This ‘nothing ever happens’ mindset also explains why the elite have slowly and methodically boiled us frogs, inculcating us into ever deeper pits of despair.
Silly to think that we can quickly and efficiently intercede the enemy as they enjoy the fruits of their long march. They will get to take a few bites at the very least. More likely they will consume to the last seed. Perhaps we can intervene before then, if not, it behooves us to plant our own seeds.
Build something from scratch with your hands and a few tools. Like a deck or a cabin. Grow a garden. Learn to carve or dont learn just carve. Walk barefeet in the sand and grass. Social media and government are constant noise. Never have people had so much to say. All of it is meaningless. Constant distractions. We give them power over our mind.
Physical exhaustion feels great. Speak with God often.
Indeed, there's no satisfaction like that derived from seeing the fruits of your mind translated into the world through your hands. Our pushbutton society deprives us of this.
I hate to break the flow of this conversation, but...am I the only person who's been living through far too many weeks where decades have happened since late 2019? You know, watching the world and so many of the people in it turn utterly insane, and it seemed like every week there was a new diktat or five. Disease, wars and rumours of war, talk of a new world order and one world government, countries acting in lockstep, and no matter what language you listened in, all the same words in the news?
All with a very Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe. And you knew, you just knew, that if you said a wrong word to safeandeffective the pod people would get you.
Or is it just me (I hope), and the bored people are still waiting for something to happen?
Yes. So much happened. And people are just ignoring it. The authors narration of what we have been through in this decade was frightening - “The decade kicked off with a bioengineered virus escaping from the lab (maybe by accident, maybe not), which precipitated biomedical tyranny straight out of dystopian scifi powered by network-enabled mass psychosis. As a direct result of this, the majority of the human species are now genetically modified mutants thanks to multiple injections with an mRNA gene therapy serum” - but we just carry on as if nothing happened!
I think of modern society like an old growth forest. Normally, wildfires occur periodically to remove decay and promote new life. However, as in non-metaphorical forests, the state steps in and extinguishes the flames before they can get going, in the interest of safety and stability. There might be a controlled burn occasionally, but not enough to create the same effect as nature would. The result is a buildup of fuel that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic inferno beyond the capacity of the state to manage. Judging by the increasingly overwrought undertones of panic seen in the media, we may be at that point of a purge of dead wood.
I hope you're right. I think a collapse is the only thing that will save us at this point. The problem is that things seem to be moving away from the big dramatic conflicts of the covid era and back towards the same slow creep that we've been experiencing for decades. A little more taxes here, a little more expensive here, a little more delayed here, etc. Nothing too alarming until we wake up one day without electricity or running water.
I think the very interconnectedness of everything is both the reason everything has held together for so long and the reason that when it does fall apart, it will be systemic, rapid, and irreversible. Up to this point the ability to pull resources from every corner of Earth has masked local dysfunction. When that is not possible, and things collapse in enough places at the same time, the system will be overwhelmed. Imagine the critical mass of riots and destruction if EBT cards ceased to work in a dozen major urban areas for more than a week, for example.
I got to witness the collapse of complex systems in real time this past weekend. Trying to fly out of Newark airport was a clown show. First, our flight was delayed for six hours because we didn't have flight attendants (?!). After the flight attendants finally arrived, the computer system that scans the boarding passes went down. That had to be reset. When we landed, there were no open gates. After a gate became free, they discovered that they didn't have a jet bridge pilot to connect the plane to the gate.
Now none of this is a true disaster. Airports have always sucked, and stupid things like this have certainly happened before. But if this same level of incompetence is being displayed by every industry across the country, things may be unraveling quicker than we thought.
These are just the early symptoms. Also note the ongoing, seemingly random shortages afflicting the supply chain. All a preview of what's in store I suspect. Indoor plumbing will be a luxury for the rich if this path continues.
My dad and I went fishing in Canada once when I was about 9 or 10. There were other men with their sons at the camp. The other boys called me Billy goat because I would run up the granite bluffs. I won a trophy for Patience because I would fish as long as the adults wanted to, even in the rain. The trophy did not have a sign on it. They said they would send the sign in the mail. I'm still waiting, patiently.
