However, in order for democracy were to work in practice, it requires effort. This is why it inevitably fails: people are lazy. In order for democracy to work, everyone would have to devote, minimally,  5-10 hours a week to understanding the most important things effecting our country, because determining the cause and therefor helpful attempts at solutions to those things is a very complicated process. In order to elect and hold accountable competent leaders capable of dealing with real world problems, especially in a world where change is happening so much faster than the bureaucracy can keep up with it, the public needs to be constantly educating itself in order not to fall prey to the manipulative wiles of self-serving ideologues who distort facts in order to serve their own shortsighted agenda.

Instead, people watch television for an average of 28 hours per week, using up plenty of time that could be spent being a responsible member of the electorate, while at the same time filling their heads with propaganda in order to be more easily cowed into a state-approved point of view. Time not spent watching TV is usually occupied with consumption, whether of alcohol or some other drug in a setting totally devoid of responsibility for anything or anyone.

None of this would bother me in other circumstances; how one spends her time is not really my business if it does no harm to me. But it does harm me, and everyone, because it is the endorsement from these people in the form of their votes that allows the criminals in our government to assist the bankers and institutionalized investors to bleed all of the fucking money out of the world with no sense of accountability for all of the damage they do. The bankers and insurers and pharmaceutical companies harnessed an ignorant, fat, and irresponsible middle class in order to create a new tyranny out of what is still nominally a democracy. And you let it happen.

So fuck anyone who thinks that merely voting is enough to be a responsible citizen. You’re only harming yourselves with your ballots because you’ve made no effort to understand the actions of your government and their consequences, or if you have it was likely only a superficial survey that kept you well within the bounds of conventional thinking (i.e. slavery).

America has the leadership it deserves, and when this country finally finishes its thrashing, shrieking, pitiful death throes, hopefully ignorant, lazy people will know enough to stay the hell out of its government, for their own sake.

AB

To be honest, we didn’t even fight this one like we wanted to win it.

Your life will improve by reading this piece!

It’s easy to make ignorant speculations without really knowing anything (RACISM!), but a little bit of context makes it clear that the answer goes deeper than one president’s skin. In fact, one doesn’t have to look too far to find a president as politically contentious as our 44th president… just look at our 43rd.

Hypothetical
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Country U is politically divided, roughly 50%-50%, between two political parties, D and R. Party R is able to gets its nominated candidate for the presidency, W,  elected. W has an active presidency: war is declared, government size and importance is increased, and a major shift in the government’s role occurs (W decided the government should be a transparent vehicle for cronyism, good man that he is). Party D is outraged at W’s heavy-handed, unilateral actions. W is hated, insulted, spit on, and called a traitor who should be impeached from office. W serves out two terms before party D’s candidate, O, wins the presidency and takes over.

With poetic symmetry, both presidents (W right as his term ends, and O just as his begins) pass legislation to give wealthy bankers in failing institutions billions of dollars.

O begins an active presidency: the wars continue, reforms are proposed, government size and importance are increased, and a major shift in the government’s role occurs (O decided government should be a vehicle for national property redistribution, good man that he is). Party R is outraged at O’s heavy-handed, unilateral actions. O is hated, insulted, spit upon, and called a terrorist who should be impeached from office.
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Two presidents, one from each of the two relevant political parties, are elected in succession. The American public reacts the same way to both, the only difference being the people doing the criticizing (and that’s determined largely by a simple matter of who a person chooses to identify with personally). The half of the populace which chooses to identify with the “winning” side is silent or at best dismissive of their opponents. The other side expresses persistent outrage.

With an outsider’s perspective it becomes clear that the problem is less likely to be with particular political figures and more likely to be with long-term trends in the office of the presidency and the government itself (which is why that’s the non-partisan position I’ve consistently held).

What trends?

I’m pretty sure there was once a time when people didn’t have to gather in groups of thousands of people (whether war protests or “tea parties”) to impotently wave signs around in order to get the people making major decisions about their lives to stop and listen for a minute. Most of those decisions were being made at a much more local level- now the federal juggernaut makes most of the important decisions and we can merely stand by and watch it happen. No wonder people (people who don’t consider themselves “winners” in the short-term political scene) are getting outraged at the government’s actions.

Small government: don’t react ideologically. Rather, act logically.

Causality is a tricky thing. Understanding why an event happens after the fact can be difficult and even impossible, given the complexity of reality, and given that any small contingency can have a massive effect upon the whole (the Butterfly Effect). This is why government solutions mostly fail: because problems are addressed without being understood. The government’s proper role is not to solve everyone’s problems, it’s to execute the general interest (e.g. military defense). When it extends itself beyond its proper bounds it balloons and then collapses, the way a star might burn brightest just as its fuel runs out and it burns out for good.

No revolution will be necessary to bring down this government. What’s scary is the question of who will be in a position to step into its shoes once the collapse happens.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Emerson

I’ll go one step further and say that all lives are experiments. There are endless infinities standing before us, paths leading through life in every possible way; each of us is here to try one of them. There are two principal reasons why it’s incorrect to always take the lead of others or to ignore your inner voice for the sake of satisfying the demands of others. The first is straightforward: if you’re not living your own life and following your own potential, then whose life are you living? Quieting yourself for the sake of satisfying the arbitrary demands of others is a kind of suicide and slavery and should be avoided by people who believe they are capable of achieving anything at all significant.

