Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of internet culture emphasize the informality or (more judgmentally) the vulgarity of our promiscuous messages. These communications, in their ease, inexpensiveness, and abundance, suffer less pressure than before to be or seem important, meaningful, or definitive—in other words, to last in our minds. In their clamorous competition with one another, they more often strive to be the first noticed…. TV [has nothing] on porn sites or the comments sections of blogs when it comes to the solicitation of lust or anger….

I have noticed that it’s of no great use telling myself, when I go online, that I should muster my willpower against the sirens of amusement, distraction, and curiosity. I do better at not spending too much time at my computer if I remind myself how comparatively shallow and irregular my enjoyment of the internet is. The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online.

From a review by Benjamin Kunkel in n+1 magazine of three new books on our uneasy relationship with the internet [via Arts and Letters Daily].

I resisted getting a computer until 2002. I say “resisted” because there were so many cheerleaders singing the praises of the internet. It’s my ornery nature, to resist embracing something that is supposedly great — I don’t like having something shoved at me, great or not — but that, it seemed to me at the time, was focused on interests that were not my own. Like, for example, at least in its earliest days, a near-universal fascination with technological innovation for its own sake. Technology is just a tool, it should be used in the interest of creating something more thought-provoking or more beautiful than what was available before, with older technology. Like, uh, pen and paper. (What would Shakespeare have done if he had had access to the internet? Would he have written even better plays, sparked by the wealth of available inspiration, or would he have frittered away his time posting updates on Twitter and videotaping his cat’s antics for YouTube?)

The truth is there’s plenty of thought-provoking substance on the internet. It’s just that it’s so easy and alluring to be tempted away by the flashy and silly. When I was less aware that this was somewhat of a given, a couple of years ago, I got sucked in but felt guilty about it. I found that given the choice of slogging through another depressing and upsetting article on economic inequality, or chiming in on a ridiculous and hilarious discussion, going on in real time and right at my fingertips, about which hair color best suits Billie Joe, I chose… guess?

I can’t count how many online videos and photos of Green Day I’ve looked at. Probably hundreds. I’m glad they’re posted here, on the ole interwebs, but looking at them quickly becomes a compulsion, only because it’s hard not to sate my curiosity when I know something is out there and I haven’t seen it yet. When I was a fan of Green Day in 1994, and no less obsessed than I am now, which I should be — but am not (okay, maybe a little) — embarrassed to admit, I had their music and nothing else, except for the occasional magazine article. I didn’t (and don’t) have cable so I didn’t even see their videos on MTV. But I never felt that I was missing out. My enjoyment of the band was much more personal and therefore more satisfying. Now, (no) thanks to the internet, enjoying Green Day has become an emotional minefield.

Which brings me to the second and central issue about the internet: it’s crowded with people that I wouldn’t normally have ever come in contact with. That seems like a good thing in theory, but so many seem to be brimming with anger and self-righteous stupidity. Or at least that’s the side of themselves that they choose to bring out when they come online. That’s nothing new of course, but steering clear of it has been harder than I would have expected.

My own experience with the online world is similar to what Kunkel describes, but its most defining feature has not been boredom or distraction, nor annoyance at the shameless bids for my attention, though I have certainly contended with plenty of that. It’s been getting sucked in by the emotional vortex: making connections with people I would never have known in real life and naively thought I could connect with in spite of our fairly large differences, which now strikes me as a mistake begging to happen.

In the early days of the internet, probably because it was a new medium and people were more wary of it, there was an understanding that relationships formed online were unreliable. It might have been unfounded paranoia about internet stalkers, or a vague fear of unseen weirdos who could hide behind their computer screens and pretend to be something they were not. But as the internet became more familiar, the people populating it began to seem less sinister, or not at all sinister, since they were the same people you might see every day at the store or dropping off their kids at school.

But getting to know someone online leaves out an essential element of actually getting to know a person, the part where you can see how they carry themselves when they’re around you, or when they interact with others. In real life, I doubt I would have befriended housewives who refer to Billie Joe Armstrong as “fucktacular”, especially if they also have disturbing right-wing points of view. But on the internet it seemed like harmless fun. And, here’s the rub: I didn’t want to be judgmental. Is there a phenomenon like white-liberal guilt that could be called “liberal-intellectual guilt”? I don’t want to be a snob. I don’t want to look down on someone because they are not terribly smart or open-minded (that alone seems like a terrible thing to say). But the truth is I don’t know what to do with someone who is intransigent in their ignorance and holds onto it like a badge of honor. I am a snob. Maybe I just need to accept that, and suffer much less heartache.

