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anonymous

Recognizing the End of the Chinese Economic Miracle - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...g-end-chinese-economic-miracle

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A crisis can exist before it is recognized.
  • The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis.
  • First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble.
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  • Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?"
  • Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs -- where in November 2001 Jim O'Neil coined the term BRICs and forecast that China might surpass the United States economically by 2028 -- cut its forecast of Chinese growth to 7.4 percent. 
  • The New York Times, Barron's and Goldman Sachs are all both a seismograph of the conventional wisdom and the creators of the conventional wisdom. Therefore, when all three announce within a few weeks that China's economic condition ranges from disappointing to verging on a crash, it transforms the way people think of China.
  • Now the conversation is moving from forecasts of how quickly China will overtake the United States to considerations of what the consequences of a Chinese crash would be. 
  • Suddenly finding Stratfor amid the conventional wisdom regarding China does feel odd, I must admit. Having first noted the underlying contradictions in China's economic growth years ago, when most viewed China as the miracle Japan wasn't, and having been scorned for not understanding the shift in global power underway, it is gratifying to now have a lot of company.
  • One of the things masking China's weakening has been Chinese statistics, which Krugman referred to as "even more fictional than most."
  • China is a vast country in territory and population. Gathering information on how it is doing would be a daunting task, even were China inclined to do so. Instead, China understands that in the West, there is an assumption that government statistics bear at least a limited relationship to truth. Beijing accordingly uses its numbers to shape perceptions inside and outside China of how it is doing.
  • The Chinese release their annual gross domestic product numbers in the third week of January (and only revise them the following year). They can't possibly know how they did that fast, and they don't. But they do know what they want the world to believe about their growth, and the world has believed them -- hence, the fantastic tales of economic growth. 
  • China in fact has had an extraordinary period of growth. The last 30 years have been remarkable, marred only by the fact that the Chinese started at such a low point due to the policies of the Maoist period.
  • Growth at first was relatively easy; it was hard for China to do worse. But make no mistake: China surged. Still, basing economic performance on consumption, Krugman notes that China is barely larger economically than Japan. Given the compounding effects of China's guesses at GDP, we would guess it remains behind Japan, but how can you tell? We can say without a doubt that China's economy has grown dramatically in the past 30 years but that it is no longer growing nearly as quickly as it once did.
  • China's growth surge was built on a very unglamorous fact: Chinese wages were far below Western wages, and therefore the Chinese were able to produce a certain class of products at lower cost than possible in the West.
  • China had another essential policy: Beijing was terrified of unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. This was a rational fear, but one that contradicted China's main strength, its wage advantage.
  • Growing the economy is possible, but not growing profitability. Eventually, the economy will be dragged down by its inefficiency. 
  • As businesses become inefficient, production costs rise. And that leads to inflation. As money is lent to keep inefficient businesses going, inflation increases even more markedly. The increase in inefficiency is compounded by the growth of the money supply prompted by aggressive lending to keep the economy going. As this persisted over many years, the inefficiencies built into the Chinese economy have become staggering. 
  • The second thing to bear in mind is the overwhelming poverty of China, where 900 million people have an annual per capita income around the same level as Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia or Mongolia ($3,000-$3,500 a year), while around 500 million of those have an annual per capita income around the same level as India, Nicaragua, Ghana, Uzbekistan or Nigeria ($1,500-$1,700).
  • China's overall per capita GDP is around the same level as the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Thailand or Jamaica.
  • Stimulating an economy where more than a billion people live in deep poverty is impossible. Economic stimulus makes sense when products can be sold to the public.
  • The Chinese have maintained a strategy of depending on exports without taking into account the operation of the business cycle in the West, which means that periodic and substantial contractions of demand will occur. China's industrial plant is geared to Western demand. When Western demand contracted, the result was the mess you see now.
  • The Chinese can prevent the kind of crash that struck East Asia in 1997. Their currency isn't convertible, so there can't be a run on it. They continue to have a command economy; they are still communist, after all. But they cannot avoid the consequences of their economic reality, and the longer they put off the day of reckoning, the harder it will become to recover from it.
  • The Chinese are not going to completely collapse economically any more than the Japanese or South Koreans did. What will happen is that China will behave differently than before. With no choices that don't frighten them, the Chinese will focus on containing the social and political fallout, both by trying to target benefits to politically sensitive groups and by using their excellent security apparatus to suppress and deter unrest.
  • The Chinese economic performance will degrade, but crisis will be avoided and political interests protected. Since much of China never benefited from the boom, there is a massive force that has felt marginalized and victimized by coastal elites. That is not a bad foundation for the Communist Party to rely on.
  • The Chinese are, of course, keeping a great deal of money in U.S. government instruments and other markets. Contrary to fears, that money will not be withdrawn. The Chinese problem isn't a lack of capital, and repatriating that money would simply increase inflation.
  • Had the Chinese been able to put that money to good use, it would have never been invested in the United States in the first place.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jul 13
       
      I'm having a hard time following all the econ stuff, but I understand this to mean that the U.S. is 'old reliable': Not an investment of last resort, but an investment to run to when you don't have a sure thing.
  • Rather than the feared repatriation of funds, the United States will continue to be the target of major Chinese cash inflows.
  • In a world where Europe is still reeling, only the United States is both secure and large enough to contain Chinese appetites for safety. Just as Japanese investment in the 1990s represented capital flight rather than a healthy investment appetite, so the behavior we have seen from Chinese investors in recent years is capital flight:
  • money searching for secure havens regardless of return. This money has underpinned American markets; it is not going away, and in fact more is on the way. 
  • The major shift in the international order will be the decline of China's role in the region. China's ability to project military power in Asia has been substantially overestimated.
  • Its naval capacity is still limited compared with the United States. The idea that it will compensate for internal economic problems by genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) military action is therefore unlikely.
  • In our view, the most important shift will be the re-emergence of Japan as the dominant economic and political power in East Asia in a slow process neither will really want.
  • China will continue to be a major power, and it will continue to matter a great deal economically. Being troubled is not the same as ceasing to exist. China will always exist. It will, however, no longer be the low-wage, high-growth center of the world. Like Japan before it, it will play a different role.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 13
     
