The Meaning of Christmas: Peace on Earth With Comfort and Technology

There is the usual round of cries of outrage the meaning of Christmas is being lost in the pursuit of commercialism and consumerism. I counter the exact opposite: the meaning of the season is the giving of material gifts, of visceral courtship romance, of taking time off for worry of world news and issues to eat, drink and be merry.

I'm only speaking of American Christmas traditions, leaving out the world. Europe had several centuries of wanton revelry as their mode of celebration, while in the US most of the people were consciously more Puritan and austere, ignoring Christ Mass altogether.

The first uptick of Christmas as we know it came after the Civil War, in the newly industrialized and commercialized North. Dead was the Jeffersonian vision of a Republic of simple autonomous farmers, replaced by a more complex society of factories, railways and shops to sell those wares (mostly in the North and spreading West with northern investment and rail).

Northern Puritan preachers condemned this new partying, consumerism and pursuit of comfort with technology. Most all Southerners hated most all things Northern, so contempt for the partying, consumerist Yankees came easily. Those with contempt for this newly industrialized consumerism and partying were on the wrong side of history,  they were dinosaurs falling into extinction.

The second uptick of Christmas as we know it came after World War II, in the strong and enduring iconography of the American 1950's. Being a child of the 60's, in my teens and twenties I thought the vision of early 50's consumerism, Lazy-Boy chairs, dad smoking a pipe, and watching this new thing called TV was something uncool, that the 60's,70's and 80's had marshaled in new counterculture full of something better. Of late I've realized the 50's vision of a convenience oriented home full of comfort came after the hellish epoch of 1917-1945 when the general public in countries all over the world were considering sophisticated and extreme political ideologies, and fighting and dying in the quest to figure out which would triumph.

With that grandly intellectual and viscerally miserable Hell behind them, the Americans of 1950's inherited the only society on Earth with an industrial sector, all other industrial sectors on Earth were in disrepair due to bombing campaigns. While the whole world probably wanted to celebrate the end of the hellish epoch, Americans were the only ones in a position to actually do it.

And American did. It's recorded in the 1950's romantic movies and songs about Christmas. [e.g. http://xkcd.com/988/ ]

Dropping back to Christmas, and the phrases we use. Peace on Earth. What does that mean or look like? If you ask a philosopher, political scientist, or theologian you'll get a very (appropriately) long description, ironically I bet their solutions would look a lot like the solutions being tested in the World Wars of the 20th century. But for the regular folks having to actually live in that peace, I can think of no more real and good peace than this: young couples kissing, giving of expensive gifts, having dinners in which the worst that happens is someone drinks too much alcohol. That is a practical Peace on Earth, and while we strongly associate it with 1950's America, I contend people from all over the world want in on it, and I applaud every one that does.
References:

1. Why Christmas Should be More Commercial By Leonard Peikoff

The Long View, Transience, Progress and the Profound

I recently attended a lecture at a local Sakya Tibetan Buddhist Monastery titled Dharma Lectures: Buddhism and the Hard Sciences. Lecturer Chris Rebholz did an impressive job presenting the intersection of science and Buddhist practice. Even though I've read Buddhism texts and have a Bachelor of Science, I came away from the lecture with new information that seemed to be operating on me in a way that might reconfigure some of my attitude about the meaning of Life.

I gained a lot from Rebholz's explanation of emptiness. It is not a black void. Rather, it is ultimate transience of everything. Meditating with a mental frame of emptiness is not to achieve a kind of ignorance of the world and objects (nouns) in it, rather it is to acknowledge every last little thing you know and see it through the lens of eternity. Unlike Christian and Islamic concepts of a God with an agenda with eternity being the field in which God is going to actualize that agenda, the Buddhist concept is an inquiry into reality at the level of a scientific physics in which nouns such as tables and even mountains have a limited lifespan, with even Earth having limits to its permanence, much less the whims of social fashion and politics. To meditate in emptiness is to simply grapple with and hopefully be at ease with the transience of all that you know. (or as I like to think of it: every noun you know)

Chris Rebholz focused on a few quotes by Geshe Thupten Jinpa that basically claim objective reality and Buddhism are in perfect agreement, that empiricism is trumps everything else in science and Buddhism equally. The gist of all this was to indicate a strong presence of objectivism in Buddhism.

I'll drop pretentious language and say this lecture made me feel real good about Buddhism. I went home fired up about an objectivist, reality worshipping, Godless religion...no not religion, rather Rebholz stressed it is not a religion but a mode of inquiry expressed socially as rhetorical logic and privately as meditation.

