The Transgender Mess

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

The transgender issue is very much like immigration. On immigration, Republicans attempt to make hay by saying Democrats want open borders, with immigrants (and drugs) streaming over without control. While there are Democrats taking such a radical position, the party overall is not. The vast majority of Democrats recognize the need for immigration controls, and Biden’s policy has certainly not been for open borders. However it has been difficult for Democrats internally to agree on language describing what their immigration policy actually is, so Republicans continue to claim it is open borders. With Biden as President, though, Democrats can at least point out that the reality is certainly not that.

Transgender issues are similar in the following sense. Democrats have been strong and unified about the defending the rights of transgender people, since they are in fact discriminated against and even attacked today. However there is a bigger issue in how the Democrats view gender in society as a whole. And since Democrats have not clarified that point, Republicans have jumped on the most radical positions expressed.

For the sake of argument there are two poles. One way of thinking says that transgender people, like homosexual people, are born that way and need to be able to live as they see themselves without fear. This is a relatively small number of people, and the role of government is primarily to defend them. The more radical view is that gender is something anyone can choose, and that children from an early age must be brought up to understand that it is up to them to decide the gender they want–and up to parents to support that decision. Republicans make hay by claiming the second option is what Democrats will impose. From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s argument for sucession: “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times, and L.G.B.T.Q. indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government-controlled gender transition schools.”

Again, since there are many opinions among the Democrats, it’s hard to state where the party stands. But as with immigration, Democrats are not proposing to turn society upside down–for one thing Democrats, unlike Republicans, support personal freedoms of choice. So there is a job to do. The reality is that transgender issues are simply not the bogeyman they have been made to seem. For that we need a real statement of policy, something like this:

  • There are people who legitimately believe that their birth gender does not match the person they are. In other words there are people for whom a change of gender makes sense. There is no reason to forbid a person to change gender as medically possible, and certainly no excuse for discrimination against people who do this, and anyone who harms such a person on the basis of such discrimination should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
  • It is not the role of government to either encourage or discourage such changes.
  • People who make such changes should be allowed to live their lives as the sex they have chosen. That includes use of restrooms. Inappropriate behavior should be prosecuted just as it is today.
  • However in some cases (such as sports teams) the gender distinction is a stand-in for a statistical difference in physical capabilities between men and women. That difference will persist after the sex change and is therefor legitimate to recognize after the change. The birth sex (e.g. as determined by chromosome count) can continue to be used where appropriate in such competitions.

This position will undoubtedly make a lot of people on both the left and the right unhappy, but I don’t see any other way to go.

Bach as a dramatist

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

The ideas here are based on a small amount of data and are undoubtedly well-known in some form to many people.  However they don’t show up in the usual discussions of Bach, and they certainly don’t seem to have influenced performances on recordings.

I’m been playing some pretty basic Bach—three-part inventions (in D and B flat) and a Well-Tempered Klavier fugue (in B flat).  What is striking is that all of these pieces are in a very specific form you could call Bach’s sonata form.  I’ll say a little about the specifics in a minute, but the important thing is that it is obvious that Bach wants those pieces to be played in a way that reflects this clear dramatic structure.  No one would ever play Mozart or Beethoven without respecting the dramatic structure those composers have set up, frequently based on their own versions of sonata form.  However for some reason pretty much no one does that with Bach.  Is there a concern about “authentic performance”?  How can it be inauthentic if it is clearly intended?

Bach wrote for a harpsichord, so he didn’t have dynamic variation to use in performance. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t build drama.  Tempo variation and ornaments were parts of his language, and he undoubtedly used them to the same ends.