    "Major shifts underway in the Chinese economy that Stratfor has forecast and discussed for years have now drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Many have asked when China would find itself in an economic crisis, to which we have answered that China has been there for awhile -- something not widely recognized outside China, and particularly not in the United States."
anonymous

Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy - 0 views

www.faz.net/...ice-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • let us not pass over America’s surveillance addiction in silence. It is real; it has consequences; and the world would do itself a service by sending America to a Big Data rehab. But there’s more to learn from the Snowden affair.
  • It has also busted a number of myths that are only peripherally related to surveillance: myths about the supposed benefits of decentralized and commercially-operated digital infrastructure, about the current state of technologically-mediated geopolitics, about the existence of a separate realm known as “cyberspace.”
  • First of all, many Europeans are finally grasping, to their great dismay, that the word “cloud” in “cloud computing” is just a euphemism for “some dark bunker in Idaho or Utah.”
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  • Second, ideas that once looked silly suddenly look wise. Just a few months ago, it was customary to make fun of Iranians, Russians and Chinese who, with their automatic distrust of all things American, spoke the bizarre language of “information sovereignty.”
  • Look who’s laughing now: Iran’s national email system launched a few weeks ago. Granted the Iranians want their own national email system, in part, so that they can shut it down during protests and spy on their own people AT other times. Still, they got the geopolitics exactly right: over-reliance on foreign communications infrastructure is no way to boost one’s sovereignty. If you wouldn’t want another nation to run your postal system, why surrender control over electronic communications?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      This could have been written by StratFor.
  • Third, the sense of unconditional victory that civil society in both Europe and America felt over the defeat of the Total Information Awareness program – a much earlier effort to establish comprehensive surveillance – was premature.
  • The problem with Total Information Awareness was that it was too big, too flashy, too dependent on government bureaucracy. What we got instead, a decade later, is a much nimbler, leaner, more decentralized system, run by the private sector and enabled by a social contract between Silicon Valley and Washington
  • This is today’s America in full splendor: what cannot be accomplished through controversial legislation will be accomplished through privatization, only with far less oversight and public control.
  • From privately-run healthcare providers to privately-run prisons to privately-run militias dispatched to war zones, this is the public-private partnership model on which much of American infrastructure operates these days.
  • Communications is no exception. Decentralization is liberating only if there’s no powerful actor that can rip off the benefits after the network has been put in place.
  • Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      THIS right here, is crucial.
  • The sheer naivete of statements like this – predicated on the assumption that somehow one can “live” online the way one lives in the physical world and that virtual politics works on a logic different from regular politics – is illustrated by the sad case of Edward Snowden, a man with a noble mission and awful trip-planning skills.
  • Fifth, the once powerful myth that there exists a separate, virtual space where one can have more privacy and independence from social and political institutions is dead.
  • Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels of privacy and security.”
  • Read this again: here’s a senior Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
  • Convergence did happen – we weren’t fooled! – but, miraculously, technologies converged on the least secure and most wiretap-friendly option available.
  • This has disastrous implications for anyone living in dictatorships. Once Microsoft and its peers start building software that is insecure by design, it turbocharges the already comprehensive spying schemes of authoritarian governments. What neither NSA nor elected officials seem to grasp is that, on matters of digital infrastructure, domestic policy is also foreign policy; it’s futile to address them in isolation.
  • This brings us to the most problematic consequence of Snowden’s revelations. As bad as the situation is for Europeans, it’s the users in authoritarian states who will suffer the most.
  • And not from American surveillance, but from domestic censorship. How so? The already mentioned push towards “information sovereignty” by Russia, China or Iran would involve much more than protecting their citizens from American surveillance. It would also trigger an aggressive push to shift public communication among these citizens – which, to a large extent, still happens on Facebook and Twitter – to domestic equivalents of such services.
  • It’s probably not a coincidence that LiveJournal, Russia’s favorite platform, suddenly had maintenance issues – and was thus unavailable for general use – at the very same time that a Russian court announced its verdict to the popular blogger-activist Alexei Navalny.
  • For all the concerns about Americanization and surveillance, US-based services like Facebook or Twitter still offer better protection for freedom of expression than their Russian, Chinese or Iranian counterparts.
  • This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.
  • On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in neither.
  • Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
  • What is to be done? Let’s start with surveillance. So far, most European politicians have reached for the low-hanging fruit – law – thinking that if only they can better regulate American companies – for example, by forcing them to disclose how much data and when they share with NSA – this problem will go away.
  • This is a rather short-sighted, naïve view that reduces a gigantic philosophical problem – the future of privacy – to seemingly manageable size of data retention directives.
  • Our current predicaments start at the level of ideology, not bad policies or their poor implementation.
  • As our gadgets and previously analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere. One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost.
  • In other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange, you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush.
  • If this is, indeed, the future that we are heading towards, it’s obvious that laws won’t be of much help, as citizens would voluntarily opt for such transactions – the way we already opt for free (but monitorable) email and cheaper (but advertising-funded) ereaders.
  • In short, what is now collected through subpoenas and court orders could be collected entirely through commercial transactions alone.
  • Policymakers who think that laws can stop this commodificaton of information are deluding themselves. Such commodification is not happening against the wishes of ordinary citizens but because this is what ordinary citizen-consumer want.
  • Look no further than Google’s email and Amazon’s Kindle to see that no one is forced to use them: people do it willingly. Forget laws: it’s only through political activism and a robust intellectual critique of the very ideology of “information consumerism” that underpins such aspirations that we would be able to avert the inevitable disaster.
  • Where could such critique begin? Consider what might, initially, seem like a bizarre parallel: climate change.
  • For much of the 20th century, we assumed that our energy use was priced correctly and that it existed solely in the consumer paradigm of “I can use as much energy as I can pay for.” Under that paradigm, there was no ethics attached to our energy use: market logic has replaced morality – which is precisely what has enabled fast rates of economic growth and the proliferation of consumer devices that have made our households electronic paradises free from tiresome household work.
  • But as we have discovered in the last decade, such thinking rested on a powerful illusion that our energy use was priced correctly – that we in fact paid our fair share.
  • But of course we had never priced our energy use correctly because we never factored in the possibility that life on Earth might end even if we balance all of our financial statements.
  • The point is that, partly due to successful campaigns by the environmental movement, a set of purely rational, market-based decisions have suddenly acquired political latency, which has given us differently designed cars, lights that go off if no one is in the room, and so forth.
  • It has also produced citizens who – at least in theory – are encouraged to think of implications that extend far beyond the ability to pay their electricity bill.
  • Right now, your decision to buy a smart toothbrush with a sensor in it – and then to sell the data that it generates – is presented to us as just a purely commercial decision that affects no one but us.
  • But this is so only because we cannot imagine an information disaster as easily as we can imagine an environmental disaster.
  • there are profound political and moral consequences to information consumerism– and they are comparable to energy consumerism in scope and importance.
  • We should do our best to suspend the seeming economic normalcy of information sharing. An attitude of “just business!” will no longer suffice. Information sharing might have a vibrant market around it but it has no ethical framework to back it up.
  • NSA surveillance, Big Brother, Prism: all of this is important stuff. But it’s as important to focus on the bigger picture -- and in that bigger picture, what must be subjected to scrutiny is information consumerism itself – and not just the parts of the military-industrial complex responsible for surveillance.
  • As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from programs like Prism.
  • Some might say: If only we could have a digital party modeled on the Green Party but for all things digital. A greater mistake is harder to come by.
  • What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it.
  • Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” – it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved.
  • The Pirates’s tragic miscalculation was trying to do too much: they wanted to change both the process of politics and its content. That project was so ambitious that it was doomed to failure from the very beginning.
  • whatever reforms the Pirates have been advancing did not seem to stem from some long critical reflections of the pitfalls of the current political system but, rather, from their belief that the political system, incompatible with the most successful digital platforms from Wikipedia to Facebook, must be reshaped in their image. This was – and is – nonsense.
  • A parliament is, in fact, different from Wikipedia – but the success of the latter tells us absolutely nothing about the viability of the Wikipedia model as a template for remodeling our political institutions
  • In as much as the Snowden affair has forced us to confront these issues, it’s been a good thing for democracy. Let’s face it: most of us would rather not think about the ethical implications of smart toothbrushes or the hypocrisy involved in Western rhetoric towards Iran or the genuflection that more and more European leaders show in front of Silicon Valley and its awful, brain-damaging language, the Siliconese.
  • The least we can do is to acknowledge that the crisis is much deeper and that it stems from intellectual causes as much as from legal ones. Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
  • anonymous on 05 Aug 13
     
