Never been one to let the carrier drop

From time to time people speak bitterly of the political messages embedded in music from bands like U2 and the Beatles, and ask why they have to foray into politics instead of just sticking to the music. This is often coupled with asking why we should be listening to the political views of entertainers.

I have a number of thoughts on this, which I will attempt to enumerate a few of.

1. I’m not sure that we should be. But certainly as someone who writes music I feel I should be free to write music about my opinions about political matters
2. If we should be, the reasons are as follows:

I am someone who has done a lot of things, and I consider myself to be – based on feedback from my friends and apparent comparison with my peers – at the top 2% of intelligence for humanity and the top 10% of drive to do things. My income is in the top 2% for my country (but not the top 1%, which would require two orders of magnitude more income – see elsewhere for discussions about this). I am a fairly capable dude.

Therefore perhaps you will believe me when I tell you that learning to play a instrument at virtuoso level – not something I have yet achieved, but something I expect to achieve in the next couple of years – is the hardest thing I have ever attempted. That’s one reason – they have proven, by dint of their capacity to perform, that they have discipline and dedication.

Another reason is that of course they are a member of the human family and either everybody counts or nobody does.

But to go beyond that, let’s ask the logical questions – why should we listen to the political views of newscasters, who are hired to have great hair and sound sincere even when they’re lying? Why should we listen to the political views of *politicians*, who for the most part only got to be politicians by winning a popularity contest and for the most part are politicians because it’s easier than working for a living. (I make exceptions for people like Brian Leeper, who became a politician to fix a specific problem and did indeed fix it – you find people like this all the time in local politics but a lot less in national politics – a future essay of mine may be about the evil that is  Big Politics, which is possibly worse than Big Pharma, Big Health, and Big Oil put together – it certainly enables them to do things like killing millions of innocents in order to secure access to oil, or routinely charging tens of thousands of times the cost of production for life-saving technologies that should not even be patentable)

I guess I will listen at least somewhat to the political messages of everyone from The Who to Pink Floyd to U2 because I feel like those people had to work pretty hard to get the skills to do what they do and in the process of acquiring discipline they may also have become somewhat less of nitwits than the average man on the street. I also think they tend to be very well travelled as a side effect of their career choice, and I think travel also opens the mind.

So, one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is how susceptible we are to viewpoint hijacking by talking heads.

It’s built into our hardware to decode and interpret facial expressions – which are the same in every human all around the world – and because of reasons talked about elsewhere when discussing Milgrim, most prevalently that individual subnets have no way to know whether a data source is internal or external – when those talking heads project a attitude of trustworthy authority, as many a talking head on the fake-news-as-entertainment shows loves to do (i.e. Fox and Friends), we subconsciously absorb their content with applying anything like enough criticism.

I think this partially explains how the right wing politicians in America manage to thrive despite repeatedly acting against the best interests of humanity in general and the electorate in particular.

I do not, as a rule, get my news from video sources, because I noticed how I started finding myself agreeing with whatever video source I tuned into, and also how many supposed “news” sources are in fact either heavily spinning the truth to project their own viewpoint or in some cases outright lying. Interestingly enough, it’s far more often the right that I catch doing this than the left (although certainly I can cite examples for both).

Anyway, this does partially explain how so many people who ought to know better are supporting the blatant acts of evil that are the behavior of the republican party since Nixon. It does, however, get extra disturbing when they start parroting the talking points of same when said talking points *obviously* apply to them. The people who are only alive because of medicare talking about the evils of single-payer or universal health care, for example. “The government shouldn’t have to pay for people who make mistakes” says the person who is only alive because the government does, for example. In general I find this attitude awful – “We shouldn’t share. We should be selfish and therefore *all* lead worse lives because we’re all connected. I’ve got mine, screw you. Or, I didn’t get mine, screw you.”

I do wonder to what extent the trumpanzees are going to be screaming “fake news” this morning as they discover Dear Leader is horribly in debt (and that doesn’t even include the off-the-books money he owes to the russian mob) and if he was re-elected would be the first sitting president to be foreclosed upon. A friend of mine used to talk about what a brilliant businessperson Trump was, and all I could do was be impressed at the brainwashing. (Brilliant business people generally don’t rack up quite as many court cases and bankruptcies as Trump – not to mention that if Trump had simply placed the money from his father in a standard mutual fund he would be far richer than he is now. He is a *impressively* bad businessman.)

