Politics – Page 15

American Exceptionalism

Apex So much of my life was spent believing in a kind of American exceptionalism. An earned kind, where America’s fundamental nature was so different and new that it amounted to social innovation akin to the steam engine, and therefore, was exceptional.

But the more I learn from experience and disparate sources, the more I realize America is just another country, as petty and infantile as any in history with only a small margin of difference in which to play.

We are worse than some nations, better than others, as a whole, or on an issue by issue basis. But the behaviors school children typically would dismiss as things only other countries would do, like torture, hydraulic despotism, murder, rewriting history, etc, are well within the scope of action for our country.

And that’s not even touching on the mythology and lies about our founding. Or the causes of our various wars, or our behavior during them.

As time goes by I feel less like an American, and more oddly enough, like a Kentuckian.

Support “our” troops? Ha! No.

(Repost from G+)

This essay is a response to a picture posted of a solider crying over his baby. This photos was labeled “What love looks like.” Here is my response.

Uhhh, no, love is not putting yourself in front of a bullet for money or ego, doubly so when you have people depending on you. Triply so when the employment chosen is not only potentially lethal but murderous. When our country goes back on the meds and our solders get back to being defenders and not profit margin protecting assassins, then maybe that will change, until then, at best, this guy is a victim of a brutal scam or economic exploitation.

At worst he’s a sadistic thug.

“Service to our nation” is crap unless his primary jobs have been hurricane cleanup and the like, but given our military spending break downs, odds are his job has been to facilitate the murder of brown people with the express purpose of perpetuating what is rapidly becoming a holy war.

I am an American, and this service is NOT on my behalf. I will not be a party to littering a desert populated by (now parentless) children with over priced unexploded bomblets that happen to look like toys because defense spending lobbyists and blood thirsty and racist right wing politicians and soulless banking magnate arms dealers define foreign policy in this country and have managed to convince the weaker minded among us that blowing up those who are different, and who can often barely scrape up a glass of clean water, makes us tough.

Grow some spine people. Speaking out about this feel good crap for what is essentially advertising for something that is to put it mildly, ethically criminal, is our damn civic duty at this point. Especially since all this murder inc. garbage has gotten so out of hand its about to wreck our ability to keep the lights on.

Go find a picture of a fireman hugging his kid. Get doe eyed about that. Oh but that’s different, it’s not like running into a burning house is lethal. Oh wait. It COMPLETELY is. This kind of photo is just defense contractor P.R.

This crap makes me want to tear my hair out. It’s deliberately promulgated to make it seem as those being anti-murder is somehow anti-baby. “Awww isn’t she cute! I better vote for the guy that wants to raid the social security budget for another shipment of predator drones.”

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” ~Albert Einstein

If you’re actually capable of being a solider you’re damn sure capable of being a fireman, or an EMT or something, anything, else.

This attitude that it doesn’t matter how evil you have to be to make sure your family has money is about as ethically bankrupt as “I was just following orders.” Getting money when you’ve abandoned ethics is a cake walk, whats really hard is doing it and keeping your soul at the same time. Lets see some photos of the guy that’s a career janitor or a career trash man hugging his kids.

Life isn’t a fucking action movie.

Just because you’re profit sharing with an infant doesn’t mean you’re by definition doing good. Especially if your job is ultimately to facilitate killing people, including someone else’s infants.

This crap makes my blood boil. I can’t imagine how that kid is going to feel when she finds out what was done in her name. I almost hope she’s successfully indoctrinated by then just to spare her the guilt of breathing and the shame of being an excuse for murder.

And all that’s on top of the injustice perpetrated by the system that would take a father away from his family and send him into the desert to murder people. It’s like all these religious fanatics that say “Thank god, it’s a miracle!” when a truck load of orphans explodes and one manages to crawl from the burning wreckage instead of “Fuck god for letting a truck full of orphans explode!”

We let the country, which exploits loyalty and patriotism to protect a profit margin and an exploitative way of life, rip away that father from his child and then get all misty eyed and patriotic when someone manages to survive and someone snaps a photo of him given back what was in effect stolen.

