Moderates United

The overwhelming bulk of the essays I’ve published were written in
one day.  Once I’m ready, I can easily write thirty pages in a day. 
Well, with difficulty and cognitive hangover, but I can get it done.  As
part of my new Whale mode, though, I’ve decided to reject that way of
doing things, what I have called “spasmodicism”.  I spent 3 hours
writing what follows, but now have had enough, and will come at it again
in a day or two.  I’ve tried to scale this mountain before, and not
made it.  This time, I feel I will.  Part of my problem is that if the
goal is helping people reframe things in fundamentally new things, I
have to explain basic elements that are foreign to them, like how
business works.  This necessitates a comprehensive, and thus long,
approach.  The final product will likely run to 20-30 pages, but
hopefully be USEFUL.  My target is people who write for a living.


To be clear, Romney and Ryan have very good options open to them as
to what to replace Obamacare with.  If we accept that the government
should take on preexisting cases, we should put them on Medicaid, rather
than corrupt our entire system; we should require all States to allow
all carriers to sell in their jurisdiction; and require all States to
allow all carriers to offer Major Medical/Catastrophic health insurance
directly to individuals, as opposed to rationing access solely to those
employed by companies ABLE to buy them insurance.


Further, we should resist the call to expand Medicaid, since it is
ALREADY bankrupt.  It will only get worse.  I spent an hour reading a
comprehensive summary of Obamacare, and how they claim to be able to pay
for it, and it amounts to a vast expansion of subsidies and hand-outs,
with NO chance that the taxes they will be levying will pay for even a
fraction of them.  The very possibility should have been laughed out of
Congress.


Anyway, here it is: 

As one obvious
example, roughly half of Americans do not have the ability to buy insurance
directly from the carrier.  If you live
in, say, California or New York, you MUST get the insurance through your
employer.  Why? You buy car insurance
directly.  You buy life insurance
directly.  You buy home-owners insurance
directly.

Guns are a tool, not different in principle from a screwdriver, whose existence in effect grants that some people become insane and want to hurt others.

“Gun” violence is social.  It exists in the social field.  For a gun to be used violently, there must be a violent person who owns it.  They don’t shoot themselves.

When we see the phrase, therefore, “gun violence”, what we need to read is “violence”.  The problem is that people want to shoot one another, not the method they choose.  I would submit that the countries with both very low crime rates and strong gun controls are peaceful because they are peaceful, because their social web is largely intact, and not because guns are not available. 

To be clear, I have read of people killing 10 or 20 people with knives in Japan, China, and elsewhere.  Knife crime is currently a huge problem in the UK.  The problem is that people are disenfranchised, alienated, hopeless, and taught by the media to express their rage through externally directed violence.

If we are going to have conferences, this needs to be the topic. It is the height of unawareness that people like the Weinstein’s would make movies like Pulp Fiction, and simultaneously support gun control.

Politically, the 2nd Amendment was CLEARLY intended to be a part of the checks and balances built into our Constitution.  Private gun ownership prevents government monopoly on the effective use of force.

The history of weapon control is very long.  Our Founding Fathers looked to bans on guns in England in more repressive periods of its history.  One could equally look to the bans on sword ownership in Islamic nations, for the Dhimmis, or in feudal Japan.  No government that is oppressive wants the oppressed to be anything but passive and unarmed.

The essence of Conservatism in this country, or at least what should be, is Liberalism, the creed of those who wrote our Constitution, who wanted to maximize freedom within a structure that would not devolve into anarchy and renewed tyranny (as indeed happened with the French, whose revolution was NOT Liberal).  This does involve a government, but one which was intended to be as localized as possible, and to have many restrictions on its behavior.  Logically, the freer the government, the less free the people.  A government with no checks on it is totalitarian.

The goal is generalized felicity: life at a rock bottom minimum; liberty up to the point of interfering with that of others; and an order organized around the pursuit of happiness, which was understood largely in moral terms. 

The means is generalized accurate connection of means and ends; efficiency; accurate, actionable information, and the will do act on it.  As I have said before, the three elements in getting things done are good information, motivation, and physical capacity.

The essence of the Liberal creed is the self organizing system.  The most basic perceptual self organizing system is the individual human consciousness.  What we want, then, is as many individuals as possible to be well informed, motivated, and empowered.

Imagine waves of something undefinable sweeping over a landscape–motion plus time–and leaving patterns in its wake.  The extent of the qualitative landscape, the latent order, will be revealed by how complex and rich the patterns are.  The extent of the possible development of latent order is a function of freedom, of the possibility of doing things in many different ways, according to individual considerations.

What socialism does is block self organization.  It blocks generalized individual perceptions.  It blocks progress.  Now, to be clear, charity is not socialism.  Having groups and entities devoted to helping back up those who fall is not socialism.

