Russell's Ten Commandments of Liberalism and Critical Thinking

Bertrand Russell wrote the following article for The New York Times on 16 December 1951. Russell received $90 for this submission, much less than the $250 he usually received. The article was reprinted in slightly different and edited forms in several newspapers. His writing reflected a response to a Cold War climate that had spawned a corrosive conformity. It is not unfair to point out that Russell blamed much of this defect on American politics. One editorial response to this article claimed it was "shocking" for Russell to compare "official suffocation of all free thought with the random results of a free society reacting to the shock of facing a bitter truth after years of self-deceit."

It's not easy to find the full article so I've reproduced it here. It's really worth the time to read it and surreal how much it applies to today's Trump-led world. American politics has not improved upon itself in the 69 years since this piece was published. Some could argue it's much worse.  

The Best Answer to Fanaticism – Liberalism

The more I see of other countries the more persuaded I become that the English are a very odd people. Their virtues are due to their vices, and their vices to their virtues. They are tolerant – more so I think than any other large nation – because they consider ideas unimportant. In other countries ideas are thought important and therefore dangerous; in England ideas are thought negligible and therefore not worth persecuting.

This was not always the case. In the seventeenth century, England had a spate of ideologies leading to civil wars and executions and thumb-screws, but in 1688 the country decided that it had had enough of earnestness and that anybody who believed anything at all fervently was no gentleman. This decision was made all the easier by the fact that the most fanatical fanatics had gone to America. Ever since, Englishmen who have beliefs are treated as licensed buffoons or court jesters. There are no civil wars and nobody’s head is cut off. This is convenient, but one sometimes feels that a little persecution would be a more sincere compliment.

        There is, in the present day, a very general decay of liberalism even in countries where there has been an increase of democracy. Liberalism is not so much a creed as a disposition. It is opposed to creeds. It began in the late 17^th century as a reaction from the futile wars of religion which, though they killed immense numbers of people, left the balance of power unchanged.

The great apostle of liberalism was Locke, who dislike both Roundheads and Cavaliers, and thought the important thing was to learn to live at peace with one's neighbor, even if, there were matters about which one did not agree with him. Locke based this attitude of live-and-let-live on the fallibility of all human opinion. He thought nothing in dubitable. He held that everything is open to question. He maintained that there is only probable opinion, and that the person who feels no doubt is stupid. Such an outlook, we are now assured, is a great drawback in battle, and is therefore to be decried. But the English, while they held this attitude, acquired their Empire, defeated the French and the Spaniards, and were only defeated by the Americans, who had the same attitude in an even more marked degree.

Those happy days are past. Nowadays, the man who has any doubt whatever is despised; in many countries he is put in prison, and in America he is thought unfit to perform any public function. What you are to be sure of depends, of course, upon your longitude. In Europe, east of the Elbe, it is absolutely certain that capitalism is tottering; west of the Elbe, it is absolutely certain that capitalism is the salvation of mankind. The good citizen is not the man who attempts to be guided by the evidence, but the man who never resists longitudinal inspiration.

America, which imagines itself the land of free enterprise, will not permit free enterprise in the world of ideas. In America, almost as much as in Russia, you must think what your neighbor thinks, or rather what your neighbor thinks that it pays to think. Free enterprise is confined to the material sphere. This is what Americans mean when they say that they are opposed to materialism.

Those to whom free use of the intelligence has made intellectual submission difficult find themselves, wherever the government is persecuting, led into opposition to authority. But the liberal attitude does not say that you should oppose authority. It says only that you should be free to oppose authority, which is quite a different thing. The essence of the liberal outlook in the intellectual sphere is a belief that unbiased discussion is a useful thing, and that men should be free to question anything if they can support their questioning by solid arguments. The opposite view, which is maintained by those who cannot be called liberals, is that the truth is already known, and that to question it is necessarily subversive. The purpose of mental activity, according to these men, is not to discover truth, but to strengthen belief in truths already known. In a word, its purpose in this view is edification, not knowledge. The liberal objection to this view is that throughout past history, received opinions have been such as everyone now admits to have been both false and harmful, and that it is scarcely likely that the world has completely changed in this respect. It is not necessary to the liberal outlook to maintain that discussion will always lead to the prevalence of the better opinion. What is necessary is to maintain that absence of discussion will usually lead to the prevalence of the worse opinion. At the present time, persecution of opinion is practised in all parts of the world, except western Europe, and the consequence is that the world is divided into two halves, which cannot understand each other and which find only hostile relations possible.

There is, of course, a case to be made for edification as opposed to truth, Edification, that is to say the bolstering up by specious arguments of the opinions held by the police, tends to preserve a stable society. It militates against anarchy and gives security to the incomes of the rich. When successful, it prevents revolution, and ensures that kings and presidents will be welcomed by cheering crowds whenever they show themselves to their subjects. When, on the other hand, pure reason is allowed to intrude into political speculation, the result may be to let loose such a flood of anarchic passion that all orderly government becomes impossible. It is this fear which inspires conservative and authoritarians. No one can deny that philosophers in eighteenth-century France prepared the way for the guillotine. No one can deny that philosophers in nineteenth-century Russia undermined the traditional reverence for the Czar. No one can deny that under Western influence Chinese philosophers weakened the authority of Confucius.

