Understanding the Socialist Delusion
Paul Murphy Democrats are nuts, and their violence will get worse - but to help them back to sanity we must understand what's going on with them. We can observe the left's behavior without understanding or judging it. In general that behavior can be summarized as a collective response to two conflicting imperatives: shout allegiance to basic Christian, and thus American, values; act at every opportunity in opposition to those values. That's insane, but it is happening all around us, every day -- ask any of the screaming harridans who protested the Kavanaugh confirmation and they'll tell you they're committed to the ideals of freedom, human rights, truth, and the rule of law -- and yet their actions showed them spitting in the face of all they believe in, all that's good about the American judicial and political system. Their behavior has to change, but we can't help them make that happen without first understanding it, and understanding starts with honest description. Although many highly visible leftists are so politically focused they're intolerable, most ordinary democrats seem like sane, sensible, superficially educated (i.e.they present as literate, but have little or no factual knowledge of science, history, or western culture), and reasonably intelligent people you'd be glad to have as friends or neighbors -- until the conversation touches on politics and you realize they've placed themselves beyond the reach of reason in this one area of their lives. You get together for a nice dinner: their oldest is in university but won't study, yours drives too fast, their dog isn't quite as gassy as yours, and everyone agrees the Twins will make it to the playoffs this year - but then someone brings up politics and it turns out they voted for Clintons every time; think Kavanaugh a rapist, see Trump as a Hitler wannabe, adore John Kerry and Jane Fonda, and think Cuba a successful democracy with great medical care for everyone. That behavioral dichotomy demonstrates a limited, but very real, form of insanity in which the person's actions in the political context absolutely contradict their own values and most deeply held beliefs. Thus they really do believe in civilized values and human rights, but instantly sever relationships with old friends who admit to thinking that the words "Peace and Love" don't belong on posters of Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara; abhor political violence and think the Nazis epitomize evil but excuse and even support Antifa; hate racism but insist on racial quotas; value American rights and American freedoms but see nothing wrong with jailing Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on a pretext; demand rational analysis and reasoned argument from everyone on everything, but respond to almost any factual political statement you make with a vituperative ad hominem attack either on you or on some other conservative somewhere or somewhen. The behavior is insane but typical for cultists in the later stages of delusion -- exactly that chronicled by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in their study of believers who seem perfectly normal in their everyday lives, but repeatedly double down to the point of violence and suicide on loyalty to a prophet whose earlier prophecies have undeniably failed. So, for the progressive left, which prophet and what prophecy? Not Thomas Malthus as he actually was, but Malthus as misread, misinterpreted, and misused by nineteenth-century European cafe intellectuals like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Frege, and Heidegger. Scratch any leftist and you'll find the foundational belief: there are too many people, the world has limited resources, and we're all going to die. It's nonsense, it's the lifeboat earth fallacy, and it's not what Malthus actually thought, but the belief identifies the prophet and the source of the prophecy that failed, that continues to fail: the future the progressive left both most fears and most assiduously strives to create. At base the prophecies driving today's progressive movement grew from the social needs and limitations of 19th century, mainly German, cafe intellectuals using unintelligibility as a kind of emperor's clothes to claim and maintain a symbiotic relationship with those whose goodwill and credulity they depended on for their livelihoods. In reality, Malthus was a hardworking English vicar fascinated by human behavior under stress who ultimately understood the role of markets in individual behavior well enough to come away fairly optimistic about humanity's future, but that isn't how he was understood by the self-proclaiming elites of the day. Those people generally struggled through some early translations of his writings, stroked their collective beard, and announced to the gathered pretenders that everything Malthus ever said or thought was about the allocation of, and thus the struggle for, limited resources -- and then, after several decades of profound thought and good living, added a little oversimplified Darwin to derive their survivalist programs for the most brutal forms of eugenics and "scientific" national socialism in which the concept of ownership is done away with and the leadership, which owns nothing, controls everything and everyone. Thus, the prophecy that fails holds that the socialist ideas developed on the assumption that everything is ultimately about access to resources should provide a better life for those who attempt to implement them -- a consequence reality consistently denies. Think of the history of modern progressives from Marx to Soros as Jim Jones and apostolic socialism writ large: not just 900 dead in Guyana after thirty years of disappointment and re-entrenchment, but as over 100 million dead and ten times that many lives destroyed in a century of worldwide disappointments and retrenchments ranging from the Bolsheviks in Russia to Antifa in Berkeley. Normally, of course, cults die out as their prophecies fail, the less committed fade from sight, and the more committed eventually take what's left of the movement with them when they die. In this case, however, colleges and universities referentially teaching ideas derived from poseurs like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx continually churn out new Bernie Bros -- and the obvious failure of any form