The Difference between Socialism and Communism

The terms "communism" and "socialism" are often used interchangeably in American political discourse. That is to say, they're used incorrectly. They're even used incorrectly by people who recognize that others around them are using them incorrectly. Socialism is not "Communism Lite," where there's a mix of communism and capitalism. It does not mean a system of government like those found in Western Europe, where rich people trade stocks but poor people can still count on food and housing from the government. That is not socialism.

The Chinese Communist Party isn't communist any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. These days, they're not even particularly socialist. An economy can have a mix of socialism and capitalism, but a government, by definition, cannot be communist. Almost everyone I hear using any of these terms gets all of them completely wrong--even "capitalism." Capitalism doesn't just mean "There are stores that sell stuff and you have choices about what to buy." There are socialist countries that have that. That's not what capitalism is.

Let's start by sorting out what these words mean.

Capitalism - One so often hears the phrase "free market" paired with the word "capitalism" that many people think that's simply a redundancy, and that the words are basically interchangeable. That's not the case at all. The key is in the name: capital. Karl Marx's master work was not The Communist Manifesto, as is often assumed by people who defend capitalism and attack socialism and communism without knowing what any of those words actually mean. His big, boring book that really laid out his ideas about socialism was Capital (or Das Kapital in the original German). In it, he meticulously dissected the (at that time fairly new) economic system he called capitalism. 

In the beginning, when humans were nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no ownership of land. That's not to say that bands of humans didn't claim certain areas for themselves and chase off other bands of humans who intruded, but there were no deeds defining the precise borders of a plat of land and naming a certain person as the owner, let alone any such plats being sold and the deeds transferred. It would have been an alien concept to them.

Then once agriculture started to take root and all a family's food grew in one place, with enough surpluses to carry them through winters and dry seasons, there was no longer any reason to move in search of food. People invested their time into clearing land, building fences, keeping gardens weeded, and so on. As such, they had an interest in protecting this investment. They didn't want to be pushed off their land and have it claimed by others.

One problem with this is that when a farm family's children grow up, the farm that supported parents and ten children isn't going to support the two parents and ten children, plus ten children's spouses and 100 grandchildren. When the kids grow up, at least some of them need to go start their own farms. And when an entire community is doing this, they quickly run out of land. Fortunately, those farms are so productive that they not only produce surpluses to carry families through the winter, they also provide enough food to feed some people who don't have farms. These people, in turn, can specialize in occupations that provide convenience or expertise--as healers, potters, weavers, or what have you--to the farmers in exchange for food.

This system of trade that pre-dated money itself, was not capitalism. For one thing, almost everyone was self-employed or worked for their family. That's closer to what we'd call distributism.

Then there were thousands of years of other developments like the invention of money and hereditary rule and statism and a lot of other things that we don't need to get distracted by right now. But as we're skipping through time here, let's pause briefly to observe one thing that really grew with agriculture, a thing that scarcely anyone had any real use for before then--slavery.

What's the point of slavery? The slave owner has more work to do than he's able or willing to do on his own or with his family's help, but he still wants to own more than he's capable of producing. All his technology (whatever that is) has made him as productive as he can be, but he still wants more. To get what he wants, he needs a scheme where he can get someone else to do the work, and then claim ownership of what they've produced. Various such schemes have been devised over the ages, from debt to taxation, but the simplest of them is plain old slavery, where a person claims ownership of another person just as they might claim ownership of a sheep or a cow.

Americans, particularly, have a tendency to think of slavery only in the form in which it existed in the United States until that was abolished under Abraham Lincoln. That one's called "chattel slavery." It's where a slave is property like any other piece of property. You can buy it, sell it, trade it, lend it out, use it for profit or pleasure, even destroy it. It's a pretty horrible and psychopathic way to think of a human being. 

But that's not the only form of slavery that has ever existed. The Vikings were known to have captured, bought, and sold slaves, but they society also allowed slaves to advance in the social hierarchy and eventually not be slaves anymore. Mesoamerican peoples had temporary slavery, where a person might work for a time as a slave in order to pay off a debt, often as a result of gambling. Under feudalism, the serfs were seen as being part of the land itself, much like wildlife, so that the owner of the land controlled them, but they couldn't be sold to other landowners. As populations grew and non-farming workers formed guilds of specialists, apprentices served a term of temporary slavery, wherein they did whatever work their master told them to do with no pay other than food and shelter, so that they could learn the trade and eventually have apprentices of their own. Various cultures throughout history have and still do force convicted criminals or prisoners of war to do work, with or without pay. 

