Tag: misinformation

The Price Of Bread
Introduction
Problems Of Fact
Problems of Reason
Why It Matters
Ya Thought I Forgot, Huh?
Introduction

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]he “price of bread” is a tried and true hook on which to hang any given complaint from any given ideological perspective to shock the consumer, draw attention, and stoke feelings of anger and frustration. The “bread” in question is a metaphor for any consumer good. The arguments in question tend to take the general form of “I can’t believe how terrible the economy is today. Why, when I was young I used to get two packs of name-brand cigarettes and two 16-ounce glass bottles of Mountain Dew for $2!”

The “price of bread” argument fails not only in that it’s usually highly subjective and prone to strong influence of personal bias e.g. artificially glorifying “the past” as having been “better,” but it’s also completely meaningless by itself. Numbers increase, particularly in capitalized systems wherein the currency is based on an intangible asset like “the full faith and credit” of the issuing nation, as is the case with all such nations including the United States. By itself this increase means nothing that can be said to meaningfully reflect on the average quality of life.

Worse than that for those seeking progress, it often inadvertently draws attention to weaknesses in argumentation and flaws in a given logical calculus attempting to rationalize or validate progressive social policy. In doing so, the net effect tends to be empowering counter-arguments rather than advancing the ostensible agenda at hand.

In today’s example we’re going to look at a tweet by someone calling themselves “Fred Krueger” (not likely to be a real name, but it’s possible). Mr. Kreuger, who is entirely unknown to me, claims to hold a PhD from Stanford, and says he’s a “bitcoin maxi,” whatever that is, in his twitter profile. I’ve included a link to the original tweet below, but given conditions at Twitter I thought it best to also include a screenshot.

The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x

however,

The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x.

The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x.

The median cost of an ivy league…
— Fred Krueger (@dotkrueger) December 29, 2024

Original URL: https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285

Screenshot of original tweet posted at https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285

The tweet reads as follows: “The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for “progress.””

Problems Of Fact

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]here is a whole lot wrong here. First and foremost there is no indication of any of the sources of any of this information, so let’s track that down first. The Census Bureau tells us that the first number isn’t far off – the median family income in 1971 was $10,290. We also find with a bit of quick google-fu that the median price of a new car was $3890, and a new home was a nice even $25,000. Of course none of those numbers are normalized – those are 1971 dollars being compared to 2024 dollars, which is sort of the whole point of the exercise.

The “reader added context” in this case isn’t particularly helpful and leans toward its own agenda.

First and foremost the reader feedback ignores that the entire point of the framing is to compare price increases of specific items to baseline inflation. I believe the intent of the writer was to imply that life is much more economically challenging for most of us than a simple broad average inflation rate tells us, so noting that the numbers haven’t been normalized doesn’t really address any of the problems with the tweet and in fact mostly serves to point out that the people offering that particular criticism didn’t understand what they read very well. The fact that the numbers aren’t normalized is the whole point of the tweet.

Second, there aren’t many people alive right now who were around in the 70s who really feel like they have nearly twice as much purchasing power today as they did fifty years ago, and there are some very good reasons for that.

While the implication that quality of life is significantly improved across the board for most people is ostensibly supported by adding up the cash value of various goods and services, it also overlooks the necessity of far greater levels of spending than were necessary fifty years ago, even accounting properly for inflation. This is propaganda in the other direction; suggesting that people are basically doing just fine right now and any struggle you’re experiencing must be down to something other than a steadily decreasing quality of life. In short: gaslighting.

But I digress, let’s get back to the tweet at hand and check some numbers. I’ve included a few direct citations links, those numbers not directly linked come from the same or similar sources.

The median family income “today,” i.e. 2023, the most recent year for which statistics have been properly documented, is $80,610 – a difference from the quoted post of about $32K, and an increase of 8x, rather than 5.5.

Already this is going to make the comparisons less striking, and we haven’t even checked them yet, but let’s finish the job for posterity and we’ll move on to understanding why we can’t keep doing this, nor allow it to continue being done.

A new car in 2024 is averaging about 48,400.

A new home is about $420,400 – a greater increase than the tweet by about 18% (and an increase of about 17x rather than the 14x cited).

The rest of the numbers are similarly garbled; an ivy league education in 1971 was 2600 rather than 3K – a difference of about 13%. Today’s cost is 64,690 – $25K less than cited. The Social Security Administration tells us that per-capita health care expenditures in 1971 were $358 – less than 90% of the number given here. The most recent available information is for 2022, which the WHO tells us is 12,473 – about a sixth less than this tweet reports.

So we’ve established that, at the very least, there are significant errors in basic information here, which of course throws all the calculations off.

We’re not off to a good start; if someone wanted to argue against the core thesis of the tweet (that the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971), this writer has certainly given them plenty of ammunition to call their basic reliability into question, which delegitimizes the thesis in the reader’s mind before it even happens.

It all forces us to consider: why are we listening to this person or taking this message seriously in the first place?

Problems of Reason

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]O[/su_dropcap]n the other hand, here are two semi-randomly selected prices for 25-inch televisions from the Sears catalog in 1974. One is 609.95, the other 759.95, which average to 684.95. Divide by 25 and you’ve got 273.98 per viewable diagonal inch, in old-school NTSC resolution at best.

I’m currently using a 40-inch Polaroid flatscreen as my desktop monitor. I paid $259 for it in 2019, which is 319.62 in 2024 dollars, or 7.99 per viewable diagonal inch.

