I occasionally get books sent to me in hopes of a review, I guess, and more often than not they don’t interest me. But I check anyway! This was probably the fastest nope yet; I flipped it over, and the first blurb on the back cover was from…Michael Shermer. On that grounds alone, I’d throw it away, but his blurb was hilarious.

[The] best book I’ve read on [this topic].

The brackets aren’t mine! They actually had to butcher his quote that much to get something they could use!

Then, further down, the Washington Monthly blurbs,

…explaining the now well-documented psychological, biological, and genetic differences between liberals and conservatives with reference to human evolution…

That’s from Chris Mooney, who ought to know better.

Well. All I can say is that my genetics won’t allow me to read this crap, and right now I’m praying for a speciation event.

He wants Democrats to take a pledge.

Will you join me in pledging not to speak negatively about any of our candidates? We don’t know who the nominee will be, but they need to be as strong as they can be going into the election against Trump.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 26, 2019

No fucking way. Do we want a good, strong candidate who will represent our values and who has been thoroughly vetted for skeletons in their closet? Then rip and rend and tear now, winnow the field, and get the nominee who has the greatest chance of surviving the ripping and rending and tearing that the Republicans will do. Takei’s idea is the stupidest way to dribble our way to defeat. In the absence of criticism, we’ll just get a boring party apparatchik who represents a passionless status quo.

We’ll get this asshole.

“I’m not Bernie Sanders,” Joe Biden said at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble. The folks at the top are not bad guys… wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks.”

Well, glad we got that cleared up. pic.twitter.com/Z2uMFBsQ6S

— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) April 27, 2019

Right now the insufferable conservative media is calling Biden the “grown-up” in the sprawling chaos of the Democratic candidates, unaware of the insult they’re dealing to all the others, some of whom actually have substantive experience and policy plans. He’s not the grown-up — he’s the corporate politician who’d continue the Democrat party’s slide into irrelevant centrism. The Democrats would be dead right now if the Republicans hadn’t made an incompetent malignant orange pustule their flag carrier for their party, making the most miserably awful human being their candidate. You don’t respond to a weak opponent by fielding a doddering glad-hander who is barely better than a Republican, you put up your best. Biden ain’t it.

This is our time to rage and let the Democratic party know who will motivate us to go to the polls. Stick the knife into bad candidates before they get the official nomination rather than waiting for the Republicans to do it for us. And jeez, but Biden is on a par with Howard Schulz. Move on, please.

That said, if the party fools were to give us something as lackluster as a Biden/Schulz ticket, I’ll still drag myself reluctantly to the polls in 2020 and mark the ballot for them. The question is, will the more apathetic, Democrat-leaning electorate do likewise? I don’t think so.

The basis of Carl Benjamin’s popularity on YouTube has always been his racism, sexism, outright misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, and just plain nastiness to his ‘enemies’ on the left. It’s not as if he has any intellectual, artistic, or even thoughtful contribution to make — he’s nothing but a fart from the middle-class id. He has recently tried to make something more of himself (not much more, though) by running for the European Parliament under the banner of UKIP. Maybe he thought that since one crass, anti-intellectual, outspoken white nationalist had succeeded in becoming president of the US, the door was open for other dumbass thugs to rush in, too.

He’s run into an obstacle, though. The media have been exposing his YouTube career to the light. Buzzfeed ran a rather revolting review of his greatest hits which reveals why he hates “trigger warnings” so much, since any Sargon of Akkad retrospective has to be preceded by explaining that you’re going to see a lot of unpleasant racist, sexist filth.

Here's the BuzzFeed News video showing UKIP's star candidate Carl Benjamin – known as Sargon of Akkad – repeatedly using racial slurs in YouTube videos: pic.twitter.com/2zGNhKp5qB

— Mark Di Stefano 🤙🏻 (@MarkDiStef) April 25, 2019

Here’s a fine example of the Carl Benjamin style. He made a response video to another video that was protesting hate speech. This, of course, simply prompts him to vomit up hate speech all over the place.

Another male actor then says to the camera, “It’s not acceptable to call me a kike.” The video pauses and Benjamin says, “I totally agree, absolutely unacceptable, how dare you.”

Anti-Semitic images are then overlayed on the screen, showing several different versions of hook-nosed caricatures.

