Archive for the ‘USA’ Category
some meandering complaints about our world
It’s a well-known fact, though it should be better known, that being super-rich makes you indifferent to the financial struggles of others. Frump, for example, is very crookedly wealthy and takes advice, if he ever takes advice, from wealthy cronies and tries as best he can to place them in positions of power, and yet his impoverished MAGA fans still think he’s the greatest being in the multiverse. Yes, he’s looking bad percentage-wise, but I’m talking about hardcore MAGA fans who will go down with the ship.
This indifference, and selfishness, of the Elon Skums of the world should always be borne in mind when examining your own government and its advisors. Take note, as I have, of libertarian types, as they’re generally into ‘every bloke for himself’ (it’s a very blokey ‘philosophy’, pace Ayn Rand). And, just as an aside, one of the great joys of life consists of telling a libertarian, in no uncertain terms, that ‘free will’ is a myth, and then watching them boil over with rage.
The difficulty of course, with all governments, is that the powerful, aka the rich, are the ones whose voices are most heard. Their voices always rise ‘above the fray’ somehow, and their ‘magical’ wealth always suggests that they have something better to offer to government than any random street protestor.
So what happens when just about everyone in government is super-rich? This happens in Putinland of course, because he’s basically the only one in government, and the same goes for other bizarro ‘governments’ like Turkmenistan and North Korea.
And then there’s the USA…
It’s so hard to ignore that country, it casts its bleak shadow everywhere, especially in the WEIRD world. And of course it has plenty of billionaires, and the biggest rich-poor gap in the west. And considering its extreme jingoism, and ‘rugged individualism’, that’s never going to change. Its Presidential system is the best/worst example of that individualism. It’s basically an elected Kingship – I’m sure I’ll never see a Queen of the USA in my lifetime. And will they learn from the Frump disaster and develop a more distributed, inclusive political power system? Never never never. And I wouldn’t care but they interfere so much with other countries, pushing their weight around so that we have to sully ourselves by negotiating with them. Australia, at least, is at a safer distance than most. We need to keep minding our own business, but that’s hard, and it could be that their next King is reasonable enough to draw us in against our better judgment.
I’m meandering on with this, but it seems to me that the human world has become a more unpleasant place over the last few decades, at least politically. Crises will grow – climate change, the nuclear threat (Hiroshima-Nagasaki is fading in the public memory, and I recently heard someone suggesting nuking Putinland), the failing of internationalism, it all seems to be going the wrong way. I wish I had some decent, non-political focus to take me away from it all, to some calm, steady Lagrange point where I can indulge in purely autistic speculations.
Perhaps I should focus more on the local, Australian scene, but then I’m such a global citizen (sigh), and I suppose I’m too old and set in my income and circumstances (barring some sudden accident or disease, etc) to be too self-concerned. In Australia the arguments are about tax levels, and there is a concern about extreme right movements drawing their ‘inspiration’ from MAGA (I just now typed into Youtube ‘how do I get rid of Sky News from my Youtube feed’ and the result was a whole heap of Sky News videos. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but….). I do have concerns about Australia’s stance re the ridiculous but dangerous Frump declaration of war against Iran, and I worry about the government’s positioning on the David and Goliath Israel-Palestine conflict, with anti-semitism claims being tossed around like confetti. As to domestic politics I suppose I should be ashamed to say I’m mostly woefully ignorant, though the NDIS cuts have caused serious concern among friends with a severely mentally impaired son (a very rare trisomy), and I’m concerned, as I’ve written before, about funding going to private schools from our largely private school-educated MPs. And we also have a rise in MAGA-type noises from the rabid right, which will no doubt subside when Frump carks it.
Anyway, that’s enough meandering, I’ll try ro find something more substantial to write about next time.
