Invitation to a Beheading

Ironically this post of mine from 2011 turns out to be--I mean ironically because it's one of the I guess many in which I say out loud that I really don't know what I'm doing here--one of the more compelling points for the position that doing whatever I was (uh, have been?) doing in this thing over the years was (uh ... is?) not a complete and utter waste of time. (I mean of my time, no guarantees expressed or implied about anyone else's, quite the opposite in fact I'm sure.) Which is to say I'm glad to have this record that I was irritated by Mark Carney, for a vague mist of reasons that have a lot to do with why I will still never vote for anyone in his ballpark unless it somehow comes down to a stark choice between them and the outright bad shit to their right (which reminds me again what a horrendous idea separating the executive from the legislature turns out to be in practice: the economic events of the last week or so are awfully reminiscent of those that led to the lettuce's outlasting Liz Truss, but the American way of electing a king means cooler heads (!!--nice job brain if you somehow did that unconsciously on purpose) simply cannot prevail in their case), going on fourteen years ago. (It's also interesting to look back at that time and see that Carney in Canada was on the leading edge of a watershed in monetary policy: it turned out you could nail interest rates at 0 indefinitely and not cause significant inflation. It's also funny in that regard that my irritation with Carney had to do with his frustration that his low interest rate policy was having too much effect on the demand side, not by increasing inflation (except in housing prices; arguably Canada is still stuck in the Carney housing bubble) but by increasing consumer debt to dangerous levels, when what he was really after was to stimulate supply. And interestingly also you now see progressive economists like Jim Stanford arguing that raising interest rates has an inflationary effect, not only in an obvious way by raising the cost of carrying debt but in a, well, also obvious but traditionally underacknowledged way, namely by stifling supply across the board. Which is to say, I guess, everyone is a supply-sider now (although Stanford for a long time worked for the Canadian Auto Workers/Unifor, and no one in labour is so bought into the supply side of things as autoworkers.)) [ETA: one other funny thing about that 2011 post: the reference to savings accounts, which--in the sense meant there, which is the sense that "savings accounts" has had for most of the history of that term--are things that just don't seriously exist anymore. I keep thinking these days, this lately is (isn't it?) the first serious stock market decline in which most everyone who has "savings" has them largely in the stock market. That, you would think, would have certain practical implications.]

What I've been meaning to write up in here for a couple of months now is something on Foucault and neoliberalism, after finally having been compelled by uh all this to read his neoliberalism lectures from the late '70s. The basic points, at least off the top of my head right now, that I would want to address if I ever got around to it (beyond the meta-point that Foucault may not be the guy you necessarily want to get this history from; contrary to his reputation among people who know nothing about him he's an extraordinarily meticulous scholar, but he's also a rather extreme and meandering generalist (so much for "the specific intellectual" eh)) are these:

1. Neoliberalism in its roots is not the political morality, founded on a commitment to a certain conception of freedom, which it has manifested as since Thatcher and Reagan but a political economics, founded on (a) a skeptical epistemology of political economy (just like the more specific 20th-century "neoconservatism" with its "unintended consequences", with which "neoliberalism" was confusingly synonymous before "neoconservatism" was convoluted into meaning "supporting the Iraq war"), on which rests (b) the central practical principle that prices set by competition (not necessarily "free" competition, as freedom is sometimes in conflict with competition, such that the state has to intervene to ensure a sufficiently competitive economy--this finally explained to me why, as I learned to my puzzlement in the '90s, certain figures on the otherwise apparently libertarian right were in favour of things like antitrust laws) being the means to the most efficient production and distribution of goods and services in the interests of serving the prosperity of the state as a whole.

2. "There is no socialist governmentality." I suspect Foucault said this as a provocation meant to provoke something like "what about China" as a response from his students, but he also means it completely seriously, and while I would have to put some effort into unpacking what it means, it has shaken my view of what's possible in the "West" or whatever we are now calling whatever that is that we are calling something like that. There's a bunch of scholarship about whether or not Foucault himself became a neoliberal and a promoter, however ambiguously, of neoliberalism in the late '70s and clearly if that question were to be put to him directly, and he were to answer it directly, he would say we are all neoliberals now.

3. As a specific aspect of that Foucault addresses the question why Marxist arguments about the exploitation of labour have no purchase on labourers in the West: he says this is because they don't conceive of themselves as natural possessors of labour power forced to sell it for less than it's worth but as entrepreneurs who reap returns on investments made in themselves. I don't know that this is necessarily the right way of putting things at all let alone the whole story, but something like this is something.