of socialism to ever produce the promised result merely separates the true devotees, who double down on their earnestness each time there's a new Pol Pot or Maduro, from those willing to face reality. To put all this in a more current context, there may be as many as sixty million people who routinely vote Democratic in the United States, but only a small proportion of them actually invest significant physical and emotional resources in working for the party and an even smaller group, possibly numbering no more than a few thousand, truly understand and support the progressive left's use of the party in its attempt to remake the American political and economic system in its own totalitarian image. Thus there may only be a million or two true useful idiots -- committed believers who have no idea that the leadership is wearing the Democratic party like an Edgar suit but teeter on the edge of sanity as an ever increasing proportion of their refusal to face reality expresses in hatred for conservatives and conservative causes. Unfortunately, small as the numbers of the true believers may be, they're big enough: as of July 5th, 2018 John Nolte's Breitbart list of media approved acts of violence against Trump supporters ran to 613 items -- and new reports of significant violence against conservative candidates and organizations are now a daily occurrence. Worse, I hope to see a massive red wave in November but if that happens many of these people will have their belief in the social support available to them, a belief the mainstream media fosters at every opportunity, suddenly destroyed -- and when that happens many will fall away, but some will go over the edge and head straight for the proverbial clock tower to attack, not the ideas or institutions representative of conservatism and constitutional law, but the persons representing those ideals. I expect, in other words, to see a serious escalation of liberal violence against individuals after the midterms. Author's note: Back in mid 2014 I drafted a short book under the title "Useless Eaters: Understanding the Socialist Delusion" which expands on the themes of this essay. At the time the core testable prediction: that we would see a dramatic increase in political violence as groups like Black Lives Matter and Obama's Organizing for America morphed into modern day brownshirts seemed almost indefensible. Now we're seeing evidence of that change underway everyday -- and your comments on the draft, available on telearb.net, are invited.
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US Troops Deploy 'Overwhelming Force' Against Iceland's Beer Supplies
And apparently, Icelanders did not expect US troops drink, a lot! Luckily the scrum only lasted until the beer began to run out. Beyond that and things could get bad, really bad. Silicon Valley nannies are phone police for kids But I see it every day. Yesterday I had to go to Costco. It was jammed with people, the parking lot was full, and I had to park around back. The lines inside were miles long but I was there to get an Rx for Sir Time the Enchanter Sprinkles von Vicious, so I didn't have to wait. As I left, I noticed that all of the people walking into the store were zombies, all were staring at their phones as they walked. Entire families walked by me each staring at their phone. A father and young son walked past, not talking, staring at their phones. It was one of the creepiest things I've seen in a long time. I expected one of them to go full Donald Sutherland on me! Just say no!
And tell your kids they cannot use their phones in your presence. The kids and I had to have an intervention with Wife to get her to leave her phone in her office during dinner. She would actually sit at the table and fondle her phone or even scroll through junk while we were eating. That was perhaps 6 or 7 years ago and it worked, she seems cured of the addicition today. The Bullshit-Job Boom
Are you stuck in a “bullshit job”? Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism It would seem my last post made an impression on someone already! Rise of the machines: Automation reshapes job market
"Looking at a map of California on a projector screen, Johannes Moenius, an economics professor at the University of Redlands, hovered his mouse over the Inland Empire, which glowed with a splotch of red pixels. The colored dots signified how susceptible an area would be to job losses caused by automation. And the alarm-bell red that covered Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario signaled high risk — roughly 63 percent of tasks performed by workers in the area could be automated in the future. To Moenius, the rise of robots in warehouses, factories and fast-food restaurants presents danger for places like the Inland Empire, where most residents work in logistics and the service industry and just 21 percent of adults have four-year degrees. As technology transforms the nature of work in California, how do people most at risk find their way to new jobs? “We’re facing a major challenge,” Moenius said. “If we don’t do anything, then it will turn into an apocalypse.'" One would think an economics professor might know something about the history of jobs if he is to speak on jobs, but no. Jobs are a new concept which came about because the industrial economic model needed people to work in factories. The result was that people who had previously lived on farms and who did not know what the word job meant were pushed out of their farm positions and forced to seek work for pay in city factories. Jobs were created to allow the industrialists to accomplish their goals of building autos or laying rail for trains and to attract men to work the new jobs they had to redistribute some of the wealth they were creating. Before the industrial period, there were few jobs; wealth was redistributed in other ways, people were poorer, had less liberty, and poorer health, and a lower standard of living. During the industrial period, massive wealth was created, and jobs and ownership of assets were used to redistribute that wealth. One might think an economics professor would know all of this. Nope. So, today we are facing a new socio-economic model change just as we did when we moved from the agricultural model to the industrial model. People like this professor are incapable of looking at history for guidance. While the