There’s a nice article on Dissident Voice that gets to some of the basics of why the world is so unbelievably screwed up.

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste…. In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a “market failure.” It is the way the system works…. The devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism’s continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

Yet the people who say these basic and obvious things seem like tiny voices in the wilderness. Even left leaning news and opinion blogs tend to expend all their energy battling minutia. Of course the mainstream press is reprehensible. Of course the openly right-wing press is even more so. Why bother to give them any importance by discussing them at all? The reason why billions of people are struggling and the earth is becoming despoiled is not because of something Rush Limbaugh, or someone else of his ilk, said or did. He’s monstrous, but if he and his blowhard cronies were somehow eliminated, the system would continue its path of destruction utterly unfazed. Those chattering people and the manufactured issues they bring up are just a distraction.

I don’t entirely agree with the premise of even this article, but I won’t go into a critique that would be in any case out of my depth. I don’t entirely think that socialism is the solution, though it’s far and away preferable to what we have now. But its indictment of capitalism is, it seems to me, right on the money. The environmental destruction it brings is only its most tangible and quantifiable manifestation. The exploitation of not just nature but also of humans is perhaps harder to quantify. In wealthy nations, in particular, people are not only the exploited but also the exploiters. Globally, the vast majority of people are undoubtedly victims of the capitalist system. In rich countries, it seems to me, it’s not as cut-and-dried. The relatively, moderately well-off are in the paradoxical position of being both victims and perpetrators. The planet is reeling from our own collective consumption. And while it’s true that we are all, except for the ruling class, living within a system not of our own making, the only people who can overturn that system are us. And as maligned as the idea of creating different, less consuming, lifestyles, individually and collectively, is, I still see it as a viable road. And I suppose I’ll keep on talking about it, as the tiniest of voices, even if I’m only talking to myself.

I’ve been meaning to get back to writing the blog because I miss doing it. I miss the people I got to know here (or rather where my old blog used to be, at its old web address) and the relief and sense of sanity I got from knowing there were people who had some of the same thoughts and similar perspectives that I sometimes have, when I’m not feeling confounded and at a loss for thoughts. Many of the people whose blogs I used to follow are no longer writing them, and although I’m not sure it makes any sense, those who are still writing I haven’t kept up with, because somehow writing and reading seem to be part of the same daily routine, and when I let one go unattended so did the other.

Because I’ve largely lost track of my old circle, I feel more at a loss than ever. The internet changes so quickly, and it seems harder now than before to find the things I want to share in. Is it just my own perception or is there a much greater emphasis on the web on for-profit commercial sites that are short on content and big on flashy soundbites?

I’m not an expert in the subjects that interest me, like inequality, poverty, and economic injustice, and their various related subcategories (consumer culture, anarchism, radical frugality, the do-it-yourself ethos, and whatever else), so I kind of need frames of reference to write about these things. I need to be able to point to an article and say, yeah, that’s interesting, that’s something that sounds right to me and that contains some valuable insights. And then maybe I can add my two cents as well. But if I can’t find any source material, it leaves me with nothing to say. It seems foolish to write something like, “Well, I don’t really know enough about these things, but this is my impression of what’s wrong with [fill in the blank].”

But rather than feel stymied, I think I will try to just write what I can, to feel my way around and eventually maybe get some sort of momentum, find some kind of groove that makes sense to me.

Until I do, I’m thinking that I what I will post will be a combination of dreary explanations of issues I’m trying to sort out, interspersed with purely self-indulgent navel gazing. And then I tend to also just post about about random things, like commenting on the articles I find on Arts & Letters Daily, which has not ceased to be a treasure trove. Since no one is reading, it doesn’t really matter, so I think I can feel free to bore or amuse myself.

I came across an article on the panic and sense of fear and loss that middle-to-upper-middle-class baby boomers are experiencing now that the rug has been pulled out from under them: their retirement funds that were invested in the stock market have shrunk, and the value of their homes, their most valuable asset, has also gone down considerably. It’s a good article, written with insight and nuance, but I couldn’t help thinking about the picture missing so glaringly from its analysis. Surely, counting on a comfortable retirement and then seeing it slip away must be hard, but what about not having ever had any possibility of one?

