What would I even call this?

I'm very tired and will probably question this in the morning, but I want to get this out. Sometimes I just really don't understand my mother.

This probably doesn't seem surprising but I feel (special pleading alert!) that my situation is unusual. We're both INTJs, we're both fairly intelligent, but we completely differ in our approach to living.

In particular, I just can't seem to wrap my head around why she'll suggest one thing and then wonder how anyone could ever do something so stupid as what she suggested! It's like she's completely incapable of seeing how her own behavior prevents the very behavior she wants out of me.

All I want is to just be left alone long enough to get something done. That'll never happen. And then the damn fools will wonder why it never got done.

How anyone has a family and doesn't believe in laissez-faire is utterly beyond me.

Anti-Capitalism and Misanthropy

I've been reprising my summer job at a retail store over the holiday break, and naturally I've been just astounded by the ridiculous sorts and quantities of things that people buy. While I will admit that the store's prices are a lot lower for various reasons, I still don't see the reason why anyone other than a millionaire or newlyweds would buy so many lamps, vases, or plates, not to mention the endless stream of trinkets and doo-daas.

The work doesn't nearly approach occupying my mental capacity at all times, so in my mental meandering I realized something interesting. Hating commercialism is often an alternative to hating people, or more precisely, hating people's vapidity. All too many people think that commercialism causes the vapidity, when in reality, vapidity is what made commercialism possible in the first place!

Following this line of thought, we see that anti-capitalism on both the left and right (colloquially known as socialism and fascism, respectively) is a misanthropically-motivated desire to control people because they're obviously too stupid to run their own lives. Whether or not you believe that's true (I think in a lot of cases it is), that's no proof that you would be any better at the job. It certainly doesn't justify totalitarianism. That's of no consequence to the totalitarian, who believes himself—through the state—perfectly worthy of controlling other people.

The socialist anti-capitalist believes that if we can end capitalism, we can free people of their vapidity. The fascist anti-capitalist is more honest, believing that since people are vapid, we must control them through the state to subdue their vapidity. Europe's history of socialism and fascism in the 20th century should be sufficient evidence that neither approach will work.

Looking at my own political history, I see elements of both viewpoints. I hated industry like a good little ecosocialist, but in other ways could have been described at proto-fascist in my views. Fortunately I came around to see the folly of authoritarianism many years before I could vote, and learned some valuable lessons from it.

Creepertarian Pick Up Lines

For fun a few months ago I made up some "creepertarian"* pick up lines. They went over pretty well when I told people about them, so I thought I'd share.

• I think you just shifted my market equilibrium
• You're stimulating my private sector
• Let's increase aggregate demand by tearing off those clothes
• Looking at you shifts my demand curve
• I'm just thinking about the production possibility frontier if we had a merger
• If I weren't so convinced of the Non-Aggression Principle, I'd consider a hostile takeover
• I'd like to seize your assets.
• Is that bottom on the open market?
• Do you read Rothbard on the first date?
• Do you support private ownership of the means of reproduction?
• I'm usually for fiscal restraint, but I just can't control my outlays around you
• That butt is a positive externality
• If you were the market, I'd like to be equilibrium, so I could lie at the intersection of your curves
• I oppose all regulations that would limit the supply of you.
• I really had a scarcity of you in my life until just now
• Want to go create some market anarchy in the bedroom?
• Buying that outfit did more than just make GDP grow...

*Creepy libertarian, for those of you blessedly ignorant. The fact that we have a portmanteau for this should tell you how many there are.

New Blog

I went ahead with that idea of creating a writing blog. I'll try to populate it a bit over break. Link in my profile.

Datum

I'm thinking about spinning off another blog where I write fiction (both short stories and serials). Having somewhere to publish my stories might give me the added incentive to finish them. Then again, maybe not.

Anyway, it would probably be mostly hard science fiction mixed with some pro-capitalist political fics. Maybe a little fan fiction would show up. I might make some progress on that front over winter break. Two weeks from now I'll be home again. God, that seems soon.

It seems like all I write about on here is b-grade political rants. Maybe I should branch out?

Sentiment

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm the only person willing to say "It's not a perfect world, and that's okay" without using it as an excuse to ignore an actual problem.

Stupidity

I really can't understand how anyone who survived K-12 (to say nothing of college) with a semi-functional brain can possibly support public schooling. The criminal incompetence is staggering, and you want to reward that sort of behavior?

Apparently they don't teach how to identify idiocy in high school.

Neoliberal Communists

I've been saying for awhile now that the People's Republic of China is practicing a sort of Communist Neoliberalism. It appears the Chinese Communists are perfectly aware of this. Following a recent party meeting, the CPC released a statement saying that markets need to play a "decisive role" in allocating resources.

