Advice to Liberals on Dealing with Donald Trump

Pop quiz: when the big, dumb bully in grade school shouts some asinine insult at you, what do you do? Has it ever been a successful strategy to get huffy? Huffy people look ridiculous, and therefore amusing. Has it ever been an effective strategy to make a reasonable argument about why the asinine insult is way off base? No, you sound like a weakling nerd.

So when liberals start petitions and take out ads in the NY Times and generally get huffy over things Donald Trump says, you’re helping him. He loves that. It makes him look powerful in the eyes of the dummies who listen to him. Can we all just agree that when Donald Trump says some ridiculous, terrible, asinine crap to get liberals riled up, we do the following:

1. Call him an asshat
2. Be cool

Really. I think “asshat” is the solution to the whole Donald Trump problem. Don’t say “America was founded on religious equality” or “He’s not qualified to be president” or really anything. Those are sentences, and sentences are not effective in the kind of primitive power display situations he initiates. It’s not about ideas, it’s about power. Derision and dismissal are good, though. Just say “asshat” and move on. You need to make the bully look ridiculous instead of yourself. This is done through humor. Quick, dismissive humor. 

Science

Science. I find myself surrounded by people who don’t believe in science. Believe isn’t even the right word. Science is the only thing you don’t have to believe in, that’s the beauty of it. It is so fundamental to me, that I find myself at a loss of words to explain it. People think science is just one more thing to believe, that Buddhism or Catholocism or Astrology are all equally valid. How to explain the qualitative difference between science and belief systems?

Science makes as few assumptions as possible, and acknowledges the ones it does make. It makes only those assumptions necessary to function – the ones that without them we would just never get out of bed. Such as that there is an external and knowable outer reality. Other people exist. That kind of thing. Of course you can question all that, and sometimes science even does, but not to the extent that it paralyzes you. And even while making these base, necessary assumptions, science acknowledges that they are assumptions.

Science is not a set of facts. Science is a process. It is continually humble, continually questioning its own discoveries. Just because science changes, makes new discoveries that replace old ones, does not mean it’s unreliable. It means it’s honest.

There is a prejudice against science in popular thought. Even amongst progressives, strangely. Religious conservatives are of course the enemy of science, as always. But now it seems that there is a deep misunderstanding of what science is, and why it is deeply important…Why it is the ally and a necessary element of progressive change. Somehow science itself has become equated with “the man,” with power, greed, capitalism. Hard to make people see the distinction between science itself – a way of thought, truth seeking over blind belief – and the fruits of capitalist application of science. There is an impatience, maybe, a desire to believe in spiritualism, in things beyond what science has documented, proven. We may intuit, and feel, that there is something greater than what science has already documented. But that’s no reason to reject science. If people would just be patient, science will probably eventually discover things that will far surpass what we’ve made up in our desire to believe in something greater than ourselves. People have forgotten that science is what took us out of the dark ages. What freed our minds. What allowed us to start questioning everything, stop making assumptions, blindly accepting what we are told by authority.

Thoughts on plastic

A material that everything can be made out of. It has largely replaced all other materials. It is made from a non-renewable resource. We are taking a valuable, limited resource –oil - and turning it into temporarily useful (and often not all that useful) objects that quickly become trash. We are wasting something precious. Also, we are damaging the environment by turning something that is within nature's many finely tuned and highly evolved cycles - oil - into something that is outside of most of these cycles, and therefore highly destructive of them - plastic.

Who's responsible for this? Well, no one. There is no one making the decisions on the scale of the world, which is the scale of oil. When there is no one else in charge, the fall back is the free market, the invisible hand. The free market is supposed to be a logical way of distributing resources. But what's logical about this? Plastic, in and of itself, is not bad, but for god sake, save the plastic for what it's really good for. Things that it's really the only good material for. Like...the space program. Greenhouses. Maybe galoshes. And make it recyclable. Make recycling it mandatory. What we need is some form of world government that is able to make logical choices about our resources in the long-term interests of humanity in general. In the mean time…

Here's how I deal with plastic: I try to act like it doesn't exist. First of all, I avoid buying anything plastic or packaged in plastic at all costs. And if I am at the store and want to buy something unpackaged but didn’t bring a container with me, I don’t buy it. If I’m out and about and I want a coffee to go, but I don’t have a container, I don’t have coffee. Or I make the time to sit down and drink it there in a reusable container. I find that if I take advantage of the convenience of plastic and tell myself I’ll remember my container next time, I never do. But if I go without once or twice, I sure do remember then. Also, I try to imagine that there is no dump. On a large scale, that’s true. We’re all living with our trash. But I try to imagine it on a personal scale. What if I couldn’t rid myself of all the things I want to throw away? I would buy a lot less, and be more careful about what I bought – will it last? Will it decompose once I’m done with it? I would be more careful about what I threw away. Can I use this longer? Can I find another use for it? I try to act like that’s the case. I may put it into actual practice once I have my own land. Rather than throwing things away, I’ll have a long-term compost pile.

