A drunkard's walk amid silly people... Left and Right

Okay, this blog entry is going to be a bit rambling and angry... somewhat of a drunkard's walk, while ranting at the lamp posts! Hope it at least entertains. Here goes.

We’ve all known this and said it for a long time. I laid it out in explicit detail in my Disputations Arenas. Still, it’s nice to see a cogent naming of the phenomenon -- Brandolini’s law - or, as Alberto Brandolini suggests, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle:

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

== Heading for war? ==

On the left side of the spectrum, and in some places on the right, folks are asking whether "Obama is playing into Bush's bad policies. Now he's taking the U.S. back into Iraq with more bombing."

Sorry, this is a wrongheaded reflex. Back in 2002 - 2003, the issue was never "should Saddam Hussein be toppled and replaced?" Nor was it "should the Taliban - who supported and helped bin Laden to attack us be toppled and replaced?" 

We needed to do both things. (Though in Saddam's case it deserved genuine policy debate and not a festival of Bushite lies.)

No, the real issue, re U.S. involvement/meddling over there, is and was "should it be done in the stupidest and most expensive ways possible? In a calamitous, gruesomely thuggish methodology that would cost us trillions, damn-near ruin our military and our reputations and leave only two winners: Iran and Haliburton?"

If you actually (astonishingly) think that there will be any resemblance between the coming Obama-led engagement and the Bushite quagmires, you really need to read about the diametrically opposite ways that Democrats and Republicans wage war.

==Decaying Infrastructure== 

And so the drunkard turns and veers in another direct, to rant that --

America's transportation infrastructure, once a continental engine of mobility, productivity and opportunity, has fallen into such disrepair that it's become an economic albatross. Consumers shell out billions of dollars for extra car repairs every year. Insufficient and poorly maintained roads mean costly bottlenecks for businesses, which discourage expansion and hobble American companies competing in the global economy. We all have heard of 60,000 bridges in desperate need of maintenance. Why is almost nothing being done?

At a time of steeply declining budget deficits (always true during democratic administrations and never true during GOP ones) it might seem simple to put middle class blokes back to work, stimulating the economy with high velocity cash while fixing the damaged streets and bridges and getting tons of benefits. One obstacle though. The do-nothing US House of Representatives… the laziest and least accomplished in the history of the republic… has refused to fund infrastructure repairs.

Moreover, several gopper congressfolk have openly admitted their reason — that the resulting improvements and economic boost might help democrats at the polls. It is the Hastert Rule. Never cooperate or negotiate in good faith with democrats, ever. (The last GOP leader who did negotiate - Newt Gingrich - managed to put together with Bill Clinton both the highly successful Welfare Reform Bill and the Budget Bill that led to several years of fiscal surpluses. But Gingrich was dumped and jettisoned for that very reason by Hastert, DeLay, Boehner and other leaders of the madness that has taken over today’s Republican Party.)

Anyone who continues to support this mutant betrayal of true conservatism/libertarianism is a rationalizing fool.

Let's see... any other lamp-posts to yell at?  Oh yes....

 ==War against Nerds==

Salon runs a fun article eviscerating how explicit has become the mad-right’s Assault on Nerds. It has got so clear and full-pitch that even William F. Buckley’s once-intellectual National Review has joined the War Against All Smartypants. Scientists and members of every knowledge caste have been driven out of today’s hijacked version of conservatism. God help us if this relentless campaign drives them all the way across -- past moderate liberalism -- all the way to the opposite madness on the far left.

I doubt that will happen. All we want is a sensible society where adults negotiate with each other mixed-pragmatic solutions to problems, aiming for a future that will be vastly better than the past that nostalgic loonies (of both the far-left and the entire-right) yearn for. Is that too much to ask?

More evidence?  In late May, the Republicans in the House put an amendment in the Defense Spending Authorization Bill that forbids the Defense Department from spending any money preparing for the consequences of climate change. This article -- House Votes to Deny Climate Science and Ties Pentagon's Hands on Climate Change - on an admittedly liberal site - nevertheless lays this latest lunacy bare and lists an impressive array of serving and retired officers and military contractors who are deeply concerned.