That’s a 97% price decrease, and this is why item price comparisons are always a flawed argument.

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, this isn’t less true but more so when the flawed argument is supporting a larger (and entirely valid) point about the relative cost of living.

In 1974 the minimum wage was $2.00 an hour, that would be 12.80 today. But that’s also not a fair comparison because so many things have changed since then about how we make and spend our money. The internet and its accouterments were not a required part of living in 1974, and the expenses one might incur to replicate the necessary functionality were often far lower but also with much lower quality of access, e.g. looking up information in an encyclopedia at your local library rather than on your cell phone. Fundamentally free or close to it, but also limited access and functionality. (Worth pointing out for pedantry that there are of course costs involved in transportation plus the value of one’s time, but that’s still not working out to a monthly cell phone bill of $50-$200+ dollars…and if you’re a kid in the seventies and eighties like I was, you were at school with a library full of reference material several hours a day anyway).

There is also a long, LONG list of important social advances that have happened in the last fifty years. That we are not yet in some progressive utopia doesn’t change that. However as a rhetorical tactic, to ignore or disregard that progress out of fear that people will think the job’s done and stop trying or something (see: “post-racial America” circa 2009) is insulting to the people who made that progress happen and disheartening to those working to ensure we keep moving forward. It also adds to the general sense of futility that can attach to any attempt at meaningful social change, on any level.

Cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

“People aren’t going to change and it’s a waste of time to try. You may as well give up, because even with all this advancement you’ve gotten nowhere.” This is a critically important subtext contained within this entire argument. It’s messaging that serves only the interests of the entrenched and abused power to which so many people taking this attitude believe they’re working against.

A loaf of bread ran 28 cents in 1974. It’s 1.92 now. That’s only 7 cents off the standard rate of inflation.

These comparisons have no meaning. They’re only intended to shock and grab attention, but they don’t convey meaningful information. What they are is a nice setup for someone who understands why this framing fails (consciously or unconsciously; Hanlon’s Razor applies) to come along and yank out a list of similar comparisons – go ahead and price what would’ve conceivably passed for a home computer in 1974, or a mobile phone! – in an attempt to invalidate the core point that we’re living in a capitalist-sliding-quickly-into-fascist dystopia, which stands just fine on its own without making a bunch of cherry-picked comparisons in an appeal to emotion.

In both cases – and this is important! – the actors at hand, both the person throwing these kind of “information” around and those who show up to try to undermine the thesis by attacking the obvious weak points in the supporting arguments or evidence, are deliberately and intentionally aiming at your emotional responses in order to subvert, distract, and ultimately mitigate your critical thinking, because they both know their arguments don’t hold up to critical analysis.

Why It Matters

“RAWR! THERE’S NOTHING BUT LIES AND DAMN LIES IN HERE!’ (Bing AI generated image, with modifications by JH)

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]A[/su_dropcap]s with so many discussions of this nature, the first objection one can usually anticipate is some sort of argument from apathy – why does this matter, you’re just splitting hairs, this is all just pseudointellectual self-indulgent twaddle, insert dogwhistle for whatever audience e.g. “wokeism” or appeals to ridicule, etc.

So let’s talk about why it matters for a minute.

First, cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

This seems like one of those things that would hardly bear saying out loud, but apparently it does: the most effective way to lie is with as much truth as possible. Simply throwing a bunch of statistics around without context and validation is often the tactic of someone who knows they’re trying to make a point, but doesn’t know how, and doesn’t want to let that get in the way of the dopamine rush and-or traffic bump and-or possible passive income generated by throwing around empty aphorisms and questionable statistics that are emotionally appealing and don’t invite careful scrutiny.

(NB: When this is done at high volume with deliberately malicious intent, it can quickly turn into what’s become known as the “Gish Gallop,” wherein the speaker just throws such a ridiculous pile of misinformation around that by the time you sort through it you’ve forgotten the original point and likely made some superfluous error the speaker can then seize on as evidence of your incompetence. Hence the troll…)

But there’s more. Inherently the application of dishonest and manipulative rhetorical tactics reflects, at the very least, a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker in their own words – if they believed what they were saying they wouldn’t think they have to lie about it to convince anyone else. By using these tactics, the subtext we’re writing is that either we don’t believe our position holds up on merit, or we don’t believe we’re not capable of expressing our reasoning effectively. Most importantly, it shows. People tend to pick up on it when you’re trying to con them, whether they do so consciously or not.

To a discerning media consumer – and we’re all media consumers, discerning or not – this is an immediate red flag that the speaker may not be a reliable information source. Maybe they know they’re lying; maybe they’ve bought into it and are choosing to resolve any internal cognitive dissonance between what they want to believe on one hand and reality on the other by trying as hard as they can to convince other people to believe with them. Whatever the specific situation may be, people who are paying attention are going to pick up on the flaws in the argument almost immediately, and that calls into question the validity of the entire thesis. As I’ve noted above, they’ll often pick up on it even if they don’t consciously realize it.

Arguably however the real damage comes among the less discerning consumers, those who repeat this information in earnest good faith, not realizing that they’re basically being set up to fail. Now they’ve distributed the information, and those who consume it via their distribution will hold them responsible for its accuracy. The entire conversation is now reduced to back-and-forth arguments that resolve nothing and are all based in factual and logical error. They’ve sacrificed their own credibility and taken on a huge set of arguments, while validating the source of the bad information!

