Perhaps the outwardly significant feature a stranger would notice about somebody first is their deafness. So I am going to make this blog mainly about that...if only to get it out of the way. For most of you this may be your introduction to Deaf Culture.
First I am going to give you a few operational definitions. For "culture" it's a set of social behaviors and beliefs, usually including a history, a folklore, and a language that is unique to a group of people. A culture's "folklore" includes art, humor, and common stories, even stories from other cultures about your culture. Sharing these characteristics and beliefs and behaving in common ways identifies individuals or members as belonging to the culture. The Deaf culture contains all of these elements.
As with the larger Disabled Community the folklore of Deaf people has very few if any positive characteristics. Where some might see the Irish (please forgive me Irish people) as drunkards, they ALSO see them as poets and playwrights. Until recently disabled people have almost universally been portrayed in the wider culture as crippled (broken in body and mind, and the mirror of that, superheros) and typically as bitter malevolent vengeful types, or as heroic super-achievers. The disabled are seen as the psychic Other because the possibility of becoming disabled looms before every individual, people naturally shy away from serious consideration of disability or the disabled. We become a mythologic receptacle for the fear and anxieties of the able-bodied, or unrealistic icons of overcoming all adversity.
Although the idea that Deaf people have a culture and community is new to many hearing people, it has existed for a long time. The Deaf Culture has the same kinds of characteristics as those of other ethnic groups or subcultures. It is born out of shared experiences. The Deaf community has its own organizations, events, and arts. Deaf intra-marriage is common and there are also Deaf religious congregations. Perhaps the most essential link for members of any culture is language. And for Deaf culture among the American deaf community it is it's language—American Sign Language.
Uniquely for Deaf Culture the majority of deaf children are born to Speaking parents, the passing on of Deaf culture does not usually come from family members, but from contact with other Deaf people in the larger world. Like all acquired disabling conditions the challenges, successes, and pitfalls of living with my disability are recursive. Hopefully two steps forward and one step back, but not always. Like with the aging, disabled people are repeatedly discovering some new loss or some new field of human endeavor unassailably closed to them by virtue of simply who they are. Learning what and where to surrender, or to strategically withdraw, is a skill slowly learned and always at a very steep cost to yourself and your support network. And learning that a new achievement is frequently not an indicator of future successes but a lure to further frustration is a moral challenge in itself too.
Not every deaf person is part of the Deaf community and Deaf culture, however. The deaf ( notice the small "d"? ) and hard of hearing community is very diverse, differing greatly on the cause, degree, and age of onset of hearing loss, educational background, communication methods, and feelings about hearing loss. How people define themselves in terms of their hearing loss is personal and may reflect identification with the Deaf Culture and the deaf community. When writing about deafness, many writers will use a capital “D” when referring to aspects of deaf culture and a lower case “d” when speaking only about the hearing loss or about a group of deaf people who do not identify with Deaf Culture. Therefore, individuals may see themselves as either deaf, Deaf, or hard of hearing.
The “small d” deaf, typically, tend to have few associations with the Deaf community and may never have experienced schooling or community activities with others who are Deaf. This view, sometimes called the medical or clinical view, essentially accepts the behaviors and values of people who can hear as the norm. Those who hold this view might define the Deaf community as a group of people whose hearing loss interferes with, or disables the normal reception and generation of speech and who have a range of learning and social problems due to their hearing loss.
Unfortunately, as with many minorities, we have also built up a reactionary sub-culture that finds it's expression in reverse-audism. This is clearly seen when Deaf parents deny cochlear implants to their children because they would then grow up with the medical view, and disparage the values and worth of their own parents and the wider Deaf Culture altogether.
It's time to break the impasse, to raise our personal standards and stop adding barriers and work together to build a more accpeting society.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
My Roman Holiday
Why should I live?
Audrey Hepburn said in the movie "Roman Holiday", "If I were not completely aware of my
duty I should not have returned tonight. Nor indeed ever."
I don't know if it's my sense of duty or just a bad habit, or mere laziness...but I have returned again tonight.
I used to think about this a lot. I finally got around to asking myself what matters, as the measure of whether or not struggling to continue living made sense. Things matter...items, things you can sit on, or wear or eat. You can make a difference in the world by making things. Long ago, and every now and then for a week or a month I get moved by this motivation. But it doesn't last. My struggle with the SpaceWar program will be a very public demonstration of that. I got to the point that ideas matter more. Ideas can outlast things. Very few things have outlasted really good ideas. You can name most of them, and mostly they're useless, were useless from the beginning, and always will be...like a pyramid.
There's an idea in my fiction. It's not a big one and I am sure its nothing like unique to me. The idea that Bible stories, as presented, almost always talk over the heads of kids. (and adults are so stupidized by this century of public education that they are just as needy of this...)That I my stories aim low to include them. It might last, but I am struggling so much with discouragement I will likely not even bother illustrating them or try to get the submitted for publication.
What will I affect?
Almost nothing. I have changed nothing except a handful of lives, to some modest degree. Mostly that wont count for anything in the world. And the fondest memories of the most loved in our lives may be a cherished thing, from time to time, for a moment here or there, but that's of almost no consequence in a person's life.
lol I have re-invented existential angst.
Here's my advice. Don't talk to me or read my words. There's nothing in any of them except that one thing in my fiction that...as far as I can tell one person actually cared to read. Everybody else had to be asked to read my stuff. That person just likes me mainly because that person is really sweet, and forged a bond with me in dire/exceptional circumstances...and so far away is not enough of a motive to face this life for.
Maybe there's more to live for when your snug in the web of a family you love, or maybe its just more distracting. But I always have and always will live in my head, and as such will never integrate, never have integrated, like other people do. I see it in small things. Its not easy to see, but if you look closely for a decade or so, you can see the differences.