The video ends on Potter, who has Down syndrome, asking not to be called a “retard”. Alongside her, Lynch says the r-word is like any other minority slur.

“Well then good job trivialising minority slurs, you nigger, spic, fag, chink, kike, retard,” Benjamin said, again pausing the video. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Do you think you’re my mum or something?”

I’m hoping that Carl Benjamin has just hit a brick wall that will kill his political career dead, but I don’t know — Trump could say “grab ’em by the pussy” and he got elected. Abusing children with Down syndrome is just another step in conservative devolution.

By the way, the other guy UKIP recruited to represent them goes by the moniker “Count Dankula”, and his sole claim to fame is that he trained his dog to do Nazi salutes. That’s it. That is all he has accomplished. This is the intellectual heavy artillery of the party, I guess.

A Twitter executive was asked why, since they’ve been successful at eliminating Islamic State propaganda from the platform, they can’t likewise eliminate white nationalist propaganda. He delivered the answer I expected.

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

I think I could accept the benefit of banning white nationalists at the expense of inconveniencing a few Republican politicians. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

Maureen Walsh, the Washington state Republican who thinks nurses are lazy and don’t deserve humane working conditions, got another royal smackdown from a nurse. Maybe there’s a reason nurses are overworked.

Hospital administrators pull down enormous bonuses- and most are not required to be disclosed to the public. Nonclinical healthcare wages- as in hospital administrators- increased 30% over the last decade to $865 billion (Bryant, 2018). Furthermore, salaries for nonprofit CEOs far eclipsed those for nurses. Over the past decade, salaries for hospital CEOs jumped a whopping 93% (Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research 2018). Average salaries for hospital CEOs skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 2005 to $3.1 million in 2015. In fact, salaries for nonclinical workers are a major factor in skyrocketing national healthcare spending. In 2017, 84 of the largest nonprofit hospital systems boasted total annual profits of $14.4 billion — resulting in a 2.7% operating profit margin (Bryant, 2018). Are you telling me that hospitals can’t afford to hire enough staff to allow nurses to get legally mandated breaks? Please, Senator Walsh, show me that math. Sounds like you’re being played by the lobbyists and that you’ve been too lazy to do your own research. Shame on you.

I do have to wonder what those CEOs are doing to earn $3 million salaries. Do they actually work 50 times harder than I, or one of their nurses, do?

I suspect the CEOs are in turn only a small part of the problem. I wonder how much of the money flowing into hospitals is sucked away by insurance companies?

I confess that I’ve never really thought deeply about the Tragedy of the Commons — it’s a story that we are all told early, and superficially, it seems to make a lot of sense. Sure, we have to worry that a shared resource might be exploited by selfish individuals. We have to be concerned about free riders. But do we really? And why is it that somehow the blame always falls on the weakest, poorest members of society? So I read Garrett Hardin’s original essay from 1968, and realized…it’s dreck. Why has this thing been so influential? It’s entirely about population control, nudging around the edges of eugenics, and yuck, I realized that the people who think this is great stuff tend to be the wealthy and deluded Libertarians. Look at this:

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line–then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Unfortunately this is just the course of action that is being pursued by the United Nations. In late 1967, some 30 nations agreed to the following: “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.”

Oooh, ‘ware the improvident. They might use overbreeding to aggrandize themselves! I’ve never felt that way. It seems to me that those gigantic families are harming themselves, perpetuating self-destructive myths at best, and reducing resources to their own children. Those children aren’t cows, property that they can use to seize an unfair share of the commons; they are independent, educable individuals who, if given the opportunity, could learn to be cooperative members of society and who would see that their own self-interest is not served by dropping a baby every year.

Hardin’s own example of herdsmen overgrazing a shared pasture is full of limiting assumptions — his herdsmen not only fail to cooperate in managing a shared resource, they don’t even talk to each other. And this is a shared myth used to justify privatization and control of basically everything in the world?

What prompted me to dig into the source material was an excellent article on Hardin and his “tragedy” by Matto Mildenberger. Humans actually do not lack cooperative management tools; we don’t need authoritarian intervention to save us from ourselves.

But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else.

Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions. This striking finding was the life’s work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (technically called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Using the tools of science—rather than the tools of hatred—Ostrom showed the diversity of institutions humans have created to manage our shared environment.

