I had an interesting conversation on Amtrak with a retired CIA spook who worked "behind the Iron Curtain", funnelling money and means to anti-Soviet elements.
Of course that was not how he introduced himself - he vaguely identified as some kind of businessperson who had some kind of undefined job at one of the major stakeholders of Paramount Pictures and other firms and also spent a lot of time during the 1980s doing undefined business in a bunch of countries "behind the Iron Curtain" (he loved that phrase). But given that there are CIA insiders in business and media who action the anti-populist goals of organized business, this is what they look like. It was a cincher when he got tremors when I parenthetically said (as part of a much longer and typically Aestu philosophical exposition) that we were reaching the logical limits of the Capitalist system.
Like many Boomers, this guy was utterly solipsistic. He complained about feelings of general discontent with his life and an exaggerated fear of death. He embraced my suggested to "shift the center of your identity outside yourself" by engaging in charity or whatnot, but he could only interpret this to mean to work within his comfort zone and was baffled when I suggested that there were good causes and people worth helping within 50km of where he lived, rather than in some faraway country. Fundamental to the crusade against Communism (or the latter-day "White Woman's Burden" movement) was and is a chauvinistic notion that there can't be injustice or genuinely needy people within the US. This is also why I think Misha Collins should be burned at the stake.
I freely admit that as I am unable to enjoy most of the things that make life worth living for most people, I derive great pleasure from using my strength to intimidate others. The spook repeatedly sought to make references to things, places, people that would be obscure to most Americans (the Trabant, Ceausescu, French Huguenots, Indochina, macular degeneration, etc) and was a bit unsettled that I was two steps ahead of him each time.
In true Men In Black style, he passed me his business card, with only his name and address on it. I responded in kind with my own, which included the pretense of a career, "Proficiency & Study Services". Seeking to regain the high ground, he made a point of chuffing at this. "This," - I made an ambient gesture - "is what I do".
While I was in Gambia, I had visited a gigantic mosque gifted by Qadaffi in his efforts to push pan-Africanism (which met with terminal resistance when he tried to sell oil for currency other than dollars). Years ago, when I took the FSOT, I remember being asked to write an essay about the "Triumph of Diplomacy" that was Qadaffi's "reformation" into the international community. My essay (the substance of which was characteristically cynical, presuming evanescence) won me a high pass. Less than a year later, of course, Qadaffi had tried to get off the dollar and wound up dead.
Such events in the last decade convinced me that banks, corporations and a cabal of right-wing insiders have total control over foreign policy, and that what we see in the media are simply rationalizations for what has already been decided at business roundtables. Indeed I believe this has typically been the case in Anglo-American nations through most of our history - less true of continental powers with stronger republican traditions (by that I mean that final power rests with the bureaucracy appointed by the democracy, rather than presenting the mere facade of a democracy offered by our winner-take-all two-party system).
After the conversation, I felt compelled to research the term "petrodollars" - I had wanted to better understand the macroeconomic issues underscoring oil wars.
As I understood it, American insistence that Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and other states sell oil in dollars created a strong external demand for dollars that allowed the US's debt-based economy to function.
I noticed something else, too. The term had popped into use by a professor at Georgetown at almost the same moment the US went off the gold standard. The light went on inside my head. The US didn't really go off the gold standard. The US just went from backing its money with yellow gold to backing it with black gold. Quite a revelation.
As with many Americans, debt is fundamental to my way of life, but unlike most Americans, I have the insight to plan around macroeconomic issues. That's not to say that I am putting all my cards on the dollar imploding - that would be foolhardy - rather I am structuring the debt so that it is payable should superinflation not occur, but maximizing benefit should it do so. In practice, this means maintaining low *fixed* interest rates on high levels of debt against monetizable assets (house, car, education, career), while keeping total credit lines long enough to maintain options and a good credit rating. If superinflation does not occur, then the debt will gradually be paid off; if it does, then I will simply leverage the monetizable assets to discharge it immediately, then buy more assets from cash-strapped Americans. This is also why I want to purchase more real assets - land, euro and copper (and not gold) - and build additional lives outside the country.
Anyway, reading more about petrodollars improved my understanding of the Ukraine crisis. It was my belief that Putin wanted to grab Ukraine to deny the EU an alternative source of petrol and to appeal to the many frustrated hawks and nationalists in Russia. I still think this is largely the case, but I think European indifference to the whole thing is driven by the fact that the actual target of the invasion is not Europe or Ukraine but the US.
Russia has been frustrated with the dominance of the dollar and Sino-American hegemony of global resources. Putin probably believes that by establishing strong relations with China, India and Iran - and now grabbing Ukraine - he can undermine the dominance of the dollar and make countries deal in rubles. Clearly, this is about as realistic as Stalin claiming that the language of the future would be Russian, but the basic premise - that the strength of the dollar is ultimately built on nothing more than the US's capacity to terrorize third-world nations, and that increasingly, the gig is up - is sound.
So the EU's indifference to the Ukraine crisis now makes sense: it doesn't directly concern them. They think they can win either way: either the US wins (and the reasonably acceptable status quo continues), Russia wins (and they shrug and pay in rubles instead of dollars, which will probably increase the EU's spending power), or both lose - and the Euro takes over the world.
But I said that I would explain how green energy would destroy the American economy. This is why: because green energy will destroy demand for dollars, vacillate the petrodollar system and the entire economy will go out like the Warsaw Pact.
I have gradually become convinced that the choice between fossil fuels and green energy is not really a microeconomic choice between alternatives in cost, quality and externalities. In truth, the choice between fossil fuels and green energy is a choice between two very different ways of life. The difference is as fundamental as the difference between societies based on feudalism, slavery or barter and societies based on freedom and commerce.
The economic changes that will accompany the historically inevitable conversion to green energy will change our political, economic, personal, "and yes, even spiritual", lives in a way few today can realize. Democracy, capitalism, and the very nature and purpose of life will come to mean things as different from today as what those terms meant in ancient Athens 2500 years ago.
I will explore this revelation in greater detail later. For now I am doing correspondence and tying up loose ends with my little African safari.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
The Oikonomics of Automatic Benefits Transfer (ABT)
No, "oikonomics" has nothing to do with pigs. The word "economics" is on everyone's lips today. We use the word all the time, although we have completely forgotten what it means.
The English word "economics" is descended from the Greek word "oikonomia", literally, "household sense". The derivation is no coincidence: in ancient Greek times, and, indeed, until recently (the beginning of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago), the basis of the economy - the creation of wealth - was the household.
The ancient Greek household economy divided work between three groups of people: male citizens, their wives, and their slaves. The overwhelming majority of male citizens were farmers, with a minority employed in construction and service industry. Women were responsible for making clothing and raising children. Slaves worked in mining and metalworking.
Although modern Feminist and ultraliberal scholars decry the perceived injustice of ancient Greek society, what they fail to realize was that this tripartite division of labor was universal in the ancient world because it was the most efficient at meeting the needs of ancient civilizations, doing the best they could with the very low level of technology available. In practice, life was so brutally hard for everyone - men, women and slaves alike - and everyone was so busy just doing the huge amount of work it took to get by day-to-day, that there just wasn't time to consider alternatives. Not that there really were any.
This, then, is the suitable context for the decline of slavery in the Southern US and the real cause of the American Civil War: the Confederate States of America (like Nazi Germany, which bore a significant resemblance to ancient Sparta) are best understood as an ancient barbarian nation brought forward two millennia into the modern age and inevitably drawn into conflict with a contemporaneous society.
I say "barbarian", because, unlike the ancient Athenians, Romans and Persians, who managed to do some remarkable things in their limited free time, the Confederacy, like ancient Sparta, Scythia, Gaul or Macedonia, had no cultural accomplishments, a failing that contributed to the demise of the society.
"Gone With The Wind" is ultimately accurate in portraying the American Civil War as a clash of civilizations: the ancient slave society versus the modern industrial society. The novel is also accurate in another sense: identifying that, indeed, something intangible was lost in the transition from ancient oikonomia to modern economy. Modern industrial society created two basic problems that have yet to be resolved to satisfaction: economic surpluses, and the separation of economic produce from man's labors.
Recently I read an article about the European economy in which the practice of transferring funds directly into the bank accounts of European women "just for having children" was decried. Indeed, we have similar systems here in the US, where women are "paid" to make babies.
The impulse to outrage at such systems (and the prolific abuses they engender) overshadows the basic premise of EBT and other "get paid to make babies" systems. In the ancient Greek oikonomia, the role of women and family in the raising of children was inherent in the functioning of the system. When the basis of the economy moved out of the house and from people to machines, this basic dynamic became confused.
Our modern industrial society places no market value on the rearing of children (which is one of many examples of why free markets don't exist and don't work) - so in order to keep society going, it is necessary and appropriate to compensate women for their efforts. The alternative would be starvation, food riots, social breakdown, etc.
Now that we understand the premise of EBT - the "value" of the "work" it takes to make babies - we can get some ideas as to how to fix the system.
Operating under the premise that bringing children into this world and providing them with the appropriate care and attention is a worthy pursuit that should be compensated by society in lieu of fiscally rewarding occupations, it stands to reason that the system should reward good performance.
Parents who raise well-behaved children who reach their full potential should be more generously rewarded than those who do not. I would argue that children who top their class at each grade and are recognized as good citizens based on social participation (book faires, church, sports teams, social work) should see their parents rewarded with bonuses. I would even go so far as to argue that Social Security payments should be tied to the progress of the next generation.
Feminists have long made the rather trite argument that divorced women should be entitled to the same quality of life that they had when married so that they would not be disincentivized from leaving husbands they find abusive (or, more often, boringly responsible). This argument is commonly associated with really stupid Feminists who idolize Lysistrata but ignore the point of the story: the adaptive value of the oikonomia, the household division of labor.
If we accept the value of the oikonomy and the utility of the labor of wives and mothers - and the opportunity cost to a woman (or man) of staying home and raising children well, then, I would argue, EBT and similar "pay to make kids" systems should offer compensation that scales with the earnings of the other spouse and the ending wages of the full-time parent.
Such a system would remove the choice that most women and families face between making ends meet via two wage-earners and having time to spend with the kids. The system would in large part pay for itself by removing large numbers of women from the labor pool, raising salaries for the remaining, mostly male, workforce.
It is easy to lose sight that arguably the two biggest changes in the American economy since the idyllic 1950s - and the real causes of the degeneration of American society - have been automation and the entry of women to the workforce.
In sum, I very much agree with Benito Mussolini's observation:
"Women and machines are the two main causes of unemployment."
The English word "economics" is descended from the Greek word "oikonomia", literally, "household sense". The derivation is no coincidence: in ancient Greek times, and, indeed, until recently (the beginning of the Industrial Revolution about 200 years ago), the basis of the economy - the creation of wealth - was the household.
The ancient Greek household economy divided work between three groups of people: male citizens, their wives, and their slaves. The overwhelming majority of male citizens were farmers, with a minority employed in construction and service industry. Women were responsible for making clothing and raising children. Slaves worked in mining and metalworking.
Although modern Feminist and ultraliberal scholars decry the perceived injustice of ancient Greek society, what they fail to realize was that this tripartite division of labor was universal in the ancient world because it was the most efficient at meeting the needs of ancient civilizations, doing the best they could with the very low level of technology available. In practice, life was so brutally hard for everyone - men, women and slaves alike - and everyone was so busy just doing the huge amount of work it took to get by day-to-day, that there just wasn't time to consider alternatives. Not that there really were any.
This, then, is the suitable context for the decline of slavery in the Southern US and the real cause of the American Civil War: the Confederate States of America (like Nazi Germany, which bore a significant resemblance to ancient Sparta) are best understood as an ancient barbarian nation brought forward two millennia into the modern age and inevitably drawn into conflict with a contemporaneous society.
I say "barbarian", because, unlike the ancient Athenians, Romans and Persians, who managed to do some remarkable things in their limited free time, the Confederacy, like ancient Sparta, Scythia, Gaul or Macedonia, had no cultural accomplishments, a failing that contributed to the demise of the society.
"Gone With The Wind" is ultimately accurate in portraying the American Civil War as a clash of civilizations: the ancient slave society versus the modern industrial society. The novel is also accurate in another sense: identifying that, indeed, something intangible was lost in the transition from ancient oikonomia to modern economy. Modern industrial society created two basic problems that have yet to be resolved to satisfaction: economic surpluses, and the separation of economic produce from man's labors.
Recently I read an article about the European economy in which the practice of transferring funds directly into the bank accounts of European women "just for having children" was decried. Indeed, we have similar systems here in the US, where women are "paid" to make babies.
The impulse to outrage at such systems (and the prolific abuses they engender) overshadows the basic premise of EBT and other "get paid to make babies" systems. In the ancient Greek oikonomia, the role of women and family in the raising of children was inherent in the functioning of the system. When the basis of the economy moved out of the house and from people to machines, this basic dynamic became confused.
Our modern industrial society places no market value on the rearing of children (which is one of many examples of why free markets don't exist and don't work) - so in order to keep society going, it is necessary and appropriate to compensate women for their efforts. The alternative would be starvation, food riots, social breakdown, etc.
Now that we understand the premise of EBT - the "value" of the "work" it takes to make babies - we can get some ideas as to how to fix the system.
Operating under the premise that bringing children into this world and providing them with the appropriate care and attention is a worthy pursuit that should be compensated by society in lieu of fiscally rewarding occupations, it stands to reason that the system should reward good performance.
Parents who raise well-behaved children who reach their full potential should be more generously rewarded than those who do not. I would argue that children who top their class at each grade and are recognized as good citizens based on social participation (book faires, church, sports teams, social work) should see their parents rewarded with bonuses. I would even go so far as to argue that Social Security payments should be tied to the progress of the next generation.
Feminists have long made the rather trite argument that divorced women should be entitled to the same quality of life that they had when married so that they would not be disincentivized from leaving husbands they find abusive (or, more often, boringly responsible). This argument is commonly associated with really stupid Feminists who idolize Lysistrata but ignore the point of the story: the adaptive value of the oikonomia, the household division of labor.
If we accept the value of the oikonomy and the utility of the labor of wives and mothers - and the opportunity cost to a woman (or man) of staying home and raising children well, then, I would argue, EBT and similar "pay to make kids" systems should offer compensation that scales with the earnings of the other spouse and the ending wages of the full-time parent.
Such a system would remove the choice that most women and families face between making ends meet via two wage-earners and having time to spend with the kids. The system would in large part pay for itself by removing large numbers of women from the labor pool, raising salaries for the remaining, mostly male, workforce.
It is easy to lose sight that arguably the two biggest changes in the American economy since the idyllic 1950s - and the real causes of the degeneration of American society - have been automation and the entry of women to the workforce.
In sum, I very much agree with Benito Mussolini's observation:
"Women and machines are the two main causes of unemployment."
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Putin For Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2014: Not As Crazy As It Sounds
The Nobel Peace Prize pretty much lost its credibility when it awarded Obama the prize back in 2008, for doing nothing more than being elected President as a man with black skin who promised "Change".
