Who needs international conspiracies when we already have MammonCard and Baalvisa?

Awwwww, aren’t you cute?  No, Soros is the head of the International Jewish Conspiracy To Support The Anti-Christ.

This whole currency discussion simply taps a deep well of wingnuttery that dearly holds to the beliefs that:

The US is a Righteous nation
The rest of the world is a cesspit of heathen evil, to be interacted with only on the level of Missionary work and cheap precious moments bible figurines
We cannot let the rest of the world sully our precious national fluids

I’m not sure why China is proposing this, other than through the same motivations as others who like to play the “risk is shared, reward is private” game.  It is fun to watch the lather, as there are few domestic persons that it can be pinned to this time.

(and, yes, the google ads are getting entirely more hilarious with “get rich quick schemes for Christian Moms to use google ads”.  The pseudomommyblog ads are getting hilarious - time for a parody?)

“There is a deep irony to this situation, because the paranoids that style themselves as the only people who oppose a one world government put their political support behind conservative pundits and politicians who are rabid about dismantling the nation-state system and replacing it with a corporate order that would be, in essence, a one world government.”

The extra-rabid religious nuts don’t want corporate order either — they want One World Government with Jesus (or his Southern Baptist oracles) in charge.  As long as that government is made up of White Christian Protestants of the correct flavor, they’d love it.

But they’re also the same ones who carry on about the evils of government…until government is used to control our reproductive choices, or used to impose their flavor of religion on everyone, or used to force other countries to do our bidding, and then it’s just great…

I think it’s interesting that Soros is made out to be such a scary manipulator of politics in America, but when Richard Mellon Scaife, for one example, rightwing billionaire and one of the funders of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the “David Horowitz Freedom Center” (hah!), the Federalist Society, GOPAC, Judicial Watch, the Media Research Center, and the primary backer of the Arkansas Project, is directly attempting to bring down the federal government and/or influence it in any possible way, not a word is spoken.

So a somewhat left of center billionaire is evil, Evil, EVIL!

But a rabidly rightwing billionaire trying to wreck America purely in the name of politics…is a Good Man of Deep Moral Character and a True American Patriot, or some such crap…

IOKIYAR…still…

Funny how so many of these government hating wingnuts are dependent on the government for their deathlihood - through social security, through the military, through businesses that exist because of military or military bases, etc.  Most of them live in states that are subsidized up their their earmarks with federal money, they just don’t know it.

What’s ironic is the fact that the dollar is a de-facto world currency and the caterwauling is about the fact that the dollar might have competition.  Also, who put us in charge of China’s monetary policy?

I tried to listen as Michelle Bachmann and Glen Beck discussed it all, but gave up when it was conclusively proven that they don’t know any more about international finance than I know about quantum physics.  And I think Quarks have big ears and talk like Ross Perot.

I though this, from one of Yglesias’ commenters, was educational:

“The IMF’s Special Drawing Rights are monetary units valued against a composite of currencies. Zhou said they should be used for international trade, financial transactions and commodity pricing, rather than just between governments and international financial institutions.”

There’s also a link in that comment to a FT article discussing the possible Chinese motivation for a move to SDRs. As Ms. Kate correctly noted, it’s something like “risk is shared, reward is private”. [It’s unclear, at least to me, why the article says that it’s a good thing to allow China to put its interests ahead of ours.]

As an aside, I enjoyed Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, cited in the post, and recommend reading it for a thorough discussion the complicity of sanctimonious free-marketeers in torture, murder and abuse of human rights from the 1970s to the present.

I had read quite a bit about the right-wing torturers and murderers the USA supported in Argentina and Chile but had been unaware that, for example as Klein points out, Ford Argentina supplied the torturers with their Falcons and had a torture and murder room on its factory premises in Buenos Aires so that the police and military could torture the union leaders on the spot.

Even if one agrees, why does George Soros get a pass? Is this blog really so biased?

no, you’re just that stupid. Soros doesn’t get a pass. we do not give a shit about Soros. I know you think we have some secret organization with him in charge and we’re all marching to his orders, but leftists bristle under authority like that. He’s a guy. He’s stupid rich. He contributes to political campaigns of people we like. but he matters to us not even a little bit. The magnitude of our indifference is measured in gigateenagers.

I know it’s confusing. when you are attempting to stir controversy out of nothing, you might end up convinced everyone is as concerned about the irrelevant thing as you are.