The funny thing about points 2 and 3 is that they tie in directly to my first plan for my MA thesis on Foucault, about how socialist or whatever revolution in the West was impossible without a different kind of--in Foucault's term--subjectivation. Of course, as a 22-year-old theoretical political radical what I wanted to do was to figure out how to carry out that different kind of subjectivation. Which I'm pretty sure Foucault would have thought was pretty dumb.

No you fell asleep in my chair

The Does-Anyone-Know-What-Day-It-Is Edition!

You know the drill: time to get fueling!

But first: time to carve the muse....

Before it gets too far away: I concluded my Lenten bible-reading this year with the gospel of John and I noticed another one of those things that hit you like a hammer that's previously somehow gone right through you unresisted: the story of Jesus healing the blind man in chapter 9 starts with a bit where the disciples ask him whether the man himself or his parents sinned so that he was born blind, which is an obviously weird question that John misdirects you from, Plato-style, by having Jesus say neither, he was born blind so that the workings of God can show themselves in him. I've noticed the weird question before but what I hadn't noticed is that immediately before that, at the end of the preceding chapter, "the Jews" are about to stone Jesus because he has said, in response to their asking how Abraham could be glad to see him doing his stuff as he has told them Abraham is, "before Abraham was born, I am". This is one of several times in the gospel of John that Jesus invokes God's "I am" from the burning bush in reference to himself. The whole end of chapter 8 has to do with the wibbly-wobbliness of God-time, eternity, the time which not only God/Jesus but all who "believe" inhabit (another repeated phrase in John: "an hour is coming, and has come"), and chapter 9 picks right up again with that. (It goes on to have Jesus say that he has come to make the blind see and the seeing blind, and it turns out that being able to see is a curse (analogous to how people from Joshua to Paul say that being under the Mosaic law is a curse) because only those who can see can sin. Well... then.)

But absolutely the most Plato moment in the whole bible is when Jesus says to his guys in chapter 16 that he has spoken to them in "figurative language" (as the NASB translates παροιμίαις, which you could literally translate as "beside-the-ways") but "an hour is coming" when he'll speak plainly--and they immediately say, oh, now we know you're speaking plainly! Oh no, oh no, oh well.

Seems like about time for another bird round-up, so hey why not fly in the face of the current fashion of doing year-in-review things at least two weeks before the end of the year (I'm not sure to what extent Spotify is to blame for this but I am definitely blaming Spotify) and do a year-in-review thing of the actual year. (If we had an actual culture in our society we would be well on our way to instituting a year-end uh Saturnalia in which nothing you do counts because it's outside the scope of all years-in-review and so will never have officially happened.) Anywut, how about let's do my top 15 birds of 2023, by number of ebird checklists they appeared on (with their places on my last all-time top-15 round-up in brackets):

1. Black-capped chickadee, 351 (1)
2. American goldfinch, 330 (2)
3. White-breasted nuthatch, 270 (3)
4. Downy Woodpecker, 249 (8)
5. American Crow, 201 (5)
6. Hairy Woodpecker, 178 (6)
T7. Blue Jay, 167 (4)
T7. Common Raven, 167 (9)
9. Mourning Dove, 139 (7)
10. American Robin, 119 (10)
11. Red-eyed vireo, 101 (12)
12. Purple Finch, 97 (11)
13. Eastern Phoebe, 93 (13)
14. Chipping Sparrow, 83 (-)
15. Red-breasted nuthatch, 68 (-)

Birds in the previous top 15 not in this one: ruby-throated hummingbird (14) and dark-eyed junco (15), but they were 16th and 17th in 2023, right behind red-breasted nuthatch with 66 and 65, so. Song sparrow was 18th at 64, and then brown creeper 19th at 59 but coming on strong because I learned (sort of, I will have to re-learn) to pick out their songs and calls this year, and, y'know, they're creepy, so they're a lot easier heard than seen (although their creeping is pretty distinctive if you notice it--for some reason, unlike nuthatches, the smaller red-breasted ones of which you could otherwise easily mistake them for at a distance, they only creep upward).

Downy woodpecker jumped way up the list last year, and leapfrogged hairy woodpecker, apparently because they presumably randomly happened to nest near the house so were around consistently through the summer. Mourning dove continued to slide in the early part of the year but has started coming back lately to the point of becoming a near-daily regular again. Blue jays I'm guessing ebbed with their food supply; apparently it was a great year for acorns a couple of years ago--well, I guess 2020/21, before the dreaded moths-formerly-known-as-the-thing-they-were-formerly-known-as (which suffered a plague after wreaking most of their destruction in 2022 and were not a thing in 2023) showed up en masse--and there's lots of oak trees around here. Chipping sparrows, probably I've just gotten better at picking out their calls, but also maybe they've been randomly nesting around here more the last couple of years.

