The Posterous redesign is incredibly annoying, I prefer using a platform with actual features, and I wanted to get all my political writing under nydwracu anyway. So.

http://nydwracu.wordpress.com/

My respect for libertarianism of the odd liberal, market-fundamentalist sort that seems to be the only sort practiced today is only slightly greater than the same for left-liberalism or Stalinism, but I'm starting to think supporting Ron Paul might not be all that bad an idea.

I have next to no respect for that particular sort of libertarianism because it makes the patently absurd claim that the only source of power, or at least the only one worth worrying about, is government. The market libertarian argument is that market forces will ensure that this is true in the long run; worrisome uses of power by private corporations will cause those corporations to lose market shares to others less abusive of their power. But, since we are not 'rational' in the economists' ridiculous sense of the word, not all non-governmental use of power is motivated strictly by the drive toward higher profits, and even if it were, as John Maynard Keynes, the devil of the market libertarian pantheon, said, in the long run we are all dead.

However, the most significant area that the president has control over is foreign policy, which is an area that Paul definitely gets right. Considering that neither Obama nor any of the 'mainstream' Republican candidates show any signs of reducing our military activities in foreign countries, and that the issues that Paul is worst on are the ones that the president has minimal control over (Obama's use of his position and personality cult as motivators for specific legislative action notwithstanding), Paul could turn out to be a net asset to the country.

The ideal, I think, would be Paul as president and a Democratic majority in both houses, so the ideologue's inevitable idiocy could be overridden when necessary, but bills could (and almost certainly would) be vetoed when not. In an ideal situation, I'd have no problem with a president as veto-happy as I'm sure Paul would be, but this is not an ideal situation and I do not trust ideologues.

I do not trust this specific ideologue because, among other reasons, he 'knows' things I do not; namely, that federal government intervention will not be necessary to deal with our economic situation, or any other situation that falls outside the boundaries of his own rather idiosyncratic reading of the Constitution. My paranoid tendencies lead me inevitably to the desire to hear a proof of that piece of knowledge, but government is not mathematics, so such a proof is clearly not possible.

What would it take for your belief to be falsified? I do not think Paul could answer that question, but I am not sure how relevant that is. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and utility must take precedence over ideological purity, especially since any ideology I could be said to hold is fringe enough to be not only unelectable, but utterly unheard of in the American political scene.

Excessive militarism was involved in the collapse of two empires before us. Considering this fact and our own circumstances, what makes us think we can survive?

Nazi Germany fell due to Hitler's megalomaniacal insistence on running more concurrent military operations than could reasonably be sustained. Soviet Russia spent its last years in a drawn-out war against the US-backed mujahideen (a term derived from the same root as "jihad"), where Osama bin Laden got his start as an Islamist warrior fighting communist antitheism.

As a result of the 9/11 attacks and the resulting paranoia, we are now in... how many wars? Who knows? Where does this leave us?

Make people panic and they'll start behaving irrationally. Make people behave irrationally and they'll end up destroying themselves. What can be called rational about a game plan that appears to consist entirely of convincing those who dislike our extensive military operations to change their opinion of us through even more extensive military operations?

Osama won. All that can be done now is damage control, but even that is politically unlikely.

But who would want to live in an empire anyway? Empires, by their very nature, are very reliant on entities outside themselves. I can't imagine Finland spending time and effort propping up tinpot dictators all over the globe to keep the oil and cheap labor available.

I must admit to having employed a bit of false advertising. In my last post, I explained how to carry out a process that will have the same results as a revolution; however, that is only one form of revolution, and not the one that commonly comes to mind when a revolution is mentioned. The common conception of 'revolution', which I will call a reboot, is a single, abrupt event of which the beginning and end can be easily pinpointed. The process that I described, which I will call a Roman revolution (remember that the Roman empire still called itself a republic), is not abrupt; instead of a quick surgical strike at the old order, it eats away at that order from within and, once it is gone, wears its skin Buffalo Bill-style, resulting in something that I suppose could be called, in the spirit of alliteration, a Gumb government. (Although it occurs to me that duocodical bureaucracy might be a better term.) The difference between a Roman revolution and a reboot should be obvious; it is clear that a Roman revolution has occurred in America, but, unlike with the American Revolution (a military reboot), no starting point can be named.

