Category: Politics

Discussing what is going on in the world with respect to rights and values.

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Equality Has Many Definitions

This is a RAID post. Contents are brief thoughts based on few sources, and have not been checked for accuracy or usefulness.

These notes are based on a section of Equality by Darrin M. McMahon. I haven’t finished reading it, and a bug deleted most of my notes from the first ~200 pages, so it is even less complete than it might otherwise be.

People are different, and this makes them inherently unequal. This has been used to justify bigotry on arbitrary differences throughout history, but declaring equality of all doesn’t make people equal either. Everyone has needs and capabilities, and the only path to equality is to have all people use their capabilities collectively to fulfill their collective needs.

Stalinism took “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” and replaced the word “need” with “work”. By including this seed of meritocracy, anyone injured, disabled, or elderly is excluded from equality. (I think every person has a phase where they see meritocracy as ideal. Fortunately, most people grow out of this phase.)

Nazis promoted equality of a few at the expense of everyone else. (How equality has been used throughout history changes. It is important to recognize that it means different things to different people.) Fascism creates a meritocracy exclusive to one class, relying on the existence of outsiders (who must be murdered1). In this way, fascism must shrink the accepted class to have more outsiders, and eats itself.

We claim all nations are equal, while propping up some, sabotaging others, and we can all see that nations are not equal. WWII’s devastation increased equality (see “four horseman of leveling” in Quotes). Post-WWII, economists claimed that industrialization forms a natural progression of brief extreme inequality that quickly brings in equality. (This is an obvious lie.) At the same time, economists claimed that it was better to make a nation wealthy than to fix its inequality, and that commerce is a leveling force. “When a rich man sells to the poor, they become equal.” cannot be true, and yet it was the predominant claim.

Quotes

  • “self-love is the great barrier to full human equality” I see in many people, especially myself, a critical lack of self-love, so this stood out to me as worth investigating further. It may not be true, or it may be more true than I am capable of recognizing right now.
  • “Christianity is Communism” If you research when and where Christianity was formed, the people were living under a form of communism.2 The ideals of Christianity are communist ideals, but have been changed and replaced by centuries of adaptation and interpretation.
  • “iron law of oligarchy” In every government, an elite few control all. There are many systems to stop this, but they have all failed so far.
  • “four horseman of leveling” – war, revolution, state failure, disease. These are all common things that have caused increases in equality by hurting everyone.

Questions

  • Does communism only work at small scales? It is implied to have only worked when implemented by communities instead of countries.
  • Does Marxism rely on individualism? The more I learn, the more I see that individualism is the biggest threat to progress. (Ever heard “divide and conquer”? Individualism IS self-division – a destruction of community. It makes us weak.)
  • What makes immigration “good”?3 From my education, I “know” that immigration has always had benefits, but what are those benefits? Why do we call them beneficial? As far as I know, the benefit has always been cheap labor (exploitation of immigrants). I want to challenge my education, and learn more about the complexities of immigration. (There is never a valid reason to stop immigration.)
  • Should we not want greatness? What IS greatness? Nietzsche argued for a constant personal struggle to achieve greatness, and against many institutions that improve equality. If seeking greatness requires sacrificing others, should we ever want it?
  • What was good/bad about the “New Deals”? They compensated for a destroyed economy, and produced infrastructure still used today, but what were the exact short-term and long-term effects?

Further Reading

  • Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx

Footnotes

  1. Fascism relies on exploitation of the unaccepted classes, which often literally involves mass murder, but also makes the unaccepted people leave. This is why fascists inevitably shrink their accepted class.
  2. Romans were the capitalists of their day, exploiting the people that became the first Christians. Communism is a broad and complex subject. In this context, communism is being used unrelated to the way it is used as a classification for modern countries.
  3. A partner reminds me that diversity is an inherent good, and that immigration increases diversity. (At minimum, diversity brings new ideas and perspectives into focus, and increases resiliency.)

(It’s kind of difficult to keep motivation when hard work is unceremoniously destroyed by a glitch..)

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A Luke-Warm Political Hot-Take

Back in 2016, I published a blog post1 about the major election results for my state and country (California, USA). While I probably agree with most of my feelings at the time, I know for a fact that I made some bad choices with my votes, and an invalid hot take. I want to revisit this, and respond to it with a little more knowledge and hindsight.

