To Pary Gherkins (facebook):
Yes - I didn't have the right name but that is exactly what I'm talking about. Confirmation bias ... hard to claim that I know anything if I'm really just convincing myself of what I want or need to believe - guess my understanding the nuance of this facet of psychology shows I've got a leg up on other people who don't.
I guess voluminous rants (often really wacky if judged by logic) have been going on in cyberspace for a while now - I just never paid attention before.
I'd always thought the internet was going to save the future because a marketplace of ideas could replace the monotheistic media we've had since television (or even newsprint? or since the bible was first collated by the Roman Empire?). Instead, as I sample Six Degrees discussions, I'm horror-struck by the sheer volume of crap-headed thinking and reasoning that goes on here.
I'm glad that enough people respond to Lynn and the others that their crazier ideas don't go unchallenged for others to read. And at the same time I'm almost hopeful, because although they unthinkingly post opinions handed to them by media hacks (like Rush I suppose), at least they aren't just silently believing them - they're discussing them and maybe that increases the odds that they'll begin to critically think about the world. Even Lynn agrees we should get rid of the Fed, and just because he hates Obama doesn't mean he can't admit Bush was an idiot. I agree that all politicians suck and Obama may or may not be a good first step towards taking the country back from industrial powers (I'll go ahead and claim that Socialism must be a deep underground conspiracy indeed to have more power than the pharmaceutical lobby or the defense lobby). I have hope where Lynn has doubt (or paranoia) - but for the grace of god, I'd be right where he is. I just happened to grow up in a liberal town and I happen to think hippies are usually cooler people than non-hippies.
I've studied persuasion and psychology, so I feel like I might be able to somehow get through to these people to say: "I know the world looks a certain way, but read more books and newspapers, read less internet sites and watch less "infotainment", and you'll really be amazed at how ya'll were duped into voting against your own interests all these years." Of course, they think the media is liberally biased. Seriously? Was impeaching Clinton for a blow job a "liberal" or "conservative" thing to do, and didn't the media totally swarm after that? Drumbeats to war, aren't they in every newspaper headline? Advertising being the only reason newspapers don't lose money printing papers (for so many years), that'd make a newspaper more liberal? All the dozens of major U.S. military or U.S. sponsored operations that never got reported and are widely unknown to the public (i.e. East Timor), and that comes from a liberal press? I don't understand the logic, other than many writers become journalists because they are passionate about exposing the truth of things. I guess the truth seems liberal to most people.
I guess I'm asking how you can keep posting and communicating with people who refuse to take their information-source blinders off - isn't it so massively frustrating that you just want to say the hell with it and become a nihilist?
Well, maybe not that last - I do try to include satire or sarcasm sometimes, though it seems these things will be interpreted literally here.
It's such a downer to start getting hope, and then to see that the very changes that are bringing me hope are directing legions of crap-heads to go to war against the ideals I believe in.
I don't think socialism, capitalism or any other -ism has anything to do with solving our problems. I don't think nationalizing the hospitals and health insurance industry would take away any of my individual freedoms or Lynn's (unless he were healthy and wealthy, in which case, he'd be blessed with all the health and opportunity in the free world, and a few extra bucks shouldn't bother him) - and in fact, I'd say taking away the freedom of the health care industry to make profit off of my dying Grandmother who's gone into foreclosure because Safeco hired somebody to stamp denials on insurance claims and she doesn't have the time, money, or life left to fight the claim to get the care she needs; I'd say taking away even ten thousand people's right to profit off of health care is exactly what people who love individualism and freedom would do - even if a million stockholders and CEO's lost their vacation homes and private Jets, every American would enjoy the freedom that comes with being healthy. Every other business except the insurance, drug, and other health care companies would suddenly be richer AND be able to pay their employees a little more through the saving that would come.
To me, Obama may fail because of loud-mouthed rednecks who think the term Socialism is somehow relevant to the modern world (of which they know precisely jack squat, despite all our best efforts to enlighten them about Enlightenment ideas through education that taxes pay for, and yet stupid people seem continually proud of wasting). If it weren't for all the noise they're making, Obama would be much more apt to truly cut out the profit-takers who are killing my Grandmother by making a truly national health care system where the "high achievers" that Lynn cares so much to protect get the same medical care and the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our founding documents talk about, as the crap-heads who wasted their education, got saved, and still cry at the funerals of people to poor to stay well.
