Author: Alan Buddug

The Biden administration is trying to decrease the price of gasoline in the US — or at least they are making a performance of trying to decrease the price. Let’s take a look at how capitalism is making this problem worse and how a liberal (i.e., capitalist) government like the Biden administration is ill-suited to actually fix the problem.

First off, when they release oil from the US strategic oil reserve, where does it go? The oil is purchased by private corporations.

Second, when the Biden administration makes an effort to increase domestic oil production, where would this hypothetical increase in oil go? The oil is extracted by private corporations and becomes their property.

OK, so we have all these private corporations who now have more oil at their disposal. Where do they sell it?

They sell it on the open market. Oil that is released from the US strategic oil reserve can end up anywhere. Oil that is extracted from the geographical US could end up anywhere. So, these Bidenist solutions have a tiny fraction of the impact they could have if US oil stayed in the US. This is capitalists — and a government corrupted by capital — screwing over the people of this nation, which is what they do in every country on earth. But more to the point: The impact of both of these strategies is relatively small since the oil goes on the global market rather than the US market.

But it gets worse. It turns out that oil companies are sitting on huge amounts of oil right now in order to force the price up. If they’re sitting on all this oil already, then how will giving them more oil (in the form of releases from the strategic reserve or more permission to drill) going to solve the problem?

It won’t.

I don’t want to by like a fascist and mislead you about my own position on this, so let me be clear: We need to decrease production of oil in the US — as well as globally. While keeping the oil we do produce in the US is a good idea, the better idea would be to reduce our need for oil with the end goal of eliminating oil production. From my perspective, all these people complaining about how expensive gasoline is right now are getting exactly what they deserve; their failure to support more efficient transportation in the past is the real reason things are hard right now.

Related: Explainer: How the US’s strategic petroleum reserve works (Al Jazeera)

The “political spectrum” as we usually see it is specifically designed to make it seem like a free-market libertarianism is the best political system. It puts “social” on the horizontal axis and “economic” on the vertical axis. Of course, you realize that economics is just another kind of power (and that all power is ultimately enforced with violence), which means that a simpler left-right political spectrum actually makes more sense.

Here is where Bidenism and Trumpism might fall on that simple left-right political spectrum:

(Those dots are meant to represent the average position of the political group, and they are only a guess.) But why is it, then, that conservatives say that support of Muslims is leftist even though conservative Islam is obviously very conservative?

As we move to the authentic left, we see more democracy — power is shared among more people — until we get to the very left edge of the political spectrum where everyone shares power. This means all kinds of power, not just the right to vote, and not just economic power; certainly that would include access to powerful tools like cryptography and firearms. That far left position could be called “Total Democracy”.

There’s certainly a lot of inauthentic leftism going around; for example, the Soviet Union seemed to really be trying to move their society to the left, but after taking a giant step to the right (which may be unavoidable in the execution of a revolution), only managed to move a little to the left overall (from a monarchy, to a single-party authoritarian state). In this essay, I’m not talking about Soviet-style not-leftism when I say “left”; instead, I’m talking about the authentic left.

There’s really just one way to be authentically on the left — you have to share power with all kinds of people, and you have to protect minority rights regardless of the kind of minority. (The only exception is that you can’t support the right of people to move the society to the right — this is the Paradox of Tolerance.) The differences between leftist positions are — in my opinion — all about how to move society to the left.

There are, however, an infinite number of ways for a rightwing government to be organized. You could have a government by white men. You could have a government by Christian leaders. You could have a government led by the tallest among you. You could have a government led by Muslim leaders. All of these ideas require a hierarchy of power, with those most closely fitting the criteria at the top of the hierarchy.

Here is a way we might visualize that:

Of note is the fact that you can have a far-right government organized under the hierarchy of “liberalism”. This would just mean that the power of individual people would be determined by how much money they have, and not by any other method. People might have theoretical rights, but their ability to enjoy those rights would be completely determined by how much power they have, and power would almost always be determined by money. Imagine a society, for example, where you are told you have the right to pursue happiness, but a huge percentage of the population don’t have enough money to even survive, much less find it; that would make the right to the pursuit of happiness an empty joke.

To return to the case of the Soviet Union example, you can imagine a “theocratic monarchy” track and a “single political party” track; they jumped from one track to another, and only moved a small bit toward the actual left in the process. In the end, more people had power, but they never really made it out of authoritarianism. Now, they’ve jumped from the “single political party” track to the “kleptocracy” track. That was more of a hop than a jump, and they’re doing the same things they did when they were Soviets — for example, poisoning political opponents and imprisoning them. (It’s almost like the problem with Russian communism was the Russians rather than the communism.)

Here that process is visualized on the multi-dimensional political chart. Blue represents the Russian monarchy, red represents the Soviet Union (circa 1930), and green represents the current Russian political system. You can see that the Russian system really hasn’t changed that much (except in terms of monarchy and Christian theocracy) and the current Russian government really represents a return to normalcy for Russia. Against Marx’s advice, the Russian revolution skipped capitalism as a societal structure, so “neoliberalism” doesn’t need to be included on this chart (in my opinion); the dimensions are qualitative and culturally determined.

