Category: Politics

More Controversial Beliefs: I am a Libertarian Socialist

If you’re going to categorize my politics, this is the stuff I believe society should be organized around.

I am a libertarian socialist. I believe that societies should be organized at as close to ground level as they can possibly be. Centralized power is anathema to human happiness.

In fact, Capitalism never considers the need for people to be whole, healthy, and happy a priority at all. One only has to look at the current state of the world to see that this is so.

Capitalism is a good servant but a poor master. Commerce and trade offer crucial support to a community, but they must be held in check, and carefully managed with the larger context of sustainability and human happiness in mind.

Large corporations should not be allowed, and capitalists should not be allowed to earn more than 50 times the basic income rate, which should be defined in relation to how much it takes to meet basic necessities such as enough good, nutritious food, adequate housing, all other basic expenses met, and enough extra money to save against emergencies and for education and amusement.

Billionaires in general should not exist. I agree with the idea that if you somehow manage to amass a billion dollars, everything over 900 million of those dollars should be taxed at a marginal rate of 100%.

Centralized power should be avoided at all costs. Large concerns should be organized by cooperating communities and/or worker’s coöps. Large concentrations of power cause suffering in the best circumstances. Power should be balanced and distributed into as many different hands as possible. People caught abusing their power should have it taken away.

Administrative tasks should be handled on the most local and small level possible, and larger projects should be organized across boundaries between communities if necessary. Once projects of a larger size are completed, the authorities that created them should be either disbanded or minimized in size to conduct reasonable maintenance of any particular ongoing project. Such authorities should be under the aegis of all impacted communities.

Communities themselves should be organized along two axes: geography and affinity. Society should be as free as it can be made to be, but people should be able to organize based on what they need, like, and want as well as where they exist on the map. Communities should have different sizes and shapes and should have porous borders in some ways and firm ones in others. The power of the collective will always outstrip the power of any individual. By the same token, the power of the collective should only be exercised out of necessity.

There is more to say on these topics, and at some point, I may come back to this.

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Zeitgeist 3/5/25

Annie Haslam puts me in mind of Jacqui McShee

I’m listening to Renaissance’s Ashes are Burning from 1973. I read it as harkening back to Vanguard Records kinda stuff. Honestly, if you like Pentangle, you’re going to love this. Jon Camp is one of those Rick with a pick™ guys and is melodic in that Chris Squire/Paul McCartney way. Annie Haslam definitely puts me in mind of Jacqui McShee, but making mathy, orchestral music.

Really nice. I’m midway through side two of this thing, so I feel like I can say that this is a truly great pop/prog album.

I’m thinking about this theory Krystal Ball put forward that suggests that Trump may actually be trying to cause a recession. I think maybe so. Maybe that’s what’s happening.

Our options are these: he’s doing it intentionally OR he’s just that stupid. I don’t know which to believe. Much will be decided over the coming weeks. I’m praying that the upshot is that Trump is just a stupid muhfuggah, and that Elon Musk makes Pumpkin Spice Palpatine look like a friggin genius. (A big friggin OMG DUDE to whoever came up with the name “PayPalpatine” for Elon, btw.)

That’s my favorite conspiracy theory.

My LEAST favorite theory is that Trump is a Russian asset. I don’t believe it for a minute. Second worst possibility is that Trump and Putin see each other as equals, and Putin’s rule is the closest analogue to what Trump wants.

He might get it. <shrug>

Zeitgeist 2/2/25

How I’m thinking right now.

The Toxic Dweeb and the Orange Guy

As capitalist democracies so often do, the land of my birth has embraced the bundle of sticks. I sometimes wonder if it’s possible for a capitalist democracy not to.

Maybe the person we elected President is a wholly owned subsidiary of a South African trillionaire not-see. Maybe not, but remember, he’s just as bad on his own.

I’m 65. Medicare age and trans. Mosk has his Nazi-saluting hands on the payment apparatus of the US Treasury now. The Treasury Secretary resigned in protest.

Mosk has a transgender daughter. Her name is Vivian Jenna Wilson. He signed off on her transition when she was 16. He says he was “tricked.” Ah, the old “tricked by a tran” trope. How pathetic.

He lies about everything. As Trompe does, and as you all know. This is a time of shock and awe. Uncounted loud outrages done in the light so you miss the worse ones done quietly in the shadows.

Remember, the best Christofascist “minds” designed this project, and Mosk/Tromp are executing it as planned. This looks to be a complete top-to-bottom, right-wing takeover of the you-knighted Staits.

Keep your eyes open, and your hearts, too. There are dangers ahead. Fighting Fascists is never easy, but it must always be done. This is the crucial time, a fulcrum in the flow of history. Our time.

AOC posted this on bluesky: “One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.” I feel the same way. Our fathers and grandfathers fought the Fascists. Our time now.

I Have Thoughts About the Rowling Implosion

I won’t spend a lot of time recounting the public record about JK Rowling’s recent forays into gender identity politics, there’s a pretty good and reasonably unslanted account of the major and more recent events in the controversy here. This controversy is one of the most written-about dustups between an author and their fans ever; one of the most focused-on stories of any sort this year short of the Corona pandemic and the US Presidential election. I don’t know that there’s a lot left to say on the subject. Still, I’ve been asked for my opinion about this several times, and it’s taken me until now to feel like responding.

