"The reality is ‘serious problem that needs to be fixed asap’ vs the idealism of allowing the (very) slow process of due process." My take on that kind of problem is: if you are not a citizen of a particular jurisdiction, you are not entitled to due process - you haven't paid for it! So, if you are asked to kindly vacate the premises because you are an uninvited guest, then you should foxtrot oscar. It's the same as if someone moved into your house without asking. I'm guessing you would use physical force to eject them if they refused to leave? You wouldn't make up the spare room whilst you paid for a court order to require them to leave. Maybe that's crystallised it.
Well said. Entry into, and residence in, the US by foreigners (aliens, in the parlance) requires process, which you might argue is “due” and which many skip by entering or remaining illegally.
It’s hard for me to understand why particularly much “process” should be extended to those whose regard for process and the laws that give birth to it is so obviously merely tactical.
If you’re in the US illegally, you are NOT entitled to access the systems that legitimate citizens, residents and taxpayers pay for. That includes the legal system.
Due is like fair: it ceases to function as an applied concept when there's no common understanding of it.
Like when playing games involving dice. Do they count if they land on the floor? To some, that's fair. To others, a formal dice tray and casino-quality dice must be used or it's unfair.
And some may instead isnist on an electronic RNG.
As for a house: there have been cases in Sweden where gypsies have tried to steal vacation-homes, by moving in and then waving about forged documents about them buying the property from some anonymous now-defunct third party in Romania.
The case media didn't manage to cover-up took 18 months to solve, for which time the gypsy clan lived rent free in a vacation-home, wrecking and befouling it and stealing everything they could before moving on.
And the reason they could do so was they were exploiting the cultural difference in the interpretation of "due process" and what kind of behaviours are "beyond the pale" even for criminals.
Or as some Greek is said to have said: "A heap of building materials isn't a house".
Exactly! So unless you are a citizen of the same jurisdiction (game) as me, and sharing the responsibilities as well as the rights, the rules of the 'game' are irrelevant. We are back to common sense and natural rights, rather than man-made rules.
And, just like that, we're back to a notion of common understanding. Two (or more) versions of 'reality' or the understanding of that reality in play again.
This is quite a serious problem isn't it? And especially so when you let those with, shall we say, a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality run the system. Although I suppose in true conspiracy fashion we could say that those running the system know exactly what reality is and are deliberately pouring the gasoline of fantasy onto the flames of idiocy - and laughing all the way to the bank.
Both sides - to create kind of a false binary for simplicity's sake - know what they are doing and are spending the majority of their energy in trying to stop the other side from achieving anything (disregarding if the "anything" is possible, desirable or viable).
English game Warhammer 40 000 Rogue Trader is a perfect example.
It was originally written as a friendly game based in the very English notion of sportsmanship, fair play and honourability.
When introduced in the USA it became clear that a culture-clash had started: the American way of playing was competitive where the playing p
pieces were just funny-looking tokens, and min-maxing/optimisation became a game in its own right.
Naturally then, conflict ensued within the gamer-space between "fluffheads" (story- and shared experience-focused) and "waacs" (Win At All Costs).
The problem is unsolvable: you cannot have game at all if one player is a waac and the other a fluffhead: the waac wins hands down and is bored, and the fluffhead gets no story-experience.
Obviously, in gaming you can simply create two rule-sets: one for competitive championships and one for story-drien gaming; the historicals have been doing that for donkey's years now.
A nation or a civilisation can't do that. One side must triumph and subjugate the other, or suffer that fate itself.
There are various amounts of process that may be due, depending on circumstances. The radical left equates "due" with "all process that can be imagined in the wildest of dreams". In reality, the only process that is due to an illegal alien, for example, is the presentation of an array of gun muzzles and a hostile expression, along with a gesture indicating "fuck off now, before we open fire".
Haha! Yes, I think I prefer the shoot first, ask questions later approach! On the basis that you have no rights unless you have concomitant responsibilities. The only exception being if you share a LAND border with a country at war - a NEIGHBOURING country ought morally to offer TEMPORARY shelter. True war refugees should seek asylum in the continent of origin, not sail the seas looking for the largest welfare state.
I'm not really on board with the gun array thing - but I certainly understand the sentiment! It's very frustrating to see the erosion of one's culture on such a short timescale
On the one hand I really would like people to be treated *fairly* by the system and for each case to be determined on its own merits. That's my idealism speaking.