 

The Bill is now in the Senate.

One of you in the community commented: “Our military wargames all kinds of scenarios. Preparedness is part of the job of our military planners, and having a plan prepared is the first step to winning a fight. I expect that somewhere the US military has a plan to deal with a threat from just about any conceivable direction. Oh, but not waves of hungry and thirsty refugees from all over the world, not that. We cannot plan for that contingency.”

To be clear, as we speak both the Canadian and US navies are struggling as fast as they can, to build capabilities to match the twelve  new military bases the Russians are building around the Arctic Sea, now that it is ice-free or navigable for much of the year. Denialism is a cult that borders on treason.

Ah... but now the drunkard does one of his patented veers... and aims some of his ire in the other direction!

==Divisive Politics==

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have thrown another grenade. “Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity-particularly diversity of viewpoints-for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity.”

Read that between the lines.  It is an indictment of the political correctness that rules in several hundred university soft studies departments.  Along with San Francisco, Berkeley and Illinois, these are the places where you get to see the reason why moderate liberals are rightfully wary of their lefty allies.  And I will not be squelched in reminding you folks that there is danger there!  I remember campus lefty bullies.  I remember the Soviet evil empire (that was fought so effectively by George Soros.)  Just because the US right is currently more dangerous and crazy, that does not mean we can ignore warnings like the one issued by Haight.

But again... a few hundred university soft studies departments are a far cry from the worst danger to our republic and freedoms and planet. True, they hate and persecute science fiction!  That is one good reason to glance, askance at those allies of ours.

I am wary of that direction. But I am bloody furious at the New Confederates who are (at present) vastly more damaging and lethally dangerous to civilization.  For example...

==  Where are the Chicken Littles hiding, all of a sudden? ==

I predicted that, once the tepid and minimal “healthcare reform” called “Obamacare” kicked in, it would start applying market forces that would work fairly well, reducing both the ranks of the uninsured and the rates of increase of US medical costs… all of which is happening.  At which point (I also predicted) GOP pundits  - who had been proclaiming the sky would fall and America would collapse into the stone age - would simply DROP the subject, hoping that their viewers would forget their chicken little end-of-the-world ravings. (And given their viewership, that amnesia is pretty much guaranteed.)

 Indeed, I said that after using this “issue” to lock down and destroy all political processes in the United States of America, that suddenly GOP politicians would start pragmatically adapting to the ACA and even… claiming it as their own.

Which… they are somewhat justified to do!  Since “Obamacare” was cloned from “Romneycare” and “Gingrich-care” and the standard, Heritage-Foundation-designed Republican Healthcare proposal on every GOP platform for ten years.  Watch as that fact is suddenly remembered!  But do not let them forget the hell they put us through, the hysterics and frozen American political life.  The screeching.

== Ironies abound ==

My sci fi author colleague John Shirley dissects “sovereign citizen”… a cult-like movement among those who take the anti-government wing of our widely shared Suspicion of Authority ethos to an extreme that denies any legitimacy of common bonds with three hundred million fellow Americans. 

While I agree with John, on many levels, I believe his approach is more left-versus-right than it needs to be, regarding this matter. (Indeed, while they are fewer - today - there ARE would be tyrants whose metaphors of outrage and hate come from (shall we say) the opposite direction. Surfaces can be misleading.)

In fact, it can be dissected very simply. Those who deny any validity to shared institutions that derive their legitimacy from the electoral political processes... institutions that in-turn reflect consensus of a great and educated nation ... are not simply asserting autonomy — (while hypocritically depending on that nation, utterly). They are either ignoring 6000 years of brutal feudal rule by armed thugs, or else deeply committed to becoming precisely those same armed thugs and feudal lords.