Controversy exists over whether any of those things can rightly be called "capitalism," so let's compromise and call them "proto-capitalism." 

Capitalism is a system in which the owner of a thing--a farm, a machine, a share of a business--also owns anything produced by that thing, no matter who actually does the work of producing it. So if you own a farm, for example, and someone else comes and grows the vegetables and tends the animals, and then brings you food or money or whatever other form of payment just because you're the owner, that's capitalism. It doesn't matter whether that person is a slave, an indentured servant, a convict, a prisoner of war, a debtor, an apprentice, a tenant, a serf, a volunteer, or whatever other sort of relationship might compel them to do this. If they do the work, and you're entitled to at least a piece of what they produced just because you own the resource they used to do the work, even if you didn't lift a finger (or even if you did), then you are a capitalist. 

This gets a lot more abstract when the resource is money. Maybe you lend someone some money, and they use it to start a business, then pay you back with interest. You've been paid money just for being the owner of money. That makes you a capitalist. 

Marxists tend to talk in terms of extremes, where capitalists are all extremely wealthy and workers are all barely surviving, but that's not necessary for capitalism to be capitalism. A person can own capital and earn income from it without that income being sufficient to sustain them all by itself, so they still work. That describes most of the middle class and even some of the lower class. People might work every day, but they have a retirement account or a savings account that earns interest. Or they might rent out a house they inherited and earn income from that. The system that allows them to do this is capitalism. They're getting paid just for owning stuff. Success in capitalism is when you get paid so much for owning stuff that you don't need to work anymore. Other people do all the work, and you just sit back and get paid for being the owner. 

Some people who have, for whatever reason, deeply internalized capitalism and come to see it as part of their identity get defensive when they hear what they think is any sort of criticism of capitalism. They'll get emotional reading what I've just written and lash back with statements like, "Why shouldn't I get a profit from my retirement account? I worked hard for that money and didn't get to use it while it was sitting there being used by others until I retired!" or "Running a business and maintaining a rental property is hard work!" But remember, I've already stated that one can be both a capitalist and a worker. You deserve the product of your own labor. You don't, morally, deserve the product of anyone else's, unless it's compensation--say, as payment for something you're trading to them, or because they harmed you in some way and they're making restitution. Just because you're shoulder to shoulder with your slave in the fields picking cotton doesn't mean you're morally entitled to their work. Inherent in capitalism is the idea that it's okay and even desirable and laudable to exploit other people for your own profit.

Socialism - In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, particularly in England, capitalism grew rapidly. Owners of factories, mines, and farms grew astoundingly rich while the people who worked to make them rich were often barely surviving, leading writers like Charles Dickens and Karl Marx to comment on how unfair and shockingly immoral the situation was. Marx painstakingly detailed what exactly was unjust about capitalism, and proposed what he believed would be a better, fairer system in which everyone would have enough of everything. No one would starve, no one would be homeless, and nobody would be rich enough to use their wealth to wield power over others. He called this system socialism. This idea became popular with social progressives and with poor workers around the world. In some places, they actually overthrew their governments and instituted this new system, socialism.

Under socialism, no one person owned a farm. The government owned the farm, some of the people worked there, and everyone got to share the food from it. No one person or collection of elite shareholders owned a factory. Everyone collectively owned the factory. The government controlled it and distributed to the people the things that the factory produced. At least that's how it was supposed to work. 

While defenders of capitalism will tell you that the problem with socialism is that the people had no motivation to be productive or innovative, or that all the hard workers left socialist countries and only lazy people were left behind, the real problem is that the same sort of exploitation that had existed under capitalism still existed, but was now centralized and organized under the power of the state instead of being widely dispersed among individual businessmen. As far as exploitation was concerned, it was like capitalism on steroids. The Soviet Union put the first man in space, rivaled the United States in military power, and was productive enough to prop up the economies of client states like Cuba and Angola. There was no lack of productivity. 

