Saturday, December 18, 2010

Creating Fear, Cynicism, Bigotry, in order to rule

Nobody does it like right-wingers and few do it with as much fervid desperation as the harpercons. This isn't an original observation, I know, but for a few days I've been reflecting on the harpercons' cynical attempts to manufacture anxiety about the crime rate by making people think it's soaring when statistics show it's stagnant or falling.

It's one thing to cynically manipulate genuine fear in order to get people to empower you. But to actually set out to create that fear in the first place is bottom -of-the-barrel stuff indeed.

At some point in peoples' lives, those who have taken some wrong paths (alcoholism, selling dangerous narcotics, bumping people off of health insurance, writing bullshit studies that sow doubt about global warming or the harms of tobacco smoke, etc.) stop and ask themselves: "What have I become?" Some people are able to do the hard work, make the hard decisions, to turn their lives around. One would hope that those among the harpercons do the same.

What sort of moral midgets try to make people feel bad by inventing a problem where there isn't one? Think about it. The harpercons are trying to make Canadians feel less safe and secure. Why? So that the harpercons "solutions" (to the non-existent problem) will become attractive to these now-frightened voters. And it goes beyond that! While proposing their idiotic policies (which haven't worked when they were tried elsewhere in any case) they tell fearful Canadian voters that the opposition parties have been frustrating their efforts, so as to deliberately endanger Canadians in their efforts to "hug thugs" or whatever. The reality is that the opposition has been very accommodating at getting through necessary revisions to old crime legislation and has worked hard to work with the government with special committees to study legislation and propose sensible amendments. They have been forced to work harder because the government has had a bad habit of proroguing Parliament whenever it feels itself in danger politically, thus killing their "anti-crime" legislation on the order table again and again.

And it gets worse than that! Given the fact that there is no problem of rising crime in Canada, the harpercon solution to this non-existent problem, necessitates throwing tens of thousands of Canadians into prison for lengthy terms and weakening the constitutional rights of everyone else. I mean, how sickening is that? "There is no rising crime rate, but I'm going to pretend that there is so that I can obtain power, which I will use to take away peoples' rights and jail many of them, for no other real reason."

Scratch that last bit. There are a couple of other ulterior motives. Weakening Canadians' constitutional rights makes it easier to control them. And who wants to control them? Capitalist elites and authoritarian goons. (More on this in a moment.) As well, creating hysteria about crime and enacting harpercon policies will mean big budgets for police AND private security contractors, the building of larger prisons (for construction contractors, and, if you can successfully "privatize" the running of prisons (who will be paid from the public purse), you have another satisfied corporate customer providing support and cushy post-political jobs for you and your operatives. Sickening and sleazy.

If anything, the proven fact that right-wing social policies CREATE crime, combined with the fact that their "anti-crime" policies DO NOT WORK, (as the incarceration rates and crime rates in the USA so tragically prove), it is the right-wingers in general and the harpercons in particular who should be labelled "soft on crime." But, again, when you're the sorts of creatures who want to make people afraid when there's nothing to be afraid about, it goes without saying that you want to be able to control the populace so as to be able to exploit them while restricting their ability to fight back. When you've simultaneously manufactured hysteria about the threat of terrorism, you can incrementally describe genuine protests as terrorism and create an ideological justification for demonizing protesters and abusing them. But even without the public hysteria against protesters, your work at weakening constitutional rights by exploiting anxieties about crime has already made the work of crushing dissent easier.

Finally (and perhaps more depressingly?) the examples of the McGuinty Liberals and the Obama Democrats show that attacking constitutional rights and abusing human rights is not limited to moronic, retrograde right-wingers. (I feel obliged to say that authoritarianism is a character defect shared on the right and the left of the political spectrum, but I want to point out that I don't want anyone to believe that I think McGuinty or Obama are on the left.) The difference between "conservatives" and Liberals is that "conservatives" shriek and howl like monkeys in the ways I've just described, whereas Liberals are much more quiet about things and can seriously debate whether it makes sense to shovel public money out the door to enrich prison-building firms and incompetent, corrupt, private prisons. It is the right-wing, and especially in Canada, the harpercons, who yammer the loudest, the most dishonestly, the most cynically, the most stupidly, about the problem of crime and who propose the most criminal, cynical, incompetent "solutions."

And again I ask: "How repulsively amoral do you have to be to make a career out of such disgusting behaviour?"

