Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Tag: politics

  • Theme:

    of idiots and believers

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    1–2 minutes

    At a recent gathering, one individual remarked to me, ‘Texans, always brandishing their firearms, oblivious to the potential government response: a drone strike, and they’d vanish in an instant.”

    What’s intriguing is not just the vitriol, but how it is delivered: a common enough observation wrapped in an insult denigrating intelligence, appealing to factional loyalists. “If anyone believes this they are an idiot. I’m on the smart side.”

    However the inverse is more accurate.

    To believe someone is an idiot, and voice that in public when the premise of your logic doesn’t address the primary aspects of their motivations, makes you the idiot believer.

  • Theme:

    freedom produces managers

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    1–2 minutes

    When individuals are granted greater moral/personal freedom, it often leads to social anarchy due to the resulting diversity. This causes people to cry out for more managerial control.

    As established social norms decompose liberty ascends. Our first line of defense, consideration for others and self-regulation, holds no sway because there are no longer social sanctions. To re-establish consideration we turn neighbors into managers wielding policy to regulate what was once informal negotiations.

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    Use your worst traits to counter each other

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    1–2 minutes

    Our society coaches, in eco-cybernetic fashion, use your worst traits to counter each other.

    To harness your pride, greed, gluttony, vanity, lust, or sloth, empower another (more compelling) sin.

    Apparently, the way to counteract avarice is ambition, and vice versa: the politician will leave office only if he can make more money elsewhere, and the rich man will vacate the market and jump into politics because of his pride.

    Thus, selfish traits have been recast as steadfast (predictable) and mutually beneficial.

    While these counterbalancing forces appear stabilizing, they normalize rationalizing increasingly excessive appetites.

  • Theme:

    siege perilous

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    1–2 minutes

    The “siege perilous” is the seat held empty by Merlin at King Arthur’s round table.

    It is a place of supposed honor reserved for the worthy one who will accomplish the improbable.

    To be granted the seat is often a curse, crushed beneath its pressure and politics.

    The trap is to provide a seat at the right hand of power, which draws forth the ambitious and unfailingly proves them undeserving. The king is always gracious in the offer; the ambitious are fools or naively pure of heart. If the seat is legitimately claimed, then the king is stronger for it.

    Either way, the opening up of a space adjacent to power is brilliant: a void begs to be filled while distracting from those who set the game board.

  • Theme:

    liberalism: Flattened Freedoms

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    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:

    social media is performative, it is anti-social

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    1–2 minutes

    Social media is not social: it is performative. It is a theater (platform) to entertain an audience.

    Social media is (arguably) anti-social because it encourages politics and morality plays.

    (first sentence from Naval)

  • Theme:

    provoking the reaction

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    1–2 minutes

    Knowing people are trainable, you can break expectations for your own gains, but it will incur resentment that will lead to confrontation.

    Be sure you have a legitimate (logical not emotional) precedence and a grievance they can remediate.

    When confronted you can provide them with a choice: accept my behavior or compensate me for compliance.

  • Theme:

    Top down change

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    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

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    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:

    Flipping: Conservative v Progressive

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    1–2 minutes

    Perhaps a “conservative” merely wants stability, and the “progressive” merely wants change.

    The complication is when the backward-looking move forward to recreate and the forward-obsessed stall out into regressive stability.

    This flipping of values for achievement combats the motivating soul of the movement, forming a contradictory spirit versus action paradox seemingly impossible to rectify.