Adam Victor Brandizzi

Pra que serve um Banco Central independente? Não sei. Mas me bota lá que eu te conto. Brincadeira. Para entender pra que serve um BC independente a gente tem que entender pra que serve o BC at all. E um Banco Central serve para imprimir dinheiro e dar de graça para os bancos de verdade. Virtualmente de graça: a juros que você nunca vai ver na sua vida – hoje, de menos de 1% ao mês.

Mas o Banco Central também serve para passar a perna nos bancos de verdade. Pode chegar um dia em que você, banqueiro, está precisando de um cascalho emprestado para fechar as contas do mês. Onde é que você, que já é dono de banco, vai pegar emprestado? Com o Tio Patinhas? Mais ou menos. Você pega com outro banco.

Vamos dizer que você é o dono do Itaú, e pediu um bilhãozinho emprestado para o seu amigo do clube de golfe, o Sr. Bradesco. Vocês acertam um juro, tipo, de 0,5% ao mês. Aí, quando estão para apertar as mãos e selar o negócio, vem o Banco Central e estraga a festa. Ele chega para o Bradesco e diz: “Opa. Quer dizer então que você está com um bilhão sobrando para emprestar para o seu amigo? A 0,5%? Empresta pra mim que eu te pago 1%”.

O que o Sr. Bradesco, que não é besta, faz? Empresta para o BC, lógico. Muito mais negócio. Rapidinho, a notícia de que o Banco Central está pegando emprestado geral e pagando o dobro de juros no mercado de empréstimo entre bancos começa a se espallhar. E você, probre dono do Itaú, fica na mão: quando for pedir em outro banco, vai ter que pagar no mínimo os 1% ao mês. O dinheiro fica mais caro para você do dia para a noite.

O que você leu aqui não é uma alegoria. Os bancos pegam dinheiro emprestado uns com os outros o tempo todo. Não todo mês. Todo dia. É normal qualquer banco não ter fundos no fim do dia para pagar todas as despesas que tem em 24 horas. O fluxo de dinheiro que eles recebem, na forma de quitação de empréstimos ou de dinheiro de correntistas novos, é inconstante. Uma hora, um banco está com dinheiro faltando, e outro, com dinheiro sobrando. E no dia seguinte o cenário se inverte. Tanto a coisa é normal que a taxa de juros que um cobra do outro nessa ciranda tem um nome bem conhecido: DI (Depósito Interfinanceiro): empréstimos entre os caras lá de cima, os bancos. A própria ciranda de empréstimos também tem um nome relativamente popular: overnight, já que os empréstimos acontecem de um dia para o outro, então é como se taxa de juros corresse só ao longo de uma noite. Overnight.

Bom, essa festa do overnight acontece porque a poupança que as instituições financeiras fazem para si mesmas não é em dinheiro vivo, mas em títulos públicos (normal, a sua também é, caso você tenha dinheiro num fundo DI ou de renda fixa). E não vale a pena sair vendendo títulos para pagar as despesas do dia a dia – eles perderiam dinheiro. O que os bancos fazem, então, é pegar emprestado uns com os outros, deixando os títulos como garantia.

No fim do dia, depois que um monte de banco pegou emprestado deixando títulos como garantida, um sistema calcula qual foi a taxa média que um cobrou do outro. O nome de sistema é Selic (Sistema Especial de Liquidação e Custódia; mas não importa o nome: é só um termo tecnicista para o toma-lá-dá-cá).

O outro nome que a Selic tem é menos impenetrável: “juros básicos da economia”. “Básicos” porque trata-se do preço que os bancos pagam pelo dinheiro que vão te emprestar depois, quando você financiar um carro ou ou uma casa. E “básico”, também, porque é o menor juro que pode existir dentro do sistema financeiro. Claro: de outra forma, nem valeria a pena ser dono de banco. O importante aí é que, no fim das contas, quanto maior a Selic, maior o juro que você paga lá na frente.

Mas e quando vem o Presidente da República e diz que vai “baixar a Selic”? Ele está dizendo que vai colocar um revólver na cara do Bradesco e do Itaú e impor as taxas que um cobra do outro? É quase isso. Mas não. O governo não tem poder para impor taxas de juros no grito. Na prática, o Bradesco e o Itaú cobram o que bem entenderem. Se um quiser extorquir 1.000% ao mês do outro, problema deles. Eles que são grandes que se entendam.

Mas na prática a teoria é outra. No mundo real, o governo tem uma arma mais eficiente que qualquer revólver para influenciar nas taxas que um banco cobra do outro: o Banco Central.

O BC é um banco mágico. Ele não precisa ter dinheiro em caixa para conceder emprétimos. Ele cria dinheiro. Se achar que os bancos estão muito pobres, ele vai lá, imprime, e empresta. Fácil. Nisso, a taxa de juros que o Banco Central estiver cobrando vira a referência para todos os bancos. Ninguém vai ser louco de cobrar menos, nem estúpido de cobrar mais, já que não dá para concorrer com um banco que tem caixa mágico, ilimitado.

Mas aí fica a pergunta: por que é que existe uma coisa dessas? Não dava para deixar os bancos se virarem e pronto? Não dá. Por causa do seguinte: quando a economia está mal das pernas, com muita gente desempregada, ninguém tem dinheiro para por no banco. Os bancos ficam com poucos fundos também, e começam a regular demais o dinheiro que têm para bancar os nossos financiamentos. Aí, com menos gente comprando carro, casa, e TV de 64 polegadas em 12 vezes, as montadoras, construtoras e as Casas Bahia ganham menos dinheiro. Começam a demitir, e o começa tudo de novo, num ciclo vicioso rumo ao inferno econômico – é exatamente o que aconteceu na Grande Depressão, nos anos 30, em escala planetária, e que nos deu de presente a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Os Bancos Centrais de qualquer país, então, são máquinas anti-Depressão. Se começa a faltar dinheiro na ciranda diária de empréstimos entre bancos, é sinal de que a coisa pode estar ficando feia nos andares de baixo da economia. Para cortar o mal pela raiz, o BC vai lá e começa a emprestar no overnight a juros mais baixos. Se não for o bastante, baixa mais ainda. Vai para zero se for necessário – e é justamente o que o Banco Central Europeu tem achado necessário, já que a Selic deles está basicamente em zero há um bom tempo. Nos EUA, é a mesma coisa.

Bom, com os bancos recebdendo dinheiro praticamente de graça, eles podem bancar financiamentos cobrando menos. Aí mais gente vai financiar casas, carros e TVs. O Dr. Casas Bahia vai contratar mais gente, e as coisas começam a voltar aos eixos.

Lindo. Mas por que então não deixara Selic no zero paras sempre? Ou abaixo de zero, para deixar tudo tinindo de uma vez?

Porque existe uma coisa chata que sempre chega para atrapalhar: as leis da física. Se tiver dinheiro demais circulando, a demanda por apartamentos, carros e TVs vai ficar maior do que a capacidade que os próprios empresários têm de montar carros, fabricar TVs e distribuir tudo isso em concessionárias e lojas. Prédio, então, nem se fala. Levantar um já demora. Fazer um novo nos Leblons e Jardins da vida, é quase impossível, já que Deus não tem aberto novos terrenos baldios nesses bairros nas últimas centenas de milhões de anos – na verdade, a deriva continental só tem aberto terrenos novos do outro lado do continente, no Chile, ainda assim, a uma taxa de 2 cm ao ano… Mas vamos voltar ao que interessa.

Existe um limite físico para a produção. Para fazer um carro, você precisa de matérias primas como minério de ferro e gente formada em engenharia. Minério a gente até aranja, ainda que haja um limite obvio para a velocidade da extração. Engenheiro não. Entre a noite de sexo que forma o embrião do futuro engenheiro até o fim da faculdade são 20 e tantos anos. Sem falar que levantar faculdade que preste, ou escolas públicas capazes de alfabetizar o sujeito antes de qualquer outra coisa, também não é simples, você sabe.

Aí a gente chega numa sinuca de bico. Se você, Banco Central, pega e fica injetando dinheiro mágico de graça nos Bradescos e Itaús indefinidamente, uma hora vai esse limite físico para a produção vai chegar. E provavelmente ser ultrapassado. E o que acontece, então, quando o BC atravessa essa linha vermelha? Os preços sobem. Se a quantidade de dinheiro na praça cresce sem parar, e a produção de novos apartamentos, carros e TVs trava, esses produtos entram em leilão. Os empresários vão vender mais caro, já que existe demanda. E você tem inflação. Mal negócio.

O que o Banco Central faz, então, para frear a inflação? Produz mais terrenos no Leblon e engenheiros? Infelizmente não dá. O jeito, então, é sugar dinheiro do mercado. Passar geral o aspirador, de modo a diminuir o total de dinehiro em circulação. Com menos dinheiro girando, os preços têm que baixar. Xô inflação.

E o BC faz isso como? Lá na ciranda do overnight. Em vez de emprestar dinheiro mais barato, ele vira a chave. Dá aquela passada de perna do começo do texto: começa a pagar mais juros do que todo mundo. Nisso, o banco disposto a emprestar vai e empresta para o BC mesmo. Não que o BC precise, lógico. O que ele quer é tirar dinheiro de circulação.