The article says they'll be pursuing a policy of open, unified markets, reducing regulations and expanding free trade zones. This should encourage economic growth and increase revenue for everyone, from the factory workers to multinational CFOs. American economic nationalists will probably cringe at this news, but from a free market capitalist standpoint this is good news. Free trade is good for everyone in the long run, and capitalist nations rarely go to war.

My main concern is that this will be chalked up as a victory for central planning, when in fact it's an example of more laissez-faire policy. Admittedly, it's an ordoliberal approach of rather careful liberalization and deregulation, but fact that Communists are freeing the markets should not be overlooked.

We'll have to wait and see just how far they go and how successful this program is. Considering that the Chinese haven't had much real experience with free markets since, well, ever, a careful gradualist approach is probably the way to go. Hopefully, one of the last bastions of central planning will finally yield their power, and show the world just what liberty can do.

Antarctica

I did a silly thing and started thinking about Antarctica again.

I don't know why this happens, but it undeniably does. Last time I had it really bad was in April. Give me enough time, and I'll get obsessed with anywhere that doesn't have too many people. Maybe it's an aspect of my introversion, maybe I'm just a touch too misanthropic.

Either way, I'm probably going to accumulate more posts in my drafts because of this.

Political Spectra

Traditionally, we're taught that politics is a left-right spectrum, with authoritarian communism on the far left and authoritarian fascism on the far right, with some quibble about how it's actually a circle when the similarities between the two are pointed out. I think it's obvious that this arrangement isn't adequate for describing the various political philosophies at work in the world.

The primary problem with Left and Right is that they mean different things to people at different points along the spectrum. Leftists tend to believe that leftism promotes egalitarian societies, and that rightism promotes elitist or hierarchical societies. Rightists, on the other hand, tend to believe that leftism promotes an expansive state, while rightism promotes a minimal state (by this definition, anarchism is right-wing). In either definition, rightist do tend to be more tolerant of social inequality, for various reasons. But that's another post.

Follow up

Following up a previous post, I've had a few more thoughts about some of these ex-"libertarians." You've got your high profile Bill Mayer types, then there's the social justice warrior I encountered, and then there's the communist I was talking about before. Interesting how they're all leftists. Also interesting how there's precious little evidence to suggest they were ever actually libertarians.

I'm beginning to think that a lot of these people never were libertarians, in the classically liberal, anti-state, pro-capitalism sense. They were probably disgruntled*  "moderates" (read: modern liberals) who latched onto "libertarianism" because it was principled in its opposition to the drug and Iraq wars. They never understood the whole idea of free markets and economic freedom (maybe they confused it with the leftist "freedom from want" definition), and when they found out what all that entailed, they split for pinker pastures.

I might argue the same thing of the claims of frequent Objectivist recidivism: the people who backed out, probably never understood what they were dealing with in the first place. If they had, they either wouldn't have picked it up in the first place, or would have stuck with it.

That's my amateur psychologist take, probably 70% wrong.

*I know I'm not the first to ask this, but what is it like to be "gruntled?" It doesn't exactly sound good.

Terraforming

Here we go again. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year (which is what I should be working on instead of a blog post), and because it takes place in part on Mars I've seemed to have fallen off the terraforming deep end again. I'll assume you know what terraforming means and dive right into it.

I really like the idea of terraforming other planets to make them habitable for humans. It's the most permanent solution to sustaining a larger human population. Mars and Venus are the most likely candidates, but I sometimes wonder: what if we terraformed every possible world in the Sol System?

Now, there's obviously this scenario, which is by authorial admission impossible. But there are a large number of potential terraforming candidates around. Let's go through the list and see what we think.

Mars

The Time for Choosing Approaches

About two weeks ago, I was skimming some material on cargo cult science to prepare a facetious argument on the appropriation of Western Culture, and came across one of those interesting footnotes of history: specifically, the Sokal Affair. This led to a spate of curious clicking, and led me to some interesting thoughts about the future of Leftism.

To summarize briefly for those too lazy to click the link, in 1996 Alan Sokal, an NYU physicist, submitted an outright silly paper to the journal Social Text, purporting that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. There are some allegations that this was not done in good faith (I should hope not!), but the fact that Social Text ran it was pretty alarming even so. Sokal contends that this an example of a larger trend in academia, particularly the liberal arts and humanities, to ignore the fundamental teachings of hard science in favor of their own pet navel gazing fantasies theories, postmodernism and the like being particularly problematic.