Do you know the end of "One Monster after Another?" Anyhow, I am trying, likely against the wisdom of all your interesting thoughts herein, to Make Something Happen in my little conservative-academic circles, with a new piece “Adjunct Suppressors: The Claremont Institute Editors Have Helped Squelch the Covid-19 Vax-Harm Story,” https://pomocon.substack.com/p/adjunct-suppressors perhaps most important thing on the Covid/Vax disaster I’ve ever written. I will likely be attacked for it, and so I would appreciate your or your readers' support, in the comments there, or here, or by sharing it as widely as you can.
Honestly, I'm very much groping after my own meaning here, and quite certain that I haven't captured it. I feel like when someone really understands this dynamic, it will be as epochal as the birth of language. Until then I'm like a blind man trying to understand color....
A compounding problem is that among the commentariat class generally - and I
increasingly in our spheres now - predictive analysis is being supplanted by pure wishcasting masquerading as predictive analysis. My essay from a few months ago A World of Glass Bees gets into why this is, but it's a huge problem. As people's wishcast wet-dream 'predictions' get knocked over in favor of more realistic courses of events, the chorus chant of 'Nothing Ever Happens' will only grow louder, and it will train us to not spot and not understand more nuanced event consequences.
We do have to consider some of the hints buried in what we are told.
Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers. That's when they crucified him.
Consider that as executive and regulatory function, government amounts to a social nervous system, while money and banking are a form of blood and circulation system. When we have public government and private banking, the banks rule, as there is less oversight, they don't have to work around election cycles and control the finances of anyone running for office. Does it occur to anyone that the one job the clowns we seem to have in office are really good at, is running up the public debt?
What is the one thing the financial system really, really needs from government? Public debt.
We tend to think of money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like it was gold, or bitcoin, but the fact is that it functions as a contract, between the individual and the community. So to store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt on the other side. "The real money is in bonds." The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks. Money is a form of public utility, like roads and needs to function as such. We need to store value organically. Back in the day, people raised their kids and were taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts, the kids have mountains of debt and the bankers are happy.
As for this process we call time, as these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the foundation of culture, as narrative and physics codifies it as measures of duration, yet the evident fact is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback loops in the middle.
Given that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, it's fairly basic dichotomy.
The point and problem is that our minds are crammed into the various thought boxes from a very early age and trying to see beyond them takes real, serious effort, but once you begin to sense the reality is the vibes, not the boxes, it does start to open up.
Consciousness does have a love/hate relationship with order. It builds the boxes, then desperately tries breaking out of them.
"Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the more remote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and excitement with which they wait for the announcement "Christos anestê," "Christ is risen!" and the response "Alêthôs anestê," "He has really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasant woman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow we shall have no harvest this year" (Modern Greek Folklore, p. 573). We are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneath its Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in its essence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remote pre-Christian past. Every spring was to primitive man a time of terrible anxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead world revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?"
"Artificial intelligence has more or less passed the Turing Test, which it turns out is not a good indicator of consciousness, not that this matters one way or another to the utility of artificial intelligence."
Indeed, but this is nevertheless a pet peeve of mine. Or rather, a gigantic peeve. This Turing Test bullshit is nothing but behaviorism. And behaviorism is 1. False and 2. Already about 100 years old when Turing "invented" his "test." As John Searle said in another context, you could construct a Rube Goldberg device out of empty frozen orange juice cans that could produce responses that passed the Turing Test, but you wouldn't say it was "conscious" would you? (Unless you're a lunatic like Watson or Skinner or Churchland or Dennett). It's pure capitalist deception, like rebranding a beer makes it taste better. Sorry for the interuption, now I'll go lie down.
There's swedish saying, with two versions. The normal one told to children mainly, goes like this if translated:
"He who wait for something good, always waits a long time".
Note that in swedish as in english, "good" can mean everything from tasting good to moral good. This version is for teaching patience.
The other version, used by our military mainly, is for teaching initiative:
"He who waits for something good, will keep waiting".
Meaning is quite clear: take the initiative and start doing instead of waiting.
Me, I've recently had mice and voles showing up in the chicken's feed bins. So traps and bait and checking the traps twice daily. Not one or two traps, half a dozen. Plus improved feed bins.
