Distributism

Because it came up in the Chesterton comments, I bring this forward from June 2011. I was going to make some of these points in the comments, but see that I was smarter ten years ago.

*****

Distributism – You can catch wikipedia here. A more informal, modern take here.

All I had remembered about Distributism is that it had been championed by Chesterton, and its slogan was “three acres and a cow.” I hadn’t even gotten that right, actually, as I had misremembered it in an American fashion, “forty acres and a cow.” It was an individualist twist on the marxist idea of workers owning the means of production, in that individual workers would own their means of production, not The Workers as a group. Which is certainly an improvement, as The Workers always turns out to be a front for New Bosses. Hillaire Belloc was also a proponent (no surprise), and much of Catholic social action of the 30’s, including the Antigonish Movement, was influenced by the idea. My grandfather left Nova Scotia before the Antigonish Movement, and I don’t know if any siblings or other relatives he left behind were participants. But he moved to Massachusetts, and after some grim times and false starts, moved to Westford and eked out a living the rest of his days on…three acres and a flock of chickens. He usually needed another job as well, beyond selling eggs and strawberries. It’s an important addition to the discussion, as it was to Carl’s income.

Nestled in Chesterton’s thought was the belief that not only could a man support a family if he were given such means of production, but that a certain type of historical Englishness would be preserved. “Three acres and a cow” were not the only possible means of production distributism might provide, but the example was meaningfully chosen. He desired a return to bucolic England. So did Tolkien, if his Shire is any indication. There is certainly some element of unhealthy fantasy here – not the elves and magic-imbued artifacts, but the memory of England as it never was, only as it seemed to a child’s eyes. That the fantasy was sustained by continuing examples of charming smallholders even in their adult experience can be attributed to convenient data selection – confirmation bias.

It’s easy to see how the idea arose. Small farmers rented from large landowners, often hereditary, and often contributing nothing of obvious value to society. An observer might well think “if these farmers owned that land and didn’t have to support this ridiculous aristocracy, they could do much better.” By the late 19th C this was already under correction and breaking down, but that might have not been easy to see while living through it. Changes in the law made aristocrats less and less eligible for those rents, and they had to resort to other means of support. Investments was one, and the financiers and money-movers were reaping that reward. Perhaps this is what galled Chesterton and contributed to his early antisemitism – that the money was finally being redistributed, but not in a way that would preserve his myth of Merrie England. Someone else had cut in line, somehow.

Imagine if such a system had come in. It has a certain attractiveness to it, that an impoverished person in Detroit might be able to make a claim on the government and say “give me three acres and a cow further upstate” as a way of getting a leg up. Except you likely couldn’t live on that. A young man I have known since his childhood has forty acres, is very intelligent, works very hard, and is supporting only himself. He still needs outside work to get by. So this original distributism might allow one to subsist – which is historically accurate for preindustrial England but not what Chesterton was envisioning. If we had gone that route, we would be a poor nation. Americans in many cases actually do own their means of production now – a computer and a cell phone being the most obvious examples.

In the debate about job creation a similar, though updated myth has come in. The 1950’s of our imagination, where a man could go to work at a good union manufacturing job and make his way in the world is the same sort of fantasy: not only a type of job, but a type of life that should still be available, dammit! What’s wrong with America that we can’t do this anymore? Well first, we never did. The poverty rate was almost 25% for the 1950’s. My uncle whines about this all the time, and he’s not the only one, dreaming of a world that never was of manufacturing jobs dominating, not in any era. Second, even for those who had it, it is a life that people wouldn’t go back to. How do we know? Because even when it was still available, people got out of it unless they were in the most favored of manufacturing situations. When I was in school, no one waxed eloquent about the great joys of manufacturing jobs – they were referred to as soul-deadening assembly-line, or shoe factory, or electronic assembling employment. It was no more the great nostalgic time of American greatness than Chesterton’s bucolic fantasies were in his day. As Garrison Keillor wisely pointed out. “We think of those as simpler times, because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others.”