I attempted to portray this in The Postman, way back in the 1980s… and it is one part of the book that Kevin Costner translated to the film with utter accuracy! Especially Will Patton’s delightful General Bethlehem, who conveyed where all this would inevitably lead.

Indeed, I wrote The Postman specifically as a direct answer to these fellows. How average folks would not just cower before these would-be lords, but instead might (if properly inspired) rise up to restore that gracious consensus nation, once again.

Having tasted civilization, many of us will fight to the death, to keep it.

In an impromptu interview at a Portland restaurant, I gave a six minute run down of why I think the American political process has so broken down that we are effectively in phase eight of the U.S. Civil War. Not one of the factors that I mention has a scintilla to do with so-called “left-versus-right” or any of the matters that you are being told to hate-over.

==The Tea Party and the Confederacy==

And finally...

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party -- Here’s a somewhat too-radical but interesting essay about how the Confederacy lost phase four of the Civil War, in 1865, then won phase five with the collapse of Reconstruction and minority rights, in 1877. Indeed, things have swung back and forth, ever since, including the Civil Rights phase that was won by Blue America - finally crushing the vileness of segregation - but at a cost that resulted in the complete flip-reversal of the two U.S. political parties. In that light, today’s raging “culture war” is only the latest phase.

Clearly the Tea Party is not heir to the 1776 Founders. Their romantic delusions about that Revolution are dissected elsewhere…

… but the crux is clear; instead of wearing three-cornered hats, our Tea Party neighbors should wear gray, for they are the neo-confederate party. In fact, more and more of them are realizing this. Their devotion to the rising, worldwide oligarchy is identical to the feudal loyalty that their forebears gave to plantation lords. (Yesss Massa Koch an' Marse Rupert.) The aim - to tear down the future-oriented, change-welcoming, scientific and pragmatic Blue America, in order to replace it with classic nostalgia and feudal hierarchy - is identical to that of the southern tories who rode with Cornwallis and Tarleton.

I trace out the phases of the Civil War, from 1776 to today, here.

Which phase was the most important?  My own, earlier take: The crucial phase of the Civil War, phase three, started in 1852, when waves of southern irregular cavalry began 8 years of violent raids into Northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. This was never the “war of northern aggression.” It was the diametric opposite. And it is time to re-learn the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Picture the drunkard now, careening off into the dim night shadows, crashing into trash cans and - hoarsely - singing at the top of his lungs...

"... He hath trampled out the "newsroom" where the Fox of wrath has whored..."

A Thumbnail Political Bestiary -- and the right's bizarre Putin-worship

A Thumbnail Political Bestiary … and a weird, 1960s almost happened!

I want to tell you about an almost-happened trend that once seemed unstoppable and that might have changed everything, but that is now (strangely) almost-forgotten.  

Also a remark about the cult of worship of Vladimir Putin, that is surging across the American right.

But first, I keep being asked for a CHART of American politics, as I see it.  Let me start with something simple, based on the metaphor I despise most.  The so-called left-right axis.

== litmus tests? ==

Can a machine tell whether you are liberal or conservative? A topic that's been much circulated, lately, including on this very blog, a few postings ago.

Want an even better way to predict political leanings? How about hypocrisy: many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The 10 states that received the most federal recovery aid in FY 2011 and 2012 elected 47 climate-science deniers to the Senate and the House. Nearly two-thirds of the senators from these top 10 recipient states voted against granting federal emergency aid to New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy.

Want the thumbnail political bestiary? Because some of you asked for one… and fully aware that I often rail against oversimplification and the stupid, lobotomizing left-right "axis…" here goes.

(Note, I have an even better 3-D model here.)

All right. Sigh. Here goes. A True "Leftist" wants the world remade for the better… but primarily through allocation of resources by state bureaucrats. Coercion may be necessary. Cooperation = good, even if it must be enforced.  Competition is inherently suspect. 