See also
The USA has the worst political system in the democratic world, but they don’t think so
full democracies in v dark green
Okay, so I’ve written along these lines before but I need to double down. The USA has a problem with its history, as well as its national ego. The obvious needs to be pointed out to United Staters – that no other democratic country has ‘no kings’ rallies, because no other democratic country has what is in effect an elected monarchy, with massive pardoning powers, massive immunity, and power to appoint never-elected individuals to positions of great power and impact on the welfare of the state. And he gets to live in a massive white palace surrounded by courtiers for the four or eight years of his reign (and it looks like this king will always be male). Even the judiciary is overly politicised. And there seems to be no limit to the amount of money that can flow to favoured candidates. And yet, ask more or less randomly any bunch of United Staters to name the world’s greatest democracy, and we all know what the answer will be.
Here in Australia, voting is mandatory for citizens of 18 or over. Of course such compulsion is out of the question for ‘the land of the free’, but I do think that mandatory voting does remind us that we’re all in it together, that we’re fundamentally social creatures, and that we would do well to consider seriously the kind of society we want. It is a kind of participation in the broader society, which hopefully should bring us together. But when Australians vote, we vote for a local candidate as well as a set of policies. We don’t vote for anything like a king, or an ‘I alone can fix it’ superhero. As in the USA there are two major parties, but the parties decide on their leader, and they can dump that leader by a simple vote of no confidence if they feel she’s ineffective, or if they feel it’s time for a change, or whatever. She’s like the captain of a soccer team, she’ll be dumped if the team is performing poorly, or if they lose confidence in her leadership and so on. It’s all about collaboration, and the success of the team.
Of course, there is no perfect political system, and reform needs to be ongoing as societies evolve. The White Australia policy, which existed in my lifetime, now strikes us as an embarrassment, and it’s possible that much that seems normal now will strike others as an embarrassment in 60 years time. Maybe by that time the USA will have dumped its monarchy – but probably not.
Change often occurs when a crisis reveals serious problems with a system, and Trump, who is essentially a crime machine, as many have pointed out, has certainly shown how bad a so-called democratic state can get, but there seems to be something in the US psyche, something profoundly insular, and blindly nationalistic, that prevents it from engaging in the kind of root-and-branch reform that outsiders see as necessary.
The Trump saga continues because he hasn’t suffered a moment’s harm from the criminal convictions against him, in a nation that has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democracy, by a very large margin. The only other countries with a higher rate are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, but it’s unlikely that most United Staters are aware of this revealing fact. It seems clear that those being incarcerated are not the ultra-wealthy, a tiny minority that wields a highly disproportionate degree of power. The vast rich-poor gap and the high incarceration rate are clearly related.
This is a nation that really struggles to be clear-sighted about itself. Its influence on South Korea’s type of democratic system – an imperialistic Presidency, rather than the more party-based, team-focussed system more or less successfully used in Australia and other Westminster-style democracies, has been disastrous, as it would be anywhere else. It’s my own view that even many of these variants of democracy are too individually-focussed. We need governments to be as collaboratively and inclusively based as it is possible to be. We need to reduce, as far as is humanly possible, the old left-right divide, in which one government dismantles the policies of its predecessors, only to have its policies dismantled in turn, often at great cost to the public at large. A more inclusive and collaborative system, devoid of ‘I alone can fix it’ hubris, must surely be the politics of the future, but that future, I admit, seems distant. There are few nations following this model, and if they are, they’re largely being ignored by the rest. I can’t pretend to be an expert on global political systems, but I suspect that some Scandinavian systems are heading in the right direction. I shall look at some of those systems in future posts.
I’ve referenced below an interesting 2020 survey by Wurzburg University, ‘Ranking of Countries by Quality of Democracy’, which tends to confirm those suspicions. The top 5 countries, in order, are Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Germany (perhaps a bit of local bias for number five!). These countries, along with the next 30, are classified as ‘working democracies’. The next country, number 36, the USA, is the first of the ‘deficient democracies’. Few people in the USA would agree, of course.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
patriarchal power, money, and endings
I’ve written before about how people make the category error of confusing patriarchy/matriarchy, which is a system, with men/women, which is about individuals. Of course we can think of woeful women and marvellous men, but that’s not at all the point.
