The Freedom to Starve

Over at Yastreblyansky's joint he's initiated a discussion of the sort of "freedom" the Trumpenscum and assorted tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel are pimping:

"...pursuing happiness has to be something we do collectively, as social beings. That makes it not only a different list, but also a different concept of what liberty is--I mean, making it into a slogan, the conservative idea is liberty from other people and the liberal idea is freedom with other people."

That's fine, as far as it goes. But I think the whole business is a lot simpler and more primal.

This is simply about a certain sort of person, the sort of person who gravitates towards something like the 2022 GOP and someone like Donald Trump, who wants to do whatever the fuck they want to do without a moment's thought for the consequences.

They don't want consequences, period. They want to be immune from ALL the shit their nonsense stirs up; gunfire, lawsuits, mean tweets, censorious looks...it's all about being able to be what they want without so much as a single hard look in return.

Now.

That's a kind of "freedom".

Tom Hobbes described it as "the war of all against all". It basically comes down to that if you can do what you want to without consequence, I can do what I want to, and if I'm bigger - stronger, smarter, richer, a bigger fucking sociopath - that you are, I can do it to you and you just have to suck it up.

It's the 21st Century Melian Dialogue; the rich do what they can, and everyone else - the poor, the dark, the non-cis-het, the planetary climate, everyone - suffers what they must.

It's not a very new concept, or a very original one.

And it only appeals to the sort of nitwit who thinks there can't be anyone bigger, stronger, smarter, more sociopathic, that they are.

In other words, the stupid, the greedy, and the egotistical fathead.

Which means it appeals to a Donald Trump. And all the little mini-Trumps out there (around here we just call them "assholes") who make up about maybe 60% of the GOP.

(...the other 40% or so are just fucking morons, QANuts and people like Margie Green who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They're the "lean Objectivist jerky" that Scalzi talked about; the real monsters will, if they're lucky, keep them as pets (Greene will be some plutocrat's muppet as long as she keeps her looks) but in a pinch will make do with them as soylent green)

The problem is that a whole bunch of the inhabitants of the US circa 2022 - not just Republicans, unfortunately - have been so addled by the firehose of chatter they encounter every day that they have become largely unable to think their way through this. 

I mean...it's hard for ME to keep up with the constant stream of lies, damned lies, and commercials - Steve "I Fell Asleep With My Head In The Toilet" Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" - and I'm a lifelong cynic, skeptic, and political junkie who is utterly immune to GQP nonsense.

So we have people who depend utterly on an impartial government to protect and defend them from rapacious fucksticks like Thiel and Musk and Exxon and Amazon and every other plutocrat who would be their kings...voting for people like DeSantis and Trump who think that they ARE kings and who will let these plutocratic scum BE kings.

(And the problem with Trump himself, of course, is that so long as someone like Thiel sucks his ass and lards him with flattery and bling Trump doesn't care enough about the actual kinging to get in the plutocrats' way. It's kind of ironic that Tubby loves him some Putin, because Vlad the Impaler made damn sure that he put the boot hard on the neck of his plutocrats. For a while after the crash in 1991 it looked like Russia would become just another kleptocracy, with the mob bosses, the New Rich, looting the joint while their pliant figurehead opened the shopping malls and chaired the committee meetings.)

I'm not sure what the hell the rest of us can do about this.

IMO the real issue is that in a massive industrial democracy the only way that the citizens can be involved and informed is through things like newspapers (increasingly irrelevant) and the various electronic media like television (cable and otherwise) and the various internet sites.

The outfits that inhabit these places, the ones that "inform" Americans, seem utterly unable to be clear about the simple reality I've laid out.

I'm not saying they have to be "against" the notion that the strong/rich do what they can...etcetera.

But that they make it clear that is what will happen without some sort of collective protection - whether in the form of a union, or a government (which is needed to back the union against the sort of money power the union's employer will use against it).

Without that?

You as an individual are prey.

Instead, as Jordan Orlando over at Rectification of Names points out (citing John Ganz here):

"An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. 

In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation."

Yep. That's it. That's the plan.

Or, as Driftglass used to sum it up:

There's a club.

And you're not in it.

And people like Trump - and Musk, and Exxon, and Kroger - like it that way.

In re: Gates vs Gates

The weird thing about Bill Gates is how he seems like a poster child for late 20th Century “American innovation”.

He seems to have been a moderately decent coder and programmer, though I’ve read that people like O’Rear and and Greenberg did more of the fundamental DOS construction that made the original produce work with PCs.