A "rightist" wants the same coercive allocation of resources done by an even narrower clade of secretive "deciders"... aristocratic owner oligarch Lords -- the cartel of 10,000 golf buddies who appoint each other onto interlocking corporate directorates. Rightists ignore that owner-oligarchy oppressed humanity for 6000 years, crushing markets, freedom and competition in 99% of human cultures, far more often than bureaucrats ever did. If it's private, it must be sacred. Hence they, too, work against fair and flat and open competition, even despite claiming to love it!  They are the truest enemies of open-fair markets.

I despise both kinds of competition-destroying tyranny. Americans used to be able to turn their heads and see Big Brother looming in varied directions… till culture war stiffened our necks to face only, insipidly, either left or right (take your pick: but choose only one!)

Me? I can turn my head.  I despised communism and the USSR… and I worry about the seemingly inevitable return of truly massive left-wing radicalism…

...but it is the return of feudal owner-lordship that's looming right now, with wealth disparities skyrocketing to French Revolution levels. And their propaganda machine smears anyone who opposes the current putsch, calling even mild objectors "leftist." Hence, they do not want anyone reading Adam Smith anymore, who denounced owner-oligarchy.

There are two other major zones in U.S. politics. "Liberals" are the true  heirs of Adam Smith... (whom most historians rightly call "the first liberal")… though millions mistakenly believe liberals are "leftist-lite."

They are not! 

Leftists want to equalize *outcomes*. Liberals want to equalize the *starting blocks* so that all children get everything they need (health, food education) so that they can then... compete! As Adam Smith called for. There is a huge difference! And were Adam Smith around today today he would be a democrat.

Finally there are libertarians. But they come in many sub-flavors.  I consider myself a Smithian/Heinleinian libertarian, who believes devoutly in individualism and creative competition on a flat and transparent playing field. But that makes me a heretic to the Rothbardist-Randian fanatics who have taken over much of the movement and who actually think that oligarchs are friends of flat-open-creative capitalism. Something that has never, ever been true.

Hah! I shall speak of this at Freedom Fest in July when I will stand up for Smithian/Heinleinian Libertarianism! If I am lynched or otherwise disposed of, you'll know how far the freedom movement has drifted...

There. I gave it a shot. A capsule summary of why those denouncing the lying-evil treason being foisted on us by Rupert Murdoch are not "leftists." They are Americans. More can by found at: http://tinyurl.com/polimodels

In fact though? To hell with the lobotomizing "left right axis!" We should be negotiating with nuance, like adults.

=One of the biggest obsessions and might-have-beens that you never heard-of=

Now this is going to be obscure.  I know lots of economists and such, and only the very oldest of them remember what was once the top concern discussed in every business journal, decades ago.

"Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated." - Das Kapital

It is almost forgotten today. But books and books were written about a "problem" when I was young. In the 1970s, capitalists were terrified by the fact that Union Pension funds seemed to be the main accumulating pools of capital -- and by 2020 workers would -- in effect -- own the means of production.

Even around 1965 there were countless papers declaring it "obvious." Amid much hand-wringing, the punditry caste - especially William F. Buckley - discussed how it seemed inevitable that corporate capital would thus be majority "owned" by the workers, though not via Karl Marx's revolution or expropriation. Rather, through an organic and natural process of regulated savings.

Some saw this as a good thing, potentially ending the class system forever! Especially since it would happen "fair and square," with all stockholders seeing their shares bought by those pension funds at fair market value, with no real losers. No expropriation of wealth from the already-rich.  Just a working class getting steadily richer.

Others saw the prospect as a disaster… for exactly the same reasons... and began planning ways to change the rules and system, so that the looming threat would go away. They began by banning the pension funds from participating much in control over the companies they invested in, or unions from giving orders to their pension funds. There were some sound reasons… and others were just rationalizations to keep control in the hands of major individual stockholders. 

I believe much of the Reagan "revolution" was specifically targeted to end that dire threat… through the quelling of unions, the underfunding of pensions, the empowerment of nested shell-ownership, and the vast tsunami of tax largesse to the top aristocracy via "supply side" voodoo. And they succeeded, which is historically unsurprising.

