Moderates United

I would like to add an analytical category between Sybaritic Leftism and Cultural Sadeism: to whit, Soft Sadism.

We hear this term “codependent”. That means that one person is seriously dysfunctional, but that their dysfunctions are enabled, facilitated, allowed to continue without consequence by, someone else.

That person, too, is mad.

I see socialists, and they NEED the poor. The poor are their raison d’etre. Without the poor (oppressed; somehow disenfranchised in reality, or more commonly plausibly enough that the facts can be created to support this need), they have nothing to do.

This is a form of cruelty. If you need me to suffer to feel alright about yourself, you are an idiot, and a mild sadist. You don’t realize that you want me to not succeed, consciously, but it is there all the same.

That is why Sade is so “liberating” for many leftists: he says what they come to feel, that the sense of power is itself liberating in some ways, and that you need no longer even PRETEND to care about others.

If the Left gave a flying fuck about the poor of Detroit, Detroit would not be Detroit. But this is, of course, a counterfactual statement. What they really care about is power, and there is no extent of OTHERS suffering they are not willing to countenance to get and keep it.

Suffering lays as a blanket keeping the wicked warm in the cold winters of failed worlds.

As I say often, this is my think out loud blog. I can and do change my mind. That bit of poetic metaphor is not far off, though. The kings of old who did so much to oppress the poor of their lands are not so very different than the kings of Detroit City Hall, who live well, without doing ANYTHING to help the plight of their subjects. That their subjects continue to vote them in is testament to their powers of deception and guile, and, of course, naked corruption.

We’ll be at well over a 100 stories on unsustantiABLE allegations by women who are presumably partisan Democrats soon. Yet most people don’t know the names Rezko, Ayers, or what Obama’s preacher for all those long years was saying quite openly, and in a manner he cannot fail to have heard or understood.

To the point here, if Herman Cain had issued the “birth certificate” that Obama has, he would have been torn to shred. The EVIDENCE of forgery is present. The EVIDENCE of Cain’s misdoing is not present.

In any event, would it not be interesting to redo the posted certificate, to the same level of precision, with Buckwheat listed as his father, and Rosa Luxemburg as his mother? Or some other combination?

The extent of media complicity is truly breathtaking. We are borrowing $125 BILLION a MONTH, and they and their children will suffer the same fate the rest of us non-rich will when our economy collapses. Nothing good will happen, but for the 1% which includes both the rich and the government bureaucrats who grant them their power and immunity from scrutiny.

Keep in mind that “individual” means “Undividable”.

Watched Die Hard 4, I guess it is, when hackers take over the country. Young techy dude asks McClain: Why are you doing this? Mclain (net, paraphrased): “because the work needs to be done, and it isn’t getting done. Trust me, I have better things to do, but I’ll be damned if I walk away from the responsibilities just dropped on me.”

Can there be any better summary of the benefits of liberty, as combined with an accurate assumption of generalized personal responsibility? An attack of any sort comes anywhere. Local people organize, and respond, without external direction or prompting. They understand a problem exists, that it needs to be solved, and that the solution falls first to them.

Our system WORKS, if the people composing it understand the value of being free.

If you lack a belief in the capacity of all of us for progressively greater moral perfection, as seen in models (spiritual or religious) whose lines continue well past our physical deaths, then it is hard build a very large space for your life, in my view. To be able to grow–note, not necessarily to do so consciously, but to imagine it as possible–is important for optimal psychological health.

With Freud we see the sum total of human life reduced, in the end, to instincts no different in principle than those of squirrels. With Ayn Rand, the fundamental unit of human experience is elevated to the principle, but for all that retains a certain continuity with concept that to be is inherently to be selfish. For Freud, the point of life was self replication through sexuality. For Rand (to be clear, I have not read her in depth, but rather summaries of her work, which seemingly proceeds quite rationally from her basic premises; I have also spent a lot of time watching the behavior of her fans, which is interesting), it seems to me to be self replication through creative, nonsexual output. Both have always seemed constrained to me. I have not read Rand for the simple reason that I do not share her premises, so no matter how wonderful the edifice she builds on them, I will not be able to inhabit it.