But third, and most important, even if we could, we can’t. We may think it a tragedy that manufacturing has gone elsewhere, or think it a great blessing, but either way, that world is not in any possible future. We may be pessimists who believe that 50% of us will be unemployed in 2040 or optimists who believe a technology-supported, human value-added economy is going to be the great liberator, but either way the change is coming.

Political Theater

We went out for dinner in Manchester tonight - unusual for us, especially just the two of us, but Tracy had a coupon (she always wins coupons) - and caught Radio Row at the Radisson, Occupy NH Primary across the street, then drove home via the debate at St. A's in our town.  We've been downtown in the height of primary season in many other years, and I'd forgotten how odd it is to see so many people clearly from around here in the restaurants and talking earnestly on the streets - junior movers-and-shakers who wait on the campaign and media people with Important Haircuts.  Nothing objectionable about this crowd, I just can tell at a glance I don't want to talk with them.  These are people who sell ideas, rather than having ideas, and they know more about sales than thinking.  Not that they see themselves that way, of course.  They largely think they have entered a cultural backwater where people don't know What's What and Who's Who.

Which is true, I suppose, in one sense.

But the energy was a bit subdued downtown.  Most of radio row was empty - most folks heading over to St. A's, I imagine.  Across the street, Occupy was poorly attended - though they did have some drumming!  Wouldn't want NH to miss out on the full experience. But the prominent multi-stickered cars had Mass plates...Mass plates...NYYankees decal...Yeah, you folks really didn't do your research, did you?

I think "Occupy" has become a brand name, because it's generic, unofficial.  Every small group with a liberal bent had attached "Occupy" to their posters.  You couldn't do that with Tea Party two years ago, because major media would swoop on you and try to bait you into saying something stupid which they could play nationally, pretending that you represented everyone else.  So the Tea Party got pretty good at enforcing its boundaries.  With Occupy, only independent media tries that.  Though Fox did try a couple of times, quite successfully, I heard.

An Obama group was out at St. A's with trombones and saxophones, playing some bluesy thing - that deserves a little credit.

Just not as big a deal as previous years.  Our own lack of effort may be part of that.

Political writer Walter Shapiro, quoted by James Fallows at The Atlantic. 

As a political reporter, I am prepared to offer a spirited defense of New Hampshire's outsized role in presidential politics. Nowhere else in the nation do voters display such fidelity to old-fashioned civic obligations.... New Hampshire may be a living monument to participatory democracy, but what in God's name is the justification for making the Iowa caucuses the campaign equivalent of the book of Genesis?

Complain all you want, but without NH, the Jon Huntsman's of the world have no chance at all to even attempt to run for president.  Wealth, and/or coming from a big state, already are dominant factors.  You want to make that worse?  Maybe the first primary should just be a single county.

See If You Can Bear Them

Grim over at Grim's Hall links to these essays by liberals at Washington Monthly, What If Obama Loses?  I found them unbearable because of their closed assumptions - utterly unaware that they even are assumptions - but you may do better.  The comments at Grim's take an interesting turn, with Texan99 trying to navigate a line of being gentle but forceful in her persuasion.

NPR

A NYTimes food guy on NPR is talking about "Junk Food Pushers," and lobbyists, and bemoaning that no federal agency has the power to take on Big Food, and that's why we have this childhood obesity.

Obesity correlates most strongly with fatherlessness and food stamps.

But those are no fun to solve.  It's much more fun to pretend that it's lack of nutrition education in the schools, or evil corporations.

Santorum

Now that he has become an issue in NH, if only because of his strong finish in Iowa, I will weigh in on Rick Santorum.

He is a Big Government Conservative, rather like Gingrich.  If socially conservative issues are your focus, Santorum is your guy, more than Perry, Gingrich, or Paul.  But for hands-off government, Santorum's statements and actions over the years suggest he likes "requiring all schoolchildren to have basic personal economics lessons in school," national service, pro-family teaching (whatever that is), and other nanny-state interventions.  It's just this time, the nanny is a Baptist instead of a Unitarian.

