It is the seventh anniversary of the Jamrud mosque bombing. It was a suicide bombing and at least 48 people were killed and roughly a hundred injured. According to witnesses, a boy of 15 or 16 climbed into a window, went to the main hall that was filled for Friday prayers, and he blew himself up. It was a complete horror as you can see in the photo on the left. But there are two issues that this raises in my mind.

The first is the use of children as suicide bombers. I once heard an interview with a teenage girl who was supposed to be a suicide bomber but backed out at the last minute. And her story was really tragic. Her boyfriend had been killed by the Israelis and so she was upset and mentioned that she would like to get revenge, and the people who lead these kind of things jumped on her and pushed her into becoming a suicide bomber. It is so horrible. Like military leaders everywhere, she was just a resource to be used however they thought best in their war with the Israelis. All I can say is that warriors should fight their own wars and leave kids out of it. I realize this is not the way things work, and there is nothing any different between that and killing children. Still, I have a hard time not seeing this teenage boy as a victim as well.

The second issue is the bombing of a mosque. I’m just not clear where all our resentment of Muslims comes from. The Muslims who are politically radicalized are mostly in the business of killing other Muslims. So I just don’t see what the whole issue is with their religion. I keep coming back to Sam Harris’ line that “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas.” Really?! It’s such a bigoted and ignorant claim. His depth of thinking on Islam is about as deep as Phil Robertson’s thinking on atheism. The main thing that occurs to me is that this kind of thinking (that many atheists are very open about) is very much blaming the victim.

With deep sadness and hope that the world becomes a better place, we mark this seventh anniversary of the Jamrud mosque bombing.

On this day in 1807, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Slave Trade Act — pushed most notably by William Wilberforce. It outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. But it was just part of the process of ending slavery. Slavery itself wouldn’t be outlawed until 1833. But slavery in England itself had been illegal since 1772 with the decision in Somerset v Stewart.

Now the timing of that last one is quite interesting. This had an impact on the American Revolutionary War. It is discussed in Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. Somerset v Stewart was extremely well reported on here in the colonies. And slave owners could see the writing on the wall. We can’t say how big a factor there was with regard to this, but it was certainly a force pushing for the war.

In the musical 1776, the biggest part of the drama circles around the southern states walking out because of an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence. But we don’t actually know what was said because the secretary of the Second Continental Congress thought it unimportant to write it down. In the movie, the discussion is all about how the south would not accept independence if it meant losing their slaves. But I have a hard time believing that people were not making rather the opposite argument, “We are in favor of independence because of the threat to our peculiar institution; why would we sign a document that threatens it?!”

Political progress is always made slowly — step by tiny step. There are broader features of it, however. Slavery was going to end. America bought itself 30 years of slavery with the Revolutionary War. And I can’t say it bought much more. Democracy was in the air. It’s hard to say that progress has been made more quickly in the United States. In fact, it seems rather the opposite. And here we are in America fighting over economic issues that were considered settled in the 1950s.

But we continue on. And this was an important day for humanity in 1807.

On this day in 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled about a half million barrels of oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska. I remember at the time that I bought a shirt that said, “We don’t care. We don’t have to care. At Exxon, we’re part of the problem.” This was based, I think, on Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator character, Ernestine. It amused me for a while.

But even at the time, I understood that the problem was not Exxon or even the oil companies. The problem was and is the system itself. If you have a population that is dependent upon something as toxic as fossil fuels, you are going to have accidents. There will be consequences.

I don’t talk about it much because it seems elitist of me with my relatively stable life. But I wonder about capitalism and our push for ever more growth. I do see that if regular working people are going to see improvements in their lives, we need economic growth. But that’s only because we’ve decided that capitalism is the only system we can possibly have. And that seems less and less tenable.

I find that I get hung up on how you would replace capitalism. But the truth is, that’s silly. In our society, capitalism is like water to a fish: it is such a given that it doesn’t really even exist. I would say that for the vast majority of people in the “advanced” economies, belief in capitalism is far more real than belief in God. At least with God, people know there are other people who don’t believe in their particular choice.

So we are stuck in a situation where we are just trying to make the given state of awesome capitalism more humane. Think about Bernie Sanders for a moment. He calls himself a socialist, but that’s really a joke. He’s just an old style liberal. We’ve lost so much ground over the last five decades — especially here in the United States.

Obviously, we will eventually get over our addiction to oil and things like the Exxon Valdez oil spill will be a thing of the past. But capitalism will create new ways to destroy us. Rest assured.

[This is a reprint of last year’s Anniversary Post, Fascism. It’s interesting that a year later, we are looking at Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination for president. A lot of people don’t like it when Trump is called a fascist. They claim that he’s more along the lines of a right-wing populist as we see in Europe. But I think these people are being pedantic. They want to confine the word to a very narrow definition. I think it is that after the Nazis, no one wants to use the word fascist to describe anything that is popular in the United States. But what are you going to do? Donald Trump is a fascist. Maybe he’s not exactly Mussolini, but then Hitler wasn’t either. -FM]

On this day in 1919, fascism was born. It seems like only yesterday! Maybe that is because the United States has so many fascist elements to it — and I’m not just talking about the Republican Party. When the head of Whole Foods said that Obamacare was basically a fascist law, he wasn’t wrong. Neoconservatism is entirely in keeping with fascism in terms of nationalism and foreign policy. But neoliberalism has many similarities to fascist economic policies. I don’t know where we ever got the idea that the best way to improve the lives of Americans was for the government to “partner” with the private sector. I think neoliberalism has had a much greater negative impact on Americans than neoconservatism. Of course, the fact that most neoconservatives are also neoliberals (or worse) when it comes to the economy does tilt the argument quite distinctly away from them.

