the Nationalist Socialist Party is scary

Why do commentators seem to have such a problem with the imaginary* socialist wing of the Nazi party but the nationalist part is just fine?

*okay, not always imaginary, it used to exist before Hitler destroyed it

Not everything Hitler did was bad

We live in a strange world in which anything can be criticized with "Hitler did that" or "Hitler did something similar". I wonder how we uselessly attacked people in 1930. I suppose we had Lenin. But the 1910s must have been pretty difficult times for poorly supported arguments.

Hitler did personally orchestrate the industrialized murder of millions of innocent people and started wars which caused the deaths of millions more. That's certainly bad. If someone wanted to criticize someone for having an idea similar to "kill millions of innocent people", I could see that as a valid criticism. In general I think people can agree that "kill millions of innocent people" is a bad idea, regardless of whether or not Hitler had done it.

The problem with Hitler wasn't that he was Hitler. It's not as if he was born a symbol of timeless and ruthless evil. Hitler isn't even a specific name, since I presume his father also had the name Hitler, as well as his mother, grandfather, perhaps some uncles and aunts, and so on.

The bad parts of Hitler are the bad things he did. Not who he was or everything he did, just the bad parts. When he orchestrated the murder of millions of innocent people, that falls under the "bad things he did" category. When he told France "go fuck yourselves and your ridiculous 'guilt for WWI debt'", I'd put that in the "good things he did" category, since the Treaty of Versailles was timeless bullshit. When he invaded France, through Belgium, in addition to invading just about everywhere else, that falls under the "bad things he did" category. This in no way diminishes the positive aspects of things like leading the recovery of the German economy and pulling millions out of misery and poverty.

Hitler is dead. Even assuming conspiracy theories were true and he actually escaped to go hide in South America, by now he'd be over 120 years old and probably dead. Not even his Aryan super-race descended from gods could live that long, and he clearly was not part of it. Someday Hitler won't have as much impact as he does now. Just as outside of England and Ireland people tend to not know much about the mass killings attributed to Cromwell, and therefore rarely use pictures of people with Cromwell's mustache attached, so some day Hitler won't evoke much emotion or outrage. Hopefully by then we'll have figured out that we shouldn't criticize ideas for "being like Hitler", but instead should criticize them for the true problem "being like killing millions of innocent people".

Taming the Beast

The stock market is overrun with speculators. And not just people speculators. No, that might be like actual work (not that it would be anyway). Instead they've automated their leeching. Welcome to the world of high-frequency trading in which computers are used to jump ahead of real traders and grab tiny bits of money from them. That's right, your mutual fund and pension are being slowly drained by a computer.

I propose two methods to calm the markets, to make speculating against other people unprofitable. My goal is to encourage investment in companies and long-term profitability, rather than grabbing the next big payout next quarter with accounting tricks and gambling on the fluctuations of the market, fluctuations which their speculation drives.

First, add a one cent tax to every stock transaction. This will have a minor effect on investors, a larger effect on speculators, and will completely wreck the computers. With a one cent tax buyers would only want to buy when they had a good chance of substantial price increases, the kind which can only be assured over the long term with stable companies. Even if a person can pull of 10 cent profits on transactions, this cuts that by 10%, a significant hit which would discourage such trading. The tax could be reduced or waived for sufficiently cheap stocks which might only move small amounts even over years.

Second, add a holding requirement, such as requiring stocks to be held for at least two years and unable to give dividends for a similar amount of time. This encourages long-term investment. Buyers would want stocks which will perform well for years and will not be tied to the short-term outlook. This means companies could focus on the research and development which drive long-term growth and profits (and the economy), rather than short-term gains from accounting tricks, layoffs, and deceptive advertising. It would also become impractical to speculate on the actions of other investors, since projections would have to go out for years, and therefore short-term bubbles and busts would be insignificant.

The goal is these changes is to stabilize the fluctuations in the stock market, fluctuations which are unrelated to the actual state of the economy, and which only harm it. The focus of traders could then shift away from predicting the market itself and towards the actual health of companies. Imagine how much different the dot com bubble would have been if investors had been forced (by their own self-interest) to look at the long-term profitability of tech firms. Maybe there would have been less of a bubble, less of a bust, and a better economy for Bush to inherit. With a genuinely good economy we might not have been so easily drawn to cheap credit and housing speculation. And so on.

These ideas aren't perfect. The tax needs tweaking, maybe a variable scale based on the initial stock price. The holding requirement might need to be longer or shorter. But I think it's a good start.