No começo do Plano Real, em 1994, o aspirador de dinheiro teve de funcionar na potência máxima. A inflação tinha sido de 2.708% em 1993. Chegou 1994 e a danada já ameaçava fechar o ano em 8.000% (44% ao mês, já que naquela época ninguém falava em “inflação anual” – era só por mês mesmo, para economizar dígitos).

Já que a ideia era tirar dinheiro de circulação como se não houvesse amanhã, o BC começou pagando juros de cartão de crédito rotativo: 145% ao ano. Isso não está registrado nos anais da nossa economia porque naquela época só divulgavam as taxas mensais de juros. Em  1994 essa média foi de 3,2% ao mês. Ou seja: 145% anuais. Uma pornografia perto dos 11% de agora, e mesmo dos 45% que do último pico histórico, em 1999.

Seja como for, as notas coloridas com bichos estampados que você tem na carteira estão de prova: a coisa deu certo. A drenagem de dinheiro (mais uma dedetização nas finanças do governo, que tinha como tradição bancar obras públicas imprimindo dinheiro) mataram a inflação de quatro dígitos.

Mas inflação é que nem ebola. Quando você acha que matou a bichinha aparece de volta. É que um pouco de inflação é bom para a economia. Se nenhum preço jamais subisse, significaria que nenhum mercado tem para onde crescer. Só faz sentido abrir uma segunda sorveteria no seu bairro se a primeira tem fila. E se a primeira tem fila, provavelmente ela aproveitou para aumentar os preços. Se a sorveteria do seu bairro contar para o índice de inflação do governo, no fim do mês o William Wack vai dizer no Jornal da Globo que a inflação subiu. Mas beleza. Você vai lá, aproveita a oportunidade, e abre a segunda sorveteria para aproveitar a onda, cobrando um pouco menos para arranjar clientes. Depois, com a competição entre vocês, o preço médio do sorvete volta para o chão. Tudo isso enquanto o PIB cresce – já que agora são duas sorveterias, oferecendo o dobro de empregos no ramo sorveteiro.

Inflação zero, ou abaixo de zero, é algo tão ruim quanto inflação descontrolada. No Japão, faz vinte anos que tentam acabar com a deflação, para que alguém se sinta estimulado a abrir a segunda sorveteria do bairro. O governo lá instituiu como meta uma inflação de 2,5%, para ver se o PIB engrena. O BC deles joga dinheiro a rodo no overnight japonês apostando nisso.

Aqui também tem meta de inflação. No nosso caso, um pouco maior, de 4,5%. Mas o problema aqui, você sabe, é o oposto: nossa inflação fica consistentemente acima disso. E tem sido um péssimo negócio, porque não tem tido efeito nenhum no crescimento do PIB. Tem é atrapalhado, já que está carcomendo devagar e sempre o nosso poder de compra. O desafio, agora, é fazer essa trolha voltar para a meta – até por isso os nossos juros agora estão num patamar relativamente alto, 11%, contra 7,25% em 2013.

Só tem um problema. Quando a taxa era de 7,25%, a inflação já estava bem fora da meta. Qualquer presidente de Banco Central do mundo teria começado a subir os juros bem antes, para drenar dinheiro do mercado e segurar a inflação no braço – inclusive Alexandre Tombini, o presidente do nosso. Mas o Poder Executivo vetou. Mandou que os juros continuassem baixos para bombar o PIB.

Não funcionou. E acabamos com o pior dos dois mundos: crescimento zero e inflação desembestada. Se o Banco Central fosse independente, a história poderia ser outra.

Essa independência consiste do seguinte: o Presidente da República nomeia um presidente do BC no meio do mandato. E o cara tem um mandato fixo de quatro anos, até o meio do governo seguinte – é o que acontece nos EUA, na Inglaterra, no Japão. Nesse meio tempo, ele só pode ser demitido por justa causa – lembrando que desobedecer uma ordem como a que Dilma deu quando os juros estavam em 7,25% não, não conta como justa causa. O sujeito tem poder de fato.

Mas é um poder restrito a ditar a taxa básica de juros da economia. Ele manda na Selic, mas não na economia. Quem dita a meta de inflação, que é o que importa, continua sendo o Presidente.

É um sistema que tem funcionado bem nos países que o adotaram. A ideia de Banco Central independente só existe por porque um governo, qualquer governo, de qualquer país, tende a cometer o mesmo erro: jogar mais dinheiro na economia do que deveria, e depois acabar com uma inflação insustentável no colo. Não importa a competência ou o caráter de quem esteja lá em cima. O sujeito sempre vai focar mais no crescimento do PIB do que na ameaça de inflação. É humano. Normal que um político, qualquer político, seja alguém mais afobado que um presidente de Banco Central, um técnico por natureza. Normal que esse político seja alguém mais propenso a fazer besteira, a cair na tentação de imprimir dinheiro demais. Os países que preferem deixar o Banco Central banco-centrar, na dele, fazem isso porque sabem que deixar esse poder na mão do Executivo é amarrar cachorro com linguiça.

Mas no Brasil não. Nem dá para falar nessa ideia – e quem falou acabou escorraçado. Sabe quando o Ahmadinejad disse que não tem gay no Irã? Então. Aqui, pelo jeito, o que não tem é Presidente que não seja gênio da economia. Nossa tradição continua imutável desde Dom Pedro I: o mandatário da nação, seja ele quem for, faz questão de exercer o Poder Moderador, inclusive nas áreas em que não tem capacidade técnica para moderar nada. Lula acertou ao deixar Henrique Meirelles, seu presidente do BC, trabalhar tranquilo. Dilma errou. Aécio é uma incógnita, mas o desprezo que ele mostra pela ideia de tornar o BC independente por lei, como é nos países que adotam o modelo, depõe contra a ideia de mudança que ele promete. Agora é ver se essa conversa evolui. Em 2018.

[Trigger warning: Some discussion of rape in Part III. This will make much more sense if you've previously read I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup]

I.

One day I woke up and they had politicized Ebola.

I don’t just mean the usual crop of articles like Republicans Are Responsible For The Ebola Crisis and Democrats Try To Deflect Blame For Ebola Outbreak and Incredibly Awful Democrats Try To Blame Ebola On GOP and NPR Reporter Exposes Right Wing Ebola Hype and Republicans Flip-Flop On Ebola Czars. That level of politicization was pretty much what I expected.

(I can’t say I totally expected to see an article called Fat Lesbians Got All The Ebola Dollars, But Blame The GOP, but in retrospect nothing I know about modern society suggested I wouldn’t)

I’m talking about something weirder. Over the past few days, my friends on Facebook have been making impassioned posts about how it’s obvious there should/shouldn’t be a quarantine, but deluded people on the other side are muddying the issue. The issue has risen to an alarmingly high level of 0.05 #Gamergates, which is my current unit of how much people on social media are concerned about a topic. What’s more, everyone supporting the quarantine has been on the right, and everyone opposing on the left. Weird that so many people suddenly develop strong feelings about a complicated epidemiological issue, which can be exactly predicted by their feelings about everything else.

On the Right, there is condemnation of the CDC’s opposition to quarantines as globalist gibberish, fourteen questions that will never be asked about Ebola centering on why there aren’t more quarantine measures in place, and arguments on right-leaning biology blogs for why the people opposing quarantines are dishonest or incompetent. Top Republicans call for travel bans and a presenter on Fox, proportionate as always, demands quarantine centers in every US city.

On the Left (and token libertarian) sides, the New Yorker has been publishing articles on how involuntary quarantines violate civil liberties and “embody class and racial biases”, Reason makes fun of “dumb Republican calls for a travel ban”, Vox has a clickbaity article on how “This One Paragraph Perfectly Sums Up America’s Overreaction To Ebola”, and MSNBC notes that to talk about travel bans is “borderline racism”.

How did this happen? How did both major political tribes decide, within a month of the virus becoming widely known in the States, not only exactly what their position should be but what insults they should call the other tribe for not agreeing with their position? There are a lot of complicated and well-funded programs in West Africa to disseminate information about the symptoms of Ebola in West Africa, and all I can think of right now is that if the Africans could disseminate useful medical information half as quickly as Americans seem to have disseminated tribal-affiliation-related information, the epidemic would be over tomorrow.

Is it just random? A couple of Republicans were coincidentally the first people to support a quarantine, so other Republicans felt they had to stand by them, and then Democrats felt they had to oppose it, and then that spread to wider and wider circles? And if by chance a Democrats had proposed quarantine before a Republican, the situation would have reversed itself? Could be.

Much more interesting is the theory that the fear of disease is the root of all conservativism. I am not making this up. There has been a lot of really good evolutionary psychology done on the extent to which pathogen stress influences political opinions. Some of this is done on the societal level, and finds that societies with higher germ loads are more authoritarian and conservative. This research can be followed arbitrarily far – like, isn’t it interesting that the most liberal societies in the world are the Scandinavian countries in the very far north where disease burden is low, and the most traditionalist-authoritarian ones usually in Africa or somewhere where disease burden is high? One even sees a similar effect within countries, with northern US states being very liberal and southern states being very conservative. Other studies have instead focused on differences between individuals within society – we know that religious conservatives are people with stronger disgust reactions and priming disgust reactions can increase self-reported conservative political beliefs – with most people agreeing disgust reactions are a measure of the “behavioral immune system” triggered by fear of germ contamination.

