My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
"Virginia won’t let The Gays get married, so this couple just walked into a courthouse and said “We would like to get married plz” and they got a marriage license and even got married, even though they were two dudes. (One of them had really nice skin, though!) And just like that, billions of straight marriages around America went kerplunk in an explosion of existential despair."
Ah, fringe politics. You gotta love the morons who treat politics as an extension of religion, warfare, or the stankest-possible gossip mill. Nothing like some weak-minded power-mongering and bullying to brighten up your day.
From Andrew Sullivan. You gotta read this shit to believe it (my italics).
"My own on-air contribution to Obonics was "Obamistan" — the new name for a United States that is forced to accept Islamic Shari'a law. If you think that is a far-fetched idea, then consider another Islamic term: taq'qiyah. That word describes the fact that, under Islam, it is entirely acceptable — even encouraged — to use any level of deception against 'unbelievers' (in Allah, who is not the same as the God of the Bible) to advance the cause of Islam. In the video linked above, note that an Islamic 'scholar' (Abu Hamza al-Masri) advocates that Muslims may commit any act — beat, kidnap, sell, or kill — upon any non-Muslim that they might encounter. Al-Masri says that all non-Muslims are 'like a cow.'
Barack Obama claims to be a Christian. But, is he? His 'church' seems to hold Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan in higher esteem than they do Jesus Christ. Obama used his political clout to support a regime in Kenya that oppressed Christians and attempted to impose shari'a law on all Kenyans. Obama's grandfather renounced Christianity. (For the results of that, read Hebrews 6, especially Verse 6.) Barack Obama's childhood friends recall him as a devout Muslim, and so do his relatives. A news item from India reports that Obama also carries a miniature Hindu idol in his pocket for 'luck.' (The word 'luck' stems from the name 'Lucifer.' The word in Russian for "evil" is lukavaho. Christians should bristle whenever someone wishes them 'good luck.')...
Recently, I floated the idea that Barack Obama could become The Antichrist by three ministers. One laughed at me, and two have not returned my messages. But, if the idea is so far-fetched, then how is it that:
He was raised a Muslim, claims to be a Christian, but has never publicly renounced Islam? (In the Orthodox Church, when a convert is baptized, part of the ritual is to renounce any other god. Most other Christian denominations accept that concept, even if they do not have a written liturgical procedure for renouncing Allah.)
He claims to be a Christian, but carries a Hindu idol in his pocket?
He supported an African politician that hunted down Christians?
His followers believe whatever he says, even if it is proven to be a lie?
It has been 'revealed' that he is likely not even a United States citizen, yet he has not been disqualified from office? (Is that not an ultimate example of 'lawlessness,' to become a lawmaker illegally?)
The Holy Bible describes certain attributes of The Antichrist. He will be a man that ultimately 'sets himself above all that is called god.' (If one claims to adhere to several different gods, even though each one claims exclusive dominion, then what does that say about the man?) The Antichrist will be a persecutor of Christians. He will be a consummately skilled liar. And, his identity will be revealed only after The Tribulation has already begun.
Now, before readers make too many assumptions, consider that The Antichrist will be preceded by a False Prophet, who will give The Antichrist his political power. Recently, former president Bill Clinton endorsed candidate Barack Obama, even though Hillary Clinton has only suspended (not withdrawn) her candidacy for president. Bill Clinton cannot become president again. But, he could be appointed — by a President Barack Obama, or even by a President Hillary Clinton — to become US Ambassador to the United Nations. And, in that position, he would be eligible to become UN Secretary General. That, in effect, would make Bill Clinton 'king of the world,' if the UN seizes power. All of that handed to him by a man that rises up, 'speaking boastfully' to the world about "change we can believe in.' Hmmmmm."
And this bullshit is even better. Thanks to Politico for tipping me off to these left-wing assholes (again, my italics).
“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?
Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode.
McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, 'I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital...'
His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite...The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.
...two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.
...McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.
This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune...'"
What is really bizarre about fringe politics is their ability to play upon the really pretty foolish insecurity and pretension by folks of every ideological leaning that, since their ideology clearly has all the answers to important political, cultural, and life questions - I mean, really now, which ideology doesn't have all the right answers? Silly moderates, humility is for the weak - that only identifying with the most mindless elements of their fringe can they truly prove credentials that will never be satisfied, anyway, since the whole point is manipulation not genuine understanding.
It's like trying to prove to Hamas how much you care about the Palestinian cause. In fact, it is the exact same thing as trying to prove to Hamas how much you care about the Palestinian cause. That's what Hamas is. They are the Palestinian flank. That's what terrorism is, to anyone who is not busy rationalizing their own fucked-up political activities. It's the most extreme fringe, willing to rationalize any brutal thing to justify its cause and the power they seek.
Hamas doesn't care. They're just using you to kill Israelis and expel the Zionist enemy. They could care less how much you care about the Palestian cause. They have no doubts about the righteousness of the Palestinian cause any more than ultra-conservative nutballs in Israel have doubts about the righteousness of Israeli occupation of Palestine. At best, they care about how much you can help them advance their cause.
That's the beauty of fringe politics. It means never having to be wrong. Ever. That's the point, you see. If you hang out with a bunch of people who all agree with you and all agree that they are right all the time, then it actually makes you right all the time, for real. Strong-minded stuff, let me tell you. That's what the strong do. They get a bunch of losers like themselves huddled together in a room and tell each other how they're right, all the time, and how the people who disagree with them are the Anti-Christ or Communist collaborators.
Fuckin' brilliant, that line of reasoning. It almost makes you wish they'd start up a university and let the rest of the world in on their infinite wisdom. Which is the whole point, of course, of radical activism and it's ideological presence on college campuses: to bully peoples' consciences in the one place where reason is most valued.
One of the central commitments of my life and my policy thought is to end this brainless bullshit, in every quarter, and to center policy discussions and thought squarely in the realm of the reason. And to undercut the efforts of every shitbag who has ever tried to substitute repression and manipulation for reason and thoughtful, compassionate policy.
Fuck the revolution, as Bono might say in a younger day. Fuck the warmongers and activists who don't know the difference between muscle and liberal democratic values. Fuck the dumbasses of the world who let various groups think for them. And fuck everyone who tries to substitute power for my independent conscience.
Mindless bullying is not a virtue. But everyone seems to find a cause that rationalizes it as so. Everyone. Since the beginning of humanity.
And the only thing that gives me hope that it might be different is that we always seem to give it up the tendency just a little bit more each generation.
It'd be nice to live in a world where my kids don't have to worry about being bullied because they think for themselves. A world where they can and will fight if they need to fight. But a world where they genuinely avoid doing so as much as is reasonably possible. It'd be nice if all kids could grow up in that world.
And fuck every single last asshole who tries to force that question otherwise.
It's time, as much as possible, that we ended this bullshit.
An important part of my teaching job - I work in a special day school with kids with serious academic, behavioral, and mental health issues - is an understanding of mental health and how it impacts peoples' relationships and functioning.
In that vein, I've done and continue to do a lot of broad study of mental health issues. One isssue that came up, recently, in a conversation with my roommate, was schizophrenia.
