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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.
*
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).
*
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 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).
*
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Yeah. You know, I just filmed a segment for Nightline, about [the movie version of his novella] The Mist, and one of the things I said to them was, you know, "You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you're missing the whole fox hunt." Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who's gonna get custody of Britney's kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit.
"You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.
"So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip." -Stephen King
"You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West's mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that's going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his... wife. And meanwhile, you've got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You've got a guy in charge, who's basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d'etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.
"So you've got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip." -Stephen King
http://laptopfoundation.org/partici
You can now buy the $100 laptop -- for $200. And that's only if you buy 10,000 of them at once. The minimum order is 100 at once, and that costs $300 each.
Kind of funny, but I still like the project despite that (they changed their name awhile back, to be fair: they're now One Laptop Per Child).
If you know of a particular third world village that you like and have $30,000 or more to spare (haha) I suggest trying this out. ^_^
EDIT: According to the video above for a narrow window in November you can buy one for $400 (actually you buy two for that price, and one of them is given to a child somewhere).
You can now buy the $100 laptop -- for $200. And that's only if you buy 10,000 of them at once. The minimum order is 100 at once, and that costs $300 each.
Kind of funny, but I still like the project despite that (they changed their name awhile back, to be fair: they're now One Laptop Per Child).
If you know of a particular third world village that you like and have $30,000 or more to spare (haha) I suggest trying this out. ^_^
EDIT: According to the video above for a narrow window in November you can buy one for $400 (actually you buy two for that price, and one of them is given to a child somewhere).
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_Eas
Russia says an attack on Iran will be interpreted as an attack on Russia. (Funnily I'm part Iranian and part Russian.)
I'm not really sure how this could play out; I suspect the U.S. will back down now, but it's hard to say. I know that there was disagreement in the Bush administration over this; Condi Rice and by some reports even Bush himself have been reluctant to attack Iran whereas Cheney and Wolfowitz and Bolton and so on were for it. But on the other hand there's a lot of distrust of Russia too (even in Condi, since she was a cold war expert and all) so maybe this would make them less reluctant?
Russia says an attack on Iran will be interpreted as an attack on Russia. (Funnily I'm part Iranian and part Russian.)
I'm not really sure how this could play out; I suspect the U.S. will back down now, but it's hard to say. I know that there was disagreement in the Bush administration over this; Condi Rice and by some reports even Bush himself have been reluctant to attack Iran whereas Cheney and Wolfowitz and Bolton and so on were for it. But on the other hand there's a lot of distrust of Russia too (even in Condi, since she was a cold war expert and all) so maybe this would make them less reluctant?
Larijani himself had told the Iranian media that Putin had a "special plan" and the Supreme Leader observed that the plan was "ponderable". [...]
As if anyone needed to be reminded, the buck - or rial - stops with the Supreme Leader, whose last wish on earth is to furnish a pretext for the Bush administration to launch World War III. If Ahmadinejad now deviates from a carefully crafted strategic script, the Supreme Leader may simply get rid of him.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c
I've noticed this too. Even just my generation (I'm 29) was a lot better than this current one. I don't exactly know how much of this is intentional and how much isn't (and it has to be at least partly intentional) but it's pretty horrible to watch. At least I can be grateful that every country isn't going through this, a lot of them still have an education system which does more good than harm.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad. [...]
But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single [high school] student could do it.
It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph.
I've noticed this too. Even just my generation (I'm 29) was a lot better than this current one. I don't exactly know how much of this is intentional and how much isn't (and it has to be at least partly intentional) but it's pretty horrible to watch. At least I can be grateful that every country isn't going through this, a lot of them still have an education system which does more good than harm.
This guy continues to impress me. When I first heard about him about 20 years ago he was the world chess champion, which he achieved at the age of 22, the youngest to do so. Now he's a political activist, hated by Putin (arrested occasionally), fighting for democracy in Russia, and recently announced that he's running for president of Russia. I hope he wins, but he probably has even less of a chance of winning than Ron Paul does here.