These types of programs are a drop in the bucket in terms of cost, and children don't tend to learn what we force on them anyway, so you may be comfortable with that.  Heck, a really shrewd liberal might be fine with that, reasoning that these showcase legislations are often more symbolic than effective, and it signals a guy they can do business with, trading support for, I don't know, paying schoolkids to learn Arabic* or Chinese* because we're going to need it, or setting up IRA's for five-year-olds, or funding a Motown museum or whatever. 

If Santorum finds a way to cut entitlements, reduce our medical-insurance promises, or wastefraudandabuse, then I suppose all this nanny-state clutter won't matter much.  And truth be told, a lot of it would still happen under Romney or even Ron Paul.  That Washington barge only turns by degrees.  Yet better to have less of this than more.

*And then complaining that it was mostly kids who already had these as family languages, who weren't any more likely to be doing this for patriotic interest as we thought when we envisioned Nebraskan Lutherans populating the State Department in 2025.

Wikipedia Bias

Yeah, that could be a whole category on a blog, couldn't it? There was a Ferdinand Marcos link on the Wikipedia main page today. I come from a Marcos-hating era, of course, as his declaration of martial law occurred while I was liberal, and his fall from power occurred when I was apolitical. In the end, I recalled, even the American conservatives dropped him as just too corrupt and too vicious, however reliably anticommunist he was. So I still had extreme negative associations with Marcos.

Yet I recalled a doctor from the Philippines, Melicio Flores, who I had worked with during the 80's and 90's at the hospital. I recall him being very anti-Marcos, pro-Aquino, but also annoyed at some of the posturing his countrymen were doing back home. Something along the lines of They forget how they cheered him then, early on. He did some good things early on, that they benefited from but don't talk about now. Many of the families that are against him now made a lot of their money by being his friends. And they forget how dangerous his enemies were. Still, Dr. Flores was glad to see him go. Fifteen years early would have been fine with him.

Thus, I thought it a good time to read up on Ferdinand and Imelda, to see what good things had been accomplished, however roughly, that might moderate my negative opinion of him.

Apparently there were none. According to Wikipedia there was nothing redeeming about him ever, other than being clever. And American involvement in the Philippines was likewise entirely without virtue until the day that Reagan belatedly cast Marcos aside. I'm going to bet that's not true. Not that I doubt any of the accusations they make against him. I expect that they are sourced and accurate.

I also expect that the account is slanted enough to be deceitful. Perhaps not. Perhaps he really was a Ceausescu, a Saddam, a Stalin, whose virtues were so insignificant as to no longer bear mentioning. Yet is should be noted even with those comparisons that Saddam and Ceausescu started off pretty reasonably those first few years.

Of Pancakes and Candidates - and Feathers

Ben is up from Houston, and is re-experiencing what it was like to grow up here in NH presidential primary season.  We get frequent phone calls, ignoring many because of caller ID.  We didn't have that in earlier years.

We were trying to recall who the candidate was who fell off the back of the stage while flipping pancakes.  Tracy and Ben had been present for the event.  A school snow day, perhaps.  Was that '96 or 2000? Or perhaps even '92?  No, it was all Bush 41 and Buchanan for that one - we would have remembered that.  Was it Gary Bauer?  It wasn't Dole... It wasn't Alexander...Forbes?...Dornan?

It was Bauer, 1996, for those tormenting themselves over it.

We discussed how such foolishness is in many ways a good thing.  Even our stuffiest, most self-important candidates have to venture such things.  They have to risk looking foolish, having to quickly cover, looking a little sheepish.  You can't imagine Vlad Putin putting himself in that position, nor Bashar Assad.  Dictators try to look like a Man of the People by wearing military garb, as Saddam Hussein or a thousand Latin American leaders did.  In the West, and I think particularly in the Anglosphere, we require more.  We make you throw baseballs, and eat kielbasa.

I think Obama is pretty imperious, yet I can easily imagine him covering a pancake-flipping fall with charm and grace. Mao, not at all, and Hu Jintao, just barely starting to make his way into that territory. That tells us something about a country, doesn't it?

It has it's bad side, of course, and isn't exactly a qualification for the presidency.  Plenty of corrupt, glad-handing, back-slapping politicians also have that common touch we like.  But it provides a check on one type of bad presidency, and for that we should be grateful.

