Obama? No. He Can't.

When Barack Obama was campaigning for President, he made all these promises to the American people to try and get us to vote for him. His campaign slogan: "Yes, We Can!" Since then, he hasn't followed through with hardly any of his campaign promises, and most of those were early in his presidency. Lately, he's been spending too much time appeasing the most conservative Republicans and "Blue Dog" Democrats and the megacorporate lobbyists who own them to actually push through any real reforms. He's losing big support among his liberal base in the Democratic Party. And now he's supporting Sen. Max Baucus' anti-consumer, corporate-welfare version of health care reform; all but puts agribusiness in charge of the US Department of Agriculture; and proving that he doesn't deserve his Nobel Peace Prize by giving in to Bush's generals and secretly escalates the war in Afghanistan.

Obama has started to resemble a Lyndon Johnson in blackface. Johnson started out as a popular reform president only to lose it in Vietnam, and ended up one of the most hated presidents in American history. And we thought Obama was a liberal. We are realizing the truth:

No, he can't.

(Notice that I compared him to Neville Chamberlain the appeaser, not to Hitler like the neocon "deather" trolls crashing the health-care town hall meetings do, compulsively invoking Godwin's Law.)

Now consider the actual structure of this oligarchic republic. The Founders intended to prevent democracy in their 1787 constitution that established an electoral oligarchy in the new United States. The result is that when the election's over, the citizens' role in government vanishes. Citizens have no voice in government except on election day. (This applies above all on the federal level. Some states and localities have limited direct democracy.) So neither the President nor Congress has to listen to the American citizens at all. Usually, they listen to the richest CEOs and their lobbyists instead.

Alas, Obama turns out to be no exception. He doesn't care about you, American people. He, like nearly all other American politicians, serves first and foremost those corporations that bought him into the White House. In the case of health reform, it's the very corporations that started and spread the "deather" conspiracy theory in the first place. With the war, it's the military profiteers who laugh at the powerless people's desire for an end to the war; after all, America's business is war. If he weren't such a pushover, we'd have Canadian- or European-style socialized medicine by now, rather than yet more taxpayer money crammed down the collective throat of the corporate welfare kings.

Also consider this: Obama is carrying on Bush's massive bailout of Bush's bankster buddies. Instead of helping the victims, he's helping the Wall Street crooks who crashed the economy and screwing the victims. He's letting AIG and Goldman Sachs give out even more obscene bonuses, and punishing those who criticize them for it. Worst of all, he's not only not stopping the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but escalating them — exactly like the hated Bush!

Is this the Barack Obama we thought we elected? Hell no! President Obama has already surrendered to the corporate health care lobby; the bill he's now pushing guarantees massive corporate welfare for them and a raw deal for us. The military-industrial complex all but owns him the same way it owned Bush, which is why he has been so eager to prove that he doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize by immediately acting like a warmongering Bush and escalating the Afghan war.

In an electoral oligarchy, politicians don't represent the people. They represent whoever buys them into office. In the corporatist system that currently controls the Western world, that usually means the biggest corporate welfare kings. Obama has turned out to be no exception.

That's why I'm afraid I have to say:

No, he can't.

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Extra! AP Declares War On Internet!

#Bloggers ap #censorship
In June, the Associated Press filed a lawsuit against the Drudge Retort. The Retort claimed that citing an AP article falls under the fair use law. The AP insists that any citation other than a link constitutes plagiarism under the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (full text in PDF format here). Under the new AP copyright policy, it is forbidden to copy even one word from an AP article without payment. The cost for quoting? $2.50 per word!

You know what this means.

The Associated Press has declared war against the Internet.

Attention fellow bloggers! You can't quote from AP articles unless you want your asses to get sued for cost plus damages, and maybe even get thrown in jail for plagiarism (under the fascist DMCA, of course) while you're at it! So do what TechCrunch does, among others: ban AP! If you want to blog or tweet a news story, look at the byline; if it says "Associated Press" or "AP", do not blog or tweet it if you don't want the cartel suing you for copyright violations! This goes not just for newspaper websites, but also for such aggregators as Google News and the Huffington Post. I went even further: I blocked all of AP's accounts on Twitter, starting with @AP.