A list of countries that the United States currently has troops in. No other country comes close to having military bases in this many countries (I think the closest is China, with a dozen or so). We could save over a trillion a year (allowing us to reduce income tax to zero and turning the deficit into a surplus besides) if we withdrew from all of these.
Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Antigua
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Bulgaria
Burma
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Congo
Costa Rica
Cote D’lvoire
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominican Republic
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Fiji
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Guatemala
Guinea
Haiti
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Liberia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Mali
Malta
Mexico
Mongolia
Morocco
Mozambique
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
North Korea
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia and Montenegro
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Slovenia
Spain
South Africa
South Korea
Sri Lanka
Suriname
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
Uruguay
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Afghanistan
Albania
Algeria
Antigua
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belgium
Belize
Bolivia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Brazil
Bulgaria
Burma
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Canada
Chad
Chile
China
Colombia
Congo
Costa Rica
Cote D’lvoire
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Djibouti
Dominican Republic
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Fiji
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Greece
Guatemala
Guinea
Haiti
Honduras
Hungary
Iceland
India
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lebanon
Liberia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Mali
Malta
Mexico
Mongolia
Morocco
Mozambique
Nepal
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
North Korea
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Qatar
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia and Montenegro
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Slovenia
Spain
South Africa
South Korea
Sri Lanka
Suriname
Sweden
Switzerland
Syria
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Trinidad and Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
Uruguay
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe
I'm sick again, sore throat and I can feel the beginnings of a flu or a cold. This isn't really worth mentioning. These never last, I've recovered from every sickness I've ever had -- so I have to empirically conclude that I'll never die, because there's no previous case where I didn't recover from a sickness.
If god doesn't exist then I'll create him with my own hands! <--- best line from Xenogears. I know it's derived from Voltaire but it's an original variation.
Somehow I think elections are fake. I don't mean in the usual "the media rigs them!!!" way. I mean it seems weird that the most powerful position in the world only "costs" some popularity and about a billion dollars. Either it costs more than that or it isn't really the most powerful position. Someone pointed this out on the news: that the amount of money spent on Easter candy during the week prior to Easter exceeds the amount of money spent on the presidential elections by all candidates combined. That's how paltry the sum is relative to industry. Look at another example; some corporations spend about a billion per year advertising; car companies and drug companies especially. And the presidency will cost someone less than the advertising budget of Ford? Really? Something wrong here. You'd think more people would want the job and be willing to pay a higher price for it than that.
The world's going to change a lot over the rest of my lifetime, even if I only live around the average lifespan. It's going to be great to watch, even if a lot of the changes are bad. The panopticon is coming, the only option is its nature, whether the mirrors are two-way or one-way, they'll no longer be zero-way.
If god doesn't exist then I'll create him with my own hands! <--- best line from Xenogears. I know it's derived from Voltaire but it's an original variation.
Somehow I think elections are fake. I don't mean in the usual "the media rigs them!!!" way. I mean it seems weird that the most powerful position in the world only "costs" some popularity and about a billion dollars. Either it costs more than that or it isn't really the most powerful position. Someone pointed this out on the news: that the amount of money spent on Easter candy during the week prior to Easter exceeds the amount of money spent on the presidential elections by all candidates combined. That's how paltry the sum is relative to industry. Look at another example; some corporations spend about a billion per year advertising; car companies and drug companies especially. And the presidency will cost someone less than the advertising budget of Ford? Really? Something wrong here. You'd think more people would want the job and be willing to pay a higher price for it than that.
The world's going to change a lot over the rest of my lifetime, even if I only live around the average lifespan. It's going to be great to watch, even if a lot of the changes are bad. The panopticon is coming, the only option is its nature, whether the mirrors are two-way or one-way, they'll no longer be zero-way.
http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/6241
When I see that I imagine Team B coming up with this headline: Lack of light in North Korea indicates the North Koreans have an even more advanced form of light which doesn't show up on satellite imagery.
When I see that I imagine Team B coming up with this headline: Lack of light in North Korea indicates the North Koreans have an even more advanced form of light which doesn't show up on satellite imagery.
I wanted to save a theory I expressed to konami recently but haven't written about here.