Like the Russian example, most hierarchies are multidimensional. The people in charge identify multiple characteristics that they think make people superior. This is typically the case with far right governments — they are white supremacists, but they’re also male supremacists, hetero/cis supremacists, and so forth. They usually support some extra-cruel version of a particular religion as well (note how the American right loves Russia now that Christianity is being used as a cudgel in that society). No specific hierarchy is required. If you imagine each of these factors of supposed superiority being on their own track, we can kind of imagine where the Bidenists and Trumpists might fall on those various tracks. For example:

Those dot locations are pretty much a shot in the dark, so please don’t take them too seriously. As I look at it, I’m thinking that the locations for the dots for “Liberalism” should probably be swapped, for example. The far-right claim that they love capitalism is based on the fact that they 1) don’t understand what it is, and 2) grab on to anything they think will grant them power or make them appealing to the average person in their society.

Let’s get back to the odd problem of conservatives saying that anyone who supports the existence of Muslims is a leftist, and that Islamic extremists are leftists. To truly be a leftist, you must support the existence of everyone, and so you would obviously support the existence of Muslims (and their religious freedom), but you would also oppose Islamic extremists when they agitate for an Islamic state, or persecution of various types of people (women, LGBTQ people, or Christians). You’d have to be able to see past a simple dichotomy regarding not just Muslims, but many different people.

Leftists also support the existence and religious freedom of Christians in the same way. In contrast, rightwing atheists like Ayn Rand find Christ’s teachings to be abhorrent because they promote the ideas of loving thy neighbor, tolerating (and even forgiving) people who trespass against us, and disdain for the wealthy (just to name a few). Naturally, conservatives think all atheists are leftists, but there is a huge amount of political variation among atheists, just as there is a huge amount of political variation among Muslims or Christians.

Islamic extremists are not leftists. Though they do tend to oppose capitalism, they oppose it because they see it as being opposed to their preferred hierarchy — not because they think a hierarchy is bad. In the Iranian revolution, the left decided to side with those wanting an Islamic state because they thought they could work with them to a greater extent than the other side, which was the liberal (western capitalist) faction. As soon as the Islamic extremists had control of the state, they purged the left — but the western capitalists would have done the same thing.

This multi-faceted reality, and the idea of having solidarity with people who don’t necessarily have solidarity with you, are not ideas that conservatives embrace. They want things clear-cut, with every person either in their camp or the enemy camp. They assume that both Muslims and rich Democratic party donors are leftists. They call pantsuit feminists “Nazis” — not because pantsuit feminists support the capitalist hierarchy that creates enormous poverty and suffering, but because they find effective ways to force conservatives to treat women as equals.

An egregious example of conservatives assuming all their enemies are leftists is Black Lives Matter. BLM just wants law enforcement to stop murdering Black Americans at a far higher rate than white Americans (though, they’ve also vocally opposed the unjust murder of white people by law enforcement). Although there are leftists supporting BLM and within BLM, most people participating in BLM protests are probably not leftists. If you consult with some Black Americans, I think you will find that they are just as likely to have conservative values (like supporting capitalism) as any other group of Americans, and just like most people, don’t want to be executed in the street.

Let’s look at the curious fact that “conservatives” (Republicans) label the left edge of the Democratic party as “communists” even though they are clearly centrists who want to balance the power of the wealthy and the power of working class people. We might call these people (Sanders, Ocasio, etc.) “Democratic Socialists” or “Social Democrats”. They oppose the power of the very elites that conservatives seem to be angry about — so why do conservatives hate them so much? I’ve fixed the previous chart (putting Democrats further to the right on “capitalism”) and added Democratic Socialists as green dots.

There it is! Conservatives don’t call them “communists” because Democratic Socialists want to balance the power of the wealthy and the power of the working class. They call them “communists” because Democratic Socialists are opposed to all the other hierarchies that conservatives care about. This chart also explains why the United States are doomed. The opinions of the voters themselves are split between the blue dot positions and the red dot positions — almost no one is a centrist if you consider all these political dimensions. Centrists like Democratic Socialists look like dangerous extremists to both parties; to the right wing, democracy looks like chaos because it disposes of their beloved hierarchies.

I really hope this clears up a key area of confusion regarding the relationship between the left and various other cultural and political positions. Until we all have a shared, basic understanding of the world — and especially the meaning of words — it’s pretty hard to find common ground. Again, all those dots aren’t meant to be in precise locations; the purpose of the charts is just to help you visualize the differences between the various dimensions that have previously been crammed together in a way that makes “left” vs. “right” extremely confusing.

Originalists vs. Structuralists

There are basically two active sides in the debate over what the Constitution says about things like abortion rights, sexual behavior rights, marriage rights (including same-sex and interracial marriage), voting rights, and so forth. On one side are the Originalists who contend that we should go with the intent of the authors of the Constitution, as reflected in the way they objectively lived their lives. On the other side are Structuralists who contend that the Constitution has thematic patterns which imply (or even plainly state) things that may not have been intended by the authors, and that the author’s intent is not relevant.

