No matter what

I have to say that no matter what I end up doing with my life, that I honor the fuck out of the work that these teachers, all teachers, all professors (especially my professors), police officers, firefighters, military servicepeople, public-serving lawyers, judges, political leaders, and all of the public servants who work on behalf of the public.

But I do have to say that contrary to the nonsensical babblings of Michael Barone and his ilk, I honor the work that all teachers at all levels do. It's the most important work in the world. It's the reason I wanted to do this work.

And if Michael or anyone needs a reminder that all these soft-hearted teachers can be hard, I would be more than happy to lay him or anyone else the fuck out to give them a taste of just how hard a teacher can be if they want to be.

You doubt I'm tough? Ask my students. And if you need further reminders, I would be more than willing to step outside and give them to anyone convinced that soft-heartedness means weak. I'll show you weak, you piece of shit. And then I'll forgive your sorry ass for being such a fuckin' asshole.

All those teachers made it possible for you to have that cushy job to disrespect them, Michael. I'll forgive you. But if you need your ass kicked, I am more than willing to oblige on that front as well.

Love,
Ben

Progress?

Great. The first war on poverty went so well, I guess the Republican candidate would like us to embark on a second attempt.

McCain Vows War on Poverty, Says Nation in Recession

This is progress, I suppose. No offense, but if this is progress, I think I'm going to slit my fucking wrists.

I need a new fucking job. Because if this is it, we are going fucking nowhere.

And if we're going nowhere, I want first class seats and I have no interest in funding this shit.

Why we rationalize power and getting tough

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

"It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

'In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,' Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in 'Democracy in America.'

No more.

'Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. 'Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.'

Prison sentences here have become 'vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,' Michael Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in 'The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.'

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States "a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach."

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation's relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

'The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,' said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. 'But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it's much higher.'

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. 'The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,' said Stern of King's College...

...Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville's work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America's booming prison population.

'Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,' he said. 'We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.'"

The countercase is argued cogently with U.S. Justice Department statistics in this piece. It is a case that I will need to deal with in my book. As you can see, my thinking runs more along the lines of that of those who wrote this article and, specifically, with this line of reasoning.

"'Rises and falls in Canada's crime rate have closely paralleled America's for 40 years,' Tonry wrote last year. 'But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.'"

Meaning, in many cases - alcohol and drugs being ones that I am fairly convinced happen to fit - when behavior is prohibited or made illegal, it has the unintended consequence of increasing the behavior in question, as well as other more dangerous behaviors, like murder and violence around these illegal trades.

In other cases where incarceration is necessary, for purposes of containment, I think a strong case can be made in favor or incarceration, but reducing crime, long-term, is not one of those cases. Recidivist rates among violent (and non-violent) criminals should give us pause to believe that prison reduces crime (Paul Cassell makes the straight-forward and yet evidenced claim that tougher and longer prison sentences reduces crime - "[F]rom 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England." - that needs to be considered, even as I have much reason to disagree with this conclusion). But I am fairly clear, at this point, that such sentences, at best, reduce the likelihood of recidivism only when criminals believe that they might be caught. And they are far from addressing the matters of conscience and thought which underly criminal and decent or law-abiding behavior.

The better case, I think, favors the idea that prison rates have negligible effects on criminal behavior, even when they are without doubt, to my mind, necessary, when people who are rationalizing clearly dangerous behavior need to be contained. Meaning, prison is necessary in cases where clearly dangerous behavior is being rationalized and is, thus, likely to be repeated. But, even then, it, likely, has a very negligible impact on criminal behavior, and only when people think they might be caught.

This is why Americans and people all over the world do and always have rationalized power and toughness. Because they are convinced that such behavior reduces their vulnerability to pain and hurt that result from aggressive and criminal behavior. It is true in cases of national security as well as cases of domestic law and order. It is a pernicious illusion, I believe. But it has been with us since the beginning of time.

And it is the reason why Americans are rationalizing power, right now, I believe. It is the reason that humanity has always rationalized power. And it is, without pause, it seems, the reason why humanity finds itself in all of its most serious messes and dealing with its most serious and ugly behaviors.

My job, in this book I'm working on, will be to honestly explore this question and offer up answers that move us forward.

Mugabe and Clinton

The parallels between the Mugabe government and the Clinton candidacy are spooky.

Officials release 1st result in Zimbabwe election recount

"The state-run Herald newspaper also suggested Wednesday that a government of national unity led by Mugabe could end Zimbabwe's deepening political and economic crisis — a departure from its regular stance of accusing the opposition of manipulating the vote."

It's the dream ticket, featuring Robert Mugabe. How dreamy.

"No presidential results have been released from the March 29 election, and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's party insists it won outright. The Movement for Democratic Change has called the government's refusal to release the results part of a ploy to steal the vote.

