I love this idea and already live it as much as I can. Civil disobedience! If I lived in London, I would definitely be one of those people sawing down the ULEZ cameras.
I think thermodynamics plays a big role in all of the obscure power structures. There is money to be made in expanding bureaucracy, especially by _former_ members of the b…
I love this idea and already live it as much as I can. Civil disobedience! If I lived in London, I would definitely be one of those people sawing down the ULEZ cameras.
I think thermodynamics plays a big role in all of the obscure power structures. There is money to be made in expanding bureaucracy, especially by _former_ members of the bureaucracy who can then get lucrative government contracts for themselves and their cronies. Corruption grows on tax revenue like mold grows on bread. How can this be countered?
I read my aunt's high school Latin textbook ("Latin For Today" by Gray and Jenkins) and was struck by the stories of ancient Romans. They all seemed to be about civic virtue, and the unity of Romans as one people. This was the secret sauce of the early Roman Empire. They were all interrelated, a nation and not just a country, definitely not an empire yet. They gave a shit. This, along with impressive engineering, made them nearly invincible.
Then they slowly opened up citizenship to the world, and slowly sank into the miasma of corruption and bureaucracy. The secret to security and prosperity is _unity_ as members of a nation. Deliberately divisive diversity is death for nations. Anyone praising diversity should be publicly slapped. The melting pot was the answer. We need to bring it back.
100%. The organic unity of blood and culture makes bureaucracy largely unnecessary; and vice versa. There's more to it of course - the Romans succeeded not only because they were one people, but because that people was passionately committed to virtue.
We have neither the unity of blood and culture, nor an alignment with virtue, and so, things fall apart.
The word Arete is my favorite word in greek, and doesn't have an easy translation into english. It means something like the ideal man but far more complex. They asked questions like: A wolf knows intrinsically how to be a wolf. A bear a bear. An eagle an eagle. But what is it to be a man? What is being a man entail? The answer was an amalgamation of all the ideals it took to be a fully embodied, fully expressed man in all his potentials. Thie quote by Heinlein would be a good summary of the concept: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Had to look that up, as I didn't read the Æneid in Latin. Should be required reading, especially in this age in which Westmen have been rendered effectively stateless.
There is also a connection to virus in the 'vir' root, and 'virility': the vax has slapped awake/alive so many.
The best thing about the Roman Empire is that there is a physics behind their unity and virtue. Their symbol of the fasce has its precedent in nature, in the 'Birkeland current', which is an electromagnetic force interconnecting planets to suns, and their influence to us. When everyone flows in the same direction (as the Bc does, as the Roman fasce symbolised) the force is unstoppable and eternal.
Actually, that's a common misconception. Virtus was a specific type of Roman virtue, but there were others. A Roman man was supposed by possessed of both types. Virtus was actually a female Roman Goddess, although she was possessed of manly virtues. In some instances, particularly those commemorating successful campaigns, this was dealt with by substituting Mars.
One can find a list of Roman virtues online. Some, but not all, overlap with the concept of Virtus.
What's sad is there was a time "the left" got this. I remember a bit on left anarchist Utah Philip's album "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere," that went something like, "what good are laws, the good people don't need them, and the bad people ignore them." We can of course quibble about the stupidity of full anarchism, the point is there was a time in the past when the left weren't hopeless suck ups to the establishment system. The loss of that left is a tragedy IMO.
As a side note, can you imagine a modern left anarchist releasing an album with a title praising the past, like "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere?"
The left of course has became parasitic suckups to the system, we must move on, but I for one don't mind taking a moment to mourn what was.
Hi, may I suggest that what is called the “left” is really the very tiny remnants of the old left that wasn’t discredited, imprisoned, or killed. The survivors were co-opted and allowed to pretend that they were still leftists. All the supposed left or liberal or even much of the conservative parties are not anything remotely like they were fifty years ago. They say the same pretty words of the past only.
Restated, if “they” have any ideology, it’s neoliberalism and austerity while wearing the different labels of mummified organizations, looking to keep their grift going.