AP is a cartel not of our time. If you go to their history page, you'll find that it was started in 1846. It's nineteenth-century, folks! Older than the RIAA, the MPAA, and similar 20th-century media cartels! The newspaper cartel known as the Associated Press was founded in 1846. Its war against the blogs and news aggregators betrays the fact that its collective mentality is stuck in the 19th century.

Face it: the newspaper industry is dying. There's even a Newspaper Death Watch keeping track of the death of the industry. Like the RIAA's relentless fascist jihad against music file traders, AP's decision reflects the desperation of the so-called "mainstream media" (MSM) conglomerates and the print news outlets they own. Several newspaper publishers are even going so far as to make their websites accessible only through paid subscriptions — as if that would get them more viewers.

As with the now hated RIAA, the members of the AP are dying. They are trying to prevent the inevitable extinction of their medium by punishing the Internet. Great move, MSM. Just the thing that will accelerate your demise. As of April 6, the Associated Press has officially jumped the shark. Only decline is ahead of it now, before it inevitably ceases to exist, along with the entire industry it represents.

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Going Public Again

I've neglected my opinion blog here since, actually, Inauguration Day. For some reason, despite my strong opinions and my desire to keep up with current events, I couldn't think of anything to write. I've posted lots of entries on my main and opinion blogs in the past six months, but nothing here. Since then, my attitude has mellowed some; I'm no longer quite the "angry young man" I was last year (this post on my main blog explains part of the reason). But now I feel I'm ready to take on the world again, so I intend to post here regularly now.

Here's a few of the current events that I'm keeping up on right now:

1. The Iranian revolution in progress. Right now, the massive and frequently violent protests over the perceived rigging of the recent presidential election have died down considerably, but the theocratic régime is increasingly divided.
2. The anti-abortion movement seems to be breaking up because the "pro-life" organizations are increasingly far more conservative than the majority of Americans opposed to abortion.
3. The rise of the conspiracy theory of the "birthers", who claim that President Obama is not an American citizen and therefore cannot legally be President. They even have their own website! The big problem they have with Obama, it seems to me, is that he's black. The "birthers" are neoconservatives who are almost all white; they ruled America till January 20 this year, but now they are bitter and even willing to call for violent revolution.
4. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, of course.

And other issues of the day, in their context.

But I'm not going to neglect my opinions and philosophy, either. This blog isn't purely political; I don't call it my opinion blog for nothing.

I hope to post at least once a week at minimum.

Update: Sarah Palin wants her own radio show! Interesting choice for someone who keeps attacking the media. Even so, whenever people ask me about the Alaskan ex-governor's future, I always tell them "Fox News". I have to say it: I told you so!

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Inauguration Day 2009: The Day Everything Changed

Is it just me, or do you too think it highly significant that Inauguration Day this year came the day after Martin Luther King Day? MLK Day is an American government holiday established to honor the legacy of the martyred civil rights hero, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous "I Have a Dream" speech he gave at the 1963 March on Washington, he gave voice to the idea of equality between Americans of African descent, most of whose original ancestors were brought to America as slaves, and their European-descended fellow citizens. Today, the dream has still not been fully achieved. However, today represents one big step closer.

Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African immigrant, has just been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America.

Hell has officially frozen over.

Much of the credit for the seemingly impossible becoming reality rests with President Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who I like to call Emperor Shrub "Dubya" Enron (in honor of the corporation that bought him into the White House). He actually said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Bush ran for office under the slogan "compassionate conservatism" — whatever that was, other than a meaningless yet emotive duckspeak catchphrase coined by a hired ghostwriter. But when, during his first year in office, 9/11 came around and the gang lord Osama bin Laden sent his goons into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon using hijacked civilian airplanes, Shrub Enron at once placed the imperial crown on his head and proceeded to invade the world. At home, he had a rubber-stamp Congress pass laws aimed at curtailing freedom, and used executive orders (read: royal decrees) and signing statements to try to counteract the barriers the U.S. Constitution put in the way of his absolute power. However, he had no such barriers abroad, especially in the Middle East. The first thing he did as emperor of the world was to invade Iraq — a war still going on, and which will likely destroy America as well as Iraq.