It's true enough that there was less choice for consumers. In a capitalist society, different manufacturers of breakfast cereals are all trying to get the same customers' dollars. They're like flowers competing for the attention of a bee, each trying to be showier than the next, so there are many, very different and attractive choices. For the consumer, it's a dazzling, sometimes overwhelming array of options. But those choices are the manifestation of a struggle in which many will fail. Under socialism, the government has a goal--feed everyone breakfast--and might make a massive amount of one kind of very bland food that achieves that goal, whether anyone likes it or not. Nobody will go hungry, but that's the best-case scenario. There's no flash, no dazzle, no dizzying display of options, and possibly not even much flavor.

 But I said above that the real problem was centralized, organized exploitation. That is, the part elites who are actually running a socialist country will find ways to funnel a lot more money and resources into their pockets than the common worker would ever see, and this typically comes directly at the cost of the workers. So maybe not everyone does get breakfast, because the Supreme Leader wants to fill his swimming pool with champagne. It's the same problem socialism was created to solve, but worse, because no one can kick him out of office through re-election, because political dissent is criminalized. 

If there were a way that the people could have a socialist economy without sacrificing their power to a dictator or single, unrivaled and unchecked political party, then that might be an improvement. Not only would everyone get breakfast, but they could actually take a vote on what to make for breakfast. This is democratic socialism. To my knowledge, this isn't actually done anywhere, but the idea is popular among progressives in many capitalist countries who don't want starvation under capitalism or the horrors of socialist dictatorship. The closest we get to it is capitalist democracies with strong social safety nets, where taxes on the rich are used to fund buying the basics for the poor and giving everyone a vote on how that should be managed. 

Communism - Defenders of capitalism often complain (usually in a whining tone of voice), that when they criticize communism (meaning socialism), they're met with the response that "real" communism has never been tried, and that all those other horrible (socialist) governments that called themselves communist didn't really count. Well, they don't count, because they weren't communist. They were (and are) socialist, not communist. We know this because a communist government is an oxymoron. Communism is anarchical. That is, it is stateless. A communist society has no government, no hierarchy. It's a utopia where everyone shares everything and nobody outranks anybody else. Nobody in a communist government has the power to force others to do things they don't want to do. It's completely non-coercive. There would be no gulags because there would be no system of government to run them or force anyone into them.

This has never even been attempted on a national level, and for good reason. A place as large as a nation needs some kind of system of organization, and an organization that large doesn't stay organized for long unless there is someone who's recognized as having the authority to keep everyone else on track. If millions of people are doing their own thing, even if they all have good intentions and want the best for each other, they're not going to be unified as an efficient, smoothly functioning organization.

The Soviet Union recognized this and actually did try to decentralize power into "soviets"--districts of local control that operated mostly independently, much like American states or counties. But they never got anywhere close--and I'd argue that the people in charge never really wanted to get anywhere close--to abolishing the overarching national government that tied all those soviets together. 

The fact that this has never even been attempted on a national scale doesn't mean that the idea is wholly without merit, though. It has been done, with varying degrees of success, on much, much smaller levels. I'm talking about communes. Whether the "intentional communities" of hippies, or "utopias" of various religious groups in the past few centuries, or simply bands of indigenous hunter-gatherers who don't even scold their children, there have been countless groups of people who decided that the best way to do things was to all share what they had, help each other, and not have anyone bossing anyone else. It really only works well, though, at an intimate level--extended family, for example, or a group of friends about the size of a small church, perhaps. Any larger than that, and having recognized leaders becomes a necessity. Sure, the people can vote for a leader, but unless there's consensus, it isn't really communism. Bullying is antithetical to communism. Communists join together. If they're in conflict with each other, they're not communing. 

To anyone who's come to accept the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism as normal, communists' attempt to suppress their own individuality for the good of their group looks creepy. It looks like a cult. It's like we can't wrap our minds around the idea of putting others' well-being ahead of our own unless someone is forcing us...unless we bring it down to the level of a parent making sacrifices for their children, for example. We live in such an unloving society that we can't imagine voluntarily accepting the vulnerability of loving everyone in our community enough to take care of them, especially when they seem undeserving, and taking care of them would mean neglecting ourselves. It's because we're so accustomed to being neglected ourselves that we know intuitively that if we don't take care of ourselves, no one else will do it for us. We're afraid to share our food with the starving because we fear there won't be enough left for us because nobody will share with us. We've built a whole culture and personal identities around being proud of being able to provide for ourselves without anyone else's help. We look at it as a mark of adulthood to never need help; if you ever have to ask for assistance, it must mean you failed in some way, probably something you should feel ashamed of. 

