Note to a Young Activist

Note to a young activist, none of whom will likely read this or listen to it if they do

1) Center Left parties often win elections: Blair, Clinton, Obama.
2) Farther Left parties rarely win elections and when they do, they don’t last long because they have no clue what to do
3) The current status quo is unsustainable, inequitable and needs massive reform or replacement ,
4) Rage about the status quo is perfectly understandable but responsibility for it should include the Left for its failures as well as not expecting the Right to change as the status quo works well for them. Don’t expect magically fair media either.
5) But there is little point in this rage unless you first understand how we got here aka the causes of the status quo for which you need some history and some economics
6) Without understanding the systemic nature of the current system, you have nil chance of changing it. This is really hard work
7) And once you understand the current system well, you have a chance to develop a reformed or replacement system This is even harder sustained attention, years of work the Left hasn’t even started.
8)Most voters, even those screwed by the current system, have a lot of stake in it or can be convinced they do by the Plutocrats
9) So voters are only likely to support changing the current system if you have a coherent, tested, credible alternative. And a strategy to implement it after winning their support. Good luck with Leninist vanguardism sans winning elections.
10) Without all this, you will be pissing in the wind as we say in England and the Right will continue to win elections and make things worse and destroy the planet.

Though I may well be completely mistaken and Far Left Pigs can indeed fly without a program of status quo replacement.

If you think so please contest any of these points you think mistaken. Generalized content free, argument free denunciation of these points doesn’t really do it, does it?

SETI

I have always found the SETI project interesting. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

But I think we also need a parallel research project: STI: the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence?

Hostility: G A Kelly

When you experience hostility on line or in person, you may want to remember George Kelly (1905-1967) creator of Personal Construct Theory’s definition. Kelly defines Hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.”

Notice that this definition combines awareness of a validational event(invalidation) with a response to that event(extortion of evidence) That quote is foundational for my negotiating stance.

And when quoted I find it makes the hostile even more Hostile, which I suppose is a form of validation
?

What does this mean in practical terms? Well I find that my style of arguing in person or on line is something like this:

I mainly argue to learn, not to teach or preach, as my late Dad taught me, by doing it to me from the age of six. And as I practiced as a professional negotiator.

I set out my view as clearly as I can as to how I see that things are, were in the past aka history, or how things maybe should or could be in future. Often noting that I may be mistaken and with some argument and data, as to why I think that is the case.

The main point of this is to have someone contest this stance, if appropriate, with argument and data to show how I am mistaken. Ideally point counter point against what I said, rather than some made up straw person, and avoiding ad hominem aka you only say that because you are an x. If they show I may be mistaken, after maybe I have pushed back and contested their contesting.

Then I have learned something new, like a good Bayesian observer adjusting my view, my prior, in the light of new information. If not then I have a little more confidence in my perspective, it having been tested. But my confidence is way short of 100% certainty, which I rarely do. And I wait the next round of testing. Challenging to those of fixed views? Probably.

When someone switches from contesting my views to attacking me personally: to saying that I only say because I am an x aka they ad hominem me. I only say that because I am stupid, or right wing or left wing, ignorant, malign, corrupt, know nothing about the subject, whatever. Then basically they have conceded they can’t argue against my argument, that their stance is indefensible, and so they must attack me personally, often by attributing failings they have themselves to me or as Jung said: “Attribution is 90% projection.”

So I note when they react with Hostility, that G A Kelly defined as what happens when the way you construe the world is profoundly challenged. I don’t usually do Hostile, especially not in retaliation, as I rather like having my world view challenged.

How about you?

Here’s George Kelly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kelly_(psychologist)

Curmudgeon: Guilty as Charged

What’s the Matter with Human Resources?

There is another thing I am struggling with. Since I got back in the UK I have had about a dozen chats with senior Human Resource professionals here, who worked for me back in the day and something major seems to have changed.

When I was last in the UK and indeed when I was in the US, HR was an incredibly challenging profession. We were focused on people and creating ways to make business work. We were creating rigorous approaches to selection, to organization change, to labour relations conflict, we were contributing to business strategy and I was on the operating committees of my plants and on the major business divisions I later served.

