Post Human

One aspect of the world as currently constituted is that machine labor in factories has replaced human and this is making it ever harder to find decently paid work. It is also the case that the US military has embraced the productivity fetish and is constantly trying to use ever more machines to replace humans. There are two obvious advantages for the military.

The first is that with smaller number of actual people involved while a majority of Americans oppose the various freedom bombing forays into the wider world, the direct impact, in terms of honored dead, grows ever smaller.  The second advantage is that at some point in the future war can be waged without people, which is perfectly consistent with the neoliberal project of creating a world designed to protect plutocrats from the rest of us.

The other day I posted this video:



The other day, via War is Boring, came this video of a half-way measure:



  Most of us remember, either from the unintentionally -- I assume -- campy movie or the deeply perverse Heinlein book, the dystopic future where men and women in suits of similar nature fought for earth and the right to vote. It is odd, isn't, how it all the promises of a future made pacific and equitable through the use of technology are proven time and again to be false while the the actual critiques of the policies that led to this neoliberal, neocon nightmare are proven right.

Here In Wisconsin

We have the misfortune to be represented by business man and accountant Ron Johnson who is an idiot. He advised poor and or uninsure3d women who needed contraception to use the google to find free contraception, which as this Think Progress report points out finds a bunch of either useless information or explains the high cost of getting birth control. In the course of making this stupid argument he suggested that anyone who insisted that uninsured women couldn't get contraception were making  "a straw-dog argument."

Perhaps he was trying to tell the truth. Strawdogs is, after all, a brutal investigation of violence in everyday life to say nothing of the treatment of women in the modern world.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ue1zbYIX2E&feature=related

Bright Young Things Are so Often Wrong

Matthew Yglesias and Dana Goldstein are two of the bright young things of our new media. Each in their own way fail to understand what the 99% versus the 1% means. It isn't about income as such. 

Yglesias' claim that NBA players are rich and therefore members of the 1% misses the point that your average NBA player isn't trying to create an oligarchical system. The Kochs, Bloomburg, and the Republican party's war on voting are. These folks are less interested in money then  they are in power. For them money is a means to an end and that end is creating a world in which the few dominate the many.  The 99% movement isn't some attempt to simply redistribute wealth but rather to end the creation of a market state in which the wealthy oppress the poor through a combination of the laws of supply and demand, which insists that markets follow the money, and the manipulation of the political system through the creation of a system in which the state functions solely as enforcers.

Goldstein makes a similar mistake in pooh poohing the linkage between the 1% and neoliberal educational reform when she concludes that

[t]The trouble with this narrative comes in comparing education reformers with greedy bankers. The dominant ethos of the school choice/Bloomberg/Obama reform movement is one borrowed not from Wall Street, with its desperate lust for profit, but from Silicon Valley, with its commitment to meritocratic innovation that—yes, of course—earns money, but also serves the public.

One suspects that she knows this as in a later post, she links to an article on the danger of the 1%ers drive to privatize and virtualize k-12. Privatizing education, much like the privatization of prisons, takes one of societies most important functions out its hands and gives it to corporations, whose ability to do anything right is of limited. The creation of public, as opposed to religious, education is one of the hallmarks of modernity; granting corporations and rich folks the right to "reform" and run our educational systems spell the end of critical thought and beginning of education as vocational training or, even worse, no education and no vocational training for the mass of humanity.

When people talk about a market state what they really mean is democracy's demise at the hands of technocrats.

Democracy Almost Broke Out

So the technocrats win yet again and the Greek people find their future in the hands of the mumble-brained thus and sos who got them in the mess in the first place. Hurray. By the way, if you haven't had the chance to read Neoliberal Hegemony you really should

And There You Have It

via

Freedom Isn't Free

If you work for a secular state, you cannot use your position to advance a sacular cause. No one, for example, would applaud a registrar who refused to sign a marriage license for a Catholic and non-Catholic or an Orthodox Jew and a Gentile because his or her religious beliefs didn't recognize those marriages as legitimate. America is a secular state and the price of serving it in an official capacity is putting the laws of the land above private belief. Consequently, this woman is an anti-American religious zealot and ought properly resign or be fired. And the NYTimes needs to rethink it's stance on wrong-headed actions even if the maxim of that action, perhaps especially if, is private belief.

Paul Ryan Hates Democracy

The nerve of these thugs trying to get into a constituent service office. I mean after all it's not as if the Constitution guarantees the right to petition the government for the redress of grievance.[1]



Oddly enough everyone seems very mid-westernly pleasant.

via


[1]I know there's a tension here between the property holder's right to organize access to her property as she might please; but there does seem to have been a kind of hierarchy of liberties current in the 18th century, which varied depending on whether you were an automaticist or a humanists,[2] in this instance, I would argue the public and political clearly trump the private and commercial.

[2] I'll try to explain what this means at some point in the near future; for right this second, its the difference between thinking that people creating their own present and the proper order of things creating the proper present.

Oh For Dumb

Megan McArdle:

John Quiggin complains that what the classic essay I, Pencil actually shows is the wonders of a mixed economy, not the market.  The essay traces all the amazing transactions that need to occur for a simple pencil to be made, pointing out that not one of the people involved could make a pencil by themselves, and most of them don't even know that they're involved in producing a pencil.  But what about the US Forestry Service? Rail rights of way? The education system?

This is an argument to which the left-wing has a great deal of recourse whenever anyone suggests that people have a right to keep what they earn from voluntary transactions.  You can only make money in the context of society, and so society has a right to regulate your transactions, and seize the proceeds, in any way that society sees fit.

And yet, the argument applies just as well to our sex lives or our political beliefs: they take place in the context of all sorts of government protections, from rape prosecutions to whistleblower laws.  Without markets and the government, the "anything between two consenting adults" morality to which the majority of the elite subscribes would be impossible; the closest substitute for these things is family, and families have a very clear, deep, and persistent interest in regulating the sexual behavior of their members.

Does this mean that the government (or our employers) may properly restrict our sexual behavior to that of which a majority of our neighbors approve? That bed you're having sex in probably travelled on the interstate highway system, so standby for government inspection . . . 

You know if the sex being had is a for profit enterprise than of course the kind of economic regulation authorized by the Commerce Clause and its interpretation is fully warranted. Taxation with representation also being part of the Constitutional order of these United States makes claims about seizing proceeds "in any way that society sees fit" a nonsense. If, on the other hand, its sex between adults then the privacy rights derived from Griswald etc pretty clearly enjoin the State from regulating.

So the idea that the regulation of consensual sex undertaken in the pursuit of happiness is similar to the profits earned because of state protections and investments is a silly.

Here in Wisconsin: Democracy Dies Edition

Via we learn that Fitzgerald stripped the Democratic senators of their right to vote in committee:

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald wrote this afternoon in an email to his caucus that Senate Dems remain in contempt of the Senate and will not be allowed to vote in committees despite returning from their out-of-state boycott of the budget repair bill vote.

"They are free to attend hearings, listen to testimony, debate legislation, introduce amendments, and cast votes to signal their support/opposition, but those votes will not count, and will not be recorded," wrote Fitzgerald, R-Juneau.

This will end well, I'm sure.