If there are any leftists or moderate conservatives in them, they are trapped in the mummies’ corpses.
Frankly at this point "neoliberalism" simply means "any part of the status quo I don't like".
Thus it's easy to form dissident coalitions against "neoliberalism" while papering over the fact that the members don't agree on which part of the status quo they want to get rid off, or what they want to replace it with.
The official, remnant "Left" of today has been subsumed into Neoliberalism.
Please remember that the American Left before the 1960s had communists, socialists, social democrats, and democratic socialist, moderate left, and left of center people in it. Starting in the 1950s, the leftist edge of the American Left was gradually sheared off. First the communists in the 1950s, then the socialists, and onward until the elimination of the everything but the remnants of the moderate left was the most left of this left in the 1980s. Bill Clinton and his DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) put the shiv in the little that had not been castrated and coopted.
To paraphrase Clinton, where else are they (Blacks, the poor, working class, etc) going to go? The old language of equality and justice with a tiny soupçon of economic baloney to remind people of the New Deal as they shipped the factories overseas.
Do not feel too bad about the Democrats, the Republicans have undergone a less extreme version of this process as well. The acceptable, official, establishment Overton Window has moved so far left that the Democrats are economic conservatives and the Republicans are insane. This has *nothing* to do with their social ideologies are and no matter what either party purports, their economic and social ideologies are not connected to the old school left, moderate, conservatism, or liberalism of pre 1980, say before the Reagan Revolution.
Both parties are firmly establishment and the Establishment believes in the Washington Consensus: low taxes, reduced regulation, and nearly absolute free market capitialism. As a corollary, they also believe in reducing to almost nothing the social programs especially those of the New Deal and the Great Society.
So, yes, the "leftists" and "liberals" of today are neoliberal. I could also mention that Neoliberalism is not liberal either, but that is another loonnng post. Traditional Liberalism comes out of the Enlightenment and its child Classical Liberalism. It is what the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are based on. Also there was the New Left's (New Left of the 1960s that is) Free Speech Movement.
The Left is neoliberal, but with the caveat that big government is the answer to any of the problems which arise from the market. For example, the market reallocates both labour and capital, but if you are fifty year old in a redundant field, you're not going to fare well in terms of future labour competition.
The Nordic Model actually scores quite high on the Index of Economic Freedom. One of the few areas where they make an exception is with stronger worker protections. If one wanted to try and create a stripped down version which optimised social good, whilst maintaining employer freedom, then it would be by retaining statutory redundancy pay for longer serving and loyal employees.
It's not an option American government seems keen on exploring. It's a legal mechanism which is relatively cheap for employers and fair to workers, so obviously they wouldn't like it. The smart thing is that it utilises soft incentives rather than force or coercion. An employee with 20 years of service can look bad on a balance sheet even though anyone with half a brain really shouldn't care about structural costs, when cost recovery is usually less than two years.
American government prefers bureaucratic bloat and welfare. They like to encourage a significant number of citizens to become 'clients'. Like most types of regulation simple legal obligations and contract law remains by far the cheapest option for the taxpayer, and the fairest system for all parties- which is why American government won't allow it- it runs counter to Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
A 2018 ProPublica article showed that 56% of American men over 50 who lose their job will do so for employer-driven reasons. A healthy statutory redundancy law (which isn't great compared to voluntary agreements), would probably prevent about two-fifths of this loss, allowing more people to capitalise on better terms for their company or private pensions, military pensions or social security.
Bureaucracy is the death of a thousand cuts that all empires suffer over time. Every ruler and administrator has his own bugaboo that he lobbies to do something about, and individually they're small one-liner things with marginal impact that either prohibit something that peeves some petty fuck or else slightly improves someone's business prospects.
But they accumulate over time and this drives the growth of the administrative state, which in turn produces more petty fucks and their bugaboo projects, and it grows exponentially until it consumes all of the state's operations.