And then there are others who say that the aim should be égalité, not oppression of one gender by another. Of course this is reasonable, but if we look at other primates we find a complexity that is hard to parse into neat categories. In a study of 121 primate species, published in PNAS, entitled ‘the evolution of male-female dominance in primate societies’, they start with this:
We show that societies where males win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare. Evolutionarily, females became more dominant when they gained more control over reproduction, as in monogamous, monomorphic, or arboreal species, as well as when they faced more competition, as in solitary or pair-living species. Contrarily, male-biased dominance prevails in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and polygynous species.
Human primates (and don’t we just hate being described that way) are, these days, mostly monogamous, very varied in terms of size, and generally terrestrial, so it’s hard to say how that works for gender dominance.
However, though it galls me to harp on human uniqueness, we have created or evolved these things we call civilisation, language, nations, technology, etc, which have complicated questions of gender dominance. For example, it’s clear that size would hardly be expected to matter so much in a technically-savvy society such as ours. Then again, male violence against women, as we all know, is far more prevalent than its opposite.
Male dominance is still very much the norm in human societies, and is often taken for granted in surprising ways. I remember as a mature-age student in the 90s befriending a young woman who was convinced that men had better, more complex brains than women, and that neural physiology would bear that out. What could make her think this? Did she also think that male cats and dogs had more complex brains than their female counterparts? It seems that our patriarchy, slightly declining though it is in recent times, is still doing its damage in terms of human ambitions and expectations.
One way that gender empowerment can be measured in human societies, and nowhere else in the living world, is wealth. Moulah. Wealth, they say, is power. And when we look at the USA, supposedly the richest country on Earth, with the greatest wealth disparity in the WEIRD world, it’s very clear that wealth is wielding its power there in rather disturbing ways. This has made me wonder – how much wealth, globally, is in the hands of men, compared to women? Would it be 90%? Surely more than that. Surely closer to 99%. In any case it makes a mockery of looking at gender dimorphism when determining the power imbalance between the sexes in humans. And it’s no good looking at the disparities of pay between Mr and Ms Average, I’m talking about the world’s controlling billionaires, all of whom are men. Here’s the opening paragraph of an essay from the Brennan Center for Justice, on money spent on the recent US election:
The 2024 federal election cycle was the most secretive since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. Dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors, plowed more than $1.9 billion into last year’s election cycle, a dramatic increase from the prior record of $1 billion in 2020.
Though it occasionally happens, the super-rich, pretty well all male, don’t contribute money to the left side of politics. There is an Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution, but it’s a sick joke, and I’m very doubtful about that $1.9 billion figure – surely it’s far more than that. And although it hasn’t been so prominent lately, the ‘project 2025’ agenda includes an assault on women’s rights and freedoms in that beleaguered country, including a nationwide ban on abortion care, with the further threat of banning all forms of birth control and fertility treatment such as IVF. It also plans to prosecute health professionals who engage in abortion care, and to largely curtail the Affordable Care Act, which would disproportionately disadvantage women in a number of ways.
Of course Trump, who is now clearly the dictator of that country, is less concerned with project 2025 than with prosecuting anyone who has slighted him, and with cashing in on his dictatorship, but his fellow-travellers are mostly of the macho-fascist type, so the assault on women’s rights, freedoms and empowerment will continue, perhaps into Trump’s third term. All we seem to be able to cling to is the long arc bending towards justice that Martin Luther King evoked.
I suppose it will all end by our discovering how smart we are, as opposed to how smart we think we are….
And then maybe bonobos will survive us, and evolve…
References
The USA’s political system is not normal
Andrew Weissmann, the well-known US lawyer, legal expert and, I believe, MSNBC politico-legal commentator, has presented a talk from his home called ‘Reality Check’. My purpose here isn’t to respond in detail to his critique of the current US situation, but to return to and elaborate upon some of my own critiques of the USA’s social and political systems.