For most people who weren’t counting on a paycheck from Lehman Brothers, the central drama of the 2008 collapse has been the more personal matter of their retirement savings and their property value. And with it, the prospect of a non-penurious old age, the basic reward for a life of hard work suddenly seems embattled. So much for all those ideas of affluent freedom, all those TV ads featuring Harley-riding healthy seniors, after leaving the 9-to-5 behind. That rug has been yanked away. But how to say farewell?

And it’s not just one article. The mainstream news media has only one story to tell: people who had been living relatively comfortable lives now are threatened with losing their good-paying jobs, their stock portfolios, and their homes (or much of their home’s previous value). But what about the poor, who had none of those to begin with? They weren’t in the news before the current economic downturn, when they were struggling, and they’re not often in the news now, still struggling and the hardest hit: the loss of a job or a home is much greater catastrophe for someone who has no cushion to fall back on. The relatively wealthy are not the majority, yet the story of the poor and even of the median earner, who takes home about $25,000 a year, is not being told, at least not very widely.

According to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the poor in the US are worse off now that they were in past recessions, because the aid available to poor families and individuals at both the State and Federal levels has been reduced or eliminated over the last several decades. Not only are only 40% of eligible families receiving assistance through TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is half the percentage that received help from its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, (which was eliminated during the Clinton administration), but unless they qualify for unemployment, adults who are not raising children don’t qualify for any type of cash assistance at all. Many are not even eligible for food stamps.

More people will fall into poverty and deep poverty as the recession grows. Yet government is focused on giving money to Wall Street firms and banks, which, even if one were to buy the argument that those institutions will then extend loans which will keep businesses going so they can continue to employ people, it’s an awfully indirect way to help the people who need help the most. And it will be of no benefit to those who already don’t have a job or were only partially or occasionally employed to begin with.

If the loss of a previous sense of security and prosperity creates, for relatively-affluent baby boomers “a kind of vertiginous feeling, like stepping out a window in your childhood home only to realize that the balcony that’s been there all your life is gone,” what feeling does the loss of the basic means of survival create for those who have been perennially on the edge of that open window with no balcony in sight?

The value of a given stock, and by extension of the stock market as whole, depends entirely on perception. If speculators perceive that a stock is likely to go up, they buy it, and if enough of them do the same, the price of that stock goes up. And if they believe the price of a given stock will go down, they sell it, which drives down the price if enough speculators also sell their shares. This is altogether obvious — it’s the way one might explain the stock market to a child — but you wouldn’t know it by listening to the ever-present news reports on the vagaries of the stock market, which insist on the fiction that the actual value and profitability of companies are what drives stock prices.

Sure, the price of a stock does reflect to some extent how well that company is actually doing, since that’s part of what shapes the perception of speculators, but unless a company is obviously tanking, it’s only a sideline in the way the stock market functions.

We hear so much about the need to boost “investor confidence.” Gee, is that because Wall Street analysts are so worried about our collective feelings of contentment? Of course, not, it’s because “confidence” will lead people to buy stocks, thus raising stock prices and increasing the wealth of the largest stockholders.

The notion that a healthy stock market is good for everyone is presented as a given. It’s even conflated to mean that if the stock market is up then the economy is doing well, and that should benefit everyone since most people need a job to survive, and if companies are doing well they are able to hire workers. But one thing has very little to do with the other. When companies announce layoffs their stocks usually go up, at least in the short term, which is the only term speculators are interested in..

This is from an article about hedge funds, which are especially pernicious (from what little I understand of them), but what the author says applies broadly to “short-selling,” the widespread practice engaged in by speculators of buying stocks to keep them only for a short time in order to turn a quick profit by taking advantage of the market’s constant up-and-down shifting:

Too much speculation turns the markets from an investment vehicle into a casino. Most commentators about the market ignore this. When the market suffers big losses on a single day, they find some small piece of bad economic news and attribute it to that. When the market gains a lot on a day, they look at the overall upward direction of the economy and attribute it to that. When the market stalls and seems to move aimlessly, they say the American economy is stagnating. The point is that even though the market is behaving in unfamiliar ways, it is explained as if it were behaving in traditional ways. Nowhere is the change in the players in the market recognized. The change in the means by which large players seek to profit and the greater role of the hedge funds and of speculation via short-selling is ignored.