I've thought about this. A word count limit. The Law may consist of no more than 100,000 words - the length of a long novel. Should give them plenty of space.
Turn the tables, be like Calif. They've tried to limit the second amendment through a roster of "safe" handguns, and if any gun model is added, two have to be removed. It is obviously being challenged as unconstitutional, but what if congress, the supposed body that writes and approves "law", were to sneak in a rule that for every proposed new law, two had to be eliminated?
Any kind of natural growth limiter on laws would be great. It wouldn't stop them filling up the register with retarded ideas, but at least the scope and scale would be constrained and a single human could be expected to review and comprehend them all.
You don't want to say "lines" though. Then some midwit will figure out you can use wider paper and bad punctuation to stick lots of dumb ideas on one line.
That's why I suggested a word count. Of course they could then just start inventing words that each take several paragraphs of definition to understand, thereby laundering the legal complexity.
How about: don’t kill; don’t steal; ejaculate responsibly/tell him to; do unto others as you would have them do unto you, do nothing to another you would not want done to yourself.
I love this idea and already live it as much as I can. Civil disobedience! If I lived in London, I would definitely be one of those people sawing down the ULEZ cameras.
I think thermodynamics plays a big role in all of the obscure power structures. There is money to be made in expanding bureaucracy, especially by _former_ members of the bureaucracy who can then get lucrative government contracts for themselves and their cronies. Corruption grows on tax revenue like mold grows on bread. How can this be countered?
I read my aunt's high school Latin textbook ("Latin For Today" by Gray and Jenkins) and was struck by the stories of ancient Romans. They all seemed to be about civic virtue, and the unity of Romans as one people. This was the secret sauce of the early Roman Empire. They were all interrelated, a nation and not just a country, definitely not an empire yet. They gave a shit. This, along with impressive engineering, made them nearly invincible.
Then they slowly opened up citizenship to the world, and slowly sank into the miasma of corruption and bureaucracy. The secret to security and prosperity is _unity_ as members of a nation. Deliberately divisive diversity is death for nations. Anyone praising diversity should be publicly slapped. The melting pot was the answer. We need to bring it back.
100%. The organic unity of blood and culture makes bureaucracy largely unnecessary; and vice versa. There's more to it of course - the Romans succeeded not only because they were one people, but because that people was passionately committed to virtue.
We have neither the unity of blood and culture, nor an alignment with virtue, and so, things fall apart.
I was amused to find that the word "virtue" itself comes from Latin virtus (“manliness, bravery, worth, moral excellence”), from vir (“man”).
Very politically incorrect these days.
I had an essay on that very subject about a year ago ;)
The word Arete is my favorite word in greek, and doesn't have an easy translation into english. It means something like the ideal man but far more complex. They asked questions like: A wolf knows intrinsically how to be a wolf. A bear a bear. An eagle an eagle. But what is it to be a man? What is being a man entail? The answer was an amalgamation of all the ideals it took to be a fully embodied, fully expressed man in all his potentials. Thie quote by Heinlein would be a good summary of the concept: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
That Heinlein quote is one of his best.
I have long thought that “Arma virumque cano” is the most thrilling opening line in all of literature.
Had to look that up, as I didn't read the Æneid in Latin. Should be required reading, especially in this age in which Westmen have been rendered effectively stateless.
This board is too smart for me.
If you are the smartest guy in the room, you are in the wrong room. Love lurking and learning.
So true. I'm a lurker too!
Sometimes I get out ahead of my intellectual ski's...but that's the way I learn.
Nah, I just happened to have read a Latin textbook. Took me several months to get through it. Well worth it though.
Either way I always read your posts.
We need more people with balls.
You're definitely not afraid to tell it like it is.
Stay Strong.
Thanks. I do pay a price. Some relatives and friends refuse to talk to me for telling it like it is.
But the alternatives, ie not saying what I believe, or saying what I don't believe, are both worse. I could not live like that.
Yeah it's binary.
The other two options are one and the same; to exhaust your critical thinking.
