Decline of the Empire

Warning To Humanity

I found out yesterday that Carl Benjamin (aka youtuber Sargon of Akkad and here and here) got "de-platformed" at Patreon, which means that he just got booted off for no good reason. Patreon is a funding site for internet "makers" of content. Benjamin's content is political. He is a "classical liberal" in the John Stuart Mill sense. Benjamin's youtube channels have not been removed—yet—but he has effectively been de-monetized, which is the more subtle strategy for suppressing free speech.

But that's not the story authoritarian alt-liberals want you to believe (political philosopher John Gray's term). No, these so-called liberals want to tell you Benjamin is an alt-right fascist, or a gateway to white supremacy or some such nonsense,  which is a beautiful example of the primitive defense mechanism called projection.

Projection is the misattribution of a person’s undesired thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person who does not have those thoughts, feelings or impulses. Projection is used especially when the thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at their significant other for not listening, when in fact it is the angry spouse who does not listen.

Projection is often the result of a lack of insight and acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and feelings.

The rule of thumb is simple—always focus on what people do, not what they say. This rule of thumb is right there in the flatland model of human nature if you properly understand that model. Straightforwardly— 

those suppressing freedom of speech on the internet are the dangerous ones, not those exercising their right of free expression.

Asserting the principle that free speech is indispensable in a free society is what the important free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960's was all about. 

So, what is my warning to humanity? Again, straightforwardly, if you want to preserve free speech, if you want to preserve due process and the presumption of innocence, if you want to be protected from arbitrary arrest for imaginary "hate" crimes, if you want to keep your precious Western Civilization, such as it is, and you don't want to see the large-scale political "mistakes" of the 20th century repeated in the 21st, then you should be very alarmed about the suppression of free expression on the internet. Your rights are not guaranteed. There is nothing natural about them. Indeed, it is human nature to try to take them away from you.

History tells us that dangerous repressive things like internet censorship always start out small and then snowball. Experience tells us there is a slippery slope. At the start everyone has rights, then some people have rights and some people don't, and then, lo and behold, there comes a day when nobody has rights except self-appointed gatekeepers who then tell you what you can or can not say or do.

I could not have published DOTE if there were not freedom of speech rights in the United States. Surely some repressive do-gooder busybody would have tried to shut me down for saying, among many other things, that humans like them suck.

I stopped reading, listening to or watching mainstream media about a year ago. I went cold turkey. I get all my news on youtube now. Using only "alt-media" has been a revelation. While I understood that the corporate-owned media was corrupt, biased and therefore heavily edited, I did not realize the full extent of it. For example, only one mainstream outlet even mentioned that Carl Benjamin was de-platformed at Patreon. That was vice.com, who said only this—

The accounts of British conspiracy theorist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known as Sargon of Akkad, and U.S. far-right political commentator James Allsup, were removed Thursday.

The ban will be a particular blow for Benjamin, who was earning more than $12,000 a month from the crowdfunding site [Patreon]. Benjamin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

I have watched lots of Benjamin's videos. I have never heard anything even close to a "conspiracy theory" in those videos. In fact, this conspiracy theory bullshit is yet another projection (definition above). The only conspiracy happening here is to suppress the free speech rights of people like Benjamin who hold non-politically-correct views. The mainstream media routinely misrepresents or totally distorts the views of people like Benjamin and all others who refuse to go along with an increasingly intolerant "social justice" agenda. That can not be an coincidence. 

At this point, labels like "nazi" or "nationalist" and so on have completely lost their meanings because anybody to the right of Pol Pot is routinely called a nazi or alt-right or far-right or some similar delusional ad hominem bullshit on Twitter. I hope you realize just how dangerous this corruption of true meaning is.

And when Apple CEO Tim Cook tells you his company won't tolerate "conspiracy theorists" (like actual conspiracy theorist and wacko Alex Jones) on Apple's platforms, you had better watch your back because today's classical liberal can easily be cast as tomorrow's conspiracy theorist.

You have been warned.

Changing Your Mind On Election Eve

I'm still working on a short essay which will attempt to explain all the embarrassing political nonsense happening in the United States and much of the western world. It's coming along very nicely.

But with the midterms tomorrow, could the great truth this former Trump voter received at a Swarthmore poetry slam tip the balance for ordinary voters? 

We shall see.

Toward Explaining The Political Crisis In The West

Despite my best defensive instincts screaming duck and cover, keep your head down, try to stay invisible, I plan to publish a short essay to try to explain how human nature drives the political & polarization crisis in the West. I will of course be using my model of human nature as described in the 4th flatland essay. In so doing I will fill in many of the gaps in that model. In particular, I will finally fulfill this promise—

An updated discussion of (instinctual) Sociality will be published as an addendum to this essay.

I started this project in a recent post Sociality Rules (Tribalism). And I thought, what the hell, I'll just finish up what I started. Some tragically motivated part of me still wants somebody—anybody—to understand Homo sapiens the way I do.

First, let's get in the mood.

Below I've included a link and a couple videos for you to watch. These sources unknowingly introduce some key things you need to understand in order to figure out what is motivating the political crisis in the West and in America in particular.