These are some very nice videos demonstrating what schizophrenia looks like, offering a fuller, truer-to-life illustration of this condition and its serious consquences for peoples' lives.
Mental health and psychology is subject to debate, of course, like any other idea or body of knowledge. It is subject to democratic discussion and debate as much as scholarly discussion and debate.
But the reality of the impact of psychology on our functioning and perceptions of reality is much more undeniable the more you see such situations and the consequences of mental health and our understandings of psychology, our own and others', on our lives.
My job lies between the world of serious mental illness, as demonstrated in these cases, and the more mentally healthy and yet always less than ideal mental health of those of us who do not suffer from a serious mental illness.
But understanding psychology and mental illness is critical to any understanding of people and how they relate with one another, including policy thought and discussions.
These videos give just a taste of what that understanding has to offer us.
If you have not seen the Oscar-award winning documentary, One Day in September, an excellent account of the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics and one of the best documentaries I have ever seen in my life, it has uploaded, in toto, apparently, on Youtube.
I highly recommend this really brilliant and remarkable film. I do not agree with all of its conclusions, especially its conspiracy-minded thinking about the German government and its motivations in its handling of this tragedy and its aftermath.
But, especially given an extended interview with Jamal Al Gashey, the last remaining member of the Black September terrorist cell responsible for this crime, I highly recommend giving this a watch.
You also might check out another excellent documentary on radical Islam, Obsession, when you get a chance.
If there is any group of folks whose votes I want ruling the world, it is definitely this group of geniuses.
The idea that we would have our major policy debates about who can emulate or pander best to this bullshit rather than an engaged and honest debate and discussion about who has the best ideas about how to tackle our problems most effectively - and how to best let people tackle problems on their own and with one another without the oversight of the equally impressive geniuses who run for office - is, well, really fuckin' brilliant, you must admit.
And the idea that force, rather than liberal and democratic engagement, would operate as some kind of substitute for more genuine liberal democratic values, is as foolish in its consequences as it is the most persistent and stubborn abuse of power.
If our history was not so replete with a long track record of steering ourselves in the right direction despite such foolishness and abuses, I would be more gloomy about the world.
But, for awhile, as Lincoln wisely opined, these dumbasses can be convinced to do just about anything. And that is the problem. Power inherently involves manipulation. And these folks are just too subject to it.
If only that could be the end of it. Except that it can't. There is only one way out. We just all have to get smarter. And more responsible for our own lives.
My roommate just rented Control, recently, the surprisingly moving biopic of Ian Curtis and his band, Joy Division, the band soon to become 80's pop icons, New Order.
I must say that, other than the elementary school fascination that I had with bands like New Order - New Order was one of the major bands of my youth - as an adult, I both enjoy pop music and have never really completely understood my friends' obsession with pop music, popular movies, popular television dramas and sitcoms, and other things that seem so completely mindless and mindnumbingly boring to me as a thinking grown-up.
But, I must say, that after spending an evening with Joy Division and New Order videos, myspace pages, audio clips, Wikipedia entries, and other lore, I think I'm finally understanding the obsessive appeal of pop culture for my friends.
There's always been the mindless escape. The wanting to be part of the crowd, to belong and do what all the kids are doing, these days. The secret wish for an opportunity to sell out, make big cash, and not care about anything else other than having a good time.
But, mostly, there's the music.
Just getting lost in it, as Ian Curtis clearly does in this video for "She's Lost Control."
There's the ambiguous melancholy and introspection of Ian's lyrics in this early Joy Division work.
For me, with New Order, there's memories of childhood in the 80's, a period that seems innocent as the morning dew compared to the blunt, crass, sexual, drug-glorifying, and commercial messages on contemporary radio and video play.
I remember watching videos for songs like True Faith
...and Bizarre Love Triangle
...songs that I was completely clueless to their meaning but loved, nonetheless, inasfar as anyone can love a pop song, and never understanding what the hell these videos or songs meant, and not really caring, particularly. As a kid, I would try to decipher lyrics of even mindless pop songs, like these, and get to the bottom of what that big, mysterious grown-up life was like.
And, tonight, I realize that their appeal, for me and I assume for others, is not just the musicality for its own sake and chance to take a break from the complexity of real life. It's not just the memories as a kid of trying to decipher what often seemed a dark and enigmatic life of grown people.
It is the ability to pull back from a world that is overwhelming, sometimes, in its mindless and endlessly complicated pressures, struggles, and conflicts with apparently no end and often for reasons that seem kind of foolish and not good for much and just enjoy some uncomplicated and minimally taxing entertainment, hoping for it all to blow over.
It's more complicated than all that, of course. Everything is, of course.
But, sometimes, it's fun to take a little time off. And, more often, it's fun just to not think about it at all and just enjoy the music.
As I kid, I did more enjoying without thinking. As a grown-up, I don't know how to enjoy anything without thinking. Even mindless entertainment.
Enjoy. Don't think about it too much. Or do.
God knows I do. I know. It's pathetic. I just can't help myself. I never have.
Time to shut my brain off, watch some mindless 80's pop videos, and fall asleep to the tunes of True Faith, New Moon of Monday, Lovergirl, and other meaningless pop songs of my childhood that I read all kinds of meaning into trying to understand a strange, uncertain world.
Maybe everything will all blow over tomorrow. Or maybe I just need some sleep and do my best to understand this still all too odd and mysterious world tomorrow as today.
Goddamn, Bono can make a speech, can't he? I miss the days when these boys sang like this. I appreciate being a rock star and not wanting to seem so pious.
But I think it's a little late for that, don't you, boys?
And for God's sakes, fuckers, risk a little sanctimony.
In the meantime, I remember when U2 had fewer friends with power and made more of a difference.
No offense, fellas, but pressuring the President and G8 leaders to make donations they were already committed to making is hardly the stuff of political courage.
In that spirit, a clip from an excellent movie about the war this song was written to end.
After that self-righteous screed, you'll need a little dose of the indominatable Richard Cheese (the contrast between Cheese's cheese and Bono's ire could not be more brilliant or more hilarious).
Here's their more recent, shitty, garbled, acoustic version for the Clinton Presidential library dedication.
And my favorite cover by you know who.
But nothing really holds a stick to Bono's performance, back in the day, huh?
Get some testicular fortitude, boys. Risk some sanctimony.
Real men and women don't have to go around swaggering about, proving how tough they are all the time. It's the fuckin' poseurs who sit behind desks, and those too callous to the harm they inflict, who romanticize tough when better and less destructive options are available.
Meaning, it's the weak who romanticize tough when other less destructive options are available or when its really not their place, at all, to impose themselves. People like Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal, Osama Bin Laden, and Mohammed Omar. Plenty of people in the United States and all over the world too close to those examples to be proud of themselves.
And David Dillon is a nice reminder of that fact that compassion does not mean soft, except to the weak.
Compassion is strength. In fact, it is this strength that more solidly than any other distinguishes the efforts of the West and liberal democracies from the efforts of the more repressive forces of the world.