The credibility of the prize was not particularly enhanced when in 2012 it was awarded to the 500 million citizens of the European Union - although in that case, the committee had a pretty sound argument, that they had worked together to, if not resolve all differences now and forever, had at least committed to resolving them peacefully.
And now the nomination of Putin. The corrupt, quasi-constitutional shadow president of the oil kingdom of Russia. Of course, it's just a nomination. Personally, I think Edward Snowden is the probable winner (which, for him, will amount to diplomatic immunity - no small thing). And I think Snowden does deserve it, for fighting for freedom by means for which the American armed forces lack the balls.
But is Putin really so far-fetched?
Helmut Kohl liked to say that of the EU that "problems that were once resolved on battlefields, are now resolved in the halls of Brussels". To whatever extent the Europeans ever had anything material to fight over, they sure don't now. As with the removal of the Jews from their field of vision and the usurpation of world plunder by the Americans, it's easy for the Europeans to be good when they don't really have the option to be bad.
The Europeans can sit back and whine about the Jenin massacre while doing dead nothing about the Trafigura incident or Milosevic's genocides (though they were delighted to take Slobo from the Americans and make a big, pretentious show of a trial, thinking this somehow made them morally better than the people from the other side of the world who took the initiative to bring him to justice - even if the Clinton administration did it mostly for the copper and the political distraction it offered).
That's not the case with EU-Russian relations. There is, materially, still quite a bit to fight over, fundamental and material differences that aren't going to be resolved any time soon - but at least aren't translating into the Russians rolling tanks into Poland or Germany.
Russia is a country that doesn't quite accept the concept of democracy as the US and the EU do. There will be endless arguments about who should control the resources of the Ukraine, just as there have since the days of Alexander. (And it is a zero-sum game, because if the EU can get some other country's petrol and wheat on the cheap, that is a direct, immediate and enormous loss to Russia). Mutual fear and contempt between the EU and Russia and their fundamentally different political visions will remain the rule into the foreseeable future.
Yet Putin has masterfully projected a George W-esque tough-guy image to his own people while being known internationally as a phlegmatic reptile. He has satiated militant, outsized Russian pride while keeping the peace like perhaps no one else could. He has achieved a peacemaking effort in breakaway regions worthy of Nixon - backpedaling out of a fight while preventing a revolt of the hawks.
Some may ask why Russia holds onto Chechnya and other minority regions. A Russian friend enlightened me - because Russia is, like the US, a polyglot nation dominated by a particular ethnic group. If every region that wanted to leave could whenever it wanted, the country would become ungovernable. And I know many people from former Soviet republics who bereave the unity and strength that the USSR brought, use of the Russian language replaced by obscure native Turkish-Mongol tongues with a couple million speakers.
The US had a similar experience during its Civil War. Blue Americans claim the war was about slavery, plain and simple. Red Americans claim it was about states' rights. In reality, the cause of the American Civil War was neither slavery nor states' rights but the South's massive inferiority complex. (This is also why they are still obsessed with the war and waving the Stars & Bars 150 years later, while the North has moved on).
Lincoln was speaking truthfully when he said he fought the war not to abolish slavery (something he no doubt had the wisdom to appreciate was a historical inevitability that would bring with it its own host of new problems) but to preserve the Union. Lincoln did what Putin is now doing, fighting to prevent a bunch of stupid yokels from making the nation ungovernable. Putin, unlike Lincoln, has managed to hold Russia together without killing over half a million of his own people.
Putin's efforts have fallen far short of perfect. Russia is heavily reliant on oil cash, while the real economy continues to stagnate. Putin has built his political empire on the Mafia and now is completely unable to fight them (to whatever extent he might be inclined to do so). Putin is in mind, heart and soul still the KGB spook he once was; someone who cannot even conceive the notion of a truly democratic Russia.
While Putin is personally not an anti-Semite (no small achievement for a Russian leader, and it took no small courage for him to once say to a colleague at the KGB that he thought Jews were "perfectly normal people"), he did throw Khodorkovsky to the mob not because of any crimes he committed nor a desire to divest him of his wealth or power, but because he wanted to show that he was fighting the "Jews stealing Russia". But the fact remains the man has done reasonably well in balancing evil with necessity.
In style and character, Putin is deceptively similar to his colleague Obama. Both are master politicians who project an uncompromising image while being men of compromise. Both work with byzantine, dysfunctional political logjams and are reliant on the patronage of corrupt corporations, politicians, military, mafia and gestapo that they can't get rid of. Both promise change while managing at best two steps forward, two steps back. Both arouse sentiments of visceral hatred and cult-like devotion totally out of proportion to their colorless personalities and moderate inclinations.
But in the final analysis, it is Putin, and not Obama, who is the stronger leader. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has taken the political bull by the horns and managed to at least tread water. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has managed a rise in Russia's stock. And it is Putin, and not Obama, who has done more to restrain the warmongers.
If the Nobel Peace Prize is destined for men who are not saints, but flawed characters doing a respectable job of advancing the cause of peace - Putin may not be so undeserving after all.
The credibility of the prize was not particularly enhanced when in 2012 it was awarded to the 500 million citizens of the European Union - although in that case, the committee had a pretty sound argument, that they had worked together to, if not resolve all differences now and forever, had at least committed to resolving them peacefully.
And now the nomination of Putin. The corrupt, quasi-constitutional shadow president of the oil kingdom of Russia. Of course, it's just a nomination. Personally, I think Edward Snowden is the probable winner (which, for him, will amount to diplomatic immunity - no small thing). And I think Snowden does deserve it, for fighting for freedom by means for which the American armed forces lack the balls.
But is Putin really so far-fetched?
Helmut Kohl liked to say that of the EU that "problems that were once resolved on battlefields, are now resolved in the halls of Brussels". To whatever extent the Europeans ever had anything material to fight over, they sure don't now. As with the removal of the Jews from their field of vision and the usurpation of world plunder by the Americans, it's easy for the Europeans to be good when they don't really have the option to be bad.
The Europeans can sit back and whine about the Jenin massacre while doing dead nothing about the Trafigura incident or Milosevic's genocides (though they were delighted to take Slobo from the Americans and make a big, pretentious show of a trial, thinking this somehow made them morally better than the people from the other side of the world who took the initiative to bring him to justice - even if the Clinton administration did it mostly for the copper and the political distraction it offered).
That's not the case with EU-Russian relations. There is, materially, still quite a bit to fight over, fundamental and material differences that aren't going to be resolved any time soon - but at least aren't translating into the Russians rolling tanks into Poland or Germany.
Russia is a country that doesn't quite accept the concept of democracy as the US and the EU do. There will be endless arguments about who should control the resources of the Ukraine, just as there have since the days of Alexander. (And it is a zero-sum game, because if the EU can get some other country's petrol and wheat on the cheap, that is a direct, immediate and enormous loss to Russia). Mutual fear and contempt between the EU and Russia and their fundamentally different political visions will remain the rule into the foreseeable future.
Yet Putin has masterfully projected a George W-esque tough-guy image to his own people while being known internationally as a phlegmatic reptile. He has satiated militant, outsized Russian pride while keeping the peace like perhaps no one else could. He has achieved a peacemaking effort in breakaway regions worthy of Nixon - backpedaling out of a fight while preventing a revolt of the hawks.
Some may ask why Russia holds onto Chechnya and other minority regions. A Russian friend enlightened me - because Russia is, like the US, a polyglot nation dominated by a particular ethnic group. If every region that wanted to leave could whenever it wanted, the country would become ungovernable. And I know many people from former Soviet republics who bereave the unity and strength that the USSR brought, use of the Russian language replaced by obscure native Turkish-Mongol tongues with a couple million speakers.
The US had a similar experience during its Civil War. Blue Americans claim the war was about slavery, plain and simple. Red Americans claim it was about states' rights. In reality, the cause of the American Civil War was neither slavery nor states' rights but the South's massive inferiority complex. (This is also why they are still obsessed with the war and waving the Stars & Bars 150 years later, while the North has moved on).
Lincoln was speaking truthfully when he said he fought the war not to abolish slavery (something he no doubt had the wisdom to appreciate was a historical inevitability that would bring with it its own host of new problems) but to preserve the Union. Lincoln did what Putin is now doing, fighting to prevent a bunch of stupid yokels from making the nation ungovernable. Putin, unlike Lincoln, has managed to hold Russia together without killing over half a million of his own people.
Putin's efforts have fallen far short of perfect. Russia is heavily reliant on oil cash, while the real economy continues to stagnate. Putin has built his political empire on the Mafia and now is completely unable to fight them (to whatever extent he might be inclined to do so). Putin is in mind, heart and soul still the KGB spook he once was; someone who cannot even conceive the notion of a truly democratic Russia.
While Putin is personally not an anti-Semite (no small achievement for a Russian leader, and it took no small courage for him to once say to a colleague at the KGB that he thought Jews were "perfectly normal people"), he did throw Khodorkovsky to the mob not because of any crimes he committed nor a desire to divest him of his wealth or power, but because he wanted to show that he was fighting the "Jews stealing Russia". But the fact remains the man has done reasonably well in balancing evil with necessity.
In style and character, Putin is deceptively similar to his colleague Obama. Both are master politicians who project an uncompromising image while being men of compromise. Both work with byzantine, dysfunctional political logjams and are reliant on the patronage of corrupt corporations, politicians, military, mafia and gestapo that they can't get rid of. Both promise change while managing at best two steps forward, two steps back. Both arouse sentiments of visceral hatred and cult-like devotion totally out of proportion to their colorless personalities and moderate inclinations.
But in the final analysis, it is Putin, and not Obama, who is the stronger leader. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has taken the political bull by the horns and managed to at least tread water. It is Putin, and not Obama, who has managed a rise in Russia's stock. And it is Putin, and not Obama, who has done more to restrain the warmongers.
If the Nobel Peace Prize is destined for men who are not saints, but flawed characters doing a respectable job of advancing the cause of peace - Putin may not be so undeserving after all.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
The Giant Loophole In Gun Advocates' Arguments The Left Is Too Self-Absorbed To Notice
I don't care much for American politics. I concluded a long time ago that American politics are two different brands of irrelevance and unreality, and most Americans are way too stupid and greedy to be able to look at their country objectively. I think most arguments in American politics are far divorced from the realities of the issues.
State sponsored birth control, for example, is treated as a cost/benefit or moral/freedom issue, when in reality, state-sponsored birth control is cheap, available and not an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers or recipients, but doesn't get used, because the inability of Americans to conceive a middle ground between, or alternatives to, "Uncle Suga" and "rely on charity or die in the street".
This false duality, driven by the deleterious impact American market values have on family and personal values - the American inclination to look at life as a fundamentally individual and economic affair - leads people to make irresponsible decisions irrespective of whether birth control is available or not. Thus, both sides of the political discourse have agreed to wage the debate on terms that have nothing to do with the issues at hand.
Anyway, gun rights. Gun advocates continue to insist that gun ownership is a Constitutionally guaranteed right. Most have never even heard of the Federalist Papers and have no idea how Alexander Hamilton's book clearly defines the bona fide truth of the issue (and also why American gun rights advocates who also support the military flatly don't understand this country or what it was founded on).
But that is not really here or there. The point is, though, that the argument that gun rights are Constitutionally guaranteed is flawed, but the Left is too lost in its own banality to grasp why.
Constitutional rights are by definition guaranteed and non-negotiable. This means, for example, that although the government can take your tax money, your house, your right to drive a car, or prevent you from doing things perceived contrary to national interest, the government cannot revoke, for example, your freedom of speech, your freedom of belief, your freedom of association or your freedom of non-incrimination. Even people who have committed the most serious crimes in our society continue to enjoy those freedoms (although they may be deprived of personal liberty due to being incarcerated).
That a murderer retains his freedom of speech or a mobster his freedom of non-incrimination may seem perverse, but the guaranteed nature of rights serves a very important role in our society. Were rights not guaranteed, but rather something that one can be deprived of "by due process of law", such as life, liberty and personal property (i.e., taxation, imprisonment and execution), constitutional rights would have no meaning; anyone could be made subject at any time to petty laws arbitrarily revoking those rights.
By extension, if the personal right to own whatever weapons one wishes was in fact Constitutionally guaranteed, then criminals would also have a right to be armed - since Constitutional rights are irrevocable. This flies in the face of the gun lobby argument that the goal should be to keep criminals away from guns, rather than remove guns as a force in American society. They are, in effect, contravening their own claim that gun rights are in fact Constitutionally guaranteed (they aren't).
This truth is simple and obvious once understood. But it is completely missed by adherents of both parties...because American politics ceased to be relevant a long, long time ago.
I believe that is so partly because of our obsolete winner-take-all political system, partly because of the depredations of the military and corporations, and partly because Americans are too greedy and dumb to understand the concept of a social contract - or how excessively limiting the power and mandate of government is self-defeating and is in fact the surest path to tyranny.
The proper role of government is to be the Great Equalizer, champion of the weak against the strong and the many against the few. The guaranteed nature of rights establishes a hedge on the government's mandate - to protect the few and the strong against the tyranny of the majority. When the government fails to fulfill this mandate, the result is social chaos and inevitably civil war and Communist insurgency. Most societies that fall into despotism, wind up there precisely because of a lack of strong authority to establish uniform terms for free interaction between individuals in society - and not the other way around. And, if you doubt this, go look at Iraq.
This truth also reveals something else about Americans - why I so easily see myself apart from my countrymen. Americans talk about freedom, but they do not understand it. Most Americans think that freedom means the freedom to get rich and ignore the problems of the world at large. My notion of freedom, on the other hand, is freedom of self-actualization - to live life on my own terms. Unlike most Americans, I am more than willing to forfeit my "right to get rich" if I believe that in return I am guaranteed the relatively low standard of living that is a necessary condition of my enjoyment of life.
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Eudaimonic
State sponsored birth control, for example, is treated as a cost/benefit or moral/freedom issue, when in reality, state-sponsored birth control is cheap, available and not an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers or recipients, but doesn't get used, because the inability of Americans to conceive a middle ground between, or alternatives to, "Uncle Suga" and "rely on charity or die in the street".
This false duality, driven by the deleterious impact American market values have on family and personal values - the American inclination to look at life as a fundamentally individual and economic affair - leads people to make irresponsible decisions irrespective of whether birth control is available or not. Thus, both sides of the political discourse have agreed to wage the debate on terms that have nothing to do with the issues at hand.
Anyway, gun rights. Gun advocates continue to insist that gun ownership is a Constitutionally guaranteed right. Most have never even heard of the Federalist Papers and have no idea how Alexander Hamilton's book clearly defines the bona fide truth of the issue (and also why American gun rights advocates who also support the military flatly don't understand this country or what it was founded on).
But that is not really here or there. The point is, though, that the argument that gun rights are Constitutionally guaranteed is flawed, but the Left is too lost in its own banality to grasp why.
