Author: Lorraine Lee

I’m never quite sure who to believe when it comes to international matters, as that’s where the disinformation runs thickest, but I am sensing a pattern. The American right has been trending isolationist (NOT the same as dovish) in a way somewhat reminiscent of pre-WWII era. Both 🇷🇺 and 🇺🇦 seem to me to be socially conservative cultures and nationalistic countries, and I imagine someone like me would be unlikely to survive to adulthood in either, so I have a somewhat “a pox on both their houses” attitude, and it also seems hypocritical for a foreign policy critic of my vehemence to go hawkish now that I’m well past enlistment eligible age, but the spectre of history repeating itself is haunting.

Had you asked me 20 years ago I’d have said that economic power is a lesser evil than political power, and that bottom unity is a more appropriate strategy than left unity. America’s irrational and irresponsible reaction to “9/11” (Patriot Act, unitary executive doctrine, “total information awareness,” etc.) somewhat solidified that position. Since then, the level of concentration of informational power in the Silicon Valley part of the private sector has shocked me and scared me shitless, enough to flip-flop on that issue. I fear business far more than I do government. Not that political compass measures anything meaningful, but left unity all the way!

Mozilla is like the Democratic Party. This is of course a simile, not a speculation about Mozilla’s internal politics. I assume they’re very much a nonpolitical, let alone nonpartisan, organization. Perhaps for the brief period of time when Brendan Eich was their CEO, they were like the Republican Party. But the gist of it is this: Mozilla is for the open web, and for privacy, but it seems like every move they make is the exact opposite of what it would be if they actually believed in those things. So, Mozilla is like the Democratic Party. It’s the alternative you settle for, because the other choice(s?) is distilled ontological evil.

Cory Doctorow:

A country whose residents’ dignified retirement depends on house prices going up is a country whose government is committing to making shelter more expensive.

The Arthurian:

As for myself, I think it is sad that we still have to dwell on the evils of slavery. I think we need to focus today on the evils inherent in the idea that property is sacred. For if we do not cut short the concentration of wealth that arises because we honor the “property is sacred” principle, it will soon be too late to prevent the return of slavery on a massive scale.

Don Gisselbeck:

It will be darkly amusing if we end up with fascism because Americans are to stupid to figure out gas pricing.

Paradoctor:

The Pen is mightier than the Sword only if it is in alliance with the Coin.

Inflation is my least favorite subject mainly because counterinflationary policy is basically severe austerity. To the extent that it’s a tradeoff, I’d much rather live in a high inflation low unemployment economy (apparently the status quo) than the opposite. Obviously the supposedly liberal media want the exact opposite. They’re absolutely salivating at the prospect of an election cycle with inflation as the front burner issue. They report on inflation with relish.

There seems to be an assumption by many that electric vehicles will be subsidized, perhaps down to the upper middle class (in the American sense of that term), or maybe even the middle-middle class. Something tells me the hoopty class will never get a seat at the EV table. Our socio-economic tier is running on fumes as evidenced by the plethora of car-repair-financing scams advertised on over-the-air television. As the shills for that industry delight in pointing out, every car has a four-figure repair bill in its future, and DIY isn’t a thing any more. The repairability and other vendor-lock-in stories I’ve heard about electric vehicles suggest five-figure repair bills may be the new norm (albeit with better statistical reliability until the aggressively proprietary battery dies). My prediction would be that we the people of humble means will get gently ushered out of the larger society (into a largely homebound life), perhaps with a UBI as sort of a pacifier, before American society gets serious about mass transit.

Code I advocate is, businesses have a right to attempt to safeguard trade secrets, but hackers have a right to attempt to reverse engineer technologies. Reputable engineering careers, like reputable science careers, would be “publish or perish,” with more emphasis this time on perishment of research than that of researchers. “Legit research (AND development!) is published research” would be a good social norm. Otherwise society becomes a cargo cult.

Like anything pertaining to organized religion, it’s about social control. Within strict Catholic practice, the only way out of having kids is swearing to poverty, celibacy, and obedience. Emphasis on that last one, since cheap living has evolved into a life strategy, and family planning is a more exact science than ever before. If you have kids, your personal poverty line (now a family poverty line) goes up, and your latitude in taking jobs and shoving them goes down. As I’ve said before, the supply curve for labor has the steepest slope “at the water line,” or the line between solvency and non-solvency.

I’m not generally supportive of term limits for legislative office. Nobody’s forcing us to re-elect incumbents. Why limit our choices? Seniority in itself may in some cases be a contributor to some politicians’ lack of commitment to the public interest, but surely money is a much, much larger contributor. I worry that calls for term limits tend to work with, rather than against, the conservative idea that the public sector (which includes politicians) is the main problem. It is not.

Of them to whom much is given, much is expected. Honestly, I think the United States should be kicked out of the first world (or “developed world”), stupendous per-capita income notwithstanding. We have a first-world level of economic development but a well below first world level of social development. That should be reflected in international discourse. It would be good if journalists and the like use the term first world (if they use it at all, I know it’s problematic) to refer to the social-democratic world, especially when speaking of the first world as a group of nations characterized by high quality of life.

This is of a piece with my belief that public policy is informed perhaps too much by economics, but certainly far too little by sociology. It may be that economics is a science, and that the laws of economics are self-enforcing and non-negotiable, but if social sciences count as sciences, that should include sociology. As sure as “no such thing as a free lunch” is a law of economics, “no justice no peace” is a law of sociology. If so (and I believe so), political projects (such as neoliberalism, or if you prefer, ideological private sector preference, or insistence on “separation between economy and state”) that insist on disregarding such fundamental laws will (and should) fail miserably. Burn, baby, burn, as far as I’m concerned.