As much as we all are, I suppose, I was made to give love and with a hunger to be loved. Its just not going to happen. Not in this lifetime. There's not enough left, the changes would be to great to make in 10 or 20 years.
I'll likely continue talking and writing. Distracting myself as much as I can, while I can.
Sock away a bottle of strong alcohol if you can drink because there'll be a good blizzard or some snowy mountains you can drive to before it gets too bad, or start storing up a cache of pills if, like me, you can't drink.
This was my "roman holiday."
Sorry, but it's good to vent, even to a stupid blog nobody looks at.
Audrey Hepburn said in the movie "Roman Holiday", "If I were not completely aware of my
duty I should not have returned tonight. Nor indeed ever."
I don't know if it's my sense of duty or just a bad habit, or mere laziness...but I have returned again tonight.
I used to think about this a lot. I finally got around to asking myself what matters, as the measure of whether or not struggling to continue living made sense. Things matter...items, things you can sit on, or wear or eat. You can make a difference in the world by making things. Long ago, and every now and then for a week or a month I get moved by this motivation. But it doesn't last. My struggle with the SpaceWar program will be a very public demonstration of that. I got to the point that ideas matter more. Ideas can outlast things. Very few things have outlasted really good ideas. You can name most of them, and mostly they're useless, were useless from the beginning, and always will be...like a pyramid.
There's an idea in my fiction. It's not a big one and I am sure its nothing like unique to me. The idea that Bible stories, as presented, almost always talk over the heads of kids. (and adults are so stupidized by this century of public education that they are just as needy of this...)That I my stories aim low to include them. It might last, but I am struggling so much with discouragement I will likely not even bother illustrating them or try to get the submitted for publication.
What will I affect?
Almost nothing. I have changed nothing except a handful of lives, to some modest degree. Mostly that wont count for anything in the world. And the fondest memories of the most loved in our lives may be a cherished thing, from time to time, for a moment here or there, but that's of almost no consequence in a person's life.
lol I have re-invented existential angst.
Here's my advice. Don't talk to me or read my words. There's nothing in any of them except that one thing in my fiction that...as far as I can tell one person actually cared to read. Everybody else had to be asked to read my stuff. That person just likes me mainly because that person is really sweet, and forged a bond with me in dire/exceptional circumstances...and so far away is not enough of a motive to face this life for.
Maybe there's more to live for when your snug in the web of a family you love, or maybe its just more distracting. But I always have and always will live in my head, and as such will never integrate, never have integrated, like other people do. I see it in small things. Its not easy to see, but if you look closely for a decade or so, you can see the differences.
As much as we all are, I suppose, I was made to give love and with a hunger to be loved. Its just not going to happen. Not in this lifetime. There's not enough left, the changes would be to great to make in 10 or 20 years.
I'll likely continue talking and writing. Distracting myself as much as I can, while I can.
Sock away a bottle of strong alcohol if you can drink because there'll be a good blizzard or some snowy mountains you can drive to before it gets too bad, or start storing up a cache of pills if, like me, you can't drink.
This was my "roman holiday."
Sorry, but it's good to vent, even to a stupid blog nobody looks at.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The New American Fascists
Paternalism and a misunderstanding of freedom are the foundation for the New American Fascism. This is how it's expressed in American politics for the last hundred years or so. Yes that's right, there's nothing new about the New American Fascism.
The New American Fascist, my Tutor, tells me that he's willing to spill a few martinis if it means he gets to erect a welfare state. I let him get away with referring to spilling a few martinis till tonight. David drinks single malt Scotch whiskey, not martinis, but then I recalled David is paying more than 40% in taxes this year, and next year or the year after his rate of taxation will be passing 50%. So, my dear Fascist Tutor...how can you call confiscating half of everything he produces and calling it merely spilling his martini? Remember, all he does to create all that wealth does nothing but benefit everybody in his community in the first place so he's being taxed for being a boon to everybody around him begin with.
Progressivism is a political and social term, a Moral Stance, that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating "progress", "improvement", or "reform." And its the soul of the New American Fascism...the velvet Benevolent Intent glove, on the iron Power Over Other (POO) fist.
As an Moral system, Progressive-fascism is socialism with a "freedom loving" Liberal face painted on it. A happy face with a Hitlerian mustache. Since the beginning of the 20th century Progressive-fascism has been touted as the compassionate alternative to the "leave them swinging in the wind" (how my Tutor describes my Moral Stance) heartless boom-and-bust-prone capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, the wasteful competition of maximizing the economic experiments (which is the real value of free markets), and profit-oriented egoism (which is just the common sense, honest philosophic admission that everybody does everything they do to improve their world as *they* see the world profits...in other words, selfishly). The Child is not disciplined by the paternalism of Progressive Liberal Fascism, the Child elevated to distributed autocratic POO.
Today Progressivism is called "...rather Evolutionary, building on the existng architecture." when our Treasury Secretary advocates handing over control of our currency to the International Community...and what *is* that, except a club where dictatorships are treated as identically legitimate as democracies?
Thwarted repeatedly by the will of the people, and their native understanding of the common sense of the Constitution, thwarted to a degree still in the congress, thwarted to a degree still by the courts...the New Fascism moves the decision into the International Arena. Leaders of our government banking system, of our state department, of our supreme court are all for this process of DE-soverignizing the American people in their own country.
Socialism seeks totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state regulation of the means of production, fascism seeks that control indirectly, through domination of *nominally* private owners. Where socialism nationalizes property explicitly, fascism does so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic administration conceives it. Socialism abolishes all market relations outright, (all the millions of economic experiments that makes the boom-bust-cycle a relatively minor phenomena, in favor of permanently institutionalizing the few and mostly failing POO "Fixes" so we end up living in a Permanent Depression), fascism leaves the appearance of market relations while coercively regulating all economic activities. All this is as true now as it has been for a hundred years. The NRA, the FEDERAL RESERVE, the the Big Business Bail-out, you name it...same same.