We, however, do not give a fuck.

What’s your point, L’il Sam? I though you righties were all about making profits. In any event, why is the fact that Soros’ fund made money a bad thing? Nothing in the article indicates that he operated illegally or immorally (unlike, say, the investment banks and mortgage companies that knowingly made toxic loans with the plan of securitizing them and dropping the pain on someone else). Sounds more like he knew what a house of cards Wall Street was creating and made his investment decisions accordingly. Please clarify your animus towards this man…

Amanda, I’m not sure where you’ve gotten this currency-trading-as-punishment stuff, and I hope you’ll document it so that you don’t look as crazy as the folks on the right.  In my experience currency trading tends to be heavily reliant on technicals and so you get some weird amplification effects and some weird disconnects from fundamentals.  But I do think it’s a relatively unemotional market, when compared to some other trading venues.  I do tend to think that there’s some worry that, say, China will punish the US using currency markets (dumping dollars, basically) but it hasn’t happened and it’s not clear that it ever would.  Also, I’m not clear how you’d have international trade on any scale without a market in currencies.

In general I think Ms Kate has identified the core of it, which is that the right tends to see the value of the dollar as some kind of indicator of national greatness, where the markets tend to see it as just another object to trade, and so when currency traders make what are basically rational decisions, given their context and the information they’ve got, the right will tend to see insult and threats.  I continue to believe that the reason that the right is so gung-ho about market solutions for everything is that they really don’t understand markets at all.

Lil Sam, you just showed your troll face from under the bridge here ... go back and search the archives for Soros.  You will find, much to your displeasure no doubt, that Soros isn’t exactly considered to be a wonderful guy in these parts, but isn’t reviled as evil either.

I realize that the complexity gives you hives and cause cognitive dissonance in your binary love/hate circuits ... but that’s how intelligent people discuss the complex world.  Read a bit before you come back, please - or don’t come back.

ema:

The thing about SDRs is not just that they risks are shared, but that no country gets either the profits or the losses of having its currency used as the default world currency. Profits when things are going well, because you in effect get to take a (microscopic) cut of every international transaction that goes on anywhere, and you get to denominate your international debts in currency that you control (imagine if other debtor countries could pay off in their home currencies).  Losses because your monetary policy is not your own—you’re expected to keep things on a much more even keel (ha!) so that other peoples’ transactions will remain stable, but at the same time actions by inestors elsewhere in the world can completely negate your local economic-policy action. Whee.

In a lot of ways it would be good for the US to not have the dollar be the default currency, but conservatives of almost all stripes are against it because it would require US policy to be much more reality-based.

Look you Reichwing idiots.  This thread is about the ridiculous obsession many of your fellow travelers have over poltergeists and specters like One World Government and some new currency taking the place of the Dollar in international commerce.  Those same people said not a word when Bush Jr. and his buds were looting the country for the last 8-years — directly leading to the economic disasters that are causing the strength of the Dollar to be questioned and maybe being replaced by some other currency.  You’re only just now waking up when the same Big Finance Bastards are doing the same things, but under Obama instead of Bush.

Instead of trying to conjure up problems in an alternative reality, how about dealing with the all too real ones in objective reality?

You idiots cheered on two wars that helped suck the vitality out of this country, you idiots voted in the cynical manipulating politicians who dismantled piece-by-piece the regulations thoughtfully put in place after the last economic clusterfuck in the ‘30’s, you cheered on the “OMG, we better bail out Wall Street!” bullshit when it was under Bush, etc.

At long last, haven’t you people done enough damage?  Can’t you just build your bunkers, lock yourselves in them, and silently await your eagerly anticipated Rapture and the Second Coming and get the fuck out of the way while we try to clean up this fucking mess?

Sombody’s got to do it, and right now you guys are just standing there with your thumbs in your asses going on about George Soros…

Melinda, the probably capital examples are the colonial and protectorate regimes of the 19th century.  The UK was the biggest practictioner of this sort of thing.  Aside from the gold standard (and unequal treaties with colonial subjects) thing, they have managed currency interventions in Latin America, especially Brasil.  Not quite so much out of spite as ensuring that import substitution doesn’t take place, which is the goal of *most* currency games.  “Punishing” countries usually is a matter of instigating coups, or perhaps, sending some of that “best military in the world” to that problem spot.  Hence, look at Omar Torrijos, Aristide, or Sukarno.