Sociality Rules (Tribalism)

First watch this video.

Politics and polarization have obviously gotten very bad and are getting worse by the day, not only in the United States but also in the rest of what has historically been called "western civilization." Tribal behaviors are primitive in the sense that they are entirely instinctually driven, so those engaging in these behaviors are never aware that they are doing so. These unconscious behaviors can be overridden over time, but only with great effort and only rarely. The rules below are for non-tribal observers who want to understand what they're looking at.

This Is It — There's Nothing To Add

I remember when I used to give a shit... .

<
Comic Doug Stanhope lays out the Human Condition

No Can Do

Not going to write about this human horseshit anymore.

The Terrific Adventure of Being Alive

This is a note on pointless suffering, one of main subjects of an essay I am writing. That post will stand as the last and ultimate addendum to my Adventures In Flatland essays. That addendum will be finished when I get around to finishing it. That essay will contain a theory of the origins of religion, a subject I avoided for a long time because I didn't understand what was going on. At this point, I wouldn't call it a "theory" so much but rather an obvious truth, a truth so obvious that it only took me 35 years to figure it out 

The Best Kept Secret On Earth

I was thinking about the pointlessness of writing a series of posts illustrating a "good enough" model of human behavior which few people have read and even fewer have understood. So I won't do it. I have a few other things to talk about which follow from the model (for example, religious behaviors), but that's about it. I'm done.

The flatland model implies that important human behaviors at their root are predictable and therefore meaningless in anything other than an evolutionary (Live & Grow) sense. That is literally the last thing humans want to be believe about themselves.

Adventures In Flatland — Part IV

The first three Adventures In Flatland essays were written in 2014 and appeared on this blog (DOTE).

Adventures In Flatland

Adventures In Flatland — Part II

Adventures In Flatland — Part III

This essay presupposes that you have read the original, but it would be helpful to read all three. This fourth and final long essay does not review those earlier essays. You've got to read them.

I use the term "flatland" in different ways. As a hypothesis, the flatland model posits a set of unconscious core instincts which drive our most important characteristic behaviors. I also use the term as an adjective (e.g. describing those characteristic behaviors as "flatland nonsense"). Flatland as a metaphor implies a 2-dimensional world, where the missing 3rd dimension is human nature itself (all those unconscious processes). Otherwise, the term simply refers to the human condition itself. These various usages will usually be clear enough in context.

Commute To Work By Boat

File Under:  we do not make this stuff up

I have nearly completed the 4th Flatland essay. After that, I will send it to a few early reviewers for comments, make the final changes and publish it late next week. Or so I hope.

Anyway, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes a brief appearance in the essay's conclusion. And if you read this article, I think you'll see why (Bloomberg, March 8, 2017). I saw this after I had used Robinson as a Flatland example. I may have to change the text (or link to this).

... His 18th novel, due out on March 14, bases its plot on something more typically down-to-earth: New York real estate. In New York 2140, unstoppable glacial melt has caused a 50-foot rise in global sea levels, flooding the city. Everything below Midtown has become a tidal zone where menacing green waters flow around the ground floors of skyscrapers.

Wall Streeters commute to work by boat; the super rich live on high ground, above 125th Street; and speculators have started moving in on downtown, an underwater Bohemia where artists and middle-class strivers struggle to get by. A winter freeze locks the city in ice. And, spoiler alert, billions of gallons of standing water don’t help with the smell in summer.

But life goes on much as it does today. New Yorkers adapt. “Most people are treating climate change as the disaster that is going to end civilization,” says Gerry Canavan, an English professor at Marquette University who co-edited a book of essays on ecology and sci-fi with Robinson. By contrast, he says, Robinson shows a “process of improvisation and innovation that will allow us to continue living.” People living their lives, only wetter, may not produce the same vicarious thrills as more dystopian visions—John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape From New York imagined the city in 1997 as a walled maximum-security prison—but books such as 2140 feel more relevant and essential as startling reports of climate change mount. The year 2140 isn’t exactly around the corner, but we did just have the hottest year on record. How far off will rowing to work seem even in 2040?

Climate change has long been Robinson’s preoccupation. His Science in the Capital trilogy, whose first installment was published in 2004, stars National Science Foundation employees who, having failed to stem the consequences of global warming, launch “terraforming” projects, pumping melted glacial ice into the Sahara and trying to restart a stalled Gulf Stream. His 2312, published 300 years before the title date, predicted that we’d figure out how to live on Mercury and the moons of Jupiter but not how to prevent our planet from becoming too hot. Stephanie LeMenager, a professor at the University of Oregon who studies climate change fiction, recommends 1992’s Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy by the same name, which explores that planet’s colonization. Robinson “tends to be a utopianist,” she says, explaining that he’s “a person who finds solutions in the most wicked problems—problems that would seem unsolvable.”

The utopian streak running through 2140 has its roots in what would seem a particularly intractable problem. Robinson believes that the free-market financial system, the cause of a great deal of ruin in recent years, could yet become something better...

There you go.