People lacking an individual moral future, a clear path towards moral [I will note, too, that I differentiate this from psychological improvement, since historically improvement consisted mainly in the remediation of dysfunction; this has changed in recent years with the advent of “Positive Psychology”, but the system itself still FEELS constrained. This may be unhelpfully uncharitable, so I am noting my subjectivity on this topic] growth, are disproportionately affected by calls for SOCIAL perfection.

In a very real sense, the choice between Liberalism and Socialism/Fascism/Communism is between the notion of individual growth and eventual perfectability, and the rejection of that notion, by, to be clear, individuals.

There is no “Society”. This is a reification. There ARE individuals, who are always and necessarily the locus of decision making, and thus the logical center of moral improvement. You cannot improve a “Society”, without improving the behavior of the individuals. Do they stop to help you when you break down on the highway? Are they honest? Can you leave your door unlocked? Are they intelligent, erudite, and principled? All of these traits can ONLY be expressed by individuals. The “society” is a demographic, statistical abstraction from countable individual behavioral acts.

“Society” is a creation of the intellectuals, who are little able to differentiate between their fantasy lands between their ears, and actual human beings. In general–and Obama is a great example of this–they are utterly lacking in empathy, because they see individuals as small cogs in a large machine, and not as intrinsically valuable on their own. They see no spark of God anywhere.

When I was in Europe as an exchange student, the graffito (I think that is right) “No Future” was commonly seen. Now, this was during the period of Reagan and the end of the Cold War, when many of us feared a large scale nuclear war. The forests of Europe were seemingly dying. Many feared (in my continuing view, irrationally) nuclear power. The list was long.

But at root, it has long seemed to me that what they were really referring to was purpose. “No future” could as easily have translated to “no purpose” and “why live?” Would the best and brightest have found solace in their institutions of acculturation, which for most of them were their family and school? Not if their family was not religious. Only in socialism could they find that solace, and then only by renouncing their individual identity, for submersion in a whole LESS than the sum of the parts.

This situation is unacceptable, and unsustainable. If we are to worry about any environment, I think our moral environment is the most important, as taking care of that will most reliably lead to taking care of our physical environment. Many if not most of the most “pressing” environmental concerns–such as “global warming”–are, properly understood, efforts to express coherent morality in a condition in which that is the only means by which to do so conceivable within that person’s moral and ontological world.

This is the point of “Goodness Movement”. I have not solved all the problems of the human race. You have to solve your own problems, you ridiculous human being. So do I, and I am ridiculous, too, in my own way.

Here is the thing: if you move forward daily, relying on certain core principles, and helpful metaphysical beliefs (the interconnectedness of life and the survival of death are both excellent ones, and in my view the most empirically defensible ones), then you will never get too far off course. If you want to reach the North Pole, and keep moving, always staying within 5 degrees of the proper direction, you will get there eventually.

This quote is useful on many levels: Our task is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Thomas Carlyle.

Look around you. Are you caring for your children properly? Your spouse? Your parents? Your community? Are you educating yourself? Are you taking time in silence to feel what you really feel, and choose more carefully how you behave, upon the basis of principles that are important to you?

My confidence is complete that with enough people of goodwill–which I define very broadly as being a genuinely nice person–things will work out. Just avoid both complacency and pessimism. “Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now”, as TR said approximately. “Then do it again”, which I said. “And again.” Me again.

See how that works?

I am continuing to listen to Dr. Goldberg’s Teaching Company series on “Listening to Great Music”. Of course, he has difficulty saying too many nice things about the music of Mozart. What I found interesting is that he was very sickly all his life, and that he died at age 36 or so, of causes that are still undetermined. But he virtually every disease that you could get in his day and age along the way, including smallpox, which permanently disfigured his face.

He had major father issues. His father was very demanding, and in the end he had to run away from him. I wonder if his musical output, prodigious at substantially all times after perhaps age 20, was his version of escape. I wonder if he learned to use his will to create beautiful places he could not find in his own life.