In a communist society, rather than being motivated by the shame of being somehow incompetent as an adult, we'd be motivated by the pride we'd feel in being of value to the community, able to help others beyond just ourselves. It's the same feeling as what capitalists sometimes describe to their workers as being "a productive member of society." Communists would celebrate those who went above and beyond to provide good things to their neighbors. 

It's entirely possible for this to work at the small scale and probably sounds like a dream to many who've never even considered the possibility of living like this. Marx saw how dehumanizing capitalism was, how it turned the workers--the majority of society--into livestock and machines who existed just to make other people rich, and how even the rich had trouble finding any real satisfaction in life. His hope was that, though the automation of industrialism, organized under socialism, we might eventually get to a Star Trek-like economy where anybody who wants anything can just push a button and get it without anyone having to do any work, so that we could all be free to pursue creative expression like art and inventing. He thought socialism, with a benevolent dictator calling the shots, was the path there; about that, he was dead wrong.

I don't believe that communism could ever function at a national level. Even at a regional level, there would have to be some sort of hierarchy for enforcing judicial decisions that settled disputes. One community might have a dispute with another community, and they'd turn to an authority to mediate a settlement. If one party tried to deviate from the settlement, there'd need to be some kind of enforcement. That can't happen unless someone has the authority to make someone else do something they don't want to do. Even at the small group level, communism doesn't work without love. It is deeply dependent on all the participants purging greed from their hearts, and no one can truly do that while they still fear scarcity. The bigger the group, the harder it is to trust that all participants love you and care about your best interests. Some of us can't achieve that level of trust with even another individual, let alone with a group of hundreds, let alone millions, of other people. 

That's why we say there's never been a truly communist country. Most countries that said they aspired to communism never even achieved success at socialism. Communism is anarchy based in loving cooperation. It's the Heaven that socialists hope to earn their way into. Anarchy without loving cooperation is an apocalyptic hellscape where we crave the stability of having a bigger, all-powerful bully to keep all the smaller bullies in check. When local warlords are terrorizing your community, having a dictator and clearly defined, if oppressive, laws looks like an improvement. 

Marx was clear that he felt that industrial capitalism (with its automation) was a necessary stepping stone to socialism. But historically, a lot of "communist" (socialist) countries went straight from mostly agrarian economies to being socialist--Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea. Actually, I can't think of a single socialist nation, current or defunct, that had a thriving, industrial, capitalist economy firmly in place before becoming a socialist dictatorship. That, combined with intense, hostile interference from capitalist nations, may be why we don't see thriving socialist countries today, let alone a single country even approaching communism.

The Evolution of Labor

 

                                                                           

I saw someone joking recently about the disparity in furniture prices. They said that if you want a table, your choices are either a $14,000 art piece made by hand from a tree that was kissed every day, or a table made of sawdust, paper, and glue for $140.

The reason is mass production through mechanized industrialization. A factory full of machines and workers on an assembly line can crank out lots and lots of tables very cheaply, and they can do it even faster and cheaper if they're using cheap materials that are easier to form. The companies that do this race each other to the bottom, and quality suffers as a result.

The woodworker who wants to do things the old way can't compete on price. His materials would cost more than the competitors' finished product. Never mind the fact that doing each piece by hand, one by one, means that his labor cost per piece is also much higher. If he simply does it the old way with actual wood, and produces just a modest, functional table made to appeal to an average (working class) consumer, the table will cost several hundred dollars even if the woodworker's cut amounts to poverty wages. Furthermore, the difference in functionality won't be great enough for that low-end consumer to justify spending the extra money, so the craftsman will be working himself into the ground just to produce pieces that he can't even sell.

If he wants to use authentic materials and methods, he has to target the high-end consumer. He needs to make a boutique luxury item, a piece of such quality that it conveys status. He needs to create a treasure piece for a multi-millionaire to buy. This is the only way he's going to make a living at this (other than changing the methods or materials).

The internet has allowed such artisans to reach a wider market. Instead of having to maintain a retail store that's sufficiently inviting to draw in the millionaires, they can simply create a website with good photographs and sell online. While that's revolutionary in allowing more people to become self-employed, it doesn't actually do anything to speed up the process of making the table (other than maybe facilitating the procurement of materials). The internet doesn't do the cutting and sanding for you. You still have to do that part by hand, one at a time.

