Oppression

an email i wrote to a friend, and some notes on my ideas.

since i've started a family, i'm all the more convinced that the nuclear family is a unit of discipline. yet my attempts to get away from it resulted in greater misery. i've been turning over this book idea in my mind, "how to be a man in the 21st century", and the idea is that a morally rigorous life is more compelling than a sloppy one. but i don't want to write a book about morals. i want to write a book about how the "post" feminist world is in some ways oppressing and screwing women even more than they were before, and that men have to evolve to create a better world. and some alchemy of buddhist thought and moral rigor, along with the emotional growth of embracing adulthood and accepting the devilishness of the world, are kind of the key ingredients to making the world better (starting at home). i know you must have been thinking similar thoughts. it feels like the world is ready for this book, the world needs this book. should we write it? it needs to be like Justice, by michael j sandal, in that it takes difficult concepts and rigorously but pleasantly presents them to a lay audience.

i'm sending you this email because this thread goes through my head all the time and the project of turning it into an outline for the book is going to be long. i also know that you must have been thinking about some of the same problems, if not in the same way. i'm curious what you think. the rule of the game is that if you want to talk about it, you don't have to write out anything long or particularly well thought out, the goal instead is to just get a dialog going that is longer than 140 characters but short enough that it can be tapped out quickly in the brief 5 minutes of solitude you may get in your day. i'll probably use a blog to capture my mind barfs to somewhere more permanent than email.

Notes on my book, How to be a Man in the 21st century West.

• Women have all the responsibility of men, plus they are responsible for child-raising. It's become more acceptable for successful, educated women to opt to be house wives for extended periods, but it is still bullshit. Our world and economy has made it harder than ever for families to succeed, especially families where a reasonable standard of living is sought after. 
• The family is a productive unit, a node of bio-power to coerce disciplined, productive work units out of the bourgeoise. The bourgeoise is convinced that they enjoy freedom because they are not in jail, despite the fact that their lives are structured in the exact same way as a jail. Jail exists to convince the working people that they are not in one.  
• Actually raising a family requires more labor than 2 people can provide. Certainly non-North American and probably non-Western families are closer-knit geographically and emotionally and raise children together. Ok ok I'm not saying we all need to live in primitive villages, but the point is that the nuclear family is a post-war invention designed to isolate and discipline and it doesn't work.
• I'm tired of conservatives owning the narrative of family and child-raising, which can be summarized as fear and loathing. 
• I'm equally tired of the liberal bourgeoise narrative of fear and achievement, as it really is just a nicer version of the conservative narrative of fear and punishment. 
• Men are increasingly immersed in a mindless world of juvenilia as the balance of desirable men and women grows increasingly out of whack. 
• Taking on lives of moral conduct is viewed as succumbing to "oppression", while those who do embrace some moral life often do so with the express intent of oppressing others
• The narrative of hyper-sexualized hedonism compels people to search for ever-higher levels of chemical stimulation, whether from orgasm or pharmaceutical drugs to squash the pain of disappointment and loss.
• Moral conduct itself is viewed as old fashioned, the narrative of self-directed lives free from contraints is a fantasy peddled by the baby boomers, and we see how that is working out for them. People need boundaries and constraints and communities to function properly. They also need rituals and release. We've dismantled all these things (or they've hyper-ossified).

Letter to the Editor time again: David Brooks and the Conservative fantasy land

David Brooks' latest column represent the kind of facile thinking that is fueling voter fantasies about the "growth of government", and seems to suggest that state and federal employees are a new kind of "welfare queen". There are many logical fallacies with his argument. The most obvious is the idea that Democrats just want to "spend, spend, spend," while Republicans want to reduce spending. The last time the GOP was in the majority, they oversaw the largest expansion of Medicare since its inception with the Part D benefit, and they started a $3 trillion (according to Columbia University economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) war of choice, while cutting taxes and demanding no sacrifice for anyone who wasn't in the military. Meanwhile the last time this country didn't run a deficit, it was under President Clinton, a Democrat.

