Civil Discourse in the Public Square

Civil discourse in public should follow the Socratic Method, it should be the pursuit of truth in facts and ideas and making them plain for all to consider. It should be left to the intelligence of the people to realize what is true, and it should never be dictation nor ad hominem personal attacks.

The ideas and ideals must be placed before the people and the people are smart enough to decide fairly. There are never enough rabid followers to sway the outcome, there are only liars that hide truth from the public. The liars, when exposed, should be vilified by the appearance of their bias or allegiance, not their personal qualities. Even when I portrayed these ideas, I was mindful not to be too preachy for fear of stamping on my own point.

Anyone that does not treat you or your ideas in this manner gives you the evidence you need to make your own choice on what they stand for.

Manners are the grease of civilization, use them but don't let wrong ideas propagate through politeness. 

When I wrote this, the power went out, so perhaps I am angering the powers that be by speaking towards reason for all. 

People are the same globally

I've never liked the idea that we are equal. Equal under the law, fine. Equal in terms of priority, ok.

But no one is definitively equal. Equal means the same in every way. Without exception.

Equal in the sense of equivalent means that you can substitute one for another virtually. Never. Not even identical twins. If you can't copy and duplicate brain function there is no way to equivocate. In fact, since we are in a constant state of change (add coffee then subtract pee) we are time-varying so we don't equal ourselves moment to moment.

I understand the importance when people (white rich land owners) declared themselves equal. But we've moved on since then. It's an old problem.

A lesser claim is that we are all the same. Similar more or less. It is also more accurate. I've travelled from Hawaii to Hungary. People I've met, worked with lived with, shared wine and bread with are all the same. There is nothing ordinary or unimportant in this fact. It should be celebrated. 

Promote the Theory of Evolution to a Law

If scientists want to represent the theory of evolution as a proper fundamental law inherent in the natural system, then it should be described as a law.  The evidence is overwhelming, therefore it should be explained as such to society.

People don't understand the scientific definition of theory.  They assume if it's still a theory it can't be 100% reliable.

But look at it this way, we call Newton's three Laws of Motion "laws" but they were in fact are proven wrong. They don't work at subatomic levels.  They don't account for relativistic speeds. They are not true natural laws but an approximation. People got in the habit of calling them laws and no one wants to change that.

I'll start:  Darwin's Law of Evolution describes how natural biological organisms form species through adaptation and survivors evolve the genetic traits and characteristics of the successors.

The Ultimate Oxymoron of Capitalism: Big Banks don't compete for Federal Reserve windfall.

If every other person or company must compete for business, then why do the biggest banks get access to the largest sums of money without competition?

Should it not be that the largest financial institutions must compete to get the loans, to show that they are improving, to demonstrate how they are benefiting the people in order to remain in the position to get the biggest loans?  If not, why would they change?

Even a policy of higher interest rates for the worst offenders would punish the worst run banks. That would punish those at the centre of the worst abuses.

Maximum Wages - Defeat Sociopathy that ruins Capitalism

Capitalism survived because it works better than every other system.  But what we are seeing now is the less fettered capitalists are, the less they use the system for society's benefit and the more they appeal to their own baser needs.

The whole point of capitalism is it accepts that people are both greedy and lazy - to greater or lesser degrees.  We get people to get out of bed by working for a living and contributing at the blue collar levels.  Basic survival and trying to make a better life for their kids. All workers work for a few dollars more.

Everyone's involvement in capitalism comes down to how lazy and how greedy they are.

Unfortunately, at the highest wealth levels, people are prone to take total advantage of the system they now own by taking full advantage of all the perks.  They play dirty to win a few billion more.


Society owns capitalism, not the wealthy. The social contract is we all agreed to play by the rules in everyone's favour.


When you combine extreme wealth with sociopathy that's not in everyone's best interest. 

How do you combat that?  Make a maximum wage. Or increase taxes over that limit on an exponential scale.

If we cap total income per year at say $10 million dollars then we reduce the incentive to be a sociopathic wealthy person. 

If you can't make any more, then you don't have the incentive to go to extreme measures to make more.  You can be more lazy and less greedy. 

Laws can fix capitalism.  If we invoked a global maximum wage we would solve captialisms ills more than any bailout or legal proceeding.

The Illusion of Sovereignty and Scotland

Max Keiser's Scottish Independence Farce

At the end of Adam Smith's (one of the world's most famous Scots) The Wealth of Nations - which you can download for yourself at the link,  he laments his English king's delusion of control of the American colonies.  He pleads to reason for others to see that you can't control a single people, let alone one across the ocean, without any useful means to do it. As soon as Americans decided to kick out the British soldiers and refuse to pay England the control was lost. 