What I do find mind-boggling is that not even one pundit today ever mentions this reversal of what was once seen as an inevitable, unstoppable trend toward a Rooseveltean-style "soft socialism" that would owe zilch to either Marx or revolution, and that would be just as capitalist, only with worker ownership the norm.

How weird that even top economists scratch their heads when I mention this… before a light of dawning memory shows in their eyes (the older ones, that is) and they say… "oh… yeah, that was something we used to talk a lot about, wasn't it!"

It was once topic #1, much discussed in the 1960s and 1970s. Now gone from the mind. Weird, huh?

== Putin Worship ==

You'd have to be unconscious not to have noticed the surge of admiring paeans to Vladimir Putin that have been surging across the punditry caste of the American right.

The goofiness of Putin-adoration was starkly portrayed by Doyle McManus in his LA Times op-ed "Putin, master player." This fetish to portray the Russian President as some latter-day Peter the Great, for having seized Crimea and defied western sanctions, while poking at some eastern Ukrainian cities, manifestly ignores the elephant in the room.  Which is the Ukraine, itself.

Putin is... a winner?  He has lost the Ukraine as a pro-Russian puppet state, which it was, under ousted President Viktor Yanukovich.  Now veering westward toward stronger ties with the west, Ukraine is no longer a pliant buffer state of the sort that all Russian strongmen have desperately sought since Ivan the Terrible. 

 We should not play that game, nor think of these events as a win for "our side" in some kind of new-coldwar contest. But you can be sure that is how most Russians view it. Vladimir Putin's nibble-back of Crimea - and possibly some portions of the Donbass Region - are not the moves of a "master player," but a politician striving hard to salvage something out of a strategic disaster.

What is fascinating? The frenzied efforts of Mr. McManus and others in media to divert attention from the big picture, stoking fear and bogeyman tensions and suppressing any talk of the upside of recent events. At best this is myopia.

And now... loons of the left prove that it isn't a monopoly

All right then, you've been warned to expect some of my trademarked "contrariness," this time.  A tendency -- call it a compulsion -- to always turn and point in some unexpected direction, especially if I have been looking one way for too long.  It drives everything from my chosen profession to science to politics.

And yes, today I plan to take a break from decrypting the political madness of the far-right and instead point my j'accuse finger to the left.

But first, do not even begin to interpret what I am about to say as "both sides are equally crazy."  Anyone who read my previous missives can tell which direction I condemn most harshly, as the core of madness and outright treason in American life.  I've spoken at length about the rightwing cult that has taken over the conservative movement, sending poor Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave and betraying America by sending our great nation into debilitating "culture war."   It is still monstrous and unbelievable that Rupert Murdoch and his co-conspirators can get away with posing as populists, while pursuing oligarchic takeover of the country.  Without  any doubt, that is the direction from which civilization and the American Republic face their greatest danger.

Anyone who doubts the tenacity with which I've fought this fight should have a glance at any of the following extended (and, I'm told, influential) missives:
     http://www.davidbrin.com/neoromantics.htm
     http://www.davidbrin.com/neocons.htm
     http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/09/real-bush-war-neocons-vs-us-military.html

Nevertheless, I have also made clear my utter contempt for those who simply choose one of the major ideological cults and thereafter march in uncritical lockstep.  People who pronounce themselves proud individualists, but then turn their suspicion of authority reflexes in only one direction.

Yes, the right is presently far more noxious and dangerous, having allowed their entire movement to be taken over by monsters.  But Lefties who forget Stalin and Mao are intellectually as bankrupt as righties who ignore 4,000 years of oppression by kings and lords and preisthoods.

In fact, nearly all ideologues can be categorized together by a set of sharedpersonality traits that run deeper than their differences of surface policy.  Far-lefties and far-righties both partake, for example, in a near-universal propensity for dismissing civil society as futile.