There are other “sides” to this debate but they don’t really matter. Consider, for example the Wrong position, which is that the authors of the Constitution intended things that were directly contrary to both the way they lived their lives and things they said in other contexts, and were gifted with not only Christ-like goodness but also psychic powers that allowed them to see that some day, Black people would be free to marry whites, vote, and become President. As if Jefferson knowingly winks at us through history, and then scurries off to the secret room where he keeps his 14-year-old sex slave (see Note on Jefferson, below). But, to return to the main topic, there are other valid ways to interpret the Constitution; for the sake of brevity, I’m just talking about the currently popular methods.

Both Originalists and Structuralists are technically correct; it’s just that the Originalists are fascists.

A Structuralists looks at the thing the authors created and judges it based on its own merits. They see the structure of the thing, and disregard the author completely. You could call this “death of the author” — which is something I strongly believe in. If a bad person says something good, we should not reject the good thing they said because of the source, but rather embrace it and reject the hypocrisy of the speaker. A Structuralist interpretation…

…draws inferences from the design of the Constitution: the relationships among the three branches of the federal government (commonly called separation of powers); the relationship between the federal and state governments (known as federalism); and the relationship between the government and the people.

In contrast, Originalists consider the Constitution in the context of the authors, so the authors’ actions in life as well as other documents reflecting their views are part of the Constitution. This means that Originalists believe that only white, cis, straight, Christian men who own property should have the right to vote. When they say that the minority should be protected, they mean the “opulent minority” (rich people) and that they should be protected from “mob rule” (democracy). Originalists believe that the purpose of the Constitution was not to give rights to everyone, but rather to promote a specific type of people. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

…originalist approaches consider the meaning of the Constitution as understood by at least some segment of the populace at the time of the Founding. Originalists generally agree that the Constitution’s text had an “objectively identifiable” or public meaning at the time of the Founding that has not changed over time, and the task of judges and Justices (and other responsible interpreters) is to construct this original meaning.

Today’s “conservatives” (fascists) take the Constitution as something that applies only to them, and not to any of their enemies. It gives them, specifically, rights. It does not give their enemies rights.

This is consistent with an Originalists interpretation, and the Originalists have a point. Jefferson didn’t intend for his sex slave to be free and have the right to vote — otherwise he would have treated her differently (see Note on Jefferson, below). Madison didn’t want taxes on the rich to allow working class people to be able to afford healthcare. Yet, to make this your standard for determining how the document should be interpreted today is nothing less than evil.

The Structuralists’ point is better because it disposes of the villainous lifestyles, secret intentions, and supposed beliefs of the authors. Just because something was created by deeply flawed people doesn’t mean that it necessarily reflects their flaws. People can created things that are better than themselves. It’s an insult to both the creation and the creator to shackle it to the creator’s flaws. If the Constitution is something worth having, it is because it is better than the people who created it.

States’ Rights

A consistent argument made by fascists is that the parts of the Constitution that they do not like should be ignored, and that state governments should rule over these particular issues. The greatest example of this was slavery, where fascists claimed that each state should be allowed to determine whether people should be able to own other people. In essence, the argument is that a state government should be able to deny individual rights when those rights are not consistent with conservative culture.

The Constitution says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Unfortunately, that’s a little bit vague. It seems like it allows the states to deny people rights as long as those rights are not explicitly granted to people in the Constitution. That’s why “states’ rights” is such a popular strategy among fascists. Structuralists reject that framing, however, and instead see the Constitution as prohibiting States from infringing on individual rights. This is confusing to fascists because they want to have the right to dominate other people — they believe this is the most important right.

Flaws of Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision for two reasons. First off, it fails to address the equality of women. Of note is the fact that the United States has failed to ever add equality between men and women to the Constitution. Second, it fails to address the religious aspect of the abortion debate; specifically, the fact that the far right claims that their hostility toward abortion is based on the idea that a sperm and egg are imbued with a soul the moment that they join together. That idea is a religious idea that is not shared by most Americans, or even all Christians. Quickening is the alternative option among Christians, but among those who do not believe in such a thing as a soul, the limit is when the potential person achieves awareness (and, really, isn’t that when the soul is imbued?). In short, an abortion ban is a violation of the First Amendment rights of any person who wants to abort a fetus; this is a clear fact, but it’s probably too late to do something about it now that the Supreme Court is controlled by fascists.

Instead of depending on the First Amendment or the non-existent Constitutional equality of women, Roe v. Wade infers a right to privacy (based on the Fourteenth Amendment) and somehow uses that to grant the right to abort an unwanted pregnancy.

Note on Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but was fairly consistent in stating that he was opposed to slavery, with his anti-slavery statements becoming more vehement over time. However, he also said that ending slavery had to be done as part of the democratic process. This puts him in the same do-nothing category as the Republicans of pre-John-Brown America and today’s do-nothing Democrats. Based on how I’ve come to understand today’s Democrats, my guess is that Jefferson understood that there was something morally wrong with slavery, but cared much more about his own comfort than about fixing that problem or doing the right thing, and was really making these statements as a performance meant to pacify an audience — probably including Sally Hemings, who he never chose to free.