This raises larger questions about the Academic Left (their terms, not mine), particularly about their understanding of reality (or lack thereof). When the "intellectuals" who have significant influence in the formative years of a large segment of the electorate can't distinguish between fact and fantasy, it makes one sit up and notice. In particular, the left-leaning academics who can make the distinction (scientists in particular) were quite vocal in their concern.

On this issue, at least, I agree with them. At risk of sounding pedantic, there is a large segment of academia verily seeped in mysticism. Postmodernists, linguistic analysts, and whatever other groups advocating half-baked pseudo-theories are almost always quite literally beyond the reach reason. Their beliefs, based in feeling rather than fact, are almost religiously sacrosanct, and cannot be refuted by scientific or logical argument. Individually they are harmless, but the madness of the 1960s and 1970s suggests that together they have the potential to wreak incredible havoc.

I could argue that this is to be expected of leftism, and to an extent it is, but that overlooks the reasonable leftists, such as Sokal. While they are largely mistaken in their political beliefs, their implicit acceptance of reason means they are at least potentially salvageable. I think there is a major divide in leftist thought, soothed over but still there, between the thinking leftists and the feeling ones. And I think this divide is eventually going to break.

Ultimately, the thinking leftists are going to have to make a choice: do they accept the facts (that socialism has proven itself a failure, that free markets work better than mixed markets, that personal freedom also requires personal responsibility) or follow others' feelings, back into the world of violent revolution, pseudoscientific mysticism, and the eventual collapse into looting thuggery? Which is it going to be? We'll have to wait to find out.

Technocracy

In a convoluted turn of events which began with the politics of Germany (specifically the Christian Democratic Union) with a major stop at political color, I ended up reading about the technocracy movement. Now I've been interested in the idea of technocracy for a long time, particularly because I advocated a similar program long before I ever read the word. By the time I encountered the idea, though, I'd largely abandoned that program in favor of liberal capitalism.

After my first dip into the technocratic pond, I considered the idea of combining the better aspects of technocracy with capitalism, which I termed capital technocracy. Though I didn't get very far along articulating my ideas at the time, I'd now describe the idea of capital technocracy as using the opposing forces of self-interest and competition exemplified in capitalism to achieve technocratic ends. In English, that means that forward-thinking entrepreneurs end up making the best decisions in their pursuit of profit, leading to optimal outcomes. At that time, my understanding of capitalism was primarily based on competition, rather than understanding markets as a whole.

I re-approached the idea of technocracy from a market capitalist perspective, and realized that the idea of integrating capitalism and technocracy is still essentially valid, but requires a different tack. Markets are essential giant organizers, which aggregate the value decisions of millions of actors to result in a price. The technocrats rejected the price system because of the bust in 1929, but I think that central banking deserves more blame than prices (?!) for starting the Great Depression. The technocrats thought that central planners could make economic decisions better than millions of people could for themselves, and that is the fatal conceit, isn't it? In 1935 I can understand that position; having seen the abject failure of the Soviet Union compared to market economies, I can not.

Ultimately, though, I'd say that the market performs the technocratic function far better than socialism ever could, and for that reason I may start advocating for the free market under the label market technocracy. My main reason is simply that the term "capitalism" comes with so terribly much baggage that using it often does more harm than good. I've thought about using other terms, but only liberalism seemed to fit, and that would only serve to confuse.

In addition, technocracy can be marketed with social reform towards a rational society. Capitalism is usually linked, both when it is and isn't warranted, to the various forms of conservatism, particularly social conservatism and traditionalism in general. I find many traditional ways of doing things (the English system of measurement, the Gregorian Calendar, contemporary public education) quite abhorrent for various reasons. Integrating reforms away from those into my political platform wouldn't be exactly distasteful.

Last thing tonight: would ordoliberalism be considered comparable to market technocracy?

Not buying it

I was arguing with a communist today (a terrible waste of time, I might add), and after making an outright stupid assumption, making death threats, and stating that issue wasn't up for discussion, he goes on to claim he used to be a minarchist.

I'm not buying it.

This person flatly refuses to listen to libertarian arguments, and hates me because I came to similar conclusions from a different path. This person certainly isn't rational, and quite possibly not sane. At best, in their younger, more rational days, they were a "left" libertarian. They certainly weren't a minarchists capitalist.

I'm just astonished by some of these people. If we can't discuss things, how are we supposed to come to the conclusions in the first place?

Off Hiatus

I think I'm going to come off hiatus here.

I spent the summer and autumn thus far blunting my ignorance on Tumblr, but I'm thinking this could be a good intermediate staging ground for my thoughts. It'd be nice to appear to jump right from gathering data to articulating the decisive counter-argument.

However, I'm probably going to still do some of the intermediate stuff over there, because I can get more input.

