Month: July 2019

Drink from a toilet, why don’t you?

benfell

Migration

Believe the worst. Believe the absolute worst, no matter how over the top it may seem. And remember, I didn’t tell you so, but Philip Zimbardo did.[1] And Brian Resnick, from whom I’ve still not seen a retraction, must be judged complicit.[2] As is the National Border Patrol Council (a union) attempting to dismiss members of an absolutely repugnant Facebook group as exceptions rather than the rule.[3] Zimbardo addressed that too.[4]

I have to tell you: For me, folks such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have infinitely more credibility than anyone working for the Department of Homeland Security, including the inspector-general who denies that detainees are forced to drink from toilets.[5] And there is so much more than what I present here, indeed, more than what I can bear to even look at.

“CNN and other media outlets toured the Clint facility last Wednesday [June 26] but were barred from taking any pictures or video.” They found relatively sane conditions and an apparently well-supplied facility,[6] but:

While CNN was told by a CBP [Customs and Border Protection] official at the Clint facility the environment was the same on Wednesday as it was last week when legal monitors visited, a CBP source with firsthand knowledge of the facility said, “Typical. The agency prepped for you guys.” The source added, “It’s a never-ending cat and mouse game.”[7]

As I have previously written,[8] this situation[9] looks precisely as Zimbardo might predict, only now, even more so.[10]

A. C. Thompson, “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes,” ProPublica, July 1, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes

Priscilla Alvarez, “Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, lash out over conditions following border facility tours,” CNN, July 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clint-texas-facility/index.html

San Francisco

Incredibly, some alleged ‘experts’ still try to deny[11] that San Francisco is becoming a place where only the really rich, not even techies earning six-figure incomes, can afford to live, while the realities of gentrification, homogenization, homelessness, and destitution set in for all.[12] Now the Guardian joins the fray saying pretty much what any ‘non-expert’ could and would tell you: It’s true and it sucks.[13] Those so-called ‘experts’ need to get the fuck over themselves.

But also, the techie whiners who don’t have it even remotely so bad as the folks they shoved aside so they could move in to San Francisco.[14] Because there’s an obvious at least partial solution to affordable housing there: They stole the city from people who had lived there all their lives, even for generations. They can easily live elsewhere. They could all move the fuck out.

Julia Carrie Wong, “‘We all suffer’: why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed,” Guardian, July 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry

Donald Trump

Given the letter of the law as previously reported,[15] I do not see how the administration has a defense on withholding Donald Trump’s tax returns. I would think a summary judgment would be in order. But I guess it’s harder than that.[16]

Jeff Stein and Rachael Bade, “House Democrats sue Trump administration over president’s tax returns,” Washington Post, July 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/02/house-democrats-sue-trump-administration-over-presidents-tax-returns/

Census

Noah Bierman and David G. Savage, “Trump administration abruptly gives up fight over citizenship question on the census,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-census-trump-citizenship-20190702-story.html

Ann E. Marimow, Matt Zapotosky, and Tara Bahrampour, “2020 Census will not include citizenship question, Justice Department confirms,” Washington Post, July 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/2020-census-will-not-include-citizenship-question-doj-confirms/2019/07/02/0067be4a-9c44-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html

  1. [1]Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008).↩
  2. [2]Brian Resnick, “The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud,” Vox, June 13, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication; Brian Resnick, “Philip Zimbardo defends the Stanford Prison Experiment, his most famous work,” Vox, June 28, 2018, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/28/17509470/stanford-prison-experiment-zimbardo-interview↩
  3. [3]National Border Patrol Council, “National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) Issues Statement on ProPublica News Article Regarding Facebook Group ‘I’m 10-15,’” July 1, 2019, https://bpunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/July-1-2019-Press-Release-Facebook-Group.pdf↩
  4. [4]Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008).↩
  5. [5]Priscilla Alvarez, “Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, lash out over conditions following border facility tours,” CNN, July 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clint-texas-facility/index.html↩
  6. [6]Priscilla Alvarez, “Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, lash out over conditions following border facility tours,” CNN, July 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clint-texas-facility/index.html↩
  7. [7]Priscilla Alvarez, “Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, lash out over conditions following border facility tours,” CNN, July 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clint-texas-facility/index.html↩
  8. [8]David Benfell, “It’s time to be clear: Migrant children are being held in concentration camps and the Trump administration is fascist,” Not Housebroken, June 24, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/06/24/its-time-to-be-clear-migrant-children-are-being-held-in-concentration-camps-and-the-trump-administration-is-fascist/↩
  9. [9]Priscilla Alvarez, “Lawmakers, including Ocasio-Cortez, lash out over conditions following border facility tours,” CNN, July 2, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clint-texas-facility/index.html; Caitlin Dickerson, “‘There Is a Stench’: No Soap and Overcrowding in Detention Centers for Migrant Children,” New York Times, June 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/migrant-children-border-soap.html; A. C. Thompson, “Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes,” ProPublica, July 1, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memes↩
  10. [10]Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008).↩
  11. [11]Melissa Caen, “Experts Say Article Claiming San Francisco ‘Broke America’s Heart’ Is Misleading,” KPIX, May 22, 2019, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/05/22/experts-say-article-claiming-san-francisco-broke-americas-heart-is-misleading/↩
  12. [12]Karen Heller, “How San Francisco broke America’s heart,” Washington Post, May 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-san-francisco-broke-americas-heart/2019/05/21/ef9a0ac0-70ea-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html; Dan Kopf, “San Francisco’s Diversity Numbers Are Looking More and More Like a Tech Company’s,” Atlantic, May 9, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/san-francisco-diversity-migration/481668/; Alexis C. Madrigal, “Who’s Really Buying Property in San Francisco?” Atlantic, April 19, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/san-francisco-city-apps-built-or-destroyed/587389/; Julia Carrie Wong, “‘We all suffer’: why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed,” Guardian, July 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry↩
  13. [13]Julia Carrie Wong, “‘We all suffer’: why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed,” Guardian, July 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry↩
  14. [14]Julia Carrie Wong, “‘We all suffer’: why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed,” Guardian, July 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/01/san-francisco-big-tech-workers-industry↩
  15. [15]Brian Faler, “Treasury misses congressional deadline for turning over Trump’s tax returns,” Politico, April 10, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/10/trump-tax-returns-congress-1342027↩
  16. [16]Brian Faler, “Treasury misses congressional deadline for turning over Trump’s tax returns,” Politico, April 10, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/10/trump-tax-returns-congress-1342027↩