When investigating a crime, it is always a good idea to ask, “Who benefits from this crime?” I’m not sure if the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s initial draft majority opinion on overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would qualify as a crime, but the person who stands to benefit the most from the leak is none other than…. Justice Samuel Alito! bum bum bummmm!

Yes, while conservative media returns to its favorite (and predictable) chorus of “leftists did it!”, Justice Alito is sitting in the shadows laughing evilly and clutching his hands together evilly. The leak establishes an extreme starting point for the conversation (i.e., it helps to normalize that position), puts pressure on the other conservative justices to comply with it by letting the public in on it, and distracts from the opinion itself by occupying everyone with the fact that something was leaked from the Supreme Court (oh, look! I am participating in the distraction).

The leak doesn’t just mention abortion. It also alludes to prior court decisions on “sodomy” (Lawrence v. Texas), “gay” marriage (Oberfell), and “interracial” marriage. The villain — Alito — says that these decisions did not protect “rights” that are “deeply rooted in history”. How is taking away someone’s right to bodily autonomy (and denying their religious beliefs along the way) a protection of rights? How is taking away someone’s right to marry who they want a protection of rights? How is regulating human sexual behavior (including both sexual practices and using contraception) a protection of rights? All these things are about allowing conservatives the “right” to dominate others and make them comply with conservative culture.

More than just being an effective strategy, Alito’s leak fits the standard fascist pattern (yes, Alito is a fascist) of announcing your intended actions in the context of explaining the fucked-up fantasy that justifies them (in this case, “rights deeply rooted in history”). The Nazis didn’t just say, “Let’s kill the Jews.” Rather, they went on and on about their Jewish conspiracy theory, and didn’t move on to killing them until enough people believed that the fantasy was real — making an unthinkable action seem obvious, even inevitable.

It is very likely that the person who leaked the draft opinion was someone who wanted to soften up the opposition by defining the context of the fight before it begins, and the most likely person to have done it is Alito. Sure, he probably only facilitated the leak, but this helps him get what he wants and may set him up to become Chief Justice under the next Republican President. He should be the number one suspect, and he certainly is the villain of this story.

Sure, it could have been someone who simply thought the public needed to know what the Supreme Court is up to (in this case, villainy), and I can’t help but agree with that, despite the fact of the leak functioning as a tool to advance fascism. Maybe they thought they could embarrass so-called “conservatives” into dropping the whole thing; that’s laughable. Regardless of who it was, though, it certainly was not a “leftist” — there are no leftists working at the Supreme Court.

Alito has just announced exactly what the left has been concerned about since Republicans refused to seat Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court — that conservatives would take over that branch of government, and then reveal that they were never “conservatives” in the first place, but rather fascists. With majority control of the Supreme Court, fascists are free to do whatever they want and it will be legal. Moreover, mainstream Democrats (like President Joe) will do absolutely nothing about it, just like they did nothing when Republicans failed to seat Garland. Sure, sure — they say they might end the filibuster, pack the court, impeach Justices who lied during their confirmation hearings, but will they actually do anything?

Biden has told people that they should vote, so there’s your answer — he will do nothing except promote voting Democrat so they can do nothing but promote voting Democrat.

When you think of the person that killed the most people in history, you probably assume it is going to be a dictator — probably a Hitler or a Stalin — but no, the person that killed the most people in history is Midgley. He was an aspiring capitalist who cared more about making a ton of money than he did about human safety, and through his greed and shortsightedness not only killed more people than anyone else in history, but probably doomed the entire human species. I don’t want to spoil it, but think about what group of people were most affected by his horrible mistake without being killed, what they’re like now, and what they are doing to the world.

I still occasionally get questions from all kinds of people — including those who own guns — about the “gun show loophole”. It’s poorly understood because the entire characterization of it is wrong. When we think of a “loophole” what we typically mean is a detail of the law as written that has been discovered by a nefarious person who uses it for the purpose of circumventing the intent of the law. The “gun show loophole” however, is not so much a loophole as it is the intent of the law. Yes, this is going to end up being about race.

Background checks for gun purchases are a result of the Brady Act of 1993 (implemented in 1998). It was a direct reaction to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 by John Hinckley Jr., who says he was trying to impress Jodie Foster after seeing her in Taxi Driver (she was 12!!). Incidentally, he also considered Jimmy Carter as a candidate for death, so his choice of target was less about Foster’s politics than it was about assuming that Iris (the character she played in the film) would be impressed if he killed a President.

The point is that when violence touched federal politicians, they suddenly decided that “something must be done” but their solution couldn’t be one that affected the fine, upstanding conservative white people that owned most of the guns. The law, and the politicians that create it, are conservative institutions — they usually work to preserve the status quo. Hinckley was seen as an aberration rather than what he was — just another unhinged white man who had decided that killing several people was the solution to his troubles. The intent of the Brady Act was to keep guns out of the hands of the aberrations while minimizing the effect on “good honest gun owners”.

