A Confession: I Was Wrong About Not Being Disruptive to Thomland

I often accuse Libs of not being very reflective of their ideas or even their own actions as in what they write on public message boards/forums. So in the spirit of self-reflective analysis, I wish to say that I was wrong about not being disruptive of discussions that happened on Thomland. I honestly did not want to address that issue before as I was always under the assumption that a discussion can only be disrupted if the participants so let it happen. My words or anybody's words can not take away from someone else's. For example, adding a book to the library in no way diminishes the value of any other individual book. In fact the more books {variety} in a library the more likely to be visited by readers. I tried in fact to show that no matter how many "troll" visited my threads, I was not the least bit distracted. Of course when you get banned for simply pointing out their failures in logic and sources of information, then yes, my ability to continue a conversation is greatly diminished.

This form of censorship creates "dead zones" in the free flow of information. After a while it is like being in a dysfunctional family. I often refer these dead zones in families as the collective "taboo" subjects. As a family creates more and more taboos, the family no longer is communicating but simply on non-personal levels. Their interactions become more like transactions in the market. "May I have the butter?" "Yes, here it is." "Thanks." As I even told .Ass, I personally identify people by the subjects that interest them. Clearly it was easy to spot him on other boards. He denied it but clearly he just lied.

I had the sneaky idea about this long before writing this, and not because they kept squeaking like a little mouse about it, but because when I took breaks then certain threads would pop up without a single conservative voice or any view of variance. The most recent example is "Republican Neoliberalism". Four pages and not a single contrary view-talk about group think. Any deviance was quickly squashed by the intellectual bullies.

Of course, my absence allows the intellectual shallow mice to come out of their woodwork and spout nonsense. Since their "leader" is just as shallow {i.e. Thom Hartmann} it is no wonder that they so easily fall under group think mentality. One of the most hilarious idiotic statements made on that thread was: "Glen Beck as spokesman for the neoliberal forces..." Obviously if you watch his interview with Ron Paul {Glenn Beck - Interviews - Congressman Ron Paul Interview} then you would not jump to such idiotic statements. I did include his full descriptor as he likes using "weasel words" to describe simple shit. I suppose he thinks it distances himself from his words but he either thinks Glenn Beck is an actual supporter of Neoliberalism or he is not and no amount of adjectives takes that away. For example what does it mean "spokesman for neoliberal forces"? Is that different from being a supporter? Is .Ass trying to say that he gets paid to say stuff whether he believes it or not? And if so then why "neoliberal forces" included? Is the forces different than the actual people?

Naturally, .Ass feels the need to put his ideological opposition in "ticky tacky little boxes" as this makes it so much easier to address the issues they bring up like Glenn Beck being a neoliberalist or not? At first he tried countless times to put me in the Neocon box. I honestly found things that I could agree with, according to the PNAC website {defunct?}. The issue that most of the neocons presidents over the past century were clearly Democrats. Even Obama is clearly a neocon with his stance on Afghanistan. This does not mean it is right or wrong but just a framework that fits the model. Then it was binary oppositional thinking, neoliberalist, authoritarian, conservative narrow minded cretin, intellectually shallow-based on writing, and of course all the various ad homs that Kate spewed out including rodeo clown, Eddie Haskal...

Now it seems that I am a "positivist". It seems that at least I should have been allowed to defend myself from personal attacks. Oh that is right, respect is what is demanded for people to speak to the mighty and great .Ass, all other intellectually inferior people get spoken down to. I really have not studied that much, but from what I have read, .Ass is clearly a positivist when it comes to matters of ecology. Strangely, he would play the "Only an expert can know" video, but it seems to only apply to "experts" that he disagreed with. Like he hates economists. I can only conclude that he clearly does not understand the concepts of economics and as such does not like those "experts" but when it comes to the ecology, they "know their stuff" and are experts we need to counter the right wing noise machine.

.Ass clearly showed his positivism when we discussed DDT. He insisted that for us to have a discussion I must in fact announce that DDT was a Persistent Organic Pollution (POP). Even recently with Chris he mentioned that he spent days trying to explain to "someone" about POP and DDT.

Even though I admit that maybe I was wrong about being disruptive, I in no way will change my behavior. I felt I was invited by Thom Hartmann, and as such he needs to be the one to address me or to the conservatives on his board. He needs to spell out that he plans to change policies. Otherwise, this is just an example of principle-agent problems. All the moderators are {including Sue and Louise} just agents of Thom and thus have no bearing on my decisions. They can have adverse effects on my encounters at Thomland, but what they say has no bearing on my actions.

As far as the moderators are concerned, they clearly are whores as they work for an organization that limits speech and censors people out of some distorted sense of justice. I have lost a lot of respect for liberals from these encounters. I am not sure that conservative groups are much better, but at least the pretenses are done away with. Thomland was suppose to be different as he invited all different points of view.

Cross post at JoeDan's also: A Confession: I Was Wrong.

WARren Huntsinger at it again...

Well WARren is at it again and tried to spread some of his normal diatribe posts at Znet including the post: Z Blogs | Do As I Say documentary. I find it funny that a man that was a drop out and could not get rhyzomes and naval right in English sentences would criticize my English so called "fumbling attempts". Just recently I was amazed at how many words he truly does not know how to spell when supposedly his spell checker was off. And this is from a man that hung out with an idiot that could not use an apostrophes correctly. If you are going to go all pedestrian on a blog then at least spell correctly is the first step. When has WARren ever criticized a Libtard with improper English including "Poly the ideologue"? Well let me get back to the blog post at Znet:

Another way to make a little money if you don't have any real skills to do something like build your own home, grow organic foods, help prepare your community for the post apocalyptic world where the grocery store shelves will be empty and the gas pumps won't work because there's no power to power the electric pumps and there's no gas to ship to the gas stations, where no matter how high we turn the thermostats in our homes when the temperature dives into the teens, the furnace doesn't turn on, is to make a cheap documentary about hypocrisy.

The documentary Do As I Say is one such documentary.

What moronic shit is that? You clearly are trying to identify two individuals. One is the virtuous man that is trying to save the world in some heroic manner that is more narcissistic than actual factual understanding. And another guy that just wants to points out the hypocrisies of those that are the "leaders" of various movements.

But unlike WARren, if I see a mistake, I am not hesitant to reveal it and not just say some shit like, "Indeed, why should one expect any continuity of thought? Let's just toss some word salads together and have some lunch." I would say you are missing another verb in the first part since the first man is doing something and before the comma and is there should be an or to signify that there are two ways and not just "Another way". Loganthor was right, conservatives are much more willing to give even if it the receiver likes looking into the mouths of a gifted horse.

Anyway, that paragraph describes WARren's gloom and doom scenario. I have attempted countless times to address his issues but just like the discussions about Kuznets curves, he just wants to bloviate instead of discuss issues. Part of our discussions are at: RDRutherford • View topic - 2010 Posts from Thomland.

Since we are pretty much all in this managed global system together, then, if we want the system to change and be truly different, we are all hypocrites, one way or another, by default. Those who want change are therefore more likely to be vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy than those who want to maintain the status quo. That's a working axiom I'm using for this piece, and my underlying criticism, whatever other flaws there might be in the substance of the documentary.

Strangely WARren never had a problem with whole threads of "Republican Hypocrisy" promoted by a fascist. Even if your adult son or daughter did something wrong it was to imply hypocrisy of any family member that was a Republican. Strange indeed that WARren never uses his principles in a balanced manner. Instead he uses them in a biased manner accepting some Libtarded talking points and accepting most stereotypical smears of conservatives.

Actaully, ren does do a good job in reducing his ecological footprint according to on-line questionnaires but he lives in a garden that is attended by and managed by an "evil corporation" {name is not a matter of concern} and thus he enjoys a lot of externalities that he does not pay for.

The only real possibility for change, if change is even wanted, would be if billions of people do billions of little things every single day that are truly different than what the system now makes easy for us to do, which is, of course, how it manages us through our willing, nearly blind participation.

That is clearly possible under our current system even if WARren thinks corporations rule the world. One way this is possible for his dreams to come true is through globlalization. Even Noam Chomsky understands that some versions of globalization is beneficial-he just hates corporations. I personally have no love or hate for them. They are what they are and studying east Asia has taught me that they have just as many domineering corporations {and even more so} than the USA.