The idea is that humans are not adapted to grow up and live in safe environments, we were adapted to have to struggle for survival: to be constantly on the lookout for things to hunt or things hunting us, including other tribes, to have to work hard all day and make life and death decisions fairly regularly.
Today, especially in industrialized countries, but even to a good degree in third world countries, that's all gone. In the past you had to work extremely hard to live to 10, now you can pretty much do whatever you want, even just laze around all day and expend no effort whatsoever, and live to be 80. The difference is tangible and unimaginable.
I'm not saying we should go back to the old ways, only that we should recognize that this change has brought along problems and maladaptions. I'll go through a few.
Take habits for a big example. Habits were originally intended to get us to repeat things which help us survive and not repeat things which do not. But today, no matter what you do, you will probably survive. You don't need habits anymore. Really, habits are completely useless today, even though they were life-saving and indispensable 50,000 years ago.
I'd even go so far as to say that our propensity to habit is a very big liability today, particularly because they work by detecting what helps you survive and repeating it over and over; this leads to addictions, but more importantly this leads to repeating arbitrary actions over and over simply because those actions don't kill you; your brain reasonably believes that if you're doing something and you're still alive, it must be a good thing to repeat.
A second thing is free time. Our brains weren't built for idle thought; thinking without action is the cause of most psychological problems. Knowledge exists as a supplement for action, the only reason we're as good as we are at thinking is because it helps us choose better actions. But collectively humanity has become so good at choosing actions that we've pretty much eliminated the need to choose actions.
In other words, humanity is so good at thinking that there is no longer any reason for any person to think. You can think like Einstein or you can think like Forrest Gump and chances are you'll live the same amount of time either way. Maybe you'll gain another three years on average if you're a better thinker, by avoiding unhealthy foods or whatever, but big deal.
Because this is so, thinking, like habits, has become counter-productive. In most people, it causes more problems than it solves. I'm not saying we should abandon thinking, because we can't; we can't abandon it any more than we can abandon habit. But we should recognize that most of the time thinking causes more problems than it solves, just as having habits causes more problems than it solves.
I don't mean normal thinking like figuring out how to best get from point A to point B on a map or figuring out how to tie your shoes. I mean abstract thinking, such as whether mankind is inherently noble or ignoble, or whether or not this movie is Kurosawa's best movie, or who killed JFK. That type of thinking doesn't actually help you do anything, it makes no tangible difference in your actions, it's for all intents and purposes waste heat, which exists because that type of thinking was once useful in your evolutionary past but no longer is. Most habits are bad, and most thoughts are bad. Even when the thought is factually correct, it can still be morally bad to dwell on it, to have it consume you.
The cause of most political and social problems is at root psychological, that humans are not yet adapted to always being safe and never having to fight for survival. And we probably never will be adapted for that, for biological reasons (particularly because, genetically, extremely large populations evolve extremely slowly, and there's 6 billion of us -- there's a reason the cockroach hasn't changed much in so long: there are so many of them).
But what can't be changed genetically can be changed through culture, and I think a culture in which we foster things adapted to civilization has been developing for some time. There are pretty major ways that culture tries to adapt you to civilization, things which are completely alien to tooth-and-nail life: various moral ideas are just the start, entire emotions (or more specifically emotional interpretations) have been fabricated and brought into being which didn't previously exist, yet feel just as real as can be.
There are deep manipulations of someone's psychology going on as they grow up that aren't noticeable, even when we look for them. They mainly take the form of expectations about ourselves, such that we usually falsely believe such things are part of human nature when they are not which only becomes obvious when you read ethnographies of peoples still living in prehistorical ways and notice, say, that 90% of them aren't monogamous or that most of them don't see murder as a serious crime if it's done to someone outside your tribe or that most of them don't have a concept of falling in love (and neither did even Western civilization until recently).
But back to my point: we are built for tough lives, not soft lives, and the more comfortable your life is the worse you feel. Happiness comes from the achievement of goals, but if you're handed those goals before you're even born (supermarkets to provide easy food, sinecures to provide easy funds to buy that food, and the rest is entertainment) there can be no happiness in the sense that someone who struggles to survive knows happiness.