It was far from perfect but enormous fun and very meaningful. And we looked after are our own people in HR: trained them, developed them and generally made sure they got good feedback and were appreciated and promoted if they worked out. And its these people who are now in senior HR jobs across British business.

But now talking to these people, HR seems to have joined the Administa side of the world. It seems more like BS political games, go fetch rover for senior managers who are not good leaders/good with people, keeping them out of diversity trouble, and providing call centre (your call is very important to us) type support to employees and with limited role in the overall business or people management. The people I talk to seem embarrassed to talk to their former boss about what they are doing and our chat becomes more gossip about what old colleagues are now doing. It’s pretty disheartening.

One of my former colleagues put me onto someone, a consultant apparently working on making HR more effective and we discussed the above and he agreed and seemed interested, gave me some ideas he had written up and I gave him some of my ideas to fix things back. Then silence….clearly he was not really serious about fixing HR or my ideas are so far from current reality as to be unworkable.

There is another angle: almost all the young professionals I mentor suffer in organizations that are useless at people management. Organizations that demoralize people and the research suggests this problem is rampant and much of the current Great Resignation reflects this, the quitting of soul destroying jobs. Most of my mentees actually like their job teaching, in healthcare, IT, retail, non-profits, architecture, social work, business; it’s their bosses and bosses bosses that destroy their motivation. The organizational context.

And yet where is HR in this problem: no where best I can see. So my personal experience seems to have rather wider implications?

FTM

There is a lot wrong with the world and in recent years there have been some great campaigns to highlight this. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Climate Change protests.

But to be effective they need a parallel movement of equal force: Follow Through Matters FTM. The pressure needs to be sustained, to really impact the status quo where it hurts, and be followed by far more work on the replacement systems. Simple idea but requiring attention spans and yes institutions of some sort to sustain momentum. Less rage perhaps and more creative design work.

Occupy Wall Street was the greatest disappointment for me personally because it started to focus on the uber problem: the financial system….but then petered out as some fashion that went out of fashion.

Climate Change Reality and the Market System

The likely sad reality is that the masses of the people (that’s us) don’t really and seriously see the problem.

Don’t see the climate change catastrophe coming our way or if they do, are too busy in the day to day struggle to live, to look after themselves and their families, and to be distracted (often deliberately by the self interested Plutocrats and their servants) by click bait and infotainment, limitations of the education system, and the lack of a compelling narrative about a different economic system that would avoid destroying the planet via the externalities of the market system.

We are all deep into the market system that plays us, and like fish in water, say what water and no one has a compelling vision to change the water. Do we? To fix things would require attention span and follow through most of us lack.

The politicians feel little pressure to act decisively do they?

Democracy versus Plutocracy

I have some really good sane conservative friends and we have good debates. One of them was saying Democracy was an ambiguous term. I responded with this:

Democratic is not really an ambiguous term. It is to me at least: one citizen one vote (not a few billionaires most of the effective votes) and a polity, institutions, the rule of law, that responds with Burkean uncorrupted representative democracy to convert the people’s will into sensible affordable (given the people’s appetite for taxes) consistent doable politics that preserve the nation and the people. It’s the worst possible political system as Churchill said apart from all the others.

I do sense you are not in fact a democrat but lean aristocrat, rule of the best. Which in our current system is laughable, as our elite and almost any imaginable elite available to us, are so corruptly incompetent as to be not true. Talent does not go into politics except the game playing mediocrities. Two of the people who worked for me in Ford were likely future pols and they were not great at their jobs but at least they had good business experience.

A Democratic system does indeed need capable leaders and is indeed prone to demagogues if the other leaders are useless. Though actually what we have is not democracy or aristocracy, but plutocracy: rule by money and the billionaires (who made their money not making stuff but via the financial casino, property deals, or hi tech rigged trusts, monopolies) are useless at ruling in the interest of the people. Government of the people by the Pluts for the Pluts is what we have. No legislation was passed by Congress the last 30 years that was counter the interests of the top 10% or more often 1% as Gilels showed.