Waldo County Homesteaders' Community Land Trust

WALDO COUNTY BACK-TO-THE LAND TRUST MANIFESTO:

Here are some thoughts on this land trust thing I've been mulling over...

I want to homestead. By homestead, I mean build a small off-grid cabin and garden. I would need 1-2 acres to do this, plus some wild areas to bang around in and forage.

I am having trouble finding a place to do that. The most traditional method would be to buy a piece of land. I can afford a down payment for a small parcel and handle the mortgage. But I wouldn’t have much money left to build anything. And I don’t want a small parcel in the midst of a bunch of other small parcels, which might not agree with or develop in a way conducive with my way of life. I also can’t afford to buy anything big enough to own my own wild space.

The problem is this. Back-to-the-landers came to the Belfast area back in the 70s and 80s. Their presence made this area cool. Waldo County is a great place to homestead. MOFGA, Unity College, the Belfast Co-op, Fedco. But this is changing. There is pressure for more corporate development, along the lines of MBNA, the hospital, Job Lots, etc. As these kinds of “amenities” come to this area, land prices will likely escalate. This will price out the young, the artistic, the eccentric, and those who simply are unwilling or unable to do what it takes to make money in our present system. They will be replaced with the old, the well-off, the main stream. And the character of this place will be lost.

We need to take control of what is being done with the land. Without some sort of intervention, the private real estate market dictates our development, in the above way. We can wait around or agitate for government to intervene and do something, though the likelihood of that seems slight. Government occasionally sets aside land for a park, but there is little or no government intervention having to do with how people are able to obtain and live on the land.

The alternative is to organize and do it ourselves. The way that private citizens can obtain land and then dedicate it to a higher purpose is through the mechanism of community land trusts. Community land trusts are non-profit organizations. CLTs obtain land to use for a mission in perpetuity, thereby permanently removing it from the private real estate market. CLTs are well established and wide spread mechanisms for obtaining and using land for higher purposes. For instance, there are a number of CLTs in the area that obtain land for wilderness preservation – Coastal Mountains Land Trust for example. Maine Farmland Trust’s mission is to encourage agriculture as a viable economic pursuit in Maine, and they obtain land for that purpose. It is sold or leased to would-be farmers at below market rates. They remove land from the private market and distribute it in ways that further their mission. In many urban areas CLTs are used to provide affordable housing.

My hope is that there is a place in Waldo County for another kind of land trust, between wilderness preservation and commercial farming. The mission of this trust would be to obtain land and make it affordably available to (low-income?) people for sustainable living. The parcels could be single lots, or big parcels that are split up into separate leaseholds. The basic framework would look like this: People can rent anywhere from 1-5 acres from the trust, for a low, per acre amount ($100 an acre for example). They can have a simple small homestead, or rent more for small scale farming, etc. With large enough parcels, a portion could be set aside as wild space for recreation, foraging, sustainable wood harvesting, etc. There is no down payment, no big up-front cash requirement. The reason for this is that people can then save their capital for setting up their homestead. The leases are long-term and basically permanent (99 year), as long as they live within a set of rules that ensures sustainable development. I imagine the rules to look something like this:

- a square footage limitation on dwelling size (maybe 1 person = 600 square feet, 100 square feet per additional person

- off grid (people can provide their own power through solar, wind, etc.)

- no pesticide use – strictly organic gardening and farming

- no septic systems – gray water and composting toilet systems only

The major hurdling blocks to going back to a simple way of life are the usual requirement in the private market of a big down payment and high overhead, depending on the price of the land and the resulting mortgage. The land trust with long-term lease scenario eliminates both of these. There is no down-payment, and rents are kept as low as possible (how to determine rent is a question – enough to cover taxes/maintenance? What about money for the land trust to acquire more land? Is there a way to determine an amount that allows for some profit to go back towards the mission without defeating the mission?...). People may actually pay more over their lifetime, since there is nothing to “pay off” as with a mortgage, just an ongoing rent. But this a pretty good trade considering the benefit: people are enabled to live a homesteading lifestyle immediately, without a years-long delay to acquire the capital for a down payment and then many more years of full time work to pay off a mortgage.

