Showing posts with label communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communism. Show all posts

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Are we all the Same, or all Different?

Refining diversity.

There has been some confusion and convenient logic around diversity. Are we all the same? Conventional wisdom makes us legally the same, and the same in terms of rights, in an ever-expanding program of level playing fields- race, gender, gender preference, neurodiversity, etc. At the same time, conventional wisdom treasures diversity, inclusion, and difference. Educational conventional wisdom assumes all children are the same, and deserve the same investments and education, until some magic point when diversity flowers, and children pursue their individual dreams, applying to higher educational institutions, or not. But here again, selectiveness and merit are highly contested- should all ethnic groups be equally represented at universities, or are we diverse on that plane as well?

It is quite confusing, on the new political correctness program, to tell who is supposed to be the same and who different, and in what ways, and for what ends. Some acute social radar is called for to navigate this woke world and one can sympathize, though not too much, with those who are sick of it and want to go back to simpler times of shameless competition; black and white. 

The fundamental tension is that a society needs some degree of solidarity and cohesion to satisfy our social natures and to get anything complex done. At the same time, Darwinian and economic imperatives have us competing with each other at all levels- among nations, ethnicities, states, genders, families, work groups, individuals. We are wonderfully sensitive to infinitesimal differences, which form the soul of Darwinian selection. Woke efforts clearly try to separate differences that are essential and involuntary, (which should in principle be excluded from competition), from those that are not fixed, such as personal virtue and work ethic, thus forming the proper field of education and competition.

But that is awfully abstract. Reducing that vague principle to practice is highly fraught. Race, insofar as it can be defined at all, is clearly an essential trait. So race should not be a criterion for any competitive aspect of the society- job hunting, education, customer service. But what about "diversity" and what about affirmative action? Should the competition be weighted a little to make up for past wrongs? How about intelligence? Intelligence is heritable, but we can't call it essential, lest virtually every form of competition in our society be brought to a halt. Higher education and business, and the general business of life, is extremely competitive on the field of intelligence- who can con whom, who can come up with great ideas, write books, do the work, and manage others.

These impulses towards solidarity and competition define our fundamental political divides, with Republicans glorying in the unfairness of life, and the success of the rich. Democrats want everyone to get along, with care for unfortunate and oppressed. Our social schizophrenia over identity and empathy is expressed in the crazy politics of today. And Republicans reflect contemporary identity politics as well, just in their twisted, white-centric way. We are coming apart socially, and losing key cooperative capacity that puts our national project in jeopardy. We can grant that the narratives and archetypes that have glued the civic culture have been fantasies- that everyone is equal, or that the founding fathers were geniuses that selflessly wrought the perfect union. But at the same time, the new mantras of diversity have dangerous aspects as well.


Each side, in archetypal terms, is right and each is an essential element in making society work. Neither side's utopia is either practical or desirable. The Democratic dream is for everyone to get plenty of public services and equal treatment at every possible nexus of life, with morally-informed regulation of every social and economic harm, and unions helping to run every workplace. In the end, there would be little room for economic activity at all- for the competition that undergirds innovation and productivity, and we would find ourselves poverty-stricken, which was what led other socialist/communist states to drastic solutions that were not socially progressive at all.

On the other hand is a capitalist utopia where the winners take not just hundreds of billions of dollars, but everything else, such as the freedom of workers to organize or resist, and political power as well. The US would turn into a moneyed class system, just like the old "nobility" of Europe, with serfs. It is the Nietzschian, Randian ideal of total competition, enabling winners to oppress everyone else in perpetuity, and, into the bargain, write themselves into the history books as gods.

These are not (and were not, historically) appetizing prospects, and we need the tension of mature and civil political debate between them to find a middle ground that is both fertile and humane. Nature is, as in so many other things, an excellent guide. Cooperation is a big theme in evolution, from the assembly of the eukaryotic cell from prokaryotic precusors, to its wonderous elaboration into multicellular bodies and later into societies such as our own and those of the insects. Cooperation is the way to great accomplishments. Yet competition is the baseline that is equally essential. Diversity, yes, but it is competition and selection among that diversity and cooperative enterprise that turns the downward trajectory of entropy and decay (as dictated by physics and time) into flourishing progress.


  • Identity, essentialism, and postmodernism.
  • Family structure, ... or diversity?
  • Earth in the far future.
  • Electric or not, cars are still bad.
  • Our non-political and totally not corrupt supreme court.
  • The nightmare of building in California.

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Bukharin's Lesson in Communism

A review of "The ABC of Communism", by Nikokai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1920.

Nikokai Bukharin was one of the 1917 revolutionaries that brought communism to Russia. He was in New York (as was Leon Trotsky) in February 1917, as the news of the budding revolution spread around the world, and joined that revolution in May. He and Trotsky were penning a socialist newspaper at the time, and were particular fans of the New York public library- a great example of a public-private partnership, (not to mention free speech), which houses countless products of private enterprise, in a public facility. Back in Russia, they helped establish the world's first socialist and communist state, destroying the nascent parliamentary system of Karensky, and then the arrayed forces of the old aristocracy in the Russian civil war. They did this by promising something even better than parliamentary democracy- a proletarian state that would forever place workers in power, and end the power of capital and the aristocracy. 

A convenient document of the thinking behind all this is the "The ABC of Communism", by Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, put out in 1920 and republished long thereafter to provide a popular argument for communism and the soviet system. It encapsulates the economic and political theories that animated, at least at a conscious level, the new rulers. Bukharin was relatively young, regarded as a leading theoretician, and somewhat on the liberal side, not quite as ruthless as Stalin and Lenin. An autobiography and film about his wife tried to paint a positive image of him and of what things would have been like if Bukharin had managed to not get murdered by Stalin. So this work should present a relatively coherent and attractive case for communism.

Bukharin (center) in happier days, in Soviet leadership.

Well, I have to say that it is not very impressive as either economics or politics. While it provides insight into some capitalist dynamics, it fundamentally fails to understand the most basic drivers of economic systems, and obviously has not engaged with Adam Smith, who had written almost 150 years before. 

On the plus side, there is a lengthy treatment of the economies of scale, which rightly describes the advantages that large industrial enterprises have over smaller ones. The point of this, however, is mostly political, to show why anarchism, which was one of the many revolutionary threads still active at the time, made little sense. The Bolsheviks were besotted by industry and large-scale industrialization, which was at least one area where they put a lot of resources and accomplished a great deal, saving their skins in world war 2, later on.

"Consequently, THE LARGER THE UNDERTAKING, THE MORE PERFECT IS THE TECHNIQUE, THE MORE ECONOMICAL IS THE LABOUR, AND THE LOWER IS THE COST OF PRODUCTION."

