Psychopolitik 2.0

With the panic over rising oil prices, the hijinks just don’t stop:

House Republicans on Thursday killed a Democratic plan designed to spur drilling on already available federal lands in Alaska, the West and the western Gulf of Mexico.

Republicans scoffed that the Drill Act — imposing a tougher “use it or lose it” rule on leases already held by oil companies — would do little to boost exploration. They renewed their demand to open up the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to exploration.

The bill won a 244-173 majority, but still failed because it did not get a two-thirds margin under rules requiring a supermajority vote. (emphasis mine)

On a purely common sense basis, the rush to bring back offshore drilling falls flat.  There’s already tons of space where the oil companies have leases that they aren’t using.  Reason they aren’t using that land already is, given reasonable expectation prices will continue to go up, that oil is worth more to them in the ground than out of it, so they’d rather wait.  But clearly the story doesn’t end there…

Note that this is “federal” land being discussed, land that the government claims ownership of.  Knowing that the State cannot hold a legitimate property claim, the Democratic proposal is highly ironic: “use that land we shouldn’t have in the first place or we’ll take it back!”.  Though it probably wasn’t realized, they are in effect endorsing a Lockean interpretation of property — establishment comes through application of labor.  Thus, as long as the oil companies do not, well, drill for oil on the land, their claim to it voids itself.  Yet, at the same time, the government ownership is void already because of how they would come across such ownership in the first place!  We have two groups arguing over something neither should have, like a den of thieves coming to blows over how to distribute the gains.

That said, rather than stopping at Locke, let’s follow the logic and take up “occupancy and use” as the definition.  Now who rightfully controls the land?  The people that live on it and use it (or in the case of uninhabitable space, live near it).

Where this formulation leads is enlightening, particularly in just how far such consistency is from what has become accepted wisdom: the oil companies would be asking the people on or near these lands whether they could drill on them.  Now, I’m not assuming that everyone knows a lot about the economics behind oil, but given the status quo I think it’s safe to say getting a better deal would be inevitable.  At the least, cutting out the government middle man and having a higher likelihood of serious consideration of environmental impact would be a huge improvement already.

The Atlantic has up an illuminating, and rather sad, article on the unintended effects of Section 8 vouchers & the move to disperse the population of the projects. First, just in case anyone has a bad memory, I’ll give a summary of how that went:

=============================

Government: “Wow, look at all this crime going on in the projects! We’ve been getting more aggressive, but it’s doing nothing, what gives?”

Sociologists: “We think it’s the concentration of poverty. Break them up and mix the neighborhoods, & they’ll learn Middle Class Values™ by osmosis.”

Government: “Eh, whatever, we’ll give it a whirl…”

~~~~~~time passes for the bureaucracy to get going~~~~~~

Random Bureaucrat (after knocking on door of project resident): “hey, you wanna move to the suburbs? We’ll help!”

Project Resident: “…interesting offer. I’ll mull it over”

Random Bureaucrat: “Oh yeah, did I mention we’re tearing these buildings down soon anyway?”

Project Resident: “Well damn, OK then.”

~~~~~vouchers get distributed, wrecking balls are swung, families are moved~~~~~~

Outlying area local resident (reading paper): “Odd, crime seems to be going up sharply. What happened?”

meanwhile…

Government: “WTF?!? Those damn eggheads said this would work! Oh well, at least we can still shoot them…”

===========================

Do read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

One interesting thing they touch on is how drastically misunderstood cultural structure among the poor is — a large part of the reason why despite all the crap that goes on in the ghetto people weren’t uniformly running for the exits (needless to say, the other part was fear of rejection wherever they DID go). Several people in the article had comments about how they had stronger bonds with people at the places they left behind, which doesn’t surprise me at all since it’s been a common theme of virtually every newer work I’ve come across on this, including Sudhir Venkatesh’s book I discussed awhile back. I would’ve thought it’d be common sense by now that taking a group that, for survival purposes, formed an insular subculture with its own rules outside what is declared as “Middle America”, and sprinkling them among a population that is predisposed to shy away from them at the LEAST, is not going to magically do away with the violence and dependency. They were already poor and isolated, making their isolation even more obvious accomplishes zilch unless your goal is to treat people like guinea pigs and get paid for it.