Seriously, it’s too expensive to “punish” people by currency, and not very gratifying.  There are almost always strongly economic reasons for bad behavior with currencies.  It’s better to just get them into debt.

A comment on the main post.  Race.Is.All.About.This.Dynamic.  Using group paranoia and the thugs that love them is classic divide and rule technique.

I’ve always wanted a tattoo but am too indecisive on what to get. Maybe the Mark of the Beast is just what I need.

Even if one agrees, why does George Soros get a pass? Is this blog really so biased?

Stupid asshole.

Very recent comment thread upsetting your premise: http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/but_what_if_george_soros_goes_galt/

Just a thought: could one motivation for China to ask about a global exchange medium be that they don’t want the Yuan to become that global exchange medium?

There are good reasons to oppose world currencies.  The proper unit for currencies isn’t even the nation, but the city.  See a nice review of Jane Jacobs’s work here:

http://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html

George Soros, currency speculator, is behind the move to a world currency.

Yes, that makes sense.

Next: The birth certificate of “Soros” proves that his real name is Rothschild.

Stay Tuned!

Admittedly, the conspiracy runs not deep but also goes back nearly 70 years. The special drawing rights of the IMF are only the remnant of a propose world currency named “bancor”. Proposed by no less than…

Keynes (alias Keinstein).

You know, maybe one of the reasons US politics is so batsh*t crazy is that unexamined US privilege mirrors unexamined male privilege: in the postwar era we were motly by accident by far the biggest player on the block. Then the usual world political situation of lots of different power centers reasserted itself, and people went crazy about how all the other countries were conspiring against us and we were being persecuted. Meanwhile at home white male workers were getting the shaft and being told to blame it on women and blacks, so it makes perfect sense that they would see the UN (and its baby-blue helmets) as part of the universal emasculating conspiracy…

“gigateenagers” hee!

I’m aware of how currency trading is used a) as another fancy way for rich people to make more money and b) to punish errant countries for perceived slights against capitalism and white supremacy.

The open trading of currencies, bonds, and national securities exists for many reasons aside from punishment and making people rich. The vast majority of currencies are held by non-issuing governments as reserve capital. Open trading allows the value of these assets to be adjusted based upon a variety factors, and, just as in the security and options markets, trading decisions are at times made for irrational and avarice reasons. Open trading, however, allows exchange rates and values to be set based upon, at least, some shared criteria; rather than,  the sayso of the issuing institution—I seem to recall Stalin declaring the Ruble was to be valued at 2:1 over the Dollar for no reason other than national pride.

China’s suggestion was to utilize—or create—a more standardize global reserve currency which would be held by governments and not individuals. This meta-currency would replace the baskets of currencies held by governments around the world. Ultimately, this would—no doubt—lead towards a decline of US economic influence around the world, as the Dollar currently makes up the bulk of reserve currency held by most countries. I doubt, however, that the rightwing nuts understand the long term implications of China’s suggestion. Rather, people like Bachman—and the associated Birchers—don’t begin to understand modern monetary systems and thus believe it is a conspiracy. And to suggest that currency trading systems exist primarily to punish or service greed is to align with those who rant abount the federal reserve and long for the return of the gold standard.

“Please clarify your animus towards this man…”

I don’t know about Sam’s dislike, but every time my mother-in-law brings him up, she might as well be yelling “Five Jew Bankers! Five Jew Bankers!”

wnoise, you are smoking something.  Really.  Cities?  Some people don’t live anywhere NEAR a city!

Good gawd, flat earth and everything!

MikeEss,
Let’s not forget that Glen Beck has a show on a news network that is owned by a company that until very recently was traded on the Sydney Stock Exchange.  Yes, NewsCorp is an Australian company. 

Foreign subversion anyone?

This thread is about the ridiculous obsession many of your fellow travelers have over poltergeists and specters like One World Government and some new currency taking the place of the Dollar in international commerce.

You have to admit, it’s pretty funny that a thread mocking the idea of a one-world government is immediately trolled by someone who’s CONVINCED that George Soros is the Scary International Banker Behind Everything!!1!1!!!111!!one!  Ohmigod, don’t you people realize that it’s all true!?!?!

The hysteria is, well, hysterical.