          I will not attempt to maintain that thinking has never had any bad effects, but where it has had such effects it has been because its lessons have been only half learned. The teacher who urges doctrines subversive of existing authority does not, if he is liberal, advocate the establishment of a new authority even more tyrannical than the old. He advocates certain limits to the exercise of authority, and he wishes these limits to be observed not only when the authority would support a creed with which he disagrees, but also when it would support one with which he is in complete agreement. I am, for the my part, a believer in democracy, but I do not like a regime which makes belief in democracy compulsory.

In favor of freedom of discussion there are several arguments. There is first the argument that it tends to promote true belief, and that true belief as a rule is more socially useful than false belief. There is next the argument that where freedom of discussion is curbed, it is curbed by those who hold power, and is practically certain to be curbed in their interest.

The result almost inevitably is to promote injustice and oppression. There is lastly the argument that injustice and oppression imposed by a dominant caste lead sooner or later to violent revolution, and that violent revolution is apt to issue either in anarchy or in a new tyranny worse than that which has been overthrown.

          There have been ages and nations in which an urbane orthodoxy has succeeded, without ostensible persecution, in establishing an almost unquestioned intellectual authority. The supreme example of this is traditional China. All wisdom was contained in the Confucian books. A considerable amount of education was required in order to understand these books. The men who had this education controlled the government, and the result was a system which was civilized, in a sense enlightened, and fairly stable for about 2,000 years. There was, however, nothing in the Confucian books about warships or artillery or high explosives, and therefore as soon as China came into conflict with the West, the whole Confucian synthesis was seen to be inadequate. A similar fate must overtake any static culture, however excellent in itself. Some fifty years ago (the matter is quite different now) there was a thoroughly Chinese synthesis which was inculcated by those who did “Greats” at Oxford. One learned the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Hegel. Other philosophies were ignored as being “crude”. The result had a considerable aesthetic merit but happened not to be adapted to the modern world. There are those in America who hope to spread a cultured atmosphere through American universities by selecting 100 great books and confining education to them. This again is a static ideal. The best books of the past, at any rate where science is concerned contain less useful knowledge than very inferior textbooks of the present time. And those who have read only the best 100 books will be ignorant of many things that they ought to know. Moreover, vested interests will rapidly cumulate about the best 100 books. Professors will know how to lecture about them, but not about books outside the sacred 100. They will, therefore, use all their intellectual authority to prevent the recognition of new merit. And it will presently happen, as happened, in 19th-century England, that almost all intellectual merit is to be found only outside the universities.

Those who oppose freedom, whether in the political or the intellectual sphere, are men dominated by apprehension of the evil consequences that may result from unbridled human passions. I will not deny that there are such dangers. But I would ask timorous people to remember that safety is impossible to achieve and is ignoble as an aim. Risks must be run, and those who refuse to run risks incur a certainty of much greater disaster sooner or later. It is all very fine to wish to curb human passions, but you cannot curb the passions of those who do the curbing. In imagination of course you see yourself in this position, and you know yourself to be a person of exemplary virtue. This, dear reader, I shall not dispute. But you are not immortal. Other will succeed you in the censor’s office, and they may be less humane and less enlightened than you are. They may build the dykes higher and higher against the flood of new ideas, but however feverishly they may build, their dykes will ultimately prove inadequate, and the higher they have been built, the more terrible will be the flood when the waters overtop them. It is not by such methods that subversive violence is to be prevented. The dangers that frighten authoritarians are real, but no other method of combating them is so effective as freedom.

Perhaps the essence of the liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one, but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking, for, you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument, and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion how accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than, in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

 

1950 Milwaukee 35th and Fond du Lac Ave

Before traffic lights, police directed hectic traffic...

Cars streamed in all directions, and the policeman directing traffic was right in the middle of it. This photograph of the intersection of Fond du Lac Ave. and 35th and Burleigh Streets was taken about 1950. Sonny's Sandwich Shop (white building at top center) stood where Fond du Lac and 35th met. Burleigh is in the foreground. As traffic converged here, flowing in six directions because of three busy main thoroughfares, the policeman with his whistle was a welcome sight. On Dec. 29, 1953, traffic lights went into operation at this intersection. The viewer is looking south on 35th (right) and east on Fond du Lac (left).

Today:

Donald Trump's Greatest Shell Game and The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time

Back when I first started attending university, I lived far enough away I'd hop on the bus to get to class on time. On one ride, there was a guy playing a card game. It looked pretty easy to win: three cards, find the queen. He made it look easy of course. The first couple times, I won. So I bet the money I had - the money I needed to buy food that week - 20 bucks. As you can guess, before I realized what happened, the guy was hopping off the bus with my week's nutrition fund. Naturally it was a rigged game. There was no way he was going to lose and there was every way I was going to.