It's been that way a long while, too.

No Politics

Very little political this month, and most of that is noting what others think rather than what I think. Looking over the last few months, that has been increasingly true. Replaced by music.

Maybe I'm not thinking as much, and so not writing about my thought.  Much easier to watch other people think.

My current thought is to read absurdists and existentialists and connect it to church and culture.  My fear is that I will have many brief, unrelated thoughts that don't tie in to any helpful ideas.

(Head slap) Lists!  Lists are supposed to drive up traffic, and are traditional at the end of the year.  I imagine they drive up traffic with real readers, too, not the in-and-out kind that come over to download ABBA or meerkat pictures.

AVI's Top Ten...Top Ten...can't think of anything.  Absurdist dramas isn't likely to grip the imagination, nor is ABBA costumes, nor obscure NH villages, and English language trivia you can get on other sites pretty easily.

Ron Paul

He continues to poll about 20% here, so I thought I let you know my unscientific reading of that, based on what I hear people say at work (not everyone who works in a psych hospital is a social worker, after all) and a t church.  Half of that number are people who are pretty lined up with Ron on a lot of issues, who would vote for him any year.  Another half might dislike, even greatly dislike, one or another of his general positions, particularly on foreign policy.  But they are so determined that the government should shrink that they'll risk that, and they're voting for him in the primary.

That's not going to be me, but I entirely understand that reasoning.

50 Best Quotes

Right Wing News has it's 50 Best Political Quotes of the Year.  I don't agree with them all, and surprisingly, Michael Moore had one of the ones I liked best (#26. for its irony.) Ann Althouse at #47 has one dear to my heart, as it echoes my A&H Tribe thinking.

Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.”

Jonah Goldberg at #40.

If you’ve ever known anyone with a serious addiction, the easiest thing for friends and family to do is pretend it’s not a big deal. Who wants to have a confrontation? Far easier to let things slide and have a good time. “Let’s have a nice Thanksgiving without any arguments, OK?” The tea party is like the cousin who’s been through AA and refuses to pretend anymore. As a result, he spoils everyone’s good time. For the enablers, and others in denial, he’s the guy ruining everything, not the drunk. Uncle Sam is the drunk and the tea partiers are the annoyingly sober — and a bit self-righteous — cousin. Measured by spending, and adjusted for inflation, the federal government has increased by more than 50 percent in 10 years. Some have enabled the drunken spending, others continue to deny it’s even a problem. The tea party is sounding the wake-up call. If America didn’t have a problem, then there really would be good cause to be furious with the forces of sobriety. Nobody likes a party-pooper, especially the people hooked on partying.

Carl at No Oil For Pacifists has his own favorites, and you can get the full link there.

Ron Paul Family Cookbook

One interesting effect of living in NH is getting an up-close look at political advertising every four years. I don’t think there has been anywhere near the fuss this time – perhaps because Iowa and SC have increased importance, perhaps because 24-7 media and instant polling gives the nation much of the information it used to depend on NH for.

But still, the rest of the country may not have received the Ron Paul Cookbook in the mail. Quite the item, and exactly as it says, it has recipes; it’s not using “cookbook” as a metaphor for legislation and attitudes. There are lots of pictures of Ron’s family, and some short essays, including his wife’s about America, but there’s banana bread and brisket as well. Simple, everyday American recipes, including such ingredients as a bottle of catalina dressing for the brisket (only two more ingredients there).

I am trying to imagine when this could have occurred before in American campaigns. I think one would have to go farther back than my parents’ generation (which is Ron’s generation). It looks like something I would have found in my grandmother’s bookcase, kept either because it had a particular recipe worth keeping or because she liked the pol. I can’t imagine who that would be, even then. It wouldn’t be something from the Bass family, or the Greggs, or the Bridges. One of the Straws might have tried something like that as PR for the mills, but not for office-seeking. It’s just not us. Seems like it would go down better with the voters in the Midwest or the South.