Secondly, the author's treatment of cyclical crises in capitalism is not too far off the mark. They pin the problem on over-production, which then leads to workers getting laid off, loss of income and buying power, loss of credit, loss of ancillary business, and the downward spiral of depression. Whether lack of demand or over-supply, imbalances of this kind are indeed central to this kind of crisis. The author's solution? Better organization, in the form of state control over every aspect of the economy. They ceaselessly rail against the waste of capitalism- the competition with similar products, the disorganized manner of production by competing and cut-throat capitalists, the lack of overall harmonious coordination for the public good. But what of Adam Smith? It turns out that the chaos of capitalism has its beauties, and its efficiencies, squeezing every drop out of the environment, and out of workers, in its Darwinian competition.

Thirdly, they make a great deal out of the ambient excesses of capitalism, which were truly horrific, and were clear enough all over the world, leading to the communist's program of world-wide revolution by the working class. The monopolies, the strike-breaking, the child labor, the inhuman conditions, and the vast inequality- these were unquestionable evils, some of which remain endemic to capitalism, others of which have been ameliorated through reform in (relatively) democratic countries. As is typical, criticizing is easy, and there were, and remain, plenty of problems with capitalism and with democracy as well. The question is whether Bukharin plumbs the essential depths of economics sufficiently to come up with a better economic system, or of its associated politics to come up with a better form of the state.

And here the answer has to be, as history demonstrated, no. In their discussion of large scale enterprise, they go through a rather particular example to show the power of scale.

"How great is the advantage of this system was made manifest by some American researches instituted in the year 1898. Here are the results. The manufacture of 10 ploughs. By hand labour: 2 workers, performing 11 distinct operations, worked in all 1,180 hours, and received $54. By machine labour: 52 workers, performing 97 operations (the more numerous the workers, the more varied the operations), worked in all 37 hours and 28 minutes, and received $7.90. (We see that the time was enormously less and that the cost of labour was very much lower.) The manufacture of 100 sets of clock wheels. By hand labour: 14 workers, 453 operations, 341,866 hours, $80.82. By machine labour: 10 workers, 1,088 operations, 8343 hours, $1.80. The manufacture of 500 yards of cloth. Hand labour: 3 workers, 19 operations, 7,534 hours, $135.6. Machine labour: 252 workers, 43 operations, 84 hours, $6.81."

... "All these advantages attaching to large-scale enterprise explain why small scale production must invariably succumb in capitalist society. Large scale capital crushes the small producer, takes away his customers, and ruins him, so that he drops into the ranks of the proletariat or becomes a tramp. In many cases, of course, the small master continues to cling to life. He fights desperately, puts his own hand to the work, forces his workers and his family to labour with all their strength; but in the end he is compelled to give up his place to the great capitalist."

If we read this carefully, and do the math in the case of the ploughs:

$54 / 1180 hours = 4.58 cents per hour in wages

$5.40 per plough in cost

$7.90 / 37.5 hours = 21.1 cents per hour in wages

$0.79 per plough in cost

... we can see that not only is the plough almost ten-fold cheaper (some of which is presumably shared with the buyer in the market), but the workers were paid almost five-fold more per hour. How is this a bad reflection on capitalism? This is by way of telling why small scale production dies in a capitalist system ... it doesn't stand a chance. But the authors fail to mention that, in their own example, some of these gains are apparently shared with workers. So the gains in efficiency are shared quite widely- with customers, with workers, and also with the managers and capitalists, since this new form of work requires much greater contributions of management and capital equipment.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are "doctrinaire" communists, blind to a gem hidden in their own data that tells us how and why the capitalist system really works. Why did workers flock to the cities when there were agricultural jobs to be had? It was higher pay. Were the new capitalists holding workers as serfs against their will? Not at all. In the US likewise, whatever the horrors of capitalism, it did not hold a candle to the horrors of slavery.

More broadly, Bukharin and the communists generally had little appreciation for the difficulties and role of management. The surplus labor theory of Marxism leaves no room for management contributions of value to the final product- it is all excess labor stolen from the worker, to be restored in the idealized worker state/paradise. The capitalists are parasites:

"In communist society parasitism will likewise disappear. There will be no place for the parasites who do nothing and who live at others' cost."

Rentiers may be parasites, but managers are not. Theirs is the job to locate the resources, drum up the customers, to build the factories, to negotiate the wages, to run the work and fire the lazy. It is not an enviable or simple position to be in, rather is perhaps the most complex in the capitalist system, or any economic system. (And it is noteworthy that failures of management are endemic in government, of even the most enlightened kind, where crucial parts of this constricting set of incentives are often lacking.) It is the competitive forces pressuring on all sides- from customers, from workers, from government, from the financial markets, etc., that are integrated by the petty bourgeoisie / kulak class into a solvent enterprise, and are the soul of the capitalist system, for which they take a premium of profits off the top.

Bukharin and colleagues never pause to consider why capitalism is so dominant:

"Contemporary capitalism is world capitalism. All the countries are interconnected; they buy one from another. We cannot now find any country which is not under the heel of capitalism; we cannot find any country which produces for itself absolutely everything it needs."

Why is this? There was no shortage of experiments in the 1800's in socialistic styles of life, extending from the Shakers and the Owenites to the Tolstoyans. Few of them even survived very long, and none had a broader impact, let alone rising to the organic level of country-wide economic system. Religious monasteries are probably the only example of successful long-term socialistic organizations, though most are run on more or less totalitarian lines, with a whole separate set of emotional and personal committments. This starkly unsuccessful track record should have been a red flag- forgive the pun!- that while socialist utopianism is very popular, it is not practical.

This cavalier disregard of management and the elementary aspects of human economic demand (aka desire, aka greed) naturally came back to bite the communist Soviets, when, in the absence of a well-thought out way to run things in the wake of winning power on the back of their fantasy of a perfectly (and apparently easily, thanks to a mythical "statistical office") ordered and efficient economic system, they fell to the lowest device in the manager's toolbox- terror.

Bukharin on his way to execution, after having helped Stalin hound Trotsky to death.

Why the loose economics, fantastical pronouncements, and embarassing lack of realism? The reason becomes apparent as you read through "The ABC of Communism", which is that its main purpose is to inspire hate. It is a political tract that, as was current among communists then and since, seeks to frame an enemy, inspire hatred of that enemy, and support for the valiant vanguard that will vanquish that enemy. 

"What civil war can compare in its destructive effects with the brutal disorganization and devastation, with the loss of the accumulated wealth of mankind, that resulted from the imperialist war? MANIFESTLY IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT HUMANITY SHALL MAKE AN END OF CAPITALISM ONCE AND FOR ALL. WITH THIS GOAL IN VIEW, WE CAN ENDURE THE PERIOD OF CIVIL WARS, AND CAN PAVE THE WAY FOR COMMUNISM, WHICH WILL HEAL ALL OUR WOUNDS, AND WILL QUICKLY LEAD TO THE FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF HUMAN SOCIETY."

... "We are thus confronted by two alternatives, and two only. There must either be complete disintegration, hell broth, further brutalization and disorder, absolute chaos, or else communism."

