Rough draft of a piece I was writing about police oversight in September 2020

 There are a couple things that I've found particularly irksome in the discussion around police reform. Well, there are many, but there are two main ideas I'd like to talk about.

The first is one that has existed since long before this George Floyd business, and even predates Black Lives Matter. I believe I first noticed it--or at least I remember first being irritated by it--in a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Prior to that, I had developed a very favorable opinion of Gladwell when I read Outliers: The Story of Success. I thought him to be a wise and insightful man, able to probe past our usual, lazy assumptions and find answers in previously unexamined connections. 

(Outline) point 1: Gladwell seemed to think cops should have superhuman powers of perception, judgement, and speed. I find it to be a common belief that police officers, because of the training they go through, possess abilities and traits not found among mere mortals. Paradoxically, this belief is often made by the same people who decry police training as being inadequate, and the officers themselves as dullards and bullies who couldn't qualify for any other job. [Schoedinger's cop: simultaneously superhuman and an incompetent loser]

2. Perhaps because liberals (because--let's face it--that's who's leveling these criticisms) look at police officers as being intellectually and socially inferior to them, there's a tendency for those demanding reforms to engage in a bit of Dunning-Kruger miscalculation of their own ability to make useful recommendations.

An example of this is the widespread suggestion that there be a civilian review board to investigate alleged police misconduct, and that the members of this board be chosen by popular election. As far as I've heard, that's the only qualification required--simply to be voted in.

Suppose we used the same approach in investigating alleged bad practices in the work of surgeons, civil engineers, and airline pilots. Kevin the cashier and Tasha the daycare provider will determine whether Dr. Osaka made the most appropriate choice in deciding which surgical technique to use for a given patient's condition, just because they got the most votes. 

I'm not saying that Dr. Osaka shouldn't have any oversight. I'm saying that the overseers should be qualified. At a bare minimum, they should know as much about the situation as Osaka does. Preferably, they should know much more. They should be experts among experts.

Presently, in cases of alleged police brutality, that's how it's done. Initially, it's looked into by the officer's own supervisors. If that's not sufficient, it goes to an Internal Affairs investigation, or perhaps investigation by an outside agency. Evidence is examined--video, witness statements, injuries to the victim, the officer's testimony, etc. State and federal law are consulted, as well as department policies and procedures. Lawyers--people who know a hell of a lot more about the law than a cop does--will be involved. If it goes to trial, a judge--or a jury guided by a judge--will make the decision after hearing expert testimony from the people who train the police, so that there can be no question whether the officer did what he was supposed to do or whether he went outside his prescribed procedures.

The problem is that after a thorough examination of all the evidence, it's usually discovered that the officer acted correctly. That doesn't sit well with Kevin and Tasha, who, based on a media story and a gut reaction, decided that the officer was guilty. They wanted to see him lynched. They wanted blood, and when they don't get it, they declare that the whole legal system is corrupt and covering up for the police.

The situation we have now is that some public officials are more worried about re-election than justice, so they want to appease Kevin and Tasha by offering up the accused officer as a sacrificial lamb.

"Back in my day..."

Gather 'round and listen to an old man tell a tale of how things used to be. You old folks, too, as many of you seem to have forgotten.

I grew up during the Cold War, back when the Soviet Union was still a thing. It was the Eighties, so they had long since given up having children do "duck-and-cover" drills, but being vaporized by the USSR was always on our minds. We understood that if a launch occurred, we'd have 20 minutes warning, and the only thing a person could really do to help themselves in that 20 minutes was to try to make it close enough to Ground Zero to be vaporized rather than suffering a lingering death from radiation poisoning. The goths of that era, the New Wave fans, actually had a reason to think life was pointless, given that other people, over whom we had no control, could destroy the planet several times over in less time than it would take for us to drive home and say goodbye to our loved ones.

Back then, we had the conservative/liberal cultural divide, but it wasn't like it is now. After Nixon and the Vietnam War, and with the coming of age of the massive Boomer generation, the political pendulum swung far to the left. But then in the '70s, with Democrats in the White House, the economy tanked. Factories and mills shut down, leaving whole cities newly unemployed. Terrorists from the Middle East were kidnapping people, and the Dems couldn't seem to do anything about it. Our biggest cities had turned into cesspools of violent crime. The liberals were an embarrassing disappointment, so the country started swinging back to the right.