Finals Week

A week from now I'll be vegging out at home, but for now, I'm trying to force myself to study for finals week. I've got a practice test in 40 minutes. I guess I should eat before then.

At this point, after months of feeling burnt-out, it's reached the point, the accumulation of apathy, that making myself study feels like pushing a rope made of water uphill.

I am overjoyed with the thought of being done with this semester. Unfortunately, I need to get good grades or else I'll loose my scholarship, so I can't do the minimum to get by. I feel annoyance in the extreme.

In general, a few things I'm happy about with regards to going home:

• No more dealing with my stupid dorm-mates. Their irrational, Dionysian culture is disgusting. Their antics really do make we question the hypothesis that we're all of the Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies. Surely their must be some biological explanation for this insanity ... ?
• Sleeping reasonably. I don't even know how to describe my sleep schedule. I plan on sleeping 10:30 a night for a week after I'm home.
• Sane meal times. The dining courts here run on a schedule completely divorced from human beings, let alone college students. Having a degree of control would be lovely.
• My room. My roommate here is probably the best I could have asked for, given the other loons on my floor, but after 8 months, I grow weary of shared space. I want to shower without the possibility of a conversation, and the option of changing whenever I'd like.
• And hugs. I miss physical contact with human beings I like. (Hint: I don't like people here.)

And just maybe, I can accomplish something this summer. My brain has completely atrophied at school, so we'll see if I can get it functional again.

Motivation and Weekends

I've noticed recently that my motivation level on the weekends is darn near zero. I have a couple of hypotheses on why this is the case:

First, obviously, is that my assignments are pointless. This is a given. At this point some of my courses are literally spiraling into gibberish that bears only superficial resemblance to human language.

Second, as an introvert, I need the weekend to recover from 5 days of being confined with other human beings. I need two or three days to get to the point where I don't want to squirrel away in a corner, after which point I can reasonably start the assignments that they expect done at this point (though that would require superhuman skill). Essentially, the dice are loaded against introverts.

Third, I'm bored. Really, really, really bored. There are no goals here, just an endless string of progressively more difficult assignments and progressively less useful lectures. None of this has anything to do with getting me into space, it seems, and moreover, all seems complicit in holding me back. The rampant anti-conceptualism of these rather conceptual classes is destroying my drive, and will likely do the same thing to my GPA.

Life has no purpose when you submit it to the review of others.

Integrated Approach

Most efforts to combat irrationality are unsystematic, incomplete, and one-sided. That is, they focus on one specific cause or effect of irrationality, usually the latter. They do not integrate that specific irrationality into a coherent framework. But most importantly, they attack from only one side, combating the cause without attacking the effect, or vice versa.

I propose to change that.

My idea is simple: chart out all the major effects of irrationality and the forces that contribute to existing irrationality. From this, determine the main factors that propagate irrationality and its effects. Then attack both the causes and effects of irrationality, in an integrated sweep.

Confession

I probably shouldn't let stupid people on the internet get me this worked up. I need to focus on confronting stupidity in "the real world" and actually confronting the problem.

On the plus side, I think this should count as cardio.

Exception to the Rule

The is only one group that I make unqualified, collective generalizations of.

And that group would be collectivists.

I'm currently thinking about how to attack cultural collectivism as a mean of achieving freedom and promoting rationality. This will probably have to be a major tactic.

Some Sleep Addled Thoughts on the Culture War

I wasn't exactly self-aware when it was going on, but in retrospect, the "culture war" that the conservatives made some effort to wage in the early nineties was rather silly. A "culture war" requires separate subcultures (which there were) and separate cultural drivers (which there weren't). Essentially, the so-called culture war was, fundamentally, a political exercise, and did not accurately reflect on the subcultures of the United States.

Personally, I find the left- and right-wing "cultures" fairly irrational. Neither side really represents an integrated philosophy. The left advocates control over ones economic decisions, and freedom over ones body (except for a list a longer than the Appalachian Trail). The right claims to be all about economic freedom, but does love its cronyism, and is completely inconsistent about personal freedoms.

Really, I think the only "culture war" in this country, and in the whole of the western world, is reason versus feeling. The left and right both use different forms of feeling, and direct it at different things. But really they're the same.

Now there's probably someone out there who reads this an immediately thinks I'm some unemotional monster. You're funny. It's a typical argument: if you don't recognize the absolute supremacy of unintegrated feelings you're evil. That's insane. There's nothing wrong with rational emotions, that is, emotional states that do not conflict with reason. And it's exceedingly easy to live entirely with rational emotions. It just requires knowing oneself.

