Economics – Page 11

The Downfall of the Psychopath

“Beware the fury of a patient man.” ~John Dryden

The trick to dealing with psychopaths is to allow them to expose and destroy themselves with their greed.

The problem with being obsessed as they are is that they can be reliably baited into any trap. You can even tell them it’s a trap, as I am doing now, and still they’ll stick their neck in.

For example, their pursuit of profits has caused many of their kind to invest in bitcoin despite the disruptive effect widespread adoption of bitcoin will have on the global banking monopoly.

If they weren’t obsessed, and powerless to resist what they see as an exploitative opportunity, however short term, they would have simply ignored, if not actively sought to destroy it.

But what did they do? Dumped in hundreds of thousands of dollars, both directly into bitcoin and into bitcoin based services. And suddenly it has undeniable legitimacy. Short of ww3 or the blockchain being hacked bitcoin is now a permanent part of humanity, and that means an ever more developed and viable alternative to the petrodollar system.

That’s just one example of a dozen other cases where their lust for short term profits and power are being exploited to expose and destroy them. They routinely fund the development and deployment of disruptive technologies that can be, and/or are being, readily democratized.

My favorite recent example is the implosion of the right wing here in America where mindless support for their 1% campaign financiers caused them to usher in the beginnings of true medical reform. (After the fact opposition to the ACA would not have been required had they been less eager to please their insurance and big pharma contributors to the point of near revolt.)

They have made it obvious that their interests are entirely fiscal. This is a massive strategic weakness. A dangerous and wise foe is capable of self discipline and walking away from bait, but being psychopaths, they are pathologically incapable of it.

It’s only a matter of time now.

Prison

We suffer prisons to exist because prisons scare us into doing so. I can think of no more directly ethical act than harming them without harming life.

Anyone who works for a prison is the equivalent of a Nazi. I mean that very soberly and literally. I don’t care if you stamp forms in an office, if it is part of a prison, you’re a mass murderer and your targets are minorities, the mentally ill, and ‘undesirables.’ You literally help run for profit (which they all are, regardless of designation) concentration camps. You are also literally a slaver.

If you applaud prisons simply because of who they claim to torture, you’re no better than the jeering mob attending a decapitation. Prisons serve no useful function that a hospital can’t do better.

Prisons are proof that our way of life is wrong.

If I am ever diagnosed with a terminal illness that precludes cryonic preservation, I will very possibly spend the rest of my life knocking down walls.

That Americans do not attack prisons is proof of our collective lack of spine, gullibility, and/or capacity for self deception.

The psychopathy of police, prison, judges, lawyers and vengeance are right there, in the very word. Justice. Just Ice.

There’s nothing warm or helpful or human about any of it.

Criminals are either desperate or mentally ill. The entire concept of there even possibly being a criminal worthy of sadistic torment is absurd. It’s literally equivalent to outlawing poverty and mental illness. The obviously insane idea that we can cure those things by simply hurting “offenders.”

By closing the asylums and leaving the prisons open we doubled down on torture as a cure. Every bit as backwards as calling in an exorcism priest to deal with epilepsy.

Norway is doing it right. Prison and asylums should be pleasant social quarantine at worst.

We as a species need to grow the fuck up.

Videos:

A “voluntaryist” society is a contradiction in terms.

(“voluntaryist” is the dumbest most redundant sounding word ever. Why can’t they just call it a voluntary society like they understand grammar and syntax? But at least I can honestly claim to have independently invented “Volitionism/Volitionist” 🙂 oh well, anyway…)

A “voluntaryist society”…

WTF

I find it amazing that people can engage in this level of doublethink. I say doublethink because ignorance alone simply can’t explain it when in fact the ignorance can be cured in a single logically obvious sentence.

The whole point of society is to exploit economies of scale, and you can’t, physically, logically, as in square-circle can’t, have a society of true individuals without some degree of hierarchical control over the individual by the society.

You must do one or the other or your society will be destroyed from within eventually:

1. Edit people in some way such that their desires/will do not induce society destroying actions.

2. Constrain people with such desires/will from doing harm.

The End!

All this claptrap about systems of dispute resolution makes the fatal assumption that there IS a resolution all parties can agree on. But reality is bound by no such edict.

It’s like a meta-myth, a belief that the concept of irreconcilable differences is a myth.

Can society be made more free? Yes, obviously.

Can it be improved by additional freedoms? Yes.

Can punishment itself be feasibly removed from society? Yes.

