Month: June 2011

Pure socialism, which we can define as a system in which there are no economic difference between non-Party members, is really the same as feudalism, in that an unelected aristocracy uses its power to bestow favors on those it likes, and to withhold them from those it does not like. If you want to start a business in China or Vietnam, you better know somebody, or do a lot of palm-greasing.

This is, of course, a regression to another age, that of kings. You have no rights. From where you are sitting, if you aren’t part of the system, they may as well be Gods. They just invoke History, rather than the much more tangible presence of God.

I was thinking about it, though: what would be more fair, bestowing favors arbitrarily, or by chance? It is argued that having bad luck in Capitalism is unacceptable, that you have to have a “safety net”, which in reality consists in a pair of handcuffs and a jail cell you are locked in for your own “safety”.

But is a system better in which, say, black people can’t even be considered for some positions, say Party membership? Or white people? Or Muslim Uighurs?

Would it not be more just to offer up Party membership–and all the opportunities for corruption that go with it–on a lottery basis?

When you analyze, really analyze Leftism, it is a species of lunacy. Literal insanity, in the sense of a complete separation of idea from reality, truth from falsehood. If we define schizophrenia as what it is, a complete separation from the capacity for rational analysis, then Communists are schizophrenic. And this includes large swathes of our academic world, and other thought leaders.

Really: how is it possible to be so stupid? My thought is that it results from a crisis of identity that attends metaphysical pessimism, which itself is a result of failing to understand reality.

It’s a mystery, but it’s also the problem of all right-thinking people to do what we can to keep these nuts away from our children, and away from our political and economic lives.

I do have readers: I checked the stats. For those unwilling to sort through what is a LOT of words, I did want to point out that I created this blog initially in frustration at the lack of a simple, logically coherent refutation of the Anthropogenic Global Warming conjecture.

This is what I came up with. My arguments have only gotten stronger in the last few years, with Phil Jones admitting he was withholding data from people he knew were on to his game; hurricanes at a 40 year low after we were told confidently that what has now become “climate change” would cause them to increase in size and intensity; and frankly weather that is not hot.

If something is heating somewhere, self evidently that just means the Earth is getting hotter. It does that, and it’s a good thing too, since we have spent most of our history in ice ages.

As I defined it on my other site, this is the economic doctrine which holds that the more wealth is created, the poorer we will all be. It underlies, as a quasi-moral sentiment, all variants of Leftism.

To call it pessimistic is to miss the point: it is a misanthropic anti-humanism. A great many of the exponents seem uncomfortable that humans exist at all. They seem to be quite willing to kill the human race to save the planet. This is the necessary outcome of removing notions of qualitative superiority from the table.

The reality is that I can think better than my dog. I can think much better than plants. I have a right to exist, and a duty to exist. Everything that is, endures. This principle reality necessarily reaches into an understanding of reality, and the nature of life.

People that think we are machines made out of meat have no way of differentiating us from machines made from fewer parts. As William James pointed out, all questions of action and philosophy necessarily proceed from a fundamental myth–taken in the sense of a gestalt that involves more than just your brain, and that is a whole–of reality.

The vision popped into my head of a virus that helped people, that rather than debilitating them made them smarter, stronger, wiser.

What does a virus do? It has the capacity to remain motionless for long periods of time, and go into frantic motion when the conditions are right. It has the ability, in effect, to put its life on hold, and to accellerate it.

Can some sorts of ideas not do this, such that the are dormant for long periods of time, then resurrect and furiously reproduce? How much life is in an idea, that can potentially be expressed? This is a measure of its quality.

It struck me today that Fundamentalism is at root a desired relationship with the future. Obviously, it looks back, generally to a past that never was, and seeks to impose a reality on the present. But what is really desired is the ability to predict the future, which is all too uncertain in the modern age.

We all want immortality of some sort. For his part, Sade wanted his grave to disappear; but one senses he wanted his books to survive. Ho Chi Minh was buried, as I understand it, on three different unmarked hills, presumably as bones. But he wanted his vision of a socialist Vietnam to endure.

Tradition represents a continuity with the future. You do as your father did. He sees this, and assumes your grandchildren will do as his grandparents did. One can call it a circle or a line, but it is a series of points which are connected, one to the other.

In our own age, it is impossible to see what will happen because we have no–or very few–traditions. We have science, but of its nature science necessarily will always make contingent claims, not final ones. There is no other way to do it.

So we see people wanting to fetishize specific ontologies, particularly orthodox materialism of the ping-pong ball or Relativistic sort. Whatever else changes in science, they feel, this will not change.

And of course we have our genetics. However we modify life, what we really ARE will not change; nor will our perception of what we are. This is very important to people of a certain bent.

This, too, is a fundamentalism, which rather than looking to the past looks to what parts of reality can be assumed to be ineluctably real; that whatever interesting discoveries will be made in 24th century science, if we live that long, will be RELATED to them and their work.

There is so much sadness in this world, and so much pain. People need figurative walls to lean on, floors to hold them. They need, as George Jones sang, “four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going stray”.