I have a problem with this in a pretty serious way because I happen to fully support and believe in the surface thesis presented by this tweet as a question of personal ideology. I was alive and conscious in the early 70s and I absolutely believe that in many important ways we were all doing far better then than we are now. Many of us were also doing far worse, which nobody of any sense wants to ignore or pretend isn’t the case. However it’s also true, and important to recognize in this context, that in terms of stability and security in the lives of the average American, the 70’s and early 80’s were far superior to any time since including the present, and indeed the nature and pace of our social progress has sunk to embarrassing lows by contrast as well, especially when one thinks not in terms of what constitutes the current status quo but in terms of what’s being done to improve it, and why, and for whom.

We had a lot of work to do back then.

We still do.

We’ve done a significant bit of it as I’ve alluded above, and there are significant and powerful forces in this world who do not want that work done because our collective progress threatens their personal power. We were more honest with ourselves, culturally, especially in advanced nations, about our need to grow and recognize that we weren’t the pinnacle of human advancement but just the current step in a never-ending series of them, and that our job was not to be the best but to be the best we can, improve on what came before us and set up and inspire what comes after to do the same, where “improvement” is defined as being in more complete compliance with the “ultimate ethic” of keeping the species alive and propagating.

We know through the research of all human history that the greatest progress happens when human minds are well-educated and free to explore and express their thoughts and ideas in a fair and just context that ensures both the right of the individual to say their piece and the right of other individuals to reject their piece as ugly, ignorant, or malicious, including the right of society to collectively reject their values or ideology as unacceptable, immoral, or unethical.

We know that the holding the privilege (and it is a privilege, as is everything else we keep trying to call a “right”) to say your piece does not include the privilege to insist everyone pretend they agree with it and love you for saying it.

We know that human progress individually and collectively relies entirely on our capacity to unlearn old lies. We also know that there are forces in this world whose power relies (no pun intended) on us not doing that. The capitalists can’t keep running everything if we refuse to be capitalized or to participate in their games anymore. Problem is we’ve been letting them do it for about five hundred years now and they refuse to get out of the way.

Now, given all of that…

Ya Thought I Forgot, Huh?

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]O[/su_dropcap]ur thesis is that dragging out prices fifty years ago, or a hundred, or twenty-five and comparing them to current prices is a waste of time and energy, except perhaps in radical situations like a collapsing currency where you’re seeing prices jump by orders of magnitude in a short period of time, and in very specific applications of economic analysis that simply aren’t either directly relevant to or within the personal intellectual capacity of the average person. It’s certainly of no value in social media conversations about the need for broad social reform of capitalized institutions.

Another AI take on trolls cherry-picking statistics, this one courtesy of OpenAI via Jetpack, and enhanced a bit by yours truly

I hope that by laying out weaknesses that are readily open to valid criticism in this framing, we can learn to first frame our own thinking more effectively but also learn to start rejecting those who either can’t or don’t.

Because the raw truth of the matter is that either you understand the things I’ve discussed here or you don’t. If you don’t understand them, you’re probably not qualified to be participating in the conversation as anything but a spectator, and that’s okay. I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery, and that’s not a reflection on my character either. NB: If I know I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery and insist on doing it anyway, that is definitely a reflection on my character!

If you do understand the things I’ve discussed here and still choose to frame things in this way, you’re being deliberately dishonest and manipulative. This means you can’t be trusted, and nobody with a worthy message wants to have it promoted by someone who engages in deceit and manipulation to communicate it. Since I happen to think that the underlying message of diligent and constantly refining progress of human quality of life is worth, I have to stand up and call out this radically unhelpful framing as it is.

If the message is worthy, deceit and manipulation isn’t necessary.

If deceit and manipulation are necessary, the message isn’t worthy.

What happens when we allow this kind of noise to flood our zeitgeist is that we begin to accept the premise that the behavior is necessary, like someone trying to rationalize lying on their resume. “Everyone does it, you can’t avoid it.” That argument has its place. For instance, I can’t avoid trying to make money with my work; I live in a world that requires money to survive and ensure my capacity to do that work.

That argument isn’t valid in this conversation; it’s a capitulation to the bullies and the liars, the manipulators and deceivers.

What happens when we allow those who are intentionally deceitful and manipulative to control the conversation is we force everything to become deceitful and manipulative in order to keep up. The deceit and manipulation undermines the legitimacy of the core ideas in people’s minds until eventually nobody knows what truth is anymore, and at that point Big Brother has won the game. We let them make deceit and manipulation necessary, and then none of us can trust each other enough to work together on anything…including pushing back against the powers who want to permanently convert the vast majority of us – everyone but them and those they choose – to “human capital stock.”

So please stop doing this stuff and stop putting it over. Stop believing and validating things just because they push your emotional buttons in a way that satisfies you. That reaction, all by itself, is what every perpetrator of evil has counted on in one way or another for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories.

The only way to stop the evil is to stop falling for it.
January 21, 2025
More Two-Party Myths

Clearly we need further discussion of the two-party myths that are rampant in our discourse.

I ran into this on Facebook. For those of you with screen readers or other visual impairment which makes it difficult for you to read text in images, it reads as follows:

“We won’t be able to elect third parties if we never vote for third parties.