    "The problem with the sick, obsessive superpower revealed to us by Edward Snowden is that it cannot bring itself to utter the one line it absolutely must utter before it can move on: "My name is America and I'm a dataholic.""
anonymous

Obama's Bluff - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...obamas-bluff

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Damascus' close ties to Iran and Russia give the United States reason to be hostile toward Syria, and Washington participated in the campaign to force Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Still, the United States has learned to be concerned not just with unfriendly regimes, but also with what could follow such regimes.
  • The United States has been reluctant to heed these calls. As mentioned, Washington does not have a direct interest in the outcome, since all possible outcomes are bad from its perspective.
  • U.S. President Barack Obama therefore adopted an extremely cautious strategy. He said that the United States would not get directly involved in Syria unless the al Assad regime used chemical weapons, stating with a high degree of confidence that he would not have to intervene.
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  • Al Assad is a ruthless man: He would not hesitate to use chemical weapons if he had to. He is also a very rational man: He would use chemical weapons only if that were his sole option. At the moment, it is difficult to see what desperate situation would have caused him to use chemical weapons and risk the worst.
  • The truth here has been politicized, and whoever claims to have found the truth, whatever it actually is, will be charged with lying. Nevertheless, the dominant emerging story is that al Assad carried out the attack, killing hundreds of men, women and children and crossing the red line Obama set with impunity. The U.S. president is backed into a corner. 
  • The United States has chosen to take the matter to the United Nations. Obama will make an effort to show he is acting with U.N. support. But he knows he won't get U.N. support.
  • Regardless of whether the charges against al Assad are true, the Russians will dispute them and veto any action. Going to the United Nations therefore only buys time.
  • This is no longer simply about Syria. The United States has stated a condition that commits it to an intervention.
  • If it does not act when there is a clear violation of the condition, Obama increases the chance of war with other countries like North Korea and Iran.
  • If these countries come to believe that the United States is actually bluffing, then the possibility of miscalculation soars.
  • Syria was not an issue that affected the U.S. national interest until Obama declared a red line. It escalated in importance at that point not because Syria is critical to the United States, but because the credibility of its stated limits are of vital importance.
  • The question therefore becomes what the United States and the new coalition of the willing will do if the red line has been crossed. The fantasy is that a series of airstrikes, destroying only chemical weapons, will be so perfectly executed that no one will be killed except those who deserve to die. But it is hard to distinguish a man's soul from 10,000 feet. There will be deaths, and the United States will be blamed for them.
  • attacking means al Assad loses all incentive to hold back on using chemical weapons. If he is paying the price of using them, he may as well use them. The gloves will come off on both sides as al Assad seeks to use his chemical weapons before they are destroyed. A war on chemical weapons has a built-in insanity to it.
  • When Obama proclaimed his red line on Syria and chemical weapons, he assumed the issue would not come up.
  • He made a gesture to those in his administration who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to put an end to brutality. He also made a gesture to those who don't want to go to war again.
  • It was one of those smart moves that can blow up in a president's face when it turns out his assumption was wrong.
  • Obama can get overwhelming, indisputable proof that al Assad did not -- and that isn't going to happen -- Obama will either have to act on the red line principle or be shown to be one who bluffs
  • Libya was easy compared to Syria. Now, the president must intervene to maintain his credibility. But there is no political support in the United States for intervention.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 13
     