Fascism cannot be distinguished from what the Liberal apologists meekly moniker "interventionism", or the "mixed economy." Interventionism seeks to guide the market process, but there is no bright line, no Principled Difference between the New American Fascism, and benign sounding "Interventionism." The Interventionist's Principles of minimum-wage and antitrust laws, regulate the free market in ways indistinguishable from Fascism.
Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism” which is also called "Corporatism."
Corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. I'll leave aside the crippling moral damage it does to its beneficiaries/slaves.
We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.
New American Fascists, and other Leftists usually understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is neglected by the willful blindness of the POO addicted New Fascist Left, and its unconscious commitment to externalizing the costs of it's power lust, is that the history of the America's Welfare Statism and Regulatory Fasicm directly corresponds to the rise of state corporatism. It is no coincidence that the bail-out Trillions went *exclusively* to large corporations. This is nothing but Corporate Welfare on a scale no Leftist ever even imagined accusing Republicoid Bushite nominal capitalists of. All legitimnized by bald faced Fear Mongering ("never let a crisis go to waste") of a breadth and depth 911 couldn't and all the Reactionary Republicoids never imagined possible.
The classical liberals, typified by Thomas Jefferson early on, had their political outlet in the Democratic Party, which, for the most part, stood on the side of limited, constitutional government and individual rights. How far have the "illiberal big-L Liberals strayed?
By the end of the 19th century, the so-called robber barons came to dominate much of the industry in oil and railroads. They are misunderstood by nearly everyone, because they certainly were not a homogeneous group, because most of them were not champions of pure laissez-faire capitalism. Most notably, and most typically, the federal government empowered the railroad tycoons with eminent domain, forcibly taking privately owned land and giving it to the railroad companies. That was not the free market at work. There was a private transcontinental railroad, but you just try finding that out in any textbook sanctioned by any school running on tax money.
Those who believed in a strong central government, typified early on by Alexander Hamilton, found their political home first in the Federalist Party, then in the Whig Party, and then in the Republican Party, the last of which openly embraced the doctrine of big government throughout the 19th century. For about a hundred years the Jeffersonian tradition was mostly associated with the cause of the common man, whereas big government was often associated with monopoly privileges and big business. Hamilton and his philosophical progeny fought perennially for central banking, high tariffs, and subsidies to corporations to build “internal improvements.” Hamilton’s first major successor, Henry Clay, called this governmental corporate program the “American System.”
The Progressive/Fascist Era
The Left has often hailed the Progressive Era as a time when, for the first time, Hamiltonian means -- big government -- were used to achieve Jeffersonian ends -- the dignity and respect of the common man. In fact, the Progressive Era was a time in which the two-headed beast of state-corporatism/socialism received major steroid injections.
Corporate interests pushed through the most significant Progressive-Era government reforms in order to guarantee profits, which they had been losing to smaller businesses that had emerged in the relatively free market of the early 20th century. Government expanded to promote, not curb, the interests of big business. State-capitalists in every industry -- from meatpacking to coal, from railroads to insurance -- embraced the bloating regulatory-state-fascism for their own gain -- to push competitors out of the market and give government legitimacy to their companies
State financed textbooks regurgitate the conventional history characterizing the Progressive Party’s Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as a response to the backwards laissez-faire William Howard Taft administration. Iin reality the party was favored by large businesses with whom Teddy Roosevelt had strong ties and whom Taft had pissed off by failing to empower and institutionalize through regulatory-state-fascism.
Perhaps no government "reform" has been more deliberately mischaracterized as anti-business populism than the Federal Reserve, which was sold to the American people in 1913 as an agency to regulate greedy and irresponsible bankers. As many have shown, the Federal Reserve established a banking oligopoly, guaranteed bailouts for the big bankers, created new barriers to entry for smaller bankers, and was in fact designed by people representing some of the most powerful banking interests in the world, including the National City Bank of New York; Kuhn, Loeb & Company; J.P Morgan Company; and the First National Bank of New York. That's how regulatory-state-fascism always works it, offering regulatory fixes who's need was created by the last set of regulatory fixes. That's exactly how the Fed was sold to America..right after the last depression that was solved in the typical boom-bust-cycle fashion, in a number of months...not years.
We needed this fictional history to become institutionalized by our public schools, before FDR would be able to turn the Typical boom-bust-cycle depression into the Great Depression. Just like Bush and Obama governments, we were sold a series of regulatory fixes this time painted with the name "de-regulation" that have added to our QUADRILLION dollar debt, by jacking up the rate of debt increase by 300% or 400% per year.
The New-New-Deal..or what I call the New American Fascism is working along the same lines as it's model.
Both Franklin Roosevelt’s admirers and his detractors often think of his New Deal legacy as generally socialistic. Like the Progressive Era, the New Deal is deliberately mischaracterized and misrepresented in the state funded Academy, and then of course widely misunderstood by the public: it did indeed attack the free market, but did so at the behest of corporate interests.
The New American Fascism is right in front of our eyes.
In our time, corporate interests cheer on big government programs, ironically the same ones championed by those who consider themselves anti-corporate. In the late 1990s, the now-defunct Enron was one of the largest lobbying influences behind the international Kyoto Treaty, which would have forced the world to comply with a ghastly web of new regulations and would have meant large energy contracts for Enron. The antitrust breakup of Microsoft was a de facto bail-out to competitors such as Netscape.
The Bush Era's farm subsidies were Corporate Welfare for the biggest agricultural corporations, and it's protectionist trade policies are Corporate Welfare for politically favored businesses. The recent expansion of Medicare has been both the greatest augmentation of the American welfare state in decades and a bail-out to large pharmaceutical corporations. When Obama's universal health care comes to America, the corporations will no longer have to satisfy customers, only the politicians.
In conclussion...