Bach’s sonata form is in five sections:

  1. Entry of the voices
  2. Limited development based on the fugal subject as presented and transitioning to a strong cadence in a new key—as an end to the exposition.
  3. Development section proper, with a clear departure point and free use of any pieces or rhythms of the fugal subject or other features of the exposition
  4. Recapitulation in the subdominant as a clear contrast with development.  In all three pieces Bach goes to some pains to emphasize the recapitulation event.
  5. Transition to the tonic as if anything a bigger event, followed by a short kind of victory lap

All three cited pieces do this exactly.  The fugue even goes one step farther.  Bach actually marks each transition point with a rhythmic figure (four 16th notes with a break after the first) that occurs nowhere else in the piece. And the chord progressions in the transitions to the subdominant and tonic are such that Bach is practically waving his arms to get our attention.

I think you can make a case more generally that people pay too much attention to the “horizontal” structure of Bach’s music—the intricacies of multi-voice writing—and not enough attention to the “vertical” structure—the musical events created by all the voices acting together.  That overemphasis on the “horizontal” leads to performances where the sole objective seems to be making sure the fugal subject is heard clearly regardless of whatever else is going on.  In the extreme there are performances which amount to little more than the same thing played over and over again in different keys—because that’s just about all you can hear.

Another side of the same thing is in the comment you sometimes hear about how amazing it is that that real emotional music emerges out of all that complicated polyphony.  I think that point of view is wrong.  Bach wanted to produce music, and the complicated polyphony was his language to produce it.  He manipulated that language the same way any other artist manipulates his medium of creation.  Bach’s ability to master polyphony is jaw-dropping, but that doesn’t mean he regarded it as the primary objective.  Bach wrote music; an overemphasis on “horizontal” structures in the music misses Bach’s point.

There’s a quote from Beethoven (that I can never find) where he described Bach as a genius in chains.  That’s a little bit wrong, because for Bach those chains could be managed like the air he breathed.  What’s really wrong though is to believe those chains are the main point.

We Can’t Afford That

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

Heather McGhee begins her book The Sum of Us with the question “Why can’t we have nice things?”.  And she makes clear what she means: “basic aspects of a high-functioning society, like adequately funded schools or reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty or a public health system to handle pandemics”.

She then goes on to explore how racism has been systematically used by the wealthy and powerful to keep that from happening—which is to say how they keep that money and power for themselves.  I’m happy to promote her book, however I also want to spend a little time here on her question—on the mindset that says we can’t.

My example is Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.  I’m not going to argue the details.  What I am going to argue is the senselessness of the knee-jerk reactions, i.e. how ridiculously entrenched is the idea that we just can’t have nice things.

The cost of the program was estimated by the government accounting office as $400 B, which puts it in the same ballpark as some stimulus packages.  Virtually without exception that number was taken by the press at full face value.  This was ridiculously, “humongously” expensive.    It was going to undermine free enterprise everywhere, drive inflation, and possibly bankrupt the country.  “We can’t afford things like that.”

There are two problems with that assessment. Let’s start with the $400 B number.  For accounting reasons, it is for a program lifetime total taken over 30 years.  That reduces the average yearly value to $13 B, which is the number to compare against stimulus packages.  Except that number is itself too high.  Again for accounting reasons it assumes that all current debtors will keep paying for the full period—something that has never happened in the past.  Let’s take $10 B as a nice round high estimate, and compare it with another per-year item in the budget—the defense budget just passed.   That number is $858 B. The humungous expense is 1% of that total.  It’s not even big enough to count as a rounding error, and the inflation claim is a joke.

We’re so used to “we can’t afford things like that” that the press can’t do even that much arithmetic.

What’s more (on the free enterprise issue) that money was spent because college had become vastly more expensive precisely during the worst downturn since the Great Depression.  (And the Republican legislature refused to do anything about it—hiding behind the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.)  We like to talk about equality of opportunity.  We, the USA, pioneered high school for all.  In today’s economy college or some other form of post-secondary education has become necessary for good jobs (and bad jobs in this country won’t even get you above the poverty line!).  So we’re not talking about buying televisions on credit—we’re talking about most people’s only chance at a middle class existence.