Did I mention that Enron, of which he used to be a vice president, bought the presidency for him? Bush, like his father, declared war on "welfare queens", but he immediately became the sugar daddy to the corporate welfare kings, starting of course with his good buddy "Kenny Boy" Lay — who just happened to be Bush's owner, the chairman of Enron. It was orgy time for the financial oligarchy, and especially the infamous military-industrial complex. His vice president — Bush's, not Lay's (that would be his hitman, Jeffrey Skilling), was Richard Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton (corporate welfare watch here). Sure enough, with Shrub Enron and Dick Halliburton in charge, the military-industrial corporate welfare queens charged into Iraq like an all-destroying Mongol horde and proceeded to steal everything. Since one of Bush's top priorities was to outsource America's jobs to slave-wage countries, the American economy now rests upon the corporate welfare kings who rule Iraq, which is why American troops continue to occupy Iraq to serve them.

Bush may claim membership in the theocratic Christian Right, but his dictatorship was the high point of the neofascist political movement called neoconservatism. Besides being politically authoritarian, neoconservatism is also corrupt on principle.

I say: Good riddance to Emperor Shrub Enron, his chickenhawk cabal, and their gods, the corporate welfare kings.

Now, a whole lot of skeptical Americans, and countless millions of even more skeptical non-Americans, are doubtful that the new president will be able or willing to change much about this. However, this is only President Obama's first day on the job, he hasn't done anything yet. He's said a few things about what he plans to do; but we'll have to see whether or not he can actually reverse Bush's biggest mistakes.

But now the dictator is gone, having blown us off on his way back to Texas. Now a new era has begun. Even if everything continues to stay the same on the political level, at least at first, everything has changed on the symbolic level. The impossible has finally happened: a member of the former slave race is now presides over the country from the Oval Office. Some phenomena defy reason. President Obama may disappoint us in the next 4 or 8 years; some are even predicting that he will be an epic disaster in his own right; but on day one of the Obama presidency, hope still reigns.

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What I missed by not posting here for so long...

I haven't been posting here often. In fact, for almost four months last year, I didn't post here at all. And so I missed a whole lot of things, including some very important events. Here's what I missed:

1. First and foremost, the American election, and especially the long process that led to the historic election of Barack Obama as president.
2. The sudden and cataclysmic collapse of the American financial industry and the total extinction of the investment banks, which has all but plunged the world into economic depression. Recently, this was complicated by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's gigantic pyramid scheme.
3. The big December 2008 snowstorm that paralyzed Seattle and the Northwest, with its January sequel. (However, I did take pictures...)
4. And other things that happened, but which I've already forgotten.

There are advantages to keeping your readers informed about current events, or at least your take on these events. The tradeoff, however, is that this is time-consuming. I have limited time, and much of it is taken up by writing my novel. So I haven't really been keeping up lately. For almost four months, I hardly even touched my computer at all.

I hope to get myself informed enough to comment more often here. Since it takes time to do so — that is, to research what I'm writing about, for one thing — I probably won't post as often as I'd like. Still, I should at least try...

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Finally: This Blog Gets Its Final Name

At last, I found the right name for this opinion blog. It is "Take Nothing On Faith", which just happens to be the motto I live by, just as "with great power comes great responsibility" is Spider-Man's. Now, how did I come up with this title? Archetypically: it came to me while I was brushing my teeth.

Also, I found out why my recent posts look so screwy in their layout. I found out when I was preparing to post this very entry. It was the post template, something that can be corrected in my settings. Believe it or not, it's a bug in the regular Blogger, one that amazingly does not exist (or has been corrected) in Blogger in Draft. Somehow regular Blogger has been turning my newlines into spaces. I corrected the problem manually in this post, then I corrected it definitively in the settings menu — in Draft, of course. Problem solved. Now I'm ready to start posting here again. Stay tuned...

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Nihilism and Three Levels of Mindsets

In my previous entry Atheism Without Nihilism, a pious Christian posted an anonymous comment that, in retrospect, made me realize that between people with differing mindsets, no communication is possible. To the religious mind, atheism is defined as nihilism. Why? Because of religion's definition of "value": all value is of God, and is therefore supernatural by definition. If God doesn't exist, then value doesn't exist. Ergo, atheism = nihilism. period. And so if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, to avoid nihilism you must redefine the meaning of value so that it refers to this world and not the world above. However, you can only make the redefinition if your mind has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity. Thus, I need to speak of mindsets.