It doesn’t make sense for someone in a deep red state to theor their vote away on Biden when they can try and run up higher numbers for Cornel West

If they reach 5% of the popular vote, that guarantees ballot access and funding in the next election cycle.”

It doesn’t guarantee a platform though. Nor does it circumvent Duverger’s Law.

It’s important to point out at the top that this has been the operating strategy of “third parties” in this country for decades and it has yet to bear meaningful fruit. The two “third” parties that have made any headway at all, the Greens and the Libertarians, have yet to seat a federal legislator, and have only had spotty, inconsistent, and functionally useless success at the state level.

You won’t be able to elect “third” parties in an electoral system based on single-member districts decided by simple majority vote until one of the two existing major parties decays so much on one end of the spectrum that a challenger from the other end can rise effectively, while the party in the middle drifts into the space formerly occupied by the fallen second party. That’s what we’re seeing right now as the GOP implodes and the democratic party continues sliding to the right under neoliberal capitalist-plutocrat stewardship and patronage.

When serious leftist candidates have the confidence they can split off from the Dems and have a viable challenge from the left, it will happen. Then you’ll have a few cycles when the DNC basically runs the show while the GOP desperately tries to save itself by doubling down on plutocracy and the “new left” gets organized and gathers power from within the current Democratic party. We are probably in the early stages of this right now.

It’s never one time happened any other way, even the direction of the shifts and rises are consistent – a leftist party becomes one of the two “majors,” and in the process of trying to protect and grow its power begins compromising and sliding to the right.

As that slide – frequently called the “Overton Window” (* see below) – happens, the current right-wing group keeps moving further right until they hit the point of no longer being able to plausibly deny they’ve gone fascist/totalitarian. As the old left calcifies and stagnates it slides into the “moderate” right position.
In every functional democratic system that has existed, it ends up either like this or with the hard right being so successful they rise to a level of power where they’re functionally capable of imposing the autocracy they crave and then you have a big war and a reset to more or less the status quo that existed prior to the rise of the right.

Examples of the earlier process can be found in the demise of the Whigs in the US in the 19th century; examples of the latter can be found in Germany and other nations in the mid-20th century.
It always goes one way or the other. Not once in human history has a populist left-wing movement coalesced into a viable party from outside the existing party structure.

Focus on empowering your genuine leftists within the democratic party and helping them gather strength and viability so when the GOP finishes falling off the edge of fascism the new left has the confidence to believe they can step up. Your only other realistic option is sitting around carping about “third parties” and voting for almost universally unelectable candidates until you’re left with a one party system, and nobody wants that.

Short of everybody getting off their asses and actually learning their individual candidates and deciding on an individual basis who they’re going to vote for, which absolutely will never happen because people are generally lazy and love to be part of an in-group, that’s the only way you’re going to find a viable pushback against the fascism and autocracy that has wholly swallowed the GOP and taken in a horrifying portion of the DNC as well.

I know that’s not easy to hear and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the truth, and when we acknowledge it and work within it instead of trying impotently to fight the weather because it gratifies our egos to feel like we’re “too smart for that,” we’ll continue losing this country to fascism until we have to fight – literally – to get it back, and I don’t think anyone wants to go through that except the fascists, who think they’ll win that fight too.

(* We shouldn’t use the “Overton Window” labeling. Overton’s description is deliberately malformed to present the process as being unrelated to left or right but rather, disingenuously, as a question of what is “socially acceptable.” Fundamentally it’s an attempt to advise right-wing politicians how to avoid social disapproval and loss of electoral power by being too honest about their intentions. Overton was a fellow of the radical right-wing, plutocratic, self-described “think tank” The Mackinac Center For Public Policy.)

October 5, 2023
Six Easy Ways To Avoid Facebook Jail
Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.

It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.

There’s some stuff I’m not going to cover here – if you’re posting crappy spam fake t-shirt ads or lonely-hearts scams and things like that, you know what you’re doing and I’m not trying to help you anyway. Also, this is just about Facebook. Different platforms have different standards and rules. Like I used to tell my daughter, the four most important letters in the English language are “RTFM,” so make sure you RTFM if you’re not sure about something.

Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.

Disinformation, Misinformation, and “Fake News”

Disinfo on Facebook has always been a problem and in some ways always will be. The reality of the world is that there is no possible way Facebook can hire enough human beings to read every flagged or reported message and spend even five minutes carefully assessing it. However, there are some pretty common things that scammers and traffic maggots love doing that are a fast and easy way to get thrown off the network.

Super important: If you are running a page or group and something posted there gets a fact check overlay put on it, DELETE THE POST IMMEDIATELY, DO NOT LET IT JUST SIT THERE WITH THE FACT CHECK ON IT.