Due to their origins, Gumb governments can only take on certain forms: they outwardly appear to be identical to the governments they replaced, albeit possibly more bloated, while inwardly operating on what Tom Ball termed the Second Set of Books: the heuristics it uses in place of the laws that have become too unwieldy to enforce, the mechanisms used to justify the new order in the eyes of the old, and so on. Certain other forms of government are clearly impossible, or at least unrealistic, to bring about through Roman revolutions: to bloat a government until it shrinks is a contradiction in terms, unless the method by which it is expected to shrink is a reboot—a full replacement of the old order, structures, philosophy, and all, usually in the form of a revolution. (And obviously, the result of a reboot could not be a Gumb government!) So Roman revolutions may be viable roads to power for philosophies centered around one strong central government (a New Order, one could say), but what if the intended new order is not a New Order? If that intended order is sufficiently different from the old order, a reboot is clearly in order, but it's not as simple as throwing the bums out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and, as Hobbes et al. made clear, power vacuums are no different. A reboot leaves an open playing field, on which you may well lose. Notice that nobody knows what's going to happen in the Middle East; the bums have been thrown out, but it's anyone's guess as to whether the liberals, Islamists, or Martians will be next on the throne.

What, then, is to be done?

For a new order to take power after a reboot, it must already exist as a viable institution—a set of existing, developed organizations with the support of its subjects (or at least most of them), the capacity for self-defense, and the ability to govern and carry out the functions of government in the absence of the currently existing government. If your institution is currently viable, it can be called an ungovernment, since, by definition, it has the ability, but not the power, to act as a government. Parts of an ungovernment, or organizations that could be incorporated into an ungovernment were one to be built, can be called ungovernmental organizations, as can organizations that realistically could become such.

Ungovernmental organizations take many forms, from church organizations to local currencies. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all alternative organizations, not reliant on the government, that perform, or have the capability and the legitimacy to, in the absence of the currently existing government, perform functions normally delegated to the government.

So far, we have seen two sorts of revolution: the ungovernmental revolution and the Roman revolution. To this I would add a third, the übergovernmental revolution: the creation of, as the name implies, an institution (the übergovernment) encompassing multiple existing governments, followed by the gradual strengthening of said übergovernment at the expense of the sovereignty—that is, the governmental status—of the former governments, resulting in one übergovernment ruling over some amount of ungovernments. Übergovernmental revolutions have taken place in both America and Europe, but the American case shows some of the characteristics of a reboot.

But the question remains: what sorts of governments can be created through ungovernmental revolutions? For ungovernmental revolutions to have unlimited possibilities would break the pattern established by Roman revolutions, which create Gumb governments, and übergovernmental revolutions, which create federations.

Ungovernmental revolutions appear to be less limited, since they can bestow sovereignty upon any viable ungovernment, but it seems to me that ungovernments and ungovernmental institutions would be more likely to form, and more viable once formed, on a smaller scale and in areas with higher social capital, meaning that such revolutions would be most likely to bring about small, localist, communitarian governments of the sort advocated on sites such as Front Porch Republic.

That, for reasons that should be obvious, make them my preferred form of revolution. Especially since, if the reboot never comes, the ungovernmental institutions may very well be more effective than the equivalent governmental institutions; I live in an area where, when it snows, someone on the block will usually drive around in a pickup truck with a snowplow attachment and get the roads cleared days, sometimes weeks, before the government snowplows show up.

Remember Tom Ball? The man who said that this country is run by a shadowy dictatorship of unelected bureaucrats, and then set himself on fire in front of a New Hampshire courthouse?

Well, he got the dictatorship part right.

From his last statement:

Any one swept up into legal mess is usually astonished at what they see. They cannot believe what the police, prosecutors and judges are doing. It is so blatantly wrong. Well, I can assure you that everything they do is logical and by the book. The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime[s] call[ed] Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright.

Translated into grammatically correct English with proper terminology, this essentially says that such concepts as separation of powers and rule of law are now irrelevant; instead of laws being written entirely by legislative bodies, many are now written by the other two branches. In the current political climate, of course, this makes sense to a degree; the laws are so complicated and so far-reaching that to consistently enforce them would require far more resources than are realistically available.