I think the market system taking over everything destroys democracy. A democracy needs its citizens to have multiple identities: worker, union member, student/apprentice, professional, voter, church member, consumer, soldier, sports club member, political party member, social club member, community member, mentor of the young, extended family member and yes law abiding citizen. And these identities should cross party lines and bind the nation in dialogues of all sorts. Raising money together for a sports field sort of thing. Give opportunities for leadership and alliance building in many spheres to develop and move on to politics with age.

Politics should not be a post college profession sans anything else or a profession of marketing. You should not be allowed to run for office without at least ten years doing real value add hands on work in business, the military, the community, unions whatever. Getting real. Heck I don’t think you should be able to graduate college without a year of real work. Toyota make every graduate recruit work on the assembly line for six months before they start their traineeship. I thought Ford should do that too. I did a few shifts myself, not nearly enough.

We now have an Amazon Prime society. Every identity is subsumed to consumer. Students are customers demanding product and A grades, not apprentices. Hence what you hate in universities. Universities are overrun by admin, who operate as if they are consumer businesses. Mega churches operate like market places for pimping beliefs with high paid CEOs. Mercenaries are replacing citizen soldiers. Political parties treat members as on line consumers. Families are breaking under economic strain of the market place among the poor of all races. Admin game playing replaces real jobs. Voters are offered political product. Communities are atomized by economic desolation. Participation in actual sport plummets or is marketized for college athletes and sold as a media product to all. People don’t hang out in social clubs or their local pub mixing with others of differing views. They cluster on line with like-minded folks in social media market places. And so on.

A consumer society in which every citizen’s main identity is consumer: we want the world and we want it delivered by Amazon Prime tomorrow sans effort, just bill our credit card. Cargo Cult. That sort of society is no match for China or even weak Russia. And no match for the challenge of climate change either. Sacrifice is not a word in a consumer society. Loyalty to your country either.

Another conservative friend yesterday on Zoom with whom I have similar good debates. He asked me: “seriously do you think the young would fight for America, if needed, would turn up if drafted? Or volunteer to fight?”. He was not making a political point, as we both think Trump’s GOP and the Dems are equally not addressing the issue: to survive a nation cannot consist solely of consumers.

Choice Architecture and Being Wrong

For years now two of my lines of study have been around what I call Choice Architecture, especially around conflict handling as per this blog: how the deliberate framing of choices by the market place, by capitalism and by the Plutocracy political capture of government leads to decisions by individuals that seem plausible, but by any objective standards of long term self and group interest are incredibly stupid.

The other line of study that is related has been around Being Wrong: the whole set of cognitive mechanisms that stops us realizing and admitting when we are wrong, so preventing us learning from our mistakes and doing better next time. This is part of Choice Architecture too and is played by the Plut Media most recently over the 2020 US Election result.

These two lines of study lead directly to my problem with the Left and Progressives these last 50 years or so. Not only do they fail to admit and learn from their mistakes, but far more importantly, they have done nothing to build a different alternative Choice Architecture. Specifically a different way to run the economy, so people don’t make planet destroying decisions and aren’t played by the Pluts daily via the media and market place. A reformed or replaced market place.

But no one on the Left seems remotely interested in exploring either strand: Being Wrong/learning from error or Choice Architecture/reformed or replaced market place, and without this as my friend Don would say: “we are doomed!”Though of course I may be mistaken.

I also notice, as Don does, that most of our Cassandra posts get almost no reaction, which kinda illustrates the point, eh? As my friend Sally said in an email yesterday: “you are so gloomy Ed.” Well actually I am hugely optimistic in my novels and my economics book about what could be done, and hugely pessimistic that we can be assed to do it.

The Afghanistan Situation

The Pundits are rampant at the moment on the situation in Afghanistan. I am somewhat insulated from the optics as I don’t watch TV, haven’t since 1989.