This is what caused the big Obama page to get taken down; we had an admin who would occasionally post questionably sourced information and particularly memes, and they’d get fact-checked. What we didn’t realize is that every time that happened and the rest of the admins let it stay up (because we were all trying to not step on each other’s stuff and like most people we figured better to leave it out there so people could see the fact check), it was another red flag in the algorithm…and they accumulate. They don’t go away. So after a decade of that, we got shut down, and while the source of the problem was definitely a single admin, from FB’s point of view it was the problem of all the admins because nobody removed the stuff. A decade-plus of work and 200,000+ readers gone overnight, and no way to get ’em back ever.
- Fake celebrity death reports – this is way too common, still. Not a day goes by when I don’t see some jerk posting about Simon Cowell or whoever’s likely to draw traffic dying tragically in the hospital. Aside from my feelings on the matter there are tons of people who just can’t resist sharing this kind of stuff because they see it and go OH MY GOODNESS SIMON COWELL WAS KILLED BY A MOSQUITO BITE ON HIS TAINT! I HAVE TO TELL ALL MY FRIENDS WHO LOVE X-FACTOR! Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T do this. ANY time you see a celebrity death report, even if it looks like it’s coming from a legitimate source, check the news first. Until you see it on trusted outlets – regardless of your political biases – don’t believe it and don’t share it. (Bonus points: check your local network television station website! They’ll usually have stories like this covered within a few minutes of the story being officially and reliably confirmed.)
- False medical/health information – regrettably Facebook has become less aggressive about nuking stuff like telling people to drink horse dewormer to treat viral infections, but the most egregious stuff will still be flagged. It’s not just about stuff like Covid though, and it’s not just about “what’s in the news right now.” NaturalNews.Com and the odious con man who owns them, Dr. Joseph Mercola, finally got thrown off the platform for constantly pushing bad health information so he could sell useless supplements to the naive and credulous, and FB’s tolerance for this sort of scam has become very, very low. Just like above, that means a whole lot of folks are risking the loss of their accounts for sharing this kind of information because they don’t know any better. Those unfortunates are created by people like Mercola, but that’s not going to save them from getting banned or ultimately booted off the network if they share this kind of (completely wrong and dangerous and utterly scamtastic) content.
- Fake missing animal or missing people reports – this is a more insidious form of disinformation that’s currently rising in popularity. The way this works is the scammer will post a message to a ton of regional pages and groups about a missing animal, which induces just about everybody to go “awwwww” and share the post. Then when the scammer sees one going viral, they change the post to something different and very much not what you thought you were sharing. This can range from scam sales and malware links to odious political stuff like white supremacist or neo-Nazi content. Be sure you check out any information like this very carefully before sharing it; if it’s not sourced from a law enforcement agency or known journalism source, it’s probably fake and you shouldn’t touch it.
As a general rule, if you can’t find the information on a major news site or in a peer-reviewed journal article, don’t trust it until you can. Important caveat: sites like PubMed are often mistaken for reliable sources, but they’re just source aggregators and not all the journals they aggregate from are reliable. If you’re not sure, don’t share!

Bullying & Violence

Look, there’s no polite reason to say this and no reason to say it politely – if trying to intimidate people with threats is your jam, you don’t belong online at all. You’re not fit to operate in public until you grow up. Nobody’s impressed with your empty claims about how much you can bench or how many guns you own or how you’re gonna kick someone’s ass if they don’t stop posting entirely legit news stories about Donald Trump being a criminal scam artist. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone who would do this to even find this article, but if you do…stop that crap.

For people whose entire personality isn’t a giant obvious attempt to hide their cowardice and low self-esteem behind a bunch of aggression, though, there are still risks. For instance, I got a pre-emptive warning the other day for a comment I was about to make that had some wordplay on “punch” – I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something on the level of “people like this make me feel punchtastic.” In that case I was offered the chance to delete the comment before they sanctioned the account, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that, and there’s no indication it left a lasting sanction on my account because I did in fact delete the comment immediately.

A few years back, though, I had a guy not far from me tell me straight up he was going to shoot me, skin me, and eat me. I reported the comment. He wasn’t sanctioned…but when I posted a screenshot of his threat, I got banned! So just avoid that kind of language if possible, especially if it’s in any way suggestive of a threat or of inciting other people. Stuff like “burn it all down” is likely to get you banned. (There are weak spots; I ran across a neo-Nazi a few weeks ago whose bio said straight up “shoot all communists” and that seems to have escaped FB’s notice until it was reported.)

While it’s a much milder form of this kind of talk, you also want to avoid telling people to “f–k off” and things like that. You’ll get banned. Trust me. Even aggressive but not “dirty” language like “shut up and sit down” will draw a ban if you aren’t extremely artful about it.

And stop “hey-babying” in the comments. “You’re so beautiful, please send me a friend request” isn’t fooling anyone – you’re a horndog with boundary issues and that’s just not cool, in public or in private.

Sexually explicit material

There are two very broad categories here. Let’s knock out the easy one first, and this goes out to the men: nobody wants to see your penis unless they ask you to see it, and if they do don’t show it to them on Facebook even in a private message. I can’t believe I have to say that out loud, but my female friends assure me that this is still a near-daily problem. STOP IT. If someone wants to see your junk they’ll ask you to see it. If they do, don’t show it to them on Facebook.

The second category is a bit tougher, and that’s the stuff that can reasonably be described as “artistic depictions.” FB is more relaxed than some about this – if you throw a giant emoji over your crotch in a photo, you’re usually safe so long as the subject is clearly an adult. There’s been a ton of controversy over artistic depictions, and that’s softened up a bit; I’ve seen painting or statues with full frontal nudity that weren’t taken down, and pictures involving life-like prosthetic penises as well, but then others get yanked. Best to avoid. They’ve also softened up on photos of breastfeeding, which was a big controversy a few years back; these days the rule of thumb seems to be that if you can’t see a nipple or any part of the areola, you’re okay.

