Those of you who know me, know that I’ve been running WordPress blogs for many, many years. Not Housebroken was the blog blog; the Irregular Bullshit was where I updated news. Not Housebroken was supposed to be more considered. The Irregular Bullshit was meant for my hot takes. Both were mostly about politics, mostly from a radical left perspective. How well that worked is a question someone else will have to answer.
It wasn’t WordPress itself that was my problem. It was the hosting. I am not a winner in this economic system; I have neither the time, the money, the inclination, nor, any longer, even the ability to battle technical details which, after all, the hosting company should be attending to. I considered importing the sites here, but Substack would only import some of the most recent posts. So I abandoned that.
With this project, I am starting again. It’s under the Not Housebroken name because some folks apparently still object to obscenities; when these posts get shared on social media, it’s an invitation for an asshole moderator to censor. I’m still me. I’ll still swear. I’ll still refer to cops as white supremacist gangsters (because they are). I’ll still insist that ‘America’ refers to an entire hemisphere (because it does), Amerikkka is the constitutional oligarchy I live under, and that you can’t ever call it a ‘democracy,’ because it is only really a democracy when everyone votes on everything, and by this, I do not mean through representatives.
And the term ‘republic’ was James Madison’s cover for that constitutional oligarchy: In Federalist No. 10, he was just shy of explicit in trusting the rich to rule, and fully explicit about wanting to protect the rich—almost exclusively white males and often slaveholders—from having their property, presumably including slaves, confiscated by a popular mob. This is not a country I’m proud of.
If you don’t know me, I have a Ph.D. in Human Science, which is about the experience of being human in multiple contexts. I treat quantitative conclusions as questions: How and why did the researchers reach those conclusions? At least in the human and social sciences, quantitative work needs to be fully developed with qualitative work.
My dissertation was on conservative attitudes toward unauthorized migrants; I understand borders as existing for two purposes:
To delimit the territories that rulers rule. The competition for control over such territories and over the people and resources therein can account, to some degree, for nearly every war in human history.
To withhold rights and privileges available to people on the ‘right’ side of those borders from those on the ‘wrong’ side. There can be no moral justification for this: Under international law, human beings are human beings entitled to human rights, entirely regardless of borders.
I understand conservatism in a way that few do, having identified and described seven tendencies of conservatism that Donald Trump came along and mostly united, creating a monolithic and extraordinarily powerful movement: white Christian nationalism. You don’t need to scare me with Trump—I’m plenty scared already.
But that does not mean I embrace the Democratic Party. This party’s record of accomplishment, yes, even under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, is so dismal that I am persuaded that Democrats collectively prefer to sit in opposition, where they can complain about Republicans to their hearts’ content without every actually being expected to accomplish a damn thing. I have, in the past, called the Democratic Party the ‘neoliberal party,’ because it has seemed to prefer neoliberalism even to winning elections.
Neoliberalism has been getting a lot of extremely well deserved bad press lately. It is a particular form of conservatism (not one of the tendencies I identified in my dissertation) that often espouses progressive values while enacting conservative policy, often mutated from capitalist libertarianism. Neoliberalism is a neoconservative moral imperative and I understand neoconservatism, which sees the U.S. political and economic system as the best possible system for all humans everywhere, regardless of culture, regardless of history, as the governing consensus, the so-called “Washington Consensus,” that enables U.S., European, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization imperialism in geographic, financial, and economic terms.
I object to U.S. and NATO imperialism. I also object to Russian and Chinese imperialism. I strongly object to Israel’s (lately and arguably long-term genocidal) ethnic cleansing in Palestine, see it as undermining the country’s legitimacy, and absolutely object to any support for it in any form. And I object to Russia’s war on Ukraine and to China’s bullying in the South China Sea. In general, I advocate that rulers should govern exclusively with the consent of the governed—I would prefer anarchism, but have been compelled to conclude that after thousands of years of authoritarian hierarchical rule, humans have all but lost the ability to govern themselves in such a way.
I am vegan for moral, environmental, and health reasons. I am moving away from calling the moral reasons ‘ethical reasons’ because I see problems with animal rights philosophy: I usually agree with their conclusions but sometimes find their argumentation inadequate. On moral grounds, I generally object to sentient beings killing other sentient beings, which, while I grant that humans may be uniquely privileged to choose the resources we exploit, is to say that I object to our ecosystem, where nonhuman animals do in fact prey on other animals, sometimes even as obligate carnivores. Yet this is the same ecosystem I seek to preserve in part by being vegan.
Yeah, that’s a big problem. Ethics is a branch of philosophy. My arguments need to be much better developed than this. So I’m not making them.
I am mostly areligious. I am profoundly troubled by the question of theodicy, the question of why an allegedly all-powerful, all-knowing ‘good’ Creator permits, let alone creates evil.
If you argue that the choice between good and evil enables ‘free will,’ I argue that ‘free will’ depends not specifically on ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but on meaningful freedom to choose—a privilege I most certainly do not enjoy in an ideologically capitalist society. The premise that we enjoy ‘free will’ at all is, to put it mildly, contested—a philosophical issue for it can never be conclusively answered, but in the form of argument given, requires that if ‘good’ and ‘evil’ exist, ‘free will’ must exist.
For me, this eliminates the possibility of a superior being existing precisely as described in the Bible—the contradiction between a ‘good God’ and the evil we live with is simply too glaring. I do not know any other superior beings. They may exist. I cannot prove they do not. But they are not in my experience.
And trust me when I tell you I am unimpressed when people rationalize settler-colonialism by insisting that such beings “gave us this land.” I am also unimpressed when people claim that such beings created two sexes who are to pair off and procreate:
The claim that ‘God’ created men and women demands that we explain why this ‘God’ also created people who do not fit comfortably in that binary and people who do not feel attracted to the ‘opposite’ sex. (And I am astonished that this objection to conservative religious ideology is not more often raised as I have never seen it properly answered.)
Our planet might be able to tolerate the abuse we heap on it if our population were limited to about the maximum we could have attained as hunter-gatherers. By this standard, we now have about 40 times too many people. We do not need more. (But see above: I do not advocate mass killing. War, extreme weather, pestilence, famine, and plagues will, however, likely do at least this job because our response to the climate crisis has been woefully inadequate, so inadequate that I have given up in despair and generally do not bring it up.)
The trouble with introductory letters is that they will inevitably leave something out that’s important. But I hope you’ll join me—and please do subscribe because I really do need the money.