His primary talent seems to have been marketing; so basically he was a salesman, a traveling show, hawking his product…which, frankly, is kind of a kludgy mess; crash-y, easily hacked, prone to deconstructing over time – it’s primary “value” is that it provides an Apple/Mac interface over a DOS so it freed you up from command-line but without the craftsmanship of the actual Mac OS and it let you buy a computer without mortgaging your home. That’s not a bad thing…but consider what we got in return.

I mean, think about what he “created”; a product that you legitimately expect to die on you at any moment. I’ve heard MS-DOS described in comparison to almost all the other things we use in our daily life as “imagine you’re driving along and suddenly your car engine simply dies…and to restart it everyone has to get out of the car, close all the doors, open the doors, and get back in. You’d sell that junker for pennies on the dollar as too much of a pain in the ass to be worth driving.”

But we’ve made him richer than the most rapacious medieval robber baron.

The mere existence of the fortunes of people like Gates make me nostalgic for the days of the 90% top marginal income tax rate.

Nurture

Yesterday I put up a post about the Whacking of The Nancy that included this comment about the woman who was (depending on who you believe) either the éminence blonde behind the entire plot or an innocent wee slip of a girl betrayed by bad company:

"These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable. In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives. Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people..."

This is and was a sad fact rather than an opinion; the world is full of such people, and the wreckage that their shit-magnetry leaves behind.

But I should add this:

It's important to distinguish between the effects of behavior and environment, between the hard work of fucking your life up and the good luck of having a life that's fundamentally hard to fuck up.

Unbolt the tits off Tonya and put the resulting body in an Andover and Yale sweatshirt and you pretty much get George W. Bush; an intellectually stunted, emotionally impaired, ethically flat-lined, greedy, egotistical peckerhead.

Tonya is a convicted petty crook. A substantive case can be made, based on the grounds upon which an international tribunal indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged Hideki Tōjō, that Dubya should be a convicted Class A war criminal.

Not just that little pecadillo binds the two together. Look at the pattern of their lives. One fuckup after another, one stupid decision followed by a period of complete nonreflection followed by another stupid decision. These two people made careers out of putting themselves in positions of public confidence only to do something incredibly boneheaded that made it clear that said confidence was utterly and disastrously misplaced.

So why is it that Tonya is living in an anonymous trailer somewhere east of Terrebone while Dubya is still booking speaking tours and lounging about the in-ground pool at one of the family mansions?

You know why as damn well as I do.

So, while it's popular and entertaining to sneer at the Tonyas of the world - hell, there's a whole business of trumping up television and movies and books - and even a gawdawful checkstand magazine sneering and leering at these poor mooks - the only real difference I see between them and the Dubyas and the William Kennedy Smiths and the Alice Waltons and the Kenny-Boy Lays of the world is what Ernest Hemingway supposedly said when Scott Fitzgerald told him that the Rich are Different:

They just have more fucking money.

So I don't want you think that I'm slagging off on Tonya. Yes, she fucked up.

But when she did she had nothing there to protect her from the consequences of her fuckedupitude. She got one shot and when she screwed it up she fell, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

Whilst here in the Land of the Free one of the great privileges of great personal or family wealth is the "right" to fuck up - over and over again - and never pay so much as a moment's regret or a day's liberty for it.

The Great Gun of Athlone

The Easter Rising of 1916 was probably not something my Scots grandfar liked to celebrate.

My Scots forebears were not Scots but "Scotch-Irish" which is to say they were the thugs the English planted in "The Pale" around Dublin and in the North to keep the boot on the neck of the Catholic proles. They and theirs went a long way into making the bloody calvary that has been the history of the Six Counties since the Rising cleared the way for the founding of free Ireland. The "Ulster Scots" have long been the Boers of Europe; stiff-necked bastards who could fuck up a child's birthday party.



On the 97th anniversary of the Éirí Amach na Cásca it's worth remembering, amid our rush to hate and fear "terrorism", that one man's "terrorist" is another's freedom fighter, and one man's "military tribunal" is another's "judicial murder".

And to recall a time when men like James Connolly openly fought for the working man and woman, when those of us not in the two-yacht family stood together, holding strongly to the now-"outdated" notion that the rich and the well-born were (and are) no more our friends than the wealthy farmer is the friend to the sheep, the cow, or the pig.

(h/t to Pierce for the outstanding cover of the Ballad of James Connolly.)