To return to my theme, though, we've got two cultures in America. There's the rational culture, focused on science, productivity, rational dialogue. That's the minority. The vast majority is the emotional culture, which doesn't worry about the sanity of what it's feeling. The feeling is more important than the cause of that feeling.

Emotionalism is impotent in the face of reality, but the emotionalists command such numbers they have political power. Wrestle politics away from them, and they'll be able to see the error of their ways soon enough.

That's the culture war in America.

April Fools Day

I'd just like to take this opportunity to state that this holiday is terribly stupid and inconvenient to the rational mind. I want to post something important and controversial, but my theme would be brushed off as a joke.

My mind doesn't shut off for your holidays.

Stupid holiday.

Atlas Shrugged ... LIVE!

I usually feel rather guilty leaving physics lab, because by Friday I'm completely wiped out, which means I'm the least contributing member of the team. But this Friday, I felt guilty for an entirely different reason.

You see, this week the shoe was on the other foot, in the most extreme sense possible.

For those who don't know (and really, there's no reason you should), each week we're assigned to groups of three to complete the labs activities. These usually involve a fair degree of programming and/or calculation, after which we stumble out with completed assignments and (in my case, at least) an utter lack of comprehension. The entire course seems to be a mass of anti-conceptual nonsense, but that's beside the point.

This week, I had an interesting group arrangement. I'd never worked with these two individuals before (each week is usually that way, unless we retain the previous week's groups). These two, however, proved to be quite interesting.

One of the group, a girl of I believe subcontinental origin, had all but completed the lab beforehand (as I would do if I had time--but in this instance I actually had time, but used it for a more entertaining purpose). There were plenty of mistakes, but they were corrected with a fair amount of ease once the ever patient TAs pointed them out.

The other in the group, however, was the precise intellectual opposite, as I'll explain as follows.

Now, we may have gotten off on the wrong foot, I'll happily admit. The purpose of this lab was to calculate a number of quantities based off our jumps (yes, physical crouch and leap jumps) using the energy principle. This fellow, rather jockish in nature, mocked my attempt. I used so unintegrated excuse, mostly out of fatigue, but ironically our jumps had the same displacement (though he was shorter).

But that would be a minor annoyance on it's own, certainly not worth an extended blog entry that no one will read. But the young man in question made no contribution, not the slightest hint of effort at contributing, throughout the remainder of the lab. He made a few halfhearted attempts at conversation, irrelevant, regarding the fact that someone had brought a few basketball players back to his fraternity the night before. While some might see the probable lack of sleep from this incident as an acceptable excuse. Priorities, man! I at least got about 7 hours that night, though I will admit I overslept and missed part of my first lecture.

And so, you see, the other two of us carried him on our shoulders. We played Atlas.

You see, I should have shrugged, told the TA he didn't make any input, and before that, should have asked him to do some of the work. But I didn't. I accepted my role as a producer supporting a consumer.

This, in fact, illustrates the greater trend. The basketball players that he spoke of are most certainly consumers more than producers. Our entire economy, it is clear to me, is based around the idea of supporting the unproductive, especially the beloved celebrities. We're not a capitalist nation anymore. Were we ever?

I'm not going to make that mistake again. I won't play Atlas for people anymore. For the time being, this producer is on strike.

Libertarian Party as a Coalition

I've had a bit of fun on various libertarian and Objectivist Facebook pages the last few days introducing somewhat unpopular opinions and watching the little piranhas tear at whatever I have to say despite the fact that it's largely in accordance with their views. I've been implicitly called a neocon, a fascist, an irrationalist, an altruist, and a mystic. All in all, it's been good fun.

What I've concluded is that many people have a little fetish of purism, and this is probably why libertarianism and Objectivism aren't very popular. To be frank, a lot of these people are overweight middle-aged jerks who spend their time arguing with teenagers on the Internet without actually accomplishing anything. But there's more than that.

The specific case I'd like to reference is the Libertarians and Rand Paul. Rand Paul got a lot of attention a few weeks back after his 13 hour filibuster. The media, being idiots, sometimes capitalized the 'l' in libertarian, to the consternation of some actual Libertarians. There are a fair number who actively despise him as a socially conservative neocon. Fascist gets thrown around surprisingly much, despite the fact that I think he's actually a conservatarian. (Right-Middle rather than Middle-Bottom on the Nolan Chart.)

My own views aside, I can say with certainty that this purism is not an asset to the Liberty Movement. Both Pauls have done a great deal to increase the popularity of libertarian ideas, such as non-interventionism, abolishing central banking, eliminating crony capitalism in favor of the real thing, and getting the federal government out of the economy. Now there are things that I disagree with both Pauls on, such as marriage freedom and abortion, but they think that those are state issues, and neither of them have served in state government, so really its irrelevant.