Constitutional rights are by definition guaranteed and non-negotiable. This means, for example, that although the government can take your tax money, your house, your right to drive a car, or prevent you from doing things perceived contrary to national interest, the government cannot revoke, for example, your freedom of speech, your freedom of belief, your freedom of association or your freedom of non-incrimination. Even people who have committed the most serious crimes in our society continue to enjoy those freedoms (although they may be deprived of personal liberty due to being incarcerated).
That a murderer retains his freedom of speech or a mobster his freedom of non-incrimination may seem perverse, but the guaranteed nature of rights serves a very important role in our society. Were rights not guaranteed, but rather something that one can be deprived of "by due process of law", such as life, liberty and personal property (i.e., taxation, imprisonment and execution), constitutional rights would have no meaning; anyone could be made subject at any time to petty laws arbitrarily revoking those rights.
By extension, if the personal right to own whatever weapons one wishes was in fact Constitutionally guaranteed, then criminals would also have a right to be armed - since Constitutional rights are irrevocable. This flies in the face of the gun lobby argument that the goal should be to keep criminals away from guns, rather than remove guns as a force in American society. They are, in effect, contravening their own claim that gun rights are in fact Constitutionally guaranteed (they aren't).
This truth is simple and obvious once understood. But it is completely missed by adherents of both parties...because American politics ceased to be relevant a long, long time ago.
I believe that is so partly because of our obsolete winner-take-all political system, partly because of the depredations of the military and corporations, and partly because Americans are too greedy and dumb to understand the concept of a social contract - or how excessively limiting the power and mandate of government is self-defeating and is in fact the surest path to tyranny.
The proper role of government is to be the Great Equalizer, champion of the weak against the strong and the many against the few. The guaranteed nature of rights establishes a hedge on the government's mandate - to protect the few and the strong against the tyranny of the majority. When the government fails to fulfill this mandate, the result is social chaos and inevitably civil war and Communist insurgency. Most societies that fall into despotism, wind up there precisely because of a lack of strong authority to establish uniform terms for free interaction between individuals in society - and not the other way around. And, if you doubt this, go look at Iraq.
This truth also reveals something else about Americans - why I so easily see myself apart from my countrymen. Americans talk about freedom, but they do not understand it. Most Americans think that freedom means the freedom to get rich and ignore the problems of the world at large. My notion of freedom, on the other hand, is freedom of self-actualization - to live life on my own terms. Unlike most Americans, I am more than willing to forfeit my "right to get rich" if I believe that in return I am guaranteed the relatively low standard of living that is a necessary condition of my enjoyment of life.
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Eudaimonic
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Your Guide To University Of Cincinnati: Chief Diversity Officer Candidates
1) Sabrina Gentlewarrior: Misandrist lesbian with a ridiculous made-up changed name. Spent the last decade as a sexual examiner, acting out her hatred of men by accusing random guys of rape while getting her jollies by fondling women's privates. Her keystone work is "Transgender Survivors of Sexual Violence".
2) Cheryl Nunez: La Raza Feminist with a massive inferiority complex who graduated Harvard 30 years ago yet has no documented work experience other than six months at Xavier. Likes to deliver speeches about how she thinks women earn less than men for the same work (the reverse is true) because she's upset she's too stupid, lazy and ugly to pull down the six-digit salary she thinks she's entitled to.
3) Keith Borders: Do-nothing who washed out of the DOJ, washed out of Macys, then spent the next 20 years playing politics and spouting buzzwords at the notoriously dysfunctional Sears chain.
4) Bleuzette Marshall: Another misandrist lesbian with a ridiculous made-up changed name. Spent 10 years whoring herself out for UC donations. Now bitches that women are persecuted by society because she has nothing else to bring to the table but her body.
2) Cheryl Nunez: La Raza Feminist with a massive inferiority complex who graduated Harvard 30 years ago yet has no documented work experience other than six months at Xavier. Likes to deliver speeches about how she thinks women earn less than men for the same work (the reverse is true) because she's upset she's too stupid, lazy and ugly to pull down the six-digit salary she thinks she's entitled to.
3) Keith Borders: Do-nothing who washed out of the DOJ, washed out of Macys, then spent the next 20 years playing politics and spouting buzzwords at the notoriously dysfunctional Sears chain.
4) Bleuzette Marshall: Another misandrist lesbian with a ridiculous made-up changed name. Spent 10 years whoring herself out for UC donations. Now bitches that women are persecuted by society because she has nothing else to bring to the table but her body.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
"Boys From Baghdad" Panned By Critics
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Sunday, September 8, 2013
Military Contractors & Marines: Lowest Form Of Human Life
I had a conversation today with a military contractor:
"I work at IBM as a national security programmer. I'm white, it's expected to me to be a member of society, nothing is handed to me unlike many blacks and some whites who overwhelm the system. That is not me, I have worked for most that I have."
"But many more blacks come from poor backgrounds and don't have land, and the govt/taxpayers pay for your education and life so that's not really fair or true."
"I went to private school, my grandparents and parents paid for it, I work for IBM not the government. As far being black racism is over and they can have lands of there own if they work for it like the rest of us."
"But your parents and grandparents were Marine mercs and the money IBM pays you comes directly from the government and taxpayers. For black people, paying for private school is not an option, and white people have land because they stole it from the Native Americans during slavery and have been passing it down ever since."
"The money is from working hard, saving up, not from the government, I'm half Native American [obvious lie]."
"White people don't have land on the basis of Native American ancestry, and you only have the money from your job because of the government creating the job. Your family gets its money from the government."
"I work for IBM and last time I checked it is its own company..."
"If the govt doesn't give IBM money then your job doesn't exist."
"I'm through talking to you. You're not what I thought..."
"What were you thinking? I meet military welfare trash all the time. They all live in the sticks, live off the govt, are super racist, get everything paid for by Northern taxpayers, and have insane entitlement issues."
"I am not a military welfare person and I don't live in the sticks."
"Missouri is the sticks and yes you are. If you didn't get military welfare your family would be dirt poor."
"I'm not super racist..."
"You think whites and blacks deserve their respective lots in life, and you think because you are white you should have higher expectations for yours."
"I don't think I'm entitled to anything. IBM pays me and I don't get anything from the govt..."
"Your entire family are Marine thugs. I've met a lot of them. They are all very racist, entitled, hate America and hate democracy, and think they aren't living off taxpayers. The government pays you and them. IBM gives you money from taxpayers, if they didn't, taxpayers and America would be better off."
"I'm sorry but you are wrong..."
That is the case with every military contractor I've ever met.
-Intensely racist
-Entire family is in the military (which is how they get connected with overpaid jobs with extremely light workloads and free education)
-Live in the sticks (usually on family estates)
-Untouched by the [intellectually] liberal world (i.e., they have zero knowledge of history, current events, or other cultures and ways of life and get all their ideas - not news, but ideas - from FOX)
Eturnalshift, anyone...?
About the Marines, my observations stand. I have never met a US Marine that doesn't hate America and hate democracy.
Of course they will never admit it straight up, they are always really gutless and dishonest about it. But if you listen - really listen - to what Marines and other military people have to say, that is their fundamental message, how they hate America and what it stands for.
Military trash, especially Marines, always try to draw imaginary divisions between themselves ("real" Americans) and Americans who are not like them: don't share their anti-American views, aren't WASP (e.g., colored or non-Protestant), and have real jobs instead of being on military welfare.
The factual implication of their message is that the Marines are really only loyal to themselves and those like them. That is why they always make a point of saying that "I have a family," as if breeding is proof of moral rectitude. The goal is to narrow the scope of moral consideration to those like them, and that in reality they hate who the American people actually are, a polygot united by loyalty not to blood or a government organization, but a nation, a common history and a set of ideals.
If it came down to a choice between facing a reduction in their importance/stature or fighting the American people with gun and bayonet, don't doubt for a moment which option the Marines would choose.
Marines also love blaming politicians for all their problems and talk about how much better things would be if the Marines (some of them even add the flourish, 'especially the enlisted') were in charge. Go read books like Starship Troopers or Ender's Game which lay out the Marine anti-American dogma.
The implication of the Marine fetish for politician-blaming is that democracy is what is wrong with this country, and military dictatorship would be the solution. Therefore, for all their nonsense about fighting for freedom, in reality the Marines despise not only American freedoms but our very way of life.
This is also why Marines think nothing of threatening Americans with violence when their anti-American views are challenged. Because, in the heart of a Marine, every American's right to his own opinion and expressing it freely is an intolerable inconvenience to his own selfish anti-American agenda. To the Marines, the American way of life is not something that should be fought for, but fought against.
This is why it is very important to disrespect the American military at every opportunity. When someone asks you to donate to "Support the Troops", laugh at them and spit at their feet and tell them to go get a real job. When a guy walks by in a military uniform, tell him to get a real job. Make a point of being deliberately rude to these scumbags. Refer to them parenthetically as welfare trash or burdens on society.
Some might ask what this really accomplishes, besides making a spectacle. The answer is that the technical term that applies here is "taboo". Taboos serve to demarcate the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a society, to ensure the continued legitimacy of social institutions and ultimately the morals a society rests on.
Not all morals are good. Some, such as reverence for the military, are bad. The prime historical example, of course, is Abraham the idol-smasher gradually turning this world from one that accepts idolatry and respect for graven images into one that accepts monotheism in principle if not fact. Or the famous Kirk/Uhura kiss that, however imperfectly, laid the foundations for a more just society.
As soon as the unthinkable becomes thinkable, then acceptable, then commonplace, things begin to change; first what we see, then what we think, then what we accept. And disrespecting the military at every opportunity is part of that.
So what do you do if you get hit?
Nothing. They can hit you, but they're still wrong. After all, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and if you aren't willing to make some sacrifices, then you don't deserve to change the world.
"I work at IBM as a national security programmer. I'm white, it's expected to me to be a member of society, nothing is handed to me unlike many blacks and some whites who overwhelm the system. That is not me, I have worked for most that I have."
"But many more blacks come from poor backgrounds and don't have land, and the govt/taxpayers pay for your education and life so that's not really fair or true."
"I went to private school, my grandparents and parents paid for it, I work for IBM not the government. As far being black racism is over and they can have lands of there own if they work for it like the rest of us."
"But your parents and grandparents were Marine mercs and the money IBM pays you comes directly from the government and taxpayers. For black people, paying for private school is not an option, and white people have land because they stole it from the Native Americans during slavery and have been passing it down ever since."
"The money is from working hard, saving up, not from the government, I'm half Native American [obvious lie]."
"White people don't have land on the basis of Native American ancestry, and you only have the money from your job because of the government creating the job. Your family gets its money from the government."
"I work for IBM and last time I checked it is its own company..."
"If the govt doesn't give IBM money then your job doesn't exist."
"I'm through talking to you. You're not what I thought..."
"What were you thinking? I meet military welfare trash all the time. They all live in the sticks, live off the govt, are super racist, get everything paid for by Northern taxpayers, and have insane entitlement issues."
"I am not a military welfare person and I don't live in the sticks."
"Missouri is the sticks and yes you are. If you didn't get military welfare your family would be dirt poor."
"I'm not super racist..."
"You think whites and blacks deserve their respective lots in life, and you think because you are white you should have higher expectations for yours."
"I don't think I'm entitled to anything. IBM pays me and I don't get anything from the govt..."
"Your entire family are Marine thugs. I've met a lot of them. They are all very racist, entitled, hate America and hate democracy, and think they aren't living off taxpayers. The government pays you and them. IBM gives you money from taxpayers, if they didn't, taxpayers and America would be better off."
"I'm sorry but you are wrong..."
That is the case with every military contractor I've ever met.
-Intensely racist
-Entire family is in the military (which is how they get connected with overpaid jobs with extremely light workloads and free education)
-Live in the sticks (usually on family estates)
-Untouched by the [intellectually] liberal world (i.e., they have zero knowledge of history, current events, or other cultures and ways of life and get all their ideas - not news, but ideas - from FOX)
Eturnalshift, anyone...?
About the Marines, my observations stand. I have never met a US Marine that doesn't hate America and hate democracy.
Of course they will never admit it straight up, they are always really gutless and dishonest about it. But if you listen - really listen - to what Marines and other military people have to say, that is their fundamental message, how they hate America and what it stands for.
Military trash, especially Marines, always try to draw imaginary divisions between themselves ("real" Americans) and Americans who are not like them: don't share their anti-American views, aren't WASP (e.g., colored or non-Protestant), and have real jobs instead of being on military welfare.
The factual implication of their message is that the Marines are really only loyal to themselves and those like them. That is why they always make a point of saying that "I have a family," as if breeding is proof of moral rectitude. The goal is to narrow the scope of moral consideration to those like them, and that in reality they hate who the American people actually are, a polygot united by loyalty not to blood or a government organization, but a nation, a common history and a set of ideals.
If it came down to a choice between facing a reduction in their importance/stature or fighting the American people with gun and bayonet, don't doubt for a moment which option the Marines would choose.
Marines also love blaming politicians for all their problems and talk about how much better things would be if the Marines (some of them even add the flourish, 'especially the enlisted') were in charge. Go read books like Starship Troopers or Ender's Game which lay out the Marine anti-American dogma.
The implication of the Marine fetish for politician-blaming is that democracy is what is wrong with this country, and military dictatorship would be the solution. Therefore, for all their nonsense about fighting for freedom, in reality the Marines despise not only American freedoms but our very way of life.
This is also why Marines think nothing of threatening Americans with violence when their anti-American views are challenged. Because, in the heart of a Marine, every American's right to his own opinion and expressing it freely is an intolerable inconvenience to his own selfish anti-American agenda. To the Marines, the American way of life is not something that should be fought for, but fought against.
This is why it is very important to disrespect the American military at every opportunity. When someone asks you to donate to "Support the Troops", laugh at them and spit at their feet and tell them to go get a real job. When a guy walks by in a military uniform, tell him to get a real job. Make a point of being deliberately rude to these scumbags. Refer to them parenthetically as welfare trash or burdens on society.
Some might ask what this really accomplishes, besides making a spectacle. The answer is that the technical term that applies here is "taboo". Taboos serve to demarcate the difference between acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a society, to ensure the continued legitimacy of social institutions and ultimately the morals a society rests on.
Not all morals are good. Some, such as reverence for the military, are bad. The prime historical example, of course, is Abraham the idol-smasher gradually turning this world from one that accepts idolatry and respect for graven images into one that accepts monotheism in principle if not fact. Or the famous Kirk/Uhura kiss that, however imperfectly, laid the foundations for a more just society.
As soon as the unthinkable becomes thinkable, then acceptable, then commonplace, things begin to change; first what we see, then what we think, then what we accept. And disrespecting the military at every opportunity is part of that.
So what do you do if you get hit?
Nothing. They can hit you, but they're still wrong. After all, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, and if you aren't willing to make some sacrifices, then you don't deserve to change the world.
DC Comics Conspired With Pentagon On "Contingency Plans", Wikileaks Reveals
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Internal documents recently leaked by Wikileaks "hactivists" reveal how noted comic book publisher DC Comics - one of two major American comic book publishing houses, the originators and owners of superhero icons such as Batman and Superman, and a mainstay of American culture for over 75 years - conspired with the Pentagon on preparing "contingency plans" to respond to possible future political and military developments.