But there's a couple of hidden assumptions behind that which are roughly
(a) there's enough resource to do that
(b) one can trust the system
When you've shipped in millions and effectively given them carte blanche to stay it's going to be very difficult to achieve (a).
It's clear in the UK that we can't trust the system - plenty of cases of total scumbags (rapists and the like) fighting their deportations in the courts. And winning!
But it's hard to argue with the basic principle - if you have entered a country illegally then you have no *right* to be there. You can't just waltz across a border (or sail across a channel) and expect to enjoy all the benefits of citizens already there - at least not in a sane world.
But this is exactly what the idealists who imagine some progressive paradise seem to think is 'right' - they seem to think that not only should vast sums of public money be set aside to provide services and some kind of indefinite 'right' to remain in your chosen new ATM - sorry, I mean country - but when deportation becomes an issue more money should be spent on the process of due process.
With both the UK and US drowning in debt, and with only the US seeming to be making a start on tackling that, we simply can't afford the luxury of being 'nice' with this number of people who are a net drain on the economy. The cost/benefit - an assessment of the economic reality - doesn't pan out in favour of benefit.
Idealism is all well and good when it is (a) practical and (b) affordable
(Tried to like your reply but substack didn't like it)
Immigration is not simply an economic issue - that immigrants cost far more than they contribute - in benefits and state funded resources. This is well documented.
1. Culture
There is also the question of culture - it's not simply an economic issue. I think all countries should be able to preserve their culture, which is destroyed by mass immigration (and higher birthrates) from alien cultures who do not integrate.
2. Space
England is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. Increased population decreases living standards, particularly for the poorer end of the economic spectrum. This impacts the ability of young people to afford rents and mortgages. It also has a detrimental effect on mental health because they cannot get jobs. Supply and demand - we are creating scarcity in everything.
3. Food
We cannot feed ourselves and rely on imports not to starve. This is environmentally unfriendly, expensive and precarious because of geopolitical instability. We import half our food, so our population needs to HALVE in order to have food security.
4. Crime
Mass immigration from countries that have low average IQs produces more violent crime. The link between violent crime and low IQ is well-established and perfectly visible in the crime and prison statistics here. Our justice system was created to deal with a high IQ, high trust, culturally homogenous (Christian) society. It provides no deterrent to those from other cultures who see it as a system to be gamed with very, very rich pickings in terms of the proceeds of crime. Here they get a slap on the wrist for something that in their country of origin would have triggered incarceration in a hellhole or the death penalty. So crime rises inexorably to the detriment of the law-abiding.
Yes - I have no real problem with immigration as such. I think it's cool that some people want to live in a different country. I've met plenty of immigrants who are doing a stellar job in the UK's NHS (my mum's been in hospital/care for the last 3 months after a minor heart attack but is thankfully on the mend now and about to come back home this week). I cannot fault their dedication or care or their attitudes and have had many fun conversations with them. If only this was representative of all of them, but we know it's not.
I like *some* mixing of cultures - and that was all cool back when we could expect immigrants to be bringing something positive to the table - as many still do. And we welcomed them as valued guests and members of our society - as we should.
The issue I have isn't with the concept of immigration, but the current *scale* of immigration which makes no sense in terms of 'national' benefit. And there's also an issue of the underlying 'philosophy' of a good chunk of the current excessive crop of immigrants.
I was an immigrant for 10 years when I worked and lived outside of the UK. Were there things I disliked? Sure - but I didn't go about whinging about them publicly or campaign for change or cry 'victim' or want to completely undermine the existing culture. There were lots of good things too - I learned a lot, I hope others learned a few things from me, and I hope we parted ways as friends.
Truth is we know that the current population replacement project has nothing to do with the normal ebb and flow of people, but is part of the globalist plan to break down the idea of borders and the nation state in order to impose world governance, all digitally tracked and controlled with everyone on universal income and owning nothing. Well, at least some of us know this. Others truly believe the government can do nothing to stop the invasion. The government shrugs and obfuscates and does the 'computer says no' stonewall. The truth is the ECHR is a paper tiger - treaties have no direct effect in the UK. They need enabling legislation. Repeal the enabling legislation (Human Rights Act 1998). Done ✅ Google it.
Anyway, we can do what we want as a country - nobody can force us to do anything. International law is just a 'let's all play this game for a bit' farce - it doesn't really exist as an objective reality. It's all excuses.
