. . . an examination of things of interest to jad

Looking back on it now, Howard Zinn had a major impact on my radicalization.  I remember reading The 20th Century, essentially a subsection of The People’s History, on a park bench in Rutland, VT.  I recall my surprise that the progressive political agenda whose return I had hoped for during the Clinton presidency was, in fact, a reactionary force.

The political giants of the era who, I had been told for years, fought against greedy and monopolistic corporate barons had, in reality, actively crushed social movements challenging the economic dominance of said barons.  The 20th Century also introduced me to dozens of individuals and communities that I had never read about, but with which I felt an immediatel and powerful solidarity*.

** RIP that notion ~2002

Before I present the story, I need to make a statement for the record: I hold Islam in no lower (or higher) esteem than any other lunacy invented whole-cloth by crazy people and passed down through the generations by abusive indoctrination of children.  Also, this is apparently an old story (Feb 2009), that I’m just now hearing about due to some even nuttier recent updates (h/t Rob Taylor, btw I disagree w/ his assessment of Lancet).

My beloved better half constantly chides me for exiting the popular political narrative during a given discussion. As a made up example: she’ll call bullshit on Obama’s not repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and I’ll jump in with, “having a military is bullshit.” So I’m not much fun when discussing the kinds of tactical political minutiae favored by my intellectual peers–or political events in general, frankly.

Nevertheless, like a horrified bypasser stopping to watch two trains heading at each other at full speed, I Googled “Massachusetts election ‘exit polls.’” Guess what? Nobody’s taking exit polls! Nobody has to convince me that elections are a complete fraud and were even before Diebold and their “buggy” proprietary software guaranteed preselected results.

Even in a sham 4th world election, there are exit polls so that everyone *knows* the results are a fraud. Anytime the UN or other multi-national body declares irregularities in an election, it’s due to a discrepancy between exit polls and actual results.

Soooo, playing inside the box, I’m pre-declaring the results of the Massachusetts election to be a fraud–a fraud inside lie wrapped in a sham, to paraphrase a beloved war criminal. Since the democrat candidate had a gigantic lead (part of the stated reason for no exit polls), I’m going to guess that this one is rigged for the republicans–again, just a guess.

Zogby, who correctly predicted that John Kerry would “win” the 2004 race–if by win one means having the majority of voters cast a ballot for you in the correct electoral combination*–is saying that the dem will win by < 1%. I feel supported in my assertion that this is a republican steal by Zogby’s prediction.

* as opposed to the more favored definition which refers to actually assuming the political title for which one was contending.

I’m not an original thinker–at least not often. I do have, I believe, a better than average ability to sort claims into categories along the true-false spectrum. Of course, I have several biases in my data collection methodology–1. I am me and am partial to data that supports the hypothesis that I am awesome. 2) I have a terrible memory and am prone to construct narratives of my past beliefs from whole cloth supporting the hypothesis that I am awesome.

And so, the only solution is to go on record with my support of other’s predictions and see, over the course of time, how able I am to detect accurate forecasters from inaccurate.

I won’t take credit for the easy ones: Bill Kristol, George Will, Paul Krugman, anyone else in policy positions or in the MSM. These guys are never right*–it’s sort of their job never to be right.

No, I’ll try to stick to the alternative and academic media as much as possible. At least in those circles, there’s *some* consideration given to the track record of the person making a claim or prediction. Picking out the wheat from the chaff in this field will be a worthy test of my claim of super-average bullshit detection.

*Unless they’re contradicting a position they previously held–predicting two opposing outcomes does not equal accurate forecasting.

A position of non-violence is incompatible with the idea of political solutions to social problems. The state, as we know it, ultimately has only one tool for controlling behavior, it can legitimately kill individual people. All other punishments are premised on this power. Until this is understood, the mass of humanity will remain the the impoverished slaves and servants of a tiny parasitic ruling class and will, perversely, thank them for the “safety” they provide.

If you oppose the non-violent position, then you will only ever contribute to problems stemming from violence. While you may point to a temporary victory–a political solution that “solved” a social problem–growing from the “solution” like bamboo shoots will be dozens, hundreds, thousands of resulting problems, each begging for a new political solution.

I’ve encountered alot of anger around this argument. Almost nobody, especially on the left, wants to be in a position of preferring violent solutions to non-violent. Yet how can one logically argue that support of state solutions is anything but the preference for violent solutions (answer: you can’t).

This puts the angry person in the position of having to create an imaginary world in which violence and only violence can stave off apocalyptic disaster. In this fiction, attempting, or even beginning to attempt to organize voluntarily to address social problems leads immediately to a fate worse than death–a world of chaos and violence in which everyone good dies at the hands of the evil, mad and powerful. These arguments, lunatic as they are, can be persuasive because a) no matter how horrifying real-life state atrocities are, the apocalypse is worse and b) they rely on fear, a historically reliable way of overriding rational thought and bringing debate to an end.

A novel position came up in a conversation recently that simultaneously surprised and delighted me. It is worth addressing because it is the only alternative to the fear based response. The position is that the state doesn’t need to use violence but could be reconstituted in such a way that it is a voluntary organization. In principle, how can I have any problem with that? If the state renounces violence in favor of voluntary cooperation, it will cease to be a remnant of stone-age barbarism and become a part of the future of humanity. By my definition, it would no longer be a state at that point, but I would be happy concede to calling it a state if it is ever brought into being.