In summation, the Pauls are an integral part of the movement to reduce the size and scope of government. Many Libertarians, though, prefer to focus on the fact that the Pauls are social conservatives and that Rand is a proponent of Israeli militarism. While these are legitimate points, they entirely write off huge groups of supporters over relatively minor issues.

What does this mean? In effect, by alienating potential allies, they weaken their movement. These absolutist Libertarians refuse to do business with people that are working towards the same goal, and consequently, neither has the same kind of success that they would have together.

This is highly notable in leftist circles. The Leninists and Trotskyists are an immediate example, but in my own casual research I've been utterly amazed at the number of American socialist parties that have experienced schisms. There are literally dozens of the organizations and in many cases they hate each other over irrelevant or inconsequential differences. It's no wonder socialism never succeed in America: they were too busy biting each other in the back after Eugene V. Debs stopped running that the electorate completely forgot about them.

The same thing is happening today in the libertarians. Libertarianism is a coalition: there are Objectivists, Austians, cosmotarians, left-anarchists, minarchists, anti-corporatists, liberaltarians, anarchocapitalists, neohippies, paleoconservatives, and a dozen other groups involved in the movement. Many of these overlap; many of these have bones to pick with the others. But none of them have anywhere near an elective majority--the entire Liberty Movement doesn't have that. Sniping at each other will only reduce the Party's credibility to the electorate.

If electoral success is the goal, the Libertarians are going to have to accept the fact that they are a coalition party. The platform doesn't take a strong stand on the issues, because it can't. The Libertarians need all the voters they can get to put some cosmotarian like Gary Johnson in office, at which point they can actually go to work.

In short, the Libertarians need to focus on outreach, teaching the ideology. As a near Objectivist (Semi-Objectivist? Objectivoid? Galt, we need a word for that) myself, I think that Rand fans should be an important part of this. Didn't Rand smear libertarians by saying they just used her ideas with the teeth torn out? Aside from the fact that she ignored the possibility of parallel development, Objectivists are just the people to put the teeth in Libertarianism.

To the point, though: we should work together to spread the ideas of Liberty. Rand Paul advocates smaller government which respects our rights, even if he disagrees about the extent of those rights. Someday, the government will be in a situation that Rand Paul likes but we do not, and at that people, we will part ways. But until that day comes, there's no reason not to work together towards common goals.

And that's the critical issue with the Libertarians: they'll always be a coalition party. Small 'l' libertarianism is a broad political class with extreme and significant variations therein. Once the Libertarians have achieved repeated electoral success and begun implementing the generally accepted program, the party will tear itself apart. The Objectivists, Minarchists, and various capitalists will pull away from the the left-anarchists and anti-corporation strong government types, the anarchocapitalists will be trying to eliminate the government entirely, the various hippie-esque folks (usually left-libertarians) may or may not become a significant factor, and the cosmotarians will become the new "moderate" party.

I, myself, am making preparations even now to take advantage of the Objectivist-Minarchist wing post-separation. It's quite another post entirely, but my Capitalist Party of America is developing nicely. The thing about CapPAm, though: we're not running any candidates anytime soon. CapPAm will be strictly a Libertarian Party ally until the Libertarian program begins to take effect, after which we'll start to run our own candidates. In the interim, however, we'll forcefully campaign for capitalist causes--and tell people to vote LP.

That's what we need, people: Alliances. The purist impulse to excommunicate anyone who doesn't agree with you perfectly is electorally harmful. You can't hope to grow support by hating anyone that doesn't agree with you.

In the end, the answer isn't to love the enemy. It's to love those who don't know better--and tell them.

Eugenics and the Future of Human Evolution

Eugenics has a bad reputation. Most people either associate the idea with Nazi Germany or Brave New World, but as a proponent of eugenics myself, I think that both of those are examples of precisely what not to do.

First, I do not think any eugenics program should be mandatory. In fact, having the majority of the population, at least 65%, probably more, continue to play reproductive roulette is necessary to keep a strong control group of humans with plenty of random mutations and a great diversity of traits. More importantly, forcing someone to reproduce (or not!) is a disgusting violation of the Right of Liberty. The ends of such a program most definitely do not justify those means.

Second, I think that sterilizations are a rather ineffective way of promoting better offspring. Sterilizations are a very crude method: it is very unlikely that ever gamete an individual produces has the negative allele(s) that the eugenicist wishes to suppress. There are most likely plenty of traits the eugenicist favors present in gametes that do not contain the negative allele(s); these should be selected for producing zygotes, rather than a full ban.

