You evil bastards

The US government has been separating children from their parents at the border, and at this point they do not even know exactly how many children have been torn away from their families. HHS has admitted that the number “was certainly larger than the 2,737 listed by the government in court documents”, and that they’re going through over 47,000 case files to sort out the mess that shouldn’t have been made in the first place. It’s going so slowly that they’re about to throw up their hands and give up…so they’ve got a new rationalization.

The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.

Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.

It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children, White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.

Where was your fucking concern for the children when you snatched them from the arms of their mothers, you goddamned pompous bureaucrat? If you sincerely wanted to avoid traumatizing and destabilizing children, the place to start practicing what you should have learned as a social worker was in refusing to tear apart families in the first place. If separating children from their ‘sponsor’ homes would cause them emotional harm, you’ve just admitted that separating them from their natural families had to have been devastating.

These criminal fuckers need to be burned to the ground.

Surprise! A billionaire’s favorite graph is one that justifies billionaires!

Wow. This is a capitalist miracle: extreme poverty is rapidly declining!

Except…what is extreme poverty? What about regular poverty? Is there something we could call moderate poverty? And, errm, where do those numbers from the 1800s and 1500s come from? Why is the 19th century represented with such a smooth, gradual improvement when we know that the lives of so many were ruined and suffering by colonialism (where does Rhodesia fit into this graph) and slavery? Those are charts that raise more questions than they answer.

Jason Hickel tries to answer some of the questions. The early numbers are guesswork, molded into the desired form, and the economic data are a case of applying an invalid metric to messy human reality.

What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.

In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.

So money is a convenient proxy for real wealth, which is land and resources and labor, and using it as a metric conceals the fact that a few people have seized most of the real wealth, and masked their theft by doling out pittances to the displaced billions.

As if that isn’t enough, “extreme poverty” is an arbitrary parameter chosen to hide the ongoing grand larceny by people like Gates. It had to be set extremely low so that you wouldn’t see what’s actually been happening.

But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.

Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.

So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away.

You know, if Bill Gates set a Universal Basic Income of $3 a day, he could set “extreme poverty” in the US to zero. What a triumph! I’m trying to imagine what I could do on $3 a day. I know I could live cheaply on a diet of rice and beans for that, but, well, just my mortgage is 10 times that, and it was -36°C this morning. Forget about owning a car. Or having electricity. Or getting sick. Right now, on an income considerably greater than that, one debilitating illness could wipe me out.

Shorter Bill Gates: Relatively fewer people are dropping dead in the streets of starvation or cholera today, so therefore concentrating billions of dollars into my hands is good for everyone.

Reagan Redux

Donald Trump has been telling this story about souped-up cars driven by bad guys who run the border with women tied up (with blue tape!) in the trunk, and finding prayer rugs in the desert left by terrorists. It’s all a lie. He’s making shit up. Where did it come from?

…there’s a movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, which was released last summer, and which included a woman being tied up with tape, smugglers driving vast vehicles, and officials finding prayer rugs in the dirt near the border.

Again, just so we’re all clear, the movie is real, but the story is fictional. The script was written by screenwriters, not documentarians. The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.

As Rachel added, “In a normal administration, it would be insane to suggest” the president of the United States saw stuff in a movie and maybe thought it reflected reality. And who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence.

We’ve been here before with a president who can’t tell reality from fiction.

It was Reagan, you might remember, who told an annual meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society about a World War II B-17 commander who elected to stay with a wounded crewman rather than bail out of his stricken plane. “He took the boy’s hand and said, ‘Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.’ Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded.”

Actually, Congressional Medal of Honor never awarded. There’s some dispute about where Reagan got the story. Some said it was from the 1944 movie “A Wing and a Prayer” while others cited a Reader’s Digest item. Whatever its source, Reagan’s account was not true.

We have a madman at the helm, and he’s forcing us to ride it down together.

Trump has to have been informed that his story is false. Next time he tells it, someone tackle him, put him in an ambulance, and take him to the nearest hospital for a thorough neurological examination.

I do enjoy a good Pinker-dunking in the morning

Did you know that Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is full of misleading claims and false assertions? It is! And this article takes an interesting approach to documenting it: the author focuses on one chapter, on a topic he knows well, and contacts a bunch of people Pinker references and asks them if he represented their views correctly. A surprising number say no, and explain why.

I am not a fan of neo-liberal techno-optimism, as you might guess. It’s always just some well-off dude trying to persuade people that we can ignore systemic injustice because he’s doing just fine.

Those wacky billionaires!

Michael Dell, the billionaire, was asked what he thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to increase the marginal tax rate to 70%. He didn’t like that at all. His reasoning was mostly skewered by a competent economist on the panel, who pointed out that the US had that rate for quite a long while during a period of strong growth.

But I was amused by another point. He claimed he donated more to his charitable foundation than the increased rate would take from him.

My wife and I set up a foundation about 20 years ago, and we would have contributed quite a bit more than a 70 per cent tax rate on my annual income.

That seemed unlikely. So I had to look it up; my source is Forbes, which is going to be biased in favor of billionaires. I am aware that the 70% would be taken from his earnings for a year, and this number is apparently as a fraction of his lifetime earnings, so there’s a bit of apples/oranges comparison going on here, but as I suspected, he’s not giving away as much money as he implies.

I’m pretty sure 5% is a lot less than 70%.

Not covered in just the bare numbers is the way billionaires use philanthropy as a tax dodge, and to manipulate the target population in a way that benefits them personally. For that, I’m going to recommend this podcast, “The Neoliberal Optimism Industry”, which explains the game these arch-capitalists are playing.