Millions of people all over the world were thoughtless enough to accept this poisoned chalice, and went down the road of economic brutalization, famine, mass terror, and the gulag. Communism turned out to be a power play, not an economic Oz. It was a bright and shiny political lie. We are in the US becoming familiar with the power of such lies- their use of the basest and most powerful instincts- hate, and hope. Their ability to cut straight through any rational and empathetic analysis, and their ability to make seemingly reasonable people believe the flimsiest absurdities.


  • China is looking at some serious problems.
  • Utopias should be strictly for thinking, not doing.
  • Wait, I can't live in an exclusive neighborhood?
  • Is it OK for lawyers to engage in insurrection?

Saturday, July 15, 2023

Profiles in Pusillanimity

China, its communist party, and our free speech. Review of America 2nd, by Isaac Stone Fish.

Why are there always spoilers on the international scene? Some country is always unhappy with the way things are, and does its best to shake up the system. That shaking can be as detrimental to itself as to any other nation, but greed and ambition are always with us. After the Cold War, Russia descended into criminal chaos, with little real help from the West, and, once it had finally pulled itself together, turned around with veangence on its mind to refashion its imperial / security sphere. Russia could have been a nice country, tied into the European cultural and defense system. But no, the nostalgia for satellites and empire were just too strong. Putin spent a decade and more pulling Ukraine into the Russian orbit, only to be finally rebuffed in a people-powered revolution. Now he is trying to do it the hard way, and will take and keep whatever he can grab, little though that may be.

All that is peanuts compared with the game brewing between us and China. While Russia is playing for its neighborhood, the stakes in this next game are the whole world. That is, who runs the "international system", such as it is, and who plays the dominant role over the next century. The US has spent the last couple of decades trying to pull China into the existing trade and security system, in hopes that it would change into a "nice" country, aligning with the US, Europe and our developed allies all over the world in a quest for peace and lawful security. That has not happened. Even less so than with Russia, which at least has a long strand of pro-European sentiment, China learned its lessons from the Russian debacle, and its own Tienanmen square brush with democracy, and resolutely stayed in the Leninist camp- of absolute and unapologetic party power. It was hardly even tempted by European values.

In his book "America 2nd", Isaac Fish is eloquent about how deep China's resentments vs the West go. China suffered a century or more of humiliating vassalage over the 19th century, mired in poverty, opium, and weakness vs colonial powers. Then it suffered again at the hands of imperial Japan, and then several decades on its own account under Mao enduring the Western ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Maybe the last part is projected on the West as well, I am not sure. But China has plenty of ground to make up, and the last few decades of managed capitalism have been, as all can see, completely transformative.

China has already attained number one status in pollution, in population, (though later overtaken by India), and will soon attain that status in GDP. China is busy projecting its power and values via foreign aid, "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, their takeover of the South China sea, propaganda, intelligence, and hard-ball economic warfare. The question Fish asks is- why are we supporting this policy and the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?

Recall the quaint old days of "linkage", when the US considered using some points of leverage with Russia to influence Soviet policies we didn't like? China has no such qualms. Everything is linked, and particularly, China's great economic engine is linked with CCP propaganda. US companies that say anything the CCP does not like lose business and IP. The NBA went through a humiliating episode when Darryl Morey of the Houston Rockets criticized CCP repression in Hong Kong. The CCP promptly cancelled NBA air time and business in China, until the NBA comprehensively groveled back into its good graces, and has ever since kept its mouth shut. Black lives may matter, but Tibetan lives, Uyghur lives, Hong Kong lives... not so much, when a totalitarian power waves its big stick.

China can make its own jingoistic media as well. This is Wolf Warrior 2, whose tag line runs: "Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated."

Far more damaging is the capitulation of Hollywood. After dabbling with tailoring films for the Chinese market, it turned out that it was easier, and not at all influenced by CCP pressure to project a positive world wide image, for Hollywood studios to get fully on board with CCP censorship for all releases, not portraying China or Chinese in a negative way. So, after a brief and now thoroughly repressed few years of agitation on behalf of Tibet a couple of decades ago, the film industry, one of the premiere arms of American soft power, has been turned and cowed, into a lapdog of the CCP. Not a peep about Tibet any more, indeed DreamWorks brought out a thoroughly whitewashed Tibet-adjacent feature in 2019 that suggests everything there is perfectly fine, thanks to Han characters who protect the region.

Capitulation has been the rule across the business world, as each business faces the brutal choice of playing with the CCP, or being barred from Chinese markets, and even hobbled in other ways as China gains power abroad. But this has not been enough. China has been busily corrupting the US government itself, masterfully using former officials to press its case for Western acquiescence. Henry Kissinger is the pioneer in this effort, but former presidents and many other officials have spared no effort in setting up post-career "consultancies" that assiduously advise any and all comers that resistance is futile- China will rule the world and we must accommodate ourselves to that fact. 

"There are plenty of antagonists in this story, some Chinese, some not. For those upset with Beijing's influence in America, understand this: by helping normalize corruption among our former diplomats and warping American perception of China over the last four decades, Henry Kissinger has done more harm to American interests than every ethnically Chinese businessman, hacker, spy, whether they hold American or Chinese citizenship."

It is ironic, with all the current complaints about cancel culture, free speech for fascists, woke restrictions, etc. that we are actually being policed in our speech by our geopolitical opponent, China, and do not seem to think anything amiss about that.

The ancient Art of War recommends winning by shaping the battlefield and the minds of the opponents- whereby not a shot needs to be fired. Fish emphasises the United Front operations of the CCP and its propaganda arms, which seek influence in many ways, not just media. The seduction of foreign officials and fixers comes under this area of government work, for instance, as does the pressuring of speech and behavior by foreign corporations. Everything is linked, as is proper under a totalitarian system, and every oar pulls in the same direction of keeping the CCP in power and gaining influence across the world.

The CCP has a great deal to answer for, both historically, and in its brutal approach to its current rule, even given its huge successes in economic growth and allowing the modernization of China. A democratic and free China would look very different, and could flourish just as well. We should not be taken in by the propaganda of identity between the CCP and China, or the permanence of CCP rule. We need to be able to think and speak freely, and facilitate the freedom of others. And this should start with Taiwan, whose freedom is in the crosshairs of the CCP. We should not acquiesce to the narrative that Taiwan must/will be assimilated into China, or that it is not, in fact, an independent nation with every right to self-determination. The CCP's track record of cultural genocide in Tibet, actual concentration camps and genocide in Xinjiang, and the decapitation of Hong Kong shows clearly enough what would be in store for Taiwan, and for the rest of us, were China to gain even more leverage.


  • More of the same, and Maurice Greenberg is always at hand to support China.
  • India is only marginally better.
  • Should we end the drug war?
  • Maybe we should just leave nature alone.
  • Fascism is coming.
  • But Scientology is ... aready here.

Saturday, April 29, 2023

War is Politics by Other Means

What happened in the American war in Vietnam?

