Tag Archives: Political Theory

Random Thoughts On My Return

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My thoughts on the last leg of my schlepp back to the US were mixed….how did my 4 month jaunt get stretched to double the length, for starters..

And why does a continent as rich in natural resources as South America have poverty of any kind….and why is customer service such a difficult concept for some cultures….

But let me rewind a bit.

I left you in Salta, where I spent a two days recovering from a 33 hour bus trip from Montevideo sans any food.

That wasn’t provoked by an attack of asceticism.  When I got to Buenos Aires, I had no Argentine pesos on me, the banks were closed, the ATM wouldn’t take my card for some reason, and it was pouring too  heavily for me to venture out into the city. The restaurants at the station wouldn’t accept Uruguayan pesos or a card. So, between Friday morning in Uruguay and late Monday in Salta I literally ate nothing, except for a soggy white bread sandwich with watery cheese and ham. I didn’t really feel hungry, though, until I got off at Salta….

But more on all that in another post, when I’ll give you my impressions of my trip back..

Today, I’m still catching up and will just leave you with a few random thoughts….

1. The infrastructure and organization of the United States is still unparalleled and impressive in every way, in spite of deterioration and neglect…

2. Americans should get over their love affair with politics. They’re bad at it, it doesn’t suit their style, and it annoys everyone else. America is at her best making things happen. The business of America really is business.

3. I love the English language. With a smattering of Asian and European languages for comparison, I still find everything I want in English.

4. You can lead a rich, well informed, and not uncomfortable life without a car or a bicycle, without air conditioning, a fan, internet, a phone, an I-Pod, a blackberry, wireless, a TV, or even a radio.

5. If you’re willing to drink tap water and eat stall food, you can eat every meal out on 2 dollars a day in Peru, and have meat/fish at least once a day. If you cooked at home, you could eat well for under 15 dollars a month.

6. America has been a unique experiment in history, made possible because several favorable elements lined up in one spot on the globe. One of those elements – in fact, one of the cardinal ones – was the puritan work ethic. What it does it say that our intelligentsia, by and large, despises it.

7. A man can be free with just economic freedom. Even if he cannot act politically, or speak his thoughts, he can think them. If he can think his own thoughts, he is still his own man. But a man without economic freedom can think only his master’s thoughts….and his master will be the state.

8. It isn’t the politicians we need to worry about. They have to stand election. It isn’t even the financiers. They have to reckon with bankruptcy.

But the media faces neither elections nor a balance-sheet. There you have the tyrant.

Bernard Stiegler On Justice And Shame

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French philosopher Bernard Stiegler writes about the need to have an ideal that informs the competition of the market place. This ideal would prevent competition and efficiency from degenerating into what he calls shamelessness, a state he associates both with globalization and with the suppression of individuation in modern societies:

“Imitation cannot be the first or unique principle of a new political and economic community. It is precisely to the degree that relations between countries allied in the same political community are not reduced to economic exchanges and competition, but instead presuppose a common interest above particular interests, that one can distinguish between a political union and a simple league of economic interests like the Hanseatic League or the Alena today, as well as countless other zones of special economic exchanges. Continue reading →

Doug Valentine On The Impotence Of Progressives

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Doug Valentine offers a piece on the futility of much activism.

(Please note: The opinions in this piece are not mine. They are Doug’s. But his point was not to exclude himself or any other writer who claims to be an activist. Its something all of us feel one time or other. I know I do. Frequently. At some level, what writers do is perfectly useless and only a form of self-advancement, if that).

Why Don’t All You People Just Shut Up!

“As my friend Roger says, ‘Never have so many held Washington hangers-on office for so long and talked endlessly to each other for so much money and done so little as the Republic rotted. The utter impotence of the progressive think tanks, lobbies, etc. is a great unwritten story.’ Continue reading →

MindBody: Reading Between The Tea-Leaves

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When I was young – around 11 or 12 – I recall having very strong hunches about things that would pan out. Nothing weird, simply day-to-day things. I’d lose my stamp album and then I’d go to sleep and in my dreams I’d see it was in the bottom drawer of a cupboard. And when I woke up and went to the drawer, I’d find it. I  would have very strong feelings I’d pick up from other people’s emotions. When someone said something, I’d feel the emotion from which they spoke. I’d hear anger, and overlaid on that, jealousy or envy. I’d often have a sense of what someone was going to say before they said it.