Contempt for the masses is the common steam that rises from every pore, as they preen over things that they "know" that "the majority is too blind to see."

(Am I unaware of the irony of my having typed the previous three paragraphs?  Since a majority of my fellow citizens do seem to swallow the abysmal notion of "left-vs'right" - doesn't that make me a masses-contemptuous snob?  Har!  Hey, I am human too.  The difference is that I know this pitfall and have schooled myself to be wary of it.  And yes, that is snobbery, too.)

So, as promised, I am going to offer a little balance, this time.  To remind us that the left can be as crazy as the right (even while being less dangerous, during THIS decade) go have a look at a horrific piece of preening nonsense that keeps being sent to me by liberals, who think that it is the best thing since spray-on cheese. It's called Sheeple of Amerika.

Feh!  Gawd, this thing is a calumny, on so many levels that I am tempted to call it deliberate psychological warfare against the Enlightenment.  Perhaps one of Murdoch's put-up provocations, crafted precisely in order to undermine liberal credibility.

Look, no one can teach me a thing about rambunctious contrarianism and suspicion of authority.

But think.  What is the most pervasive and relentless "propaganda" campaign in the history of the world?

When asked this question, people name all sorts of messages that they perceive as responsible for turning the masses into contemptible sheep.  Lefties point to pervasive "buy this" consumerism.  Rightists screech over the other side's incessant demands for conformist political correctness.  What's never mentioned is the propaganda that actually worked... on them!  If you asked these guys for a week, a year, and even if their lives depended on it, they would never guess.

Surprise, surprise. We are self-flatterers and so we never attribute OUR favorite traits to propaganda that filled our very pores, from a young age.  But there's a pair of messages that inarguably and statistically outnumber both "buy this" and Tolerance Fetishism, combined.

 We all grew up suckling Suspicion of Authority (SOA) combined with "I'm a F4$#$@king individual and everybody else are lemmings!" 

You see these twin themes conveyed in nearly every film, most of which also portray civilization itself (and its institutions) as utterly hopeless.  Usually evil. With some central/awful authority being bravely opposed by one -- or a few -- stalwart individualist heroes who don't need no institutions to stand between them and justice!

Think about it.  List the themes in nearly every Hollywood product.  Name any messages that occur more often than this pair.  But people never notice the propaganda that made THEM the way they are.  Now add in the most alluring theme of all.  Yes, our old pal contempt for the masses.  Go ahead and TEST YOURSELF with my questionnaire.


So, will Brin ever get to the point? How does all of this apply to "Sheeple"?

Let's be frank.  THE message of this 'film' is not urging folks to wake up, or fomenting rebellion; it is contempt. Feeding the producers' sanctimonious sense that they are privileged and smarter and more insightful than their sheeplike neighbors, like gods above mere animals.  Self-flattery is the cheapest drug around.  Any addict can get all he wants, and these guys have it hard. http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.htm

But it gets worse. For, you see, it's been shown that the surest way to get the masses under control is NOT to inculcate worshipful passivity, but rather to spread a dull, simmering state of generalized resentment, aimed in all directions and at each other.

What?  You've never studied Machiavelli?  Really? What do you think "culture war" is all about? The whole "populist" theme driving Red America to hate the cities and anyone with a graduate degree?

  The formula is simple. Inundate the prols with distractions that scatter their SOA in every direction.  And if some of those directions are "up" toward some corporations and meeting groups of the rich?  So what? So long as you shotgun a vast number of targets, you'll keep it scattered. Impotent. (Notice though, the Sheeple guys never mention Rupert Murdoch or the petroprinces who have been doing the most meddling of all.  Gee I wonder why.)

 And so, the ultimate irony.  This is exactly the sort of thing that the masters would want produced!

Do I seriously believe that "Sheeple" was generated at the AEI or Heritage or some other Murdochian pimphouse?  Naw. Funny thing is, they probably got it for free, or maybe with the gentlest prodding.  This shit is self-stirring.

