Gravel makes the best YouTube videos of any presidential candidate.

This was a comment in the Ron Paul LJ community which I meant to be much shorter but which spiraled off; it may be worth saving. And then after that was another comment on why I felt the campaign didn't win, which may also be worth saving.

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I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.

RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.

This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.

It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.

That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).

But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.

Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).

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I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:

- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.

- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.

- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.

- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.

- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.

i do not own other people. i have no right to "vote" to run their lives. i may not inflict myself on anyone. voluntary interaction is a wonderful thing; when i see people lining up to buy ice cream from a neighborhood entrepreneur, i smile. my smile doesn't lessen just because the company gets bigger.

the state is evil. its members prohibit and crush voluntary human cooperation in the name of humanity. they are a lie. those who link themselves to the state are evil. those who worship and tie their happiness and livelihood to it enable most of life's misery. most people are brainwashed by the state through constant exposure and are unable to see liberty as anything good. to get around this problem in america, the state — official crime syndicate — merely changes the definition of liberty, raping the word's meaning while wringing from it the last part of positive association. "liberty" in america now means control by violence monopolists — the mafia with a twist (piety and flags).

any proposal that involves one man inflicting himself on another, taking his property, or otherwise demonstrating through aggression that his life is more important, must be opposed. to neglect that fight is to succumb to hate and surrender to inferiors. there are men who mean to be your masters. what does that make you if they succeed? a patriot? -saltypig

I have been reading his blog for awhile, he's great. I have the feeling that his blog may become one of the classics of anarchism, going down in history with Max Stirner and Bakunin and the rest. If there even are people who are allowed to read anarchist writings in the future, that is.

I suspect he didn't mean it exactly that way, it was more of a "without our money buying their oil they wouldn't be able to fund terrorism" thing, but it's still funny.

Miyu wrote a few things about what her platform would be if she were running for president, and I replied with mine. I'm reposting mine here.

- abolish all taxes except the death tax, which will be set at something like 50%

- give ownership of all public schools to its teachers, privatizing them

- abolish all jails, replace with a fining system of 10x value for lesser crimes and exile from the country for greater crimes; remove all laws for victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use

- abolish the military except for the coast guard, similar to Japan's system; withdraw all our troops from around the world

- abolish all lawyers, give everyone the right to be a lawyer

- abolish the FDA, abolish the system where you need a prescription buy certain things

- allow anything to be used as legal tender, not just US dollars; abolish the Fed

- members of congress and the supreme court, all presidents after myself, and all other officials shall henceforce be decided by drawing from lot, no voting required, because randomly selecting people to rule would be superior to voting for them

!!!

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_interviews_U.S._Green_Party_presidential_candidate_Cynthia_McKinney

I didn't know Cynthia McKinney is running for president on the Green Party ticket. Maybe I'll vote for her, she's impressed me before. Right now it's between her and Nader for me anyway (note: I hate environmentalism in general because it often is anti-humanity and thinks of our species negatively and it's often an excuse to hate humanity rather than to love nature, but I've a lot of respect for both McKinney and Nader as people, much more than I have toward McCain, Clinton, or Obama).

Lately I've been losing whatever inclination I had to express thoughts in words. The very idea of writing something has become detestable. EDIT: Let alone writing something as long as this entry.

This might be due to an increasing distrust of the abstract (and all words are abstract, some more than others, but all of them.) I think a good response is to instead only write in a storytelling, pointing way. Truths that exist which cannot be conveyed in that way aren't usually worth conveying.

China will replace the US as a superpower solely on the basis that they eat more omega-3 fats than we do, and because the lack of them is associated with most forms of mental illness and all kinds of neurological troubles. They also don't have HFCS and so on (which is not to say that their diet doesn't have some problems, but it's far better than here). Also, although both the US and China are fascisms (in the sense of an unholy alliance between business and government), but at least theirs is more corrupt, and corruption is usually good for the people of a country because it keeps fascisms weak and ineffectual. Their economy also grows at around 10% a year and ours actually shrinks at around 1.5% a year if you account for standard of living and inflation. I suggest a good time to immigrate there is around 2035, 27 years from now; the relevant stars align around then. By 2050, definitely. To bad I have to wait so long to see how this turns out, but there are interesting things to do in the mean time.