This trust would basically be a form of “affordable housing” – but instead it’s affordable land for sustainable living.

Long overdue thoughts on the Maine gubernatorial election.

I wish people would accept that we currently have a two party system. Not permanently, not be resigned to it, just accept the facts as they stand right now. Rather than putting our energies into doomed third party campaigns that result in a minority extremist wielding dangerous amounts of power, those of us who would like to see a multi-party system should be putting our energies into changing the political system into a multi-party system. Easy no-brainer reform: Instant Runoff Voting. Or any other number of variations on that theme. While I've heard the refrain that no major party will ever pass such a thing because they stand to lose prominence, I really doubt that. Most Democrats I talk to strongly support IRV. At any rate, we'd have a much better shot at it with Dems than with conservatives I'd wager.

Which brings me to another favorite political point of mine - while fighting for reform such as IRV, work within the current system by shifting the debate left. What I mean by that, is the lesser of two evils IS better. Much better. Keep fighting hard to get the Democrats in, until Democrats are the norm, and then the Greens can become the other major party while the Republicans fade into obscurity. This happens in real life all the time - there are lots of cities where the two major parties are Democrats and Greens. Portland, for example.

I guess the overriding theme is that we need to take a realist approach to reaching our progressive goals. Wishful thinking and "voting your conscience" (i.e. voting for long-shot third party progressives) is going to result in right wing victories and terrible costs to people and the environment. I think it's pretty selfish to close one's eyes to that reality in return for a momentary feeling of elation and moral superiority in the voting booth.

The case of Maine's recent election is somewhat different from the "starry-eyed third party progressive with a single-digit fraction of support" scenario. Here we had two progressive candidates running neck and neck for much of the campaign. In this situation, my anger lay not so much with the voters, who were understandably confused, as with the Eliot Cutler campaign. Why Eliot Cutler and not Libby Mitchell? Because Libby Mitchell WON the Democratic primary. In our current system, we need to get behind one candidate in order to win. The process in place for choosing that candidate, is the party primary. Like it or not, that's the reality.Eliot Cutler is a Democrat in all but name. He works for Democrats, he has basically progressive values on most issues. Yet he chose not to compete in the Democratic primary, and enter the race as an independent, thereby endangering and ultimately dooming a progressive victory. I really can see little other reason for his candidacy than either hubris or secretly working for the LePage campaign. IF Eliot Cutler had won the Democratic primary, I absolutely would have supported and voted for him. The overriding imperative here, folks, is to have a progressive, any progressive, in power, rather than a conservative.

Which brings me to another point. Individuals matter very little. I would sooner send a progressive drug addled high school student to the Blane House than a genius seasoned political conservative. What matters is political philosophy. That's all. Not age, not experience, not their private life, not a checkered past, not whose jet they fly on, or how much their clothes cost - just their politics. I could vote given no other information than party affiliation. In some European countries that's how it's done - people vote for their party (aka belief system) and the party picks the representative. I suppose a lot of Americans who are used to the media circus craziness of picking apart everything about candidates other than um, what they believe and how that will translate into public policy, will find this idea abhorrent. I think it's utterly ridiculous and arrogant to think you can know anything about a person's character through a political campaign. Or anything about their ability to govern through their private life. Come on. It takes years, decades, for most of us to even know our own character, or that of those closest to us. I think the whole character judgment thing is just another way for people to feel superior. And to avoid actually doing some serious reflective thinking about what their political beliefs are.

Which brings me to my final point. I have no respect for the swing voter. Anyone with any minimal amount of self awareness and intelligence is capable of sitting down and figuring out their political belief system. It's not that hard. If you don't have a political affiliation, you haven't thought about it enough, that's all. No one with real values would be capable of voting both Republican and Democrat. They're opposites. If you're voting for both, you're confused. Pandering to these people is demeaning. And cheapens our political debate. Progressive would be better of being progressives and talking progressive values rather than pandering to the confused and lazy.

Well, I know the tone of all this might be a tad abrasive. It comes from a place of being deeply saddened and disgusted with the minority vote victory of the dangerous extremist, Paul LePage, and the suffering and destruction he will no doubt cause.