    "Images of multiple dead bodies emerged from Syria last week. It was asserted that poison gas killed the victims, who according to some numbered in the hundreds. Others claimed the photos were faked while others said the rebels were at fault. The dominant view, however, maintains that the al Assad regime carried out the attack."
anonymous

For the Love of Money - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...for-the-love-of-money.html

shared by anonymous on 17 May 14 - No Cached
  • I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.
  • In desperation, I called a counselor whom I had reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help.She helped me see that I was using alcohol and drugs to blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That began some of the hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked open, exposing my heart to air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it.
  • For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.
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  • At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.
  • My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.
  • I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.
  • But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth.
  • I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”Continue reading the main story I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.
  • From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.
  • I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.
  • Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone.
  • Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.
  • DESPITE my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to leave. I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses.
  • The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten promoted.
  • Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets.
  • In the three years since I left, I’ve married, spoken in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called Groceryships to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction.
  • And as time passes, the distortion lessens. I see Wall Street’s mantra — “We’re smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money” — for what it is: the rationalization of addicts. From a distance I can see what I couldn’t see then — that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.
  • I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction. The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away.
  • Dozens of different types of 12-step support groups — including Clutterers Anonymous and On-Line Gamers Anonymous — exist to help addicts of various types, yet there is no Wealth Addicts Anonymous. Why not? Because our culture supports and even lauds the addiction.
  • Look at the magazine covers in any newsstand, plastered with the faces of celebrities and C.E.O.'s; the superrich are our cultural gods. I hope we all confront our part in enabling wealth addicts to exert so much influence over our country.
  • I recently got an email from a hedge-fund trader who said that though he was making millions every year, he felt trapped and empty, but couldn’t summon the courage to leave. I believe there are others out there.
  • Maybe we can form a group and confront our addiction together. And if you identify with what I’ve written, but are reticent to leave, then take a small step in the right direction. Let’s create a fund, where everyone agrees to put, say, 25 percent of their annual bonuses into it, and we’ll use that to help some of the people who actually need the money that we’ve been so rabidly chasing. Together, maybe we can make a real contribution to the world.
  • anonymous on 17 May 14
     
    "IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million - and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted."
anonymous

The Monster Within Us - 0 views

alistapart.com/...the-monster-within-us

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The amygdala, one of the earliest to evolve parts of the brain, is responsible for the fight or flight instinct: that reflexive, subconscious reaction that protects us in moments of dire danger.
  • In the amygdala’s world, the only thing between life and sudden death is a few measly milliseconds.
  • But in our #firstworldproblems, we rarely encounter life-or-death situations. And as a result, there’s a diminished need for the amygdala’s role as bodyguard. Instead of being on the lookout for predators or incoming spears from rivals, the amygdala spends all its time on relatively more trivial matters. Like protecting our delicate egos.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • We are phenomenal at dressing our monster-driven opinions as fact, thanks to our ability to confabulate.
  • But in reality, we’re simply characters in an issue of Modern Jackass
  • people taking a tiny smidgen of understanding and stretching it far past the breaking point. This applies even to the brightest among us.
  • Under a critical lens, each of the above examples possesses one and only one objective truth, and they all have it in common: they’re defensive in nature.
  • And when you take away the thin veils of our shaky rationalizations that we’re defending everything from beauty and freedom to capitalism and craft, they reveal what we’re truly defending: ourselves.
  • The manifestation of our monsters on the web is but an amplification of their already thriving existence. The internet simply helps wipe the condensation off the mirror, so to speak.
  • As with most problems, the solution seems to lie in nipping the offending behavior in the the bud: by catching a defense mechanism before it can mutate into committed jackassery. And our weapon of choice is introspection—using our mind to monitor our brain.
  • Among the many strategies you can find online and in books, my favorite technique is known as affect labeling, an elegant aikido-like maneuver that uses the brain’s weakness to gain the advantage.
  • It involves labeling what you’re feeling in moments of conflict.
  • For instance, if someone does something that upsets you, you identify exactly how you are upset by saying to yourself, “I feel disappointed. Walt’s behavior really disappointed me.” This labeling of your feelings trades off a potentially monstrous reaction for conscious thought, effectively reducing the load on the amygdala, and allowing your higher brain to work through the problem.
  • But before we get carried away with best practices and extemporaneous problem-solving, it’s worth pausing to remind ourselves of that old adage, “The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one.” Nothing is harder than recognizing a problem with ourselves. If you take away only one thing from this article, let it be the following: There is a monster within you (and me).
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 13
     
    "I recently learned that the phrase "trick or treat" is short for "Give me a treat or I will play a trick on you." It's actually a threat. It also happens to be a frighteningly good metaphor for how our brains work. "Give me short-term gratification, or I will make your life miserable!" is the brain's modus operandi as it communicates with itself to help us live our lives."
anonymous

Pandora's Seed - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...pandoras_seed