There are all kinds of things happening in the world and it's hard to decide which is the most interesting to follow and work within. Just through proximity and other accidents the ones I follow the most are independent game development, nutrition / scientific alternative medicine, and the ridiculously ineffectual minarchist movement. But they could just as easily have been any of a thousand other things that people are interested in and work within, and although it seems to me that these three may be more important than most of those, anyone with a familiar knowledge of any of those thousand other movements would likely believe likewise. I do think that some may be more important than others, but just that with the bias of knowing some in more intimate detail than others, it's easy to be mistaken. For all I know, the so-called Mexican illegal immigrant invasion or the so-called Jewish banking conspiracies or the people who talk about drunk driving or the war on terrorism or the problems caused by not banning (or banning too many) guns or global warming or abortion or class warfare could be more important than the things I'm interested in are.

There are thousands of things that seem important to a lot of people which are irrelevant, stupid, or only mild curiousities to many other people. I wouldn't even dismiss the possible importance of celebrity culture and the people who intensely follow the activities of movie stars (even those who do so while admitting it's not important), even that kind of stuff could be more important in its possible effects on the world than I or even they realize: it sounds ridiculous, but maybe Clay Aiken really is more important than the torture camps in North Korea, or something (and I don't mean that just humorously, it's possible).

Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but here is how it's possible: people are largely controlled either through pleasure or pain. The more cruder nations tend to use pain to control, the more sophisticated countries tend to use pleasure to control; that goes not only for nations but also for just individual control of one person over another, parents over their children, cult leaders over their cult: the greater and more subtle control is obtained by pleasure rather than pain. Threating to cause someone pain is actually less effective than threatening to cut off their pleasure; psychology has shown this in studies as well. The Victorians as an example prevented people from having too much sexual pleasure, whereas other societies did the opposite and tried to overwhelm with too much of it. So while North Korea uses torture camps and force to keep its people chained, other governments have celebrities -- and many other things, such as pornography or various customs and holidays and economic products like drugs (illegal, prescription, or legal) -- to keep its people not chained but in a way enraptured.

And I'm not saying it's preferable to live under the former than the latter, or that NK does not use pleasure (think of those perfect birthday dances they have) or that we do not use pain (look at all the brutality in our prisons), just that one should recognize the essential similarity between the two methods to reduce the extent to which one is controlled, either by pain or pleasure, at least when you don't think it's a good idea to be controlled in a certain way (and it's usually not). Left to their own devices people in nature do not naturally seek out to maximize their pleasure to the extent that people do in many industrial democracies, and when they occasionally do they don't feel as guilty about it as the civilized do, but above all they don't drastically change their principles or their lifestyle or what or who is important to them just to maximize pleasure the way that's routinely done here. Pleasure is a mechanism and when it's working correctly most every-day things are pleasurable, just staring at the snow fall or doing a good day's work or just waking up or going to sleep. Requiring specific objects or activities or substances, at cost, in order to have pleasure is strange and inhuman when you think about it, it's kind of the inverse of torture, where there's pain for the sake of pain rather than pain for the sake of avoiding every-day things that are harmful.

So! What I think is good: ever-constant pleasure from every day life rather than its rise and fall, avoiding exterior behavior controls most of the time which limit you, being interested in a few domains while recognizing that they probably are no more important than the domains others are interested in, and moving to China around 2035.

Nader is now running for president.

"Hillary Rodham Clinton said Nader's bid would be bad for whichever Democrat ultimately faces likely Republican nominee Sen. John McCain in November."

"She called Nader's candidacy "a passing fancy" but conceded the only party likely to be hurt by it was the Democrats, adding, "I can't think of any Republicans that would vote for him.""

What is she talking about? I'm Republican (in registration at least, and in the candidates I've historically supported) and would definitely vote for Nader over McCain.

I suspect the most important elections this year were the Pakistan ones rather than the US ones, at least in terms of the difference it'd mean for people and in terms of how interesting it is to follow the news of.