To me, the real issue is a relative lack of control on the part of people who want to improve their situation over just who that culture retains and who gets frozen out. Contrary to popular belief poor neighborhoods aren’t universally populated by scumbags; a few people can mark the difference between a working-class area and “tha hood”. Obvious undesirable types can undermine attempts by the rest of the population to improve their condition, and in the worst cases you get a regional Dictatorship of the Bangertariat like Sudhir described. Dealing with such a delicate concern on an internal basis is inherently a non-State task, so I feel that the possibility is there for the anti-state Left to have something helpful to contribute to the situation. After all, it’s not like the last several decades of handouts and treating them like animals has worked.

Between the story about that polygamist compound in Texas & having to wait the other day at a restaurant behind a reform Amish family (”reform” because apparently someone drove them there; if I’m wrong, feel free to correct, it’s not like I follow that shit) trying to explain to the hostess or whatever they call ‘em how many people were coming in after them, I got to thinking to myself. Here’s the result:

First, the obvious: As I’ve stated before, I don’t follow a religion, because in thinking about the concept of a deity I realized the possible outcomes are infinite, thus the odds of going the “right” path are zilch. To put it another way: Russian Roulette is already stupid, picking a religion is like Russian Roulette with all 6 chambers loaded. On top of this, culturally I’m about as Who Cares as one can possibly get, don’t want power over anybody else, and think a woman’s place is wherever the hell she feels like it. My grave would probably say “Eh, Whatever” on it. So I’m about 110% NOT the type that would ever go for such a philosophy.

In that respect, they didn’t lose me, they never would’ve had me. Now, PRACTICALLY speaking it puzzles me why the fuck any man would want such a life anyway. The man of the group I saw the other day looked like his pants were up to his neck, the wife (at least the one I saw; might’ve been others) had this glazed over look on her face like society itself confused her & was dressed two inches away from wearing a burka, and at least six kids were hanging off both of them. Eh, at least the kids were well-behaved, but regular people can get that without the extra baggage via the Whoopin’ method.

To each his own an’ all that, it just looked like torture to me. If I were the religious extremist/polygamist type, my compound would look…quite different. The family would fund our way of life by selling barbecue, beer & weed to outsiders, my goin’-to-town attire would be akin to “Cuban Linx”-era Ghostface, and all the women would have their own side jobs & tend to look like the girl in this video*:

Kids? What kids? Are you crazy?!?

Lemme know when a “prophet” comes along offering this, an’ I might reconsider…

(* - Edit: I am not liable if you read this site from work & playing that video gets you fired.)

Over on Hit’n'Run there’s a post about the Libertarian Party convention. In the comments someone quoted a bit about Mike Gravel re: public government education, which exploded into a purity fight of sorts. I had a comment to add there, but the server squirrels are still pissed about the possibility of yet another Spurs finals appearance so I’m sharing it here:

Can’t we just agree that, while for anything beyond basic reading & math government schools suck ass on average, the real problem is parents who don’t give a fuck, and a huge reason private schools tend to do better is sending your kid to one tends to be a sign of giving a fuck?

I went to shitty public schools during most of my childhood. However, my parents encouraged me to learn on my own, so I did. A lot of old friends of mine didn’t have that. One can believe government-run education fails a cost/benefit analysis without automatically believing private schools are a miracle cure-all. Hell, IMO the belief that it’s that simple smacks of the same type of utopianism that’s driving the current education establishment to gradually seize power and responsibility from parents.

Explanation of post title here.

Looking at TPM Cafe, stumbled across a discussion involving Eric Alterman, Brink Lindsay, & two other people.  Brink’s comment about modern liberalism losing its moorings via embrace of centralization as a virtue — an analysis I mostly agree with, save for the inaccurate labeling of this as “socialism” when it was managerialist corporatism with a drawn on smiley face — prompted a response from Eric including this thoroughly beaten dead horse:

I share the libertarian concern with the growth of bureaucracy and as Brink was kind enough to mention, also locate the core of liberal thought in the experiences and insights of the Enlightenment–and focus on their implications for the rights of the individual. But as John Dewey argued, “liberty” should be imagined not as an abstract principle merely to be admired but as “the effective power to do specific things”–things that could not be done by people enjoying only the theoretical ability to act on their freedoms. No longer could the slogan of political liberals be “Let the government keep its hands off industry and commerce,” as the government became necessary to protect the individual’s freedom from the growing power of just those forces. “There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class,” Dewey explained, “except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.”

I feel that libertarianism, as I understand it, is overly concerned with theoretical liberty at the expense of its actual practice. The freedom to starve, to see one’s labor unfairly exploited, to drink polluted water or breath polluted air, are not freedoms I strongly value. And to battle these and others like them, society requires collective institutional action and in many cases, government (or labor union) protection. I’m no fan of “big government” per se–and neither was Dewey. It’s merely that powerful forces like global corporations require powerful forces to balance them. (emphasis mine)

The next book Eric reads should be this one.