Crap-heads think America is great because we have a great military. These people make me sick, because if my neighbor thought he was great because he pointed a gun at my other neighbor, I'd think he was sick.
Crap-heads think America is great because god is on our side. These people have my pity because they're more often than not going to hell even by their own standards - killing in the name of god indeed.
Crap-heads think that if you disagree with American policies that you're against America. The reason the founding fathers were so frightened of the general public ever getting any real power was because even they who were educated formally and spent hours in rigorous debate still made mistakes. People who don't even know how to debate would lead government like a horde of crap-heads managing to idiot their way into a corner in an office shaped like an oval. I'll listen to your opinion, even if it's mal-formed and banal, but you better believe I have a right to tell it like it is when a bank-backed dynasty politician from texas cooks up a war of aggression.
I comfort myself that their way is the old way, built out of the "me" generation that was raised to believe that stuff is the same thing as happiness. Their ignorance of how hollow and contrived that mode of thinking was, literally a consumer demand created through mass psychology to derive profits from post-war surplus, was so obvious once some of them stepped outside the "box" they'd been put in, that the world almost saw a non-violent revolution of consciousness in the 60's. But, in the end, they were still the "me" generation and couldn't stick with John Lennon's vision (Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, nothin' to kill or die for, of brotherhood of man). And those that didn't participate in this movement or were harmed by it (psychologically if not physically) just couldn't help but be mortified at the paradigm shift they sensed around them. Too bad squares are so damn good at getting promotions and being put in charge of everything.
I hope, as part of the " X "/" Y " generation to walk more, dry more clothes for free on the clothes line, grow or hunt for more of my own food, and only buy things that last a long time. I intend to have as much fun for free as possible and so be able to spend my hard earned dollars on locally or sustainably made and traded goods. When unsustainable box stores like Wal-mart fail as they inevitably will, I won't care since I won't buy goods from them and would never work for them. Meanwhile, those of us living with nature's ways (also called god's ways or science's ways, you know, using the brain that the creator blessed you with to make educated guesses about how to save yourself) can only abide, inform and hope that climate change (human caused or not) doesn't kill our crops and our livestock. And, in the end, if humanity can't rise above what we are now, those of us that aren't mired in the stuff that surrounds us won't be all that upset at seeing everything go - we'll know that the earth will go on, life will go on, and maybe in some small way we'll be a part of that.
Keep on Truckin'.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
How I Feel About The New American Century And Where We All Fit Together In There
Collectivism is a church, or a grange, or a group of neighbors getting together in living rooms near you talking about political activism or health care.
Tomorrow's story will be about camping, anarchy, and the beauty of Alaska, but today is looking at Memorial Day.
I'm thinking about making a progressively written cookbook published live and unedited on this blogspot site. The idea is to weave the recipes into stories of past adventures, and especially cruise-line shannanigans. So stay tuned.
This year, Memorial Day really seems like the whole weekend because of an e-mail I got from a former math-tutoring student of mine. The cartoons, whose messages were essentially 'thank and remember our veterans, don't just party on memorial day' were very thought provoking. I got this sense that most people think of the military on memorial day, but I'm concerned that everyone thinks of the military in a particular way. I worry that our national consciousness completely accepts the idea that "freedom isn't free," and I believe such rhetoric going unexamined and unquestioned makes us inherently unsafe in our modern world.
Fact is, no one wants to dishonor any veteran. I'd contend, that in an ideal world, we wouldn't even dishonor prisoners, poor people, or Downs Syndrome people, as doing so serves no righteous cause other than inflating our own egos (not that it will necessarily happen, but from what I've studied, I'd say having an In-Group/Out-Group mentality, while functionally helpful to society, is one of the biggest things that holds us back as a species). Since there is no counterbalance to the people who deeply revere veterans (and I don't deny that doing so is worthwhile and moving to many people), Memorial day seems to only speak with that one voice - we don't do enough for the people who wield guns in our name. Left out of the Memorial day message is the voice of all the dead soldiers: "don't send my younger brothers and sisters off to war unless another Hitler is upon us."