There are no real answers to this problem. You can't just become a hermit in aboriginal Australia (well you can, but not practically), nor can you accept the full comforts of modern society and expect to be happy (not even content), and any attempt to mix the two will also fail because they can't be mixed, either life is constantly dangerous or it isn't, either you're living on the edge of death or you're not.
The best answer I know of is Karma Yoga: to do good work and to focus all your energy on doing good work. It doesn't matter if that work is making games or baking cakes or building watches, as long as it can't be done automatically (a living death) and especially as long as there is a constant struggle to do it better and better and some type of prideful record of one's work, like a stack of novels you're written that's getting ever taller. If done correctly this maintains the safety of modern society while avoiding most of its problems (it avoids habit because it provides an constant, if artificial, challenge, and it avoids thinking too much because there's no time to be idle).
Preferably the work should do good for others and be useful, but that isn't even mandatory, building houses out of cards and trying to get ever better at that, or juggling 7 balls and then 8 balls and then 9 balls and trying to become a master juggler -- both of those sound pretty useless but they're still Karma Yoga. My personal preference is that the work be useful, but even someone pursuing mastery of juggling is better off than someone who just entertains themselves by watching X-Files or going to concerts or all the other millions of things that people become stuck in habits around, and certainly better off than people who think all the time and never do anything and create psychological problems which eventually end in suicide.
EDIT: And yes I know this entry is doing exactly what I say we shouldn't do (thinking too much), but in my defense I'm so overactive at thinking that I can come up with theories like this over the course of the few minutes it takes to drink a cup of coffee, and I type at 100 wpm and this entry only took a few minutes to write, so it doesn't really take up much of my time, most of which is spent on making and playing games (or, more recently, on getting Ron Paul elected).
The idea is that humans are not adapted to grow up and live in safe environments, we were adapted to have to struggle for survival: to be constantly on the lookout for things to hunt or things hunting us, including other tribes, to have to work hard all day and make life and death decisions fairly regularly.
Today, especially in industrialized countries, but even to a good degree in third world countries, that's all gone. In the past you had to work extremely hard to live to 10, now you can pretty much do whatever you want, even just laze around all day and expend no effort whatsoever, and live to be 80. The difference is tangible and unimaginable.
I'm not saying we should go back to the old ways, only that we should recognize that this change has brought along problems and maladaptions. I'll go through a few.
Take habits for a big example. Habits were originally intended to get us to repeat things which help us survive and not repeat things which do not. But today, no matter what you do, you will probably survive. You don't need habits anymore. Really, habits are completely useless today, even though they were life-saving and indispensable 50,000 years ago.
I'd even go so far as to say that our propensity to habit is a very big liability today, particularly because they work by detecting what helps you survive and repeating it over and over; this leads to addictions, but more importantly this leads to repeating arbitrary actions over and over simply because those actions don't kill you; your brain reasonably believes that if you're doing something and you're still alive, it must be a good thing to repeat.
A second thing is free time. Our brains weren't built for idle thought; thinking without action is the cause of most psychological problems. Knowledge exists as a supplement for action, the only reason we're as good as we are at thinking is because it helps us choose better actions. But collectively humanity has become so good at choosing actions that we've pretty much eliminated the need to choose actions.
In other words, humanity is so good at thinking that there is no longer any reason for any person to think. You can think like Einstein or you can think like Forrest Gump and chances are you'll live the same amount of time either way. Maybe you'll gain another three years on average if you're a better thinker, by avoiding unhealthy foods or whatever, but big deal.
Because this is so, thinking, like habits, has become counter-productive. In most people, it causes more problems than it solves. I'm not saying we should abandon thinking, because we can't; we can't abandon it any more than we can abandon habit. But we should recognize that most of the time thinking causes more problems than it solves, just as having habits causes more problems than it solves.
I don't mean normal thinking like figuring out how to best get from point A to point B on a map or figuring out how to tie your shoes. I mean abstract thinking, such as whether mankind is inherently noble or ignoble, or whether or not this movie is Kurosawa's best movie, or who killed JFK. That type of thinking doesn't actually help you do anything, it makes no tangible difference in your actions, it's for all intents and purposes waste heat, which exists because that type of thinking was once useful in your evolutionary past but no longer is. Most habits are bad, and most thoughts are bad. Even when the thought is factually correct, it can still be morally bad to dwell on it, to have it consume you.