Harlock recently has been worried that rights don't exist, and argued with me that they don't, and by coincidence the topic came up in a LJ community, so this is my argument for rights as a biological instinct, copied and pasted.

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I think there is only one right: the right not to have force used upon you. Secondarily, as a consequence, there's the right to use retaliatory force back if it's used upon you. All other rights (including the ones you name [in the original post]) derive from that; the bill of rights for example (free speech, protection against unwarranted search and seizure and so on) are some different ways in which force cannot be used on people by the government, but they are all essentially protections from the initiation of force.

The idea of natural rights is that they are a) not cultural, b) still exist even if they aren't defended. [R]ights are biological, part of our species, just as real and stable as fins on a fish or echolocation in bats or the different roles of the different ants among ants. So if that is true, different cultures might differ in how they understand rights, but not in what they are.

The origin of that [non-initiation of force] right is the structure of homo sapiens as a species, in particular its social organizations, which is essentially biological in nature, not cultural or religious. In particular, imagine a human civilization or tribe in which there was rampant initiation of force. I don't mean between them, but within them. That civilization or tribe could not long survive, and would soon go extinct.

Rights evolved to keep that from happening; people have a natural aversion to murder and a natural sense of fairness which comes into play very early and is similar across all cultures.

But to be clear, a right is not 'what one ought to respect', it's not a 'should', it's an 'is' -- people can make their own choices about whether to respect them or not, and it's sometimes moral not to respect the rights of another person, but even when they don't [respect rights], people have a natural feeling that it's unfair to murder or steal or rape.

Also it may sound strange to say that something as abstract or ephemeral as rights is biological or evolved, but it's really no different from other instincts we have, such as the maternal instinct, or any other instinct we have.

In the case of slavery and war, there's one interesting thing about how we evolved rights: if you see another people not as people, but as animals or subhumans, you can get around the instinct of feeling any respect for their rights. That's why Japanese were trained to see Chinese as pigs, not as humans, during WWII -- and why ancient Romans or ancient Chinese saw anyone not of their kind as a subhuman barbarian. The instinct of rights is less forceful when someone doesn't look like you or speak the same language unfortunately.

Another Bush; another Iraq War, another Clinton; another War in Kosovo?

:O

McCain has a history, beginning with his military career, of lucky charms and superstitions to gain fortune. While serving in Vietnam, he demanded that his parachute rigger clean his visor before each flight. On the 2000 campaign, he carried a lucky compass, feather, shoes, pen, penny and, at times, a rock. An incident when McCain misplaced his feather caused a brief panic in the campaign. His superstitions are extended to others; to those afraid of flying or experiencing a bumpy flight, he says, "You don't need to worry. I've crashed four fighter jets, and I'm not going to die in a plane crash. You're safe with me."

During a campaign appearance in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina on April 18, 2007, McCain was asked a question about possible military action against Iran. He responded by singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the melody of the Beach Boys' song "Barbara Ann", reminiscent of a 1980 parody by Vince Vance & The Valiants. When later confronted about the matter, McCain stated, "My response is lighten up, and get a life." Asked whether the joke he made was insensitive, McCain retorted, "Insensitive to what? The Iranians?"

O_O

http://www.gambling911.com/Ron-Paul-Louisiana-012408.html

Ron Paul got second again, this time in Louisiana; McCain was first. It's looking more and more like McCain will win the Republican nomination. But it's nice to see RP take two second places, considering that he was a fringe candidate with less than 2% of Republicans supporting him back last summer.

Argh, things like this are why I hate most politicians -- in most of them their every move is calculated and what they say so obviously has nothing to do with what they actually really think. Ron Paul, Kucinich, and Gravel, and maybe to an extent McCain, are the only people who actually feel like they're saying what they really think without political considerations.

Can most people really intuitively not tell the difference between honesty and saying what people want to hear? Perhaps it's because most people do this type of thing themselves? I once heard of a study that said that the average person lies seven times a day on average. So perhaps the way to get honest politicians is to develop a more honest people?