Of particular controversy was a "contingency plotline" to be published in the highly unlikely event that the secessionist initiative enacted by disgruntled Republican voters in southern GOP strongholds had actually been successful in fracturing the United States. 10GB of brilliantly illustrated high-res TIFF files illustrate a third iteration of the "Superman Red / Superman Blue" cycle published in 1963 and 1998.
In the conceived cycle, Superman resolves a Congressional budget deadlock over military allocations by agreeing to be the first test subject for a directed-energy weapon, which splits him into Superman Red (a diehard Republican) and Superman Blue (a straight-ticket Democrat). The division of the iconic hero precipitates a fracturing of the United States into two nations along party lines, each accepting one of the two Supermen as their patrons.
The hacked archive includes several permutations of the plot cycle, apparently intended to reflect possible real-world developments, from a speedy reunion of the country, to a long-term division, to a second American Civil War.
"I don't understand why this is so controversial," said Robert "Bob" Harras, editor-in-chief of DC Comics. "We publish plotlines designed to offer constructive commentary on real-world events all the time, and the Pentagon is always busy creating all sorts of contingency plans. It was a natural partnership."
Wikileaks revealed such contingency plotlines" have been in production since at least the 1960s. Apparently, then-President Richard Nixon sought DC Comics' input and cooperation in his long-rumored authorship of a speech to be given in the event that the historic Apollo 11 manned lunar mission ended in failure. Contained in the archive, codenamed, "Black History Year" (so-named because the volume totals 52 issues, or a full year, of contingency plotlines, for various releases), is an allegorical plotline in which Green Lantern attempts to rescue astronauts stranded on the dark side of the moon, but is thwarted by a conspiracy between super-villain Sinestro and the Soviet Union.
"So you see, we didn't help fake the Moon landing. Rather, we helped with the situation that would have ensued should it have failed. We're very proud of the stories we write, even if they're not as vivid as a fake Moon landing," continued Mr Harras. "What really upsets us is that Wikileaks didn't just release old contingency plotlines, they also released plotlines which we may have released in the future and in doing so really spoiled things for our fans."
***Editor's advisory: Spoilers ahead. Passionate DC fans may wish to abstain from reading further.***
DC Comics has long had a "Justice League: Europe" organization of superheroes. With the growing consolidation of the European Union, however, DC Comics apparently felt pressured by both American and EU authorities (particularly the European Central Bank, whose new headquarters is currently under construction in Frankfurt), and fans on both continents, to create an "iconic superhero for the European Union comparable to Captain America", "the ECB has been pushing hard for this...they feel that such a hero could provide the same sense of unity and patriotism that CptA inspires from Americans and convince French and Germans, even those who aren't DC fans, to support a Greek bailout."
The iconic hero in question was styled "Commander Europe," a stocky, epauletted hero clad in black, blue and yellow armor, wielding a mace in either hand. By day, "Commander Europe", biological son of a Greek mother and German father and adopted in infancy by a French Belgian family, is an ECB banker and heir to the family shipbuilding firm. By night, he is a "proactive humanitarian" preoccupied with ensuring peace in Europe and justice in the former colonial world.
"A clear contrast must be made between Captain America, who received his powers from a US military experiment, and other typically American heroes who act as lone vigilantes, without the approval of law and political authority. This contrast must be made subtlely and without being so diametrical as to make Commander Europe appear to be a welfare state wuss or cheap knockoff, a mere 'un-America'," reads an unsourced "Editor's Notation" included in the Wikileaks archive.
"We have all kinds of wacky ideas in our creative sessions," contended Mr Harris. "There are people out there who actually think there's such a thing as a collective European national identity, or that Europe is actually going to support or actively oppose an American invasion of Syria.
"We're no crazier than those guys."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Of particular controversy was a "contingency plotline" to be published in the highly unlikely event that the secessionist initiative enacted by disgruntled Republican voters in southern GOP strongholds had actually been successful in fracturing the United States. 10GB of brilliantly illustrated high-res TIFF files illustrate a third iteration of the "Superman Red / Superman Blue" cycle published in 1963 and 1998.
In the conceived cycle, Superman resolves a Congressional budget deadlock over military allocations by agreeing to be the first test subject for a directed-energy weapon, which splits him into Superman Red (a diehard Republican) and Superman Blue (a straight-ticket Democrat). The division of the iconic hero precipitates a fracturing of the United States into two nations along party lines, each accepting one of the two Supermen as their patrons.
The hacked archive includes several permutations of the plot cycle, apparently intended to reflect possible real-world developments, from a speedy reunion of the country, to a long-term division, to a second American Civil War.
"I don't understand why this is so controversial," said Robert "Bob" Harras, editor-in-chief of DC Comics. "We publish plotlines designed to offer constructive commentary on real-world events all the time, and the Pentagon is always busy creating all sorts of contingency plans. It was a natural partnership."
Wikileaks revealed such contingency plotlines" have been in production since at least the 1960s. Apparently, then-President Richard Nixon sought DC Comics' input and cooperation in his long-rumored authorship of a speech to be given in the event that the historic Apollo 11 manned lunar mission ended in failure. Contained in the archive, codenamed, "Black History Year" (so-named because the volume totals 52 issues, or a full year, of contingency plotlines, for various releases), is an allegorical plotline in which Green Lantern attempts to rescue astronauts stranded on the dark side of the moon, but is thwarted by a conspiracy between super-villain Sinestro and the Soviet Union.
"So you see, we didn't help fake the Moon landing. Rather, we helped with the situation that would have ensued should it have failed. We're very proud of the stories we write, even if they're not as vivid as a fake Moon landing," continued Mr Harras. "What really upsets us is that Wikileaks didn't just release old contingency plotlines, they also released plotlines which we may have released in the future and in doing so really spoiled things for our fans."
***Editor's advisory: Spoilers ahead. Passionate DC fans may wish to abstain from reading further.***
DC Comics has long had a "Justice League: Europe" organization of superheroes. With the growing consolidation of the European Union, however, DC Comics apparently felt pressured by both American and EU authorities (particularly the European Central Bank, whose new headquarters is currently under construction in Frankfurt), and fans on both continents, to create an "iconic superhero for the European Union comparable to Captain America", "the ECB has been pushing hard for this...they feel that such a hero could provide the same sense of unity and patriotism that CptA inspires from Americans and convince French and Germans, even those who aren't DC fans, to support a Greek bailout."
The iconic hero in question was styled "Commander Europe," a stocky, epauletted hero clad in black, blue and yellow armor, wielding a mace in either hand. By day, "Commander Europe", biological son of a Greek mother and German father and adopted in infancy by a French Belgian family, is an ECB banker and heir to the family shipbuilding firm. By night, he is a "proactive humanitarian" preoccupied with ensuring peace in Europe and justice in the former colonial world.
"A clear contrast must be made between Captain America, who received his powers from a US military experiment, and other typically American heroes who act as lone vigilantes, without the approval of law and political authority. This contrast must be made subtlely and without being so diametrical as to make Commander Europe appear to be a welfare state wuss or cheap knockoff, a mere 'un-America'," reads an unsourced "Editor's Notation" included in the Wikileaks archive.
"We have all kinds of wacky ideas in our creative sessions," contended Mr Harris. "There are people out there who actually think there's such a thing as a collective European national identity, or that Europe is actually going to support or actively oppose an American invasion of Syria.
"We're no crazier than those guys."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Monday, September 2, 2013
The Real Difference Between Public & Private Universities
In an era when the credibility level of the public educational system has never been lower, it's a bit rich to hear educators at public universities tut-tut about the relative quality of private education. Private universities are diploma mills, say professors, that print diplomas for anyone wiling to pay - and they're right.
But public universities are, too. Public and private universities both have infinitesimal fail-out rates; many more students quit for lack of funds than for lack of skill. And by all accounts, the higher one goes in the system, the more outrageous grade inflation gets and the lower fail rates go. As the saying goes - Harvard is very hard to get into, and all but impossible to flunk out of.
The difference between public and private universities, then, isn't the quality of education. It's the relative importance of money and other personal characteristics in entrance requirements. Note that I didn't say "academic performance", I said "personal characteristics". There are other forms of social influence than money (although of course money is the pre-eminent one). People make a big deal about affirmative action and Feminism in higher education, but what those phenomena really are, is symptoms of the Balkanization of American society into mutually opposed interest groups.
Now here's where things get interesting:
The strongest correlation with personal success in American society is your parents' wealth. IQ is probably second. Education isn't a pre-eminent variable unless graded along a very compressed bell curve - i.e., the advantage of having a doctorate or JD as compared to having a HS degree.
Therefore, since private colleges are more expensive than public colleges, and the fail rate of both public and private colleges is near-zero, all other things being equal, private colleges should have a stronger correlation with life success, for the reason that attendance correlates directly with the strongest indicator for life success.
If that isn't the case, then that would seem to prove the academics' argument. Or perhaps it merely proves that private colleges are for fools from declining estates who can't leverage their family wealth more effectively. Either way, I'm sure there's some interesting statistical study there for someone more knowledgeable than I.
But public universities are, too. Public and private universities both have infinitesimal fail-out rates; many more students quit for lack of funds than for lack of skill. And by all accounts, the higher one goes in the system, the more outrageous grade inflation gets and the lower fail rates go. As the saying goes - Harvard is very hard to get into, and all but impossible to flunk out of.
The difference between public and private universities, then, isn't the quality of education. It's the relative importance of money and other personal characteristics in entrance requirements. Note that I didn't say "academic performance", I said "personal characteristics". There are other forms of social influence than money (although of course money is the pre-eminent one). People make a big deal about affirmative action and Feminism in higher education, but what those phenomena really are, is symptoms of the Balkanization of American society into mutually opposed interest groups.
Now here's where things get interesting:
The strongest correlation with personal success in American society is your parents' wealth. IQ is probably second. Education isn't a pre-eminent variable unless graded along a very compressed bell curve - i.e., the advantage of having a doctorate or JD as compared to having a HS degree.
Therefore, since private colleges are more expensive than public colleges, and the fail rate of both public and private colleges is near-zero, all other things being equal, private colleges should have a stronger correlation with life success, for the reason that attendance correlates directly with the strongest indicator for life success.
If that isn't the case, then that would seem to prove the academics' argument. Or perhaps it merely proves that private colleges are for fools from declining estates who can't leverage their family wealth more effectively. Either way, I'm sure there's some interesting statistical study there for someone more knowledgeable than I.
Why Radioactive Waste Is The Greatest Thing Ever
Nuclear power. "The Other Green Energy". Except, of course, for the occasional meltdown and nuclear waste. Meltdowns aren't actually a problem, though, assuming you don't build your plant in a tectonically active area or without a containment dome.
Radioactive waste is something else. People make a big deal about how it lasts essentially forever and is hard to contain. But what is missed, is that radioactive waste is not a problem, it's a solution.
Radioactive waste has a peculiar quality called radiolysis that makes it difficult to store safely. Radiolysis is the phenomenon of water molecules being broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by radiation. This causes dangerous buildups of hydrogen and oxygen, which in turn can cause fires, explosions or sheer material fatigue in containment units. This is not a problem, but a blessing in disguise.
Commercial fusion power demands two things: very large quantities of deuterium and tritium, and armies of experts to build and operate the reactors. Obviously, the armies of experts and fuel supplies cannot be snapped into being overnight. The key to successful commercial fusion power, is to first make a big investment into fission power. Such an investment will create the fuel infrastructure and an immediate economic incentive to train nuclear engineers and techicians to staff the fission plants, who can then be easily cross-trained in the operation of fusion plants.
Fission and fusion power can together provide limitless green energy. Now, this will have an impact much more significant than just bringing down our power bills. When the non-economic costs of energy use - fuel, environment, sheer space - are no longer a consideration, a Green society and economy changes from one based on scarcity to one based on sheer technical ingenuity. Energy is to production as money is to economy - with the correct infrastructure, it can be turned into anything. Take desalination, for example. With unlimited green energy, desal will become possible and practical on an almost unlimited scale. It may eventually be possible to reinfuse our depleted aquifers. Synthetic fossil fuels, which cost much more energy to produce than is released by their combustion, would become practical. Recycling of even the most abject waste would become practical. We might even see such marvels as the replacement of the interstate highway with a sort of giant conveyor belt.
Perhaps the biggest impact of unlimited green energy would be relieving the pressure to use more energy-efficient but less eco-friendly materials.
Currently, the cost of energy and scarcity-based competitive forces make the use of ecologically and aesthetically sound materials such as wood and stone impractical. We make roads out of asphalt and buildings out of plywood because competitive forces compel us to do what is cheap in the short run, rather than effective or sustainable. Yet cobblestone roads are more durable, more environmentally friendly, and require less frequent repair; wood has the advantage of being infinitely renewable and carbon-negative (because every time a tree is grown, cut down to make something, and another tree grown in its place, that much carbon is being removed from the biosphere).
Our irrational economy is premised on our scarcity-based Capitalist system. But, due to high technology, scarcity is no longer an issue. The premise of our economy is false; the Capitalist system is obsolete.
Green Socialist economics, in which clean energy would be essentially unlimited and a living wage guranteed, would permit non-scarcity based production - production that truly puts quality before economy. After all, who needs the efficiency of asphalt roads or motorized ships when the economy is not at full employment?
High technology and Green Socialism would allow mankind to truly reclaim what has been lost - a pristine environment and a humane quality of life.
So - how to organize this?
First, as I said, there should be a fundamental shift in our economy from scarcity to social actualization. Citizens should work to improve their lot, not for fear of losing it. The necessary policies are pretty straightforward - guaranteed food, housing, medical care, meritocratic education, etc.
Second, there must be a cultural shift in favor of humanist values. I have come to believe that humanist values are fundamentally non-rational, and therefore can adequately be addressed only by passionate movements like religion and nationalism.
There must be a new, green democratic socialist nationalism and religious observance premised on the development of the individual as the avatar of the group. In practice, this means a 21st century equivalent of the gamesmanship depicted in the Homeric Hymns - men from different communities competing for honor for their person and city-state. This would come to pass largely on its own - with material considerations no longer being a driving force in society, it is reasonable to believe people will seek other ways to distinguish themselves than conspicuous consumption. I do not believe that this item actually requires any social action other than undermining Capitalism.
The World Wars are best understood as Capitalism opting out of peaceful gamesmanship, preferring the gains to be had through military dictatorship and war. If the Capitalists and militarists had lost the first round of the 20th century, and the Social Democrats had won, it is likely that such a world would have eventually metasized, just as is currently coming to be the case in many liberal-minded communities in the Western World, where people seek notoriety through blogging or playing MMOs or doing research. While many of these pursuits are of dubious nobility, vacillating Capitalism will provide more social room for humanism to flourish. After all, why make artisan crafts or freeware or farmer's markets when you need to pay the bills and are just going to get crushed by Wal-Mart, even though efficiency is irrelevant because there's enough to go around?
