What is the point of prevention? We do it on a micro scale. Why do we wear seat belts, eat right, check references, etc etc. Because it is in our direct control. In the macro societies, there is always a political solution to bemoan; the bland and bloodless committee who produce only reliable profits and rule, with favored privilege and wealth as a byproduct. The autocrat/narcissist rapacious strongman who rules with an iron hand, with no conscience. Our leaders rise, be they with charisma and promises, or with training and boring skills, or with killing and fear by mob rule.

If the point of this blogpost is to enlighten us to our inborn biases and reactions, and our need to recognize them first, then yes, I see it – if we are operating in a rational society. I think humanity has still not been able to overcome it’s tribalism, it’s corruption, it’s graft, it’s tendency to resort to the id, the primitive and the machinations thereof. I love your discussion, but meanwhile, it is now Nov 2022. Rome is burning.

I’ve just been reminded of this brief conversation by watching a chunk of your program on waves repeated on BBC4. So anyway, here I am again!
Have you read JGB’s “The Crisis In Human Affairs”?

A most useful analogy. A little mind bending of course but then,what else are minds for?

It’s a lovely approach for understanding the mindset of those whose upbringing is different, who live in a different culture, or have been exposed to different cultural influences. It’s also essential for the historian. If you can’t get yourself into the mindset of those who regarded slavery as normal then how is it possible to understand much of the past? If not into the mindset of those who regarded peasants as so much livestock, how to understand our own even quite recent history.

Though I sometimes feel we make a little too much of that relativistic approach. After all, not all slaves regarded their condition as normal and not all peasants saw themselves as livestock. Nor all, I think, of those who treated them so.

But essentially your analogy, and the perspective behind it, has to be adopted. If we do not then we must regard anyone who does not share our Weltanschauung as abnormal. And from there it is but a small step to regarding them as evil, and maybe to be killed or otherwise suppressed.

To digress, but only slightly, that is the Johnsonian approach. Dr Johnson is perhaps the only political philosopher who never treated of philosophy. He just lived it and thus it was for him implicit, not expressed. A great mass of contradictory prejudice and conviction, but able to see himself as such and able to enquire with unabated curiosity – and as an equal, not a superior – into the culture and views of those with different prejudices and convictions. That weltoffen approach sums up the best of the English liberal tradition, though we must use “liberal” there in a way very different from today’s, and is I believe also expressed in your comment above.

What about the practical, the mechanical?

There are some areas where your analogy is ultimately inappropriate.

If you don’t put petrol in the car it doesn’t go. View that statement as one will, understand the point of view of the man who argues to the contrary as sympathetically as possible, the damn thing still doesn’t go.

So take one of the simpler debates. Money issuance. That debate brings in with it a host of unstated presuppositions and ideological positions but essentially it’s a mechanical “Does it work?” argument. If you create “money” to a greater extent than is needed for the purposes of trade you end up with disaster. Or at best disaster postponed. That’s true or false independently of the mindset of those arguing the point.

Sometimes, though, such arguments escape computation. We live in so complex a society, so many interacting variables, that all one can do is wait, figuratively speaking, for all to coalesce around the strange attractor and see what that attractor is.

So it is with the command economy argument. There’s not a lot mechanically wrong with that argument. Looked at mechanically it can seem a superior mechanism for production and distribution. I was reading Harold Wilson’s biography, and saw there that he and many others believed back then it was so superior that the economy of the Soviet Union was expected to overtake that of the West in the near future. To such thinkers clause 4 was no chimaera.

They missed some variables. If we are all idealistic altruists then command economy might be superior. I say “might” because it’s appallingly clunky, but the argument’s there. But put the human variable in, allow for the fact that most of us are greedy bastards if we get the chance, and the thing’s a non starter.

So it proved. But we had to wait to find that out. And even now there are those around who argue that had it been done differently, could we be just a little nicer to each other, command economy is the way to go.

For most of us it irrefutably isn’t. Factor in all the variables and it’s the way forward to a crony-ridden dysfunctional economy. We know that empirically now. We didn’t earlier. That car ran out of petrol whether we wanted it to or not.