I don’t want to portray the Brady Act as having had no effect. It did, in fact, reduce the number of suicides. Suicide by gun is a remarkably common thing in the US, and 60% of gun-related deaths are suicides. There are stories about men walking into a gun store, asking to see a gun behind the counter, then loading it and taking their own life right there in front of the counter and the horrified shopkeeper.

The effect of the Brady Act on other kinds of firearm violence is negligible, and that’s for a couple of reasons.

First off, while the intent was to keep people with a history of violence-associated mental health issues from getting guns at all, that didn’t really happen. Factually, people with mental illness are less likely to commit an act of violence than they are to be victims of violence, so the blanket condemnation of people with mental illness implied by the law was quite simply wrong; it was also way more complicated to implement than politicians expected. To make matters worse, conservatives realized that they could easily be defined as people with mental illness, and so they fought against this aspect of the law. For these reasons, the federal background check system still does not meaningfully integrate with data about who might be violent according to a mental health professional (that’s the broad stroke; the details are quite complicated — see 1, 2).

Second, to keep the Brady Act from bothering the people who already owned most of the guns (conservative white men), the Brady Act allows for the unregulated transfer of guns between private individuals. It only regulates sales of guns by federally-licensed dealers. The meme associated with this part of the law was, “I am a completely good conservative white man and what if I want to give my gun (a precious family heirloom) to my completely good conservative white son? How dare the government tell me what I can do with my property!!”

A side-effect of the Brady Act — which undoubtedly helped it become law — is that it made it harder for the people who are not conservative white men to get a gun. Conservative white men could feel good about it because the black gangster of their racist fantasies would have to either pass a federal background check (which he can’t, because in this fantasy, he is a felon) or buy one from a conservative white man, who would obviously be able to detect that the buyer has ill intent (via racism).

Since 9/11, the conservative function of the background check has been kicked up a notch, and the same people who are on the secret “no-fly list” and the even more secret “super shitty special screening” list for flying also get extra special attention when trying to purchase a gun from a federally-licensed dealer. Most of those people aren’t dangerous, but are just members of some group that conservatives are afraid of (i.e., leftists, Muslims, and Black people who have been vocal about the idea that Black people shouldn’t be murdered by the police more often than other types of people).

There’s really only one group of people who shouldn’t be allowed to buy (or own) guns, and that’s fascists. We can go down that rabbit hole some other time, but yes, I would include the standard “domestic violence” or “stalking” guy in that category. Coincidentally, Twitter created an anti-fascist algorithm, but decided not to use it because of how frequently it flagged conservative politicians.

If you go to a gun show, most of the vendors there will be federally-licensed firearm dealers, and if you buy a gun from one of them, they will perform the background check required by the Brady Act before handing you that gun. Some of them even make it one step more annoying and ask you to pay now, but then ship you the gun from their store after they run your background check (gun shows are typically Friday to Sunday, so they’d run your background check the following Monday). However, a gun show is also a place where private individuals can sell guns to other private individuals. Typically, this looks like an attendee (not someone with a booth) walking around with a sign on his back (literally) that says what he has for sale. At a gun show with 100 people, you’re only typically going to see one or two of these guys at a time.

The “gun show loophole” isn’t a loophole, and it also isn’t really about gun shows. Rather, it is about private sales, and it isn’t the “private sale loophole” but rather the “private sale feature”. The reason for the private sale feature is that conservative white men already own most of the guns, and they are presumed to be both good people and adequate judges of who may purchase a used gun.

I’m not a sports fan. I’ve been known to refer to such activities as “sportsball” and I certainly agree with Noam Chomsky’s analysis of professional sports as part of the greater distraction function of capital-owned mass media. The latest trend in far-right insanity still has me scratching my head, though, and honestly, I can’t help but reflexively feel more positive toward professional sports.

Yes, the far right (the very, very far right) has decided that they hate professional sports. The biggest reason appears to be that COVID-19 restrictions have been dropped so thoroughly that they no longer have that to rally people to their cause, so they’re forced to come up with something new.

They’re being vague about what, exactly, they hate about professional sports, but if we read between the lines, the reasons appear to be:

1. Professional athletes represent various racial, ethnic, and sexual/romantic identities. They are diverse.
2. Professional athletes as well as the business entities that control the teams support various racial, ethnic, and sexual/romantic identities; see, for example, Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe. They support the neoliberal conception of equality — and the destruction of old hierarchies. They still support capitalism, obviously, but the far right doesn’t actually like capitalism.
3. Professional sports have an inherent homoeroticism. All those fit, scantily-clad same-sex bodies bumping into one another. Rowr.
4. Professional sports promote a kind of idolatry of the human form and of human excellence. Put another way, it promotes the idea that human beings can achieve greatness, can do amazing — even miraculous — things.

So, in summary:

• Racism
• Homophobia
• Christian extremism

These are not the reasons why I dislike sports — not anywhere close. If anything, these are all major strengths of professional sports; they are things that contribute positively to society and culture. This right-wing take won’t convince people to give up watching professional sports, but it might encourage conservatives to feel even more angry and alienated. I feel like this strategy can’t really last very long, but you never know.