I want to restate this fact one more time. ***Our economics of scarcity are premised on the biggest lie in the world.***
Poverty and want aren't caused by the global economy not being productive enough; they are caused by the malicious greed of the rich seeking to enslave the world for their own aggrandizement. There is, in fact, enough to go around. Productivity today is so astronomical that it would be exceptionally difficult at the world's level of development for that to cease to be the case.
My vision is of a world of fusion-fission plants, infotech, tree farms, zepplins, maglevs, cobble-stone roads, and clipper ships. A world of space stations and cathedrals, MMO coliseums and lyceums.
Finally, the economy for non-essential goods should be premised on ecological impact. To this end, I believe that fiat money and the gold standard should be replaced by money that literally grows on trees.
How to fix our country's problems by making money grow on trees will be the topic of my next article.
Radioactive waste is something else. People make a big deal about how it lasts essentially forever and is hard to contain. But what is missed, is that radioactive waste is not a problem, it's a solution.
Radioactive waste has a peculiar quality called radiolysis that makes it difficult to store safely. Radiolysis is the phenomenon of water molecules being broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by radiation. This causes dangerous buildups of hydrogen and oxygen, which in turn can cause fires, explosions or sheer material fatigue in containment units. This is not a problem, but a blessing in disguise.
Commercial fusion power demands two things: very large quantities of deuterium and tritium, and armies of experts to build and operate the reactors. Obviously, the armies of experts and fuel supplies cannot be snapped into being overnight. The key to successful commercial fusion power, is to first make a big investment into fission power. Such an investment will create the fuel infrastructure and an immediate economic incentive to train nuclear engineers and techicians to staff the fission plants, who can then be easily cross-trained in the operation of fusion plants.
Fission and fusion power can together provide limitless green energy. Now, this will have an impact much more significant than just bringing down our power bills. When the non-economic costs of energy use - fuel, environment, sheer space - are no longer a consideration, a Green society and economy changes from one based on scarcity to one based on sheer technical ingenuity. Energy is to production as money is to economy - with the correct infrastructure, it can be turned into anything. Take desalination, for example. With unlimited green energy, desal will become possible and practical on an almost unlimited scale. It may eventually be possible to reinfuse our depleted aquifers. Synthetic fossil fuels, which cost much more energy to produce than is released by their combustion, would become practical. Recycling of even the most abject waste would become practical. We might even see such marvels as the replacement of the interstate highway with a sort of giant conveyor belt.
Perhaps the biggest impact of unlimited green energy would be relieving the pressure to use more energy-efficient but less eco-friendly materials.
Currently, the cost of energy and scarcity-based competitive forces make the use of ecologically and aesthetically sound materials such as wood and stone impractical. We make roads out of asphalt and buildings out of plywood because competitive forces compel us to do what is cheap in the short run, rather than effective or sustainable. Yet cobblestone roads are more durable, more environmentally friendly, and require less frequent repair; wood has the advantage of being infinitely renewable and carbon-negative (because every time a tree is grown, cut down to make something, and another tree grown in its place, that much carbon is being removed from the biosphere).
Our irrational economy is premised on our scarcity-based Capitalist system. But, due to high technology, scarcity is no longer an issue. The premise of our economy is false; the Capitalist system is obsolete.
Green Socialist economics, in which clean energy would be essentially unlimited and a living wage guranteed, would permit non-scarcity based production - production that truly puts quality before economy. After all, who needs the efficiency of asphalt roads or motorized ships when the economy is not at full employment?
High technology and Green Socialism would allow mankind to truly reclaim what has been lost - a pristine environment and a humane quality of life.
So - how to organize this?
First, as I said, there should be a fundamental shift in our economy from scarcity to social actualization. Citizens should work to improve their lot, not for fear of losing it. The necessary policies are pretty straightforward - guaranteed food, housing, medical care, meritocratic education, etc.
Second, there must be a cultural shift in favor of humanist values. I have come to believe that humanist values are fundamentally non-rational, and therefore can adequately be addressed only by passionate movements like religion and nationalism.
There must be a new, green democratic socialist nationalism and religious observance premised on the development of the individual as the avatar of the group. In practice, this means a 21st century equivalent of the gamesmanship depicted in the Homeric Hymns - men from different communities competing for honor for their person and city-state. This would come to pass largely on its own - with material considerations no longer being a driving force in society, it is reasonable to believe people will seek other ways to distinguish themselves than conspicuous consumption. I do not believe that this item actually requires any social action other than undermining Capitalism.
The World Wars are best understood as Capitalism opting out of peaceful gamesmanship, preferring the gains to be had through military dictatorship and war. If the Capitalists and militarists had lost the first round of the 20th century, and the Social Democrats had won, it is likely that such a world would have eventually metasized, just as is currently coming to be the case in many liberal-minded communities in the Western World, where people seek notoriety through blogging or playing MMOs or doing research. While many of these pursuits are of dubious nobility, vacillating Capitalism will provide more social room for humanism to flourish. After all, why make artisan crafts or freeware or farmer's markets when you need to pay the bills and are just going to get crushed by Wal-Mart, even though efficiency is irrelevant because there's enough to go around?
I want to restate this fact one more time. ***Our economics of scarcity are premised on the biggest lie in the world.***
Poverty and want aren't caused by the global economy not being productive enough; they are caused by the malicious greed of the rich seeking to enslave the world for their own aggrandizement. There is, in fact, enough to go around. Productivity today is so astronomical that it would be exceptionally difficult at the world's level of development for that to cease to be the case.
My vision is of a world of fusion-fission plants, infotech, tree farms, zepplins, maglevs, cobble-stone roads, and clipper ships. A world of space stations and cathedrals, MMO coliseums and lyceums.
Finally, the economy for non-essential goods should be premised on ecological impact. To this end, I believe that fiat money and the gold standard should be replaced by money that literally grows on trees.
How to fix our country's problems by making money grow on trees will be the topic of my next article.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
What REALLY Would Have Happened If Germany Won WWII, And Why Israel Is A Mortal Threat To Judaism's Survival
Dark alternate realities about a Nazi victory are amongst the most eye-rolling cliche. Typically they feature a senescent Hitler, the swastika flying over the US and UK. Very little critical thought goes into such productions. Then there are those holdouts who like to make frighteningly unrealistic YouTube videos about a Nazi utopia. But the truth - what REALLY would happened if the Axis won WWII - is interesting in its own right.
Germany winning WWII and uniting Europe by force of arms would not, in fact, have been an unprecedented development. Charlemagne, Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Theodosius all built mighty empires encompassing, if not continental Europe, at least as great a land area and diversity of populations.
Legend has it that Alexander the Great was asked upon his deathbed, "To whom shall your empire be bequeathed?" Alexander, characteristically, replied, "To the strongest."
Empires founded by conquest in a short space of time by a single great leader pretty invariably follow a clearly defined pattern. The great leader conquers, then upon his death (often precipitated by the end of the conquering), his lieutenants carve up his empire into little fiefdoms. To secure their positions, the lieutenants pander to the native populations; the garrisons gradually "go native" and become assimilated into the localities. The localities become more powerful than their erstwhile conquerors, and within a century, the initial conquest simply becomes another chapter in the establishment of a common history. Obvious examples of this pattern of conquest, dissolution and synthesis include the processes of Hellenization & Romanization, and the spread of Christianity and Islam.
Ironically, if Hitler hadn't committed suicide, he probably would have lived a longer life than he would have if he had won the war. Hitler was insane, and he was the man of the hour for the reason that no sane man could be. As soon as any stability set in, his days would have been numbered; even during the war, different factions jockeyed for power under his neurotic rule; most obviously the Wehrmacht (led by the Prussian clique), the bureaucracy (led by Albert Speer), and the SS/SA (led by Hermann Goering).
Beneath all the propaganda and lip service, none of the three groups really had any loyalty to Hitler. The Prussians hated Hitler (and tried to kill him) because he was "an Austrian corporal"; Speer was a morally flexible technocrat who nodded his head through Hitler's rants over tea; and Goering was already plotting his unrealistic contingency plan of making peace with the Allies and ruling over at least some of the ill-gotten gains (like the Prussians, Goering completely failed to grasp that the Allies would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender until it was too late).
So, if the Germans won, Hitler would have been knocked off in short order, the empire would have fragmented, the SS/SA and Wehrmacht probably laying claim to different regions (the former most likely taking Eastern Europe, where they found easy recruitment amongst sadly deluded Poles and Ukrainians), native populations would have reasserted themselves, and within a century, the result would have been...the EU.
There are at least two lessons to be learned here. One is that war is deceptively irrelevant to the overall flow of history. Another is that political consolidation is one of the great overall long-term trends of history. Great empires come and go, but the gradual amalgamation of local communities and princedoms has been a "two steps forward, one step back" trend over the last five thousand years of human history. In that sense, the EU is best understood as a historical inevitability.
Nor is the process over. The long-term impact of the current economic crisis - which has yet to hit its climax, not by a long shot (***prediction: something very, very bad is going to happen to the global economy this Christmas***) will probably be a big international consolidation. Now, this won't come about by all of the peoples of this world realizing they're in it together. Quite the contrary, what will happen is, the rich will continue to collaborate to screw everyone else over; their efforts will be rendered futile by the inexorable march of history, and the people of the world will "inherit the wind".
A case study is how the American and Chinese people share the same enemy, although they do not realize it - the unholy alliance between the American Capitalist and Chinese Communist oligarchy. China - less stable than the US, although it is not obvious - will eventually become a democracy, and when it does it will be the US's natural ally, probably within the next 40 years. In the long run, we may actually see a positive iteration of Orwell's dystopian vision of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia - the US/NAFTA, PRC/ASEAN, and the EU. History will eventually guide them all into being moderate socialist democracies, because no other option will prove historically valid. Political history, like natural evolution, is a process of elimination - guess-and-check.
For the same reasons - and many will find this a hard pill to swallow - I don't believe the Holocaust was actually a mortal threat to the Jews, for the same reason that none of their other historical adversaries were.
The Jews' great strength is that they have never sought national greatness and the inevitable polarization and degeneration it brings. The Jewish way has always been to focus solely on keeping the traditions alive for another generation, embellishing them through literary and philosophical elaboration. This is a supremely wise approach: it is far easier to commit mass murder, bring down a civilization, destroy an empire, than to extinguish a way of thinking, a way of life, certainly not one that has produced so many tangible benefits. Western civilization as we know it is really nothing more than a hybridization of Jewish and Roman ideology.
If the Holocaust had continued unopposed, claiming the lives of those in the camps, the not insignificant number of Jews outside Europe would have just keep digging themselves further into their new homes - India, Japan, South America - just as they had when they were previously forced out of Spain or Judaea itself.
The Nazi regime was always an organized hypocrisy that appealed to human stupidity by claiming that all complex political, social & economic problems could be solved through the doctrine of racial superiority and the dictator's infallible judgement. A Nazi victory would have inevitably resulted in decadence and degeneration, as Germany would have become a country reliant on plunder and incapable of exporting anything but violence - just like every other great conquering power - born with the seeds of its own destruction.
And when that would have inevitably happened - in no more than a few decades - the Jews would have simply come back to Europe, or come out of the woodwork, just like the Spanish "crypto-Jews" who survived the Inquisition by writing really clever cookbooks of kosher recipes designed to appear Gentile. There is a book, which I haven't read (and don't know how good it is) entitled, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers".
That's not to say that if the Holocaust had proceeded without Allied interruption the final death count and human suffering wouldn't have been far, far greater. The truth of the matter is, though, in war or peace all the same, Nazism would have destroyed itself in the end - and Judaism would have endured. The old cliche that compassion ultimately prevails over hatred is in fact an empirical truth.
Which brings me to my views on Israel.
I perceive Israel itself as the most mortal threat the Jews have ever faced, because the nature of what Israel is - a Jewish state - threatens to vacillate the conditions that have made the Jews a great people.
Christians, Jews and Muslims do not realize it, but they have a symbiosis - all the horrible wars and petty feuding aside, the three major religions have achieved much more together than they could have apart. For all the horrors of anti-Semitism, bitter Christian persecution of the Jews coerced them to take on their singular role in European history, as niche-finders and agents of change. The Jews' role as unfortunate effigies kept Christianity alive (which, as hard as it may be to believe, was a good thing - any dogma is better than a society with no rules at all - if you doubt this, compare the Sistine Chapel to Wal-Mart). And Islam served as a reservoir for Classical wisdom during the dark days of the Early Middle Ages. The historical fact is, any one of those groups alone, would have inevitably sunk into barbarism. We are beginning to see that today, with the advent and failure of secularism as a way of life.
My view is that just as the EU has redefined the European dynamic to capture most of the strengths of a Balkanized Europe without all the killing, religious differences must be expressed in a vocal and peaceful way to ensure that different cultures remain discrete and clearly defined, continue to feel external pressure to maintain their respective traditions and ways of life.
Therefore, I believe it is actually to Israel's long-term advantage to allow the Palestinians to become an enfranchised majority and for Israel to join the EU, while continuing to allow the yeshivas and Mosaic law their special privileges in Israel. Ensuring that the Jews become a minority in a state run by Jewish law and guarantees the Jews protection, becoming a small member of a much larger organization, will ensure that the Jewish people continue to enjoy the external pressure necessary to continue to push themselves to greatness, without the downsides of the previous iterations of the symbiosis.
Their partners - the rest of the EU, and Palestinians - would enjoy the same benefits. After all, I think it was Golda Meir who bitterly remarked that there was no Palestine before Israel. If Palestine could gradually become another Lebanon or Netherlands - a munificent sub-group of a larger culture borne of contentious history - that would be nothing but good for the world at large. Being a majority population in a Mosaic law country could provide the cultural definition to push Palestinian culture to novel definition as well...
Comments?
Germany winning WWII and uniting Europe by force of arms would not, in fact, have been an unprecedented development. Charlemagne, Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Theodosius all built mighty empires encompassing, if not continental Europe, at least as great a land area and diversity of populations.
Legend has it that Alexander the Great was asked upon his deathbed, "To whom shall your empire be bequeathed?" Alexander, characteristically, replied, "To the strongest."
Empires founded by conquest in a short space of time by a single great leader pretty invariably follow a clearly defined pattern. The great leader conquers, then upon his death (often precipitated by the end of the conquering), his lieutenants carve up his empire into little fiefdoms. To secure their positions, the lieutenants pander to the native populations; the garrisons gradually "go native" and become assimilated into the localities. The localities become more powerful than their erstwhile conquerors, and within a century, the initial conquest simply becomes another chapter in the establishment of a common history. Obvious examples of this pattern of conquest, dissolution and synthesis include the processes of Hellenization & Romanization, and the spread of Christianity and Islam.
Ironically, if Hitler hadn't committed suicide, he probably would have lived a longer life than he would have if he had won the war. Hitler was insane, and he was the man of the hour for the reason that no sane man could be. As soon as any stability set in, his days would have been numbered; even during the war, different factions jockeyed for power under his neurotic rule; most obviously the Wehrmacht (led by the Prussian clique), the bureaucracy (led by Albert Speer), and the SS/SA (led by Hermann Goering).
