A Couple of Wild Tales

 Years ago I worked with a guy who had served in the army during the Vietnam war. He told some of us  a story that the MIAs from the war were not really missing in action or prisoners of  the North Vietnamese but rather were held by our government in a secret sanatorium/prison camp in the Philippines because they had contracted the incurable black syphilis in Southeast Asia and were being kept in permanent quarantine to prevent the disease from spreading to the United States.  We  listened politely and  took it as another tall tale from a guy who liked to tell tall tales.

But suppose someone had a reason for taking the story seriously enough to ponder whether to believe it was or to think it might be true. How would he go about deciding reasonably?  He wouldn’t  accept it on faith. He might ask himself whether the person telling the story was generally honest and level headed, and ask him whether he had seen the camp or only heard about it from a guy who heard about it from a guy who heard about it from a guy who said he had seen it.  He might wonder why almost all the listed MIAs were people who disappeared in combat, rather than having vanished  from the streets of Saigon. He  could ask himself why there were no reports of the black syphilis  spreading from Vietnam to other places or infecting anyone in Vietnam or other countries in Southeast Asia, or even existing and infecting anyone anywhere.  He could wonder how, if the story were true, such a secret could have been kept. Most of all, a reasonable person would want to know what evidence the guy telling the story had for his extraordinary claim.  The evidence would have to be compelling to get him  to believe the story and very good to make him even consider it as a possibility. Without evidence  a reasonable person would  dismiss or ignore the story and perhaps wonder whether the one telling it was lying, just having fun pulling people’s legs, or maybe at least a little strange in the head.

Now consider a guy  telling people a story that his landslide victory in  the most recent American presidential election was stolen from him in a huge, nationwide conspiracy with millions of votes mysteriously  switched on compromised voting machines, hundreds of thousands of bogus mail in ballots secretly delivered to counting sites in the middle of the night, thousands of flawed ballots approved by crooked election officials including those of his own party, and untold numbers of votes allowed from dead people, double voters, illegal aliens, people who had not established residence, and others  who should not have voted.

How would a person go about deciding reasonably what to think of that story? He wouldn’t take it on faith. He would remember that the man telling it has no reputation for general honesty and level headedness, but rather the opposite.  He would notice that the storyteller did not  directly observe the events he said happened. He might wonder why election officials  of the man’s own party, people who wanted him to win, have said and  ruled that the election was on the up and up, and the votes were counted accurately. He could ask himself  why the man’s  lawsuits on the election were unsuccessful, and why the man’s own attorney general and head of cyber security contradicted his claims. He could consider how many people would have to have been in on the conspiracy to bring it off and be puzzled why none of them had been caught or induced to rat out his confederates.  Most of all, a reasonable person would want to know what evidence the man telling the story had for his extraordinary claim.  The evidence would have to be compelling to get him  to believe the story and very good to make him even consider it as a possibility. Without evidence  a reasonable person would  dismiss or ignore the story and wonder whether the one telling it was lying or maybe at least a little strange in the head or both, since the man clearly was not pulling anyone’s leg.

I know decent, usually sensible people who wanted Trump to win  and in their disappointment have accepted his story about a stolen election. They are not credulous fools, and they would not have bought the first story. They need to be honest with themselves and stop believing the second because it stands up very little better.  They and people like them  have been conned, and the sooner they realize it, the better off the country will be. Others should try to help them realize it. Dismissive ridicule won’t work, but polite, rational persuasion might at least some of the time.

Rioting and Rebellion

 Political riots and vandalism in the last year by antifa, Trumpists, and BLM and QAnon activists should have led people to consider an important question: under what circumstances is rioting or rebellion against government justified?  