Fire Insurance

Maybe I'm biased, but in America we seem to have a pretty good system for dealing with fires. When your house is burning, the firemen come and put it out. Then afterward you sort out damages with the insurance. But the fire gets put out. No smoldering embers or gas manes left leaking. If there are you get to sue them.

I wonder what it would be like if fires were handled more like healthcare.

Your house catches on fire and the firemen rush over. They put out most of the fire, so it's not going to catch up again since things are so wet. But there's still a gas leak and some piles in the basement are still glowing. But your house won't burn down anymore, at least not right away, so they go. Then you have to sign some forms and see if you can get an insurance-approved fireman to put out the last few dangers. Because of paperwork he isn't even allowed to under the front porch, though you can clearly see a few flames already. But firemen are expensive and paying out of pocket just isn't an option. You've missed work and are behind on bills. Eventually you think you've settled all the billing and pretty much taken care of the fire. A few months later the house explodes and kills you. The insurance company refuses to pay or send anymore firemen to your house to get your children out.

Yep, the second example in which fires are handled by the free market, rather than those lazy socialist firemen, that sounds pretty good doesn't it?

Fetuses are elderly

Have you ever noticed how anti-abortion activists often use pictures of babies? The general message they present is "Don't kill babies!" This is a message I can get behind. I have a niece now and she is amazing, and if someone were to harm her, I would perform a very late term abortion on whoever hurt her. I won't say I'm a fan of babies in general, but I'm certainly anti-baby-killing.

I'm pro-choice as well. Well, none of the very late abortions, those really are just killing babies. I would know, I was one, born nearly thee months early. So I can conclude that 6 months is definitely too late for an abortion. Six days isn't too late. Between those it's a fuzzy area that needs work. When is it a baby? I don't know.

Why are the pictures always of babies? Unless it's a late abortion, it's not killing a baby. In most cases it's an undifferentiated, nonviable blob of cells. That's not a baby. It is certainly the potential of a baby. But if they are defending potentials, why only baby pictures? Why no posters of teenagers? Or middle-age adults? Or the elderly? If they seek to protect potential, they appear to be ignoring 99% of human life.

I have a theory: Anti-choice activists don't actually care much about babies. If they did they might focus more on far bigger sources of dead fetuses, and dead babies: malnutrition, stress, war, and the expense of pre- and post-natal care. Instead what is at stake for them is contraception. They've fought against condom use, birth control pills, and whatever else you can think of. But those are look so harmless: a bit of rubber, a pill, not all that scary or easy to attack. Abortion is simply more convenient. It's a starting point.

I wonder if anyone would care so much about abortion if it wasn't a way of preventing childbirth. Would we accept killing people if it didn't give women control, but instead gave us cheap stuff? I think we would. We would! We only need to look at factory conditions overseas, or even here in some cases, to see that it is true.

This is not Obama's Katrina

It's his Dust Bowl.

Once upon a time America was based heavily on agriculture, but by the 1930s was transitioning to manufacturing. Similarly, we are in a transition from oil-based manufacturing to a service economy, though still based on oil.

But perhaps not. The dust bowl drove millions of small farmers off their land and into distant cities where they sought non-farming work. This paved the way for industrial agriculture as small-scale farming became unprofitable and the former farmers found alternatives. We may see a similar shift. Unsustainable land use faded (though obviously not completely). Hopefully the same will happen with oil use. This could be the start of a green economy, whatever that means. Makes a great buzzword though.

The poorest and most vulnerable are the ones hit worst by the disaster, those who work directly off the land, or water. The fishermen of the gulf are losing their harvests, and the water in which they would fish, to the oil. Will this trigger a similar exodus? It is likely. But where will they go? A recession is not a very good time for hundreds of thousands of unemployed people to attempt to migrate into other occupations.

Both disasters were made by humanity. Well, the Dust Bowl was a combination of drought and poor farming techniques. It didn't help that the plains weren't naturally the best place for farming. Similarly the drilling was a man-made disaster, made worse by the location so deep.

Steal back BP

BP's negligence has caused untold damage to America. We'll probably never know the full cost. And they'll probably never pay the estimated cost.

So fuck em! Let's seize all BP assets in America. All physical infrastructure, any patents based here, any accounts, stock, bonds, anything and everything. Let's take their suits after they get done lying to Congress.

We'll call it even and promise in the future to have a more effective means of containing anger.