In the days after the lecture I scoured the web using search terms that basically bind Buddhism, Objectivism, Science and Technology. I came up with nothing. Even trying refresh and augment my reference to emptiness I got references less clear than Rebolhz's, such as this Emptiness is Form, which, to me, is silly at best, and an attack on logical language at worst.

But that is one writing, by someone who has a prominent webpage, not endorsed by a set of or even one major monastery in the west or east. Every afternoon in most monasteries in Asia monks meet and present their views of reality, with the listeners harshly attacking whatever weakness the detect. I will assume their is much more vetted and strong argument for Buddhism among those monks than this unendorsed writer with a high profile webpage.

After a few hours, my web based research had these results:

• 1%    ↳ Objectivist/Science/Technology Buddhism
• 9%    ↳ Logic-undermining content (e.g. emptiness).
• 90%    ↳ Equal valuation of all sentient beings.

This is when my excitement for Buddhism began to break down.

The Technium wants what evolution began (WTW page 270) and I'll posit evolution is contrary to Buddhist claims of human delusional sensibilities of superiority and inferiority, in the evolution certain things gain advantage while some other thing has disadvantage. In some cases we can state plainly one group has the winning hand, and by winning hand we could mean greater array of options, luxury, ease, or just plain old ability to stay alive.

Buddhist contests in rhetorical logic have enjoyed a few thousand years in which Buddhist wisdom easily won by calling people's sense of superiority/inferiority foolishness. Evolution -both biological and technological- offers a reality that undermines Buddhist schema of valuation.

The Sound Craftsmen -by Seth Galbraith

Twilight of the Elites tipped me off to this speech by C. S. Lewis:

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

The Inner Ring thesis explains the fundamental social dynamic by which elitism corrupts previously honest normal people (the "mainspring" of "The World.") The existence of informal power structures is inevitable and morally ambiguous, perhaps even good, but our instinctive fear of being left outside the inner ring causes us unnecessary suffering and tempts us to do wrong things in the futile pursuit of an impossible goal.

(When I say "people are monkeys" or "humans are social animals" this is usually what I am getting at: our irrational obsession with everyday status. When you combine this with the tendency of people to act like jerks and make rash decisions when they imagine themselves to have a little authority, the irrational obsession is useful: in certain circumstances we need quick decisions more than we need right decisions or popular decisions and a social hierarchy helps us do that. These situations were common for our ancestors, but rare for civilized people, so the lure of the Inner Ring seems exotic and mystical.)

But there is an alternative to living an empty, sometimes corrupting life pursuing membership in an Inner Ring. If you put some effort into actively resisting the desire to belong to exclusive groups that exist for exclusion's sake, you can become a "sound craftsman" - an exclusive brotherhood of sorts defined by the integrity of their work, who add honor to their professions rather than competing for honor like dogs fighting for scraps. The sound craftsmen are a lonely and powerless bunch in their way - they don't feature in many great capers or conspiracies, but they do good work, and in a world produced by human effort, doing good work makes the world better.

(When I talk about "the engineers" and "The Long War", what I have in mind are the "sound craftsman" - people who improve whatever profession they are in by understanding and giving life to the essentials of that profession. I tend to think of them as engineers and designers, but they could be academics, janitors, artists, maybe even soldiers and politicians. C. S. Lewis points out that cultivating this virtue sometimes requires the sound craftsmen to painfully suppress their craving to be accepted and advance socially.)

This thesis is also the undoing of all conspiracy theories and the reification of Conspiracy Theory writ large. The Knights Templar, Priory of Sion, Freemasons, Rothschild Family, Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Trilateral Commission, Reticulan Empire or Reptilian Visitors are ultimately just superficial structures of formal ritual, membership and rank, while the real power is held by an informal clique of Rothschilds or Reptilians within the conspiracy. And since the formal structure doesn't matter a whit, we can dispense with all those hypothetical secret societies, and recognize that inner circles with no names, using innuendos for passwords and our insatiable desire for belonging as their ultimate blackmail, form spontaneously in the organizations of the daylight world: government, business, church, etc.

The Conspiracy as an elegant scheme is a farce, but Conspiracy as a pervasive force driving history is real and perhaps even fundamental.