    Three-card Monte is a variation of a shell game, a short confidence game, con game, played by a confidence man, con man, who earns the dupe's confidence and then scampers off with the dupe's valuables. Losing my money on the bus in a matter of seconds taught me a valuable lesson: a pot of lentil soup can feed a person for a week, there are people trying to take advantage of other people's gullibility, and I am one of the gullible ones. 

    I quickly learned that the perfunctory and most prudent path to follow is to not trust people when they tell you stuff especially if it sounds more promising than could be imagined (i.e. if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is). To put it another way, if you're not the one conniving money from others, you're the one getting swindled.   

    As I've grown older, I've noticed that the pitches look more polished, the methodology shinier, but the message is the same - give us your money, win some crap.

    There are get-rich-quick schemes, pyramid schemes, and Ponzi schemes - named after Charles Ponzi - that are just flat out bilking scams run by smooth talkers like Bernie Madoff. 

    I can kind of understand why people give their money to these scalawags. There's a promise of something better, albeit a completely false one; it still represents a promise. That classic American dream of betterment, you know, the streets-paved-in-gold idea.

    What's this guy offering?

    That's really Donald Trump's, the current President of the United States, website where he's begging for money, I mean, raising money for...well, to be perfectly frank, nothing. That's right, humankind have sent the blowhard in chief over $170 million since he lost the election. It's a classic bilking that makes Trump University pale in comparison.

    His sites include all the bells and whistles to lure in dupes willing to part with their cash. They've got the flashing icons and the slogans, but they're terribly short on promises.

    The fundraising sponsored by Trump is run by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee (“TMAGAC”), which is a joint fundraising committee composed of several participating committees,  Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (“DJTP”), Save America, and the Republican National Committee (“RNC”). 

    All contributions are divided into the sub-categories of participating committees and each contribution is divided differently depending on which committee has been allocated. I can't assume people who are visiting these sites and sending this caitiff cash are inclined to believe that all of their money is going to fight for overturning the election, but if they do think that, they're in for quite a shock.

    Reading the small text provides that at least 50 to 75% of any donation goes to Trump's debts and Trump himself. As Philip Bump reported money raised "in the Save America PAC, unlike money contributed to a standard campaign committee, can be used to benefit Trump in innumerable ways. Memberships at golf clubs. Travel. Rallies. Even payments directly to Trump himself, as long as he declares it as income."

    That's right. If you've contributed to Trump's fundraising since November 3rd, you've given money to a self-proclaimed billionaire for nothing in return, to pay his debts, and to pay him to play golf. 

That leads me to my book choice of the day.

This book excerpt is from Maria Konnikova's The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time. 

The confidence game has existed long before the term itself was first used, likely in 1849, during the trial of William Thompson. The elegant Thompson, according to the New York Herald, would approach passersby on the streets of Manhattan, start up a conversation, and then come forward with a unique request. “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” Faced with such a quixotic question, and one that hinged directly on respectability, many a stranger proceeded to part with his timepiece. And so, the “confidence man” was born: the person who uses others’ trust in him for his own private purposes. Have you confidence in me? What will you give me to prove it? 

Cons come in all guises. Short cons like the infamous three-card monte or shell game: feats of sleight of hand and theatrics still played avidly on the streets of Manhattan. Long cons that take time and ingenuity to build up, from impostor schemes to Ponzis to the building of outright new realities—a new country, a new technology, a new cure—that have found a comfortable home in the world of the Internet, and remain, as well, safely ensconced in their old, offline guises. Many come with fanciful names. Pig in a poke, dating back at least to 1530, when Richard Hill’s “Common-place book” suggested that “When ye proffer the pigge open the poke,” lest what comes out of the bag is not a pig at all. The Spanish Prisoner, called by the New York Times, in 1898, “one of the oldest and most attractive and probably most successful swindles known to the police,” dates back at least to the 1500s. The magic wallet. The gold brick. The green goods. Banco. The big store. The wire. The payoff. The rag. The names are as colorful as they are plentiful. 

The con is the oldest game there is. But it’s also one that is remarkably well suited to the modern age. If anything, the whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. That’s why they flourished during the gold rush and spread with manic fury in the days of westward expansion. That’s why they thrive during revolutions, wars, and political upheavals. Transition is the confidence game’s great ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change. We may cling cautiously to the past, but we also find ourselves open to things that are new and not quite expected. Who’s to say this new way of doing business isn’t the wave of the future? 

In the nineteenth century, we had the industrial revolution, and many present-day scam techniques developed in its wake. Today, we have the technological revolution. And this one, in some ways, is best suited to the con of all. With the Internet, everything is shifting at once, from the most basic things (how we meet people and make meaningful connections) to the diurnal rhythms of our lives (how we shop, how we eat, how we schedule meetings, make dates, plan vacations). Shy away from everything, you’re a technophobe or worse. (You met how? Online? And you’re . . . getting married?) Embrace it too openly, though, and the risks that used to come your way only in certain circumscribed situations—a walk down Canal Street past a three-card monte table, an “investment opportunity” from the man in your club, and so forth—are a constant presence anytime you open your iPad. 