I am watching the lengthy PBS series on Vietnam, which facilitates a great deal of sober reflection. This dates me, but I recall (barely) the nightly body counts on TV, and the arguments with family about what was going on, both abroad and in the US in reaction to the war. I was too young to be particularly anti-war or pro-war, but I was very perplexed. The US was the greatest nation ever, had nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers, and had sent people to the moon. What power did this tiny country so far away have that we did not have?

The salve of time helps to clarify that we had lost this war long before it ended. Because, in the Clausewitzian dictum, war is politics by other means. The North Vietnamese had something that we didn't, which was an unassailable political position and ideology. They were in effective charge of much of the South, especially rural areas, for most of the war. The North Vietnamese had the double political distinction of military victory against the French, and of effective land reform against the landlords. In comparison, the South Vietnamese government was a bumbling, corrupt holdover from the French, which spent its time alienating the majority religion of the country, Buddhism, and keeping the landlords in power over the peasants of the countryside. Who was going to win this battle for hearts and minds?

Yes, North Vietnam was run by communists, and is still. But their propaganda and policies were effective to the mass of the population, in selling themselves as nationalists first and foremost- victors over the Japanese, the French, and later on the Americans too. Who would mess with that kind of record? Unfortunately, to put it in LBJ terms, we got into a pissing match with the North Vietnamese. No one wanted to "lose" South Vietnam, or let communism snatch one more country, or be the first president to lose a war. So it was our pride vs the North Vietnamese pride. Sadly, this did not translate into political support or governing competence in South Vietnam. Its government crumbled in our hands, and no amount of napalm was going to fix that.

We should at this point (that is to say, roughly 1963) have reframed the whole effort in Vietnam as one strictly in support of the South Vietnamese government. The US military is never going to win hearts and minds in foreign countries, not unless, as in World War 2, we have utterly destroyed those countries first and brought all their civilians to their knees in thankfullness for ridding them of their demented fascist government. Not conditions that come around very often, thankfully. The more time we spend somewhere, (say, Afghanistan, or Iraq), the worse it gets. The fact that the US had previously propped up the French position in Vietnam didn't help either. So all we can realistically do is support the native government (and even that may bring taints of colonialism and racism, rendering that support rather poisonous). And in this case, the government of South Vietnam was a mess, and should have been left to die on its own. That is what the politics dictated at the time, and the PBS series makes it clear that this was apparent to those who knew what was going on. They showed a great passage by an ex-soldier from the North, to the effect that, were it not for the US, the North would have taken Saigon by 1966.

It is instructive to compare our effort in Korea. North Korea tried to set up a Viet Cong-style insurgency in the South as well, but it was crushed by our client there, Syngman Rhee. North Korea tried to drape itself in the banner of anti-Japanese militancy, but that didn't play particularly, since the overwhelming US role in defeating Japan was so clear. South Korea instituted effective land reform in 1948 as well, which was key to dampening enthusiasm for communism. One might wonder why communism excites enthusiasm at all, but to landless peasants whose rent is half their crop, and who suffer countless other humiliations, it is a pretty easy sell, at least before the collectivization drive begins(!) So the political position of South Korea, destitute as it was, was far better than that of South Vietnam vs their respective northern antagonists. One might also add ancient cultural patterns, whereby modern Vietnam was created over the preceeding millenium by the gradual southward military expansion of the North Vietnamese, after they had successfully defended themselves against the Mongol and Chinese empires. 

Ho Chi Minh city, present day. Is this communism?

So, communism. Vietnam suffered terribly upon reunification due to a decade of doctrinaire communism, as if the aftermath of our brutal war hadn't been bad enough. After the wonderous dispensation of market-Leninism (!), begun in 1986, it is now a moderately prosperous but still one-party state with a miserable human rights record. Vietnam is reaping rewards from the US-China trade tensions as it becomes a top destination for low cost manufacturing. The US is its top export market. Its citizens have 1.4 cell phone subscriptions per capita, and its Gini coefficient is now similar to that of the US. Buddhism remains the leading religion, which, while confined to a state-run Sangha and political impotence, is relatively free otherwise. 

The US was right to be against communism. States like North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam show that communism, even after all the reforms and backtracking on Marxist theory, is antithetical to fundamental human freedoms, due to its Leninist / Stalinist greed for single party political control, which implies vast intrusion into all aspects of civic, social, and personal life. Russia is backsliding into that mindset, and we are right to stand once again with a friend in need, this time Ukraine, against its onslaught. But the new war just goes to show the critical importance of having a friend able to stand on its own feet, politically. Our military help would be pointless if Ukraine were a rotten state, with Russian insurgents and sympathizers, say, running 70% of the rural communities, and the central government pursuing vendettas against the Orthodox church instead of shoring up its support on all fronts.


Integral to the politics of warfare are economic factors like land reform and inequality. It was the corruption and steadfast lack of recognition of the peasant's plight that destroyed South Vietnam. The Viet Cong would not have been able to mount an insurgency were the peasants not desperate and open to well-honed propaganda based on economic equality / opportunity. Ruthless terrorism played a role, as it did for the Taliban. But the basic position of hopelessness versus an uncaring state and economic system was fatal. We are facing similar issues ourselves, as people in rural areas feel left behind and neglected, despite being the beneficiaries of such various and generous handouts from the state that would make welfare recipients blush. No matter- the US has become incredibly unequal and economically/socially stagnent, which is a recipe for populism and revolt, of which we recently had a taste. As inequality rises in China and Vietnam, will they face class-based revolt, driven by some new ideology of equality, fraternity, and liberty?


Saturday, April 15, 2023

Prisons as Social Prisms, Mirrors, and Shadows

From deTocqueville to BLM by way of Solzhenitsyn.

Carl Jung promoted the concept of the psychological shadow- that part of ourselves that is dark, bad, and repressed. It tends to be what we project on others, leading to the kind of political and cultural polarization we see so much of today. For individuals, integrating the shadow, (that is, at least perceiving it, if not valuing it), is difficult but an important path to a more mature and integrated self. Societies have similar psychological characteristics, and have shadows that they project on others, both other cultures and unfortunate classes in their own system. Unlike shadow elements in individual psychology, which are all too easily hidden and ignored, people are harder to keep out of sight, so societies do a lot of explicit work to heap opprobrium on the lower classes- minorities and the poor, in a social process that keeps the social hierarchy stable, and keeps the majority self-satisfied.

A big product of the shadow work of society has appeared in prisons. In primitive times, no one had prisons, and criminals were tortured, killed or ostracized. Now, the world is too small, ethical standards have risen somewhat, and we have turned to prisons as a general purpose punishment- a modern form of ostracism. Prisons express (and contain) our attitudes and definitions of antisocial activity and contagion. Alexis de Toqueville came to the early US to investigate our prisons, as a way of gaining insight into our society, before being waylaid into a much more general tour of this vibrant country. But his instincts were sound. France had been through its revolution only forty years prior, with its gruesome imprisonments and executions, which mirrored the tumultuous reversals of the social order. In the US, de Toqueville found a relatively unsophisticated and small carceral system, as money was short and there was plenty of room for criminals to disappear out west. It did not turn out to be an interesting prism on American life.