transition from agriculture to industry was rough at times, the results are stunning. We are wealthier today than ever in history. Why would he believe that the next socio-economic change will not move us forward to an even more prosperous world? All of economic history shows this is the outcome, more prosperity over time. Here is a good video which shows how the infantile beginnings of the industrial model triggered a profound redistribution of wealth making us all far more wealthy than any man who lived even 100 years before us. Don't believe me, give up sewage sanitation, garbage sanitation, our knowledge of food handling, refrigeration, and medicine. But remember, of those, medicine is the least important. In 1930, life expectancy was about 56 years. Today life expectancy is about 80. Most of that was due to all of the above except medicine which only accounted for about 5-10% of the total improvement. Medicine was important, but refrigeration was more so, as was sewage sanitation, garbage sanitation, and many other simple but powerful improvements. Give those up, and your life expectancy drops - a lot. If we are willing to rely on history to suss out what is most likely to happen as we exit this model change, we find that we should expect the new socio-economic model is highly likely to create and redistribute wealth in mind-boggling amounts. You must either rely on history for the roadmap if offers or you must rely on fever swamp beliefs and neurotic dystopian fears. History may not hold direct answers, but it offers at least an understanding of how humans handled these problems in the past the outcomes they generated. I fully expect that jobs will disappear within the next 50 to 75 years. The shift from agriculture to industry took about twice that long to get fully underway, and it seems clear this change will be much faster (other historical experience would be the shift from hunter/gatherer to agriculture which took millennia so arguably we are speeding these changes by order of ten each time). If that is true the first change took millennia, the second took a few hundred years, meaning this change should take a few decades. I think this is probably right but sticking to 50+ years is a more conservative estimate. Progressives need to be charged for false advertising. They are regressive, not progressive; they are neo-victorian, neo-Malthusian, and neo-Luddite. They live in terror of change, and this drives them into a dystopian madness. Remember the Population Bomb or Soylent Green? These were the dystopian fantasies of the 1960s, and Earth Day. Global Warming is a modern dystopian fantasy designed to assist the progressives as they stand athwart the engines of change screaming STOP! This fear of a lack of jobs is one more way the progressives stand athwart the engines of change shouting stop. They wish to keep these changes from happening. They wish to make the progressive socio-economic model permanent even if that means they have to turn you and billions of other humans into serfs, or corpses. The one thing socialism/progressivism does well in democidal mass murder. No political model has ever come close to the mass murder efficiency of socialism/progressivism. There will be problems which arise from this dramatic and unsettling change. We should do what we can to help people who are injured by the change, but we cannot try to slow or stop these changes. If we do, we are cutting off our leg to spite the body. If anything, we should be attempting to smooth the way to allow these changes to occur unleashing rapid wealth creation and more efficient wealth redistribution. An election looms. If you wish to keep the current low prosperity progressive model we saw under President Obama, vote for Democratic candidates. If you want something better, you need to carefully find the candidates who will pursue these changes and help usher in the dawn of the new socio-economic model. The establishment Republicans will not do this, and they will need to be voted out of office just as will the Democrats. Sadly, it is time for Americans to turn away from the three pillars of America - Family, Friends, and Work/leisure. We need to turn our attention to politics and reduce the malign political system created by the progressives. If we don't our children and grandchildren will pay for our foolishness. "Since the 2007-09 recession, the prospect of getting a well-paying job with just a high school diploma is dim." Of course, it is but this is because our K-12 schools are designed to create factory workers, and college to create factory managers. FYI, there are no more factory jobs and what few remain will disappear soon. We need to change our educational system to match the needs of the new socio-economic model but because the progressives are holding back the dawn of the new model we do not know what it will look like and cannot recreate our schools. The first thing we do, we get rid of all the progressives! "But there’s no consensus on what the future will look like. One 2013 study, which Moenius used to build his analysis, estimated that 47 percent of American jobs were at risk of being automated. A 2016 paper put that figure at only 9 percent. A study in 2017 posited that 23 percent to 44 percent of work hours in the United States will be automated by 2030 — particularly in jobs with a high degree of repetition such as machinists, office support and retail sales. But that study also said jobs would be added, especially among care providers such as surgeons, nurses, and construction workers." Good, humans should be freed up to do things robots cannot do. If a robot can do the job, it is not something we should have humans waste their time doing. Every single human has skills and talents which allow them to act to make the world a better place, let's get them out of jobs and doing more productive things. "Virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa are being used in hotels, standing in for concierges or front desk assistants. Self-driving vehicles could upend the country’s transportation and logistics sectors, but it’s not clear how quickly those cars and trucks will be widely deployed." Thank you for making my argument. Do we need to waste people driving taxis when a robot can do it more safely? No. Free the human to do something more useful and necessary. "'Generally speaking, our academic institutions feel reluctant to place a high value on employability. Traditionally, our attitude has been: We prepare students to be better citizens, deeper thinkers,” said Oakley, the community college chancellor. “That’s all very true. But we have also become a proxy for employability, so we have to realize much more acutely the importance of job preparation in our curriculum.'" It took me a minute, but this has to be a comedy bit. Universities believe they "prepare students to be better citizens, deeper thinkers ..." In reality, they are indoctrinating the students outside of the STEM fields to be progressive zombies who cannot think at all. They are not making "better citizens" or "deeper thinkers." That is a joke. I could go on, but it is midnight, and even I need to sleep on occasion. Read the rest and marvel at the progressive nonsense and drivel. Responding to External Reality | Newgeography.com