One might term socialism, of say the North European sort, an oligarchy of experts.  In Sweden, say, it seems to me the reality of Global Warming is taken for granted.  The benevolence of the UN is taken for granted.  The absolute truth of materialistic evolution is largely taken for granted.  This is because their system teaches two things: reverence for the religion of science, whose apostles have Ph.D’s, and content developed by these apostles.

Education provides two things: motivation and information.  Since these are HUGELY important in social self organization, homogenization of content makes for less rich structures, and less accurate perception, in my view.  This is why in our own system the Federal Government was very consciously left with NO say in education.  It is abundantly clear to me that they considered it self evident that God would be mentioned in most classrooms, and considered this beneficial.

Oi.  I’m not quite pulling this all together.  Consider this an essay fragment,

must be able to integrate scribbling.  Most don’t: that is why I read so little philosophy.

Today I saw a large bird carrying what looked like a snake in its mouth.  My oldest and I both saw it.  It was long and curved, and I could see no reason to carry a stick that long, and it was an unusual shape for a stick, hanging down on both sides.  In any event, I decided to take it as a sign of something, in my current state of mind, which in part involves trying to integrate some deep emotional and–who knows?–maybe even spiritual realities.  I had felt for some reason a day or two ago that I should write more on these totems, but could not rationalize it as other than a bit of self absorption likely to be perceived as weird.

Well, fuck it: here we go.

The Garuda is the essence of speed and of ferocity.  It hunts demons and snakes.  It hunts darkness and destroys it.  It feels like a bird, but it is essentially formless.  By the time a target sees it out of the corner of its eye, it is far too late.  To a great extent it is invisible, and felt only by the emotions it produces, particularly that of fear in those it targets. It is not cruel, but an aspect of the justice of this world, one hated by those who refuse to obey the laws they understand but do not respect.

It is portrayed by the Tibetans as soaring in the sky, carrying a snake.  Perhaps if I want to be mystical, this was a sign that the snake has been caught.

The whale and dog are both snow white.  The whale symbolizes deep joy, tenderness, strength, and wisdom.  It is patient and kind.

The dog is relentlessly curious.  It wants to know everything about everyone and everything.  It is in constant movement, and really enjoys the quest of learning, knowing, doing.

There you go. I can check that off the list.

I found this in my notes, looking for something else.  I have no idea if I ever posted it, but if not, here it is:

 
What do you believe?  It is a simple enough question.

Negative emotions are natural, but this does not mean that we need hold on to them, or that they need influence our general emotional state in the slightest.  I think–and this has happened to me–that negative emotion–say anger– can flow up the way it does, and if you don’t resist it, just keep going into the sky.  You let it roll, and once it arrived, it realized it had nothing to do, and so left again.  There emotions are there to protect us, and if we don’t need protecting–a fact we signify by greeting them as friends–their work is done.

This is the essence of the spiritual insight when it comes to emotions: that you can be free of them by ACCEPTING them.  So often I think people get this picture of some sanctified yogi or Buddha, always serene, always smiling, and think they can get there by simply focusing on positive things.  To some extent this is true, but to some extent it is like arguing you can get healthy by eating good foods and never crapping them out.  For my part, I think there is a cycle there that is best understood and accepted.

Some of the phoniest people you meet will be “sincere” students of spirituality.  What they are trying to do, in many cases, is pretend they don’t feel like strangling people sometimes, and to the extent they repress this tendency they were born with, they actually become less spontaneous, less open, and less genuinely spiritual.

It is my personal belief that when we die all our illusions fall away, and we are forced to see ourselves as we REALLY are, and are utterly unable to look away.  Given this, it is logical to begin that process of truth telling NOW.  In support of this basic idea, I often act as if people can read my mind, and it is my belief that in some future state they will be able to.  That attitude in part informs what I write here.  I hold little to nothing back.

I can’t resist adding, actually, that the “confessional” is also a very old trick, used to great effect by hucksters like Rousseau.  Do not allow your emotions to be bamboozled.  Look at the world through your own eyes, and no one else’s.  Use what you can, and fuck the rest.

When you see this “kill the Buddha” theme, that is what is intended.  Most people recite it by rote, though, since most people are uncomfortable with the solitude and determination that attend actually trying to see things in-dependently.

One of the most primal adaptations is with gravity.  We all must learn how to organize our neuromuscular structures in a world literally pulling us down.  Moshe Feldenkrais has written a lot about this.

Another adaptation is learning what emotions we are going to express, and how.  This is a longer term process, and an interesting one.  I think we all need to be able to express anger, horror, shock, sadness and even violence.  If you are not allowed to do so within your social field openly, they come to be expressed in ways which disguise their true nature.  They become lies, in other words, and all lies are degradations by definition of the truth, and hence of accurate perception.