Thanks for the update Rudolph. I particularly liked your analogy of putting weights on bird wings to equalize flight speed. I’ll use that when having conversations with my liberal friends about equity issues. But I’ll give you credit for the analogy.
Yes - good points. I think I'm thinking more on the lines of pragmatically realist when I use 'realism' 😂
I am by nature an idealist - it's probably why I like theoretical physics so much. You can get carried away by the 'purity' of it all and studiously ignore the fact that when someone tries to implement your nice pure theoretical ideas practical realities have a tendency to fuck it all up.
Woolly shit is a good name for humanities and social sciences, and I don't mean that derogatory:
As with wool from shorn sheep, the trick is in separating the shit from the wool. Shit goes on the dung-heap to become nutrient for more sheep-food (and an abundance of sheep make for cheap food too); wool can be made into all kinds of useful stuff.
What's happened to the fuzzy subjects is, they stopped employing empirical metrics and methods in the separation process and so we've wound up with a whole heap of wool covered in dingleberrys, while being told there's no real difference since they're all made up of the same quantum whatstits in the end (or from the end, rather).
Idealism is indeed by necessity totalitarian, since an ideal is possible only in theoretical terms. Thus, to strive /towards/ an idea demands you impose coercive force on everything that helps you towards the idea and also that you exterminate everything in the way of the ideal.
The best way to curb this (I claim it the best not only in my opinion, but objectively so) is instead to have an ideal that forces you to move not towards it, but away from its opposite, and only away from its opposite conditions.
A simple example is food/nutrition/health. A progressive ideal necessitates total control over what you eat, how much and when plus how you keep in shape, if it's to achieve its goal of a healthy well-fed population. No freedom, and total control under set parameters as per your production-line example.
A "regressive" ideal would instead be that the food (all edibles/drinks) be correctly labeled, have a list of ingredients, a sell by/use by date, info on how to store it (always get a chuckle from soda-cans reading "Do not expose to direct sunlight" - wtf is in that soda?) and so on, and then let people decide themselves.
Another way of looking at it is that the progressive ideal, as per my scribblings above, is like cutting off the tails of the Bell curve about 1/6 of the curve from the center, whereas the "regressive" ideal is just letting things be that way.
---
The "North and South"-example is a good one and offers an Abyss to explore: how to avoid exploitation of the situation without falling into the progressive ideal-trap. During the early 1990s, when people revealed that European and American corporations were happily employing child labour and slave labour in SE Asia, the defense from the globalists of that days was:
"If we didn't emply them for a dollar a day, they'd be starving and unemployed!"
How to avoid that isn't easy, but it can be done. It is also a good topic for what capitalism results in if allowed to rule/form the ontological and epistemological basis for society.
Essentially, total communism and unrestrained capitalism arrive at the same terminus, but via different routes using different semantics and rhetorics.
---
Also, good to see the Starm-troopers haven't locked you in the clink! I was, no joke, getting a mite worried given the "state of the Union Jack" if you pardon the wordplay. Of course, it's ust as bad here. Yesterday a blog run by an octogenarian reported that they had been contacted by a special police squad dealing with "hate crime". A commenter had in a comment referenced what his Filippino wife had said about Negros and Arabs being "integrated via entry-level jobs in the elder care sector", and now the police demanded the blogger give up the commenters real name and "confo" (Is that neologism for "contact information" used in English English? It's annoyingly common in "Swenglish".) or the blogger "could face trouble".
To quote myself from when I was in my teens, angry and doing my level best to look as if I had merkin glued to my head (mohawk/coxcomb-hairstyle a foot high):
"The best way to curb this (I claim it the best not only in my opinion, but objectively so) is instead to have an ideal that forces you to move not towards it, but away from its opposite, and only away from its opposite conditions."
Damn you Rikard - can you just stop writing stuff that I'm going to have to spend the next few weeks thinking about? 😂
Many years ago, when I was an under grad and dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were driven by steam, someone pointed out to me the incredible complexity of the systems involved in supplying me with a 2H lead pencil to be used in taking notes. It really was a long time ago.
Graphite production, wood growing and harvesting and shaping, paint production, shipping systems requiring fuel drilled from the desert or the ocean, warehouses employing thousands...I could go on and on. Unimaginable systemic complexity, all to produce a pencil that I could use to doodle pictures of cocks and balls while the Numerical Analysis chap (an incredibly tedious American) droned on about Big O Notation.
I greatly fear it's all going to disappear, in the name of diversity and equity. I suspect that my children may look back on the days of indoor flushing toilets with envy.
