I just caught a tiny bit of the show Shark Tank. Regular readers will know that I hate this show. In November of last year, I wrote about how evil it is the way we deify these people, Business Will Not Give Up on GOP. In January, I wrote about the the vagaries of wealth, Arbitrary and Inequitable Distribution of Wealth and Incomes. In February, I wrote about how small minded the “sharks” are, Herd Mentality on Shark Tank. And in May, I returned to the deification issue from a different angle, Heroes for a Debased Culture. But today, I have something different, although mentioned in the past: the “sharks” are generally idiots.

In the clip I saw, there were a couple of guys selling socks (Bombas Socks, if you are interested, and you shouldn’t be). They had one of these stupid “social justice” kinds of businesses where for each pair of socks they sell, they give a pair to a homeless shelter or some such nonsense. Sound familiar? It is the sock version of TOMS shoes. Slavoj Žižek dealt with this in a 2009 lecture First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. In it, he talks about how people can feel good about themselves buying a five dollar cup of coffee at Starbucks because a nickel goes to help sustainable agriculture or some such. It is what it is. If the upper middle class want to feel that all they have to do to be socially responsible is to be good consumers, it’s not my fight, even though it shows them to be silly and ultimately evil people.

The point of this approach to the business is that it is a gimmick. It’s like when you were a kid and your mother sent you to get something at the store. You could go to market A where the owner gave you a sucker or market B where you got nothing. You went to market A. The lazy do-gooder goes to the coffee shop that gives a negligible amount of profit to the cause du jour. So from a business standpoint, it is just a marketing cost. See how simple it is? Even I understand it and I don’t get business at all.

Enter the stupidest of the “sharks” (which says a lot): Kevin O’Leary. He asks, more or less, “Why should I invest in this? If you are giving away one pair of socks for each one you sell, aren’t you cutting your profits in half?” This is like saying to the CEO of Coke, “Why should I invest in your company when you are spending all this money on advertising? I mean, you’re just throwing away profits!” But it’s worse than this. And it gets at one of the reasons I hate these kinds of “social justice” companies.

If a do-gooder buys a pair of socks for four bucks (these are actually nine), he figures that half the money goes for his socks and half the money goes to help that grateful homeless man. Of course, that isn’t it at all. Let’s assume the socks only cost a dollar to manufacture and distribute. The buyer gets two dollars worth of good feeling, even as the seller only invests half that. So as long as you have the right kind of lazy idealists as customers, this is a great way to market your product.

So why is it that Kevin O’Leary didn’t understand such a basic concept in marketing? There are loads of similar kinds of ploys. There is no real difference between this sock deal and the old “buy one, get one free.” He didn’t understand because he’s not smart and he’s not very competent. None of them are. You know the old Edison saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”? Well, modern business seems to be zero percent inspiration (Give away a pair of sock for every one sold? Really?!) and fifty percent connections and fifty percent just being a cold hearted bastard. The Bombas Socks segment had it all, in exactly those percentages.

I’ve been hearing a lot of people talking about the possibility that Ben Carson might run for president. Why not? I’m sure he will have another book out that he wants to sell. Perhaps, “One Nation: We Can Save America’s Future by Killing the Poor.” But a presidential run by him would be very typical of the Republican Party, in that they think one doesn’t need to know anything about governing in order to govern. And Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bush the Younger proved that in a technical sense, you don’t need to know anything, even if it is really bad for the state and country. Carson has no experience in government whatsoever. This, of course, in Republican circles makes him a great candidate. It is much the same as the way that the emotionally immature are most in love with people they know least about.

But thinking about this got me reading about Carson. He’s an interesting guy. He is clearly a brilliant neurosurgeon. But apart from that, he has long been a crank. And I mean that in a good way. He had many ideas that were all over the place. In a saner time, he just would have been one of those odd guys (Like me!) who publish their marginal ideas and mostly no one really notices. He could have been a modern Iganatius Donnelly. And that would be super cool!

To give you an example, in the 1990s, he was pushing for the elimination of for-profit health insurance, “The first thing we need to do is get rid of for profit insurance companies. We have a lack of policies and we need to make the government responsible for catastrophic healthcare.” So what he’s calling for is single payer healthcare above a certain level. Depending on that level, that could be a very liberal policy. But as I’ve seen, the definition of “catastrophic” has gone up and up and up over the years as far as conservatives are concerned. Of course, now he compares Obamacare to slavery.

