Do your fellow citizens act morally?

A while back I wrote that the nasty guy and his military had allowed Iranian and friendly ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz while the Iranians blocked all other traffic from passing through the Strait. That such a detail had not been thought of seemed strange. That has changed. The nasty guy’s military now has a blockade of the Strait. If a ship is friendly to the US Iran won’t let it through. If it is friendly to Iran the US won’t let it through. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that this reminds him of Sarajevo – in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. Interlocking European alliances mobilized on the side of Serbia or Austria-Hungary starting WWI. As I mentioned before Hartmann wrote Israel’s Netanyahu has a reason for his attacks on Iran – he can claim emergency status to pause court proceedings in his fraud and bribery trial. Hartmann looked at the command authorizing the blockade. It is a global directive, meaning he says the US Navy may board Iran friendly ships anywhere in the world, not just near the Strait. Under international maritime law, that is piracy. China gets about 80% of its oil through the Strait. They will be desperate for it soon. China also has military ships in the region. China, along with Russia, has been providing targeting intelligence to Iran. So what happens if a Chinese ship challenges the nasty guy’s blockade? Does the nasty guy pull his famous TACO, collapsing the blockade? Or does the war escalate? Also Russia’s Putin, no matter how deep he is in Ukraine does not respond with moderation when cornered. He cannot be seen accepting defeat. He would love to see China humiliate the nasty guy.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned. ... The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

Hartmann ended the piece calling on us to call our senators to support another Democrat-led War Powers Resolution. I heard on today’s news it failed. Emily Singer of Kos wrote that Republicans know that they will lose the House and likely also the Senate in the midterm elections. One bit of evidence they know this: Republicans are suggesting that Justice Samuel Alito, now 76 and recently hospitalized with an unspecified illness, retire from the Supreme Court this summer so there is time to nominate and confirm his replacement before they lose that ability. They don’t want what happened to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to happen to Alito. Some are even suggesting Clarence Thomas, now 77, also retire. A month ago Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed a study from the Pew Research Center. It asked adults to rate the ethics and morality of the people of their nation. The US was worst with 47% rating their fellow citizens as ethical and moral and 53% rating them as unethical and immoral. The average of 25 countries matched Germany where 72% rated fellow citizens as ethical and moral. At the top of the list is Canada, where 92% rated their fellow citizens as ethical and moral. Pew hasn’t asked this question before, so they can’t offer a trend or speculate how long Americans have viewed each other this way. There are polls that have shows that over the last 20 years the intensity in which we view the other political party negatively has increased. These feelings have been made worse by the nasty guy, someone who relishes cruelty. And that explains why Democrats (at 60%) are more likely than Republicans (at 46%) to say their fellow citizens are immoral. But maybe he is a symptom of an already cantankerous citizenry. Those countries with better views of each other “don’t have such malicious, divisive heads of state, or their right-wing populist parties hold less power.” Kos community member cinepost discussed modern American composers that invested in society. These composers were the elites of their day. As society became more egalitarian, the elite composers did too. Aaron Copland incorporated American idioms into Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid and he wrote an opera to be performed by high school kids (this one I didn’t know about and I’m a Copland fan). Leonard Bernstein wrote Candide in response to the McCarthy hearings and gave the Young People’s Concert to bring in a new generation of listeners. Michael Tillson-Thomas composed From the Diary of Anne Frank in response to the Holocaust, created Keeping Score, a series of documentaries on how music gets to performance, and established the New World Symphony to train young musicians for professional careers. Turning to the Information Age elites, cinepost says they have done the opposite.

Rather than seeking to preserve their elite status by insuring strong societal support for that which made their position possible, the Information Age elites have decided that they will instead defend their position by eliminating any “threat” to their status. Bezos seeks to dispense with those “pesky workers” and their unionizing ideas by replacing industrial workers with robots. Musk, Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg, et. al., want to “scrape” up the accumulated knowledge of mankind so as to hold title to it and sell it back to individuals “by the byte.”

But if they defend their position by destroying the working class, who will purchase their goods and services?

The lesson to be taken from the classical music “elites” is this: to maintain your position in society, you have to use your position to maintain the society in which you live, for without that society, you have no position at all. If they do not invest their time and resources in maintaining our society, they will find themselves lording over an impoverished land where even if the people might have the desire, no one will have the means to pay tribute to the Information Age elites. But if they do invest in society wisely so that it grows and strengthens, they will do more than simply maintain their position.