First, the Presidential system, which is way too much like a monarchical system, albeit elected. Weissmann has emphasised, as I have, channelling Benjamin Franklin, that politicians are our servants. If Trump had ever been made to accept that this really was the case, he would never have run for President, or for any political office. When Trump first started making noises about running for President, about a decade ago, many prominent Republicans spoke out strongly against him, knowing not only of his ignorance, but his passion for self-aggrandisement – effectively his only real passion. So Trump quickly realised that he needed to get ‘the people’ behind him, and was successful enough to ‘win’ the 2016 election, though Hilary Clinton was the actual winner (yes gerrymandering and Electoral College-type systems plague many countries, including my own, and constant reform needs to be advocated). Why did this happen?
It’s complex, but has largely to do with a huge rich-poor divide, much larger than any other WEIRD nation. The poor, many of whom would never bother to vote, in a system they don’t much understand, are generally under-educated, and easily manipulated. The rich, on the other hand, in a system which is all abut money, are happy to donate to a fellow flouter of the tax system. Most WEIRD nations have strict rules about campaign contributions, even the USA, but compliance with those rules is another thing, and while there might be a few law-abiding super-rich people…. haha, I’m joking. Huge amounts of money are shifted during US elections, and money is still flowing swiftly today, into Trump’s coffers.
So that’s how an obvious grifter and ignoramus can get into office today in the US, in a way that couldn’t happen in Australia – to focus on the country I obviously know best, but which I think is similar enough to other English-speaking Westminster-based nations (Britain, Canada and New Zealand) to be representative. It couldn’t happen here because we don’t have a Presidential system. We have a party-based system in which the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) is voted to that position by the elected members of her or his own party, and can be voted out at any time by same. This doesn’t have to be disastrous because we vote for parties and policies, not individuals. Nor do we give our Prime Minister any pardoning powers, or any immunity. We do have a pardoning system, rarely used, which is ultimately in the hands of the federal Attorney-General, usually on the advice of the High Court, the highest court in the land. The monarch in Britain has a similar rarely-used pardoning power, which is only granted on the advice of the government of the day. The contrast with the US President’s freewheeling powers is too horrendous to dwell upon. To mention some others – the Presidential candidate gets to choose her or his running mate, who, if she becomes Vice President, will become the leader of the nation if the Prez becomes incapacitated, or is bumped off, without ever having been personally elected to the position.
And that’s just the beginning. The President gets to select a whole squadron of unelected people to positions of great power and responsibility – positions that, under a party-based system, would be taken up by individuals elected by their local constituents. And this same President gets to stay far from the madding crowd in a White Palace surrounded by courtiers, while our Prime Minister sits in the parliament with her fellow ministers and MPs, defending their government’s policies against the opposition’s jibes and critiques. Moreover, most WEIRD countries have a multi-party system, in which a variety of views and approaches to government can be aired and debated. This can make decision-making more cumbersome, but also more nuanced, as a wider variety of the people’s views are taken into account. Government can be a little more participatory, whereas I would argue that there is no government less participatory, in the WEIRD world, than that of the USA.
Moreover the USA is the most divided nation in the WEIRD world. It may be united in its jingoism, but that’s about it. I’ve mentioned the huge rich-poor divide, and this is exacerbated by that nation’s having, by a long, long way, the highest per capita incarceration rate of any WEIRD nation, and the lowest minimum wage, federally. It also has the lowest federal spending on education, health and welfare. All of this hurts people, especially the poor. You could say that the country is united by all these failings. I certainly can’t think of any other way that it is united.
So Weissmann is worried about the current US political situation becoming normalised, but my view, on learning about the US socio-political system, in place more or less since its inception, is that Trump’s accession to the ‘throne’ is largely the result of the normalisation of that seriously, almost fatally flawed system. In other words the problem is much deeper than Weissmann realises, or seems prepared to admit.