How many rich people’s kids are in Afghanistan or somewhere similar right now? Yeah, that’s what I thought, it’s always poor people’s kids that gotta step in front of the bullet or worse drop a bomb on a terrorist training facility (or pre-school, whatever, same dif, right?)

You care about this country? You care about soldiers? You care about children? Then elect someone that will bring them home RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

How about we use all that money to build some schools and hospitals and solar facilities and water purification facilities and farms.

Wake up. Shit like this has let people with the morals of a roundworm turn this country into the bad guy.

The only silver lining is that if we don’t fix it and I mean damn quick it will economically implode anyway.

Libertarianism is Camouflage for Republicans

99% of libertarians want to be George Bush when they grow up, at best. They just know that the current crop of republicans are in the long term politically doomed

Libertarians have more in common with religious conservatives than they would care to admit.

Everyone in the real world knew that already.

That’s why the vast majority of “libertarians” most closely identify with the republican party. Even back when I was hoping for Ron Paul as president I lamented the collective libertarian choice of linking with the right instead of the left.

Imagine if instead libertarians had infiltrated the democratic party (which incidentally plays by it’s own rules more often and thus would have offered up Ron Paul had he won the internal primary) instead of the republican party?

And don’t give me that shit about smaller government. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that the right wing is owned by people that want a global monopolist corporate autocracy which is every bit functionally a one world government. So then why?

Because intelligent republicans of the earlier era saw the current situation coming. They saw how a massive right wing failure was in-bound and sought to be republican without having to admit to being republican. (I on the other hand simply pushed for the one real opportunity for change that I saw.)

If libertarians were collectively what they claimed to be and not closeted neocons at best, they would infiltrate the left, and force them via internal politics and simple logic to abandon gun control as an issue, at which point enough one issue voters could switch sides and make social policy the priority that it should be without the fear of being black bagged as a distraction. (Which is really what guns are about preventing, and I think that’s a fair fear given the rise of the security state and the NSA/whistleblower/drone/etc crap.)

2nd Amendment and Related Links

But that’ll never happen because the fact is that 99% of libertarians want to be George Bush when they grow up, at best. They just know that the current crop of republicans are in the long term politically doomed, and they don’t want to be caught in the open being a party to the pantheon of ethical degeneracies that is what it means to be right wing in the united states.

Can you blame them?

photo_2015-08-14_19-38-03

What did you expect?

We make irrational demands and reject anyone that tells us what we don’t want to hear, thus we are stuck with alpha liars.

Sure, the government is a captured 1% puppet now, but we allowed it to get that way. And until we start making rational demands we’ll keep getting irrational representatives. And I’m not talking about a new round of punish thy enemy. I’m not talking about tough love for other people but magically you’re just fine.

I’m talking about giving up some shit you’re straight up addicted to.

The right in particular rose to power by telling people what they wanted to hear no matter how incorrect or cruel or narcissistic it was, and it still is that way. How many assholes get elected basically saying “I’ll make sure you can do whatever you want and force only other people to change/suffer.” All of them as far as I can tell. Right and left. Like the man said, you can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.

“Tough on crime” for example still gets votes. It’s basically just socially sanctioned sadism/racism/etc. The organized conflation of crime with criminals so that you can jerk off to all the modern equivalents of public flogging. (Crime shows and court TV much?)

What do we expect when we vote for those people? Unconditional compassion, patience, tolerance, these things are hard and require helping people we don’t always like. When you demand someone else have less freedom/compassion, don’t get all bitchy when suddenly yours gets taken away.

We love prison because we can imagine our enemies being beaten and raped. Then we get a police state.

We love school because we imagine our children turning out EXACTLY like we want them. Then we get teen pregnancy, school shootings, and bullying unto suicide.

We love “defense” spending because we imagine a death machine enforcing that will on all who disagree. Then we get drone wars and the NSA reading this post as I type it.