Statism -My Definition

A site dedicated to the Nolan Chart has an entry explaining Statism at http://www.nolanchart.com/article1418-what-is-a-statist.html. I thought the entry was slightly informative and largely silly. So I quickly wrote my own definition describing Statism:

Statism is the wielding of power by a consolidation of individuals that are not of the same class, share little in values or epistemology, and would likely kill each other in a tribal only world. Statism is all about big power to do big things like, at the very least, put a bridge across a gorge, and at medium put a rail connection across a large continent, and at best put humans on other planetary objects.

Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller

Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller at Dangerous:Movement:News

Moral High Ground when combined with Incorrect

There are many in the world that believe choosing the path of highest moral stance is valid by default; that actions aligning with the purest form of (for example) pacifism, justice, tolerance and honesty are never wrong. That a life lived committing no sin is a good one.

I say this is entirely wrong, and while anyone can lead whatever life they want, in the public sphere when an example of reaching for higher moral ground has resulted in harm or waste then someone should pay in way that subtracts, weakens and shortens their tenure in this world.

My words are all abstract so far, so here is an example.

There are many who believe in leniency for criminals, sometimes believing that society or "the system" are to blame, or believe if we jail one innocent person our society is guilty of some higher crime.

I believe when the courts decide to allow someone on the street after police have arrested them, and prosecutors have made a case for their guilt, and that subject then commits a significant violent crime; then the jurisdiction associated with that court should be sued and forced to pay a figure high enough to have an effect on that community's ability to function. For reference I give this story of a man who has murdered and hurt people since he was a teen, yet the courts erred towards leniency in all the cases against him. The legal society of this man's community chose to avoid the stigma of putting a teenage boy in prison for life. Now several people are dead. We as a society tend to move on, assigning the monster label to this killer but holding in high regard the system that treated a teen as a child rather than as a killer. I say the monster is the system that knew of his violent tendencies, but chose to be kind. That kindness needs to be punished in a way the weakens the entire entity practicing the kindness.

• Wash. to pay $3 million settlement for killings by ex-con

A Compendium of George Dyson Google Artificial Intelligence Links

• TURING'S CATHEDRAL [10.24.05]
  A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer. by George Dyson
• ENGINEERS' DREAMS [7.14.08]
  By George Dyson

The Rise of The TV Preacher and Evangelical Christianity Explains the Modern Right

Before the mid-20th century phenomenon of Evangelical TV Preacher brand of superficial Christianity, the norm in Europe and North America was sectarian division. Methodist vs Baptists vs Anglicans vs Catholics vs etc etc, if you will. Up till the late 1800's people killed others based on these divisions, and into the late 1900's people socialized based on these divisions. The founding fathers knew that a national religion would mean a bloodbath, a war between Protestant sects, or at least something like the Anabaptist persecutions in Europe.

My thesis extends to explain the rise of social conservative Right wing politics beginning with Reagan. Before 1970 sectarian divisiveness was the norm. After 1970 a new kind of superficiality rose in Protestant ranks: non-denominational evangelism. Throw in a superficial right wing view of American history and reason for existence, and boom you've got a new kind of solidarity that grows and is persistent because of its superficiality. It's strength is in its dumbness. The old time religious people read their Bibles and interpreted on an exacting precision, making them seem cranky and weirdly obsessed by today's standards. But this prevented them from bonding together into a political meme and force.

Off-topic a little, but this analogy helps see a deeper political/social construct. The Mongol Empire was a culmination of an early stage of peace and alliance between normally warring nomadic tribes. The lesson here is obvious: peace and cooperation between small militaristic bands results in a large militaristic group that can then go out and conquer weaker groups. Beware of peaceful resolution of a normally contentious people, for in their cooperative new mode they are in a better position to defeat...you.

Media Ecology, The increase of Alienation, Alienation is Good, Tribal/Collectivist Culture is Bad

Subsections:

• McLulan's Media Ecology Ages
• The Information by James Gleick

Outside of my coding job and family life, I've been obsessed with the McLulan construct of Media Ecology. Scroll down to the Tribal_Age/Literary_Age/Print_Age/Digital_Age, which is what I'm specifically interested in. In today's pop academic rhetoric "alienation" (the tribal era had none, and each other media era increases it) is seen as a negative and something to undo, such as through renewed emphasis on local, physically connected, committed community. I see "alienation" via media technology as fundamentally positive and empowering, without exception.