Plain Tales from the West Hills

Had a job of work up on S.W. Montgomery Place the other day. Portlanders would recognize the address as up in one of our our tony West Hills neighborhoods, and indeed it is. It's a lovely old turn-of-the-last-century house in Portland's Vista Heights neighborhood that's having some slope issues - not a terrific shock; many of the developments cut into the slopes in our Southwest do.

(As an aside, here's a nice post from a fun little blog that, along with food, fire stations and Japanese kaiju flicks, talks about the cablecar lines that used to run into - among other places - the West Hills in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The houses in the picture below are along Montgomery Drive, the larger street just east of my client's place. Fun blog, and the old car lines are kind of amazing - the Vista Trestle must have been a hell of a fun ride!)As I went about my business outside the beautiful home my surroundings prompted a couple of thoughts, and prodded up from the varves of my mind a couple of memories.

My main thought, sadly, was a question: "Hmmm...I wonder how long it would take two tweakers to strip all these gorgeous, chi-chi copper gutters and downspouts off this freaking barn to sell at Dirty Eddie's down in Lents for crank?"I have a dangerously low-rent mind. But copper downspouts, really...it's like tweaker candy. Good luck with that.

The memories were of the early days of my time in Portland. I was in grad school and working on a grant for the Oregon state geological survey, doing seismic refraction field work up in the West Hills.

This involved carting around a portable seismograph and geophones in my old Mazda hatchback and setting them up along the streets in hundred-foot-long arrays. I would - or Barry, the other grad student who was my field assistant would - then strike a steel plate with a sledgehammer to generate the noise source that would travel down and along the soil and rock layers beneath us and back up to the geophones.

We desperately wanted to use the small dynamite charges that are more common and more useful for seismic work - they generate a stronger and far sharper noise source. But the state geologist in charge of the project took one look at the two of us and clearly imagined the effect on the public of turning us loose in the affluent West Hills with a sackful of quarter-sticks of dynamite.

We were told that we would use the hammer, instead.

So we spent all the summer of 1992 doing this, up and down the streets of the Vista and Burlingame and King's Heights neighborhoods. It was hard work but fun, in its way, and I got to know the wealthy heights pretty well for a poor mook from Beaverton.

Barry, who was even more poor and desperate than I, truly loved discomfiting the well-to-do residents of the Hills. He'd throw the steel platen down on the sidewalk to make it ring in the quiet of an August morning and grin; "Time to wake up some rich people..!"

So it shouldn't have surprised me when I got an angry call from the state geologist I was working for.

Seems that I'd been down at one end of a block of S.W. Vista when the homeowner at the other end walked out to see what Barry was doing setting out the "pots" (i.e. geophones) in front of his house.

"What are you doing?" he asks in his polite, well-bred fashion.

Barry looks up and sizes up his questioner. "We're doing some seismic research for the state geological survey." he replies.

"What are you researching?" asks his interrogator

"Oh, you know, the soils here and what's gonna happen in the next big earthquake."

(Mind you, this was before the 1993 "Spring Break Quake" that alerted everyone in Oregon to the hazard of earthquakes. At the time a lot of people believed that one of or big advantages over California was that we never had them.)

"Earthquake?" says the homeowner "What earthquake?"

So Barry explains about subduction zone earthquakes and what happens to homes on hills during eight to ten minutes of strong shaking, fire, landslides, the dead rising from their graves,dogs and cats living together, total disaster. His listener becomes increasingly horrified and agitated as he goes through all this. Finally he can't wait any longer - he has to find out the REALLY important thing.

"Ohmigod that's awful!" he cries to Barry "When do they expect this earthquake?!?"

Barry looks thoughtful. "I dunno...could be any time. Could be today." he says. "In fact...what time is it?"

Barry said that the panicked scramble of the guy for his cell phone and his insurance agent was worth the ass-chewing that Matt at the Survey gave us for being smartasses and scaring the rich people.

Update 2/14: Just because I can't resist showing y'all how smart and literary I am, my Valentine's present to you is the Gutenburg link to the Kipling book that shares the title of this post. Hard to say which is better: the tragedy of "Lispeth"? The magical realism of "The Bisara of Pooree? The domestic farce of "Miss Youghal's Sais"? Regardless - go, read it. Kipling, though he knew almost nothing of Indians other than the racist fantasies of a middle-class Victorian, genuinely loved India and his fellow Anglo-Indians. Outside The Jungle Book, his early tales of Anglo-Indian life may well be his best work. And the best of Kipling is, well, pretty damn good.