As I see it, you can use will for creativity. Will, per se, does not create, but what you can do is clear a figurative, imaginative space, and wait patiently for it to be populated, with ideas that seep up from the ground. The trick is keeping the space pristine long enough for this to happen. This is something, I feel, that Mozart did well. In his own words he “wrote music like cows piss”. It did not feel hard to him, but I wonder if that was because that exercise of his will was habitual, and necessary to maintain any semblance of psychological equilibrium

Random musings. Time for bed.

And calling them “Obamaville’s”. These are his people. They are the radical losers disconnected from common civility and decency, pragmatic problem solving skills, and the way of life of most ordinary people the world over, including most Americans. They are rudderless people who, without anger, have no purpose to their lives at all.

OF COURSE violence will happen. The entire concept–that of denying the use of a public space to any but fellow travellers–is in its very foundation violent, being intended to limit the civil rights of others, while preaching loudly about the importance of civil rights.

As I say often, it would be humorous, if these people really didn’t want to hurt people.

Hell, my experience in life is that everything is harder and takes longer than you think it will. You can normally count on this by figuring how long you think something will take, then add a third. That third will often save your ass.

As far as market readjustments following a universal revaluation, the more realistic timeline is six months to a year. This is something like a preventive surgery to eradicate a tumor, and it takes time to recover.

Still, I think my logic is sound. We let the actual people do what the banks do for themselves all the time.

In its essence, it is LARGE inflation, followed immediately by LARGE deflation. It is treating money as the marker it is, but making sure all the coins fall in the right slots.

Now, the best way to do this would be just to do it. Don’t announce it: just do it. That won’t happen here, of course, so we need to think through some details. It literally does not matter if we even change how the physical dollar looks. Most money is 1’s and 0’s anyway, and that is where the inflation and deflation happens.

Let’s think this through, though. The day is announced, and comes. For simplicity a national holiday is declared. All debts are paid in full. All banks are fully capitalized (in fairness, all the major Federal Reserve banks should probably have their collective assets seized; for pragmatic purposes, though, I am willing to let their ill gotten wealth stand, provided the system they used to get it is ended). Your credit card bill is gone. Your mortgage is gone. Our national debt is gone. Nobody owes anybody anything. The banks are full of money, and you now have more available cash.

What happens? What happens to that $500 you have in the bank in savings? We just quadrupled the amount of money in circulation. Now, the money the banks loaned was by and large created ex nihilo. When you get a loan, you pay it out. To build a house you pay carpenters and plumbers, who spend that money. When you pay the bank back, though, you take an equivalent amount of money, plus interest, OUT of circulation, negating its inflationary effect. [note, stuff like this is why it is so hard to measure “inflation”, which is a very slippery concept]. I just paid the bank back for you, without taking it out of circulation. This means the inflationary effect remains.

In concept I have Dollar One, and Dollar Two. Dollar Two is worth, say, 10 of Dollar One, after our money printing is done. What seems to make the most sense is that by a feat of accounting magic, your $500 is simply converted from Dollar One to Dollar Two. We get professional, actually competent, economists to estimate how this should work.

The day comes, and there will be uncertainty. Coffee might be priced anywhere from $1/cup to $50/cut, because people just don’t know. Your home might have been worth $250,000 of Dollar One, but with Dollar Two you just can’t be sure, until people start buying and selling again.

This is, however, the beauty of free markets: even when disrupted, they are self stabilizing. Within a week or so, I would expect most of the uncertainty to be gone. It may be that the price of your home falls to $125,000, but this will also mean that the buying power of the dollar has doubled, meaning the price means nothing at all. All of this can be sorted out in countless individual transactions, unhindered by the government.

I think some small country can make this work. Do you suffer through decades of failure, only to fail more, or try something bold and untried?

I would suggest this for the Greeks, but they don’t have a central bank, and are in any event too irresponsible not to wind up in the same place 10 years down the road.

What would it take to get something like my proposal passed?

