All my life I have been confused by “groups.” How does one form a “group?” What motivates people to form groups? When is a group officially a “group?” What do groups do? When I was a kid I assumed this would all make sense when I was grown up, but my mind still reels. They [...]
Posts under ‘Politics’
Movements in the forest
I started out sort of middle left. For a while, when I was too young to understand the implications of communism, I was sort of semi-leftist. Come to think of it, that was quite a while ago. Now, I am fairly hard right. Many people would say that I’m far right. Many of these people [...]
All I Really Needed to Know to Avoid I Learned in Kindergarten
Back in the 1980s, before memes were memes, a popular meme circulated on mimeographed sheets called “All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” It later became a best-selling book. It was a list of a dozen or more rules based on the teachings of kindergarten classrooms. The gist of these were that you [...]
A news round-up (05-13-13)
Where normally I write free-form based on the values of philosophy and culture, since I prefer such organic understanding to the linearization that occurs with science and politics, sometimes it’s best to remember my roots: I’m a news junkie. And even though most of the media is moose drool that leans toward the left only [...]
Esoteric conservatism
Like entropy itself, language builds up many potential meanings over time. At some point, choosing between them becomes too huge of a task, and the society reverts to using many small imprecise words and being governed entirely by context. In our time, the word “esoteric” has lost much of its meaning in day-to-day use. For [...]
How Crowdism destroys all good things
The first secret of Crowdism is that it is never unique. It is a universal human tendency that ruins things, like laziness or narcissism. It does not require anyone to invent it, because it is invented in all of us. It is an inherent pitfall to intelligence. Some might call it hubris. Crowdism is what [...]
We are the robots
Our ancient societies evolved much like a species does. Over time, they tested out their hypotheses about how the wide world out there operated. They kept the ideas that worked, and pitched out the rest. From that came culture, wisdom and even religion. Part of this original culture was that we had social castes, which [...]
Collateral damage of the Cold War
If you are old enough to have lived through The Cold War, you will remember, at least partially, the sheer terror it caused you to experience. For sheer fright value, nothing else even came close. An invading army might shoot you, even from tanks or aircraft, but at least you might see them coming, and [...]
War between galaxies commences, April 2013
The day was winding down in futuristic America. As I write this (April 28, 1953) I can’t imagine what the future must be like. People probably travel by levitating platform, take nutrition from the sun and spend their days immersed in a great microfiche library, learning all of humanity’s past so they can make its [...]
Sitzkrieg’s end
Now that the tattered bunting of the Boston Marathon has been taken down, the grillwork security barricades stacked and put away and the shrapnel swept up, the chorus of self-flagellation has begun. The introspection. The blaming of the victims. The shaming of American patriotism. We must apologize to the enemies, we’re told. If we apologize [...]
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