Alienation is often the negative umbrella term used to encapsulate positive capacities:

1. The Scientist As Rebel phenomenon, in which a bright individual can break from any epistemological and ethical boundaries his local (family, friends, class, neighborhood, etc) society adheres to, and choose to accept the feedback provided by math, literacy and success/fail status of tests in the material world, valuing these more than the emotional expressions of his local human clan.

2. Defection, the anti-thesis of Localized Solidarity. In the Tribal Age [see below] defection is easily detected due to all activities being seen by others in the tribe. There are no levers to pull in private of any great power or consequence. Whereas, for instance, in a voting democracy one can break from any solidarity and vote for the opponent, thus empowering a political trend one's local tribe or class may be against.

3. Solidarity that is not local or within one's class. Through the time and space travel afforded by literacy, an individual can bond with an idea or command transferred in a book, or web page. Solidarity may not be the correct term here, in the case of a command all the actors who have read the command are captured by the message and directed to effect their material world. This becomes a virtual tribe in which the media is a primary member of the tribe and the people are something more ephemeral and verb-like expression plane of the media. These kinds of virtual tribes can often defeat and entirely eliminate illiterate-acoustic tribes due to the undying nature of the virtual tribe's leader (a mass produced document on paper or hard drive).

The text below is a copy of Wikipedia's Media Ecology circa August 18 2012.

Tribal Age

The first period in history that McLuhan describes is the Tribal Age, a time of community because the ear is the dominant sense organ. This is also known as an acoustic era because the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were far more strongly developed than the ability to visualize. During this time, hearing was more valuable because it allowed you to be more immediately aware of your surroundings, which was extremely important for hunting during this time. Everyone hears at the same time makings listening to someone in a group a unifying act, deepening the feeling of community. In this world of surround sound, everything is more immediate, more present, and more actual fostering more passion and spontaneity. During the Tribal Age, hearing was believing. Click here to see excerpt from The Information regarding McLulan's views on tribalism/acoustic media age..

Literary age

The second stage is the Literary Stage, a time of private detachment because the eyes is a dominant sense organ; also known as the visual era. Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic environment. Words were no longer alive and immediate, they were able to read over and over again. Hearing no longer becomes trustworthy, seeing was believing. Even though people read the same words, the act of reading is an individual act of singular focus. Tribes didn't need to come together to get information anymore. This is when the invention of the alphabet came about. During this time, when people learned to read, they became independent thinkers.

Print Age

The third stage is the Print Age, mass production of individual products due to the invention of the printing press. It gave the ability to reproduce the same text over and over again, making multiple copies. With printing came a new visual stress, the portable book. It allowed men to carry books, so men could read in privacy and isolated from others. Libraries were created to hold these books and also gave freedom to be alienated from others and from immediacy of their surroundings.

Electronic Age

Lastly, the Electronic Age, an era of instant communication and a return to an environment with simultaneous sounds and touch. It started with a device created by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph and lead to the telephone, the cell phone, television, internet, DVD, video games, etc. This ability to communicate instantly returned us to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. Being able to be in constant contact with the world becomes a nosy generation where everyone knows everyone's business and everyone's business is everyone else's. This phenomenon is called the global village. "We have seen the birth of nationalism which is the largest possible social unit. It occurred because the print media made it possible for government systems to coordinate, which facilitated homogeneous cultures. Now other nations join our nation to form a global community. Nations can easily break apart as fast as they join together like we see in case throughout the former Soviet bloc, in the developing world, or in Iraq and with Al Qaeda. Strate hopes we can find the freedom to step outside the system to understand our media environment and that we can find the discipline to systematize that knowledge and make it available to others."

The text below is an excerpt from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick -pages 47-50

Then the vanished world of primary orality was not missed. Not until the twentieth century, amid a burgeoning of new media for communication, did the qualms and the nostalgia resurface. Marshall McLuhan, who became the most famous spokesman for the bygone oral culture, did so in the service for an argument for modernity. He hailed the new "electric age" not for its newness but for its return to the roots of human creativity. He saw it as a revival of the old orality. "We are in our century 'winding the tape backward,'" he declared, finding his metaphorical tape in one the newest information technologies. He constructed a series of polemical contrasts: the printed word vs. the spoke word; cold/hot; static/fluid; neutral/magical; impoverished/rich; regimented/creative; mechanical/organic; separatist/integrative. "The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism, " he wrote. It leads to "a desert of classified data". One way of framing McLuhan's critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech -in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch- engages all the senses, not just hearing. If the ideal of communication is a meeting of souls, then writing is a shadow of the ideal.