Jingoism, as mentioned, is a big problem in the USA. One can be nationalistic, or patriotic, to use the term preferred by Timothy Snyder, while recognising that all political systems need to be open to reform, as society evolves. But the USA’s system has congealed into a highly combative two-party contest, as if they’re rival football players and their fans. One gets the impression that most of the ‘fans’ have little idea of their party’s policies, as long as they win the game. And any criticism from outside, I’ve learned to my bemusement, meets with a torrent of invective and jingoistic claptrap – and it’s really hard to know whether this is a superiority complex or the opposite.
The advent of Trump, however, and the lack of proper checks and balances within the US federal system, has raised serious international concerns. Trump is an extremely lazy, ignorant and noisy man who is drawn to other big boss figures on the world stage. He’s keen on making big, momentous, much talked-about decisions in which he’s seen as a winner, and damn the details (and the effect upon the losers). I can’t help but feel that Tom Phillips had Trump in mind, when, in his 2017 book Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, he described the attitude toward leadership, and work, of the world’s most notorious mass-murderer:
… it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. In fact, this may have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies…
Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency – they just failed to realise that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich wrote later in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, ‘In the 12 years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilised state’.
His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea of what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans.
There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really really bad at being in charge of stuff… But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.
Tom Phillips, Humans… pp 129 -132
This is Trump to a T – (okay, replacing the obsessive anti-semitism with a more generalised bigotry). In his previous outing as Prez there was much bemused reporting about his ‘down-time’ and his ‘passion’ for playing golf… You just don’t get that kind of ‘leadership’ from someone who has come up through the party ranks via a proven ability to work for her constituents, to bring people together, to effectively articulate and institute policies. As I’ve written before, if there was an effective vetting system for candidates, a system Trump has never been subjected to, he would never have been hired to manage a public toilet, never mind a nation. Nevertheless the US system allows this. They even boast that any of their citizens can become President. But that’s definitely not what you want, and it’s nothing to boast about.
References
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017
Tom Phillips, Humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up, 2017
super-punishment in the usa, and other dismal stuff
ok this graph is from just over a decade ago, but things haven’t changed much
I’ve written, I think, that I’ve decided to give the USA a rest, after the latest federal election there, for the sake of my sanity if nothing else. And I have to say I feel better for having made that decision. I live far from that country after all, and nothing much that happens there is going to affect me directly. But one of the books I’m currently reading, Humankind: a hopeful history, by Rutger Bregman, a ridiculously young Dutch author (writing as a quintessentially ageless old man) and, I would say, sociologist, has prompted me to reflect on the issue of crime and punishment, not just from a US perspective, but from the starting point of the ‘broken windows’ thesis that originated in that broken country.
Put most simply, the broken windows concept suggests that if you don’t do something about a broken window in a building, pretty soon you’ll get more of them until the building’s a right mess. That’s to say, you need to bring the original breaker to justice, even if it was accidental. And here’s the Wikipedia definition:
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes, such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking and fare evasion, help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
The first thing to note about this ‘theory’ is that it would obviously appeal to micro-managing types and blame merchants everywhere. It would encourage the police to harass loiterers and ‘suspicious-looking characters’ wherever they find them, and has even created a system where the police are given brownie points for numbers of arrests. And surprise, surprise, the theory was developed in the US, with its private prisons, high incarceration rates, death penalties and super-long prison sentences – and Bregman effectively counters the crime policies based on this theory with the approach in Scandinavian and other European countries, with their much lower crime and incarceration rates.
One obvious point to be made is that a broken window isn’t a crime, ipso facto, and it could have any one of a multiplicity of causes, as could a crime. So to look at these matters from a punitive perspective, right off the bat, might just be counter-productive. I won’t go into the ‘no free will’ argument again here, but to look at people’s circumstances from a more humane perspective would be of assistance, to put it mildly. When you come across a rabid, vicious dog who seems prevented from tearing your throat out only by a strong mesh fence, it seems reasonable to assume that she wasn’t brought up in a happy, playful, loving environment among other pets and humans. And you wouldn’t expect that dog’s behaviour to be improved by spending the rest of her days in solitary confinement in a black hole.
