! Employees who have mass amounts of stock in a company are more likely to be actively engaged in that company’s success. After all, if the company is worth more, so are they.

Yes, yes, there’s caveats, but when you get right down to it, stock options are capitalism taking a good long look at communism and cherry-picking a good idea out of all that useless, excess crap.

One could even make an argument that we’ve been actively engaged in subversive communist activities since the Dutch first started trading commodities on blackboards.

Essentially, when a company starts selling itself (the obvious sexual reference is actually not intended, for once), it stops being privately owned in any meaningful sense. Oil companies tend to be owned by millions of people. Problem?

The people working at the bottom of the chain can’t afford stock. Their wages do not fluctuate with company performance, so neither does their performance. They see CEOs at the top of the chain making more when the company is doing better, and they wonder “why does he keep getting a raise, and I can’t even make my medical bills?

With CEOs making salaries in a ratio of 411:1 them:worker or worse, you can kinda understand why the bottom rung is pissed. And there’s no pretending that distributing half of a CEO’s salary would not significantly increase the income of the rest of the employees. If a CEO makes a paltry 4 million annually in even a company that has a full thousand employees, each employee would make an additional 2,000 dollars each year if the CEO’s salary was reduced to only “mostly” extremely ridiculous.

This is why people think CEO salary caps are a good idea, and you’ve got to admit that from almost every angle they’ve got a pretty solid point.

There are, of course, a few economists (self-correctionists, I call ‘em, I think Tiro might be one) who believe that CEO salaries are a natural result of market pressures, and that forcibly reducing them will cause companies either to find ways to circumvent the law to offer bonuses and such and court the CEOs they want, or cause companies to base themselves in foreign countries to avoid the salary caps. I don’t know the technicalities of this route of argument, Tiro could better inform you and hopefully will in the comments.

I crunched some numbers today in response to a comment on Sodahead where someone claimed that a better way to reinvigorate the economy would be to offer all taxpayers a 1 million dollar tax rebate. Seems like a dumb idea, doesn’t it? His numbers don't quite add up, of course, but nonetheless:

If you crunch the numbers, it turns out that giving everyone in America (women, children, dependents, unemployed and most of the illegal immigrant population included) $2,000.00 each, is actually cheaper than the bailout plan by over half. It would cut down the rich-poor gap slightly, give the housing industry a leg up and give people some disposable income or at least a break from their credit cards. The car industries might not even need to be bailed if their customers weren't so damn broke, and if the rate of mortgage foreclosure is pulled back a bit, the lenders might be able to recover without government aid too.

Downside? People probably wouldn't buy American cars (they fail to compete with the foreign market in every meaningful way, especially in gas mileage and trade-in value), and given how the mortgage giants have been running their business up through now, chances are they'd still fail, and then where would we be? We'd have expendable income and an unemployment rate of "which way is Canada again?"

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are moving overseas and the service industry is overpopulated by teenagers and college students eking out a rent check. Eventually, (ad-absurdum) you’ll have two options for getting out of the serving-coffee business: make your living by investing in foreign markets, or die. Starting your own business will be impractical, as they’ll all be ritualistically devoured by larger corporations once a month, and while large chains distribute amazing deals nation-wide at affordable prices, they also don't buy locally, so if you want to get your goods into them, you'd best have a billion dollars behind you putting your product into instant international circulation. Best of luck. (The tone of bitterness is due to this being a very personal problem right now.)

Eventually, education in America will catch up to investment potential, and the only hindrance to new investment strategies will be distribution of wealth. At that juncture, it might not actually be unwise for the government to start "sharing" the wealth, perhaps by giving each Taxpayer an "investment fund" paid into directly by a percentage of their taxes, which they can use only to invest locally or abroad. Foreign infrastructures would get a huge boost from the influx of investment, Americans would see a huge influx of wealth and our Nation would become a venture-capital source the rest of the world can use to bring itself up to our standard of living. It's a pretty shiny win-win-win situation. A good place to be.

But there’s really only one way to get there, and that’s to grow the middle class until everyone is in it.

Which is really the point of the middle class, actually... it’s a comfortable level to live at that is attainable by just about everyone, if the system is balanced right. The best standard of living sustainable on an even playing field is essentially the definition of the middle class.

Which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that by growing the middle class, we’re becoming socialists. We just think that the best way to get to the socialist Utopia is a capitalist system tweaked to encourage the expansion of the middle-class. Ironically, we might be right.

So it’s about time we abandoned all this random dissociated hatred for “socialists” and “communists” and just started looking at what works and what doesn’t. Lumping the baby in with the bath water is what got us into this mess in the first place, and any good suggestion this late in the game is going to involve creative economic thought, not purism.

Purism never works, ever. It never has, and no matter how many times you end an argument by calling someone a socialist, it never will.