CAPTAIN'S BLOG
We Hope To Live Long Enough To See Our Heros DieSo I got into an argument with my favourite teacher from my second stint in college a few weeks ago. Among other things, his main point seems to be that trans people are being excessively authoritative by demanding that our rights be respected. They also think TERF is a slur. Hilarious! It's all pretty self explanatory, and his logical inconsistencies are demonstrated quite well I think. Let me know what you think. To view these pictures in an Imgur album, click here.
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An Ex-Conservative's Take On The Invalid Rational and Logical Basis of Modern Conservatism3/19/2017 In a word: Modern American Conservatism is garbage. It is an embarrassment to the political process, constantly betrays the principles it is thought to uphold, is fueled by ignorance, isolationism, paranoia, the worst parts of religion, and willful ignorance. I say this having grown up as a young Conservative in a relatively Conservative household. I appreciate some of the basic facts of Conservatism - an efficient government, a government generally uninvolved in the day to day lives of the people, and an economic system based upon Capitalism and a free market. The values espoused by those who claim to have read Atlas Shrugged seem flipped on their heads: I see wealthy cronies using their power and social influence to get people to do things that doesn't help anyone but themselves, going for zero-sum games when mutually-beneficial ones exist. My Conservatism died with the invention of fact checking via The Internet. To wit, I reject the notion that Wikipedia is an automatically invalid and biased source, and besides, I check my citations. First, we'll start with the basics. First off, I believe in small government too. A small government does not care which bathroom I use. A small government does not care if a woman has an abortion. A small government does not prevent scientists from reporting their discoveries A small government does not prevent scientific research for moral reasons A small government does not invest more in their military than any other nation. A small government does not care about my gender, or the gender of who I marry. A small government does not imprison people for behaviour like drug use or prostitution. A small government does not care if felons can vote. A small government does not imprison more people than any other nation in the world. A small government does not gerrymander districts. I also believe in an individual's right to be free. The pursuit of happiness. You are not free if you are one missed day of work away from losing your home. You are not free if you are one unplanned pregnancy away from losing your home or job. You are not free if you are unable to get a job because where you live, no one hardly ever sees a person of colour, or a queer person. You are not free if someone's irrational beliefs, religious or not, can curb your rights. You are not free if you are not making a Living Wage. You are not free if you have no time or energy to live your life. You are not free if you struggle to maintain employment because of your brain. You are not free if you struggle to maintain employment. I also believe in an efficiently run, not-wasteful government. It is more efficient and costs less to provide people with publicly funded healthcare. It is more efficient and costs less to provide people with education for free. It is more efficient and costs less to tax progressively - the more you earn, the larger percent you pay. It is more efficient and costs less to spend our money on science and technology than on war and defence. It is more efficient and costs less to reduce our CO2 emissions now rather than later. It is more efficient and costs less to leave LGBTQ people alone. It is more efficient and costs less to not punish drug use. It is more efficient and costs less to rehabilitate than to imprison. It is more efficient and costs less to provide Universal Basic Income than to provide Welfare and Employment Insurance. What Is Conservatism? How is it opposed to Liberalism?I asked my Father, the key conservative in my politically formative years, this question often.
Eventually we came to a foundational dichotomy that made some sense to me: Conservatism is about the preservation of the a culture and state as it currently is. Liberalism is about changing that culture and state to fit some new ideal. Both entail enforcement of some sort of moral principle - either it is morally right to prevent progress at the expense of the oppressed or it is morally right to expedite progress at the expense of the oppressors. A visual representation of these concepts (with much more detail) is available from the great Information Is Beautiful, in their piece "Left Vs Right". The joke when I was younger was that Liberals are wont to impulsively go for all of the things that they want without adequately considering the financial or moral or otherwise unexpected consequences. This has, indeed, become the joke of the Modern Conservative Movement - both in practice, and in their impressive ability to project their own prejudices and biases onto their political opponents with a blindness that takes one's breath away. The idea that Liberals are the ones who have their head in the clouds of dangerously wishful thinking while Conservatives stick to the practical and the "stick to what you know" and "common sense" thinking paradigms became hilarious the moment Trump was elected President - but it's funny for a while before that. He is the master of lying like an 8 year old - the narcissistic ideal of being right, and a grim reminder in how illusory free will can be to the truly malfunctioning. The simple fact of the matter is that we have reached the extent of what common sense can do for us. The very big and the very small and the very interconnected all behave in ways that do not make common sense. We've also been crippled by Conservatism's constant undermining of education - including the very foundations of public education as established by an old fashioned, heavily-capitalist society. Read On for more reflections on the failures of Modern Conservatism. We start with the rather bleak history of Conservatism, from the rejection of Climate Science to the rejection of the American Revolution. As some of you may know, CBS recently changed their rules for transwomen who donated blood.