In a world where the weak and the insecure are always turning to tough and denigrating compassion to avoid facing themselves, it's nice to know that people like David Dillon spent some time here, if only for awhile.
That's what I want people saying at my funeral. I don't want some asshole talking about what a "tough sum bitch," I was. That will be apparent from my life, well enough.
I want people to remember what a big heart I had. And that I was someone who gave having a big heart a good name. And that I'd gladly kick the ass and anyone who said different, if need be.
Ironically, for all of the swagger and bluster of tough characters in the world, the source of repression and inhumanity, since the beginning of humanity, has always been weakness.
Emotional weakness. Pride. The cowardice, unwillingness, and failure to face oneself and one's failures and mistakes honestly and with forgiveness for ourselves and for others for the pain that we and others have inflicted and experienced.
"Robert Mugabe's mother told him when he was a child that he had been chosen by God to be a great leader. No wonder he thinks only divine power — not elections, not foreign critics, not a crumbling economy or a much younger opposition leader — can unseat him.
In the mind of Zimbabwe's leader of nearly three decades, reality is summed up by a massive banner hanging in the entrance to the presidential offices: Mugabe is Right...
Robert Mugabe's mother told him when he was a child that he had been chosen by God to be a great leader. No wonder he thinks only divine power — not elections, not foreign critics, not a crumbling economy or a much younger opposition leader — can unseat him.
In the mind of Zimbabwe's leader of nearly three decades, reality is summed up by a massive banner hanging in the entrance to the presidential offices: Mugabe is Right.
Heidi Holland, who recounts the anecdote about God's chosen one in her recently published book 'Dinner with Mugabe,' says Zimbabwe's leader is an 'emotionally weak man' who's never come to terms with some of life's earlier disappointments.
He has never forgiven the father who abandoned him when he was 10 to the women in the family — a heathen grandmother and an over-pious mother converted to Catholicism who proudly gave her son into the care of Jesuit priests at nearby Kutama mission. There, Mugabe found a surrogate father in Anglo-Irish headmaster the Rev. Jerome O'Hea.
To this day Mugabe models himself on a British gentleman — dark lounge suits, silk ties and handkerchiefs, a fondness for tea and cricket.
Holland said Mugabe was likely humiliated in the past week when Queen Elizabeth II stripped him of the honorary knighthood bestowed in 1994 when he was an anti-colonial hero.
Yet it is Britain that Mugabe has chosen to demonize, accusing the former colonizer of wanting his southern African nation back.
'When you hear Mugabe vilifying Britain, expressing hatred of Britain, underlying that is a love of Britain,"'said Holland, a Zimbabwean journalist living in South Africa who won a rare interview with Mugabe in November, meeting with him for 2 1/2 hours.
She did not think he was crazy, but 'lives in the world in a mad kind of way. But I think it's deliberate, I think he's in denial, I think he can't face what he's done in Zimbabwe because that isn't what he intended to do. He did genuinely, I think, want be the savior of his people, the liberator of an oppressed nation. What has happened is a source of deep pain to him, I think.'
Mugabe still is bitter, Holland says, that the white Rhodesian regime refused to allow him out of jail, where he was a political prisoner for 11 years, to attend the funeral of his only son with his first wife, Ghanaian fellow teacher Sally Hayfron.
Even as a child, Mugabe could not bear to be criticized, she said. He was a loner with his head constantly stuck in a book and an astute scholar who earned six degrees while he was in jail...
Chenjerai Hove, a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who fled Mugabe's regime, says whenever Mugabe is challenged 'he becomes a wounded lion and goes on the attack.'
Those who have failed to see that pattern chose 'to look the other way while the man was busy showing his dictatorial tendencies,' says Hove, a writer in resident at Brown University.
Back in 1976, when Mugabe fled Rhodesia to take control of the war for black rule from Mozambique, 'a lot of people were arrested and tortured for him to be accepted as a leader, so his cruel past started at that time, and he has always worked like that,' Hove said.
When Mugabe's leadership was challenged after independence in 1980 by disgruntled military leaders of rival liberation leader Joshua Nkomo's movement, Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained elite Fifth Brigade on a rampage against Nkomo's minority Ndebele tribe. Some 20,000 people, most innocent civilians, were killed. Thousands starved to death as Mugabe withheld international drought relief from Ndebele civilians.
'This is a man who does not forgive ... I think it's about revenge ... He now knows that his own people don't want him.'"
Sounds like a very accurate portrait of what I would expect from a man like this. It's the reason that repressive characters demean compassion, decency, forgiveness, and humanity.
Because it means facing themselves honestly. And doing that is too painful for their fragile egos.
Facing ourselves honestly is painful for everyone. Most, likely all, people in the world, since the beginning of humanity, have struggled facing themselves honestly. It is difficult and painful effort. It is made more difficult and painful by our efforts to repress and harm one another rather than contain people who are dangerous and make good faith efforts to engage and lead people to take honest responsibility for themselves and their actions.
It is this failure that has been the source for our illiberal, undemocratic, and ugly and bitter past. Repression makes facing this failure and all failures more difficult because it adds to the pain load that emotionally fragile egos already fail to come to terms with. And the legacy of repression is a legacy of weak and fragile egos failing to come to terms with that fact of life and their role in creating and prolonging much needless tragedy in the world.
It is ironic that the false heroes that humanity has forever turned to in the name of strength and courage have always, in fact, been figures of enormous emotional weakness and cowardice. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Jong Il, Ahmadinejad, Hussein, Mugabe. But also American, British, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Canadian, and other leaders the world over and since the beginning of humanity. It is more common than not, really, is the truth. As is our persistent and tragic rationalizations for their repressive behavior and our own that has led to our ugliest and most destructive legacies.
The source of humanity's repression and inhumanity has always been our weakness, our emotional weakness and cowardice to face, honestly, and take responsibility for our inhumanity and its consequences.
It is the saddest of ironies, since repression was originally meant to facilitate resposibility in the face of humanity's sinfulness and proclivity to making even the most serious mistakes.
And humanity, today, and till the end of time, faces a fundamental choice:
Will we face, honestly, our inhumanity, its consequences, and the repression that breeds it? Or will we continue to face the consequences without facing our responsibility in those consequences, and thus continue down this self-fulfilling prophecy of force, violence, tragedy, mayhem, and destruction till the end of time.
One thing is for sure.
Whether we take responsibility for this legacy and its consequences or not, we are responsible for it and its consquences. And no amount of denial, today or ever, will make that go away. It will simply put off the inevitable and tragic reflection by our peers and our progeny on what sad, destructive fools we are and have been.
How sad that we would accept that fate rather than expect better from ourselves. How sad that we would accept cowardice as our legacy rather than genuine courage.
It cannot and will not go on forever. We are not so cowardly and foolish as all that.
But how sad that we would even consider a fate so cowardly and needlessly tragic because we cannot offer up the one thing that we say that all that repression is meant to elicit: responsibility.
I am most certainly sorry for everything that I have ever or still might contribute to that legacy, in my own life. I have been responsible for plenty of harm, in my own life. We all have. And I am sorry for everything that I've contributed to that ugly legacy.