Yet there is much light in this world too, and it is infinite. Einstein wanted to make it the only constant in the universe. Perhaps in its form as motion and infinite expansion, we can agree with him.

Right after I posted that last piece, the word “Haggadah” popped in my head. I didn’t know what it was, so I looked it up.

It is a Passover ritual in which, in effect, the history and identity of the Jews is conveyed across generations.

Is ritual not in some respects a way of predicting the future? Does it not bring order from chaos?

I never get tired of watching the enormously interesting parades put on in front of me each and every day. There is so much color and beauty in this world. I hope we can keep it.

One, I fragmented it. I’m not going to fix it. There are still some interesting ideas in there.

What got me started there was the thought: say the Cultural Sadeists really do take over. What does Earth look like a 1,000 years from now? A million? A billion?

Think of your own future. Does it not look like fog 20′ from your headlights? What if you could drink a potion to tell you your own future, with the proviso you could not change any decisions because of it? Would you do it? What if you could change your decisions, with consequences you were not allowed to see? What if you made things worse, inventing new mistakes? What if you lived the perfect life? It would be like a life review, but on the front end.

Is part of the art of life not learning to live with mystery, with the future a mystery second only to what is, now? Can you see the mists surrounding you at this very moment?

What if you knew there were an infinite amount of space around you, that nothing you see is solid, not even the ground around you? Could you accept that?

It often seems to me that the most important limitations on our freedom are those we set ourselves, to avoid extending our horizons to infinity.

The Masters in that post were of course the Grand Inquisitors of Dostoevsky, who set as their “burden” the enlightenment through material improvement of the human race. But what if they achieve it? What then? Their source of meaning is gone.

This is why I define the ability to live happily by oneself as an integral aspect of Goodness. If you need other people to need you, you are not free, and your need for them will lead you to control them, to the detriment, finally, of both of you.

Few thoughts.

I was thinking this morning about the matter of gay marriage. Two things seem clear to me: 1) that civilly they have the right to demand a legal arrangement identical to that of heterosexually married couples: 2) that the use of the word “marriage” constitutes a cultural and not a civil demand. It constitutes a demand for equality culturally and socially, and not just legally.

This led to what I will call the insight that the essence of Liberalism is the protection of culture within a system of law. What the First Amendment tells us, in effect, is that any and all statements are allowable, but that none shall be coerced. You will neither be prohibited from believing things, nor compelled to pretend to believe in them.

The Bible plainly prohibits sodomy. Self evidently, the word itself is from the Bible. Compelling the use of the word marriage is equivalent to compelling conformity to a set of values you do not share.

Yet plainly, the set of values in San Francisco or Columbus, Ohio would be perfectly congruent with allowing the word marriage.

The essence of true Liberalism is national protections from coercion, but allowing local permutations of permissions. All powers not granted to the Federal Government were to devolve to the States, many of whom banned sodomy (incidentally for heterosexuals as well, referring to the necessary non-missionary position permutations of the sex act demanded by realities of anatomy) until as recently as a decade or so ago. Logically, if you can explicitly criminalize it, you can explicitly legalize its fruition (sorry) in gay marriage.

The key point is that no heterogeneous group of people is ever going to agree on everything, so on some level of organization it has to come down to majority rule, as restricted by the foundational rights in our Bill of Rights. In principle, I would support local implementations of Sharia Law, if that’s what the people wanted, but only as limited by the Bill of Rights. No cruel and unusual punishment. No punishment for blasphemy. But if they want the government to pay a Muezzin to sound the call for prayer, and the taxpayers are OK with that, then in my view that should be perfectly legal. Self evidently, sedition could not be permitted either, but in principle that is my view.

For my part, personally, I am fine with gay marriage. I’m with Dolly Parton, who said “why shouldn’t they be allowed to be as miserable as the rest of us?”

It is the larger issues of principle that concern me.

This seems to me like comparing wolverines to badgers. Yes, there is a difference,but they are both mean tempered and very similar animals.

I see sometimes where people argue that it was the Communists who fought the Fascists. They fought in the streets in Germany. The “Republicans” fought Franco in Spain.

Yet if a wolverine kills a badger in a fight, does its nature change?

Look at our Bill of Rights. Systems which in some form or fashion respect those rights are liberal. Those which don’t are tyrannical. There is no way, other than an abuse of language, to argue otherwise.

It occurred to me the other day that anger boosts self confidence. I had never thought of it that way. Framed thus, though, it becomes more clear why chronic anger has beneficial effects for some people–and to a very limited extent I am one of them–who sometimes feel unequal to some situations.

I did martial arts for a long time, and one interesting thing I learned is that anger is not only not needed to fight effectively, it is often counterproductive. I suspect the best fighters absolutely get the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, but know how to control it, and rationally direct their actions. This is confidence, which leads to competence.

I would argue that real anger is almost always a failng of some sort, although I am not sure if practically any of us can live full lives never feeling it. I know people who never express rage, and it limits them emotionally in other areas. It leads to tension, and a lack of self confidence. Far better to use anger as a tool than to fail to accomplish some needed task.

Goodness is always crooked, as Chuang Tzu would put it.