(free tip for liberal political activists – offering to tidy up voting booths before the election is probably a thousand times more effective than anything you’re doing right now. I will leave the free tip for conservative political activists to your imagination)

If being a conservative means you’re pre-selected for worry about disease, obviously the conservatives are going to be the ones most worried about Ebola. And in fact, along with the quarantine debate, there’s a little sub-debate about whether Ebola is worth panicking about. Vox declares Americans to be “overreacting” and keeps telling them to calm down, whereas its similarly-named evil twin Vox Day has been spending the last week or so spreading panic and suggesting readers “wash your hands, stock up a bit, and avoid any unnecessary travel”.

So that’s the second theory.

The third theory is that everything in politics is mutually reinforcing.

Suppose the Red Tribe has a Grand Narrative. The Narrative is something like “We Americans are right-thinking folks with a perfectly nice culture. But there are also scary foreigners who hate our freedom and wish us ill. Unfortunately, there are also traitors in our ranks – in the form of the Blue Tribe – who in order to signal sophistication support foreigners over Americans and want to undermine our culture. They do this by supporting immigration, accusing anyone who is too pro-American and insufficiently pro-foreigner of “racism”, and demanding everyone conform to “multiculturalism” and “diversity”, as well as lionizing any group within America that tries to subvert the values of the dominant culture. Our goal is to minimize the subversive power of the Blue Tribe at home, then maintain isolation from foreigners abroad, enforced by a strong military if they refuse to stay isolated.”

And the Blue Tribe also has a Grand Narrative. The Narrative is something like “The world is made up of a bunch of different groups and cultures. The wealthier and more privileged groups, played by the Red Tribe, have a history of trying to oppress and harass all the other groups. This oppression is based on ignorance, bigotry, xenophobia, denial of science, and a false facade of patriotism. Our goal is to call out the Red Tribe on its many flaws, and support other groups like foreigners and minorities in their quest for justice and equality, probably in a way that involves lots of NGOs and activists.”

The proposition “a quarantine is the best way to deal with Ebola” seems to fit much better into the Red narrative than the Blue Narrative. It’s about foreigners being scary and dangerous, and a strong coordinated response being necessary to protect right-thinking Americans from them. When people like NBC and the New Yorker accuse quarantine opponents of being “racist”, that just makes the pieces fit in all the better.

The proposition “a quarantine is a bad way to deal with Ebola” seems to fit much better into the Blue narrative than the Red. It’s about extremely poor black foreigners dying, and white Americans rushing to throw them overboard to protect themselves out of ignorance of the science (which says Ebola can’t spread much in the First World), bigotry, xenophobia, and fear. The real solution is a coordinated response by lots of government agencies working in tandem with NGOs and local activists.

It would be really hard to switch these two positions around. If the Republicans were to oppose a quarantine, it might raise the general question of whether closing the borders and being scared of foreign threats is always a good idea, and whether maybe sometimes accusations of racism are making a good point. Far “better” to maintain a consistent position where all your beliefs reinforce all of your other beliefs.

There’s a question of causal structure here. Do Republicans believe certain other things for their own sake, and then adapt their beliefs about Ebola to help buttress their other beliefs? Or do the same factors that made them adopt their narrative in the first place lead them to adopt a similar narrative around Ebola?

My guess it it’s a little of both. And then once there’s a critical mass of anti-quarantiners within a party, in-group cohesion and identification effects cascade towards it being a badge of party membership and everybody having to believe it. And if the Democrats are on the other side, saying things you disagree with about every other issue, and also saying that you have to oppose quarantine or else you’re a bad person, then that also incentivizes you to support a quarantine, just to piss them off.

II.

Sometimes politicization isn’t about what side you take, it’s about what issues you emphasize.

In the last post, I wrote:

Imagine hearing that a liberal talk show host and comedian was so enraged by the actions of ISIS that he’d recorded and posted a video in which he shouts at them for ten minutes, cursing the “fanatical terrorists” and calling them “utter savages” with “savage values”.

If I heard that, I’d be kind of surprised. It doesn’t fit my model of what liberal talk show hosts do.

But the story I’m actually referring to is liberal talk show host / comedian Russell Brand making that same rant against Fox News for supporting war against the Islamic State, adding at the end that “Fox is worse than ISIS”.

That fits my model perfectly. You wouldn’t celebrate Osama’s death, only Thatcher’s. And you wouldn’t call ISIS savages, only Fox News. Fox is the outgroup, ISIS is just some random people off in a desert. You hate the outgroup, you don’t hate random desert people.

I would go further. Not only does Brand not feel much like hating ISIS, he has a strong incentive not to. That incentive is: the Red Tribe is known to hate ISIS loudly and conspicuously. Hating ISIS would signal Red Tribe membership, would be the equivalent of going into Crips territory with a big Bloods gang sign tattooed on your shoulder.

Now I think I missed an important part of the picture. The existence of ISIS plays right into Red Tribe narratives. They are totally scary foreigners who hate our freedom and want to hurt us and probably require a strong military response, so their existence sounds like a point in favor of the Red Tribe. Thus, the Red Tribe wants to talk about them as much as possible and condemn them in the strongest terms they can.

There’s not really any way to spin this issue in favor of the Blue Tribe narrative. The Blue Tribe just has to grudgingly admit that maybe this is one of the few cases where their narrative breaks down. So their incentive is to try to minimize ISIS, to admit it exists and is bad and try to distract the conversation to other issues that support their chosen narrative more. That’s why you’ll never see the Blue Tribe gleefully cheering someone on as they call ISIS “savages”. It wouldn’t fit the script.

But did you hear about that time when a Muslim-American lambasting Islamophobia totally pwned all of those ignorant FOX anchors? Le-GEN-dary!

III.

At worst this choice to emphasize different issues descends into an unhappy combination of tragedy and farce.

The Rotherham scandal was an incident in an English town where criminal gangs had been grooming and blackmailing thousands of young girls, then using them as sex slaves. This had been going on for at least ten years with minimal intervention by the police. An investigation was duly launched, which discovered that the police had been keeping quiet about the problem because the gangs were mostly Pakistani and the victims mostly white, and the police didn’t want to seem racist by cracking down too heavily. Researchers and officials who demanded that the abuse should be publicized or fought more vigorously were ordered to attend “diversity training” to learn why their demands were offensive. The police department couldn’t keep it under wraps forever, and eventually it broke and was a huge scandal.

The Left then proceeded to totally ignore it, and the Right proceeded to never shut up about it for like an entire month, and every article about it had to include the “diversity training” aspect, so that if you type “rotherham d…” into Google, your two first options are “Rotherham Daily Mail” and “Rotherham diversity training”.

I don’t find this surprising at all. The Rotherham incident ties in perfectly to the Red Tribe narrative – scary foreigners trying to hurt us, politically correct traitors trying to prevent us from noticing. It doesn’t do anything for the Blue Tribe narrative, and indeed actively contradicts it at some points. So the Red Tribe wants to trumpet it to the world, and the Blue Tribe wants to stay quiet and distract.

HBD Chick usually writes very well-thought-out articles on race and genetics listing all the excellent reasons you should not marry your cousins. Hers is not a political blog, and I have never seen her get upset about any political issue before, but since most of her posts are about race and genetics she gets a lot of love from the Right and a lot of flak from the Left. She recently broke her silence on politics to write three long and very angry blog posts on the Rotherham issue, of which I will excerpt one:

if you’ve EVER called somebody a racist just because they said something politically incorrect, then you’d better bloody well read this report, because THIS IS ON YOU! this is YOUR doing! this is where your scare tactics have gotten us: over 1400 vulnerable kids systematically abused because YOU feel uncomfortable when anybody brings up some “hate facts.”

this is YOUR fault, politically correct people — and i don’t care if you’re on the left or the right. YOU enabled this abuse thanks to the climate of fear you’ve created. thousands of abused girls — some of them maybe dead — on YOUR head.

I have no doubt that her outrage is genuine. But I do have to wonder why she is outraged about this and not all of the other outrageous things in the world. And I do have to wonder whether the perfect fit between her own problems – trying to blog about race and genetics but getting flak from politically correct people – and the problems that made Rotherham so disastrous – which include police getting flak from politically correct people – are part of her sudden conversion to political activism.

[edit: she objects to this characterization]

But I will also give her this – accidentally stumbling into being upset by the rape of thousands of children is, as far as accidental stumbles go, not a bad one. What’s everyone else’s excuse?

John Durant did an interesting analysis of media coverage of the Rotherham scandal versus the “someone posted nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence” scandal.

He found left-leaning news website Slate had one story on the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, but four stories on nude Jennifer Lawrence.

He also found that feminist website Jezebel had only one story on the Rotherham child exploitation scandal, but six stories on nude Jennifer Lawrence.

Feministing gave Rotherham a one-sentence mention in a links roundup (just underneath “five hundred years of female portrait painting in three minutes”), but Jennifer Lawrence got two full stories.

The article didn’t talk about social media, and I couldn’t search it directly for Jennifer Lawrence stories because it was too hard to sort out discussion of the scandal from discussion of her as an actress. But using my current unit of social media saturation, Rotherham clocks in at 0.24 #Gamergates

You thought I was joking. I never joke.