What’s ironic is the fact that the dollar is a de-facto world currency and the caterwauling is about the fact that the dollar might have competition.

IIRC, one of the reasons we invaded Iraq was that Saddam started selling their oil in Euros instead of dollars, which was going to hurt the US dollar in the international market.

And to suggest that currency trading systems exist primarily to punish or service greed is to align with those who rant abount the federal reserve and long for the return of the gold standard.

sjk on 03/28 at 03:20 PM

Why do you feel that is necessarily the case?

If I say that China spies on the US, does that make me suddenly morph into a raging neoconservative in your eyes? All kinds of stuff happens in this crazy world. To deny it would be foolish.

It does not seem absurd to me to say that currency trading, and indeed many different modes of trade, can be used for both mutual benefit, and also as weapons.

Of course, I consider the “fiat currency” ravers to be rather unhinged as well.

do tend to think that there’s some worry that, say, China will punish the US using currency markets (dumping dollars, basically) but it hasn’t happened and it’s not clear that it ever would.

It’s never going to happen.

By “punishing” us China would be fucking themselves over ten fold. The Chinese, out of pure self interest, do not wish to see the US economy fail. Because if we fail, they do do too, but harder.

Thanks for filling in the blanks, shah8.  I’m just not comfortable with assertions about currency trading being used as punishment.  I had been under the misimpression that it never had been.  It still seems as if it’s historical rather than a current threat, and I’d like for the left to keep our arguments fact-based.  I traded currency for a few years and at the retail level it’s certainly almost exclusively on technicals.

Ben, we know that China would damage itself if they tanked the dollar.  We don’t know to what extent, and it’s my general impression that China can suck up a lot more suffering than the US can if sufficiently motivated.  I don’t have any reason to think they will but on the security side we tend to weigh things in terms of tradeoffs.  It may be that one day China could decide that the benefit to them from undermining the value of the dollar is worth any (presumably temporary) pain it might cause.  I think it’s exceedingly unlikely but stuff changes.  It seems to me that the real question here is about the broader context.

I’m digging how everybody’s suddenly expert on currency markets, in any event.

Why do you feel that is necessarily the case? . . . It does not seem absurd to me to say that currency trading, and indeed many different modes of trade can be used for both mutual benefit, and also as weapons.
atheist on 03/28 at 05:42 PM

Hence, I used the word primarily. . .

What must always be remembered is that the more open any market system is the more corrupt and abusive they tend to be - one need only look at the heroin trade (which is an open market system) to validate this. Monetary trading, though not as tightly controlled as it could be, remains a fairly well controlled system to set exchange values among international notes.

Um…yeah…nobody’s trying to create a single world currency.  Maybe someone should tell her this, if she can hear it through her tinfoil hat.

sjk, that makes sense, we’re on the same wavelength.

This stuff is coming up more lately. Must be in response to the economic shitstorm. I have a freind who I have considered to be very intelligent in the past. And yet lately, this freind seems to go for every kind of crackpot conspiracy theory under the sun.

He’s become a 9/11 Truther. He was also stating that the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson river must have been doing it intentionally, because how could the reports say that one engine was missing? How could one engine be missing, but the other one be there? I mean it’s all that kind of wack-ass shit. Maybe he’s so intelligent that it’s driving him nuts or something.

So now, he’s also stating that we need to get off of fiat currency and go back to the gold standard. I suggested that we should not base our currency on a pretty but useless material like gold, we should base it on something with intrinsic value to humans like liters of drinkable water. He didn’t appreciate that.

To my mind there’s a kind of elevation of symbolism over boring reality in this argument. Look lets be honest I know very little about currency, the Federal Reserve, FX Trading, or the rest of it. But look at this page on Lew Rockwell.com. Especially look at the graphical advertisement on the right hand of the page, which says, “Protect and Prosper from the Dollar’s Demise”. To my mind there’s something symbolic in this abused, burning paper dollar being thrown like a paper airplane, while gold coins sit serenely. They are suggesting that paper money is untrustworthy, useless. While shiny gold coins with some dude’s head stamped on ‘em are good, trustworthy.

But why should we trust gold any more than we trust paper? Just because gold is shinier, heavier, and more substantial, this means nothing in terms of its “actual” value. Its like a form of traditionalism, an emotional connection to the past. Which is fine, but we can’t depend on the mythical past for answers here. These guys believe that, if they are holding substantial gold coins, trade will become likewise more substantial, heavy, solid. But, it seems to me trade has never been that way and probably never will. It’s always risky, tricky and a bit random. That’s its nature, in my mind.

