Wednesday, August 31, 2016

The Long Argument


Given the current tit-for-tat, conflict oriented media and politics (generally speaking), people knowing what words meant and mean now falls casualty to the sturm und drang.  Also, words change their meaning in a present, as time passes.
Among the casualties the words:
Democracy
Republic
Liberal(ism)
Conservative(ism)
Granted, these 4 words have long history of being abused in the American lexicon. But, what they mean or meant to the Founders of the country, as opposed to what they mean for most today, is relevant, I think. We struggle to operate inside the political structure/framework they laid down.

It is curious characteristic of American political and legal debate that what the “framers” of our constitution understood the various sections and amendments meant, is a major part of constitutional interpretation now. I say curious, because, as well explained in the book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 ; the Framers would be puzzled by this view.
The vagueness of the documents reflects the varied political positions of the Framers and their respective states. They ended up towards the end of the process, writing to each other that that was a good thing, as it allowed future generation to constantly re-interpret the documents, in relation to the needs and issued of the times.
Two example of Judicial “Activism”/modern interpretation by the current Supreme Court:
Gay marriage & the “individual” right to have a gun (2nd Amendment issues).
Ok. Back to the political labels.

Democracy.
The United States of America is not a democracy, as Jefferson, Madison Hamilton, Washington et al would have told you. That is a question of how you structure sovereignty in a given government.
“Democracy, (from Greek: "δημοκρατία") or "rule of the commoners", was originally conceived in Classical Greece, whereby political representatives were chosen by lot (as in a jury) from amongst the male citizens.” This form /structure was rejected by the Framers of our constitution in favor of the structure called a “republic”, and created a modified Roman Republic model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy

A republic (from Latin: res publica) is a sovereign state or country which is organized with a form of government in which power resides in elected individuals representing the citizen body and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic

Liberal” in late 1700’s North America was used to simply refer to the belief in the principles of The Age Enlightenment. Therefore, It was the dominant ideology of the founders/Framers. For a brief review of the expression of the Enlightenment in the colonial period of the United States, the “first” revolution of the Enlightenment, and the early republic, see American Enlightenment .

Liberal is tied to the concept of liberty, both for the Founders/framers and their primary inspiration, the Roman Republic (the goddess Libertas, which is seen in the U.S. as the statue of liberty, and the paintings and statues all over of the female figure Columbia and/or liberty.  )
Liberty meant, to the Founders/Framers, to be a liber homo, a “free man” means not being subject to another's arbitrary will, that is to say, dominated by another. Living in a society under the rule of non-arbitrary laws, passed by elected representatives that you can vote for.
“Liberalism” has developed distinct flavors through space and time. As did “conservative”. “Conservatism as a political and social philosophy promotes retaining traditional social institutions in the context of culture and civilization.”

The first use of the term “conservative” ideologically in the U.S. was in the 1820’s in the term Liberal Conservatism. That is what the opponents of Andre Jackson called themselves. “Liberal” was used in tandem with “conservative” because it meant you supported the Enlightenment and did not favor the British ( the common meaning of conservative at the time, in the U.S.). Perhaps the closest modern child of Liberal Conservatism in the U.S. is Libertarianism in some ways. But technically, “Liberal Conservatism” is extinct in the U.S. and the term is considered by those not familiar with the Enlightenment to be an oxymoron.
The negative association with the word may have contributed to the curiosity that the United States never developed a “conservative” party, properly so called, as is common in Europe and the other former British colonies, and Japan. Instead, what Americans usually call conservative is actually with in the range that is “liberalism”.
Assuming you have read through the above hyperlinks, you are aware that liberalism branched over time into distinct variants.
Iiberalism in the United States
American liberalism in all its variants, including the mis-labeled American Conservatism through Progressivism share one particular element, that being Adam Smith inspired concepts of market  “capitalism”. Much of the history of post-revolutionary political debate in the country can be viewed as a changing range of argument between the political rights of the individual vs the economic rights of land owners and large owners of capital. Socialism, much less communism ever achieved a lasting purchase on the country’s political landscape. Another form that failed to stick here was Fascism. The one late 19th Century “ism” that has achieved entrée’ into the county’s political landscape as elsewhere, was and is religious fundamentalism.