What do I mean by all that? Simply this: violence begets violence; honoring soldiers without pushing against the "need" for their slaughter is just another kind of violence and injustice done to the world. Christianity is not my thing, but I seem to remember something in it about "shalt not kill." Yet, people who want to give all their problems to jesus all the time really seem just as ready to let the Flag-bearers blame everything on Saddam, or Iran, or Vietnam and Communism. As far as I can tell, their stated evidence for believing in the "enemy" usually goes no further than television heresay. God even told W. to go and kill people in the name of freedom, and of course he felt obliged to tell his country that god told him so. How many truly religious people would abhor that idea? How long before truly religious people give their piety to a god that doesn't command them to kill and conquer for freedom and country? Not long I hope.
If you take a step back from yourself, it is interesting to look at Collectivism and Individualism and what type of people such societies create. Individualism ascribes a person's priorities automatically into the self-and-related category. As long as we all live by fair laws and wait our turn, all the people in an Individualist country may proceed to consider themselves similar or different from everyone else as they see fit. Given the freedom to make that choice, most people tend to believe they are different from everyone else, since making that cage of uniqueness and cutting yourself off from everybody is cool in the U.S. and being the odd man out is everyone's secret indulgence. Being a sheep is worth deep ridicule in this country, even while our pastures grow denser and denser populated with people unwilling to examine the dischordant values they espouse (like that the ten commandments should be stamped on courthouses where we shalt sentence to kill via lethal injection). I don't claim to hate sheepdom for myself. In fact, I wish more people grazed at the pastures where evolved forage is found - humanity is capable of so much more than instant gratification and entertainment, the crowning achievements of Capitalism.
Whereas all that may apply to Individualist societies such as where we live, Collectivist societies are a different ball game. In a place like China, if you claim a religion makes you different, better, or more special than everyone else, you're given a one-way ticket to jail or worse. Though the punishments and restrictions on such activity may lessen as the execution of such non-collectivist ideas becomes less and less necessary to maintain the status-quo (and since executions tend to cause revolutions), in the end we see that China's entire population, through their ancestry, has been naturally selected to believe the doctrines behind such punishments. Just like the death penalty here, enough people believe with their hearts that the State has a right to take life, that even those who abhor such punishment rarely use the argument that the State should generally not be an agent that takes human lives. That argument simply isn't effective in persuading people here, just as saying the State shouldn't have the right to dictate belief systems isn't an effective argument to persuade people there.
But, a unique strength lies in a Collectivist society that America will have to figure out how to match if we're to avoid being overwhelmed in the future: any Chinese is far more willing to act for the greater good of society as a whole than Americans are. When financial crisis or disease or any other interruption of our daily order arrives, which society do you think will be better able to cope? The society where an individual believes themselves to be roughly equal to everyone else, or a society where any individual courts the notion that they are somehow more important than their neighbors? A society where every day, the citizens vote to support government programs and decisions with their actions, or a society where far more than half the citizens don't care to vote?
Obviously I don't really know what the future will bring and whether our way is better than other ways or not. Obviously, we could end up having more pockets of surviving civilization after world catastrophe hits (here in the place where only the strong have survived in many places for a while now). But, my point is that competition and individualism should have limits. If you buy that then you're less likely to believe it when they tell you that National Health Care is Socialism, and saying such a thing will no longer be sufficient for you to dismiss it out of hat.
Tomorrow's story will be about camping, anarchy, and the beauty of Alaska, but today is looking at Memorial Day.
I'm thinking about making a progressively written cookbook published live and unedited on this blogspot site. The idea is to weave the recipes into stories of past adventures, and especially cruise-line shannanigans. So stay tuned.
This year, Memorial Day really seems like the whole weekend because of an e-mail I got from a former math-tutoring student of mine. The cartoons, whose messages were essentially 'thank and remember our veterans, don't just party on memorial day' were very thought provoking. I got this sense that most people think of the military on memorial day, but I'm concerned that everyone thinks of the military in a particular way. I worry that our national consciousness completely accepts the idea that "freedom isn't free," and I believe such rhetoric going unexamined and unquestioned makes us inherently unsafe in our modern world.