Today things are vastly different. The gangster era of the 20's and 30's led to a new focus on crime, noir, and high-profile prisoners like Al Capone. The crime and drug era of the 80's and 90's led to an almost four-fold increase in the prison population, so that now the US leads the world with a prison population of roughly 0.5% of the population behind bars. The BLM movement and defund the police movements were in part about recognizing that something had gone serious astray here. Whether it originated from environmental lead poisoning, or social breakdown, or drug cartels, the result was a huge population of ostracized, mostly male, and disproportionately minority people locked away. On top of that, the society had lost interest in rehabilitation amidst its turn to more conservative attitudes that valorize the rich and powerful and disparage the poor and disadvantaged. 

Our prisons today say alot about us as a society. Not that prisons are not needed, and that there aren't true criminals and insidious criminal organizations that prey on the rest of society; but our lack of empathy and lack of a wider social vision is palpable. Particularly, our attachment to property, its "rights", its local and parochial control, and particularly its inheritance, has gotten a little extreme. It is the perpetuation of privileges through property and wealth that explain a lot of the persistent lack of social mobility, the vast industries of greed/tax avoidance, easily politicized fears. Capitalism is at its heart competitive, and having winners of billions implies also having losers- those who sleep on the street, and those locked up, not to mention the hordes of low-wage workers who make everything go.

All this came to mind as I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. It is a vast tome, befitting the vast archipelago it describes, its huge population, its protracted duration, its unimaginable suffering, and what it says about its society. While unexpectedly enjoyable to read, as Solzhenitsyn is joking the whole time in various sarcastic and dark modes, it is an indictment of Soviet Russia on a comprehensive basis. One particularly striking theme that he weaves through is comparison with the Tsarist period that came before. Solzhenitsyn meets prisoners, often dedicated socialist revolutionaries, who had done time under the Tsar, and regarded that experience as heaven compared to what they were faced with now, under Stalin. To put it very bluntly, Russia used to be a civilized country. Now, under the Bolsheviks, torture of the most vile kinds is practiced, less vile kinds are routine, execution is carried out on a whim, and law and justice are a mockery. The Gulag is loaded up with many orders of magnitude more political prisoners than the Tsar had ever contemplated and works them mercilessly to early graves.

Breaking rocks in the gulag.

While this all mostly reflected the paranoia and totalitarian genius of Stalin, he was only following his model, Lenin, as Solzhenitsyn lays out in particularly damning detail. The larger Russian society clearly had, and still has, an ambivilent nature, as close students and subjects of the Mongols, but also as eager to engage with and learn from Western Europe. Who knew that the most left-tinged and idealistic ideology to be imported from the West would so quickly curdle into a second coming of Ivan the terrible? But so it did, and Solzhenitsyn describes what that really meant in human suffering, in this book that may have done more than any other to delegitimize and ultimately destroy that system.


  • The neighborhood to prison pipeline in the US.
  • The questionable science of ice cream.

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Building the Middle Class

Why are poor people in the US enslaved to tyrannical, immiserating institutions?

Santa Claus brought an interesting gift this Christmas, Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed". This is a memoir of her experiment as a low wage worker. Ehrenreich is a well-educated scientist, feminist, journalist, and successful writer, so this was a dive from very comfortable upper middle class circumstances into the depths both of the low-end housing market and the minimum wage economy. While she brings a great deal of humor to the story, it is fundamentally appalling, an affront to basic decency. Our treatment of the poor should be a civil rights issue.

The first question is why we have a minimum wage at all. What is the lowest wage that natural economic conditions would bear, and what economic and social principles bear on this bottom economic rung? In ancient times, slavery was common, which meant a wage of zero. This was replicated in the ante-bellum American South- minimum wage of zero. So as far as natural capitalism is concerned, there is no minimum wage needed and people can rather easily be coerced by various social and violent means to work for the barest subsistence. The minimum wage is entirely a political and social concept, designed to express a society's ideas of minimal economic, civic, and social decency. Maybe that is why, as with so many other things, the US reached a high point in its real minimum wage in the late 1960's, 66% higher than what it is now.

Real minimum wage in the US, vs nominal.

The whole economy of low wage work is very unusual. One would think that supply and demand would operate here, and that difficult work would be rewarded by higher pay. But it is precisely the most difficult work- the most grinding, alienating, dispiriting work that is paid least. There is certainly an education effect on pay, but the social structure of low end work is mostly one of power relations, where desperate people are faced with endlessly greedy employers, who know that the less they pay, the more desperate their workers will be to get even that little amount. It is remarkable what we have allowed this sector to do in the name of "free" capitalism- the drug tests, the uniforms, the life-destroying scheduling chaos, the wage theft, the self-serving corporate propaganda, the surveillance.

Is it a population issue, that there is always an excess of low-wage workers? I think it is really the other way around, that there is a highly flexible supply of low-wage work, thanks to the petty-tyrannical spirit of "entrepreneurs". No one needs the eighth fast food restaurant, the fifteenth nail salon, or the third maid cleaning service. We use and abuse low wage labor because it is there, not because these are essential jobs. If a shortage of low-wage workers really starts to crimp an important industry, it has recourse to far more effective avenues of redress, such as importing workers from abroad, outsourcing the work, or if all else fails, automating it. What people are paid is largely a social construct in the minds of us, the society of employers who couldn't imagine paying decently for the work / servitude of others. To show an exception that illustrates the rule, nurses during the pandemic did in some cases, if they were willing to travel and negotiate, make out like bandits. But nurses who stayed put, played by the rules, and truly cared for those around them, were routinely abused, forced into extra work and bad conditions by employers who did not care about them and had .. no choices. In exceptional cases where true need exists, supply and demand can move the needle. But social power plays a very large role.

Some states have raised their minimum wage, such as California, to $15. This is a more realistic wage, though the state has astronomic housing and other costs as well. Has our economy collapsed here? No. It has had zero discernable effect on the provision of local services, and the low wage economy sails on at a new, and presumably more humane, level. When I first envisioned this essay, I thought that a much more substantial increase in the minimum wage would be the proper answer. But then I found that $15 per hour provides an annual income that is almost at the US level of median income, 34k annually for an individual. The average income in the US is only 53k. So there is not a lot of wiggle room there. We are a nation of the poorly paid, on average living practically hand-to-mouth. On the household level, things may look better if one has the luck to have two or more solid incomes.


My own individual incomes analysis, drawn from reported Social Security data.

Any any rate, a livable wage is not much different from the median wage, and even that is too low in many economically hot areas where real estate is unbearably expensive. This is, incidentally, another large dimension of US poverty, that the stand-pat, NIMBY, no-growth zoning practices of what is now a majority of the country have sentenced the poor and the young to an even lower standard of living than what the income statistics would indicate, as they fork over their precious earnings to the older, richer, and socially settled landlords among us.