To convince the New Fascist and otherwise Leftist skeptic of the benefits of the free market, it is vital to defend the legitimate systems of profit and private property. But before you can begin to do that you have to explain this, what is to them wildly counter-intuitive concept, that America doesn’t have a free-market economy, and the ills associated with free markets are actually the result of regulatory-state-capitalism, or if you prefer this term "socialist corporatism", but I prefer mine..the New American Fascism.
That we can plainly see thisexpansion of government regulations, lately deliberately misnamed "deregulation", often done in the name of combating corporate excesses, is loudly supported most enthusiastically by corporate interests *should* make it all the easier to explain economic liberty to those who have become disenchanted with the current system and misattribute the problems to the free market.
Even with my personal history of service, I find it much much harder than that to convince people I do not wish to leave poor people "hanging in the wind." I hope this essay helps flip their "voucher switch" =P ...and keeps their power-lusting mitts form taking half of everything I produce, and calling it just a spilt martini.
The New American Fascist, my Tutor, tells me that he's willing to spill a few martinis if it means he gets to erect a welfare state. I let him get away with referring to spilling a few martinis till tonight. David drinks single malt Scotch whiskey, not martinis, but then I recalled David is paying more than 40% in taxes this year, and next year or the year after his rate of taxation will be passing 50%. So, my dear Fascist Tutor...how can you call confiscating half of everything he produces and calling it merely spilling his martini? Remember, all he does to create all that wealth does nothing but benefit everybody in his community in the first place so he's being taxed for being a boon to everybody around him begin with.
Progressivism is a political and social term, a Moral Stance, that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating "progress", "improvement", or "reform." And its the soul of the New American Fascism...the velvet Benevolent Intent glove, on the iron Power Over Other (POO) fist.
As an Moral system, Progressive-fascism is socialism with a "freedom loving" Liberal face painted on it. A happy face with a Hitlerian mustache. Since the beginning of the 20th century Progressive-fascism has been touted as the compassionate alternative to the "leave them swinging in the wind" (how my Tutor describes my Moral Stance) heartless boom-and-bust-prone capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, the wasteful competition of maximizing the economic experiments (which is the real value of free markets), and profit-oriented egoism (which is just the common sense, honest philosophic admission that everybody does everything they do to improve their world as *they* see the world profits...in other words, selfishly). The Child is not disciplined by the paternalism of Progressive Liberal Fascism, the Child elevated to distributed autocratic POO.
Today Progressivism is called "...rather Evolutionary, building on the existng architecture." when our Treasury Secretary advocates handing over control of our currency to the International Community...and what *is* that, except a club where dictatorships are treated as identically legitimate as democracies?
Thwarted repeatedly by the will of the people, and their native understanding of the common sense of the Constitution, thwarted to a degree still in the congress, thwarted to a degree still by the courts...the New Fascism moves the decision into the International Arena. Leaders of our government banking system, of our state department, of our supreme court are all for this process of DE-soverignizing the American people in their own country.
Socialism seeks totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state regulation of the means of production, fascism seeks that control indirectly, through domination of *nominally* private owners. Where socialism nationalizes property explicitly, fascism does so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic administration conceives it. Socialism abolishes all market relations outright, (all the millions of economic experiments that makes the boom-bust-cycle a relatively minor phenomena, in favor of permanently institutionalizing the few and mostly failing POO "Fixes" so we end up living in a Permanent Depression), fascism leaves the appearance of market relations while coercively regulating all economic activities. All this is as true now as it has been for a hundred years. The NRA, the FEDERAL RESERVE, the the Big Business Bail-out, you name it...same same.
Fascism cannot be distinguished from what the Liberal apologists meekly moniker "interventionism", or the "mixed economy." Interventionism seeks to guide the market process, but there is no bright line, no Principled Difference between the New American Fascism, and benign sounding "Interventionism." The Interventionist's Principles of minimum-wage and antitrust laws, regulate the free market in ways indistinguishable from Fascism.
Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism” which is also called "Corporatism."
Corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. I'll leave aside the crippling moral damage it does to its beneficiaries/slaves.
We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.
New American Fascists, and other Leftists usually understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is neglected by the willful blindness of the POO addicted New Fascist Left, and its unconscious commitment to externalizing the costs of it's power lust, is that the history of the America's Welfare Statism and Regulatory Fasicm directly corresponds to the rise of state corporatism. It is no coincidence that the bail-out Trillions went *exclusively* to large corporations. This is nothing but Corporate Welfare on a scale no Leftist ever even imagined accusing Republicoid Bushite nominal capitalists of. All legitimnized by bald faced Fear Mongering ("never let a crisis go to waste") of a breadth and depth 911 couldn't and all the Reactionary Republicoids never imagined possible.
The classical liberals, typified by Thomas Jefferson early on, had their political outlet in the Democratic Party, which, for the most part, stood on the side of limited, constitutional government and individual rights. How far have the "illiberal big-L Liberals strayed?
By the end of the 19th century, the so-called robber barons came to dominate much of the industry in oil and railroads. They are misunderstood by nearly everyone, because they certainly were not a homogeneous group, because most of them were not champions of pure laissez-faire capitalism. Most notably, and most typically, the federal government empowered the railroad tycoons with eminent domain, forcibly taking privately owned land and giving it to the railroad companies. That was not the free market at work. There was a private transcontinental railroad, but you just try finding that out in any textbook sanctioned by any school running on tax money.
Those who believed in a strong central government, typified early on by Alexander Hamilton, found their political home first in the Federalist Party, then in the Whig Party, and then in the Republican Party, the last of which openly embraced the doctrine of big government throughout the 19th century. For about a hundred years the Jeffersonian tradition was mostly associated with the cause of the common man, whereas big government was often associated with monopoly privileges and big business. Hamilton and his philosophical progeny fought perennially for central banking, high tariffs, and subsidies to corporations to build “internal improvements.” Hamilton’s first major successor, Henry Clay, called this governmental corporate program the “American System.”