And what about the notion that most average people have investments in the stock market and therefore bad performance hurts even the little guy? According to the Economic Policy Institute [pdf]:

Less than half of American households are invested in the stock market in any form –either directly or indirectly through mutual funds or 401(k)s. The percentage of households that own stock was 48.6% in 2004. The percentage of households with more than $5,000 in stock was 34.9% in 2004. The wealthiest 20% of households own over 90% of all stock value. For the top 1%, the average value of stock holdings was $3.3 million in 2004. The average value of stock holdings for the middle 20% was $7,500 in 2004.

No doubt it’s frightening for those who have 401(k)s invested in the stock market to see their retirement shrivel up. Yet the majority of Americans have very little or no investment in the stock market at all. So why is there so much emphasis placed on the stock market in the public discourse? Because it benefits the wealthy, of course. As long as people keep on buying stocks — and at the very least refrain from selling the ones they have — the wealth of the rich will continue to increase. At the same time, the little guy who has no insider information and is not savvy about stock market dynamics is the one who will get screwed by the shenanigans of speculators and large investors if he dips his toe in those shark-infested waters.

Every day when we listen to the news, we’re just being treated to more of the proven fallacy of trickle-down economics. When the rich get richer — surprise! — the poor and middle class don’t benefit at all.

The solutions to the world’s problems are known. This struck me recently when I was reading a scathing article on the folly of our collective inaction in the face of environmental destruction in Harper’s:

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion. The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens.

It’s no mystery that the degradation of the environment requires a massive realignment of our ways of consumption. We have to consume far less, waste far less, pollute far less. And to resist inequality and greed we have to also consume less, to turn over less of our money to the corporations that are perpetrating wholesale injustices. And we need to seek out and put into practice ways to function equitably and sustainably. Yes, of course governments and corporations are at fault, and the possibility of swaying them can seem like applying pressure to immovable objects, but that’s no reason not to try. The powerful bullies of the world hold most of the strings, but not only is there a lack of broad popular commitment to changing the fundamental conditions through grassroots mobilizing, but basic conservation and measures to foster equality are not widely acted on by even most individuals, in the spheres within which we each have direct control.

There’s a wide range of possible action and degrees of commitment. Shopping at eco-boutiques or buying only fair trade is well and good, but for most of us it’s not a useful option. We can’t afford it, and buying a few trinkets here and there is not much of an answer. A much more radical transformation of how we think and live is going to yield the most results.

But even for those who are not radicalized and don’t want to see ourselves as living an alternative way of life, there are possibilities for transformation, both big and small. Many will say that the public has given up, that we see ourselves as so powerless we’ve all just collectively thrown in the towel. That’s why we don’t vote, don’t show up for protests or community events, don’t even try to make our voices heard or alter how we live. Yet we make choices every day, and those choices have both harmful and useful consequences, and when multiplied by the hundreds of millions, even only counting those of us in America, they form the fabric of our world.

Given even the dismaying choices of voting for an awful or a more awful candidate, tens of millions go out to the polls to specifically choose the more awful option. And in our own lives? Why was the average home size in the United States 2,330 square feet in 2004, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970? A larger home is less affordable and consumes more energy, so why the folly of choosing to live in one? Of all the various types of available automobiles, why does anyone buy anything other than the cheapest or most efficient (which often go hand in hand)? Sure, there are many variables. A given community that is seen as the safest and offering the best schools may only have expensive housing. But then why do we not question the fear that leads us to assume that slums should be left to the desperate and poor and that those who can afford it, even if only just barely, should ensconce themselves in sheltered and sanitized communities?

I can see the furrowed brows of those who will say that the victims of the powerful ruling elites are not the culprits. Yes, those of us toward the bottom — or even middle, with the exception of only a few at the very top — of the economic ladder didn’t create the conditions that all of us are forced to exist under, yet just by looking around, there doesn’t seem to be any collective or individual will to change even what conditions are within our control. If you think environmental degradation is worrying, then conserve. If you deplore inequality and human suffering, then don’t support the companies that perpetuate both. Or withdraw your support to the extent that is feasible for you.

The ugly truth is that we are all complicit, unless we are at least trying. It’s important to care and to become informed, indeed those are necessary steps, but the next step, it seems to me, starts with the most basic: transforming our day-to-day.

MickeyZ writes, in No Innocent Bystanders: Riding Shotgun in the Land of Denial:

Their participation in the two party farce and their acceptance of lesser evilism, however, are not seen as the problem by those in the know. It’s all Bush’s fault. There are no innocent bystanders when our money and/or rhetoric support the world’s most powerful military and the corporate status quo. But if we just keep telling ourselves it’s all Bush’s fault, we can sleep better, our innocence wrapped around us like a big white SUV.