The real point of contention I have with Brooks' argument is the idea that the path to regaining control over budgets is to cut benefits and pay to employees. The idea that the massive transfer of taxpayer monies to private corporations in the form of agricultural subsidies, oil-company subsidies, and the Part D benefit, never seems to cross Mr. Brooks' mind. This suggests that he believes it is OK for private corporations to receive unlimited taxpayer largesse, but heaven forbid should an everyday middle class wage-earner derive a paycheck by working for it.

As Mr. Brooks alludes to, much of government spending in post-war America went towards things that created the greatest growth in opportunity our country has ever seen, from the GI Bill to the space program. The real problem in the decline of innovative programs is not greedy unions, but a lack of political will and leadership to innovate as one people and one country. Conservatives have used fear and greed to divide our country as never before, pouring gasoline on the fires of time-wasting and irrelevant issues to our nation. In addition they have pushed for deregulation and the promulgation of a value-draining economy based on speculative real estate deals and unregulated derivatives trading.

This translates to lack of cohesive national vision and the decline of government-induced innovation. It is an ideologically-driven assertion with no basis in fact to blame the decline of useful government programs on pensions. It is part of the conservative agenda to siphon ever more taxpayer money into Wall Street, and he alludes to one of the favorite hobby horses of conservatives: privatize the pension plans. Anyone who has had a 401(k) plan and an interest in retiring while still capable of self-ambulating can tell you about the effectiveness of this approach.

In addition, the largest political campaign contributions are coming from shadow organizations funded by the Koch brothers and other dubious private interests, and it is simply not true that unions spend more than any other entity.

I also wanted to point out that the growth of the prison-industrial complex is the direct result of the conservative obsession with punishment and incarceration as opposed to education and rehabilitation. If Mr. Brooks is so concerned about prison pension plans, he might consider the root cause of the growth of prisons is that they are a job creation program in rural areas in California, and that conservative voters enjoy the idea of punishing criminals far more than the idea of educating people before they become criminals in the first place. To his credit, he does point out that California pays more for prisons than for schools, but he seems to fail to connect the dots that conservatives like prisons while normal Americans would probably prefer to pay for schools.

Republicans: Black = White

Pro-life, Pro-Death Penalty
Pro-life, anti-neo-natal care
Pro-life, anti-healthcare
Pro-life, anti-immigrant
Pro-life, pro-war
Pro-Freedom, Pro Jails
Pro tax cuts, Pro Jails
Pro-Jesus, Pro hate fear loathing stealing lying killing
Pro-tax-cuts, Pro agricultural subsidies for GOP-voting districts
Anti-welfare, Pro-corporate tax subsidies for Big Oil ($100 million for Exxon)
Pro-tax-cuts, Pro $2 trillion dollar optional wars
Pro-free-market, Pro government bailouts
Pro-free-market, pro protectionist tariffs
Pro ideology, anti-results
Decrease taxes, increase spending
The number one goal of any Republican is to siphon as many tax dollars as they can get their hands on into the pockets of themselves and their friends. Their brilliant discursive strategy is to play into the racist and economic fears of the ignorant and uneducated, to govern strictly by ideaology rather than pragmatic need. They've taken a completely incoherant agenda full of paradoxes and logical contradictions and created a simple, easy to digest platform of racist, religious jingoism. In short, they are today's Nazi party without the concentration camps. Any Republican is as good as a "good" German was in 1942. By being Republican, you are consciously and deliberately seeking the destruction of your own country, and you are committed to the prolongment of suffering to the disenfranchised people of the world. In short, you are evil.

Letter to Senator Cantwell about health care

Listen to the pod cast of the show - an amazing conversation with small business owners in the PNW

Dear Senator Cantwell,

I heard you the other day on KUOW discussing health care reform with Steve Sher. I don't believe your argument that co-ops are the only option. The world is very diferent now from when the prescription drug option was passed.

