A Paranoid, Desultory Phillippic
Except during the nation-consuming wars, the US government has been the tail to the private sector's dog. As long as the legislature and executive stayed mostly out of the way, and the courts worked to enforce contracts and prevent fraud, the economic heart of the private sector continued to pump nourishing taxes and graft into the government tail.
But over the decades since the early 20th century, the government tail has grown like a malignant tumour to consume more and more of the blood nutrients meant for the rest of the dog. With the excesses of the New Deal, the Great Society, Compassionate Conservatism, and the coming neo-fascist regime of the Narcissist-Elect, the tail is not only wagging the dog, the tail is killing the dog.
The corruption of Obama's home state of Illinois may be startling to innocents, but it is echoed in state capitals from Sacramento to Albany, and multiplied out of all ability to calculate in Washington DC. The scum rises to the top, and with the congealing of the corrupt layers around the centers of government -- choking private initiative and enterprise -- the US has grown to resemble the old world centers of stifling elitism the founders of the country had meant to prevent.
The massive complexity of the national and world financial systems allows infinite avenues of government intervention, so that it becomes impossible to determine which effects result from which intervention, or what would have happened without the uncounted connecting threads between governments and financial and market institutions.
The end result is for wealth and power to concentrate more thoroughly, into fewer hands. A neo-royalty of graft, growing out of the pretense of popular election. It was all made so much easier through widespread academic lobotomy and psychological neoteny.
Under such a regime -- or reich -- arbitrariness rules over rationality. The reigning top layers grow more insular and inbred. Information finds it more difficult to pass between thickening boundaries between layers. The cure grows worse than the disease, and the general suffering flows like blood across the landscape.
These are the times when the isolated vital centers take inventory, and do what they can despite the shackles placed on them by the neo-fascist reichs that have grown accustomed to feeding on the bodily fluids of the thinkers and doers. The outlook seems particularly grim due to the growing uniformity of such fascist reichs from China to Germany to Russia, and now the US.
The positive news of liberation through technology lies farther in the future than we might wish. The transformation of life via genetics, nanotech, robotics, machine intelligence, new energy technologies, life extension, augmented and expanded human intelligence, and many other disruptive technologies, is in danger of being placed in a long-term tentative holding pattern by the incoming Luddite, neo-fascist reich. After waiting so long to achieve such widespread control, it simply will not do for the new reich to allow upstart technologies to overturn the glorious new world order.
In Russia and China they simply declare any vocal opposition to the regime treason, and shoot the malefactors. In the US, the reich will simply silence the protesters by any means necessary, and call it fairness and unity. It helps to get the media in on the joke first.
So why am I smiling? Because I am not left handed. And in the sense that I mean, I hope that neither are you.
More later.
But over the decades since the early 20th century, the government tail has grown like a malignant tumour to consume more and more of the blood nutrients meant for the rest of the dog. With the excesses of the New Deal, the Great Society, Compassionate Conservatism, and the coming neo-fascist regime of the Narcissist-Elect, the tail is not only wagging the dog, the tail is killing the dog.
The corruption of Obama's home state of Illinois may be startling to innocents, but it is echoed in state capitals from Sacramento to Albany, and multiplied out of all ability to calculate in Washington DC. The scum rises to the top, and with the congealing of the corrupt layers around the centers of government -- choking private initiative and enterprise -- the US has grown to resemble the old world centers of stifling elitism the founders of the country had meant to prevent.
The massive complexity of the national and world financial systems allows infinite avenues of government intervention, so that it becomes impossible to determine which effects result from which intervention, or what would have happened without the uncounted connecting threads between governments and financial and market institutions.
The end result is for wealth and power to concentrate more thoroughly, into fewer hands. A neo-royalty of graft, growing out of the pretense of popular election. It was all made so much easier through widespread academic lobotomy and psychological neoteny.
Under such a regime -- or reich -- arbitrariness rules over rationality. The reigning top layers grow more insular and inbred. Information finds it more difficult to pass between thickening boundaries between layers. The cure grows worse than the disease, and the general suffering flows like blood across the landscape.
These are the times when the isolated vital centers take inventory, and do what they can despite the shackles placed on them by the neo-fascist reichs that have grown accustomed to feeding on the bodily fluids of the thinkers and doers. The outlook seems particularly grim due to the growing uniformity of such fascist reichs from China to Germany to Russia, and now the US.
The positive news of liberation through technology lies farther in the future than we might wish. The transformation of life via genetics, nanotech, robotics, machine intelligence, new energy technologies, life extension, augmented and expanded human intelligence, and many other disruptive technologies, is in danger of being placed in a long-term tentative holding pattern by the incoming Luddite, neo-fascist reich. After waiting so long to achieve such widespread control, it simply will not do for the new reich to allow upstart technologies to overturn the glorious new world order.
In Russia and China they simply declare any vocal opposition to the regime treason, and shoot the malefactors. In the US, the reich will simply silence the protesters by any means necessary, and call it fairness and unity. It helps to get the media in on the joke first.
So why am I smiling? Because I am not left handed. And in the sense that I mean, I hope that neither are you.
More later.
Labels: Academic lobotomy, big government
posted by al fin at 7:32 am
3 Comments:
The antidote to this is that a society with such a tumour will be outgrown by one which isn't, or whose tumour is in remittance as I believe China's, India's & Russia's are. Since we live in a small world & economic growth is more evident than it ever has been before it becomes increasingly obvious when a country is failing & what needs to be done.
This is why I think you are overly critical of Russia & China & even moreso why I am opposed to a global state which would allow the tumour of government to grow unchecked.
Russia and China are unfortunately composed of almost nothing but tumour at this point. Particularly Russia.
What happens to journalists who are too critical of those regimes? (sweeping motion of flat hand across throat)
A world government would create a very unpleasant environment. A world with several regions and nations in outright bloody competition to be world hegemon would create an environment even more hazardous to the health of your friendly neighborhood anarcho-capitalist. (think world war three with biological, chemical, and nuclear/dirty nuke weapons)
Perhaps we should hope the war happens before nanotech and nano-bio weapons are perfected ? That is the class of weapons that I fear. Almost everything else can be defended against or mitigated with a little advance warning.
Nano-weapons can turn off the sun over one part of the world for the indefinite future. Freeze the bastards out, what?
No matter how much one may hate the US, when counting off alternative hegemons and the possible world they would have allowed us to live over the past 60 years, it is difficult to conceive of another that would have allowed as much autonomy.
History. Perspective. Oh, the blood! The death! The tyranny! Pardon the melodrama, but other than the two world wars, the past century has been an incredible time for most of the world.
I must admit that the probability that it will be technically possible for some lone nut or 3rd world dictator to design a new disease in the next few decades to wipe most of us out is worrying. The fact that if we get into space, where quarantine is easy, such weapoms won't work is only a minor reassurance.
We agree about world government, on the other hand I think we desperately need a rule of international law, if only to inspect the aforementioned dictators. Having legal judgement without government is a difficult trick - probably the nearest anybody got to it was done by the medieval Popes in Europe.
You are right about the alternative hegemons - as a Brit my objection to US hegemony is that it has been clumsy & thoughtless more than wicked & sometimes, as with Yugoslavia, allowed itself to be led by the nose by evil "friends". While I wish Russia & China the best I would much prefer that space was part of the anglosphere, preferably led by Dan Dare. It is only because our leaders are Luddites that I am pleased when China does act.
And on those cheery notes - have a Merry Christmas.
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“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” _George Orwell
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