It is now up to the consciences of each and everyone in this sad, foolish, and forgivable species of humanity to bring that kind of strength and courage to the world and to their and our lives.
And then, and only then, can this sad, foolish, and all too human legacy end.
"Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book --a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.
This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we'll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary -- the comments posted on this blog -- will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of "capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool" probably won't be used. But we're genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)
The same goes for economics bloggers who write about the stuff here on their own sites: If we can get permission, we'd like to use that material too.
We also invite contributions by email. You can send submissions to conorjclarke [at] gmail [dot] com. (Anything you send can be posted here, though we might edit it a bit first.) We are especially interested in contributions from economists and anyone working in development. But we welcome pretty much anything that's interesting and well-written."
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have a really interesting conversation on that pager about what Bill means by "creative capitalism."
"Warren Buffet: I would rather have Bill, if he will, give me the main points.
Bill Gates: Well it’s not completely well defined. It’s a phrase that I used in a speech at Harvard a year ago, because I totally believe in markets as such powerful forces for drawing out innovation and creating things that are sustainable. And yet, you do get trapped in this situation where the markets serve where the dollars are, so you don’t get markets meeting the needs of the poorest. And so how do you bootstrap or support the needs of the poorest so markets are reaching out to them. I mean, when I view the last hundred years as an experiment in how good markets are, the answer is very, very clear and very strong. It’s one of those things that’s so clear people won’t even discuss it with you anymore. Like in this [Edward] Teller biography: he says, Look, if he didn’t believe in innovation, he would have been a communist. If the economy is a zero-sum situation, then you ought to try some crazy sharing thing. It’s only the innovation and pie-growing activity that made Teller feel comfortable with the capitalistic approach. And I think that that’s been validated.
You often hear people saying that companies should do something besides profit maximization. And it’s amazing how strong a message is hidden in words like 'diversity' or the broad term 'corporate social responsibility.' Warren and I were just at the Microsoft CEO Summit for the last couple days and it was amazing how many of the talks were about how a company needs to have core values of who they are and what they do as the thing that makes the employees feel they have a purpose and guides their action. And how that needs to be really at the center, even more so than the short-term profit metrics. Jack Welch was very good on that and Lee Scott [CEO of Wal-Mart] was very good on that, I think in a very sincere way. I think it’s more true all the time.
Bill George [of Harvard Business School] ran the leadership panel, and he was saying how the younger generation really wants to go to work with people who have a purpose. So what I’m saying is when people write down that purpose, when they write down their values, that an element of that should be: what can we do based on our skill set, our innovators, whatever unique capacities we have as a company--what can we be doing for the poorest 2 billion? And that can either be taking more risk in terms of trying to develop markets there, which is C.K. Prahalad-type stuff, or just doing things like the Merck donation that are not profit seeking and yet not giving up huge percentage of profit.
So somebody can read the words 'creative capitalism' and say, 'Okay, Bill Gates said that you should serve the poorest 2 billion and ignore profit.' That is not what I intend to say at all, but then I am being a bit ambiguous about how far you go in being willing to give up something. Am I saying one percent? Two percent? Three percent? Nobody who sets these dual roles is very good about being clear. I mean, what do they say you’re supposed to give up for corporate social responsibility. Well, they’re not willing to be numeric because they feel like the two goals, profit and social responsibility, aren’t totally at odds over time—or diversity, or whatever the value is.
I understand it best in terms of the big companies of the world: pharma, banks, technology companies, food companies. Buying from the poor world, supplying to the poor world, having scientists and innovators who come together to think about the poor world. It’s best defined for me there, and then I think, “Okay, how concrete is this?” I go back to this thing of: Okay, if all companies did as well as the best do, then it would be pretty dramatic in terms of the rate of improvement for the poorest. And a year from now I’ll know a lot more about this, because in my new time back at the Foundation I’ll meet with heads of pharma, heads of food companies, heads of…I’ll meet a lot of these companies and try and get a sense of, do they agree that in their hiring it would help them, do they agree that in their reputation and maybe seeking long-term markets it would help them and see how concrete a response is possible.
Warren: But as Bill was talking, it just occurred to me that if you don’t trust the government to do a lot of things very well—and business will never trust them to do that; rich people will never trust them to do that—and if, on the other hand, the honor system doesn’t work particularly well in terms of how many people behave (and this idea just occurred to me ten seconds ago so it will take a lot of refining): what if you had three percent or something like that of the corporate income tax totally devoted to a fund that would be administered by some representatives of corporate America to be used in intelligent ways for the long-term benefit of society, This group—who think they can run things way better than government—could tackle education, health, etc. or other activities in which government has a large role. And it would have this forced funding of three percent of corporate profits or some sum like that. Ace Greenberg used to insist that all the managing directors of Bear Stearns give four percent to charity, and in December he went around and talked to everyone who hadn’t yet given his four percent. And he told all the Jews that they had to give any shortfall at year end to Catholic Charities, and he told the Catholics they had to give it to the United Jewish Appeal. Well this would be a variation on that. Take three percent—pick a figure—of corporate income. That would be, perhaps, $30 billion a year (you would exempt small companies). If there are things to be done in society that the market system doesn’t naturally lead to, something like this would be a supplement to the invisible hand. It would be a second hand that would come down for society—administered in a business-like manner—and it might be interesting to see what a system like that might produce...
Bill: I think there are going to be corporations where expertise builds up to solve problems that is not built up any other place. And your hypothetical is a little strange because what we’re faced with is a world with vast disparities in wealth that have to do with what country you’re born into and you wouldn’t have that if you had one person running the world and so, you know, the degree to which a little bit of innovation can make a huge, huge difference whether it’s an LED flashlight or something you can roll to move the water that you used to have to carry.
Some of these innovations--when you see them you say, 'Oh, well, obviously that rationally should have happened,' but it only happened because somebody cared. Now you could say in the grand sweep of time capitalistic economics would have come up with that. Well, there’s a lot of suffering between now and eventually that this thing can deal with.
The brilliance in innovations inside universities--we haven’t talked about universities here because I haven’t thought about that as much, although even some of them are starting to get involved. Getting them to take their innovation power, thinking power, awareness raising power, into these things is another part thing that I think is important and I hit a tiny bit on that in the Harvard speech, but we have all this expertise. You need to apply it. Drugs are just such a clear, clear case. The government doesn’t know how to make drugs. They don’t know how to trial drugs. There’s no government in the world that’s in the business of doing that. So you’ve gotta send the signals…now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company. Whereas here I’m actually explaining the fact you have people who care about humans working at the company.
Warren: But I think the most realistic model actually can be the Gates Foundation. If you’re really looking for ways to take huge amounts of resources over time, and they are going to be huge aggregations of resources, and you show the world that something is a better system than government and will work better and can attack things that government can’t and so on; and that will use resources efficiently. I think people will look for that--not 100 percent of the people, not maybe 50 percent of the people, but a lot of people will. But I think it could be a demonstration project like nothing else the world has ever seen.