Gold is far from a useless shiny metal, atheist.  If it was only ornamental, it would still have value.  But it’s a useful shiny metal that doesn’t tarnish with age, is both malleable and durable, and conducts electricity very very well.  (Silver is supposed to be the best conductor of electricity, as long as it doesn’t tarnish.)  Gold is good stuff to have, will be good stuff to have around in a century, and also has this allure to those who want bling.  That you can’t eat it (though you can if you want to waste it) doesn’t make it useless.

As for your friend and the many others who are getting involved in conspiracy theories, that’s what happens when people don’t understand complex things and those complex things go awry.  Simple explanations get told, half-truths become official stories, people fill in the gaps in other people’s knowledge, and the whole thing just emphasizes the idea that people should learn more about the world before the rest of the world suddenly “becomes important” (as if it wasn’t before.)  It’s why we believe crap about the rest of the world being out to get us, when the truth is it’s mostly too busy trying to get through next week.  It’s why we can believe the Pope, Jewish bankers, the Queen of England, cocaine and heroin cartels, Russian mafia, African diamond merchants, Belgian gun dealers, the Weather Channel, and Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are all part of an international conspiracy to make everyone get a late charge on their Visa cards in 2012.  The bigger the conspiracy, the harder it is to disprove.  And since hardly anyone other than pesky reporter types actually looks things up, government actions will become more and more byzantine to outsiders.  Welcome to the age of information, where half-truths that ring true travel as fast as ears can listen.  You know, kind of like all the other eras in human history.

Maybe he’s so intelligent that it’s driving him nuts or something.

It may be pathological or psychopathological.  We had a guy in the neighborhood who was a liberal republican, a news photographer of some note with a deadhead sticker on his car.  He got stranger and stranger, combative with his wife from what I hear, and they were in the midst of divorcing when he dropped dead of a severe brain hemhorrage.  As is common, it wasn’t the only brain bleeding he had had.  A friend of my mother’s was a corporate lawyer with her husband in legal as well marital partnership for thirty years.  He suddenly got strange, groped his female associates, stayed out all hours, etc.  She had initiated divorce proceedings when it was discovered that he had Mad Cow disease.  He died not long after.

I know of more situations where a person’s personality changed overnight, and they died not long after of brain pathology or were diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

Oh, and does China’s interest in a global medium of exchange have to do with all the dollars of our debt they have been buying up?  What about the allegations that they have been manipulating the Yuan on the world market to their protectionist advantage?

Ms Kate, it doesn’t really matter, because we wouldn’t do much other than grumble at their gaming the system that we are already gaming so as to allow our future gaming on the same level as before., which causes them to grumble about our gaming.

I think my shallow understanding of the situation—one that comes to a conclusion that Everybody Does It—may be just as stupid as the conspiracy folks’ worldview.  All I know for certain is that our financial sector deserves a huge kick in the yarbles, and I don’t trust that either insiders or outsiders will deliver it with enough force.

Gold is far from a useless shiny metal, atheist.  If it was only ornamental, it would still have value.  But it’s a useful shiny metal that doesn’t tarnish with age, is both malleable and durable, and conducts electricity very very well.

Granted. Gold isn’t useless, I shouldn’t have said that. What I was trying to get at was, I think the Breitbart/ Lew Rockwell types assign a kind of value to gold that, in my opinion, it does not really posess.

About the wacky conspiracy theories, it’s just wierd to me that very intelligent people can get caught up into it, while others who aren’t that smart don’t get caught up. Maybe it’s less about intelligence, and more about over-valuing your own theories, or believing that, like you said, there’s got to be a simple explanation for what is actually a very complex problem.

If the Rockwellites really wanted a currency backed by something extremely valuable and useful, they’d be favoring energy-backed currency (i.e., oil-backed). THAT would be valuable, more so than gold.

But gold? Come on. Those fuckers need to read the Cross of Gold speech and realize William Jennings Bryan was popular for a reason!

atheist,

Like you, I don’t know much about “currency, the Federal Reserve, FX Trading, or the rest of it.” What I do think I understand about it, I get from reading Karl Marx’s Capital, which makes a good deal of sense. Until I read that book and various left-wing developments and commentaries on it, I didn’t understand money at all.