Note that this film -- after purportedly demanding that people "wake up!" -- doesn't suggest any of the things that might ACTUALLY cause sheep to look up... such as actual, pragmatic links to learned and detailed analyses of world power, for example. Or self-organizing tools. Nor does it recommend the kind of "proxy power" organizations that can empower any individual to join with large numbers of others, in common cause to deal, effectively, with specific, targeted issues.

They can't offer such suggestions!  Because that would be to admit that the sheep can and do self-organize, effectively, and we must never admit that!  So, instead, "Sheeple" jumbles a huge goulash. Mixing genuinely worrisome trends, like rising income gaps, with vapid idiocies like 9/11 "loose change" conspiracies and UFO cults.  That's right, keep the paranoia spread evenly, guys.  It's what you're subsidized to do.

Oh, maybe a third of the slides do point to genuine problems that deserve attention, problem-solving appraisal, or even criminal prosecution.  So?  A two-second flicker and each issue joins the jumble of true, false, misleading and just plain stupid.
  
Is the greedy patenting of seed strains and eliminating self-fertility, so that farmers cannot re-seed their fields, evil?  Sure!  Is Genetic Modification of food crops automatically a crime against people and nature?  Bullshit!  That's pure luddite sanctimonious unscientific claptrap and the surest sign of dullard minds, while every single bite of food they eat was genetically modified by previous generations of farmers and breeders. Have these guys helped us to intelligently parse the good parts of a techno future from the bad?  Hah!

If you actually and really want to pragmatically fight evil, promote justice, save the world and advance the Enlightenment, there's a proved method.  One that bypasses all this contempt-for-the-masses malarkey and goes straight to problem solving -- combining the tiny influence of individuals into the momentum of millions.  Drop by the PROXY POWER site.

It will tell you how to do exactly that.

Oog, these guys got me exercised.  And sure, I expect to be derided as a tool of corporate interests, just for criticizing their lobotomized (or else corporate sponsored) uselessness.  But note that I never claimed that they weren't pointing to some genuine enemies of humanity and the world.  As I said, about a third of the slides were completely or partially right-on!

But they aren't helpful.  Not at any level.  As elistists, on a sanctimony drug-high, they are proof that the left contains crazies, too.*  They are part of the problem.  The REAL problem -- the insanity of culture war.

We won't defeat the Rush Limbaughs by acting just like them.  We'll defeat them by being the grownups.

DB


* Reiterating the central point, yet again.  The liberal and conservative movements ARE fundamentally different, today.  Both contain some good ideas, deepdown.  Both contain some crazies.  The crucial distinction is that one of these movements keeps its lunatics marginalized. Its leaders perpetually try -- hit or miss -- to re-awaken the American genius for honorable negotiation and pragmatic problem-solving.

The other side may have some genuine ideas, lying dormant under the snows.  But all its potential good has been rendered useless, by giving itself over, body and soul, to its psychopathic wing.

Do not hate American Conservatism.  Pity it.  Pray for the fever to break and for our fellow citizens to rise out of delirium, to rejoin us at the dinner table conversation about human destiny. And defeat them with reason, until they do.

The Left-Right Axis Redux: More on the War of Ideas

==Left vs Right: A Failed Axis? ==

Back to the issue of whether the "left" has run out of "ideas".... I am one of the leading proponents for abandoning the left-right axis, it is hard for me to say what are the leading ideas of the left. But let me try with a four-state metaphor.

Capital "L" Left = loony mystical platonists who want power over us so that they can (for our own good) ensure rule by philosopher kings who ERADICATE class differences.

Capital "R" RIGHT = loony mystical platonists who want power over us so that they can (for our own good) ensure rule by philosopher kings who EMPHASIZE class differences.

lower case "l" = left . To me, this stands for an emphasis on problem solving techniques that utilize the 'left hand' of negotiated COOPERATIVE CONSENSUS, including (but not entirely) the utilization of tax-gathered resources to be applied according to politically determined policies, always heeding the human tendency toward institutional calcification.

lower case "r" = right . To me, this stands for an emphasis on problem solving techniques that utilize the 'right hand' of COMPETITIVE CREATIVITY, within a market that generally responds to consumer desire... but that has also been tuned by consensus policies that strike a balance, avoiding excessive meddling while encouraging markets to heed overall civilization needs.