I learned about three evolutionary levels of mind by reading Richard Brodie (his site here), specifically Virus of the Mind. These levels are:

1. gene-driven, meaning concerned only with one's instincts and appetites;
2. meme-driven, meaning concerned with one's ideology or religion, sometimes at the expense of life itself, one's own or others'; and
3. self-driven, of a sufficiently high level of consciousness that one can define the way one defines their life.

These three levels of consciousness are obvious enough if you observe people long enough. They were first described by, believe it or not, the ancient Gnostics, who were notoriously unworldly but who saw the effects of people's level of consciousness and divided them into "hyletics" or materialists, "psychics" or conventionally religious people, and "pneumatics" or truly spiritual people. Modern science made the "pneumatics" into objective realists, people who treat reality and themselves with objectivity. The religious mentality has become every bit as apparent among Gnostics as among more conventionally religious people. So the schema itself has evolved, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Now the thing about mindsets is that minds operating on a higher level can understand those at lower levels, but lower-level minds cannot understand those at higher levels. The religious mind cannot understand the scientific mind; people who operate according to dogmas (religious or ideological) defined as Absolute Truths cannot possibly conceive of the higher mindset in which people submit everything to objective inquiry and take nothing on faith.

So, to answer the question as to whether atheism is nihilism: yes &mdash but only on the second, meme-driven, dogmatic (religious and ideological) level of consciousness. But on the third, self-driven, scientific level of consciousness, definitely not. Indeed, the Level 2 belief in a Supreme Being, or at least Absolute Truth, strikes the Level 3 mind as itself nihilistic, because it drains all value from the world and leaves it a desolate wasteland from which Level 2 longs to escape to the world above. So Level 2 minds like my anonymous commenter's and Level 3 minds like mine are doomed to talk past each other. Less tolerant Level 2 minds simply declare "holy war" against all other minds that are like them, and become terrorists.

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Why do I need a new opinion blog?

Because, for one thing, I realized that the URL I chose for my original opinion blog, The Space Helmet Show, didn't quite fit the opinion blog mold. And the name "The Outside View" that I chose all the way back in 2001, when I was merely considering blogging (I didn't actually set up my first two blogs till March of this year), turned out to be so common as to be utterly cliché. And so I'm going to abandon that overly common name "The Outside View", repurpose The Space Helmet Show as a repository for my more miscellaneous stuff, and transfer the more political posts on TSHS here.

I like to keep each of my blogs focused on a single range of subjects. That way, I can keep them in order. I have a few more blogs I want to set up, since I have a few more subjects I can use them on, including myself. All of them will link to the other in my list of "Links to My Sites".

Soon, I will create both my main homepage and my project page. I'll use my main site as the central hub for all my sites, including my blogs and my future social network accounts. Some of this is in my list of Big, Fun, Scary goals I drew up for NaNoWriMo, and some are not. From now on, my politically incorrect opinions go here.

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The Oligarchic American Constitution

The official spin is that America is a democracy. It's a crucial part of the national mythology. Well, guess what: This is nowhere near the truth. The Founders never said they were setting up a democracy. In fact, in The Federalist, three of them argued repeatedly against democracy. The republic the Framers set up with their 1787 Constitution was intended to be an electoral oligarchy. What else would you expect from a constitution that originally gave slavemasters extra votes representing 3/5 of each of their slaves?

On the other hand, there is a lot of democracy below the federal level: in most states and localities, direct democracy has been implemented in the form of initiative, referendum, and recall. It's not quite as participatory as the Athenian assembly, in which all the citizens met every month or week to do what legislatures and city councils do today, but it's actually far more democratic than the US federal government, which restricts democratic participation to electing a limited number of officials and was far more restrictive in its unamended original version.

Naturally, there's a huge contradiction that is undermining the entire creaky 18th-century American system. On the one hand, you have the oligarchic federal government which has over the decades become increasingly monarchic. On the other, there's the long-term trend toward democratization which has led to the universal right to vote and to expanding civil rights for women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and immigrants among others. The democratic trend also involves the expansion of the vote until now all adult citizens can vote, where originally only propertied white males were eligible. Increasingly, these two opposite trends are working against each other. Eventually they will not be able to coexist, and one or the other must prevail at the other's expense. At that time, a revolution will be highly likely. That time will be when the colonial conquest campaign in the Middle East is lost and the troops come home.