Pretty remarkable that we live in a society that is monolithically, fanatically, devoted to the pursuit of money, that we don’t grow up with commonsensical, consensus, comprehensible concepts of what profit, or even money, actually is, eh?

Re “the gold standard” and all that—money, explains Marx, serves several related functions. That the developing markets gravitated toward the most useless of the “precious” metals (and away from using useful materials like say, wheat, or as you comically suggest, water) makes sense, precisely because a material being used as money cannot be simultaneously used for its useful, even necessary, primary purpose. But according to fundamental labor theory of value, any material that is used for money has value according to how much human labor is needed to obtain more of it. Thus, any material version of money is a drag on the economy, as labor will be devoted to obtaining a material that has no other use but to assist in managing the exchange of goods.

Thus modern, state-regulated, bank money (which the Rockwells of the world call “fiat” money) has the advantage that it is based on the value (that is, embedded labor-content) of all goods circulating in the economy, which are being used for their productive (more or less!) purposes at the same time. Basically a portion of the “value,” the abstracted labor-content, is being peeled off the goods and used as such, while the goods themselves continue to serve as food reserves, raw materials, finished goods waiting to be sold or in use, etc.

This only works well if the entities managing this transfer—banks and the business world in general, and governments regulating them—behave reasonably and realistically. If they don’t then the drawbacks of the system manifest.

But if all the governments in the world were to abolish non-material “money” tomorrow and insist on say the gold standard, not only would this throw monkey-wrenches of inefficiency into the system; virtual “money” of the same type would emerge, as it initially did, anyway from the practices of businessmen themselves. It’s called “credit” and if it were legally abolished, it would continue anyway under the table, because it is essential to the operations of competitive productive enterprises seeking to maximize profit. Because material money does represent embodied labor, it is advantageous for businessmen to agree to future payments or to bartering swaps of their commodities—indeed to future swaps!—rather than settle every transaction with cash payments. The ones who engage in such practices are at risk of loss if the promised swaps never come off in the future, but the advantage they gain by not having to bog down large portions of their resources in cash reserves outweighs that risk generally and puts them ahead of more stodgy competitors who insist on cash every time. That’s how we got banks and credit in the first place.

These guys believe that, if they are holding substantial gold coins, trade will become likewise more substantial, heavy, solid. But, it seems to me trade has never been that way and probably never will. It’s always risky, tricky and a bit random. That’s its nature, in my mind.
atheist on 03/29 at 04:15 AM

Exactly. “Trade,” business in general, is, rightly understood, a vast, global, nigh-universal enterprise of cooperative labor—the workforce of the world engaging in tightly-interlocked specialized activities to satisfy global needs. It is done over time, using material means, and thus is subject inherently to unpredictable circumstances. That we govern this complex global machine by means of competing private capitals seeking to maximize profit throws in another layer of chaos—inherent in that very system, based as it is on legions of secretive groups (that’s what “private” means after all!) seeking their own advantage and thus implicitly the ruin of their competitors.

Actually my introduction to serious Marxist economics was a book called Laws of Chaos by Farjoun and Machover, which is very interesting. As the title suggests they focus on the inherent chaos of the market system, seeking to apply basic principles of statistical mechanics as developed in thermodynamics to Marx’s framework. As they point out, this works for Marxist political economy—and completely fails for the mainstream “marginalist” approach, which cannot tolerate consideration of very basic aspects of chaos that are quite plain in real life.

Last time I looked the whole book was available (as TIFF pages) online.

Atheist, I know what you mean about smart people being more easily baited by half-baked theories than stupid people.  I think it still has a lot to do with stupid people being too stupid to even begin to want to try to figure things out.  Meanwhile, smarter people have an idiotic thing called pride that causes them to talk about and nod their head regarding things that don’t actually make sense rather than be the one in the room who admits to not knowing what the hell is going on.

The secret to being smart isn’t so much knowing stuff, but knowing where to look things up.  And then trying another source to back it up.  And then still looking around, asking questions, and reading more and more sources, and consulting experts.  And learning who the crackpots are.  And then not giving up.

Maybe it’s less about intelligence, and more about over-valuing your own theories, or believing that, like you said, there’s got to be a simple explanation for what is actually a very complex problem.