This apropos state/capital, an artifical divide if ever there was one: the modern liberal democratic state is nothing but the enforcement arm of capital. So far, Engels predictions in 'Das Kapital' on how capitalism ushers in and acts as birthmaid and nursemaid to communism is bang on the money. Sadly, most people who oppose marxist policies never read 'Das Kapital', possibly due to thinking it preaches and teaches communism as something good, confusing it with Marx' 'Communist Manifesto' which is just a little pamhplet in comparison.
It's also bitterly funny to see how "liberretardians" as the online moniker is for anyone not wanting statecapital to decide what books you may own cling to Friedman, Hayek et al despite they having been thoroughly proven as wrong as Marx by reality itself. If I had $1 for every time I've seen version of "but it's not real capitalism" I could by beachfront property it feels like.
This is real capitalism. Capitalism has always behaved like this when not curbed by the state, the only entity with enough direct power to challenge capitalism. Capitalism has always sought to control the state to avoid being subject to its power and to abuse that power. State has always sought control over capitalism forthe same reason.
In the 1990s, they stopped struggling and joined forces.
As I said, how to get rid of vermin... there are two methods and two methods alone:
Kill them and keep killing them until ridof them, and safeguard their targets against them.
As our Founders observed; republicanism and capitalism are suitable only for the religious and ethical. All others need a heavy hand to constrain evil. What happens when the Hand becomes evil?
Once the magnetic poles flip again, and they will within the next week or thousand years, there will be a huge extinction event. I feel the current global anxiety and subsequent madness is partially rooted in these natural cycles. You can literally feel the crazy....
The irony being that if any major change was to come, people would freak out! We all fantasise about doing daring stuff - commercials on TV often portray people doing outrageous, illegal and often cruel things and yet we find ourselves rooting for the offender, or at least we are supposed to. For example: there was a fast food ad where a cheeky youth on a skateboard steals an unsuspecting guy’s lunch. He hides behind a tree and gobbles down his prize as the victim stumbles about in the background desperately looking for his lunch. In this scenario it is the gastroboarder that we are supposed to be alliance with. Obviously if such a thing happened in real life we would be appalled at such behaviour. What gives? The fantasy of change, of danger and the unpredictable is desired but the reality of such an event, with all its suffering and inconvenience, is most unpalatable. Perhaps when change does occur we tend to minimise the impact in our minds because of our love of the status quo?
History, written by the winners, ultimately shows the good guys being victorious. With current events, there is more variety of information, and it often seems like the good guys are losing. Maybe this feeling that the West was great and is now in decline just reflects our sources of information, historical and tidy vs. current and messy. As an example, from the view of common Americans, WWI must have been a real stinker. 100 years later, our leaders wouldn't be able to pull that kind of stunt. Progress, no?
It's true that change feels slow. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
This ‘nothing ever happens’ mindset also explains why the elite have slowly and methodically boiled us frogs, inculcating us into ever deeper pits of despair.
Another thoughtful essay sir!
An excellent point. It's that very inability to see the cumulative effects of small changes that enables them to direct the flow of history.
Silly to think that we can quickly and efficiently intercede the enemy as they enjoy the fruits of their long march. They will get to take a few bites at the very least. More likely they will consume to the last seed. Perhaps we can intervene before then, if not, it behooves us to plant our own seeds.
The Long March through the institutions was barely noticed until it couldn’t be missed, or corrected.
Build something from scratch with your hands and a few tools. Like a deck or a cabin. Grow a garden. Learn to carve or dont learn just carve. Walk barefeet in the sand and grass. Social media and government are constant noise. Never have people had so much to say. All of it is meaningless. Constant distractions. We give them power over our mind.
Physical exhaustion feels great. Speak with God often.
Only God knows.
Indeed, there's no satisfaction like that derived from seeing the fruits of your mind translated into the world through your hands. Our pushbutton society deprives us of this.
Yes!
Something happens every day at my mini-farm. And in solitude & silence, I can sometimes hear God whisper.
Some days I'm so tired I crave "boredom." Or at least rest.
The best rest days are dream days.