The 1787 Constitution is obsolete. There might be a way to save it: state nullification, the right of any one state to veto or nullify any federal law, regulation, and decree. Thomas Jefferson himself came up with that, and insisted that it was the only thing that would ultimately prevent the American republic from degenerating into a tyranny. Now would be a good time to revive the idea. It would make an excellent 28th Amendment. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to scrap the dysfunctional federal system entirely, and replace the current 1787 Constitution with something at least as good at protecting rights but far more democratic.

The problem with an oligarchic constitution, you see, is that an oligarchy ultimately loses touch with the mass of ordinary citizens. Oligarchs are unaccountable to the people. Increasingly drunk on power, they lose touch with reality as well. In the democratic age, good government requires the rulers to be accountable to the citizens, or they will rule arbitrarily and tyrannically. So a modern constitution must make the government accountable. That means democracy in some form. Some critics of the current constitution advocate a European-style parliamentary system elected through proportional representation instead of the current setup. What was originally the equality of the executive and legislative branches has degenerated into the monarchic supremacy of the executive, or "Imperial Presidency". European-style parliaments subordinate the executive (usually called a "prime minster") to the legislature. This may be more workable. However, it still proves oligarchic in practice if it doesn't have at least some features of direct democracy (initiative, referendum, recall, nullification). But we won't know what we'll come up with till the revolution begins and the Fourth Republic is born.

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The Third American Republic

Now let's talk history for once. Sometimes I speak of "the Third American Republic", numbering American republics like French ones. I have to explain it to most people. Some historians and pundits measure it differently, but in fact the periods of independent American history fall into three periods which can rightly be called republics:

• The First Republic is the period from independence to the adoption of the Constitution, 1776-1787, including the period of the Articles of Confederation.
• The Second Republic began with the ratification of the Constitution and ended with the Civil War: 1787-1861.
• The Third Republic was established by the Union victory in the Civil War in 1865 and is the government still in power in Washington, DC today. Because the American Empire was built during this period, it is also known as the Imperial Republic. There is strong evidence that it is coming to an end.

A Fourth Republic would be a good idea, as long as the power shifts from a bloated federal government back to the people.

One hallmark of the current Third Republic is a presidency far stronger than in any previous American republic. In fact, right now the presidency is being transformed into something of an elective absolute monarchy. Another is our not quite so laissez-faire form of capitalism in which corporations are defined as "legal persons" which in practice gives them greater rights than mere puny humans; right now, this is transforming into a full-blown state capitalism.

Counter to trends like these is the growing trend toward full civil rights for ever wider sections of the American people since the Civil War. This trend started in fact with two amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth, which bans slavery, and the Fourteenth, which promises full civil rights (or at least voting rights) to all men regardless of race and also extends the Bill of Rights to the state and local levels. It took some time for the full effects of these (and subsequent amendments that extended full civil rights to women and others) to sink in, which is why most of the great advances in civil rights were made in the 20th century.

Now consider the contradiction: a basically authoritarian federal government with an imperial obsession, opposed to a still growing trend toward democracy and civil rights for all. This contradiction is at the core of the problems in the later stages of the Third Republic. By now, the trends toward democratization vs. world empire have diverged so completely that they have begun to clash. Soon the contradiction will tear the country apart. It could get nasty before we get a Fourth Republic, but let's hope not.

I hope that's a good enough explanation. Hopefully it's not merely a private reference now.

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Sorry for the delay...

As you can tell from the date of the last post — 10 days ago — I haven't posted here for quite a while. There are two reasons:

1. I've been preoccupied with writing the first ever production script for my manga Spanner for Script Frenzy. I wrote a lot of pages and claimed my victory. You can read more about it on my project blog.
2. I thus haven't had much time to seriously think about my politically incorrect opinions or even about simply blogging.

But I'll make sure to post here more often. After all, I'm the kind of opinionated person who wants people to know where I stand.

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Atheism Without Nihilism

In some of the many books packed in the bookcases in my living room, and in some of the books I've checked out at the library, I've been reading about how some atheists have become convinced that life is meaningless because there's nothing to look forward to after death. They think this makes this life meaningless. But one of the things I learned back when I was a closet disciple of Ayn Rand is that, though the universe and existence as such have no intrinsic meaning (one way of interpreting her statement that "existence exists" is that the universe just is; it is its own meaning), life itself has meaning, especially human life. All living organisms have purpose; this is the primary difference between living and nonliving things. Living things are goal-pursuing things; for example, green plants constantly seek light. But human beings don't just pursue goals; we create meaning. One can even go so far to say that the highest purpose of human life is to give meaning to the universe; thus we have science, art, religion, etc. So even if the soul perishes with the body at death, life and reality are not meaningless.