Beneath all the propaganda and lip service, none of the three groups really had any loyalty to Hitler. The Prussians hated Hitler (and tried to kill him) because he was "an Austrian corporal"; Speer was a morally flexible technocrat who nodded his head through Hitler's rants over tea; and Goering was already plotting his unrealistic contingency plan of making peace with the Allies and ruling over at least some of the ill-gotten gains (like the Prussians, Goering completely failed to grasp that the Allies would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender until it was too late).
So, if the Germans won, Hitler would have been knocked off in short order, the empire would have fragmented, the SS/SA and Wehrmacht probably laying claim to different regions (the former most likely taking Eastern Europe, where they found easy recruitment amongst sadly deluded Poles and Ukrainians), native populations would have reasserted themselves, and within a century, the result would have been...the EU.
There are at least two lessons to be learned here. One is that war is deceptively irrelevant to the overall flow of history. Another is that political consolidation is one of the great overall long-term trends of history. Great empires come and go, but the gradual amalgamation of local communities and princedoms has been a "two steps forward, one step back" trend over the last five thousand years of human history. In that sense, the EU is best understood as a historical inevitability.
Nor is the process over. The long-term impact of the current economic crisis - which has yet to hit its climax, not by a long shot (***prediction: something very, very bad is going to happen to the global economy this Christmas***) will probably be a big international consolidation. Now, this won't come about by all of the peoples of this world realizing they're in it together. Quite the contrary, what will happen is, the rich will continue to collaborate to screw everyone else over; their efforts will be rendered futile by the inexorable march of history, and the people of the world will "inherit the wind".
A case study is how the American and Chinese people share the same enemy, although they do not realize it - the unholy alliance between the American Capitalist and Chinese Communist oligarchy. China - less stable than the US, although it is not obvious - will eventually become a democracy, and when it does it will be the US's natural ally, probably within the next 40 years. In the long run, we may actually see a positive iteration of Orwell's dystopian vision of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia - the US/NAFTA, PRC/ASEAN, and the EU. History will eventually guide them all into being moderate socialist democracies, because no other option will prove historically valid. Political history, like natural evolution, is a process of elimination - guess-and-check.
For the same reasons - and many will find this a hard pill to swallow - I don't believe the Holocaust was actually a mortal threat to the Jews, for the same reason that none of their other historical adversaries were.
The Jews' great strength is that they have never sought national greatness and the inevitable polarization and degeneration it brings. The Jewish way has always been to focus solely on keeping the traditions alive for another generation, embellishing them through literary and philosophical elaboration. This is a supremely wise approach: it is far easier to commit mass murder, bring down a civilization, destroy an empire, than to extinguish a way of thinking, a way of life, certainly not one that has produced so many tangible benefits. Western civilization as we know it is really nothing more than a hybridization of Jewish and Roman ideology.
If the Holocaust had continued unopposed, claiming the lives of those in the camps, the not insignificant number of Jews outside Europe would have just keep digging themselves further into their new homes - India, Japan, South America - just as they had when they were previously forced out of Spain or Judaea itself.
The Nazi regime was always an organized hypocrisy that appealed to human stupidity by claiming that all complex political, social & economic problems could be solved through the doctrine of racial superiority and the dictator's infallible judgement. A Nazi victory would have inevitably resulted in decadence and degeneration, as Germany would have become a country reliant on plunder and incapable of exporting anything but violence - just like every other great conquering power - born with the seeds of its own destruction.
And when that would have inevitably happened - in no more than a few decades - the Jews would have simply come back to Europe, or come out of the woodwork, just like the Spanish "crypto-Jews" who survived the Inquisition by writing really clever cookbooks of kosher recipes designed to appear Gentile. There is a book, which I haven't read (and don't know how good it is) entitled, "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers".
That's not to say that if the Holocaust had proceeded without Allied interruption the final death count and human suffering wouldn't have been far, far greater. The truth of the matter is, though, in war or peace all the same, Nazism would have destroyed itself in the end - and Judaism would have endured. The old cliche that compassion ultimately prevails over hatred is in fact an empirical truth.
Which brings me to my views on Israel.
I perceive Israel itself as the most mortal threat the Jews have ever faced, because the nature of what Israel is - a Jewish state - threatens to vacillate the conditions that have made the Jews a great people.
Christians, Jews and Muslims do not realize it, but they have a symbiosis - all the horrible wars and petty feuding aside, the three major religions have achieved much more together than they could have apart. For all the horrors of anti-Semitism, bitter Christian persecution of the Jews coerced them to take on their singular role in European history, as niche-finders and agents of change. The Jews' role as unfortunate effigies kept Christianity alive (which, as hard as it may be to believe, was a good thing - any dogma is better than a society with no rules at all - if you doubt this, compare the Sistine Chapel to Wal-Mart). And Islam served as a reservoir for Classical wisdom during the dark days of the Early Middle Ages. The historical fact is, any one of those groups alone, would have inevitably sunk into barbarism. We are beginning to see that today, with the advent and failure of secularism as a way of life.
My view is that just as the EU has redefined the European dynamic to capture most of the strengths of a Balkanized Europe without all the killing, religious differences must be expressed in a vocal and peaceful way to ensure that different cultures remain discrete and clearly defined, continue to feel external pressure to maintain their respective traditions and ways of life.
Therefore, I believe it is actually to Israel's long-term advantage to allow the Palestinians to become an enfranchised majority and for Israel to join the EU, while continuing to allow the yeshivas and Mosaic law their special privileges in Israel. Ensuring that the Jews become a minority in a state run by Jewish law and guarantees the Jews protection, becoming a small member of a much larger organization, will ensure that the Jewish people continue to enjoy the external pressure necessary to continue to push themselves to greatness, without the downsides of the previous iterations of the symbiosis.
Their partners - the rest of the EU, and Palestinians - would enjoy the same benefits. After all, I think it was Golda Meir who bitterly remarked that there was no Palestine before Israel. If Palestine could gradually become another Lebanon or Netherlands - a munificent sub-group of a larger culture borne of contentious history - that would be nothing but good for the world at large. Being a majority population in a Mosaic law country could provide the cultural definition to push Palestinian culture to novel definition as well...
Comments?
Saturday, August 17, 2013
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Microwave Gun
Microwave weapons are no longer a matter of "conspiracy theory"; they are a matter of fact. The Active Denial System, the Marines' new torture toy, is in the public domain. For those who don't know, and are too lazy to Google, it is simply a microwave dish mounted on a Humvee, that causes an intense burning sensation on any who are in its field of fire. Man-portable versions (read: laser guns) are in the works and should hit the field within a decade.
There are those who worry that these new torture toys (which is exactly what they are) herald a new era of techno-tyranny, reminiscient of Orwell's 1984 or THX1134, which portrays a world in which technological and social progress have mostly stagnated, except for technologies designed to control and torment people. This is more or less the world we live in, although people do not realize it; although we have some new tech tools such as iPhones and the Internet (both of which started out as military toys), the greater part of really cutting-edge technology (particularly in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, rocketry and cybernetics) see only military applications.
But in the long run, microwave guns and other new torture toys under development for use by the US Marines and other evildoers won't really make a difference, and here's why:
The microwave gun, like the taser, is at its heart nothing more than a fancy cattle prod. That is it; that is all. If you really want to inflict pain on an individual, the means to do so have always been around. The alleged quality of the microwave gun, that it has the advantage of leaving no scars and can be used at range, and against groups of people, are dubious at best. Realistically, if there is a situation that compels the use of such torture toys, the decisive factor in managing the public's perception will be media coverage and cultural factors.
At best (at worst), the real difference is the technology's capacity to sanitize violence and cruelty, the cost to man's dignity by controlling him only through applying pain. The microwave gun also has the advantage of creating a perceived distance between the inflictor of the pain and the victim (like the creepy Button Assistant experiments at Stanford half a century ago, in which a mock "assistant" was asked to press a button believing it would cause a lethal electric shock to a "test subject" someone in the next room) which serves to lower the threshold for the use of violence against the innocent. The Agony Booth in the classic Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" (which bears a disturbing resemblance to microwave torture) comes to mind.
The real motives for the creation of the microwave gun isn't that it's safer, more effective, etc. It is its capacity to sanitize violence, and, of course, its hideous expense serves to enrich contractors connected to the Bush family.
It is a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian ideology that evil is ultimately self-defeating, and as overly romantic or divine as the argument is made out to be, it is in fact factually correct. As this one princess once pointed out, the more authority relies on fear and pain to enforce its will, the more it guarantees its eventual demise. Reliance on fear and pain corrodes legitimacy, loyalty and ultimately competence, turns an affiliation inherently regressive.
Let me explain here what the term "regressive" really means, as an antonym to "progressive". A progressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise more people. A regressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise fewer people. As soon as a movement must resort to fear and violence to achieve its goals, the movement has become regressive.
This is also why gun rights are stupid and self-defeating. Governments don't lose power when they are overthrown by armed citizens, they lose power when they cease to enjoy the faith and confidence of the citizens. The actual goal of successful terrorists is never to actually overthrow a government by force, it is to undermine government credibility.
The dualism between progressive and regressive is one of the major paradigms of history, and it is fundamental to the natural lifecycle of all Human political movements. All political movements begin with a specific social injustice they seek to correct. The injustice gradually expands as reactionaries refuse to deal with the problem, alienating more people. Eventually the reactionaries lose credibility and are overthrown by the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries then become institutionalized and begin implementing their vision. The flaws and contradictions of their vision gradually become apparent, and the institutional revolution must resort to lies, fear and pain to ensure continued obedience. The revolution has now become reactionary in nature, and is inevitably in turn overthrown.
This is a model for the success and decline of basically every ideological movement in history, from Christianity and Buddhism to Communism and Nazism to Feminism and Black rights. When movements become institutionalized, they sow the seeds of their own obsolescence.
Mao Zedong realized this, and his solution was "perpetual revolution". For very obvious reasons, it didn't work out; the result was spiraling violence, social instability, technological regression; ultimately basically everyone got tired of it and it took some of the bloodiest purges in the history of Communism to finally get things to calm down. More than that, revolutionary ardor, like hipster chic, can't help but become banal after a while. Nothing can't become a social norm. Even revolution.
Anyway, the fact of the matter is, the microwave gun won't save Capitalism any more than the crucifix saved Rome, or the Death Star saved Palpatine. History will have the last word; every day more people will watch life get harder, standard of living plummet, lies grow ever more outrageous, society and economy become ever more unworkable, until gradually the US turns into the USSR in 1989: a jaded, dysfunctional mess. Does anyone really think that the Berlin Wall would still be standing if Gorbachev had microwave guns?
So we should love the microwave gun, because it's just a signpost along the road of history, and, someday, when there is dawn after darkness, the good people of this country will have a chance to see that technology put to better use. Which will be the topic of my next rant.
There are those who worry that these new torture toys (which is exactly what they are) herald a new era of techno-tyranny, reminiscient of Orwell's 1984 or THX1134, which portrays a world in which technological and social progress have mostly stagnated, except for technologies designed to control and torment people. This is more or less the world we live in, although people do not realize it; although we have some new tech tools such as iPhones and the Internet (both of which started out as military toys), the greater part of really cutting-edge technology (particularly in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, rocketry and cybernetics) see only military applications.
But in the long run, microwave guns and other new torture toys under development for use by the US Marines and other evildoers won't really make a difference, and here's why:
The microwave gun, like the taser, is at its heart nothing more than a fancy cattle prod. That is it; that is all. If you really want to inflict pain on an individual, the means to do so have always been around. The alleged quality of the microwave gun, that it has the advantage of leaving no scars and can be used at range, and against groups of people, are dubious at best. Realistically, if there is a situation that compels the use of such torture toys, the decisive factor in managing the public's perception will be media coverage and cultural factors.
At best (at worst), the real difference is the technology's capacity to sanitize violence and cruelty, the cost to man's dignity by controlling him only through applying pain. The microwave gun also has the advantage of creating a perceived distance between the inflictor of the pain and the victim (like the creepy Button Assistant experiments at Stanford half a century ago, in which a mock "assistant" was asked to press a button believing it would cause a lethal electric shock to a "test subject" someone in the next room) which serves to lower the threshold for the use of violence against the innocent. The Agony Booth in the classic Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" (which bears a disturbing resemblance to microwave torture) comes to mind.
The real motives for the creation of the microwave gun isn't that it's safer, more effective, etc. It is its capacity to sanitize violence, and, of course, its hideous expense serves to enrich contractors connected to the Bush family.
It is a cornerstone of Judeo-Christian ideology that evil is ultimately self-defeating, and as overly romantic or divine as the argument is made out to be, it is in fact factually correct. As this one princess once pointed out, the more authority relies on fear and pain to enforce its will, the more it guarantees its eventual demise. Reliance on fear and pain corrodes legitimacy, loyalty and ultimately competence, turns an affiliation inherently regressive.
Let me explain here what the term "regressive" really means, as an antonym to "progressive". A progressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise more people. A regressive movement's fundamental nature is to enfranchise fewer people. As soon as a movement must resort to fear and violence to achieve its goals, the movement has become regressive.
This is also why gun rights are stupid and self-defeating. Governments don't lose power when they are overthrown by armed citizens, they lose power when they cease to enjoy the faith and confidence of the citizens. The actual goal of successful terrorists is never to actually overthrow a government by force, it is to undermine government credibility.
The dualism between progressive and regressive is one of the major paradigms of history, and it is fundamental to the natural lifecycle of all Human political movements. All political movements begin with a specific social injustice they seek to correct. The injustice gradually expands as reactionaries refuse to deal with the problem, alienating more people. Eventually the reactionaries lose credibility and are overthrown by the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries then become institutionalized and begin implementing their vision. The flaws and contradictions of their vision gradually become apparent, and the institutional revolution must resort to lies, fear and pain to ensure continued obedience. The revolution has now become reactionary in nature, and is inevitably in turn overthrown.
This is a model for the success and decline of basically every ideological movement in history, from Christianity and Buddhism to Communism and Nazism to Feminism and Black rights. When movements become institutionalized, they sow the seeds of their own obsolescence.
Mao Zedong realized this, and his solution was "perpetual revolution". For very obvious reasons, it didn't work out; the result was spiraling violence, social instability, technological regression; ultimately basically everyone got tired of it and it took some of the bloodiest purges in the history of Communism to finally get things to calm down. More than that, revolutionary ardor, like hipster chic, can't help but become banal after a while. Nothing can't become a social norm. Even revolution.
Anyway, the fact of the matter is, the microwave gun won't save Capitalism any more than the crucifix saved Rome, or the Death Star saved Palpatine. History will have the last word; every day more people will watch life get harder, standard of living plummet, lies grow ever more outrageous, society and economy become ever more unworkable, until gradually the US turns into the USSR in 1989: a jaded, dysfunctional mess. Does anyone really think that the Berlin Wall would still be standing if Gorbachev had microwave guns?