But some creators can use the internet to amplify their productivity. If you create a song, or a video, or a book, or a computer program, you don't have to hand-produce a single copy from scratch for each person who buys one. You make one, just one time, and you can sell an infinite number of digital copies. Moreover, you can ship them worldwide, instantly, without any shipping fees or delays. Think about that--you set up a camera and record yourself playing a song on your guitar, upload that to the internet, and you earn money from it passively for years.

That business model is as far ahead of the factory cranking out sawdust tables as the factory is ahead of the traditional woodworker. And so it's no wonder that we're in an information age, where most middle-class and better jobs are ones involving data rather than physical goods. We've become a sedentary society because the office jobs are the ones that offer the greatest return on investment of labor. (Yes, you might earn more as a pipefitter or a tower climber, barely, but your body is going to pay the difference.)

Of course, capitalism being what it is, any business model is going to draw predators, the sort of people who try to squeeze in as middlemen or set themselves at the top to claim a cut of other people's work. This one has been no different. So in this age of YouTube millionaires who independently produce and market their own content, we also have huge entertainment companies that have content creators on staff as paid employees--often very poorly paid employees. The content, digitized and sold over the web, can earn money over and over again for as long as anyone wants to pay for it, but that money goes to the companies, not the creators.

That's what's at the heart of the Writers Guild of America strike. They write scripts for shows, get paid once, and then those shows get streamed by companies like Netflix and become passive income in perpetuity for their employers, but the writers never see another dime. The writers want to change that. They're demanding royalties. Unfortunately for them, they're doing it just as AI is becoming advanced enough to possibly replace some of them.

That's something we need to talk about. AI is poised to cause a leap in productivity comparable to the Industrial Revolution. It will also lead to the displacement of a lot of labor, or at the very least, the cheapening of labor. Those screenwriters may soon find themselves in the same position as workers in Asia who stitch shoes together for thirty cents a day. This leap in productivity, and the free time it will produce, would be a boon to our civilization if everyone shared in the spoils. But, capitalism being what it is, the predators will claim all the profit for themselves, and the once-exploited workers will become just surplus mouths to feed, unemployed and considered a nuisance by governments that will use them as cannon fodder or worse. The problem of AI displacing workers isn't a problem of the technology itself, but of who owns it and who owns what it produces. Any attempt to correct the imbalance will be decried as socialism, but it may be that socialism is the only ethical solution.

It pains me to say that, because as a distributist, I don't want to see people become slaves to the state any more than I want them to be exploited by businesses. I want a nation of self-employed people running mom-and-pop businesses and joining together in worker-owned syndicates to run factories and other large, collaborative projects. I don't see a way to get there from here, though, not with AI being privately owned and about to push most of society into poverty. Ideally, Mom and Pop wouldn't have to work anymore if they had robots waiting on them hand and foot--growing and cooking their food, making and washing their clothes, managing their financial affairs for them automatically. That's where I'd like to see us arrive, but I really don't see how we get there short of the government stepping in and either directly expropriating the technology, or taxing the bejeezus out of its owners and establishing a universal basic income. If you know another way, I'd love to hear it.

Guilt by Association

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that there was a big company dumping toxic, radioactive waste in your neighborhood--used fracking chemicals, maybe. Some of your neighbors work for the company. They've mostly bought into the company's reassurances that the chemicals are safe, and whatever fears they do still have are offset by their desire to remain employed. These people are either quiet about the dumping, or they're vocally supportive of it.

Most people in the neighborhood are simply unaware of what's happening, and would be upset if they knew.

There are, however, two houses on the end of the street occupied by people nobody else in the neighborhood talks to. And the reason nobody talks to them is because of the giant Nazi flags they have hanging on their front porches. One dude actually dresses up like Hitler. Nobody in the neighborhood talks to them, but their neo-Nazi friends from a ten-county region get together at those two houses to do whatever it is racists do when they get together in large groups.
 

The people who live in those two houses are well informed about the dumping, and they're quite upset. Being passionate, politically active sorts who have some experience with organizing groups, they decide to do something about it. They start going door to door, knocking on doors and talking with the neighbors about the dangers of the chemicals being dumped in their back yards. They say they're forming a community organization to get out the word and to put pressure on local government to stop the dumping. Individual voices, they argue, would have no effect, given the influence of this big, wealthy company and the support of their employees. If the other residents of the community want to get the government to stop the dumping, they're going to have to pull together.

