I think most people, in reading whomever, tend to assume that apparently coherent bodies of thought are in fact coherent, and do not contain contradictions. This is rarely true, although few pay sufficient attention to notice this.
My last post contains a contradiction. If you saw it, good on you, and if not that is not unusual. Always trust your instincts. If they are wrong, you are honing them through practice, and eventually they will be mostly right.
Oh, I’ve been drinking, so don’t take this too seriously, but why can’t we fashion global economies in which people can stay out until 2:05am and be fine the next day? As it happens, that is my challenge. I have met this challenge more times than I care to count, but I am unusual.
Why don’t we, as a globe, party every night, go to bed happy, and carefree, and wake up with a job that is not too demanding?
I am not someone opposed to discipline, but rather someone who asks, very simply, where the twenty fold increase in our shared productivity went.
Fuck bankers. Is that too simplistic?
Oh, I do feel it is democracy or banks. The two cannot coexist, not if the “people” grasp what fractional reserve banking is really all about.
Edit, next day, clear: have you not read that hunter/gatherer societies only work perhaps 10-15 hours a week, and spend the rest of their time telling stories with one another?
We assume that life is meant to be a grim business, one filled with competition, hard work, and very little spontaneous fun. I interact with very successful people on a regular basis, and the cost of success quite often seems to be becoming hard on the inside, and deceptive and disingenuous. The more success you find, the less able you are to be happy, innocently. There must always be some victory over some other.
I have been arguing for several years now a very simple logical progression: if inflation is theft, and if inflation has been 20-fold since the founding of the Fed, then that means there should be 20x the wealth there actually is in the public sphere. Most people should own their own homes, outright (no mortgage). Most people should be able to pay cash for cars. But they don’t and they can’t.
I am certainly not lazy, although I am equally certainly undisciplined. I work hard, but irregularly. An average day, if I count blogging–which is work–and all the reading I do, I put in 12-14 hours. I don’t watch TV.
This I point out because my goal is not to be some child taken care of. I pay my own bills, and have worked continuously since I was 16. But more generally, can we not imagine a better world?
Such a dream feeds the utopian idiocies of people like the Greeks, who use debt to be paid in the future to fund “life” now. They want drama, excitement, fun.
There is nothing wrong with this, if we both remember that life is work, and that bills have to be paid.
I agree with this completely:
“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.
The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct our sins, we should understand that racism will endure until we stop thinking in terms of groups and begin thinking in terms of individual liberty.”
– Ron Paul, 2002
I will append to this that segregation, and all the other State sponsored systems of racial discrimination, are exactly that: STATE SPONSORED. You cannot enforce any form of anti-competitive activity without using the government, in both its ability to enforce and to IGNORE laws.
I like this phrase. So often, we look to both virtue and vice as things that are DONE, and not as things not done.
But it is wrong to ignore wrongs when you have the power to act. More subtly, it is also cruel to fail to SEE people as they are; and also to fail to carry one’s one weight, thereby forcing it on another person, who may actually see carrying that weight as virtuous, when in fact it weakens both people, and detracts energy from actually useful tasks.
To be is to work. Sometimes “work” is doing nothing–but you can never really do nothing, outside of dreamless sleep. Me, I like the words “process”, and “experience”. To be still and aware is to act purposively.
And, to repeat, to fail to be aware is to be cruel, sooner or later, certainly.
I am putting out a series of short ideas. It’s Tuesday, but it’s already been a long week.
To the point: it seems difficult to me to overestimate the importance of Rousseau’s sexual masochism. He sought, and found, older women to be his dominatrixes, to tell him what to do, to punish him for wrongs, real and imaginary.
What a short leap it is from the desire to be sexually and psychologically dominated to wanting to bring into existence a rationale for the eradication of personal agency and autonomy, supposedly under the direction of a “General Will”, but of course in reality under the domination of those who arrogated that silly abstraction into concrete positions of power for themselves, as for example Robespierre, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh did.
When you are dealing with emotionally ill philosophers, you can I think in general dispense with their philosophies without much effort at working through them: they are wrong in their foundations, and as such, wrong in their conclusions, absolutely without regard to the brilliance of exposition and reasoning that might take place in the middle.
As should be obvious, I am rarely short on words or opinions. If there is a topic you would like me to deal with, let me know.
Anonymous comments are enabled.
The first victim of the sadist is always himself. This point is generally missed.
I may expand on this later; perhaps not: if the point can be made to YOU, then I think it already has been.
Is what we call gratitude something other than feeling lucky? Is the opposite something other than going through life feeling like you have been unlucky?
Luck has a price: it is effort.
The older I get, the more I admire equanimity as a virtue. I admire those who don’t get upset by things, who are able to live without constant avarice of one sort or another: for experience, for wealth, fame, self respect, success in some enterprise or another.
Who is more successful: the CEO who is worth billions who has to fight every day to keep his position–and having to constantly compromise morally to do so, even if he or she refused to admit it–or the pipe-fitter who comes home tired and goes fishing with his kids?