Here’s a related Twitter thread:

It's hard to express just how radicalized far-right spaces have become in the last month, in part because this new brand of radicalization is so specific.

These spaces have become openly, aggressively, mask-off anti-gay.

They've also become extremely… anti-sports! It's weird!

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 31, 2022

There’s a persistent narrative in America about collapse involving a small band of heroic individuals surviving through a relatively short hard time to rebuild the human species. Sometimes, “relatively short” means only a few days, while sometimes it is as long as a generation, but the band of people is never bigger than perhaps a thousand people, and quite often, the group is quite small.

The truth is that it would take a population of at least 2500 people to save humanity from a long decline ending in total extinction. Corey Bradshaw does a nice job summarizing the situation in Why populations can’t be saved by a single breeding pair. Keep in mind that this isn’t just 2500 people on Earth, but rather, 2500 people who are part of the same general community or a bunch of separate communities that regularly visit one another. The 2500 have to interact with one another regularly. If there are 1000 in China, 500 in the US, and 1000 in Argentina, that doesn’t count.

In the US, I think the belief that a single breeding pair can re-establish humanity comes from three places: 1) A literal interpretation of the Bible, with all the inbreeding that it implies, 2) Hollywood budgets that limit the size of groups in apocalyptical and post-apocalyptic stories, 3) Lack of understanding of population genetics. I’m not an expert in population genetics myself, but I choose to trust people who have studied the subject in depth.

This is just one misunderstanding about the survivability of the coming collapse of this civilization. Others include the complexity of modern technology, the cognitive capacity of people who are struggling to merely survive, the post-collapse availability of dense energy sources (like oil), the rapid oscillation of climate on a planet that is re-establishing equilibrium after a destabilizing event (anthropogenic climate change), and the genocidal ambitions of those who typically own weapons. In short, there isn’t going to be a happy ending after a period of turmoil.

The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report has been out for a while (August 2021), and scientists are continuing to comment on it (the working group portion came out in February). In summary, limiting warming to 1.5C (probably the threshold for keeping advanced civilization from collapsing) requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 (only 3 years from now!) at the latest and be reduced by 43% by 2030 and, furthermore, we are on track for temperature increases of 2 to 4C which will likely kill all human life. We are fully on-track for an unlivable world.

You may recall that one of Joe Biden’s talking points to the donor class during the election was that, “nothing will fundamentally change.” Nothing fundamentally changing means the end of the human species. Not coincidentally, Columbia just elected Barbara Buffaloe as mayor. One of her first acts as mayor-elect was to legitimize right-wing talk radio by being all chummy with them. When they asked why “conservatives” shouldn’t be terrified of her (because she is a “progressive”) acting as mayor, her big talking point was that during her time as the head of Columbia’s sustainability office, nothing fundamentally changed.

The function of progressive liberalism is not progress; rather, it is to maintain control of society by near-right (capitalist) forces by holding back change from both the left and the far right. Those self-described “progressives” in the Democratic party have been very clear that they “are capitalist”, and Democratic party voters like that. They think a regulated capitalism is the best possible world (with regulation being the method they use to “perfect” capitalism) because they’ve somehow lost the ability to imagine a better world. If you take the meaning of the word conservative literally, “liberal progressives” are the conservatives. Self-described conservatives are something else entirely. Both groups believe in the inherent evil of human beings — they just have different ideas about how you solve this problem.

(It is true that there is a small minority of people involved with Democratic party politics that call themselves progressive but mean it in a very different way that might be centrism or even near-left.)

Mainstream Democrats do not believe in climate change. I know that’s a confusing thing to say, but hear me out. Climate change is real regardless of whether you believe in it or not, but if the climate change you believe in bears little resemblance to the real climate change, do you really believe in climate change? You believe in something entirely different that resembles climate change, but is fictitious. Real climate change is a world-ending force, and because we waited so long to act, it can now only be mitigated through sacrifice; it can no longer be solved. On the other hand, pretend climate change can be solved by sorting your refuse into garbage for the landfill and recyclables, buying an electric car, smart investment strategies, and a clever bumper sticker. This is very similar to how conservatives believe in climate change; most of them admit it exists, but say it is insignificant (and also natural, so therefore non-lethal).

But to get back to the IPCC report — the IPCC is a conservative body. It is a product of capitalism and makes predictions that are optimistic relative to what the data indicate. The IPCC is not run by lizard people, but rather capital-controlled governments, capital-dependent scientists, and reviewers that are frequently direct representatives for capital. All that’s true and yet the excuse for why we don’t take serious action against climate change is invariably “the economy”. In essence, there’s a growing understanding among the wealthy that humanity is screwed, but they still don’t want any of the possible solutions to affect their bottom line — and that’s partially because they’ve decided that their solution for climate change is to purchase really nice bunkers. The wealthy are trying to outsource the solution to you — the taxpayer — and if they can’t make that happen, they’re just going to go hide in a hole.