The second reason is more abstract but perhaps more significant: if new ideas aren’t considered and attempted, if the experimenting stops, the static framework which results will inevitably crumble. It’s beyond the scope of a short blog post to get into alot of detail, but if you’re willing to indulge me for the sake of a hypothesis (experiment?), take this for granted: the modern American is hyperstimulated, first by media images; and second by other people who, having also been exposed to the same media images, tend to reinforce the media influence on an individual.

The result of this overstimulation is an atrophy of internal thoughts and desires- the self is sacrificed for the sake of social acceptability. This has worked well enough for the past few decades. Ill effects of this situation include strong personalities either becoming alienated or gawked at like zoo animals until they submit to normalcy, depression and suicide becoming more frequent, and counter-culture becoming its own mainstreamed milieu just as stifling to the expression of personality as the TV culture. However, the worst consequences of the herding of America are only just beginning to be felt. The bigger we are, the harder we fall.

When you look at history, the greatest innovations, the longest leaps forward, and the most important solutions come less often from planned and coordinated efforts and more often from individual creative efforts. For example, a small group of technicians in Silicon Valley have created a culture where there is a computer in every home and have allowed me and millions of others to publish our writings online quickly and easily. The human species adapted in a way where a small percentage of the total population was creative and innovative, another percentage can inspire people to follow them, another percentage is careful detail-oriented; together this soup of human ingenuity is capable of conquering any problem.

However, by surrendering our children’s personal growth and development to a television screen, drugging away their unique abilities, and pigeonholing their opinions into select groups of state-approved nonsense, we stand a very real risk of incapacitating the various problem solving segments of our population, like a lobotomy on a national scale. The system has been failing since, at the latest, the 80s; we’ve been able to get by anyway with debt-financing and worldwide optimism about our economic power. Neither of these things will last significantly longer.

If there’s a theme to this blog, it’s that you should NEVER, EVER MESS WITH A COMPLEX SYSTEM. YOU DO NOT AND CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT, NOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

Can it just continue to finance social programs by selling debt forever? No, but empires always fail by assuming the opposite. How long can this debt-financing last? I optimistically predict two years, but anticipate it will be much sooner than that. How? The US’ bond rating will be lowered, causing bond prices to drop dramatically. They’ll be more difficult to sell and won’t get us as much money. This will cause a cascading effect which will disrupt the very foundations of US and world society as funding for government programs dries up.

No, Obama, that’s fine, spend more money. Spend our way out of the depression. Spend our way to a better healthcare system. Ignore that cliff ahead of us and hit the gas.

Nobody listens, nobody listens, nobody listens, the US is dead and we let it happen. We let parasites chew her away from the inside, and now she’s just a beat-up shadow of her former glory. Guys, there are disasters coming. Please listen, please try and take steps to prepare yourselves and protect yourselves.

That is why the government’s power must be limited: it’s a tool of manipulation which can only be wielded by the extremely wealthy, at everyone else’s expense. The problems are not limited to one evil company (as this recently popular article suggests) but rather is systemic and related to our entire government-economic superstructure. GS is just the best manipulator, but all the most successful companies are vampiric manipulators.

Important stuff, ya know?

When a politician starts talking about morals, pinch your nose and light a match. In a world acting under the attitude of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction, it should come as no surprise, when the world’s most powerful nation with the largest nuclear stockpile calls Iran part of an “axis of evil” and spews rhetoric about how dangerous the country is, that Iran would respond by attempting to build their own nuclear bombs. Yes, this is an aggressive move, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that it’s irrational or that the political players making this move are crazy and want to destroy the world. Their actions make sense if you allow them to.

There’s plenty one can say to criticize Iran’s leadership. But political moralizing is just an explanation (i.e. excuse) for the extremely aggressive stance the US has taken in matters of foreign policy. The US takes action to bring itself greater power and to undermine the power of their enemies to stand in the US’s way. It is an empire.

As the Cato piece indicates near the end, this foreign policy is seemingly undertaken without considering the likely consequences (retaliation, 9/11-style). And the world-conquerors who turned people against us in the first place will say that they weren’t allowed to take their mission far enough and that’s why we were attacked again, subsequently taking more power for themselves so that they may pursue terrorists more effectively. Supreme irony and tragedy.

What’s wrong with letting the world sort out its own problems, without us? We are not the world’s daddy, we have no responsibility to other countries other than to be good neighbors in the world we share. A defenseive, non-interventionist foreign policy is infinitely safer, less expensive, and morally sound. Isn’t it something we can at least consider?

Government, at best, can be seen as a means by which a people can express their general interest.

• This implies that government subsidies of special interests are tantamount to a theft from the people (if the people under a government want to donate money to a special interest, they’re free to, if they don’t then there truly isn’t a good argument for forcing them to)
• This implies that a group of people who have no interests in common should not be subject to the same government
• This also implies that a government should not legislate beyond the common interests of its subjects (e.g. the only good purpose for the USA’s government is to protect the 50 member states from foreign armies, this nation doesn’t have another common interest)
• This implies that full-time legislators are unnecessary parasites, as a government need only convene when a problem is to be considered, and even then solutions from enterprising individuals should be attempted before taxation

Don’t confuse this with “trickle down economics.” It’s organic economics. Allow the system to fulfill its functions naturally and it will adapt itself to any new challenges with which it is presented.