The reason that today is the birthday of fascism is because today is the day that Benito Mussolini started his political movement. Of course, fascism dates back much further than that. In fact, it is hard not to see fascism as fundamentally a movement trying to bring back the Roman Empire. I don’t think we should hold it against the Romans, given that they ruled roughly 2,000 years ago, but they had many of the same kinds of beliefs and policies that we know and despise in modern fascism. I think there will always be fascists, the only question is how much power we will allow them to get.

The American right wing has a lot of fascist elements. The biggest way is in their nationalism. That is probably the single most important aspect of fascism. But there are other aspects: authoritarianism, imperialism, traditionalism, racism, and anti-intellectualism — all of which are alive and well in American conservatism. There is one way that the American right is not like fascism. In its early days, fascism believed in workers being combined as an important part of the power structure of the nation. So basically, you had labor, business, and government all working together. American conservatives are not on board with that kind of thing. In that regard, they are more believers in feudalism. So you can say that American conservatism is very much like fascism, but worse.

Liberals, of course, are not like that. But the New Democrats (who continue to control the Democratic Party) have a number of similarities. But it’s like everything about the politics of America: the New Democrats generally suck, but they are so much better than the Republicans (who have been completely taken over by the conservative movement). A better argument could be made that Democrats are communists, but that doesn’t make much sense either. I think that most people on the American left wing see themselves ultimately as being in favor of a kind of Swedish socialism. And the worst you can say about them is that their markets are not as efficient as they ought to be. I don’t agree with that criticism, but I’ll take it if the conservatives will accept that there really isn’t much they have to disagree with Mussolini.

Happy birthday fascism!

[And welcome to America! -FM]

On this day in 1413, Henry V of England became king. He was king for less than ten years, due to his early death. And his reputation really is just due to the British victory at the Battle of Agincourt. Now that’s one of those great battles that sum up the stupidity of war. Reading Shakespeare, you would think that the British simply fought more bravely than the French. But if anything, they fought more cowardly. It was all due to the use of the long bow that allowed the victory. The vast majority of the British troops were archers. Bravery and resolve in such matters are fairy tales designed to convince men to get themselves killed for no good reason.

It is, then, perhaps appropriate that the great warrior king should die at the age of 36 of dysentery. You gotta love that!

Anyway, Shakespeare’s play Henry V is not bad. It’s interesting how different people at different times have performed it. It’s clear that Shakespeare meant it to be the jingoistic travesty that becomes clear if you sit down and read the whole thing. But normally when it is performed today, people finesse it into something anti-war, or at least nuanced. Which it isn’t. As I’ve argued for years: Shakespeare has benefited greatly by having 400 years of the best editors, directors, and actors finding meaning he never intended and probably would have found horrifying.

Still, we should mark this day of King Henry V by listening to Kenneth Branagh’s do the Saint Crispin’s Day speech. It’s great. It’s beautiful. His performance is wonderful. Yet what he says is vile. Pretty language should never be used to hide ugly ideas.

On this day in 1968, the US Congress repealed the requirement that the dollar be backed by a gold reserve. I haven’t been able to confirm this, actually. But it’s on Wikipedia, so it must be true! And it gives me an opportunity to rant about the gold standard.

The thing is, I don’t understand people who believe in the gold standard. Even when I was an idiotic libertarian, I didn’t understand it. The general thinking is that with the gold standard, the government can’t “print money” and “devalue the currency.” In other words: it’s about inflation. The problem is that inflation was a far bigger deal when we were on the gold standard than it has been since we got off it.

The very concept of money is mysterious. But as far as I can tell, as long as the flow of cash doesn’t increase faster than the economy is growing, there is no problem. Usually, there isn’t even a problem when it does! But somehow, we are supposed to wed the supply of money to one particular metal that used to be very valuable but really isn’t today. It’s value in no way tracks what’s going on in the economy. Starting in the mid-15th century, gold has done little but go down in value. (Other than spikes because gold bugs were freaking out.)

What the fascination with the gold standard shows is that this stuff is not rational; it is a matter of faith. Gold bugs are convinced that the government is just itching to devalue the currency. This is despite the fact that the government itself would do very badly if inflation goes up. It reminds me of these people who claim that Obama wants to destroy the United States. He’s the most powerful man in the world because he is president of the United States and he wants to destroy it? At least liberals had a point when they noted that George W Bush was an idiot. No one ever accused him of wanting to do things that went entirely against his own interests.

I know how much of a rant this is. But it is has been a long time since I’ve been able to deal with supporters of the gold standard rationally. It just makes no sense. I’ve waited for decades to hear a good argument for it. And I’ve looked! But there is no good argument for it. It’s just a bunch of freaks who believe it the same way other people believe in gods. But you can’t prove that gods don’t exist. You can prove that the gold standard is a stupid idea.