We have a whole series of posts about climate change that you can read if you’d like to better understand this perspective:

This Discontinuity 1: Current Conditions
This Discontinuity 2: Worldviews
This Discontinutiy 3: Strategy
Nothing Will Fundamentally Change, and Then Humanity Will Die

Fascism is hard to define. For the time being, we’ve all accepted that it is a bad thing, which makes things even more confusing because no one — not even fascists — wants to claim the label. To make matters worse, there are a lot of fash-adjacent groups (e.g., neoliberals, capitalists) who want to define it in a way that makes it sound like they are the farthest thing from fascism while also including their enemies to the left (e.g., socialists) in the definition. The most popular list of characteristics of fascism is a list from 2003 by Lawrence Britt. I find it to be both inadequate and a little bit wrong, so I came up with my own list.

The following are some important characteristics of fascists:

1. Fascists limit the definition of who “citizens” are according to their conception of what people “the nation” includes. Anyone who is not a citizen is considered to be less than fully human, while members of the nation are portrayed as superior. Often, but not always, fascists will pretend that citizens are a biologically distinct “race” and that non-citizens are members of other races. Examples: Nazis decided that Jewish people were not citizens (even if born in Germany); Trumpers decided that Muslims and atheists are not citizens (even if born in the US); European colonists who came to the Americas decided that the natives that they found there were not citizens.
2. Fascists advocate for physically removing non-citizen groups from society by instituting some form of genocide. They believe this is necessary because the non-citizens are somehow harmful to citizens. Genocidal strategies might include outright killing, forced expulsion from the national territory (deportation), forced sterilization, imprisonment (often including forced work with inadequate/no compensation), and suppression of a group’s culture. Examples: Nazis moved various groups to ghettos (impoverished, walled parts of cities), then to concentration camps (which included forced work), then began systematically executing them; Trumpers created laws to prevent gay and lesbian couples from adopting children (making it so they could not pass their culture on to those children) and separated immigrants from their children and placed those children with right-wing families; the Trump administration deported individuals who were in the process of becoming citizens because they were from “bad” countries (places where people tend to have brown skin) but allowed people from “good” countries (places where people tend to have pale skin) to continue the process.
3. Fascists want power, and will use any ideas or symbols that they believe will increase their power, even if it does not really make sense. Examples: Hitler called his ideology “national socialism” because socialism was popular at the time, but then had all the socialists imprisoned or killed once he was in power; The Nazis used the swaztika as their symbol even though it was already established in Hindu (Indian) culture as a symbol of good luck; Trumpers say that they favor democracy, but also create laws that make it harder for their perceived enemies to vote; Republicans say they are in favor of civilian gun ownership, but opposed it when they learned the Black Panthers were armed (Mulford Act in California); Trumpers say that they favor free-market capitalism, but want Facebook to be forced by the government to publish their ideas.
4. Fascists engage in real-time hallucination; aka “will to power”. This means that they actively choose to believe certain things are true if those things being true would increase their power or create leverage. Put another way, will to power is believing something is true in order to force it to be manifested into reality. This probably isn’t a conscious process most of the time, so it isn’t that they are “lying” or “fooling themselves”, but more like their imagination is plugged directly into their perception of reality without a filter. They also imagine that their enemies are plotting to attack them in the same way that they have attacked their enemies or have plotted to attack them; they imagine themselves as the most marginalized group (they are usually the most powerful group but have begun losing power). All this makes them very susceptible to conspiracy theories. Examples: Nazis (and many Trumpers) chose to believe that the world was controlled by a global conspiracy of Jewish people – it isn’t; Trumpers choose to believe that the 2020 election was stolen – it wasn’t; since slavery times, American fascists have imagined that Black people were about to organize a genocide against white people, yet it was white people who went into predominantly Black towns and burned them to the ground.
5. Fascists advocate for strict gender roles and are opposed to LGBTQ people existing and any type of feminism. In service of strict gender roles (and not in service to “unborn babies”), fascists are strongly opposed to abortion and birth control. The “ideal woman” of fascism is self-sacrificing and obedient to men, but it is also seen by some women as empowering as this idea recognizes and respects their roles as caregivers for children and other relatives (which is typically neglected by liberalism/capitalism). Examples: The Nazis awarded the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother” to women who bore 4 or more children; Nazis imprisoned and killed gay people; Republicans advocate for gay people to be imprisoned and forcibly “converted” to become straight; the Trump administration was aggressively anti-trans and Trump himself was openly misogynistic and a womanizer; Republicans have a long history of being anti-abortion while also refusing to support welfare programs that benefit children (the baby production supports gender roles by forcing women to become mothers, while they believe that the welfare program aids their perceived enemies, especially people of color).
6. While it is true that all social power (including economic power) can be reduced to violence, fascists actively and sincerely advocate for violence (while also creating plausible deniability; e.g., by claiming satire) and see their violence as both morally good and noble. Under fascism, violence flows “down” to people with less power; in contrast, far left ideologies encourage violence to flow “up” (though fascists frequently try to portray themselves as punching up). Examples: Both Hitler and Donald Trump encouraged their followers to commit acts of violence against anti-fascist protesters and portrayed those protesters as the bullies who were oppressing their supporters; Trump encouraged his supporters to overthrow American democracy, but portrayed that action as a fight against “the elites”; American fascist group “Operation Werewolf” used as their slogan, “We want the total war.” In contrast to fascists, leaders of the French Revolution encouraged violence against the monarchy and other nobles, and leaders of communist revolutions encouraged violence against monarchists and wealthy capitalists.
7. Fascists are preoccupied with appearing dominant, and want their country to be dominant as well because they see the country as a reflection of themselves. If an enemy beats them (or their country), they will claim that the enemy cheated. They will even express that weak or submissive people deserve to be hurt. Examples: Fascists drive physically large vehicles and drive in a domineering fashion; fascists were very angry with Barack Obama for making progress toward peace with both Cuba and Iran.