That’s why no amount of technological sophistication or growing scientific knowledge or other markers we like to point to as signs of societal progress will—or can—make cons any less likely. The same schemes that were playing out in the big stores of the Wild West are now being run via your in-box; the same demands that were being made over the wire are hitting your cell phone. A text from a family member. A frantic call from the hospital. A Facebook message from a cousin who seems to have been stranded in a foreign country. When Catch Me If You Can hero Frank Abagnale, who, as a teen, conned his way through most any organization you can imagine, from airlines to hospitals, was recently asked if his escapades could happen in the modern world—a world of technology and seemingly ever-growing sophistication—he laughed. Far, far simpler now, he said. “What I did fifty years ago as a teenage boy is four thousand times easier to do today because of technology. Technology breeds crime. It always has, and always will.”

Konnikova, Maria (2016-01-11T22:58:59). The Confidence Game . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The "S" Word - Socialism in America

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. 

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” 

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself !” 

“I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

-- Lewis Carroll. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Kindle Locations 1019-1023). Random House, Inc.. 

I'm from Milwaukee. The home of beer, meat packing, and socialism. Or as Alice Cooper explained in Wayne's World, "I think one of the most interesting aspects of Milwaukee is the fact that it's the only major American city to have ever elected three socialist mayors."  

    Milwaukee holds a rich and vibrant immigrant past. Germans brought with them the techniques for brewing as well as the ideals of a government supporting the people, not to mention festivals, pilsners and lagers. At one time, when walking in the streets of Milwaukee, you'd have heard more German than English being spoken. Several of the major newspapers were published in German. Buildings retain that German heritage indelibly etched in stone, like the German-English Academy that still boasts 'Turnlehrer Seminar N.A.T.B.' The legacy of a socialism movement in Milwaukee remains in the public transit, Summerfest, and lakefront festivals, and on Jones Island where effluence is transformed into Milorganite for fertilizer, and the liquid refuse is sanitized and returned to Lake Michigan.

   In this pandemic-plagued election season the most common boolean search should be socialism. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made socialism one of the most talked about concepts throughout a good portion of the campaign season. The Right and conservatives demonize and vilify it while Marxists and the Left idealize it.

    The truth is far less sensational. The truth is that socialism and socialist constructs are ubiquitous in America and have been for over a century. The truth is also that fighting for socialism required the no-nonsense duty and commitment that didn't make headlines and didn't bring fame. Victor Berger, the editor and journalist from Milwaukee and the first elected socialist congressman, was denied his seat in D.C. For his dissent against American involvement in World War I, he spent time behind bars. But the people of Milwaukee would not be denied his seat. They re-elected him three times until a judge finally overturned his conviction and he served his term in the nation's capital. As a reward for his hard work, the east coast socialists bestowed the Milwaukee socialist with the vituperative name 'sewer socialists.' 

    Milwaukee politicians and the public embraced the term. Sewer socialism earned its name from the fight in Milwaukee over clean water. Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century was one of the largest cities in America. The population density matched that of Manhattan and it was growing fast. As the population grew, so did the amount of polluted water. Human, animal and industrial waste was transported from the source to the nearest rivers. And the rivers were the source of potable water, which it wasn't. Sickness and illness were rampant. The socialists organized to fight for clean water and clean government. 
    The sewer socialists weren't talking about government takeover of industry like their namesakes on the east coast. Instead, in Milwaukee the socialists won elections by promising and achieving practical change. Along with clean water, they fought corruption in the government; they aimed at creating better lives for the people through public education, parks, libraries, and safer working conditions. This mantle of socialism in Milwaukee thrived until the last socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, decided not to run for a fourth term in 1960. So for about 60 years, socialists held major sway over the running of a major US city.

    Yet for all of that history, there's an awful lot of confusion about just what socialism is and what it is not. 

    It's hard to know what people are talking about when socialism is brought up especially when in many cases the person describing socialism doesn't know what socialism is. Listen to Alabama's newly elected senator Tommy Tuberville's ahistorical explanation that we fought against "socialism and communism as our enemies in WWII." Of course, he botched that entirely. The communists in the Soviet Union were, in fact, US allies fighting against the Nazis and the axis nations. Our common enemy was fascism as introduced by Mussolini and Hitler. It was not socialism. Over the years, socialism and communism have melded together. Is that an accurate conflation? What is socialism? Socialism who, what, are you?  

    William Buckley, Jr. defined socialism when in growing frustration with interlocutor Michael Harrington's repeated denials that the LBJ poverty program was a socialist platform, Buckley blurted out, "Nobody any more thinks of the word socialism as involving purely the ownership of the means of production. Obviously, it's a socialist program; socialistic in the sense that it is financed and governed by a central authority, that it does not encourage private means by which much of the same thing can be done." For Buckley, poverty would better be attacked through private entrepreneurship and government incentives like tax deductions.

    But for the socialists in Milwaukee, poverty could be defeated when the government invested in education, mass transit, clean parks and a clean way of life. They created a Milwaukee that thrived up to and around the two world wars.

    American socialism's apex nestled between the Civil War and the beginning of the Cold War. Nationwide, life for the common worker was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Upton Sinclair's depiction of the meat packing industry in The Jungle spurred vast regulation and oversight. Theodore Roosevelt rode into the White House with the full support of muckraking socialist-leaning journalists and progressives who hoped for a presidency more inclined to "government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection of civil liberties, an end to US imperialism in Latin America, and a national referendum vote before any president could again lead the nation into offensive war."