Biden’s debt forgiveness plan does not fix everything wrong with affordability of education. And it isn’t means-tested (although people who borrow are usually not rich and means tests are almost always counterproductive).  But it is a step forward and addresses a real problem that was not caused (despite the rhetoric) by sheer profligacy.  And the most ardent critics of the incomplete solution are the people committed to doing nothing at all.

Most galling, however, is the universal knee-jerk of “we can’t afford things like that” which can’t be bothered for even a cursory look at what’s real.

Reality Check for Climate Change

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

There’s an important article about climate change in the latest IEEE Spectrum.  It’s only two pages long, but there is much to think about.  It is high time to recognize the reality of what we’re fighting.

The article points out that a reasonable estimate for the cost of the energy transition is $275 T.  That’s an enormous, almost unthinkable number.  It may well be right.

While the article itself is not big on drawing conclusions, it does have an important one: “because the world’s low-income countries could not carry such burdens, affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task.  Such shares are comparable only to the spending that was required to win World War II.”  We’ve talked about the “rest of the world” problem before, but without such dramatic support.   No one anywhere is talking about that level of effort.

In fact, as a nation, we still have the idea that climate change is a matter of every country (or state) putting its own house in order.  Once we’ve done our part, it’s up to everyone else to do theirs.  However we in the US have:

  • The highest per capita energy usage in the world.  Only Russia is close.
  • Close to the highest per capita GDP
  • Historically, still the biggest contribution to global CO2 and the climate mess we’re in

And somehow all we have to do is take care of ourselves?  And this can be handled as a small activity on the side?  There’s only one atmosphere, and with that mindset we’ll get nowhere.

Biden has finally started something, but there are still major barriers here.  Here are a few:

  • Oil company control of the Republican Party and many media outlets.  (Let’s call a spade a spade:  the Kochs—an oil services company—have complete control of the judiciary!)
  • Oil company propaganda about “individual responsibility” versus government action
  • Arrogance in the environment movement that has made climate a culture war item.
  • Splits in the environmental movement on needed electric infrastructure (supported by a kind religious faith in purely local solutions)
  • “America first” attitudes about aid to the rest of the world

Furthermore internationally the picture has continued to deteriorate:

  • Trump’s catastrophic renouncing of the Paris Agreement has been impossible to walk back.  He killed the idea of world unanimity, so cheating by Russia, Saudi Arabian and others is now the order of the day.
  • There are continuing and intensifying international fights over contributions of rich nations to the climate efforts of poorer ones.
  • Trump’s bullying view of international relations has been taken up with a vengeance by both Russia and China.  So most international discussion and cooperation is effectively dead.

Given the size of the problem and the limited time available, where do we go from here?

One recent answer came in a set of climate scenarios coming from Princeton University.  They claim that they have evaluated a comprehensive set of climate control approaches, but all of their options end up with a huge role for carbon capture. Maybe they were influenced by oil company money, but in any case they have given up on the energy transition itself!  And carbon capture on that (unproven) scale would end up in the same $275 T ballpark.

So the conclusion, I’m afraid, is that we can’t rule out geoengineering.  However distasteful and risky that may be, we’d better find out as much about it as we can   It is a fact (however often denied) that we don’t have all the technologies we need, and we’ve done a bad job with the ones we do have.  We may well have to buy time until we’re better able to cope.  But as we’ve said before, we’d better recognize that geoengineering has a drug-like dependency:  we can never get off of it until all that extra CO2 has been taken back out!

Call to Action

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

Democrats must challenge Republican lies about inflation. The Republican message is simple: “Inflation is caused by Democrat’s unrestrained spending. Elect us and we’ll stop that and fix it.” Both parts of that message are lies.

Inflation is everywhere in the world and we’re generally on the good side of average. That last Covid payment is not what turned the world upside down. We’re still fighting the product and labor bottlenecks that persist. Republicans haven’t proposed one single bit of a plan.