The Progressive/Fascist Era
The Left has often hailed the Progressive Era as a time when, for the first time, Hamiltonian means -- big government -- were used to achieve Jeffersonian ends -- the dignity and respect of the common man. In fact, the Progressive Era was a time in which the two-headed beast of state-corporatism/socialism received major steroid injections.
Corporate interests pushed through the most significant Progressive-Era government reforms in order to guarantee profits, which they had been losing to smaller businesses that had emerged in the relatively free market of the early 20th century. Government expanded to promote, not curb, the interests of big business. State-capitalists in every industry -- from meatpacking to coal, from railroads to insurance -- embraced the bloating regulatory-state-fascism for their own gain -- to push competitors out of the market and give government legitimacy to their companies
State financed textbooks regurgitate the conventional history characterizing the Progressive Party’s Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as a response to the backwards laissez-faire William Howard Taft administration. Iin reality the party was favored by large businesses with whom Teddy Roosevelt had strong ties and whom Taft had pissed off by failing to empower and institutionalize through regulatory-state-fascism.
Perhaps no government "reform" has been more deliberately mischaracterized as anti-business populism than the Federal Reserve, which was sold to the American people in 1913 as an agency to regulate greedy and irresponsible bankers. As many have shown, the Federal Reserve established a banking oligopoly, guaranteed bailouts for the big bankers, created new barriers to entry for smaller bankers, and was in fact designed by people representing some of the most powerful banking interests in the world, including the National City Bank of New York; Kuhn, Loeb & Company; J.P Morgan Company; and the First National Bank of New York. That's how regulatory-state-fascism always works it, offering regulatory fixes who's need was created by the last set of regulatory fixes. That's exactly how the Fed was sold to America..right after the last depression that was solved in the typical boom-bust-cycle fashion, in a number of months...not years.
We needed this fictional history to become institutionalized by our public schools, before FDR would be able to turn the Typical boom-bust-cycle depression into the Great Depression. Just like Bush and Obama governments, we were sold a series of regulatory fixes this time painted with the name "de-regulation" that have added to our QUADRILLION dollar debt, by jacking up the rate of debt increase by 300% or 400% per year.
The New-New-Deal..or what I call the New American Fascism is working along the same lines as it's model.
Both Franklin Roosevelt’s admirers and his detractors often think of his New Deal legacy as generally socialistic. Like the Progressive Era, the New Deal is deliberately mischaracterized and misrepresented in the state funded Academy, and then of course widely misunderstood by the public: it did indeed attack the free market, but did so at the behest of corporate interests.
The New American Fascism is right in front of our eyes.
In our time, corporate interests cheer on big government programs, ironically the same ones championed by those who consider themselves anti-corporate. In the late 1990s, the now-defunct Enron was one of the largest lobbying influences behind the international Kyoto Treaty, which would have forced the world to comply with a ghastly web of new regulations and would have meant large energy contracts for Enron. The antitrust breakup of Microsoft was a de facto bail-out to competitors such as Netscape.
The Bush Era's farm subsidies were Corporate Welfare for the biggest agricultural corporations, and it's protectionist trade policies are Corporate Welfare for politically favored businesses. The recent expansion of Medicare has been both the greatest augmentation of the American welfare state in decades and a bail-out to large pharmaceutical corporations. When Obama's universal health care comes to America, the corporations will no longer have to satisfy customers, only the politicians.
In conclussion...
To convince the New Fascist and otherwise Leftist skeptic of the benefits of the free market, it is vital to defend the legitimate systems of profit and private property. But before you can begin to do that you have to explain this, what is to them wildly counter-intuitive concept, that America doesn’t have a free-market economy, and the ills associated with free markets are actually the result of regulatory-state-capitalism, or if you prefer this term "socialist corporatism", but I prefer mine..the New American Fascism.
That we can plainly see thisexpansion of government regulations, lately deliberately misnamed "deregulation", often done in the name of combating corporate excesses, is loudly supported most enthusiastically by corporate interests *should* make it all the easier to explain economic liberty to those who have become disenchanted with the current system and misattribute the problems to the free market.
Even with my personal history of service, I find it much much harder than that to convince people I do not wish to leave poor people "hanging in the wind." I hope this essay helps flip their "voucher switch" =P ...and keeps their power-lusting mitts form taking half of everything I produce, and calling it just a spilt martini.
The child metaphor and Benevolent Paternalism
My friend wrote to me.."I have power over my little boy, protecting him from what I call his efforts to kill himself: climbing on the roof, running into the street, playing with sharp blades. Just now I'm making him vacuum up a mess of cracker crumbs that he leaves on the floor, or I said I would turn off the TV. I could do it myself but shouldn't he develop a sense of responsibility? And how could he do this without first developing respect for the power that I have over him? Ahh. He just now defied me, throwing things onto the floor downstairs to show that HE has power of ME. So the TV is off and he's timed out in his bed, raging about how unfair I am to make him do something so boring. He says that the future will be much better because then he won't have to do anything he does not want to do. Isn't it a good thing for him that I'm bigger than he is? :))"
This example would seeming validate POO. But isn't there a difference between institutionalized relations between Adults who presumptively know about things like gravity and blades and running enough to not endanger themselves and others (and if they do so, to treat others and expect to be treated as responsible agents) because they have not lived years sufficient to have the knowledge common adults, which enables them to live self-regulated lives.
He continued..."The state has power over me: regulating driving speed, enforcing boundaries of self and property, regulating medical licenses and facilities. It was not so long ago that patent medicines were sold as cure alls with codeine as the only active ingredient. Sanitation and safety are regulated. A failure of regulation has precipitated this most recent economic crisis. Regulation is demanded in order to prevent abortion. Police are needed to enforce regulation. Isn't this all power over others?"
