Tag: universal morality

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
We Can’t Be Nice About Any Of This Anymore

Duh.

Lately it seems like I’ve been on a bit of a tear, as they say. There’s been some status messages, and even a short video, all coming back to the core idea we’ve got to stop explaining basic things to people who completely understand them but pretend not to because the pretense allows them to continue engaging in unacceptable behavior.

I don’t mean to ever discourage reading or genuine intellectual curiosity. I absolutely believe that understanding what the facts are is critically important, and that of necessity that means understanding what a fact is, is pretty important too.

I’m just over the constant going back and forth with people who act like they don’t get it.

It sucks up too much energy.

Explaining why black lives matter and what that phrase means when it’s been under public discussion since 2013 is waste of time, as is arguing back and forth over what groups where and why “own” what “interest” in whatever related commercial trademarks there may be and how they’re used and why. First and foremost the conversation must begin with the basic understanding that black lives matter. Full stop. Anything beyond that is nonsense and argument, because anything beyond that means on some level and to some degree you are willing enough to compromise that basic idea to bother arguing about it.

Same thing with explaining why Confederate statues don’t have any place in the United States, same thing with explaining people why they should wear a mask in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic, on and on. We just expend so much time and energy on people not to educate them but to chip away at the idea that their position has some social acceptability, that we can’t ever move forward because these sandbaggers keep siphoning all our energy into just not going backwards any faster.

Manners?

The darker colors have smaller gaps; the darkest, the *smallest* gap is about 10% (women make a little over 90% what men do), and the lightest – in Utah, women make less than 70% of men on average.

Meanwhile women are still making 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, black people are still getting shot by cops on an almost daily basis if not more than daily, there are still thousands of kids in cages in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re doing worse than nothing to help them including losing them entirely.

I’m really not trying to be rude about it, but at this point who’s more rude here? The person who is continuing to act as though they don’t understand the arguments why human beings should be human beings and we shouldn’t put up statues to people who bought and sold human beings and fought against the interests of human freedom because that is neither honorable nor laudable? Or the person who says “enough, we’re moving on now?”

Who’s being more disrespectful, the person who refuses to wear a simple facemask, repeatedly demonstrated to have zero to negligible ill effects, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that’s already killed at least – depending on your source – 125-130-ish thousand people just in the United States at the time I’m writing this, and probably many more? Or is the person who firmly insists we’re done arguing about it now and have the best guidance possible, and that’s WEAR A MASK WHEN YOU GO OUT, being rude by their firm insistence? Who dies in which direction? How many cases are there, EVER, of people dying because they were wearing a mask? Right. Wear the damn thing. If you’ve got reason beyond selfish and spurious hypochondria not to, you really WILL have the advice of a doctor because you’ve already got other serious problems.

In the vast majority of cases that first person is simply not being honest. It’s silly that we keep having to say the same things over and over as if each individual person is always hearing it for the first time. For instance I’m quite sure that my friend’s friend, whose remark started the comment that became this article, has heard all of these arguments before. He just doesn’t want to accept them. He can’t find a reasoned basis in objective fact and ethical behavior to support his position so he just pretends not to understand the arguments against it. Maybe that’s a conscious decision, maybe it’s not, I don’t know the man well enough to say. But that’s what’s happening.

At some level that stops even being about questions of racism or sexism or xenophobia or bigotry, and just starts being about personal character and integrity. I know people are going to find that offensive and outrageous and insulting, but it’s more offensive and outrageous and insulting to continue to insist that we don’t understand the basic realities of life whenever they’re inconvenient for us.

Consequences

Worse, it’s deadly.

This whole “I don’t get it” game is half the problem in a lot of places right now, where you’re talking about coronavirus or gender issues or racial issues or economic disparity issues or any of it. Half of any of those problems at least is people who just insist on pretending not to get it because if they admit they understand the arguments they have to admit that they’ve been wrong. Nobody likes to do that, so we’ve developed this elaborate set of communications to justify not doing it.

That has to stop now. That’s really what all of this is teaching us.

In another example, there’s a big kerfuffle up the road from me in Allendale, Michigan over the removal of a “confederate statue,” arguably more a civil war memorial featuring a generic confederate soldier.

That statue, though, was placed in 1998. It’s less historically relevant than The Simpsons, Nirvana, or Baywatch. And, it’s in Michigan. Nobody from this state fought for the breakaway traitorous republic; the statue doesn’t represent anyone who has any sort of tie here.

But obviously it must be important, after all apparently nobody in that town heard about the Civil War until 133 years after it was over and that’s why we’ve got to keep the statue!

Top feature of Allendale MI civil war memorial statue. Statue photos courtesy reddit.com user u/resister_sister

No more of that nonsense. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a bunch of dishonest and disingenuous people complaining about things that don’t even have the slightest significance to them other than having something to complain about.