This doesn’t surprise me much. Yes, you would think that the systematic rape of thousands of women with police taking no action might be a feminist issue. Or that it might outrage some people on Tumblr, a site which has many flaws but which has never been accused of being slow to outrage. But the goal here isn’t to push some kind of Platonic ideal of what’s important, it’s to support a certain narrative that ties into the Blue Tribe narrative. Rotherham does the opposite of that. The Jennifer Lawrence nudes, which center around how hackers (read: creepy internet nerds) shared nude pictures of a beloved celebrity on Reddit (read: creepy internet nerds) and 4Chan (read: creepy internet nerds) – and #Gamergate which does the same – are exactly the narrative they want to push, so they become the Stories Of The Century.

IV.

Here’s something I did find on Tumblr which I think is really interesting.

You can see that after the Ferguson shooting, the average American became a little less likely to believe that blacks were treated equally in the criminal justice system. This makes sense, since the Ferguson shooting was a much-publicized example of the criminal justice system treating a black person unfairly.

But when you break the results down by race, a different picture emerges. White people were actually a little more likely to believe the justice system was fair after the shooting. Why? I mean, if there was no change, you could chalk it up to white people believing the police’s story that the officer involved felt threatened and made a split-second bad decision that had nothing to do with race. That could explain no change just fine. But being more convinced that justice is color-blind? What could explain that?

My guess – before Ferguson, at least a few people interpreted this as an honest question about race and justice. After Ferguson, everyone mutually agreed it was about politics.

Ferguson and Rotherham were both similar in that they were cases of police misconduct involving race. You would think that there might be some police misconduct community who are interested in stories of police misconduct, or some race community interested in stories about race, and these people would discuss both of these two big international news items.

The Venn diagram of sources I saw covering these two stories forms two circles with no overlap. All those conservative news sites that couldn’t shut up about Rotherham? Nothing on Ferguson – unless it was to snipe at the Left for “exploiting” it to make a political point. Otherwise, they did their best to stay quiet about it. Hey! Look over there! ISIS is probably beheading someone really interesting!

The same way Rotherham obviously supports the Red Tribe’s narrative, Ferguson obviously supports the Blue Tribe’s narrative. A white person, in the police force, shooting an innocent (ish) black person, and then a racist system refusing to listen to righteous protests by brave activists.

The “see, the Left is right about everything” angle of most of the coverage made HBD Chick’s attack on political correctness look subtle. The parts about race, systemic inequality, and the police were of debatable proportionality, but what I really liked was the Ferguson coverage started branching off into every issue any member of the Blue Tribe has ever cared about:

Gun control? Check.

The war on terror? Check.

American exceptionalism? Check.

Feminism? Check.

Abortion? Check

Gay rights? Check.

Palestinian independence? Check.

Global warming? Check. Wait, really? Yes, really.

Anyone who thought that the question in that poll was just a simple honest question about criminal justice was very quickly disabused of that notion. It was a giant Referendum On Everything, a “do you think the Blue Tribe is right on every issue and the Red Tribe is terrible and stupid, or vice versa?” And it turns out many people who when asked about criminal justice will just give the obvious answer, have much stronger and less predictable feelings about Giant Referenda On Everything.

In my last post, I wrote about how people feel when their in-group is threatened, even when it’s threatened with an apparently innocuous point they totally agree with:

I imagine [it] might feel like some liberal US Muslim leader, when he goes on the O’Reilly Show, and O’Reilly ambushes him and demands to know why he and other American Muslims haven’t condemned beheadings by ISIS more, demands that he criticize them right there on live TV. And you can see the wheels in the Muslim leader’s head turning, thinking something like “Okay, obviously beheadings are terrible and I hate them as much as anyone. But you don’t care even the slightest bit about the victims of beheadings. You’re just looking for a way to score points against me so you can embarass all Muslims. And I would rather personally behead every single person in the world than give a smug bigot like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”

I think most people, when they think about it, probably believe that the US criminal justice system is biased. But when you feel under attack by people whom you suspect have dishonest intentions of twisting your words so they can use them to dehumanize your in-group, eventually you think “I would rather personally launch unjust prosecutions against every single minority in the world than give a smug out-group member like you a single microgram more stupid self-satisfaction than you’ve already got.”

V.

Wait, so you mean turning all the most important topics in our society into wedge issues that we use to insult and abuse people we don’t like, to the point where even mentioning it triggers them and makes them super defensive, might have been a bad idea??!

There’s been some really neat research into people who don’t believe in global warming. The original suspicion, at least from certain quarters, were that they were just dumb. Then someone checked and found that warming disbelievers actually had (very slightly) higher levels of scientific literacy than warming believers.

So people had to do actual studies, and to what should have been no one’s surprise, the most important factor was partisan affiliation. For example, according to Pew 64% of Democrats believe the Earth is getting warmer due to human activity, compared to 9% of Tea Party Republicans.

So assuming you want to convince Republicans to start believing in global warming before we’re all frying eggs on the sidewalk, how should you go about it? This is the excellent question asked by a study recently profiled in an NYMag article.

The study found that you could be a little more convincing to conservatives by acting on the purity/disgust axis of moral foundations theory – the one that probably gets people so worried about Ebola. A warmer climate is unnatural, in the same way that, oh, let’s say, homosexuality is unnatural. Carbon dioxide contaminating our previously pure atmosphere, in the same way premarital sex or drug use contaminates your previously pure body. It sort of worked.

Another thing that sort of worked was tying things into the Red Tribe narrative, which they did through the two sentences “Being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life. It is patriotic to conserve the country’s natural resources.” I can’t imagine anyone falling for this, but I guess some people did.

This is cute, but it’s too little too late. Global warming has already gotten inextricably tied up in the Blue Tribe narrative: Global warming proves that unrestrained capitalism is destroying the planet. Global warming disproportionately affects poor countries and minorities. Global warming could have been prevented with multilateral action, but we were too dumb to participate because of stupid American cowboy diplomacy. Global warming is an important cause that activists and NGOs should be lauded for highlighting. Global warming shows that Republicans are science denialists and probably all creationists. Two lousy sentences on “patriotism” aren’t going to break through that.

If I were in charge of convincing the Red Tribe to line up behind fighting global warming, here’s what I’d say:

In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat. Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.

Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of Russia and China continue to industralize and militarize rapidly as part of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.

A giant poster of Mao looks approvingly at all the CO2 being produced…for Communism.

We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal government to do it for them.

Please join our brave men and women in uniform in pushing for an end to climate change now.

If this were the narrative conservatives were seeing on TV and in the papers, I think we’d have action on the climate pretty quickly. I mean, that action might be nuking China. But it would be action.

And yes, there’s a sense in which that narrative is dishonest, or at least has really weird emphases. But our current narrative also has really some weird emphases. And for much the same reasons.

VI.

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe have different narratives, which they use to tie together everything that happens into reasons why their tribe is good and the other tribe is bad.

Sometimes this results in them seizing upon different sides of an apparently nonpolitical issue when these support their narrative; for example, Republicans generally supporting a quarantine against Ebola, Democrats generally opposing it. Other times it results in a side trying to gain publicity for stories that support their narrative while sinking their opponents’ preferred stories – Rotherham for some Reds; Ferguson for some Blues.

When an issue gets tied into a political narrative, it stops being about itself and starts being about the wider conflict between tribes until eventually it becomes viewed as a Referendum On Everything. At this point, people who are clued in start suspecting nobody cares about the issue itself – like victims of beheadings, or victims of sexual abuse – and everybody cares about the issue’s potential as a political weapon – like proving Muslims are “uncivilized”, or proving political correctness is dangerous. After that, even people who agree that the issue is a problem and who would otherwise want to take action have to stay quiet, because they know that their help would be used less to solve a problem than to push forward the war effort against them. If they feel especially threatened, they may even take an unexpected side on the issue, switching from what they would usually believe to whichever position seems less like a transparent cover for attempts to attack them and their friends.

And then you end up doing silly things like saying ISIS is not as bad as Fox News, or donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the officer who shot Michael Brown.

This can sort of be prevented by not turning everything into a referendum on how great your tribe is and how stupid the opposing tribe is, or by trying to frame an issue in a way that respects or appeals to an out-group’s narrative.

Let me give an example. I find a lot of online feminism very triggering, because it seems to me to have nothing to do with women and be transparently about marginalizing nerdy men as creeps who are not really human (see: nude pictures vs. Rotherham, above). This means that even when I support and agree with feminists and want to help them, I am constantly trying to drag my brain out of panic mode that their seemingly valuable projects are just deep cover for attempts to hurt me (see: hypothetical Bill O’Reilly demanding Muslims condemn the “Islamic” practice of beheading people).

I have recently met some other feminists who instead use a narrative which views “nerds” as an “alternative gender performance”, ie in the case of men they reject the usual masculine pursuits of sports and fraternities and they have characteristics that violate normative beauty standards (like “no neckbeards”). Thus, people trying to attack nerds is a subcategory of “people trying to enforce gender performance”, and nerds should join with queer people, women, and other people who have an interest in promoting tolerance of alternative gender performances in order to fight for their mutual right to be left alone and accepted.

I’m not sure I entirely buy this argument, but it doesn’t trigger me, and it’s the sort of thing I could buy, and if all my friends started saying it I’d probably be roped into agreeing by social pressure alone.

But this is as rare as, well, anti-global warming arguments aimed at making Republicans feel comfortable and nonthreatened.