The cause of most political and social problems is at root psychological, that humans are not yet adapted to always being safe and never having to fight for survival. And we probably never will be adapted for that, for biological reasons (particularly because, genetically, extremely large populations evolve extremely slowly, and there's 6 billion of us -- there's a reason the cockroach hasn't changed much in so long: there are so many of them).
But what can't be changed genetically can be changed through culture, and I think a culture in which we foster things adapted to civilization has been developing for some time. There are pretty major ways that culture tries to adapt you to civilization, things which are completely alien to tooth-and-nail life: various moral ideas are just the start, entire emotions (or more specifically emotional interpretations) have been fabricated and brought into being which didn't previously exist, yet feel just as real as can be.
There are deep manipulations of someone's psychology going on as they grow up that aren't noticeable, even when we look for them. They mainly take the form of expectations about ourselves, such that we usually falsely believe such things are part of human nature when they are not which only becomes obvious when you read ethnographies of peoples still living in prehistorical ways and notice, say, that 90% of them aren't monogamous or that most of them don't see murder as a serious crime if it's done to someone outside your tribe or that most of them don't have a concept of falling in love (and neither did even Western civilization until recently).
But back to my point: we are built for tough lives, not soft lives, and the more comfortable your life is the worse you feel. Happiness comes from the achievement of goals, but if you're handed those goals before you're even born (supermarkets to provide easy food, sinecures to provide easy funds to buy that food, and the rest is entertainment) there can be no happiness in the sense that someone who struggles to survive knows happiness.
There are no real answers to this problem. You can't just become a hermit in aboriginal Australia (well you can, but not practically), nor can you accept the full comforts of modern society and expect to be happy (not even content), and any attempt to mix the two will also fail because they can't be mixed, either life is constantly dangerous or it isn't, either you're living on the edge of death or you're not.
The best answer I know of is Karma Yoga: to do good work and to focus all your energy on doing good work. It doesn't matter if that work is making games or baking cakes or building watches, as long as it can't be done automatically (a living death) and especially as long as there is a constant struggle to do it better and better and some type of prideful record of one's work, like a stack of novels you're written that's getting ever taller. If done correctly this maintains the safety of modern society while avoiding most of its problems (it avoids habit because it provides an constant, if artificial, challenge, and it avoids thinking too much because there's no time to be idle).
Preferably the work should do good for others and be useful, but that isn't even mandatory, building houses out of cards and trying to get ever better at that, or juggling 7 balls and then 8 balls and then 9 balls and trying to become a master juggler -- both of those sound pretty useless but they're still Karma Yoga. My personal preference is that the work be useful, but even someone pursuing mastery of juggling is better off than someone who just entertains themselves by watching X-Files or going to concerts or all the other millions of things that people become stuck in habits around, and certainly better off than people who think all the time and never do anything and create psychological problems which eventually end in suicide.
EDIT: And yes I know this entry is doing exactly what I say we shouldn't do (thinking too much), but in my defense I'm so overactive at thinking that I can come up with theories like this over the course of the few minutes it takes to drink a cup of coffee, and I type at 100 wpm and this entry only took a few minutes to write, so it doesn't really take up much of my time, most of which is spent on making and playing games (or, more recently, on getting Ron Paul elected).
Maybe this is why there are no homosexuals in Iran:
"Iran carries out more gender change operations than any other country in the world besides Thailand. [...] [S]tate support has actually increased since Mr Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. His government has begun providing grants of £2,250 for operations and further funding for hormone therapy."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,
"Iran carries out more gender change operations than any other country in the world besides Thailand. [...] [S]tate support has actually increased since Mr Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. His government has begun providing grants of £2,250 for operations and further funding for hormone therapy."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,
http://www.maniacworld.com/i-want-m
http://www.maniacworld.com/most-int
Thailand has the best television commercials -- never seen anything like those here.
http://www.maniacworld.com/most-int
Thailand has the best television commercials -- never seen anything like those here.
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