So what is the answer? I would advocate for a mix of deep policy change. First is a minimum wage that is livable, which means $15 nationwide, indexed for inflation, and higher as needed in more high-cost states. It should be a basic contract with the citizenry and workers of all types that working should pay decently, and not send you to a food pantry. All those jobs and businesses that can not survive without poorly paid workers... we don't need them. Second would be a government employer of last resort system that would offer a job to anyone who wants one. This would be paid at the minimum wage, and put people to work doing projects of public significance- cleaning up roadways, building schools, offering medical care, checkups, crossing guards, etc. We can, as a society and as civil governments, do a better job employing the poor in a useful way than can the much-vaunted entrepreneurs. Instead of endless strip malls of bottom-feeding commerce, let local governments sweep up available labor for cleaning the environment, instead of fouling it. Welfare should be, instead of a demeaning odyssey through DMV- like bureaucracies, a straight payment to anyone not employed, at half the minimum wage.

Third, we need more public services. Transit should be totally free. Medical care should be completely free. Education should be free. And incidentally, secondary education should be all public, with private schools up to 12th grade banned. When we wonder why our country and politics have become so polarized, a big reason is the physical and spiritual separation between the rich and poor. While the speaker in the video linked below advocates for free housing as well, that would be perhaps a bridge too far, though housing needs to be addressed urgently by forcing governments to zone for their actual population and taking homelessness as a policy-directing index of the need to zone and build more housing.

Fourth, the rich need to be taxed more. The corrosion of  our social system is not only evident at the bottom where misery and quasi-slavery is the rule, but at the top, where the rich contribute less and less to positive social values. The recent Twitter drama showed in an almost mythical way the incredible narcisism and callous ethics that pervade the upper echelons (... if the last administration hadn't shown this already). The profusion of philanthropies are mere performative narcissism and white-washing, while the real damage is being done by the flood of money that flows from the rich into anti-democratic and anti-government projects across the land.

And what is all this social division accomplishing? It is not having any positive eugenic effect, if one takes that view of things. Reproduction is not noticeably affected, despite the richness at the top or the abject poverty at the bottom. It is not having positive social effects, as the rich wall themselves off with increasingly hermetic locations and technologies. They thought, apparently, that cryptocurrencies would be the next step of unshackling the Galtian entrepreneurs of the world from the oppression of national governments. Sadly, that did not work out very well. The rich can not be rich without a society to sponge off. The very idea of saving money presupposes an ongoing social and economic system from which that money can be redeemed by a future self. Making that future society (not to mention the future environment) healthy and cohesive should be our most fervent goal.


Saturday, October 22, 2022

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era

China girds for defense against infiltration by Western ideas. And Wang Huning leads the way.

The current Chinese Communist Party congress prompts us to take stock of where we are in our relations with China and where China is going. The major theme is of course conservativism. Xi Jinping remains at the helm, and may stay there for several cycles to come. The party remains uniquely in control, using all elements of new and old technologies to "guide" Chinese culture and maintain power. And increasingly is trying to shape the international environment to abet its internal controls and maybe spread its system abroad.

It is worth recounting the fourteen points of Xi Jinping thought in detail, as stated on the Wiki page:

  • Ensuring Communist Party of China leadership over all forms of work in China.
  • The Communist Party of China should take a people-centric approach for the public interest.
  • The continuation of "comprehensive deepening of reforms".
  • Adopting new science-based ideas for "innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development".
  • Following "socialism with Chinese characteristics" with "people as the masters of the country".
  • Governing China with the Rule of Law.
  • "Practice socialist core values", including Marxism-Leninism and socialism with Chinese characteristics.
  • "Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development".
  • Coexist well with nature with "energy conservation and environmental protection" policies and "contribute to global ecological safety".
  • Strengthen the national security of China.
  • The Communist Party of China should have "absolute leadership over" China's People's Liberation Army.
  • Promoting the one country, two systems system for Hong Kong and Macau with a future of "complete national reunification" and to follow the One-China principle and 1992 Consensus for Taiwan.
  • Establish a common destiny between the Chinese people and other peoples around the world with a "peaceful international environment".
  • Improve party discipline in the Communist Party of China.


The casual reader will note that Communist party dominance and retention of control is the subject of roughly four or five of these points, depending on interpretation. One can sense that control is absolutely the central obsession and fear of party. And no wonder- there are plenty of structural and historical reasons.

China has had a tumultuous history from earliest recorded times, cycling between centralization and dissolution and civil war. The golden periods were always ones of stability, while the worst were times of anarchy, banditry, decline. Then there were the colonial humiliations, from the opium wars to Japanese occupation. Whether one adds in the disastrous legacy of Marxism- which also came from the West- into the mix, is a matter of taste. As noted above, the current CCP still gives lip service to Marxism-Leninism (though pointedly not to Maoism!).

In the more current era, the West promotes free trade, human rights, and democracy as a way to contest the power and ideology of the CCP. Each have their ulterior aspects, certainly in relation to China. Human rights and democracy are obviously direct attacks on the very core values of the CCP. Free trade might seem like a no-brainer and objectively desirable. But in reality, it cements the advantages of highly developed countries, since less developed countries can never gain an advantage in high technology if their only advantage is low labor cost and poor education & other infrastructure. Therefore, China has had to protect itself from the onslaught of the West, economically, politically, and socially.

This is the basic theme of the CCP ideology, driven particularly by Wang Huning, a social scientist. academic, and now politbureau member and close advisor of Xi Jinping. Huning has been a close advisor to the last three leaders of China, and evidently a major architect of their signature mottos, "The Three Represents", "The Chinese Dream", and now "Xi Jinping thought ...". He is a close student of the US, and appears generally to be the "vision guy" for the Chinese leadership. (Maybe even the brains behind the operation, if one wants to be hyperbolic.) While Huning in his earliest writings advocated for the democratic development of China, in line with general development of a modern, mature state, and with models such as Japan, that has all been deferred and subsumed under the more immediate needs of the party. His public writing ceased after he joined the central government. 

The biggest and most traumatic historical shock guiding the CCP today was undoubtedly the collapse of the Soviet Union. (As it guides Putin as well.) Before everyone's eyes, the siren song of the West, of capitalism, and of "freedom" (particularly the freedom to be nationalist) captured the populace, and destroyed the Soviet state from within, resulting in a gangster Russia that has only painfully re-established its strength and order, turning back into an authoritarian (and nationalist) state and a colleague of China on the anti-Western world stage. 

