Blogdom,
We all remember the television industry giving us infotainment, the marriage for purposes of fattening a visa account between the innocent maiden unexhumed Alice Information and the swaggering self-made businessman L. Otis Entertainment. Alice Information was mysteriously out there to be found, somewhat like Cain's wife in Genesis, who appears to arise outside the creation of Adam and Eve, the mother of all living things. Come along L. Otis Entertainment, who grabs her by the head and dances her round the fire 24/7. But this is not the place to discuss the nature of truth. Whatever she be and wherever she go, she sh0uld have stayed unmarried, if not necessarily virginal.
The television industry may as well cash out now and put the money in China, because infotainment has gone homespun. No one needs an evil media empire to conflate information about the world with entertainment to satisfy various layers of the soul anymore. However, Alice aint in a Kansas movie palace sleeping a night-table away from the silk-pajamaed Otis anymore. We're doing this now with the we-wide-web, on which there is no room for them, whoever they may be. No room for them means conflict now. Thus, inevitably, is born conflict-tainment, in which our own dilemmas are projected on the computer screen as embodied in very real conflicts we have little to do with, and instead of living out our own lives, we hope our side wins the war somewhere else, while we watch, spectators to the soul.
I hear the retort to the previous paragraph already; there is no other, it's a smear fiction. I have two firm defenses against this argument, which I consider ridiculous in this context. First, Alain Badiou, in his controversy with Emanuel Levinas the most eloquent and erudite defendant of the idea that the other doesn't exist, in his less read but more significant tome Being and Event states that "Every multiple contains some other" as a simple truth of set theory. Frankly, in the tome he was concerned with establishing the true philosophy, in the anti-Levinas essay, winning at all costs. (The same duality is seen in Socrates via Plato, I am informed by an expert and good friend). Second, as long as there is human conflict, there is an other whose desires are radically opposed to one's own. While the other is not a permanent installation of the over there like the Egyptology wing of the British Museum, there were multiple others yesterday, are many others today, and will be more tomorrow, till the last syllable of you know what. In philosophais one would say something like "l'alterite est un fait structurel permanent, mais l'autre particulier est passager." Bible-wise, Goy-el-goy (nation against nation) till the end of time. That's that; I am I am, he is he is.
When a conflict is somebody else's it is very difficult to tell what sort of conflict it actually is, and our social science universal categoricals like economic, political, ethnic, and religious, to present a partial list in descending order of sensefulness, can tell us nothing. They are deliberately and happily terms empty of particular nature, or eidetic terms (terms of kind) under which to classify unlike things by their surface manifestations. These I maintain to be choices of representation from an available body of idioms in the outside world radically separate from the actual mental world of man.
Concerning conflict, I find no eiditic analysis particularly more useful and convincing than that I learned in 4th grade reading class: there were there three types of conflict. The conflict of man against man, the conflict of man against himself, and the conflict of man against nature. In a conflict into which foreigners inject their passions, all possible variety of commentary can be found online, and I pick the random example of, oh, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict to demonstrate how effective this particular classificatory scheme actually is. In physical fact, as best I can ascertain it, there are as many conflicts as there are Israelis and Palestinians, but they are brought together under their flags to fight a war in the timeless fashion of physical reality from the ancient Pelloneus to contemporary Iraq. In cyberspace, though, a couple of motifs repeat, of which the eidetic analysis of my onetime teacher can help us see some varieties. The conflict of man against man, or regular Joe, regular Yussef, shows us regular dudes, or at least dudes regular by the standards of that veiled and mysterious middle east, who all want a good life and happen to be on opposite sides of fence. Then there is the conflict of man against himself, in which the two particular traditions and cultures involved must be similar because they all believe in only one god and chant a variant of the ancient name "Avram" and therefore, the conflict must be between a high and a base impulse played in one arbitrary "culture" among others real or possible (dem non-Abrahamitics), which I will call the Isradam or "struggle against man" conflict. Then there is the most peculiar conflict of all, which falls perfectly under the remaining category of my early teacher, the conflict of man against nature, or Israel/Philistine conflict. It does not concern the Palestinians, but some idea of a natural people pitted against an explicitly demarcated people celebrating all in human nature that may or may not be rotten but needs to sublimated and not speak its own name. Hilariously enough, the nature's people regrettably chosen nom de guerre happens to come from the ancient root just mentioned. The word "Palestine" comes from "Philistine", as surely and irrelevantly as the Swahili Barack and the Hebrew Baruch are closely related forms of "blessed" or "benedict." Spinoza is spinning in his Netherlandish grave.
Not only do I find the conflict-tainment an aesthetically repugnant form of life, but
it has the already manifest potential to dull or sensibilities for action wherever we happen to actually be, as we hope our aspirations will be won with blood--of somebody else and by somebody else. This here is not the "society of the spectacle." It's the society of spectator.
May it shock and outrage the world that this blog does not take a piously
pure stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The blogger has no particular stake in the real situation thousands of miles eastward and thus finds it unethical to take a pious position other than the following: may your conflict-tainment at the expense of others be put to bed relatively painlessly.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Does Public Disease Call for Nationalized Remedies?