OTOH, the styling has a 90’s Rodale Press look about it, which in turn drew some from Grit or Burpee’s seeds from a generation before, so the appeal might intentionally be to a younger audience, hankering for an America that never quite existed in any region but was pretty solidly in the imaginations (and aspirations) of most Americans years ago. Ron Paul apparently does have quite a following among the young, and perhaps that’s why.

I think I’ll keep it. Heck, no other candidate ever sent me a cookbook before. My grandchildren might have a hard time integrating it into history at first glance, though.

Who to thank

For the second time recently, I have seen a car with a few similar bumper stickers on the back. Something like "Got Medicare? Thank Democrats." "Got Social Security? Thank Democrats" And even "Got Equality? Thank Democrats."

It is easy to see what they mean. They mean legislative votes. They are claiming that it was primarily Democrats who designed and voted for these things - and let us leave that part of the argument aside for the present - and you wouldn't have them otherwise. \

But that leaves out entirely the more important meaning of those words. Do Democrats pay for those programs all by themselves? Certainly not, and they would never claim so. But it is fascinating that the deeper who-to-thank question does not even occur to them. They go through all the trouble and cost of discussing, designing, ordering, and distributing these stickers and no one says "Hey wait. There's a problem here we might not want to be associated with. If you've got Medicare you should really be thanking all Americans, don't you think?"

I find these mental slips enormously revealing. People say what they really mean, often unwittingly, if you let them go on long enough. The implication that the lawmaking part is almost the whole deal, with the money-finding part a rather distant consideration is exactly how they do think about such things. The government action is all, the action of the people nothing. (See especially Al Gore, considering the government permissions to be the key to inventing the internet, and the government mop-up the key to Love Canal.)

I will predict, in fact, that even if confronted with being busted as government centered narcissists they will still not be able to really see what the problem is. They will still see the voting for legislation as not merely one necessary aspect of the thing happening, but almost the entire show. That the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of many others is involved will be regarded as "well yes, technically, but..."

I always thought those "If you can read this, thank a teacher" and similar sentiments were badly overstated and inaccurate. But they are enormously more justified than this new offering from the Strafford County Democrats.

OWS

No one is saying 150,000,000 Americans are lazy. And sure, 400 Americans are greedy. What's your point? How is this a rational argument?

While I don't consider it impossible that the people at OWS might be decent, reasonable people who can make an intelligent argument, the fact is, they don't. Here is Occupydesigns.org. The posters range from fairly easily refutable to sea anemone stupid.

These are not the communications of the people making fun of them, nor are they the placards being waved by people on the fringes trying to horn in on their credibility. This is what they have to say for themselves. These are unforced errors. The 1st Amendment is my permit. Really? Did anyone think that through for possible consequences for like, a minute or so?

Swedish Model Reassessed

Link fixed. Thanks to James From Bird Dog's links over at Maggie's is a report by a Finnish think tank on the Swedish economy, It's not as long as it looks.  I am always irritated by truncated graphs, but these seem less bad than usual.  I'd like folks to read it before I put in my two kroner.

To bear in mind:  left-and right- of center in this context refers almost entirely to economic, free-market issues, not social or foreign policy ideas.  There are scandinavians more right of center on those other issues than Americans, but there aren't many.  In free-market ideology, however, their categories are roughly comparable to ours.

Much of this was half-known to me, but this is more complete and organised a summary than I have encountered over the last few years.

Cain And Accusations

Mona Charen at NRO wonders whether Cain is being borked or is being evasive because there is something to this.  Her thoughts are here, and I have little to add.  Nor do I know much about the accusations and their likelihood of being true.

And that's a revealing limitation on my part.  I am very likely to make my decision about whether Cain is guilty on the basis of how he responds to the accusations, not any basis of examining the facts.  It's a shortcut we use a thousand times a year - does Jack seem to be lying?  A great timesaver.

The weakness is rather apparent, though.  It's a good rule of thumb, but not a perfect one.  In particular, excellent liars exploit this human tendency by imitating innocent people, and distracting us with how terrible the accusers are.  Bill Clinton was exceptionally good at this.  He didn't act like a guilty person, and he didn't go over-the-top by trying to act like a completely innocent person.  He acted just like a person who was guilty of some small, unimportant thing, but outraged that people would accuse him of something large.  Of course he drove 6mph over the speed limit, but really...