The New Liberalism
What Americans tend to label “conservative” is actually properly called Neoliberalism . For the reader not familiar with this term, I recommend the book Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics
In the country, Neoliberalism has since about 1980 gained increasing mindshare. It now the core philosophy of the Republican Party, and the majority of the members of the Democratic Party. Currently in the Republican Party, neoliberalism is joined with,  for many a resurgent nationalism, and to a lesser extent tinged with a tad of rascism.
Our neoliberalism may be seen  as consistent with the end stage of the transition from republic to plutocracy.  I think this transition is well illustrate by some national/thematic issues, involving the concept of privatization.

Education. As expressed in the series of Northwest Ordinances of 1785-1787, the young republic committed to the creation and maintenance at the state level of public education. In a republic, the main purpose of education is to create “citizens”. Now, as we have become a neoliberal plutocracy, the primary purpose of education is worker training.  Also, the neoliberal view is that public education needs to be privatized, opening a very large new market.

Social Security. As American republicanism adapted to the industrial revolution one of the blooms of that process was the Social Security System. Hardcore neoliberals now talk about the problems of that system and argue a range of private sector alternatives. The rational for it is the redefined concept, in neoliberalism of individual/consumer/taxpayer choice, as opposed to the traditional republican concepts of citizen/individual, political choice.
Also, privatization would open trillions of dollars from the social security fund, to commissions for the financial sector of the economy, and all that that implies…

Citizens United/1st Amendment rights of corporations
The Framers/Founders would have flipped over that one. They, as was Adam Smith, were very leery of allowing the formation of business corporations, In 1787 (the year of Constitutional Convention) in every state you had to have a bill introduced in the state legislature to create a corporation. This was due to the understanding that the concentration of capital tied to limited liability for the shareholders created, in a republic, a dangerous concentration of influence, that could lead eventually to a broad economic disparity if unchecked. Therefore, the existence of a corporation was a public creation and a public question, limited to a public purpose (unlike business partnerships and sole proprietors which were considered private in nature).
Now in every state, you create a corporation by filling a particular document and paying a filing fee. Apparently by doing so you have can create a Super-Citizen; a creature that has first Amendment rights, is comprised of concentrated funds from owners who are not personally libel for what the creature does.


Of course, strong proponents of neoliberalism tend to also champion issues (wedge/values issues, 2nd amendment, etc) that are apparently of significant interest to Euroamericans who are not rich. This over the last 36 years gave birth to both quasi-producerism of the Tea Party and then the rise of Donald Trump. I think the neoliberals certainly benefit from those issues. If the majority of the bottom 75% economically speaking, actually examined their own lives and neoliberal ideas, those ideas would not fair well.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

The Role of Abdication in a Tainter Symplification

A picnic in the ruins


I just ended my viewing of a live feed from a “town hall meeting” that illustrates, at least in my culture, a micro view opportunity of our current Tainter Symplification.

Public comes to view taxes as something “bad” & government as something to “big”.
Public elects people who talk about that, from the group of people that taught them to think that.

A state government cuts funds for something that happens locally. Local governments  are not amused.

What is interesting in all of this, is what is not discussed:

Reduce state tax cuts and restore funding
Or increase state taxes and restore funding
Or, local governments raise taxes and if necessary politically force the state to restore local powers to do so.

 It is like they cannot even think about those options, which are traditionally, i.e. in the former complexity of a republic, standard.  Perhaps that is, in my culture, a feature of the simplification process. A certain helplessness in the face of the simplification as it rolls downward?