Internautes,
The health records of the world leave little doubt of two facts; first basic sanitation and access to lifestyle improvements have done more for the health (including the longevity) of world citizens than all applicable knowledge of biology thus far, and it is arguable that neither further medicine nor human engineering can ever replace the essentials. Second, the United States is dead last in the industrialized world in providing opportunities for lifestyle improvements. While the record can never budge us from the correlation of poor lifestyle-improvement opportunities with the poor public health/preventative medicine outcome for America if we wish to blame lazy Americans who have had everything too good for their own bad health, but the correlations are there to suggest heavily not only the obvious importance of lifestyle, but the contribution of relative prices of healthy and unhealthy food, availability of healthy food altogether, urban design, transportation policy, etc. to the relative health of nations.
This is public health or health economics 101.
What is more frequently missed is what all this means to health-care policy. When one method is more important than another in achieving results, it makes correlatory statistics, from everyday mental comparison tests to the fanciest of regressions, looking at the effect of the second and less important variable on the outcome while ignoring the first all but bunk. In the case of regressions, the omitted variables are in this case exceedingly unlikely to be uncorrelated to the included ones. The regions of the United States or Europe with better preventative care, for instance, are almost certainly the ones with more effective medicine; there are legal and political reasons why this should be so within the blocs but not between them. All of which means that to say that the proposition that European nationalized healthcare systems have proven themselves by the health outcomes they achieve against the American system is bunk simply beacuse that they're not the achievers here at all. The European lifestyle and incentives to lead it are what we ought to be imitating. Starting by explicit health-care is all but insane: the United States has the best curative medicine in the world, if also the most expensive. While some are excluded from the system, the majority of people get what the nation pays for. It is a question of value whether one gives more importance to the total quality-weighed amount of curative medicine in the country, or gives more importance to the basics being broadly provided. Especially given the diminishing marginal returns of care to any one individual, there is much to be said for the second position. But it is a matter of fact that the best available care in the United States is the best available care anywhere, that the United States is the leader in medical research and actually subsidizes the rest of the world in the arena of prescription medicine (a highly atypical but real situation). It is also a highly likely conjecture that the continued incentives to produce medical goods in the United States could give this country the advantage in next-generation biological technologies; an advantage we seem to now lack in just about everything else, and consequently need desperately.
The state of the nation's health is an outrage that calls for public health solutions, not nationalized medicine whose results are not what they appear to be if one ignores this crucial causative factor. A serious healthy urban planning, healthy food incentive-creating program together with more innovative approaches to improving lifestyle would of course drastically reduce insanely rising health-care costs far more effectively than Hillary Clinton's proposal to create a monospomy (buyer-side monopoly, which reduces costs) of health-care or Barack Obama's unthought compromise plan, which includes elements from so many sources the likely economic result is presently undecipherable. Why is no one telling the public any of this? We live in a republic, not a democracy, not so we may elect pop-stars to embody our ideal selves but so that those who thought most about a question are in a position to present it to those who have thought less and have them ratify the leaders who listen to the best advisers. The hope of republican forms of government is that the people's reasoning about candidates' debate correspond or map unto the actual complicated policy questions, of which no one has a grasp of all. Each person trying to decide the issues all for themselves adds up to a highly repetitive crystal matrix of dunces projecting a largely grey image on the screen of governmental decision. The citizens of a republic each contribute a different facet to the image on the screen; the members of a mob, each in his own isolated world, all do more or less the same thing, creating an additive, rather than a transformative, aggregate.
Obama and company have perverted a common-sense but already flawed logical imperative to judge things by their results into a nonsensical injunction to compare systems by their late surfaces; which is precisely what the Madisonian republican form of government is supposed to prevent.
So why does Europe have nationalized health-care whereas we do not? It is a complicated question involving historical accident, selection of citizens by mentality in the era of mass migration, two world wars, and many other factors of which I am but hazily aware. None of them however means that Europe's medical system works better than ours. Europe's public health system is what's doing that work. Perhaps American medicine is still what it is because it is the only remedy to our lifestyle, or perhaps it is a flawed system that could use improvement. But no such ammendations will have the massive consequences that the candidates believe they will have.
I am all for public works projects. But the candidates have agreed upon the wrong starting point by which to orient the rest of the picture through a presumed future policy process.
The health records of the world leave little doubt of two facts; first basic sanitation and access to lifestyle improvements have done more for the health (including the longevity) of world citizens than all applicable knowledge of biology thus far, and it is arguable that neither further medicine nor human engineering can ever replace the essentials. Second, the United States is dead last in the industrialized world in providing opportunities for lifestyle improvements. While the record can never budge us from the correlation of poor lifestyle-improvement opportunities with the poor public health/preventative medicine outcome for America if we wish to blame lazy Americans who have had everything too good for their own bad health, but the correlations are there to suggest heavily not only the obvious importance of lifestyle, but the contribution of relative prices of healthy and unhealthy food, availability of healthy food altogether, urban design, transportation policy, etc. to the relative health of nations.
This is public health or health economics 101.