Note well: depictions of sex acts, no matter how “artistically” rendered, still seem to be completely off-limits even if you cover the naughty bits. Ditto any references to minors, “family relations,” or sexual violence in any context but straight reporting of news or clinical discussion of issues is likely to get you banned (although to my eternal confusion, running around calling everyone a “groomer” or “pedophile” seems to be just fine with Zuck &Co).

Privacy Violations & Over-Networking

Ever notice how people will post a screen cap of a facebook comment and edit out the name and user icon of the commenter? That’s because Facebook considers posting those, especially when you’re criticizing or making fun of the comment, as intimidation; they treat it like you’re trying to get your readers to go mob-harass the poster. To be on the safe side, if you’re going to do the thing where you screencap your trolls and post their more entertaining BS, black out their identity. Oddly this doesn’t seem to apply to original posts, only to comments and inbox messages.

Doxxing people is bannable, even if they have their information fully visible on their page. Don’t. It’s an intimidation tactic and will be sanctioned.

“Over-networking” is when you add too many friends, follow too many pages, or send too many invites or friend requests in a short period of time. This behavior is almost always driven by commercial interest – trying to grow an audience by high-volume contact-making rather than by creating quality content and

Stupid Spam Tricks & “Dirty Words”

I’ve made occasional remarks for years about the tactic of “munging” words that are problematic – “adult” language, or words like “Covid” or “vaccine.” Those people who do things like t.hi.s and or talk about “yt ppl” instead of “white people” think they’re being clever? They’re not. They’re buffoons who think they’re smart, and here’s the funny part – Facebooks algorithm won’t punish you for saying “Covid,” but if you say c.o.vi.d they absolutely will because that’s a clear sign you’re deliberately trying to avoid/trick the algo, and that’s a clear display of intent to post content you think is a violation and get away with it. That makes you a troublemaker who’s intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules, and that gets the algo’s negative attention even if you’re not actually breaking them.

You’re not gonna get banned for simply naming an identity group in discussion. You say something like “all white people are murderers,” then yeah. That’s not because you said “white people,” it’s because that’s bigoted as hell and bigotry is not allowed. Same with Black people or any other ethnic group, LBGT folks, etc. You’re not getting banned for using a neutral and inoffensive label for a group, you’re getting banned for what you say about that group, because what you said about that group was prejudiced/discriminatory/bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic. You’re not getting banned for “talking about” vaccines, you’re getting banned because what you’re saying can kill people, ya jerk. Maybe take a look at that instead of thinking you’re c.l.ev.e.r.ly f00ling the algo.

You really won’t get banned for saying the “seven dirty words” in and of themselves (the two of those words that describe actions – “cs” and “mf” – are riskier). If you feel the need to mask those words to avoid jarring your audience, just use the classic asterisk substitution for that f***ing s**t. James Fell’s entire gimmick is “sweary history,” and he doesn’t make anything. It’s not the words themselves, it’s how you use them. If you say “that Rage Against The Machine concert was f***ing awesome” they don’t care. If you say “you’re a f***ing jerk and you need to f**k off,” they will – even if you mask it, because now you’re being aggressive. I drew a thirty-day ban once for posting 8 letters and a symbol to a troll: “STFU & GTFO.” It’s the tone and intent of the words, not the words themselves, unless the words themselves are slurs. Always mask those if you’re discussing them, and never use them as slurs.

Wheaton’s Law

Nearly all of this stuff really does just come down to not being a jerk, and avoiding the risk of looking like you’re being a jerk. Nobody wants to read hate speech and swaggering threats and sexist creepiness and transphobic stupidity. There are behaviors I’ve very intentionally left out of this article that will definitely get you banned, because frankly if you’re the kind of person who does/says those kinds of things you’re a dick, you don’t need to be part of a community until you can get your act together, and I’m not going to help you avoid being treated the way your behavior and attitude clearly justify.

Facebook’s highest priority is creating a space where people feel reasonably safe, free from intimidation and aggression and bigotry, and allowed to be their authentic selves, while giving maximum possible latitude for robust discussion, even of controversial subjects. They’re not perfect by any means, and sometimes they just plain blow it, but if you’re honest with yourselves and do our genuine best to honor Wheaton’s Law, you’re probably not going to find yourself unable to participate in Facebook.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this information useful! Please remember to share it with all your friends so they don’t get banned!
September 18, 2023
The Myth Of The “Rigged Two-Party System”

The narrative that there’s a “rigged two-party system” is one of the most destructive and misguided mythologies of political science and discourse in the United States, and it has kept us tripping over our own feet for most of the last century.

The number of parties isn’t relevant.

Who we’re electing – the individual human beings we select to make our social decisions – is important.

Duverger’s Law tells us that a democratic or pseudo-democratic political system based on first-past-the-post voting in single-member districts will tend to coalesce into a two-party system. It’s not a function of intent or conspiracy or manipulation; it’s math and sociology.

When you study political science and pay attention to how partisan systems in general function, it quickly becomes clear that functionally two-party and multi-party systems simply aren’t “different” enough to substantively impact the issues people tend to lean on regarding the “two-party system.” Makes for great sloganeering and gives people a boogeyman to point at, but it’s meaningless.

Human beings, politically, tend to group around two basic ideological poles in matters of social management.

One pole can be called “labor” or “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the masses.”