I blame the media, I really do. Remember, from within a system no one necessarily has an incentive to do what the system as a whole is supposed to do. Daily Kos or someone has a little label saying “supports liberal ideas”, but actually their incentive is to make liberals want to click on their pages and ads. If the quickest way to do that is by writing story after satisfying story of how dumb Republicans are, and what wonderful taste they have for being members of the Blue Tribe instead of evil mutants, then they’ll do that even if the effect on the entire system is to make Republicans hate them and by extension everything they stand for.

I don’t know how to fix this.

A beautiful video about poop transfer. (Yes, no irony here, I swear!)

The marijuana sanity movement gets a new anthem:

Recent polling suggests that “Oregon is likely to be the third state to legalize marijuana”:

The poll found 52 percent of likely voters plan to support the initiative while only 41 percent plan to vote against it. The remaining 7 percent are undecided or refused to answer.

Meanwhile, the marijuana market in Colorado continues to grow:

New figures from the Colorado Department of Revenue show that recreational marijuana sales continued to climb in August, the most recent month for which data are available. Recreational sales totaled approximately $34.1 million in August, up from $29.3 million the previous month.

But Sullum spotlights a problem facing Colorado’s cannabis tourists – they often don’t have legal places to toke up:

Public officials who do not welcome marijuana tourists have ways of making marijuana tourists feel unwelcome, most conspicuously when it comes to finding a place to legally enjoy the cannabis they are legally allowed to buy. Because Amendment 64 prohibits consumption of cannabis on the premises of the state-licensed stores that sell it, Colorado does not have anything like Amsterdam’s famous “coffee shops,” where you can buy and consume marijuana along with soft drinks and snacks.

The Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act, which has been amended to cover marijuana as well as tobacco, bans smoking inside bars and restaurants. Outdoor areas of those businesses are exempt from the smoking ban, but that does not necessarily mean tourists can enjoy their newly purchased pot there. The section of Amendment 64 that eliminated penalties for marijuana use does not apply to “consumption that is conducted openly and publicly,” which remains a petty offense under state law. Last year Denver, the state’s largest city and the center of marijuana retailing, passed an ordinance defining “openly and publicly” broadly enough to foil the plans of visitors who thought they could legally smoke pot on the patio of a bar or restaurant.

You know the joke? You describe something obviously heading for disaster—a friend crossing Death Valley with next-to-no gas in his car—and then add, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Such is the Middle East today. The U.S. is again at war there, bombing freely across Iraq and Syria, advising here, droning there, coalition-building in the region to loop in a little more firepower from a collection of recalcitrant allies, and searching desperately for some non-American boots to put on the ground.

Here, then, are seven worst-case scenarios in a part of the world where the worst case has regularly been the best that’s on offer. After all, with all that military power being brought to bear on the planet’s most volatile region, what could possibly go wrong?

1. The Kurds

The lands the Kurds generally consider their own have long been divided among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. None of those countries wish to give up any territory to an independence-minded ethnic minority, no less find a powerful, oil-fueled Kurdish state on their borders.

In Turkey, the Kurdish-inhabited border area with Iraq has for years been a low-level war zone, with the powerful Turkish military shelling, bombing, and occasionally sending in its army to attack rebels there. In Iran, the Kurdish population is smaller than in Iraq and the border area between the two countries more open for accommodation and trade. (The Iranians, for instance, reportedly refine oil for the Iraqi Kurds, who put it on the black market and also buy natural gas from Iran.) That country has nonetheless shelled the Kurdish border area from time to time.

The Kurds have been fighting for a state of their own since at least 1923. Inside Iraq today, they are in every practical sense a de facto independent state with their own government and military. Since 2003, they have been strong enough to challenge the Shia government in Baghdad far more aggressively than they have. Their desire to do so has been constrained by pressure from Washington to keep Iraq whole. In June, however, their military, the Peshmerga, seized the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the wake of the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul and other northern cities in the face of the militants of the Islamic State (IS). Lacking any alternative, the Obama administration let the Kurds move in.

The Peshmerga are a big part of the current problem. In a near-desperate need for some semi-competent proxy force, the U.S. and its NATO allies are now arming and training them, serving as their air force in a big way, and backing them as they inch into territory still in dispute with Baghdad as an expedient response to the new “caliphate.” This only means that, in the future, Washington will have to face the problem of how to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle if the Islamic State is ever pushed back or broken.

Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and now under the control of the Islamic State, is the most obvious example. Given the woeful state of the Iraqi army, the Kurds may someday take it. That will not go down well in Baghdad and the result could be massive sectarian violence long after IS is gone. We were given a small-scale preview of what might happen in the town of Hassan Sham. The Kurds took it back last month. In the process, some Shia residents reportedly sided with their enemies, the Sunni militants of IS, rather than support the advancing Peshmerga.

Worst-case scenario: A powerful Kurdistan emerges from the present mess of American policy, fueling another major sectarian war in Iraq that will have the potential to spill across borders. Whether or not Kurdistan is recognized as a country with a U.N. seat, or simply becomes a Taiwan-like state (real in all but name), it will change the power dynamic in the region in ways that could put present problems in the shade. Changing a long-held balance of power always has unintended consequences, especially in the Middle East. Ask George W. Bush about his 2003 invasion of Iraq, which kicked off most of the present mess.

2. Turkey

You can’t, of course, talk about the Kurds without discussing Turkey, a country caught in a vise. Its forces have battled for years against a Kurdish separatist movement, personified by the PKK, a group Turkey, NATO, the European Union, and the United States all classify as a terrorist organization. Strife between the Turks and the PKK took 37,000 lives in the 1980s and 1990s before being reduced from a boil to a simmer thanks to European Union diplomacy. The “problem” in Turkey is no small thing—its Kurdish minority, some 15 million people, makes up nearly 20% of the population.

When it comes to taking action in Syria, the Turks exist in a conflicted realm because Washington has anointed the Kurds its boots on the ground. Whatever it may think it’s doing, the U.S. is helping empower the Kurdish minority in Syria, including PKK elements arrayed along the Turkish border, with new weapons and training.

The Turkish ruling party has no particular love for those who run the Islamic State, but its loathing for Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad is such that its leaders have long been willing to assist IS largely by looking the other way. For some time, Turkey has been the obvious point of entry for “foreign fighters” en route to Syria to join IS ranks. Turkey has also served as the exit point for much of the black-market oil—$1.2 to $2 million a day—that IS has used to fund itself. Perhaps in return, the Islamic State released 49 Turkish hostages it was holding, including diplomats without the usual inflammatory beheading videos. In response to U.S. requests to “do something,” Turkey is now issuing fines to oil smugglers, though these have totaled only $5.7 million over the past 15 months, which shows the nature of Turkey’s commitment to the coalition.

The situation in the IS-besieged town of Kobani illustrates the problem. The Turks have so far refused to intervene to aid the Syrian Kurds. Turkish tanks sit idle on hills overlooking the hand-to-hand combat less than a mile away. Turkish riot police have prevented Turkish Kurds from reaching the town to help. Turkish jets have bombed PKK rebels inside Turkey, near the Iraqi border.

Meanwhile, U.S. air strikes do little more than make clear the limits of air power and provide material for future historians to write about. American bombs can slow IS, but can’t recapture parts of a city. Short of destroying Kobani by air to save it, U.S. power is limited without Turkish ground forces. Under the present circumstances, the fighters of the Islamic State will either take the city or it will slowly burn as they slug it out with the Kurds.

The Turkish price for intervention, publicly proclaimed, is the creation of a U.S.-enforced buffer zone along the border. The Turks would need to occupy this zone on the ground, effectively ceding Syrian territory to Turkey (as a buffer zone occupied by Kurds would not do). This would involve a further commitment from Washington, potentially placing American warplanes in direct conflict with Syria’s air defenses, which would have to be bombed, widening the war further. A buffer zone would also do away with whatever secret agreements may exist between the U.S. and Assad. This zone would represent another open-ended commitment, requiring additional U.S. resources in a conflict that is already costing American taxpayers at least $10 million a day.

On the other hand, Washington’s present policy essentially requires Turkey to put aside its national goals to help us achieve ours. We’ve seen how such a scenario has worked out in the past. (Google “Pakistan and the Taliban.”) But with Kobani in the news, the U.S. may yet succeed in pressuring the Turks into limited gestures, such as allowing American warplanes to use Turkish airbases or letting the U.S. train some Syrian rebels on its territory. That will not change the reality that Turkey will ultimately focus on its own goals independent of the many more Kobanis to come.

Worst-case scenario: Chaos in Eastern Turkey’s future, while the sun shines on Assad and the Kurds. An influx of refugees are already taxing the Turks. Present sectarian rumblings inside Turkey could turn white hot, with the Turks finding themselves in open conflict with Kurdish forces as the U.S. sits dumbly on the sidelines watching one ally fight another, an unintended consequence of its Middle Eastern meddling. If the buffer zone comes to pass, throw in the possibility of direct fighting between the U.S. and Assad, with Russian President Vladimir Putin potentially finding an opening to reengage in the area.

3. Syria

Think of Syria as the American war that never should have happened. Despite years of calls for U.S. intervention and some training flirtations with Syrian rebel groups, the Obama administration had managed (just barely) to stay clear of this particular quagmire. In September 2013, President Obama walked right up to the edge of sending bombers and cruise missiles against Assad’s military over the purported use of chemical weapons. He then used an uncooperative Congress and a clever Putin-gambit as an excuse to back down.