But of course the broken windows approach isn’t about improving that dog’s behaviour, or that of a ‘criminal’. It’s about improving the environment by removing these nasties from it. And the more ‘improved’ you want your environment to be, the more rules you will need to create, the more violations you will have to find, to make it so. That might just require more trained and toughened people to enforce the rules. A police state, no less.
Okay, so the USA is a diverse country and it would be unwise to generalise. Nevertheless, let me make some general points. The USA has the lowest minimum wage of any developed country, while Australia, where I live, has one of the highest (it’s true that individual US states can offer higher wages, but many of them don’t). It also has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any democratic nation, by a long way. Could these two factoids be connected?
There are also other negative indices. The USA has, by far, the highest wealth inequality of any OECD country. It has the highest rate of executions of any democracy. It is also the only country in the OECD that doesn’t have universal healthcare, though its average expenditure on healthcare is higher that that of other OECD countries – with poorer outcomes. That’s according to The Commonwealth Fund, which, in its 2023 analysis, referenced below, made these points:
- The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.
- The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.
- Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population.
Much of this has to do, I suspect, with the USA’s championing of ‘the individual’. Spin-offs of that ideology include extreme selfishness, which helps explain the rich-poor divide, an ‘I can do whatever I want’ mentality, which helps explain obesity, and ‘I alone can fix it’ thinking, which results in not seeking medical help, with lack of demand leading to lack of supply.
And it seems to me that most United Staters don’t recognise these problems, I think largely due to insularity and jingoism. To give a personal anecdote about the jingoism, I used to leave comments on some US political videos, and I had a a thought of referring to the people of the US as ‘United Staters’, because it occurred to me, reasonably enough, that ‘America’ referred to a double continent and surrounding islands, with a population of over a billion. It was Wikipedia, in fact, that suggested United Staters as a perhaps more accurate term of reference. But on my first (and, I think only) comment using the term, I was hit by a response so abusive that it was very soon wiped, presumably by site monitors. Other times, in commenting on some scientific issue, I would receive a response laden with US jingoism, which had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Surely nobody of any other nationality does this! It’s quite creepy.
Anyway, returning to the USA’s adoption of the ‘broken windows’ paradigm, there has been blow-back, and some states are recognising the effectiveness of very different approaches, particularly in Europe. In Humankind, a revelatory work about the power of positive community, Bregman describes a couple of prisons in Norway, maximum-security Halden, and Bastoy, an island-based facility, and it’s worth quoting:
The inmates of Halden prison each have a room of their own. With underfloor heating. A flatscreen TV. A private bathroom. There are kitchens where the inmates can cook, with porcelain plates and stainless steel knives. Halden also has a library, a climbing wall and a fully equipped music studio, where the inmates can record their own records. Albums are issued under their own label, called – no joke – Criminal Records. To date, three of the inmates have been contestants on Norwegian Idol, and the first musical is in the works.
On the island [of Bastoy, a ‘softer prison’], there’s all kinds of things to do. There’s a cinema, a tanning bed, and two ski slopes. Several of the inmates got together and formed a group called the Bastoy Blues Band, which actually scored a spot opening for legendary Texas rockers ZZ Top. The island also has a church, a grocery store and a library.
Rutger Bregman, Human kind, pp 328-9
The island prisoners do engage in community work, ploughing and planting, chopping wood and making furniture, using such lethal tools as chainsaws. The prison guards, a high proportion of whom are women, are trained in ‘dynamic security’, designed to prepare inmates for a return to the ‘normal life’ that the prison itself seeks to emulate. The effectiveness of such a system is proven by Norway’s recidivism rate, the lowest in the world. ‘In the US, 60% of inmates are back in the slammer after two years, compared to 20% in Norway [and 16% in Bastoy]’, writes Bregman.
Wikipedia cites the World Prison Brief’s incarceration data, which tells us that the USA’s per capita incarceration rate is ten times that of Norway – and three times that of Australia (where the incarceration rate has long been a matter of concern).