Nope. In America our Declaration of Independence and Constitution say that all rights are inalienable properties of Human beings. The state never has any Rights, it only has powers we surrender to it in certain very specific circumstances. Police do not have power over us, unless we surrender it to them, and we do so *only* (if we're clever as *I* am) because its legitimate for them to prevent us using POO unrestrictedly on each other. The Only legitimate use of POO is to restrain the illegitimate use of POO.
...
The Staw Anarchist. How Anarchy is the Leftmost edge of politics, where Left = Tyranny, and Right = Maximum Freedom thru Rights-Limited Democracy
My friend went on to say..."The complication of your POO thesis might be summed up by understanding that anarchy is fundamentally a system in which institutionalized power over others is refuted. BUT ... individuals are then freed to act in the most destructive ways."
This is usually the first Straw Man I am asked to knock down. If you make a political spectrum with Individualism on one end and Slavery on the other, anarchy is the same end as Slavery. Its totalitarianism taken to such an extreme the Tyrant is not off in some distant capital..he's the biggest thug on your street. Its a maximization of Governance, not any sort of reduction or freedom from Government.
He also said..."The anarchy of Lebanon's civil war is a good example; decades of destruction because of the failure of its government. Somalia today is a good example, where the failure of the state (Somalia is called a failed state) allows for all sorts of criminality. Ideals such as anarchy, universal compassion, or anti-POO fail when they do not take into account the "finitude" (your word :) of the human condition."
I disagree that ideals fail. Compassion that is not compassionate to all, is not compassion. Freedom which is not the most free for all, is not freedom. If Anarchy is touted as an Ideal Freedom, its simply because somebody's left realityland, to be "idealistic." I am not prone to that error, I am Realist Idealist.
This example would seeming validate POO. But isn't there a difference between institutionalized relations between Adults who presumptively know about things like gravity and blades and running enough to not endanger themselves and others (and if they do so, to treat others and expect to be treated as responsible agents) because they have not lived years sufficient to have the knowledge common adults, which enables them to live self-regulated lives.
He continued..."The state has power over me: regulating driving speed, enforcing boundaries of self and property, regulating medical licenses and facilities. It was not so long ago that patent medicines were sold as cure alls with codeine as the only active ingredient. Sanitation and safety are regulated. A failure of regulation has precipitated this most recent economic crisis. Regulation is demanded in order to prevent abortion. Police are needed to enforce regulation. Isn't this all power over others?"
Nope. In America our Declaration of Independence and Constitution say that all rights are inalienable properties of Human beings. The state never has any Rights, it only has powers we surrender to it in certain very specific circumstances. Police do not have power over us, unless we surrender it to them, and we do so *only* (if we're clever as *I* am) because its legitimate for them to prevent us using POO unrestrictedly on each other. The Only legitimate use of POO is to restrain the illegitimate use of POO.
...
The Staw Anarchist. How Anarchy is the Leftmost edge of politics, where Left = Tyranny, and Right = Maximum Freedom thru Rights-Limited Democracy
My friend went on to say..."The complication of your POO thesis might be summed up by understanding that anarchy is fundamentally a system in which institutionalized power over others is refuted. BUT ... individuals are then freed to act in the most destructive ways."
This is usually the first Straw Man I am asked to knock down. If you make a political spectrum with Individualism on one end and Slavery on the other, anarchy is the same end as Slavery. Its totalitarianism taken to such an extreme the Tyrant is not off in some distant capital..he's the biggest thug on your street. Its a maximization of Governance, not any sort of reduction or freedom from Government.
He also said..."The anarchy of Lebanon's civil war is a good example; decades of destruction because of the failure of its government. Somalia today is a good example, where the failure of the state (Somalia is called a failed state) allows for all sorts of criminality. Ideals such as anarchy, universal compassion, or anti-POO fail when they do not take into account the "finitude" (your word :) of the human condition."
I disagree that ideals fail. Compassion that is not compassionate to all, is not compassion. Freedom which is not the most free for all, is not freedom. If Anarchy is touted as an Ideal Freedom, its simply because somebody's left realityland, to be "idealistic." I am not prone to that error, I am Realist Idealist.
The Abortion Movement Shows Its True Colors
The story is heartbreaking. A woman showed up at an abortion clinic “in flip-flops and in tears,” having walked for an hour to have her fourth child aborted after her boyfriend lost his job. “‘This was a desired pregnancy—she’d been getting prenatal care—but they re-evaluated expenses and decided not to continue,’ said Dr. Pratima Grupta,” in the Associated Press report.
Columnist Bonnie Erbe asks us, about the aborting of baby for economic reasons, “can we agree that this unwed couple’s decision not to bring a fourth child into the world when they are having trouble feeding themselves and three children is no tragedy?” According to Erbe's calculations that their “fact-based, rational decision” is “no tragedy: it’s a good decision.”
There's no room for feelings about either one’s aborted child -- OR -- the fact that the pregnancy she was describing was desired, and nurtured—“not when the economy is depressed, jobs are scarce and family incomes are dropping,” as Erbe says.
And her heartlessness towards hard decisions, and unborn babies, is not a coldness reserved for agnostics or atheists. Katherine Ragsdale calls abortion a “blessing” when it enables women to continue their education or career. And Ragsdale is the new dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
British official Jonathan Porritt, just last week voiced his desire to cut his country’s population in half for the sake of the environment. So this is the new world order, where Erbe and Ragsdale base their concerns on the scarcity of resources, the theme is the same... Fewer humans means better living for those of us who are permitted to live.
I am not well enough to pen my own Immodest Proposal to fit the Human Hating emotional undercurrent in these kinds of politics.
But in today's society people mockingly joke about eating the rich, to attack or defend one side or the other. But I look around and am struck that we aborted 40 million babies, and imported 40 million under-educated, under-skilled, poor sick Mexicans to do jobs those 40 million americans "wouldn't want to do" (and we leave off, because when you're raised here you wont agree when rich-pimp-businessmen or rich-pimp-politicians decide you could make them a little more profit, or get them a few more votes.)