I find it hard to get a good picture of the actual health of the planet. There are some areas that clearly need more attention and most of those areas deal with lack of properly defined property rights. Even government ownership is better than just free for all which of course results in tragedy of the commons. Which this discussion only points out WARren's lack of really wanting an open discussion as he had to sabotage any discussion of Dr. Olstrom's work. Instead of trying to understand her work and how it related to and contrasted with others that deal with property rights, WARren would rather create diatribes sprinkled with name call droppings. For example, I read most of one of Korten's books and found nothing of substance. It contained not one useful model, paradigm or knowledge set that could help understand the world and it was just a collection of self-aggrandizing Libtarded talking points.

Meanwhile, what makes life easy now, ultimately and systematically destroys a little more of the grid of living systems that we pretend to understand through our most advanced tools.

Yes indeed, those advanced human created tools, tools we can simultaneously use to tell ourselves we are destroying the living systems of the planet while also hypocritically creating the potential for destroying this grid of life which makes it possible for us to breathe each minute, something we tend to take completely for granted until that moment when a breath is not possible.

At least for me, ren nor any environmentalist has given me a complete scope of the problem. All I get are anecdotal pieces of information. Much of our news is disjointed and fragmented and even ren might agree with. Thus being more of a scientist I want to understand the aggregate not individual cases of measles. Much like our fruitless discussions about DDT, in which case you could never acknowledge that the way DDT is being used in Africa and other developing nations is much different than how the USA and industrialized countries used it before. In addition, ren has failed to show that how an increase in GDP actually "systematically destroys a little of the grid". It is not a simple more people equals more environmental pollution and it is one reason that Kuznets curves are useful for looking at explanatory variables. It was not meant that it was going to answer the meaning of "life, universe and everything".

Our science, translated through our system of cultural idea systems, like our philosophies, literatures, even religions, envisions human beings at the pinnacle of the planet, and the system of managed, programmed human beings as a whole agrees de facto, by their daily actions if nothing else, that they are that arrogant chosen species at the peak of their self conceived hierarchy that makes up the grid of linked living ecosystems and moving cycles of gaseous atmosphere and water we call the biosphere.

Here is where I find it strange the logic. If humans are arrogant, would any other animal be different? If the future is to go to ants, bees or roaches, then would they not enslave and use every last bit of resources of the planet? But beyond that, if humans are a virus like WARren says we are then what are we fighting it about since it is inevitable {predestined} that we consume every last corner of the petri dish and die out. If not a virus then we will change and adapt to the new surroundings and do just fine. Although I have not had a chance to read some of the work of "collapse" of civilization, the examples I have seen are derived from rigid societies without a democracy or capitalism to adapt to changing environments. While ren thinks that so called capitalism is like a disease, I see it as a functioning system that adapts well to changes especially if wrapped in what we would call a "liberal democracy". His ideas of Parecon is just as dangerous as Pol Pot's or Mao's visions of communism.

(Well, at least hypothetically that's the case, according to the hypocrites who don't live the life they preach, except for maybe a few really strange wackos, who probably didn't show up in the documentary about hypocrisy.)

Sounds like WARren did not watch it. I know he likes fiction stories to reveal all the truths about the world, but for me I like to watch or read it before making too grand of proclamations. I even plan on watching the fat man's latest propaganda piece on capitalism on DVD to see how he bend the truth and spreads his lies. Should be very educational as a piece of propaganda.

rén, let me just say that I feel your pain and empathize with the fact that that post got zero responses. Don't people know how smart you are? Do you feel lonely and an outsider at Znet? And here they already gave me membership.

Bill lost his moderatorship about two boards ago. I haven't seen much of him since. Bill hated Chris and he associated Chris with me, I guess. Bill and I never had much to say to each other. I finally found out how he really felt in that exchange, which has been "disappeared" as they were wont to do with such things at that time.
Next Justice to believe in "Unitary Executive" theory?

WARren, and you have the nerve to question my Engligh grammar skills? Are you just jealous that I have a MSc, and you are a loser drop-out???

Bloviating Ren H at it again. Just give it up!!!

Ren H wrote:

drc wrote:
Barefoot Gen and Dr. Buckley

Lol. Are you just trying to play within some constricted rules of the board, here drc, or are you really unaware that:

BarefootGen openly morphed (at Sue's permission) from Mazeppa early at the beginning of this version of Thom's board; that Mazeppa was a resurrection of a certain Dr. Buckley, who was banned a couple of boards back, nearly two summers ago, along with a few other possibly associated names (formally known as "socks") since, maybe too many to mention? That of course he was closely associated with Ronald Rutherford and a host of Rutherfordian socks, definitely far to many to mention?

While I heartily agree that whoever was behind those names brought a kind of "intellectualism" to the board, I don't think it's fair to equate that intellectualism with conservative intellectuals -- though Buckley himself and Rutherford may be a conservatives, I don't know. And I don't know how I could know.

What they did bring was a kind of systematic disinformationalist techniques which they used to disrupt serious discussions.

I think it's really important to separate the use of various "Neuro Linguistic Programming" (NLP) techniques from any political ideology, because not to do so clearly offers a potential for using those techniques to create even more confusion. After all, Thom himself is well versed in those techniques, has even taught on air classes in his radio shows on how they work, and it would not seem fair to say he is therefore a conservative.

As far as serious intellectual conservatives are concerned, I think they would have to identify themselves. I'm not sure if Dave M would call himself conservative, but he's surely an intellectual, and when he takes the trouble he can present some excellent and challenging arguments.

I guess I'm a bit uncomfortable with generalizing about conservatives as you have, drc, because I have a very different sense of what this board has become, and why, since it had a listing of some 16,653 accumulated (though certainly not active) members several boards and years back. I have no way of knowing what Norske's motivation for this thread was, not for sure, but I took it as a way of making a point about the current make up of board participants.

I, in my own personal vision, do see a correlation with what has transpired since I first joined a Thom Hartmann board six years ago and what Norske's asking for in his post. And from my limited view, I also see a correlation with what I know of as a consistent application of disinformationalist strategies by a very small group of constantly banned and re-emerging posters, who have as a result had a very significant and still continuing effect on the atmosphere of discussion on this board. There's no way to measure how much. I can only say that I am aware of the loss of a host of intellectual progressives who have gone elsewhere, who were once an important part of the atmosphere of the board. I don't think it's easy to see that unless someone has been here for a long period of time, long enough to have experienced the change and to have established a network of friends who have nearly all left for very pertinent reasons.

Damn, idiot!!! Is English your second language??? Like for example:

That of course he was closely associated with Ronald Rutherford and a host of Rutherfordian socks, definitely far to many to mention?

Putting a question mark at the end of a sentence only shows you do not know how to form a question and are too lazy to use the rules of English. It is also "too" as in too many. Are you an idiot???

I was talking to my wife the other day, and I was explaining that you are like many foreigners that learned "English" in such a formal setting that they find no difficulty in creating elaborate run on sentences but have no grasp of actual English. They can not even speak it. They do well on GRE tests but can not communicate simple conversations with people here. But in one sense the papers they present are such blather that professors {and real ones not made up in your make believe mind} are blinded by their "brilliance". Brilliant! You are like those people.

You criticize the simplest sentence I write as a response and wonder how you can decipher DRCs and Polycraps shit and not understand a simple sentence. It is just short hand for your ideological blinders and condescending BS. Just leave me the shit alone and you would get along better in life.

You show so little respect to others that you disagree with and you always wonder why people do not respect you.... If you ever get a mirror look into it deeply...

Take for example "closely associated with", I just find him much more of an intellect than you can ever muster to be. An honest and thus respectful participant in discussions unlike you and your NLP. Yes you and Thom studiously ignore your propaganda that you spew on a daily basis. That is why when you present a piece by Noam Chomsky that is just lies and innuendos you just lap it up like a little pussy cat. So my relationship was purely as a result of us both discussing issues that we thought were interesting. It was in fact you that destroyed so many fruitful conversations.

You are just an intellectual bully and a small intellectual.

Hey Ren, one more thing, I graduated with a MSc what did you graduate with???? Oh, that is right. You are a loser drop-out!!!

It's more like PeeWee gets all weak in the knees when I show him some attention, and this is the best he can do to express himself about it. I think he's maybe a little embarrassed. Or maybe its the unwanted guest syndrome. They want to be wanted, but can't be because they can't make conversation, so they stand around making sounds like they are going to say something, but never do. They can't leave without being wanted, but can't make themselves be wanted either. It's a horrible dilemma for them. So to cover that over, they sneer at everyone.

It never ceases to amaze me how you can manipulate the situation that you are the brave hero and intelligent but that all conservatives are bumbling idiots that do not match up to your intellect. You should have been banned long ago and repeatedly for such shit as that.