And Herr Rikard...everywhere I go on the internet I see his comments. A remarkably prolific man!
Being retired has its benefits - if being "terminally online" can be said to be that.
Also, it's five below (Centigrade) and all the yard-work is done so I get to enjoy a Wormwood-flavoured vodka on this sunny yet cold Sunday, before walking the dogs.
I wonder where using a lead pencil as an example originated. I've heard that one too, in the 1980s, and again in the late 1990s when listening to an econ-tutor explaining why logistics rule the world.
"But what do we do when (by design, I believe) there is no firm agreement on what reality is? You end up with idealism running amok without any tempering mechanisms. You end up with perturbations to the system all over the place and optimisations against all the wrong things."
This sums it all up, but there are apparently even significant components of this overall messy system that have evolved over time to make the most of these perturbations and optimizations against all the wrong things. In my own thinking, I visualize these (introduced sometimes by design, perhaps) perturbations -- like wars, to use your example -- as serving as an always reliable means for throwing previously socially- or personally-stored free energy back out into the overall system so that naturally evolved, opportunistic 'filter-feeders' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_feeder) can gather up that useful, newly-released free energy for themselves. Viewed this way, perturbations caused by a high level of human confusion and uncertainty about reality seem entirely to the point -- from the viewpoint of opportunistic 'filter-feeders', at least.
Yeah, that comment was courtesy of my long ago introduction to Le Chatelier's Principle in freshman chemistry: remove the reaction products from solution and the producing reaction is sustained and driven forward. (Thereby, for example, excessively developing and expressing human appetite for fiat money and the valuable resources it imperfectly represents.)
"The reality is ‘serious problem that needs to be fixed asap’ vs the idealism of allowing the (very) slow process of due process." My take on that kind of problem is: if you are not a citizen of a particular jurisdiction, you are not entitled to due process - you haven't paid for it! So, if you are asked to kindly vacate the premises because you are an uninvited guest, then you should foxtrot oscar. It's the same as if someone moved into your house without asking. I'm guessing you would use physical force to eject them if they refused to leave? You wouldn't make up the spare room whilst you paid for a court order to require them to leave. Maybe that's crystallised it.
Well said. Entry into, and residence in, the US by foreigners (aliens, in the parlance) requires process, which you might argue is “due” and which many skip by entering or remaining illegally.
It’s hard for me to understand why particularly much “process” should be extended to those whose regard for process and the laws that give birth to it is so obviously merely tactical.
If you’re in the US illegally, you are NOT entitled to access the systems that legitimate citizens, residents and taxpayers pay for. That includes the legal system.
Due is like fair: it ceases to function as an applied concept when there's no common understanding of it.
Like when playing games involving dice. Do they count if they land on the floor? To some, that's fair. To others, a formal dice tray and casino-quality dice must be used or it's unfair.
And some may instead isnist on an electronic RNG.
As for a house: there have been cases in Sweden where gypsies have tried to steal vacation-homes, by moving in and then waving about forged documents about them buying the property from some anonymous now-defunct third party in Romania.
The case media didn't manage to cover-up took 18 months to solve, for which time the gypsy clan lived rent free in a vacation-home, wrecking and befouling it and stealing everything they could before moving on.
And the reason they could do so was they were exploiting the cultural difference in the interpretation of "due process" and what kind of behaviours are "beyond the pale" even for criminals.
Or as some Greek is said to have said: "A heap of building materials isn't a house".
Exactly! So unless you are a citizen of the same jurisdiction (game) as me, and sharing the responsibilities as well as the rights, the rules of the 'game' are irrelevant. We are back to common sense and natural rights, rather than man-made rules.
And, just like that, we're back to a notion of common understanding. Two (or more) versions of 'reality' or the understanding of that reality in play again.
This is quite a serious problem isn't it? And especially so when you let those with, shall we say, a somewhat tenuous grasp of reality run the system. Although I suppose in true conspiracy fashion we could say that those running the system know exactly what reality is and are deliberately pouring the gasoline of fantasy onto the flames of idiocy - and laughing all the way to the bank.
Both sides - to create kind of a false binary for simplicity's sake - know what they are doing and are spending the majority of their energy in trying to stop the other side from achieving anything (disregarding if the "anything" is possible, desirable or viable).
English game Warhammer 40 000 Rogue Trader is a perfect example.
