I have in the past referred to corporations as “job creating entities”, or JCE’s. A better term might be employers. Tax cuts for employers. If you want to create jobs, you want good things for the people who create them. Yes, it leads to money being made, but you can’t get rich without making other people rich.
I posted this on Yahoo in response to this link, in which George Soros argues that anything but ENORMOUS budget deficits is bad for our economy.
Do you see the beauty of Keynesian socialist logic? If your economy is good, then public spending will make it better. If it’s bad, then public spending is ESSENTIAL. If you’re going broke, trying to stop the process will only make you broke faster.
No matter what happens, the answer is larger government control of the economy. Anyone who is pushing Keynes nowadays is either stupid–most of them–or a Communist in all but name. The aims of Keynes were the same as George Bernard Shaw: Fascist tyranny.
I wrote about Keynes here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/keynes.pdf
I wrote about the link between the New Deal and Fascism (it did actually exist, I will note, and had identifiable characteristics) here: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-dealfascism.html
The man most identified with the New Deal in the early days, other than FDR himself, literally liked Mussollini, passed out books praising Fascism, and was only fired for being a drunk that was a political liability. He was Times Man of the Year for 1933.
I like the Harry Potter movies. I am a huge fan of the imaginative capacities of Joanne Rowling. I own the first six (and need to see if the seventh is out yet, actually).
Anyway, as most will know, there are these nasty creatures called Dementors, which can perform a “kiss”, which sucks all the happy thoughts out of you, leaving only darkness and eventually death. They steal your soul.
The cure is called a Patronus charm, which in effect is the expression of your inner joy, and symbolized by an animal with which you relate. It is composed of light, which dispels the darkness.
Anyway, the Patronus Charm is defensive. It drives them away or keeps them at bay, but why could it not be used to attack them? Why not inject into them happy thoughts freely, using the infinite amount of light around us, and blow them up like balloons? Attach a fire hose of joy and life to their mouths, and destroy all the darkness within them?
We tend to think of Goodness as not being bad. I would argue that it is a way of being which is positive and tending to the better. The Tibetans have this nice metaphor of the Windhorse, which is running horse with a glowing jewel on the back. This is a nice image. It conveys motion, the wind of light, and the light itself. Goodness is galloping on an endless field on a beautiful day, completely free, and filled with happiness and love.
This morning I was thinking about light as a place in a field of battle. You have this “front” of light energy, facing realms of darkness. We tend to think of them as creeping up on us, but why? Why can little “light bombs” not be dropped into these realms? Can’t we use artillery? Can we not move forward?
I think we can.
That latter part appends my post on Strategy a couple ago.
In it, I came out of a building, and my car was gone. This very, very tall black man came up to me and apologized and said he had stolen it, and it was 8 blocks away. I was angry at first, then wondered why he had told me, when it would have been much easier to deny it. I was warned by someone that he was a prison guard, and very tough, but I decided to ask him anyway. I don’t back down in dreams, much more than I do in real life.
His answer was incoherent in the dream, but amounted to the fact that he needed it. He was sad that he needed it, but he had felt he had no choice.
For whatever reason, I suddenly had a burlap bag full of stuff, which I decided to give him. It was full of tree seeds, and all the tools to fertilize them properly. I gave them to him, and suggested he plant them, which he agreed to do. End of dream.
As I think about it today, there are some interesting ideas here. First off, it is undeniable that we have many people suffering in ghettoes around the country. Maybe kids act tough, talk tough, and get tough. But they are sad. They are outside of the society most of the rest of us live in. Jeremiah Wright likes to talk about ghettoes as prisons. This man was a prison guard, symbolically, since he controlled prisoners.
Who built the prisons, though? Was it rich white men? Why are they poor? Are they not poor because there are not enough good jobs around for them to do, and because many of them were born into and recreate single parent homes which do not provide enough love, support and GUIDANCE to use those tools for self improvement that our system offers to them?
For the last 40 years or more, the incessant hum of the theme of victimization has poured throughout all these neighborhoods. It has resulted in constant Democrat victories, year on year, decade on decade. Elect us, they are told, and manna will fall from the sky. But it doesn’t. It never does. Promises are made and broken. A few benefit, but only those connected with the private wealth that flows through governments via taxation. City government members benefit. Teachers benefit. Unions benefit, or at least those who keep their jobs once the job roles continue to decline.