Birds I recorded on ebird for the first time in 2023: surf scoter, cliff swallow (in Detroit), least flycatcher, mourning warbler, willow flycatcher, magnolia warbler, Lincoln's sparrow, green heron (in Buffalo), bohemian waxwing, Cooper's hawk, and snow bunting. Of those, Cooper's hawk I had almost surely seen before but hadn't learned to ID (and specifically to differentiate from sharp-shinned hawk); there was a family nesting a ways back in the bush from the house last summer. Snow bunting I had definitely seen at least once before, before I was ebirding; bohemian waxwings I'd seen and IDed on two pre-ebird occasions. Of the rest, green heron is the only one I'd guess I'd never seen or heard before (and oddly for a heron it was in a tree when I saw it); surf scoter I think I may possibly have IDed once some years ago; the others aren't particularly rare so there's a good chance they've been around me without my having any way of knowing it.

So them's the birds, ayup.

I just realized I got confused about what year it is today and thought it's 2024. LOOK I'M BASICALLY 50. Why did I open this though, uhhhh... fuck I have completely forgotten, but at least I have switched to Mill Street Organic, please stand by.

The other day I re-read Stephen Mitchell's introduction to his translation (or whatever it is, maybe it's an actual translation, maybe he reads Hebrew, I don't know) of the book of Job... the thing I always remember about it is the idea that Satan disappears because Satan is assimilated back into God but it turns out that idea is Carl Jung's? And is sort of mentioned only in passing. Anyway the thing about Mitchell is--well, if you've heard of Stephen Mitchell it's probably something to do with Eastern philosophy. I first heard of him when I bought his tranlation (or whatever it is, I don't kthink it's an actual translation) of the Tao Te Ching some thirty years ago (it was probably ten years later that I bought Ursula Le Guin's not-translation of the Tao Te Ching, which familiarized me with the concept (Heidegger did it too, in German, of Chuang Tzu maybe?--not "published" and presumably never will be (ugh but when they run out of other stuff in his desk drawers they probably will), but given all the HEAVY HEAVY stuff we all know Heidegger says about language, isn't it amazing he produced versions of texts in languages he didn't read, maybe that might be some indication y'all oughta lighten up, I dunno), but it was only sometime in the last few years that I learned that Mitchell doesn't actually read all the languages of the books he produces "translation" of either. Um I got lost in the parenthesis there, sorry, I am drunk, uh... but where have we strayed to? Oh right: Mitchell I guess is basically Buddhist or something, anyway, he seems to be saying that the point of Job is that nothing matters, fucking Buddhist nihilism, EXCEPT: ... ??? ...that all of that tremendous suffering is exactly to demonstrate to Job that... THIS! WHAT???

I mean I still don't buy it. Fuck that. No really, fuck that. You don't need to go through all that to get to that point. Whatever paltry but soul-shattering painful shit I have gone through did not get me to that. I got to that when I was twelve years old or whatever lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. Seriously. And then I forgot about it, "in the grip of an ideology". And then I remembered again. And suffering DISTRACTS EVERYONE FROM IT. So fuck that shit.

But I mean I take the point, sure, maybe Buddhism has a point, I don't know, sure, maybe, I dunno. Fuck it though.

Good thing the clocks go back tonight cuz I'm feeling late for no good reason at all. Well, maybe because I'm sleepy (uh oh) but the clocks going back aren't going to help with that. Unless... I believe hard enough? Anyway, got the fire going, and gone straight to the big guns this year, starting with Writers' Tears. Now let's manifest that muse....

There's a thing people I otherwise generally like and respect on the left keep saying that bugs me, which goes like this: "Food prices are too high because grocery chains are taking too much profit." It doesn't bug me if it's said in contrast to something like "food prices are high because supply-chain issues have raised costs for grocers"--in that context, it's correct, and a good point (and maybe a corrective to my tending to think that doing things like escalating trade wars with China is going to lead to a lot more inflation[1]). It bugs me when it's said (more or less implicitly, because the more explicitly it's said the more apparently nonsensical it is) in contrast to the idea that inflation generally and food inflation in particular is caused by people having too much money to spend, and the way to remedy that is to indirectly take money out of people's pockets, mainly by raising interest rates (which will theoretically, among other consequences, increase unemployment). It bugs me in that case because it boils down to saying that what's causing high food prices is not that people are paying grocers too much for their groceries but that grocers are being paid too much by people for their groceries.