It was originally written as a friendly game based in the very English notion of sportsmanship, fair play and honourability.
When introduced in the USA it became clear that a culture-clash had started: the American way of playing was competitive where the playing p
pieces were just funny-looking tokens, and min-maxing/optimisation became a game in its own right.
Naturally then, conflict ensued within the gamer-space between "fluffheads" (story- and shared experience-focused) and "waacs" (Win At All Costs).
The problem is unsolvable: you cannot have game at all if one player is a waac and the other a fluffhead: the waac wins hands down and is bored, and the fluffhead gets no story-experience.
Obviously, in gaming you can simply create two rule-sets: one for competitive championships and one for story-drien gaming; the historicals have been doing that for donkey's years now.
A nation or a civilisation can't do that. One side must triumph and subjugate the other, or suffer that fate itself.
The question is really what is the mean of "due".
There are various amounts of process that may be due, depending on circumstances. The radical left equates "due" with "all process that can be imagined in the wildest of dreams". In reality, the only process that is due to an illegal alien, for example, is the presentation of an array of gun muzzles and a hostile expression, along with a gesture indicating "fuck off now, before we open fire".
Haha! Yes, I think I prefer the shoot first, ask questions later approach! On the basis that you have no rights unless you have concomitant responsibilities. The only exception being if you share a LAND border with a country at war - a NEIGHBOURING country ought morally to offer TEMPORARY shelter. True war refugees should seek asylum in the continent of origin, not sail the seas looking for the largest welfare state.
I'm not really on board with the gun array thing - but I certainly understand the sentiment! It's very frustrating to see the erosion of one's culture on such a short timescale
Yeah - my thoughts aren't properly formed yet.
On the one hand I really would like people to be treated *fairly* by the system and for each case to be determined on its own merits. That's my idealism speaking.
But there's a couple of hidden assumptions behind that which are roughly
(a) there's enough resource to do that
(b) one can trust the system
When you've shipped in millions and effectively given them carte blanche to stay it's going to be very difficult to achieve (a).
It's clear in the UK that we can't trust the system - plenty of cases of total scumbags (rapists and the like) fighting their deportations in the courts. And winning!
But it's hard to argue with the basic principle - if you have entered a country illegally then you have no *right* to be there. You can't just waltz across a border (or sail across a channel) and expect to enjoy all the benefits of citizens already there - at least not in a sane world.
But this is exactly what the idealists who imagine some progressive paradise seem to think is 'right' - they seem to think that not only should vast sums of public money be set aside to provide services and some kind of indefinite 'right' to remain in your chosen new ATM - sorry, I mean country - but when deportation becomes an issue more money should be spent on the process of due process.
With both the UK and US drowning in debt, and with only the US seeming to be making a start on tackling that, we simply can't afford the luxury of being 'nice' with this number of people who are a net drain on the economy. The cost/benefit - an assessment of the economic reality - doesn't pan out in favour of benefit.
Idealism is all well and good when it is (a) practical and (b) affordable
(Tried to like your reply but substack didn't like it)
Immigration is not simply an economic issue - that immigrants cost far more than they contribute - in benefits and state funded resources. This is well documented.
1. Culture
There is also the question of culture - it's not simply an economic issue. I think all countries should be able to preserve their culture, which is destroyed by mass immigration (and higher birthrates) from alien cultures who do not integrate.
2. Space
England is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. Increased population decreases living standards, particularly for the poorer end of the economic spectrum. This impacts the ability of young people to afford rents and mortgages. It also has a detrimental effect on mental health because they cannot get jobs. Supply and demand - we are creating scarcity in everything.
3. Food
We cannot feed ourselves and rely on imports not to starve. This is environmentally unfriendly, expensive and precarious because of geopolitical instability. We import half our food, so our population needs to HALVE in order to have food security.
4. Crime
Mass immigration from countries that have low average IQs produces more violent crime. The link between violent crime and low IQ is well-established and perfectly visible in the crime and prison statistics here. Our justice system was created to deal with a high IQ, high trust, culturally homogenous (Christian) society. It provides no deterrent to those from other cultures who see it as a system to be gamed with very, very rich pickings in terms of the proceeds of crime. Here they get a slap on the wrist for something that in their country of origin would have triggered incarceration in a hellhole or the death penalty. So crime rises inexorably to the detriment of the law-abiding.