Carson is also an evolution denier. I have no problem with this! It goes right along with his crankery. Of course the neurosurgeon believes this. He is the same man who said of his political party, “If I were part of one, it would be called the Logic party, and it would be dedicated to commonsense approaches we all should be able to see.” Ah yes, logic! He decided that evolution is wrong because the universe is just too complex to be explained. Just the same, evolution is such a big deal because it is a simple idea that explains that complexity. I’m sure it all comes down to the fact that he is a Seventh-day Adventist and they don’t believe in evolution. But, you know: logic!

The shame is that Carson has now become cause célèbre in the conservative movement. This has destroyed his ability to be the crank that he was clearly born to be. There’s just too much money to lose with even the smallest of apostasy. So even when he says that people have no right to semi-automatic weapons in a city, he moderates it with, “There’s a reason for the Second Amendment; people do have the right to have weapons.” Of course, who cares what people do in cities? They are just a bunch of liberals anyway. (What’s more, conservatives like Ben Carson are in cities, and they don’t want gun toting idiots running around any more than anyone else!)

But when it comes down to it, I can’t say that the Republicans won’t nominate Ben Carson. It’s interesting that everyone talked about what terrible candidates the Republicans ran in 2012. But was that really true? Mitt Romney was a perfectly acceptable candidate and he did as well in the general election as any Republican would have. There were also people like Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty. But the Republicans didn’t like these more reasonable guys. If it hadn’t been for his sexual transgressions, Herman Cain might well have been the nominee. I think that Carson doesn’t have his baggage, and is a hell of a lot smarter. So why not?

I don’t think Carson would have much of a chance in a general election, even if the economics were clearly favorable a Republican. Most Republicans would be thrilled to vote for an African American. But there is still a sizable part of the party (I’d say 20%) who absolutely would not vote for a black man. Many of them would not vote at all, but many others would go with Clinton. But Carson has already lost his soul, just as Ronald Reagan did before him. Both men were cranks, and they traded that exalted state to be nothing but conservative ideologues — doing the bidding of their billionaire betters.

I spend more time than a sane man would thinking about bloodletting and leeches. You may be aware that Mozart was likely killed by his doctors who bled him to death in the name of curing what was probably a minor problem. We look back on this and think, “How could they be so stupid?!” I don’t do that. I look around the world and wonder what it is we are doing today that future generations will look back on and think, “How could they be so stupid?!” Although in our case I don’t think it will be as much “stupid” as “cruel.” Take, for example, the way we treat drug users — although there is a whole lot of stupid in that too.

The main thing that I think about in this regard is free will — or rather the lack of it. We humans are a smug lot. And the more successful we are, the smugger we are. The CEO with a high paying and interesting job is eager to go to work each day. He sees himself as having a strong work ethic. But this is like a king thinking he has a good work ethic because he wakes up each day. Most people would consider the most wonderful vacation ever to be fawned over and asked their opinions about the work that other people would do. It is just icing on the cake that they would know that no matter how badly they performed, they would be given tens of millions of dollars when they were fired.

I was thinking about this because Paul Krugman wrote, The Show-Off Society. He started it with this well known observation, “Liberals talk about circumstances; conservatives talk about character.” Here’s the thing: conservatives are simply wrong. And in a hundred or two hundred years of intellectual development, people will think about our economic policies the way they think of Medieval doctors and their collections of leeches.

But there is a difference. Most of the time that people were being bled to death, no one knew any better. When it comes to economic and social policy, we do know better. And it isn’t mysterious. It doesn’t require a PhD in sociology to see children raised with every possible advantage will do better than other children. But to the conservative mind, that isn’t it at all. It is about “character.” And how do they know? Because Daymond John is a multimillionaire! You see, he is black and he wasn’t born rich. Of course, he wasn’t exactly poor. He managed to start FUBU with a $100,000 mortgage on his mother’s house.

This explains all the “cultural dysfunction” talk among conservatives when talking about African Americans. They have to, or otherwise they have to come right out and say that white men have more character than anyone else. But that isn’t real argumentation; it is just apologetics. The “cultural dysfunction” argument is just a way to say the current racist and sexist make up of power in the country is right and proper. (There is much more than racism and sexism, but we don’t have handy names for them.)

There are differences in people’s abilities, of course. But there are various problems with this. First is that intelligence has basically no correlation to financial success in this country. When I talk to rich people, I am as shocked by their stupidity and ignorance as I am when I talk to poor people. I’m sure if I took a collection of rich and poor people and taught them vector calculus, they would both do as well. (That is: they would both do very well because I’m a brilliant and inspiring teacher.)

Second, is that we have monetized certain skills to the exclusion of other skills that are as important or more so. I think humans are fundamentally decent. When living in small groups, they tend to get along rather well. But the structures we have created to allow large groups to live together have brought out many of our worst characteristics. I still think most people are decent. But what we value as a culture is mostly terrible.