For the first time in Mugabe's 28-year rule, the opposition defeated his ruling ZANU-PF party in the first count of last month's parliamentary vote. But electoral officials began recounting ballots Saturday for the 23 legislative seats, most won by opposition candidates. The ZANU-PF party needs just nine seats to reclaim a majority.

The recount in Goromonzi concluded Tuesday with just a one-vote difference from the original count from the poll, giving the seat to Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, the Herald said. Officials found no errors in the vote for the upper house, or Senate.

The opposition had demanded the Goromonzi recount. No further results from the recount were released.

In the editorial prominently displayed on the Herald's opinion page, columnist Dr. Obediah Mazombwe called a unity government negotiated by regional leaders of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community as 'the most viable and safest way forward.'

He said regional leaders, along with 'the progressive international community,' could bring together key players: Mugabe's party, the opposition, former colonial ruler Britain and the United States.

'The situation in Zimbabwe is dire, but all is not lost. Whilst the ruling party must stop behaving like a wounded buffalo, the opposition must stop its hysterics and lapses into delusion,' he said.

'The West, particularly the Anglo-American establishment, should stop insisting that President Mugabe and ZANU-PF cannot be part of a future prosperous Zimbabwe,' Mazombwe said.

Under a transitional arrangement, the resumption of critical Western financial assistance could be negotiated, Mazombwe said.

Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders, now in 'virtual exile,' should be guaranteed their safety and 'come home and start playing a constructive national role.'

A unity government would then be expected to reform the nation's constitution and organize fresh elections under regional and international supervision, he said."

If the election results are not significantly different from the original count, then the numbers I saw say the opposition should have the slight edge. And but for bullshit parliamentary rules - which, tragically, may exist - then the opposition should win this election outright. The only need for a runoff should be if there is either a tie or if some parliamentary procedure not cited in this article makes that necessary. Either way, it looks like, from the numbers I've seen that the opposition should have a bare majority and Robert Mugabe should not be in power (the opposition inexplicably got a bare majority, because Mugabe has so clearly demolished that economy and undermined a free civil society, by any objective measure, that there is no good empirical reason by any liberal democratic standard that Robert Mugabe should still be in power).

Mugabe's whole election race has so creepily taken several pages from Hillary Clinton's power playbook - his arguments about being "a fighter" who was still in the race came within weeks of Clinton's same arguments and calling for a unity government with an opposition which, by these numbers as much as by the original numbers, that is in the lead are both bizarrely reminiscenct of the Clinton campaign - that it is hard for me to understand why Americans would have such a hard time seeing the rationalization of power in both cases.

Except that many Americans and Zimbabweans are also rationalizing power. Same as they did in Nazi Germany. Same as they did in the Soviet Union. Same as they have virtually everywhere since the beginning of humanity. Because people are dumb and they have this stubborn habit of belief that power solves more than it does, when the Zimbabwean case should be such a clear and undeniable refutation of that fact that entertaining it becomes an exercise in intellectual dishonesty and futility.

This was the wrong line of work for me. Public service. Politics. Public education. Anything having to do with power. Because people are too stubborn and stupid to finally throw off this bullshit rationalization. They can. They need to. But they perpetually engage in it.

That's why Hitler, Mussonlini and Stalin all knew they could get away with their ugliness. Because they knew that the dumbasses of the world would stand behind them. Because it's all they know. Because in the face of aggression, people almost invariably turn to aggression rather than thought. Because they are convinced that aggression solves more problems than it does rather than being the pretty clear source of many of our worst problems that it is.

It doesn't matter how obvious the problems become, as in Zimbabwe, which suffers with up to 165,000% inflation and 85% unemployment. If your problems are that bad, and you still can't see that strongmen do not solve them, when are people going to face the bullshit?

When hell freezes over, I suppose. Or until the next intellectual rationalization for this bullshit takes root.

Robert Mugabe and Hillary Clinton both need a serious breather from public life. Even if majorities and their followers are too dumb or too full of the rationalization of power to see it, they both need to take a break and/or be removed from office.

And I need a break from this life, too, if power does perpetually overwhelm honesty. Because there's no fuckin' use wasting my life because people are too fuckin' stupid, scared, and self-righteous to see the goddamn problem.

Most people are cowards, is the truth. And they perpetually want someone they think is stronger than they are, more powerful, wealthier, more whatever than they are to come and fix all of their problems for them.

I need a life where I'm not subject to such peoples' bullshit all of the time. Be as stupid, scared, and self-righteous as you want with your life, I say. Just leave me the fuck alone. And leave everyone else alone, too, while your at it.

I need a beer in a serious way, after reading this news.

Another term of Robert Mugabe depresses the shit out of me.

How Zimbabweans could be be so fuckin' stupid to reelect this asshole or even let him get close, I will never know.

All I know is that I am tired of people being so fuckin' stupid. And acting like no big deal.