I've previously been denied access to blood donation because of my trans identity, even though I only had one sexual partner at the time. Because - and despite of - the fact that she was a post-op transfemale, they still considered our relationship "Male on Male" and thus denied me access to donation services, as male on male sex is at high risk for transmission of HIV, and the transfemale population apparently has a higher than average HIV infection rate. These sound legitimate reasons to change the way we handle transwomen who want to donate blood, but certainly not at all in the way that CBS has done lately, which appears to be searching for irrelevant information to care about. Now, transpeople are evaluated based on their surgery status, and are once again placed into "Male on Male" or "Male on Female" boxes based on their sexual organs. This reliance on gendered terms, for one thing, is inherently offensive because it is so misleading. The blood donation community should not be so afraid of asking someone if they receive or give unprotected or protected anal sex, vaginal sex, non-penetrative sex, or whatever. I am not certain of the medical veracity of relying on anal sex to be a predictor of HIV - vaginas transmit HIV at about the same likelihood as assholes do. It doesn't make any sense to have unprotected vaginal sex instead of anal sex in an effort to prevent the transmission of HIV. It also doesn't make sense to differentiate between people who have anal sex and those who don't. I'm also very disappointed that the CBS is sticking with their argument that /because/ transwomen are at high risk for HIV they need to be treated fundamentally differently. We are extremely good at detecting infections in harvested blood, so frankly I just don't think the level of concern is entirely worthwhile. All incoming blood must be screened. All outgoing blood also needs to be screened before it's given to anyone. Maybe we should run tests again once it's been in storage for a bit. Given that we test the blood so often, filtering out large numbers of people who seem like they are at risk but aren't - even if 25% of transwomen in Canada have HIV, 75% do not - seems a little unnecessary. At the very least, if we are to deny or restrict transwomen as a class of people from donating blood, it shouldn't have anything to do with our surgical status. Sexual history is a relevant predictor for people with infections, so denying us based on that is allright - but now we're denying 'some person' from donating blood because of their sexual history, not because of their surgical status. These new rules are an embarrassment to Canadian Blood Services, and to Canadians as a whole. We are proud of our inclusiveness and secular reasoning, and the world has recognized us for our friendliness, understanding, and willingness to accommodate. We also have a pretty badass military history. And ended slavery without a war. And legalized gay marriage without much fuss. Now all we need to do is figure out what to do with transpeople (hint: listen to what we say instead of making decisions for and without us) and marijuana (hint: Legalize it, including unregulated home growing for personal use.) and we'll deserve a little bit more of the respect so many in the world have for us. My dad sent me this article. Unsurprisingly, I think the article missed the mark. What it calls 'reality', is more like 'various logical fallacies trussed up with transparent political rhetoric'.