That same criticism was made of other constrained channels, created by later technologies -the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and e-mail. Jonathan Miller rephrases McLuhan's argument in quasi-technical terms of information: "The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender's mental state." In the stream of words past the ear or eye, we sense not just the items one by one but their rhythms and tones, which is to say their music. We, the listner or the reader, do not hear, or read, one word at a time; we get messages in groupings small and large. Human memory being what it is, larger patrterns can be grasped in writing than in sound. The eye can glance back. McLuhan considered this damaging, or at least diminishing. "Acoustic space is organic and intergral," he said, "perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas 'rational' or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland." For McLuhan, the tribal echoland is Eden.

By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh...the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written...Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.

Up to a point maybe. Yet three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, looking from a vantage where literacy was new, had taken a less rosy view. He could see the preliterate culture more clearly: "Men lived upon gross experience," he wrote. "There was no method; that is to say, no sowing nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds and common plants of error and conjecture. " A sorry place, neither magical nor divine.

The anti-materialism of Philip K. Dick and Gnosticism, a long war for the Demiurge and the Materialists

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-2/

This is an amazingly smart and important article. I recommend it highly even though my next statement is negative. In this Part 2 section, it delves into Gnostic belief that *this world* (the phenomenal/physical world explained and manipulated by politics, science and technology) is inherently evil and not the product of God, and God's creation is out there in another knowledge/non-physical universe that is calling some of us to it. It even names the demiurge as a height of evil. That is a quick snapshot of who the good guys and bad guys are to Philip K. Dick.

I couldn't disagree more, nor be more in opposition. Serious opposition. What Gnostics and Philip K Dick would call the Evil Empire -something very much like the machine managed human-using Matrix- I call this: The Best Thing in the Universe, the Superior Thing in the Universe. And I say superior with the full weight and intention of such a loaded word.

I anticipate a long, maybe endless, battle between anti-materialists such as Gnostics (Muslims and Christians of certain types possibly included) and the demiurge (people who maintain this political technological world). I see a never ending torrent of anti-materialists arising through every age, and the only way to defeat them is with a further Rise of the Machines.

My book Athena Techne is a healthy push against the anti-materialists. I'm so glad I made this contribution to the war against anti-materialism.

Southern Culture discussion in email thread

Seth Galbraith writes:

So there are two distinct kinds of very religious states in the USA:

• Southern type: religion is pervasive, but there are many degrees of religiosity
• Mormon type: religion is compartmentalized, but it is taken very seriously.

---

Lance Miller writes:

I like the distinction made back in your original post about Southern style religion.

I've been way busy lately, but a lot of postings....on anything US political or US economic...I've wanted to scream something about how the Southeastern US has always held an antithesis to the American identity and narrative.

During the Revolution it was Tory/British sympathetic. It stood at a cultural standstill while the rest of the US industrialized. It is a place where average or lower economic order people capital H hate socialist/anarchist schemes to distribute goods or status to the poor.

While there are plenty all over the US who think of themselves as Conservative, they are reliant on the Southeastern US as the Hollywood and New York City of their platform...the Southeast is where the stuff is stored in bulk, especially through progressive phases of America.

There, i got that off my chest.

---

Seth Galbraith writes:

Until recently the South was predominantly agricultural, making the South a target of colonization as much as a colonizing power. Southerners were significant in conquering the Banana Republics of Latin America during the early 20th century. Because of it's very different labor laws the industrialization of the South is essentially a form of "offshoring" labor from pro-union to anti-union states. (And in the long run, just as the world is becoming flatter in a race to the bottom, so the United States is becoming internally flatter and more Southernized - but from the Southern POV, the South is being invaded by Yankees.)

If the politics of the South begin as the politics of the British Empire, then the Plantation tradition may originate in the Ulster Plantation - the colonization of northern Ireland by wealthy British landlords and their protestant minions from all over Britain, but stereotypically Scottish Presbyterians. This started around the same time as the first British Plantation in Virginia. (Note the etymoloigical connection: "plantation" = "colony". The plantation lifestyle of the Old South is a colonization system.) Many of the Ulster colonists ended up coming to America. We call them Scotch-Irish.

In a very crude and stereotypical way you could say that Ulster Plantation = Scotch-Irish = Appalachians = Hillbillies. Virginia Senator Jim Webb and self-proclaimed redneck wrote a book called "Born Fighting" which credits the Scotch-Irish for all sorts of rebellious American ideas like mistrust of government.