We love ignorant energy policy because we think windmills and solar panels are fashionable and we’re terrified of the dark magic of radiation. Then we get pipelines and coal inspired lung cancer.

We love the hope of patenting the letter E and dying a multi-billionaire and so we get the TPP and walmart on track to owning half of everything and Monsanto being handed a food monopoly.

We love marriage law because we damn sure want our ex girl/boyfriend fiscally and socially punished for breaking our hearts and we can’t possibly learn to share. Then we get domestic violence, atrocious music, sexual objectification, and the all too common homicide in a desperate attempt to avoid a costly divorce.

Bottom line, 99% of people are hypocrites and are merely experiencing the natural and logical consequences of their demands.

When you want to play with fire in the living room, sometimes the house goes up. Is it really the fault of the fire marshal with the nice smile you elected to tell you it was ok to do? Or was it your vault for handing power to someone who told you what you wanted to hear?

Why we’ll always need currency.

Where does currency come from? Ultimately it comes from the need to exchange items indirectly. Why indirectly? Because direct exchange is barter and has limitations which create (or are) resistance. Money comes from the needs created by the weaknesses of direct barter. Barter in turn comes from the mammalian strategy of communication and socialization. Organization itself is a step towards diversity because that’s where advantage is found.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood

Organizational life implies interaction. Interaction is always an exchange. Even a hug or a hand shake has a cost. There will always be supply and demand, since not all demands are material there will always be diversity of supply which means a basis for trade, the long term intolerable weaknesses of barter can only be overcome by currency of some sort or by stasis/homogeneity.

Any optimal society has money/currency. A way to render an abstraction as tangible. A way to externalize commitment and desire. A contract for example is a form of barter. Sure you could try to tolerate the weaknesses of barter but you’re only setting yourself up for either universal stagnation (as a result of trying to prevent…) or re-capture by covert capitalists. (What do you think the mafia/yakuza/triads are? They are competing governments.)

Economy is just an abstracted way of saying movement. Typically expressed physically as matter or energy traveling from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration along the path of least resistance.

Creating these paths in advance and waiting for reality to take them according to an imagined superior state, leading to an objective, leading to a plan for accomplishing that objective, is how one controls and shapes reality. Each of these steps can be debated forever. That’s why we have to actually try stuff.

Societies without money have been tried. They were first after all. It only works in conditions of extreme homogeneity, because only at the simplest levels can barter suffice because of a lack of diversity among goods/services/demand. Simple of course need not mean small, or boring. You can have simple and entertaining huge things. There have been massive barter economies. But they were intrinsically disadvantaged and quickly trumped by the greater diversity tolerance/exploitation of competing systems. Systems which developed from within the older systems. Even the church was forced to adapt or die.

History can be seen as a constant war and progression. A war between social inertia and innovation created diversity. A progression of capabilities growing out of growing tolerance for diversity. Progressiveness vs conservatism. Diversity will always win over the long term because it produces new opportunity/ability or exploits previously unexploitable opportunity.

http://swankivy.com/shenanigans/labels/evolve.jpg

But of course one can reject the earth as it is or ever has been as an argument. One can have faith in imagined superior alternatives because being an imaginative construct it is flawless and infinitely malleable.

So instead of going up in scale, let’s go down. To start with, life is activity. And activity is movement. Like movement explained above. A rock is lifeless because no part of it changes or moves “on its own” (whatever that ultimately means philosophically.) I can’t sit on a rock and get it to hatch, I can’t plant a rock and get a tree. If I could, then it wasn’t a rock, it was an egg or a seed.

The moment it sprouted roots or started to hatch it, by definition had to have an economy.

But let’s go a little lower. If it moved/reacted at all it still had an economy, even if it wasn’t alive. Like if it was made of dry ice and I dropped it in water. Now you have a temperature exchange and phase/material/chemical economy. Go lower and everything has an economy, because it’s all moving.