Fact is, no one wants to dishonor any veteran. I'd contend, that in an ideal world, we wouldn't even dishonor prisoners, poor people, or Downs Syndrome people, as doing so serves no righteous cause other than inflating our own egos (not that it will necessarily happen, but from what I've studied, I'd say having an In-Group/Out-Group mentality, while functionally helpful to society, is one of the biggest things that holds us back as a species). Since there is no counterbalance to the people who deeply revere veterans (and I don't deny that doing so is worthwhile and moving to many people), Memorial day seems to only speak with that one voice - we don't do enough for the people who wield guns in our name. Left out of the Memorial day message is the voice of all the dead soldiers: "don't send my younger brothers and sisters off to war unless another Hitler is upon us."
What do I mean by all that? Simply this: violence begets violence; honoring soldiers without pushing against the "need" for their slaughter is just another kind of violence and injustice done to the world. Christianity is not my thing, but I seem to remember something in it about "shalt not kill." Yet, people who want to give all their problems to jesus all the time really seem just as ready to let the Flag-bearers blame everything on Saddam, or Iran, or Vietnam and Communism. As far as I can tell, their stated evidence for believing in the "enemy" usually goes no further than television heresay. God even told W. to go and kill people in the name of freedom, and of course he felt obliged to tell his country that god told him so. How many truly religious people would abhor that idea? How long before truly religious people give their piety to a god that doesn't command them to kill and conquer for freedom and country? Not long I hope.
If you take a step back from yourself, it is interesting to look at Collectivism and Individualism and what type of people such societies create. Individualism ascribes a person's priorities automatically into the self-and-related category. As long as we all live by fair laws and wait our turn, all the people in an Individualist country may proceed to consider themselves similar or different from everyone else as they see fit. Given the freedom to make that choice, most people tend to believe they are different from everyone else, since making that cage of uniqueness and cutting yourself off from everybody is cool in the U.S. and being the odd man out is everyone's secret indulgence. Being a sheep is worth deep ridicule in this country, even while our pastures grow denser and denser populated with people unwilling to examine the dischordant values they espouse (like that the ten commandments should be stamped on courthouses where we shalt sentence to kill via lethal injection). I don't claim to hate sheepdom for myself. In fact, I wish more people grazed at the pastures where evolved forage is found - humanity is capable of so much more than instant gratification and entertainment, the crowning achievements of Capitalism.
Whereas all that may apply to Individualist societies such as where we live, Collectivist societies are a different ball game. In a place like China, if you claim a religion makes you different, better, or more special than everyone else, you're given a one-way ticket to jail or worse. Though the punishments and restrictions on such activity may lessen as the execution of such non-collectivist ideas becomes less and less necessary to maintain the status-quo (and since executions tend to cause revolutions), in the end we see that China's entire population, through their ancestry, has been naturally selected to believe the doctrines behind such punishments. Just like the death penalty here, enough people believe with their hearts that the State has a right to take life, that even those who abhor such punishment rarely use the argument that the State should generally not be an agent that takes human lives. That argument simply isn't effective in persuading people here, just as saying the State shouldn't have the right to dictate belief systems isn't an effective argument to persuade people there.
But, a unique strength lies in a Collectivist society that America will have to figure out how to match if we're to avoid being overwhelmed in the future: any Chinese is far more willing to act for the greater good of society as a whole than Americans are. When financial crisis or disease or any other interruption of our daily order arrives, which society do you think will be better able to cope? The society where an individual believes themselves to be roughly equal to everyone else, or a society where any individual courts the notion that they are somehow more important than their neighbors? A society where every day, the citizens vote to support government programs and decisions with their actions, or a society where far more than half the citizens don't care to vote?
Obviously I don't really know what the future will bring and whether our way is better than other ways or not. Obviously, we could end up having more pockets of surviving civilization after world catastrophe hits (here in the place where only the strong have survived in many places for a while now). But, my point is that competition and individualism should have limits. If you buy that then you're less likely to believe it when they tell you that National Health Care is Socialism, and saying such a thing will no longer be sufficient for you to dismiss it out of hat.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Obama is Not A Socialist (Though I'd Personally Be Okay With It If He Was)
Post #10
The following is a conversation thread from facebook that prompted me to write the above column as my latest reply.
It came from a random group I joined called Six Degrees, which claims to be some sort of social experiment (though I'd guess it'd be easier to prove mathematically that the theory is true or false).
Post #1
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