Even after some large things turned out to be true.

And now here I am, doing what I complained about others doing, because it's a timesaver.  I don't want to put in the energy to read up on this.

President Whatever

I'm thinking I don't want anyone to be president.  They're too much trouble.  Vice-Presidents seem to be a comparatively minor annoyance.  Can we have three or four of those instead?

I'd promise to be polite to them and everything.

99%

Since I'm not part of the 1%, I must be part of the 99%.  As such, does anyone think I would be welcomed by the 99% Declaration Working Groups for my state if I tried to enter the discussion?  I could be a real pill of course, and call them on it and encourage all sorts of people completely unsympathetic to their ideas to sign up to be part of the Working Group discussions.

Yet though this would indeed point up their logical error, it strikes me a juvenile tactic.

OWS

Let me start with a prejudice that caught me right from the start with OWS. It's this 99% thing. It may be only a PR mistake on their part, but I suspect it is actually an attitude problem that is revealing itself in this catch-phrase. I get the point that they are trying to make, that it is a very small group of people who are ripping off the decent Americans, who may have their differences but should be able to get together and just fix this. They don't want to be opposed to everyone, they just want to alert us to the real enemy, and lead us to a solution.

In political matters, I have three immediate associations with that. First, 99% is how much of the vote dictators get in sham elections. Even if they were elected semi-reasonably the first time around, as they remain in power, the number climbs to insane percentages. It is a clear sign that the opposition is being suppressed and the nation is crazy. Secondly, this world-view that says that everything would go along smoothly if it weren't for a few evil people (plus their dupes, who may be more numerous) is a mark of paranoid thinking. The tendency to think like this precedes the identification of who those conspirators are. Thirdly, in the bad old days of communism, leftist groups would claim to be speaking for, and to represent, ever-expanding circles of the rest of the population. They represented The People. And they believed it. Those people who disagreed were people who just didn't understand and needed things explained to them; then they were dupes and agents of the oppressors; finally, they were the oppressors, and needed to be dead. This happened repeatedly. I don't think that the typical OWS protestor is anything like this. But I do worry two things: there are people among them who do indeed think like this, who will say so right out loud; secondly, the gentle, innocent people really do believe that they represent the 99% in some ways. They are not halfway to violence, but they are more than halfway to accepting one of the key arguments of the violent people. Worrisome.

You may say that they really don't believe this, but well, that's what they say. We, the 99%... What are we supposed to think? If challenged, I'm sure they have enough reasonable people on board at present to allow that no, of course not, we don't really claim...it's just that the 1%...(list of unfair and bad things follows). Well, then - don't say 99% just because it sounds cool to you. Because my contention is that it sounds cool to you for some very bad reasons you haven't recognised yet.

I will politely at least allow that it is just a PR mistake, and the number of people for whom this reveals some unattractive motives is actually quite small.

The Commentary Proper

If you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, or catch the interviews on NPR, you will come away with the impression that the OWS protestors around the country are mostly nice, frustrated young people who can't find good enough jobs, have a lot of student loan debt, and feel that something has gone fundamentally wrong with America. They believe, in the main, that corporate America, corporatism, and/or corporations, are cheating the rest of us, getting rich despite the difficulties others have. They are sure - as many Americans of divergent political beliefs have said for years - that there are lots of millionaires who pay no taxes. They contrast this with the people who they know, who don't have enough.

If you read conservative news sites, you will see an emphasis on OWS protestors saying stupid things, engaging in criminal acts, attracting nutcases and undesirables, or other negatives. Both are true, and many other slants could also be true, in that they highlight real people who are actually on site. A lot of this is still inchoate at present.