The lack of economy is a perceptual limitation or an illusion. Like when a tree appears to not be growing because it’s not happening fast enough for you to register. Or when pitch appears to be a solid because of its rate of flow.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/18/pitch_drop_experiment_video_science_world_aflutter_after_experiment_pays.html

or lower…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

It can be argued that existence itself is movement, or vibration.

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

Are you hearing me yet? If you eliminate movement at any point you merely create an insulator around which movement must occur. This is the base reason why external discipline is always doomed to fail and why prohibition creates black markets and why it takes more voltage to get around, or through resistance, etc etc etc, including why you can never dispense with economy/movement/money without hideous cost. (Like saying becoming an inert chunk of rock.)

http://www.lifegem.com/ Ironic really, the only way to mostly escape the economy is to become something often used as a form of currency. XD

Even the body has an oxygen economy. How that oxygen is distributed changes based on the needs of the market/organism as a whole.

Sure, you could make an organism that doesn’t need oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria for example, which in turn just have a simpler and far less capable/diverse economy.

The planet’s surface has a water economy, upon which I modeled my economic solution (ubt/cap) because it’s a proven system. It also has a magnetic economy powered by fission, which is great for us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Importance

All of it is running out. This movement appears to be unidirectional.

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

The entirety of observable reality is the progression or movement from one state to another. The only point at which we can be free of this is the last point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death

Why I Oppose the “Venus Project”

TLDR:

Unless you plan to annihilate all forms of uniqueness there will always be need for currency of some sort to allocate access to that which cannot (or should not) be reproduced. (Such as an individual’s time or use of a specific radio frequency range.)

Material post scarcity is of course possible and coming. That’s easy really:

We can acquire a high degree of ubiquitous material wealth if we do three things:

1. Reform IPL to make all code free as in speech and beer. Privacy could still easily be respected. In fact copyright enforcement and privacy of correspondence are mutually exclusive. (To program the robots.)

2. Deploy nuclear reactors quickly to provide the bottom of an anthropocentric materials economy food chain. (To power the robots.)

3. Develop an open source humanoid robot, recharged by the reactors, and instructed by ever evolving shared open code above, to automate any labor task we need done yet are unwilling to do personally. (To have the robots.)

But you’ll still need both authority and currency to manage things like frequency allocation and to evade tragedy of the commons situations at the macroscopic emergent level.

Best way to allocate the funding is via a steeply progressive tax and a UBI.

Main post:

TVP to me is just one of thousands of positive liberty (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) global proposals that require too much (however gentle) forced (via “education”) homogenization and indoctrination.

I stipulate that TVP is materially feasible and logically consistent, but then again an ant hill is materially feasible, and most religions are, internally at least, logically consistent. A good global plan requires more than that. We cannot simply ask if we can do something, we must ask if we should.

Simply improving on the situation now is insufficient if the method annihilates better possible futures. Indeed some have formally defined intelligence is the evasion of future constraints.

The opportunity cost must always be considered. An improvement alone is insufficient justification for any course of action. (Much like how a UBI is incomplete without a wealth cap.)

TVP is ethically sub-optimal, if not actively wrong. Global order through unity of mind, delivered by “education” is one of the more insidious (precisely because it could work) facets of any proposed global social system.

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

And without question TVP would require, an admittedly benevolent, compulsory schooling system. That alone is a deal breaker for me. Any system that requires it is in my view an ethical and ultimately biological threat. Diversity is strength for a reason. You can’t just looks at snapshots in time you have to look at the whole of it.

I imagine myself being transported to the TVP future. I don’t like what I see. It would have to exile me, ignore me, or force me. It really has no other options. The founder said in a video that it has to be global. Think about what that means. EVERYONE has to agree or it won’t work. So what do you do with the people that don’t agree?

You educate them out of existence or you quarantine them (psycho-socially or physically) until they die and are replaced by “properly” educated citizens.

But really that’s just ideological icing on the cake, the real death stroke for TVP is the fact that humanity is not going to fundamentally be the same species in 50 or so years. Altering that baseline would require a complete reevaluation/redesign of all the TVP materials.