What is more frequently missed is what all this means to health-care policy. When one method is more important than another in achieving results, it makes correlatory statistics, from everyday mental comparison tests to the fanciest of regressions, looking at the effect of the second and less important variable on the outcome while ignoring the first all but bunk. In the case of regressions, the omitted variables are in this case exceedingly unlikely to be uncorrelated to the included ones. The regions of the United States or Europe with better preventative care, for instance, are almost certainly the ones with more effective medicine; there are legal and political reasons why this should be so within the blocs but not between them. All of which means that to say that the proposition that European nationalized healthcare systems have proven themselves by the health outcomes they achieve against the American system is bunk simply beacuse that they're not the achievers here at all. The European lifestyle and incentives to lead it are what we ought to be imitating. Starting by explicit health-care is all but insane: the United States has the best curative medicine in the world, if also the most expensive. While some are excluded from the system, the majority of people get what the nation pays for. It is a question of value whether one gives more importance to the total quality-weighed amount of curative medicine in the country, or gives more importance to the basics being broadly provided. Especially given the diminishing marginal returns of care to any one individual, there is much to be said for the second position. But it is a matter of fact that the best available care in the United States is the best available care anywhere, that the United States is the leader in medical research and actually subsidizes the rest of the world in the arena of prescription medicine (a highly atypical but real situation). It is also a highly likely conjecture that the continued incentives to produce medical goods in the United States could give this country the advantage in next-generation biological technologies; an advantage we seem to now lack in just about everything else, and consequently need desperately.
The state of the nation's health is an outrage that calls for public health solutions, not nationalized medicine whose results are not what they appear to be if one ignores this crucial causative factor. A serious healthy urban planning, healthy food incentive-creating program together with more innovative approaches to improving lifestyle would of course drastically reduce insanely rising health-care costs far more effectively than Hillary Clinton's proposal to create a monospomy (buyer-side monopoly, which reduces costs) of health-care or Barack Obama's unthought compromise plan, which includes elements from so many sources the likely economic result is presently undecipherable. Why is no one telling the public any of this? We live in a republic, not a democracy, not so we may elect pop-stars to embody our ideal selves but so that those who thought most about a question are in a position to present it to those who have thought less and have them ratify the leaders who listen to the best advisers. The hope of republican forms of government is that the people's reasoning about candidates' debate correspond or map unto the actual complicated policy questions, of which no one has a grasp of all. Each person trying to decide the issues all for themselves adds up to a highly repetitive crystal matrix of dunces projecting a largely grey image on the screen of governmental decision. The citizens of a republic each contribute a different facet to the image on the screen; the members of a mob, each in his own isolated world, all do more or less the same thing, creating an additive, rather than a transformative, aggregate.
Obama and company have perverted a common-sense but already flawed logical imperative to judge things by their results into a nonsensical injunction to compare systems by their late surfaces; which is precisely what the Madisonian republican form of government is supposed to prevent.
So why does Europe have nationalized health-care whereas we do not? It is a complicated question involving historical accident, selection of citizens by mentality in the era of mass migration, two world wars, and many other factors of which I am but hazily aware. None of them however means that Europe's medical system works better than ours. Europe's public health system is what's doing that work. Perhaps American medicine is still what it is because it is the only remedy to our lifestyle, or perhaps it is a flawed system that could use improvement. But no such ammendations will have the massive consequences that the candidates believe they will have.
I am all for public works projects. But the candidates have agreed upon the wrong starting point by which to orient the rest of the picture through a presumed future policy process.
Friday, February 22, 2008
probable truth^many=complete nonsense: so what might be true?
Blogdom,
Put together a number of propositions that are very likely, and you get an extremely unlikely conclusion. (Michael Dummett has an excellent passage on the phenomenon that actually convincingly explains common sense as the quality of letting nature supply new information that beats out attempts to reason thouroughly in "The Logical Basis of Metaphysics"). If the more you look at the news over the last seven years from beginning to end, the crazier all the parties involved appear, the possibility of doing this under an unprecedented media and information regime should be noted as the proeminent explanation. The more information there is, the more of it can be put together in thought and discourse, and the more vigilent adherence to Dummett's principle is necessary to avoid immensely logical, but absolutely false, conclusions.
The consequences of this logical depreciation through probabilistic multiplication are unfortunate for the contemporary world. But, deluding oneself into believing the multiplicity of voices on the internet is a passing confusion that will organize itself out of existence ere long, it is not directly evident how to follow Dummett's advice and draw at the well of nature frequently in these times. Nature used to just crowd upon us in our less reflective hours. It is what became us when stopped thinking, neither matter nor our deliberate selves. As such, in one sense it was metaphysical, and there was nearly mathematical identity between metaphysics and nature. That was before Gutenberg II, the generic coming. The internet is one machine. Everything on it, from a maximal multiplicity of sources that essentially cover what folk there happen to be that one can understand and thus truly shares a world with, appears through one generic filter. The medium cannot help but affect the message, here or elsewhere. How the message is received and integrated into the communication between self and reality simply always matters, whether in McCluer's hell, his heaven, his middle earth, or, say, Galicia in 1843. What makes the particular information regime we live in so disturbing is that the singularity of nature, the well we draw upon that at once voids the previous and anchors the real, is being challenged by another thing singular in nature. There isn't room for two such singularities in our brains, and hence on this planet. With apologies to Eliayahu (Elijah) and translators, I would sum it up by saying that if the deep affords an effectively infinite string of words of unknown provenance, it then affords no water.