Can a society be constructed that gives maximum feasible respect to the sanctity of volition? You’re goddamn right it can.

HOWEVER!

Can everybody get what they want? > No. <

I’m so tired of this debate. It’s virtually identical to debating creationists.

Libertarians of this extreme are little more than right wingers who want to build a society around the excuses they need to allow their compassion to atrophy entirely, while having their ego stroked for being good people at the same time.

http://underlore.com/islanders/ (And its links, which are admittedly months of reading.)

The price of civility and the Carlin Paradox.

The truth is I’ve respected my opponents so much that they lost interest.

I used to be much more inclined to tearing into minds individually. Google only made it easier because I quickly had access to surface personal details, and I would use them to attack credibility and character as I was attacking ideas or false logic. Which would of course enrage my opponents and make them easier prey.

Later I realized this was logically bankrupt and a bit of a cheat, as well as an admission of weakness on the part of my position, because by distracting them with rage I was saying that at their peak ability I might fail to defend my point. It was like getting someone drunk so you could win a debate.

Also it really didn’t matter who they were, because they were not their ideas and assertions individually. Thus I was attacking the messenger.

In learning these things and changing tactics accordingly I lost my audience, pro and con. Pro because many I suspect just liked watching me get my claws wet, and con because when they weren’t being goaded to froth mouthed rage they realized, before I did obviously, that the most useful tactic would be to ignore me since I have no social status that labels me as being worthy of attention. But there is no social status that conveys such worth. You’ll find that it’s not who you are the empowers what you say it’s a combination of what you say and who you are.

It’s what I’ve come to think of as the Carlin paradox. In order to gain an audience one must adopt a label or persona that annihilates the power to change things. The more credibility I attempt to garner for myself the more easily my position is assimilated and thus de-clawed. Real power can only be exercised from the shadows. Bernays understood this which is why despite his parties, no one among there rank and file could spot him on the street.

For a quick example of how sober professional efforts at amassing social respect are none the less impotent in the face of trying to actually get meaningful attention I need only point here: http://www.ae911truth.org/ Their collective credibility is quite good, but what they are saying regardless of veracity is no match for its opposition.

I call it the Carlin paradox because he wasn’t a comedian so much as a sociologist on a mission later in life and the only way he could get an audience was to don the jester cap and surrender all chance of actually influencing social policy. There really is no way to transition this audience either. Just look at Al Franken. Promptly declawed/assimilated/marginalized.

“I used to believe that any theory, once published with supporting evidence, then became open to discussion and debate. But I’ve learned how envious, vindictive, and vicious the academic community can be. They’re swine. Polite swine, but swine none the less. Convincing the world fairly to consider a new idea takes patience, perseverance, and a willingness to fight the good fight in any media forum one can find.” ~Dr. Timothy Flyte, Phantoms

What Dr Flyte didn’t realize was that “any media forum” which has an audience won’t have any credibility.

There are only two forces that change the course of human policy. Environment and volition engineering.

Technology is our only hope, because PR cannot be used for good by its nature.

Much like television. Its very structure lends itself most easily to misuse. In many real ways a gun is less dangerous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television

“What’s wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattel. Our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair; we throw gobs of money at them! The problems always get worse. Why is that? Because money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it.” ~Cosmo, Sneakers

And all that is why no one is reading this.

Sell your soul for a glass of water?

“I sold out long before you ever even heard my name.“ ~Tool

I am beginning to understand why people of means are callous and ignorant, or at least act as though they are.

It’s primarily because I think that low cost (owing to information’s unique supply logistics) intellectual pleasures can’t compete with the gene subsidized sensual pleasures which, by and large, require resources to experience.

A good example is comparing the most boring hike in the woods with the best artistic depiction of a hike in the woods.

No writer, no painter, can truly compete with the pleasure channels accessible only via the senses.

Of course this line is blurring as various forms of simulation get more adept at fooling those senses and processes to give up their dopamine reward for simulated experience. Which is why games and movies are so popular. (And why advertisers own you like so much livestock.) They are dopaminergically speaking, close to the real thing. But sadly they cost resources as well, at least initially in terms of equipment purchase and constantly by way of feeding that equipment. Environment and content costs being the minimum.

Manipulating the brain’s built-in environment renderer is the ideal solution. As per lucid dreaming. But sadly, that’s a single-player exercise for the time being and such an option doesn’t exist for a wide range of minds, until such time as technology opens the door.