The other day the courts struck down the will of the people yet again, to ensure that even underaged girls can get abortion pills without hindrance. The Pope said spreading condoms increases the spread of AIDS by increasing irresponsible sex and the Left laughed and sneered, until the next day when the head of Harvard's AIDS project said the Pope was exactly right. Because, he said, when you pass out condoms you inculcate a false sense of security that increases risk taking behaviors. Did the mainstream press or Leftist pundits apologize and correct themselves? Of course not. Its their accepted wisdom that people cannot act responsibly when they are creating life, only when they want to kill it kill it so they can pretend that before you create a life is not the better time to act responsibly.
Death and Slavery is your duty to save the environment, the way this economy has been regulated. That's why I think more regulations, and more government control is the only restorative for this society. <--all the satire I could muster.
Columnist Bonnie Erbe asks us, about the aborting of baby for economic reasons, “can we agree that this unwed couple’s decision not to bring a fourth child into the world when they are having trouble feeding themselves and three children is no tragedy?” According to Erbe's calculations that their “fact-based, rational decision” is “no tragedy: it’s a good decision.”
There's no room for feelings about either one’s aborted child -- OR -- the fact that the pregnancy she was describing was desired, and nurtured—“not when the economy is depressed, jobs are scarce and family incomes are dropping,” as Erbe says.
And her heartlessness towards hard decisions, and unborn babies, is not a coldness reserved for agnostics or atheists. Katherine Ragsdale calls abortion a “blessing” when it enables women to continue their education or career. And Ragsdale is the new dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
British official Jonathan Porritt, just last week voiced his desire to cut his country’s population in half for the sake of the environment. So this is the new world order, where Erbe and Ragsdale base their concerns on the scarcity of resources, the theme is the same... Fewer humans means better living for those of us who are permitted to live.
I am not well enough to pen my own Immodest Proposal to fit the Human Hating emotional undercurrent in these kinds of politics.
But in today's society people mockingly joke about eating the rich, to attack or defend one side or the other. But I look around and am struck that we aborted 40 million babies, and imported 40 million under-educated, under-skilled, poor sick Mexicans to do jobs those 40 million americans "wouldn't want to do" (and we leave off, because when you're raised here you wont agree when rich-pimp-businessmen or rich-pimp-politicians decide you could make them a little more profit, or get them a few more votes.)
The other day the courts struck down the will of the people yet again, to ensure that even underaged girls can get abortion pills without hindrance. The Pope said spreading condoms increases the spread of AIDS by increasing irresponsible sex and the Left laughed and sneered, until the next day when the head of Harvard's AIDS project said the Pope was exactly right. Because, he said, when you pass out condoms you inculcate a false sense of security that increases risk taking behaviors. Did the mainstream press or Leftist pundits apologize and correct themselves? Of course not. Its their accepted wisdom that people cannot act responsibly when they are creating life, only when they want to kill it kill it so they can pretend that before you create a life is not the better time to act responsibly.
Death and Slavery is your duty to save the environment, the way this economy has been regulated. That's why I think more regulations, and more government control is the only restorative for this society. <--all the satire I could muster.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
The Point of Beginning
A long time ago, I started this new life. I stepped out of very dark shadows, into a hope and a promise. My mind was sharp then, and I had a lot more energy too.And I thought I could build connections. I thought that's what people did. I naievely look at all the poeple in the world and saw them all connecting, some poorly, and thought that if you just paid attention and worked at it...that what happened. You got connected.
I stepped out of a place so dark, and so lonely, it literally made me crazy. I mean, verbal halucinations, paranoid seeing conspiracies to do me harm all around me, crazy. Into this ...belief state? ...world view? I thought I rememebred making friendship grow..making love grow...making connections deepen and broaden.
I guess I should say that I was always, from the beginning isolated. I think, more than most people. I always lived in my head, but I'd find somebody to partner up with and do things...play, make up games, stories, wander around in a imaginary world being in my "molecule ship" so small I could pass thru a tree, or a person or whatever.. whoever my partner was, we'd slowly walk around describing the perils around us. If the tree trunck went between is we had gone thru it...otherwise we'd skirted it narrowly, averting possible dangers. In my head, but connected to my play partner, my puzzle working partner, my story telling partner.
One on one, it was easy for me that way, to connect.
I knew I was alone in groups, seperated by my difference, that being that Ilived in my head...not anything else was so different. I liked floating in the pool, or sitting still submerged beneath the water's surface...where it was quiet and still. Safe, uncluttered, uneventful.
And I think, I thought that would be workable. A way to live. I could find work partners and play partners. I could connect thru those channels. But the truth was I never really had connected like I thought I was.
People were necessarily seperate. Its just that, growing up people learn that some way I missed. I missed schol that day, and you can't teach a lesson like that years and years later and learn it really, I am sad to say. You spend far too long thinking the world worked a different way, and now you're just hung out there...a big stupid blank face, surprised at how alien the world really is to you.
I found that out, partly, when I discovered I hadn't even had that connection with my sister. Her marriage was messed up and couldn't help because I didn't even have a conenction to the real her. Just this connection belief in my head. And then she got cancer and died, and I was so hurt...so cut off suddenly. I didn't know what to do..or if I even should try. She had so many friends and they were so connected, that was plain, she conencted with so many people. But I couldn't even understand how to visit her, *how* to do any of the things I did do to help. She hugged me, she said she loved me, I know she did love me. But I don't know, even now, what that means. What was I supposed to do? How ws I supposed to do...whatever...so i would be connected to her too, like I had grown up believing I was?
And what now here? Am I a parent? I don't know how to be. If I'm a child of parents I am a poor one, I don't know how to do that either. How do I make these connections?
I think I don't. I think this is my being enmeshed, co-dependant.