Put together a number of propositions that are very likely, and you get an extremely unlikely conclusion. (Michael Dummett has an excellent passage on the phenomenon that actually convincingly explains common sense as the quality of letting nature supply new information that beats out attempts to reason thouroughly in "The Logical Basis of Metaphysics"). If the more you look at the news over the last seven years from beginning to end, the crazier all the parties involved appear, the possibility of doing this under an unprecedented media and information regime should be noted as the proeminent explanation. The more information there is, the more of it can be put together in thought and discourse, and the more vigilent adherence to Dummett's principle is necessary to avoid immensely logical, but absolutely false, conclusions.
The consequences of this logical depreciation through probabilistic multiplication are unfortunate for the contemporary world. But, deluding oneself into believing the multiplicity of voices on the internet is a passing confusion that will organize itself out of existence ere long, it is not directly evident how to follow Dummett's advice and draw at the well of nature frequently in these times. Nature used to just crowd upon us in our less reflective hours. It is what became us when stopped thinking, neither matter nor our deliberate selves. As such, in one sense it was metaphysical, and there was nearly mathematical identity between metaphysics and nature. That was before Gutenberg II, the generic coming. The internet is one machine. Everything on it, from a maximal multiplicity of sources that essentially cover what folk there happen to be that one can understand and thus truly shares a world with, appears through one generic filter. The medium cannot help but affect the message, here or elsewhere. How the message is received and integrated into the communication between self and reality simply always matters, whether in McCluer's hell, his heaven, his middle earth, or, say, Galicia in 1843. What makes the particular information regime we live in so disturbing is that the singularity of nature, the well we draw upon that at once voids the previous and anchors the real, is being challenged by another thing singular in nature. There isn't room for two such singularities in our brains, and hence on this planet. With apologies to Eliayahu (Elijah) and translators, I would sum it up by saying that if the deep affords an effectively infinite string of words of unknown provenance, it then affords no water.
If our conception of reality, including political-historical reality, were made of words, the internet would be a utopic revolution. As I firmly hold that it does not, not as a probable truth but as an operational axiom, my system of thought inclines to think that the supposed neccesity of its absolute benevolence in helping us accomplish whatever goals we priorly had or have developed, personally or collectively, must be understood in light of, or perhaps under the shade of, the fundamental rewriting of the human and natural condition under the new univocity.
Since I declare all this axiomatically, rather than as a probable truth under fundamental shades of meaning of the words I employ, I can only hope the reader shares enough natural and internautical experience with me to momentarily share this interpretation with me. What effect it will have on anybody's future mind, only nature and its possible succesors can determine. Things change radically; but belief in a metaphysical reality (not a religiously defined one) inclines to believe that the categories of one and many, self and other, thought and forgetting, also bestow on us an indestructable continuity and an inalienable condition---of a very abstract and difficult to grasp kind. It does not ensure a continuity of our political condition across technologies, whatever laws, cultures, or resolves we may try to bring with us to great novelty.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Work stoppage as a strategy of effecting political ends (such as impeaching improperly elected presidents)
Blogdom,
As an admirer of certain aspects of James Madison's thought, I exercise caution before suggesting any strategy of activism meaning to effect political ends directly rather than improve a democratic/republican system so that it may effect them by an approximation of the ultimate idealized law of the greatest good for the greatest number. As careful readers of Madison know (but Noam Chomsky pretends not to know) Madison's strategy for effecting this gain in aggregate welfare was two-fold; to allow representative government, but not pure democracy, at the highest level, and to have two fundamental layers of government, state and national. Pure democracy in which each question be decided upon by a show of hands, he reckoned in part, was mobocracy, in which a collective decides what to do according to the law of crowds: each part is ignorant of most necessary information and the whole cannot be guaranteed to directly simulate the knowledge its' parts lack. An invisible hand of politics in which the opposite is true is ludicrous to intuition and most forms of reason, and besides that, empirically unprovable given ever-changing definitions of "the good." Madison called the actual mechanism of crowd decision faction formation, a name which implies at least a prisoner's dillemma-like achievement of less than optimal gain from each man competing for himself, and at worst all forms of extra-legal manipulation contrary to the basic premises of government for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, recognizing holes in the theory (there must be holes in any theory), and the lack of competition rendering a parliament an uncontested authority in any single-layered and purely republican government, he allowed considerable leverage to states, and allowed them to have purely democratic (and thus potentially mobocratic) elements, with a supreme court holding ultimate jurisdiction over the propriety of their laws.
As many say today, states (and somtimes cities) are laboratories of new ideas. This is an interesting twist on both Madisonian and economic ideas: a small number (50 max, currently) of tested laws to choose from, developed naturally (mobocratically) in a republic-controlled environment, as an alternative of a market of untested ideas too large to count. I think Madison would be proud of this line of thought: first because empirically tested ideas are information to go on other than instinct, and second because it allows for democratic elements without the perils of pure democracy. And its' no surprise: the idea is the brainchild of a people reared in a system he played a very important role in fashioning.