Yes - I have no real problem with immigration as such. I think it's cool that some people want to live in a different country. I've met plenty of immigrants who are doing a stellar job in the UK's NHS (my mum's been in hospital/care for the last 3 months after a minor heart attack but is thankfully on the mend now and about to come back home this week). I cannot fault their dedication or care or their attitudes and have had many fun conversations with them. If only this was representative of all of them, but we know it's not.
I like *some* mixing of cultures - and that was all cool back when we could expect immigrants to be bringing something positive to the table - as many still do. And we welcomed them as valued guests and members of our society - as we should.
The issue I have isn't with the concept of immigration, but the current *scale* of immigration which makes no sense in terms of 'national' benefit. And there's also an issue of the underlying 'philosophy' of a good chunk of the current excessive crop of immigrants.
I was an immigrant for 10 years when I worked and lived outside of the UK. Were there things I disliked? Sure - but I didn't go about whinging about them publicly or campaign for change or cry 'victim' or want to completely undermine the existing culture. There were lots of good things too - I learned a lot, I hope others learned a few things from me, and I hope we parted ways as friends.
Agree with everything you say!
Truth is we know that the current population replacement project has nothing to do with the normal ebb and flow of people, but is part of the globalist plan to break down the idea of borders and the nation state in order to impose world governance, all digitally tracked and controlled with everyone on universal income and owning nothing. Well, at least some of us know this. Others truly believe the government can do nothing to stop the invasion. The government shrugs and obfuscates and does the 'computer says no' stonewall. The truth is the ECHR is a paper tiger - treaties have no direct effect in the UK. They need enabling legislation. Repeal the enabling legislation (Human Rights Act 1998). Done ✅ Google it.
Anyway, we can do what we want as a country - nobody can force us to do anything. International law is just a 'let's all play this game for a bit' farce - it doesn't really exist as an objective reality. It's all excuses.
PS - wishing your mum better!!! Good luck 🙏🏻
Thanks for the update Rudolph. I particularly liked your analogy of putting weights on bird wings to equalize flight speed. I’ll use that when having conversations with my liberal friends about equity issues. But I’ll give you credit for the analogy.
No need Stephen - steal away. I'm honestly not bothered about things like attribution.
In my experience, people who describe themselves as "realists" tend to be pessimists.
I would also argue that those running around with their doom and gloom nonsense about saving the planet can hardly be described as idealists.
And mass immigration wasn't an idealist scheme about equality but a very nefarious plan by some thoroughly evil people.
I don't think it's just a straight either/or and maybe you should have included pragmatists into your equation.
Yes - good points. I think I'm thinking more on the lines of pragmatically realist when I use 'realism' 😂
I am by nature an idealist - it's probably why I like theoretical physics so much. You can get carried away by the 'purity' of it all and studiously ignore the fact that when someone tries to implement your nice pure theoretical ideas practical realities have a tendency to fuck it all up.
Woolly shit is a good name for humanities and social sciences, and I don't mean that derogatory:
As with wool from shorn sheep, the trick is in separating the shit from the wool. Shit goes on the dung-heap to become nutrient for more sheep-food (and an abundance of sheep make for cheap food too); wool can be made into all kinds of useful stuff.
What's happened to the fuzzy subjects is, they stopped employing empirical metrics and methods in the separation process and so we've wound up with a whole heap of wool covered in dingleberrys, while being told there's no real difference since they're all made up of the same quantum whatstits in the end (or from the end, rather).
Idealism is indeed by necessity totalitarian, since an ideal is possible only in theoretical terms. Thus, to strive /towards/ an idea demands you impose coercive force on everything that helps you towards the idea and also that you exterminate everything in the way of the ideal.
The best way to curb this (I claim it the best not only in my opinion, but objectively so) is instead to have an ideal that forces you to move not towards it, but away from its opposite, and only away from its opposite conditions.
A simple example is food/nutrition/health. A progressive ideal necessitates total control over what you eat, how much and when plus how you keep in shape, if it's to achieve its goal of a healthy well-fed population. No freedom, and total control under set parameters as per your production-line example.
A "regressive" ideal would instead be that the food (all edibles/drinks) be correctly labeled, have a list of ingredients, a sell by/use by date, info on how to store it (always get a chuckle from soda-cans reading "Do not expose to direct sunlight" - wtf is in that soda?) and so on, and then let people decide themselves.
Another way of looking at it is that the progressive ideal, as per my scribblings above, is like cutting off the tails of the Bell curve about 1/6 of the curve from the center, whereas the "regressive" ideal is just letting things be that way.