Michael: The retiring CEO of the Gates Foundation--she’s very excited about the idea of a middle institution that’s not non-profit and it’s not for-profit. It’s a low-profit, and I think [Grameen Bank founder] Muhammad Yunus has suggested this and basically it runs like a corporation except all the money is put back in.
Bill: Well, there are such things, you know, there are mutual operations that are like that, you know, the recreational co-op, which is pretty sizeable now a days…What percentage of the hospitals in the U.S. are under that type of structure--50 percent, 60 percent?
Warren: If I owned 100 percent of Berkshire I could have set it up that way. But I think the model of intelligent, private philanthropy will look superior to governmental spending in many areas. I don’t think there will be a shortage of funds over time and I think there will be a lot of people who will make a lot of money who don’t now have the faintest damn idea about how to best funnel that money back to society, but will, nevertheless, feel like they want to funnel that money back to society. I think intelligent private philanthropy has a huge potential.
Bill: Yeah. I would say two things about that. One is there will be an effort with more to spread the word about how much fun it is to do philanthropy--either the way I’m doing it, where you get deeply involved, or the way Warren’s doing it, where you look and you pick somebody who you’re excited about their approach and you back them to go do it. So I’m going to meet some percentage of the very rich people in a quiet way and encourage them. It will be all their credit if they choose to do it, but I’ll say that (a) philanthropy is good, and (b) the hardest part of philanthropy, which is getting to poor countries because learning how to do that, knowing it’s effective, dealing with some of the challenges there, you know, showing them where that works and in a few cases maybe they will want to partner with us. I think upping that goes along with upping the corporate part, which is the creative capitalism, and goes along with upping the academic attention to the problems of the poorest.
Things like grand challenges are another kind of innovative thing here where we might dial a grand challenge in micronutrition and it might be some guy at Nestle in that food lab who sees that thing and says he can solve it and he needs a little bit of forbearance from his managers to take, you know, five or 10 people and write it up and come to us and say they’ll transfer that technology or something. It doesn’t take some big diversion of a profit.
Also, to the degree The Gates Foundation works, we are engaged in these things where companies like GlaxoSmithKline--even though we’re funding a lot of the work--they’re putting some of their top innovators on the malaria vaccine. You’ll never figure out the numbers, but there are some opportunity costs where those people could have worked on something else. Now if one or two of them were people who said they would have retired if they couldn’t work on this or figuring out how fungible that resource really would have been for them and what it would have done. It would be pretty hard to beat America on that, but they are really giving up opportunity costs to do these things. If we work it will be partly because people like GSK are going along with us or [India’s] ICICI Bank are going, or Nestle are going along. And that list, you know, a year from now will be a lot longer.
Warren: Over the years, by his letter, Bill will be talking to more rich philanthropists or potential philanthropists, you know, than anybody ever has in the world. I mean Carnegie is still talking 100 years later or whatever it may be since writing The Gospel of Wealth. Bill’s model can have a huge potential and it can have a huge potential with smart people who may think of variations on it. He’s in a unique position to talk to the world on it and the world wants to hear what he has to say. It’s a great opportunity.
Bill: Just to be clear what Warren’s referring to: I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to do something that in the world of philanthropy that is much like what Warren’s annual letter is in the world of business. And the target is that the first one of those will come out this January.
I do think talking with rich people globally, they will be interested. Not necessarily that they will do anything, but for me to say, 'Oh, wow, this went well, this went poorly. Damn these governments who can’t do this and that.'
Mike: You get the letter if you could give away money and you don’t actually have to be giving it away yet?
Bill: The letter will be on the Internet. We’ll promote it as, 'Hey, maybe you’d be interested in reading this thing.' And there will be a number of constituencies, but potential givers are a big part of it. Somebody who works at a UN agency I bet, you know, some of them will read it. Some people in poor world governments will read it. Some people in the drug industry, who knows.
Warren: They will all read it every time.
Bill: I’m going to get the jokes from Warren and so that is--
Melinda: The clean ones.
Bill: No Mae West.
Warren: It’s got huge potential, because you’re actually doing it. I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something. Everything goes through your mind and they love it. They want to know that. They get a chance to sit down with Bill Gates and talk about philanthropy or listen about it anyway. They can see what you’ve done and they can say all kinds of things. Really, look at Carnegie’s thing. I mean it isn’t that amazing what he wrote or anything like that, but it influences people a century later. I mean this has got 100 times the potential."
For policy folks, it's got to be kind of funny to read Bill say something naive like this:
"...now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company."
...and then read Warren say this...
"I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something."
I always love when people talk about serious thinking and writing like it isn't doing something. As if all those wise things just get thought up and written all on their lonesome. I'd be curious to see what kind of world we would have where people were always doin' stuff without studying it, seriously, or if people didn't write about the important stuff. Warren's got to be curious about what his world would look like without Ben Graham - the man whose work he credits all his wealth to - doing all that there them book learnin' and writin'. And we all need to reflect, seriously, about what the world would look like without the writing of people like John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Karl Popper, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Benjamin Graham, and the writers of the Bible. Not all of those folks are academics, of course. But they do go to the point. Thinking and writing are doing something. And, often, they are the most powerful things to be done, when we're not bullshitting ourselves.
But I also agree with Buffet's larger point. Most people are more convinced by what they see than what they read (even when they're wrong). It's a curious, reasonable, if often foolish tendency we have. But it also often one of the most powerful final words on many matters and makes enough sense to be true.
I do happen to seriously believe in what Gates is arguing. It is an important reason why I believe in the capacity of for-profit and non-profit markets to handle most areas of public service and commitment that are not ones government uniquely or ideally performs or performs well. And I think this is a better focus, generally, than either a strictly for-profit focus in the market or a focus on government responsibility for society's needs or a non-profit focus that is not focussed on results and accomplishment.
This is a nice opening play on this concept. The rest is up to us. Actually, no matter happens, the rest is up to us.
Politics is often so shrill and mindless, that I've often felt that many policy questions are a matter of just sitting down dispassionately with evidence, rather than the self-righteous fits that people are often so given to.
Single-payer health insurance as a route to a commitment to universal access to health care is one such issue, I believe.
It is encouraging that the architect of the Quebec single-payer system has arrived at the same conclusion.
"Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.
The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: 'the father of Quebec medicare.' Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.
Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in 'crisis.'
'We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,' says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: 'We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.'
Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.
In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It's as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.
What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.
Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.
Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.
The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.
De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care.
Since the spring of 2006, Ontario's government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as 'broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.' Other provinces have followed Ontario's example.
Canada isn't the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain's system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.
The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can't centrally plan their way to better health care.
A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards.
Declarations can't solve staffing shortages and the other rationing of care that occurs in government-run systems.
Polls show Americans are desperately unhappy with their system and a government solution grows in popularity. Neither Sen. Obama nor Sen. McCain is explicitly pushing for single-payer health care, as the Canadian system is known in America...
However the candidates choose to proceed, Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada's government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?"
I favor a commitment to universal access to health care, actually. I just think a single-payer system or any system driven by government is far from ideal and trades off with the advantages of a private market unnecessarily.
