Cosmic Milk-Bone

How can a society expect to be exempt from violence when they themselves legitimize and worship violence (what else can you call millions of pro wrestling fans, NRA members, and "Minutemen" who devote their lives to the pursuit of violence?)--when they themselves create, distribute, and profit from the most dangerous weapons in history--when they themselves routinely murder, kidnap, torture, bomb, burn, and poison anything that stands in their way (or happens to stand on some oil)?  You can't go around destroying other people's countries, wrecking other people's ways of life, and oppressing other people to the point of starvation--then expect them to lie down and meekly accept their own destruction!  Verily, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

I suppose I am going to be accused of justifying terrorism.  So be it.  If a terrorist bombs your home, and you bomb him back, does that make you also a terrorist?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was so far ahead of his time that it's impossible for me to think about his paintings without referring to concepts from 300 years after his death.  While most of his contemporaries confined their art to kings and saints, Bruegel painted scenes of peasant life.  300 years later, this would be called proletarianism.  Unlike those of his contemporaries, his paintings were densely detailed and not necessarily focused on a single subject, an aesthetic that was revived in the 20th century by postmodern art and anime.  And in this painting, "The Procession to Calvary," Jesus is portrayed as a tiny part of the much larger human canvas, in no way separate or distinct, as if to say, "He was just a man, like any other."  Today, many Christians would regard this as dangerously humanistic, if not downright atheist.

This page is a moving description of poverty in the U.S.  After reading other people's comments about it, I am of two minds.  On one hand, it's undeniably true that by "third-world" standards, Americans live in a land of plenty.  I see people on my block (in a supposedly poor neighborhood) throw away enough stuff to feed, clothe, and shelter a dozen third-world families indefinitely.  If I were a solitary predator hunting for survival, it's hard to imagine how I could starve in America.

On the other hand, most people are not solitary predators; they are social animals, with social needs just as real as physical ones.  Those who think poverty is only a question of starvation are making a category mistake.  Poverty is a social condition, not a biological one (polar bears experience starvation but not poverty).  That's why economists and psychologists studying poverty define it as a condition of "relative deprivation."  In other words, it doesn't matter if you're immensely better off than people on the other side of the world.  What matters is whether you're worse off than people in your own society.

Moreover, the emotional and physiological effects of relative deprivation are much worse than just feeling slighted.  Even non-human social animals, such as apes, experience these effects (see, e.g., Robert M. Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir).  My guess is that most of the people who make light of relative deprivation have never been forced to live in grinding poverty for years on end (choosing to live in a seedy part of Brooklyn to establish your bohemian credentials doesn't count).

I feel incredibly fortunate that my family was allowed to immigrate to America and has become part of the American middle class.  But I feel even more fortunate that my expectations and character were formed under the hammer of poverty.  To me, there is something really ugly about living your entire life in imperial luxury, having no personal experience of even the slightest deprivation, and then blaming those who have for not being more stoic about it.

These are the guys paying the price for Bush's genius and godlike competence.  Meanwhile, Cheney and his Halliburton cronies are laughing hysterically all the way to the bank.

I keep coming back to this photograph and wondering about the cryptic look on this Marine wife's face.  What must she be feeling?  Does she let herself think about the huge disparity between what the war did to her husband and what it is doing for the personal fortunes of the people who planned it?  How much inner beauty does it take to stand by your man after a tragedy like this?  If I had a wife and she came back from Iraq with comparable injuries, would I have half the strength and courage that she obviously does?

Perhaps they should remove this sign and let natural selection take its course.

The brazenness with which Republicans lie, cheat, steal, and in every other way betray their so-called "Christian morals" is breathtaking.  It should be obvious to everyone by now that conservatives could never win a vote or an argument based simply on the merits--thus the deception and propaganda.

These guys are truly Hitlerian (and I do not say that lightly).  Like the Nazis before them, they have made a deliberate choice to exploit the weaknesses of the democratic system by spreading misinformation and playing on people's fears and prejudices.  They have hijacked our country and are leading it in the same direction the Nazis led Germany--toward war, genocide, murder, kidnapping, torture, and all-around evil.  As Hermann Göring said,

Naturally the common people don't want war....  But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship....  All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country.

If that sounds familiar, maybe it's because "exposing the country to danger" is interchangeable with "emboldening the terrorists."