We’re told the world is getting better all the time. In January, The New York Times’ Nick Kristof explained “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” The same month, Harvard professor and Bill Gates’ favorite optimist Steven Pinker lamented (in a special edition of Time magazine guest edited by – who else? – Bill Gates) the “bad habits of media… bring out the worst in human cognition”. By focusing so much on negative things, the theory goes, we are tricked into thinking things are getting worse when, in reality, it’s actually the opposite.

For the TEDtalk set, that the world is awesome and still improving is self-evidently true – just look at the data. But how true is this popular axiom? How accurate is the portrayal that the world is improving we so often seen in sexy, hockey stick graphs of upward growth and rapidly declining poverty? And how, exactly, are the powers that be “measuring” improvements in society?

On this episode, we take a look at the ideological project of telling us everything’s going swimmingly, how those in power cook the books and spin data to make their case for maintaining the status quo, and how The Neoliberal Optimism Industry is, at its core, an anti-intellectual enterprise designed to lull us into complacency and political impotence.

All those names really do have to be among the first lined up against the wall when the Revolution comes.

It’s like watching dominoes fall in slow motion

It’s agonizing. You can look ahead and see the whole chain that will eventually topple, but right now you’re stuck just watching them fall o n e  b y  o n e. It’s like how you can look back on Nixon now and think Watergate break-in, boom, Nixon resigns, when it was actually months and agonizing months of boring hearings disrupting my cartoon viewing habits.

So now Roger Stone has been arrested, and the indictment forges a link to Steve Bannon. Now the waiting begins for the next domino to fall.

Maybe Stone will squeal like a pig and accelerate the rate of the whole process. One can hope.

Who is falling for QAnon?

This is kind of depressing: KT Nelson trawled through QAnon facebook groups to get a feel for what kind of people go for it. And the answer is…old, gullible people who have totally alienated themselves from their families with their obsessive crank theorizing.

As you probably noticed from the examples I have provided, the Q crew is made up of a very specific archetype of internet denizen: elderly right-wingers who have gone too far down the online rabbit hole. Diving into any given thread you’d be lucky to find someone whose age drops below 55—but you will encounter one of the most unnerving melanges of psychotic ramblings and hateful screeds available anywhere. Calls for sanity are met with accusations of “controlled opposition,” and the only theories that are criticized are ones that question if the group has gone too far. But more importantly, almost every single member of Q’s following seems to have one glaring and unifying trait: They are deeply, heartbreakingly lonely.

Yikes. The pain and suffering inflicted on the people who adore Trump almost makes me feels some sympathy for them.

Wait…over 55? But that’s not that old, I’m over 55.

It gets worse.

Theories about Q’s endgame abound, but after watching closely for several months now, I think the odds are in favor of Q being an elaborate troll, aimed directly at one of the most gullible demographics in the world—old people on Facebook. A recent study found that people over 65 were several times more likely to share “fake news” online than young folks were, and nobody loves sharing a hot bowl of bullshit more than QAnon adherents. I thought early on that as more and more Q predictions did not come to pass, the following would dwindle, but these incredibly online grandparents have seemingly endless capacity for dissembling, and can conspiracy-brain themselves out of almost any corner.

Old people on Facebook? I’m on Facebook!

I was talking to my daughter the other day, and she informed me that the only people still using Facebook are old boring people, which is why she doesn’t use it much. I asked her what the young exciting people were using nowadays, and she hesitated — like she didn’t want to encourage some old gomer to discover the haunts of beautiful young people, and ruin them — and reluctantly admitted that some of them were using Instagram, but I think she might be hiding something. I have a conspiracy theory about that, and clearly Zuckerberg is in trouble.

At least I haven’t alienated my family…yet. Or they aren’t telling me.

Red Hats = “malevolent, murderous goblin”

From Alyssa Milano:

Last week, a group of boys engaged with a Native American man beating a tribal drum. The exchange was caught on video. And watching that video, each of us saw what we wanted to see. Because the divisions in this country are so deep they’re fossilized.

Still, some things in that video cannot be disputed–no matter what angle or how extended the cut is. These boys, who attend a religious school, were there on a school trip protesting against a woman’s right to reproductive freedom. Several of these boys were wearing red MAGA hats, a hat that has become synonymous with white nationalism and racism. Several were doing a “tomahawk chop.” Several were laughing.

When I saw that video, I saw boys flaunting their entitlement and displaying toxic masculinity. It seemed to me like they were reflecting the white nationalism and racism that the hats on their heads have come to represent.

I sent out a tweet that read, “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.” Right-wing pundits and anonymous trolls alike screamed for my head–literally and figuratively. My husband received death threats on his cell phone. Many demanded an apology.

Here’s the thing: I was right.

Yeah, she was. It’s so obviously true that those hats have come to represent a deep political division in this country that I’m surprised any of the right-wingers are complaining — they should just own their shit. Of course that hat represents bigotry and narrow-mindedness and tribalism and know-nothingness and American provincialism, that’s how Trump got elected. When you see someone wearing that hat, you know from the get-go they’re not going to advocate for tolerance and progressivism, that they despise immigrants, want women to get back in the kitchen and have babies, and have a deep affection for jingo and Fox News.

But I guess the Red Hats at least still have a vestige of shame if they’re trying to lie about their associations.

Oddly enough, red hats have another meaning: The redcap (or Redcap) is a type of malevolent, murderous goblin found in Border folklore. He is said to inhabit ruined castles along the Anglo-Scottish border, especially those that were the scenes of tyranny or wicked deeds, and is known for soaking his cap in the blood of his victims. Seems appropriate.