In the greater part, right now especially, they are complaining simply because other people whose oppression these people have benefited from for centuries are demanding an end to that oppression. The loudest subgroup of those voices, those with legitimate grievances that remain ignored, are those who descended from or look like the people who have been largely enslaved and dehumanized throughout the entire history of this country. And those people are saying “you see this? This is what we’re talking about!”

That scares people whose current state of privileged comfort is in some way is a product of their privilege and social standing they were born to and other irrelevancies like their gender or the color of their skin. They are facing the reality that pretty much their entire way of thinking is wrong and cruel and intolerable and it must stop. They’ve lived so long with privilege, they think they’re entitled to it. They’re afraid they can’t compete without the advantages privilege brings, against those who have historically been denied those privileges. So when the oppressed rise up and say “you see this?” the response of the oppressors is “I don’t know what you mean,” and they keep right on going.

Solutions

So the privileged are scared again because their privilege is threatened and they imagine that’s a threat to their comfort. That’s where all this comes from, right, is this stupid zero-sum thinking where in order for me to have, you have to do without. Some people, most of them simply mislead and others deliberately misleading, push that way of thinking to rationalize their own greed or self-interest above and beyond others. It’s uncomfortable for people who have defined themselves around a core creed to realize that it’s cruel and harmful, not only to those against whom it is directed but also against those who create it and perpetuate it. They don’t want to change because it’s not comfortable and they think it means they’ll lose something.

That, my friends, is just too bad. Those privileged folks are just gonna have to handle themselves, because if they continue behaving that way and treating the problem that way, they may just end up right. Problem is, so will we all, again, and that crap has to end or we’re going to end. So the traditionally privileged can just go find find those bootstraps they’re always telling the oppressed to pull themselves up by. Because the world is moving on, with them or without them.

The truly stupid thing is, it’s not even really “taking away” anything; it’s just making sure other people have access to the same opportunities and “rights” even if they’re *not* born into privilege &c.

Those people who are afraid they can’t compete on a level playing field rely on the power of their privilege to continuing to sabotage the game.

All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the statue itself perpetuates the idea that freedom of black Americans is a gift from white men rather than their right as human beings.

The problem is – and this is why I’ve been saying for years that “kumbaya liberalism is dead” – those same people have learned that they can manipulate the good nature of people who are decent. They can claim injury where there is none, or ignorance that is really saccharine stupidity, and rely on The Good Guys™ to continue being gentle.

It’s time we faced the difficult reality that the long term result of that has been a lot of good, dead people and a lot of live crappy ones, and it’s quickly becoming an existential threat to the species.

As I’ve paraphrased Heinlein so many times: survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality. Ultimately, as a totality of human consciousness and existence, anything threatening that single universal morality will be eliminated, one way or another, just as happens with Darwinian selection for any other species, to the greatest extent that can possibly be exerted by that totality.

What makes that humane and ethically acceptable – or what defines the point at which it becomes so – is the effect of individual human will. At some level, all else being equal, we can each choose to act in ways that benefit or detract from the universal morality. “Lower” life forms don’t always have a choice about that.

In the US and other nations we’ve built entire systems that detract from the sole universal human morality, and we’ve insisted on treating the very things about those systems which detract from that fundamental drive to survive as though they are themselves required for our survival.

We have, rather than elevating and empowering human life, chosen to subjugate and restrict it for our own material benefit.

That has to stop, and we can either choose to stop it or the greater will of the collective species will absolutely act to stop it one way or another.

Conclusions

When our self-serving idiocy begins to work against the universal morality of other species and we refuse to put an end to it ourselves, those species do their best to fight back.

When we act against the universal morality of great numbers of species, we act against the universal morality of all life, and all life will work together to ensure we can’t keep doing that.

This is how all of this crap keeps going on, every bit of it. Including coronavirus, even including an alarming percentage of seismic activity in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the natural disasters that are made worse by our destruction of the environment, and it just keeps going and it all starts with individuals thinking clearly and ethically. Individuals who make a deliberate choice to refuse to at least make the genuine effort to *try* to do either one of those things are making a deliberate choice to die.

We no longer have the option of first considering the hurt feelings of the privileged. Especially when it’s mostly adults acting like little kids, being afraid to remove a band-aid and see the healing where a wound used to be. None of this is really going to “hurt” anybody, beyond the blow to their ego in finding out they’ve got to actually start living up to their own self-image, they’re not allowed to keep faking it anymore.

The coddling of these egos has to stop, and it has to stop now. It’s killing us, in very large numbers, and those numbers are going to get larger still before they start shrinking. Aside from basic human selfishness in the immediate sense, what mostly keeps this going is that arguing over these things is a multibillion dollar industry, and in spite of the generalized damage is inflicts on society as a whole, it props up the power and lifestyles of the ownership class.

But if we don’t change what we’re doing, NOW, they’re not going to start shrinking until so many people have died that the human population is no longer a threat to the rest of the world or itself.