Democratic mobocracy, however, may very well be the best way to decide upon questions everybody does have the necessary information about given a failure of a globally republican government. When in the course of human events does activism indisputably become necessary? When the republican form of government defeats itself, such as in a rigged election. Therefore, I suggest activism in the face of any future stolen election.
It having been demonstrated "beyond a reasonable doubt" with Bayesian statistical and elementary probabilistic means that an election has been rigged, extra-legal means of action are appropriate. In its' broadest outline, needing details (feel free to comment if you're out there), this is the one I suggest.
A work stoppage, or general strike. May everybody who believes the United States has crossed the line into dictatorship refuse to work until corrective legal measure is taken or new elections are held, (whichever is more democratic-republican under the circumstances), at the risk of their job. Labor is the power of the people. Demonstrating is useless. The only hope of a bloodless revolution should revolution become necessary (such as in the case of a massively rigged election) is to cripple the economic system for political ends.
This is not a question of whether the ends justify the means. It is a question of whether one mean can be used to effect an end of a different kind, which can only reasonably be answered in the positive.
To make this stoppage practicable, rather than a fanciful idea, it is necessary to reduce the number of jobs lost, or for each individual the probability they will lose their job. This requires making deals with factions one doesn't respect. Such as the most abusive of corporations, etc. Natural principles reveal that, once the strike has achieved its' ends, most people will be rehired, as the cause of the strike is the enstatement of a man who will then be the president-elect, which it is in business's interest to please, and, if the strike has enough adherents, there won't be pools of same-skilled alternate employees to hire. This "most" isn't good enough to ensure safety, especially if the arguments behind it aren't known. So steps need to be taken to put at least a few major corporations on the side of the strikers: in other words, to make the companies themselves part of the stoppage, with means of labor, money, reasoning, or whatever else may work.
So, again, the suggestion is: put down your placards and stay home from work in the case of a clearly illegitemally elected president. There are not enough compliant soldiers to enact the Taft-Hartley act on the scale I'm suggesting. The weapon of the people is labor, as known by Gandhi, a rather succesful non-violent revolutionary, whatever else he was, and all his followers. This is the answer given unjust regimes, regardless of the situation and whether you're a Wall Street Broker or a day-laborer, a citizen or not.
As an admirer of certain aspects of James Madison's thought, I exercise caution before suggesting any strategy of activism meaning to effect political ends directly rather than improve a democratic/republican system so that it may effect them by an approximation of the ultimate idealized law of the greatest good for the greatest number. As careful readers of Madison know (but Noam Chomsky pretends not to know) Madison's strategy for effecting this gain in aggregate welfare was two-fold; to allow representative government, but not pure democracy, at the highest level, and to have two fundamental layers of government, state and national. Pure democracy in which each question be decided upon by a show of hands, he reckoned in part, was mobocracy, in which a collective decides what to do according to the law of crowds: each part is ignorant of most necessary information and the whole cannot be guaranteed to directly simulate the knowledge its' parts lack. An invisible hand of politics in which the opposite is true is ludicrous to intuition and most forms of reason, and besides that, empirically unprovable given ever-changing definitions of "the good." Madison called the actual mechanism of crowd decision faction formation, a name which implies at least a prisoner's dillemma-like achievement of less than optimal gain from each man competing for himself, and at worst all forms of extra-legal manipulation contrary to the basic premises of government for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, recognizing holes in the theory (there must be holes in any theory), and the lack of competition rendering a parliament an uncontested authority in any single-layered and purely republican government, he allowed considerable leverage to states, and allowed them to have purely democratic (and thus potentially mobocratic) elements, with a supreme court holding ultimate jurisdiction over the propriety of their laws.
As many say today, states (and somtimes cities) are laboratories of new ideas. This is an interesting twist on both Madisonian and economic ideas: a small number (50 max, currently) of tested laws to choose from, developed naturally (mobocratically) in a republic-controlled environment, as an alternative of a market of untested ideas too large to count. I think Madison would be proud of this line of thought: first because empirically tested ideas are information to go on other than instinct, and second because it allows for democratic elements without the perils of pure democracy. And its' no surprise: the idea is the brainchild of a people reared in a system he played a very important role in fashioning.
Democratic mobocracy, however, may very well be the best way to decide upon questions everybody does have the necessary information about given a failure of a globally republican government. When in the course of human events does activism indisputably become necessary? When the republican form of government defeats itself, such as in a rigged election. Therefore, I suggest activism in the face of any future stolen election.
It having been demonstrated "beyond a reasonable doubt" with Bayesian statistical and elementary probabilistic means that an election has been rigged, extra-legal means of action are appropriate. In its' broadest outline, needing details (feel free to comment if you're out there), this is the one I suggest.
A work stoppage, or general strike. May everybody who believes the United States has crossed the line into dictatorship refuse to work until corrective legal measure is taken or new elections are held, (whichever is more democratic-republican under the circumstances), at the risk of their job. Labor is the power of the people. Demonstrating is useless. The only hope of a bloodless revolution should revolution become necessary (such as in the case of a massively rigged election) is to cripple the economic system for political ends.