    Around the country, socialists elected to local office ushered in huge changes to work weeks, workers' rights, safety standards, clean water standards, fire prevention, and myriad public works. It was progressives and socialists who paved the way for the New Deal and it was Eugene Debs' influence on unions and worker organizations that led to OSHA and safety standards.

    Anyone who tells you that publicly funded fire prevention, police protection, national parks, education, sewerage systems, roads and infrastructure, a standing military, libraries, Medicare, Social Security are not socialist systems need only be reminded of Milwaukee's history. 

    In the wealth of available contemporary literature on the subject, there's Michael Newman's very easy reading book simply called Socialism. But it's journalist John Nichols' The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism that narrates the full poignant and compelling story of the people behind the movement that changed America. Milwaukee takes center stage as the experimental city with its socialist vision for anti-corruption and a government that fights for the welfare of the people.  

    Berger, Eugene Debs, Daniel Hoan, Zeidler, Emil Seidel, Norman Thomas share the starring roles. "The Socialists’ most immediate and noteworthy accomplishment...was to root out municipal corruption, much of which came from the brothels in City Hall’s shadow and from the privately-owned streetcar which stopped at its front door. With that task complete, Hoan and Zeidler then set about building public institutions, which continue to improve our lives today."

    Today, regardless of the way Republicans tell it, people really like socialist policies. Take a look at health care, for example. The Kaiser Family Foundation has tracked public opinion on Medicare for many years. Older Medicare recipients are happiest with their coverage. Nearly nine out of 10 people who are 80 years old or older say they're satisfied or very satisfied with Medicare. Only 6% said they're either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. That's compared to 79% of people age 71 to 79, 71% of people 65-70 and 69% of those under 65; satisfaction with private health plans drops to 55%.

    Upon reaching the final pages of Nichols' crucial and essential book, no one should be surprised if a latent desire to implement socialist policies throughout the country suddenly awakens. At a time when health care and public health has been thrust upon the forefront of all our minds, there are those still fighting to overturn the ACA and cast millions into healthcare uncertainty. At a time of widespread infrastructure and education failures, it seems more pressing than ever to initiate a government-backed push to restore and provide for the welfare of the American people. 

    From the Milwaukee experiment, FDR built on the socialist platform and co-opted its ideas and systems. Today, millions of seniors rely on socialist inspired Medicare and Social Security. All Americans can thank socialists for sewers, clean water, city, state, and national parks. The socialist legacy that began as an experiment in Milwaukee, pervades the entire American system.    

Excerpt from The "S" Word, by John Nichols:

    "If we have been led to believe anything by the enthusiastic expressions of our media and political elites, it is the basic premise that America was founded as a capitalist country and that socialism is a dangerous foreign import best barred at the border. The common if not quite wholly accepted “wisdom” holds that everything public is inferior to anything private; that corporations are always good and unions always bad; that progressive taxation is inherently evil and the best economic model is the one that avoids the messiness of equity by allowing the extremely wealthy to skim off their share before letting what remains trickle down to the great mass of Americans. No less a historian than Rush Limbaugh informs us with some regularity that proposals to tax people as rich as he is in order to provide health care for sick kids and jobs for the unemployed are “antithetical to the nation’s founding.” Limbaugh, the loudest voice in an anti–Barack Obama echo chamber, says that the president is “destroying this country as it was founded.” 

    The shrillest of Limbaugh’s flattering imitators, Fox News’s Sean Hannity, charged when Obama offered tepid proposals to organize a private health-care system in a modestly more humane manner, that “the Constitution was shredded, thwarted, the rule of law was passed aside …” Hannity got no argument from his guest on the day he assessed the damage done to the Constitution by those who would care for our own: former speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. “This is a group prepared to fundamentally violate the Constitution,” the former congressional leader (and 2012 Republican presidential contender) said of an Obama administration that he argued was playing to the “30 percent of the country [that] really is [in favor of] a left-wing secular socialist system.” Then, for good measure, Gingrich compared Obama with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—an actual and ardent socialist who, though the former speaker apparently missed the report, had recently referred to the American president as “a poor ignoramus [who] should read and study a little to understand reality”—with a crack about Obama’s previous employment as a constitutional law professor. “Which constitution was he teaching? Venezuelan constitutional law?” opined Gingrich. “I mean, you know, I can’t imagine how he could have actually taught American constitutional law and be this wrong this often.” 

    The former speaker, who swore more than a few oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States…without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion,” surely knows that the document makes no reference to economic systems, to capitalism, to free enterprise or to corporations or business arrangements. Unfortunately, as James Madison warned, partisan excess can cause even former history professors at West Georgia College to lose their bearings. The same can be said for former heads of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at Wasilla High School. 

