Do White People Suck?

 In the wake of the recent discovery of unmarked graveyards at residential schools in British Columbia (at least 219 bodies) and Saskatchewan (at least 751 bodies), I've seen an outpouring of outage from some of the Twitter accounts I've been following.  One said simply "White people suck!  Don't @ me".

At first, I dismissed it as just one more emotive expression that didn't mean anything; but then I began to wonder.  Do white people suck?  Or is it just that people in general suck and white people just happen to collectively hold systemic power in much of the world?

This isn't a meaningless question.  Maybe white people really do suck.  Maybe there is some genetic predisposition to power-seeking behavior or perhaps western culture is predicated on conquest instead of peaceful coexistence and this leads to endless subjugation.  If that's the case then all of us, especially white people, owe it to the world to identify and eliminate this tendency.  

On the other hand, maybe the tendency to distrust and discriminate against those who you perceive to be not like you is a near-universal evolutionary response to our tribal roots.  In the pre-civilization era, it would have been a survival advantage to trust members of your own tribe and distrust others.  Is it possible that all forms of discrimination whether it be based on race, religion, culture or other indication of group allegiance is predicated on a primitive 'friend-or-foe' identification mechanism?  

 Still, the question remains:are white people generally more racist than non-whites?  Well, not according to the (admittedly limited) research I did.  Researchers conducted a survey asking people if they would be comfortable having neighbors of a different race and found that the most tolerant countries (surprisingly for many of us who live in them) are in North and South America, Australia and western Europe.  Conversely the worst were in Asia, Africa and Middle East.   

Anyone who's read this far might be tempted to dismiss all of this as rationalization and ask "Why does any of this matter?  Shouldn't we be against all racism?"

 Here's why I think it matters. If it's true that racism and other forms of group discrimination are evolutionary tendencies inherent in all of us, then many of the solutions proposed by liberals and leftists are wholly unlikely to rectify the issues and in fact are more likely to make them worse. The rise of identity politics and the propensity to see events through filters of race, gender, sexual preference or other identity dimension may actually be triggering to the unconscious forces within us that are predetermined to perceive other groups negatively.  Similarly, reparations for historical wrongs, affirmative action, and subsidies targeted at marginalized groups could cause resentment and further the tendency towards discrimination.

If we really want to build a world where everyone is perceived on a equal basis, it seems to me that the way we do that is to stop accentuating differences that are often based on superficial qualities (eg skin tone) and build societies based on shared goals, shared values and mutual respect.

And for the white people proclaiming "White people suck", no doubt you mean well; but you're more likely part of the problem than part of the solution.

Russia, Putin and the 2020 Election

 As the 2020 US election draws near, one of the oddest and most dysfunctional debates I'm witnessing is in regards to Russia and its alleged election interference.

Liberals and centrists insist that not only did Russia interfere with the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, the campaign and possibly Trump himself colluded with them.  They see the interference as an attack by a foreign power.  

Leftists, on the other hand, refer dismissively to "Russiagate" as just furtherance of US imperialism and a ready-made excuse for how Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.  They see the lack of a conclusive finding in the Mueller report as proof that the affair was overblown.  Many (rightly) point to the the history of US interference in other country's elections (including Russia) as proof that this is all hypocritical posturing. 

I find the whole debate odd from a plethora of perspectives:

1. Both sides refer to "Russia" as if the Russian people have some role in this.  Russia stopped functioning as a democracy years ago so any actions like election interference would be solely the responsibility of the oligarchy and the intelligence agencies
   