50 years ago, Detroit was a good place to live. Slowly, all the companies that provided good paying jobs left town, or shuttered their doors. This has not happened everywhere, but it has often happened selectively in inner cities. Why would this be? Is it racism? Or is it the fact that the same people who promise their electorate the sun and moon consistently enact policies that cause job and business flight? There are very nice areas AROUND Detroit. They just aren’t IN Detroit.
Tax rates, attitudes, business support or neglect: these are the things that affect jobs, both their quantity and quality.
I have used this metaphor: what the Democrats provide this constituency is salt water for thirst. It always feels like it should work. It always sounds plausible. But it always makes things WORSE. The problem is not a lack of money spent. It is HOW it is spent.
I gave this man the seeds to sprout a new life. I asked him to take care of and tend it, then washed my hands of it. This is all most people need.
What Democrats don’t want to grasp is that black communities need to have demanded of them self organization, personal responsibility for the quality of life in their neighborhoods. They should not look to government for it.
What I am saying is trust them. Let them figure things out. People who are never challenged never learn. Obviously, working three jobs to make ends meet is a challenge. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about minds meeting to figure out how to improve lives.
Black people in this country have by and large been trained relentlessly to look to their Democrat saviors to, well, save them. This is foolishness. This has led to an atrophy of will and capability that would otherwise have been there. Virtually all black neighborhoods were every bit as peaceful as everywhere else 50 years ago. They had families, went to church, made sure their kids did their homework, and said their prayers at night. They were systematically excluded then, but can anyone argue with a straight face they are included now? The cure has PREVENTED integration.
This is either the height of incompetence, or malignancy. And incompetence prolonged sufficiently long becomes the latter in practice, since stupidity at some point becomes willful.
This is the trait I think conservatives and genuine moderates have this year, that they have not had for a very long time. Even in the Reagan era, after the disastrous failures of Carter, and even those under Ford facilitated by the Imperial Congress which had hog-tied him, Democrats continued to own Congress. They continued in large measure to own many of the narratives, particularly the farcical claim that they were in fact the best protectors of the interests of the poor, minorities, and the working classes.
I am presently reading a good summary of the history of political policy in the New Deal era, and it is frankly distressing to see how many obvious, unmistakeable similarities there are between the literally Fascist policies enacted then–and the rationales that enabled them–and those under Obama.
One sees, for example, a tension between “reform”, and “recovery”. Time and again, the latter is sacrificed for the former. To take one egregious example, FDR quite literally intended his direct control over the agricultural sector to contineu forever. To be clear, this was the power of the President to appoint people to tell farmers how much they could produce, and what it could be sold for. To belabor the obvious, this is a Command/Planned/socialist/Fascist conception of the role of the government. Adn to be clear, when I say Fascist, there were many then who admired Benito Mussollini and longed to be able to end economic freedom in the United States. And for some number of years they were successful.
To the point, though, what we have today that we did not have then was the evidence of the past, and the capacity to get messages out across wide populations quickly, and accurately.
I would submit there is an informational equivalent to Gresham’s Law, which stipulates that bad money drives out good money. Given a choice between gold coins–which have worth both from the printing on them, and from the gold in them–and paper money which could be doubled easily in a week or two, most people opt to keep the coins, and circulate the paper.
Likewise, I believe that good information, when allowed to circulate, will drive out bad information. Stupidity loses to intelligence, in the end, if intelligence is allowed into the system. To the extent conservatives–which I prefer to call Liberals, but which seems to confuse people who don’t read history–are right, then, the advantage is to us.
Most people can readily grasp the basic facts, if allowed to. As Dave Ramsey roughly put it, we are a household making $58,000, spending $75,000, and $325,000 in debt. It does not take much brainpower to grasp this is an unsustainable condition, that Obamacare will make it worse, not better, and that no Democrats and too few Republicans possess the intestinal fortitude to confront this problem with sober calculation and decisiveness that is needed to prevent a wholesale disaster, which will hurt the poor and middle classes the worst, by far.