    Though Sarah Palin famously struggled to name a “favorite founder” when asked to do so by Glenn Beck, and though she made remarks about the role of the vice presidency that provoked a lively national debate about whether she had ever read the nation’s founding document, that did not in the spring of 2009 prevent the former governor of Alaska from raising constitutional concerns about Obama’s proposal to develop a system of “universal building codes” in order to promote energy efficiency. “Our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our country had in mind for us,” a gravely concerned Palin informed a nodding Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel. 

    Hannity had an idea about the direction in which Obama was evolving the country. Arching an eyebrow and leaning forward with all the “I play an anchorman on TV” sincerity of someone who had recently volunteered to be waterboarded for charity, he interrupted Palin with a one-word question.

    “Socialism?” 

    “Well,” the immediate former vice-presidential nominee of the second-oldest political party in the nation responded, “that’s where we are headed.” 

    Actually, it’s not. 

    Palin was wrong about the perils of energy efficiency. And she was wrong about Obama. 

    That is no cover for the 44th president. This book is not written as a defense of Barack Obama against any charge. In fact quite the opposite, as Chapter Seven will detail. What is important for the purposes of introduction is that the president says he is not a socialist. And the country’s most outspoken socialists heartily agree with him on that point. Indeed, the only people who seem to think Obama displays even minimally social-democratic tendencies are those pundits, politicos and pretenders to concern about the republic who imagine—out of sincere if misguided faith, or for the purposes of crude electioneering—that the very mention of the word “socialism” should inspire in Americans a reaction not unlike that of a vampire confronted with the Host.

Nichols, John. The S Word (pp. 4-6). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.   

 

We are told that this is a new age. Yet, all that is new are the gadgets we are sold, and the prospect that those gadgets might put a lot of us out of work. The schemes of fabulously wealthy monopolists to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of us are certainly not new. They are ancient, as ancient as what Eugene Victor Debs described when he recalled “the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself.” That, complained Debs, “was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man.” Just as monopolists and monopolies are not new, neither are the responses to those schemes. It is good and necessary to demand jobs for the unemployed and wages for the underpaid. It is good and necessary to fight to maintain the rough outlines of civil society as defined by public education and public services. There is nothing new about these fights, nothing modern about these demands. They, too, fit in the construct stated by Debs when he explained, “Thousands of years ago the question was asked: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.” Debs was trying to sort that all out in 1908. A century and some years later, we’re still at it. 

    Unfortunately, in a digital age, some responses are less sufficient than they once were. There is even, in specific circumstances, a danger that incremental responses may fit rather too easily into the business plans of the new monopolists—who meet demands for more pay for human beings with schemes to spend a little more on research and development of the apps and robots that replace human beings. It’s a vicious circle, and most of us are running in it. The way out is not to run faster. The way out is the same as it has always been: to seek a new politics that is adapted to our times but that is not defined by them. What is needed is a politics that is sufficient to assert the social and human agenda in the face of rapid technological change and the raging inequality that extends from that change—a politics that puts the people in charge not just of making economic demands but of making economic decisions. 

    The crisis of the twenty-first century, already well defined and much discussed by elites, is that digitally defined and driven automation, in combination with a race-to-the-bottom ethic with regard to globalization, will lead to dramatic displacement and dislocation of workers. European Commission technology commissioner Neelie Kroes explained in 2014 that: “a shortage of jobs is a pending social disaster.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits: “There is quite a bit of research that middle-class jobs that are relatively highly skilled are being automated out.” What is now commonly referred to by the elites who gather for economic conferences at Davos and Aspen as “the jobs problem” will, Schmidt argues, be “the defining problem” of the next several decades. “The race is between computers and people and the people need to win. I am clearly on that side,” says Schmidt, who counsels that: “it is pretty clear that work is changing and the classic nine-to-five job is going to have to be redefined. Without significant encouragement, this will get worse and worse.”

Nichols, John. The S Word (p. 264). Verso Books. Kindle Edition. 

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

The East End of London was a notoriously wretched hive of scum and villainy. It is associated indelibly with dark alleys, moist foggy wharfs, packs of street urchins, damp dwellings, kind-hearted prostitutes and men in top hats and cloaks who stalk the gas-lit courts and closes.

The serial killer dubbed ‘Jack The Ripper’, who conducted his nightmarish campaign slashing and mutilating at least five women in and around Whitechapel in the late summer and autumn of 1888, bears much of the responsibility for this haunted landscape. But it was also conjured by Charles Dickens in his novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) where he describes Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam on the moonlit Thames hooking in suicide victims and fishing through their pockets. It is also thought that Fagin, Dickens’ repulsive master pickpocket in Oliver Twist (1837–39), might have been inspired by the real-life criminal Isaac ‘Ikey’ Solomon, who operated in East London in the early 1800s. 

Jack London lived in the East End of London in 1902 while researching his book The People of the Abyss. As he approached Whitechapel, he wrote, "Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes’ walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum."

Hallie Rubenhold recently contributed an inimitable and distinctive contribution to the accrescent body of literature on the Whitechapel murders of 1888. She importantly has detailed the lives of the five canonical women who died alone in the streets victims of an unknown killer. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper brilliantly brings to life the streets, dosshouses, workhouses, sanatoriums, and alleys. 