A voluntary, decentralized for-profit and non-profit commitment to universal access to health care is a better model. It offers more diversity, more choice, better care and better opportunities for care for everyone, it threatens the advantages of our private health care market not one iota (in fact, it very much supports those advantages since it alleviates pressure to curb the all-too-taken-for-granted advantages of our health care market, with all of its research and development, specialties, technology, pharmaceuticals and drug research, and all of the plethora of advantages of a robust health care market), it offers patients the ability to more readily navigate a robust and forever imperfect marketplace of ideas, relationships, options, etc., in a way that a socialist system could never match, and it could, as Castonguay suggests, be easily transitioned to from single-payer systems, by simply decentralizing control of existing hospitals, doctors' offices, drug manufacturers, and the like from the top-down model currently in place in Canada and giving them autonomy and responsibility for patient issues and results.
Public education, the field I work in currently, is the last bastion of socialism in the United States, and it should be plenty evidence of the failure of that route to anyone not dead-set on defending its every failure. Like health care, the freedom of choice and the freedom to develop institutions that care for peoples' most basic needs is critical to strong institutions and strong services.
What maintains socialists commitments is not their success. What maintains them is persistent defense of the part of their apologists, the fear that abandoning socialist projects equates with abandoning people and serious needs, much agnosticism and ambivalence on the part of a lot of citizens, and the lack of adequately argued and understood alternatives.
Decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets, the kinds that are advocated by school choice advocates in the United States, is the strongest general idea to address institutions where citizens have commitments to universal access to fundamental needs in modern societies, like education and health care.
Properly conceived, it is the only reasonable way to offer the highest quality care and services to the most number of people possible. And it is the only way to most adequately and constructively address inequities in those services, with a given understanding that such inequities will never fully be addressed, no matter what system is now or ever adopted. We can reduce the inequities, we cannot eliminate them, ever. And decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets offer us the best opportunity to do that in a way that single-payer and socialized care and services could never, in their wildest dreams, accomplish.
Here's to one more important voice to contribute to that chorus.
What Robert Mugabe is consistently able to use as propaganda to rally people of Zimbabwe to his utterly ugly, failed, and ridiculously dysfunctional leadership is Zimbabwe's past colonial relationship to Great Britain, and, by extension, the West, and the manipulation of internal Zimbabwean affairs by foreign forces.
We've already poisoned the well with imperial activity. Manipulating them further only strengthens Mugabe's hand. The abuse of power does have consequences, whether we want to face those consequences or not. And, in this case, our abuses of power have kept a murderous, repressive thug in power.
Morgan Tsvangirai's suggestion for United Nations peacekeepers to guarantee a free and fair election is the best proposal I have heard thusfar.
He is now disavowing it, I think likely in response to pressure from Mugabe and his government mouthpiece, the Herald, referring to Tsvangirai's talk of United Nations troops as calling "for military intervention in Zimbabwe disguised as peacekeepers," which prompted Mugabe to rally Zimbabweans to "vote for the ruling party to show the world their resolve to defend the country's sovereignty and independence." And that is the heart of the problem.
I agree with Tsvangirai that United Nations peacekeepers guaranteeing a free and fair election is the most ideal way out of this mess. The people of Zimbabwe need to remove this despot, if despotism is not to become a habit in Zimbabwe and if liberal and democratic principles are to take root. The troops should be made up by as many African nations as possible, and some from Zimbabwe, if some independent Zimbabweans might be able to volunteer for such a force (Zimbabwean government forces should either be excluded or only included if it is absolutely clear that they can act independently, a likelihood I doubt), and as few European and American forces, as possible. We need a competent and credible professional troop presence. If African nations can do the trick, that would be ideal. But if they cannot, as many non-European and non-American troops as possible would be best to ward off fears of foreign invasion or occupation by Zimbabwe's most recent imperial masters or those they associate with them.
We want these elections to be free and fair. We also want Mugabe booted, is the truth. But we neither want to determine that outcome for the Zimbabwean people, nor do we want them to keep him in power as a bulwark against British and Western imperialism. Zimbabweans should bring Mugabe to justice, ideally, which can best happen with a self-determined democratic election that ousts him from power and brings him to justice for his horrific crimes against Zimbabwe and humanity.
We will find this in most places around the world, today. It is our abuses of power that undermine our ability to use our power wisely. This is a valuable situation to learn that lesson. Because learning it will make all the difference in the success or not of our efforts.
I don't care what the folks who convinced Heinz to pull this ad, say. I think it rocks. It's so completely gay. And I mean that in the most awesome way possible.
The day that this ad gets played and most people think, "That's pretty goddamn sweet," and not "Those guys threaten my marriage" is a day for us to be proud of ourselves.
David Brooks' essay in the New York Times, today, is the best I've seen about the Bush Administration, the war, and politics, generally, in a long time.
"The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.
The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.
The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.
But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.
Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."
Best line I've read in a long time. And the heart of what is most true about liberal and American democracy today or ever.
More true than even Lord Acton or George Orwell.
And probably the most important lesson we can take for this whole godforesaken political period. And maybe from any period.
Glad someone else said it and not me. Thanks David.
Given the dissing of Reagan's greatest legacy - his diplomacy with the Soviet Union and his persuading Mikhail Gorbachev of the failures of Communism - I thought this was an appropriate time for this.
This isn't about Barack Obama, a man I've less likely to vote for, today, than I first encountered him. This is about smart policy.
If you need any more evidence of the depth of ignorance and denial that government officials often have about their efforts, this article is quite the exhibit.
It's passages like this one that make me wonder if government officials are capable of rational thought, at all, sometimes:
"Western nations have told Iran that they could cut off any new help to Iran's anti-drug units unless the Islamic regime halts uranium enrichment, which Washington and its allies worry could be used to develop nuclear arms.
The warning was a small but potentially significant item tucked amid an array of trade and economic incentives seeking to sway Iranian leaders to strike a deal. Iran has not formally responded to the package, presented June 14 by the five permanent United Nations Security Council members plus Germany.
But Iran has repeatedly said it will not back off uranium enrichment — pushing the European Union to consider wider sanctions and placing the little-known drug trafficking fight in jeopardy.
It's the type of pressure that strikes the United Nations as counter-productive.
A 'heroin tsunami' could hit Europe if the drug interdiction by Iran is weakened, warned Antonio Maria Costa, the director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
'We should definitely assist Iran in this respect,' he said.
Roberto Arbitrio, head of the U.N. drugs and crime office in Iran, said the war on drugs should be viewed as 'a non-political area of mutual interest.'"
And it's not just that anyone familiar with drug culture, at all, knows just how fruitless and easily circumvented this drug war is. And anyone who watches the news and pays attention to the broader culture, for any substantial period of time, should be aware of that fact, at this point.
All of this is done to sanction Iran's development of nuclear weapons, an effort which has failed for 5 years straight right in front of the eyes of the entire world and which there is, in fact, very serious issues to be discussed and debated, namely how Iranians will provide for self-defense against many enemies that they have much reason to believe might attack them, namely Israel and the United States.