(Not really) anarchists

benfell

IMG_20190701_121541
All of a sudden, beginning just a few days ago, these flowers are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere I go, sometimes in gardens, sometimes growing wild.

 

Antifa

So I’d made a couple errors on Twitter yesterday and meant to go to bed. I wound up tossing and turning—I was worried about money and yesterday was a dismal Lyft day when I really could have used a decent one—and wound up tangling with self-identified (but fraudulent) anarchists on Twitter. The point is simple and in the title of a new blog post, “Violence is the illegitimate authority that begets all other illegitimate authority.”

The context for this is Antifa, which claims to act in defense of marginalized communities and protesters. But a funny thing happens when you ask the folks at demonstrations if they want this intercession: They say, Hell, no.

The idiots on Twitter called me “bourgeoisie” and even white supremacist. But if you ask folks protesting police violence on the streets of Oakland, California, for example, they’ll tell you that Antifa (also known as the Black Bloc) is just a bunch of white kids wanting to smash windows and skulls and who hijack their demonstrations. And they’ll be right: You can find these kids doing just that even without provocation, even in the absence of a demonstration, and then bragging about it.

That is not, no way, no how, anarchism. But these kids seek to wrap themselves in the righteousness of anarchism as they harm both anarchism and the legitimate protests against state oppression they claim to defend. Which is bullshit.

Whaling

Ulrike Putz, “Japan resumes commercial whaling, but days could be numbered,” Al Jazeera, June 30, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/japan-resumes-commercial-whaling-days-numbered-190628083537070.html

Liberalism

On June 28,[1] I asked what sort of liberalism Vladimir Putin declared obsolete.[2] Most people don’t ask that question as they don’t recognize that there are, in fact several different usages of the term ‘liberal’ in current usage, and in my dissertation, I argued when people use the term, they need to be clear about which they mean.[3]

Today, I was in for a bit of a pleasant surprise: Pankaj Mishra is very clear about his assumption that Putin conflated ‘liberalism’ as favoring expansive individual rights and representative government emerging from the Enlightenment era with ‘neoliberalism.’[4] It’s a different take: I had not recognized liberalism in this way.

Existential Comics, July 1, 2019, fair use. I’m not familiar with Nozick, but assuming the (unknown to me) author of this comic is correct, he likely marks the departure of capitalist libertarianism from “classical liberalism” as I understand it.

My understanding was drawn from capitalist libertarians who seek to reclaim the term ‘liberal’ as derived from Adam Smith but in fact discount Smith’s context[5] and from Jürgen Habermas.[6] This is what I call “classical liberalism,” and I distinguished it from “New Deal” liberalism and “liberalism” as “whatever a conservative opposes.”[7]

If Mishra is correct (and I have little reason to doubt him), then the Adam Smith variant as hijacked by capitalist libertarians and neoliberals, accompanies the conception arising from the Enlightenment era,[8] a conception I hadn’t been aware of. The difference between us is not huge. I have not actually read Adam Smith’s works—sorry, I could only get to so much—but am aware that Smith’s advocacy of laissez-faire was accompanied (in a separate book all too conveniently overlooked by capitalist libertarians) by a recognition of a social context beyond capitalism. This context entails moral obligations and this in fact is the basis for my distinction between Smith’s “classical liberalism” and capitalist libertarianism.[9] (It’s also forgotten that even Friedrich Hayek recognized a need for the state to intervene for social goods that the profit motive could not support.[10]) Mishra, I should hasten to acknowledge, clearly recognizes those shortcomings and what they have wrought and complains of “liberalism’s self-appointed defenders[’] . . . reflexively fanatical faith in market mechanisms.”[11]

Pankaj Mishra, “Putin’s Wrong, But So Are Liberals,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-01/putin-s-wrong-on-liberalism-but-so-are-liberals

  1. [1]David Benfell, “Vladimir Putin’s ‘mark,’” Irregular Bullshit, June 28, 2019, https://disunitedstates.com/2019/06/28/vladimir-putins-mark/↩
  2. [2]Tom Parfitt, “Liberalism is obsolete, declares Putin,” Times, June 28, 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/liberalism-is-obsolete-declares-putin-vx2xhhc2w↩
  3. [3]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  4. [4]Pankaj Mishra, “Putin’s Wrong, But So Are Liberals,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-01/putin-s-wrong-on-liberalism-but-so-are-liberals↩
  5. [5]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  6. [6]Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991).↩
  7. [7]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  8. [8]Pankaj Mishra, “Putin’s Wrong, But So Are Liberals,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-01/putin-s-wrong-on-liberalism-but-so-are-liberals↩
  9. [9]David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016). ProQuest (1765416126).↩
  10. [10]F. A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. 2, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents; The Definitive Edition (1944; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago,
    2007)↩
  11. [11]Pankaj Mishra, “Putin’s Wrong, But So Are Liberals,” Bloomberg, July 1, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-01/putin-s-wrong-on-liberalism-but-so-are-liberals↩