So why does the USA, which so indefatigably touts itself as the world’s greatest democracy, and then some, have such a shocking record in this field? It seems to be connected to its obsession with individualism, and associated praise and blame. ‘Self-made’ individuals are idolised, while the ‘left behind’ are blamed for their plight. No doubt that’s overly simplistic, but it contains more than a grain of truth, methinks. Thankfully there are smart United Staters, such as Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, who have exposed the mythology of free will for what it is, for those willing to listen.
So let me end this post on a slightly more upbeat note. Bregman, always looking for silver linings, describes the impact of a visit to those Norwegian prisons by North Dakota’s top prison officials in 2015. North Dakota is a conservative, sparsely populated state with an incarceration rate many times greater than that of Norway. The state’s head of the Department of Corrections was brought to tears by the experience, and came to the stark realisation that the broken windows strategy was fatally flawed, and that ‘the implementation of humanity’ was key. Since then, prison officials from six other US states have visited Norway – and things are beginning to change (that’s as of 2020, when Bregman’s book was published). It’s a small beginning, but figures on incarceration rates, dating to as recently as 2024, make it clear that implementing humanity within the USA’s legal and correctional system has a long way to go.
References
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: a hopeful history, 2020
Global Inequality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
US politics, a view from 2019
Here’s a video I made in October 2019 about Trump and US politics. It’s a bit rough and ‘amateur hour’, but it made a few valid points, methinks. I’m thinking about doing a bit more on the video side of things…
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
US democracy: another problem
Please Be Sensible, and fund public broadcasting properly
Jacinta: So we’ve long been wondering why things are so bad in the USA, why so many people believe such rubbish, and even act on it, to the detriment, it seems, of their democratic system. We’ve talked about their jingoism and their religiosity, but there’s so much more to it. For example, there’s a movement of the religious Right, the supposedly Christian Right, which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the supposed teachings of Jesus…
Canto: Or his example, since he clearly wasn’t much of a family man. Actually much of Jesus’s behaviour and speakings were contradictory, certainly nothing you could build a coherent moral framework from.
Jacinta: Yes the Christian Right is all about ‘old-fashioned family values’, men who are men, women who know their place, the corruption that is homosexuality, feminism and the pro-abortion crowd. And this stuff is prevalent in Australia too, but with nowhere near the force and noise. And the same goes for the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, the libertarian, anti-government breast-beating and so forth. In the USA it has threatened, very seriously, to bring down their democracy, which is clearly still under serious threat. But something I heard today on the SGU podcast (The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe episode 875) has helped me understand why so many United Staters are so loopy. Their public media outlets – as opposed to private media – have nothing like the presence that Australia’s ABC and Britain’s BBC have. Kara Santamaria, the SGU’s resident (but not token) female, presented research on this. Government-funded media (not of the Putinland or CCP kind of course) can be seen as ‘funding democracy’. The research comes from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, presented in a paper called ‘Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries’. It’s behind a paywall, but the link is below, for anyone who ever reads this, haha. I’m basing my comments on an article about the research, published on the Annenberg website – and on Santamaria’s commentary.
Canto: My turn. From the abstract of the research article we get this conclusion:
Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.
In terms of its public media funding, [the USA] is almost literally off the chart for how little it allocates towards its public media compared to other democracies around the planet. It comes out to .002 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At $465 million dollars, 2020 federal funding of U.S. public media amounted to just $1.40 per capita. Meanwhile, countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden spend close to $100 or more per capita toward their public media.
Since the market is no longer supporting the level of news media — especially local journalism — that democracy requires, there is arguably now an even stronger case to make that public media needs to step into the vacuum to address the widening news gaps as the commercial newspaper industry continues to wither away. News deserts are expanding across the country and around the world. This should be public media’s moment – an opportunity to revisit its core purpose and assess how it should operate within a democratic society and within an increasingly digital media system. Ideally, we would both restructure and democratize our public media system as we expand this critical infrastructure.
References
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/public-media-can-improve-our-flawed-democracy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612211060255
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index