You choose between whether you're able to think when it's critical, or not.
That's the choice they prefer was not recognized.
There is also a connection to virus in the 'vir' root, and 'virility': the vax has slapped awake/alive so many.
The best thing about the Roman Empire is that there is a physics behind their unity and virtue. Their symbol of the fasce has its precedent in nature, in the 'Birkeland current', which is an electromagnetic force interconnecting planets to suns, and their influence to us. When everyone flows in the same direction (as the Bc does, as the Roman fasce symbolised) the force is unstoppable and eternal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtlhe1JS4pY (From about 4.5 minutes in, goes for a minute or so, if you're interested.)
Actually, that's a common misconception. Virtus was a specific type of Roman virtue, but there were others. A Roman man was supposed by possessed of both types. Virtus was actually a female Roman Goddess, although she was possessed of manly virtues. In some instances, particularly those commemorating successful campaigns, this was dealt with by substituting Mars.
One can find a list of Roman virtues online. Some, but not all, overlap with the concept of Virtus.
What's sad is there was a time "the left" got this. I remember a bit on left anarchist Utah Philip's album "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere," that went something like, "what good are laws, the good people don't need them, and the bad people ignore them." We can of course quibble about the stupidity of full anarchism, the point is there was a time in the past when the left weren't hopeless suck ups to the establishment system. The loss of that left is a tragedy IMO.
As a side note, can you imagine a modern left anarchist releasing an album with a title praising the past, like "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere?"
The left of course has became parasitic suckups to the system, we must move on, but I for one don't mind taking a moment to mourn what was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0UOn6SeM2U
Hi, may I suggest that what is called the “left” is really the very tiny remnants of the old left that wasn’t discredited, imprisoned, or killed. The survivors were co-opted and allowed to pretend that they were still leftists. All the supposed left or liberal or even much of the conservative parties are not anything remotely like they were fifty years ago. They say the same pretty words of the past only.
Restated, if “they” have any ideology, it’s neoliberalism and austerity while wearing the different labels of mummified organizations, looking to keep their grift going.
If there are any leftists or moderate conservatives in them, they are trapped in the mummies’ corpses.
Frankly at this point "neoliberalism" simply means "any part of the status quo I don't like".
Thus it's easy to form dissident coalitions against "neoliberalism" while papering over the fact that the members don't agree on which part of the status quo they want to get rid off, or what they want to replace it with.
Wait...you think the left is neoliberal?
The official, remnant "Left" of today has been subsumed into Neoliberalism.
Please remember that the American Left before the 1960s had communists, socialists, social democrats, and democratic socialist, moderate left, and left of center people in it. Starting in the 1950s, the leftist edge of the American Left was gradually sheared off. First the communists in the 1950s, then the socialists, and onward until the elimination of the everything but the remnants of the moderate left was the most left of this left in the 1980s. Bill Clinton and his DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) put the shiv in the little that had not been castrated and coopted.
To paraphrase Clinton, where else are they (Blacks, the poor, working class, etc) going to go? The old language of equality and justice with a tiny soupçon of economic baloney to remind people of the New Deal as they shipped the factories overseas.
Do not feel too bad about the Democrats, the Republicans have undergone a less extreme version of this process as well. The acceptable, official, establishment Overton Window has moved so far left that the Democrats are economic conservatives and the Republicans are insane. This has *nothing* to do with their social ideologies are and no matter what either party purports, their economic and social ideologies are not connected to the old school left, moderate, conservatism, or liberalism of pre 1980, say before the Reagan Revolution.
Both parties are firmly establishment and the Establishment believes in the Washington Consensus: low taxes, reduced regulation, and nearly absolute free market capitialism. As a corollary, they also believe in reducing to almost nothing the social programs especially those of the New Deal and the Great Society.
So, yes, the "leftists" and "liberals" of today are neoliberal. I could also mention that Neoliberalism is not liberal either, but that is another loonnng post. Traditional Liberalism comes out of the Enlightenment and its child Classical Liberalism. It is what the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are based on. Also there was the New Left's (New Left of the 1960s that is) Free Speech Movement.