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • From obesity to chronique fatigue syndrome, jihadism to urban ennui, the costs of civilization are becoming ever more apparent. Spencer Wells explores adapting to a world where accelerating change is the new status quo.
  • Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations.
  • Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?
  • It turns out that early farmers were actually less healthy than the surrounding hunter-gatherer populations. So why did the farmers ‘win’ so resoundingly, to the extent that virtually no one on Earth today lives as a hunter-gatherer?
  • necessity is the mother of invention.
  • It is likely that we have changed more at the DNA level in the past 10,000 years than we did in the previous 100,000.
  • As we settled down into farming villages, and then towns and cities, society became more complicated. Hunter-gatherers, having fewer people in their groups, tend to have fairly simple and egalitarian social structures. A chief perhaps, but certainly not a specialized bureaucracy, a professional army, a priesthood and other trappings of what we call civilization.
  • The existence of these things is a direct outcome of the decision to settle down and start growing food.
  • ow can a species that spent almost all of its evolutionary history adapting to hunting and gathering in small, fairly dispersed groups learn to cope with the challenges posed by this relatively new culture?
  • The first is the growing power of genetic engineering.
  • unlike other technologies that have witnessed explosive growth over the past couple of decades, from computers to nanotechnology, the applications of genetics have the potential to affect the biological identity of future generations, through our ability to choose the traits our children – and all subsequent generations – will carry.
  • The second enormous challenge that we need to face as a result of the events set in motion 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture is climate change.
  • The final significant challenge, unlike the other two, is not fundamentally technological in nature, though some of the solutions will likely involve the application of technology. We have now evolved culturally to the point where the entire world is connected in a way it has never been before.
  • For secular rationality, read loss of faith and certainty. For improving living standards, read increased consumption. For increased social mobility, read loss of traditional roles and threats to vested interests.
  • The rise of fundamentalism in the latter half of the 20th century reflects the very real loss of the traditions that guided much of humanity over the past several thousand years.
  • Providing an inclusive mythos for the modern age will be a significant challenge of the next century.
  • The biggest revolution of the past 50,000 years was not the advent of the Internet, the growth of the industrial age out of the seeds of the Enlightenment, or the development of modern methods of long-distance navigation. Rather, it was a seemingly trivial event that happened rather quickly around 10,000 years ago – the dawn of the age of agriculture, when a few people living in several locations around the world decided to stop gathering their food from the land, abiding by limits set in place by nature, and grow their food.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    A guest essay by Spencer Wells at Seed Magazine on June 7, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & Politics, Part 58 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ectivism-politics-part-58.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • If she had a clear, rational case against Libertarianism, wouldn’t she have presented such a case and left it at that? But she does no such thing. Instead, her arguments appear drenched in malice and petty resentment.
  • Now if Libertarianism really is as bad as Rand would have us believe, why did Rand have to resort to name calling and illogical guilt-by-association arguments? I have several conjectures on this score, as listed below.
  • Conjecture 1: Logical deduction from Rand’s basic premises.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • From Rand’s views of history and psychology, she concluded that bad arguments do more harm than outright opposition.
  • Conjecture 2: Vanity motive.
  • In short, even those who sympathized with Rand’s political ideals found her arguments unpersuasive. Imagine how galling that must have been to Rand that even people who shared her political convictions found her arguments unconvincing!
  • Conjecture 2: Jealousy.
  • Perhaps Rand simply resented that some defenders of freedom and capitalism had more success or were taken more seriously than she was.
  • she wrote, “[The Road to Serfdom] had no base, no moral base. This is why my book is needed.” [ibid, 104-105] This final boast suggests that Rand regarded Hayek as a rival, and that jealousy may have played a role in her overwrought denunciations of his book.
  • Conjecture 4: Resentment against excommunicated Objectivists.
  • Apologists for Rand might insist that conjectures two through four must be wrong, because Rand was incapable of vanity, jealousy, and resentment. This, however, is a rather implausible assertion difficult to find creditable. Vanity, jealousy, and resentment are emotions deep within the warp and woof of human nature.
  • Rand’s claim that she didn’t have these disagreeable emotions because, after all, she was a woman of self-made soul, is no more creditable than someone denying that his or her organism produces disagreeable body odors.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Why was Ayn Rand such a vociferous opponent of Libertarians - one of the few groups that didn't regard her with contempt? Another great post at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on July 12, 2010.
anonymous

The Very Angry Tea Party - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-very-angry-tea-party

criticalthinking media politics

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief.
  • When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy. 
  • Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What Lilla cannot account for, and what no other commentator I have read can explain, is the passionate anger of the Tea Party movement, or, the flip-side of that anger, the ease with which it succumbs to the most egregious of fear-mongering falsehoods. 
  • My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding. 
  • they would be politically acceptable only to the degree to which they remained invisible
  • Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that  one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. 
  • Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.
  • If stated in enough detail, all these institutions and practices should be seen as together manufacturing, and even inventing, the idea of a sovereign individual who becomes, through them and by virtue of them, the ultimate source of authority. 
  • is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given  or a social creation?
  • It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects
  • Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. 
  • because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. 
  • This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable.
  • All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved
  • About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality.  The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction. 
  • In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing.  Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. 
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 10
     
    By J.M. Bernstein (Opinionator Blog) at NYTimes.com on June 13, 2010.
anonymous

What is Cognitive Dissonance? - 0 views

cheeptalk.wordpress.com/...what-is-cognitive-dissonance

criticalthinking education

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Cognitive dissonance is a family of theories in psychology explaining how we grapple with contradictory thoughts.
  • It has many branches, but a prominent one and perhaps the earliest, suggests that we irrationally discard information that is in conflict with our preconceived ideas.
  • The “rational” (i.e. Bayesian) reaction is to weigh your prior belief in the alternatives.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "You firmly believe that the sun will rise every morning. Then one day you awake and the sun does not rise. What are you to believe now?" By Jeff at Cheap Talk on July 12, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & "Metaphysics" (Part 1) - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...tivism-metaphysics-part-1.html

