tingilinde

dealing with inequality

Greg notes a piece on universal property - a concept that has worked across ideological lines in places like Alaska.

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Around the same time that Calhoun was penning his Disquisition, across the Atlantic two German émigrés offered a very different notion of class struggle. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels portrayed the working class as the true creators of wealth, and the owners of capital as parasites. A key plank in their program for building a more egalitarian society was state ownership of “the means of production.” The shortcomings of this recipe became all too clear with the advent of Communist regimes in the 20th century. The belief that state property would in a meaningful sense belong to all was belied by the rise of new elites, whose power like that of capitalists rested on control of property—property nominally belonging to the governments they ran. In Russia, three decades after elite “reformers” in the U.S.S.R. leveraged their political status to reinvent themselves as post-communist oligarchs, wealth is distributed even more unequally than in the United States. And in China inequality has reemerged with a vengeance.

The lesson: Neither private property nor state-owned property is sufficient to guarantee equality and liberty for all. The first can allow economic elites to monopolize wealth and power, the second can allow political elites to do the same. But there is an alternative type of property that can never be concentrated in the hands of an elite. It was pioneered in, of all places, Alaska.

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unleashing creativity is capitalism's big advantage.

 

a relevant quote

I've posted it before, but sadly it seems to always be in fashion

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Issac Asimov

 

the paranoid style in american politics

The classic 1964 Richard Hofstadter essay in Harpers

I first read it in American History class

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American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

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a hell many of us know

Leaf blowers -- particularly those with two cycle engines.

 

dismantling democracy

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier on the current Republican effort to damage and possibly destroy democracy.

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American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.

This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.

When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.

Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.

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the pope's op-ed

Pope Francis has an op-ed in the New York Times today.

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With some exceptions, governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom! Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.

It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.

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votes

Currently Biden leads Trump by a bit over six million votes ..  31 states have populations smaller than Biden's lead.

We really need to elect Presidents by the popular vote.  Of course that is unlikely any time soon.

 

it

 

It craves power without responsibility, adoration without accountability, devotion without duty, victory without reckoning. Those who follow it stand for nothing, because it believes in nothing but itself. 

 

moose

 

It seems they're addicted to licking road salt off cars