2. As soon as intelligence agencies get involved, it's hard to know the truth about anything.  Supporting information gets locked behind the wall of "classified information".  So, while it's certainly plausible that Putin interfered in the election, it's hard to be sure.
3. Putin is the very last person that leftists should defend.  He's a crony capitalist who robbed his country blind and has somehow become one of the richest men in the world while on a politician's salary.  Labor rights in Russia have declined under his rule.
4. Under the Clinton administration, the US interfered in a Russian election on behalf of Boris Yeltsin while Putin backed one of Yeltsin's opponents.  Yeltsin then handed power to Putin who's wielded it ever since. So, if Putin is now interfering with US elections, you could call it karma.  Or blowback. Liberals and centrists never seem to acknowledge this.
5. Through all of this neither side makes much mention of the fact that the integrity of the entire election rests on voting machines with multiple vulnerabilities.  According to attorney and election advocate Jennifer Cohn, 80% of the country's voting machines are supplied by two private companies, meaning who owns them isn't public knowledge.  Further, Cohn has reported that in some battleground states (Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin), these voting machines are connected, via cellular modems, to the internet.  She says they could be hacked.  Maybe by a state actor.

So, here's what I make of this whole messy debate:

Leftists would be well advised to check their sneering when it comes to interference from Putin's Russia.  He's ex KGB, has a reason to hold a grudge and it doesn't take an enormous amount of money to mount a cyber war.  His interference in democratic elections in many countries has been widely documented.

Before liberals point the finger at Russia or anyone else, they should look at the actions of their own government.   The US has a long and unsavory record of interfering in elections around the world going back decades.

Both sides should worry less about Russia and focus on their own voting machines.  They've already been implicated in potentially being the deciding factors in each of the past 3 Republican victories.  When I read Jennifer Cohn's research, I find it crazy that more action isn't being taken.  Where is the Democratic Party on this issue??

It's a crazy time in world politics and particularly so in the US.  Hype and rhetoric win out over nuance and detail.  Under those conditions, it's hard for an intricate issue like this one to get due consideration.

I hope democracy wins in November.

Planetary Health Index - a better way to measure progress

 "You get what you measure".  This old business aphorism is an essential truism.  Whether your goal is personal, organizational or national, that which you measure regularly will get your focus.  

Too often, we measure the wrong things.   People measure their weight, which is a poor indicator of health. Corporations are often focused on the quarterly results, which could be detrimental to the overall health of the company. 

 As societies, we obsess over gross domestic product (GDP), which is a largely arbitrary figure, consisting of the total goods and services produced in a country during a given time period.  When the media talks about the economy, they're talking about GDP.  If the economy is doing "well", GDP is growing.  If a country is in recession, GDP is shrinking.  Since the economy is a matter covered by general mainstream media and obsessed over by business media, it's foremost in everyone's mind.  It also means that if a government is judged to have managed the economy poorly, the chances of being elected are minimal.  A large GDP also provides a country with more geopolitical clout.  So, governments obsess over the GDP, elevating its importance over almost everything else.

What's wrong with that?  After all, GDP is a measure of how well off we are, right?  Well, it's not a very good one.  GDP is an aggregate measure, meaning that if some people are extremely wealthy, it says little about the experience of most people.  It counts bad things as well as good so if there's a plane crash and a lot of money is spent on cleanup, lawsuits and funerals, that's part of the GDP.  It only counts what you pay for.  If you pay for someone to cut your lawn, fix your car, look after your kids or paint your house, you're "helping" the economy by increasing the GDP.  Most worrying, though, is that GDP says nothing about the degradation of our planet, the ultimate resource on which we all rely for life itself.  When you remove plant life that was producing oxygen, when you kill microorganisms that are the basis of life, when you pollute the air and water, when you degrade the soil, when you destroy biodiversity that sustains the web of life, it takes a long time for that to be noticed in the form of GDP.  And by time it does, it's too late.  It's not exaggeration to say that our single minded pursuit of GDP is jeopardizing the ability of the planet to sustain life.

We need a new measure, one that reflects the ability of the planet to sustain life.  It needs to be an aggregate measure, including biodiversity, climate stability, air pollution, water pollution soil health and ocean health.  We could call it the planetary health index.  It needs to be top of mind for everyone, everywhere.  Free browsers should come with bookmarks to it.  News aggregators like Google need to include links to it.  Social media sites need to promote it.  Public broadcasters should host shows about it.

This needs to trump the GDP as the top priority of governments.