But the people leading the effort are literally Nazis. Worse, they can't seem to compartmentalize their Nazism from their concerns about the chemicals. All the literature they're passing out to alert people about the dangers of the chemicals has swastikas on it, and messages about "preserving the health of our children, and thus the future of the white race." Disturbingly, there are a few people in the neighborhood who don't have a problem with this and think that maybe they had misjudged the Nazis. Many more aren't at all comfortable with the Nazi stuff, but they are very concerned about the chemicals. Some of them thought of starting their own, independent groups, but they were talked out of it with the argument that, "We need to present a united front. If we let petty differences divide us, the polluters win."

The company that's dumping the chemicals looks at this situation and decides to run a public relations campaign smearing the environmentalists as being a hate group. Like the extremist leaders of the community organization, the chemical company depicts opposition to pollution as being inherently racist. They lean into their image of being anti-fascist and contact the media. The media runs with the story. Now, outside of this neighborhood, the whole country has heard about this battle between polluters and the residents of the place where the chemicals are being dumped, but they've only heard it framed as "Diversity, Inc. versus the enviro-nazis." And of course, every time the media interview someone representing the environmentalists, they go to the leadership, who have a habit of taking that opportunity to rant about wanting to exterminate the other races and whatnot. 

Pretty soon, the whole nation is polarized into two camps. As far as most people are concerned--even people who've never been anywhere near your neighborhood--you either support dumping the chemicals in residential neighborhoods or you're a Nazi. Those are the two choices--cancer or genocide.

You live in the neighborhood, and you don't like either one of those options. You're opposed to the dumping, and you like seeing so many members of your community coming together to fight it, but you're not at all on board with the Nazi stuff, not one little bit. You can't just look past it or downplay it in the interests of advancing the environmental cause. You try to be independent and put out your own message on social media and whatnot, but people misjudge you. Every time you mention the chemicals, people decide you're a Nazi, and when you deny it, they just call you a lying Nazi. When you denounce the Nazis, everyone assumes you're on the company team and believe that the chemicals are safe and good for the community.

What do you do in this situation? Do you take on the role of "the weirdo nobody in the neighborhood talks to" that was formerly occupied by the leaders of the new community group? Do you isolate yourself like that? Do you organize your own, independent organization that, like those Nazis on the end of the street, is seen as a fringe group, only being able to increase its numbers by drawing on the support of people across a wide region? Or do you get louder trying to make yourself understood? Or do you get sneaky and try to infiltrate the enviro-nazi group with the intent of changing it from the inside? Or do you just try to be friendly to everybody on both sides and hope that things will work themselves out, never mind the fact that each side denounces you when they find out you're friendly with the other?

Let me know in the comments what you would do in this situation.

"May I Respectfully Ask How Many Times You've Been Shot at?"

In the course of a debate on gun control--if you can call it a "debate" when one person takes an informed position and a half-dozen others with no expertise on the topic pile on calling him an idiot--somebody asked me if he could respectfully ask me how many times I've been shot at. Following is my reply.

O Canada

 

Back when slavery was still legal in the United States, runaway slaves used to flee to Canada. Then in the 1920s, when alcohol was outlawed in the United States, people smuggled booze in from Canada or went there to drink. During the Vietnam war, some American men who wanted to avoid the draft sought amnesty in Canada. In 1985, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale, a novel depicting a dystopian future in which an oppressive theocracy took over in America, and Americans defected to Canada. During the Bush II and Trump years, we often heard liberals saying they planned to run away to Canada, fearing that a Handmaid's Tale-style police state was soon to follow. In recent decades, since America has grown increasingly inhospitable towards the world's tired, poor, and huddled masses, Canada has stepped up to welcome them. If the United States is the Mother of Exiles, Canada is the exiles' cool aunt who they stay with when Mom is mad. I've heard that when savvy American backpackers are traveling abroad, they stick a Canadian flag patch on their backpacks, because so many people around the world hate Americans but feel warmly toward Canadians. Canada appeared to be the last bastion of liberty, the last place people could bug out to when even the Land of the Free was no longer free enough.

But things have changed.