It will begin as cures for genetic disorders, then it will become a new type of vaccine, then it will become performance enhancements, and finally it becomes recreational and biohacker territory.

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

I own my own genetic code. I have the right to edit that code. I just currently lack the tools and map.

http://www.hedweb.com/confile.htm

I’m a larvae waiting for the tools and opportunity to pupate. And I’m not even close to alone.

I expect the human baseline to explosively branch off. (The furries alone when given the option of actually becoming animal hybrids of every possible combination will do so with gusto.) And that’s relatively bland compared to the kind of experimental chimeras I expect to see.

In 100 years you won’t even be able to find a single objective biological classification that will encompass all humans who have ever lived. There will be or have been extreme examples of neo-human in every known niche of macroscopic life.

There will be aquatic anaerobic humans living around deep sea vents. (http://www.feedbooks.com/book/974/starfish) There will be humans that have forgone gender and adapted themselves to breed parthenogenetically. (As per the whiptail lizard.) There will be humans that have become reptilian, insectile, fungal, and those are just the experimental or obsessed individuals.

There will be actual vampires (within the realm of physical possibility), actual werewolves, actual vulcans and elves and hobbits and trolls and dragons, because people will modify themselves to suit. Do you really see that level of diversity all living in neat little domes, sitting in neat little rows learning how to be “technicians?” Or would you just outlaw genetic engineering?

TVP can’t cope with nor tolerate that level of diversity because, Fresco is completely overlooking the feedback impact loop of transhumanism. Even his geometry fails in that regard. (What about the humans that want to be 10ft tall or the ones that want to be 2ft tall?)

Very few people have any real idea what the future will look like.

Don’t misunderstand, I sure as hell see where TVP is coming from. But the problem is that TVP is a package deal. I can’t back it for the same reasons I can’t just say I’m a democrat and be done with it.

Freeing people from slavery is a fine goal, and I certainly believe that material scarcity can and will be annihilated. Also, currency needs deep reform as well, just not abolition.

99% of TVP adherents have their heart in the right place, and really to me that’s all that matters so long as they remain, like you, open minded and critically aware. To the degree that TVP actually promotes the scientific method and not a self serving corruption of it, it is an excellent idea(s).

Currency isn’t the problem:

But TVP’s attacking the wrong thing primarily. You don’t need to annihilate currency to annihilate slavery.

Bait and Switch

One Possible Solution

Explore bitcoin, and how it is different from fiat money. Currency is a tool, a technology. And like any tool or technology it is not intrinsically good (useful) or evil (harmful). Anyone working to annihilate money is wasting their time.

Currency isn’t about reward and punishment. That’s merely one way to deploy currency.

Currency is about externalizing priorities. Making objective show of your subjective intent. (“Putting your money where your mouth is.” or “Voting with your wallet.”) Currency represents a share of the planet. How we allocate those shares is a political, ethical, and economic question.

In effect he’s looking at a pizza and in order to share it fairly advocates the abolition of slices. It’s nonsensical. Even if you eliminate slices you still have to divide up the pizza. Even if you refuse to say that’s what you are doing, there’s no way to escape it.

Currency in the future will be about prioritizing your desires. The idea is to give everyone enough to be healthy and comfortable and informed. (Not via education but just by eliminating the slavery of compulsory schooling or employment.) Human curiosity will do the rest.

I’m a glutton. I love me some good (and junk) food, it’s just in my nature. Thus I’d spend more of my share on different foods, and traveling to experience those foods. (I want to fly to Vietnam and have a couple bowls of Pho for example.)

Other people aren’t going to care as much as I do. Other people might want a larger share of the planet than I have for reasons of their own, and I might be willing to give up some of my portion of X for some of their portion of Y. Allowing them to engage in enterprise to convince the rest of us to fund them so they can accomplish that goal has to be possible or else humanity loses a critical avenue of adaptation and diversity.

Maybe they want to pool resources for some objective. Like a space program for example. Or some kind of kickstarter project.