Some Unsolicited Advice to Democrats from an Outside Observer

At this point, there is a very good chance that in 9 months, we will be "celebrating" Trump 2.0.  That's a sobering thought for people who believe in climate science.  Or any science.  Or intelligent discourse. Or honesty.  Or justice of any sort. Or democracy.

Do you think that's an exaggeration? According to Sarah Kendzior, expert on the authoritarian states that emerged after the dissolution of he USSR, Trump has been following a well-documented pattern of undermining democracy since he was elected.  In fact, the situation with the Trump family is eerily similar to that of Uzbekistan.

Still, Trump is historically unpopular.  Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that polls say that almost any Democratic candidate would be 8-10 points ahead of him in an election? Maybe.  The problem is the increasingly vitriolic infighting that is going on between supporters of various Democratic candidates - particular between Bernie supporters and people I will refer to as Bernie-phobics (including those who say they will bring a barf bag to the ballot box if they have to vote for him).

If I were a Trump strategist, an obvious strategy presents itself.  When you need to re-elect a divisive, unpopular leader, you need to aggressively deploy voter suppression techniques.  Release damaging information (true or not) and make it appear that the candidates are cheating or employing unethical tactics to win.  For Republicans, the path to victory is to get Democrats engaged in a bitter battle to the point where the loser's supporters stay home on election day.

If I could address Democratic supporters, I'd say this.  First of all, stay clear of conspiracy theories.  If you are spreading rumours about other candidates that even your own candidate doesn't repeat,  you're not helping.  If you're announcing that you will never vote for candidate x, you're not helping.

For the Obama/Clinton/Biden crowd who seem to be desperate for any centrist alternative to Bernie Sanders, I have to ask: what's so bad about universal healthcare and free post-secondary education?  It seems to work pretty well for the Finns. If you're convinced that Bernie can't win, I invite you to read this insightful analysis that claims the opposite.  If you think Sanders is a radical, here's what French economist Thomas Piketty had to say on the matter:

 I think, first, that [Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders are not radicals," said Piketty in response to one interviewer's question. "They are moderate social democrats by European standards....

Like many other economists, Piketty insists that, as happened in Sweden, sharing wealth more broadly will make the U.S. economy stronger, not weaker, and richer overall.

And for those of you who consider Michael Bloomberg some sort of saviour who can stand up to Trump, I invite you to look at his own, very troubling past, particularly when it comes to racial issues.  No, he's not Trump but he's not great either.

For Bernie supporters, I would say this.  Yes, this is a historic chance to finally get a progressive in the White House and it will be a bitter blow if it doesn't happen.  Still, there is no basis for the claim that Biden, Klobuchar, or even Bloomberg is "worse than Trump".  Publicly declaring "Bernie or bust" is divisive and will encourage centrists to stay home or worse, defect to Trump.  Your best play is to support Bernie but stay positive.

To everyone, I would say support your candidate.  Keep it clean and remember that the ultimate goal in November is to have  president whose name doesn't rhyme with "dump". 

Good luck to the US and to the world.

Why the Democratic Party Demonizes Third Party Candidates

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the shitstorm started by Hillary Clinton when she spoke on David Plouffe's podcast Campaign HQ.

I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.

If you're just visiting this planet, you may not be aware that the "somebody" that Hillary references is none other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently running in the Democratic primaries to be the presidential nominee.

There are so many levels of weirdness attached to this, I need to prune some of them to narrow the focus. Forget, for the moment, that Hillary, whose supporters have been rightly claiming for years has been the subject of unfair accusations, is now leveling unsupported accusations at a fellow Democrat.  Forget that she is a senior member of the Democratic Party wading into a primary to shoot at one of the candidates. Forget that Gabbard's campaign was dying and Hillary's foray into this mess has shone a new spotlight on it.  Forget even that by stirring up controversy, Hillary is doing the Russians a huge favor because they ostensibly are trying to sow division in the US.