This year’s model—ignore Assad, attack IS—evolved over just a few weeks as a limited humanitarian action morphed into a fight to the finish against IS in Iraq and then into bombing Syria itself. As with any magician’s trick, we all watched it happen but still can’t quite figure out quite how the sleight of hand was done.

Syria today is a country in ruins. But somewhere loose in that land are unicorns—creatures often spoken of but never seen—the Obama administration’s much publicized “moderate Syrian rebels.” Who are they? The working definition seems to be something like: people who oppose Assad, won’t fight him for now, but may in the meantime fight the Islamic State, and aren’t too “fundamentalist.” The U.S. plans to throw arms and training at them as soon as it can find some of them, vet them, and transport them to Saudi Arabia. If you are buying stock in the Syrian market, look for anyone labeled “moderate warlord.”

While the U.S. and its coalition attacks IS, some states (or at least wealthy individuals) in that same band of brothers continue to funnel money to the new caliphate to support its self-appointed role as a protector of Sunnis and handy proxy against Shia empowerment in Iraq. Vice President Joe Biden recently called out some of America’s partners on this in what was billed as another of his famous gaffes, requiring apologies all around. If you want to see the best-case scenario for Syria’s future, have a look at Libya, a post-U.S. intervention country in chaos, carved up by militias.

Worst-case scenario: Syria as an ungoverned space, a new haven for terrorists and warring groups fueled by outsiders. (The Pakistani Taliban has already vowed to send fighters to help IS.) Throw in the potential for some group to grab any leftover chemical weapons or SCUD-like surface-to-surface missiles from Assad’s closet, and the potential for death and destruction is unending. It might even spread to Israel.

4. Israel

Israel’s border with Syria, marked by the Golan Heights, has been its quietest frontier since the 1967 war, but that’s now changing. Syrian insurgents of some flavor recently seized border villages and a crossing point in those heights. United Nations peacekeepers, who once patrolled the area, have mostly been evacuated for their own safety. Last month, Israel shot down a Syrian plane that entered its airspace, no doubt a warning to Assad to mind his own business rather than a matter of military necessity.

Assumedly, the Obama administration has been in behind-the-scenes efforts, reminiscent of the 1991 Gulf War when Iraqi SCUDS began raining down on Israeli cities, to keep that country out of the larger fight. It is not 1991, however. Relations between the U.S. and Israel are far more volatile and much testier. Israel is better armed and U.S. constraints on Israeli desires have proven significantly weaker of late.

Worst-case scenario: An Israeli move, either to ensure that the war stays far from its Golan Heights frontier or of a more offensive nature aimed at securing some Syrian territory, could blow the region apart. “It’s like a huge bottle with gas surrounded by candles. You just need to push one candle and everything can blow up in a minute,” said one retired Israeli general. Still, if you think Israel worries about Syria, that’s nothing compared to how its leadership must be fuming over the emergence of Iran as an ever-stronger regional power.

5. Iran

What can go wrong for Iran in the current conflict? While in the Middle East something unexpected can always arise, at present that country looks like the potential big winner in the IS sweepstakes. Will a pro-Iranian Shia government remain in power in Baghdad? You bet. Has Iran been given carte blanche to move ground forces into Iraq? Check. Will the American air force fly bombing runs for Iranian ground troops engaged in combat with IS (in a purely unofficial capacity, of course)? Not a doubt. Might Washington try to edge back a bit from its nuclear tough-guy negotiations? A likelihood. Might the door be left ajar when it comes to an off-the-books easing of economic sanctions if the Americans need something more from Iran in Iraq? Why not?

Worst-case scenario: Someday, there’ll be a statue of Barack Obama in central Tehran, not in Iraq.

6. Iraq

Iraq is America’s official “graveyard of empire.” Washington’s “new” plan for that country hinges on the success of a handful of initiatives that already failed when tried between 2003-2011, a time when there were infinitely more resources available to American “nation builders” and so much less in the way of regional chaos, bad as it then was.

The first step in the latest American master plan is the creation of an “inclusive” government in Baghdad, which the U.S. dreams will drive a wedge between a rebellious and dissatisfied Sunni population and the Islamic state. After that has happened, a (re)trained Iraqi army will head back into the field to drive the forces of the new caliphate from the northern parts of the country and retake Mosul.

All of this is unrealistic, if not simply unreal. After all, Washington has already sunk $25 billion dollars into training and equipping that same army, and several billion more on the paramilitary police. The result: little more than IS seizing arsenals of top-notch Americans weaponry once the Iraqi forces fled the country’s northern cities in June.

Now, about that inclusive government. The United States seems to think creating an Iraqi government is like picking players for a fantasy football team. You know, win some, lose some, make a few trades, and if none of that works out, you still have a shot at a new roster and a winning record next year. Since Haider al-Abadi, the latest prime minister and great inclusivist hope, is a Shia and a former colleague of the once-anointed, now disappointed Nouri al-Maliki, as well as a member of the same political party, nothing much has really changed at the top. So hopes for “inclusiveness” now fall to the choices to lead the key ministries of defense and the interior. Both have been tools of repression against the country’s Sunnis for years. For the moment, Abadi remains acting minister for both, as was Maliki before him. Really, what could possibly go wrong?

As for the Sunnis, American strategy rests on the assumption that they can be bribed and coerced into breaking with IS, no matter the shape of things in Baghdad. That’s hard to imagine, unless they lack all memory. As with al-Qaeda in Iraq during the American occupation years, the Islamic State is Sunni muscle against a Shia government that, left to its own devices, would continue to marginalize, if not simply slaughter, them. Starting in 2007, U.S. officials did indeed bribe and coerce some Sunni tribal leaders into accepting arms and payments in return for fighting insurgent outfits, including al-Qaeda. That deal, then called the Anbar Awakening, came with assurances that the United States would always stand by them. (General John Allen, now coordinating America’s newest war in Iraq, was a key figure in brokering that “awakening.”) America didn’t stand. Instead, it turned the program over to the Shia government and headed for the door marked “exit.” The Shias promptly reneged on the deal.

Once bitten, twice shy, so why, only a few years later, would the Sunnis go for what seems to be essentially the same bad deal? In addition, this one appears to have a particularly counterproductive wrinkle from the American point of view. According to present plans, the U.S. is to form Sunni “national guard units”—up-armored Sunni militias with a more marketable name—to fight IS by paying and arming them to do so. These militias are to fight only on Sunni territory under Sunni leadership. They will have no more connection to the Baghdad government than you do. How will that help make Iraq an inclusive, unitary state? What will happen, in the long run, once even more sectarian armed militias are let loose? What could possibly go wrong?

Despite its unambiguous history of failure, the “success” of the Anbar Awakening remains a persistent myth among American conservative thinkers. So don’t be fooled in the short term by media-trumpeted local examples of Sunni-Shia cooperation against IS. Consider them temporary alliances of convenience on a tribe-by-tribe basis that might not outlast the next attack. That is nowhere near a strategy for national victory. Wasn’t then, isn’t now.

Worst-case scenario: Sunni-Shia violence reaches a new level, one which draws in outside third parties, perhaps the Sunni Gulf states, seeking to prevent a massacre. Would the Shia Iranians, with forces already in-country, stand idle? Who can predict how much blood will be spilled, all caused by another foolish American war in Iraq?

7. The United States

If Iran could be the big geopolitical winner in this multi-state conflict, then the U.S. will be the big loser. President Obama (or his successor) will, in the end, undoubtedly have to choose between war to the horizon and committing U.S. ground forces to the conflict. Neither approach is likely to bring the results desired, but those “boots on the ground” will scale up the nature of the ensuing tragedy.

Washington’s post-9/11 fantasy has always been that military power—whether at the level of full-scale invasions or “surgical” drone strikes—can change the geopolitical landscape in predictable ways. In fact, the only certainty is more death. Everything else, as the last 13 years have made clear, is up for grabs, and in ways Washington is guaranteed not to expect.

Among the likely scenarios: IS forces are currently only miles from Baghdad International Airport, itself only nine miles from the Green Zone in the heart of the capital. (Note that the M198 howitzers IS captured from the retreating Iraqis have a range of 14 miles.) The airport is a critical portal for the evacuation of embassy personnel in the face of a future potential mega-Benghazi and for flying in more personnel like the Marine Quick Reaction Force recently moved into nearby Kuwait. The airport is already protected by 300-500 American troops, backed by Apache attack helicopters and drones. The Apache helicopters recently sent into combat in nearby Anbar province probably flew out of there. If IS militants were to assault the airport, the U.S. would essentially have to defend it, which means combat between the two forces. If so, IS will lose on the ground, but will win by drawing America deeper into the quagmire.

In the bigger picture, the current anti-Islamic State coalition of “more than 60 countries” that the U.S. patched together cannot last. It’s fated to collapse in a heap of conflicting long-term goals. Sooner or later, the U.S. is likely to once again find itself alone, as it eventually did in the last Iraq war.

The most likely outcome of all this killing, whatever the fate of the Islamic State, is worsening chaos across Iraq, Syria, and other countries in the region, including possibly Turkey. As Andrew Bacevich observed, “Even if we win, we lose. Defeating the Islamic State would only commit the United States more deeply to a decades-old enterprise that has proved costly and counterproductive.” The loss of control over the real costs of this war will beg the question: Was the U.S. ever in control?