Hilary Clinton vs Donald Trump

The voting system in this country is a joke. The only countries less democratic are those without any voting, and maybe “votes” with only one candidate.. which includes portions of the US. This is a large topic, but one of the easiest problems to attack is the presence of the electoral college. The popular vote doesn’t actually matter, what matters is a select group of 507 representatives. Most of the time, they vote according to what the populace votes for, but not accurately. Fortunately, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact intends to fix this.

The more immediate problem is who got elected that time. Trump is a moron, and caused a lot of harm.. and that’s even before COVID-19 became a problem. He is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and partially responsible for millions worldwide. Of course, every American president has a body count2 3, but Trump is a special level of stupid, careless, and evil.

That said, I’m still not sure he was the wrong person out of the two choices available4. Hilary wanted to go to war with Russia, a decision that could easily be civilization-ending when promoted by a competent politician. Of course, Russia interferes with all US elections, and in this case assisted the winner.

Flavors of Bad

I don’t know much about the particular candidates that ran for Senate and House of Representatives’ seats, but the Republican Party won the majority, and have a history of helping the wealthy grow their wealth at the expense of worldwide suffering. That said, I’m not holding the Democratic Party up as some kind of hero. They are responsible for the majority of the harm that Republicans have not caused, and have a history of pretending to be held up by Republicans when nothing of the sort has occurred.

Californian Propositions

I’m going to skip over propositions I can’t have a valid opinion on, as I lack knowledge on the specifics, with the exception of stating that on the surface 51-57, 59-65, 67 seem like progress. Of these, the following passed: 51, 52, 54-57, 59, 63-65. (Full results.)

58 (English-only schooling) and 66 (limiting death penalty appeals) are objectively bad propositions that passed, discriminating against non-English-speakers and increasing support for state-sanctioned murder. 62 (death penalty removal) might’ve been a good step towards prisoners’ rights – but did not pass. Of course, US prisons are somewhere between a death camp and slavery on average5.

I previously agreed with 58. At that time, I did not realize how much of a discriminatory it is to allow English-only schools. On the surface, it sounds fine, the majority is English-speaking, and should not have to be hampered by provisions for non-English-speakers in areas where there aren’t any non-English-speakers, right? The problem is these areas don’t really exist, and this just hides them farther under the rug6.

Many of us believed that 67 (single-use grocery bag ban) was a positive. I was led to believe that the benefits were grossly outweighed by unintended costs and increases in plastic usage to make reusable bags. For example, it would take a “reusable” bag thousands of uses to make up the difference in environmental impact of its creation vs a single-use bag. This is a feat that is not likely to be achieved. In fact, this post was written poo-pooing this proposition until I went to gather sources.

Turns out, it’s a lot more complicated!7 While the negative facts I’d heard are true, the result of California’s ban is the majority of purchases are being made without any bag use. Turns out, they just didn’t need them for the most part. (It is important to specify that these results are not generalizeable to any population, however.)

I am somewhat conflicted about 63 (background checks for purchasing ammo, prohibition of large-capacity magazines). My gut tells me this is a good thing, because gun control is a good thing. However, I have heard evidence that suggests that these kind of half-assed measures are easily worked around and serve no actual prevention of gun-related harm. At the time I went all-in on my gut feeling, instead of doing more research on the topic. At this time, I have not gone back to check sources to find out if this measure is actually helping.

There is much more to be said, but that also requires research. Please comment if you would like to see that done on these or other political topics.

  1. The original will likely go down as part of a site redesign and holds no value as content, so I’ve created an unlisted paste of it.
  2. That list is obviously outdated, as Trump easily makes the top 5. And that’s without even counting foreign deaths.
  3. Another example: Sanctions, which directly lead to somewhere between thousands and millions of deaths, and much more significant suffering.
  4. History shows that Americans rarely have a 3rd option in presidential elections.
  5. This article on modern concentration camps primarily focuses on more recent events, but offers a taste of what I am referring to.
  6. Languages spoken in California.
  7. ABC News’ article on plastic bag bans. I cannot reliably determine the net effect of California’s prop 67, but it seems to be edging into positivity.