The extremal answers of “never” or “whenever one’s rights are violated” are wrong. An undeserved speeding ticket from a crooked cop hot to make his quota or a twenty dollar fine from an obnoxious bureaucrat for putting a plastic Coke bottle in the wrong trash bin does not justify  calling people to the  barricades.  A more proportionate response would be called for. On the other hand if some future administration decided to seize the production and property of the farmers in a large area and forcibly starve them to death or to arrest, transport, and murder all the members of a religious minority, armed rebellion by the victims and anyone else who choose to help them would be fully justified. (For the benefit of people who recently were pupils in government schools, these last two  examples are not the product of morbid fantasy but rather taken from fairly recent history. Soviet Communists and German National Socialists did those things to Ukrainian farmers and  to European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s  in places where a quarter of a century before such savagery would have been thought impossible.)

Thomas Jefferson gave the right answer  in general  principle in the Declaration of Independence. People have unalienable rights, and  “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it“. It is important that Jefferson said destructive and not merely harmful.  All modern American governments are in some ways harmful (and in some ways beneficial)  to those ends. That is not enough to justify rebellion.  Ours is not a fully free society, but it is a mainly free one.  The present government is not nearly as bad as the colonial administration of George III and his ministers.  To see that one can read the rest of the Declaration and also the section in Jefferson’s original draft which included allowing and supporting  the slave trade among the crown’s offenses. Our government  is even farther from the tyranny of  the Nazis and the Soviets, and cranks should stop pretending otherwise.   As long as people have  freedom of speech and the  power to change the government in elections,  and as long as  governments mainly follow  the Constitution, not only rebellion but also rioting  would be foolish and unjustified.

There are good reasons for people to be skeptical and suspicious of  politicians and bureaucrats, and it is healthy for then to do so. But they should avoid and oppose those – left, right, or otherwise – who think rioting and insurrection are appropriate in the present context.  In the aftermath of Trump,  it would not hurt for sensible people of all political opinions to keep their tempers under control, cut back on the hyperbole,  and refrain from labeling their opponents as monsters or exaggerating political issues and questions  into  apocalyptic threats  – you know,  to start conducting political discussions and disputes in the manner of civilized citizens of a worthwhile republic.

A Short Squeeze

 In the last few days there has been a short squeeze on the stock of GameStop that was reported to cost some hedge fund speculators a lot of money. Some of the squeezers were retail investors who had organized their efforts to bid the shares up online.  It was a fairly big news story, and as happens too often these days it became a political one.  Conservative populists (real and fake) played it up as Capra-esque  victory of a bunch of plucky little guys over the despised establishment.  Power hungry Democrats were pretty sure it demonstrated a need for them to be given more power.  Some friends of the establishment saw it as a threat to the status quo and wanted the government to do something about it. Some critics of the establishment saw it as somehow proving that the “system” was rigged against the individual investor and wanted the government to do something about it. There was plenty of nonsense going around about the fairness or unfairness of the stock market.

Part of it was a due to a failure to understand the difference between investing and speculating. An investor buys a stock or a fund of stocks to share the profits and participate in the growth of a company or a group of companies.  A speculator buys (or shorts) a stock to place a bet on what he believes will be the (usually) short term change in its price.  Some people only invest. Some only speculate. Most people do some of each, sometimes without knowing  which among their activities  is which.  The game is not rigged against the individual investor. In some ways it is rigged in favor of him. He has to satisfy no one but himself and can afford  to take a long term view of  things. He does not have to fret over results each quarter. He can be patient and hold cash waiting for what strikes him as a good opportunity. It is different for the individual amateur  speculator. He is playing a short term, often zero sum game against talented, experienced  professionals with deep pockets. It is similar  bringing one’s  weekly pay check to a high stakes poker game with Amarillo Slim and Sky Masterson at the table. The game is not crooked, and sometimes the cards will be kind, but the odds are not good.  People who try it should know that and  be happy when they win and not whine when they lose. Big time professionals do not become big time professionals by losing to amateurs very often.

This time some of the amateurs beat some of the professionals. I find that amusing but neither important nor threatening and see no need for the government to do anything beyond checking for illegal activities. The amateurs are adults. There is no call to protect them from themselves, and surely  no reason to protect the hedge fund boys and girls from the consequences when   the cards sometimes run against them.