This is how repressive forces perpetually rationalize themselves. They identify an enemy more dangerous, often, but not always, more dangerous as a consequence of repressive policies - and the drug war is most certainly one of those situations; the violence associated with drugs is undoubtedly, to my mind, driven substantially by its illegality, as with alcohol prohibition, the other most murderous and violent period in 20th century American history (1933, the height of alcohol prohibition, and the late 1980's and early 1990's, with the advent of new drug laws and the height of the drug war, are the two highest points of homocide in American history) and they rationalize repression as a function of danger that, often, they have created or exaccerbated. The repressive regimes of the Middle East and Arab states rationalize in such ways, regimes like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; as do many regimes in Africa, like Zimbabwe, Sudan, Algeria, Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo; those in Southeast Asia, like North Korea, Myanmar, China, Pakistan, and Thailand; nations of Central and South America, including Cuba, Columbia, Bolivia, and Venezuela; and still too often in the liberal democracies and illiberal governments of the West, especially Russia, Serbia, and Turkey, but really all of the liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic governments of the world, including the United States, Israel, Great Britain, France, Germany, Mexico, and most of the liberal and illiberal governments of the world. This, despite the fact that their repression often worsens the problems that repression was rationalized for, in the first place, instead of improving them.
The greatest irony in this example being that the Taliban were, likely, the most cyncial purveyors of this lie, both claiming to have wiped out drug production under their reign through a ban on drug cultivation and brutal reign, a ban that has subsequently and dramatically failed with a vengeance, and who profited then and now from such production and the boon to profits that drug prohibition has always proved to be.
This is how it has been since the beginning of humanity and civilization, and it was this propensity that necessitated the efforts of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstencraft, Alexis DeToqueville, John Stuart Mill, and their intellectual brethren, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lord Acton, George Orwell, and the like, to criticize, reform, and/or rebel and revolt against this kind of repression, and promote freedoms and liberal democratic values and institutions that most citizens of liberal democracies take for granted, today, and which provide hope to many citizens of illiberal and undemocratic nations, even as they, too, often fear that the problems of humanity are caused by too much freedom rather than too much repression, despite the ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
Fear has always been the great deterrent and obstacle to freedom. It is what drives terrorists of all stripes. It is what motivates dictators and despots of all sorts. It is what leads democratic leaders, since the advent of liberty and democracy, to rationalize almost all of their most sordid, ugly, and illiberal legacies.
It is fear and not reason that drives this unholy drug war, just as it has been fear and not reason that had driven the entirety of our illiberal and undemocratic past.
And the idea that fear and not reason will triumph today where it has failed for the entire course of humanity to resolve our most serious concerns, problems, and conflicts is the most damned foolish notion that humanity has ever conceived.
And the idea that we would celebrate that damned foolish notion at the beginning of the 21st century, after a century that witnessed the clearest and most undeniable vindication for the causes of freedom and democracy of any century to date, is the senseless, absurd, stubborn, and dimwitted death throes of that timid, fearful, and otherwise cowardly and irrational concept.
It is not strength and never has been. It is and always has been cowardice. It is yellow-bellied. And it is no way to lead a life or anyone else, for that matter. Cowardice demands respect when it cannot earn it. It compels when it cannot persuade. It bullies and intimidates when it cannot summon real strength or virtue.
Real courage respects reason and freedom and does not turn to force except when violence warrants it.
Real courage only uses force when violence and aggression are used against the free and reasoned will of those involved, including when reason and free will leads people to poor conclusions or outcomes, unless it is literally and clearly not possible for a person to reason adequately of their own accord, and it is clear that no other route is possible or viable. And when aggression or containment are needed, because no other routes that respect liberty are possible, courage, reason, and humanity call for the least possible necessary aggression or containment to be used. And no matter how I or you qualify it, those who seek to rationalize repression and violence will always do so, as long as it confirms their own stubborn and righteous notions of controlling and harming their neighbors for their own good. They can be persuaded different. But, ultimately, as always, each individual and independent conscience will decide this question, in the end.
Real courage is not premised on fear. Real courage is premised on strength and confidence, compassion and humanity, and a thoughtful and freely chosen commitment to virtue and decency. Everything else is counterfeit. Always has been. And hence the march of freedom and progress over the course of history.
Real courage and respect is not premised on fear. Fear is the opposite of respect and courage. Honest respect does not require fear. And genuine courage operates despite fear, not because of it.
What 21st century liberal democracies and illiberal and undemocratic cultures need, what all of humanity needs at the turn of this century, is a commitment to real courage and independence of thought and judgment, which respects freedom and democratic values and the free and independent conscience and virtue that underpin them. Real courage does not manipulate or otherwise show contempt and disrespect for those values and the consciences of others. It shows genuine compassion and respect for the lives, consciences, and freedoms of others.
Manipulation is the tool of the weak. It is not the regular instrument of governance or self-governance of the strong. Strong people engage others with respect, love, concern, decency, thought, engagement, and dignity, as a rule. Those of honest strength do not need to manipulate others, except in the rarest of occassions, and even then it should be presumed against, as much as possible.
That exception will always be used by the forces of violence and repression to rationalize their foolish and ugly activities. Always.
And it will be effective only until free and democratic peoples wisen up and take freedom, democracy, and respect for the conscience that underpins them, seriously.
Real courage does not prey upon the ignorance and fear of others. Real courage enlightens and honestly faces challenges with a genuine concern for others and for an honest assessment of the life as it is, not (only) as we might wish it to be.
And is that kind of courage that I respect and have always respected in the world.
And this policy, like so much policy today, is not a function of that kind of courage. It is a function of power and the obsession with having and keeping it, and the depth of ignorance and denial that operate at its behest. It is Lord Acton wondering aloud why he said anything on the subject of politics at all. It is John Stuart Mill wondering if he should have remained with the British East India Company. It is George Orwell wondering why he did not go into investment or write pulp novels for big profit.
It is the utter failure of those in power to come to terms with the limits of their enterprise. And the foolish ventures that they will engage in to reinforce that failure of recognition.
Real courage explores and faces honestly facts of life that are counterintuitive and challenge us to reason beyond our biases of confirmation and immediate experience.
Real courage does not settle for ignorance or denial or stubborn defenses against even more stubborn facts.
Real courage faces life honestly.
And this policy squarely does not.
And that gap is the dilemma to be resolved for the cause of genuine freedom, democracy, and progress in the 21st century.
He won't do any or much time, likely, is the truth (though any time would be an abomination).
But does anyone think that such penalties would actually deter cheating and swapping grades in the future?
Good luck with that, I'd say.
Finally, we can stop worrying about such shenanigans from the always deterable next generation. God knows such hoodlums have wreaked enough havok as it is.
I tell you. When you observe the brilliance and effectiveness of force as a governing philosophy in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, I don't know how you can really question it, frankly. You gotta see the pictures of this remarkably effective form of governance.
"In her pink-and-yellow Indian sari, Neeti Patel sees the customers come into her shop, look longingly at the sandwiches, and walk back out empty handed.