None of this was overtly alarming. It blended very easily into what I considered normal and never made me feel different. I didn’t talk about it to anyone, except my mother, who dismissed it as “just imagination.” But I always knew it wasn’t either “just” or “imagination.” Continue reading →

Coincidence In Nabokov´s “Lolita”

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Anthony Uhlman on Vladimir Nabokov

“Brian Boyd, in his magnificent biography, shows how Nabokov developed an aesthetic method which at once focuses meticulously on unrepeatable particulars, and stresses the importance of pattern. Coincidences, apparently meaningless details, when examined, are shown to be linked by gossamer threads to something other, some still more complex pattern. Clearly, Nabokov could not have known, when he published Lolita, that a then three year old boy called Brian Boyd would grow to become Dr Boyd, author of numerous works on Nabokov, including the definitive biography. Yet, when Humbert first takes Lolita to a hotel after her mother has died and she is at last at his mercy, he meets a conference attendee in the Men’s Room who ‘inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy’ (125).

What can we can say about a pure coincidence like this, one which shows little respect for chronological or logical plausibility? At present, through science, philosophy, sociology, and religion, we are able to say very little: only artists, like Nabokov, somehow help us to consider this, offering a shudder of recognition, allowing us to apprehend how apparently finite lives might achieve an intuition of the infinite.“

My Comment

Coincidences have fascinated me since childhood..probably because I always seem to walk into them..

I seem to evoke synchronicity quite mysteriously. So much so that it turned into an intellectual interest that led me to study Jung´s writing for a number of years and then many forms of symbolic language, mythology and analysis.

Is Amartya Sen Good For Poor People in India?

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Sauvik Chakravarti on Amartya Sen:

“If we observe poor Indians going about making their economic achievements, we see that they are hugely gifted. In Indian markets, it is the poorest who scout around for the best buys and bargain most energetically – while the rich get easily conned! A joke is told about Indians in England – once known as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’: Why can’t Indians play soccer? Because, whenever they get a corner, they put a shop on it! A bania (an Indian trader) is rumoured to be able to buy from a Scot and sell to a Jew and still emerge with a profit! Economists like Myrdal and Sen do not see these gifted people: they see flaws in the people and perfection in their rulers……

Sen, of course, is always on the side of the poor and the marginalised. He believes in the doctrine of redistributive justice; and his most famous work is on famines. However, soft hearts can do a lot of harm; hard heads are far better. A renowned hard head, Lord Bauer, in 1961, in his first book on India, commented that beggary on the streets of India and Pakistan is not a proof of poverty; rather, this widespread beggary exists only because the dominant communities in both these countries, Hindus and Muslims respectively, believe they earn spiritual merit by giving alms to the poor. In these very countries, there are no Parsee, Sikh or Jain beggars because these communities practice collective charity, discourage beggary as a blot on the entire community, and encourage self-help. Today, India has 60,000 tonnes of foodgrain rotting in state godowns. Famine is a thing of the past. And ‘poverty’ needs to be meaningfully understood.

Indeed, notions of ‘redistributive justice’ should be unceremoniously buried……The Law cannot be Robin Hood – and, no matter what, Robin Hood was a thief. Notions of ‘redistributive justice’ have made democracy an ugly game by which some groups gain at the expense of others…..

A majority of the world’s people, all of them desperately poor, need freedom from their predatory states. For their sake, we need economists who genuinely value freedom. Amartya Sen is not one of them.”