What that pole represents should be fairly clear from the description; the interests of individuals, particularly their individual liberties, dignity, and standard of living. Its fundamental principle is achieving, as much as possible, universal equity of those attributes. Public decision-making is left generally to the public. In healthy and well-designed systems the power of the public – which can be just as fallible as any individual or small group of them – is tempered by some degree of power assigned to experts, thinkers, decision-makers, and analysts whose function is to ensure the public will is not applied abusively, cf. Jefferson’s “tyranny of the majority.” We have seen that sort of tyranny in the very recent past; just look at all the state constitutional amendments that tried to outlaw gay marriage. Typically this pole is referred to as the “left.”

The other pole can be called “business” or “industry” or “the plutocracy” or “the bourgeoisie.”

What that pole represents is stratification, ingrouping and outgrouping, control of systems and processes generally in favor of a small group of “elites,” nearly always the materially hyperwealthy, either without regard or with overt contempt for the idea that a society works best when everyone has every possible chance to become their favorite selves. This is the pole where you can find concepts like the divine right of kings, the superiority of “good breeding,” the multi-generational and logarithmic self-perpetuation of generational wealth, and the basic idea that the material circumstances of one’s birth are – illogically – reflective of the quality of one’s character. Here you also find the roots of racism, sexism, and “moral bigotry.” This pole is generally referred to as “the right.”

These fundamental poles are inescapable.

No matter how many parties there are or how they’re configured, in a democratic system the voting trends will coalesce around the classic “left” and “right” poles – “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the workers” as the “left,” and “industry” or “business” or “plutocrats” or “the bourgeoisie” as the “right.” (The left and right designations themselves are artifacts of reference dating back to the physical setup of the pre-Revolutionary French parliament.)

There simply isn’t another pole to construct. There is no third polarity, there is no “option C,” and any attempt to create or envision or imagine or fabricate one inevitably ends up with “option C” being a point somewhere in between those two poles, usually with a great deal of makeup and glitter to distract from the reality that rather than being a true “third option” it’s simply a compromise between the two you already had, to one degree or another.

In democratic systems the fundamental problem is not a “two-party system” or a “multi-party system” or how the vote is conducted (horserace, proportional rep, etc) but rather that the electorate will as a general rule be too disengaged, distracted, and apathetic to evaluate their candidates on individual merit and will instead tend to rely on partisan political labels to inform their vote.

As long as we continue doing that, any given bad actor anywhere on the ideological spectrum will be able to easily manipulate themselves into power by appealing to the emotional valence of those labels.

When it’s all said and done, it ends up right back at what I’ve been saying for decades: the revolutions we’re looking for begin in the mirror. Until we fix how we think about this stuff to align with the objective realities, we’ll just keep swinging back and forth largely at the direction of extraordinarily powerful and wealthy entities whose interests are best served by keeping us all impotently barking at each other while nothing changes save perhaps for the increasing success with which the plutocracy continues to erode and disempower anyone who isn’t part of their little club.

This isn’t to say there’s no possibility of a “third” party or of one of the existing dominant parties to fade and fall. It’s critical to note however that at no time in human history has a third party arisen from outside of the existing system. Rather the typical process is one party begins stretching the Overton Window right-ward to the extreme, pulling the left-leaning party with it, until the far right becomes too extreme and abusive for popular support. The left pulls further to the right until it bypasses the center and becomes the right-wing party, and a new left-wing party rises from within the dissenting and dissatisfied ranks of the former left. You can see this mechanism in the collapse of the US Whig party in the mid-19th century, which gave rise to the splitting of the Democrat-Republican party into two separate groups, and the Whigs eventually disappeared.

None of this means that there’s no hope, or that there aren’t advantages to one type of system over another, or even that it’s not in our interests to try to avoid the consequences of Duverger by implementing electoral systems that tend to encourage multipartisanship, such as proportional representation.

However it does mean that, properly armed with a more complete understanding of the mechanics, the informed activist advocating for genuine progress can avoid becoming mired in a fight against a mythical enemy whose defeat is simply not possible because that enemy – the “rigged two-party system” – doesn’t exist.

The enemies we’re fighting against for the survival and progress of the species are not systems and parties and social structures but individuals making malicious choices based in avarice and mendacity and greed and ego. They have names. When we begin rejecting these individuals and these behaviors rather than railing against a “system,” we gain a significant advantage in our fight, a clarity of vision and purpose that has heretofore been eluding us, and then real progress begins.

September 14, 2023
The Mind Of A Trumper

Recently the excellent Facebook page “Bring Evidence” shared a story from Ohio about Trumper, anti-vax grifter, and Darwinian one-way cul-de-sac Sherri Tenpenny, who recently had her medical license suspended for refusing to cooperate with an ethics investigation regarding various fraudulent assertions made from behind her professional status.

Those claims include that the covid vaccine makes you “magnetic,” that it “interfaces with 5G,” and that major metropolitan areas are “liquefying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply.”

This isn’t a questioning skeptic who didn’t pay enough attention in biology class. She knows she’s lying. Her refusal to cooperate with the investigation proves that.

What struck me in reading this story is Tenpenny’s reaction to being called out on her deadly disinformation for profit behavior.

“After Tenpenny made the comments that sparked her regulatory problems, she showed no signs of regret. Despite lampooning media coverage, Tenpenny emailed Gross to thank her for being “strong and brave” in allowing her to testify, according to The Ohio Capital Journal. Tenpenny doubled down on her theories.