There is something appealing about thinking of the South as a colony being developed by rich British merchants and guarded by Scotch-Irish protestant minions who still believe they are fighting an ancient blood feud against the Antichrist in Rome and other popish persons and still waiting for the Apocalypse which was supposed to start in 1666. But this also seems like a huge stretch and gross oversimplification. For example the Scotch Irish included more Patriots than Loyalists (basically the new Scotch-Irish colonists were still loyal to the crown while the 2nd and 3rd generation Scotch-Irish colonists further north were ready for independence.)

Viewed from outside the USA, the "history" of the Southern United States is a comical notion. Americans don't dig up Roman ruins when we lay the foundation for a new shopping center. And we construct things in an ephemeral way (we invented baloon frame construction and ghost towns) which ensures that history never gets started. We are savages and our narrative is an oral tradition that mixes old and new stories.

The stories of the Old South, the Hillbillies and the British Dissenters are all mixed together into a sort of Nashville Cargo Cult which is as much a product of the 20th century revisionism as 18th century imperialism or 19th century conquest. Country music for example is a politically correct, Madison Avenue approved, sanitized and bowdlerized euphemism for hillbilly music. The 20th century romance of the hillbilly is often about the narco-terrorist lifestyle of the moonshiner, drawing a long twisted path connecting the guerilla warfare of the American Revolution with the insurrections of Prohibition Era warlords.

Speaking of which, after Prohibition ended, Eliot Ness and his "Untouchables" joined the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which later became the ATF and the IRS. The ATF (sometimes under the IRS and sometimes under the Justice Department) continued to wage war against hillbilly moonshiners until the high price of sugar in the early 1970's put an end to that great way of life. That's right, the ATF is an elite national police force for reenacting Prohibition with live ammo.

The ATF then turned it's attention to guns, but rather than focusing on guns used in crimes, they went after the low hanging fruit: law-abiding gun owners, spreading misinformation about regulations and then prosecuting gun collectors for borderline technical infractions, and frequently refusing to return guns when the owners were acquitted.

So during the late 70's and early 80's, as the militia movement was just getting started and gun crimes were on the rise, the ATF was doing it's damnedest to make sure all the hillbillies had a new reason to fear and hate the government. This led to the 1986 Firearm Owner's Protection Act, which still didn't keep the ATF from triggering the holocaust of the Branch Dravidian cult in the 90's or selling 2500 guns to mexican drug cartels in the recent operations Fast and Furious, Too Hot to Handle and Wide Receiver (because they are classy like that.)

Highlights:

• Nashville continually reinvents the Hillbilly as a proxy identity for the American People because we have no History.
• Colonization does not merely exploit poverty and backwardness. It actively creates poverty and backwardness.
• Cops are not politically neutral actors who only desire to "protect and serve." In their career-building zeal they can and frequently do escalate violent situations and make insurgencies worse for their own personal gain and glory.

All this suggests that the South and all it's atavisms are not merely accidents of history but significant parts of the social and political structure of America, and that they need to be understood not merely as a reaction to progressivism, but as projects that benefit specific interests, including obviously the music industry, manufacturing and law enforcement, but probably also all the usual suspects who profit from alienation, exploitation and violence.

NanoClimes

Earth: 2110

NanoClime is a technology that alters ambient temperature and humidity within a 15 meter radius. The technology is not a gadget, it is more like a medicinal remedy that remedies something outside the body (local climate). A user of NanoClime creates a custom serum to injest, that then operates in the human body for no less than 24 hours, and except in bizarre cases, never more than 48 hours. A person becomes the "engine" for NanoClime processes, the person is called a "climate-engine" in most English speaking slang.

When the meds are being made, the person making the batch selects the desired temp and humidity. This is the reason most people wanting to be a climate-engine make their own -very few people want to endure climate settings set to someone else's extremely different preferences.

Like all complex technologies, this one started out expensive and for wealthy early adopters. Then after thirty years it became something so common it is traded in shanty towns. It currently costs $80 for a year long supply.

NanoClimes can only try to alter the temperature and humidity near its climate-engine. Wind is the main hindrance to achieving the desired levels. Of course extreme difference with the general climate and one's desired levels -e.g. wanting your local environment to be wet and warm while in northern Siberia during winter.

People can set their desired levels to whatever they want, but this is not magic, their is an effect on the body. If the person does want something extreme -a tropical local clime while walking in a Siberian windstorm- then their climate-engine has to work at a higher output, resulting in trembling. The trembling ranges from nonexistent to visibly awkward depending on how hard the climate-engine is having to work.

Once NanoClimes became ubiquitous, all these micro-climates began to effect the general weather, and create global climate change. New jet-streams and ocean currents emerged, new patterns of dust storms and tornadoes emerged also.

All hell broke loose.

And not just in the sky, but in political discourse as well.

NanoClimes became an allegory to describe our psychological political selves. Since everyone knew all too well the effect of NanoClimes, the simplest person could grasp this allegory.

The allegory explored how almost all humans have a political/cultural preference -with some wanting to focus on a culture that makes it easy for them to practice their religion, others wanting to focus on economy and themselves having a chance to be wealthier and mobile, and then infinitude of preferences answering to "which kind of religion" and "which kind of economy". The allegory of the NanoClimes brought to the fore how we use voting or some other technology to try and make our world a little more to our liking.

This allegory became popular the world over. People began to see the futility of politics if it is all about one's personal preferences.

The American Ideology, Parasites and Higher Powers

-by Seth Galbraith, February 29, 2012

Synopsis

Santorum's physical sensations and mental processes are being dominated by what David Bohm called a "higher power" and Richard Dawkins would call a "selfish meme." A parasitic idea has attached to Santorum's idea of himself. It causes him physical pain and provokes him to lash out aggressively, even when the people he is attacking agree with him on every point.

All of us have parasites like this in our minds. Santorum's behavior has alarmed observers who sense something wrong in his overly personal reactions. I suggest that the problem is not depth of feeling but actual conflation of his personal identity and his ideas. This undermines any zealous feelings or high ideals Santorum holds, because the parasite has no interest in achieving goals other than perhaps protecting and spreading itself.

I have been wanting to critique Rick Santorum for some time, but I don't want to make it about his religious convictions. I think we do benefit from people who have ideals and strong opinions, even if they aren't popular, even if I don't share them, and even if they are wrong. Zealotry encourages sincere and active participation in society.

But Santorum has said two things that tell me he is ideologically blinded, and not just about religious issues:

• Confession #1: JFK's 1960 speech about separation of church and state made Santorum want to throw up. He explains that JFK said people of faith should not run for office.
• Confession #2: Regarding Obama's challenge for every American to get at least 1 year of higher education, Santorum said, with deep disgust: "What a snob!"

Both confessions show that Santorum actually failed to understand the obvious surface message of what JFK and Obama said.

JFK was saying that he would be loyal to America, not the Vatican, and that religious convictions should not be a barrier to participation in the public sphere. He was defending his own religious freedom, not urging other people to restrain their zealotry. There are reasons to be disgusted with JFK as a person, but it was the speech itself that made Santorum nauseous.

Obama's full statement defines higher education to include vocational training and apprenticeships, which is exactly what Santorum encouraged later when asked to clarify himself. Obama and Santorum do not disagree in their educational advice, Santorum simply did not listen to what Obama said.

Gut Feelings

Aside from a tendency toward self-centered and self-serving bias that we should expect from powerful people, Santorum's visible expression of disgust in both cases could explain why he did not comprehend the messages. He actually experienced nausea while reading or listening to the speeches and the part of his brain that comprehends language literally shut down in panic.

This is not that unusual. If I were to seriously threaten you in some way, you would also feel physically ill and stop listening to me. You would feel the urge to attack me or run away. (This is why good cop/bad cop is not just useful, it's necessary any time you are bullying someone. No one will listen to the guy waving a gun if he keeps shouting angrily.) We feel that way about all threats to our selves, not just physical threats to our bodies and the people we love, but also threats to the idea of who we are. Any piece of information in our minds can become associated with our identity, and then that information gains a degree of physical control over our bodies and minds, including the sensation of nausea and our ability to understand language.

Sometimes these ideas are very complex, well organized and very good at controlling people. These ideas are often called ideologies. David Bohm called them higher powers. Richard Dawkins proposed that they could be composed of selfish "memes" that compete against other ideas in the same way that genes evolve control over animals and plants as the genes compete to replicate themselves - even if it means the animal or plant itself must suffer. Let's just stick to calling them ideologies for now.