I was an architecture student once (at Harvard no less), but I quit in disgust. One reason for my disgust was the total lack of progressivism, both in the consumers of architectural services and in the architects themselves. Cars were invented only a hundred years ago, but since then they have been continuously improved, with better engines, more features, greater safety, etc., while houses are still being built with the same basic technology available to John Quincy Adams (when environmental and social concerns were quite different from today). Cars and houses both have windows, but car windows incorporate dozens of technologies that have somehow escaped the notice of those who build houses.

Partly this is due to a lack of sophistication among house buyers, especially in the U.S., who are looking for nothing more than a "style" (Tudor, Craftsman, Aztec, whatever) that has nothing to do with the actual utility of the building. But it's also partly due to the precious attitudes of the architects, whose notions of "progress" are limited to the most current fashions. Gone are the days when architects were respected alongside doctors and scientists as people possessing specialized and valuable knowledge (in ancient Egypt, Hatshepsut's architect Senmut was worshipped as a god, right next to Osiris). Now they are just fashion designers.

How did this happen? According to Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, "The reason you get better and better products out of the car industry, aerospace and racing yacht design is because they are all businesses that depend on performance to succeed. In architecture success doesn't depend on performance but on value. To get better performance you need a lot of research and development---to get value you only need scarcity."

Some people will look at this site (Houses of the Future) and laugh, or snort, or otherwise dismiss it. But I look at it and think how great our built environment could have been if architecture hadn't been banished to the Land That Progressivism Forgot.

The disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf released 720 billion tons of ice into the Antarctic Sea.  So why do some people still refuse to accept the reality of climate change?  The answer has nothing to do with science and everything to do with social conflict.

In Collapse, Jared Diamond observed that history contains many examples of societies that have self-destructed, often at the height of their power, through mismanagement of their natural resources.  In most cases, their self-destruction was abetted by the "tragedy of the commons," a term which refers to the tendency of individual animal herders to overgraze common land, to the detriment of all.  More generally, it refers to any situation in which 1) it would be best for everyone if everyone would moderate their use of communal resources, but 2) there is no way to make sure that everyone will do that, so 3) everyone just uses as much as they can, since the communal resource is going to be wiped out anyway.

In our age, the tragedy of the commons is playing out on a planetary scale, in the form of global climate change.  We have a situation in which 1) it would be best for everyone if everyone would stop using fossil fuels, but 2) there is no way to make sure that everyone will do that, so 3) everyone just keeps using fossil fuels, since we are all going to pay the price whether we personally use them or not.  The U.S. says they won't stop until China does, and China says they won't stop until the U.S. does, because whoever stopped first would become weaker (supposedly) and have to accept their status as the #2 power on Planet Earth.  In other words, we are risking our planet in a fight for status.

Are we smart enough to save ourselves?  Are we wise enough to find a way around the tragedy of the commons?  I see no reason to believe that we will.  In every previous historical situation when human beings have faced this dilemma, we let the fight for status get out of control and destroy the entire society in which that status would have meant anything.  Easter Islanders cut down every single tree on their island, and ensured their own extinction, to build statues a little bigger than their neighbors'.  The Maya devastated their environment to pay for their glory; in the end, they were swallowed whole by famine and war.

But these people did not have the benefit of a capitalist democracy.  Isn't there something special about our system of government that will see us through this disaster?  Again, I see no reason for optimism.  Capitalism is fundamentally based on self-interest, and self-interest is what drives the tragedy of the commons.  Only some kind of limitation on self-interest, such as a social attitude favoring virtue over money, could avert the tragedy.  But throughout its history, capitalism has been the great destroyer of all such limitations.  As for democracy, here is what Marc Bloch had to say about his government's failure to protect his people from disaster in 1940:  "A democracy becomes hopelessly weak... if its higher officials, bred up to despise it, and necessarily drawn from those very classes the dominance of which it is pledged to destroy, serve it only half-heartedly."  The political classes that rule the capitalist democracies concern themselves with the same business as all ruling classes, namely maintaining their dominance over the rest of their societies.  Since this depends on getting votes and nothing else, it's natural that they would be preoccupied with electoral politics and nothing else.  To put it bluntly, global catastrophe isn't necessarily a bad thing for them as long as they still rule whatever's left.