Of course, humans can deplete finite resources. This often happens when we lack appropriate institutions to manage them. But let’s not credit Hardin for that common insight. Hardin wasn’t making an informed scientific case. Instead, he was using concerns about environmental scarcity to justify racial discrimination.

About that last bit — yeah, Hardin was a nasty character, but his nastiness isn’t the reason we should reject his myth. It’s because he was wrong.

Hardin was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamophobe. He is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a known white nationalist. His writings and political activism helped inspire the anti-immigrant hatred spilling across America today.

And he promoted an idea he called “lifeboat ethics”: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water.
…
People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. Subheadings proclaim that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” It opines at length about the benefits if “children of improvident parents starve to death.” A few paragraphs later Hardin writes: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” And on and on. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools.

Or build a wall to keep immigrants out. Hardin was a virulent nativist whose ideas inspired some of today’s ugliest anti-immigrant sentiment. He believed that only racially homogenous societies could survive. He was also involved with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group that now cheers President Trump’s racist policies. Today, American neo-Nazis cite Hardin’s theories to justify racial violence.

It’s always useful to the powers-that-be to claim that a crisis is inevitable, and that it’s all due to unavoidable Human Nature, because that obscures where the blame really lies: in the hands of a corrupt, rich few who have used their power and wealth to override the potential of the many.

…rejecting Hardin’s diagnosis requires us to name the true culprit for the climate crisis we now face. Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible.

But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice.

You can find more on that anti-corporate perspective in this video from Mexie:

We’re not going to solve climate change or any of the other global problems harming humanity until we claw down the billionaires from their perches and enact laws that control their greed.

There were a bunch of town hall meetings with Democratic presidential candidates last night. I didn’t watch a single one of them, instead retiring to my bed with a book. My wife tuned in to all of them, I think, because I don’t believe she came to bed at all (she’s the fiercely political one in the family nowadays, and I can’t blame her.) I look at the swarm of Democrats that are buzzing around during this premature election cycle, and I’m just tired. All I want is sound policy and coherence at this point. So I detest the young, brash ones like Mayor Pete who has no policy and openly says he’s avoiding it because he’s all about “values” (but what if your values are all about having a rational, sane, competent government?) I detest the old neo-liberal party hacks — I can’t believe that Uncle Joe is going to be running. Do you think he’ll get Anita Hill’s vote?

But worst of all, I detest the Republican party. They’re doing nothing. At a time when eleventy-seven thousand Democrats are plunging madly to the starting gate because they see our current president as weak and hateful and a necessary target for removal, the Republicans cower in fear and none are suggesting that they’ll run against him. Why? Because even the ones who express reservations about the Deplorable-In-Chief know that he is the current apotheosis of Republican policy, and they can’t run against him without repudiating everything the Rethuglican machine and Fox News has built since Reagan. Charles Pierce puts it well.

That there are not at least five Republican candidates challenging El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago not only is a fine metric for judging the deep internal rot in that political party, but also a good measure of the limits of the Never Trumpers as allies in an election year. Let us stipulate the following two points: 1) It is the responsibility of the Democratic Party to do everything in its power to protect the institutions of our republic, and 2) it is distinctly not the Democratic Party’s responsibility to save the Republican Party from itself, and from the political monster it has created over the past 40 years. For four decades, the party has flattered, and begged, and truckled to the very forces of which it is now terrified. Save yourselves, gang.

But that isn’t happening because, for all their brave talk, the Never Trumpers want to keep the political power that base gave them while distancing themselves from its obvious and inevitable product. So, instead of gathering forces behind a primary challenge, many of the Never Trumpers seem to be content with advising the Democratic Party on who it should nominate and what policies it should pursue. This, I believe, in preparation for a campaign to blame the Democratic nominee if the country determines that it wants to live six more years in the current gale-force dungwind.

Let us be clear: if the country re-elects this president*, it’s because modern movement conservatism prepared the ground for it and used the Republican Party to do it. It hangs on all of them like a historical deadweight. They should disenthrall themselves from the policies and tactics that hung it from their necks before presuming to beg the other political party save them from their own monster.