As I'm sure you know, the American public is overwhelmingly in support of a public option for health care, far more so than Congress seems willing to support with real legislation. Your admission that small businesses simply lack clout was appreciated for its honesty, but was also completely unacceptable. I absolutely need you as my representative to push forward a bolder vision as espoused by your colleague representative McDermott advocated on the program before you.

As I'm sure you also know, without the heavy hand of a large public plan such as the one enjoyed by Congressional representatives such as yourself, cost controls will never be implemented. Without cost control, our problem will never go away.

I know it may appear like an uphill battle from within the beltway (where I was born and raised), but the rest of the country, at least me and all the other small business employees I know, are not going to accept a middle way compromise that does not radically change the costs of health care itself. The problem is not that people don't have insurance; the problem is that health care is so expensive and provides so little value in return for the dollars spent when benchmarked against every other health care outcome metric in the industrialized world.

I laud your position that health care providers need a better value metric that correlates with outcomes rather than paying for services, which we all know thanks to Atul Gawande, incents incredibly bad behavior. However, better metrics need to be directly tied to value and payment, they are not a solution in and of themselves.

It is not acceptable to allow a few die hard right wing blowhards and timid middle-of-the-road representatives to say that we can't do what we all know is both morally just and economically required to create better health care outcomes, cover all citizens, and lower costs, which is a true public health care plan that provides all the benefits and costs of the plan enjoyed by congressional representatives.

Professors are full of it

RE: End The University As We Know It To The Editor

I know you must have gotten thousands of letters on this topic, but I was intrigued to note the near-universal rejection of Mark C. Taylor’s ideas, which I found quite appealing. It seemed to me that none of the other respondents, not even Dr. Taylor Carman, professor of philosophy, have been equipped with a suitable critical apparatus to recognize the modern university for what it is: a regime of truth that produces technocrats with little to no critical foundations or ability to stir up trouble in the real world.

You can verify my claim by noting how the neo-cons succeeded in bringing our country to its knees, as suggested by the recent wonderful book, “French Theory”; no university would have the likes of a Paul Wolfovitz or a Don Rumsfeld as a tenured professor, so, like the dogs of hell, they were unleashed in the only other institution that would have them: the US government. Dogmatic universities did not want dialog or dissent happening on their campuses. And we all know how that turned out.

All of the rabble rousers at my alma mater certainly never got tenure and found themselves on the street shortly after I graduated; I was just lucky to be at the right place at the right time to actually learn something (McGill ‘98). [Addendum: Rather than protect freedom of speech, tenure leads to unilateral dogmatism, and a highly charged political atmosphere where any deviation from the departmental status quo is not tolerated for long. It stifles innovation and is the wrong reward for talent worth retaining. It creates a mob-boss, union intimidation style environment for what should be the most intellectually diverse, challenging, AND safe places in our world.]

Of course, it is technocratism, with its total lack of depth and narrowness of focus, that has brought about our economic predicament as well. Regardless of their field, students have been taught how to participate in a highly bureaucratic institution that teaches them how to sit for an exam and get a good mark by following the rules.

I am saddened by the lack of dialog or critical discourse found in the unilateral academic rejection of changing the status quo. I also found it interesting how none of the academics offered any real useful alternatives, just vague gestures of, “something else will have to do that would not cause me to lose my chair.” What a lot of timid cowards. Perhaps if they had to read some books outside their specialties, they might recognize their institutions for what they are: either state-run tax-base enhancement vehicles, or privately-held bridges limiting the passage into the privileged hallways of power.

Universities will never change until the demand for their product declines. The ever-increasing middle class obsession with premium college-degree product seems to indicate that there is no sign of demand waning, so I’m not holding my breath. I will just make sure my kids do what I did, and go to school in Canada. If you’re not going to change with the times, you may as well have to actually work hard to get a good mark.