Why am I writing this? I've heard and read that some of the most intelligent and sensitive people have been driven to suicide by their belief that if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then life is meaningless and you might as well kill yourself. I'm saying that this "existentialist" — really nihilistic — position is nonsense. The belief in a "higher power" implies that no value is possible in life and reality because value, meaning, and purpose emanate from On High. Well, science, and objective realist philosophy, have dispensed with the supernatural Platonic realm and have been all the better for it. Metaphysical idealism, the belief that truth belongs to the supernatural realm alone, has the unfortunate side effect of sucking all value out of this world. Objective realism places truth and value right here on earth and in this life, where they properly belong. Truth is what is, and value is in the goals we pursue.

So throw away those pills, or take that gun away from your head, and start living your life in the here and now. If God is dead — and there are many philosophers and scientists throughout history who have dispensed with the need for a Higher Power entirely — then let's return our attention to living the life we're in now. Nihilism is an error that consists of deleting God from transcendentalism and then wailing that God's death has killed all meaning and value. Don't look for meaning and value in a supernatural realm that has disappeared, if it has ever even existed at all. It's all here. Truth is in reality, and value is in your life. You might find that there was never really any need for Higher Powers at all.

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Why Patriotism Is a Sin

A front page article in today's New York Times relates the tale of a Chinese student at Duke University who came upon clashing pro-Tibet and pro-China demonstrations. She tried to bring peace between the two groups. However, the pro-China group reacted viciously. She was publicly defamed on the Internet as a "traitor". She, and her family back in China, received death threats. What drove those pro-China people to persecute someone who just wanted to bring reconciliation to her school? Patriotism.. This is the true essence of patriotism: "my country right, right or wrong" — which really means "worship my country or die!"

Patriotism is a cult. The cult is called nationalism. Nationalism is defined as the cult of the State. With the death of Christendom, and Dar al-Islam threatened with being dragged out of the Dark Ages, nationalism has become the new Christendom. Inquisition, crusade, totalitarianism, and terrorism necessarily follow. And that's why patriotism is a sin.

I gave a Chinese example because nationalism is a universal malady. Wherever people are ruled over by a state, the state tries to justify its oppression by building a cult around it. The excuse used to be known as "the divine right of kings", or the cult of the king as a living god or Christ. But absolute monarchies are few and far between these days — you'll find most of them in the Islamic world, which has not yet escaped the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and the other ones are Burma and North Korea — so personality cults around single rulers have become increasingly rare. As most governments today are ruled by bureaucratic hierarchies, divine right has therefore passed from a single all-powerful ruler to the bureaucratic structures of statism. And thus divine-right monarchism has been eclipsed by divine-right statism; monarchic messianism has made way for the deified state apparat. Soulless bureaucrats have collectively taken upon themselves the mantle of divinity that used to belong to kings and dictators alone; they have become God.

Nationalism is the name of the cult, and patriotism is the name for the intolerant crusader faith that nationalism requires. As the state is the means by which the terrorist gang in power rapes, robs, and enslaves the people — it has no other purpose — any middle- or working-class person who gives in to the cult's siren song is a damned fool. For someone outside the ruling caste to declare the State — any state — their personal Lord and Savior is for them to declare: "I am a member of the ruling class! I, too, am superior to the rabble of non-patriots! I too am the State! I have pull!" And, of course, the irrational cult faith called patriotism is an absolutist belief that my government is the only true government and was created by God to rule the world. Therefore, all who do not worship my government — whatever government that is — must either be converted to the Only True (Patriotic) Faith by the sword, or blood-sacrificed as an infidel traitor, a holy sacrifice to the One True Religion State.