10 comments:

Mark said...

The difference between a global warming skeptic, at least the ones doing research, and say one of those, "creative design" people is significant. The creative design people invariably just keep pushing the goal posts back ("Well, you still haven't explained this little gap here.") while the skeptics I've listened to don't dispute climate change - they just disagree with the causes, what our contributions to the problem are, and the best means of fighting it. I fail to see how that makes someone evil, or stupid.

And I don't see what is so wrong about that. Science is never settled, or if it is, it can take a while to arrive at the right answer. Copernicus and Galileo were right about the heliocentric model of the universe, but had problems getting the numbers to come out correctly. Like the proponents of the geocentric model, they were still using circular (rather than elliptical) orbits to arrive at their numbers.

How could you say that somebody like Bjorn Lomberg is a moral midget? He doesn't deny that global warming is happening - he just disagrees with what policy should be. And if reducing malaria (it kills the equivalent of two or three 747 airplanes every year) in the third world is wrong, thwap, then I don't want to be right. It might not the "right" solution, but I fail to see how funding Lomberg, or Lomberg himself advocating eliminating malaria is evil.

thwap said...

Mark,

I have no idea what post of mine you imagine you're replying to but I'll deal with what you've said regardless.

We're agreed that "creative design" people ignore mountain-ranges of evidence in preference for a theory that doesn't explain anything.

Anti-human caused global warming types are quoted by cooks as often as outright deniers of global warming. Which is to say that they're all part of the same fossil-fuel-funded culture of crap.

To take your one example, Bjorn Lomberg, ... he DID deny global warming at first. His whole first book is regarded as a series of scientific travesties by all the scientists who are experts in the fields he traipses through. Now, he admits that global warming is happening, but that we really shouldn't do anything serious about it.

In the book "Climate Cover-up" the authors point out that while Lomborg does a lot of mewling about the pressing needs of the world's poorest and how global warming is exaggerated and meeting it will divert resources away from needy causes (like malaria), Lomborg does sweet-fuck-all to advocate for those other causes.

He's a well-compensated hack, dedicated to sowing the seeds of doubt so as to stave-off any extra causes to the corporate scum who cut his cheques.

Mark said...

@ thwap

The gist of your post, well, pretty much all of your posts, is that "Anyone who disagrees with me is either evil, stupid, or both." This post was really not any different - global warming skeptics, "tough on crime" conservatives (conveniently ignoring the fact that a lot of the harsh "Drug War" penalties were enthusiastically written or cheered on by...rational, compassionate liberals like...Joe Biden)so anti-global warming strawmen are as good as anything to tackle as anti-crime strawmen.

And as for your response, well, it doesn't really tell me anything that I can't read on Wikipedia and doesn't ever demonstrate why Lomberg is wrong, it refers me to an authority (or authorities) who says Lomberg is wrong.

Sometimes "Cui Bono?" can turn up an interesting answer, but does it really explain 100% of everything that goes on?

Mark said...

To your credit, you do gore some of the sacred cows worshipped by all god-fearing CDN progressives every now and then, so you are definitely capable of original thought:)

thwap said...

Mark,

No. I don't think anyone who disagrees with me is stupid and/or evil.

I apparently give that impression sometimes, but I think that's due to a combination of my disgust with the stances that I do trash and a superficial reading of what I'm actually writing.

You yourself sound like george w. bush right now. He likes to pretend that evolution and creationism are two equally valid theories and that both should be taught in schools.

I once read James Randi wherein he absolutely tore the shit out of astrology and the supernatural, and I showed it to someone I know who has wasted lots of time, energy, and money on astrology, ouija boards, and all that other spiritualism crap. My acquaintance's response to the evisceration of astrology was that Randi started from a negative point-of-view so of course his conclusions represent that.

As if it's all just whatever you choose to believe. As if war CAN be peace, slavery CAN be freedom.

Why should I, the air-headed pinko tree-hugging peace-nik, have to explain to you that sometimes facts matter. Some things are proven and other things are just blind, dogmatic ideology?

Let's review:

1. The crime rate in Canada has been dropping since the 1990s. (As it has in the USA for that matter.)

2. The crime rate in the USA is still far higher than the crime rate in Canada (especially for violent crimes). This is in spite of vastly higher incarceration rates in the USA.

The harpercons are trying to manufacture fear of crime out of nothing (the same way bush II concocted his case for war with Iraq). The harpercons plan to meet this imaginary problem with policies that would fail even if the problem were real.