Even union Democrats voted for "Ronnie Ray Gun." They wanted someone who would punish the urban underclass for collecting welfare, execute all the criminals, and kick Russia's ass. Right-wingers sported T-shirts and bumper stickers with slogans like "Kill a Commie for Mommy." At that time, conservatives weren't styling themselves as rugged individualists going against the grain--just the opposite, in fact. Liberals were the avant garde nonconformists, while "conservative" meant just that--favoring old traditions and fashions, and finding change distasteful. The media (mostly controlled by liberals, then as now) depicted conservatives as being overly formal and stiff, the men always wearing ties, none of them daring to curse--that kind of thing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't remember where I was going with this three years ago, but maybe someone will enjoy reading this much of it. It was probably related to that one about summoning the aleax.

Bugging Out

A friend recently expressed concern on Facebook that it was too late to start "prepping." As I was responding, it occurred to me that others might find this helpful, so I'm sharing it here as an open letter. While not related to agriculture, I'm posting it here on the farm blog, as what follows may serve as the basis for a class we could have at the farm (or elsewhere). More than just a place that grows food, I want Woodland Urban Farm to be a place that teaches the community how to sustain itself--even if, as discussed below, that means leaving. If anybody would be interested in attending any classes, hands-on workshops, or discussion groups about this or similar topics, let me know, and I'll see what I can arrange.

---

If by "prepping," you mean living off the land or stockpiling enough supplies to allow you to ride out a long-term breakdown of supply chains, then you're right. The time to start was years ago. Your focus at this point should be on mobility. Here are some points to think about and plan around.

- If your subdivision became unsafe, where could you go right now with whatever vehicles, fuel, and money you can grab in five minutes? Could you stay there 24 hours? 72? A month or more?

- Think of four places--one each to the north, south, east, and west-- outside of central Ohio that you could go and stay for at least 72 hours.

 - If cars and buses weren't an option, how far could you move your family in an hour? In a day? Could you reach any of your safe places you listed above? Tips: Think bicycles & bike trailers; wheelbarrows/garden carts for little kids & gear; light boats to move on shallow waterways; animals that can be ridden or made to pull carts, bikes, etc. or carry packs. Not too many people around here are going to have horses, but some might have goats and many have dogs. In our location, look to Alum Creek to move south, and the Alum Creek Greenway Trail to move north or south (northeast or southwest, if you go far enough, as this trail is part of the Ohio to Erie Trail).

- How easily could you get out of the country if you needed to? Do all your family members have passports? What countries would let you in? How quickly could you get there? Could you do it without an airplane? Without a car? Do you have any safe places you could go once you got to your destination country?

 - Do you have enough of everything your family uses--food, water, toiletries, clothes, medications, etc.--on hand right now to sustain you all for two weeks? How quickly can you move it all into your car? Could you move it without a car? How far?

 - If you lost phone and internet service, do you have a means of communicating with any of the people at the safe places listed above to let them know you're coming? Do you have a way to leave messages for friends who might come looking for you? Can you do it without that information falling into the hands of unfriendlies?

- If your family is not all together (partner at work, kids at school, etc.) when you have to evacuate, how quickly and easily could you all rendezvous? If your children were to get separated from you while you're traveling, do they know how to find you or get found by you?

 

- How would you get around or through a roadblock? Assume you're outgunned.

- Are there other people you know who to whom you could entrust your children if necessary? Outside your neighborhood? Outside of central Ohio? Outside the country?

- Could you travel without being seen if you needed to? How far? How quickly? Consider this both with and without children, as there may be times when it's not safe to evacuate the whole family, but somebody needs to be able to get through with messages or supplies.

...and you can't always count on there being a heavily armed, 

donkey-riding, delivery man who steers with his teeth

- How far and fast can the slowest person in your family run? Don't count those small enough to be carried.

- How well can you defend yourself and your family from violence if firearms are not an option (weapons seized or broken, out of ammunition, etc.)? Tip: For thousands of years, wars were fought mostly by infantrymen armed with spears. How quickly are you capable of acquiring a pointy stick at least as long as your arm?

- Could your whole family sleep overnight in your vehicle(s)? If not, do you have camping gear sufficient for those who couldn't, and how quickly can you load it? Could you carry it without a car, while still carrying 10-days' worth of supplies for everyone? Can you build an improvised shelter that will accommodate your entire family?

---

Nobody I know that I can think of--including myself--is likely to score 100% on this. It's useful to think about it, though, both to mentally rehearse what you know you can do, and to identify those things that are more of a challenge and start thinking now about how you would deal with those situations if they arose.

If any of you run into any areas of particular concern, let me know, and we can work on coming up with answers. If there are skills you need to learn or practice, maybe we (local people) can put together some kind of hands-on training and get people together for a workshop.