Third, the current reproductive roulette cannot realistically be channeled to produce superior offspring. Simply, you cannot realistically hope that all the children of a certain parent will have the traits you wish to promote if they reproduce through the traditional method, unless the trait in question is superdominant (and it probably isn't).

My view on eugenics is such: using modern genomics technology to ensure that the offspring of a perfectly normal couple is the best possible offspring, given the genomes of the parents.

In more detail, a couple wishing to have children would pay for tests to map their genomes. (In respect to the cost of raising a child, these are relatively cheap. Basic tests are now within the monthly salary of a middle-class adult.) From these, they would go through a sort of genetic counselling, discussing which traits (such as deleterious recessives) which they wish to avoid passing on, and which they would like their children to have. Two gametes would be selected based on these preferences for in-vitro fertilization, and the zygote implanted in the mother-to-be for an otherwise normal pregnancy.

There are two important things I must say about this method:

• Every step of this operation was undertaken voluntarily, and every service provided by private firms. The state is uninvolved.
• As a consequence of the state's uninvolvement, there will not be a national direction of a eugenics program. This will not create a reduction of useful mutations, as different couples will usually select for different traits.

Eugenics is condemned for being coercive. It needn't be.

Updates

Nothing especially prominent coming to mind this evening, so I'll satisfy myself with making a general if incomplete report on what's been going on around me, with a bit of what's been going on in my head.

On second thought, that's not really what I want to say. Nothing going on around me is very interesting at the moment, but what I'm doing might be.

I'm thinking about taking on a big project, entirely outside of school. I probably don't have time for it, but I think it's well within my abilities to at least undertake part of it. Basically, I'm going to try to change the culture from the bottom up.

My thinking is this: people choose to be irrational because it's what they're raised with. Most people are smart enough to see the truth, but they've no experience with anything except the irrational. There are no dissenting voices. There's plenty of people working to combat the effects of an irrational culture, but little going into fixing the cause itself. My idea is to create an organization, a foundation (I hate to use such words, but my brain is a little out of sorts) that actively confronts irrationality throughout all of society, primarily trying to change the culture of irrationality. The working title is the The Rational Society.

We'll see how that works out. One of the means for that project would be a "Philosophy in Five Minutes" video blog on YouTube. I finally took 45 seconds to figure out the camera on my laptop (surprisingly easy, compared to 75% of the software you come across) and recorded myself talking for awhile. Given practice, I think I could pull off a series of short videos covering a variety of philosophical topics. I did a speech for AcaDec summarizing the whole of philosophy in four minutes, so covering a simple topic like the Law of Identity in five shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

In more mundane matters, school continues to be its usual bore. Running the marathon except we're doing in on a track in the stadium, and everyone else is either too dumb to notice or can't figure out why we're not getting anywhere. Hopefully, they're just not expressing the same thoughts as I, but I can't count on other minds. If I did, I'd spend all my days being disappointed.

The job search, or lack thereof. Putting in the applications, and hoping for the best. I'll most likely spend the summer doing something mundane, if I can secure a job at all, which, to be realistic, I probably won't. If that's the case, however, I'll work on something (such as the aforementioned) that I can still put on a resume.

Residence halls put on a rave Friday night. Probably a shoddy imitation of the real thing, not that I have any interest in either. Another one of those well-intentioned but halfhearted attempts to keep the kids from doing drugs and testing the contraceptive limits of latex. At most it kept a few of the meeker ones from passing out later, because the vast majority who would have partied still went out and partied afterwards. You can't just stop people from indulging their vices. I'll probably put up a post in a few weeks about why D.A.R.E. and similar programs don't work. Hint: the irrational culture (it's really a terribly convenient idea, I'll hate to abandon it when and if something better comes up).

My hair is a fright, strange as that is to type. I got it cut last around the 20th of December, and here we are nearly into March. I don't think it's been this long since that one time back in middle school, and I didn't shower last night to boot. Not to mention I never really stop having bedhead these days. Sleeping till noon anytime its permitted, regardless of bedtime, has that effect.

I think that's all for tonight. It's technically Monday now, but it's still a Sunday Night rant. All two bots out there enjoy!

On the Non-Aggression Principle

Technically, I was attacked this evening.

Most people wouldn't say I was attacked. They would say that an certain someone in my dorm (whom has not been referenced in previous posts) gave me a surprise bear hug.

But  I was not warned, my consent was not asked, and I would not have given it. Technically, it was an act of aggression against my person. I reacted accordingly, and now the individual is question is acting all hurt and angry.

Irrationality is unalive and kicking.