I think it’s also that smart people are more likely to believe that they’re in control of their own destinies and not subject to random chance or other people’s decisions, so when they’re confronted with something out of their control (like 9/11), they will try to gain that control back by coming up with a “logical” reason why it happened.

I think that conspiracy theories are actually comforting to people in a weird way.  A conspiracy theory says, “Well, you may not be in control, but someone is in charge, so things aren’t really happening at random.  Everything can be explained.”  It can be a smart person’s replacement for religion, ie God works in mysterious ways but He knows what He’s doing.

The fact that there are sometimes conspiracies (like, say, Ford conspiring to not fix the known safety problem with the Pinto) only strengthens the beliefs of someone who believes in huge conspiracies.  After all, if it happens on a (relatively) small scale, it must happen on a huge scale as well, right?

Michael Shermer has a couple of good books along these lines, including Why People Believe Weird Things.

I don’t find the old link I found several years ago to the TIFF online version of Laws of Chaos, but then I stopped looking for it when I found this PDF version of the whole book, which seems more useful anyway!

Another essential modern book, which strongly compliments the insights of Farjoun and Machover, is Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition, Howard Botwinick, Princeton University Press, 1993. The review I linked to (because the Amazon link that comes up first under Google just says it is out of print and unavailable) stresses the main strategic purpose of the book, which is advice and advocacy for labor union strategists. But what really grabbed me (aside from the good if limited news for them, and hence all of us proletarians) was the way his theoretical approach harmonized with Farjoun and Machover’s and filled in more of the picture of Marxian labor theory applied via statistical approaches—while starting from a very different analytical position. Unfortunately my copy is buried deep in storage at the moment and it is not easy to get.

Besides, all this has little detailed bearing on the questions of currency policy; I just take this opportunity to point out a theoretical framework rather different from that of the mainstream pundits that I think is far superior. Especially from a working-class perspective.

From that perspective, I think that ideally the whole financial “industry”—banks, insurance, stockbroking, and of course currency—should be nationalized and run in the interests of the majority. For this to happen we’d have to have a truly democratic order—and sophisticated and engaged populace. Which to put it mildly we don’t have, and probably won’t in my lifetime if ever.

So in the meantime—international finance is governed by “laws of chaos” and of course is manipulated by powerful cliques. But these, being competitive, merely contribute to the chaos…

Mark Foxwell, thank you for those links I will totally be all up over that like white on rice, like black on crude, like [insert your simile here]. I’ve been looking for an economic resource to start to understand things from a socialist perspective.

Mnemosyne, I too have noted the pseudo-religious, and oddly comforting aspects of conspiracy theories before, but you bring up another angle I hadn’t really considered: the odd sort of “snob appeal” aspect of these beliefs that can pull in very intelligent people by using their pride.

3letterjon, you are certainly correct that many peope do not even try to figure society out in the big picture, and so remain untroubled by conspiracy theories. Whether that makes them stupid or wise is unclear to me, though I know I’ve taken a different tack.

And Ms Kate, those two examples of people whose actions got erratic due to terminal brain disease are interesting but also terrifying.

Heh, atheist, I should warn you that I came upon Laws of Chaos after several years of trying to master advanced physics at Caltech. While I hardly succeeded at that, at least not by Caltech’s standards, I was very familiar and comfortable with statistical mechanics. Farjoun and Machover were well aware their audience wouldn’t be, generally, but tripping down memory lane I have been rereading the PDF and there is a lot of math they do introduce!

In general once I stumbled upon serious Marxist political economy (as opposed to the garbled and generally dismissive summaries of it one finds in mainstream sources) I felt that I had found light shining in former darkness largely because I understood Marx’s reasoning as paralleling the kind of thinking I was used to from studying physics, computer science, and a rudimentary amount of engineering principles—not to mention higher calculus. At the same time, I felt he and his better followers very successfully grounded their often abtruse theoretical reasoning in concrete examples which made the whole thing vivid.

But a certain amount of my fascination was sheer wonkery; I’d take some concept and run with it, probably to inappropriate extremes. One way good Marxist economic theory resembles serious scientific/engineering thinking is that one needs a sense of proportion and empirical perspective. One lesson I did learn at Caltech is that theory is never the same thing as reality; at best it is a good model of features you find appropriately interesting.