But what this means is that separation of powers is a myth. What we have instead is a dictatorship of the bureaucrats, the shadowy, unelected masses who have amassed pervasive power through their role in writing policies, procedures, and protocols. Tom Ball's case promarily involved lower-level government, but it is trivial to see that the same principle applies at the federal level.

For example:

Now, DHS and the Department of Justice will convene a working group to evaluate, on a case by case basis, the files of everyone facing deportation, and those whose cases are dropped will be eligible to apply for work permits. The move will not grant any of those people legal status, nor will work authorization be guaranteed. But they will not have to leave the country.

For years, immigrant rights advocates have pushed Obama to exercise his executive authority, which allows him prosecutorial discretion over who the country prosecutes and deports. The numbers within Obama’s record-breaking deportation effort showed that a majority of those being deported, contrary to what the Morton memo called for, had no criminal background whatsoever. Outrage over this fact escalated after the failure of the DREAM Act last December, which would have allowed a select portion of undocumented youth the opportunity to gain citizenship if they cleared a host of hurdles. In April, 22 senators sent a letter to Obama urging him to issue deferred action to DREAM Act-eligible young people, and reminded him of the menu of options he had to ease the lives of undocumented youth.

President Obama was a vocal supporter of the DREAM Act, yet his immigration authorities were still sending deportation orders to DREAM Act-eligible youth. Obama ought to bring his policies in line with his rhetoric, immigrant rights advocates argued. Thursday’s policy change was his administration’s response to those demands.

The Obama administration has instituted a policy that amounts to a laxer version of a law that has been defeated in Congress multiple times. And those in favor of this move openly admit it. Separation of powers is dead, and it died a slow, silent death.

So, you ask, how does this tie into the title? How can this teach you, a budding revolutionary, how to overthrow the Evil Regime™ of your choice in a bloodless coup with a very high probability of success?

Unfortunately for you, it probably can't. This method only works for those in favor of instituting a bureaucracy, and I doubt this blog would attract anyone but reactionaries, libertarians, and stone-cold paranoiacs, who are generally not the sort to support such absurdities. But if you happen to be a progressive, a globalist, or some other flavor of Vogon, here's how you'd do it:

1. March through the institutions. Manipulate public opinion, especially the opinion of the bureaucratic classes, in the direction of supporting moral judgments favorable to your agenda.
2. Institute overly broad laws, or laws that would dramatically increase the workload of those enforcing them, to flood the system. If you can't get that done yourself, rustle up some idealists or opportunistic capitalists to muscle some through for you.
3. Point out that the system has been flooded and claim that heuristics (policies, procedures, and protocols) must be installed to deal with the caseload.
4. Guide the codification of those heuristics to ensure that they support your agenda. This should not be hard, since if you carried out step 2 properly, the bureaucrats should already think your agenda is sensible policy.

Then sit back and watch as your perverse vision of heaven on earth becomes reality. If opposition arises, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt.

Good luck pulling this off in America, though; it's clearly already been done.

In what may be my greatest act so far of petit-bourgeois irony, I picked up a copy of The Coming Insurrection a few days ago in the closing sale at Borders. I haven't gotten around to starting it just yet, as I'm already halfway through Beowulf and I long ago gave up on the hope that I could read two books at once without getting confused. But I did do some background research, and in the process, I found this:

Maybe we should question the basis of the liberation we aim for: you read shit that says “the more anonymous I am, the more present I am,” but what does that mean? That I must lose the emotions and experiences that make me who I am in the process of becoming a revolutionary actor?

It is my ennui that draws me to the street, my resentment that throws the brick, my desire that makes the nights in jail bearable – and these emotions don’t come from nowhere. Are all emotions beyond nihilist anger invalid and antirevolutionary? Because if they are, the lucidity and liberation I find through them are as well.