The heady promise of liberation of our very thoughts and assumptions, and the means to turn those thoughts into actions, is real and accessible. These perhaps controversial — a bit too dramatic? too optimistic? — quotes below are from Crimethinc. How to put them into practice is left up to us, but certainly we can each see a vision of ourselves that includes choosing to live, at the very least, with much less waste and material consumption, but without taking on the notion of giving something up or forgoing what we care about and love:

Look at the world around us; it is a world that we have created. We transformed the old world into this one—but why this one? Is this the world we would have chosen, if we had considered in advance the question of what the best of all possible worlds might be? But before you despair, think—we created this world, it is we who make it up. Could we not make another world out of it, then, if we chose?

But this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love, daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true.

I’ve been watching C-Span in the mornings, a program called the Washington Journal, in which newspaper articles on a given topic are read, and later on guests come on to speak on a specific subject, and viewers are invited to call in and give opinions, comments and questions.

Though it’s far from perfect, I find it much less distressing than watching news commentary on commercial TV stations, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I need to mention the alarming lack of truth or even common sense on CNN and the other news and opinion channels. But while C-Span attempts to be balanced by alternately taking calls from Democrat, Republican and Independent (which includes all other than Democrat or Republican) callers, and by inviting guests whose own positions are deemed right-leaning or left-leaning, it’s striking how far from a balanced sampling of political opinion this is. It’s the same problem that plagues all mainstream media: there’s an absence of truth in the very premise. Republicans and Democrats hold positions that range from the far right to the moderate center, and the political left is essentially entirely absent, even on C-Span, save the very occasional actually-left-leaning caller.

The Political Compass website has created an enlightening graph that places those who ran for the US presidency in the spot on the spectrum that represents their political leanings, according to their positions and public statements. It’s interesting to note, and obvious enough, except that almost no one seems to be aware of it, that none of the presidential candidates fall to the left of center, except Kucinch and Nader. The site notes that Hillary Clinton would be considered a conservative in Europe. Yet the American public seems to accept the lie that she and Obama are left-leaning, and the media obviously encourages that belief. And actively suppresses any possibility of anyone saying otherwise on the airwaves.

Granted that an absence of leftist opinion is probably representative of the US public in general, but I have lately been more and more disturbed by the simple lack of acknowledged fact on what constitutes political thought across the spectrum. Leftist ideas are not merely suppressed by the media, they are made nonexistent. Moderate centrists are decried as raving liberals by right wing hate-mongers, and we are asked to accept this view as a legitimate opinion. Calling out those who support or enact harmful policies is treated as bad table manners, and meek centrists, when they’re invited to speak on television, barely even dare to state their bland positions for fear of seeming impolite.

This is nothing new of course, but it seems to be getting worse.

The internet was supposed to free us from the monolithic viewpoint of mainstream media, but it has utterly failed to accomplish that goal as far as I can tell, and it too seems to be getting worse. Widely-read political blogs have become cemented within a particular clique of followers, and each site attracts only those who already agree with the authors’ positions, except for trolls who stop by just to stir up trouble. The internet is so fragmented that there isn’t room for any particular viewpoint to take any kind of hold. For every blogger who talks sense, there are hundreds of loudmouths who perpetuate misinformation, and the result is a spectacle.

In the 70s, when I lived in Italy, there was a lot of talk in books and magazines about the dystopia of modern life. People of the 20th century no longer experienced the daily earthiness that had in the past come from working the land or some other wholesome physical endeavor (which was of course romanticized, since working the land must take a harsh toll, not that I would know, and many people, including in Italy, are still busy every day doing just that) but were instead stuck with the crassness of modern culture, where daily life was reduced to a constant barrage of billboards, products, traffic, high rises, smog, and other blaring insults. There was a popular TV ad in Italy that illustrated this concept: a man sat at a small cafe table, blissfully enjoying a glass of vermouth, but he was smack in the middle of traffic, with a river of honking, lurching cars speeding around him. The tag line was: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” (This line was often repeated to great merriment on the bus to school: “Stop the bus, I want to get off!”)

In the 21st century, we have now become postmodern. We don’t, as a culture, fight or rail against modernity but accept it as the fabric that makes up our experience. Billboards, advertising, CNN, the minute details of the lives of celebrities: everything that makes up our media-driven culture are our collective experience. In Times Square, there are so many lit-up, animated, enormous advertising screens that being there is exactly like being inside your TV, as if you were Alice and had stepped through the looking glass, but no one seems to register much of a disconnect.