Modern American Slavery, and a peek at Relearning Humanity and an upcoming YouTube channel

I've been noticing something lately. It isn't hidden. It's right out in the open, but I haven't seen anyone else drawing attention to it, so I'm wondering if nobody noticed.

We still have a slave class in America.

I'm not talking about prison labor, or illegal immigrants, or low-paid minorities, or even the euphemistically named "working class," which has come to mean the poor and/or blue-collar workers. (Have you ever wondered why a lawyer working 60 hours a week isn't considered to be "working class?")

I mean that our economic model boils down to "Obey your boss or starve."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I abandoned this post two years ago, but I've written so much about it since then...unfortunately, mostly lost to the bowels of Facebook and Quora. I have another whole blog devoted to this topic called "Relearning Humanity" that I apparently started way back in 2012 and only posted in sporadically for seven years. But I've recently decided to continue that theme as a YouTube channel. I've worked up storyboards for a few different videos I'd like to do, and I have a few other general concepts in mind.

I'm torn about the format. At least one of these videos would, I think, be done best as an animated short, probably with a voiceover narration. But that would require me to learn computer animation, which requires a good, functional computer and a whole lot of time, at a point in my life where there are too many other demands on my time. So the desire to make this perfect keeps me from doing anything at all.

I notice that most of the YT channels I watch regularly are just a person talking into a camera. Sometimes they're playing a fictional character or wearing a costume, but it's still mostly talking heads speaking to a camera. That's easiest, and I notice that these people put out a larger volume of content on a more frequent basis than animators and other YT filmmakers do. (Editing takes time!) So on the one hand, I really love the idea for this channel and want to take time to "do it right" and produce quality content, even if it's only just a few videos at first. But then, I see that if I want to get the message out quickly AND get more eyes on it by releasing videos on such a frequent basis that watching them becomes a habit for people, I need to just do it. 

One thing I don't like about that idea, though, is that I don't really want to make it about me. I want these ideas to take off and gain traction without becoming a cult of personality, or conversely, being dragged down by my own personal lack of charm and aesthetics. I'm a fat, cranky, dour-looking, pushing-50 man with perpetually messy hair, broken teeth, glasses that would glare into a camera, a stained wardrobe, and a voice made for print media. After enduring a half-century of in-person trolling, I'm not looking forward to putting my mug out there to catch everyone's ad hominem attacks and luring the occasional stalker to my home...or pouring my heart and soul into this and then nobody but my closest friends ever even looks at it.

So however I do eventually go about it, I want to get this message out that you don't have to have a boss, and that if you do choose to have a boss, there are things you can do to make yourself less dependent on that relationship for your basic necessities. I want to show people how to do that, how to "buy their freedom," so to speak. Think of it as a mash-up between "Your Money or Your Life," "The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving," dozens of books on homesteading and bushcraft that I've read over the past 40 years or so, and my own life experience up to this point. Part theory, part practical skills, and maybe, if the channel starts making enough money to justify traveling, actually going around interviewing people who've made the jump to living off grid, starting their own business, going mortgage-free, becoming independently wealthy, and otherwise telling their boss to take their job and shove it.

Summoning the Aleax

As I've observed politics and social discourse over the past 25 years or so, the thing that I think unsettles me most is the increasing prevalence of alignment shift. I'm not talking about a mechanical problem in the front end of your car, nor about changing alliances. I'm talking about "alignment" as the word is used in Dungeons & Dragons.

For those unfamiliar with the game, Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game where players assume the role of a character which they guide through an adventure of fighting monsters and searching for treasure, guided by a "dungeon master" who serves as part story-teller, part referee. Each player has a paper called a "character sheet" that lists their character's skills, equipment, and basic characteristics. Among these characteristics is one called "alignment" that describes the guiding values by which a character tells the difference between right and wrong. There are nine possible alignments, plotted along two axes. One axis is good-evil, and the other is lawful-chaotic. This means a character may be one of the following: lawful-good, lawful-neutral, lawful-evil, neutral-good, true neutral, neutral-evil, chaotic-good, chaotic-neutral, or chaotic-evil.

This acknowledgement of a difference between conformity and morality was one of the novel features that set the game apart from others that simply cast players as either heroes or villains. Robin Hood, who broke the law to commit acts of justice and mercy, would be a well-known example of the chaotic-good alignment, while a government official who strictly enforces the letter of the law to cause pain and suffering would be an example of lawful-evil.