Extinction & Aesthetics

Pre-simplification   by jay moynihan


Joanna Zylinska - "Photography after Extinction"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnfV05JCiHg

Cary Wolfe - “The Poetics of Extinction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erpnVURnSQ4

William Connolly - “Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEswBTwkwRw

Joseph Masco - “The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgGRHY7kbgw

Elizabeth Povinelli - The Four Figures of the Anthropocene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0gcOqWNG9M

Friday, August 12, 2016

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine*

Donald Trump with President Ronald Reagan at White House reception in 1987
An interesting piece on Trump presidential race rallies this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/opinion/an-even-stranger-donald-trump.html?_r=0

The other day i was chatting with an acquaintance who is an elected Republican office holder. My mention of Trump elicited a head shake accompanied by nervous laughter. I told him, that his party created The Trump. He chuckles and says nah. I said 36 years of anti-government, anti-immigrant rhetoric and pounding a clutch of divisive social trigger issues? What did you folks think would happen? He looked pained and said, well,....ya, guess so, nervous laugh.

Fuckin right bucko, guess so. Stop saying he is a bastard. Acknowledge your paternity. 

But they were not a single parent. I think the Democrats did their part in the gestation. 36 years spent abandoning their philosophical roots, offering no real rebuttal, becoming the "New Democrats."

*  a link to the album that bears the name that is the title of this post. Being i am posting this link I will fight the urge to link a poem that is having a rebirth of interest via the Trumph phenomena, that being of course Yeat's Second Coming.




Thursday, August 11, 2016

Note on Tainter Simplification


















 Process

"Society" (the public realm)

Growth/increasing complexity.
Mantra: Do More with More

Pre-simplification.
Mantra: Do More with less

Simplification
Mantra: Do less with less

Simplification Floor.
Mantra: Do what I say if you want to live.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Post-Gedankenexperiment Speculative Questions

Matsya comes to the rescue of Manu
Assuming for the purpose of play the prior post, 
And assuming say a time point of what we would date as around say, 3000-4000 CE/AD,
What would be the mix of religions?
The simplification our species would have gone through would probably be the most drastic one yet, at least since that mysterious big human population drop about 70,000 years ago. So I doubt the current religious systems would make it through the cusp, like in this wonderful novel.

We can with some confidence in a general sense I believe, predict what governance and social methods/structures may arise. That is because we have matches from the past to go with previous socio-technological levels of complexity.

Of course, the wild card on this is the following.:
What knowledge of past human history (the time before the relatively sudden
decrease in human population) would make it through the cusp?

What form and accuracy would it entail?
Assuming the simplification is geographically inconsistent, would some surviving groups have a technical advantage or experiential advantage in competition for resources?
Would that past become mythic elements, and how long would that take?

We have seen this process in our actual past, after non-planetary-wide  simplifications, (Early post Roman Britain views on “Rome”, or the drastic simplification in a short time across the Western Hemisphere from the spread along trade routes of the diseases brought to the Caribbean by the first Europeans to come ashore there. But this time, the rapid simplification would be on a planetary scale.

For some perhaps, the actual Simplification with be reimagined and weaved into some great story. This would be not unlike how probably the human experience the flooding around the planet with the melting of the last ice age, eventually became all the human flood epics, from the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh to flood Legend of Manu.

Gedankenexperiment

One of the cool creatures that developed out of the PETM.
An attempt at an apolitical attempt to answer the question:
If you care about the world so to speak, "think big picture" should you vote for Donald Trump?

That answer probably depends on what your goals are, and how you envision a preferred world future.

If you are into one of the variants of "radical ecology", you might want to vote for Donald Trump. (I do not consider myself in the radical ecology camp.)

Assumptions:

Donald Trump does what he says he will do and he acts in accord with what he says he thinks.

The United States of America since World War 2, due to its military, economic and cultural dominance of the planet, has been in a systems dynamics sense, a stabilizing influence; militarily and economically.   