This should remind you of something quite unlike what I'm sure the author intended; namely, Lasch:

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security. Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy. Radical politics filled empty lives, provided a sense of meaning and purpose. In her memoir of the Weathermen, Susan Stern described their attraction in language that owes more to psychiatry and medicine than to religion. When she tried to evoke her state of mind during the 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, she wrote instead about the state of her health. "I felt good. I could feel my body supple and strong and slim, and ready to run miles, and my legs moving sure and swift under me." A few pages later, she says: "I felt real."

In the politics of the narcissistic mind, change becomes a means not to a better society, but to better feelings; "lucidity and liberation" is found not through living in a better society brought about by said change, but through the translation of emotions into the political realm in the form of that change. Revolutionaries must hold on to their emotions, and they must do so to reach purely emotional ends. The emotions, in fact, may very well be the ends, since the proclaimed goal is clearly far too utopian to be realized, at least in the lifetime of the revolutionary, who is almost certainly narcissistic. Sorry, kids; you've been pwned. And memes are very adaptable, especially the ones that radicals of all sorts are currently fighting against, so it would be absurd to think at least some of them could not outlast a revolution.

The application of this principle to certain other current events should be obvious. When a protest against the police in the most notorious police state in the developed world degenerates into an orgy of consumerism surpassing even Black Friday, when 'the people', whoever they are, turn a perfect opportunity for mass mobilization against patently absurd political abuses into a Mammonic mockery, a rally for free shoes, can it really be said that there is any hope of attacking the roots of the problems? Of course not!

The left will never be successful. Why? Because the left has all been pwned, and once you've been pwned, you can't be un-pwned. How can you have a successful revolution when you can't even break away from the values of the ideology you're trying to destroy? How can you educate the next generation in such a way that they will not be infected when your ideology cannot produce any learning materials that do not contain the virus?

Notice, however, that I said specifically that the left will be successful. If you buy the above, it follows necessarily that the only revolution that can succeed is a reactionary one.

Technological developments are going to end up having sociopolitical ramifications of some sort, but nobody's talking about them seriously.

Everyone has heard by now the media narrative of how Facebook and Twitter somehow caused the revolutions in the Middle East, as if people had any trouble organizing revolutions before. (One would expect Americans not to be so vulnerable to that way of thinking, but given the dismal state of American history education, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.) And most people have heard some variation of the theme that some new piece of technology is horribly mutilating the fabric of our society, but, with good reason, this sort of alarmism is almost never taken seriously.

But even though it is clear that the aforementioned ramifications exist and are most likely very large, academia refuses to seriously study them; it has instead confined itself mostly to studying small minority populations and repeating irrelevant, decades-old generalities, spewing absurd, crypto-Marxist excuses about the academic's supposed duty to further social justice when they are questioned on their tunnel vision. As if justice were better served by ignoring large-scale changes that will surely affect everyone and instead focusing on the concerns of the small percentages of the population that are favored by the establishment.

One of my professors, an ex-mainframe programmer, told me a few months ago that studying Lasch was pointless, because he didn't raise any new questions. I didn't get what he meant then, but now I think I do. (Though I still think Lasch can be made relevant; social networking and the concomitant "personal brand" absurdity are surely feeding the culture of narcissism somehow.)

From a comment at The New Republic:

Another good piece of ammunition against [Rick Perry] is the Christian prayer rally that he’ll be headlining. The event’s organizer had this to say:
“This is an explicitly Christian event because we are going to be praying to the one true God through His son, Jesus Christ. It would be idolatry of the worst sort for Christians to gather and invite false gods like Allah and Buddha and their false prophets to be with us at that time. Because we have religious liberty in this country, they are free to have events and pray to Buddha and Allah on their own. But this is time of prayer to the One True God through His son, Jesus Christ, who is The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”

In other words, by appearing at this event, Perry will be insulting pretty much anyone who’s not a Christian and endorsing the view that the Buddha and Allah are “false gods” (never mind that Buddha is neither worshipped in the Christian sense nor regarded as a god, while Allah is just the Arabic name for the same god of Abraham that Christians and Jews worship).

I find it interesting that religion—that is, real religion, characterized by actual, uncompromising belief, as opposed to the weak platitudes and vague references to some floating, bearded guy with no discernible traits other than a fondness for America that are so common today—is so alien to many in America that someone thought a weak tie to an expression of it would be a suitable attack on a politician in a primary for the more religious of the two parties.