Well summed up, very succinct - much better than I could have done it!
Also, this development happened all over the western world during the Cold War, with slight variance in pace and tone between nations of course.
In France, it largely pre-dated and inspired the american development; in Sweden it happened between 1986-1995, f.e.
The Left is neoliberal, but with the caveat that big government is the answer to any of the problems which arise from the market. For example, the market reallocates both labour and capital, but if you are fifty year old in a redundant field, you're not going to fare well in terms of future labour competition.
The Nordic Model actually scores quite high on the Index of Economic Freedom. One of the few areas where they make an exception is with stronger worker protections. If one wanted to try and create a stripped down version which optimised social good, whilst maintaining employer freedom, then it would be by retaining statutory redundancy pay for longer serving and loyal employees.
It's not an option American government seems keen on exploring. It's a legal mechanism which is relatively cheap for employers and fair to workers, so obviously they wouldn't like it. The smart thing is that it utilises soft incentives rather than force or coercion. An employee with 20 years of service can look bad on a balance sheet even though anyone with half a brain really shouldn't care about structural costs, when cost recovery is usually less than two years.
American government prefers bureaucratic bloat and welfare. They like to encourage a significant number of citizens to become 'clients'. Like most types of regulation simple legal obligations and contract law remains by far the cheapest option for the taxpayer, and the fairest system for all parties- which is why American government won't allow it- it runs counter to Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
A 2018 ProPublica article showed that 56% of American men over 50 who lose their job will do so for employer-driven reasons. A healthy statutory redundancy law (which isn't great compared to voluntary agreements), would probably prevent about two-fifths of this loss, allowing more people to capitalise on better terms for their company or private pensions, military pensions or social security.
Yes an ultra woke person like you is a useful idiot for transnational capital.
John, Brownstone would like to republish this piece. which will give you massive exposure you deserve. How can we get in contact with you?
Just reply to the same email that you receive my newsletter from, and it will go to my inbox.
Bureaucracy is the death of a thousand cuts that all empires suffer over time. Every ruler and administrator has his own bugaboo that he lobbies to do something about, and individually they're small one-liner things with marginal impact that either prohibit something that peeves some petty fuck or else slightly improves someone's business prospects.
But they accumulate over time and this drives the growth of the administrative state, which in turn produces more petty fucks and their bugaboo projects, and it grows exponentially until it consumes all of the state's operations.
Maybe the total number of lines of laws needs to be limited by Constitutional amendment.
Then creating any new law would require first removing old laws to make space.
I've thought about this. A word count limit. The Law may consist of no more than 100,000 words - the length of a long novel. Should give them plenty of space.
Turn the tables, be like Calif. They've tried to limit the second amendment through a roster of "safe" handguns, and if any gun model is added, two have to be removed. It is obviously being challenged as unconstitutional, but what if congress, the supposed body that writes and approves "law", were to sneak in a rule that for every proposed new law, two had to be eliminated?
Any kind of natural growth limiter on laws would be great. It wouldn't stop them filling up the register with retarded ideas, but at least the scope and scale would be constrained and a single human could be expected to review and comprehend them all.
You don't want to say "lines" though. Then some midwit will figure out you can use wider paper and bad punctuation to stick lots of dumb ideas on one line.
That's why I suggested a word count. Of course they could then just start inventing words that each take several paragraphs of definition to understand, thereby laundering the legal complexity.
And that's how we all ended up speaking German.
Kek
How about: don’t kill; don’t steal; ejaculate responsibly/tell him to; do unto others as you would have them do unto you, do nothing to another you would not want done to yourself.
I think that covers it.
That's all good advice.
I've heard that if 99 people chant the word ' laws' 33 times in 33 seconds, a Mason writes a new law.
Gee, those Masons must have a good constitution... Writing all those laws would be tiring.
All for one! And one for all!