Furthermore, as several authors have pointed out, Republicans are anything but a safe choice. We’re not talking about the old conservative Republicans. These are Trump’s burn down the house people. With the debt ceiling blackmail, Republicans are going after Medicare and Social Security with a threat of liquidity collapse if they don’t get it. We’re going to outdo the British Conservatives with Liz Truss!

Finally it needs to be recognized that the Republican argument on inflation is just a rehashing of the usual Republican program of presents to the rich. Inflation is the lastest bogeyman to say we can’t have public services or anything else that rich people don’t want to pay for.

A Message for Democrats Now

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

It has become clear from all polls that the key issue for voters in this midterm election is inflation.  That’s a difficult issue for Democrats, so we have tried to make it something else:  January 6, the Supreme Court, etc.  The time has come to realize that all of that has failed.  That’s particularly scary, because all of the crazy people we helped nominate in Republican primaries now stand a good chance of being elected—because voters view Republicans as better for the economy, regardless of how crazy a particular candidate may be.

So there is no substitute for taking on inflation as an issue.  It’s not as if we have no answer for this, but the time to act is now.  Please, please contribute to this.  For what it’s worth l give a few points here.

  • Current inflation is not something created by the last stimulus checks. 

Inflation is a worldwide phenomenon, and we are actually at the low end in the Western World.  It is the worst in 40 years, because we haven’t had anything like Covid for many decades.  Even today we have many categories of manpower shortages (e.g. women who can’t work because daycare centers were closed by Covid) and product shortages (e.g. in electronics) as well as changes in demand patterns (e.g. in real estate).  Energy prices are being manipulated as we resist Russian aggression in Ukraine.  We have been working to deal with all of this.  There is no simple case where none of it would have happened.   Further, since Republicans are pretending they can blame everything on Democrats’ spending, they have no plans to make any of it better.

  •  There isn’t any inflationary profligate spending in the rest of the Democrats’ program

Republicans are rushing to take responsibility for results of the infrastructure bill—even in many cases where they voted against it.  Most of the population recognizes that the climate measures are absolutely necessary.  For student loan debt, many people seem to have been confused by the $400 B figure attached to the program.   In fact this is an accounting issue, where the number is spread over decades, without any significant near-term or per year effect.   It should also be noted that college tuition costs essentially doubled starting in 2008, so there is an issue to be addressed.

  • The current Trump Republicans are not the fiscally conservative, reliable Republicans of old.  They are ready and willing to sacrifice all of us to the wild idea of the day. 

The now-serious debt ceiling blackmail is a case in point.  Republicans are ready to throw caution to the winds—in a very precarious world economy.  Massive cuts in Medicare and Social Security would be on the block in such an effort.  And forcing a US default in today’s world would create a liquidity crisis to make the Liz Truss affair look like nothing at all.  Trump Republicans are also ready to tank the economy if they think that will help elect their hero in 2024.

One British observer described similarities across the Atlantic: “Like the Republicans in the United States, the Conservatives are detached from reality. In a generation, they have become a party of monomaniacs, incompetents and ideologues.” We shouldn’t be laughing about Liz Truss here.

A Reality Check for Climate Change

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

There’s an important article about climate change in the latest IEEE Spectrum.  It’s only two pages long, but there is much to think about.  It is high time to recognize the reality of what we’re fighting.

The article points out that a reasonable estimate for the cost of the energy transition is $275 T.  That’s an enormous, almost unthinkable number.  It may well be right.

While the article itself is not big on drawing conclusions, it does have an important one: “because the world’s low-income countries could not carry such burdens, affluent nations would have to devote on the order of 15 to 20 percent of their annual economic product to the task.  Such shares are comparable only to the spending that was required to win World War II.”  We’ve talked about the “rest of the world” problem before, but without such dramatic support.   No one anywhere is talking about that level of effort.