It must have been a contemporary topic of the time to work it's way into this real economic-meaty book.   But the reality is the same today as it was 300 years ago.  Only the instruments that make a difference should men care about. Sovereignty comes not from ideas but from objects that define the difference.  A flag is a lifeless piece of cloth.  A name is a placeholder for an amalgamation of things. 

Society has realized that money is more powerful than the sword, and for nations banking has become the real currency of civilization.  To be independent yet have no currency is to be subservient to another regime. To allow another country to set your interest rates is to have no control of your destiny.  To make it harder for your citizens to secure loans is to fail them.

So why is Scotland so interested in a flag (symbolic sovereignty) and so unconcerned about financial independence (real sovereignty)?

Send Polar Bears to Antarctica

If humanity wants to save polar bears, then why not move some of them down to Antarctica?

That would spread the species out to avoid catastrophic extinction, introduce them to a new food source (penguins), and widen their habitat.

Instead of sympathetic ads symbolically supporting polar bears why don't we do something concrete and actually save them?

Police militarization versus Army nonlethalizaion

How ironic.

The US Army is funding research into non lethal crowd suppression weapons using heat wave and sound wave devices to quell large protesting crowds.

Why? The US Army learned in Iraq that to use lethal force against protesters would make them more prone to violence and hence turn peaceful demonstrators into angry frustrated terrorists.



At the same time, local police forces are misusing tactical weaponry meant to respond to terror cells that attack small town America. The media is unfair   blaming a reasonable program on the actions of a few police forces. The goal was to give small police forces the equipment to take on a well-armed and well-organized terror cell.  To be fair to Department of Homeland Security, this was a sound plan that makes sense. 

But what happens when you use tactical equipment against protesters? Same response as in Iraq.


Did those police forces read the lessons learned by the Army in Iraq?

Being apart is not being alone, morality at the highest stage drives the few

Some people do not need or seek out the attention or validation of the group. Some people participate in society by what they do for society and not what they show society. They consider society as a whole: a sum of the parts.

Consider Kohlberg' stages of moral development .  Some people attain level / stage six. At this level some people realize that all action in the specific towards one person or family is meaningless in the extremes of time and space.   That person or family may exist for a hundred years but eventually the influence on society and even history fades into nothingness. So why work in temporal matters, why work towards one goal?  This is a hard thing for most people to understand but people at this stage, people with this understanding of morality in the abstract, understand how decisions affect everyone over vast time periods, are not trying to help Steve down the street with his move but help everyone with pivotal problems.  Doing the abstract work gives them no credit or appreciation from Steve or his neighbours. Also none of the back problems.

This level of abstraction is known in many fields, in mathematics, and science and even in art. Did Monet make fifty versions of the same painting, or just one? Logically, if he wanted to make the most money from one painting idea then reproducing it many times is what an average person would do. But what if he, or anyone else like him, thought in the abstract?  To create art that defines a period is a longer lasting mark than selling 50 times as many. This is why people dedicate their lives creating things most people don't understand to care about. It's because those creators understand morality on the highest level of abstraction.

Think on it this way, some people are satisfied if they get up every day and build bridges.  In forty years you can construct maybe hundreds of bridges. But in fifty years, they will all disappear to be replaced with bigger better bridges that carry more with the latest technology.

What if instead you dedicate your life to figuring out the calculus of how to make all bridges stronger and last longer?  Then your work lives on forever.

So who is the nobler man, the doctor that heals one patient or the mathematician that discovers the infection rate of Ebola?  Whose mark is greater?

Great minds think alike; dim ones seldom differ

Estate taxes equalize economic starting points

Think of it this way, if you wanted to make sure that rich kids never contribute to society, then allow them to keep all their parents` money.

Without a way to reset wealth, not grab taxes, society would spiral into the very few rich people and the very many poor people.

Money, or wealthier people call it equity, is a tool of society.  It is not a personal tool.  It rewards work, or it used to.  It was never meant as a cudgel to keep people down by the few that can buy everything else. More money equals more help, more lawyers, more lobbyists, more means to keep power without personal risk. It makes it harder to compete when the playing field is not close to fair.  What is fair, no idea, it`s a four letter word for a reason.  Fair isn`t making one side risk everything while the other side risks a margin of their bottom line. 


At the same time, like competitiveness with businesses and industry, there is no way to make inroads to novel ideas, novel products, more efficient and less expensive ways if your opponent can simply reach into the family war chest and spend your company into the ground. 

Look at all the ideas that we couldn`t get because existing companies neutralized better ideas with anti-competitive practices!  Society gets better when we get more efficient, more productive, easier, and safer.  Less is wasted when society and our technologies improve. One way to avoid stagnant legacies is to stop family legacies from holding society back. 