In September, Syria became the 14th country in the Islamic world that U.S. forces have invaded, occupied, or bombed since 1980. During these many years of American war-making, goals have shifted endlessly, while the situation in the Greater Middle East only worsened. Democracy building? You’re not going to hear that much any more. Oil? The U.S. is set to become a net exporter. Defeating terrorism? That’s today’s go-to explanation, but the evidence is already in that picking fights in the region only fosters terror and terrorism. At home, the soundtrack of fear-mongering grows louder, leading to an amplified national security state and ever-expanding justifications for the monitoring of our society.

Worst-case scenario: America’s pan-Middle Eastern war marches into its third decade with no end in sight, a vortex that sucks in lives, national treasure, and Washington’s mental breathing room, even as other important issues are ignored. And what could possibly go wrong with that?

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog,We Meant Well. His new book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is available now.

Copyright 2014 Peter Van Buren

On the set of The Shining, 1980.

A particularly great email from a reader:

Thanks for your post on anosmia, or loss of smell. This really hit home for me. I completely lost my sense of smell following a sinus infection a few years back. Mercifully, it was a temporary loss that lasted a couple of months. But I can honestly report that that was one of the darkest periods of my life, and it nearly drove me insane.

In this state, life becomes flat and inescapable in a profound way. I had no idea how central this sense is to our well being. Everything big and small loses its luster. My anosmia nightmare would begin every morning with my coffee tasting like nothing more than hot water and would continue to torture me throughout the day. Beer tasted like carbonated water. Food? Well, I was lucky if I could get a hint of cardboard out of any of it.

People whom I would confide in would casually respond, “yeah, I had a cold once and food tasted weird.” “No!” I would snarl. That didn’t begin to capture the experience. There was NO taste. Zero. There isn’t any flavor or any sense that you’re addressing your hunger. I actually gained weight, since the failure to get that emotional satiation drove me to stuff more food in my mouth.

Additionally, as your post highlighted, intimacy really suffered, as I couldn’t smell my girlfriend’s skin, perfume, or hair. And the simple pleasure of walking outside was considerably dulled by the fact that I couldn’t smell the fragrance of grass or leaves or flowers. Yes, I had the benefit of not smelling auto fumes, but they were killing me regardless.

The only consolation was that I didn’t have to smell my cat’s offerings in the kitty litter (nor my own in the toilet). But I’ll tell you this: the first time I noticed my sense of smell coming back was while taking a dump, and to paraphrase Hitchens, the odor was like a breath of fresh air. In all my life I had never imagined that I would be so excited to smell shit! I was ecstatic.

To this day, I relish scents no matter how foul – garbage, kitty litter, my kid’s diaper, rotting cheese in the back of my car (don’t ask) … it doesn’t matter. It reminds me that I am alive and that good smells and flavors are to be had just around the corner. I thank my lucky stars for the return of this sense and have no shortage of empathy for those who never regain it.

Again, thanks so much for this post and your blog!

In 2004, listeners of the BBC’s Today program voted Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” the “saddest classical” work ever written, earning 52.1% of the vote and surpassing “Dido’s Lament” (20.6%) from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, the Adagietto (12.3%) from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony, Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen (5.1%), and “Gloomy Sunday” as sung by Billie Holiday (9.8%).

During the funeral service for Princess Grace of Monaco in 1982, the New York Times noted, “while a part of Samuel Barber’s soaring Adagio for Strings was being played, Prince Albert, who is 24, covered his face in his black-gloved hands. Princess Caroline, who wept, turned towards her father, who sat next to her by the altar, but the Prince [Rainier], partly slumped, eyes half-closed, did not raise his head.” A friend of the prince described him as experiencing “one of the most deep, most total sadnesses” at the loss of his wife.

Barber’s “Adagio” was played at the prince’s own funeral in 2005, and it memorialized the deaths of Sen. Robert A. Taft in 1953, Albert Einstein in 1955, and John Kennedy in 1963. One friend of Barber’s said he heard the music on the radio within 10 minutes of Kennedy’s assassination.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Life is already full of pain; why do we design art to exacerbate it? “If we enjoy the sadness that we claim to feel, then it is not plainly sadness that we are talking of, because sadness is not an enjoyable experience,” writes philosopher Stephen Davies. “On the other hand, if the sadness is unpleasant, we would not seek out, as we do, artworks leading us to feel sad.” How is it possible to enjoy sadness?

(Thomas Larson, The Saddest Music Ever Written, 2012; Stephen Davies, “Why Listen to Sad Music If It Makes One Feel Sad?”, in Jenefer Robinson, ed., Music and Meaning, 1997.)

From A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, From American Slavery, 1848:

“A large farmer, Colonel McQuiller in Cashaw county, South Carolina, was in the habit of driving nails into a hogshead so as to leave the point of the nail just protruding in the inside of the cask; into this, he used to put his slaves for punishment, and roll them down a very long and steep hill. I have heard from several slaves, (though I had no means of ascertaining the truth of this statement,) that in this way he had killed six or seven of his slaves.”

Roper himself escaped from slavery at least 16 times throughout the American South, most often from the prolifically sadistic South Carolina cotton planter J. Gooch. Examples:

“Mr. Gooch had gone to church, several miles from his house. When he came back, the first thing he did was to pour some tar upon my head, then rubbed it all over my face, took a torch with pitch on, and set it on fire; he put it out before it did me very great injury, but the pain which I endured was most excruciating, nearly all my hair having been burnt off.”

“This instrument he used to prevent the negroes running away, being a very ponderous machine, several feet in height, and the cross pieces being two feet four, and six feet in length. This custom is generally adopted among the slave-holders in South Carolina, and other slave States. One morning, about an hour before day break, I was going on an errand for my master; having proceeded about a quarter of a mile, I came up to a man named King, (Mr. Sumlin’s overseer,) who had caught a young girl that had run away with the above machine on her. She had proceeded four miles from her station, with the intention of getting into the hands of a more humane master. She came up with this overseer nearly dead, and could get no farther; he immediately secured her, and took her back to her master, a Mr. Johnson.”

“This is a machine used for packing and pressing cotton. By it he hung me up by the hands at letter a, a horse, and at times, a man moving round the screw e, and carrying it up and down, and pressing the block c into a box d, into which the cotton is put. At this time he hung me up for a quarter of an hour. I was carried up ten feet from the ground, when Mr. Gooch asked me if I was tired? He then let me rest for five minutes, then carried me round again, after which, he let me down and put me into the box d, and shut me down in it for about ten minutes.”

“To one of his female slaves he had given a doze of castor oil and salts together, as much as she could take; he then got a box, about six feet by two and a half, and one and a half feet deep; he put this slave under the box, and made the men fetch as many logs as they could get; and put them on the top of it; under this she was made to stay all night.”

Roper finally escaped to the North in 1834 and moved to England, where he published the book and toured making abolitionist speeches. He died in 1891.

bunnyfood:

(via becausebirds)

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In 1919 Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a message to posterity:

The sons of our sons will marvel,
Paging the textbook:
“1914 … 1917 … 1919 …
How did they live? The poor devils!”
Children of a new age will read of battles,
Will learn the names of orators and generals,
The numbers of the killed,
And the dates.

They will not know how sweetly roses smelled above the trenches,
How martins chirped blithely between the cannon salvos,
How beautiful in those years was
Life.

Never, never did the sun laugh so brightly
As above a sacked town,
When people, crawling out of their cellars,
Wondered: is there still a sun?
Violent speeches thundered,
Strong armies perished,

But the soldiers learned what the scent of snowdrops is like
An hour before the attack.
People were led at dawn to be shot …
But they alone learned what an April morning can be.
The cupolas gleamed in the slanting rays,
And the wind pleaded: Wait! A minute! Another minute!
Kissing, they could not tear themselves from the mournful mouth,
And they could not unclasp the hands so tightly joined.
Love meant: I shall die! I shall die!
Love meant: Burn, fire, in the wind!
Love meant: O where are you, where?

They love as people can love only here, upon this rebellious and
tender star.

In those years there were no orchards golden with fruit,
But only fleeting bloom, only a doomed May.
In those years there was no calling: “So long!”
But only a brief, reverberant “Farewell!”
Read about us and marvel!
You did not live in our time — be sorry!
We were guests of the earth for one evening only.
We loved, we destroyed, we lived in the hour of our death.
But overhead stood the eternal stars,
And under them we begot you.

In your eyes our longing still burns,
In your words our revolt reverberates yet
Far into the night, and into the ages, the ages, we have scattered
The sparks of our extinguished life.

That’s what residents of Seattle and Minneapolis, and schoolchildren in Portland, Oregon, are celebrating today. Daniel Beekman reports that “Native American activists laughed, wept and sang their way out of Seattle’s City Hall on Monday after watching the City Council unanimously approve a resolution designating the second Monday in October as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day'”:

“It’s beautiful to see,” said Matt Remle, a Seattle resident of Lakota heritage who wrote the first draft of the resolution, “the people walking out with smiles on their faces. Bringing that good energy and spirit to the people is what this was all about.” The legislation provoked some opposition because October’s second Monday also is Columbus Day, a federal holiday named for explorer Christopher Columbus and widely marked by the celebration of Italian-American history and culture. In the council chambers [last] Monday, a half-dozen people held Italian flags to demonstrate their support for Columbus Day. … But for each Italian American activist at City Hall there were scores of Native American activists, many wearing pieces of traditional garb and some carrying drums.