The fact that we all have different intelligence and skills allows those who want to (conservatives mostly) to justify the status quo. Regardless of how we oppress one group and pamper another, there will always be a few people who crawl out of poverty and a few who fall into it (although this latter case is becoming unheard of). And it is on the basis of this that people claim it is all about “character.”

Now, I said above that in a couple hundred years, people will look back at the cruelty and stupidity of our current situation with horror. But that doesn’t mean that I think things will have much changed. Today, roughly three million children starve to death every year. We think it is outrageous. We don’t think it is the children’s fault. But we don’t do anything about it. In the case of our nation’s shocking lack of equality and, most of all, “equality of opportunity,” it is very much in the interests of the power elite to ignore the problem. And so they will. Although I suspect by then, we will at least have some kind of guaranteed minimum income. And hopefully, it will be worldwide so that three million children aren’t starving to death each year.

We humans spend a good deal too much of our time patting ourselves on the back about how much better we are now than we used to be. In many ways, we are better. But it doesn’t help us to become better to tell ourselves we have arrived. I hear this kind of stuff all the time. The US Constitution is the greatest constitution in the world! No it isn’t. We have the best healthcare system in the world! No we don’t. We may not be equal but we have equality of opportunity and live in a meritocracy! No we don’t — not even close.

The whole “character” canard is just a way of making the power elite feel even better about themselves. They aren’t just rich and powerful; they are noble! This is the same nonsense we’ve gotten from hereditary kings for millennia. And we still haven’t gotten over it.

Poor Maria Shriver, the long suffering wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is out promoting an idea that just shows it wasn’t all that surprising that she married a Republican. According to a press release two months ago, Marriott International Joins The Envelope Please™, A New Initiative Created by Maria Shriver and A Woman’s Nation™ in Support of Hotel Room Attendants. But before getting to what sounds like a worthy campaign, let’s just take a moment to chuckle at all those trademarks. America really needs more trademarks. Like that first sentence would have been some much better like this: Poor Maria Shriver™, the long suffering™ wife™ of Arnold Schwarze™negger™, is out promoting an idea™ that just shows™ it wasn’t all that surprising™ that she married™ a Republican™.

Anyway, the idea here is to put little tip envelopes out in hotel rooms as a way to encourage people to tip the housekeeping staff. All my life, I have been a strong supporting of tipping the housekeeping staff. They do a difficult and disgusting job and generally get paid poorly. I do it because it is one small thing that I can do to help. It takes away a small amount of the oppression that the housekeepers suffer under. But this corporate push to encourage tipping is repugnant in the extreme.

Forget about “A Woman’s Nation”; it is just some group that Shriver put together back in 2011. It seems to be nothing more than a group that doubtless does a little good, but which is primarily involved in allowing companies like Goldman Sachs and Cisco Systems to look like they have the slightest interest in helping poor women. And this new venture, The™ Envelope™ Please™™™, is just a way of making Marriott look like a compassionate corporation.

At Think Progress a week and a half ago, Bryce Covert noted that nationwide, the median pay for hotel maids is $9.41 per hour. But at “compassionate” Marriott, it is even lower: roughly $8.32 per hour. So sure, maids are way underpaid for their difficult jobs. But as Covert noted, “Tips will of course help, but a pay raise would lift their living standards even more.” She added:

But the ever brilliant Michael Hiltzik suggested that there might be a much more nefarious aspect to this. Currently, hotel housekeeping is not considered a “tipped occupation” by the federal government. This means that companies must pay at least the minimum wage. But if this campaign is successful, it could be reclassified. And if it becomes a tipped occupation, then Marriott could pay their housekeepers even less than minimum wage!

Tipping is always a scam. I still always tip, because it isn’t a scam being perpetrated by the poor employees. It is a scam by corporations to keep their direct labor costs low. This allows them to post prices that are lower than they really are and skim ever more profits. We should really outlaw the practice at the same time we raise the minimum wage to $15 and peg it to productivity growth (not inflation). I’m not hopeful for anything like this. But the least we can do is push back against this kind of thing. When I go into Denny’s, at least I don’t have to look at signs that say, “Because we are so great to work for, we are encouraging you to tip your server (because we pay them less than minimum wage)!”

Media Matters brought my attention to, The Media’s Imaginary Coffee Salute Scandal. It seems that Obama had a cup of coffee in his hand when he saluted Marines while exited Marine One. The right wing are freaking out, even though Bush the Younger did the same thing all the time while holding his dog. It is just another thing for partisans to freak out about. And I don’t especially care.