We accept now that our daily experience is pretty humdrum, and that our excitement, and even our musings and fantasies, as well as serious thoughts, come from what we read in books and magazines, or maybe the internet, and hear and see in movies and TV. And I think that’s generally a good thing, since I don’t want to have only what’s in my physical life to think about. Otherwise all I would think would be: “Should I go to the store?” “What can I eat?” “Wow, my apartment is really dirty.” Frankly that stuff takes up more of my attention than I would like it to.

When I was a kid, I was not aware of being postmodern, but I always found myself comparing my experience to what I read in books, which I took to be guideposts of some kind for how to live. I don’t think that’s necessarily unusual. I think it comes from our modern culture, which is so tame and bland compared to almost anything that would make a story in a book even mildly interesting.

And I usually felt that when my family and I did something in a way that was not like in books and movies, we were doing it wrong. This may have been compounded by the fact that I grew up in American culture without having ever been to the United States. I went to American schools in Brazil and Italy, starting at age six and through the eleventh grade, and school almost instantly became the culture I lived in and associated myself with. I talked and thought in English. I read American books. But these books were full of things I had never seen: yellow school buses, suburban neighborhoods, kids riding bikes to each other’s houses, holding bake sales, building forts, buying penny candy from the corner shop. In Sao Paulo, children do not wander around neighborhoods by themselves. Houses are surrounded by iron fences or brick walls topped with broken glass. I just read a statistic that in Sao Paulo someone is kidnapped every two days, and the murder rate is four times what it is the US.

But even among grown ups who grew up in their own culture right here in the United States, there’s a sense that our lives don’t count or are somehow lacking validation if they don’t conform to what’s on TV. Juliet Schor is quoted as saying one of the reasons Americans tend to overspend (and I would add the corollary that it’s probably one of the reasons people feel cheated and dissatisfied — not that there isn’t plenty of reason to feel that way anyhow) is that TV tends to portray a wealthy upper class lifestyle as the norm, whereas the reality is that the majority, even in the US, which is a relatively very wealthy country but where the wealth is very unequally distributed, has only a very modest income.

I’m not particularly concerned about material wealth in my own life, so I don’t care that people on TV live lavishly, but there are so many ways in which one can feel she’s missed the boat. It’s a constant struggle to try to keep some perspective. When you read a book and the person writing it seems impossibly brilliant, you have to keep in mind that’s their best foot they’re putting forward. Right? There are probably other times when they can’t think of anything to say, or can’t remember where they parked? I’m not really sure.

I think it’s okay to just be whatever you are, and that the antidote to anxiety and self doubt is acceptance. It’s good to be content, but striving doesn’t only lead to stress, it also leads to accomplishments. But I’m not sure if accomplishments are important or if they’re only vainglorious?

I think I had a point somewhere when I started writing this, but I’m not sure what it is anymore. Oh well.

As many as three billion people are food-insecure, and of those, one billion routinely don’t get enough food. Fifty thousand die from poverty every day, including 18,000 children who die daily from lack of food or related issues. Global food prices have risen recently, making matters worse, but this is not a new problem.
[Sources: 1, 2.]

The Global Conference on Food Security was held in Rome this week, and the results don’t seem to warrant much optimism. There were pledges of aid to relieve the short term impact, but there doesn’t seem to be any will, among those who might be able to do so, to change in the conditions that contribute directly to chronic poverty and malnutrition.

Some of the reason for that is that there isn’t enough demand for change from the public in developed nations, in part, it seems, because the issue is not an easy one to explain. When people talk about the free market system, they seem to think the options are to either make the market freer or impose restrictions, and that those are the two dueling camps. But as I understand it, the issue is who controls the flow of goods and capital. The market is “free” and made freer when it’s useful to those who have the most power. They are then free to exploit developing nations for their resources and, at the same time, make it so poor nations have to accept their goods, services, and prices on their terms. When it’s convenient for rich nations to protect their own interests, then they impose restrictions in those areas.

So discussing whether trade should be free or regulated is not exactly hitting the mark. What needs to happen, and this has been proposed by people who are far more knowledgeable about these matters than I am, is for local producers and consumers of food in developing countries, where food insecurity is a pressing issue, to be able to work in the way they think is best, without being forced to accept conditions from the outside, a concept known as “food sovereignty,” if I’m understanding it correctly.