We could elect Ron Paul, but I don’t think even that would do it. He hasn’t proposed anything like what I have, to my knowledge, and many people think he’s nuts for even opposing the Fed. He would get it audited, for sure, which would be a very good thing. They have made many people very rich, and many of them not even Americans (as if it really matters; they are a class of their own), at the expense of the rest of us.

Here is what I would like to see: some country, say Brazil or Jamaica or someone else, should just use their central bank to write checks to all their creditors, declare themselves debt-free, then revalue their currency. This is all Weimar Germany did (although they didn’t get their war reparations paid: since they were printing literal paper money, they could not write checks).

You get long term inflation in places like Zimbabwe for the simple reason that the leaders spend more than they make constantly. If you pay off your bills, you cannot immediately go back to doing the same things. You must pay them off, then have a government that is the right size for the tax base. What I am proposing is a get rich slow scheme. Those are the sustainable ones.

There is little difference between what I am proposing and a default, except that my proposal is much cleaner. No one can say you failed to pay your bills. But for this to work, the follow up responsibility has to be there. Bankrupt nations like Greece can default. They can not pay their bills, but the cost will be that nobody will lend them money again. They have to be able to live with this outcome, and plainly they are not. They want their cake and to eat it too. Everyone recognizes this, so it is foolish to assume that the debacle will end prior to Greece being expelled from the EU.

The fundamental problem with my idea, for much of the developing world, is that the rulers rule by appealing to the greed of ordinary people. They say they can take from the rich, and share, but of course this never works. Hugo Chavez has caused tremendous amounts of wealth–and the talents it represented–to leave the country, and ordinary Venezuelans are in fact much worse off for it.

As I have said a number of times, salt water can slake anyone’s thirst, for a time. But those who drink it do not live long.

Still, I hope there is a nation out there led well enough, and populated by sufficiently mature and sober people that they can and will pull this off. In its essence, this is a very simple idea. It takes the logic of the system and applies it to the problem of creating generalized wealth, rather than wealth shared among a very few.

As I think about it, I think Cain should play the race card,which I am here going to define as speaking directly to matters of race for political benefit. Specifically, He should write a speech directed at black people. In it, he should ask them: what has any Democrat ever done for you? Is this Hope thing working for you? Many people thought Obama was going to pay their mortgages, and even buy their gas for them. He of course did nothing to discourage them from this misconception.

These people are bitterly disappointed. They know they were used and lied to. Expectations were set higher than was remotely possible. Always, every year, every election, Democrats portray themselves as the champions of African Americans, but their effects are horrible. Is Philadelphia a kind and gentle city because of all the social services, and “non-racist” policies of the Demorats? Of course not.

He needs to point that the people working at the Equal Opportunity Administration, or whatever it is called, make $70,000 a year and up, with great benefits. How much of that flows to the people supposedly protected by them? None.

Black people don’t need rhetoric: they need good paying jobs. And Cain could attack this directly. What about federal tax CREDITS for corporations that create jobs in zip codes designated by their poverty rate?

He needs to tell them: look, you’ve been misled and lied to for 45 years. What do you have to show for voting Democrat? You need a job, don’t you? What has Obama done to make that happen?

Strategically, I am beginning to think that we should nominate Cain for the simple reason that most black people have quite literally never heard any rationale for voting Republican, and will give him a listen. This is why the Democrats are crapping in their pants right now. He is WAY more “black” than Obama. He grew up in a black home; Obama didn’t. He went to school with black people; Obama didn’t. He experienced real racism first hand; Obama didn’t. He has two black parents; Obama doesn’t. Cain want to Morehouse College (MLK’s Alma Mater), his wife Morris Brown College, both traditionally black colleges; Obama went to Columbia and his wife Princeton, both traditionally the destinations of pampered rich white people.

Further, Cain has not only had real, outcome oriented jobs, but has excelled at them. Obama literally has NO business experience; Cain has done little else.

This case is strong. Cain should make it. Do what the Democrats do and run it through some focus groups to work out the kinks, but I say go on the attack. That is normally my first impulse, but that is because if you are dictating the terms of the engagement, you are usually in control, and in control is a good place to be in any agonistic engagement.