The Chinese Communist Party avoided all that through its merciless grip on power. It never let its eye stray from the ball, or softened it heart towards its dissidents and malcontents. It patiently experimented with a mixed capitalist / one party rule system, which has turned out (so far) to be highly successful. It availed itself of all available technology and capitalist methods from the West to develop its economy at a pell-mell rate, learning especially from its fellow-tigers, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. However, it continues to (rightly) fear the siren songs of freedom, democracy, etc. as core threats. It conveniently uses psychological projection to blame the West for all these attractive ideas, which in truth are not exclusively Western at all, but are dreams that Chinese people have as well. (See Hong Kong, see Singapore, see Taiwan) So the ideology and the propaganda follows the age-old script of justifying a bloated, intrusive, and often very cruel state by casting the blame for dissent on outsiders.

That's a big TV screen.

The CCP has also been highly effective in many areas. It obviously keeps tabs on everyone with not just surveillance, but with social surveys and party members at the grass roots, and even allows limited local protests, so that it has a feeling for what the people want, despite a lack of formal democracy. It has engineered a miracle of infrastructure, trains, and housing. Indeed, there is an overhang of construction that it is slowly winding down, in the current real estate crunch. It has protected its population comprehensively from Covid, surely saving millions of lives, even as it imposes stark, and likely not sustainable, costs. It has recognized the dangers of bitcoin and shut down the cryptocurrencies in comprehensive fashion- something we might learn from. And it is leading the way in solar manufacturing and installation, even while its use of coal remains catastrophic. It continually identifies and fights corruption in its own ranks, recognizing that a one-party state is an invitation to rot and sclerosis.

But the fundamental conundrum remains- how to justify and strengthen a one-party state in the midst of the rising well-being, education and sophistication of its own population. The other tigers, including even Singapore, all began with strongly authoritarian systems that each evolved, in parallel with their economic development, into more or less free democracies today. While one can sympathize with the CCP's desire to avoid the chaos of the Soviet Union's demise, the now more cogent and relevant models of political evolution in the local region are far more positive stories, which the CCP seems to pointedly, and lamentably, ignore. 

Indeed, China appears to be heading in a different direction, a bit more like that of North Korea. Their wolf warrior diplomacy is given to vitriolic statements and bullying, now showcased over Taiwan. Their internal propaganda is increasingly nationalistic and strident, following the Xi Jinping thought's guidelines of shaping the cultural values of China to be more cohesive and disciplined. (Covid hasn't helped, either.) It is increasingly intolerant of diversity, as shown against minority ethnic groups, which are being wiped out in systematic terms. For example, the government offers generous subsidies to minority members who marry Han ethnic partners, and drives the same policy by locking up large numbers of Uyghur men for re-education. China's ideological leaders are groping for CCP-friendly "values" that can effectively block what they view as foreign viruses, but which are, in point of fact, endogenous and natural to the human condition.

Under Xi and Wang Hunting, the party is still searching for those elusive "socialist core values" that are uniquely Chinese, not Western, not from the backward (and somewhat feudal) countryside, and supportive of the Communist party. But all they have come up with are greed/capitalism, nationalism, an obsession with stability, and a new personality cult. 

While I can not foretell the future, this does not seem like a good way to go. In foreign policy, one can measure success by how friendly the neighboring countries are- in this case to China, and to the US. There are areas of the world where very peaceful relations exist, such as across the EU, and between the US and its neighbors. That does not seem to be the case in the South China Sea. The constant drumbeat of threats and bullying by China, against Taiwan in particular, but others as well, various territorial disputes, and a enormous military building spree have put everyone very much on edge, and not on friendly terms. This is a fundamental problem for China, and for the rest of us if they bull their way into a world war.

Domestically, it is quite possible for the repressive system to continue indefinitely, given its continuing determination and often very intelligent management, always on guard against the heresies of freedom and goodwill. But that would be giving up an important future path. The Chinese culture would have greater growth prospects, and greater beneficial consequences at home and abroad, if it opened up and tolerated greater pluralism. Its economic dynamism is up till now built on foreign technology, and its ability to innovate and operate truly in the vanguard of world development depends on some significant degree of political and social dynamism as well, not on Big-Brotherism

So I see a future where inevitably, the CCP will have to experiment with grass-roots democracy in order to resolve its fundamental value and motivation conflicts as growth slows and China becomes a wealthier country. These will be frought and dangerous experiments. But in time, there is a chance that they will lead to the same kinds of opening that other Asian countries have experienced so successfully, with the gradual development of another party, and a more humane and less paranoid culture. Conversely, insistence on repression tends to spiral into a need for additional repression, with corresponding chances for a dramatic crackup that might produce another one of the grand cycles of Chinese history.


Saturday, June 11, 2022

God Save the Queen

Or is it the other way around? Deities and Royalties in the archetypes.

It has been entertaining, and a little moving, to see the recent celebration put on by Britain for its queen. A love fest for a "ruler" who is nearing the end of her service- a job that has been clearly difficult, often thankless, and a bit murky. A job that has evolved interestingly over the last millenium. What used to be a truly powerful rule is now a Disney-fied sop to tradition and the enduring archetypes of social hierarchy.


For we still need social hierarchy, don't we? Communists, socialists, and anarchists have fought for centuries against it, but social hierarchy is difficult to get away from. For one thing, at least half the population has a conservative temperament that demands it. For another, hierarchies are instinctive and pervasive throughout nature as ways to organize societies, keep everyone on their toes, and to bias reproduction to the fittest members. The enlightenment brought us a new vision of human society, one based on some level of equality, with a negotiated and franchise-based meritocracy, rather than one based on nature, tooth, and claw. But we have always been skittish about true democracy. Maximalist democracies like the Occupy movement never get anywhere, because too many people have veto power, and leadership is lacking. Leadership is premised naturally on hierarchy.

Hierarchy is also highly archetypal and instinctive. Maybe these are archetypes we want to fight against, but we have them anyhow. The communists were classic cases of replacing one (presumably corrupt and antiquated) social hierarchy with another which turned out to be even more anxiously vain and vicious, for all its doublespeak about serving the masses. Just looking at higher-ranking individuals is always a pleasant and rewarding experience. That is why movies are made about the high ranking and the glamorous, more than the downtrodden. And why following the royals remains fascinating.

But that is not all! The Queen is also head of the Anglican Church, another institution that has fallen from its glory days of power. It has also suffered defections and loss of faith, amid centuries-long assaults from the enlightenment. The deity itself has gone through a long transition, from classic patriarchial king in the old testament (who killed all humanity once over for its sins), to mystic cypher in the New Testament (who demanded the death of itself in order to save the shockingly persistent sinners of humanity from its own retribution), to deistic non-entity at the height of the enlightenment, to what appears to be the current state of utter oblivion. One of the deity's major functions was to explain the nature of the world in all its wonder and weirdness, which is now quite unnecessary. We must blame ourselves for climate change, not a higher power. 

While social hierarchy remains at the core of humanity, the need for deities is less clear. As a super-king, god has always functioned as the and ultimate pinnacle of the social and political system, sponsoring all the priests, cardinals, kings, pastors, and the like down the line. But if it remains stubbornly hidden from view, has lost its most significant rationales, and only peeps out from tall tales of scripture, that does not make for a functional regent at all. While the British monarchy pursues its somewhat comical, awkward performance of unmerited superintendence of state, church, and social affairs, the artist formerly known as God has vanished into nothing at all.