I was encouraged to see that Swexit failed. My hope is that the pendulum of stupidity, having swung a absurd degree towards the awful, is again swinging back.

So, I have friend who is a Trump supporter – and can’t stop going on about how old Biden looks – despite the fact that Biden, as far as I can tell, is far more lucid and stable than Trump. One interesting thing about this person, though, is that they are supporting Trump despite regularly using public health care. I do wonder, when they’re sitting on their deathbed after Trump has shut down their health insurance, if they will feel even the slightest regret for having done that not only to themselves but to many millions of people.

So, https://golf.com/lifestyle/celebrities/how-why-president-trump-cheats-golf-playing-tiger-woods/ tells what I suspect is a pretty accurate story about Trump’s character. We know that almost all of his business ventures have ended up bankrupt – which I think is what he’s trying to do to the country itself, so his conservative buddies can steal all of our social security money.

However, conservative news sources sell the idea that Trump is a good businessman, and conservatives buy the lie. There’s no convincing them that it is a lie – and here’s the part I find really puzzling. Over and over it Trump gets *caught* in his lies – like his firing of the pandemic team, his insistence that the pandemic would blow over, etc – and yet I can safely bet that my conservative friends have either already forgotten this fact or will conveniently forget it when it comes time to vote.

One thing you don’t seem to have thought of as you continue your social destruction fest is that things generally do not travel *up* slippery slopes. Every time Mitch gallops down another level of dishonorability it brings politics in our country down another level – and it’s not likely to go back up. Which means among other things that once Democrats are in power they’re likely to play every bit as dirty as Mitch has.

You all have proven to us lefties – as if we had any real doubt – that you have no honor at all. And you’ve made the world a much worse place. I hope you feel at least a little bit of shame. You’re lucky that there *isn’t* a higher power in control of all this, because if there was any sort of karma implemented at all you all would get to experience the suffering – which is vast – that you have visited on others. With everything from wars over false pretenses to prep up the petrodollar to rigging the supreme court to tax breaks for the rich to exporting total bullshit conspiracy theories to get people who are repeatedly hurt by your policies to vote for them, you are the worst.

So, I’ve repeatedly offered my (*very* experienced, valued at $100+/hr) time to help the democrats suck less at IT. In particular they need to find a way to work together to keep track of which numbers in their database are expired and cull them, they need to communicate the cull lists and with the various democratic groups, and they need to also stop calling so often for money that when they call to GOTV people automatically assume it’s another beg-a-thon call. All of this hurts their ultimate goal of getting people elected and also burns volunteer hours.

They also really should stop with the fake surveys which go directly to /dev/null in order to beg for more money. (To be fair, this isn’t a partisan thing, the republicans do the same thing)

They have repeatedly ignored me. I’m assuming there’s nepotism in the democrat IT department involved, although it’s possible that they just are so internally chaotic that the message does not get through.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Democrats is they have a real problem with triage. I agree that nearly all the things that people bring up as important to fix are important, but there’s certainly one thing that’s *most* important. In general left leaning groups seem to fall for identity politics and everyone seems to think that the item hurting *them* is the most important, not *the item hurting the most people*. This leads to everyone wanting to throw energy into their special hobby-horse while really large problems like ICE, the republican cheatiness surrounding gerrymandering, the republican cheatiness surrounding fair play in general (i.e. Mitch), and whatnot go unfixed.

I did recently buy a interesting book on possible ways to unfuck America’s deeply fucked political system. (Actually, strictly speaking, it’s not fucked – it does exactly what the 1% want it to do. It just kind of shafts the rest of us)

Anyway, the IT brokenness underlines how little they care about volunteer hours – I volunteered to do phone banking for GOTV in 2018 but 90% of the calls were wrong numbers, people with so much call fatigue that they hung up almost immediately, or people who were not eligible to vote. This made me feel extremely non-valued as a volunteer. I’ve repeatedly emailed my contact offering to help fix the situation but they have completely ignored me thus far. I suspect you have to earn your place in the organization not by having good ideas and good skills but by putting in a certain number of hours at pointless tasks.