In fact, as a nation, we still have the idea that climate change is a matter of every country (or state) putting its own house in order.  Once we’ve done our part, it’s up to everyone else to do theirs.  However we in the US have:

  • The highest per capita energy usage in the world.  Only Russia is close.
  • Close to the highest per capita GDP
  • Historically, still the biggest contribution to global CO2 and the climate mess we’re in

And somehow all we have to do is take care of ourselves?  And this can be handled as a small activity on the side?  There’s only one atmosphere, and with that mindset we’ll get nowhere.

Biden has finally started something, but there are still major barriers here.  Here are a few:

  • Oil company control of the Republican Party and many media outlets.  (Let’s call a spade a spade:  the Kochs—an oil services company—are in complete control of the judiciary!)
  • Oil company propaganda about “individual responsibility” versus government action
  • Arrogance in the environment movement that has made climate a culture war item.
  • Splits in the environmental movement on needed electric infrastructure (supported by a kind of religious faith in purely local solutions)
  • “America first” attitudes about aid to the rest of the world

Furthermore internationally the picture has continued to deteriorate:

  • Trump’s catastrophic renouncing of the Paris Agreement has been impossible to walk back.  He killed the idea of world unanimity, so cheating by Russia, Saudi Arabia and others is now the order of the day.
  • There are continuing and intensifying international fights over contributions of rich nations to the climate efforts of poorer ones.
  • Trump’s bullying view of international relations has been taken up with a vengeance by both Russia and China.  So most international discussion and cooperation is effectively dead.

Given the size of the problem and the limited time available, where do we go from here?

One recent answer came in a set of climate scenarios coming from Princeton University.  They claim that they have evaluated a comprehensive set of climate control approaches, but all of their options end up with a huge role for carbon capture. Maybe they were influenced by oil company money, but in any case they have given up on the energy transition itself!  And carbon capture on that (unproven) scale would end up in the same $275 T ballpark.

So the conclusion, I’m afraid, is that we can’t rule out geoengineering.  However distasteful and risky that may be, we’d better find out as much about it as we can.   It is a fact (however often denied) that we don’t have all the technologies we need, and we’ve done well short of what’s needed with the ones we do have.  We may have to buy time until we’re better able to get the job done.  But as we’ve said before, we’d better recognize that geoengineering has a drug-like dependency:  we can never get off of it until all that extra CO2 has been taken back out!

The Depression of the 2020’s

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

We’re not paying enough attention.  This midterm election hides a real danger of Depression.  We’re stumbling into exactly what happened in the 1930’s.

The Great Depression of the 1930’s occurred when the financial authorities of the day responded to a sudden downturn with the opposite of what was needed.  A straightjacket of fiscal austerity was applied (by the self-protecting upper classes) in place of the stimulation that would have enabled recovery.   That shut down everything in the US and much of the western world.

We are currently fighting inflation.  That’s a tough battle and will cause a slowdown that is some variety of recession.  It’s what happens next that matters. 

The only reason we got out of the 2008 recession was that there were enough Republicans to join Democrats in passing a stimulus package early on.  Already by 2010 there were few of those Republicans left, and any further stimulus was blocked in the name of the bogus “balanced budget amendment”.  The goal was national pain ahead of the 2016 election.  It worked.

We’re in that situation again, but the dangers are much worse.   To state the obvious, the worldwide economy is in extremely fragile state:  inflation is everywhere (we’re actually on the low side), there is war in Ukraine (with direct consequences for many countries), energy prices are rising from Saudi greed, there’s even a dictatorship-induced slowdown in China, and (compared with 2008) there is very little international cooperation.  Forced austerity is exactly what brought the world economy down last time, and we’re going to get it again.

For today’s Republican Party a recession is an opportunity.  A Republican (Trump) Congress will do anything to bring back their hero.  As in 2014 there will be no possibility of stimulus no matter how bad things get, because pain is the goal.  By 2024 it will be too late for any short-term way out. 

The Great Depression was so bad, that it seemed that people would always remember what happened and never do that again.  Unfortunately we’re there.