So here I am, disgusted. I am going to vote for whoever wins the Democratic party nomination, and I will say it loud and clear ahead of time, even if it’s a Mayor Pete or an Uncle Joe, because the number one priority for the country is to first get rid of that asshole in the White House, and number two priority is to bury the Republican party. Yet I hate that I’m trapped in this two-party system, and I do not trust the Democratic party to fight for anything other than corporate sponsorship. That means I cannot bear to pay attention to the process, because the process is the problem.

I’ll walk into the primaries and vote my conscience (which at this point whispers “Warren” in my brain; could change), and then when the actual election roles around after a goddamn year and a half of misery, I’ll mark the ballot for whoever is opposite Trump, which means the Democrats could nominate a chimpanzee and they’ll get my vote. Which does not make me happy.

People who can’t imagine doing good for people are the worst kind of people. Philip Klein is resentful that Elizabeth Warren’s plans might benefit people.

Aside from the cost, which, like her child care proposal, she claims would be covered by her ultra-millionaires tax, the plan would be tremendously unfair to those who have been struggling for years to pay off their student loans.

Yes. It was tremendously unfair to hit a generation of students with excessive costs and dreadful loans. So where were you when those were imposed? Have you been crying out for decades about the unfairness of student debt? Looking at Klein’s usual pro-rich, conservative Republican op-eds, I rather doubt it. But now he’s crying for them.

There are those who may have taken higher-paying jobs they didn’t necessarily want to pay off loans.

Wait, what? They were forced to suffer by taking higher-paying jobs? I don’t think that’s a common problem.

And there are those who have cut expenses to the bare bones to pay off loans while watching their friends with similar salaries eat out and travel and de-prioritize paying off loans. Those who were more responsible will feel justifiably enraged at the idea that those who may have been more profligate will now get a bailout from the government.

Boy, I think this is called projection. Philip Klein is very concerned that slackers and deadbeats might beat the unfairness of the existing system, so we ought to keep that system to punish them. This is how bad systems persist, isn’t it? By this argument that “I suffered through it, so you have to suffer, too” which only perpetuates suffering.

I’m going to vote for a candidate with this plan:

The first step in addressing this crisis is to deal head-on with the outstanding debt that is weighing down millions of families and should never have been required in the first place. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational — the cancellation of up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 42 million Americans.

My plan for broad student debt cancellation will:

• Cancel debt for more than 95% of the nearly 45 million Americans with student loan debt;
• Wipe out student loan debt entirely for more than 75% of the Americans with that debt;
• Substantially increase wealth for Black and Latinx families and reduce both the Black-White and Latinx-White wealth gaps; and
• Provide an enormous middle-class stimulus that will boost economic growth, increase home purchases, and fuel a new wave of small business formation.

Once we’ve cleared out the debt that’s holding down an entire generation of Americans, we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again. We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation. My plan for universal free college will:

• Give every American the opportunity to attend a two-year or four-year public college without paying a dime in tuition or fees;
• Make free college truly universal — not just in theory, but in practice — by making higher education of all kinds more inclusive and available to every single American, especially lower-income, Black, and Latinx students, without the need to take on debt to cover costs.

Some people will say we can’t afford this plan. That’s nonsense. The entire cost of my broad debt cancellation plan and universal free college is more than covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax — a 2% annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth. For decades, we’ve allowed the wealthy to pay less while burying tens of millions of working Americans in education debt. It’s time to make different choices.

Right now that candidate is Elizabeth Warren, but I’m open to others adopting this idea. In fact, I think it ought to be on the Democratic party platform, and that any candidate who wants to represent the will of the American people ought to be promoting it.

Note: I have no student loan debt — I only had a small debt to begin with, and paid it off years ago — I’m not planning to attend college in the future, and my kids have all completed undergraduate education, and I’m not really going to acquire any personal gain from this (although I sure wish somebody’d put this in place round about 2000, before my trio of offspring started marching off to university and broke us). So I’m not really being “bought”. This is a change that would be good for the country. Let’s build up our human infrastructure!

Also note that her plan specifically covers 2-year public colleges, which is just as important as our ivory tower institutions, and that she has specific plans for HBCUs and MSIs. Warren knows her stuff.

Why isn’t every candidate immediately recognizing a good idea and jumping on the bandwagon? Even the Republicans should be able to see the virtues.