Totalitarianism: The Total Domination of Man

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From “Evil: The Crime Against Humanity,” by Jerome Kohn

The “total domination of man” was radically evil, in Arendt’s eyes, not only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense. She asked: Why should lust for power, which from the beginning of recorded history has been considered the political and social sin par excellence, suddenly transcend all previously known limitations of self-interest and utility and attempt not simply to dominate men as they are but to change their very nature; not only to kill whoever is in the way of further power accumulation but also innocent and harmless bystanders, and this even when such murder is an obstacle, rather than an advantage, for the accumulation of power?
(see “Ideology and Propaganda”)

There is no ready answer to that question. In Hitler’s case it is well known that his unrelenting dehumanization and destruction of those who presented no threat to him hindered his ability to fight effectively against his real enemies at the end of World War II. What is the point of dominating men at any cost, not as they are but in order “to change their very nature”? If it is for the sake of “the consistency of a lying world order,” as she went on to suggest, what is the point of a system that even if it succeeded in destroying the human world would not end in the creation of a “thousand-year Reich” or “Messianic Age” but only in self-destruction? Arendt, to be sure, never thought the suicidal “victory” of totalitarianism likely. That would first require global rule by one totalitarian power, and in that regard she believed that Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 was symbolically significant in spite of his pact with Stalin two years earlier and in spite of the two leaders’ mutual admiration which she emphasized. Moreover, she saw that “no system has ever been less capable [than totalitarianism] of gradually expanding its sphere of influence and holding on to its conquests.” Most important of all, because plurality is the inescapable condition of human existence–“not Man but men inhabit this planet”–Arendt increasingly came to consider farfetched the notion that a single totalitarian regime could ever destroy the entire world.”

Intellectual Self-Defense for Libertarians

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I posted this at Lew Rockwell last week:

“There are two ways to approach the world.

In one, the popular one now, you try to control the bad actors. You create laws to trip them up before hand, or round them up after. You rely on regulations and regulators.

Nothing wrong with that, except that we already have lots of regulators and it didn’t help.

Why?

The reason is so obvious you question the intelligence of anyone who can’t see it. It’s simple. People willing and able to scam the system are going to be willing and able to game the regulations too.

In a fight between regulators and scammers, my money’s on the scammers. They’re usually richer and nastier.

In the second approach, you don’t overlook the bad actors. You hope they get what they have coming to them. But you don’t rely on laws or lawyers because you’re old enough to have figured out that bit about the bad actors being bigger and nastier than the good ones.

So what do you do?

You focus on getting out of the way of the bad guys. You limit the damage they can do to you. And most of all, you figure out how to avoid them in the first place.

Here are five warnings I wish I’d heeded more:

1. Be careful whom you deal with

Don’t lie down with a dog and you won’t get up with fleas. Delousing yourself is much harder than not getting loused up in the first place.

But delousing is what we do a lot of these days. It’s practically the only thing going on in the economy now. Right now there are people all over the country delousing the SEC.. and the Congress… and the banks…and the hedge-funds. There’s even a global delousing effort going on. The fumigators are at work. Pest control is in full force and the exterminators are crawling over the baseboards in the cellar. There’s an international delousing effort at the BIS, with headquarters at Switzerland and local shops all over the world.

A Bug Czar has been crowned and fleas have been declared insecta non grata.
There – that should do it, eh? Any bug with a classical education should figure it out.

Which is another way of saying none of this will work. Or if it works, it won’t work the way you want it to.

The fact is, lice and ticks are at home on a dog. It’s R & R for them. Holiday Inn, Bed & Breakfast, and a luxury spa combined. Get them to leave? Good luck. Much better, don’t take your dog to bed in the first place. Much better, if you have a dog, let him drool in the kennel, not on your pillow.

The short version of all that is we do jack-ass things and then wonder who’s braying.

I say jack-ass with no disrespect. Some say that those who get conned “deserve what they get.”
That is the New Testament of the confidence man and the Sunday sermon of the predator.
As financial doctrine, it occasionally makes sense. As moral insight, it’s almost always junk. Very often victims are only weak, naive, or ignorant. The kind of people who wouldn’t know malice if they saw it in the dollar-bin with a white tag tied to its toe. They’re people who follow the rules, thinking other people follow them too. They’re honorable, so they believe in the honor of their fellow man.

Now, not only is being honorable not wrong, it’s the way things should be. But doves should learn not to coo at snakes, and beautiful souls have to wise up to what goes on in the rest of the world… or expect an ugly life.

