[WAR] ... and AP

[Sean Lynch]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 3:26 PM, juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:28:38 -0700
> Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
>
>
> > >
> > >
> > >         'chaos' is just a propaganda term, at least the way you are
> > >         using it. If I support 'chaos' then you support the
> > > 'ordered' fascism we live in?
> > >
> >
> > The question is always "support" relative to what?
>
>         Relative to non-support? =)
>

Well, I meant that I do not support the status quo in the sense of helping
resist any change regardless of the direction. I would only resist change
toward something I felt was worse. And try to help bring about change
toward something I think would be better.


> > I would have to be
> > convinced that any shift I was to help bring about would be likely to
> > eventually lead to something better, preferably within our lifetimes.
> > Making things worse is easy. Making them worse in such a way that they
> > eventually get better is harder.
>
>         Well, if we want to achieve a particular result and we do
>         something that ends up causing a change in a direction we don't
>         want, then on purely utilitarian terms, we failed. But that can
>         only be known with hindsight.
>
>         And utilitarianism is pretty much a bankrupt theory anyway as
>         far as I'm concerned.
>

I agree with that. I've been intentionally vague about what "worse" or
"better" means, because frankly I don't really know.


> > > Not that this isn't a useful incentive for those who
> > > > benefit from the status quo to ensure that it keeps enough people
> > > > happy enough that they don't turn into juans, or at least ensure
> > > > such people don't have enough power and influence to bring the
> > > > system crashing down.
> > >
> > >         The double negative makes it kinda harder for me to parse
> > > your sentence...
> > >
> > >         I'm not sure what incentive you are referring to and what it
> > >         accomplishes.
> > >
> >
> > Sorry. That's what happens when I try to write out a complicated
> > thought without going back and reediting multiple times. What I mean
> > is that having enough people eventually decide that "anything is
> > better than this" serves as a useful check on those in power.
>
>         Ahh - thanks for the clarification.
>
> > Can't
> > make things too bad or people band together to bring it down without
> > regard to what follows. No different from an election where a bunch
> > of people vote for "the other guy" even though the other guy is
> > totally unqualified, just because they're so dissatisfied with you,
> > and your own supporters stay home.
>
>         Hm, I don't think the analogy is that good. The other guy is no
>         different than this guy. And if anything, in a 'democracy' the
>         winner is always the slighty worse of the options.
>

I only meant in the sense that the incumbent usually sees it as a bad thing
when they are thrown out. And it applies to everything, not just democracy.
Even in an absolute dictatorship, it's generally cheaper to control a
population that's reasonably happy than one that's angry.


> > > > Of course, this system will probably bring ITSELF
> > > > crashing down without needing much if any help.
> > >
> > >         Why? Didn't you read 1984?
> > >
> >
> > Yes. And Brave New World. We're basically in the world depicted by
> > Huxley already.
>
>         Yep. And Huxley's book is the most modern of the two, although
>         it was written almost 20 years before 1984 was. But Orwell
>         got the surveillance part right... =/
>

I think Huxley showed pretty effectively that surveillance is unnecessary
for creating a totalitarian society. In fact, too much of it can rob the
government of the appearance of legitimacy. "Why do you need to spy on your
own citizens?" The US mainly gets away with it in the name of terrorism and
the drug war, and that only goes so far. People will not support
surveillance to enforce laws they don't agree with. Instead, we get
propaganda, bread, and circuses courtesy of capitalism or mercantilism or
whatever you want to call it. The "independent" media still want to get
called on in white house press conferences and invited to embed journalists
with military units. The film industry gets heavy subsidies from various
governments in order to film there, so naturally they're not going to
release anything that embarrasses the government. Just watch the end
credits of a movie sometime and notice how many government entities they
thank.

I suspect the surveillance is really about maintaining sufficient fear
among would-be whistleblowers so they don't do things that result in
inconvenient rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's also
about money and keeping the law enforcement/prison industrial complex
well-fed. But I don't think it's about trying to maintain total control as
depicted in 1984. Even without it the system would be doing just fine.
Heck, it *was* doing just fine before mass surveillance was practical.


> > The thing that struck me most about Brave New World
> > is that none of the Powers That Be worried about bringing an outsider
> > into the world -- because it was stable! People for the most part
> > liked things the way they were. That scares me a hell of a lot more
> > than 1984.
>
>         Well, yes, but apart from the totalitarian
>         indoctrination/education  many people were born already
>         mentally maimed thanks to genetic engineering. There wasn't much
>         'informed consent' involved. On the other hand, people who
>         disobeyed the cops mostly got 'free drugs' whereas people who
>         disobey the cops today get summarily executed, especially in
>         Stephen's Paradise, aka the US.
>
>         But anyway, totalitarian political systems can be stable both
>         in fiction and in reality, sadly for us.
>

We'll see how stable it ends up being in reality. Despite the amount of
power the US exercises, it's still possible to escape, particularly for
individuals who aren't already on the government's radar.


> > I believe the system will bring itself down because the financial
> > system of the "developed world" is a house of cards.
>
>
>         Ah yes, the current financial system is a house of cards and
>         can come crashing at any moment, but a reset of the financial
>         system doesn't necessarily mean the political establishment will
>         lose power, again, sadly for us.
>

True, but it might make it so the US won't be able to spend more money on
its military than the rest of the world combined.


> > There are
> > hungrier nations that are far less vulnerable to the "seizing up" the
> > system will experience when people stop trusting the prices in the
> > market. In order for people to transact in the marketplace, they have
> > to trust that the prices in the marketplace are at least somewhat
> > reflective of value. This is why you saw banks sitting on repossessed
> > houses or holding off on foreclosing on non-performing mortgages;
> > they believed the government would intervene to raise prices, so they
> > were waiting for a better deal. But things have only gotten worse
> > since 2008, and every subsequent intervention will only become more
> > costly and create ever more perverse incentives.
>
>         I haven't been paying attention to the post 2008 housing market
>         in the US and finance in general, but what I can see without
>         doing too much homework is that the dow jones has increased
>         almost 3 times since the crisis. Which no doubt some people
>         would say is 'proof' of the amazingness of US free market
>         capitalism and the amazingness of the free planers at the
>         National-Goldman-Sachs-Central-Bank.
>
>         At any rate, there doesn't seem to be any chaos in the system
>         yet...
>

I don't think it says much to have the stock market going up when interest
rates are close to zero or even negative depending on how you look at it.
When there's no money to be made on low-risk investments, naturally
investors are going to invest more in higher risk stuff like stocks. And
whenever the market is going up, the idiot "momentum investors" come out in
force, betting that stocks will do the same thing tomorrow that they did
today. Which causes the stock market to have momentum because people
believe it has momentum, even though there's no other reason for that to be
the case. So you can always assume it will overshoot, and history has shown
it can overshoot by arbitrary amounts and for arbitrary periods of time.

If you haven't watched "The Big Short" I highly recommend it. The huge
amount of time it took between when pretty much everyone knew the housing
market was fucked and when the mortgage-backed securities actually fell in
price is a really good demonstration of how disconnected the financial
markets can be from reality. Pretty much all paper wealth has this problem.

Or you could just watch Wile E Coyote run off cliffs in Road Runner
cartoons. But if he were the stock market he could run halfway to orbit
before realizing he wasn't standing on anything.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 12104 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20160901/45b29286/attachment.txt>