I hate to break the flow of this conversation, but...am I the only person who's been living through far too many weeks where decades have happened since late 2019? You know, watching the world and so many of the people in it turn utterly insane, and it seemed like every week there was a new diktat or five. Disease, wars and rumours of war, talk of a new world order and one world government, countries acting in lockstep, and no matter what language you listened in, all the same words in the news?
All with a very Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe. And you knew, you just knew, that if you said a wrong word to safeandeffective the pod people would get you.
Or is it just me (I hope), and the bored people are still waiting for something to happen?
That's part of the point I was making here - a great deal has happened recently. And yet....
Yes. So much happened. And people are just ignoring it. The authors narration of what we have been through in this decade was frightening - “The decade kicked off with a bioengineered virus escaping from the lab (maybe by accident, maybe not), which precipitated biomedical tyranny straight out of dystopian scifi powered by network-enabled mass psychosis. As a direct result of this, the majority of the human species are now genetically modified mutants thanks to multiple injections with an mRNA gene therapy serum” - but we just carry on as if nothing happened!
I get the feeling the simulation admin got really bored with us Sims and decided to intervene...
I think of modern society like an old growth forest. Normally, wildfires occur periodically to remove decay and promote new life. However, as in non-metaphorical forests, the state steps in and extinguishes the flames before they can get going, in the interest of safety and stability. There might be a controlled burn occasionally, but not enough to create the same effect as nature would. The result is a buildup of fuel that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic inferno beyond the capacity of the state to manage. Judging by the increasingly overwrought undertones of panic seen in the media, we may be at that point of a purge of dead wood.
I have often considered exactly this metaphor in precisely this context.
I hope you're right. I think a collapse is the only thing that will save us at this point. The problem is that things seem to be moving away from the big dramatic conflicts of the covid era and back towards the same slow creep that we've been experiencing for decades. A little more taxes here, a little more expensive here, a little more delayed here, etc. Nothing too alarming until we wake up one day without electricity or running water.
I think the very interconnectedness of everything is both the reason everything has held together for so long and the reason that when it does fall apart, it will be systemic, rapid, and irreversible. Up to this point the ability to pull resources from every corner of Earth has masked local dysfunction. When that is not possible, and things collapse in enough places at the same time, the system will be overwhelmed. Imagine the critical mass of riots and destruction if EBT cards ceased to work in a dozen major urban areas for more than a week, for example.
I got to witness the collapse of complex systems in real time this past weekend. Trying to fly out of Newark airport was a clown show. First, our flight was delayed for six hours because we didn't have flight attendants (?!). After the flight attendants finally arrived, the computer system that scans the boarding passes went down. That had to be reset. When we landed, there were no open gates. After a gate became free, they discovered that they didn't have a jet bridge pilot to connect the plane to the gate.
Now none of this is a true disaster. Airports have always sucked, and stupid things like this have certainly happened before. But if this same level of incompetence is being displayed by every industry across the country, things may be unraveling quicker than we thought.
These are just the early symptoms. Also note the ongoing, seemingly random shortages afflicting the supply chain. All a preview of what's in store I suspect. Indoor plumbing will be a luxury for the rich if this path continues.
Feature or bug?
> Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear
Henry van Dyke.
My dad and I went fishing in Canada once when I was about 9 or 10. There were other men with their sons at the camp. The other boys called me Billy goat because I would run up the granite bluffs. I won a trophy for Patience because I would fish as long as the adults wanted to, even in the rain. The trophy did not have a sign on it. They said they would send the sign in the mail. I'm still waiting, patiently.
Kek
Do you know the end of "One Monster after Another?" Anyhow, I am trying, likely against the wisdom of all your interesting thoughts herein, to Make Something Happen in my little conservative-academic circles, with a new piece “Adjunct Suppressors: The Claremont Institute Editors Have Helped Squelch the Covid-19 Vax-Harm Story,” https://pomocon.substack.com/p/adjunct-suppressors perhaps most important thing on the Covid/Vax disaster I’ve ever written. I will likely be attacked for it, and so I would appreciate your or your readers' support, in the comments there, or here, or by sharing it as widely as you can.