philosophy criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Metaphysics, in the proper sense of the word, is dialectical physics, or an attempt to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions.
  • Even when used to defend postulates that are basically sound, metaphysics remains, in the words of F. H. Bradley, “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.”
  • Karl Popper applied the word metaphysics to any claims or conjectures that are not empirically testable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I don’t choose to call my so-called “basic view” of the universe metaphysical. It is merely, as Santayana calls it, cosmology or natural philosophy.
  • Unlike Rand, I don’t believe these basic presuppositions can be defended or validated via axioms or logical argumentation. All these fundamental presuppositions may conceivably be illusory—that is to say, the arguments against them cannot be decisively refuted. They are presuppositions which nature has bred in us (probably via evolution) and which have proved their worth, not by logic, but through centuries of practice.
  • They neither require nor are amenable to logical justification.
  • The belief that all human contentions and presuppositions require explicit philosophical justification constitutes a false demand.
  • Rand’s foundationalism only serves to encourage rationalization, verbalism, essentialism, and other modes of empty speculation, and is often symptomatic of a dogmatic turn of mind that has trouble accepting the provisional and conjectural nature of knowledge.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 10
     
    "Rand defined metaphysics as "the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle's words, of 'being qua being.'" Well, that sure narrows it down!" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on July 26, 2010.
anonymous

Suicide Note - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...suicide-note.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 04 Oct 10 - Cached
  • What really drives this scandal is not philosophical error, but human nature. Human beings want status, deference, respect. That's what drives Peikoff; it's what drove Rand. Of course, according to their explicit philosophy, they're not supposed to care about these things. But since nature is nearly always stronger than principle (especially when nature is denied), these motives make their appearance stealthily, without Rand or Peikoff being any the wiser. Objectivism then becomes a method of rationalizing those very motives or propensities of human nature which the philosophy seeks to deny.
  • anonymous on 04 Oct 10
     
    "In a new, special edition of his Intellectual Activist newsletter, former Orthodox Objectivist and Ayn Rand Institute member Robert Tracinski claims the official movement is committing "suicide" with what he is calling "Anthemgate", and predicts a "long, ugly period of crisis". We've already touched on this burgeoning schism - see Neil Parille's excellent coverage here - and it looks to be gaining a real head of steam now." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on October 1, 2010.
anonymous

Throw the Bums In - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

politics criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 20 Oct 10 - Cached
  • That may not make sense, but the hidden brain is not in the rationality business. When we are stuck in a bad place, whether that bad place is a marriage, a traffic jam, or a weak economy, it is very tempting to try something new. Psychologists call this the action bias—and it turns out to have surprisingly broad ramifications.
  • anonymous on 20 Oct 10
     
    "Americans distrust the GOP. So why are they voting for it?" By Shankar Vedantam at Slate Magazine on October 20, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & "Metaphysics," Part 17 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ivism-metaphysics-part-17.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 29 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Rand’s explicates her views on this issue as follows:The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).
  • 1. To begin with, how meaningful is it to declare the “primacy of existence” against the “primacy of consciousness,” given that consciousness is itself a part of existence?
  • apologists for Rand will declare that the primacy of existence simply means that consciousness does not create reality, as various forms of idealism imply. But if so, why didn’t Rand just say that consciousness doesn’t create “existence” and be done with it?
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 2. Rand’s primacy of existence construct is a rather confusing way of stating realism. However, Rand’s equation of the primacy of existence (i.e., realism) with the axiom existence exists leads to a palpable contradiction.
  • The term existence, when Rand first introduces it, is equated with the content of consciousness.
  • Both the elephant at the zoo perceived by onlookers and the pink elephant perceived by the drunken sot “exist” according to the logic of Rand’s statement.
  • The only way to escape this conclusion is through equivocation, i.e., by claiming that the drunk does not in fact “perceive” the pink elephant, but merely hallucinates it.
  • To sum up: it is illogical, even on Rand’s premises, to deduce or infer realism (i.e., the primacy of existence) from the axiom existence exists.
  • 3. Rand’s “primacy of existence” and it’s opposition to the “primacy of consciousness” implies materialism, which contradicts the predominant anti-materialistic tone of Objectivism.
  • It's also amusing to see how Rand unashamedly chose the viewpoint of the primacy of consciousness when she quoted approvingly the line "I will not die, it's the world that will end", a nice illustration of solipsism...
  • What's even more annoying is that when you try to engage an Objectivist in an intelligent discussion of the axioms and why they are not what they are hyped up to be, the usual result is having a bundle of epithets tossed in your direction related to your capacity for rationality.
  • Now what exactly is this “existence” that Rand declares as “primary”? Rand’s equation of the term existence with the term reality hardly improves matters, since Rand does not go on to define very clearly what she means by the term “reality."
  • The real problem here is not that Rand is an unwitting materialist, but that her metaphysical speculations are so loose that one can draw whatever conclusion one likes from them.
  • anonymous on 29 Oct 10
     
    By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on October 25, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & "Metaphysics," Part 19 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ivism-metaphysics-part-19.html