Black people fared horribly under FDR in the New Deal. Sharecroppers saw NO benefit from his policies. On the contrary, they were hurt. When a farmer is being paid to idle his land, there is no work for them to do. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid. The states in the South where they disproportionately lived got one third or less of the money parcelled out, simple because they always voted Democrat, and FDR didn’t need to pay them off to get their votes.
In the current climate, it is interesting to note that most trade unions back then refused to accept black people. If you add to this that FDR made unionization compulsory in many projects, and made it impossible for people to offer competitive labor bids at lower rates of pay, you can readily see that most blacks were in effect forced out of the New Deal entirely. Most Democrats back then were blatant racists, though, so that is scarcely surprising.
Given the recent lionization of Robert Byrd, one wonders why we shouldn’t continue to view that as the case. As the party of machine politics, Democrats are fine with buying votes, but they seem not to care who they hurt doing it, provided they can duck the responsibility they bear.
Bottom line: I see reason to think that many of the new class of Republicans will have the confidence to stick to their guns (this is a metaphor, folks, referring to the tendencies of cowards to abandon their posts when under both figurative and literal assualt).
They can count on high profile backing from nationally syndicated professional talkers, and the organizing capabilities the internet enables. This will prove, I think, an important source of comfort, and hopefully following courage.
Edit: the book is “FDR’s Folly”. I find his analysis somewhat deficient, but his detailing of the people and policies immensely useful. It is yeoman work.
I own the first three X-Men movies (the last one was a bit too violent for me), and probably watch one of them quarterly or so. I watched X-Men 3 Sunday night.
Anyway, I got to thinking about it, and what if you had a mutant whose power was supreme and unconditional love? I experienced it in a dream once, from a man I knew from books, and who I believe had just passed on. He was just there, and there was this amazing radiance coming from him of unconditional acceptance. No matter who I was or had been, the energy would have found a way to connect with me, and comfort me. There were no strings. He had no need to do anything but shine. You cannot help but be strengthened by such an experience.
Given a strong enough radiance, I think you could heal any emotional wound. You could erase the needs for hate. Hate has survival value. It is tactically useful, given deficient strategy. However, if the need for it is erased, then it, too, ought to fall away.
So our hero shows up, and suddenly everyone just wants to celebrate. Nobody wants to fight. This would make for an awful comic book, but it’s an interesting idea.
An interesting addendum to the basic idea is to ask why, if Jesus was the nuclear bomb equivalent of love, he was hated by so many. You can hate people who talk about love, but you cannot hate someone who gives it out in reality, freely, and completely. Love is home. That is where we all want to live. It is the answer to that clinging doubt about who we are and where we really ought to be. It is peace, and we all want peace, whether we admit it or not.
In my view this is perhaps the most compelling argument against the unique divinity of Christ. I have no reason to doubt he taught roughly what has come down to us (with a few strategic imbellishments along the way that helped the Church), or any reason to doubt he rose from the dead. People have been “resurrected” on many accounts even in the modern day. There is a medium out there, David Thompson, who many claim can do it even in our own day and time. I am a skeptic, which means I simply don’t know, but admit it is both possible, and may not be true.
I will add too a rant that I have approached at times, but I don’t think ever actually typed publicly. In my view it is sheer lunacy to believe that God–who created the universe–would have the need to get people to sacrifice his “son” so he could forgive them. Yes, you can call it a mystery. I call it bullshit, though. Please forgive me, but I find this idea deeply offensive both to the spirit of God in which I believe, and in the man Jesus Christ, who died and was reborn two millenia ago, and whose main teaching was Love.
Since all other sacrifices took place on the altars of the Temple, why would Jesus not have had his throat slit there? God could have told people to do that. Jesus could have told people that was what was supposed to be done.
What happened in my view was that the being and teachings of Jesus were so astonishingly original that when he was gone, his followers simply did not know how to classify them. So they fit them into a mold with which they were familiar, that of the sacrificial order. He was already dead (gone), so they didn’t actually have to kill him to make it work.
It is a source of consistent amazement to me, too, in the rare cases when I go to church that the priest holds up the wafer and says “This is the Body of Christ”. He holds up the cup and says “This is the blood of Christ”. Then everybody goes up there and eats the wafer and drinks the wine. Wars have been fought over whether or not Christ’s actual body enters into the wafer–if it is literal cannibalism–or if it is merely there in spirit.