---
The "North and South"-example is a good one and offers an Abyss to explore: how to avoid exploitation of the situation without falling into the progressive ideal-trap. During the early 1990s, when people revealed that European and American corporations were happily employing child labour and slave labour in SE Asia, the defense from the globalists of that days was:
"If we didn't emply them for a dollar a day, they'd be starving and unemployed!"
How to avoid that isn't easy, but it can be done. It is also a good topic for what capitalism results in if allowed to rule/form the ontological and epistemological basis for society.
Essentially, total communism and unrestrained capitalism arrive at the same terminus, but via different routes using different semantics and rhetorics.
---
Also, good to see the Starm-troopers haven't locked you in the clink! I was, no joke, getting a mite worried given the "state of the Union Jack" if you pardon the wordplay. Of course, it's ust as bad here. Yesterday a blog run by an octogenarian reported that they had been contacted by a special police squad dealing with "hate crime". A commenter had in a comment referenced what his Filippino wife had said about Negros and Arabs being "integrated via entry-level jobs in the elder care sector", and now the police demanded the blogger give up the commenters real name and "confo" (Is that neologism for "contact information" used in English English? It's annoyingly common in "Swenglish".) or the blogger "could face trouble".
To quote myself from when I was in my teens, angry and doing my level best to look as if I had merkin glued to my head (mohawk/coxcomb-hairstyle a foot high):
"The police, them's just the state's gang!"
"The best way to curb this (I claim it the best not only in my opinion, but objectively so) is instead to have an ideal that forces you to move not towards it, but away from its opposite, and only away from its opposite conditions."
Damn you Rikard - can you just stop writing stuff that I'm going to have to spend the next few weeks thinking about? 😂
Very interesting observation/suggestion here
A thoughtful piece Sir, as usual.
Many years ago, when I was an under grad and dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were driven by steam, someone pointed out to me the incredible complexity of the systems involved in supplying me with a 2H lead pencil to be used in taking notes. It really was a long time ago.
Graphite production, wood growing and harvesting and shaping, paint production, shipping systems requiring fuel drilled from the desert or the ocean, warehouses employing thousands...I could go on and on. Unimaginable systemic complexity, all to produce a pencil that I could use to doodle pictures of cocks and balls while the Numerical Analysis chap (an incredibly tedious American) droned on about Big O Notation.
I greatly fear it's all going to disappear, in the name of diversity and equity. I suspect that my children may look back on the days of indoor flushing toilets with envy.
And Herr Rikard...everywhere I go on the internet I see his comments. A remarkably prolific man!
I'll take that as a compliment!
Being retired has its benefits - if being "terminally online" can be said to be that.
Also, it's five below (Centigrade) and all the yard-work is done so I get to enjoy a Wormwood-flavoured vodka on this sunny yet cold Sunday, before walking the dogs.
I wonder where using a lead pencil as an example originated. I've heard that one too, in the 1980s, and again in the late 1990s when listening to an econ-tutor explaining why logistics rule the world.
Thanks LSWCHP
I like the pencil thing. I think I may be weird, though. I would have been more excited by the big O stuff than drawing sexual graffiti 😂
"But what do we do when (by design, I believe) there is no firm agreement on what reality is? You end up with idealism running amok without any tempering mechanisms. You end up with perturbations to the system all over the place and optimisations against all the wrong things."
This sums it all up, but there are apparently even significant components of this overall messy system that have evolved over time to make the most of these perturbations and optimizations against all the wrong things. In my own thinking, I visualize these (introduced sometimes by design, perhaps) perturbations -- like wars, to use your example -- as serving as an always reliable means for throwing previously socially- or personally-stored free energy back out into the overall system so that naturally evolved, opportunistic 'filter-feeders' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_feeder) can gather up that useful, newly-released free energy for themselves. Viewed this way, perturbations caused by a high level of human confusion and uncertainty about reality seem entirely to the point -- from the viewpoint of opportunistic 'filter-feeders', at least.
Interesting thinking there about a kind of 'second order' evolutionary process going on. Definitely worth a ponder or two.
Yeah, that comment was courtesy of my long ago introduction to Le Chatelier's Principle in freshman chemistry: remove the reaction products from solution and the producing reaction is sustained and driven forward. (Thereby, for example, excessively developing and expressing human appetite for fiat money and the valuable resources it imperfectly represents.)
Situations develop...AND
Really, is it ideal..?
😂