“Don’t let them bully you or disparage me,” she wrote. “We’re on to something here… and the LOUDER they scream, the more they are trying to hide. I stand by everything I said today. I put out FACTS and HYPOTHESIS [sic -jh] (points to ponder),” she wrote. “God Wins.””
– Cleveland.Com article linked inline above

This person knows they’re doing something bad and wrong, and intends to continue doing it by conning and manipulating other people into helping her do it.

This is what a world of Trump supporters would look like, everywhere. These are people who understand that stupidity is more socially acceptable than evil, so they perpetrate evil under the pretense of stupidity.

And they get away with it.

You don’t get to “magnetic vaccines” while holding ANY degree, without being in on the con on some level. If nothing else, you definitely didn’t earn your degree because you’re not smart enough to pass the classes.

This is one of the reasons we have to stop explaining the basics to people over and over. Some people go through their whole lives being respected, secure, and evil simply by pretending they don’t understand that they’re wrong.

This is someone who is playing a whole stack of silly games so she can feel like she’s superior to, better than, and a winner. It looks like her whole life is based on this behavior.

It’s the same behavior as any other autocratic, power-mongering, demagogue. Say and do the most egregious and outrageous things you can, and someone will believe it and pay you. All you have to do is pretend you really do believe it, and you’re a hero. Don’t break kayfabe(*) and the show will sell every time.

(*) “kayfabe” is a word used in the professional wrestling business to refer to the artistic subterfuge maintaining the “reality” of in-ring/on-screen storytelling. To admit that match outcomes are predetermined or that two “enemies” may not actually hate each other is called “breaking kayfabe.” Think of it as a bit like letting it slip that Santa’s not real. These days the pretense pro wrestling is an athletic competition as described has almost entirely disappeared from the business, but that’s a thing that’s happened within my lifetime. Forty years ago, most people still believed that it was “real” to some degree. The substance of that belief and all the pretenses needed to maintain it in the public eye are part of “kayfabe.” Dr. D. David Schultz slapping the snot out of John Stossel back in the 80’s was part of maintaining “kayfabe” – Stossel asked “the big question” (“is it fake?”) and Schultz could not, in character, let that slide…and back then you were always in character, or you’d soon be an ex-pro-wrestler.

It’s not that these people don’t understand the ethics, they just don’t care. They divert attention away from it with emotionally provocative agitprop to avoid probing questions.

“Bullying” and “disparagement” aren’t the tools of facts and reason, they just feel that way to emotionally and intellectually stunted narcissists lying through their teeth to rip people off while bullying and disparaging all critics into silence, when they’re finally caught. It is a common tactic of narcissists to accuse those they’re hurting of being the true aggressors.

It’s hard enough to get lay people to understand specialized information like medicine and law; it’s much harder when they’ve been given every good reason to distrust the entire field because they’ve been lied to so many times by “experts” like this. That the self-policing mechanisms of so many key professions like law and medicine are so clearly broken adds immeasurably to the problem; it’s outrageous this woman was ever allowed IN a hospital, let alone allowed to run anything. Someone’s responsible for that, too.

We need to start standing up and saying no to these people.

No you may not hide behind your profession (or “free speech!”) to hurt people for profit.

No you may not perpetrate a fraud on the country because you wanna be president.

No you may not spend hours rambling at the family holiday table about whatever random group of people you blame everything on because nobody’s got the heart to tell you to shut up.

Shut up. You’re wrong, you’re a jerk, and you need to sit down and shut up until you learn how to act among reasonable people.

Sherri Tenpenny’s words killed people, and she knew she was doing it, and she did it for profit. That merits more than a mere license suspension in my book. She should be imprisoned for the rest of her life and her entire personal holdings should be turned over to the state for distribution to or benefit of the many victims of her snake-oil game, and the same goes for the Sidney Powells and Rudy Giulianis and Andrew Wakefields of the world. Put ’em on the dole and don’t ever let them near a platform again without a giant standard disclaimer.

Then let’s talk about whoever let her get away with this for the last couple of decades.

August 31, 2023
What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

The Gold Standard

In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

The Eurozone
A Different Feather Of Fish
The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

“Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

The Guardrails

Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

May 19, 2023
What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)
A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.
- 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
- Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
- 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
- That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
- In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”
So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!
May 15, 2023
The Progressives Are Winning

We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.

We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.

It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.

Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.

These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.

They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.

Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.

We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.

The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.

The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.

These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.

They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.

We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.

The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.

It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.

The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.

With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.

That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.

That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.

That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.

Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.

We are right.

We have the answers we need.

Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.

April 3, 2023
The Right Way To Be Wrong

Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.

Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.

A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.

Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.

This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.

Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.

Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.

As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.

As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.

As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.

As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.

Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.

March 10, 2022
Best Of A Bad Lot

When every political candidate’s best pitch is “I’m not as bad as the worst,” it’s tough to believe you’re in a truly free system.

The Frame

Over on a big Facebook page where I’m an admin, “I Loved To Wake Up In The Morning When Barack Obama Was President,” one of the other admins posted the meme you see as this article’s header image in celebration of President’s Day, with the caption “America thrives with Democratic Presidents at the helm.”

While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.

When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.

As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:

The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook

I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.

What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”

That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.

This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.

But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.

This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…

The Game

The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.

The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.

We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.

More Of The Same

Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.

You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.

Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.

We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.

We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.

Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”

Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.

That has to end.

The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.

That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.

But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.

Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.

In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.

Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.

(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)

By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.

So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.

The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.

February 21, 2022