Contained below is my response to the article, paying attention to particularly incorrect thinking, reasoning, and conclusion. "socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families." Venezuela is not the US. Venezuela has a history of political dysfunction (which is a future the US seems to be sprinting towards - political dysfunction which was caused by the US, by the way. And bernie isn't calling for nationalizing anything - so drawing a comparison between a country which has mostly certainly overnationalised its industries to the US and Bernie Sanders who isn't calling for anything of the sort is a clear misrepresentation. There's also no reason to think that Venezuela is an authoritative example of what socialism is like. Venezuela is a mire of corruption, cronyism, and might over right. Sounds like the US - in which case my suggestion would be to get someone who is anti-establishment in office, which Bernie is the only practical candidate. And don't forget that the President is just a president - he can't Socialize the country overnight unilaterally, it has to go through the houses and pass the Supreme Court just like everything else. I'm sure we'll both agree that Hillary is a bad presidential candidate for lots of reasons - in my opinion, her representation of and support for the status quo is something that must be avoided. And Trump is, of course, a know-nothing candidate. He may be antiestablishment - even though a deeper search of his social and political ties proves that be false - but he doesn't value rationalism or the truth, and there is tons of evidence that Bernie does. " whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run." That's communism - not socialism. Socialism is the embracement of the idea that social and economic freedom are a part of the definition of 'freedom'. You aren't really free if you're one paycheck away from losing your house or one doctor's trip away from bankruptcy or if you have almost no vertical economic mobility. "That should certainly reduce capitalist "exploitation," shouldn't it?" Federal exploitation is not what happens when we control the extent and power of corporations. This is a false dichotomy. Power concentrated in the hands of the few is dangerous, whether it's in the government or a corporation or a cartel of corporations. "But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts -- such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries." That's only true if you cherry pick your results - the easiest is example is in the years after The New Deal but before Supply-Side Economics. The wealthyand the middle and lower classes had their wages increasing faster than inflation and faster than the cost of living. This is why all those people were able to afford to go to school and buy houses and travel and buy expensive new things - all without credit. Their dollars were literally worth more. Supply Side economics fucked all that up - the systems that encouraged reinvestment and raises for workers - largely to avoid taxation, like Brian did at Storm Smart - were removed. Low taxes on corporations means that it's more cost efficient to take money out of the market instead of reinvesting in the market and most importantly, in increased wages for workers. When workers have more money they can buy more things which allows more companies to pay more and whaddaya know - everyone's rising with the tide. The reference to Karl Marx here is as much a red herring as it is a strawman - no one is talking about Marxism. The idea is simply to encourage reinvestment instead of stockpiling. Our current market encourages stockpiling, which is resulting in a small number of rich people while everyone else gets very little. "Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated." Not at all like the constant references to ideas that no one is seriously suggesting with inflammatory and misleading language about the evidence that is available for the various economic models out there. Supply side economics is clearly the loser here - unless you're that 1% + politicians that benefits from it. Scientifically speaking, supply economics is a bust, bigtime. It results in a great deal of income inequality, and income inequality is bad for the stability of a society. The French Revolutions occurred because there the poor were expected to pay for all government expenses, while the wealthy ended up paying nothing. It's simply not economically sustainable. "When Senator Sanders cries, "The system is rigged!" no one asks, "Just what specifically does that mean?" or "What facts do you have to back that up?"" No, actually, lots of people have been asking those questions, and those questions have been answered quite well. Obviously the political system is rigged - how anyone could dispute that, I can't say. The US political system is obviously at the beck and call of money and the corporations that control that money. Can that realistically be disputed by anyone? I thought the Conservatives hated big government - isn't government colluding with corporations a problem? "The system is rigged" meaning, 1. System: an entity that is constrained by processes and laws, 2. a rigged system, an entity that is constrained by process whose outcome is determined or disproportionately influenced by an interested party. The facts are there because they're not hidden from anyone - it is open knowledge that the US system is based around money, not freedom of speech or ideas. If Bernie Sanders can't become president, it's because he didn't promise himself to the right people, and that's a problem. "In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that." That is hilarious 'evidence' - they are still a part of a fluctuating economic system and it does still take risk to make money. Also, that's in the world - a large portion of those people aren't from the US, but are from countries with wealthy oil-baron type families. There's also a few from Mexico, interestingly. And