The non-aggression principle, the fundamental law of human interaction, is unheard of in our society. Humans do not initiate the use of force against others in a civilized setting. Conversely, if one does initiate the use of force, they must be free to retaliate as necessary to prevent future attacks.

No one understands this. Self-defense is all but illegal in the United States, and soon will be entirely absent in the Western World. It's socially tolerable to invade the personal space of another individual for no reason (and I believe I have made it sufficiently clear that I do not want to be touched). Before too long, I wouldn't be surprised if assault is the preferred method of settling conflicts.

Our culture is irrational. If we're going to survive, we're going to have to change it. Will you?

Ennui

My mother told me she's going to retire in a few months. While this is hardly surprising, it was unexpected, if that makes any sense at all. Her boss is horrible, and what was once a nice job has since become a little bit of a nightmare. But I just had no idea that this was coming, that's all. She didn't either.

And, to a certain extent, this annoys me. I want to quit. Not all of it, mind you, but a good deal of the everyday boring uselessness that goes into getting an education these days. I want to scale it down to the basics, and actually get something of value out at a reasonable time use rate. But I Can't. I'm not in control. And that doesn't make me happy. It never has.

Bear in mind, however, that mother dear has endured this for a good deal longer than I have. She's earned it, if you will. Thrice my age and certainly a good deal more suffering in that time. She's finally going to call it quits, because she wants to and has decided she can get away with it. I don't get that.

And that's the annoyance in life: that we don't get what we want, and we don't have control, and it's all so damned unnecessary. We suffer, surviving our lives, until we finally die, having survived our lives, and not lived it.

Good luck, Mom. Good luck, everyone. May you find in retirement what you should have found in work.

Visualizing Personality Type

A lot of my meatspace and Facebook friends have been subjected to my recent interest in personality type, but I make no apologies. Personality type can tell you a great deal about a person, and knowing yours can improve your life immensely.

To begin, every person has four different indicators, running in a spectrum. You are either introverted or extroverted, sensing or intuiting, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. From these, you get a four-letter code. An extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving person would be an ESFP. An introverted, intuiting, thinking, judging person (such as myself) would be an INTJ.

You can find plenty of tests floating around the Internet to test your personality type, and learn more about the results. I won't bother you with much in the way of analysis, I trust that you can do that on your own (or are just another bot, in which case you hardly matter). The important thing is that you do it--it could save you life, it will definitely improve it.

The vital part of my argument, however, is that personality type can be visualized as a tesseract (a 4th dimensional cube, for the poor souls out there). Similar to a Nolan Chart--an entirely different topic--each edge represents one of the indicators. If we assume the cube has an corner at the origin, the x-axis runs out 200 units from extroversion to introversion, the y-axis from sensing to intuiting, the z-axis from feeling to thinking, and the w-axis (the one we have trouble visualizing, being 3D creatures) from perceiving to judging.

In this notation, a "perfect" ENFP would be at the corner (0, 200, 0, 0), for example. However, a very small percentage of the population has a "perfect" score on any one indicator, let alone all four. I'm an exception: the last time I took the Humanmetrics test, I score 100% Introversion. Altogether, I'm I(100%) N(75%) T(88%) J(22%). As you can see, I'm a strong INT, just slightly J--an this is the highest I've ever scored on J. Using our notation, I would be at (200, 175, 188, 122).

Notice, of course, that I've tipped the mathematical scales in my favor. For fairness, I'll do another example: E(45%) S(67%) T (14%) P (73%). They would be (55, 33, 114, 27).

Very few people are near a corner. This is the big takeaway. Most people people are near an edge, but not on it. Some are in the center, or only close to two edges. If this is true for you, read up on both side of that indicator. I found that everything I wasn't as an INTJ I was as an INTP, and the converse.

So, you visual-learners out there, and even you non-visual ones: think about it. Every person is somewhere in that 4D cube, and it can tell you a lot about them. Where are you?

Welcome to 2013

It's a new year, and no one thinks anything of it.

Oh, they know it's happening, for sure. They may even talk themselves into feeling they're a part of something significant. But they're not.

All around, there's noise, the sounds of "celebration"--but nothing of any value. That's all it is--noise--devoid of any significance or value. It's a New Year, and opportunity to wipe the slate clean and say, "This time, we'll do it better!" but they've no interest in that. They're out there, partying, ignoring the problems, the world, ready and eager to repeat the same mistakes that got us into this mess. Why don't people think?

Well, why should they? It's not their strong suit.

Here I am, trying to think something profound, drowning in a sea of the mundane, and I feel all alone.

You laugh, think I'm over-inflating myself. Sure. But consider what happens when you try to think a coherent thought in the sea of the not-precise.

Then get back to me.