So we should love the microwave gun, because it's just a signpost along the road of history, and, someday, when there is dawn after darkness, the good people of this country will have a chance to see that technology put to better use. Which will be the topic of my next rant.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Why White Privilege Is A Myth & Affirmative Action Is Evil
The mythic nature of White Privilege is all too obvious should one visit Norwood and observe at the poor White trash there. Many are violent, functionally illiterate, on drugs and the product of unplanned birth - just your typical ghetto dwellers. White Privilege certainly doesn't do much for them, hmm? You know why that is?
Because White Privilege is ultimately a myth invented by White people. The origin of White Privilege was rich slaveowners telling poor Whites that it was all because of the Blacks that they didn't have jobs working the land. This myth was designed to keep poor Whites as enemies of the Black slaves and not as allies against the rich Whites who played them off against each other to enrich themselves.
This is also the historical reason why Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln were opposed to slavery: not that they cared about Black people, but that they believed slavery was a "moral & social evil" to Whites. The same basic dynamic can be seen today; even with the end of slavery, racist attitudes still engender a miasma of complacency on White Middle American populations that makes them less competitive and dynamic than other societies - holds them back.
White Privilege has never really been a kind of privilege at all. Rather, what is called White Privilege is nominal enfranchisement - access to social services such as housing, employment, education, police protection, etc.
The myth was later resurrected in the postwar era by demogogues who used it as a code word for stealing the White guy's cake instead of baking another cake for the Black guy. And the guy doing the stealing isn't a Black, it's some cynical White (and usually female) bureaucrat who hopes to keep a slice for himself, and prefers not to sully herself by dealing with the actual problems of Black people.
The cake in question - access to housing, employment, scholarships, social services etc - always belongs to a middle-class White male. It never belongs to a wealthy White (because they are wealthy and well-connected enough to make sure they keep their cake), a poor White (because they have no cake to steal), or a female White (because they are the single most overprivileged group in America, universally regarded with unequivocal sympathy and considered incapable of doing wrong, which is why the Feminist movement has been so successful in keeping their own White privilege firmly entrenched, and why White Women are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Blacks when it comes to being convicted, acquitted or granted diversion by criminal courts).
In short, White Privilege is and has always been a form of demagoguery - manipulating the lowest common denominators in the service of self-interest.
The contemporary answer to statistically superior White outcomes in employment, education and wealth is Affirmative Action. The answer is wrong, and I will tell you why it is wrong.
All Affirmative Action does, is string along the status quo and play into the hands of wealthy racists, who don't want to spend or get involved in the needs of Black communities by investing in things that could really make a difference for poor Blacks and Whites alike - police coverage, primary education, medical care, urban renewal, etc.
Affirmative Action, a new form of racial privilege, will turn out just like the old. White Privilege doesn't help poor White trash in Norwood (or even the frustrated and rapidly disappearing White middle class); it only helps a certain percentage of wealthy, well-connected Whites. By the same token, Affirmative Action won't really help poor Black communities or even middle-class Blacks; it will only help a small percentage of well-connected Blacks who are pulling the strings - people who are themselves totally uninterested in real change or progress, only holding onto their personal power.
Case study: Indian gaming. Indian gaming, or Alaskan oil franchising, hasn't bettered the lives of indigenous peoples. Why? Because all the money, power and connections go to a handful of tribal insiders who are more interested in their own betterment than improving conditions for their tribe. That's not race at work...just human nature.
The only way out is true equality of opportunity. Equalizing opportunity, not outcomes. Outcomes may or may not follow (the first modern Quota system was introduced in the universities of Czarist Russia, because Jews, despite being a widely despised minority, won entrance at a rate grossly disproportionate to their meager numbers). And what equality of opportunity means, is building the pyramid from the ground up: ensuring education, healthcare and public safety for the next generation.
But this is slow and difficult work, and the reason we have Affirmative Action is, no one - Black or White, Dem or GOP, rich, poor or middle-class - really wants to get down in the mud and get the work done. Unfortunately, it is easier for all parties involved to hand out jobs and degrees than critically examine and reform our social infrastructure.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
A Bold New Approach To Eugenics: Sterilize Literally Everyone
The main argument against eugenics has traditionally been that whoever holds the sterilization gun will abuse it. It's a very good argument. An even better argument against eugenics is that the very fact of unnatural selection will have the long-term effect of narrowing the human gene pool and breeding out qualities that are often antisocial or undesirable yet are vital to human survival (e.g., aggression, risk-taking and mad creativity).
The main argument in favor of eugenics has traditionally been that allowing unchecked reproduction in a civilized society in which the unfit are not permitted to die nor the irresponsible to starve will inevitably leave the future to the most irresponsible and unfit, who reproduce nonstop and pass the consequences onto society. An even better argument in favor of eugenics is that the availability of birth control greatly exacerbates this problem by making reproductive outcomes even more favorable to the irresponsible.
But there is a way to satisfy both the pro- and anti- eugenics arguments.
Sterilize literally everyone.
By this modus operandi, everyone would be surgically sterilized by default, probably by partial vasectomy or placing an obstruction in the testes or fallopian tubes. The sterilization would take place at the same time as immunization and be designed to be easily reversible.
As it is now, sex resulting in childbirth is the default; abortion and contraception are "choices". In a civilized society, it should properly be the inverse, childbirth the choice, and sterility the default.
"Sterilizing Literally Everyone" would take the future from the most irresponsible and place it firmly in the hands of the most responsible - without treading on anyone's right to have children if they so please.
Some would say that making such procedures mandatory is a violation of human rights, or human decency. I would reply that fluoridation and immunization are already mandatory under the law, and if they weren't, society would be much worse off than it is. Most hospitals do not even ask parents before circumcising newborns, even though after 5000 years the jury is still out on whether the procedure's pluses outweigh its minuses. (Women generally opinion in favor of their first love). Reversible sterilization, I would argue, is less invasive and less degrading than the introduction of foreign substances to our bodily fluids without our consent.
I would also like to point out here that the premise of "Sterilizing Literally Everyone" runs counter to the arguments made by abortion advocates. Abortion advocates - those who are not merely of the opinion that abortion should be legal, but actively work to promulgate the procedure - argue that the main cause of birth out of wedlock and early/single/unwanted childbirth is lack of access to abortion or contraception. They are wrong, and they don't want to understand how wrong they are.
In reality - as anyone who spends time observing socially marginal people knows - the overwhelming majority of irresponsible people having kids have easy access to birth control and don't have an ethical problem with abortion. The reason for most unwanted birth is that these people are irresponsible and not in control of their lives because they are degraded people with low self-mastery. This is also why they do not invest in their own futures, and why they vote against their own interests.
This is also why the importance in improving healthcare, fighting crime, building mass transit, and planting forests is not merely to increase employment or improve living conditions, but to improve psych levels in society and give the people a sense of self-mastery - prevent the "grinding down" process of psych degeneration that makes people wear floppy clothes, do drugs and watch too much TV.
"Sterilizing Literally Everyone" is the best approach to eugenics because it will create unnatural selection in favor of the single most unambiguously positive quality: self-mastery, people who are given to the making of choices.
Opinions welcomed.
The main argument in favor of eugenics has traditionally been that allowing unchecked reproduction in a civilized society in which the unfit are not permitted to die nor the irresponsible to starve will inevitably leave the future to the most irresponsible and unfit, who reproduce nonstop and pass the consequences onto society. An even better argument in favor of eugenics is that the availability of birth control greatly exacerbates this problem by making reproductive outcomes even more favorable to the irresponsible.
But there is a way to satisfy both the pro- and anti- eugenics arguments.
Sterilize literally everyone.
By this modus operandi, everyone would be surgically sterilized by default, probably by partial vasectomy or placing an obstruction in the testes or fallopian tubes. The sterilization would take place at the same time as immunization and be designed to be easily reversible.
As it is now, sex resulting in childbirth is the default; abortion and contraception are "choices". In a civilized society, it should properly be the inverse, childbirth the choice, and sterility the default.
"Sterilizing Literally Everyone" would take the future from the most irresponsible and place it firmly in the hands of the most responsible - without treading on anyone's right to have children if they so please.
Some would say that making such procedures mandatory is a violation of human rights, or human decency. I would reply that fluoridation and immunization are already mandatory under the law, and if they weren't, society would be much worse off than it is. Most hospitals do not even ask parents before circumcising newborns, even though after 5000 years the jury is still out on whether the procedure's pluses outweigh its minuses. (Women generally opinion in favor of their first love). Reversible sterilization, I would argue, is less invasive and less degrading than the introduction of foreign substances to our bodily fluids without our consent.
I would also like to point out here that the premise of "Sterilizing Literally Everyone" runs counter to the arguments made by abortion advocates. Abortion advocates - those who are not merely of the opinion that abortion should be legal, but actively work to promulgate the procedure - argue that the main cause of birth out of wedlock and early/single/unwanted childbirth is lack of access to abortion or contraception. They are wrong, and they don't want to understand how wrong they are.
In reality - as anyone who spends time observing socially marginal people knows - the overwhelming majority of irresponsible people having kids have easy access to birth control and don't have an ethical problem with abortion. The reason for most unwanted birth is that these people are irresponsible and not in control of their lives because they are degraded people with low self-mastery. This is also why they do not invest in their own futures, and why they vote against their own interests.
This is also why the importance in improving healthcare, fighting crime, building mass transit, and planting forests is not merely to increase employment or improve living conditions, but to improve psych levels in society and give the people a sense of self-mastery - prevent the "grinding down" process of psych degeneration that makes people wear floppy clothes, do drugs and watch too much TV.
"Sterilizing Literally Everyone" is the best approach to eugenics because it will create unnatural selection in favor of the single most unambiguously positive quality: self-mastery, people who are given to the making of choices.
Opinions welcomed.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Why The World Wars Were Really England's Fault - And Why It Matters Today
Most people today perceive the World Wars as Germany's fault, identifying the wars as precipitated by the arrogant, blustering Wilhelm II's use of an unrelated issue to justify an invasion of Belgium. Most people today are still stuck in the Anglo-American biases that are also the cause of most of the world's present problems, and fail to consider the broader scope of history.
For most of its history, England has been a poor, backward country, largely irrelevant to continental Europe and all but unknown to the rest of the world. While continental Europeans were doing amazing things, from building cathedrals and aqueducts to inventing sheet music, chivalry, philosophy and science, the British got pretty much nothing done (besides inventing calculus, and that only because a genius happened to be born to a wealthy family). It is worth noting that although the British frequently made a point of meddling in continental affairs - the Spanish/Dutch Wars, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars - Europe, for the most part, left England alone.
The story of England, like every culture, is contained in its epics: Robin Hood, Shakespeare, Milton. The basic theme of all those epics, and is really what British culture is all about, is England's stifling class system. The wealthy aristocracy has a stranglehold on England, its economy and society, and everyone else struggles to get by.
The reality described in Robin Hood really hasn't changed a thousand years later, except that Sherwood Forest was cut down to make furniture and pirate ships. Milton and Shakespeare were brilliant writers, but the themes they wrote about were the only song the British know: plodding obeisance to the unquestioned wisdom of the status quo (Henry VIII, Caesar, or God). Even writers like Hobbes or Locke or More or Smith don't really offer any brilliant insight into human existence the way continental writers do - there is no real philosophy there. Smith and Hobbes justify the way things are (the "market mythos"), and Locke and More wish the "how things are" just happened to be perfect. Orwell complains about the dangers of Communism, but he doesn't have any ideas either; his cliche observation that "the world would be decent if people were decent," is nothing more than "bah humbug" by other means.
Again, that's not to say that any or all of those writers didn't have brilliant insights or were geniuses in their own right. It's simply a fact that a culture's destiny lies with its values, and for the British, their values have always been positively banal.
England finally began to become relevant and powerful in the 18th century, due to two things: the invention of more effective sailing ships, and the Industrial Revolution. Both were ultimately products of England's class system: the wealthy investing in a new way of extracting more wealth from an impoverished people and exhausted land, and new ways of importing wealth and exporting poverty.
While England polluted its land and enslaved or exported its own people to further enrich the aristocracy, France and Germany solved their problems, or at least made a passable attempt to deal with them, through revolution - questioning "the way things are" - or through further refinements to the aristocratic system, demanding discipline and service to society from the privileged few, and granting a significant degree of meritocracy and improvement in living standards for the many.
Calgacus (who was British) might have well been describing his descendants' empire when he said:
"...the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace..."
Such was the story of the British Empire. Through violence and skullduggery, the British robbed India, Ireland and Egypt of their wealth, and flooded America and Australia with their starving millions. England, like present-day Mexico, preferred to export the problems it refused to solve.
So what does this have to do with the World Wars?
The answer is really quite simple. One cannot build an empire on racism, violence and exploitation, then deny others the right to do the same.
England's entire quarrel with Germany, was that the Germans dared try on the British, what the British had done to the rest of the world. So it was that Gandhi made his glib remark that he didn't think Hitler "was as bad as they say": what's it to the enslaved Indian that the butcher of countless Native Americans and Irish should now find a bully a few pounds heavier than him?
So what does it matter to us today? The British Empire is gone, the World Wars are long over, so why should we care who enslaved who?
The reason we should care, why it matters to understand the dysfunctional nature of British society and how their problems were exported on such a scope that they ultimately engulfed the whole world in war, is that those basic problems are still with us today.
The British Empire is gone. No longer able to survive by exploiting the rest of the world, England is gradually going back to being what it has always been: a poor, backward country, looking jealously across the Channel. Meanwhile, France, Germany and the rest of continental Europe are gradually working their problems out. No shortage of grief along the way; yet slowly and surely, Europe is on course for "Anywhere But Here".
This is also why although the British Empire is gone, England insists on sticking to the Pound Sterling instead of adopting the Euro: because the pound-based financial architecture, the inefficiency and barriers to commerce it creates, along with powerful domestic institutions, is the once and future stronghold of the British aristocracy.
Nothing has changed since the days of Mary Poppins. The British aristocracy knows that if England joins the Euro, their control over the country will broken by influxes of capital from more efficient economies on the continent, buying up their factories, their estates, the talents of the British people. With nothing to offer their country or the world at large, the British aristocracy will sink to the level of everyone else. And yet the British people remain lost in their own banal jingoism, so the class system, an albatross around the windpipe of the British people, will ensure for yet another generation.
The difference - the big difference, that makes all the world of difference - between the continental Europeans, and the British, that is the basis of England's stagnant class society, three-party government, and jingoistic outlook, and continental Europe's multiparty parliaments, socialist societies, and the founding of the EU, is the unwillingness of British and willingness of Europeans to turn "how things are" into "how they should be". It is a fundamental difference in attitudes & values - the fork in the road to destiny.
We Americans should care, because, 300 years ago, we landed on what was a virgin continent, brought Anglo-American civilization with us, and now we are well on our way to recreating England and all its problems here. Same tired old story; class divisions emerge, exhausting natural resources, foreign wars to enrich the wealthy, refusal to invest in the land or the people, the steady downhill spiral into third-world status that is the historically and mathematically guaranteed natural outcome of the Anglo-American outlook on life.