Profound and deep and satisfyingly optimistic. Your meditations on the meaning of time and the oneness of it is uplifting. Thank you, sir. Well done.
Honestly, I'm very much groping after my own meaning here, and quite certain that I haven't captured it. I feel like when someone really understands this dynamic, it will be as epochal as the birth of language. Until then I'm like a blind man trying to understand color....
☺️As are we all.
A compounding problem is that among the commentariat class generally - and I
increasingly in our spheres now - predictive analysis is being supplanted by pure wishcasting masquerading as predictive analysis. My essay from a few months ago A World of Glass Bees gets into why this is, but it's a huge problem. As people's wishcast wet-dream 'predictions' get knocked over in favor of more realistic courses of events, the chorus chant of 'Nothing Ever Happens' will only grow louder, and it will train us to not spot and not understand more nuanced event consequences.
Wishful thinking will get you every time, yes. Anticipating outcomes is a reliable way of finding disappointment, and blinding oneself.
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment?
We do have to consider some of the hints buried in what we are told.
Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers. That's when they crucified him.
Consider that as executive and regulatory function, government amounts to a social nervous system, while money and banking are a form of blood and circulation system. When we have public government and private banking, the banks rule, as there is less oversight, they don't have to work around election cycles and control the finances of anyone running for office. Does it occur to anyone that the one job the clowns we seem to have in office are really good at, is running up the public debt?
What is the one thing the financial system really, really needs from government? Public debt.
We tend to think of money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like it was gold, or bitcoin, but the fact is that it functions as a contract, between the individual and the community. So to store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt on the other side. "The real money is in bonds." The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks. Money is a form of public utility, like roads and needs to function as such. We need to store value organically. Back in the day, people raised their kids and were taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts, the kids have mountains of debt and the bankers are happy.
As for this process we call time, as these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the foundation of culture, as narrative and physics codifies it as measures of duration, yet the evident fact is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is feedback loops in the middle.
Given that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, it's fairly basic dichotomy.
The point and problem is that our minds are crammed into the various thought boxes from a very early age and trying to see beyond them takes real, serious effort, but once you begin to sense the reality is the vibes, not the boxes, it does start to open up.
Consciousness does have a love/hate relationship with order. It builds the boxes, then desperately tries breaking out of them.
The right side of the ledger is debt OR equity. It doesn’t *have* to be debt.
Peace and love? You should read the actual text instead of getting information second hand.
“I have come not to bring peace, but a sword.” Matt 10:34
“If you do not have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” Luke 22:36
Turning the other cheek? An act of defiance, not acquiescence.
From string theory to accounting to Biblical exegesis- what a ride.
The problem is, equity is finite.
Text is part of the box.
Michael Hudson has been writing a series of books on debt and government, in Antiquity;
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/the-delphic-oracle-was-their-davos-a-four-part-interview-with-michael-hudson-about-his-forthcoming-book-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-1.html
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/04/michael-hudson-debt-and-the-collapse-of-antiquity-part-2.html
Apparently it was "Forgive them their debts," until the Romans co-opted the revolution.
Another good book on the foundations of Western Civ is Gilbert Murray's, The Five Stages of Greek Religion; https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm
"Anyone who has been in Greece at Easter time, especially among the more remote peasants, must have been struck by the emotion of suspense and excitement with which they wait for the announcement "Christos anestê," "Christ is risen!" and the response "Alêthôs anestê," "He has really risen!" I have referred elsewhere to Mr. Lawson's old peasant woman, who explained her anxiety: "If Christ does not rise tomorrow we shall have no harvest this year" (Modern Greek Folklore, p. 573). We are evidently in the presence of an emotion and a fear which, beneath its Christian colouring and, so to speak, transfiguration, is in its essence, like most of man's deepest emotions, a relic from a very remote pre-Christian past. Every spring was to primitive man a time of terrible anxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead world revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?"
"Artificial intelligence has more or less passed the Turing Test, which it turns out is not a good indicator of consciousness, not that this matters one way or another to the utility of artificial intelligence."