The weirdness I want to focus on is this: why do Democrats get so passionate when it comes to third party candidates?  After all, Jill Stein, who Hillary directly accused of being a "Russian asset", garnered a grand total of just under 470,000 votes in 2016.  Rough math tells me that's just around 1/3 of 1% of the votes cast. It seems hardly enough to make a huge deal over.  Democrats claim that she took enough votes away from Clinton in swing states to cost the election but this is nonsense.

Though Democrats have often pointed to Stein getting 1 percent of the vote in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a reason Clinton lost those longtime Democratic strongholds, exit polls have shown that most of Stein's voters would not have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein had not run.

 The Democratic Party is an institution with lots of money and elections run on data; so I'm sure they know that Stein didn't cost them the election.  So, why are Clinton and others making with the histrionics?  More to the point is this.  If third party candidate really are a threat to the US electoral system, isn't there a way to change the voting system to address the threat?

The answer to the second question is yes and provides insight into the first question.  If third party candidates were a threat to the US electoral system, there is a fairly simple way to address it.  Simply switch from a from a "first-past-the-post" single choice ballot to a ranked ballot where voters can rank their choices.  The inherent assumption in the Democrats complaint is that if the third party candidates (like Jill Stein) weren't there, the voters would still show up and they would vote Democrat.  This isn't actually true but for now, let's assume it is.

You might think that the Democratic Party would jump at the prospect of an "alternative vote" system with ranked ballots where people who really wanted to vote for, say, the Green Party but would choose the Democrat second.  This would allow the Democratic Party to capture the votes of those "spoiler" candidates.  If you think this, you would be wrong.

The last thing that either the Democrats or the Republicans want is a system that encourages more parties.  They have a monopoly on voter choice and they don't want to give it up.  Every election, they use fear mongering to get people who don't really like them to vote for them anyway, just to stop the other party.  It's a dumb, anti-democratic game but it works for them.  So, they don't want it to change.

The Reality Show Presidency

Say what you like about Trump but the fact is that he's transformed government.  No longer is it a dry, boring affair where serious policies are crucial and conflict of interest can ruin you.  Now, you can be as smart, as honest, as empathetic, as telegenic as you like.  If you're not entertaining, you're out.

You can be perplexed and offended by this.  You can point out that millions of lives are deeply affected by what the government does.  You can insist that governing is a serious business and needs to be done by serious people - people with expertise, compassion, experience and vision.  I agree with you but that clearly isn't what people expect anymore.  This is an era of memes, pet videos, bizarre pictures and emoji.  If the government isn't entertaining, people's attention will shift in an instant.  It isn't just young people, either.  Plenty of Xers and boomers now have the attention span of gnats as the digital age drowns us all.

Twenty years ago, Trump would have single digit approval and would have been dumped by his own party.  Twenty years ago, Trump would never have won the nomination.  Twenty years ago, he could have been the Ross Perot of his day, a crank; a joke.  He is a joke but the joke is now on Americans and on the world.  Make no mistake.  What's happening is deadly serious.  Nationalism and its ugly twin racism are engulfing the US.  The myriad of links from Trump and GOP to Russian money are not, as Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard might have you believe, baseless conspiracy theories. Authoritarian regime expert Sarah Kendzior's warnings that Trump and his minions are using well-understood tactics to move America closer to authoritarianism are not completely ridiculous notions.  It's time for people to pay attention.

Unfortunately, most of the people who are paying closest attention seem to come from the old era of boring government.  They aren't learning.  Consider this tweet posted yesterday by Kurt Eichenwald:

1. Messages from@RadioFreeTom,@JRubinBlogger,@WalshFreedom and others are the key to the survival of America. If we have learned anything from the Trump era, it is that we MUST end the personal invective of politics. Politics is about governing, and governing is about policy..

Trump has been running circles around these folks by the last three years by doing the exact opposite of what he proposes.  Does anyone think that the ~120 million Americans that, judging from the polls, still support Trump and have no intention of abandoning him, are going to have their minds changed by that?

So, what to do?