criticalthinking objectivism

shared by anonymous on 14 Nov 10 - Cached
  • If the skeptic is not refuted, how can he be prevented from wreaking havoc within society, and sending civilization over the brink?
  • this challenge was laid to rest over two centuries ago by the philosopher often most associated with extreme skepticism, David Hume
  • All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches?
  • He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer.
  • When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe;
  • though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them
  • Pursing doubt to its ultimate end, Santayana challenges self-consciousness, discourse, logic, change, memory and time. In doing so, he goes well beyond Descartes’ doubts to discover the ultimate certainty, the perusal of a passing datum, a mere instance of awareness.
  • This “solipsism of the present moment,” Santayana concludes, cannot possibly be a bedrock of certainty, because it does not constitute knowledge.
  • Knowledge does not arise until intelligence arrives on the scene and connects these instances of awareness into larger, meaningful wholes, which can then be interpreted as symbols of a posited, external reality existing in time and space.
  • this animal faith is by no means an entirely groundless or “arbitrary” inclination, but one which is tested and corroborated during every moment when intelligence holds dominion over our lives.
  • Critical to Santayana’s view is the notion that some views are biologically inevitable, so that philosophers who deny them are not being altogether sincere.
  • Some beliefs are inevitable because they have been bred in us by evolution (or by “nature,” if you prefer).
  • the nature of truth is correspondence, the test of truth is pragmatic
  • in relation to these issues, often equivocates between rationalistic speculation (e.g., the Objectivist axioms) and an extreme empiricism (e.g., basing all knowledge on the “evidence” of the senses)
  • the ultimate raison d’être of knowledge is to cope with animal needs; and so whatever knowledge best satisfies these needs, which leads to successful action and solves the most problems in the real world, is that knowledge which most likely has the stamp of truth about it.
  • In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity, to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth, and in spirit. All these objects may conceivably be illusory. Belief in them, however, is not grounded on a prior probability, but all judgements of probability are grounded on them. They express a rational instinct or instinctive reason, the waxing faith of an animal living in a world which he can observe and sometimes remodel.
  • anonymous on 14 Nov 10
     
    "Whenever the Objectivist mania for "validating" such things as "reality," "causality," "man's mind," "the senses," "reason," "concepts," and "morality" is subjected to criticism, sooner or later somebody will come forward and suggest that without such validation, how can we know anything? If the skeptic is not refuted, how can he be prevented from wreaking havoc within society, and sending civilization over the brink?" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on November 13, 2010.
anonymous

The Love of One's Own and the Importance of Place - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...one_s_own_and_importance_place

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power.
  • there is a huge gulf between the uncertainty of a prediction and the impossibility of a prediction.
  • There is no action taken that is not done with the expectation, reasonable or not, erroneous or not, of some predictable consequence.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Nature is the most predictable thing of all, since it lacks will and cannot make choices. Scientists who like to talk about the “hard sciences” actually have it easy.
  • First, human beings have choices as individuals. Second, and this is the most important thing, we are ourselves human. Our own wishes and prejudices inevitably color our view of how things will evolve.
  • Successful forecasting should begin by being stupid.
  • By being stupid we mean that rather than leaping toward highly sophisticated concepts and principles, we should begin by noting the obvious.
  • we should begin by noticing the obvious about human beings.
  • they are born and then they die
  • Human beings are born incapable of caring for themselves
  • Humans protect themselves and care for their young by forming families
  • Who should you ally with and where would you find them?
  • Why should you trust a relative more than a stranger?
  • The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of one’s own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation.
  • Which love is prior? Is it the love to which you are born — your family, your religion, your tradition — the love of one’s own? Or is it the acquired love, the one you have chosen because it pleases you as an individual?
  • one married out of love for one’s parents, and out of the sense of duty that grew out of that love.
  • Romantic love is acquired love.
  • This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.
  • Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.
  • Tradition is superseded by reason and the old regime superseded by artificially constructed regimes forged in revolution.
  • As a citizen, you have a relationship to an artificial construct, the constitution, to which you swear your loyalty. It is a rational relationship and, ultimately, an elective relationship. Try as one might, one can never stop being an American. One can, as a matter of choice, stop being a citizen of the United States. Similarly, one can elect to become a citizen of the United States. That does not, in the fullest sense of the word, make you an American. Citizenship and alienage are built into the system.
  • Loving America is simple and natural. Loving the United States is complex and artificial.
  • For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority.
  • In post-revolutionary society, you may know who you were but that in no way determined who you would become.
  • Traditional society was infinitely more constrained but infinitely more natural.
  • This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state.
  • Modern liberalism and socialism do not know what to do with nationalism.
  • For economists, self-interest is a natural impulse. But if it is a natural impulse, it is an odd one, for one can see widespread examples of human beings who do not practice it. Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life.
  • Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea.
  • There is an important paradox in all this. Modern liberal regimes celebrate the doctrine of national self-determination, the right of a “people” to choose its own path. Leaving apart the amazing confusion as to what to do with a nation that chooses an illiberal course, you have the puzzlement of precisely what a nation is and why it has the right to determine anything.
  • Europe had been ruled by dynasties that governed nations by right of birth. Breaking those regimes was the goal of Europe’s revolutionaries.
  • In the case of the American founders, having acted on behalf of national self-determination, they created a Bill of Rights and hoped that history would sort through the contradiction between the nation, the state and the individual.
  • Why should we love those things that we are born to simply because we are born to them? Why should Americans love America, Iranians love Iran and Chinese love China? Why, in spite of all options and the fact that there are surely many who make their lives by loving acquired things, does love of one’s own continue to drive men?
  • Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are.
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power. What it finds frequently runs counter to common sense. More precisely, geopolitical inquiry seeks not only to describe but to predict what will happen. Those predictions frequently - indeed, usually - fly in the face of common sense. Geopolitics is the next generation's common sense. William Shakespeare, born in 1564 - the century in which the European conquest of the world took place -- had Macbeth say that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If Macbeth is right, then history is merely sound and fury, devoid of meaning, devoid of order. Any attempt at forecasting the future must begin by challenging Macbeth, since if history is random it is, by definition, unpredictable. By George Friedman at StratFor on May 26, 2008.
anonymous

Venezuela: A Deeper Look at the Electricity Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...deeper_look_electricity_crisis