While you loved to run around and say that I was stalking you, you cleverly divert that to put it all on PeeWee that he is an inept fool that can not manage himself in group situations. You really are a fool and a tool. All I can say, is that I feel sorry for your psychotic mother that never instilled a sense of self ownership in yourself.

Ram Jaane...

Ren, I fart in your general direction!!!

Ok smart one, I challenge you to a debate over 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq due to illegal invasion occupation.

From the sources I've looked into in academia that are discussing this latest study, it was even more rigorous than the Lancet report, which had a greater margin of error, yet it has in effect, substantiated the findings of that earlier report. For those hysterics with a cynical view of the numbers, one must ask oneself if they know how to use a chi square. That's the level at which this study must be attacked and questioned. Those who have been following the violence in Iraq carefully and on a daily basis find the results plausible.
...
The infernally ignorant will continue to quibble about the irrelevant points they think, in their utter inner torment, they can ferret out of this study, in whatever way they can, given that it's also clear they lack the educational background to understand the relevent and relative validity in the most up to date social science methodology for assessing mortality in just these circumstances. But since few of them know a framing square from a chi square, all we can do is sit back and watch them flail away, just as their President does in his news conferences now.
...
The actual peer review efforts to analyze this second study haven't yet begun. For some nimrod who has never even heard of the Chi Square statistical method, let alone understand its validity, to dismiss what's being said about the methods by those who are the experts in this field, not them, is something to be dismissed itself, or at least appreciated for what it is: knee jerk fear.

Ok I just have one question for you: What degrees of freedom did they use?
Anytime anyplace you want to debate this, I will be there.

But for a primer on the Chi Square "lesson" then:
Chi-Square/Be sure to use logic in any statistic application.
Accidents at Irongate

Authoritarian Consciousness in American Democracy|ren

Well this makes the third installment of our exploration of ren's posts. The final post of ren's has taken longer for me to get into the groove from our most recent deep discussions on the subject of: "can a free market be forward looking and thus proactive to crisis that could or will face humans in the future" as compared to how markets are reactive by changes in the economy and society. This definitely had me thinking on several different levels. But without further delay...

I see where in a Media Lens, on line article by David Edward, A Warning From Auschwitz, he cites references from the seventies, a period where consciousness about our societal authoritarianism had been raised. A consciousness that has been under severe attack since then, I would say. It's at the heart of the values battle that must be rejoined by those who have given in to the traditional values being crammed back down our throats. Part of my signature line at Thom's states: “The only right you don’t have in a democracy is the right not to be offended.”

This is definitely a pattern for ren. He somehow thinks that consciousness can somehow be under attack. How can thoughts be under attack if not by better ideas? This whole post of course shows his extreme fear of 'authoritarianism'. He even approaches complete strangers and either assumes they are authoritarian or comes right and asks them as such. While the last hypothesis may be questioned I still have to wonder how values be "crammed back down our throats"? As being part of our multi-cultural and diverse society we are constantly exposed to values that we may or may not agree with. I mean for those sensitive to pornography will see those values or lack of values shoved down their throats all the time. What are we to do? Eliminate some freedoms so that they can feel 'safe' from other value systems?

It is certainly dangerous for a state when its citizens have a conscience; what it needs is men without conscience, or, better still, men whose conscience is quite in conformity with reasons of state, men in whom the feeling of personal responsibility has been replaced by the automatic impulse to act in the interests of the state.

Well if the interest of the government as elected by our liberal democracy is aligned with my interests then why should I not also have conformity with reasons of the government? Of course I changed the nouns to reflect that yes governments can provide benefits to the citizens and that the power of the 'state' or police state as I often call it may have interests that are outside the interests of nearly all parties of the nation.

This is, in a nutshell, the return to "traditional family values" movement that makes up the bulk of the Christian fundamentalism on the right. But the critical thing to take note of is not that this is safely instituted with only the fundamentalists, but is institutionalized in the culture. Some have been breaking free and the result has been a home environment that tends more towards egalitarianism and nurturing, with engendered mutual respect for all in the family, males, females, adults, children, with a trend away from leadership mindsets towards a partnership sharing of responsibilities. This involves a deep cultural change in the values of work itself. A monster task in the face of existing cultural institutions. This type of home environment develops the physical and mental conditioning in individuals that becomes the basis for the "evil liberalism" that has been so successfully demonized in the past twenty years or so.

Well I guess we live in an open society, and it is not like people live in caves and not exposed to what many people consider pornography all around us and being forced on the innocents as well as the guilty.

Well if it is evil like Communism then yes we should identify it as such. And of course the writer does not recognize that demonizing of all political groups is done on others. Just look through rens posts to see the "evil neocons".

Eisler seems to have seen the need to drop the gender pointing term: "patriarchy" and has transformed it to "dominator", at least in part I suspect because she sees that the women have been as responsible for maintining the system as men, thus gender is irrelevent. It's also a subtle use of language to move away from the victimization that is cognitively imbedded in everyone who conforms to the system. And that includes many people who consider themselves liberal, democrats, communists, or any number of other left identifiers, in other words it's systemic, not political and the challenge is to raise the general consciousness again about it, terrifying as that will be for those who now have the bit between their teeth.

This passage just reminds me that those that are afraid of something, they tend to find it at every turn. They in addition tend to speak in those terms. Like Marxists also talk about inequality and thus they see it everywhere to justify their views.

But in our society exactly this self-surrender is promoted and affirmed by the fact that it is demanded of us by every corporation that 'employs' us

Eisler and many others (including George Lakoff's strict parent/nurturing parent paradigm) are saying now that the conditioning for this starts in the home, continues in the schools and prepares the population for this self surrender to the work life of being in an essentially rightless chain of command environment most of their lives, thus giving little time to the questioning of whether it can or even ought to be any other way.

Again we go back to the controller and the controlled in our society. Instead of recognizing the ability of people to pick their careers or to start their own business. Hell, we slaves only work 40 or so hours a week. If we don't have time to think of other possibilities then maybe we are truly slaves that have chosen our bonds.

The other day I was thinking about the fact that the UAW is such a strong and powerful union, I could not see why they could not with the help of union members buy out at least one auto company. For example the market cap of Ford (F) is around $15.3 billion and there is over 1/2 million active members of the UAW thus just over $30,000 for each member to come up with not counting their war chests UAW Dues at Work. I wonder what Marx would think of that. Thus the 'means of production' can be easily owned in our society if 'labor' so desired it. Their only chains are their own inability to invest and risk capital like capitalists do on a daily basis.

What I find fascinating is the way Eisler takes this common, traditional societal perspective, the strict parent, dominator perspective, and sees it as a form of legitimized abuse. She traces it back to neolithic times in many of her works, starting with the Chalice and the Blade, and shows how humans have developed dominator style societies in place of what once were far more egalitarian, even the early agriculture based ones, which I once believed were the root of hierarchical dominance. Fascinating and very scholarly, but approachable by anyone. Well worth the exploration.

As some of the other posts have pointed out, hierarchy reared its ugly head when man planted seeds. That was the root of all evil-evil capitalist that wanted to secure the lives of their children and ancestors. And to provide a home and comfort so that he could accumulate the pleasures of society and even have time to explore his mind.

She suggests that the result of this characteristic societal abuse (and many of us have not been abused in this way at home, thus we may at heart be the "evil liberals" no matter what our political affiliation) is a "social trance". It's similar to what's been found, clinically, to happen in the more extreme cases of child abuse, where :

"the psyche of the abused child is similar to what happens in a hypnotic trance. People in Hypnotic trances are so influenced by another's suggestions -- or more properly, commands -- of what they should think, feel, and do that they suppress their own perceptions, feelings, and even will. But in the case of a chronically abusive childhood, this substitution of another's view of reality for one's own becomes habitual. Even one's own abuse, one's own pain, and one's own outrage at such injustice gradually become unreal, repressed into the deepest recesses of one's unconscious mind, or -- as required to maintain a dominator system -- legitimized as the way things are supposed to be." Sacred Pleasure, Sex Myth and the Politics of the Body Riane Eisler, 1995, p. 186

Any of that sound familiar?

Nope none at all. If you see the world as class struggles you will see it as such. But I do have to love the 'societal abuse'. Don't you feel abused? If not we have the cure for not feeling that.

These symptoms remind me of the Southpark episode World Wide Recorder Concert.

Meanwhile, Mr. Garrison has confronted his father about the issues of sexual molestation, however, the issue was not that his dad had molested him, but rather that he felt neglected because his father had not touched him. When Mr. Mackey finds out about this, he fears Mr. Garrison Jr. is so distraught about the issue that he could actually die if Mr. Garrison Sr. doesn't molest him.