So, rule number one. Research the people you plan to make your associates. And don’t dismiss your research. When you find out your prospective partner filed for bankruptcy six times in the last ten years, don’t tell yourself it will be different this time, because it won’t. One bankruptcy is a financial failure. Three is a losing streak. Six is a career decision. Follow your gut instinct.

If your boss conducts business with a wink and a leer, don’t pass it off as southern charm. He’s not Dagwood Bumstead looking for a lump of emotional candy. He’s a creep, and you’re a pawn in his narcissistic chess game. Ask for a transfer about two minutes after that. If you’re out of a job, so be it. There’s no guarantee you won’t be out of one, if you put up with it.

2. Never stop learning

Ignorance kills, as a lawyer friend of mine likes to say. Don’t be ignorant. Learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. Do your research. Know what you’re dealing with. With the internet, it’s much easier. You can do a google search on anything or anyone. You can go into google news archives and find newspaper articles and information from as far back as the 1980s.
So start reading.

Project Gutenberg has thousands of classic books online. PubMed allows you to access medical journals. LexisNexis will allow you to research law. Edgar will show you company filings. You can search houses for sale on Realtor.com and look up where a house is on Google Earth. You can go to WhoIs to find out about domain names and IP address. You can find out how well a website is doing by looking up Technorati or Alexa rankings. The Way Back Machine lets you look up old magazine articles, even when they’ve been pulled off the current site. Some sites like Zabasearch collect people’s information and put it all in one spot. That’s free information. If you pay, you can get much more.

Mind you, I find data sites downright creepy, especially when they’re online, and especially when they’re centralized and can be accessed with a key-stroke. If people have paid for their sins, why not let them start fresh? There may be a recording angel, but surely he lives farther north than DC.

On the other hand, just because the technology is already out there, it pays to keep up with what’s being done with it. Because if it’s out there, your business partner… or your employer… or your enemies ….or your friends.. probably know about it already. They might even have mined it for information to deploy against you. Shouldn’t you be prepared?

3. Limit what people know about you. Many of us from small towns grew up around trustworthy people. Our friends and our neighbors knew everything about us, and we didn’t mind, because no one was malicious enough to hurt anyone else.

The big world isn’t so nice. People who have things to hide themselves will be only too anxious to find something on you, attack being the best form of defense in their minds. If they can’t find anything wrong, they’ll hit you with whatever else they can, even a silly thing you said casually. They’ll dig out what your crazy cousin did fifteen years ago. Or perhaps you saved your husband’s latest rant about his mother online. Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning to find it in the New Yorker.

So, keep things to yourself, even among close friends and relatives.

That’s a hard one for me. I’m a verbal person. I write, I talk, even if it’s only to myself. Leave me next to a blank wall and I’ll strike up a conversation. And it will be two-way.

Fortunately, most people are unlikely to hurt you. But occasionally you’ll run into a psychopath who will. And if you work in politics, the media, or in business, psychopathy is practically the norm.

So keep track of what’s being written about you on the net with Google alerts. Write to sites that aggregate information and ask for your name to be removed from their lists. You might have to repeat that every year . Put yourself on the national do-not-call list so that your telephone number’s out of the reach of marketers.

And then limit the information you give out, even to your lawyer.
It’s taken me half a lifetime to figure out that any questionnaire shoved under my nose doesn’t automatically deserve to be filled in. Leave things blank unless you’re told it’s mandatory to fill it in. Or become creative. Develop fictitious personalities, throw-away mail addresses, exotic, non-existent addresses. Use another name when doing business. Avoid registering products or filling out questionaires in your own name. Use fake birth-dates and vary them according to a system that you, and only you, know. Change your passwords every few weeks, using a system to keep track. Write them down broken up in alternate pages in a notebook, without anything to signify what the numbers mean. If the book is lost, no one will be able to make use of the information. Neither will you, of course, but losing a little time is better than losing your savings.

Hacking email, spying on private business, blackmailing and outing people, it’s all fair game these days. Attacking the privacy of public figures has become a national pastime – witness the Letterman case. But it’s not just public life. Private business is a circus of outing and shaming too. Corporations spy on and threaten each other, as well as their employees. Employees write tell-all books.

We live in a spy state, where every half-wit believes it’s his divine right to nose into anything, no matter how little it’s his business. So, these days not only is it wise to keep your own secrets, you might be wise to keep other people’s secrets.