In politics, people's worldviews are often described by a similar, two-axes method, with one axis being left-right, and the other being authoritarian-libertarian. In my youth, leftist authoritarians were practically non-existent in this country. From what I could see at the time, the leftists were hippies. They wanted to exist outside of systems of authority, in egalitarian communes where everyone could "do their own thing." They saw themselves as rebels against "the Establishment" or "the System" or "the Man," because at that time, the centers of power were all controlled by people acting on conservative, right-wing values. The people trying to hang onto old, traditional views and the people using violence, poverty, and prison to oppress minorities were one and the same. It went without saying at the time that if someone believed in empowering minorities, they also took a casual or even oppositional approach to rules and mores. The idea of a leftist being a totalitarian was alien, something that existed only in other countries or before my time. If we were taught about them at all, it was only to tell us that they were bad and scary.

As the Boomers grew older and took control of those centers of power, things started to change. The same hippy-leftist vs. totalitarian-right narrative was still dominant, because that's how the people controlling the message saw the world. But at the same time, these hippies-cum-power-brokers started to edify their worldview through force of law. Laws were passed to punish those who made life hard for anyone the left saw as an underdog. Feminism and political correctness became the official orthodoxy on college campuses. The environment was protected, not just by protests and boycotts anymore, but by government agencies wielding power.

----------------------------------------------------------------

And that's where I abandoned this post over nine months ago, for whatever reason. Anyway, in Dungeons & Dragons, there's a little-known monster called an aleax that a character's god can send to punish the character for straying off alignment. Say an evil character had started being much too kind, helpful, heroic, and self-sacrificing for good causes. The evil deity that character worships would send this "angel of punishment" called an aleax to attack the character. It looks exactly like the character, and only the character can see or touch it. The aleax would fight the character to the death, as I remember. If the aleax killed the character, that was that. They were dead and presumably punished in the afterlife. If the character prevailed, though, and killed the aleax, they'd be given a second chance. I think the lore was that the character would be taken into the realm of their god to serve them for a year or something like that. Then they'd return to the mortal realm supposedly reformed and ready to play in a manner consistent with the alignment listed on their character sheet.

What I was getting at here was the idea that these hippies-turned-tyrants need the hippie god to send some aleaxes down to smite their asses and put them back on the love, peace, and do-your-own-thing path.

Umberto Eco's 14 Points of Fascism, and How They Describe the American "Left"

Before we begin, I'd like to clarify something. The title of this post refers to "the American Left," but that's a really poor descriptor for a group with no accurate name, a group I have dubbed "the Wokesters." It is not a reference to the Democratic Party, though the party often (insincerely) uses language that appeals to Wokesters in order to solicit their support. Nor am I referring to actual economic leftists, who favor some kind of egalitarian politics somewhere along the axis between Marxism and capitalism tempered by strong unions and an effective, compassionate social safety net. Most Wokesters would say they subscribe to such views, but plenty of other people who also do aren't Wokesters.

"Wokesterism" isn't about economic policy so much as it's about using stereotypes to split the population into The Oppressors and The Opressed, and taking a militant position against the Oppressors. Some have called this "Cultural Marxism" because of its emphasis on the downtrodden overthrowing the powerful, but Marx saw revolution as cyclical. The victims overthrow the tyrants, and eventually become tyrants themselves, only to then be overthrown by the people they oppressed. But in the worldview of Wokesters, the first tyrants are forever tryants, even if they're eventually enslaved, and the original victims are forever victims, forever incapable of evil. (If you think about it for a moment, you can see how this is probably the thinking that leads the victorious victims to become tyrants in the first place.)

Though this school of thought appears to have had its origins in third-wave (or "intersectional") and radical feminism, I believe it is more properly described as a postmodernist, second wave of anti-racism. To perhaps oversimplify it a bit, but in the interest of brevity, we can describe the thesis of Wokesterism as basically being, "Straight, white men are the root cause of all evils in the world. Even when people of color or LGBTQ+ people victimize each other, it's because of conditions created by straight, white men. The proof of this is that some individuals who see themselves as victims feel like it's so. Not only is that all the proof that's required, anyone who questions the veracity or objectivity of subjective, anecdotal evidence is committing further acts of aggression against the victims. Anyone who disagrees is a Nazi who must be silenced, shunned, and destroyed."

The first wave of anti-racism is the colorblind sort that prevailed in the Civil Rights era and persisted through the 1980s. It is perhaps best typified in the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote,

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Gen-Xers were raised on this idea, with everyone from our teachers to the characters of Sesame Street indoctrinating us to accept that a person's race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or disability is completely irrelevant to their value as a human being. We were taught to accept that the "wrapper" a person came in didn't determine what kind of person they were, and that it was evil to think otherwise. We saw the attempts by previous generations to grant or deny privileges based on these superficial characteristics as being both evil and absurd.