Libertarians who’re intellectually honest with themselves don’t support “the freedom to starve” any more than mainstream liberals do, they just differ on how to deal with it, tending to point out that much of the power corporations hold is state-based in and of itself, and thus expecting the State to seriously deal with it is ridiculous.  Also, no libertarian with any sense about them opposes labor organizing any further than to the degree that it is now government regulated, which has resulted in its neutering.  We know that big business never seriously wants the free-for-all their egomaniacal CEOs tend to fantasize about, that what they really mean is a market where capital is pampered and fluffed behind the scenes like now, only the more visible crutches handed out from the national leg-breakers are removed — while leg-breaking still goes on undeterred.  In short, to the following quote from Syvanen in the comments for Brink, we’d say “damn right!”:

One of big issues of disagreement is clearly on the efficacy of the free market. I think the issue is moot however, since free markets seem to be non-existent. If we had a free market in financial services there would be blood all over wall street, instead billions in federal money is going into bail outs.

Eric wrote a book called “what liberal media?” awhile back.  Some left-libertarian needs to write one called “what free market?”, pointing this kind of contradictory bullshit out.

Of all the problems with the State as an institution, the most obvious one could be argued as the true root of all the others: by definition, it has to assume unanimity. As a monopoly of “legitimate” force, tolerating secession is suicidal to government, it must at the end of the day operate as if there is no dissent. Otherwise, it ends up just another gang, competing for power.

This kind of force, even taken out of context, is already dangerous. Now factor in human beings and our various conflicting values. Since power corrupts, the inevitable fear is that whoever holds that power will not hesitate to use it for their own benefit: wealth, satiating their personal fears, maybe revenge on some political “tribe” they feel has wronged them. When Joe Average says that they want someone in charge that they can have a beer with, or that “understands”, they’re attempting to articulate this fear — “I want someone just like ME in charge! If some ‘other’ has control they’re going to screw me over!”. Misguided, but all too understandable, in a way they have a point.

So…why do I say this? Consider the following:

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across “a lot of racism” when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: “White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people.” (emphasis mine)

^^^^Exhibit A, as far as the uglier side of this problem goes. Plain and simple, this person distrusts anyone not like them in power, and a black man with a Harvard law degree is about as “other” as it gets for them. I’m sure there are black people that support him for the same reason, though — like with whites who oppose him for this reason — it is not the norm. Some blacks simply believe that “it’s our turn now”.

I’d be inclined to say to the above sentiment “what do you mean ‘our’?”, explain my displeasure at us continuing to place new asses in the throne instead of dismantling the castle, and point out that the sole thing me & him have in common other than skin color is that we both think invading Iraq was a dumb idea — and by extension, thinking melanin content overrides ones personal interests is also rather dumb. However, despite that fantasy of racial unity ironically playing into the paranoia of Anonymous Bigoted Whitey quoted above, they’d never listen. The simplest answers tend to be the most satisfying, them being wrong is an afterthought.

Man… the old school hiphop:

Y’know, for as much as people gripe about rap videos today being nothing but ass-shaking and materialism, that video had more ass in it than I remembered. Thanks to that period of my life, my personal view on the whole video content fuss is that an MCs bling and video-skank count should be proportional to his skills.  Applied to modern artists, this would mean Nas or Andre 3000 could wear so many chains they can’t stand up & have more scantily clad chicks than the entire Hooters franchise, whereas Rich Boy would be in front of the camera by himself, standing by a Pinto with flat tires.

Shorter Brad Reed: “If you have a chance in hell of political power, you are part of the elite.  Calling other elites ‘elitist’ is horseshit.”

Of course they’re the elite.  For the most part they generally come from the same narrow spectrum of US life, and operate as if no other people exist — or worse, as if those other people just need to be beaten into submission for their own good.   By definition the average Joe has no say, because 1) there’s really no such thing in a functional sense (blahblahopinionsdifferblah) & 2) whatever else non-elites disagree on, they tend to agree on general grounds of fairness that their sweat should benefit them & not people who happen to be friends with elite types.

So…why do the elites have authorization to use force to get their way again?  I forgot that excuse.

Moving sucks.  Heavy stuff long distances…

More coming soon, I’z back.

Vache Folle, using a classic joke setup, lays out exactly why organized religion sucks balls.  Read the whole thing.

BTW: Note what the bartender says in the story — great minds think alike, eh?