In the mainstream op-eds, there is a lot of energy being put into two narratives: One, that some people are gaming the system, darn it, and a lot of 'em are corporate and Wall St types. Even though these young people may not have all the details right and are unrealistic and overidealistic, they are essentially right about that, and we should listen to them. Their hearts are in the right place, and they are willing to make sacrifices and state their opinions, and we should be glad; the second narrative is that OWS is a lot like the Tea Party, really. The evidence for this is usually that they are both popular movements with a lot of regular people in them, that they both think America has gone wrong, and they are both...er...well, they're both protests. Happening now.

Narrative One: Yes, I suppose if you think Down With Unfairness is the political POV that your people have a corner on, and the OWS protestors are against unfairness, then I can see why you would think that they've basically almost got it, and just need a little steering, and they'll be fine. This is essentially what Obama has said as well. In my view, that's essentially what American liberalism is anyway, so the MSM approval is hardly surprising. Conservatives get all bent out of shape claiming that Obama, or Democrats, or liberals are really socialists/communists, but I think that's overdrawn. We can't even make a good tough-minded socialist these days, but have all these milk-and-water versions running around. Where it turns nasty is the rather juvenile conclusion that if you disagree with them, you must therefore be in favor of unfairness.

Narrative Two: Yes, and a horse is like a fish, because they are both animals. And they have two eyes and a mouth. And you can eat some fish, and sometimes people have eaten horses. And sometimes horses go into the water. And hoof and fin both have an "f" in them. So they are pretty much the same thing, sure.

There is actually one very good connection, that both groups would come down strongly against what we would call Crony Capitalism. They might not define it quite the same way, and they might order the queue for who goes first to the public stocks somewhat, but that piece they would agree on. Other than that, I'm not seeing much similarity, and I have to wonder if the people claiming it are that unobservant, or if their is some deeper manipulation happening here.

An OWS supporter of my acquaintance sent me the link to this group, the 99% Declaration, which includes a lot of references to 99% Declaration Working Groups. I have no idea if these people are major players or just one more group in the mix, vying to have their voice heard above the noise. But I grant that this group is attempting to act reasonably, and come up with a program, invite others to discuss, work in the standard American tradition of debate and rhetoric. What they put forward is pretty much just the liberal wish list of the last forty years, but it's merely misguided, not insane. An example:

5. A Fair Tax Code. A complete reformation of the United States Tax Code to require ALL citizens to pay a fair share of a progressive, graduated income tax by eliminating loopholes, unfair tax breaks, exemptions and deductions, subsidies (e.g. oil, gas and farm) and ending all other methods of evading taxes. The current system of taxation favors the wealthiest Americans, many of whom pay fewer taxes to the United States Treasury than citizens who earn much less and pay a much higher percentage of income in taxes to the United States Treasury. We, like Warren Buffet, find this income tax disparity to be fundamentally unjust.

Do they mean this Warren Buffet? This Warren Buffet? Also, we have this generic "fairness" going again. They are sure it's all unfair somehow, and factoids will satisfy.

There are darker elements at work, worth noting. There's no indication the average earnest couple in a tent on Dewey Square approves of this, or offers any encouragement to it. What is known is that this gangster/threatening/criminal stuff happens and no one denounces it from inside. I say no one - that's unfair, there may be some I don't know about. No one gets up and says "That's enough, I'm leaving, that's not what I'm here for." Contrast this to Tea Party Rallies, where nutcases were actively discouraged or shunned. There were constant claims there were racists and dangerous folk underneath the respectable disguise, but evidence for this was elusive. Here at Occupy Boston we have evidence and no one cares. No trial, no defense, just a self-appointed Committee Of Revolutionary Justice punishing the offenders.

Directions

Tigerhawk links to a huge collection of graphs about employment over at Big Picture.

Yeah, fine.  But my favorite part is his directions over the comments section.

"Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous."

Post 3200 - Voting

A comment I left over at Maggie's.  I haven't said it here in awhile.

PJ O'Rourke gets this one right. The purpose of elections is to vote the bastards out. Negative voting is not only an acceptable, but a preferable alternative. Don't ask yourself who you want. Ask yourself who you want to get rid of. When you think of it, that's been the American way since the Revolution. We didn't know what we were going to end up with for a government. We just knew we wanted out of the current arrangement.