 

 

Gun control in Canada has gotten increasingly restrictive, starting with handgun registration in 1934 and proceeding through to their banning AR-15s and many other types of guns in 2020. Jordan Peterson was an unknown Psychology professor from Toronto who became internationally famous in 2016 when he had the audacity to say that his government shouldn't mandate that people say certain words. And now, in response to protests from truckers and other "essential" workers who have survived COVID-19 while being required to work for the past two years (while their taxes supported everyone else staying home), the Canadian government is seizing the bank accounts of anyone connected to the protests. They're using laws intended for fighting terrorism to suppress political dissent. Police are reportedly going door to door among businesses in downtown Ottawa, the nation's capital, checking business licenses, driver's licenses, etc., and kicking people out--even people who aren't protesting--if the police don't feel that those people have a legitimate need to be there. The level of coercion that Canada is using to silence its people, to punish them for having spoken up in the first place, and to force them back to work is on a scale we typically associate with the likes of Vladimir Putin, not Justin Trudeau.

I once heard a story about a man who had come to the United States from Cuba, or perhaps from the Soviet Union. After he related how bad things had been in his home country, he said that Americans were in an even worse situation, because unlike the people in his country, Americans don't have anywhere to run to if tyranny rears its head here. But we did--Canada. I'm reminded of this story now, looking at how oppressive the Canadian government has become. It's true--we don't have any freer place to run away to anymore. The American people are backed into a corner. If our government tries to suppress us, our only options will be to comply or fight. Let's hope it never does anything so foolish.

Drop It Like It's Hot

 

I've noticed something that may be of interest to linguists or pop culture geeks. You know how there are some words that mean both one thing and its opposite? Like the word "sanction"--it can mean both to officially endorse, encourage, sponsor, etc., and to prohibit, discourage, or penalize. It can mean either officially allowing or officially disallowing. I don't know what these words are called, but if I were naming them, I might call them "autoantonyms."

Anyway, I've discovered a new one that's the result of evolving slang. I don't mean like how "bad" still retains its original definition in formal speech but means "good" in AAVE. This one has crept into usage among journalists. My wife suggested that perhaps it was just lingo peculiar to that field, but I'm seeing more widespread usage of it than just that.

The word is "dropped." It still retains its original definition of allowing something to physically fall (or causing it to fall). That hasn't changed. But in addition to that, we used to use "dropped" in a figurative way meaning "to abandon or discontinue," as in "The deadline for dropping classes without penalty is next Tuesday," or, "My boyfriend hit me, so I dropped him like a bad habit." (...which is kind of a weird expression itself, given that bad habits are not usually dropped suddenly or permanently.)

But the new figurative use means nearly the opposite. It means "to introduce, to present." I've heard pundits say, "The New York Times just dropped a headline..." which to me, means they retracted it, deleted it, refused to print it, or otherwise decided not to use it. But that's not the meaning the speaker intended. They meant, "The New York Times just published a headline," the idea being that "dropped" conveys a suddenness and powerful impact. This leads me to believe it may have come from "mic drop" or from a common origin with that expression.

Another example is one I just encountered in a magazine article. The author was telling a story about an online interaction with her friend. The friend sent her a link to a Substack, but she related this as "She dropped a link..."

I suppose in that sense, it might also come from video games. In many multiplayer games, you can't actually hand an item from your character to another player's character. To make such a transfer, you have to "drop" the item from your inventory, letting it fall on the ground, where it can then be picked up by someone else. So perhaps the author meant "dropped" in the sense of "She had this thing, but intentionally let it fall to the ground for me to find, like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs."

Disputing Reality

 

I'm active on a Quora group about homelessness, and one of the most frequent and maddening statements I find myself arguing against on there is "Most homeless people choose to be homeless. It's a lifestyle thing." I tell these people they're wrong. Most people who are homeless are so because they don't have enough money for housing. The reason I fight back is because it seems they're denying that involuntary poverty even exists, and my rage trigger is people contradicting empirical reality.

"You can't see me!"

 

It's like that old Judge Judy line, "Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." So many things coming from identetarians that I object to, and that cause other progressives to tag me as a conservative, are about this. Like when a black, multimillionaire politician says that they're oppressed and that a white welfare recipient living in a trailer park is oppressing them and has greater privilege. 

Patriarchy

 

Or when a criminal literally attempts to murder a police officer, they fight, the assailant loses, and then people say, "The police killed him for no reason but being black." 