For most of Victoria’s reign, journalists, social reformers, and Christian missionaries had been decrying the horrors that they observed in the East End, but the situation grew even more acute during the 1870s and ’80s, as “the Long Depression” bore down on the economy. What work there was for London’s vast army of unskilled laborers—those who sewed and laundered the textiles, carried the bricks, assembled the goods, peddled in the streets, and unloaded the ships—was poorly paid and insecure. Casual work on the docks might pay no more than fifteen shillings a week; “sandwich board men” who carried advertisements through the streets might make one shilling, eight pence per day. To worsen matters, rents had been steadily climbing and lodgings were harder to come by. Large areas of lower-income housing across the capital had been destroyed to make way for railroads, and the creation of broad new thoroughfares, such as Shaftesbury Avenue, decanted London’s poor into fewer and more densely packed spaces.

Whitechapel was one of the most notorious of these but was by no means the only sink of poverty in the capital. As the social reformer Charles Booth’s extensive study of London’s impoverished areas in the 1890s revealed, pockets of destitution, crime, and misery flourished throughout the metropolis, even within otherwise comfortable areas. Still, Whitechapel’s reputation trumped even Bermondsey, Lambeth, Southwark, and St. Pancras as the most sordid. By the end of the nineteenth century, seventy-eight thousand souls were packed into this quarter of common lodging houses, “furnished rooms,” warehouses, factories, sweatshops, abattoirs, pubs, cheap music halls, and markets. Its overcrowded population represented diverse cultures, religions, and languages. For at least two centuries, Whitechapel had been a destination for immigrants from many parts of Europe. In the late nineteenth century, a large number of Irish, desperate to escape the rural poverty of the mother country, had arrived. By the 1880s an exodus of Jews, fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe, joined them. In an era highly suspicious of those of other nationalities, races, and religions, integration, even within the slums, did not occur naturally. Nevertheless, Booth’s social investigators regarded these various residents as fairly uniform in terms of their social class. With a number of middle-class exceptions, a significant percentage of the inhabitants of Whitechapel were identified as “poor,” “very poor,” or “semi-criminal.”

The throbbing dark heart at the center of the district was Spitalfields. Here, near the fruit and vegetable market and the soaring white spire of Christ Church, some of the worst streets and accommodations in the area, and perhaps in all of London, were situated. Even the police feared Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street, and the smaller thoroughfares contiguous to them. Lined with cheap, vice-riddled lodging houses (known as “doss houses”) and decrepit dwellings, whose crumbling interiors had been divided into individual “furnished rooms” for rent, these streets and their desperate inhabitants came to embody all that was rotten in England.

Those who strayed into this abyss from the safety of the middle-class Victorian world were struck dumb by what they encountered. The broken pavement, dim gaslights, slicks of sewage, stagnant pools of disease-breeding water, and rubbish-filled roadways foretold the physical horrors of what lay within the buildings. An entire family might inhabit one vermin-infested furnished room, eight by eight feet in size, with broken windows and damp walls. On one occasion, health inspectors found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial. People slept on the floors, on heaps of rags and straw; some had pawned all their clothes and owned barely a scrap to cover their nakedness. In this circle of hell, alcoholism, malnutrition, and disease were rife, as was domestic violence—along with most other forms of violence. Girls, having barely reached puberty, turned to prostitution to earn money. Boys just as easily slipped into thieving and pickpocketing. It appeared to moral, middle-class England that in the face of this level of brutal, crippling want, every good and righteous instinct that ought to govern human relations had been completely eroded.

Nowhere was this state of affairs more apparent than in the common lodging houses, which offered shelter to those too poor to afford even a furnished room. The lodging houses provided temporary homes for the homeless, who divided their nights between the reeking beds on offer here, the oppression of the workhouse casual wards, and sleeping on the street. They were the haunts of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, chronic alcoholics, the unemployed, the sick and the old, the casual laborer, and the pensioned soldier. Most residents would fit into a number of these categories. In Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses, which accommodated an estimated 8,530 homeless people.3 Naturally, those on Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, and Flower and Dean Street bore the worst reputations. Four pence per night could buy someone a single hard, flea-hopping bed in a stifling, stinking dormitory. Eight pence could buy an equally squalid double bed with a wooden partition around it. There were single-sex lodging houses and mixed lodging houses, though those that admitted both sexes were acknowledged to be the more morally degenerate. All lodgers were entitled to make use of the communal kitchen, which was open all day and late into the night. Residents used this as a gathering place, cooking meager meals and quaffing tea and beer with one another and anyone else who cared to drop in. Social investigators and reformers who sat at these kitchen tables were appalled by the rude manners and the horrific language they heard, even from children. However, it was the violent behavior, degrading filth, and overflowing toilets, in addition to the open displays of nakedness, free sexual intercourse, drunkenness, and child neglect to which they truly objected. In the “doss house,” everything offensive about the slum was concentrated under one roof.