In my view, and I’m just a wandering spirit with ideas I don’t try to tame, this is stupid, stupid, stupid. It misses the damn point. My two cents.
Communism is when that one group of sons of bitches is in charge. Fascism is when the other one is.
Capitalism is where you quit working for the son of a bitch and go into business for yourself.
I used to carry a pocket version of Sun Tzu’s Art of War with me everywhere. I’d open it at random places when I had a spare moment, and probably read it cover to cover ten to fifteen times.
It is considered a subtle insight that you can attack the will of your opponent. This is considered high level strategy. It was the essence of Ho Chi Minh’s carefully orchestrated sermons, consisting of lies about who he was, what his intentions were, and what the fate of the Vietnamese people would actually be if he and his seized the draconian control they so desperately longed for.
We LOST the Vietnam War when it was our to win. The Vietnamese did not win it, except to the extent their off-battlefield efforts softened up the will of the American people; and that of Communists generally softened up our minds.
Be that as it may, I would like to suggest the following continuum.
At bottom is physical conflict. The worst type of conflict is fixed positional warfare, perhaps best exemplified in prolonged seiges. Sun Tzu said he had seen poor commanders do things quickly, but never good ones slowly.
Next is logistical warfare, in which you try to deny your enemy what he needs physically to fight.
Next is diplomatic warfare, in which you try to prevent your enemy from strengthening himself through alliance. The Cold War was in large measure diplomatic warfare, which had to reduce to physical warfare at times so that the diplomats had credibility. You can hardly ask someone to ally themselves with you if you never come to the rescue of any of your current allies. They get all of the bad, and none of the good.
Next is psychological warfare. This is warfare by prevention. Deterrance through strength is psychological. People don’t even want to start with you. What the Vietnamese were able to do is convince the American people that a war they had already won was in fact lost, and that they were superhuman, never quit, and that we could only expect more death and destruction in what was after all just a civil war half a world away that had nothing to do with America or American interests.
One also reads at times of prolonged campaigns of strategic movement, in which two superior generals never see quite the right time to strike. I would argue this is psychological when it is strategic.
Finally, though, I would add two more levels, which are not discussed in texts on war. This is the point of this post.
The next level is eliminating the reasons the other person would have wanted to attack you in the first place. No more powerful tool for world peace has ever been invented than free trade and free market capitalism. We need to understand that European colonialism–and every form of imperialism going back to prehistory–had as its aim getting stuff through violence. You take over a country, enslave the workers, and suddenly you don’t have to pay for things. It seems like a good deal, until you get the bill for the “police”.
In Capitalism, everyone wins. You never sell a thing if it is not in your interest. Others do not have to compel you to hand it over (obviously this has been done, but that is not Capitalism) because you WANT to. You get something back. The system fosters innovation, economic growth, and rising middle classes.
Trade, then, is an extension of military strategy, and aims not at managing conflict, but at elevating it to a non-physical, and mutually beneficial sphere.
The final level is actively seeking peace through love. I have spoken often of love as an aggression, and this is what I mean. It is one thing for someone to not hate you, another to benefit economically from you, but another entirely for them to value you for who you are, and you them.
In the lowest levels, the world is filled with sharp knives, and slicing, hacking, and death. In the highest levels, it is filled with golden clouds, singing, and trust.
We are always moving. We cannot help this, and it only makes sense to choose our motion. Since you have to do something on this Earth, why not work to improve it? That is the role I envision for my conception of Goodness. It is aggressive. It is strategic. It is real, and I for one like it.
I will append that I talk about love sometimes, but do not want to leave the impression I am always a nice person. I’m a curmudgeonly misanthrope at times; a butthead in the vernacular. I get irritable, particularly with large burocracies and robots used to answer telephones.
Thus: please understand I have many miles to go myself, but I do have a direction, and hope I can influence you in a beneficial direction as well. Read what I have to say, think it over, and reinterpret it as you see fit. If you copy me you haven’t understood me at all. You can do better. I’m a jackass too. Let’s just be jackasses together.
This is an interesting topic. After what–60 years or so?–of “Fascist” equalling evil, it is worth noting that Fascism in its day had its advocates, as indeed Communism/Leninism does to this very day. To the point, the two are hard to distinguish, both in the intellectual mediocrity of their exponents, and the practical effects of the implementation of their ideas.