The goals are well summarized in this article about a community group in Sri Lanka: “Work with local farmers to develop sustainable farming techniques and regain control of production systems. Establish food sovereignty on the local level by coordinating the sharing of food produced by farmers, and selling surpluses locally.”

Two essays in The Guardian were enlightening on the issues:

Certainly the world would welcome an end to the EU and US farm subsidies which lead to the dumping of agricultural produce on developing country markets, yet anyone who still believes that the WTO is going to deliver this has not done the maths. More importantly, agriculture needs a radical reorientation away from the mess that globalisation has made of it. In the current crisis, the food sovereignty model that puts local producers and local markets first is winning over more and more followers.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, reported on the squabbling among world leaders at the conference without giving much of an indication of which statements might have been somewhat factual and which entirely self interested and misleading.

For example, the president of Brazil and the US representative disagreed about the effect each of their countries’ policies on biofuels have on the food market. The concern is that using food crops for energy may divert agricultural resources away from producing needed food. Brazil makes ethanol from sugar cane, which is an extremely efficient method of producing alcohol and which, the Brazilian government argues, does not undercut food production. In fact, no rise in the price of sugar has been reported as a result of using sugar cane to make fuel. In addition, sugar is arguably not a food staple, since it doesn’t offer much in the way of nutritional value. The US makes ethanol from corn, which is badly needed for food and is a very inefficient crop to convert to alcohol. So inefficient that if it were not for heavy government subsidies, the US production of ethanol would be unsustainable.

As it happens, I have first hand knowledge about this. I used to live in Brazil, and for several years in the mid 80s my parents lived right smack in the middle of sugar cane fields. I mean that quite literally. There was a low fence around the house and the yard, and on the other side of the fence, in front of the house, there was a small cow pasture, and, beyond that, sugar cane fields as far as the eye could see. We were on top of a hill overlooking a broad valley, so the eye could see for miles.

(We were nowhere near the Amazon, I might add. We lived in the state of Sao Paulo, about 200km from the city of Sao Paulo. I don’t know whether the push to grow sugar cane has encroached on the Amazon or not: Brazil has a great deal of usable land that is not in the rainforest, but that doesn’t seem to have halted the inexorable destruction of precious forest land, so my guess would be that, among many other factors, it probably has.)

Behind the house were the factory and headquarters of a company that manufactured steam turbines, which were primarily used in sugar cane processing plants. That was where my dad worked as an executive. Virtually everyone we knew was in the sugar cane business.

The processing plants were entirely energy self-sufficient, so they were often in remote locations. We took a trip once, the whole family, to visit one of these plants, which may seem odd, but it was marvelously interesting. The directions we had were along the lines of, “Follow the dirt road that crosses the coffee plantation. When you get to a mango tree, turn right.”

The sugar cane stalks were first unloaded from the trucks, which ran on 100% alcohol. These were trucks with gasoline engines, not diesel engines, that are easily converted to use ethanol. Cars that ran on 100% alcohol were very common in Brazil. They are essentially identical to cars that run on gasoline. I think that the only modifications needed are that some parts have to be replaced to keep them from rusting, because alcohol contains a small amount of water (I don’t feel like looking up the details). The cane juice was squeezed out of the stalks by a grinding machine and was then fermented and distilled into alcohol (a process that is possibly even simpler than crystallizing it into sugar), and the woody stalks were then set aside to be burned to produce steam, which ran the steam turbines, which in turn powered the generators that provided energy for the entire plant. It was wonderfully simple.

Producing ethanol from corn, on the other hand, is so inefficient that the process consumes more energy than it produces. A peer-reviewed scientific study proved this, debunking a USDA report that claimed a very small net gain in energy when corn is processed into ethanol, but only if the by-products that can be used as animal feed are included in the equation. The US corn-to-ethanol industry exists only because it is heavily subsidized by the US government. In addition, the US imposes tariffs on imported Brazilian ethanol — so essentially it is not imported into the US — in order to protect this unsustainable domestic industry.

In spite of these well-established facts, the biofuel debate rages on, without the mainstream media seemingly willing to shed some light on who is telling the truth and who is intentionally obfuscating it.