The following characteristics are often attributed to fascism, but do not necessarily apply depending on what the fascists perceive as beneficial at the moment: opposition to capitalism, support of religion, opposition to democracy. What really matters is if they believe capitalism, religion and democracy favor them at the moment. In the case of religion, they will typically have very specific ideas about which religious groups are good, but can also reject religion entirely if they think that will be beneficial to their cause.

Finally, there are some people who say that fascists exhibit “communalism”; they are wrong. Fascism is made up of individuals who use their association with their skin color, ethnicity, religion, nation, etc. as a means of attaining their individual superiority (thus satisfying their narcissism). My guess is that those who are trying to associate fascism with communalism are attempting to associate it with left-wing ideologies, like socialism or communism, and distinguish it from its cousin, liberal capitalism. Typically, both fascists and classical liberals (e.g., American libertarians) are happy to extol the virtues of individualism.

A Lengthy Side Note

It is true, though, that Giovanni Gentile, who Mussolini called the “philosopher of Fascism”, considered fascism to be a communal order with all citizens serving the state, but if you read about his philosophy, I think you’ll see it is a convoluted mess that doesn’t really reflect reality or the mental functioning of normal human beings. Moreover, do we care about arcane theories or do we care about what fascists actually do in practice? I’d say the latter, and literally the first thing they did was to attack the communists — fascism was a reaction to communism. If their goals were similar, you’d think they would have cooperated, and we know that fascists purposefully misrepresent themselves to gain power.

What may explain things is that at the time fascism was imagined by Gentile, communists and trade unionists were the same people, and they were in opposition to the state. Moreover, the communists wanted to set up “soviets” which were distributed elected governments intended to make Italy more democratic. Democracy is directly opposed to concentrations of power, and a concentration of power is exactly what Gentile truly wanted; he didn’t necessarily care how that was structured except that he wanted a structure that would work to uphold the power of the few, which is exactly what a centralized state does well. Remember that fascists will latch on to anything that they believe will increase their power, but will discard the same thing just as quickly if conditions change.

After consulting with someone else in the club who knows something about philosophy, I can tell you that Gentile’s convoluted mess has a couple of features that distinguish it from communist or communalist thought. First off, while both Marx and Gentile were inspired by Hegel, they came to very different conclusions. Where Marx decided that the most important factor in life and politics is the material conditions the people are facing (e.g., can you eat? Can you afford gasoline?), Gentile came to the opposite conclusion, deciding that a person’s internal mental state is the most important thing and that reality is subordinate to thought (100% nuts, but a popular idea in the US). You might recognize Gentile’s perspective as a different way to describe “will to power” which I typically describe as “active hallucination”; today, we hear conservatives say people should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and use “the power of positive thinking”. Second, the purpose of Gentile’s philosophy is to allow the few to dominate the many without the many revolting; since being dominated is a materially unpleasant state of being, Gentile attempts to keep the many in check by getting them to ignore their material conditions.

The elephant in the room is the Soviet Union. In the west, our understanding of the Soviet Union is that it was a horrific, authoritarian nightmare — not democratic at all — and that the material conditions were quite bad. First off, the Soviet Union was an improvement over Czarist Russia; that should go without saying. Second, it’s my opinion that though the goals of the Bolsheviks (and the Marxists and the Leninists) were all good and supportive of democratic principles, the revolution was co-opted by bad actors, and that is why the plutocratic Russia of today (with its invasions of sovereign nations, assassinations, suppression of democracy, and oppression of LGBTQ people) looks so similar to the middle to later-stage Soviet Union; their leader even came from the Soviet Union’s powerful intelligence agency.

If you founded a non-profit that provides free wheelchairs to children in need, but then some villains managed to get control of it later and used the organization to enrich themselves, and the quality of the wheelchairs dropped to where they were hazardous to the children, does that mean you or your initial project were villainous? Of course not. The entire project of communism and its goals are villainized in the US because our media is controlled by capitalist plutocrats — the enemies of democracy — who rightly see communism as an existential threat to themselves. Certainly, we should not believe the narrative put forth by villains — that all people are selfish, that true goodness is not possible, and therefore, anyone claiming (or even attempting) to be good is the “real” villain. (For example, a Democrat told me the other day that “everyone lies” and then implied that we should never judge anyone for any lie.) That toxic narrative effectively encourages people to give up on making the world a better place and allow villains to stay in power.