Category: Politics


  • Theme:

    Reinstating Natural Rights

    1–2 minutes

    A coercive government cannot reinstate man’s “natural rights” because natural rights are a by-product of a peaceful industry.

    Granted, war may have been necessary to achieve temporary peace, but war is precisely when natural rights are suspended.

    Also, one cannot appeal to a current, settled state of peace and freedom to have “natural rights” reinstated because large businesses, industries, and machines maintain dominance. In fact, these very systems, devices, and bureaucracies are why we need to reestablish human rights: these dominant systems undermine natural liberty.

    In this conundrum, re-awakening “natural rights” implies a split from both war and managerial industrial systems that maintain servitude. It isn’t easy to imagine how a revolution that could accomplish this may manifest and engender awe in a time that could introduce such notions as “natural rights.”

    ~ from #Accelerate (the accelerationist reader)


  • Theme:

    dizzyness of freedom

    1–2 minutes

    The “dizziness of freedom” produces anxiety, according to Kirkegaard.

    When you can do anything, you open access to a surplus of choices, “the possibility of possibility,” from which uncertainty blossoms: which decision will lead to happiness?

    Kierkegaard says empowerment comes from ownership (taking responsibility) and making a choice: to restrict your “freedom” by choosing frees you from anxiety. This can be called a “leap of faith,” when you realize that more pondering of the problem is a problem to decide and act creates relief.


  • Theme:

    liberalism: Flattened Freedoms

    1–2 minutes

    Liberalism, in the classical sense, promotes individual freedom and civil liberties, that is, the agency of the individual citizen and acceptance of difference.

    However, in promoting the idea politically as Libertarianism, it becomes flattened into economic excess and regulative access, behind which selfishness thrives.

    In a system or state designed around economics and policy-making, a successful political movement would focus on -and move- these twin levers of money and law. Yet, cynically, moving the policy lever is a means to allow wealth, which exempts those made wealthy from the law, providing an elite uber-freedom and the power to close the policy door behind themselves.

    Expounded socially, the reductive, deregulatory imperative of ‘liberalism’ works hard to sell ‘positive freedom,’ which paradoxically destroys the more complex range of human freedoms, such as cravings for harmony, social and communal stability, and fiscal parity. In fact, it preys on these concepts by offering them as immanent results of complete freedom, which can never manifest.


  • Theme:

    Succession, rebellion, insurrection

    1–2 minutes

    Americans (Texans specifically) comment that an invading country (or even our own government) would never be able to subdue us, largely due to the proliferation of firearms, which is ludicrous.

    It is not a matter of being brave or well-armed against an army with drones. Being armed only matters in the ability to dissuade or combat your fellow citizens.

    Revolutions (coups) generally require the populace, but a smaller percentage of it than you would think:

    • 1) It is a matter of having already won an ideological battle.
    • 2) Followed by seeding political choke points and infrastructure with your faction from which you can asymmetrically leverage power.
    • 3) By converting the violent rule-following rebels (the gun-toting patriots) as they will enforce ideology at an inverse proportion to their numbers. (say 150 armed ideologs can control a town of 15,000.)

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    symbolic power: progress as betrayal

    1–2 minutes

    Real power wanes when people shift into the symbolic.

    For instance, as England ceased to be a global power, the monarchy became even more important, yet the country and monarchy had less power as reverence increased.

    Similarly Japan, after losing World War II, doubles down on the (symbolic) moral imperatives as unique signifiers when real power lead to disaster.

    The danger is when symbolic power becomes reified into privileged national nostalgia it locks down the citizenry so that no real change is possible: to progress is to betray.


  • Theme:

    embalmed in injustice

    1–2 minutes

    It is easy to succumb to justice: dadgummit, we are in the right. However, being "right" prevents you from living fully.
    There is definitely a type of vital energy in rage, but it is a narrow range of living: a trap of intensity that drowns joy.
    Within this trap, we live in a state of strained repetition: embalmed in injustice.

    “He was embalmed no longer in injustice.” Phillip Roth, The Human Stain


  • Theme:

    Top down change

    1–2 minutes

    A position of power is the only way to manifest change. And the most power is at the top of a society.

    In part, the top positions accrue authority through entrenched hierarchy as systemic programming. with access to people, media, and money through stable systems, a small number of people can create lasting change.

    However, defending the position consumes more resources over time until a change of leadership must occur.


  • Theme:

    Bottom up change

    1–2 minutes

    Change is commonly driven from below.

    The top requires stability for profit and maintenance, which is a form of power.

    To enact change is to replace those in power, creating a cyclic win-loss cycle, where there is always a bottom and top: the bottom craving change, while the top stagnates, fending off change.

    (Tomorrow I will argue the opposite)


  • Theme:

    censorship as freedom

    1–2 minutes

    Consider the censorship of literature: "fat" is replaced with "enormous" in Roald Dahl’s books for inclusivity.

    While this feels like a restriction, it is an alteration. To alter (despite the insipid logic inspiring it) is simultaneously the "freedom" to generate or create, though censorship does so in a negative sense.

    To amend or reshape as a tool of bland political correctness is a waste of existing freedoms; a folly which threatens future freedoms.


  • Theme:

    Freedom as unfreedom

    1–2 minutes

    To be united in wanting freedom has a paradoxical opposite where each free person wants something different from any other, creating disunity.

    To champion individualism is to back “difference,” yet “individual freedom” often coalesces into herd mentality and similarity.