What I have cared about in the past is the habit of our men in uniform saluting the President of the United States. This goes back basically to the beginning. To me it has always smacked of military dictatorships. But it is what we have always done and it does go along with Marines code (pdf) that states that one should salute “all officers senior to you in rank.” The president certainly is entitled as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (and not simply Commander-in-Chief). But the Marines mention a number of other civilians who should be saluted, such as governors. Thus this is a sign of subordination of the military to the civilian government — a very good thing indeed. Conservatives want to turn this around.

But the Marines are a practical group and they note conditions under which one should not salute. For example, if you are bent over an engine trying to fix it, you are not expected to salute. But most important in this situation, you don’t need to salute when, “Carrying articles with both hands or being otherwise so occupied as to make saluting impractical.” That would pretty much relieve a president from ever having to salute.

Of course, the president never did salute. You know Colonel Jackson, General Grant, Colonel Roosevelt, General Eisenhower? None of them ever saluted. The tradition started in 1981 when the star of Bedtime for Bonzo did it because he thought it was super keen. He had been in World War II, but only stateside working in public relations. But you know how it is: once they stuck “under God” into the “Pledge of Allegiance,” people assumed it had always been there. Allen West, who really should know better even though he is a total authoritarian nut job, called the “latte salute” disgraceful. But you gotta wonder where West and all the Fox News ranters were when this happened:

Of course they were no where. No one cared. And no one cares about the “latte salute.” Brian Adam Jones sums up the issue well:

The man can’t win. No Democratic president can win. This is because the right wing in this country has nothing to talk about in terms of policy. The world view of the right is that the nation is divided into the patriots and the traitors. And the Democrats are by definition traitors. It doesn’t matter if any given Democrat is a president or not. Thinking this way doesn’t make those on the right traitors, but it definitely destroys any claim to being patriots.

I saw this bumper sticker on the back of a car — okay, it was an SUV, of course. On its face, it is not as offensive as “If You Like Your Freedom Thank a Vet” or “Freedom Isn’t Free.” These bumper stickers equate freedom with our enormous military that does very little to protect our freedom anymore. What it does is support corporate interests. But above all, these bumper stickers just say, “Whatever the military does is great and it is wrong to ever disagree.” In other words: you are not free to express your opinions. Subtext: because we lost the Vietnam War because people didn’t “support” the troops.

This new bumper sticker (new to me, anyway) is much better in that it is explicit. There is no pretense that the things we have the military do are for the good of the country or its people or any people, for that matter. It is simply belligerent. Note that it doesn’t say if you “can’t” stand behind the troops, it says “won’t.” So the problem, according to it, is horrible liberals like myself who just refuse to do what is right. It is not a matter of differing opinions.

Of course, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t “support” or “stand behind” the troops. This entire conservative meme is a phantom. No American I’ve ever seen has wished our military ill. So what people who claim that we must “support the troops” mean is that we must support whatever war the United States is involved in. What’s more, we must support ever more funding for our military. And above all, we must be bellicose, “America, fk yeah!”

The truth is that a lot of liberals (and some conservatives) over the years have indeed stood in front of the military. They did it to yell, “Stop! You’re making a mistake!” But again, people put these bumper stickers on their cars not to call for leadership but to call for conformity and the acquiescence to authority.

Everyone loves this photo:

But this is someone standing up to another country’s army — a country that we have, at best, a difficult relationship with. What this young man did is exactly what peace protesters do, but obviously not as ostentatiously and not with the shocking amount of courage. And this gets to the very heart of what I so hate about all of these bumper stickers: the mentality that goes along with them is authoritarian. It is “America: right or wrong.”[1] And that is just about the most anti-American thing I can imagine.

Do we live in a military dictatorship? Is Bill O’Reilly right that after the government decides to go to war, all those who disagree should, “Shut up”? (This has long been official policy.) Should we all be good authoritarian followers who do just what the government tells us? I think the people who put these bumper stickers on their cars think so.

But these same people tend to be right wing reactionaries — supporters of the Tea Party and the John Birch Society and similar groups. And in general, these are the people whose love of and loyalty to the United States is the most contingent. These bumper stickers don’t say, “I love America!” They say, “I love the military!” America is always great regardless of what it does to others. But what America decides to do internally is not to be supported without conditions. These people believe in “America,” not America. And the unwavering support for any and all military adventures is a sign of that. And that, of all things, is what they put on the back of their cars.

[1] There is one early quote of this that I quite agree with. In 1872, Carl Schurz supposedly said, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” But that is completely counter to the sentiment, “If You Won’t Stand Behind Our Troops, You Are More Than Welcome to Stand in Front of Them.”