I didn't mention the American neoconservatives simply because they're typical of the patriot breed. They call me a "traitor". What they really mean is that I am an infidel — "traitor" in the cult jargon of nationalism has precisely the same meaning as "infidel" in the traditional language of the Yahwist religions. I reject the One True Faith — because I am against faith as such. I am against patriotism on principle; the principle is atheism. Patriots believe their government is the Incarnation of God. But the truth is that there is no God. The State is a menace identical to the Church and Mosque — the menace of irrational faith, the wellspring of ultraviolence. Nationalism is a cult in the exact same way that the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, and the LaRouche Gang are cults. Atheism made me a libertarian; libertarianism and anarchism aim to kill God by smashing the State just as the revolutionary regicides of the 18th through 20th centuries tried to kill God by abolishing thrones and beheading kings and dictators.

Nationalism is the religion of the State; patriotism is its fundamentalist crusader faith. The people, of course, are the Satan of this faith. Religion is the disease; Enlightenment — the philosophy of reason that made the modern world possible — is the cure.

Here's a few libertarian antidotes to the patriotic poison:

1. Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State
2. Randolph Bourne, "War Is the Health of the State" (and visit the Randolph Bourne Institute)
3. Lysander Spooner, No Treason (and visit LysanderSpooner.org)

And, of course, you can always visit the links in the sidebar.

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Class Struggle

Back to the subject of my previous post "Populism vs. Elitism". Basically, what lies behind this phenomenon is something people call "class struggle." The idea is older than Karl Marx; it's an Enlightenment idea that predates even the French Revolution. In fact, it's impossible to understand the history of Western civilization since the rise of the Greeks without it.

What is this "class struggle (or warfare)," anyway? First I must explain that people in different roles in society tend to have different interests. Sometimes these interests clash. The most important clash of interests is that between those in power and those out of power. Those in power usually have an interest in exploiting those out of power in order to gain benefits at others' expense. Free riding, for example, is an almost irresistible temptation of power. Those out of power, however, would rather do their thing without busybody authorities constantly interfering in their affairs. This fundamental contradiction inherent in any society based on dominance hierarchy -- which means, right now, any society, period -- has its inevitable consequence in the form of some sort of class struggle.

Two eras have been plagued by wars originating in class struggle. These are the classical societies of Greece and Rome, and the modern age which started with the Renaissance. The cause in both cases is the idea of democracy, which has inspired the common people to resist the oppression of their kings, dictators, politicians, bureaucracies, and churches. Democracy is inherently revolutionary. That's because whenever the common people assert their interests, the people in power are always threatened with the loss of their power, and strike back. That's why revolutions, social and cultural as well as political, are always so violent. No establishment has ever tolerated any kind of popular revolution; so either the ruling establishment is overthrown or at least transformed, or the establishment prevails and the revolution is crushed.

Unfortunately, the rulers have their revolutionary ideologies too. Stalinism, fascism, Nazism, and neoconservatism are among the most popular elitist ideologies that sprang up since World War I. All of these are heavily influenced by synarchism, an ideology that originated in France among Catholic and neo-Gnostic monarchists who revolted against the principles of the French Revolution (but see the note below), and by Social Darwinism, a pseudoscience that tells the elite that they are the vanguard of evolution and that Nature, red in tooth and claw, has preordained them to supremacy over the masses. They are more violent reactions against the popular revolution that steal from the people their language of revolution. All true populists oppose them, since they attempt to use the new revolutionary means to restore the old order by any means possible.

Populism and elitism exist because of the class struggle, and are its political expression. As a libertarian populist, I've long since taken my stand. I'll tell you what I think about certain antipopulist "libertarians" and "objectivists" in a future entry.

Note: If you enter the word "synarchism" in any search engine, most of the entries you'll find come from the Lyndon LaRouche cult. He stole the idea from Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and uses it in his wacko conspiracy theory as a code for his eternal bete noire, the "kike-limey (sic) conspiracy." But he's hiding behind "synarchy" to cover his own lust for dictatorship. Synarchy? Jeremiah Duggan suffered it from LaRouche himself. I'll write a future entry, or a full-blown essay, on this.

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Populism vs. Elitism

I said I was sympathetic to certain forms of socialism. Just before I woke up this morning, I realized (or, more accurately, remembered) the reason why:

I'm a libertarian populist.

I know why so many libertarians despair about the future of freedom. It's because they tend to look down on the common people. Some of them go so far as to attack democracy as little more than a means by which the benighted masses can loot their neighbors and legislate various ways of getting something for nothing. They blank out the fact that the common people, especially those in the cities (in the European Middle Ages, these were the merchants, craftsmen, and artisans), who are the traditional driving force of the free market. These are the producers.