losing 19 billion spread out over all 400 people isn't a lot of money lost, especially since the net worth of these people is 81 billion. So each of them lost a few hundred million dollars if divided evenly between them all. Musta been tough to make ends meet. "But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for pure capitalism and for other "bright" ideas of the political right." Fixed that line for him :) "How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? " Scientifically speaking, when the minimum wage increases more money is available to the local economy which allows more people to spend more money which adds money to the economy. The idea that people get fired when that happens is a myth, except for the exploitative part where it's cheaper to have 4 part-time employees than it is to have 3 full-time employees. Sure, one person loses a job, but since there's more money in the local economy, he is much more likely to be able to get a full time job than he was if the money in the local economy stayed the same. So in the very short term things are tougher, but things rapidly relax and expand after some time. "the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent." That probably has much more to do with the number of black people the US puts in prison, thus preventing them from getting work. Also, the 70's to 90''s was when Supply Side Economics was at it's height - given that raised unemployment is a hallmark of income inequality and Supply Side Economics, it makes much more sense to associate the unemployment rate with that, rather than the minimum wage, which study after study has shown improves the employment rate, but only when the rest of the economy is healthy and hiring, and since hiring and training is an expense, it tends to be restricted when Supply Side Economics are in force. Also, it's strange to only report black unemployment rates - it's all too easy for good old fashioned racism to skew that result, especially in the 70's and 80's. "Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can't move up the ladder if you don't get on the ladder." But that's the problem right there: Most minimum wage jobs aren't being occupied by young people, but by middle-aged and middle-class people. And there isextremely low economic mobility - as I am all too familiar, there simply isn't enough money to give employees raises or to add or promote them from within. It's just like my first job - and almost every job I've had since - in Florida told me: "There are no raises, there are no promotions." There are no better jobs. They are already taken, and because the economy isn't expanding because it's too easy to take money out of the economy, there aren't very many new 'better' jobs being made available. There aren't any companies taking risks and hiring less-experienced people who might turn out to be a bright spark because there just isn't enough money available to do that. "The great promise of socialism is something for nothing." That's what Conservatives certainly think, but in fact it is just a scientific understanding of the way money influences behaviour and decisions. The money comes from somewhere - duh. It should come from the people who can most easily afford it, as the French were brave enough to recognize, becoming the inspiration for the establishment of the US. "It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should -- and will -- be paid by raising taxes on "the rich."" Gah, people getting educated and thinking they know better than people who haven't gone to college! Obviously their knowledge is inferior to mine, because everyone knows that facts and the real world has a liberal bias! Don't trust people who go to school for a long time to learn intimately how things work and how the pieces that make up those things works. "Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates." As usual, those are not only not all the facts, but a misrepresentation of the actual facts. It's not automatic, but it is almost always the case. When it is isn't, that is an indication of a corrupt tax system with too many exploitable loopholes, and the wealthy's ability to invest their money in things like tax havens and other things that the poor can't afford and in some cases don't even know about. The poor and middle class can't pay all the taxes simply because we don't make enough money to pay for everything, especially when our income has remained flat for the last 40 years. "In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas." Sure, but that's only a tiny part of the equation - most people don't want to leave the country they live in, and it is expensive, financially and socially, to leave the US for another country with lower taxes. So in other words, higher tax rates does not automatically result in lower taxes - it depends on the interoperating systems and the rules that govern them - with the irrational economic actor doing a lot of work, influenced by the system they live within they are. "None of this is rocket science." Rocket Science is a good deal easier than economics, because people don't behave perfectly within a narrow range of behaviours. There is no law of human interaction or of economics - our economics will have to grow, change, and adapt while we do. At the moment, financial inequality is a problem in many places in the world. Bernie Sanders seems like the most likely candidate to fix such things - and comparing him or his ideas to Marxism in any serious way is to utterly misrepresent reality. But, without doing that, Conservatives haven't a single evidencial leg to stand on, and that really seems to generate a lot of heat while they lie to themselves and the public about the reality of the world and of how the people within it behave. |
AuthorChristina Hitchens is a trans female writer living in BC, Canada. She loves computers, animals, and a good argument. Archives
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