1. Stop chasing Trump's every crazy tweet.  The one yesterday about buying Greenland is a great example.  It's not going to happen so ignore it.  If the press and progressives do this and leave Trump's base to talk about it among themselves, he will look as weak and foolish as he is.
2. Focus on issues that matter to Trump's base like conflict of interest, his Russian connections, lack of wage growth and the way tax cuts have benefited the wealthy.  Use House investigations to dig up dirt.
3. Impeach.  Maybe Nancy Pelosi is a genius who is dragging her feet to make sure impeachment hearings can become an election issue.  Maybe she's timid. Maybe she's compromised. Maybe she's a genius and I just don't understand. But if Trump isn't impeached, this will be a message to future presidents. There will be no consequences for anything you do as long as your base doesn't abandon you.
4. Learn from the last election.  The Democrats need a populist, someone who can draw a crowd and make people care enough to show up and vote.  Someone like Bernie.
5. The Democrats need to firmly address the elephant in the room - the spiraling gap between the poor and the rich.  For decades, they've been promising to help the poor but pursuing policies that make the wealthy wealthier. Universal health care is a good start but it's not enough.  Bernie or or Elizabeth.  Not Joe. 

The game has changed.  If the Democrats and progressives don't change with it, they will always lose.

Socialism? wtf is that?

In the past few years, I have seen a noticeable uptick in anti-capitalist sentiment on social media.  In a remarkable turnaround from the 90s when being called a "liberal" in the US could end your political ambitions, many people are openly labeling themselves as socialists.  I always wonder what they mean by that.

While socialism actually means one of a variety of forms of collective or public ownership of the economy, the word socialist is still widely used by people on the economic right to mean almost any policy they don't like.  Even on the political left, many call social programs like welfare or socialized medicine as socialism.  Nordic countries are often described as socialism when they clearly social democracies with capitalist economies.  Bernie Sanders has, at times, called himself a socialist; something he is definitely not. 

I find that much of conventional socialist thought is still modeled after Marxist thought - exploited workers and cooperative ownership of organizations.  I find this curious in 2019 as we move towards a future where a manufacturing facility might consist of a building full of robots.  Although I support unionization of workers who truly are exploited, I also see the limitations of this from three perspectives.  First, unionization raises wages which causes companies to  invest more in labour saving technology, which in turn reduces employment.  This isn't inherently a bad thing, providing we have societies that look after unemployed people (which we currently don't).  Second, technology acts as a multiplier that allows individuals to become wealthy to an extent that wouldn't have been possible in Marx's time.  Finally, I regularly see unions on the wrong side of environmental issues as they support expansion of dirty industries for the benefit of their workers.

I think socialist thought requires an update.

First, instead of focused on workers, it needs to be people-centric.  Over the next few decades, we may find ourselves increasingly in a position where workers aren't needed for production of necessary goods and services. People still need to be free, cared for and provided opportunities to challenge themselves and grow.

Second, the resources of the world need to be equitably distributed to the people of the world.  Also, consumption needs to be capped to within and amount that is sustainable across the planet.  This means that sooner or later, there needs to be some form of democratic world government.  No, not the UN.

Third, there needs to be limits on the amount of wealth inequality allowed.  I don't care how good of a singer you are or how talented at curating cat videos, you are not entitled to enormous wealth because that wealth allows you to consume disproportionate resources.  Inequality is corrosive to social cohesion.

Finally, we need to abandon nationalism in favor of localism.  Nation-states should be weakened, with more control given to local governments, under an overall global administration.

I know this all sounds so utopian but it's all possible.  The key element is for people to wake up and understand that giant corporations and the billionaires that own them are pan-national.  When trade deals are negotiated and pundits claim that this or that country won the negotiations, what isn't mentioned is that the corporations win no matter what.  They operate in both countries and simply adjust their operations to maximize their profits.  While ordinary people are played into acting against their own interests in pursuit of the "national interest", billionaires win either way.   When people understand that their interests are more aligned with people in other countries than the billionaires in their own country, then things become much clearer.

Good luck to us all.