But now my body is taken away from me too, and my mind. I am not social. I don't know if I ever can be. I don't know if I am even supposed to want to be. And I am no longer me internally, either. Theres been so many losses for so long.
And I fear that no matter what I do, now, my life is on rails.
I find myself consumed by the fear of inevitability, by choicelessness. But the fear is I wont be able to change my self. And if I do change my self...why would I want that? To accept I am alone in my head and necessarily always will be because that's what normal people call growing up, and I have to grow up sooner or later, and until I do I'll just be stuck right where I am?
Stuck where the best option i can think of, the only way for me to possibly find any joy today, is to go to a virtual world and be an avatar.
I don't like me.
Is my connecting, that need-to-partner, co-dependant enmeshed pathology? Will I never be happy...on my own? Only happy thru others?
On nights like the other night there's a cracking I feel beneath me, the weakness I feel like I am skating on thin ice -- over the feelings I feel every time somebody speaks to me here, every time there's a chore to be done, or a help I need to give, swallows me up. Some days I curse every time I move, I say in my head the foulest insults to the people I love the most, screaming internally at their just making that same booboo...saying "to the left" when they mean right. I mean...even if they are stupid, why do I rage so evily at them? I will never make them get right from left, I will never make them stick to a plan we agreed on, no matter how many hours we debate it and plan it and how many plans I draw, or rules fo phsyics I explain...nothing willmake them get it, and so my punishing them for it in my head, every single time they do it now...poisons me, and I know it murders them. I know it shows in my eyes. I know the Mountain Range of anger stacked up in me and straining to flood forth is no excuse, and I am responsible for harming the innocents I love most in this world.
And the morning comes. And I am skating again.
And now you know.
And if you don't run screaming into the hills, you're a fool. Because no good will come of knowing me.
I stepped out of a place so dark, and so lonely, it literally made me crazy. I mean, verbal halucinations, paranoid seeing conspiracies to do me harm all around me, crazy. Into this ...belief state? ...world view? I thought I rememebred making friendship grow..making love grow...making connections deepen and broaden.
I guess I should say that I was always, from the beginning isolated. I think, more than most people. I always lived in my head, but I'd find somebody to partner up with and do things...play, make up games, stories, wander around in a imaginary world being in my "molecule ship" so small I could pass thru a tree, or a person or whatever.. whoever my partner was, we'd slowly walk around describing the perils around us. If the tree trunck went between is we had gone thru it...otherwise we'd skirted it narrowly, averting possible dangers. In my head, but connected to my play partner, my puzzle working partner, my story telling partner.
One on one, it was easy for me that way, to connect.
I knew I was alone in groups, seperated by my difference, that being that Ilived in my head...not anything else was so different. I liked floating in the pool, or sitting still submerged beneath the water's surface...where it was quiet and still. Safe, uncluttered, uneventful.
And I think, I thought that would be workable. A way to live. I could find work partners and play partners. I could connect thru those channels. But the truth was I never really had connected like I thought I was.
People were necessarily seperate. Its just that, growing up people learn that some way I missed. I missed schol that day, and you can't teach a lesson like that years and years later and learn it really, I am sad to say. You spend far too long thinking the world worked a different way, and now you're just hung out there...a big stupid blank face, surprised at how alien the world really is to you.
I found that out, partly, when I discovered I hadn't even had that connection with my sister. Her marriage was messed up and couldn't help because I didn't even have a conenction to the real her. Just this connection belief in my head. And then she got cancer and died, and I was so hurt...so cut off suddenly. I didn't know what to do..or if I even should try. She had so many friends and they were so connected, that was plain, she conencted with so many people. But I couldn't even understand how to visit her, *how* to do any of the things I did do to help. She hugged me, she said she loved me, I know she did love me. But I don't know, even now, what that means. What was I supposed to do? How ws I supposed to do...whatever...so i would be connected to her too, like I had grown up believing I was?
And what now here? Am I a parent? I don't know how to be. If I'm a child of parents I am a poor one, I don't know how to do that either. How do I make these connections?
I think I don't. I think this is my being enmeshed, co-dependant.
But now my body is taken away from me too, and my mind. I am not social. I don't know if I ever can be. I don't know if I am even supposed to want to be. And I am no longer me internally, either. Theres been so many losses for so long.
And I fear that no matter what I do, now, my life is on rails.
I find myself consumed by the fear of inevitability, by choicelessness. But the fear is I wont be able to change my self. And if I do change my self...why would I want that? To accept I am alone in my head and necessarily always will be because that's what normal people call growing up, and I have to grow up sooner or later, and until I do I'll just be stuck right where I am?
Stuck where the best option i can think of, the only way for me to possibly find any joy today, is to go to a virtual world and be an avatar.
I don't like me.
Is my connecting, that need-to-partner, co-dependant enmeshed pathology? Will I never be happy...on my own? Only happy thru others?
On nights like the other night there's a cracking I feel beneath me, the weakness I feel like I am skating on thin ice -- over the feelings I feel every time somebody speaks to me here, every time there's a chore to be done, or a help I need to give, swallows me up. Some days I curse every time I move, I say in my head the foulest insults to the people I love the most, screaming internally at their just making that same booboo...saying "to the left" when they mean right. I mean...even if they are stupid, why do I rage so evily at them? I will never make them get right from left, I will never make them stick to a plan we agreed on, no matter how many hours we debate it and plan it and how many plans I draw, or rules fo phsyics I explain...nothing willmake them get it, and so my punishing them for it in my head, every single time they do it now...poisons me, and I know it murders them. I know it shows in my eyes. I know the Mountain Range of anger stacked up in me and straining to flood forth is no excuse, and I am responsible for harming the innocents I love most in this world.
And the morning comes. And I am skating again.
And now you know.
And if you don't run screaming into the hills, you're a fool. Because no good will come of knowing me.
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