This is not a question of whether the ends justify the means. It is a question of whether one mean can be used to effect an end of a different kind, which can only reasonably be answered in the positive.
To make this stoppage practicable, rather than a fanciful idea, it is necessary to reduce the number of jobs lost, or for each individual the probability they will lose their job. This requires making deals with factions one doesn't respect. Such as the most abusive of corporations, etc. Natural principles reveal that, once the strike has achieved its' ends, most people will be rehired, as the cause of the strike is the enstatement of a man who will then be the president-elect, which it is in business's interest to please, and, if the strike has enough adherents, there won't be pools of same-skilled alternate employees to hire. This "most" isn't good enough to ensure safety, especially if the arguments behind it aren't known. So steps need to be taken to put at least a few major corporations on the side of the strikers: in other words, to make the companies themselves part of the stoppage, with means of labor, money, reasoning, or whatever else may work.
So, again, the suggestion is: put down your placards and stay home from work in the case of a clearly illegitemally elected president. There are not enough compliant soldiers to enact the Taft-Hartley act on the scale I'm suggesting. The weapon of the people is labor, as known by Gandhi, a rather succesful non-violent revolutionary, whatever else he was, and all his followers. This is the answer given unjust regimes, regardless of the situation and whether you're a Wall Street Broker or a day-laborer, a citizen or not.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
A retraction ala Beethoven
I am no longer planning to vote for Barack Obama or supporting his candidacy for a simple reason: I find it dangerous to say in any capacity within public life that one would invade a part of a sovereign state that happens to have nuclear weapons on "creditable intelligence" that Al Qaeda (the base) has a base there. The creditability of "creditable intelligence" has a poor track record to say the least, besides which, causing a potential nuclear standoff in any way, shape or form is insanity the likes of which has not been seen from the White House (to my knowledge) since another charismatic but inexperienced leader some forty-five years ago brought the world to the brink of annihilation for a fortnight. In other words, all the JFK comparisons are more on the mark than their supporters imagine, and this is bad because he was a lousy president until the day he got shot, at least in this most important of respects.
Of course, Mr. Obama probably says all this not out of plain inexperience, seeing as even little young inexperienced me knows what's wrong with it, but because it's what a portion of undecided voters wants to hear more than the other portions might be turned off by it. It still appears appropriate to me to call it inexperience and mean something other by that word than a euphemism for demagoguery because experience would teach the said candidate not to say under pressure what under more normal circumstances he or I both already realize should not be said. Any candidate who sleeps in the White House on Jaunary 20th-21st 2009 will find upon waking up that his or her diplomatic record as a president retroactively stretches back to the wild days of his or her campaign. Since diplomacy is the number one job of a president, I'm taking everything said about it right now very seriously. And voting Clinton with some reservations.
It seems to me that the Soviets were as "insane" in actuality as any nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan would be if it came to exist, and it seems untenable to me to strike nuclear-armed enemies no matter who they are, what they do, or what they say they "believe". They could use the things! Simple enough, but it seems that game theory and other strategic thought as informed and altered by historical example has largely been replaced in our times by a political "language game" I call "pro-Bush, anti-Bush." Whether you're with him like Romney or against him like Obama, the cowboy has largely decided the backbone of publicly acceptable reasoning for the worse. in particular, he has undermined the Kennan et al. framework of international diplomacy with unthought garbage allegedly drawn from the work of Leo Strauss (a bad writer and besides that a Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza commentator rather than a political strategist).For the record, this here publicly unacceptable commentator endorses the following theses: A) Kennan et al.'s manner of diplomacy was based on strategic (game-theoretical, for any economists out there) considerations of how to wage cold war given a set of weapons and any state out there threatening our country with them, and their day is on that account not over if it ever began. B) Communism and Islam are both "religions" whose stated and real goal is to inform politics, so if we dealt with one crop of madmen we can deal with another similarly. The only difference is that Islam is purportedtly "stateless." This I find to be purported but not factual. Radical Islam exists only insofar as states harbor it, and this includes both the Islamic republics and the so-called secular dictatorships that tolerate Islamic factions, brotherhoods, and other organizations. That's a big list with question marks, but it's still less dangerous than the good old Soviet Union. So why not render unto Caesar what deters Caesar, whether the Caesar calls himself communist or Muslim? C) If Al Qaeda is really a stateless enemy, rather than a multi-state enemy as I argue, tough talk about getting at one of its arms is assassination by starfish mutilation (the other arms regenerate). Either we're dealing with a nihilistic army of shadows that means to bring about Armageddon for virgins in the sky or we're dealing with states and alliances thereof, but in either case, Obama's gesture is a bad move.
So, like Beethoven ripping up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon upon his invasion of I forget which German state, as a Palinodist retracts a poem with another, I offer this argument.
Of course, Mr. Obama probably says all this not out of plain inexperience, seeing as even little young inexperienced me knows what's wrong with it, but because it's what a portion of undecided voters wants to hear more than the other portions might be turned off by it. It still appears appropriate to me to call it inexperience and mean something other by that word than a euphemism for demagoguery because experience would teach the said candidate not to say under pressure what under more normal circumstances he or I both already realize should not be said. Any candidate who sleeps in the White House on Jaunary 20th-21st 2009 will find upon waking up that his or her diplomatic record as a president retroactively stretches back to the wild days of his or her campaign. Since diplomacy is the number one job of a president, I'm taking everything said about it right now very seriously. And voting Clinton with some reservations.