But under mercantilism or state capitalism, the government interferes with the market (case in point: the desperate and increasingly futile flailings of the US Federal Reserve as it tries to stop the economic depression the Fed itself started), creating a breed of capitalist courtier (or courtesan: political whore) among managers and financiers that goes to sometimes extreme lengths to get something for nothing, generally at the expense of the taxpayer (through corporate welfare). If the free market is populist, then state capitalism is elitist, since its financial basis is not individual trade but political pull.

There are libertarian elitists. These are the people who preach freedom but practice war and corporate welfare. There's a lot of those in, say, the Libertarian Party.

Likewise, socialism too has its elitists and populists. Socialist elitists make up those small cabals of "nomenclaturists" who oppress the working class in the name of the (alleged) supremacy of the working class. These are the Stalinists and fascists. Socialist populists believe that only the working class can overcome political oppression, economic inequality (extremes of wealth and poverty), and repressive social traditions.

The same goes for liberals and conservatives, and other political stances.

Elitism is based on the assumption of the inherent inferiority of the masses and the alleged enlightenment assumed to inhere in high positions within social hierarchies. Populism trusts the people's ability to rule their own lives and change for the better. In the libertarian populist view, the modern era's moral and ethical advances over the barbaric Middle Ages are due to the trust created by peaceful trade among individual people and the prosperity this creates.

Naturally, since the interests of the people and the elites who rule them are generally at odds, populism and elitism are incompatible and must necessarily clash. This gets into the concept of class struggle. But that's the subject of another post...

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Introduction

I should have started blogging years ago.

Sometime around 2000 or so, I found out about something called a "blog" which was the hot new thing on the Web. I'd been writing journals since 1985 and writing a series of "Project Notebooks" since 1992. Surely I should take to the blogosphere like the proverbial fish to water. But no. I was still strictly a lurker. Until this year, that is.

I realized that I'm past forty and not getting any younger. My life was already approximately half over, and I hadn't yet done anything in my life. I was still very much the professional slacker. This couldn't go on. I had been working on a comics series very halfheartedly since '92, the year I joined a Japanese animation club, but nothing came of it but a lot of procrastination and self-kicking.

In the spring of 2006, I discovered the perfect excuse to get off my passive butt and start writing some of the stories in my head. The book was called No Plot? No Problem!, and it introduced me to something called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The first time I tried writing a novel, I couldn't finish it. But I'm still working on last year's novel. NaNoWriMo has a sister contest called Script Frenzy; this year comics scripts are allowed, and that gave me e perfect excuse to start work on the comics project I've been working on since 1992. And so I'm getting ready to retire from the slacking business and become the writer/artist I've long wanted to be.

For the last couple years I've been writing notes in my Project Notebooks, and this quiet little voice (the voice of reason?) keeps telling me that I should have written it in a blog. It was only now, when my novel Bad Company and manga Spanner are on their way to being published, that I actually built up the nerve to create a blog of my own. A few, actually. I'm dedicating one strictly to my writing and art projects, and another will be more personal.

This blog, however, will be my soapbox, my venue for all the politically incorrect opinions that I've developed over the years. That's why I'm calling it (for now) "The Outside View" -- apparently a fairly common name for blogs, since I couldn't use any variation as my blog site name. I've always been an outsider, having grown up as a misfit (I was the weird kid in school). I'm usually on the outside looking in, so I'm likely to have a more objective view than someone who's inside whatever. I don't expect everybody to agree with me; nobody ever agrees with everybody. This is my view.

I should start off by stating my position. I'm mainly a left-wing libertarian, though I have some respect for certain socialist views. So I like freedom, and I don't like government. By the classic libertarian principle of "war is the health of the state", that means that of course I'm against the ever escalating series of wars that are bankrupting the US and dragging the world down with it. I've learned to think dialectically, so my conclusions may be strange even to some people who share my basic political outlook(s). I'm an odd combination of idealist and cynic, and one of those rare people who actually grow more radical as they get older. There's more to it, but that's the basics of it, whether people like it or not.

It's been a long time. But now I've stopped just lurking, and started putting my views out for the world to see. I'm now a blogger. I should have been one eight years ago.

When I put my other blogs up, I'll post the links here.

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