That's it. End of story.

One last thing. You wrote:

"conveniently ignoring the fact that a lot of the harsh 'Drug War' penalties were enthusiastically written or cheered on by...rational, compassionate liberals like...Joe Biden)"

But, actually, I in fact referred to the same authoritarian tendencies amongst Ontario Liberals and Obama Democrats.

... see following comment.

thwap said...

There's apparently a limit to how long these replies can be and i didn't want to get cut-off.

So, my mentioning Ontario Liberals and USA Democrats is in keeping with my "radical" leftist view that both the Repugs/harpercons and Democrats/Liberals are two sides of the same corporatist coin. They're the good cop/bad cop routine. They're both after basically the same thing only their methods differ.

Look at both your main political parties' craven service to blatant Wall Street corruption to see the proof of what I'm saying.

And, another "finally," ... your mentioning of human-caused climate change deniers is actually kind of ironic (?).

I mention right-wingers trying to establish the existence of a crime wave in the face of all the evidence, while people like Lomborg are trying to create doubt about the existence of human-caused climate change in the face of all the existence.

Finally, finally, finally, ... have another look at the case against Lomborg. It's got to mean something to you that there's a book published by Yale University Press which shows that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the footnotes that Lomborg uses in his first two books refer to studies and reports that either have nothing to do with his arguments or actually refutes them?

thwap said...

I have no idea why i typed "in the face of all the eXISTence" in the second-last paragraph.

Maybe the kettle started whistling just then.

Mark said...

Actually, I'd agree with you that too many people wind up in jail & that certain people, your favorite bete noire, privately held corporations are the prime beneficiaries. However, I think one of the reasons for slow progress on this front can be found in the attitudes of people who don't benefit. Ask any liberal, or conservative, why pot should be decriminalized, and one of the most common responses you'll hear is, "So we can tax the shit out of it."Half a loaf is better than none, but a sin tax does imply that there is something inherently wrong with the practice itself, and with friends like that...well, you don't need enemies.

Mark said...

Re: global warming, there is a substantive difference between my thinking & Dubya's - I'm not debating the existence of climate change, just questioning the policy prescriptions.

thwap said...

I said your attitude was similar to dubya's.

Meaning your attitude on global warming is similar to his attitude on evolution.

Both of you imagine that as long as there's some hack writing somewhere that you can point to, then there's a genuine "debate."

There's voluminous literature that argues that Lomborg is beyond "wrong." The literature consistently shows him to be a hack and a fraud. And that literature is part of a vaster mountain of work that exposes most deniers of humanity's role in global warming as being funded by the same public relations liars who tried to concoct alternative "science" denying the dangers of nicotine and other cigarette ingredients.

If facts are "biased" towards liberals vis-a-vis conservatives, they're even more inclined towards leftists it seems.

What you're consistently doing is arguing against the facts it seems.

"Maybe there IS a crime wave, despite what the statistics say. And maybe politicians who advocate for harsher sentences and tougher policing DO have a point, even if the US example shows that those policies don't work in any case."

"Maybe despite the fact that we can measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the amount that we've put there through industrial activity, and despite the fact that we can also calculate the impact of this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on the world's overall temperature, ... 98.9999888777% of the experts might be wrong about humanity's role in global warming."

Maybe the reason I come off as intolerant of other views is because I mostly write about stuff I feel strongly about. As well as feeling strongly about it, I'm very sure that I'm right on the subject and that the alternative argument is clearly wrong. Furthermore, being wrong about the subjects that I'm talking about generally means being stupid or evil.

You know, life goes on, so the saying goes. From what you've told me about yourself, you appear to be financially comfortable and socially secure. Shit happens, but life goes on and by "go on" I mean "quite nicely" for you, other comfortable people, and, for now, me.

Not for the victims of the US drug war. Not for the victims of poverty in the USA. Not for the perhaps 20% unemployed in your country. Not for the families of dead or maimed US soldiers. Not for the millions of Mexican peasants displaced by NAFTA. Not for the millions of Iraqi and Afghan lives ruined by bush II's illegal wars (now Obama's).

And the thing isn't that the world MUST be perfect. The thing is that the policies that produce these tragedies are so obviously flawed that it defies belief that anyone could have bought in to them.

My thinking that I'm smarter than bush II or Dick Cheney by no means says that I think I'm smarter than practically anyone else.