That’s because my feelings on the subject are complex and I balk at the idea of being any sort of spokesperson for trans folk, or anyone but myself. I am a contrarian by nature, so I’ve had to sit with this for a while, deal with my trepidation about what Harry Potter’s real mom might be saying about me, a trans woman who has always felt a strong affinity for Our Young Wizard and his gaggle of friends. I’ve finally taken the time carefully sort out the ways in which I might agree or not with consensus opinion.

Some of you may remember this piece by me, which I have referred to a few times, about distinguishing between an artist and their work. This should establish that I make a fairly clear distinction between whatever public statements Rowling’s made and the world she created, which I’ve spent so many pleasant hours in, and which I will yet almost certainly devote some hours to in the coming years. I won’t comment further on Harry Potter in this context. I feel it’s a separate issue from what Rowling has said about trans folk in the last few months (and the opinions which we trans folk were fairly certain she held for some time before she Came Right Out and Said Stuff.) I will not be pretending, as I see that many have, that her work was never good, or that I knew she was a transphobe all along. Neither of those statements would be true.

But to get to the point, Rowling’s basic premise in posts on Twitter and on her blog – that trans women make her feel unsafe, and that young trans people may be making a mistake – are both well-known canards. She’s a good writer, so she makes those arguments in fine, writerly form, but she doesn’t vary from standard, long-since-debunked tropes, no matter how well she writes them. She references sources but doesn’t cite them, nor does she offer any counter to her own assertions so that we can judge them for ourselves. Her best defense is that she “has transwomen friends” who agree with her. The more one looks into what she’s saying, the more you just see a lot of carefully-worded jingoism framed as concern.

There’s no evidence she can cite, or that any of those who have made these charges previeously can cite, that show that men pretend to be women to invade public restrooms and commit rape. It simply doesn’t happen.

And really, why would these supposed cross-dressing rapists bother? If a public restroom is going to be the venue for a sexual assault, there’s no need to jump through all of the hoops a transgender woman has to jump through just to commit it. Just break down the door and go be a monster. I would think that female dress would be the opposite of an enhancement of this experience for the sort who is willing to consider the crime to begin with. Rape is a crime of power, and to that end an assertion of the most toxic masculinity. The two notions of dressing as a woman and committing rape are extremely dissonant. My assertion here is supported by the evidence: again, there are virtually no incidents of sexual assault committed in this manner.

In fact, it is far more common for trans folk to be subjected to violent assault simply for being who they are. I could, if I were so inclined, post links to videos of trans women being subjected to assault for attempting to use the public restroom that aligns with their gender. I am not so inclined, sorry to disappoint.

As for youth being “seduced” into transitioning “before they’re certain,” examples of this are extremely rare, and once again far outstripped by tragic counterexample. The suicide statistics among trans folk are often quoted and don’t need to be restated here. (Here’s a link to The Trevor Project’s factsheet about trans suicide prevention so that you will at least go to The Trevor Project’s site. Consider supporting them, please.

Childhood development experts place the age at which children generally develop an understanding of themselves as gendered beings at between 2 and 5 years of age. A teenager knows who they are gender-wise. Incidents of post-transition regret and detransitioning are extremely low. The idea that people only know what gender they are at some arbitrarily created age of consent is ridiculous in the face of the best evidence we have.

So don’t be fooled by Rowling’s seemingly reasonable tone and claims of concern for the safety of cis women and vulnerable teens. They are, upon examination, unconvincing covers for shockingly standard anti-trans tropes, none of which are worthy of the person who created one of the most embracingly humanist pop culture worlds of the last half-century.

Transphobia is deadly to trans folk. The evidence shows that trans folk are NOT a danger to anyone else.

And that’s what I think about that.

[ND] [ED]

Kamala Part II

This week, Kamala Harris will accept the nomination as Vice Presidential running mate for Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.

I was unsurprised to learn that Kamala Harris had been picked as Joe Biden’s running mate. She’s exactly the right kind of corporatist puppet to pair him with.

I can find no moral center in her history or in the behavior I’ve observed from her, other than that of establishment hack and hardline enforcer of the status quo. She will say whatever it takes to gain personal advantage, reverse any policy position, change any alliance as long as her bread continues to be buttered. Back in early 2019, she signed on as a cosponsor of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill.

In the very first Democratic debate, she raised her hand when the debate participants were asked if they would give up their private insurance and replace it with Mecicare for All (a provision of the bill she sponsored.) By the next morning, she was already walking back her support for M4A, claiming she had raised her hand because she had misheard the question, and that she only supported Medicare for All if it was supplemented by private insurance.

This is Kamala Harris. This is what she does — stand for nothing, shape change to fit her sense of the prevailing winds, cowtow to the monied powers. As of this moment, it’s working for her. While the country is in the throes of buckling to the will of a creeping autocrat, the Democrats, as represented by Kamala Harris and her running mate Joe Biden, are shifting to the right, and more than this, they are working as hard as they can to disenfranchise the left wing of their own supposedly-left-wing party, standing on policy that would have been considered mainstream Republicanism not so long ago.

At this point, it seems likely that she will be the next Vice President of the US. I can’t tell you that I’m thrilled at the prospect. People will respond to this by saying “yeah, but, she’s better than her opponent.” That’s probably true, but I can’t say that I am moved by that recommendation. The Biden/Harris ticket may slow the roll of creeping fascism, but they will not stop it entirely. In my view, they are instruments of the continued advancement of corporate globalism and no antitdote to authoritarianism.

Kamala Harris will not save you.

[ND]