The police and reformers were especially concerned about the link between common lodging houses and prostitution. As long as a “dosser” could pay the pence required for a bed, the lodging-house keeper asked few questions. Many women who regarded prostitution as their main source of income lived in or worked out of lodging houses, especially in the wake of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which saw the enforced closure of many brothels. The result of this meant that a large number of prostitutes were forced to ply their trade in places separate from where they lived. A lodging house with eight-penny doubles was a convenient place to take a man who had been solicited on the street. Other prostitutes chose to sleep in a cheaper four-penny single but see to their customers in dark corners outside, where quick sexual encounters, which frequently did not involve full intercourse, took place. 

Lodging houses provided shelter for a wide variety of women facing an assortment of unfortunate circumstances. While some resorted to what has been called “casual prostitution,” it is categorically wrong to assume that all of them did so. These women were inventive when it came to scraping together their “doss money.” Most took on poorly paid casual labor, doing cleaning and laundering or hawking goods. Generally, they supplemented the little money they earned by borrowing, begging, pawning, and sometimes stealing. Pairing up with a male partner also played an essential role in defraying costs. Often these relationships, formed out of necessity, were short-lived; some, however, endured for months or years without ever being sanctified in a church. The nonchalance with which poor men and women embarked upon and dissolved these partnerships horrified middle-class observers. Whether or not these unions produced children also seemed to be of little consequence. Obviously, this way of life diverged considerably from the acceptable moral standard and threw another layer of confusion over what exactly it was that the female residents of these wicked lodging houses were doing in order to keep a roof over their heads.

Rubenhold, Hallie. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (pp. 8-11). HMH Books. 2019

Police Brutality

Police brutality is what all the protests have been set off about.

But that's not what the uprising is about.

The systemic racism is deeply rooted back to the Constitution when a slave was only three fifths of a person, had no voting rights, no rights whatsoever. The Bill of Rights didn't apply to slaves, indigenous peoples, women, children. Rights were given to property owners - mostly white dudes who like to wear wigs and high socks.

Yes, to be a black woman in 1780's America was the worst trick fate could play on you. You think you're born into this great free, newly created democracy only to have the rug pulled out from under your feet.

So much for equality. Then the message changed.

Yes, the authors of the Declaration of Independence claimed us all to be equal, but somehow that message became equal in opportunity. When it became evident that equal opportunity was also a lark, the mantra became hard work and perseverance - the old bootstraps routine.

America is full of bullshit.

Trump's Administrative Bullying

The Trump administration is full of bullies from the top down. It's not even debatable at this point. The recent clearing of DC streets so the President could get his photo taken holding a bible in outside a closed church is the biggest mockery of religion since Pilate declared his hands were washed clean of Jesus' fate.

Mr. Trump ostensibly knows nothing. Because of his lack of knowledge, his preferred method of action does not involve forethought or contemplation. Instead Mr. Trump chooses to tyrannize, browbeat, intimidate and threaten anything he thinks opposes him. But this man Trump is not alone in any of this mass bullying. His entire administration is built on it and reliant on it.

They've sidelined and muzzled the CDC, neutralized the EPA, and utilized executive authority to its utmost with obsequious compliance from the GOP.

Let's just admit what it is: Trump is a lousy president. His one saving grace is that he's been donating his salary, which doesn't seem that grand of a gesture when you consider how often he's golfed and vacationed on the public tax dollar.

Remember when it was this asshole complaining about Mr. Obama's golfing practices. Remember when Mr. Obama golfed when we had two cases of Ebola and Mr. Trump went ballistic.

Trump golfs so often they've built a website tracking his outings.

To paraphrase Sean Penn from Ridgemont High, Mr. Trump, you dick!

high rises sparkle in the morning

High rises sparkle in the morning
Glitterbox prize he pretends to pop open
Nonchalantly as if there's nothing uncommon
About piping pie. a skyscraper
Revealing a sweet treat to
Suck on while reducing steady {twiddling
Hours} it's Tuesday a.m.
some of them are working
some of them hold jobs
Caterpillar clamoring 
sidewalk grey
Where you headed little fella?
One by two soil and tree and nineteen 
hundred lip
Bladed grass
his home - home
someone else's dream

Fucking asshole Republicans in the fucked up state of Wisconsin

Yeah, this is really happening in Wisconsin. Amidst the worst pandemic in the US in 100 years, with thousands of  people dying and others hiding under stay-at-home orders, with neighbors meeting online after weeks of physical distancing discussing how we've been working so hard to stay at home, as many of us have been furloughed and are wondering if we'll still have jobs in May, Republican dickheads have instructed us to go vote tomorrow. A bunch of fuckers.

In one of the most fucked up six hours I can think of, the governor, a Democrat, halted the election; not long after the Wisconsin supreme court - the flock of assholes - reinstated the election at Republican's behest voting 4-2 with all conservative justices voting to hold the election.

Then dealing another blow to democracy, the US supreme court - the utmost flock of assholes - decreed that no absentee ballots will be valid if returned after April 7.

If anyone is still loyal to these Republican fuckers after this shit show, well they must be fuckers too.

It's really a new low for Republican dickheads. I was always reluctant to denigrate or name-call, but after they fucked up the response to the covid-19 pandemic and now this election debacle, I think the Republicans can be declared the official party of fuckers and assholes.

If someone still supports them after all of this, well the conclusion seems fairly logical, right?