Not that sugar cane ethanol is a panacea. There was a recent article in The Guardian about converting the harvesting of sugar cane to mechanization because of concerns about human exploitation. The article worries about the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Having seen the sugar cane harvesters myself, I have to say their working conditions were very bleak. The sugar cane fields were set on fire prior to harvesting, which was quite spectacular. An entire field blazed, at nighttime. This was to burn off the excess foliage. After the field had cooled down for a couple days, trucks of people were brought in (news reports about truckloads of human beings being involved in accidents, with no seatbelts or protection of any kind, were not uncommon). They were covered in cloth from head to foot, I’m not sure if it was to protect themselves from insects or the heat. Then they proceeded to cut down the sugar cane stalks, which are tough and woody, like small trees, entirely by hand, with machetes. We were told at the time that the process could not be mechanized because most of the sugar is at the base of the stalk, and machines would cut too high and miss the most crucial part of the harvest. This explanation was probably disingenuous.

But as far as people standing to lose this terrible job, it’s an ongoing dilemma: whether it’s better for people to have access to some kind of job, exploitative and harsh as it is, or not have any means at all to survive. The answer of course lies in changing the conditions. But unless people in developed countries take the time to inform themselves, and agitate for change alongside those most affected, change will be slow to come.

It strikes me that every wrongheaded sentiment in society ultimately derives from the culture of inherent, unconditional rightness. As I grow older, I find myself less prone to have an opinion about anything, and to distrust just about anyone who does…. I refuse to discuss abortion with anyone who is pro-life or pro-choice; I refuse to discuss affirmative action with any unemployed white guy or any unemployed black guy. All the world’s stupidest people are either zealots or atheists. If you want to truly deduce how intelligent someone is, just ask this person how they feel about any issue that doesn’t have an answer; the more certainty they express, the less sense they have. This is because certainty only comes form dogma.

From the book, Chuck Klosterman IV.

I don’t mean to pick on Chuck Klosterman, who is a hip music critic and essayist on mundane cultural minutiae and doesn’t claim to be a political commentator. I wanted to write about this because it’s such a common sentiment, and this was the closest example at hand, since it’s a book I happen to be reading.

Certainty, though it isn’t the word I would choose, since I think it’s generally a good idea to remain open to the possibility that one could be wrong, doesn’t only come from dogma, it also comes from knowledge. Having an opinion is only foolish if it’s an uninformed opinion. And while abstaining from forming an opinion because one is insufficiently informed is laudable, and rare, taking the time to learn the facts underlying an issue so that one can come up with an educated opinion is much more laudable — and responsible, as a citizen of the world — than simply choosing ignorance.

I can’t count how many times I’ve come across the belief that a reasonable person’s duty is to consider both sides of a political or social issue — and the assumption is nearly always that every issue only has two sides — and then stop there, refraining from coming to any conclusion. Anyone who does otherwise is “biased.” Nowhere in this belief is there an acknowledgment that facts are involved, because facts are considered unknowable and therefore suspect. I was talking to someone not long ago who is training to become a social studies teacher, and this is what she said is expected of her in the classroom: teach “both sides” and step back.

Facts may not be easy to ascertain. It takes work to dig them up, and enough background knowledge and understanding of the issues to distinguish them from half-truths and propaganda. One can be misled by facts that are presented in a particular light, and one may have to revise one’s understanding as one learns more information. But facts do exist, bizarre as it is to have to say it.

Listening to self-interested lies coming from various corners, however, is not going to take one any closer to learning facts. Hearing both sides, or any of various sides, of an issue is only useful in trying to understand why different factions hold the positions that they do: it’s not a particularly useful way to figure out where the truth lies. Basing one’s opinion on someone else’s opinion is actually the wrong thing to do if one is interested in being fair-minded.

Yet opinion is virtually all of the media coverage that is available on important political issues. There’s the bombastic opinion of the right, which is delivered with a loudness that’s meant to drown out all other thought, and the apologetic, mildly worded opinion of the center-left, that’s always stumbling over itself in an effort not to offend. Politicians that are mildly left-leaning are accepted by the media, and by extension the public, only when they promise to build bridges and unite opposing viewpoints. Personally, I’m not interested in the building of bridges with liars and demagogues whose aims are to oppress the many and create prosperity for the few. Greed and self interest need to be exposed, not coddled. But if you start out with the premise that the fair-minded embrace all points of view equally, and that insisting on facts and forming strong opinions according to one’s knowledge of the facts makes one strident, that’s what you get: the politics of mildness and inoffensiveness, which are offered up as the only possible antidote to the politics of unbridled rapaciousness.