What about our own crony-ridden dysfunctional economy? Understand the mindset of its orthodox neoliberal proponents as we will, the thing still doesn’t work.

It’s not just complexity that obscures that. We have inherited such an extraordinarily productive industrial society – nothing like it before in history – that we have a lot of slack to play with. And so those orthodox economists can tell us that a bit of tinkering here, a little more goodwill and civic virtue there, and this dysfunctional society will come good too.

But there’s no petrol in that car either. We are now at the stage at which we are finding that out empirically.

Most of the political arguments we are fighting over at present are of that second sort of argument, the practical mechanical “Does it work?” sort. We may navigate those arguments using the peaks and valleys approach. That is a useful tool for understanding those who argue differently. In the end, though, and in most of those political arguments we are engaged in, “Does it work?” will settle the argument for us however we view that argument.

Summarising recent developments, Slobodian argues that:
‘the formula of right-wing alter-globalization is: yes to free finance and free trade. No to free migration, democracy, multilateralism and human equality’.
Indeed, global capitalism adores national sovereignty, and merely despises its popular democratic foundations and applicability, which decades of neoliberalism have systematically corroded. The present rise of illiberal forces, therefore, might not prove a rupture to the established order, but rather anchor its global dominance, as ‘political illiberalization might equally shield the economic core of the neoliberal project from popular resistance, effectively functioning as its toxic protective coating’ – not least to safeguard the offshore world of property.
A quick look into the data leaks mentioned earlier reveals that most authoritarian ‘strongmen’ themselves have secured their assets and incomes offshore, along with a sizeable faction of the global billionaire class who sponsor them. Cynically, the same is true for the global media barons having supplemented their neoliberal narratives with nativist venom, selling the virtues of patriotism while themselves living as true ‘citizens of nowhere’, owning multiple passports to minimise the taxes on their vast business interests structured offshore.
Adam Ramsay talks about the offshore billionaires supporting the rise of nationalist movements and reactionary autocrats.
The rise of Bolsonaro or Trump, the advent of Brexit – on closer inspection these and other political developments driven by ‘dark money’ suggest an offshore billionaire’s rebellion rather than a people’s anti-establishment revolt.
Meanwhile, even the chairman of the high church of neoliberalism – the World Economic Forum (WEF) – is semantically distancing himself from ‘globalism’ to better accommodate ‘national interests’ under globalization, notwithstanding the fact that global capitalism built
by and for the offshore billionaire class annually congregating in Davos simply rages on like before.
[Behind] the Alt-Right, we find a vulgar celebration of unrestrained corporate power behind a façade of ‘refreshing’ memes and cultural narratives, revealing a remarkable continuation of neoliberalism in general and a radically deepening of corporate sovereignty in particular.
Looking at what has euphemistically been labelled Alt-right, moreover, we find a vulgar celebration of unrestrained corporate power behind a façade of ‘refreshing’ memes and cultural narratives, revealing a remarkable continuation of neoliberalism in general and a radically deepening of corporate sovereignty in particular.
For their ideal capitalist state fully rejects the premises of liberal democracy, seeing presidents replaced by CEOs running their states as corporations, maximising shareholder value for their ultimate beneficial owners: the global billionaire class.
Under what thinkers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin label Gov-Corp, politics is deemed illegal and citizens are stripped of their rights – the only human right will be ‘exit’ for those who can afford it, meaning capital flight, upholding the cast-iron right of capital mobility. In what can only turn into an endless race to the bottom, future Gov-Corp states will forever compete for hyper-mobile offshore capital.
Notwithstanding populist appeals of popular democracy, the aim of these self-proclaimed challengers to the global order is to reach neoliberalism’s final frontier: the full corporate takeover of sovereign governments and states themselves.
Although this prospect has yet to materialise, contemporary capitalism is increasingly turning into a global platform economy, with offshore finance as its central operating system and the rest of the world plugged into its dominant operating logic on various terms.
Where ordinary citizens and businesses are subject to global capitalist rule via their respective states – enforcing austerity, taxes and, increasingly, authoritarianism – offshore residents have grown above territorial enclosure, having effectively become a global ‘stateless’ oligarchy, living secretive and tax-free lives with their vast fortunes supported by expansionary monetary policy.
Representing the very crown of capital’s defeat of labour, the offshore world is threatening to give rise to an age of ultra imperialism, as an increasing number of states have effectively joined in an offshore federation, ‘replacing imperialism by a holy alliance of the imperialists’.
The offshore world already operates as a global incorporated Leviathan, as the world’s ultimate creditor state, with a handful of global banks, law and accountancy firms ‘seeing like a state’. In this capacity, moreover, these (para-) financial players wield classic hegemonic power elsewhere, exerting ‘functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states’, as clearly exemplified throughout the financial crisis, where they advised clueless governments to bail out the troubled offshore portfolios of the few at the price of austerity for the many.
We have reached the point, like in the Hunger Games trilogy, where citizens across the ‘districts’ of the world need to rise up and unite against the Capitol of our age – the offshore world – threatening to transform the international system of states into a present-day Panem, enforcing its global rule through local strongmen.
Citizens worldwide need to reclaim democratic oversight over what constitutionally is – or should be – popular sovereignty. This will require exposing nationalist nostalgia, sugarcoated with xenophobia, as hyped-up distractions from the power grab by the offshore Capitol. It will need a spotlight on global corporations and elites avoiding public responsibility and scrutiny who urgently need to be relieved from the vast political power they enjoy and exert.
Although the fight will prove difficult, with no quick fixes, it offers a narrow political target to mobilize a broad political base, one that can bring together the indignant and deplorable, uniting red squares, green ambitions and yellow vests. For only a truly collective struggle to dethrone offshore finance opens up possibilities to really take back control.