Reflecting on it all: my view:
• I think it was likely unavoidable to go into Afghanistan in 2001 and it was done brilliantly from a military point of view: low cost using local surrogates and air power
• Probably the least worst option given how hard nation building is and how bad at it the US is in the last 60 years, would have been to have left as soon as a replacement government was in place
• Though avoiding the Iraq Invasion/occupation would have allowed this to be done in the best way with no rush, and with at least Bid Laden killed in Tora Bora.
• Once it was decided to stay, I do believe a better more cost effective intelligent strategy could have been adopted
• One that avoided BS reliance on high paid mercenaries and focused on the grass roots
• This was hard for a Republican government driven by for profit defense sector, tail wagging Dog.
• Use mainly US forces not mercenaries and focus on:
• How much money, services, security is being delivered to ordinary Afghans to build their stake in the country?
• Audit driven projects with the US Army not contractors doing the auditing
• To do that much of the support mission needed to be out in the provinces not clustered in Kabul relying on a corrupt central government
• It would not I think have been hard to audit randomly soldiers and police: did you get paid this month and cut off money to any government unit that was not paying these forces
• Coupled with that some real efforts to build an economy, maybe using South Koreans who have done that and know it and also had their own time of corruption they overcame
• They are good US allies and fight well too.
• And solar power would be an obvious win-win for providing something valuable to the people
• None of that happened and even classic counter insurgency 101 was patchy as the Brits found: when they did it, it worked; but the US could not sustain it always thinking military thoughts not political-economic-security-military thoughts and practices in that order
• Each military leader in the US army needed a political commissar to keep the political mission center stage. A friend of mine’s Special Forces friend saying the issue was humanitarian constraints, the British Army would say had it precisely the wrong way round: the point of the mission was building a viable society aka humanitarian and military winning aka Taliban body counts comes third after providing security and building things.
• Once after 20 years of trying nothing had really worked, the Trump deal was a disaster in the detail about which he and the GOP cared not a jot
• Freeing 5000 Taliban leaders was madness up front and was done pre Biden
• Cutting US troop numbers up front was madness and was done pre Biden
• He could and likely should have reversed the latter: likely his biggest mistake
• The maintain a low cost footprint forever: well maybe an option but I doubt the US could sustain it and it would always likely end like it has this month.
• Relying on the Taliban not to have terrorist bases was likely delusional and yet the GOP is now screaming: terrorist bases!!!
• The Afghan government was most responsible for the speed of the collapse
• Not the depleted US military nor the genius of the Taliban
• The Afghan government didn’t have the support of its people because of its huge corruption
• And it denied things were unraveling and denied US requests to start moving vulnerable people out
• And then it folded and fled and left Kabul to either anarchy or the Taliban
• As Hemingway said of bankruptcy: first very slowly then all at once
• The US security apparatus continued the mis-reporting it had been doing for 20 years: why break the habits of a lifetime
• The I guess I would have put in place a worst case scenario and I suspect the US Army did and we are benefiting from it: superb logistics of evacuation flights.
• The CIA actually negotiated successfully for the Taliban to take control of Kabul and not oppose the evacuation of 120,000 people
• The estimate of how many really needed evacuation 6 months back was 100,000. Well done USAF and Army for exceeding that at cost of 13 US and 150 Afghan dead
• Whatever the optics that has been a great success compared with Saigon or the alternative: trying to evacuate with artillery fire from the Taliban
• And no, keeping Bagram was likely not a good idea as the evacuation place: too remote and in more dangerous territory.
• Kabul had the advantage of being in a city of 4 million people where most of those wanting to leave lived
So I would say Biden did a reasonable job. He could have done it quite a lot better but also way worse.
But one thing for absolute certain, he did it a 100 times better than Trump had he been President. I doubt 10,000 would have made it out of Kabul with a lunatic at the helm.

That’s what I think. I may be mistaken: good I didn’t have to manage that cluster fuck. The complexities of car assembly plants quite enough for me. So I just Monday morning quarter back Biden a bit, but say he had the guts to do the hard thing.

And as Von Clausewitz said: “In war everything is very simple, but the simplest things are most difficult to make happen.”