Thoughts on technology

I have been reading a lot about technology, and theories about the downside of technology, anarcho-primitivism was one train of thought I was following for a while. Also read "The Good Life" by Helen and Scott Nearing about their homesteading experience. For a long time I have been struggling with a visceral dislike for modern technology, that I could not justify or reason out. I dislike complications, noise, things I can't fix myself, disposable goods and the incredible waste brought on by obscelesence. Gadgets replacing tools for minimal gains in convenience. For example, toasters. Why do we need toasters? First of all, how important is toast to our enjoyment of food anyways? Sure, crispy bread is nice at breakfast, but do we really need it? And how much of our desire for it was manufactured by the manufacturers of toasters? Second, you can make toast in a pan, or one of those grate things that holds the toast over a heat source. Not that hard. Yet we have an entire seperate appliance for the preparation of this one food. An appliance is a tangle of complicated electronics encased in a shell of plastic. It's a complicated device, hence some aspect of it is bound to eventually break, and generally the owner of the appliance will not have the knowledge to fix it. Maybe in the early days of toasters, one would have it repaired. Nowadays, it would generally go in the trash and off to the closest department store to buy a new one. This...disgusts me. And the toaster is just one example of the unnecessarily complicated, wasteful crap we have in our lives. Minimal gains in convenience in exchange for massive waste. I much prefer tools. What follows is a list of appliances followed in parenthese by the tools that could be used instead. Microwaves (stove). Stove (wood stove). Coffee maker (french press). Food processer (knife). Electric mixer (spoon). Dish washer (sink). Drier (clothesline). Car (bike). Etc.
I don't hate technology in general. How could anyone? If one defines technology as human innovation, obviously that's something that will always be around, and we should be happy about. There needs to be a distinction between bad technology and good technology. Bad technology = Unnecesarily complicated. If something can be done with a simple tool, why create a complicated machine to do the same thing? Complication leads to a greater chance of breakage/obselescence (hence waste). It also leads to a loss of independence since complicated things require specialists to fix them. And a loss of the skills/personal involvement of doing something with a tool. It's the lack of decision making that bothers me. No one looks at technology and says "this will actually improve our lives," "this will hurt us in the long run," "the trade off between convenience and waste is not worth it." I suppose the decisions are being made by the market, but as usual without factoring in all kinds of hidden costs.

First of all, resources are precious. Oil for plastics, metals, etc. They are not infinite. Are they really being priced taking into account that we only have so much of this stuff? If they were, would we be able to buy toasters for $20 that are made to break within 2 years? If we had looked at fossil fuels back when we first discovered their potential, and said to ourselves - "wow, this stuff is amazing, but we only have so much of it so let's put it to the best possible use" - maybe we would have used it a lot slower, for more important things, and not burned through it making appliances we don't really need. Maybe we would not have become so incredibly dependent on it. I think now, as it becomes clear to more and more people that we will run out, those thoughts will occur.

Second, waste is awful. This is an a priori position. Maybe it's my Yankee sensibilities. I don't know. I just feel that waste is ugly and morally wrong. Waste not, want not. If you make something, make it as well as you possibly can so it lasts as long as it possibly can. If something wears out, take it apart and use whatever you can for other things. And make it as simple as possible so it is easy to reuse. A toaster is hard to reuse - all those resources broken into tiny bits and all mixed together. A metal pan would be easy to reuse - melt down and make something else.

Third, pollution and trash are awful. Because they're bad for our environment, aka - that which we depend on for our very existence, the thing that provides the things that allow us to exist. I keep my body clean, I keep my house clean, I also want to keep my town, state, country, world clean. Why? Health I guess. Ultimately of my own body. If my body, house, town, state, country, world, is dirty, my chances of ill health are greater.

Fourth - and this is admittedly a bit more personal and esoteric - when we cease doing something by hand, or with tools, we lose something. The skill of making things. The pleasure of making things. The meditative process of being absorbed in creating something. The beauty of a handmade thing, the inherent inexplicable beauty of a thing in which the human input is visible in the product. The preciousness of those objects. The knowledge of the natural origin of an object, and the steps required to make it.

I wish there were some way to build better decisions regarding technology into our economic system. Perhaps predictions as to how much of a resource we have, and pricing said resources accordingly. I don't know why natural resources are not publicly owned. How can anyone, other than all of us, own a natural resource? Then we could control the use of the resource based on its' abundance, rate of renewability, etc. and charge private interests for the use of the resource accordingly. We could also find a way to make trash and pollution part of the private equation. I think that's a major problem of the private market - they use precious, finite natural resources as if they are free and infinite, and bear no responsibility or cost for damage to the natural environment. The only way to factor in these costs, I suppose, is through government intervention, which private interests fight tooth and nail with the wealth and power they have accumulated through said abuse of natural resources and environment. This also ties into the concept of scale, hence bringing us full circle to the "buy local" issue again. Only big companies can manufacture this complicated crap. Only big companies are capable of large scale resource depletion and environmental degradation. Only big companies can use their wealth to manipulate our governments into continuing to allow them to do this. So perhaps another approach to remedying the problem of bad technology, would be dealing with the issue of scale...thoughts for another post.