And now for another perspective on this nihilistic thoughts I close with the article (without comment):
Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology

One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life -- adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love -- parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.
...
We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our generation's almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you. Sorry for that, too.

We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had America spend on education, most of you got an education quite inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make sure you saw Al Gore's film.
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And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of you women who have career success and didn't get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren't as fulfilling as we promised.

So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.

But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.

Links:
Authoritarian Consciousness in American Democracy

A Warning From Auschwitz

Riane Eisler

Partnership in Action/Riane Eisler

A Critic Answers Some Questions|ren

Some answers to common conservative questions, usually addressed to what they consider to be complaining liberals:

- tell me what is really wrong with the country
- tell my why it is wrong
- tell me what your ideas are
- tell me why those ideas are better than the present

Well ren starts off with a big task to answer all those questions, so let us see how that progresses (My comments in bold.)...

Let's start with point #1
I assume he means "what is really wrong with the country".
When George Bush decides to tell Syria to get out of Lebanon and half a million Lebanese show up with banners like: "America is the source of terrorism", and "All our disasters come from America", there's a clue.
Yes that is a clue, that they are brainwashed and are misplacing their aggression. But for an analysis of what Syria did in Lebanon this article entitled Lebanese Farmers and the Syrian Occupation is a good start and The Return of Hizbullah gives a real look at who the imperialists and terrorists are in the ME.
What is America doing there telling people how to run their lives?
They have been doing such a splendid job so far, why mess with a good thing, right? Well when it affects us then I guess we should be concerned. Like if they grow and train terrorists to fly into buildings then it becomes our business. Are we not our brothers keeper as the left has been saying since Kennedy? If their government is conflicting with us like Germany and Japan were doing during WWII then it became our business. And as usual ren acts like Marie Antoinette in "let them eat cake". What if they do want to live their lives differently and the police state like in Burma is preventing such freedoms?
Why do American's have to have a military that costs as much as the next twenty one countries on the list combined?Yes we can see that the USA in measurement of US dollars is much greater than other economies based on 2002-2003 period Military budget. But at least on one level that really only signifies that the USA is clearly a bigger economy as in List of countries by GDP. What is a better scale to evaluate this is Rank Order - Military expenditures - percent of GDP. This does seem to miss North Korea that I have read is close to 25% of GDP! There is also a very strong case that many of the nations are guilty of moral hazards and relying on the USA a little too much for their defense. Notice that the USA military budget was slightly over 4% GDP and historically is closer to 3.5% and that China is actually a fast growing economy with 4.3%.
Why do American's have to have more than 725 military bases around the planet?

Already covered that issue at: 737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire and The Sorrows of Empire.

Ever been in the military?

While your chicken hawk preppie president was getting drunk, snorting coke and playing hooky from his service requirements so he could practice politics and get to be president someday, a bunch of us were getting our asses shot off in another war that a decent, real democracy would never have been in. While he was unaccounted for as far as any records can show, one of my good friends from high school was being shot to pieces in a rice paddy in Vietnam.

In the military, you practice how to behave in a socialist dictatorship 24 hours a day, not how to be in a participatory democracy.

So why is America becoming the world's dominant, bullying empire? Why is a democracy doing such a thing? Well, maybe we should ask, are we a really a democracy? Is this how free and brave people behave or is this how frightened bullies behave?

Notice how ren makes it personal? I believe the President is the President of all US citizens even if not voted for him/her. I just wonder what "real democracies" would do with regard to other nations. Would they not help out other nation states that may be facing hostile ideologies or forces? I think it is kind of strange the reference to a "socialist dictatorship" and not the usual fascist state references diatribes. Maybe ren realizes that Socialism also failed. Even if the military was to become a democracy then why would it be assumed to become a participatory democracy?

To answers to the questions: That is how nihilists view it but if the USA actually became isolationist the world would actually not like this. Because other forces are bullying then free people need to fight for freedoms of others. Yes free and brave people to risk much for the gain of little but solely for the freedoms of others. Frightened bullies is what the remaining socialist states seem to be doing. Just look at Iran, Syria, North Korea, as well as these actions on their own people like Sudan, Zimbabwe etc...

When you walk in the doors of a corporation and grovel for that job, and then gratefully get it, you begin licking bootstraps from that point on until you become the one at the top, which doesn't happen for 99.9% of the population, but even then you are not practicing democracy, you are practicing the other part of autocracy, giving orders; so for most people in this country, participatory democracy isn't even a considered possibility during most of their waking hours of existence.

As I talked about in the last post, ren somehow thinks that being an independent contractor makes him above all that. But in reality I see him as licking more boots. Independent sales people are always having to lick someone's boots to get the next job. While I believe that ren has been skilled at his selling abilities of his skills, I wonder if he realizes that not everyone wishes to take on risks that not a steady job provides. I know that ren married but no children so in essence a bachelor nearly all his life and thus no need to have the security of a 'job'. But it is ironic that he so longs for some fantasy participatory democracy in the work place but has never done anything to promote that or to create a business based on those principles. He just does not work well with others. The last paragraph sums up how he views the masses as all zombies that live their lives in quiet desperation while he thinks he is above that. This is one of the reasons for his fascination with the film Century of the Self.

So we have a sham of democracy, not the real thing. We have a plutocracy, which is also better known here as fascism. The wealthy and their corporate management structures command the political scene. They inform Americans with information they have long since learned how to distort and filter in an infotainment corporate owned media, the information that Americans need to vote in that twenty minute session with democracy they get to have every couple of years or so when they vote, and now the question arises as to whether the corporately owned machines that tally the votes are rigged. That's basically what democracy has come to be in America. American's accept that concept at home now, it's the way it's always been hasn't it? how else could it be? So when their carefully pre selected political managers they've had the privilege of voting in tell them that sort of thing is "democracy" somewhere else, like Iraq, or Afghanistan, they don't even question it.

Do you ? Do you question it?

Well he can not even tell the difference between Plutocracy and Fascism. Like usual a jumble of polysyllable words strung together without tying them together in logical ways. While he is good at asking questions (some like these appear out of nowhere) he seldom likes to answer questions directly. I know that it is some basis with trying to be above the issues in a like macro view that no one else sees, but honestly it only glosses over his own inabilities to explain himself without a thousand word essays on issues like what is "is".

Corporations and their political cronies give Americans the choices of how their economy is going to work and what kind of jobs they need to train for, the roads in America are designed primarily for their economic system, the one they've developed for themselves over the past hundred and fifty years or so, once they had sufficiently chipped away at the democratic legal structure in the various states that were originally designed to keep them in line, not a participatory democratic economy that might have evolved if corporations had been kept in their place as planned. Public roads get the goods shipped all over the place and allow corporate workers to get to their jobs, making sure, of course, that they are always just a little inadequate at the conveniently timed period that everyone seems to have to conform to, of getting to and from their corporate jobs, so that everyone can be terrified about being late to work, thereby potentially fired and have to send out another two or three hundred resumes complete with carefully crafted cover letters, most of which go in the respective personnel officers' trash cans.

Yes the frustration of living in a modern world. Wouldn't it be nicer if corporations understood that the roads they should build because of good will and provide employees with limousine rides. That is his fantasy world where there is no problems. Dare I say nihilism again.

Corporations and the economy they create for themselves and operate for themselves, since it is their profits that set all the standards in society, therefore sets the stage for how people need to be trained to fit in the specialized niches in their now extremely well designed management hierarchies which have been refined for maximum efficiency; that's today's educational system instead of system designed for giving young Americans training in how to make a democracy work. What would be the point of that? We don't need democracy in the work place, it's a privately owned and well accepted management autocracy, a dominator system, not an egalitarian, you own your own work participatory environment.

Corporations do not create economies only markets can they create. Government and people (workers, voters, unions...) create economies and with some help of the total business sector. Ren keeps talking about how there needs to be more training in democracy but how much resources does a school devote to such endeavors. Is there not civic classes and history and sociology and etc... Why should workers necessarily own the means of production unless they risked the investments to start with. There is forum member named Jason that joined a cooperative and seems to enjoy it.

Basically if labor wanted to own the means of production they already have the tools to do so. Most work in a corporation and as such they could easily invest in the common stocks and if enough workers invested and risked their capital then they could own the corporation and change management. Simple as that. Much of the things that Marx didn't analyze was risk between the different segments of the economy.

