Saturday, January 28, 2012

Managing Helots

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Were America not tied in knots to prevent it from functioning as a representative republic, a number of fundamental solutions would readily appear. Deploy general tax incentives to moderate family sizes. (This would be the most decent and sane way to address environmental concerns.) Move towards a Canadian style single payer health care system. (This would remove the monkey from employers' backs and allow them to become more competitive.) Stop allowing corporations to buy up patents in order to mothball them for years while there's not the least intention to bring them to market, because the profit-making infrastructure for the status quo would be overturned. (This would go far towards freeing the market to incentive fundamental energy independence.)
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Such solutions would readily occur to the middle class, were it not constantly agitated and divided by an allied establishment that rips its immediate gratifications by using the middle class as sheep and cattle. Democrats may finally be learning that the candidates they tend to be offered toss only crumbs to cover promises, while funneling billions to cronies at the back door. Tea Party Republicans may finally be learning much the same thing about establishment candidates from the Republican party. There's little financial motivation to the funding establishment to actually fix things to faciliate representative republicanism. Profit motive can be a good thing, but it's not essence-of-God, nor is it guraranteed to be a good thing --- especially within societies whose workers are ruled by deliberately keeping them as divided and ignorant as helots. Why expect the establishment NOT to reduce Americans to compete as serf laborers? Think of the rush of power and profit for the most imaginative of sociopaths and narcissists! who tend most often to occupy the pool of power brokers.
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Advocates for establishment Dems or Repubs tend either to be ignorant dupes or calculating traitors. Marketplace as a solution?! What marketplace? The alliance of cronies rigs the marketplace! They run the currency exchanges, banks, media, academia, politicians! Why expect them to want to stop the gravy train? There're obvious solutions, but they're poisoned with pejoratives blared by those who benefit by keeping the pot stirred away from solutions. It appears that Mitt or some clone will be the Republican candidate. We can HOPE that Mitt will grow into a representative to foster freedom, opportunity, dignity, and decency for the class that actually wants to work, add value, and earn its way. But the sheer weight of ensconced abusers renders such hope rather childish. So Mitt may be elected. If the middle class can waken --- despite the constant administering of poison to weaken it by every significant institution that's under thumbs of a corrupt and allied establishment --- then a reassimilated middle class may be able to force reform. Meanwhile, notice how Obama fairly chuckles. He knows he can say and do just about anything and then repackage and force-sell it as progress. Get mad. Keep the faith. Get assimilated. Hold hot coals to feet of cronies. Tipping points will come. It's about positioning to counter crisis opportunists and their sociopathic managers.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The most successful of bunko artists never display their true skins in public. There's always the facade. Maybe there's a hellfire club somewhere, where they can yuk it up about their prowess as bold deceivers. Given enough power and resources, what bunk could not be dressed up as piety? (The acme of bunko exemplars? I give you the Koran.) There're many who can be easily deceived, but few who can successfully pull it off to fool most of the people most of the time. No more than that is needed to win elections for the guys they front in politics. That is, unless the opponent is a once in a generation phenomena, like a Lincoln or a Reagan. Since there's no one like that on the stage, the middle class, if it's to be saved, will have to save itself. And that's not likely to come in the mere rush of a single election.

Anonymous said...

The idea is to get Americans in such a deep fix that they can never dig out. It's for the betterment of our human farmers. Grandbama, what big teeth you have! (Grandbama smiling.) Will some friendly woodcutter please slow the wolf down and give Little Red Riding Hood time to grow up and learn she's only being farmed as food? After the 3rd, 4th, 5th shot, how many Medved-denialists still don't know that sociopaths are chasing the American middle class to push them into diving down a well? Debt, spending, eternal servitude. Beyond debt, encirclement down a well. Hot new jobs for the cannibalizers and the cannibalized: Well owner, well helper, and well dweller. Jobs for well creators and well dispensers? Not allowed unless you join the cannibals. The Rinos in the room? They're just Wolfie's brothers. This is what comes of worshipping the market motive as the only God. Dinos are just as adept as Rinos at employing market ideologies to justify reducing the middle class to commodities, to be collectively bought and sold. This is a market, all right. But it's not a free market. It's a serf-self-devouring market. Some of the serfs are even learning maths for justifying the situation. The reasoning gets as twisted as the Koran. What can't our matter-worshipping reasoners justify?

Anonymous said...

So, let me get this straight. Alex, the conspiratorialist, is actually a dupe, because he's being used by double-agent conspiratorialists? My, how the conspiracy worm always churns! Maybe there abides in America's collective unconscious too much worship of the material market as the sole justifier of all, thereby leading us to cynicism from all ends of the market spectrum.


Pure materialist devotees of the "free market" can be as strangely wrapped in conspiracy-mindedness as any fundie Islamist. You will find a "free" market about the same place you will find Allah: Up a dupe's strange-ified imagination. There's value in playing games of "material as if." But such games yield diminishing returns as one becomes such a true believer as to believe they can be used to objectively map all of higher reality that's worth mapping.