At long last, we are gradually finding out what the left and right hands are good for. What functions they perform with skill and which are best left to the other. With this increasing knowledge and sophistication arising, why should we RIGHT NOW start heeding the maniacs who want us to abandon pragmatic problem solving and pick just one hand?

(In fact, the lefty yearning for communitarian cooperation is just as simplemindedly moralistic as rightwing fundamentalism. It ignores what we have learned about EMERGENT PROPERTIES IN NATURE. How what looks like competition at one level is actually highly cooperative at the next or higher level. Markets are one example. Ecosystems are another. A gazelle being killed by a lion does not want to be told about competitive synnergies or the Circle of Life. But if a liberal can recognize that transcendance, why can't he see how it works in markets?)

Ayn Rand wants me to lop off my left hand and Marx wants the right amputated. They can both go to hell.

What I will not concede is that the right has been doing better at solving problems. When I see the Insurance Industry completely revamped so that it CAPITALISTICALLY provides the vast array of services that people depend on from government, from the FDA and OSHA to medical research (Barry Goldwater wanted to begin this adventure) then I will admit that the right hand has truly started showing off new ideas.

Alas, I am falling ever farther behind.

==Losing the War of Ideas?==

A number of people have pointed out this article in Nature this week on the role of Oxytocin (the "Hug Drug") and trust...

-- Fred Turner suggested "mass oxytocin sprayings of the Middle East?"

It is absolutely eerie how this follows the story line contained in one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time - STAND ON ZANZIBAR, by John Brunner.

Phil said: "An honest person would have to acknowledge that we (liberals) are getting whupped in the world of ideas."

Well, kinda... in that liberal-enlightenment pragmatism always gets whupped when they allow the battle to be OVER so-called "ideas."

While I have made clear that I admire Locke, Smith Hayek and Franklin, I admire them precisely *because* their ideas served the overall goal of liberating practical men and women to solve problems. The general processes they recommended always revolved around reciprocal accountability... ensuring that no person or group could ever again do what both aristocracies and socialist rabble rousers always try to do - monopolize power and transfix the population with incantations.

Incantations... oops, I mean "ideas"... tend to whither when practical people are free to raise their hands and say "yes... but..."

I do not need 'liberal thought" to make me favor equality of opportunity (while opposing artificial equalizing of circumstance).

All I need is the blatantly obvious fact that we were wasting staggering amounts of human creative potential when people were repressed because of presumptions having to do with race and gender and class. The fantastic success of pragmatic "liberalism" at spurring us to take on these devils is so overwhelmingly more important than any other event of the last century that the burden of proof is on anyone who disses "liberals."

Likewise, I do not need to be a Gaian mystic (like the ones I portray in EARTH) in order to know that my great-great-grandchildren will be in deep, deep trouble if we do not make ecological matters an intrinsic part of the economic cost of goods.

"Socialism collapsed because it did not allow prices to tell the economic truth.

"Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow prices to tell the ecological truth."

--Oystein Dahle, former Vice President, Exxon, Norway


==But one more set of referrals==

Go onto Amazon and see if you can find a copy of JITTERBUG by Mike McQuay (1984), a somewhat paranoid novel about a future world devastated by a horrible disease controlled by terrorists. It is so creepily on target that I doubt you'll find a copy. Certain interests have probably bought up all the used copies floating around. If only someone would reprint.

As a contrast, also get your hands on that old chiller SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. (Or at least the Frederic March Kirk Douglas Burt Lancaster movie.)

 What a reversal. Nowadays it is the officer corps, under siege, undergoing purges but staunchly defending our constitution tooth and nail against a presidency gone out of control.