There is no difference at all between American poor white trash or ghetto blacks, or British degenerates hanging out on Dole St., dressed in ridiculous clothes, barely able to form a sentence, keeping themselves amused with hoodlumery and unprotected sex. Both are the natural end result of a society that refuses to invest in itself. If you have seen one, you have seen the other. It is that simple.
Britons and Americans react in the same ways to the same spectacle: Social Security and the dole; "bah humbug", and similarly dismissive American remarks; complaining everything would be well if they would just be willing to "work hard", as if the world's wealth is wanting for hard work.
Although it is not obvious, this is also why Feminism is a uniquely Anglo-American phenomenon. While other cultures have more or less "gotten over" Feminism - achieved female enfranchisement without political intrusion into daily life - radical Feminism maintains its singular hold on Anglo-American societies. Not for nothing was Germaine Greer Australian.
Feminism is a sibling ideology of Libertarianism and the direct lineal descendant of Capitalism. The common element to this ideological gens, is Anglo-American society's stubborn efforts to treat human beings as individual economic units, who should live their lives in service to their economic needs and themselves, rather than natural creatures who depend on each other and social conditions to ensure their well-being.
It is that STUBBORN REFUSAL to re-examine the flawed premise at the root of Anglo-American society - that humans are individual economic units who should be looking out for themselves; and that the best thing is slavish acceptance of the status quo - that is the basic cause of both the failure of British and American society, and the rise of Feminism.
As Hobbes observed, human beings will not accept a world at odds with their nature; and since Anglo-Americans will not accept socialist policies or fundamental re-examination of society, Feminism and Imperialism split the difference - offer flawed compromises to preserve those things that cannot be done without, the profit motive, and the protection of women & children.
Bismarck (and later FDR, who is tolerated in American history only because of WW2) defeated Communism by yanking the carpet out from under its feet. Ideologies of evil, like Communism, Feminism, Nazism and Imperialism, always, always, draw their vitality, their legitimacy, from unaddressed social ills. (It is worth noting that an oft-overlooked historical fact, is that Feminism, and not World War I or anti-Semitism, was the true cause of the rise of Nazism - this will be explained in greater depth later).
The message I wish to leave readers with is this: The only way forward for America (and England, "as if"), is to evolve our society and its underlying values beyond its present limitations. Americans must reject their deterministic view of life and society and adopt an "in it together" mentality.
I use phrases like "society investing in itself", or "in it together" a lot. What does that mean, in tangible terms? Does it mean tax the middle class then cut checks for corporate and poor welfare recipients? No. What I mean is, the planting of forests (to provide cheap raw materials, prevent flash flooding, retain groundwater, protect agriculture), building road and rail, nationalizing power, water, telecom and banks (basic utilities that don't need to be run efficiently, they just need to make their services available as inexpensively as possible so the secondary aspects of the economy, where enterprenurialism can wreak its magic, can thrive), and making medical care, meritocratic education, quality food and well-adjusted entertainment available cheaply.
The connection between free skate parks and free medical care and social mobility is not immediately obvious. To grasp the connection, one must observe poor degenerates, understand what makes them different from people who are capable of overcoming life.
More significant to a man than his body or mind, is his personality. What is common to people of a given culture, a given social class, is not their strength or skill or intelligence, but their confidence, their outlook on life. The cause of both crime and enterpreneurialism is a sense, or absence, of social enfranchisement. The thing one notices most about criminals - or people who live in high crime areas - is that crime is not seen as socially stigmatic. This is the natural and logical result of man's social character - the flip side of the Hobbesian coin. The perception of society as guarantor of health, safety, security, and sociability, itself defeats crime, by establishing criminal acts as "against the grain". This perception is not created by police presence, or by welfare (although they can blunt outpourings of mass rage, at least in the short run), but by social institutions. Hence the necessity of entertainment, healthcare and meritocracy to reform the minds of the people - to change the culture - and in doing so, guarantee national prosperity.
I again make reference to observation of degenerates who are not criminal. Poor people are typically physically ugly because they do not get proper medical care, and they suffer from preventable diseases and tooth decay. How this affects humans is best understood by observation of other animals, such as rats and dogs. Animals that have had a raw existence can never be socialized or domesticated, because as with humans, physical condition has a profound impact on psychodynamics. Creatures that have spent their lives perceiving the world as adversarial, can never break out of the "ghetto mentality". The bromide of the "Prince and the Pauper" still applies.
Going back to my observations about the nature of Anglo-American society, it is for this reason that Americans are unable to solve the riddle of "what exactly it means to be Middle Class" in this country. What being Middle Class in America truly means, is a series of social mores and expectations that are dependent on certain social conditions. Because of the continued economic and social degeneration of this country, those conditions - security, stability, ease of life, personal freedom, etc - are unstable, and hence our descent into mass poverty, White suburbia giving way to White favelas.
And that is why, for America to prosper, to overcome its "test of a culture", the lesson contained in my initial observation - why the World Wars were really England's fault - must be internalized.
I really hope someone bothered to read this =P who cares I like to write...
For most of its history, England has been a poor, backward country, largely irrelevant to continental Europe and all but unknown to the rest of the world. While continental Europeans were doing amazing things, from building cathedrals and aqueducts to inventing sheet music, chivalry, philosophy and science, the British got pretty much nothing done (besides inventing calculus, and that only because a genius happened to be born to a wealthy family). It is worth noting that although the British frequently made a point of meddling in continental affairs - the Spanish/Dutch Wars, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars - Europe, for the most part, left England alone.
The story of England, like every culture, is contained in its epics: Robin Hood, Shakespeare, Milton. The basic theme of all those epics, and is really what British culture is all about, is England's stifling class system. The wealthy aristocracy has a stranglehold on England, its economy and society, and everyone else struggles to get by.
The reality described in Robin Hood really hasn't changed a thousand years later, except that Sherwood Forest was cut down to make furniture and pirate ships. Milton and Shakespeare were brilliant writers, but the themes they wrote about were the only song the British know: plodding obeisance to the unquestioned wisdom of the status quo (Henry VIII, Caesar, or God). Even writers like Hobbes or Locke or More or Smith don't really offer any brilliant insight into human existence the way continental writers do - there is no real philosophy there. Smith and Hobbes justify the way things are (the "market mythos"), and Locke and More wish the "how things are" just happened to be perfect. Orwell complains about the dangers of Communism, but he doesn't have any ideas either; his cliche observation that "the world would be decent if people were decent," is nothing more than "bah humbug" by other means.
Again, that's not to say that any or all of those writers didn't have brilliant insights or were geniuses in their own right. It's simply a fact that a culture's destiny lies with its values, and for the British, their values have always been positively banal.
England finally began to become relevant and powerful in the 18th century, due to two things: the invention of more effective sailing ships, and the Industrial Revolution. Both were ultimately products of England's class system: the wealthy investing in a new way of extracting more wealth from an impoverished people and exhausted land, and new ways of importing wealth and exporting poverty.
While England polluted its land and enslaved or exported its own people to further enrich the aristocracy, France and Germany solved their problems, or at least made a passable attempt to deal with them, through revolution - questioning "the way things are" - or through further refinements to the aristocratic system, demanding discipline and service to society from the privileged few, and granting a significant degree of meritocracy and improvement in living standards for the many.
Calgacus (who was British) might have well been describing his descendants' empire when he said:
"...the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace..."
Such was the story of the British Empire. Through violence and skullduggery, the British robbed India, Ireland and Egypt of their wealth, and flooded America and Australia with their starving millions. England, like present-day Mexico, preferred to export the problems it refused to solve.
So what does this have to do with the World Wars?
The answer is really quite simple. One cannot build an empire on racism, violence and exploitation, then deny others the right to do the same.
England's entire quarrel with Germany, was that the Germans dared try on the British, what the British had done to the rest of the world. So it was that Gandhi made his glib remark that he didn't think Hitler "was as bad as they say": what's it to the enslaved Indian that the butcher of countless Native Americans and Irish should now find a bully a few pounds heavier than him?
So what does it matter to us today? The British Empire is gone, the World Wars are long over, so why should we care who enslaved who?
The reason we should care, why it matters to understand the dysfunctional nature of British society and how their problems were exported on such a scope that they ultimately engulfed the whole world in war, is that those basic problems are still with us today.
The British Empire is gone. No longer able to survive by exploiting the rest of the world, England is gradually going back to being what it has always been: a poor, backward country, looking jealously across the Channel. Meanwhile, France, Germany and the rest of continental Europe are gradually working their problems out. No shortage of grief along the way; yet slowly and surely, Europe is on course for "Anywhere But Here".
This is also why although the British Empire is gone, England insists on sticking to the Pound Sterling instead of adopting the Euro: because the pound-based financial architecture, the inefficiency and barriers to commerce it creates, along with powerful domestic institutions, is the once and future stronghold of the British aristocracy.
Nothing has changed since the days of Mary Poppins. The British aristocracy knows that if England joins the Euro, their control over the country will broken by influxes of capital from more efficient economies on the continent, buying up their factories, their estates, the talents of the British people. With nothing to offer their country or the world at large, the British aristocracy will sink to the level of everyone else. And yet the British people remain lost in their own banal jingoism, so the class system, an albatross around the windpipe of the British people, will ensure for yet another generation.
The difference - the big difference, that makes all the world of difference - between the continental Europeans, and the British, that is the basis of England's stagnant class society, three-party government, and jingoistic outlook, and continental Europe's multiparty parliaments, socialist societies, and the founding of the EU, is the unwillingness of British and willingness of Europeans to turn "how things are" into "how they should be". It is a fundamental difference in attitudes & values - the fork in the road to destiny.
We Americans should care, because, 300 years ago, we landed on what was a virgin continent, brought Anglo-American civilization with us, and now we are well on our way to recreating England and all its problems here. Same tired old story; class divisions emerge, exhausting natural resources, foreign wars to enrich the wealthy, refusal to invest in the land or the people, the steady downhill spiral into third-world status that is the historically and mathematically guaranteed natural outcome of the Anglo-American outlook on life.
There is no difference at all between American poor white trash or ghetto blacks, or British degenerates hanging out on Dole St., dressed in ridiculous clothes, barely able to form a sentence, keeping themselves amused with hoodlumery and unprotected sex. Both are the natural end result of a society that refuses to invest in itself. If you have seen one, you have seen the other. It is that simple.
Britons and Americans react in the same ways to the same spectacle: Social Security and the dole; "bah humbug", and similarly dismissive American remarks; complaining everything would be well if they would just be willing to "work hard", as if the world's wealth is wanting for hard work.
Although it is not obvious, this is also why Feminism is a uniquely Anglo-American phenomenon. While other cultures have more or less "gotten over" Feminism - achieved female enfranchisement without political intrusion into daily life - radical Feminism maintains its singular hold on Anglo-American societies. Not for nothing was Germaine Greer Australian.
Feminism is a sibling ideology of Libertarianism and the direct lineal descendant of Capitalism. The common element to this ideological gens, is Anglo-American society's stubborn efforts to treat human beings as individual economic units, who should live their lives in service to their economic needs and themselves, rather than natural creatures who depend on each other and social conditions to ensure their well-being.
It is that STUBBORN REFUSAL to re-examine the flawed premise at the root of Anglo-American society - that humans are individual economic units who should be looking out for themselves; and that the best thing is slavish acceptance of the status quo - that is the basic cause of both the failure of British and American society, and the rise of Feminism.
As Hobbes observed, human beings will not accept a world at odds with their nature; and since Anglo-Americans will not accept socialist policies or fundamental re-examination of society, Feminism and Imperialism split the difference - offer flawed compromises to preserve those things that cannot be done without, the profit motive, and the protection of women & children.
Bismarck (and later FDR, who is tolerated in American history only because of WW2) defeated Communism by yanking the carpet out from under its feet. Ideologies of evil, like Communism, Feminism, Nazism and Imperialism, always, always, draw their vitality, their legitimacy, from unaddressed social ills. (It is worth noting that an oft-overlooked historical fact, is that Feminism, and not World War I or anti-Semitism, was the true cause of the rise of Nazism - this will be explained in greater depth later).
The message I wish to leave readers with is this: The only way forward for America (and England, "as if"), is to evolve our society and its underlying values beyond its present limitations. Americans must reject their deterministic view of life and society and adopt an "in it together" mentality.
I use phrases like "society investing in itself", or "in it together" a lot. What does that mean, in tangible terms? Does it mean tax the middle class then cut checks for corporate and poor welfare recipients? No. What I mean is, the planting of forests (to provide cheap raw materials, prevent flash flooding, retain groundwater, protect agriculture), building road and rail, nationalizing power, water, telecom and banks (basic utilities that don't need to be run efficiently, they just need to make their services available as inexpensively as possible so the secondary aspects of the economy, where enterprenurialism can wreak its magic, can thrive), and making medical care, meritocratic education, quality food and well-adjusted entertainment available cheaply.
The connection between free skate parks and free medical care and social mobility is not immediately obvious. To grasp the connection, one must observe poor degenerates, understand what makes them different from people who are capable of overcoming life.
More significant to a man than his body or mind, is his personality. What is common to people of a given culture, a given social class, is not their strength or skill or intelligence, but their confidence, their outlook on life. The cause of both crime and enterpreneurialism is a sense, or absence, of social enfranchisement. The thing one notices most about criminals - or people who live in high crime areas - is that crime is not seen as socially stigmatic. This is the natural and logical result of man's social character - the flip side of the Hobbesian coin. The perception of society as guarantor of health, safety, security, and sociability, itself defeats crime, by establishing criminal acts as "against the grain". This perception is not created by police presence, or by welfare (although they can blunt outpourings of mass rage, at least in the short run), but by social institutions. Hence the necessity of entertainment, healthcare and meritocracy to reform the minds of the people - to change the culture - and in doing so, guarantee national prosperity.
I again make reference to observation of degenerates who are not criminal. Poor people are typically physically ugly because they do not get proper medical care, and they suffer from preventable diseases and tooth decay. How this affects humans is best understood by observation of other animals, such as rats and dogs. Animals that have had a raw existence can never be socialized or domesticated, because as with humans, physical condition has a profound impact on psychodynamics. Creatures that have spent their lives perceiving the world as adversarial, can never break out of the "ghetto mentality". The bromide of the "Prince and the Pauper" still applies.
Going back to my observations about the nature of Anglo-American society, it is for this reason that Americans are unable to solve the riddle of "what exactly it means to be Middle Class" in this country. What being Middle Class in America truly means, is a series of social mores and expectations that are dependent on certain social conditions. Because of the continued economic and social degeneration of this country, those conditions - security, stability, ease of life, personal freedom, etc - are unstable, and hence our descent into mass poverty, White suburbia giving way to White favelas.
And that is why, for America to prosper, to overcome its "test of a culture", the lesson contained in my initial observation - why the World Wars were really England's fault - must be internalized.
I really hope someone bothered to read this =P who cares I like to write...
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