Saturday, March 5, 2022

Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

  • Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
  • Apparently, we are all going to die.
  • Tires are bad.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

Sneakey Eating

An evolutionary perspective on overeating syndromes.

Most animals have a simple problem in life- find enough food to live and survive. But social animals, if they are even slightly advanced, share food, and thus alter this basic equation. They have to find ways to store and share food in a way that sustains the group, whether that is starving the old, or feeding the helpless larvae that can not feed themselves. Humans have always faced this dilemma, but don't have the rigid programming that insects do.

Humans can lie, and steal, and then lie some more. It isn't pretty, but sometimes it gets the job done. Humans can regard rules as optional, a flexibility that is a perpetual threat to institutions, norms, cultural patterns, and ultimately to group success. We recently went through an administration that regarded norms as suggestions, laws as annoyances, and then wondered why their behavior attracted so much hatred, and such low historical esteem.

This dynamic comes to mind more concretely in the case of overeating syndromes, which exemplify the conflict between the individual and the group. In a prehistoric setting, food was almost always scarce and precious. In all native cultures there are elaborate practices of public food sharing and eating, which contribute to surveillance by the community of what everyone is eating. Anyone who violates such social structures must have been severely penalized.

Public, communal eating is a fundamental human practice.

Imagine then that someone feels a compulsion to eat more than their share. Such a compulsion would be highly advantageous- if successful- to enable survival when the others in the group might be starving or malnourished. Some extra weight might well mean the difference of making it through the next winter or not. But being caught could dramatically alter the calculus. Primitive societies had harsh punishments for violating critical norms, including ostracism or execution. What then? 

I would suggest that this background sets the stage for overeating syndromes that commonly combine secret eating, often at night, stealth, and stealing. In a world of plenty like today, it is stigmatized and medicalized, and due to the abundance of food, relatively easy to navigate and thus easy to gain weight from. But pre-historically, it would have been far more fraught, and challenging, probably less likely to result in easily observable weight gains. Like other issues in social life, this conflict would take the form of an arms race between cheaters and rule-enforcers. It would be a cognitive battle between effective surveillance and punishment, vs stealth and the intelligence required to not get caught. So one can view it as one impetus among many other evolutionary forces that shaped human intelligence, and in light of its considerable incidence in modern populations, an arms race that was never resolved. Indeed, it is the type of trait that comes under balancing selection, where a high incidence in a population would be self-defeating, while a low incidence yields a much more successful outcome.


  • Satire- not so funny when you are the target.
  • Making every home a part of the energy solution.
  • Constitution? Who ever heard of enforcing it?

Saturday, May 1, 2021

They Thought They Were James Bond

Review of Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA.

Why do we still have the CIA? Its track record is atrocious on both operational and moral grounds, and much of its role has been assumed by the NSA and by military intelligence. It is fundamentally contrary in principle to everything the US stands for, making its reputation, such as it is, damaging abroad, and making recruitment at home excruciatingly difficult. It is a testament, in the end, to bureaucratic inertia and its own skills in backroom politics and public relations that it survives at all.

Headquarters of a bloated bureaucracy

Tim Weiner tells a totally biased history of the CIA, proving a truism of intelligence that everything bad ends up on the front page and everything good remains under wraps. This book covers every disastrous escapade from the exploding cigars sent to Fidel Castro to the torture of prisoners in a farflung network of black prisons and those of our "allies" during the "war on terror". What is even worse, however, is how its sterling successes, like its fomented coup against Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the arming of Pakistani proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war, turned out, in the end, even more disastrous than its front-page disasters. The Bay of Pigs made the US a laughing stock. But the melt-down of Iranian democracy haunts us and the rest of the Middle East, even the world, to this day.

The CIA has routinely lied to congress and to the president. It has, at other times, lied to the entire nation and world on behalf of the president, such as during the runup to the Iraq war. Its daily brief is notoriously bereft of deep analysis, and its ranks notoriously short of foreign language and cultural skills. 

Towards the end of the book, even while recounting a rising tide of mediocrity and error, Weiner oddly throws in repeated denunciations, evidently drawn from his stable of CIA veteran interviewees, of the underfunding and underappreciation of the CIA over recent decades. All in all, it is a difficult book (and situation) to make sense of. Yet it is clear that the CIA is a disaster zone, and we need to think carefully about how America's intelligence community should operate on a restructured basis.

One thing to note is that the US is simply not adapted, culturally, to run a great intelligence apparatus, as, say, Russia is with its KGB/FSB/SVR/GU. We are an open society with a well-founded dislike of deceit, and are not skilled at it. We also are a lawful society, unwilling to instill the kind of fear / terror that it takes to staff and run such shady operations. Aldrich Ames, for example, is enjoying a pleasant retirement at a medium-security prison in Terre Haute. Jonathan Pollard is now living a heroic retirement in Israel.

So, maybe we need some of the functions of the current CIA. But they should be made as compact as possible, not subsumed in the current bureaucratic dinosaur. The main function it does not need is the gathering of mundane foreign news via newspapers, low-level contacts, and fake visa officers, to create master "intelligence estimates". All that can and should be done by the State Department. Indeed, such functions should be increased with the addition of open person-on-the street contacts all over the world. We are frequently blind-sided by developments that intelligence agencies fail to see based on their derring-do, tradecraft, and focus in the highest echelons, and which normal people in that other society can easily see coming. These functions may even be replicated into red-team/blue-team competitions, with retrospective evaluations carried out to grow successful teams. The understanding of foreign cultures is a difficult task, and putting it into the hands of a white-bread secretive bureaucracy has not been fruitful. 

What would then happen to all the under-cover intelligence that we gather, mostly via the NSA and the satellite services of the NRO? These have been independent of the CIA for a long time. The CIA has not been "central" for decades. So we should dispense with the charade of special knowledge and integrated deep analysis, leaving that to the State department and perhaps the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA should be confined to espionage and covert operation in a focused way on current and future crises. It should not be meddling in Central American countries, running its own private foreign policy. It should not be trying to span the world with agents all over the place. It should not be trying to carve out bureaucratic slices from the NSA and other agencies with better track records.

Whether the CIA can even be successful in such a truncated remit is highly questionable, given its history. But at least it can then be judged more accurately, without all the distractions of routine newspaper reading, world-wide reporting, etc. It should stand or fall in whether it can supply high-level intelligence from our major adversaries- China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and North Korea, in any way beyond our technical resources. And naturally, it goes without saying that its covert operations need to be kept on a tighter leash, run not only by the president, but put on specific timelines of reporting to the NSC (cleared in advance) and select congressional oversight bodies (reported within thirty days). Malfeasance, either in reporting or in execution, would result in consequences such that the CIA fires poorly performing personnel, and keeps only a select and small cadre, perhaps in competing teams.