Look at this link. Hugh S. Johnson, Time Magazine Man of the Year for 1933. The reason I looked this up is that I read Benito Mussollini was under serious consideration for this “honor” that year.
In 1933 Roosevelt appointed Johnson to administer the National Recovery Administration (NRA). One author claims Johnson looked on Italian Fascist corporativism as a kind of model.[15] He distributed copies of a fascist tract called “The Corporate State” by one of Mussolini’s favorite economists, including giving one to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and asking her give copies to her cabinet
Here is the link, which won’t post right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Samuel_Johnson
Or consider this, from the book “The Philosophy of Fascism”, by Marco Palmieri (1936):
Economic initiatives cannot be left to the arbitrary decisions of private, individual interests. Open competition, if not wisely [!] directed and restricted, actually destroys wealth instead of creating it. . . The proper function of the State in the Fascist system is that of supervising, regulating and arbitrating the relationships of capital and labor, employers and employees, individuals and associations, private interests and national interests . . .More important than the production of wealth is its right distribution, distribution which must benefit in the best possible way all the classes of the nation, hence the nation itself. Private wealth belongs not only to the individual, but, in a symbolic sense, to the State as well.
Think about that, then watch this Michael Moore video.
Moore–and his fellow travellers–are in my view formally and with no exaggeration Fascists.
I will add that Mussollini was previously a Communist, in my understanding. He seems to have abandoned that not out of some principled sympathy for human rights, but rather because mythically it is hard to live without a nation or identity.
Fascism is simply Communism which retains a national sense of self. Both glorify imperialism (Communists call it “liberation”, since lying is what they do best); both see the role of the State as managing all interpersonal relations, economically and socially; and both see an autocratic leader or elite–who are “enlightened”–running the show forever.
This may be a bit fractured, but I’ll try and circle in the dark until it is likely mostly clear. Two parts, then a connection.
Part one, vegetarianism. I have had, if memory serves, 5 dreams at least in which it was more or less directly suggested to me that I become a vegetarian. I have had very lucid conversations with both a turkey and a fish, a pig for a friend, and been shown meat as death twice.
Yet, I am not a vegetarian. I was for two years many years ago, and I never felt healthy. I lack the discipline to do it right this time. In my considered, mildly erudite view, our bodies ARE in some respects machines, and they are machines programmed to eat meat. This is their natural condition. One can plainly see that when agriculture became the norm, people got shorter, less healthy, and seem to have lived shorter lives.
I don’t want to get into a discussion on diet though. Right or wrong, this is my belief. Now, I have a choice to make: do I heed the dreams, or do I heed my reason? My dreams tell me to abandon meat, and my reason tells me that I will be stronger, healthier and likely live longer with meat. I can justify either action. If I choose the former, I may be more spiritual. If I choose the latter I will be more vigorous and feel stronger, emotionally and physically.
Can we not posit that both options are partially wrong and partially right? If that is the case, I will be a “sinner” no matter what I do.
Here is a larger context: the only large scale, intentional experiment in long term vegetarianism I know of is in India. Specifically, it is integral to the doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence, which is part and parcel of most Hindu belief systems (and there are quite a few). As one goes up in caste, the more is one expected to abstain from all meat, and even spices thought to cloud the mind. The Brahmin caste–varna–is of course at the top of the pecking order.
Here is the interesting thing: this caste has presided over the subjugation through culture of countless billions of people over the last 2,500 years or more. There are formally four castes–varnas (colors, if I’m not mistaken)–but there have apparently always been people who did not even fit into that system, who were by design and tradition OUTSIDE the social system, who could not be members of the community. Such people were held in contempt, and higher caste people could, did, and probably still do abuse them when the spirit takes them.
Is this just and right? Has vegetarianism solved the problem of violence, actually, or does it exist simultaneously with violence expressed in an unjust social order? One story that made an impression on me was of a very talented archer, who could hit anything from anywhere, having his thumb cut off because only the Warrior caste was allowed to shoot bows. If I recall, this was a teaching story, in which he of course realized that he had been wrong to be so bold in the first place, and only got what he deserved.