It's not that her prices are high – a sausage sandwich sells for a mere 30 million Zimbabwe dollars, or about $1.25. The problem is that Zimbabwe's skyrocketing inflation – now the world's highest, running at more than 100,000 percent a year – keeps her costs rising. A 30-pound bag of potatos cost 90 million in the first week of March. Now that same bag costs 160 million, and her potential customers simply don't have the money."
And this account, really, should be fairly convincing, I think.
"Last weekend we had a big pungwe - a political indoctrination meeting - on the farm. It was after Mugabe had come to our little town of Chegutu, southwest of Harare, and addressed the crowd with threats of 'war'. A pungwe starts when the shadows lengthen and the sun goes down and darkness falls over the land. It does not stop till after the sun has risen again.
All our workers had to go, as well as all their wives with babies and any children over the age of 12. Some of them didn't go; so the mob sent little bands of chanting youth militia with sticks to fetch the absentees, drag them out of their houses and beat them for non-attendance. Through the night we heard the chanting and the slogans and the re-education speeches ringing out into the cold darkness for hour after hour after hour. On and on it went, striking fear into my heart. I got up and paced around in the cold night, listening...
It was a frosty morning. 'The major [Major Tauye, brought in from the Army to run pungwes in Chegutu district] was waving his gun around everywhere,' he went on.
I learnt that the MDC polling agents were made to put their forehead on the ground and lift their whole bodies up on their toes and then hold the position as they shook in the cold. After some time they were given sticks and had to beat each other.
The Major then said: 'You say we beat you! We don't beat you! You are the ones that beat!'
'Will the people vote?' I asked.
'We are in pain but we cannot speak because we do not know who will tell. Even if we make a report the police will not help,' Amon said.
I had seen the hope for a better future draining out of him. He had been kicked off one farm already and I sensed he was worried we would throw in the towel too.
'I will not leave,' I said. 'They must shoot me if they want me off...'
We drove through the gate and down the drive. Straight ahead there was a line of large rocks blocking the road. As we got closer, men wielding sticks got up and started coming menacingly towards us. Our presence had the effect of a stone thrown into a hornets' nest. Soon the rocks started to fly in our direction. I saw figures running through the bush to try to get around behind us and cut us off. 'OK, let's get out of here,' I said and reversed as fast as I could.
Between the Etheridges and ourselves we have spent nearly 30 hours at the police station this week making reports and failing to get a reaction.
Yesterday we finally saw our first observers. We met them at the police station. Having the observers there worked like magic: police reacted and even moved quickly after we reported that all the Etheridges belongings - the ones that had not yet been stolen - had been dumped on the side of the main road.
When the observers left to come to my house, James's wife Kerry and his brother were ambushed and started getting beaten with sticks. The police stood by because they had not brought bullets for their guns and the senator's men were armed. They had to run for it and managed to get away.
While I was on the way back to my family with the observers, our workers were rounded up by youths with sticks going to the pungwe. They started demanding that Laura come out of the house and they beat one of our dogs with a stick at the gate. Then before I got there they headed off again, running across the veldt like a pack of wild dogs seeking their next prey.
The observers didn't know about pungwes; and they have been advised not to go out after dark, so I suppose they will never see them. Almost all Mugabe's campaigning goes on after dark. The pungwes have spread like a great cancer even to town.
Owen, one of our workers in Chegutu, said he has had to go to all-night pungwes for the past three nights.
'Will you be an MDC polling agent again?' I said to Lorence, another worker, this morning.
'Ah no.' he said. 'We are too afraid for that. We need to get out of here before the pungwe tonight because they are going to beat us.' I got them into town and gave them fifteen billion dollars each for their bus fares to a 'safe' house 80km away.
As I went around town I talked to people. It was tense. They were full of fear and terrible stories about atrocities taking place; but we were together. I could sense a strong undercurrent of solidarity in the common load of suffering that we are all bearing."
Humanity has been seriously resistant to giving up force as a governing philosophy and embracing more genuine freedom and democratic engagement for much of its existence.
And the situation in Zimbabwe should illustrate why. Because force is so effective as a governing philosophy, clearly.
Either that or our fears plunge us down destructive pathes, perhaps.
All I know is that Zimbabwe makes the case better than most around the world, today.
Robert Mugabe is either a genius or a madman. Perhaps we are all mad. Or just damned foolish. Or just so effective that the results are just too difficult to recognize (or make themselves known).
Robert Mugabe takes force as a governing philosophy seriously. Maybe we should too. And be done with this handwringing and pussyfooting.
This is the direction that philosophy takes us in.
Thank goodness that there is at least one regime in the world tough enough to take it seriously.
Just a reminder of what we are up against and what repression and regression, the opposite of progress, looks like.
Every time Americans, Westerners, liberal democrats and anyone celebrates force as a governing philosophy, this is what that philosophy looks like in reality.
Much of the world takes seriously force as a governing philosophy. Most of the history of humanity has done so.
And this is what that legacy looks like when we are not sugarcoating and rationalizing it.
Be careful what you wish for.
There are people who would like to make sure that you get it.
In fact, it is the entire purpose of terrorism.
And if the terrorists don't do it to us, perhaps we will do it to ourselves.
"The murderous violence being driven by President Robert Mugabe’s militias reached new levels today with the killing and mutilation of four young men, the largest number of fatalities in a single incident in the last 10 weeks of Zimbabwe’s election campaign.
Three of the men were Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) youth activists, defending the home of a local official from attack by Zanu (PF) youths in the sprawling dormitory township of Chitungwiza about 30 km south of Harare.
The third was a passerby, abducted because he did not know the Zanu (PF) youths’ secret slogans and salutes used to identify supporters. All of the victims had their skulls smashed, said relatives who had seen the corpses in separate mortuaries. Some had their lips and genitals cut off...
Earlier, Tendai Biti, the the MDC deputy opposition leader, was charged with subversion and election rigging – offences that could carry the death penalty on conviction.
The bodies of Archford Chipiyo, 28, the son of Philemon Chipiyo, district chairman of the MDC in Chitungwiza, Yona Genti and the unidentified young man were found in tall grass at the side of the main southward highway out of Harare at around midday. The body of the fourth, Nyoni Light, was dumped near a shopping centre on the outskirts of Chitungwiza.
The township, with a population of more than a million, has been the scene of numerous petrol bombings, abductions and assaults in the last week as marauding Zanu (PF) mobs dragged mostly young people out of their homes and forced them to join them, marching through the night...
Philemon Chipiyo, 59, a respected alderman for the Chitungwiza town council for the last 25 years, said that a mob of about 200 Zanu (PF) youths attacked his home at midnight on Tuesday, but were repulsed by his guards...
He sent one of his sons, Alban, to Harare central hospital morgue to identify the three bodies found next to the highway. 'Alban said Archford’s lips were gone and his eyes were pulled out,' he said. All three had crushed skulls.
Austin Chipiyo, another son, went to Chitungwiza hospital to identify the body of Ngoni Light. 'His head was also broken,' he said. 'His genitals had been taken off. They were in his trousers. I saw it myself.'"
Congratulations to all of those embracing this governing philosophy. Robert Mugabe would be proud.
And there is no better example of the bankruptcy of this governing philosophy than the repressive dictatorship in Zimbabwe.