If you've never given that much thought and assumed otherwise, then ask yourself: Why make children learn to sit in rows hour upon hour, passively, subserviently, as an authority figure speaks, telling them what is what and grading them on their ability to conform to what is what? Why not put them in a situation where they could explore what interests them and open themselves up? Why the competition for grades? This isn't fantasy on my part, we actually took my niece out of this harmful educational environment and home schooled her at eleven. She didn't even bother with a high school diploma. She went into UC Davis at 17 and graduated at 20, top of her class. Not that being top of her class is important, just that one doesn't need the programming of the existing system to do well. Doing well is actually pretty easy, doing different is what's a bit tougher. Discovering what different is after massive programming is tougher yet.

Of course I think most people realize that our present educational system may have symbolism of factory work places. And even I agree that should change but on the extreme of home schooling I do not see our society paying for that expenses. But maybe technology combined with different teaching methods may reduce the burden our schools are inflicting on our economy without producing the results that we should be getting. So I think I can agree with ren on many of his points that the new work force may need a new paradigm in learning. Since most jobs will require computer skills then it seems that teaching should be done more with computers that with teachers giving boring lectures in front of rowed students. But grades are important for a yard stick to check progress. Think of a track star that never timed himself, how would he know that he is improving or even has the ability to compete. If ren thinks that we will no longer have competition in our society or our economy then he is dreaming and should immediately leave for Cuba.

You need to ask all those kinds of questions. You seem to have all the answers for yourself right now, but I haven't heard you ask any relevant questions yet. That's where you really need to explore if you think everything's so great. You say you work every day out of creative discontent? No you don't.

You see, it looks to me like you've already been programmed, because I don't see that your answers have come from ever exploring these deeper issues.

Well, I for one answered his silly questions and fired some back. I came across the phrase "This is so, is it not?" that best describes how I see ren's analysis. He creates the scenario and then answers his own questions. Well if this is as deep as he looks at the issues then I would say I have surpassed him in leaps and bounds.

Let me ask you something. Do you like being told what to do?

I don't. I want an America where I'm not told what to do. Not ever. I want to participate in every part of my life, free of choice. If you don't, then you can't possibly know why that would be better than what we have at present.

This part almost shouts out PARANOID LOGIC. Of course we all do not like being told what to do and that is why I think we have so many homeless people. But if you want security without risk then you make choices in life. His fantasy world where no one tells others what to do is only on the island of Robinson Caruso. Since once you have more than one person then one person's rights overlaps another. Someone in the end will be telling the other what to do. Does ren have a sample in the animal kingdom that could enlighten us. I mean if nature has not solved that problem then why does he think that mankind can. Again nihilism in practice.

I don't know if that's what you wanted to hear when you said "this is exactly why you people aren't getting the message across", since I don't consider myself a liberal, or a libertarian (well, an American libertarian, European libertarians are different), or a conservative, or whatever else there is. I don't know if I'm one of "you people" you refered to. After all, I’m just a citizen.

That may be the case that he can not identify with a specific party or ideology, same with me in certain ways. But he sure hangs around one end of the pool and it is not the conservative end.
- tell me what is really wrong with the country
- tell my why it is wrong
- tell me what your ideas are
- tell me why those ideas are better than the present
Well we are at the end of this post and as far as the above questions, I think only point one was covered. Maybe if ren wrote another dozen pages we could have had answers for the other points.

Ren|Essentials for A Values Based Participatory Economy

This should be the first of a collection of analysis of another prolific (especially at Thom's Forum) blogger's writings. While this may seem to be a constant attack on him, I truly believe that he is very smart and informed about the issues. The following is the opening statement from his website:

Part of my purpose on the web is to enhance my writing skills and to self publish in our primary, if perhaps only, form of participatory democracy. Most of it occurs as part of Message Board conversations. Sometimes I say something I want to refer to more than once, kind a basic philosophical formulation. That's another reason for this site. Below is a point of view I finally put together to answer a question about what would be involved in a values rather than profit based economy. I've thought about this perspective for years, so it reflects something important to me, that's why I keep it in my base camp notebook.

I have seen his writing skills even better than this web site shows but still acceptable for a blog. Like I have a right to criticize? LOL. So let the conversations begin...

In my view, both the left and the right want the same thing. They want a system of some kind that they can point to, to make themselves feel secure. The marketplace economy with all its pseudo science rules and laws is one such system. It operates in an ideologized framework beyond the participatory and interactive control of the subjects. Decisions about resource development and consumption occur as a result of Social Darwinistic laws that were parsed from a small segment of Darwin's much broader and more comprehensive evolutionary theory, and have been pasted over our innate intelligence by the management oriented intellectual minds who have nothing better to do than sit around and figure all this out.

Strange to talk about "pseudo science" from a guy that believes that Eco-psychology is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Yes, it is strange that both sides of the debate about economic systems compare the "capitalist system" to something like "survival of the fittest". As one of my recent posts point out (Markets W/O States) that people are basically cooperative beings and that for as much competition there is there is actually more cooperation. Just think of how so many people cooperated to create a corporation like IBM, WalMart, etc. And I have the same thoughts about all kinds of endeavors on the left that dreams up Eco-psychology, and the countless variations of Marx's basic thoughts. These endeavors are nothing beyond glorifying Nihilism. Luckily because society as a whole has so much free time on its hand then all these navel gazing get plenty of exposure. Actually complex societies (as some call what we are under) allows such a plethora of pontificators about such trivia matters.

In this context the implication that just about everyone has brought to our current cultural consciousness is that, except for a special few, humans are little more than rats in a box trying to achieve self satisfaction through schedules of reward and punishment. If only they would all just try to be better rats and learn how to maneuver through the box and jump through the hoops, all would be well. If you want to insist on using such concepts, then I would say that both the left and the right are hooked into this dominance system ideology in only slightly different ways. The result is a nation in an increasingly globalized and dangerously interconnected international society -- with occasional warring factions that must be controlled of course -- that is driven by fear and dependency because the people of the nation and increasingly the world no longer have the cultural skills to make their own self determined way through life as we all once did.

Skinner Boxes is a recurring theme in a lot of ren's writings. I just wonder what society does not impose some conditions on individuals? Mostly through social conditioning that even pre-industrialized societies had to maintain restrictions on the individual. For example those unlucky enough to be rejected by society for being elderly. Basically a throwback to the "noble savage" is the dream he is living. Since ren in essence rejects the present value system even if defined as liberal or conservative frameworks and longs for something that impossible, I conclude that nihilism has consumed his thought processes. It is no longer a rational way at deducting the problems but more of a religion that is driven by the first sin.

That segment of the brain that once took part in that activity is hardly used now as people increasingly specialize themselves to fit into the cog of a giant marketing supply/demand side system. If you are an accountant, then from that specialized niche, you would be aware that comptrollers and their department personnel are generally in a position of immense influence in management structures, at least partly because, like the priests of ancient times, nobody knows what the heck they are talking about. Look at how the financial world shakes when Greenspan opens his mouth.

Yes, there is specialization in labor that is continuing unabated, but since knowledge is so deep in every topic then people spend years and years to learn their narrow focus of information. Even generalists have to have secondary masters degrees lately. But without this specialization then eco-psychology and many of the highly educated fields would not be possible. The pyramid needs a strong and stable base to support this specialization process.

The way I see it this whole mindset of dependency on a system needs to go or we are doomed; which means we are probably doomed because I know it won't go easy. In my view, it's the mistaken result of a path taken about ten thousand years ago when, by developing agriculture as a means of controlling the vagaries of ecological fluctuation, apparently first at about where all the turmoil in Iraq is occurring, a whole system of dominance ideology evolved. The variations of capitalism are a recent variant; as would be the versions of Marxism that tend towards centralized control.

As I noted above, there was original sin that humans committed 10,000 years ago was the planting of seeds in the ground. The only other social construction that ever existed then was the 'noble savage' as a hunter-gatherer. Thus not likely any ecopsychologist would be necessary or even possible. I do agree that Marxism tends toward centralized control in practivce but on a theoretical basis it was meant to be anti-centralized.

In relation to all that I want to be a bit more specific, and hopefully much clearer about where I'm coming from on this general attitude of the left/right dichotomy that I’ve heard expressed thusly:
I also notice a common idea that concentrated ownership of resources by corporations is inherently a bad thing.

Yes, please be more specific. Ren also has the basic liberal meme of that Corporations are bad. But even by its basic setup allows non-concentrated ownership. More people own the means of production than any other time in history allowed in much part through stocks. Stock ownership allows the basic division of ownership across broad and varied peoples. Diversification of portfolios also is an added feature of corporate stocks.