Brian Braiker adds:

[I]t turns out that opposition to Columbus Day is nothing new.

As far back as the 19th century, activists sought to ban celebrations of the day (which was made an official holiday in 1934) because of the Italian diaspora’s association with the Knights of Columbus — a then-secretive organization that some feared was working to expand Catholic influence. “The move to replace Columbus Day with indigenous peoples day has its roots in one of the first indigenous advocacy groups, the Society of American Indians, nearly a century ago,” [Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth author Timothy] Kubal said.

This debate is not unique to North America, either. And it doesn’t have to be an either/or question. There is a near-exact parallel debate unfolding Down Under. “Australia Day” celebrates Captain Cook’s arrival there in 1788. Some people now derisively call the holiday “Invasion Day,” points out Christine Outram, vp, invention director at DeutschLA.

[The Colbert video initially embedded above - which was autoplaying for many readers - here]

JULIANA COISSI, EM CASCAVEL (PR)

Modu Beyé, 31, esteve mais calado do que de costume nos últimos dias. O senegalês é figura conhecida pela animação nas conversas com amigos brasileiros no entorno da antiga rodoviária, ponto de reunião de imigrantes em Cascavel, no oeste do Paraná.

A preocupação era sobre como ele e conterrâneos seriam vistos por moradores após o anúncio de que um outro imigrante na cidade é o primeiro caso suspeito de ebola detectado no país.

“As pessoas confundem tudo, Guiné, Senegal. Falam África como se fosse um país. É um continente”, aborrece-se Modu, num bom português de três anos em Cascavel.

Imigrantes em Cascavel

O guineano Souleymane Bah, 47, foi atendido numa unidade de saúde da cidade na quinta (9), após ter entrado no país em 19 de setembro. Antes, esteve por 17 dias num albergue local, onde dividiu espaço com imigrantes.

Transferido para o Rio, deve ter nesta segunda (13) a confirmação final do exame negativo para a doença, que, no atual surto, já contaminou mais de 7.000 africanos e matou mais da metade deles.

O caso em Cascavel somou mais um fator de inquietação à comunidade de imigrantes haitianos e africanos no oeste do Paraná.

Atraídos por ofertas de trabalho em frigoríficos e na construção civil, eles são 2.000 só em Cascavel –90% deles haitianos da diáspora pós-terremoto de 2010.

LUTA DIÁRIA

Passada a tensão da suspeita, a comunidade de imigrantes, que já enfrenta episódios isolados de preconceito, retoma o cotidiano em busca de adaptação e melhores condições de trabalho.

Hoje o salário médio dos imigrantes varia de R$ 900 a R$ 1.200 por até dez horas de trabalho, muitas delas em pé, dentro de frigoríficos. “Dói ficar tanto em pé”, lamenta-se Simone Junlen, 36, do Haiti.

Para os africanos, a jornada ao Brasil começa em escalas de voos na Espanha ou Portugal, de onde seguem para São Paulo ou Recife.

Alguns tomam ônibus para o Sul e outros —como teria feito o guineano— pegam voos para a Argentina e cruzam a fronteira pelo Rio Grande do Sul ou Santa Catarina.

No caso dos haitianos o trajeto é sempre o mesmo: voos até o Equador, estradas pelo Peru e entrada por terra pelo Acre, de onde se espalham.

O destino comumente é definido por referências —o senegalês Modu, por exemplo, recebeu um irmão de 23 anos há uma semana em Cascavel.

Muçulmano, o senegalês Bassiro Diop, 25, desembarcou sozinho em São Paulo e buscou apoio numa mesquita da capital. Sem achar emprego, um dos religiosos lhe sugeriu: “Vá para Cascavel”.

Na cidade paranaense, como outros muçulmanos, frequenta uma casa de oração, onde, todas as sextas-feiras à noite, africanos, árabes e brasileiros convertidos atualizam a prática religiosa.

Alguns, como o senegalês Abdou Lat Diop, 22, conseguiram negociar pausas no trabalho para as cinco orações diárias em direção à Meca.

No albergue noturno André Luiz, que recebe estrangeiros e locais, a oração noturna foi vetada pelo o barulho — o quarto é coletivo.

Os haitianos são cristãos, muitos evangélicos. Para Wilfrid Aristé, 31, que vive com outros sete haitianos, um dos poucos momentos de lazer é o culto adventista nas manhãs de sábado, que assistem mesmo sem compreender bem o idioma.

COMUNICAÇÃO

O grupo tenta descobrir a frequência de uma rádio local criada por haitianos, com músicas da terra natal e locuções em francês e créole.

“Outro dia fui à livraria, quis comprar um livro, mas não havia nenhum em francês”, lamenta Harland Joinville, 29.

Para conversar com a família, visitam hotéis para usar a internet sem fio nos celulares.

Em Cascavel levam vida econômica, instalados em hotéis baratos e casas modestas. O objetivo de quase todos é conseguir enviar dinheiro para parentes em casa.

Um obstáculo para isso, dizem, é a taxa de câmbio no país, desconhecida pela maioria até a chegada.

“Economizo R$ 1.000 e só consigo enviar US$ 300 para minha mulher e meus dois filhos”, afirma o haitiano Jon Saint Vema, 27, que se diz arrependido da mudança após três anos em Cascavel.

“Saí do Haiti por uma vida melhor. Foi muito sacrifício para chegar até aqui. Mas hoje não sei se compensou.”

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O eleitorado está dividido como nunca esteve em uma eleição presidencial brasileira (não creia em nada além de 51% a 49%). O Congresso Nacional virou uma S.A. de 28 acionistas minoritários. A eleição de governador é a volta dos que não foram. Ou seja, o poder federal ainda mais disperso frente ao poder concentrado dos caciques regionais. O que esperar do(a) presidente nesse cenário? Depende de quanta decepção se está disposto a sofrer.

Em caso de eleição de Aécio Neves (PSDB), muitos de seus eleitores se darão por satisfeitos em apear o PT do poder. À comemoração do setor empresarial e promessas de investimento se seguirão alguns meses de “boom” do mercado financeiro.

Há uma bolha de crédito barato no mundo, esperando uma janela de oportunidade se abrir em algum canto. Se Dilma Rousseff (PT) perder, a vidraça vai ser pequena para a quantidade de dólares que deve assolar o país. A Bolsa vai subir, e o dólar deve cair. Mas, como diz um dos maiores investidores na Bovespa, toda vez que se dá muita moleza para o mercado a coisa não acaba bem.

Passados os 100 dias de lua-de-mel a que todo novo presidente tem direito, será a hora de arrumar a casa, colocar as contas em ordem, como prometido em campanha. É aí que as coisas complicam. Eleitor de Aécio e especialista em gasto público, Mansueto Almeida não se cansa de repetir que a margem de manobra para o ajuste das contas federais é menos do que estreita.

Cortes de investimento e custeio tem lá seu apelo simbólico, mas são insuficientes para produzir o tamanho do ajuste que os próprios defensores desse ajuste julgam necessário. Para isso, só com reformas estruturais: tributária, previdenciária, trabalhista. O tipo de reforma que precisa ser aprovada pelo Congresso. Na Câmara onde o PSDB terá 54 dos 513 deputados. No Senado onde haverá 10 tucanos e 73 aves de plumagens diversas.

Impossível? Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB) provou que quando o presidente quer muito alguma coisa – no seu caso, aprovar o direito à reeleição -, ele é capaz de consegui-la. Tudo depende do preço que está disposto a pagar. Com o PMDB no comando das duas Casas parlamentares, não será nenhuma pechincha.

Também é bom lembrar que o poder presidencial não é ilimitado. Ao eleger-se, ele ganha um cacife que tem que durar quatro anos. Se gastar muitas fichas de uma vez só, arrisca-se a ficar descoberto e depender de empréstimos dos caciques que comandam os partidos aliados – a juros que fariam Armínio Fraga corar.

Tudo isso sem falar do Brasil real, onde vai continuar faltando água, energia e – se der azar – sobrando gás lacrimogêneo.

E se Dilma for reeleita? Esqueça o “boom” do mercado financeiro e descarte a comemoração do empresariado. O resto é quase igual.

Quando uma eleição presidencial fica muito polarizada, como esta e tantas que a antecederam, o foco vai todo para os defeitos do adversário. Os dois lados começam a acreditar na própria propaganda negativa: o problema é o outro, basta retirá-lo de cena que tudo se resolve. Se fosse assim, não estaríamos onde estamos, pois os dois lados já passaram pelo poder.

Os entraves no caminho do Brasil não são fulano ou beltrano. São as estruturas que reproduzem milhares de fulanos e beltranos. A começar por um sistema eleitoral que estimula a multiplicação partidária via aparelho excretor. Não há risco de dar certo.

A eleição para deputado federal aumentou de inacreditáveis 22 para impossíveis 28 os partidos com representação na Câmara. É a fisiologia do fisiologismo. A pregenitora do toma lá dá cá.

Para começar a reverter esse processo, basta proibir coligações partidárias nas eleições para a Câmara. Pelas contas de Daniel Bramatti e Rodrigo Burgarelli, do Estadão Dados, seis legendas não teriam eleito deputados sem pegar carona nos votos dos partidos coligados, e a Câmara ficaria com 22 partidos. Inacreditável, mas não impossível.

…

unclemother:

IM SCREAMING

Watch the world go by with this space station timelapse: