WOKE

Wokish is a different language from English. Failure to understand the differences and their purpose is double plus ungood.

The differences can be seen in sudden shifts in word frequencies starting in the Year 2013. Just as the Mayan Long Count calendar aprocryphally ended in the year 2012, so did the English language disappear for many people, replaced by the vocabulary of a new age: Wokish for woke folx.

I'm not making any of this up. You can see these sudden shifts using Google's ngrams viewer, which now incorporates texts from recent years. The results are uncanny. Here we can see gender-affirming beginning to replace life-affirming in 2013, and grow for the last 7 years as fast as life-affirming did in the 1990's.

Crits [history of critical race theory] don't affirm universals and individuality. In fact they find that whole notion an abhorrent product of liberal, western, capitalist domination designed to enable racist oppression. Just as in Orwell's newspeak, wokish employs doublespeak. Words sometimes deliberately mean their opposite - not depending on context, like an auto-antonym, but simultaneously holding two contradictory meanings, forcing you to accept an absurd contradiction as truth.

Affimation is an example of doublespeak. It is not the intent of affirmation to make people of color, women, LGBTs, people with disabilities or people of a certain size feel good in their skin. On the contrary, because there are many intersections of privilege, and new ones remaining to be discovered wherever there is [capitalist] domination, the point of affirmation is to "challenge" the dominance (privilege) of whatever is not being affirmed.

So for example fat, disabled, poor, black transgender women in prison are not "affirmed" in the sense of having their accomplishments celebrated and their issues priorities. They are "affirmed" in the sense of drawing attention to the oppressive dominance of whatever-they-are-not. Affirmation involves these people becoming woke or re-educated about their own internalized oppression as well as the internalized dominance of their oppressor. And even then intersectionality is not done working it's verbal magic until our fat, disabled, poor, black, transgender female inmates start calling out each other's privilege as non-indigneous people who benefit from historical colonialism and genocide.

Affirmation = degradation.

Wokeness is not about loving some things or people and hating others. It's about getting everyone to hate themselves, so they'll become angry and support a revolution which brings crits to power. Then maybe things will get a little less horrible, they tell us.

Do not believe a word of it. It's irrational and harmful. 

Related: rights are good affirming is wrong

Racism

[ written by friend. posted anonymously ]

First, even in science, the role of science is to inform not to decide. This is the empirical method. We do science to prove something, and then we use that to inform our next steps. This is and always has been the appropriate role of science. The fact is, science is merely data, in this context. Data can't make decisions. It definitely cannot make value judgements. Politics is all about value judgements. Data is really good at providing context for value judgements, but it can't make those judgements. What does science say about racism? It exists. The distrust of people who are different is an evolutionary trait, evolved because it was useful for improving odds of survival. It is no longer strictly necessary for that purpose among humans, because we have developed civilized cultures where we don't go around murdering each other all the time. Is racism evil? This is an opinion, not data. Science does not have opinions. Science cannot make that value judgement. If we add a value judgement, science can answer the factual parts.

For example, if we decide that all people deserve to be treated well, science can be used to conclude that racism that results in poor treatment of people is bad. Note, however, that given that axiom, it doesn't support the conclusion that being racist is evil, only that mistreating people (out of racism or not) is evil. In addition, the same axiom can be used to conclude that treating racists poorly is just as bad as racists treating people they are racist against poorly. Of course, this isn't the SJW axiom. The SJW axiom is that merely being racist is evil, even if it doesn't result in bad or harmful behavior. They've cut science out the problem entirely, which is just a little ironic, I think.

History of critical race theory

[ written by a friend. posted anonymous ]

Herbert Marcuse: Critical Theory is an alternative to traditional theory. Traditional theory strives to be objective. Critical theory seeks to expose and challenge power structures. In other words it's revisionist Marxism that tries to explain the failure of socialism and rise of fascism in the West as a problem of false political consciousness: the sheeple need to get woke. Any kind of left wing political violence is considered a good sign in Critical Theory, because the status quo is always assumed to be on the verge of going full Third Reich.

Angela Davis: Student of Marcuse, communist, radical feminist and black power revolutionary. Returns to the academy after left wing political violence peters out in the 70's. Loves every kind of communist dictatorship and left wing cult (Jonestown.) Hates every kind of liberal democratic reform movement. For example instead of decriminalizing drugs, her "solution" to mass incarceration is "schools not jails." It's about which ideological tribe controls the bureaucracy and not the actual treatment and rights of people under that bureaucratic system.

Kimberle Crenshaw: Around 1990 develops critical race theory into Intersectionality. The idea here is that poor black women (or these days we would say LGBT+ BIPOCs) need to get woke so they can lead the movement using their personal knowledge as victims of multiple kinds of oppression. In other words civil rights reforms were just more false consciousness, because Western democracy and it's capitalist mode of production is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, and nothing will change until people get really mad about that and take to the streets to force the current regime (i.e. liberal democracy) out.

Robin DiAngelo: critical race theory and whiteness studies scholar. Develops theory of White Fragility while giving corporate racial sensitivity trainings for the last 20 years. Shows up on the radar about 7 years ago with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (which is very much built on critical race theory - see the About page of any organization affiliated with the movement.)

I was a very woke left wing socialist anarchist back in 2013 when "white fragility" appeared in our lexicon - 3 years before she spoke at Evergreen and 5 years she published her manifesto of the same name. However, my wokeness was with the old school Marxists, anarchists and communists, who were very skeptical of the "identity politics" of the critical race theorists. Critical race theory was a mental virus that infected our movement and turned us against each other, every white activist striving to call each other out for (purely intellectual) abuses of white privilege and defensive white fragility. It was all 100% NONSENSE, but it was also highly effective at derailing our movement, and has cost me several friendships.

People go to corporate sensitivity trainings to save their jobs, they listen to critical race theory in college because they want to learn and they show up at Black Lives Matter protests thinking that they are literally protesting for black people's lives, and then they get fed something different.

Because critical race theory is NOT about helping individual black people or solving specific problems that affect black people. It's about using racial anger and guilt, as well as sexual identity, poverty, disability, obesity, and other sensitive subjects to radicalize people and put leaders with the correct critical ideology in positions of political and bureaucratic power.

________________________

Struggle Sessions

Here's an article I had cut out from March 9, 2019; about a year-and-a-half ago, well before the virus and what I guess I will call our cultural conflict.

Peggy Noonan says:

"I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don't want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely."

The "struggle sessions" Noonan explains, were introduced by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s to purge China of its enemies. University students were charged to "clear away the evil habits of the old society and extinguish what came to be known as 'the four olds'—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture."

So when Noonan proposes that "the spirit of the struggle sessions are here," she means there is a group of people in the United States who want to purge it of, what they perceive to be, political enemies and "evil habits."

"The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don't try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence."

This is a snapshot of how tense our society was a year-and-a-half ago. Primed and ready for the explosion that was sparked on May 25.

________-rights is good. _______-affirming is wrong

Today in the US minorities and the historically marginalized have rights. Even in the most backwater little town, if someone slaps a man for being gay at a grocery store, a deputy sheriff is going to show up and the attacker is going to be in handcuffs.

And that is real progress over how it was 50 years ago. 

________-affirming is not a right, it is optional and personal. Companies, campuses and others that demand for example queer-affirming or black-affirming discourse throughout the organization are creating a new kind of exclusionary dynamic. 

In the case of demanding queer-affirming dialogue the social damage goes further. The majority are heterosexual, and they have the right to discuss life, goals and the reality around them in a heterosexual way. Their rhetoric gets to be heteronormalized, for heterosexuals to do otherwise is absurd. The species is binary gendered and heterosexual by majority, it has to in order to make offspring and continue as a species. 

LGBTQ live on a heterosexual owned planet, having the right to live out their dreams in safety and unharrassed. 

....but not especially accommodated in all public discourse.

It is time for those that agree to undo the soft fascism in our more progressive organizations. We have mistaken a lot of silly language as progressive, and it is time to be rude to the toxic actors that have spread this garbage.

-------------------

post script: all the above written by someone supporting the legalization of gay marriage since the late 1970's. I am for legal rights.

Inspiration for this post came from this hilarious stuff by BLM.

Cause of Seattle Homelessness

Seattle did not make it's people homeless by a rising cost of housing. Those lower salary people moved for the most part to lower cost commuter cities to the south.

The homeless are from all over the United States. They selected Seattle because of the services for the homeless and especially for the leniency the courts provide.

Seattle homeless advocates actively recruited the homeless across the United States to relocate to Seattle.

While Amazon was recruiting the best and brightest tech workers from all over the US to Seattle, the city grew with this counterpoint of opposites -skilled tech and unskilled drug addicts and mental issue homeless.

Amazon the company recruited the best and brightest to add to the intelligence and wealth quota of Seattle, while Seattle government and NGO partners recruited the most problematic and unpromising individuals from all over the United States to come to Seattle in order to give these same compassion industry social justice careerists their own job security.

This analysis of systemic causes does not mean one should be divorced from compassion or helping the struggling. This systems critique simply spotlights the nurturing of a problem into a larger size by a class of careerists and their sentimentally alligned peers who reject any view other than them and their homeless being virtuious and beyond reproach, and wealth and the functionally intelligent being evil.
  

Black Lives Matter "What We Believe" Translated

Jump to: hilarious queer-affirming lines
On June 31 2020 I posted to Facebook this statement:

---

Want reforms that result with negating the unjustified killing of black men?

An end to racism isn't a goal connected with that.

There will always be racists in this country.

Especially with the moving goalposts of the Woke AF community, with the focus on ever nuanced categories like LBGTQ+fat and Trans Blacks as their heighted points of vigilance....especially if anyone is applying today's moral standards to America's past historical figures...as if we've discovered moral absolutes and can apply across all time. Woke AF has nothing to do with progress or a powerful nation and economy, their goal is the worst of all things: a self-righteous and small economy backward people, giving an eternal blank check to those of a global south and indigenous cultural heritage, and condemning the rest of the world (especially any great empire cultures such as British, American, Russian, Chinese) to eternal guilt. (exactly opposite of how we should respect cultures, the empires are full of the more significant history and valuable culture)

If black lives really mattered, specifically the need for regular black men just going to the store or to work to not be in danger due to the occasional pathological police officer, then this protest campaign would have stayed focused for the goal.

---

A friend of mine wrote the following unpacking of the official Black Lives Matter political platform, which is insightful, and more epsecially telling of how counterproductive to the goal the platform is.

---

I ran https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/ through the automated political BS translator:

Four years ago, what is now known as the Black Lives Matter Global Network began to organize. It started out as a chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission was to build local power and to intervene when violence was inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

"build local power" = recruit black activists nationwide
"intervene when violence was inflicted" = use tragedies to get attention
"vigilantes" = George Zimmerman, who is a mentally unstable vigilante thug, but also a bit of a unicorn.

In the years since, we’ve committed to struggling together and to imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.

"imagining and creating" = imagining
"anti-Blackness" = a demon that keeps people asleep until they get woke (no, I'm serious, I looked it up here: Recognizing And Dismantling Your Anti-Blackness: Janice Gassam: Forbes)
"social, economic and political power to thrive" = a sense of total despair, failure and helplessness

Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state.

"a call to action" = words
"state sanctioned violence" = guns
"anti-Black racism" = cops
"connect Black people from all over the world" = sit at our computers.
"act together in their communities" = sit at their computers.
"violence inflicted on us by the state" = political power we would like to wield ourselves.

Enraged by the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, and inspired by the 31-day takeover of the Florida State Capitol by POWER U and the Dream Defenders, we took to the streets. A year later, we set out together on the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride to Ferguson, in search of justice for Mike Brown and all of those who have been torn apart by state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Forever changed, we returned home and began building the infrastructure for the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which, even in its infancy, has become a political home for many.

"Dream Defenders" = communists who want to replace corporations, police and prisons with education and welfare spending.
"justice for Mike Brown" = use Mike Brown's death to get attention for our movement.
"Forever changed" = BLM became a communist movement that wants to compete for police funding.
"become a political home for many" = recruited many black people to spread our message.

Ferguson helped to catalyze a movement to which we’ve all helped give life. Organizers who call this network home have ousted anti-Black politicians, won critical legislation to benefit Black lives, and changed the terms of the debate on Blackness around the world. Through movement and relationship building, we have also helped catalyze other movements and shifted culture with an eye toward the dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness. These are the results of our collective efforts.

"ousted anti-Black politicians" = voter registration drives, canvassing, call centers and other staples of electoral politics
"won critical legislation" = letter writing campaigns, phone calls, petitions, etc.
"changed the terms of the debate on Blackness" = appropriated Black identity
"dangerous impacts of anti-Blackness" = losing your black card from spending too long in the Sunken Place.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is as powerful as it is because of our membership, our partners, our supporters, our staff, and you. Our continued commitment to liberation for all Black people means we are continuing the work of our ancestors and fighting for our collective freedom because it is our duty.

"the work of our ancestors" = your black identity
"our collective freedom" = BLM's political power

Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported.

"recommit to healing" = remind ourselves how helpless and oppressed we are
"a culture where each person feels seen, heard and supported" = a safe space where privilege is shunned

We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal  

We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements.

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

= We cultivate a mob mentality and addiction to social media because we're about power, not sacrifice.

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prequisite for wanting the same for others.

= We discourage black people from joining multi-racial social movements. (This is the second time they've repeated that point. They sound a lot like black separatists, and a little like antifa.)

We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.

= We reject African-American identity and identify as an international Black race. (Again, 90% black seperatist, 10% antifa.)

We are guided by the fact that all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expssion, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.

= We put victim groups on a pedestal. 😂

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

= We put the most vulnerable transgender victim group on the prow of our ship 😂 🤣.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

= We are black lesbians who hate homophobic black dudes more than the white devil himself.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

= We are a coven of black lesbian witches.😂 🤣 🤣

We practice empathy. We engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

= We use unconditional love toward people like ourselves to recruit them into our movement. (That sounds very culty.)

We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.

= We recruit homemakers and single moms at the margins of the workforce who have some spare time.

We disrupt the Western-pscribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

= In our experience as black lesbians, you don't need a man. White people invented marriage. There's no patriarchy in Africa. 😂

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

= We encourage straight people to keep that in the closet. 😂

We cultivate an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.

= Honestly we're trying to elect Joe Biden in 2020. Viva la revolucion!

We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.

= We police each other's thoughts and feelings.

CHOP Seattle Autonomous Zone Photos

All photos taken June 20 and 21 2020. 

An addition on June 21 was the presence of security. I don't mean professional security guards or police. They were CHOP community members with two way radios. They seemed highly organized, I was closely monitored by them any time I was on the zone boundary (their security stayed along the boundary)

The epicenter was in the area with the two SUVs in the photos. There is a large garden, plants are above ground in bags. The Riot Kitchen is in this area also. 

I write philosophy and science fiction. My better works have been The Oscillating Communist Capitalist Machine and Autistic Crow Computer. See all my books here: https://www.amazon.com/Lance-Miller/e/B003UQL0O6/

Do Not Tax Amazon

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/councilmember-teresa-mosqueda-unveils-her-own-proposal-for-taxing-seattles-big-businesses/

So wrong. Opposing this.

Tax for big tech companies in Seattle and directs the revenue for supporting undocumented immigrants. Mosqueda said this proposal "gives support to black and brown communities for which we owe for 400 years of oppression".

Here is why it is wrong.

1) Amazon and Expedia have spent big in building their headquarters in Seattle inner city. Revitalized the city. Now targets of shakedown by demagogues.

2) Across every culture from Ancient Greece, Ancient and Contemporary China.... the wealthiest work with symbols only (finance, law, literature, math, engineering, software) and the poorest of the poor harvest crops. This is a standard dynamic, and moral systems that try to shame or punish the dynamic are foolish, futile, and a route to poverty and ignorance.

http://progressive-positive.blogspot.com/2019/09/wealthy-tech-created-homeless-ultimate.html

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" are the disease killing Seattle.

Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes and Director of Public Defense for King County Anita Khandelwal and their agenda of "restorative justice" is part of the disease killing Seattle.

Impartiality before law. The restorative justice construct fails in this sense - if a millionaire's nineteen year old son from Bellevue came into Seattle and struck a random stranger in the face, would the restorative justice inclined city attorney advocate for a harsher sentence than this homeless drug addict with 72 previous convictions?

That is not equality.

Finally, redeeming souls is not the job of the city or county, they are mixing religious valuation of individuals in with their mission of making the city high functional. From a secular political philosophy standpoint that is a wrong.

See more deeply why it is wrong here:  why-we-want-monsters-and-should-want-to.html

Reference:
https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/why-this-seattle-judge-filed-a-complaint-against-himself

Tao Te Ting Poem 80

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 80

A small country has fewer people.
Though there are machines that can work ten to a hundred times faster
     than man, they are not needed.
The people take death seriously and do not travel far.
Though they have boats and carriages, no on uses them.
Though they have armor and weapons, no one displays them.
Men return to the knotting of rope in place of writing.
Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple,
     their homes secure;
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
And crowing cocks and barking dogs are heard across the way.


This is an ancient Chinese thought from around 500 BC. It is before the emergence of a Chinese Empire, which is antithetical to the vision in this poem. The poem is saying stay local, stay simple with no machines, and it even opposes literacy.

While the Far East abandoned this view, some in the West, and Native people's, embrace it as a preferred way.

It's always going to be the losing way, subsumed and consumed by a more powerful global mechanized society. There is no other outcome.

So it is not an option for mitigating climate change.

Reference: https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu80.html

Wealthy Tech Created the Homeless: The Ultimate Bad Narrative

Crosscut Media: Seattle is addicted to bad narratives about homelessness

Crosscut Media as offered the ultimate reference for the sick, wrong narrative that propels the political/activist/NGO machine that has created the homeless epidemics of Seattle and San Francisco. It is an erroneous narrative divorced from reality.

The truth is Seattle and San Fancisco are temperate cities with lots of services and law enforcement leniency for the homeless, and the visible homeless are not from these cities but rather vagabond drug addicts and mental cases from all over rural and suburban America. Seattle/San Francisco are destinations for the nation's homeless.

No matter how one feels about the homeless and the addicted - on a regional policy level - creating the beacon of services and leniency for the whole nation of vagabonds to migrate to creates an untenable, unsolvable problem.

My bus route serves a major addiction services methadone clinic (I support these clinics, no negative connotation intended). I've ridden the bus with hundreds of these patients. From what I can tell, they are from rural and suburban places all over the country.

The software engineers making 150,000 are not the problem, and Chinese millionaires investing in highrise condos are not either. They have made the city prettier. Those who have gotten priced out of the city have moved to bedroom communities from White Center to Tacoma. I personally have many long time friends who have made the move to a home or apartment further out in the Seattle metro, including myself. I have absolutely no friends that were priced out of their Seattle residence and are now an addict living in a tent or RV in the city...absolutely none.

A word about the software engineers making an average of 150K annual salary, and the high tech, high rise offices that have increased in the city. I love the city this transformation has created. No matter my own status, I love the city Amazon and other tech giants have helped create. This is the very kind of city I want to experience.

The only cancer this city has is the narrative politicians and activists subscribe to and serve -the narrative of the software engineer pushing the lower middle class towards substance abuse and homelessness.

I'm tired of accomodating that cancer, and the voices that spread it.

Why We Want Monsters, And Should Want to Jail Them Too

A society that creates a few murderers and insanely violent people is a society where we can say liberty and diversity are alive and well.

I am not saying murderers and insanely violent people have a right to live as they want, in complete freedom. I am saying we should create them, then jail them. 

The last thing we should want is to be a society that has eradicated these monsters. Specifically, we should never want the surest death of all -homostasis. If we somehow intervened in everyone's upbringing and had uniformly great outcomes for all, that would be a society that had cutoff the non-linear dynamism needed for evolution and iterative adaptation. It would mean certain jeopardy for that society. They would be uniformily healthy and happy as seen from within, and easily crushed by an external society capable of novel mutations.

In essence - homeostasis is terminal. 

We are successfully producing our murderers and other monsters through, essentially, freedom. By this I mean the solitary lives we in the USA have made possible. With this solitude comes the ability to devise deeply personal perspectives on the meaning of life, and what is a proper pursuit of happiness. With this many people coming up with their unique internal self, the variety is staggering, and scary. 

We don't want the scary ones, but they are byproduct of creating the totally original ones that are useful. 

So we should accept that the monsters are steadily going to be produced, and accept that we have only two choices: they are left to be free and pursue their goals, or stop them from having their freedom through incarceration or death.

We seem to currently have a third way of dealing with the monsters, by desiring to intervene and convert them to another kind of person. Reform. This impulse goes back thousands of years, to religions as diverse as Christianity and Taoism.  

This is wrong. There is no right to convert people, to change their current deep seated goals. It is right to stop them, but not right to change their internal selves.

Our laws are not discovered absolute truths. They are not operating within a moral plane, or aiding a moral agenda. They should be a constellation of rules that output a society that has a coherent sustaining organization with power over its environment, and power to project goals and control over ever more territory (such as outer space), and power to project goals and control into the future. 

We have missplaced relativism. The proper place to allow relativism is allowing that a person with violent designs is a perfectly functioning person.  Where we should have less relativism is in the belief in our wider social enterprise....this sustaining organization of people, materials, machines and infrastructure that projects power over the environment and the future. We should be unflinching in liking its power, and seeing this power as a better thing, and not having that power as a worse thing.

We only jail the monsters because of their threat to the rest of us who want to exist for some time in this sustained culture, not because the monsters are psychologically wrong. 

Stealth form of Climate Migration

In 1995 I was in Antarctica working as science support. It was there I met scientists evaluating climate change and global warming. Our conversations convinced me to move to a region that would do the best in the next few decades as the globe warmed.

I moved to Seattle, for the mitigating effect of the cold ocean, and simply being farther north. In the 21 years I've lived in the region its worth noting it went from having a brief thunderstorm every few years to having several thunderstorms per year. It also went above 100 degrees for the first time since records have been kept.

2018. I've become a rent refugee. I'm now relocated in Las Vegas and trying to start over. I'm now in a region that is already a climate disaster, with summers so hot the sidewalks are 180 degrees.

Beginning some years ago a building boom began. Many years have had over 80 high rise building projects, most being condos and apartments. Besides those skyscrapers, the city has built up and steady stream of 10 story apartment complexes totally dominating main neighborhood streets.

The spike in amount of supply has not lend to lower prices. One bedroom apartments now average just under $2000, and two bedrooms average over $2500 per month.

The primary source for the investment dollars funding these building projects are Chinese hedge funds.

(I am not even remotely anti-Chinese, nor against global economic investment. I've always seen the west coast's binding with Japan/Korea/China as a mark of superiority over the rest of the USA.)

I am also not prone to conspiracy theories of malevolent or pathological intents by powerful entities. Yet what I am about to assert sounds like a conspiracy and like a warning of ill intent by foreigners.

I think the Chinese, being less religious and more purely aligned with science, have more wholly embraced the idea of global warming. I think that as a result their wealthiest are making plans for that future. I don't think they are investing first in Vancouver BC Canada, then Seattle because those places look like a good return-on-investment, they are investing in a place for their grandchildren to live in 2050.

When I moved to Seattle in 1996 I thought I was embedding myself in the place forever. I naively did not concentrate on buying land or a residence in the region. I mistakenly had a local-centric view that I was here, foreigners were far away, and this place was mine to exist in while the rest of the world burned and stormed.

I didn't think through the idea of massive concentrations of wealth by a population scientifically smart enough to use that wealth to push aggressively into the most hospitable regions of Earth.

So now here I am, in burning unsustainable Las Vegas.

Well played Chinese, well played.

Proper Application of the Multiverse

Many Worlds Interpretation / Wikipedia.org

Quantum Mechanics Manyworlds / Stanford.edu

What if that situation you were in during sixth grade, where you found your passion in music because your aunt gave you a nice guitar, was changed? Your aunt never gives you a guitar, and in that same year you find your passion for drawing cartoons.

The multiverse theory suggests both happen. You are going along as a sixth grader and in one universe you get a guitar, in the other you do not. In all the Universes you are you, you just take the a different path at the fork in the road. 

In a multiverse the Nazi's loose in one, win the war in the other ; the electric car gets adopted as the way we do cars, in the other gasoline cars become the way we do cars. 

With each moment being a moment of on/off for whether something happened, this means the multiverse is huge, with each moment spinning off at least two versions....one where the ball was caught and the other where it was dropped. 

So hopefully you're comfortably imagining an endlessly branching out Universe of different outcomes. 

I offer that that the multiverse theory is a better metaphor for understanding evolution. 

In the multiverse metaphor there are forks, as in biological life with mutations. The mutant butterfly with a new color pattern or length for its legs spins off eventually to a new species. Lions, cheetahs, jaguars and house cats all have a common ancestor, just like in multiverse theory an event can have multiple outcomes. 

Of course in the case of evolution, we live with and see the multiplicity of mutations living all under the roof of one Universe. In the case of evolution all the different species of feline, canine and primate live on the same planet.

What about the mutations we don't see?

We talk about the amazing diversity of life by pointing to the living things around us. What about the things not in existence?

The diverse living things are not the only Multiverse....they are a small percentage of the Multiverse.

The lives that died young (before able to create offspring), and groups or species that went extinct, are the rest of the Multiverse. They are the negative space of the Multiverse.

All those born with mutations that did not work out in their environment are very much an example of diversity. They are just the end of diversity the environment killed off.

This isn't just the phenomenon of "birth defects". Mutations that gave an animal too much power in their biological niche can go extinct by being too strong. Think of a pack of wolves that have an odd
mutation of longer legs. They outrun all their prey. They are wildly successful and well fed for a season. Then, very soon, all of their prey are hunted to zero. That pack of longer legged and faster wolves dies due to not being fit for their environment. So it is not just birth defect mutants that die, but the overly strong or fast mutant that ruins its food supply by eating it all.

The only mutations that work are those that lead to offspring, and those offspring having offspring.

With all this established, we can easily see the biological Multiverse is constantly generating every form of life there could be, and the pressure of reality prunes much of the diversity from the living.

It is like an airplane factory that randomly generates every physical form of plane...even planes with the most bizarre things like playground swings and stair cases welded to their sides....and the reality of flight blots out of existence the ones unfit. What constitutes unfit?  Those not capable of coming back to the airstrip after taking off.

So all those planes the left the ground and never came back occupy the negative space of that Multiverse.

The largest portion of the Multiverse are the bad ideas, the failures, those that didn't make it. The largest portion of the Multiverse died. Died in a way that did not leave offspring, descendants in our present world.

The negative space of the Multiverse is what the Universe deemed undesirable unable to support within the frameworks and dynamics of reality. You see the strikethrough because, unlike us and our prejudices that load our desires and undesirables, the Universe is more open than we are. If we were in charge, there might be much more negative space in the Multiverse. 

Evolution is not about life, it is about death. It is not about seeking out and aiding good design, but about killing bad design. 

Evolution does not seek to make functional eyes, it does not seek to make the glories of the world around us. Evolution is just the negative space of the biological Multiverse. It only kills bad design. We end up with what survives, and call it good.

We as humans want to say a good or intelligent designer created all this good.

This is unfortunate, because the only omnipresent....God....or simply overarching immutable power....is one of subtraction....of death.

The only God that propels this enterprise called Life forward is one that employs death, combined with wildly prolific attempts at creating offspring. Mass birthing, and mass death of those outside of some boundaries, with those boundaries fickle and shifting constantly.

In the Bible Jesus healed the sick, brought back the dead, and never married and had children. The very opposite of the omnipresent dynamic that keeps Life going.

Possibly the only true God is Odin -the God of promiscuous sex and death.

Note, the multiverse analogy I describe is more how science fiction has depicted multiverses.

The Unnatural Sports League: Doping Allowed

1. Artificially enhanced sports performance should be legal.
2. An athlete on steroids is an entirely legitimate athlete.
3. Natural athlete is a meaningless term, since humans are inherently a species intertwined and reliant on technology.
4. If the terms natural and artificial are in contest, artificial has long ago become the victor.

Given the above as true. I propose the following as a means to carve out a space in the world of sports for augmented athletes.

The Unnatural Sports League needs to be created. Any of the Olympic sports along with the Tour de France would be replicated, with the sole difference being no investigation of doping.

Business models would be adopted that aggressively bought time on ESPN and other sports video forums. The goal would be to ignore news columnist op-eds, news and sports channel commentary, and any ethical statements of the status quo. Rather than wait for the blessing of the status quo, this radical shift in ethics simply creates its own forum of players and viewers with no concern for opposing views.

The expected outcome will be an alternate universe, in a manner of speaking. The Unnatural Sports League would exist as a thriving business enterprise, with loyal and enthusiastic fans, and its own mega-star athletes; making its millions or billions without a care for the opposing view. Eventually the views of the past will fatigue, or become less relevant, and this new ethical paradigm will only grow stronger and richer and more widely accepted. The Unnatural Sports League will become the basis of hero worship for the sports enthusiast who is choosing augmentation and technological enhancement in their lives, their mates and their children in order to out perform, out compete and live longer than their natural counterparts.

On Vanity

In Rod Dreher’s Monastic Vision An orthodox Christian says his side has lost the culture wars—and argues for a “strategic retreat.” -By Joshua Rothman. The New Yorker notice how all the locations are the eastern half of the US? In places where the landscape is underwhelming, a place where "human nature" and the social sphere could gain more primacy when talking about fundamental reality. In other words, from a scientific perspective, rather shallow really, kind of a middle ages level inquiry.

They ask big questions...for a person stuck in 1200 AD.

Big tech is for sure mutating us socially and even fundamentally, and these people see that as unnatural, and thus abhorrent. Which is why in my AnthroTechne I say we need to create a future where a "good" person of the past would die trying to live in it. My meaning is the old prudences become a maladaptation for the present or future world. I once lived in that side of the US locked in some of those philosophical inquiries. Then I discovered the high plains deserts and mountains, then tech, then a complete understanding of evolution and science....all things that are bigger and indifferent to inquiries of even the brightest Christian monks, whether a monk of the past or present.

The people of this article are focused on the deeply personal within a tight knit group held together by both daily work, socializing and faith. These are hipsters affirming  Dunbar's number -a theory that humans are best suited to know and interact with no more than 150 people. A theory that, in essence, promotes a sentiment humans were meant for villages, not cities.

The people of this article inquire with weight and depth the local and personal while holding on to a long view for unchanging good and evil and their relationship to God.

They invest in vanities, the small, the stunted of growth. Then they wrestle with the dynamics of these poorer performing choices in a Universe that honors and grants survival and thriving to exactly the opposite.

They make literature and conversation, of high quality, which puts on record their downward spiral, their contrived and chosen lower station, their emotional rush of victory while in the outward objective reality they are so thoroughly the loser.

The Universe has one method of crafting beauty, of crafting what the Universe is and is becoming, and that is evolution. Evolution in biology, evolution in culture, and evolution in technology.

These people record in amazing eloquence what it is like to fail on all three.

1. Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision -The Atlantic
2. Dunbar's number

Economics - Creative Destruction - Evolution in Tech and Commerce - Jobs - Employment Security - Social Unrest

Joseph Schumpeter

Joseph Schumpeter : Wikipedia

According to Christopher Freeman (2009), a scholar who devoted much time researching Schumpeter's work: "the central point of his whole life work [is]: that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and 'creative destruction'".

Amazon

Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders : A Commentary and Full Text

Where The Misery Is VS Where it isn't

I am writing this as an ebola outbreak in multiple African countries has taken over lives (statistical record). At the same there is a new nation called Islamic State, ISIS and ISIL for short. It was created by a group of soldiers and commanders practicing genocide and forced rape-marriages on a massive regional scale.

Contemporary with the rise of the Islamic State, Noam Chomsky has written a piece titled Are We Approaching the End of Human History? (link ). The article is a wad of contempt for the US as the cause of all politically miseries, and the human species as a blight on the planet.

I've fine with pointing out miseries, blight, and massive die off of humans. Not all humans by a long shot, but very definitely some.

Who is falling into a future that will be pure misery?

The small village in a non-industrialized society. I am saying this: they will not all die, rather I believe their birthrate will provide new people to experience their grist mill of misery. I believe the language of apocalyptic four horsemen is meant only for this class of society, and not at all for others, especially the US. Follow my anecdotal evidence while returning to the subjects of ebola and Islamic State.

At the time of this writing there is one case of ebola in the USA -Dallas patient from Liberia, Thomas Eric Duncan. According to news reports since he was admitted to a hospital, there has been cooperation by the public and professional execution of duties by local law enforcement, health workers, national health officials to name the main stakeholders. Dallas -a place I am sure has many who are uneducated, lawless, superstitious and void of any respect for science - has not had any clashes with the efforts to contain the virus. As of this writing the only likely death will be Thomas Eric Duncan.

Compare this to the over 3000 deaths in Africa this year, with estimates of the numbers climbing to over a million by next year. A CDC official explained in an interview the difference between the Africa outbreak and the US outbreak is resources, educated population and well equipped hospitals. Rural Africa and the US are not the same on these parameters. They are not just different, they are over a million deaths different.

The archetype of villagers fearful of outsiders

This archetype played out as an atrocity with foreign health workers chased into the forest and killed with machetes. At least the villager's resistance to medical help ensures local mass death. (link).

Islamic State versus Westboro Baptist Church versus The Sovereign Movement

Islamic State is an example of a conservative religion expressing itself politically in the Middle East. In America we have conservative hidebound religions expressing themselves politically. One that is notorious is the Westboro Baptist Church. Go do some internet research and see how many beheadings or rape-marriages they've performed. The most violent conservative religious movement I know of in the US is the Sovereign Movement (link), and the only territory they control are a few parcels of private property.

Returning to the range of sentiment Chomsky expressed. It is the end of history...for the unindustrialized...for the rural third world village.

As for who Chomsky meant to place blame or contempt on....their's is exactly the world not ending. As a matter of fact their "world" is likely to start multiplying past this one planet. Colonizing Mars is no longer the topic of authors, rather, it is the topic of industrialists. And whatever is the topic of industrialists is what will be done, what will be built.

In my book Anthrotechne I stated we need to make the future a place our ancestors could not survive in. It seems reality is in agreement.

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.

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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.

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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.