You see, it's not the problem of concentrated ownership I am talking about (I don't speak for anyone else) it’s the vast system of hierarchical organizations designed to dominate and control the resources, in a system that is regarded with almost religious awe. The hierarchical systems themselves are the problems. Stockholders are irrelevant, because the systems have a built in ontology that by nature excludes democratically based participatory control. As a system, it fits into the larger ideological market system perfectly. It's efficiency and capacity to garner resources makes it one of the strongest organizational constructs in that system. As a system that engenders ways to develop certain unimportant human capacities, like caring for one another, interactive concern for one's environment, trivialities like that, it is completely deficient.

If anyone is praying to the gods, it would be ren as his god of ecology and science that is only supported by the complexity of our present system as ren defines. Business and corporations are willing to try a lot of different management styles that give results. I had the privilege to talk to some of the people in the development projects at Hewlett-Packard and it was interesting how they were given complete autonomy to work the hours and the way they wanted as long as progress was made. When workers feel free in our new intellectual jobs markets they are more likely to be productive. While I do think that shareholders should have more say in the running of the company, they clearly can not micromanage the corporation. But shareholders are the ultimate participatory democracy as people are free to buy or sell stocks as they so desire.

Ren basically has created a anthropomorphic fallacy by giving human characteristics to corporations. They are only entities that only own assets. Only humans have human traits of compassion and concern for others and the environment. Now if corporations and thus the shareholders that own them want to have alternative purposes for being in business (aside from profit motive) then I say more power to them.

So I'm talking about democracy, and democracy is something altogether different than these externally conceived systems everyone has accepted as a fact of life, and that they allow themselves to be governed by. I believe human beings are inherently democratic in nature. But it needs to be learned and nurtured. If we could wake ourselves up we might just find that "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is built into the hard wiring of our brain, and would function naturally as a part of our everyday existence.

Yes, we are hard wired to be cooperative in nature, but we also have some sides that desire to compete for competition sake. Some have defined it as The Will to Power. Like why do people climb mountains? Because they are there. Ren's version of democracy is Participatory democracy. While this might have some positive aspects it basically lacks broad support since not many people want to explore every issue in depth. I see that our specialization of jobs is also manifested into the political arena.

Political positions that often do not gather support have followers that believe that if just given enough information that people will make better decisions. But those people somehow think if their brainwashing was more potent that it would counter the present propaganda. If humans are inherently democratic in nature then why does it coerciveness to be so 'learned and nurtured', shouldn't it come naturally?

It's about people getting together and making reasoned choices as a group based on the situations they find themselves in, starting from the truly advantageous point, in terms of survival, of caring for one another and the welfare of the group as a whole, instead of treating each other as competitors in a hostile environment. Each person in a democracy participating, not letting specialists do it. Training ourselves as we go along to do it better and better, thus providing a different kind of evolutionary framework from the Social Darwinist, free trade market competitive evolutionary scheme that has led to this conundrum of a situation, as I see it. That way of being cannot be forced on anyone, it has to be freely chosen by everyone. It is fragile. Systems of dominance have always been able to disrupt and destroy democracy. That's certainly one lesson from the past 10,000 years.

Again ren sees the present system as competing against him personally, instead of a cooperative atmosphere where many people come together to work on the same goals. But the participatory democracy has few that would possibly want to learn about all the nuances of government. I recently heard how a farmer politician had got into politics since he had opposed some taxes. He assumed that everything in the world was ok except that one tax. Obviously his constituents was just himself. While he admits that any system of participatory democracy would take broad support, he also understands that it must be free will for any structure to be sustainable. Which is one reason past communist/socialist experiments ended badly. But if a few scorpions could destroy the system that easily then that system is unsustainable prima facie. As human nature to have Interstitial Characters, then a few each generation would eventually destroy the system without some police state to control them.

This passage I wanted to point out specifically: Each person in a democracy participating, not letting specialists do it. I have known ren on-line for over a couple of years and he has used the argumentum ad verecundiam (Latin: argument to respect) so many times. And conversely questioned my knowledge or training countless times also.

In the end, democracy and corporate globalization are the antithesis of each other. Democracy is a locally interactive process, capable of being environmentally sensitive. Globalization is a system of increasing centralization and autocratization of human beings into larger and more efficient management systems, which could easily end up being a planet of nothing but monstrous corporations one day if it can go to it's logical conclusion. Such entities have already demonstrated their complete lack of concern for the value of life, and disinterest in correcting the wrongs that are left in their wake after a disaster. I submit Bhopal as an example.

How, how are they an antithesis? People get to decide what products or services they want and people in a participatory economics model decides where to spend their income and money. There are all levels of democracy and to say it is only at the grass roots is simply naive. As far as corporations we have more now than ever before and we get more all the time. We have more businesses also. As we create more markets we get more suppliers and thus more businesses and as they mature we end up with more corporations. Thus in the end we end up with more decentralization and with this nation states (police states) have lost some power. This is actually a fear of the anti-globalization fear mongers. They look at the state as their protectorate, and if that entity loses power that somehow they have lost power and freedoms also. But globalization provides freedoms, it is democracy that needs strengthening not the police state. As far as the Bhopal disaster I too think that ultimately Union Carbide is responsible, but this incidence does show that the scorpions can show up anywhere when the person that sabotaged the valves caused the deaths.

What I'm interested in is having the freedom not to be a well trained cog in any of these systems. These systems offer the carrot of security. I don't believe security is possible. I think the idea itself is a mistake. By looking for security humans have developed these huge, unwieldy, passive populations who live lives in which they have very little active engagement. Once they have bought into the concept of security, discover that they have few real alternatives with their lives but to depend on the system, then fear is the easiest motivator that can be employed in the event of some minor ripple in the system of obedience. In other words, everyone scarcely develops beyond the dependency level of a child.

More to the feelings of being caged and manipulated. Obviously a childhood that was not secure and stable. I have struggled to explain how ren sees the world as controlling and how I see it full of freedom but never quite got how to explain the differences. This is clearly a reason for me to categorize his views as nihilism. He has rejected all values as the freedoms we have without a clue to what type of freedoms he wants other than some vague concepts that resemble the bosom of a caring mother.

I can understand the point about fear of security, but then when ever there is a problem ren assumes that the Federal Government is failing. But ultimately ren wants to see humans go back to some noble time like the noble savage period. Talk about hoping for the destruction of humans. Again what compassion is that to think we should allow 6 billion humans to die?

As it stands these days, your choice is to look at the system, figure out where you want to be in that system, and try to somehow get there. In a shifting global marketplace where employers have the entire planet of people in increasingly vulnerable life sustaining environments to move around in, one can only hope the job one has trained for is still worth something in the "job market" when the training is over. The sensation of scale, up and down, is smothering. It permeates all aspects of cultural life. Ask anyone: Do you want your child to grow up to be a fully emotionally mature, self actuated human being or to be a leader? You know most people don't even ask the question. It's always: he or she has leadership potential! with much pride of course. How many are proud to say their child looks like a good empathizer, or a potential synthesizer person. Priority is leadership because we are in a dominator stratified system. Anyway, that's just a side example.

This is funny that now that we have so many more choices in life that that is actually a cage. Instead of being born a noble savage that had the choice to either hunt or die, people now have countless choices. They even have the possibility to create their own job and career. Think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

As far as empathizers in our society, I had plenty of chances to participate in "Diversity Training". And one had a list of traits on one side and jobs on the other. Corporate CEOs actually scored high on all the traits that we identify with motherhood including empathize and feel for others. Anyway leadership comes in may styles and each has its benefits. I have tried to direct and teach my wife in how to manage people. Many technical people can not manage other people.

If you fit yourself into the scheme of things well enough, chances are you will live a nice, steady secure life, maybe there will even be a little excitement somewhere. All this as long as the system you depend on works.

As we get closer to the end of this paper, we can see the personal touches of 'you' added. Well I am sure he depends on the system also to some degree. He has yet to give me any reason why the 'system' will not work for a long time. Ren feels it is a systemic problem and no matter how many problems are solved the structure itself is unstable. I see stability in two manners that will conquer all problems the first is Liberal Democracy that allows information and voting to be free and widely dispersed. The second is the market system so that allocation of resources can be diverted to the most productive uses. The problems we have is not distribution of resources but increasing the productive capacity of the lowest segments of our worldwide society. Also the people of the world having the negative rights that we have here.

I have no real interest in arguing about how to adjust the existing system one way or another. The way I see it the adjustments from either side are usually necessary, the logic of maintaining business profits for the wealthy to maintain their “incentives” versus the ambiguous logic of health and welfare of the population. Nobody ever seems satisfied so the ongoing struggle seems to suffice to keep some sort of balance. In the course of my life, I have become intolerant of the dominant social institutions and values imposed by an authoritarian system of ideas over human life and freedom. My efforts now go towards opposing processes that negate the self sustaining democratic values I care about, and I do so by emphasizing different goals, values, and aspirations that undermine this system of domination. Basically these entail concepts of participatory democracy and of course participatory economic activities necessary to life. I've been successful in doing this in a private enterprise environment with a group of acquaintances to some small degree over the past 14 years.

Basically more nihilism in the first sentence. A statement to refute all systems that have been devised so far and no replacement except some vague concept of participatory democracy. For a nice analysis of Nihilism within the framework of the movie Pi here.
But ultimately the world is made up of hierarchical constructs of the victor over the victim. And for us to somehow think that humans are going to be beyond even what nature (or God) provided is pure foolishness. Thus it rejects all values that are logical which leads to nihilism and not to the ultimate and dreamed about Übermensch. He is also fooling himself if he thinks that just because he is an independent contractor that somehow he is not in the same system. Thus ren rejects all present value systems as he describes here and prays for a system that is illogical and unstable in his own words. Thus nihilism rears its ugly head...

Links:
Essentials for A Values Based Participatory Economy

A Critic Answers Some Questions

Authoritarian Consciousness in American Democracy

rén 's video collection
ADDENDUM To My WEBSITE

Part II-You meet all Kinds on the Internet. Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder

A good story always starts at the beginning so we should start with childhood. I have thought (like a good Freudian) that we all carry baggage from our childhood and even as adults we carry our good and bad experiences with us.

Childhood:
Overprotective, insecure, socially ambitious mother; weak, unsuccessful father (Donaldson).

Parental indulgence of pretensions and of unrealistic views of the self and life's possibilities.

The more unrealistic the expectations of the parents, presupposing massive denial of emotional reality, the more likely that a discrepancy will arise between the "ideal child" and the "real child" (Wurmser, pg. 72).

I will refer back to this passage from time to time. First I want to look at our subject's views on his mother.

Let me ask something: When you were two years old and you wanted to, let's say, suddenly run across the street, and your mother grabbed you and stopped you and you screamed "no!" as two year olds do who are discovering the conceptual words for the action and their internal urges (note this is a conceptual statement based on personal observation), were you aware that your rights were being violated by your mother?Posted 20 October 2005 19:10

This was the first post about mothers that I found and although it does not specify his mother, it shows a dominating mother and that even at a young age he may have had conscience dilemnas. It is also worth noting the personal observation statement.

Perhaps another way of saying it, when I grew up I was not heavily conditioned to being told what to do. I was almost never told to do something, I was more often provided opportunities and offered choices, even the choice not to participate in something. Thus, as I got older and entered the regimentation process of public school and other behavior control processes, when I got into situations where someone told me to do something and I didn't want to, it didn't dawn on me at first that it might be a problem for me to decline. What did dawn on me very quickly was I didn't particularly like being ordered around, the act of having my personal autonomy revoked. That was an unconceptualized impulse, I still get it, and I was later considered to be one of those guys in the military service that had problems around those issues. No one taught me conceptually to have those strong feelings about not wanting to be told what to do, that came naturally. What I missed was a lot of cultural conditioning that would have allowed me to "take it" with a little less fuss.Posted 21 October 2005 01:17

So he says that he was grown up as a child with no strong parental role. But through a child's mind this could indicate weak parents and indulgence.

Those we too call rights. In this case I brought up with the mother and child it's a might makes right kind of thing, very natural I'd say. I may talk about it in an objective voice like that, but that's pretty much how it's worked for me in my life.
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Now all I'm trying to do here is deal with the problem you've presented of not being able to talk about any of this in an abstract sense, but talk about the process directly -- only here we are, stuck using an abstract medium, words, sentences, and so forth. Have I ever mentioned the notion of double binds? That's something I learned about directly, having a childhood in the company of a schizophrenic mother. (Not that I'm trying to suggest anything, it was just part of my early training. We all do it to each other. Some Buddhist masters liked to train their students with it.) Posted 21 October 2005 18:24

The first passage is hard to understand but seems to imply that mother/child relationship is based on might makes right in his own experiences including his childhood.
Even the second passage does not make complete sense. But we see the introduction of his schizophrenic mother which lead to his early training. But I am not sure how Buddhist masters expose their students to schizophrenic mothers or that we all do it to each other.

You missed the meaning of my question and then gave me the kindergarten version of an answer which I've already passed eons ago. I'm at the old man stage here. And I wonder: What does it take to get you to stop doing that? The reason I started my post with the paragraph on playing was because I was hoping you might get a clue, but it seems you didn't.
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I've been to the place where thought slows almost to a halt. I'm there all the time, actually. It's like just before you are about to get killed. I've dealt with the pain bodies Eckhart Tolle talks about. Those are concepts we use to torture ourselves with: like the war in Iraq, the awful President Bush, our cousin who lied about something that caused us to get in trouble when we were four, etc., etc. I don't know for sure if there's a war in Iraq, if we have Global Warming, if the clear cuts my eyes tell me are all around me here in Western Washington are really there, I don't know any of that for sure because I know it's possible to trick myself. You want to know what it's like to learn something of very sincere mental trickery first hand? Try being a four year old with a schizophrenic mother who is having her first break.
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You know what? This is like some kind of dogma I read in a Zen book back in 1967.Posted 22 October 2005 22:56

The first passage is when our subject is talking to another left of center person. I included this to show authoritarianism in the form of parenting. The second passage again shows the trama he experienced at the age of four which included an incident where his cousin got him into trouble and presumably his mother then flipped out. the last one just struck me as that Zen never seemed a Dogma anymore than any other philosphy. I did have a friend that useto space out when I asked her a question and she said it was her practicing Zen. She told me to read a book on it and afterward I told her she was making up excuses. Although I did enjoy the book.

I seem to be pretty much disassembled most of the time. and I'm well aware that the only one that gets me back together is me. A lot of the time I don't bother, just go with it. Benefits of having a schizophrenic parent, I guess. They have their own way of asking questions and not answering them with anything that makes sense, which is like no answer, or worse. A lot of it doesn't involve words.

I once got stuck in a baler trying to unjamb it. I was by myself out in a field. No one home but my mother who was out of it on drugs, which is what it took to keep her out of a hospital. I learned a lot about being connected to metal on that one. Also panic is an interesting experience.Posted 03 November 2005 09:59

This is the first entry on the subjects background in farming. From what I read into this is resentment toward his parents. His mother was no help by being strung out on drugs and could not answer questions that young men need anwered. His father was no where to be seen when he needed his help.

For instance, environmentally I had to deal with a paranoid schizophrenic mother who had her first psychotic break when I was four years old. From then on attention to grammatical detail had a lot to do with my mental survival in a world that wasn't always interpreted by her in a way that made sense to me. I thus became acutely sensitive to how things are stated.Posted 04 December 2005 02:09

Again our subject goes back to telling about his childhood. And yes it was trajic for a such a young person to have to face impossible choices in life that even adults would have trouble handling.

Yes, bipolar. My mother had a mixture of bipolar and schizophrenic patterns. She was fascinating in her use of poetry and juxtoposition of imagery, much as Eley found lbm to be.Posted 12 December 2005 10:49

That basically ends the links to our subjects mother. I now want to look at his relationship with his father...

Just so you know, I grew up on a small (250 acre) family farm, in fact I was pretty much running it from age twelve while my father tried to support it with outside work. We were somewhere between a commercial venture and a precursor to organics before it became popular, so we failed. I've been self employed most of my life, the last fifteen years or so as a remodeling contractor. I can repair just about anything I set my mind to, I also like to think about all sorts of things. I really hated school until I got back from 'Nam. I nearly flunked out of high school. I think it was the authoritarian aspect of it. College was like a tremendous release and the opening into a vast universe of the mind. Working with my hands seems to correlate with what I do with my mind in satisfying ways. I consider my approach to life my own unique art form.Posted 09 December 2005 12:35

So as mentioned earlier our subject had to run the family farm at the age of 12. Even with a relatively good size family farm and his father working outside they could not save the farm which to me showed a weakness in his father. Our subject has contunually mentioned how small family farms will someday replace the large industrial farms we now have because of peak oil. But how is that going to work when a 250 acre farm did not make it?