As a result of that stabilization, the influence of the U.S.A. is in a slow decline, since the rise of economic power of other state actors following the end of the "cold war".

That rapid climate change science is reasonably accurate.

That the shrinkage of mountain system glaciers continues at its current rate 

A continued problem with fresh water on a planetary basis, as to quantity, quality and equitable access thereto.

Scenario (assuming above)


A Near Future (1-8 years)

Trump elected.

The stabilizing influence of the U.S. A. rapidly decreases.

Foreign policy practices of many states become less cooperative and return to a more ad hoc, a la carte model.

U.S.A. abandons all effort towards building an international climate change mitigation framework.

The federal government abandons all efforts and funding relevant to climate change mitigation and adaptation, domestically and via foreign aide.

An Intermediate Future (Remainder of century)

Other states find it difficult to fashion an international GHG mitigation framework, without the inclusion of the U.S. and Russia in the process as "positive" actors.

Despite a patchwork of "local" attempts to mitigate GHG's/rapid climate change, much of the world continues to rely on fossil energy sources.

Central Asian mountain system glaciers provide decreasing fresh water to South Asia, central "Stans", central Russian and East Asia.

Water issues in Middle East and Asia escalate.

Periodic outbreaks of warfare in the above areas start and continue, and nuclear and other WMD's are used. 

Atmospheric drift of radiation adds contamination to the primary food production areas in the rest of the world, amplifying impacts of those areas current and ongoing "migration" north and south (depending on your hemisphere).

Formally non-combatant nuclear states, engage in limited counter-force strikes against combatant states to curtail future contamination drift. Combatants retaliate.

Social complexity, in differing ways and to various levels of complexity, rapidly simplifies.

Simplification, along with the atmospheric impacts of the numerous nuclear explosions (blocking. some solar radiation input), collapses mass agriculture, while also slowing the planetary warming trend.

Deeper time period

After the wolves went extinct and then the Simplification, the wolf niche
was occupied by feral packs of formally domestic dogs.

A drastically reduced and less concentrated  human population achieves less complex socio-technological levels of operation, with less impact on the planetary and local ecosystems.

The "long tail" of the warming trend is shorter than under a "business as usual scenario".

Past human induced changes and the impacts/changes of the above process resulted in a large non-human die-off too. But surviving plants and animals over time go through a period of genetic variation and speciation mostly free of concurrent of human influence.

Monday, August 1, 2016

The Phenomena of Teflon Don

Cleon of Athens

I would suggest that calling Donald Trump a "demagogue“ is niether hyperbolic nor an insult, (as the term was not in it's place of birth, ancient Athens). It is perhaps, just accurate.

“A demagogue /ˈdɛməɡɒɡ/ (from Greek δημαγωγός, a popular leader, a leader of the mob, from δμος, …a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by appealing to the passions, prejudices, and ignorance of the common people. Demagogues usually oppose deliberation and advocate immediate, violent action to address a national crisis; they accuse moderate and thoughtful opponents of weakness. “

The methods of demagogues
Scapegoating
Fearmongering
Lying
Emotional oratory and personal magnetism
Violence and physical intimidation
Personal insults and ridicule
Gross oversimplification
Accusing opponents of weakness and disloyalty

One of the historically apparent characteristics of a demagogue is to be a “teflon candidate”. It is rationally arguable the Donald Trump is close to being classic demagogue  and may be an absolutely American version of one, (Americans somehow separate the “elite” from the “wealthy…as foreign folks have pointed out, we tend to confuse “rich” with clever or smart).

Teflon is a nickname given to persons, particularly in politics, to whom criticism does not seem to stick. The term comes from Teflon, the brand name by DuPont of a "non-stick" chemical used on cookware.”



To back him for president, assuming it is not just a matter of party loyalty, one must suspend one's analytic functions on what he says, or at least not notice the apparent irrationality in what he says. For the supporter, maybe they have shrouded their own brain with teflon.