It seems to me that the Soviets were as "insane" in actuality as any nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan would be if it came to exist, and it seems untenable to me to strike nuclear-armed enemies no matter who they are, what they do, or what they say they "believe". They could use the things! Simple enough, but it seems that game theory and other strategic thought as informed and altered by historical example has largely been replaced in our times by a political "language game" I call "pro-Bush, anti-Bush." Whether you're with him like Romney or against him like Obama, the cowboy has largely decided the backbone of publicly acceptable reasoning for the worse. in particular, he has undermined the Kennan et al. framework of international diplomacy with unthought garbage allegedly drawn from the work of Leo Strauss (a bad writer and besides that a Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza commentator rather than a political strategist).For the record, this here publicly unacceptable commentator endorses the following theses: A) Kennan et al.'s manner of diplomacy was based on strategic (game-theoretical, for any economists out there) considerations of how to wage cold war given a set of weapons and any state out there threatening our country with them, and their day is on that account not over if it ever began. B) Communism and Islam are both "religions" whose stated and real goal is to inform politics, so if we dealt with one crop of madmen we can deal with another similarly. The only difference is that Islam is purportedtly "stateless." This I find to be purported but not factual. Radical Islam exists only insofar as states harbor it, and this includes both the Islamic republics and the so-called secular dictatorships that tolerate Islamic factions, brotherhoods, and other organizations. That's a big list with question marks, but it's still less dangerous than the good old Soviet Union. So why not render unto Caesar what deters Caesar, whether the Caesar calls himself communist or Muslim? C) If Al Qaeda is really a stateless enemy, rather than a multi-state enemy as I argue, tough talk about getting at one of its arms is assassination by starfish mutilation (the other arms regenerate). Either we're dealing with a nihilistic army of shadows that means to bring about Armageddon for virgins in the sky or we're dealing with states and alliances thereof, but in either case, Obama's gesture is a bad move.
So, like Beethoven ripping up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon upon his invasion of I forget which German state, as a Palinodist retracts a poem with another, I offer this argument.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
The endorsement season
Blogdom,
This blog, yielding less power than a small local of, say, custom hammer, sickle and flag-makers in a Republican plains-town, can only sway through argument if read at all. Argument requires infinity, and there is thus no rational argument to be propogated by endorsing one of a finite number of presidential hopefuls. Since no politics blog worth the screen-light it's printed on would however be complete without an endorsement, I am giving mine followed by argument.
This blog endorses Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. This blog hopes for the following outline of an administration under this leader: Bill Richardson, secretary of state. Joe Biden, Secretary of something important. Hillary Clinton: Secretary of something important. Somebody-or-other whose name is not John Edwards, to be chosen mainly for strategic reasons, for VP. John Edwards: getting drunk on cocunut-wine on an island in American Micronesia so that he can see two Americas in the midst of a tropical paradise but however not play any role in governance.
Now the argument:
As many Barackites say, lack of experience in Washington and excellent relevant experience in legal life and policymaking elsewhere are exactly the outline of an administration that might accomplish something policy-wise, rather than push a "left" consensus view (unthought compromise) against a "right" consensus view (unthought compromise with more disastrous consequences) and put forth impotent efforts to assure that that consensus becomes the norm (this idea is not rooted in the changing realities of the planet I happen to live on) and that democrats get elected in the future (if recent history has not taught us that the logic of these things does not follow the wills of those currently in power, we haven't been paying attention; that is the theme of this blog if it has just one). Mr. Obama does not disappoint in his role as thinking outsider. I may not agree with every last point of his policy, or share all his values, but he is a policy-thinker, and a policy-thinker is what I want in the White House as long as his core values are not overtly incompatible with my own and he is constrained by interests of which I consider myself a member: that is that he responds to the needs of the American people, of whom I am one, and to some extent the world populace, of which I am also one. Being able to predict neither what kind of American I will be in the future (this is reality, not philosophy, at this point) nor what policy will actually benefit the most Americans, proper values and intentions matter to me.
Mr. Obama is also a policy-speaker. Since, as I stated elsewhere on this blog (William XV post), I believe one of the primary reesponsibilities of a President is to steer public discourse onto a field where it may come up with realistic and effective ideas, I find this to be of prime importance. A vote for a Clinton is a vote for, well, a Clinton, that is someone who doesn't find this to be important at all. I cannot for this reason alone vote for Hillary in a primary. I do think she is a competent politician and think she should be a member of the administration, and will almost certainly vote for her in the general election should she win this round.
In addition, Mr. Obama's skin-color does matter, because, let's face it, we're racists, and the leader of the world being black has the potential to change perspectives on race and ethnicity and via that conduit change the facts of how business is conducted around here, and elsewhere. Mr. Obama's story being multicultural and unique is also good, since it should help put to bed medieval notions that our populace's history is summed up by a few stereotypes.
Also I just like the guy, and that's worth something, to me at least.