So, I guess it’s probably unlikely that the democrats would do this if they came into power, and we already know the conservatives are the cheatier of the two parties, at least when it comes to voter suppression and gerrymandering, so they’re not likely to do this, but it would be nice if we could get bipartisan support for the idea that we’re going to block cheating and corruption wherever it occurs.

What we really *don’t* want the democrats to do is redo all the republican gerrymandering to be democratic gerrymandering. A computer, driven by rules that both sides agree to and agree are equally fair to both sides, should draw district lines going forward.

We also don’t want the democrats to turn around and figure out how to do voter suppression on the republicans the way the republicans have done on the democrats. We should watch for all forms of voter suppression and suppress them.

And, of course, there are many other ways to cheat. Citizens United should be overturned, for example, as it represents a clear and obvious cheatyness. In general we should probably be building legal structures that correct for cheating and corruption as it occurs. Parties shouldn’t be delighted that they’ve found a way to cheat, they should be working to make any ways found to cheat impossible.

One thought that did just occur to me is maybe we  should ban political parties in general. They seem to lead to a lot of bad behavior.

Another thing that would be nice is to build the moral into both parties that government officials should represent everyone – especially officials like the president. Trump should have been removed from office for failing to even pretend to represent half of America – but, of course, the conservatives, by their actions, care more about winning than about continuing to have a country worth living in.

So one of the things that’s scary about the political direction the world has been taking lately, and the upcoming election, is I recently got a reminder that intelligence is not a defense against propaganda. One of the problems I think we run into is that we humans are to a certain extent herd beasts and so we tend to absorb without even thinking about it the points of view of the people around us.

I’ve been continuing to discuss with my friend who is convinced the chinese communist party is the source of all the trouble in the world, that BLM and Antifa are fronts for the CCP, and that Biden is a Chinese puppet. I do agree that Biden clearly sees China as a ally – and that the TPP was a shameful attempt to pass a backroom deal without letting it see the light of day. But I also think that BLM and Antifa are primarily what it says on the label – a organization about police murdering black folk and a not-even-organized group of people fighting facism. I think Trump clearly represents facism – his attempts to rig the election by destroying the post office during a pandemic, his statements about how he should be allowed to have three terms, and his general behavior as if he were king, not president, and making no attempt to represent more than half of his constituents underline this.

Anyway, this friend of mine is clearly intelligent and capable and yet from my point of view they are deeply bought into a conspiracy theory that I suspect is being pushed by conservatives as one of the many examples of their motto “If you can’t win, cheat.”. It wouldn’t actually make sense for most of America to back the conservative party as it currently stands so they’re trying for a disinformation campaign to get people to vote for them anyway.. and clearly at least in a few cases I could mention it seems to be working.

Part of the problem here also I suspect is party identity.. a lot of people I think would never vote for Trump if he had “democrat” on the label, and would be horrified by his now clear-as-day white supremacism, his misogyny, all the creepy pictures of him with very young girls and his admitting to doing things like looking in on people in their dressing rooms at the miss america pageant – not to mention his attempt to destroy the post office in order to win, his tax cut which was a gift for the 1% who hardly need it, and let’s also not forget the grab ’em by the pussy tape, etc

By the way, does anyone want to bet about whether we’ll “wait until the election” to elect a new supreme court justice as the republicans insisted we do during the obama years? No, of course not, Mitch McCheaterson will probably have a pro-Trump-as-king-anti-abortion justice in the court before the week is over.

Anyway, it’s rather terrifying to me that intelligence is no defense – what ends up happening is intelligence ends up getting used to sell people on the point of view they’ve already adopted. Of course this underlines that I have no real way of knowing whether my POV is valid either – there’s kind of this hopeless sinking in quicksand feeling – but I do know that conservatives in general are headed in the wrong direction from my POV because I don’t *want* to return to the 1950s, or even stay where we are – I don’t want to live in a world where cops shoot black folk whenever they want, or where women are carefully held in subjugation, or where the president can destroy large swaths of services that are inconvenient for him (i.e. the post office)

I honestly think Trump belongs in jail far more than Hillary ever possibly could have, that conservatives are largely bought in on total bullshit stories, that the conservative entertainment shows like Fox and Friends are hugely damaging to the future of our country as well as selling non-stop lies and propaganda..