I say all this because I find myself in a situation where I am simply waiting for my body to motivate me. Sitting here writing about what I think in the meantime. Because I can’t afford to go do what I would do, resources permitting, and I’ve just about exhausted the acceptable (to this brain state) and available intellectual stimuli afforded me by my status and economic picture.

So here I sit, waiting until outside stimuli or bodily needs present a sensual opportunity with a profit margin in excess of writing about the wait.

That this is a viable solution speaks to my comments above because simple passing hunger or thirst, if nothing else, will in practically no time at all accomplish this goal. And when I am done feeding my pet body, my enteric nervous system will no doubt be affected, feeding back into my mood, which will become congruent with this new state, allowing for a different set of options. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until such time that this bodily need becomes sleep and I experience that disconcerting yet all-too-common time jump we all experience, and its fleeting glimpse into a world of infinite variability and vividness, which really utterly dwarfs reality in every positive subjective sense. At least for me. Maybe your dreams are hollow and dim.

Until such time as we can truly harness the gene to reflect the will of our memes, the gene will utterly dominate the lives of humanity. And those who have learned to (or lucked into the resources allowing them to) placate and manipulate those genes toward the end of influencing the memes will continue to rule humanity.

Oh, look! Bitterness and frustration. New(ish) mental states. I wonder how long till the desire for a simple glass of water will shut out my rage?

Sidethought: Is this why so many faiths include fasting and other forms of body denial? To drown out with their own hunger, thirst, lust and the cries of all those people they are praying for instead of actually helping? Could this be a factor in the many instances of religion seeming to inspire psychopathic behaviors?

“Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to power over his will.” ~Hamilton, Alexander

“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” ~Norman Borlaug

RTS=PRS

My beef in this context as with virtually all the other “realistic” rts games is the inflexibility. Snipers are a great example. In real life the reason you can’t make an army of snipers is not because some things are immune to snipers at the tactical level but because making them is expensive and takes a long time.

From an organizational strategic perspective you get more bang for your buck just throwing rifles at a mob and then throwing that mob at a problem. (Infantry.)

In RTS terms this sucks because how it manifests tactically are units which appear magically immune to bullets.

In “Company of Heroes” Sniper versus motorcycles/jeeps are an excellent example. I’ll routinely see a jeep park, aim it’s machine gun at a building full of snipers and actually win (handily) because the game has hard coded jeeps and bikes to be virtually immune to sniper fire. (Paper vs rock.) Which is silly because in real life a sniper would decapitate the driver regardless of what “kind” of solider they are.

The problem is that real war isn’t economically balanced or remotely fair. In real war you don’t have to manage an economy or “grow” new troops because that’s the outside culture’s job. As a commander you are more or less handed resources and given an objective.

So in RTS games the PRS and ECON101 phenomenon are really when you get down to it just tricks to keep the game from boiling down to who can build snipers fastest, which would in turn boil down to input speed. (Korean RTS camps?)

The only way to really make that feel like anything other than a contrivance is to change the context such that arbitrary rules don’t seem completely stupid. And in RTS terms the best way to do that is the whole “magic tech” thing you can do in future or fantasy based rts games. (Warhammer/Supreme Commander)

In those contexts the “jeep” would be immune to the “snipers” because the “snipers” have anti-flesh zap rifles and the “jeeps” have “anti-zap” armor/shields or some such, so you arrive at the same PRS effect but it doesn’t feel completely stupid when you’re on the wrong end of it. You simply realize you’re paying the price of over specializing.

Also to make the game “fair” they create a situation where there is no simple winning strategy. The actual winning stratgey if it’s not boiled down to a case of “turtle vs rush” is a complex and fairly rigid build order, which is yet another RTS genre problem.

Basically this is why I don’t really play games generally much anymore beyond games that allow for meta, like diablo, which is not so much that I’m playing the game, as it is being useful to other humans in a fictional context. Second life is a setting purpose built for this I suspect, but because its purpose-built for meta, in a sense it stops being meta because everyone knows why everyone’s there and as a result the whole feel and “game” actually changes, creating a new meta-meta-game. (Make real money, or whatever other real life objectives were already there for the player.)

Bottomline: To correct the sniper/PRS problem, I’d have to hack the game or write a mod but in so doing I’d devalue my winning, and arrive at a different kind of fail/boredom point. Meaning make it so snipers can virtually kill anything just like irl, but get as bored with that as I got with emperor battle for dune once you can start making Fremen. Each had two types, anti vehicle and anti personnel.

_”Strange game… The only winning move is not to play.”_ ~WOPR/Joshua, Wargames

Category: Economics