[pfiir at pfinr.org: [ PFFR ] Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral']

Steve Kinney admin at pilobilus.net
Sun Aug 6 16:27:23 PDT 2017


On 08/06/2017 12:52 PM, jim bell wrote:

>>Leftist = rightist = centrist = financialist.
>
>>Using these obsolete terms does nothing but stultify the conversation.
> Let's try to find a more expressive and useful vocabulary for political
> discussion.
>
> Particularly since the Nolan Chart, combined with the World's Smallest
> Political Quiz, is so much more informative:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
>
> "Frustrated by the "left-right" line analysis that leaves no room for
> other ideologies, Nolan devised a chart with two axes which would come
> to be known as the Nolan Chart. The Nolan Chart is the centerpiece of
> the World's Smallest Political Quiz

The Nolan Chart, beloved recruiting tool of the Libertarian Party, works
reliably as such because - along with the associated diagnostic
instrument - it measures and graphs the desire of the individual for ego
gratification and freedom of action. 

Anyone who passes the Nolan test by landing in the "Libertarian"
quadrant - a foregone conclusion for most healthy adults - should
proceed from this introspective analysis to consideration of which
political / economic system would offer the best shot at implementing
their lifestyle choices as "rugged individualists."  The Nolan
instrument provides no help, as its diagnostic output indicates personal
preferences among a set of stereotyped partisan sales pitches - not the
net impact of competing public policy agendas on individual "freedom." 
The Nolan test indicates what people believe about themselves, not the
actual motives that affect their actions - otherwise, the inevitable
conversion of our society to a Libertarian model of governance would
have happened decades ago. 

To represent something more like the real world, I propose a somewhat
different graph to represent a two dimensional array of political /
economic organizational principles:  The vertical axis represents State
power mediated by applied violence as an Authoritarian / Anarchist
scale; the horizontal axis represents Private power mediated by applied
economic force on a Capitalism / Free Enterprise scale.  The upper left
corner represents total concentration of power in the fewest hands, the
lower right corner represents uniform distribution of power across an
entire population.  

Kinney Chart

http://pilobilus.net/Political-Power-Spectrum.png

The Capitalism / Free Enterprise axis raises immediate objections from
many observers, due to the indoctrinated belief that Capitalism /is/
Free Enterprise.  In my observation and experience, corporate capitalism
makes itself the natural enemy of free enterprise:  Powerful
corporations enforce their market dominance by any means necessary, from
sponsoring legislation and controlling regulatory policy to suppress
independent competitors,  to dumping look-alike products on the market
until smaller enterprises are bankrupted.  This behavior may be
"illegal" but in litigation as elsewhere, money is power and the real
golden rule says:  A player who shows up with orders of magnitude more
gold than the other player wins.  A buy-out removing the independent
small business from the market by mutual agreement is the best case
scenario for an independent enterprise in conflict with a well funded
corporate adversary. 

I have placed the political Left and Right on the chart, to indicate
their functional features in the chart's context:  The actual players
whose followers call themselves Liberals and Conservatives all seek to
conserve and advance the concentration of financial power in the hands
of an elite minority (corporate capitalists), differing only on whether
that economic power should be consolidated and exercised indirectly
through State institutions or directly through Private cartels. 

If most people who identify as Libertarian would rather live in the
lower right quadrant of the above graph, so sorry.  That Party offers no
such program or agenda:  Only a hollow promise that incorruptible Civil
Courts will deliver equal justice to penniless individuals and corporate
cartels, and that the infallible invisible hand of the Free Market will
prevent systemic abuse of corporate power.  If Fascism is defined as
"the merger of Corporate and State power," the Libertarian agenda is not
Fascist.  In practical terms, the Libertarian agenda could be described
as an effort to achieve full replacement of State power by Corporate
power.  One might call the result a Plutocratic Oligarchy.

That is why I call my own orientation and agenda Anarchism.  My
preferred quadrant of the above graph is the lower right one:  Broadly
distributed political and economic power among autonomous local
communities.  Clockwise from lower left, I associate the quadrants with
Free Market Capitalism, Socialist State Capitalism, Feudal Aristocracy
and Tribal Federations.  All loosely defined, as is proper with high
level abstract labels.  All have their upsides and downsides, but Tribal
Federations have, so far, produced the least harmful results overall. 
Can that model make a comeback in the post-industrial world?  I think
so, but that outcome depends entirely on economic drivers:  Will the
global industrial economy crash, and if so, can it recover in its
present form?  I think the crash will happen, and recovery to "the old
normal" will not.

What the hell, it's something to play with.

:o)





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