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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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. [Note: The links to my other blogs are now in the "Links to My Sites" in the sidebar.]