Of course a Christian would say that the gods of other religions are false gods. It is part of the Christian belief system that the god of the Christian religion is the only true god. If you do not believe that the god of the Christian religion is the only true god, either there's a very strange theological loophole that I'm not aware of, or you are not a Christian. Are all Christians unelectable now? Are all Christians 'insulting' all non-Christians by no other action than simply being Christians?

I'm not religious myself, but, all other things being equal, I'll take someone who is not afraid of offending a group to which he does not belong by stating a basic principle of a group to which he does belong over someone who is. The political implications of that dichotomy should be obvious, especially on issues such as immigration, which have clear ties to intergroup conflict.

(As an aside, Christians, Jews, and Muslims do not worship the same god. Imagine three Arnold Schwarzeneggers: one is the one who exists in the real world, one never starred in Terminator, and one never ran for governor. They have the same origin and name, but they are clearly not all the same Schwarzenegger.)

Ban bill names.

As things are now, discussions and opinions on bills are most likely significantly shaped by their names. Imagine the reaction of the average person to a pollster asking for their opinion on, for example, the Patriot Act. They probably won't know all that much about the bill itself, but if they haven't formed an opinion on the bill yet (even if they've never even heard of the bill!), they will most likely form one right then and there, to have an answer to put down for the poll. And the only information available to them at that time is the name.

Then factor in the effect that word choice has on political positions (e.g. the 'gay'/'homosexual' study). Is it really all that democratic to allow such blatantly irrational factors to have such large effects on the political process? (It is important here to remember that democracy, by its nature as a product of the Enlightenment, relies on the flawed assumption that humans are rational. Although this ideal is impossible to reach, the effects of human irrationality can at least be slightly reduced.)

What, you ask, should be used in the place of bill names? My preferred alternative is to use the names of the politicians responsible for (i.e. writing/introducing) a bill. This would obviously be easier to implement if bills were required to be limited to a single issue, since some bills take pieces from many other bills written by many different politicians, or involve many different politicians. The Patriot Act, for example, took pieces from the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 and two versions of the USA Act, and its development involved Leahy, Ashcroft, Sarbanes, and several other politicians. The obvious advantage is that it holds politicians more accountable for the bills they write; it would be much more obvious that Leahy and Daschle were involved in the writing of the Patriot Act if it were called the Leahy-Daschle Act.

Another possible alternative, and the one that would be the easiest to implement, is an index number. This appears to be the system used in Arizona, if the name SB 1070 is any indication. There are, however, two disadvantages:

1. The name does not contain any relevant information. HR 3162 tells readers practically nothing about the bill, whereas Leahy-Daschle Act shows which politicians are primarily responsible for the bill.
2. Strings of numbers are harder to memorize and far more prone to error. If an error is made, the name refers to a completely different bill; HR 3612 is a failed bill about the Internal Revenue Code. 

Any better ideas?

Oh great. Psychology Today is making the same mistake.

Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published--and promptly removed--from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today's mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.

Notice how they claim that the reason the post was pulled, along with the rest of Kanazawa's blog, is the "pain and offense" caused by Kanazawa's "racism". I'd expect radical feminists and other people on that end of the political spectrum to come out against science, but now a science site is doing that? 

I agree with Dennis Mangan here: "One can agree with the editor that Kanazawa's post was "inflammatory and offensive", but as for the "racism" charge, the post was either true or false, right or wrong, or some combination."

Science does not care about how "inflammatory and offensive" it is. All that science can legitimately concern itself with is its scientific accuracy; that is, whether things are "true or false, right or wrong, or some combination". Throw in anything else, and it becomes not science, but propaganda.

In fact, contrary to Psychology Today's apparent belief that informing the public and "provid[ing] a platform for inflammatory and offensive material" can be mutually exclusive, real science will inevitably offend; it is well established that people believe things that are not true, and become offended when evidence is presented that runs counter to their beliefs. It should not be surprising to anyone outside the left that the left is as guilty of this as the religious right. But the left (in its opposition to the religious right) claims to support science, despite the fact that that science offends many on the religious right. They can't have it both ways.