We can no longer, as a matter of that universal human morality I keep talking about, continue to be polite to the stupid. Yes, there are going to be people who genuinely don’t get it, but that’s what education is for. That’s ignorance and it can be fixed. I’m talking about stupidity, which is willful ignorance or pretense to it. There are many more people who get it just fine and pretend not to – they play stupid – like the people who get a fake “emotional support animal” just because they notice people with real ones and are pissed off that someone is getting something “special” and they’re not.

The protection of these people’s feelings has to end, or it’s going to end us. It sounds cruel, but it isn’t. What’s cruel is the price everyone has to pay to keep propping all this BS up.

Sorry.

July 1, 2020
The Ownership Class

“Ownership class” is a phrase I use fairly often, and even in doing so I understand that it can be ambiguously interpreted. For that reason, I’ve added this definition to the JH Lexicon, to be defined as follow:

The “ownership class” is not simply filled with the people who own things; rather it refers to the very, very small group – on the order of no more than a few hundred individuals, give or take at any particular point, and depending on how you’re measuring – who control most of the world’s wealth.

These people control everything from institutions of higher learning (and on an ever-greater scale, primary education) to the media where we get the information we’re supposed to be learning to understand in school but aren’t. As comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out as have others, it is simply not in the interests of this small group of people to have a generally informed, educated, and engaged population. That sort of person challenges their power and can take it away.

So they control the information, Orwell-style, to keep us distracted from their mendacity. Part of that is ensuring that we’re always fighting and competing amongst ourselves, often over superfluous notions like religion that have no substantive impact on the Universal Morality.

As mentioned above, in any given context “they” could refer to as few as the half-dozen or so people who own more of the world’s wealth between them than the “bottom” half of the total human population, or it may refer to as many as a few hundred people who make the most money from and control the behaviors of the largest corporations in the world. It is not any one ethnic group, skin color, religion, gender, or sexuality per se, although the tables have been tilted largely in favor of some people based on those considerations. It’s about individuals, making individual decisions including the decision to influence, for selfless or selfish means, the decisions of others.

June 30, 2020
The “Universal Ethic” or “Universal Morality”

I often use the phrase “universal morality” in my writing, or refer to that morality. It’s a paraphrase of a quote by Robert Heinlein, to wit:

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying. – Time Enough For Love

In the context he was writing, “racial” here doesn’t refer to “ethnic” but rather the “human race.” While I don’t agree with everything the man wrote, his ability to distill ideas was remarkable. Even as his work and characterizations seem more archaic and even offensive with time, that very fact is because we are finally internalizing realities that in some cases Heinlein was once very much ahead of when the rest of the world was behind.

This basic truth, that human morality can and ultimately must boil down to “what keeps the species alive and propagating,” leads to other inevitable realities. And it is not merely “a” basic truth but the basic truth of the human species or any other. To whatever extent possible, both we internally as a species and all the other species to whatever extent it is possible for them, work to ensure out own perpetuation, and one of the important ways we do that is through strength in numbers.

However, with human beings the more educated and affluent they are, the more “necessary work” can be done by fewer actual human beings, because they will continue to develop technology both for production and recreation, which means they’ve got things to do both for fun and to help ensure their ability to survive, other than reproduce.

Over time as the species becomes better educated and more affluent, ideas like human rights, gender equality, women not having to be enslaved to their reproductive ability, humans not treated as “less than” because they own a smaller piece of the planet’s wealth or they have different skin color or shape to their facial features or texture to their hair, all become both more self-evident and more imperative to pursue to ensure the further progress, survival, and propagation of the species.

However, the paradigms that are now beginning to seriously crumble as I write this in the early summer of 2020 rely on aspects of inequality and prejudice and privilege and entitlement to perpetuate themselves to the detriment of this universal morality, and those who are unable to or refuse to abandon them thus ultimately will be a terminal subspecies. I don’t say they “should be eliminated” or any such provocative nonsense, and that’s important. They are being eliminated right now, by natural occurrence often brought on as the direct consequences of their own behavior, and the longer a subset of us exist who continue to try to avoid this reality, the longer it will be until we can truly progress forward as a species in the never-ending pursuit of survival and propagation.

Nobody’s “doing that” or enjoying the fact that it’s happening; it’s the natural consequence of us continuing to work against our own interests as well as those of the other species on this planet whose lives are critical to our own one way or another. It will continue until we stop acting that way, because we are a threat to the universal morality not only within our own species but for every other, and those species together create a discrete system of life which also has its own collective survival and propagation as its number one universal priority on which all other activity is based at every level, and they act the same way.

That’s where the viruses come in and even the earthquakes from fracking. Literally we’re breaking the planet for everything, and everything including ourselves absolutely will come together, one way or the other, being it by some “natural” agent like a pandemic or disaster, or “man-made” through war or greed, to mitigate our influence on the rest of the planet to a survivable nature and level.

Because at all levels of life human and otherwise, the one universal and fundamental morality is and must always be the survival and propagation of life.

June 30, 2020