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Venezuela is in the midst of a severe electricity crisis, with its national electrical grid so stressed that it could, according to the Venezuelan National Electric Corporation (CORPOELEC), be headed for a nationwide system failure within the next two months.
  • (click here to enlarge image) The center of gravity of Venezuela’s electricity crisis is the Guri dam, which, along with the nearby Francisco Miranda and Antonio Jose de Sucre dams, provides about 70 percent of the nation’s electricity.
  • Only 37 percent of electricity users have been following rationing plans, according to a recent CORPOELEC study. Questionable government estimates place the reduction of public-sector use at 23 percent and private sector use at 5 percent since 2009.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Indeed, the director of one state-owned electricity subsidiary has resorted to company-wide prayer vigils to end the crisis.
  • Venezuela is not at that break point, but the red line is clearly in sight. Isolated protests across the country have broken out over the blackouts and could spread as the situation deteriorates. Meanwhile, political challengers to Chavez, such as Lara state Gov. Henri Falcon, appear to be sensing an opportunity and are positioning themselves for a potential break from within the regime. The stakes are high in this electricity crisis, and without a clear short-term resolution in sight, the proven resilience of the Chavez government will undergo a serious test in the coming weeks.
  • anonymous on 24 Mar 10
     
    A StratFor article from March 23, 2010.
anonymous

Health care reform: A simple explanation, updated - 0 views

politifact.com/...orm-simple-explanation-updated

healthcare layscience scientificadmin partisan politics

shared by anonymous on 16 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The Senate bill does not require employers to offer insurance, but it does impose taxes on employers if they don't offer insurance and their employees qualify for new health insurance tax credits.
  • regulate the exchanges so that insurance companies couldn't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, or charge wildly different amounts for similar coverage.
  • Insurers would have to cover preventive care, and they wouldn't be able to cut off coverage unfairly or set annual limits on benefits.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • expands eligibility for insurance programs like Medicaid and the state Children's Health Insurance Program. All poor people would qualify for Medicaid.
  • People who don't buy insurance would have to pay a penalty on their taxes. Under the Senate bill, the share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage is expected to rise from about 83 percent currently to about 94 percent.
  • promote standardized electronic health records
  • A comparative effectiveness research center would conduct and publish scientific research to find which treatments are the most effective.
  • the new rules aim to pay doctors for good patient outcomes instead of paying them per procedure, also called "fee-for-service."
  • For the large group market, the CBO found that rates would either stay the same or decline slightly. For the small group market, rates would essentially stay the same as well. The individual market is a more complicated story
  • Covering millions of people who are now uninsured would cost billions more per year.
  • Critics say the Democratic plans would lead to health care rationing.
  • The public option is an insurance plan run by the government that individuals can choose over private insurance.
  • The more generous the benefits, the higher the costs.
  • The House measure put more restrictions on how insurers could offer coverage for abortion services.
  • the CBO warns that it's very difficult to put dollar figures on many of these things, because of the size of the health care industry and the inherent unpredictability of major policy changes over many years.
  • It's good to keep in mind that when it comes to health care reform, no one has a crystal ball.
  • anonymous on 16 Apr 10
     
    From Politifact. A basic explanation.
anonymous

Evolution and Economics as Different Paradigms XI: Market Fundamentalism - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...ution_and_economics_as_dif.php

criticalthinking economics

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 10 - Cached
  • A single language--English--was concealing a community of internally consistent belief systems that could be identified by taking note of how the words were being used. Fascinating.
  • life is a matter of tradeoffs. Some behaviors result in win-win situations, others in lose-lose, win-lose, or lose-win. If your view of the world doesn't include all four possibilities, you're not describing the real world.
  • serviceable definition of fundamentalism--a system of beliefs that alleviates serious decision-making on the part of the believer.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Judging by the absence of tradeoffs, their tracts were every bit as fundamentalist as the Hutterite epistle of faith.
  • It didn't matter that Rand was an atheist who called herself a rationalist. She used her talents to create a belief system that becomes a no-brainer for anyone who steps into it. She even stated explicitly in one of her essays that "there are no conflicts of interest among rational men."
  • Of course, the fundamentalist beliefs of Rand and the Hutterites differ vastly in what they impel the believer to do. Hutterites are impelled to abandon self-will and objectivists are impelled to pursue their own interests as the highest moral virtue, but both are comforted with the certainty that everyone will benefit in the end.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 10
     
    From Evolution for Everyone (David Sloan Wilson) on April 11, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & Politics, Part 50 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ectivism-politics-part-50.html

criticalthinking politics tradition

shared by anonymous on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • Rand is unique in that she tried to justify capitalism and freedom using the same sort of rationalistic assumptions accepted by the Old Left. She insisted, just like so many of the so-called “scientific” socialists and progressives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that everything in the political and moral realms had to be explicity justified on the basis of “reason.” But whether used to provide the rationalistic justification of socialism, capitalism, or any other ism that a febrile imagination can dream up, all such rationalisms amount to the same thing: incapacity in the face of the complexities of the human condition.
  • Reverence for tradition is, for the intelligent, non-ideological conservative, merely a tool used to compliment less tacit forms of knowledge, such as science and individual experience.
  • Traditional usages often have proven their worth over time, and should not be tossed out merely become some rationalist fails to explain it by “reason.” The conservative proceeds cautiously when reforming a tradition, because he knows, from long experience, how easy it is to make things worse, and that when faced with any daunting complexity, sheer trial and error is often a far better guide than the so-called “reason” of conceited intellectuals.
  • anonymous on 05 May 10
     
    By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on May 4, 2010.
anonymous

All evolution, all the time - 0 views

www.nature.com/...news.2010.260.html

layscience

shared by anonymous on 26 May 10 - Cached
  • Take childhood education. If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, there is very little that resembles formal education. Education takes the form of play, and adults provide explicit instructions more or less when asked. And yet this spontaneous education system is not only not exploited by formal education, it is subverted.
  • The empirical evidence points to substantial group-level benefits for most enduring religions. Benefits include defining the group, coordinating action to achieve shared goals and developing elaborate mechanisms to prevent cheating. The same evolutionary processes that cause individual organisms and social insect colonies to function as adaptive units also cause religious groups to function as adaptive units. Religious believers frequently compare their communities to a single body or a beehive. This is not just a poetic metaphor but turns out to be correct from an evolutionary perspective.
  • They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.
  • anonymous on 26 May 10
     
    May 25, 2010
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