States need to get rid of land use planning, and urban growth boundaries and urban service boundaries. Everything else is window dressing and lies. This Oregon measure will not solve or even change the problem other than for a few families. Affordable housing measures put to Oregon, Portland-area voters The problem is not that the government does not pay for enough affordable housing, the problem is that the government restricts development creating an artificial shortage of housing which drives up the price. This is first-year microeconomics, but politicians and bureaucrats cannot figure out this simple economic problem. Oregonians should vote down this measure. Grassley orders SECOND criminal probe for attorney Michael Avenatti
Would someone please put this man out of his misery?! BREAKING NEWS: Active shooter at Pittsburgh synagogue
The defense is to carry concealed. The problem with the asymmetrical threat is that is cost huge amounts to protect against them. All the evil perpetrators need to do is find the weak spot where the police, guards, and security are lacking, and target those areas. The solution is always to carry concealed, train for carrying and be ready and willing to address violent threats. If far more people carried the evil people who want to commit these crimes would be much more circumspect about committing these violent crimes. This creates a natural reduction in criminality, and the fact that people would be carrying more often in public would mean that more violent criminals would be subject to counter fire which limits their willingness to continue the crime. Stop lying to people that more police, guards, and security will protect them, it will not. Russian Diplomat: "Yes, Russia Is Preparing For War, I Can Confirm It"
No one is coming! Even the feral North Africans don't stop in Russia; they keep on walking till they get to Finland, Norway, or Sweden. When you cannot even get feral North Africans to invade your country, no one will! Prepare away, but you are wasting money. Your economic incompetence and authoritarian politics are sufficient to keep others out. Bay Area Expats Are Driving Up Home Prices From Boise To Reno The Cali zombie hoard is lapping at our feet! Where are Legend, Omega Man, and The Last Man on Earth when we need them? This woman is of the leftist ilk: "Even in places like deep-red Idaho, these transplants are beginning to remake the terrain in their own image, as food co-ops and Women's Marches starting to populate the landscape. Businesses are rushing to Boise to meet every desire of the newly arrived Cali transplants. D’Agostino, the Bay Area transplant, isn’t ashamed of her progressive views and is finding her place: at the natural foods co-op downtown, the Boise’s Women’s March last year, and with the volunteer group she founded to collect unused food for the needy. But it was also good to get out of her comfort zone, she says. “I can’t remember a time when it’s ever been this divided, so the fact that I can have some interaction with people who might not have exactly the same beliefs as me, that’s fine,” she says. “As long as we can respect each other.” It’s not new for politics to factor into moving decisions—it’s just that in the age of Trump, tensions get magnified. “What’s different now is how far apart the parties are ideologically,” says Matt Lassiter, a professor of history at the University of Michigan. Politics aside, businesses are rushing into Boise to fill every West Coast craving. In nearby Eagle, the new Renovare gated community is selling 1,900- to 4,000-square-foot homes with floor-to-ceiling glass and “wine walls” that start at $650,000—a bargain by California standards, says sales agent Nik Buich. About half of buyers are from out of state, he says." But few people are independent and when they move to a new place, they slowly adopt the ways and ideas of the new place. She may never become a red conservative but will soon become a purple with some hotspot red beliefs. Those beliefs will be women's rights and abortion, not school board, and high-speed rail. I think this guy is more representative of the people moving out of California although they are less visible because they have less money than do the hard left progressives moving from San Fran or San Jose: "John Del Rio, a real estate agent sporting a beard, baseball cap, and sunglasses, just registered moving2idaho.com, where he’s planning to blog about all the things that make his new home great. He left Northern California two years ago with his wife in search of a place with less crime, lighter regulation, and more open space. Del Rio, a conservative with a libertarian bent, is reassured to see average people walking through Walmart with handguns in their holsters. In Idaho, he says, "nobody even flinches.'" But who knows? We will find out if Cali has some sort of virus which permanently infects the minds of its expats. If it does, we need a vaccine. Notice how in the map, Oregon receives fewer Californians than other states. This is because our Urban growth boundary is statewide and has driven up housing cost in most communities to above the cost of surrounding states except for a few urban areas like Seattle. While the Oregon housing costs are not as high as California's, they are high enough to act as a detractor for many Californians who are not moving from the super high housing cost coastal enclaves. |
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