“Brexiteers imagine that England will somehow revive a British Empire.”

I tried this on an elderly friend of mine, one of the few left who actually lived the Empire. She just laughed. This is 2019!

Let’s get real. It was not a civilisational empire. As a full fledged imperial dream it was of very short duration. The man (wrongly) regarded as the apostle of Empire, Kipling, was foreseeing its disintegration barely 20 years after Disraeli got up to his theatrics with Queen Victoria. Of course there’s a sentimental attachment to that part of our history. Of course there were many good people who really believed in the then version of R2P – the “white man’s burden” – and who did their best to transform a bodged together collection of trading posts into a force for good.

Of course there’s all that. But it goes for nothing against the disasters the disintegration of Empire left scattered around the globe and against the overtly predatory nature of the enterprise that lay behind the R2P cover. Closer to home, take the disastrous 1921 settlement with Ireland – so much of that was forced by imperial arrogance and the fear that if Ireland could leave so could others.

And at home it diverted the energies of some of our best and brightest in the political/administrative classes from attending to business at home to foolish and destructive adventure abroad. The only true lesson we can take from that period of Empire is “don’t”.

But it was so long ago. I’ll accept that it reached out from beyond the grave, Empire, and contaminated the thinking of our administrative/political classes perhaps even up to the present. All that nonsense about “punching above our weight”, “Greece to their Rome”, a “place at the top table” was a constant refrain from the ’50’s on and is still occasionally heard. But to assert that it was motivation for so many of us in the general population who voted “leave” is to propagate a meme that has no basis in reality.

Cheers Jacob you too.
The Author of this Blog has written a lot about TTIP, of course, it takes two to Tango and the EU were an enthusiastic partner in that particular Dance.
Whilst the TTIP Band seems to have stopped playing just now, super plus Canada sounds a lot like it to me.
Heres Golem XIV , David Malone on TTIP

https://www.reverbnation.com/artist/video/16273773

Its on the @wiki_ballot reverbnation page . embedded there from you tube.
I use Bittube and Bittubers and have also been working on some other web 3 streaming platforms.