Out of an understandable need to avoid emotional pain, I think most of develop views of ourselves as largely lacking in the so-called negative emotions.  When we feel anger, it is RIGHTEOUS anger.  When we feel hate, it is RIGHTEOUS hate.  Given that framing, it is obvious why cognitive activities, intellectual activities, would serve the purpose of emotional lying so well.

But lying is lying.  Anyone who has not read Paul Johnson’s excellent book Intellectuals should.  Ayn Rand calls the sorts of people he describes “altruists”, but of course they are nothing of the sort, outside of their rhetoric.  They are vicious thieves, with talents for rhetoric.

It has long been a staple belief of mine that people let their true selves out when drinking.  Personally, it has been my practice for the last year or so to let emotions out relatively unmolested, and see what flows out.  More often than I would like, anger–petulent anger–comes out, cowardice, self deceptiveness, aggression, and other negatives.  I let them go, say CRAP, and try to remember what their genesis felt like, so I can predict those waves in the future.

My goal is an unconscious that perfectly supports my goals, which is ALWAYS on the lookout for more and better perceptions, more and better ways of doing things, and absolute resolution.  As things stand, it often plays tricks on me.  I have a great deal of work to do.

I will point out, though, that it is generally precisely those people who think they have NO work to do who are most clueless, and most in the thrall of primal and ugly emotions.  For those who self describe as “intellectual” I would argue it is virtually ALL of them.

And this applies even for people who are “nice”.  Being nice is a negative attribute of not causing offense, and being relatively aware socially.  What you will find, in pushing people who are “nice”, is that they get VERY angry, VERY easily, since they are used to a world devoid of conflict.  People who have been through the ringer are hard to offend, and thus much easier to do useful work with.

 Posted here: http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/forum/

As I think about this, I would add another criticism.  Inherently and by
design, reducing the money in circulation will be deflationary.  As
banks “extinguish” money created ex nihilo, the value of money remaining
out and about will increase.  This means that for all loans on the
books at every bank the actual cost of repaying them will rise
steadily. 

Let us say, for example, that my monthly mortgage is
1000 pounds, for simplicity.  I work 60 hours to make that much money. 
Five years into this process, I may need to work 80 or 100 hours to make
that payment, for the simple reason that as buying power increases,
wages will likely decrease.

It is a truism that inflation helps
borrowers, a truism that, as you all have well pointed out, benefits
banks as well by disguising the fact that the money they are supposedly
“losing” as the money loses value was created from scratch in the first
place.  Any return on nothing is infinite.

The converse, though,
is clearly true as well, and part of the reason that “deflation” per se
is so widely feared.  It is why even as intelligent an economist as
Milton Friedman called for essentially the same thing being called for
here, which is to say moderate inflation, on the order of 3% or so.  In
so doing, he was more or less drawing a lesson from history, with which
he was more familiar than virtually anyone.

But that history has
been uniformly one of fractional reserve banking, central banks, and all
the problems that go with it.  What we need, in my view, is a
Capitalist Revolution, of the sort I have proposed. 

We see any
number of wide eyed fanatics calling for the subversion of our economic
order in favor of one that is supposedly “rational”, being run, as it
will, by supposed elites, who will be well educated by books, and
educated not at all by life.  Such experiments invariably end in the
eradication of basic freedoms of innovation, economic output, and even
speech and movement.  Since freedom is necessary for the development of
coherent moral structures, socialism is inherently a vicious and morally
vacuous ideology.

My proposal is radical. I grant that.  But it
is logical, and it offers the potential for large change, generalized
social benefits, and INCREASES in freedom and self determination, all
while protecting the weak.  I will submit it again:
http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

I have two children, both daughters.  I don’t talk about them because I have a quasi “evil eye” feeling about mentioning them.  Today it feels right to do so, for whatever reason.

I picked my oldest up this afternoon from practice, and she mentioned that a teammate had said she “sounds like a whale”, and that she needs to get in touch with her “whaleness”.  I had literally just written the last post.  Now, I have never accused anyone of sounding like a whale, or heard someone accused of sounding like a whale.  That that would happen just then is remarkable.

As I ponder it, I connect with her on the whale level, and with my youngest on the dog level, which is my third “totem”.  Perhaps she is radiating some of the energy I am feeling.  Hard to say.

I do want to be clear what I am saying, though: I am calling the election for Romney, and the Republicans generally, even though they may not retake the Senate.  The fight has moved into a different phase, one which will require extreme diligence and continued exertion, but a different kind of exertion, that of patient education.  The extreme danger has passed, I feel, although of course I have been wrong before.  That is my gut instinct, though, and the one I am going with.