I believe there abides a Source of common sense and that there do abide worthwhile ideals. In broad contours, worthwhile ideals need not be that hard to apprehend, but apprehending them necessitates practiced receptivity. The middle class will become able to push conspiratorialists into the nether regions only when it begins to be assimilate to common receptivity to common decency and to tune out material-based fanaticists of all stripes, sects, and cults. Materials and markets can be used to good effect, but they are not in themselves substitutes for decency, ideals, mores, or God. When that finally dawns on decent, middle class Americans, there may come a better chance to put rather sociopathic Dino and Rino money-grubbers under better adult supervision.

Anonymous said...

While Spartans spoke of "freedom," they preserved their choices by oppressing helots. Freedom pertained to enhancing choices and opportunities by uniting with some to oppress others. Or by uniting with some to prevent being oppressed by others. Freedom was not a universal value, but a zero sum value, appropriate for some, not for others. Any expanding group that wished to prevail needed to conspire against others. Such conspiracies were a constant aspect of survival. It was NOT paranoid to expect opponents would often be plotting. Competition entailed not simply anticipating plots of opponents, but misleading opponents one was plotting against. A common technique for double-dealing with opponents in order to disarm them is to belittle them for fearing conspiracy, when, IN FACT, you are conspiring!
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The founding ideal for America was to more widely extend freedom and opportunity. That ideal became muddled as more people came to believe in no basis for any ideal more powerful or encompassing than the material calculus to be enhanced by choosing opportune parties to befriend. A nation can cohere based on shared beliefs in many of the same values --- regardless of whether such beliefs are rationalized in terms of God or of natural philosophy. However, no calculus based purely on selfish materialism can hold a nation together once its leaders come to believe there are no values higher than pure materialism. At that point, it becomes childish to expect conspiracies and plots will not become rampant.
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Once society "progresses" to such a point that leaders no longer accept fundamental mores for gluing together as a society, it becomes childish to expect a system of opposing parties of opportunists will do other than plot to cannibalize the country. At that point, there comes to be little reason to trust any aspect of the establishment. At that point, we get Rino kettles calling Dino pots ... black. Then, all the objective, material-based math in the world will not restore the faith and trust needed to sustain and defend decent civilization. Of course, a person, while conditioned to think only in respect of pure materialism, will never see the point! Such a person replaces God or civilizing mores with some purely material-based, faux-objectivism --- such as "free market" or "greatest good." By itself, no such a purely material-based, elitist-ideology will assimilate or long preserve a middle class. So, America unravels.

Anonymous said...

Main indicators are that Obama, apart from lip service, does not especially believe in either corporate markets or collectivist markets. Like many who have found success in the establishment, he mainly believes in crony markets. The market tripe about socialism or capitalism is practiced patter for justifying pillage. If you're not with him, you're against him. When you're in his way, you're to be dissed, frisked, or recycled. His is the party of polarization, domination, and payback. It's about world government of, by, and for cronies. Among packs of cronies, loyalty and ruthless persistence are valued much more than intellect. Sheer ruthlessness is rare, but all the smart dupes you want can be hired. Everyone else is just for entertainment value. Obama is what he's been waiting for. As far as unifying a nation or reviving a middle class, not a prayer. Quite the contrary. We're to be thrown down a cellar.

Anonymous said...

The sweat, blood, hope, faith, trust, and loyalty of the masses is like the current of a river, which can be converted to currencies to be marketed, hedged, intensified and re-diverted among and between figureheads that contend for re-diversions of vain glories, to be expressed in quantities of fame, money, and power. Apart from delusion, it’s not common that grand re-diversions confer any viable increase in liberty or opportunity for the masses. Usually, power simply finds organization in appeals to delusions and in appeasements to vanities — the betterment of the masses be damned. Masses tend to share in enhancements to liberty and opportunity ONLY as they AWAKEN to assimilated, empathetic, inspired respect for one another’s liberty, opportunity, and essential humanity. Merely to implement one or another among philosophies of corporatism or collectivism will NOT raise a viable middle class of free thinkers — especially when leaders repress or ridicule philosophy and theosophy for awakening respect for higher empathies. Usually, contentions among warring kings, corporate profiteers, central planners, and marketing economists tend to re-divert power to flip switches from one figurehead to another. While leverage availed by power of re-organization can raise all boats, it will not by itself raise liberty and economic opportunity among the masses. Qualitatively raising liberty and opportunity for a middle class requires that respect for humanity be inspired, rather than that brawn be harnessed. When considered against pet programs of organizing elites, human freedom and dignity are coming to be qualitatively not valued, while equality in fair distribution of mind diversions is coming to be falsely valued. In short, minds yearning for liberty are being lulled to sleep by cheap diversions and misleading philosophies of experts pretending to quantify non-quantifiables.