RIght now there is a very important effort to avoid Brino this comment is very insightful I think

Jan
November 14, 2019 at 9:00 pm
John the European super state was never meant to be a democracy. Look at the founding fathers in the Paneuropean Union the oldest European unification movement and the root of the EU. Count Richard Von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Crown Prince Otto von Habsburg and other names that are listed in the Almanach de Gotha. Their aim was/is the restoration of the old imperial structures in the form of a federal Europe, hence the creation of a toothless European parliament. The Paneuropean movement had the support of people like Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill who lauded the movement’s work for a unified Europe in his 1946 Zurich speech. In 1947 a group around Churchill, Duncan Sandys and Evard Benes split and the European Movement International was established. This movement rivals the Paneuropean Union which is more of a Christian Democratic nature but in essence has the same aims. In 2004 by the way the daughter of Otto Von Hapsburg, Walburga Habsburg Douglas married to a member of the Clan Douglas, Count Archibald Douglas became honorary President of the Intl. Paneuropean Union. So as this bit of history makes clear it was never the case of just walking away from Europe. The structure has gone up and the U.k. is part of it. A referendum was granted because of a miscalculation by the Bourgeois Boheme and now we are left in a muddle and none to vote for. We have now Tories 1 under Johnson and Tories 2 und Farage. The most likely outcome is remain outright or in stages. First Northern Ireland next Scotland and perhaps Wales and in the end England hoisting the white flag. Maybe I am wrong but I think Farage pulled the rug from under the Brexit movement.
Best regards
Jan
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/the-people-cannot-win-this-general-election-but-they-can-triumph-in-broxtowe/?unapproved=846259&moderation-hash=21a025f17b69f0a78cc5b569d9d91cf8#comment-846259

I would advise you to look closer at what you are witnessing ….

– ‘’ I would only say that the EU has led the charge and as such Remain or Leave are two sides of the same coin ‘’

‘’Figuring out why has become a core part of Philippon’s academic research, and he offers his answer in a fascinating new book, “The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets.” In one industry after another, he writes, a few companies have grown so large that they have the power to keep prices high and wages low. It’s great for those corporations — and bad for almost everyone else. The European economy certainly has its problems, but antitrust policy isn’t one of them. The European Union has kept competition alive by blocking mergers and insisting that established companies make room for new entrants. In telecommunications, smaller companies often have the right to use infrastructure built by the giants.’’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/opinion/big-business-consumer-prices.html

– WEB 3 and P2P computing offers an unrivalled and further opportunity to raise awareness of the choices in the world. For my own part, I deal with what is connected to me and nearest and dearest and work outwards from my own centre which I try to keep grounded and truthful. On specifics, the Pen is mightier than the sword and HTML and JAVA Script with some love will conquer all.

Our freedom will be systematically removed.

“During my session I was asked about the biggest threat to the future of global liberal democracy. My answer was Narendra Modi”
https://twitter.com/FT/status/1193846621269872640

“the strange history of Milton Friedman & his neoliberal clan designing freedom indexes which explicitly excluded democracy and deemed all social rights “forced labor requirements imposed on others.” A parable about authoritarian capitalist utopia. “

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/11/democracy-defenders-economic-freedom-neoliberalism?CMP=share_btn_tw

Take care, Roger Out

Hello Jacob,
My plan is to keep calm and carry on.
Grub Street Journal, WikiBallot, being the change etc.
WEB 3 and P2P computing offers an unrivalled and further opportunity to raise awareness of the choices in the world. FOr my own part, I deal with what is connected to me and nearest and dearest and work outwards from my own centre which I try to keep grounded and truthful.
On specifics, the Pen is mightier than the sword and HTML and JAVA Script with some love will conquer all.

Your comment popped up here

https://thefourpamphleteersofgrubstreet.weebly.com/

I am building a web 3 RSS app

see here,
https://longhairedmusings.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/web-3-ipfs-intermediaries-in-a-disintermediated-world-coals-to-newcastle-gcmaf-effectivecancertreatment-bigpharma-davidnoakes-web3-anticensorship/

so as I say,

Keep Calm and carry on hopefull I get to play some guitar and write some poetry too

What is your plan Roger G Lewis? Try to be as precise and accurate as possible.

https://wikiballot.weebly.com/the-three-pampleteers.html

Rss-formatted:
http://feed.informer.com/digests/ZD7YJKX5T0/feeder.rss

Atom-formatted:
http://feed.informer.com/digests/ZD7YJKX5T0/feeder.atom