For corporations (which are always seeking to maximize profits!--"corporate greed" is a feature of capitalism; treating it as a special character flaw is nonsense, and moralizing about it is, in principle, silly, even if it's not generally good for business if your customers are mad at you) to make their "excess profits", two things need to be the case. (1) People have to have the money to fund those profits. If people actually couldn't afford groceries, prices would come down, especially since the high profit margins mean there's room for grocers to lower prices and still make a profit (i.e., grocers are not currently close to being faced with a dilemma between selling at a loss and not selling at all). (2) There isn't enough competition among grocers to force profit margins down. Thinking through this part of it I realize that the trouble is that competition has to be artificially created because the effect of competition is to lower profits overall; companies merge (there are deceptively many grocery store brands, as opposed to companies, in Canada, and it strikes me now that part of the appeal for companies of maintaining multiple brands must be that it fosters an illusion of competition) in part because they're more profitable when they're not competing against each other. And while it's relatively easy for governments to mandate the continuation of currently existing competition (see, currently: telecom providers in Canada, book publishers in the US), it's very difficult (after the great break-up of the state-owned or state-protected monopolies around the 1980s) to mandate the creation of new competition (see: telecom providers in Canada). Under neoliberal conditions governments will only try to do so indirectly by removing barriers to new competitors entering the market, which may or may not be effective in the short term and any effectiveness of which will fade over time unless governments actively prevent the merger of new competitors with the companies with which they compete. Anyway, there's only so much removing barriers you can do before you're out of significant barriers to remove (never mind that there might be good policy reasons for some barriers).

A much less crude, much more direct, maybe more effective way, I'd imagine with fewer unintended consequences, of achieving the desired effect of controlling inflation by reducing the money supply would be tax increases. From a policy perspective the ideal thing would be to target tax increases at relatively wealthy over-spenders who can more easily afford to take the hit. In practice, finding a nimble way to pull off the targeting might be impossible, but the reason it just isn't done at all, targeted or otherwise, is that deliberately making people poorer is not very good for your prospects of remaining in government (in fact, speaking generally, nobody thinks they can afford to take any hit; you don't have to read any paper or whatever for very long to notice that lots of people making well into six figures feel like they're barely scraping by); if you're in government, especially a democratic government, you'd better offload that job to the supposedly apolitical central bank (although the supposition that central banks are apolitical has been under attack from the left since at least the '80s, and now since Trump is also under attack from the right (such that centre-lefties now have to be careful to criticize central banks without undermining them altogether such that national currencies are replaced with bitcoin or whatever and governments are put right out of the economics business)). But if you're the kind of lefty who won't go so far as to advocate tearing capitalism right down, all you can really do is make that political non-starter of an argument--which is different from the argument that you need to tax the wealthy more heavily in order to fund whatever social goods, or even to rebalance economic power so that the very wealthy can't control the means of political discourse etc.: the argument you need to make with regard to inflation is that you need to tax the relatively wealthy (including a very large number of relatively politically active people who very much do not regard themselves as wealthy) simply so that they have less money to spend--or else just, more or less uselessly [2], moralize about it.

[1] This is obviously a major problem, though, and may indirectly contribute to food inflation: if there are Chinese-made things you would have bought except they're either unaffordably priced or unavailable because we're having a trade war with China, then you now have the money you would have spent on those things available to spend on other things, such as groceries. Actually the more I think about this the less obvious it is that any correction is needed to my tendency to blame inflation mainly on supply pressures due to the breakdown of globalization (which I have mixed feeling about for a variety of reasons (though trying to grow my own food has done a lot to beat my localist prejudices out of me)).

[2] Again with the caveat that it's not generally good for business if your customers are mad at you, though if they still want what you're selling, can't get it from anyone they're not also mad at, and would rather pay what you're charging than not have it, how much difference is it going to make?

--
Currently under my porch: 0.7. Currently at Belmont Lake: 1.1. High there today: 1.3. Supposed to get our first real cold of the winter tomorrow night, but then back to slop again next week... looking like we might get through January without touching -20.

Science reporter: did you ever wonder how x does y? Let's ask this scientist!

Scientist: here are some things we know about x! Given these things, x could do y by z! But we haven't tested z, we don't know.

Science reporter: x does y by z! 🤯 But that's only a hypothesis. BUT ISN'T THIS COOL, X DOES Y BY Z

Public: DID YOU KNOW x does y by z