In regards to what Howard brought up about Ayn Rand’s tome on the “Virtue of Selfishness”, I have a few thoughts. I was exploring the Ayn Rand’s philosophy in high school when I read that piece, and my gut reaction to it was, in the end, to reject it. I remember it fairly well, because that period was where I was beginning to intellectualize about things, and turn preconceptions around in my mind. So the idea of seeing “selfishness” with it’s bad connotations in a different way appealed to me. But in the end, after reading it, I found it violated something deep in my upbringing that has to do with a natural desire to pitch in and do my share where I see a need. Separating out other peoples needs as Rand does and making them not mine to be concerned about somehow just couldn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean I want to go around helping everybody out or that I extend it to some sort of welfare state scenario, but that I see people trying and my hear goes out and I want to help. According to Sawdust’s formula, I don’t really have a heart because I wasn’t “liberal” when I was young. And now I don’t have a brain, I guess, because I’m not really conservative.

At the same time, I was living in a very Republican family environment back in Michigan. It’s still predominantly Republican, but not lock step conservative. They’re kind of old fashioned, not very political about it. Personal responsibility was not even an issue. Everybody just pitched in. I did what I did to keep our 250 acre farm going because it needed to be done. My father and I would drop what we were doing and go help my uncle unload a semi truck of sod when his sometimes not very dependable help didn’t show up – he had a landscape business. Sometimes he’d come and help us. There was never any money involved, we didn’t rent each other’s bodies. We were all kind of self employed small business types, my father was a Rodale enthusiast (organic farming did not begin with a bunch of folks wearing Birkenstocks and eating granola bars), thus one of the first of the organic oriented farmers. Not the thing to be back then (late fifties, early sixties). I guess the thing about objectifying self interest, and then the idea of personal responsibility is then you can create a story that makes it look like once you weren’t, and then you were. In that sense, I never “was”, except all my life I’ve been told by various people at various times I’m “too” responsible, I need to lighten up. I still don’t give it much thought in regards to who or what I am.Posted 09 March 2006 08:55

Not too much insight in this passage into his interaction with his father but I included it since it shows an interesting passage on “Virtue of Selfishness”. He somehow thinks that Ayn Rand’s tome was supposed to be selfishness within cooperative groups. Families are based on cooperation and not competition. The competition happens outside the group. Just as a business is a cooperative structure inside the organization but is selfish with respect to outside interest. They do that by property rights including patents and trademarks in addition to many other ways to show selfishness.
He also said they did not "rent each other’s bodies". We actually rent people's time as well as their output. But this was just cooperation inside the family unit with some expectation of in kind payment.

This is an economic and life choice issue. Like many family farms in the last half of the last century, ours went bankrupt when I was in high school. My father was a Rodale organics devotee from the forties and resisted transforming the farm to industrial methods, which would have involved some sort of focus on one of the groups of animals we husbanded -- cows, chickens or hogs, and a trememdous capital investment we didn't have, nor did the farm have the equity value to borrow on even if we wanted to. He worked a full time job the last few years to try to keep the farm solvent, and I took over much of the managing of the farm -- which is excellent training in personal responsibily and the characteristics that go with participating in a democracy, I believe. So I'd certainly agree with Jefferson in the above article on the correlation between family farming and democracy.Posted 02 May 2006 08:47

So it again shows the weakness of his father that was unable to keep the family farm solvent. His father was also unwilling or unable to adapt to the market or change with new practices.

Seahawkfan, I've been a self employed contractor, building and remodeling houses for over fifteen years, I have every skill it takes to build a home out of a wide variety of materials. I taught myself all of it. I was repairing broken down farm equipment when I was 12, running the family farm while my father worked outside to support it, I knew how to trouble shoot mechanical problems before I got to high school. I had my own strategic planning consulting business back in the eighties where I did strategic planning for multinational class corporations like John Deere and Southwestern Bell, as well as many smaller type firms. This involved research, financial modeling and about 250 pages of analysis and forcasting per project. I had no formal business training when I started out, so I had to teach myself how to analyze businesses. I didn't even know how to begin, but I figured it out. If you don't think all that takes common sense, I suspect you don't have a handle on what common sense really is.Posted 27 July 2006 11:43

This passage leads us to see the subject's Narcissistic tendencies. And now I want to go through the points of The Disease Perspective from title link:

PTypes personality types proposes Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a pervasive pattern of unstable, "overtly narcissistic behaviors [that] derive from an underlying sense of insecurity and weakness rather than from genuine feelings of self-confidence and high self-esteem" (Millon), beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by ten (or more) of the following:
1. seeks to create an illusion of superiority and to build up an image of high self-worth

Yes we just saw that.

2. has disturbances in the capacity for empathy

Our subject has indicated he values all lives equally in the world, but his actions on Thom's Board has shown that some (negroes) have less value than others (Palestinians).

3. strives for recognition and prestige to compensate for the lack of a feeling of self-worth;

This he shows by bragging about himself.

4. may acquire a deprecatory attitude in which the achievements of others are ridiculed and degraded

Just about everyone on Thom's board has mentioned that he has ridiculed and treated other members with disdain that have conservative ideas.

5. has persistent aspirations for glory and status

Yes.

6. has a tendency to exaggerate and boast

Yes, we saw that earlier.

7. is sensitive to how others react to him or her, watches and listens carefully for critical judgment, and feels slighted by disapproval

Whenever someone has even questioned his point of view he has considered it a personal attack on him even when it was just general questions.

8. is prone to feel shamed and humiliated and especially hyper-anxious and vulnerable to the judgments of others

Yes, very similar to the above point that he is extremely sensitive of any judgment of his point of view. He easily stops talking when someone questions his logic.

9. covers up a sense of inadequacy and deficiency with pseudo-arrogance and pseudo-grandiosity

Yes, likes to put animated cartoons of peeing dogs and other rude attacks on others on the board.

10. entertains fantasies of greatness, constantly striving for perfection, genius, or stardom

Yes, at least his posts have to be perfect and considers his posts are genius status.

11. has a history of searching for an idealized partner and has an intense need for affirmation and confirmation in relationships

I think everyone on the boards tend to look for affirmation so this is hard to determine. And his relationship with his ex-wife has not lead me to confirm this also. No to not sure.

12. frequently entertains a wishful, exaggerated, and unrealistic concept of himself or herself which he or she can't possibly measure up to

Our subject often talks about everyone else (especially conservatives) being authoritarianists. But he of course can not live up to these ideals. Maybe another time we can explore authoritarianism.

13. is touchy, quick to take offense at the slightest provocation, continually anticipating attack and danger, reacting with anger and fantasies of revenge when he or she feels frustrated in his or her need for constant admiration

Yes, very similar to points already made. The revenge appears in his crude cartoons that show signs of taking actions against the other person.

14. is self-conscious, due to a dependence on approval from others

Yes, constantly looking for approval.

15. seeks to undo feelings of inadequacy by forcing everyone's attention and admiration upon himself or herself

Yes, he likes to be the center of attention.

16. may react with self-contempt and depression to the lack of fulfillment of his or her grandiose expectations

Yes, when he looses a debate he basically goes away for a couple of days (went for a walk).
And the last is a hypothetical profile of Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The Dimensional Perspective
Here is a hypothetical profile, in terms of the five-factor model of personality, for Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder (speculatively constructed from McCrae, 1994, pg. 306) (Cf. Narcissistic):
High Neuroticism:
Chronic negative affects, including anxiety, fearfulness, tension, irritability, anger, dejection, hopelessness, guilt, shame; difficulty in inhibiting impulses: for example, to eat, drink, or spend money; irrational beliefs: for example, unrealistic expectations, perfectionistic demands on self, unwarranted pessimism; unfounded somatic concerns; helplessness and dependence on others for emotional support and decision making.
High Extraversion:
Excessive talking, leading to inappropriate self-disclosure and social friction; inability to spend time alone; attention seeking and overly dramatic expression of emotions; reckless excitement seeking; inappropriate attempts to dominate and control others.
High Openness:
Preoccupation with fantasy and daydreaming; lack of practicality; eccentric thinking (e.g., belief in ghosts, reincarnation, UFOs); diffuse identity and changing goals: for example, joining religious cult; susceptibility to nightmares and states of altered consciousness; social rebelliousness and nonconformity that can interfere with social or vocational advancement.
Low Agreeableness:
Cynicism and paranoid thinking; inability to trust even friends or family; quarrelsomeness; too ready to pick fights; exploitive and manipulative; lying; rude and inconsiderate manner alienates friends, limits social support; lack of respect for social conventions can lead to troubles with the law; inflated and grandiose sense of self; arrogance.
Low Conscientiousness:
Underachievement: not fulfilling intellectual or artistic potential; poor academic performance relative to ability; disregard of rules and responsibilities can lead to trouble with the law; unable to discipline self (e.g., stick to diet, exercise plan) even when required for medical reasons; personal and occupational aimlessness.