Indeed, but this is nevertheless a pet peeve of mine. Or rather, a gigantic peeve. This Turing Test bullshit is nothing but behaviorism. And behaviorism is 1. False and 2. Already about 100 years old when Turing "invented" his "test." As John Searle said in another context, you could construct a Rube Goldberg device out of empty frozen orange juice cans that could produce responses that passed the Turing Test, but you wouldn't say it was "conscious" would you? (Unless you're a lunatic like Watson or Skinner or Churchland or Dennett). It's pure capitalist deception, like rebranding a beer makes it taste better. Sorry for the interuption, now I'll go lie down.
This interruption was very much on point.
There's swedish saying, with two versions. The normal one told to children mainly, goes like this if translated:
"He who wait for something good, always waits a long time".
Note that in swedish as in english, "good" can mean everything from tasting good to moral good. This version is for teaching patience.
The other version, used by our military mainly, is for teaching initiative:
"He who waits for something good, will keep waiting".
Meaning is quite clear: take the initiative and start doing instead of waiting.
Me, I've recently had mice and voles showing up in the chicken's feed bins. So traps and bait and checking the traps twice daily. Not one or two traps, half a dozen. Plus improved feed bins.
This apropos state/capital, an artifical divide if ever there was one: the modern liberal democratic state is nothing but the enforcement arm of capital. So far, Engels predictions in 'Das Kapital' on how capitalism ushers in and acts as birthmaid and nursemaid to communism is bang on the money. Sadly, most people who oppose marxist policies never read 'Das Kapital', possibly due to thinking it preaches and teaches communism as something good, confusing it with Marx' 'Communist Manifesto' which is just a little pamhplet in comparison.
It's also bitterly funny to see how "liberretardians" as the online moniker is for anyone not wanting statecapital to decide what books you may own cling to Friedman, Hayek et al despite they having been thoroughly proven as wrong as Marx by reality itself. If I had $1 for every time I've seen version of "but it's not real capitalism" I could by beachfront property it feels like.
This is real capitalism. Capitalism has always behaved like this when not curbed by the state, the only entity with enough direct power to challenge capitalism. Capitalism has always sought to control the state to avoid being subject to its power and to abuse that power. State has always sought control over capitalism forthe same reason.
In the 1990s, they stopped struggling and joined forces.
As I said, how to get rid of vermin... there are two methods and two methods alone:
Kill them and keep killing them until ridof them, and safeguard their targets against them.
As our Founders observed; republicanism and capitalism are suitable only for the religious and ethical. All others need a heavy hand to constrain evil. What happens when the Hand becomes evil?
If the hand offends you...
Once the magnetic poles flip again, and they will within the next week or thousand years, there will be a huge extinction event. I feel the current global anxiety and subsequent madness is partially rooted in these natural cycles. You can literally feel the crazy....
The irony being that if any major change was to come, people would freak out! We all fantasise about doing daring stuff - commercials on TV often portray people doing outrageous, illegal and often cruel things and yet we find ourselves rooting for the offender, or at least we are supposed to. For example: there was a fast food ad where a cheeky youth on a skateboard steals an unsuspecting guy’s lunch. He hides behind a tree and gobbles down his prize as the victim stumbles about in the background desperately looking for his lunch. In this scenario it is the gastroboarder that we are supposed to be alliance with. Obviously if such a thing happened in real life we would be appalled at such behaviour. What gives? The fantasy of change, of danger and the unpredictable is desired but the reality of such an event, with all its suffering and inconvenience, is most unpalatable. Perhaps when change does occur we tend to minimise the impact in our minds because of our love of the status quo?
History, written by the winners, ultimately shows the good guys being victorious. With current events, there is more variety of information, and it often seems like the good guys are losing. Maybe this feeling that the West was great and is now in decline just reflects our sources of information, historical and tidy vs. current and messy. As an example, from the view of common Americans, WWI must have been a real stinker. 100 years later, our leaders wouldn't be able to pull that kind of stunt. Progress, no?
It's true that change feels slow. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
To be fair, the Great War isn't exactly remembered fondly, even by the winners.
Woodrow Wilson gets a lot more criticism though for his social policy than for his foreign policy.
They both kinda sucked but the long term consequences of Jeckyll Island are by far the most destructive.
Lovely lyrical post.
Thank you.