In Defense of Buy Local

This editorial was written in response to an article entitled "The Buy Local Swindle" which can be read at http://younghipandconservative.blogspot.com/2009/07/buy-local-swindle.html (as well as his response to my response).

I am writing in response to Michael Hartwell's June 30 guest editorial entitled "The Buy Local Swindle." I disagree with Mr. Hartwell on a number of points.

First, I think Mr. Hartwell misrepresents the message of the Buy Local campaign. He seems to be saying that "Buy Local" means buy only things made in Portland from Portland businesses. I am not involved in the Buy Local campaign, but a moment of logical reflection and a perusal of the Buy Local website quickly proves him wrong. In fact, the message of the Buy Local campaign is try to buy from smaller local businesses wherever you are. Buy Local is essentially a campaign that favors small businesses over large chain businesses. It does not discourage people from buying products from other regions and countries. It simply encourages people to buy those products from local businesses (such as Italian food from Micucci's). Finally, it does not discourage people from buying successful and popular products (such as the music of the Beatles), but again, encourages that those products be bought from local businesses.

The basis of Mr. Hartwell's criticism of the Buy Local campaign, aside from the above misrepresentations, is classical economic theory. Classic market economics holds that specializing and trading is more efficient than each region producing their own products for local economies and leads to greater overall wealth. There is also the factor of size, since larger companies have greater bargaining power to buy in bulk, and to roam further in search of cheaper resources and labor, allowing them to pass on lower prices to consumers. All of this is true, and it is a very elegant system for producing greater overall wealth.

The problem with the theory is twofold. First, the above definition of "wealth" encompasses only monetary wealth, and leaves out a number of things that are very important to human well being that the market theory actually diminishes. The market theory carried to its logical conclusion results in fewer and larger companies, a high degree of specialization of individuals, a high degree of specialization by region and country, the concentration of power, entrepreneurship and creativity at the top of those large companies, and homogenization of stores and products. Very efficient, resulting in lower prices and higher overall wealth, but not very fulfilling to the human needs of creativity, individuality, free will and culture. We can see this theory in action by looking at any of the large box stores. Big, drawing resources from whichever country produces it cheapest, each person within the company performing a narrow and specialized role, very few of those people having the opportunity to practice entrepreneurship or creativity, and products and stores that are the same whether in Maine or Minnesota. When these stores nudge out our local businesses, we lose the character of our towns and regions, the opportunity to be entrepreneurs and creators, and the more even distribution of wealth and power that comes with more small businesses. We gain a higher overall GDP, and of course cheaper products. I'm not an economist, but that sounds like a bad trade to me.

Second, there are no guarantees within the market system of how the greater overall wealth gained will be distributed. In fact, there is an inherent tendency for the greater wealth to be distributed unevenly so that most of the wealth goes to a few, while the majority are actually worse off. As companies get bigger and fewer, there are less and less owners, and more and more workers, thereby concentrating power at the top of these companies. The more power and money that is concentrated in the hands of the few owners of these companies, the more power these companies have to influence our government to make policy that further benefits them, further concentrating power, ad nauseam. There are many examples of this in American politics, but that would be another editorial altogether.

Obviously there's a problem with the classical market theory. Either it is a very elegant system that simply does not give us a result that fits human needs, or it is a system that needs to take more factors into account to produce a result that leads to greater human well being. I am not sure what the answer is, but what the Buy Local campaign is doing is essentially the latter. Buy Local is advertising to consumers a hidden benefit of buying from small local businesses, and a hidden cost of buying from big chains. It is taking a cost that has been "externalized," to use the language of economists, (i.e. the cost of losing our local character, independence and creativity) and internalizing it, so that when people go to a big chain, they might realize that the price they're paying is actually higher if they take into account the loss of those values. On the flip side, it is internalizing a benefit, so that when people go to a local store they might realize they are actually getting more for their money by helping to preserve those values. It is a little unusual in that it is not the businesses themselves doing the advertising, but a non-profit seeking a societal goal that happens to benefit these businesses. Nonetheless, it is in essence advertising, and as such fits perfectly within Mr. Hartwell's market system.

Just because the market system is an elegant and logical way to create greater overall wealth does not mean we have to check our brains in and follow that system wherever it may lead. People have the power and the right to step back and think about what they truly value, and demand that the systems we use serve those values. Mr. Hartwell would have us sacrifice those values to the system. Buy Local simply asks that the system serves the values.