 

"You're saying I did what now?"

 Or when a guy puts on a dress and people say, "He's an actual, biological woman now, he's always been a woman from the day he was born, and if you don't believe that, you're a bigot." There's this creepily Orwellian formula to it: 1) Make a false assertion that can be easily disproved, 2) Aggressively demand that others accept your assertion as reality, 3) Punish and ostracize anyone who refuses to accept it. 

 

"Right?"

 

It's like the Wokester version of the Spanish Inquisition. One of the big things the Inquisitors went after people for was blasphemy, and one of the articles of faith they insisted on was the transubstantiation of the Eucharist. For those who aren't theology geeks, that's the belief that the bread used in a Catholic mass to represent the body of Jesus during the sacrament of Communion (where they ritually re-enact the last meal Jesus had with his followers before his execution) literally, physically BECOMES the actual flesh of Jesus during the ritual, as opposed to just being a piece of bread that symbolizes his body. Another one was that they required everybody to believe that Mary was actually a virgin. 

 

 

Oh, hey, we were just talking about you.

 

 

These are pretty far-out things to expect a person who's not schizophrenic to believe, yet the Inquisitors were so insistent about it that they'd actually torture and kill anyone they didn't feel was sufficiently enthusiastic in the expression of their belief in these things. 

"This is your last chance--tell me I'm a pretty, blue pony and say it like you mean it!"

 

That's my top pet peeve. When a person (or worse, multiple people) who are completely unhinged from reality bully others into playing along with their self-serving delusions, I can't just ignore it. I paid attention to "The Emperor's New Clothes." You don't pretend to believe in bullshit just because powerful people insist on it.

So anyway...

LGBT folks are way overrepresented among the homeless. The explanation has always been that angry parents kick out their queer teenagers, leaving them homeless. I always accepted this narrative. I felt bad for the kids and felt resentment towards their parents.

But I'm seeing conversations among trans people on Twitter and there's this running theme of "My mom kept a picture of me from when I was a kid" or "My grandma deadnamed me" and so on--basically "My family regarded me as being the same person they've known my whole life"--followed by "...so I cut off my whole phobic family and haven't talked to any of them in years." This is met with much cheering and encouragement, and general disparagement of anyone who won't play along with their delusions.

I see a LOT of that. I've yet to run across a single account of "my parents kicked me out for not being what they wanted." I'm not saying that has never happened. I'm saying that, at least from what I'm seeing, the voluntary runaways vastly outnumber the ones who were put out of their parents' home onto the street against their will.

 

"Misery loves company. If you can't make peace with your own family, encourage other people to abandon theirs."

 

I recognize that my perception may be a bit skewed because of the possibility that the kids who are homeless might have less access to the internet. Maybe there's some hidden economic dynamic where the people who cut themselves off from their families voluntarily are more likely to have internet access, while the ones that were kicked out are less likely to. I'm not saying I think that's true or that I've seen any evidence of it--I'm just leaving the door open to the possibility of something I could be overlooking.

But it doesn't look that way. It seriously looks like they're the ones being jerks and making ultimatums, and then crying that they've been victimized when they haven't been. As I've told right-wingers for years, "No, not getting to force people to do what you say isn't a violation of your rights."

On one of these discussions, I saw trans people complaining about not being able to change their birth certificate in some states. Why on Earth would you change a birth certificate? The whole point of it is to make a permanent record of facts that actually happened. You were born in a certain place. Your parents were particular people. You were born at a definite time and date. In most cases, you were born with a clearly identifiable sex. None of these things change over time. Even if you get adopted, it doesn't change your genetics. History isn't to be erased and rewritten because we didn't like how it went. I'm 5'9". I can't just demand that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles change my driver's license to say I'm 6'4". I can't become a citizen of Canada just by changing my birth certificate to say that I was born in Ottawa. I'm 49 years old. I can't just have my vital records changed to say I'm 19. It doesn't matter how intensely I feel like a tall, young Canadian. I'm not one, and lying about it on official records is--and should be--a crime. 

" I identify as being 21. Gotta problem with that?"

So now I've got to reevaluate my position on whether most homelessness is really involuntary. I need actual data so I have numbers to crunch. Are most homeless people just really, really poor, or were they all kids who ran away from home because Grandpa called them by their birth name?