But what should you do if inspite of that, you become a target of an attack on your privacy?
Often, nothing, unfortunately.

I’ll give you the example of an aunt of mine who didn’t want anyone to know she was sick, in case it would prejudice employers against hiring her. A colleague not only hacked her email but forwarded details about her illness to dozens of people. A frail, sensitive woman, her health broke down under the stress.

I’ll give you the advice I gave her. Say your piece once in private, and say it once in public. Then forget about it. Move on. You’re not the first person to have been screwed over and you won’t be the last. Innocent people are constantly being ruined by the powerful and the unscrupulous. That’s the ugly truth of our system. Reputations are often lost, unjustly. Our salvation is to worry less about our reputations and more about our consciences.
What we do where no one can see and none can retaliate is the test of who we are.

As for what others think, the world is a large place. Move far away, if you need to. As for the system, stop trying to reform it. It’s beyond reform.

4. Learn to say no

Telling someone no doesn’t come naturally. We’re trained to go through life being agreeable. In fact, learning to say no might be the hardest thing you learn. But it might also be the most important, and once you learn it, it can become good sport.

Speaking for myself, I’ve come to relish saying no to pests. And the nay-saying that gives me the greatest pleasure of all is nay-saying to internet marketers. It’s not that I’m ever rude to one. I never hang up. My malice is much deeper. I let them prattle on, even asking polite questions. Then I stop them courteously and ask them why they think they have the right to call me on a weekend and waste half-an-hour selling me something I didn’t ask for. Occasionally, when they’re especially pushy, my toying becomes cruel. I turn the tables on them. Instead of selling me things, they find themselves signing petitions or supporting causes or accepting market analysis or invitations to baby showers or anything else at hand.

Can I call you, I ask. Tonight? Tomorrow? I press them to reply. Can you buy two? Now? Pretty soon, they’re begging to hang up.

Try it and see. It’s balm in gilead.

I advise you to use this technique on rude or uncooperative colleagues too. Give them a taste of their own medicine, and do it generously. Let their cup run over. You will get something better than love. You’ll get respect.

5. Learn how to retaliate

Despite all the myths propagated about forgiveness, I’ve learned that submitting meekly to injustice usually breeds weakness, resentment, and ill- health. There’s nothing that drives up your self-respect as much as socking it back to bullies. I’m not advising being unduly aggressive. Try a friendly approach as long as you can. But when that doesn’t work, time to get tough. Throw some metaphoric crockery. Thumb your nose and thumb it publicly. Turn on the spotlight and watch the cockroaches run.

In other cases, all you may need to do is wait. Time has a knack of delivering even the biggest fish to a patient angler…and when that moment comes, don’t flinch. Yank that line and watch your target flop and wriggle on the sand.

Watch with a smile. Defy the received wisdom and develop a healthy conscience about revenge. It’s highly moral. Only our wimpy but violent age derides its feline nobility.

The uncomfortable truth is the New Testament is meant for people on the same moral level of development….for family.. and for friends. But in the big, dirty world, the Old Testament works much better.

Gandhi said an eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind. I say an eye for an eye, and after the first blind man, everyone else’s eyesight gets better in a hurry.

Become a moral vigilante. Why waste time going through the system if you can get better results outside of it? Use the law to warn, to shame, to threaten. But don’t labor under the delusion that a court case always helps. Your enemy will pour his time and money into creating mushroom clouds of paper. He’ll drown you in verbiage and “accidentally-on-purposes.” He’ll postpone and prevaricate and petition. He’ll appeal and block and delay…. and hide behind a fog of corporate black ink like an injured squid.

Instead, if you’re obliged by professional ethics to speak up, consider other channels of actions besides the court. Try mediation or arbitration. Perhaps you’re better off complaining to the Better Business Bureau. Or posting on a consumer forum.

Monetary compensation is often not the best justice either. It can make you look like an extortionist. Try going public. Give the bully a taste of his own medicine. Post the hacker’s private information on a website. Put him on the run. That might not make you rich, but the moral satisfaction is tremendous.