But this second wave, Wokesterism, defies and criticizes that idea. They say that in order for justice to be done, the injured parties and the perpetrators must be identified. That sounds reasonable on its face, but through the lens of postmodernist subjectivity, the injured parties and perpetrators are whomever the Wokesters feel like naming. They assign both blame and martyr status, not according to the objectively identifiable, documentable acts of individuals, but rather by prejudiced feelings about entire races, ethnic groups, etc. Wokesters claim that colorblindness perpetuates racism, while the first-wave anti-racists see Wokesterism as blatantly racist.

Now that that's out of the way, let's dig into Eco's 14 points*, and how the Wokesters are rushing to embody them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

To Wokesters, "Whitey" was the bad guy in the 1400s, he's still the bad guy now, and he always will be the bad guy, no matter what he might do to atone. One often hears opinions on reparations prefaced by, "While, of course, no amount of money could ever possibly be enough make up for the horrors of slavery...". If amends can never be made, why try? What good does it do? What's the point, other than to punish one class of people for things they never did while feeding the sadism and sense of entitlement of people who see themselves as victims for sins that were committed decades before they were born? True progressivism would seek forward movement--"We correct this injustice, and then we move on to the better reality we've created." But Wokesterism doesn't actually want progress. They just want power to switch from one group of bullies to another, and for the new regime to be the status quo forever more. They wish to create a new tradition of straight, white, male submission.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Umberto Eco, as a 20th century professor and novelist, was understandably focused on the fascism of 20th-century Europe when he wrote these points. Modernism was avant garde during the reigns of Hitler and Mussolini. The Nazis rejected Modernism because it attacked the romantic visions of the past that the Nazis found inspirational. But Postmodernism also rejects Modernism. Postmodernism elevates the subjective and outright denies the objective. Ironically, though, Wokesters accept certain subjective perceptions as Absolute Truth, while opposing views are condemned as heresy. The determining variable at first appears to be the identity of the person expressing their perception. But it's not even really about that. It's about adherence to Woke dogma. The moment a woman criticizes feminism, or a black person says they don't feel oppressed, the Wokesters turn on them. Suddenly, that individual's "truth" is invalid. This adherence to their own orthodoxy is the establishment of a new tradition, one vigorously defended as the only morally acceptable one.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.

On May 25th, 2020, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd for no apparent reason other than to callously defy the crowd of onlookers who were pleading with him to stop strangling Floyd. The rational, modernist view would say that this was a crime committed by one man against another man. Chauvin is the guilty party, and Chauvin should be punished for what Chauvin did. It might further allow that Chauvin had supervisors in the Minneapolis Police Department who also bore some responsibility for having allowed this to happen. Fair enough. The top of that chain of command is the Mayor of Minneapolis, or perhaps even the Governor of Minnesota. 

But that summer, we saw riots nationwide. Wokesters attacked police and smashed the windows of homes and businesses that had no connection to Chauvin whatsoever. Banging a hammer against a piece of metal here in Columbus, Ohio, is not going to fix a malfunctioning engine in China, and throwing bricks at police officers here isn't going to do a blessed thing to cause Minneapolis to change its police policies and practices. But that's logic, and postmodernists abhor logic. Their thinking was, "We're mad, we deserve to lash out, and you have no business criticizing how we choose to express ourselves." 

Wokesters use this same rationale to justify their seemingly aimless (but always authoritarian) actions regarding gun control, environmentalism, diversity, and the suppression of iconography that they find offensive.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism.

Put more plainly, Eco said that fascists regard disagreement as treason. We see this every time a feminist Wokester attempts to silence disagreement with her flimsily supported rants by accusing critics of "mansplaining." The mere fact that words are spoken by men is regarded as evidence that the words are wrong and invalid.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

This is a funny one, because Wokesters believe that they hold diversity to be the highest virtue. But as I pointed out earlier, they only tolerate diversity within the confines of their orthodoxy. In fact, the diversity they tolerate is only aesthetic. They don't tolerate any true difference in opinion. They regard "whiteness" as a sin. The mere existence of families formed around cisgendered, heterosexual couples is seen as deeply harmful. They're very clear about which people they find acceptable and which ones they don't.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

Read any fascist, anti-semitic propaganda and simply replace the word "Jews" with "billionaires," "corporations," "the One Percent," "Trumpers," "white men," "cops," or "Christians," and you'll find it's indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Wokesters.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.