At the end of the day, a good grasp of Marxist political economy can cut through a lot of ideological bull that passes for wisdom in our society, but it doesn’t really point the way to any easy solutions. It’s a map showing “You are here, 666 miles up Sh*t Creek…”

This is one reason my largely moribund blog is called “A Freeway In Hell…”

Mark,

OK I’ll keep that in mind. After all, I already have like 3 normal books I’ve avoided finishing because I can be lazy. So maybe approach this one gingerly. I’m no genius, not even a real tech geek. I appreciate the warning.

yeah, “no one really cares about Soros” my ass.

You still completely misunderstand the point. We don’t dismiss your vague attacks on Soros because we think he’s such a stellar individual and hate to hear any criticism of him. Rather, it is because your statements sound like nutty conspiracy theories with no real bearing on this discussion.

No, but I don’t expect a bunch of fuckin’ LYING, either.

Well, since people here don’t think fucking is bad per se, there isn’t too much lying about it.

What that has to do with us liking or not liking Soros or currency market structures, well, I think you lost me there.

Where did I mention anything about a conspiracy?

You linked to this calumny of Soros, which is meant to suggest - without coming out and saying it - that he somehow caused the economic crisis in order to turn a profit. The thread’s topic is the right-wing paranoia of folks who fear a strange hallucination of global currency. You apparently partake in this hallucination.

“Pretty nasty response, all in all. I was disappointed, that’s all.
I guess I expected better. I understand better now.”

Those mean libruls!  They’re always turning the the tone of the conversation nasty and ruining the fine dialog we would otherwise have.  (Now’s the time, Lil Sam, to complain about the harsh language here, just before you flounce off while telling everyone you’re leaving…)

Statement A, Lil Sam speaking:
Soros is simply a currency trader that fucked Great Britian and pretty much everyone else he touched and is certainly included in those described by Miss Marcotte in her post.

-

Statement B, Lil Sam quoting Amanda Marcotte:
And when this is pointed out, the sarcasm drips from her response…“ Awww, aren’t you cute?  No, Soros is the head of the International Jewish Conspiracy To Support The Anti-Christ.

Can you see how we percieve statement A, the assertion that Soros “fucked Great Britain and pretty much everyone else he touched”, as functionally equivalent to statement B, that Soros is “head of the International Jewish Conspiracy to support the Anti-Christ”? This is why Amanda Marcotte answered you the way she did.

In statement A you assert that Soros “fucked Great Britain and pretty much everyone else he touched”. He is, therefore, either a completely predatory individual who does nothing but destroy nations and institutions, or he is a kind of financial disease vector, spreading sickness throughout the entire globe. In either case, you appear to be suggesting that Soros be removed from society by one means or another. Amanda Marcotte took the argument which she perceived to be underlying your statements and made it explicit. Are you saying that this is not actually the argument which was underlying your statements?

Your remarks were seen by most as a suspiciously facile jump into a known conspiracist belief.

In any case, Lil Sam needs to go check the archives - there is plenty of actual argument about Soros and his behavior over the years if you bother to type “Soros” into a little box.

Unfortunately, reading the resulting discussion of the relative merits of the man’s behavior in the past and current contexts might undermine Sam’s hypothesis that we are all minions of global Jew evile market manipulation.  He might learn something that undermines his conspiracy wanking and linking to articles most of us have read, but read in the greater context of journalistic output surrounding recent events.

Thinking like a scientist or critically trained person is not Sam’s strong suit here, and I think he knows it.  Either that, or he fears that his conspiracy theory might get corrupted by some complex reality.

In any case, Lil Sam needs to go check the archives - there is plenty of actual argument about Soros and his behavior over the years if you bother to type “Soros” into a little box.

I even gave the illiterate dumbfuck a relevant link and he came right back and said “yeah, no one really cares about Soros my ass.” Now that’s just proudly stupid. His mother and father must be ashamed of their little failure.

Dumbfuck Lil Sam! Hey, fuck you.

Can you even understand that Miss Marcotte ran her mouth before statement A was uttered? Her response was in only to “Are you talking about George Soros?”

And yet, she was obviously correct in her assessment of you, since it was only about an hour before you posted your article about Soros. This is quite interesting is it not?

Classy, eh? You can only find this level of discourse here and in selected trailer parks.

Oh, that must be why I was still living in a trailer park when I was one of the top ranked high school debaters in my state.