Of course, it could also be dangerous. You risk violating the law yourself. In that case, you might be best off to leave your job. Maybe even leave town. Leave the thugs to the mercies of the universe. It sometimes does a better job of retribution than it’s given credit for. Villains do not always go to jail. And if the skeptics are right, they might never go to hell. But they often get dragged into divorce court, which is a good deal worse, from all accounts.

And meanwhile, there are all those other ways the wicked verily get their reward.
Envious rivals cut their throats; the tax man cometh, and the SEC with him; and then cometh old age, failing libido, dead-beat in-laws and brain-dead grandchildren. The inheritance get squandered and the sycophants and courtiers vanish with the money. The trash-mouth gets acid reflux, the glutton gets dyspepsia and the aging lecher ends up alone, romancing his own hairless skull and wrinkled hide.

Then at the end comes the greatest punishment of all for persisting in evil deeds. You stare into the mirror and evil stares back at you, looking not so much devilish as hollow and bewildered, less like a fiend from hell and more like a Goldman CEO at a Congressional hearing.

Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil. It was left to our age to practice the evil of banality. Habit, laziness, gullibility, ignorance, vanity, greed, fear, cowardice, bravado. We are duped not by heroic evil, but by humdrum vice.

The greatest and best defense we have against the charlatans and knaves who brought our society to its knees is not the law.

It is self-knowledge and discipline.”

Roderick Long: Six Talking Points for Libertarians

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Roderick Long at Austro-Athenian blog has a list of principles he thinks libertarians should emphasize in public interaction to define themselves as a clear-cut alternative to either conservatives or liberals:

1. Big business and big government are (for the most part) natural allies.

2. Although conservative politicians pretend to hate big government, and liberal politicians pretend to hate big business, most mainstream policies – both liberal and conservative – involve (slightly different versions of) massive intervention on behalf of the big-business/big-government elite at the expense of ordinary people.

3. Liberal politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of intervention on behalf of the weak; conservative politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of non-intervention and free markets – but in both cases the rhetoric is belied by the reality.

4. A genuine policy of intervention on behalf of the weak, if liberals actually tried it, wouldn’t work either, since the nature of government power would automatically warp it toward the interests of the elite.

5. A genuine policy of non-intervention and free markets, if conservatives actually tried it, would work, since free competition would empower ordinary people at the expense of the elite.

6. Since conservative policies, despite their associated free-market rhetoric, are mostly the diametrical opposite of free-market policies, the failures of conservative policies do not constitute an objection to (but rather, if anything, a vindication of) free-market policies.

Bastiat On Roman Rule

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Many thanks to Kevin Duffy for pointing me in the direction of this essay by Bastiat. It’s a marvel, filled with ideas, each of which could be developed into a full book in its own right.

“What is to be said of Roman morality? And I am not speaking here of the relations of father and son, of husband and wife, of patron and client, of master and servant, of man and God—relations that slavery, by itself alone, could not fail to transform into a whole network of depravity; I wish to dwell only on what is called the admirable side of the Republic, i.e., patriotism. What was this patriotism? Hatred of foreigners, the destruction of all civilization, the stifling of all progress, the scourging of the world with fire and sword, the chaining of women, children, and old men to triumphal chariots—this was glory, this was virtue….It is from Rome undoubtedly that this adage comes to us, true in regard to theft, false in regard to labor: one nation’s loss is another nation’s gain—an adage that still governs the world.

To acquire an idea of Roman morality, imagine in the heart of Paris an organization of men who hate to work, determined to satisfy their wants by deceit and force, and consequently at war with society. Doubtless a certain moral code and even some solid virtues will soon manifest themselves in such an organization. Courage, perseverance, self-control, prudence, discipline, constancy in misfortune, deep secrecy, punctilio, devotion to the community—such undoubtedly will be the virtues that necessity and prevailing opinion would develop among these brigands; such were those of the buccaneers; such were those of the Romans. It may be said that, in regard to the latter, the grandeur of their enterprise and the immensity of their success has thrown so glorious a veil over their crimes as to transform them into virtues. And this is precisely why that school is so pernicious. It is not abject vice, it is vice crowned with splendor, that seduces men’s souls.”