And let’s please all remember that Trump fired most of the pandemic team a few years ago, and that Trump’s repeated lies and inability to comprehend the situation led to the USA having 4% of the world’s population but 22% of the COVID cases. Well, that combined with the USA having capitalism as a disease.

It did also occur to me that by making sure they confirm whatever awful partisan judge Trump wants before the election, the Senate will be demonstrating that acting against the majority of the country is more important to them than acting in the best interests of the country (since what they really should be spending their time on right now is helping with COVID and the corresponding crash)

I also note that I would guess that at least a third of the lawmakers electing that judge have paid for a mistress’s abortion. I am certain Trump has. No hypocrisy here.

So, I’ve had a number of interactions with the police. More, I would say, than the average person, by a fair amount.

On the positive side of the ledger, my next door neighbor growing up was a police officer – as far as I know, he never fired his weapon at anyone and he retired from the force with honors – despite policing Washington, DC, one of the rougher cities out there at the time. It’s difficult for me to imagine him a white supremacist, or him enacting or condoning violence. Without knowing exactly how I know this, I have this belief that he was a good cop.

Another example I would cite is the car artist Speedycop – I’ve never met him in person but we have a lot of friends in common and we have conversed. Whenever I think of him, I think of the scene in Pirates Of The Carribean where James Norrington says “This is a beautiful sword. I would expect the man who made it to show the same care and devotion in every aspect of his life”. It may not be rational, but the beautiful and carefully executed artwork of Speedycop makes me suspect he is a good cop, and my interactions with him reinforce that belief.

On the other side of that equation, I’ve had police lie in reports about me, I’ve had police utterly convinced I was high even as I explained to them that I was experiencing a transient manic episode – I at one point begged them to take my blood in the hopes that analyzing it would reveal what was going wrong hormonally that I was experiencing semi-blackout mania. They tested for drugs, but no extra blood was taken for research purposes. I will say on the positive side of that that one police officer was clearly planning on beating me and another cop relocated me to his cruiser in order to separate me from that individual.

I’ve never been beaten by the cops, but once they came to my door in long beach, accused me of being a squatter, and *threatend* to beat me. They’ve aimed guns at me numerous times. If I were black, I’d already be dead.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t want to live in a world completely without police, but I think a world in which the police were better trained and less well armed would certainly be a better one. They shouldn’t be *able* to tear gas nonviolent protesters for weeks on end, because they *shouldn’t have that much tear gas*. Clearly they’ve been getting too many tax dollars. They shouldn’t have quasi-miliary equipment, and they should have a *lot* of training in de-esclation.

One valid point that the police have made is that you don’t i.e. blame all doctors for one bad doctor, or all plumbers for one bad plumber. On the other paw, the police are different. Plumbers don’t generally kill people with no consequences, for example.

I really don’t know what the right answers are. But something badly needs to change.

I still think that there is a valid place for mathematically measuring human suffering. I think as we get better and better at neuroscience we will get to a place where we can objectively measure suffering. (I wonder what the unit for it will be..)

One interesting question I was playing with the other day is whether Trump or Bush caused more suffering. It’s easier to be angry at Trump because he’s such a obvious cartoon villain, but my guess would be that Dubya caused far more suffering with the war over flase pretenses and the hundreds of thousands killed – it’s also possible if one is measuring long term effects, Reagan caused even more with striking the fairness doctrine and encouraging extreme polarization, which helped the GOP drift into the machine for pure evil and greed it is today instead of just a organization representing conservative values.

I do think that world leaders that cause massive suffering need some sort of consequences. One of the problems with our system of government is leaders in general have very little reason not to be awful – nothing bad is generally going to happen to them for being awful, politically or personally. Even if they get caught, the public seems to have about a 15 minute memory. I guarantee you in November 80% of Trump voters will be completely oblivious to the fact that Trump fired the pandemic team, for example.

I do think it’s interesting how the GOP talks about how we’re committing murder when we kill fetusi that don’t have a brain yet, but it’s fine with them if the cops shoot innocent people, as long as those innocent people are not white.

In general there’s kind of this massive and insane disconnect in our criminal justice system – “You stole $1000! We should take 20 years of your life!”. It does underline the fact that in America, money is worth more than life.

Anyway, I think measuring suffering would teach us some of what we’re doing wrong.