Currency is about equitably dividing up whatever there is to divide up and there will always be stuff to divide up, thus there will always be a need for currency of some sort. Even if it’s not declared. Something will function as currency even if it’s just hours of your day. You’ll spend them on X to get Y and how badly you want X will determine how many you spend.

Side topic about credibility:

You likely don’t think it’s possible for me to be “smarter” than him 🙂

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

They want you to think that way.They want you to believe that you don’t have the right to speak against him unless you can play the education/skill/experience card.

But given his age and life focus, that’s hardly fair for a consensus friendly movement. In actuality it’s just a way to arbitrarily exclude potential opposition.

That’s why the first thing you see in “Future by Design” is Larry King telling the world what a super genius this guy is because of all his technical skill.

Specific Responses:

Since the kitchen sink approach has failed so many others, let me focus on a couple things the guy said in the 8 minute video above. Not the FAQ, not what other people say he meant, let’s focus on the leader and his words.

How is that fair? Because if you disregard the leader then you might as well name your own movement.The leader while he is alive defines the movement, and after he dies whoever can best manage the perception of being true to that vision controls the movement. (That’s why north Korea is saturated with past leader mythology and why American politics is so full of speculation and debate over what the founders meant or thought or said.)

That’s why I focus on policy fragments/elements (like the UBI) not policy collectives (like nations, parties, or ideologies).

“It has to be global.”

This has two problems.

Firstly it’s like saying “I have a great way to live but it’ll only work if you live by yourself.”

Secondly, it has a very clear “my way or the highway” implication to it. No matter how gentle and palatable you make that highway and the journey to it.

Thirdly it betrays a deep misunderstanding of war and its causes. War isn’t about resources ultimately, war is about perception. As an example explore this little area of the planet.

TVP’s solution is the same as Cosmos in essence. He wants to destroy money because he fears what Cosmo calls _”its most powerful ability.”_ Marx and Lennon did as well but they realized more accurately what money is, what it facilitates, and why destroying it wasn’t possible, or necessary.

But they, and he, were wrong for the same reason the drug war is futile and why gun law is unenforceable. Diverse desires cannot be moderated effectively by authority. Authority itself is perception management. So is money in a sense. Control of perception can control the flow of money and the value of money, that much is obvious, but money, value itself, are just perceptions.

TVP ultimately proposes and is/would be defined by and as a command economy. the problem is that no central command (silicon or carbon) can compete with distributed parallel processing and barring totalitarian technological despotism, the collective computing power and sophistication of the group will always outstrip the computing power of any center.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…” ~Yeats

“…we announce on TV what is available and what is not available at the time…”

He intends to replace money entirely with “technically competent” and “scientific” command.

That will not work. Even if you make the entire population technicians, which he clearly expects to occur as demonstrated by his back to school rhetoric.

However, freeing the population from the slavery of work is a noble goal.

“If you have a million sincere people that have no technical competence I can assure you nothing can be accomplished.”

Really, this tells me all I need to know. He doesn’t understand humanity at all. He needs to watch this show: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/james-burke-connections/

He also need to really think about the following quote:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” ~Albert Einstein

Knowledge can be systematically acquired. Indeed it’s something machines can do.

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5923/85.abstract

Those 1000 imaginations are far more valuable than 10,000 highly skilled but dull technicians. (Or programs.) This isn’t a matter of opinion or doe eyed sentimental claptrap, it’s one of those ironic paradoxical but universal truths. We’ve scientifically confirmed that science isn’t all that important.

That’s why facts and reason don’t convince people. That’s why showmen are always in charge, not scientists. That’s why charisma is more powerful than reason.

It’s also why appearing irrational conveys advantage.

Click to access refs4375.pdf

(https://www.google.com/search?q=game+theory+appearing+irrational)

He fundamentally fails to parse the importance of the subjective. He makes the same mistake Nash did, he assumed a mercenary/rational base of human action. (By his own description his vision of what defined a rational player in part depended on his own mental illness.)