War must have a victor and a vanquished - or it must not begin.

War is a messy, nasty, vile, and evil business.  War is hell.

If that is true, then it must not be entered lightly.

It's quite simple, if a nation cannot win a war then it should not begin to wage war. If a nation does not have the will to strike with complete determination and stomach for all the evil that will return it's way, then war must be avoided.  The cost of a dithering war is staggering with no purpose.

Leaving an undominated vanquished foe behind on the battlefield is the cause of all the social problems today.  If one side does not admit defeat and become part of the victor, then this cycle of unrest continues until that happens.

Manners are the grease of civilization

A few years ago, I was in a Ruby Tuesday in Farmington Hills just outside Detroit, and I was chatting with this nice lady at the bar as loners do.

She was African American, and she was telling me how her Dad used to make her whole family get in the car and drive to California from Michigan, a serious car trip that I wouldn't attempt with my kids, to see her relatives on the West coast.  Ugh.

Then she asked me, "Why are all Canadians so polite?".
Well that might be the stereotype and like with all stereotypes it might seem that way.  Here's a few Canadians that aren't so polite.

And to be fair, from my experiences in main street  Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Washington State, Washington DC, Virginia, Rhode Island, Michigan, Wisconsin,  and Wyoming, Montana, Hawaii, Florida, Maryland, Illinois, Nevada,... ok you get the idea I've been to a few states.

Frankly, most Americans are polite.  But some aren't polite in the Denny's on Las Vegas Boulevard when the lineup's out the door.  Some aren't polite in the gas line in Phoenix when it's 110F. Some aren't polite when there's a serious social stressor like airport security. Some people push, some people cut in line or drive right in front of you without a care.  And some keep talking on their cell phone oblivious to everyone else that doesn't matter then stand right in front of you at the mall map. Some people use their cell phone through a whole movie.

I have to be honest, there are lots of Canadians that would do the same thing.

I said,"Well because as subjects of the British Empire, we didn't forget that manners are the grease of civilization. That's part of the European ethos (I didn't say ethos I said way but that's what I meant I just didn't want to sound too know-it-all). We need to be polite because that's how we survive rough situations. "

Bad manners are a short term win with possible long term consequences.  Good manners are a short term loss with possible long term consequences.  Either way you will be remembered and may not find out until too late what those consequences are.

My point is this: while people can maintain the air of grace when things are easy it's when things get harder that people should maintain their manners most, because that's when stressors can make good people do bad things.  Things they will regret when they are calmer.

When the lineup is the worst, you should prepare to give way to someone else more than when it's empty. Even if they are thoughtless, even if they are rude.  That is the key to keeping society functional.

The more people to adopt this philosophy will create a societal habit and hopefully defuse more tense situations and increase happiness. If you are an enlightened civilized atheist, a  Buddhist, or even a Christian that should be your goal.

Good Books to Read

Today, I will recommend two books for you to read.  I read a post on Google Plus https://plus.google.com/u/0/103183570053193175186/posts/fHjnDdNjv2R where someone complained about the hypocrisy of Steve Jobs - at one time stealing ideas and then later on defending against theft.

Read Machiavelli's The Prince 

and Friedrich Nietzche's The Will to Power.

Our society needs many things.  Food. Shelter. Water. Justice. and Princes.

We need people that won't sit still and accept the rules.  We, as a society, need people to upend convention and throw things on their heads.  We need people to disrupt the status quo.

Read those books and understand why.

Why do you want the government to fix global warming....

If you go through the drive-through window on a warm day?

Civilization versus Savagery

Outcasts and anarchists are not new problems for society. Their handling is a very old moral dilemmas for governments, what to do with people that reject society?

Easy. Anyone that openly rejects civilization does not need any protection from society. That is the way it was done. That is the way they want it. Civilization should not feel uneasy when dealing with anti-civilization elements harshly. It is the way civilization has survived. The problem will never go away. Everyone is given a choice to work within society or reject it and rebel. It is a conscious choice made knowing the consequences.

Before these two disaffected people there was Louis Riel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Riel


Louis Riel had real grievances with how his people the Metis were treated by the government of the time.  He won election to the government and refused to take his seat in Parliament.  He could have advocated for his people through legal means and yet he chose instead to take over.  Riel refused to recognize the government, led a group of insurrectionists against society, and killed a prisoner to be taken seriously by the government.

 

He executed a prisoner and called it, "a good thing".

He led a provisional government.

Riel and his rebellion was fought to defeat and dissolution. Riel was caught, tried, and executed. 

Society must rise up and defeat radicals.