America is Conservative

Santorum is a conservative. Conservative ideas include big role for religion in politics and disdain for academic elitism. When Santorum called Obama a snob for wanting everyone to go to college, his audience applauded enthusiastically. Their response to Santorums anti-college sentiment was as warm and accepting as Santorum’s response to Obama’s pro-college sentiment was chilling and combative. Santorum was preaching to the choir. Santorum does not have an unusual ideology, he has a very popular ideology. According to Gallup polls, most Americans consider themselves to be conservative, but most Americans also support the Democratic Party, while only a minority support the conservative Republican Party. So conservativism is not just loyalty to a party, it is an idea in itself.

If you poll Americans on individual issues, they usually skew toward moderate or liberal positions. Liberals have used this to claim that Americans are liberal. This confuses individual values with the ideological system, which could very well have it’s own agenda that conflicts with the individual’s values and interests. We see this in totalitarian socialist countries that boast about their egalitarian, popular values, but practice elitism and brutal repression of dissent. We Americans are also capable of betraying our own personal values for some great cause.

Totalitarian Systems and Tendencies

Václav Havel described a totalitarian system as a society in which everyone is involved in oppression as both oppressors and victims, in contrast to a conventional dictatorship where oligarchs focus their oppression on particular enemies. The totalitarian system requires everyone to adhere to a coherent ideology. Because individuals do not all have the same attitudes, experiences and interests, this adherence is hypocritical. Attempting to live within the truth of individual experience is a potential threat to a system where all oppress all, so any deviation is punished as a serious betrayal of the system.

Havel noticed similar tendencies in western consumerism, but argued that public competition for power required political parties to adjust their ideology to conform more closely to truth than the ideology of a single party state, whose ideology only needs to be coherent, not truthful. But tossing political power around in a popularity contest only offers us protection from becoming a complete totalitarian system with a completely hypocritical ideology. It does not mean we cannot have totalitarian tendencies, attributes and practice mixed in with a degree of sincere reflection. Also, If the majority of people adhere to an ideology, regardless of which party they support, then the public competition for power only requires truthfulness from parties that need to win minorities to their cause. If all conservatives consistently supported the Republican Party, they would always win.

Ideas can Hurt You

Take one idea from conservativism: the anti-college sentiment. The idea by itself makes sense. We live in a society of unequal people doing unequal jobs, rich and poor, less educated and more educated, talented and ordinary, laborers and inventors, care givers and risk takers. Putting everyone through the same education would be inefficient and inflate the status of those who succeed academically over those who do other important work.

The problem comes when you take a reasonable idea and make it part of who you are. Now you hear any endorsement of the idea as an endorsement of yourself, and any critique of the idea as a criticism of yourself. It becomes impossible to talk frankly about education because even the faintest suggestion of a difference in opinion will be taken as a personal insult.

The anti-college sentiment, when it is incorporated into an ideology that has won your allegiance, doesn’t just require you to support a wide range of education options or oppose the trend toward more expensive and often useless degrees (reasonable goals) It also requires you to actively oppose the efforts of anyone who doesn’t hypocritically pander to your ideology. It even makes enemies out of people who share your objectives issue-by-issue, point-by-point, as in the case of Obama and Santorum on academic, technical and vocational education.

So the ideology hypocritically prevents you even from accomplishing goals that naturally follow from the ideas that make up the ideology. The ideology is just an idea attached in your mind to the idea of yourself, triggering the instinct to defend yourself if the ideology is threatened. The ideology will still be there regardless of whether you are actually able to truthfully live by the ideas that make it up.

Letting an ideology take control actually betrays the values that made the ideology appealing in the first place.

Don’t Take it Personally

America’s past and present are full of totalitarian policies that conflict with our values but served our ideologies well. We currently have a prisoner population worthy of a totalitarian police state, handing out big sentences for small crimes as “deterrence.” We used to have overt racial segregation, state eugenics boards, prohibition, slavery and puritanism.

Rick Santorum literally takes conservative ideas too personally. Rather than feeling conservative values deeply in his soul and idealistically making them a priority in his mind, he has actually conflated the ideas with his personal identity, linking primal urges to hair trigger reactions the same way we all respond to personal threats and insults. As long as he lets these gut reactions rule him, he will be compelled to attack inappropriate targets and betray his own values. This is a poor quality in a leader whether you share his values or not.

An ideology is a totalitarian system inside the minds of individuals with power to control their physical sensations and mental processes. If we allow ideologies to rule us, we are hardly more free than a society which embraces a totalitarian system of government. Our idealism and zealotry can only be truthful and effective if we reject oppression from within and around us.