This blog, yielding less power than a small local of, say, custom hammer, sickle and flag-makers in a Republican plains-town, can only sway through argument if read at all. Argument requires infinity, and there is thus no rational argument to be propogated by endorsing one of a finite number of presidential hopefuls. Since no politics blog worth the screen-light it's printed on would however be complete without an endorsement, I am giving mine followed by argument.
This blog endorses Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. This blog hopes for the following outline of an administration under this leader: Bill Richardson, secretary of state. Joe Biden, Secretary of something important. Hillary Clinton: Secretary of something important. Somebody-or-other whose name is not John Edwards, to be chosen mainly for strategic reasons, for VP. John Edwards: getting drunk on cocunut-wine on an island in American Micronesia so that he can see two Americas in the midst of a tropical paradise but however not play any role in governance.
Now the argument:
As many Barackites say, lack of experience in Washington and excellent relevant experience in legal life and policymaking elsewhere are exactly the outline of an administration that might accomplish something policy-wise, rather than push a "left" consensus view (unthought compromise) against a "right" consensus view (unthought compromise with more disastrous consequences) and put forth impotent efforts to assure that that consensus becomes the norm (this idea is not rooted in the changing realities of the planet I happen to live on) and that democrats get elected in the future (if recent history has not taught us that the logic of these things does not follow the wills of those currently in power, we haven't been paying attention; that is the theme of this blog if it has just one). Mr. Obama does not disappoint in his role as thinking outsider. I may not agree with every last point of his policy, or share all his values, but he is a policy-thinker, and a policy-thinker is what I want in the White House as long as his core values are not overtly incompatible with my own and he is constrained by interests of which I consider myself a member: that is that he responds to the needs of the American people, of whom I am one, and to some extent the world populace, of which I am also one. Being able to predict neither what kind of American I will be in the future (this is reality, not philosophy, at this point) nor what policy will actually benefit the most Americans, proper values and intentions matter to me.
Mr. Obama is also a policy-speaker. Since, as I stated elsewhere on this blog (William XV post), I believe one of the primary reesponsibilities of a President is to steer public discourse onto a field where it may come up with realistic and effective ideas, I find this to be of prime importance. A vote for a Clinton is a vote for, well, a Clinton, that is someone who doesn't find this to be important at all. I cannot for this reason alone vote for Hillary in a primary. I do think she is a competent politician and think she should be a member of the administration, and will almost certainly vote for her in the general election should she win this round.
In addition, Mr. Obama's skin-color does matter, because, let's face it, we're racists, and the leader of the world being black has the potential to change perspectives on race and ethnicity and via that conduit change the facts of how business is conducted around here, and elsewhere. Mr. Obama's story being multicultural and unique is also good, since it should help put to bed medieval notions that our populace's history is summed up by a few stereotypes.
Also I just like the guy, and that's worth something, to me at least.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Que Bono, part I: Has money no smell?
Blogdom,
The Romans aptly pointed out that money has no odor by which we may judge it's provenance. But it does not escape many people nowadays that sometimes it bears a faint aroma of unintered dinosaur bones preserved and concentrated in vast obvious pools under sandstorms erasing the footprints of the blind camel destiny. However, somebody out there has propogated the idea that the state of Texas, with it's comparatively small reserves, and American corpos out of Michigan, whose product is machinery, not oil, are the perpetrators of the corrupt business of preventing the occurence of an overdue alternative energy push. Common sense dictates that those who benefit the most from keeping oil valuable are those who own the oil reserves, and that those who do business with them have only temporary and incidental interests in the current state of energy. The paper trail does in fact validate this guess--so long as one is willing to accept the proposition that the mad cowboys and troglodyte car-makers can, respectively, draw new contracts and connections, and make new engines rather easily. I accept this proposition. Therefore, beyond the oily smell, it is appropriate to look to the owners of the wells,not the middlemen. Their amazing influence in world politics today inspires in me the following response. Push alternative energy with big dollars, first for environmental reasons, but second, and not unimportantly, to let the clowns and butchers dance in their oil fields.
The Romans aptly pointed out that money has no odor by which we may judge it's provenance. But it does not escape many people nowadays that sometimes it bears a faint aroma of unintered dinosaur bones preserved and concentrated in vast obvious pools under sandstorms erasing the footprints of the blind camel destiny. However, somebody out there has propogated the idea that the state of Texas, with it's comparatively small reserves, and American corpos out of Michigan, whose product is machinery, not oil, are the perpetrators of the corrupt business of preventing the occurence of an overdue alternative energy push. Common sense dictates that those who benefit the most from keeping oil valuable are those who own the oil reserves, and that those who do business with them have only temporary and incidental interests in the current state of energy. The paper trail does in fact validate this guess--so long as one is willing to accept the proposition that the mad cowboys and troglodyte car-makers can, respectively, draw new contracts and connections, and make new engines rather easily. I accept this proposition. Therefore, beyond the oily smell, it is appropriate to look to the owners of the wells,not the middlemen. Their amazing influence in world politics today inspires in me the following response. Push alternative energy with big dollars, first for environmental reasons, but second, and not unimportantly, to let the clowns and butchers dance in their oil fields.
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