What of cows who live their entire lives in comfortable pastures, protected from wolves, and who are slaughtered humanely? They were going to die sooner or later anyway, and they would not have lived at all if not for their ability to provide good quality protein to humans. We all die: they will have their revenge in the end. None of us endure forever, at least on Earth.
George Bernard Shaw, who came up with the idea of Zyklon B, and Adolph Hitler, who put it to use, were both vegetarians, as I understand it. Which is greater, the sin of eating meat; or the sin of dreaming of mass murder of humans? Are cows equal to people? I don’t know and I don’t care. For my purposes, they are stupid animals that taste good when they are roasted. I may learn differently someday.
My point here is that I am a sinner. I was going to be a sinner one way or the other, and in my view I am slightly less a sinner if I pursue what I view as the pathway towards health and vigor. I may be wrong. In my view, there is no perfect answer to this question, but a decision nonetheless has to be made.
This leads me to what I will call “The Teacher’s Dilemna”. I don’t have the faintest idea if anyone will read this; for me, it doesn’t matter, since the point of writing is to figure things out that were latent by making them manifest. I have broad ideas, but don’t sort out the details–really the details don’t pop out–until I start typing.
But let us say that somebody out there thinks I’m smart. If I say it, they listen to me. I want this and I don’t want it. I want it, if what I said was actually smart; but I realize full well that I am stupid, intemperate, impatient, and probably just plain childish sometimes, and I don’t want anybody mimicking that.
How to tell the difference? This is the question. Practically, what happens is that a teacher will emerge who teaches a system. Somehow, somewhere, the Ten Commandments appeared in the Jewish people. This is a system. There are dozens or hundreds of additional commandments in the Torah.
So the Jewish people have this outline, this behavioral and cognitive template, and now they can say valid teachers teach this template, and invalid teachers don’t. This is a sustainable system, that can be replicated across many generations, and which can only be changed gradually, such that very few people see the changes that are happening, and which are normally forced by circumstance. It’s hard to say, but it seems likely that if the Romans had not conquered Israel and destroyed the (2nd, I think?) Temple, then priests might still be slitting the throats of goats on altars. They got kicked out, though.
To be clear, as I understand the matter, the method of repentance, T’Shuvah, which had literally previously involved sacrifice, had to be internalized, since they no longer had a place to ceremonially kill goats. They evolved, but not by choice.
But in a system which only recognizes congruence with the past, how is progress possible? It isn’t. It really isn’t. Conservatism is only progressive when one considers that the ideas of leftists and social radicals make things worse by contrast. This makes staying still effectively forward progress, but it is still not optimal. I discussed this in the last month or two on a post called, I think, “The Turtle, the Rabbit, and Sleepy the Dwarf”.
Useful teachers innovate. They have large dreams, which they work to implement in practical plans. But the process of creation requires a certain “distance”, shall we say, from the rules. It requires you to be able to imagine existence outside of what has always been. It is a chaotic system. It is unstable. It requires you to be able to make jokes about the system, to tease, to ruffle the feathers of others. It requires irony, and the ability to laugh.
In a system which is too tight–and I have several books on the engineering consequences of what are called “tightly bound systems”–you can’t do this. You get shut up. You get shot.
When you think of Muslims, or certain types of Jews and Christians, do you see laughter? Do you see any capacity for irony? They have a belief system in which they MUST do certain things, and not do others, or they face Hell for all eternity. That is a large burden. Failure is not an option, so fear must rule every day. Is that not true? Is fear not the inevitable, and unavoidable consequence of making failure utterly and completely an end of everything, which cannot be corrected in any way?
Is fear not the consequence of believing that your every last act is measured, and weighed, and counted? That there is a ledger counting every last thought, every last action, every last little, bitty thing you did in a long life?
Do you believe successes are few, and failures many? I don’t. That is not my metaphysics. If you can get some space in a religion, step back from it, and ask questions like: “what patterns can we get from actually observable things today”, then you can slowly integrate the scientific method into religious belief. None of this requires renouncing your identity, but I think just from a psychological perspective it is obvious that fearful people make lousy human beings, and one would think that the point of religion is to help people become better people, to progress and grow.
Oh, that should do. Hopefully this makes sense. I’m going to read a bit then go to bed.