Politics.html

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  13     <h1>Do Not Accept the Weak State of Mind in Our Time</h1>
  14    <div class="contents">
  15 <dl>
  16 <dt>
  17 <a href="#sec1">The Basis of My Philosophy</a>
  18 </dt>
  19 <dt>
  20 <a href="#sec2">The Current Economic and Political Structure Is Broken</a>
  21 </dt>
  22 <dd>
  23 <dl>
  24 <dt>
  25 <a href="#sec3">The Government of the Unites States</a>
  26 </dt>
  27 <dt>
  28 <a href="#sec4">Capitalism is Intrinsically Evil</a>
  29 </dt>
  30 </dl>
  31 </dd>
  32 <dt>
  33 <a href="#sec5">Misc</a>
  34 </dt>
  35 <dd>
  36 <dl>
  37 <dt>
  38 <a href="#sec6">Long Term Copyright Causes Harm to Society (<code>Draft Revision 2</code>)</a>
  39 </dt>
  40 <dt>
  41 <a href="#sec7">Fewer Laws Are Better</a>
  42 </dt>
  43 <dd>
  44 <dl>
  45 <dt>
  46 <a href="#sec8">Individuals should not have their actions regulated</a>
  47 </dt>
  48 <dt>
  49 <a href="#sec9">Corporations must have their actions heavily regulated</a>
  50 </dt>
  51 </dl>
  52 </dd>
  53 </dl>
  54 </dd>
  55 <dt>
  56 <a href="#sec10">Social Ills</a>
  57 </dt>
  58 <dd>
  59 <dl>
  60 <dt>
  61 <a href="#sec11">Mass Culture</a>
  62 </dt>
  63 <dt>
  64 <a href="#sec12">The Automobile</a>
  65 </dt>
  66 <dt>
  67 <a href="#sec13">Learned Ignorance and Weakness</a>
  68 </dt>
  69 </dl>
  70 </dd>
  71 </dl>
  72 </div>
  73
  74
  75 <!-- Page published by Emacs Muse begins here --><p>I have views that could perhaps be seen as odd. Do note that I am <strong>not</strong>
  76 a liberal; nor am I a conservative. I do not buy into the traditional
  77 socieconomic dipole scale, and I also reject the <em>political compass</em> two
  78 dimensional scale; my political belief system could best be described
  79 as anarchism if you must have a label for it. Naturally this is only
  80 because anarchism isn't an ideology, but rather a broad set of ideas
  81 centered around the rejection of traditional heriarchial political and
  82 social structures.</p>
  83
  84 <p>These short essays are continually evolving, and each will be split
  85 into its own page as the ideas contained within it are fleshed out in
  86 my mind. Writing things down tends to help me to do this for there are
  87 limits to how much information the top of my head can hold limiting
  88 the usefulness of internal thought once an idea becomes complex
  89 enough. Political and social beliefs are perhaps the most complicated
  90 ideas a man can have because of our complex intertwined social
  91 structures.</p>
  92
  93 <h2><a name="sec1" id="sec1"></a>
  94 <a href="Wisdom.html">The Basis of My Philosophy</a></h2>
  95
  96 <p class="first">It is often helpful to know what someone considers as the basis of his
  97 philosophy when interpeting what he has written. As such I have
  98 compiled a page of links and quotations to reveal the inner secrets of
  99 my mind.</p>
 100
 101
 102 <h2><a name="sec2" id="sec2"></a>
 103 The Current Economic and Political Structure Is Broken</h2>
 104
 105 <h3><a name="sec3" id="sec3"></a>
 106 The Government of the Unites States</h3>
 107
 108 <p class="first">I feel that the government in the United States is very close to being
 109 broken beyond repair. As it stands the government above the local
 110 level ignores the individual citizen and instead is only affected by
 111 large scale action. As far as the individual is concerned we no longer
 112 live in a Republic, but rather in an Oligarchy which is quickly
 113 descending into something far worse.</p>
 114
 115 <p>I do feel that there is still some reform that could be made in the
 116 near (ten years perhaps) future that could allow the government to
 117 become tolerable again. We are, however, quite close to the edge where
 118 there will be no fixing it. If that threshold is passed we are in for
 119 terrible times.</p>
 120
 121
 122 <h3><a name="sec4" id="sec4"></a>
 123 Capitalism is Intrinsically Evil</h3>
 124
 125 <p class="first">Cooperation is better than exploitation. How can one justify an
 126 economic system based upon paying others as little as possible in an
 127 attempt to make the most profit from their labor so as to make some
 128 profit?</p>
 129
 130
 131
 132 <h2><a name="sec5" id="sec5"></a>
 133 Misc</h2>
 134
 135 <h3><a name="sec6" id="sec6"></a>
 136 Long Term Copyright Causes Harm to Society (<code>Draft Revision 2</code>)</h3>
 137
 138
 139
 140
 141
 142 <p>It is straightforward to calculate a fair cost for material goods. The
 143 material cost follows from the materials, and the labor cost generally
 144 derives from the complexity of construction. The fixed price for each
 145 item consists of both of these factors. Thus it is trivial to ensure
 146 that a craftsman is fairly compensated for his effort.</p>
 147
 148
 149
 150
 151 <p>Creative works must have their value calculated via a more circuitous
 152 route. The physical form of a creative work is of little importance;
 153 the ideas it represents are. The material and direct labor costs
 154 (printing, binding, etc.) are thus so small as to be of negligible
 155 importance when calculating value. There is effectively no objective
 156 way to place value on abstract work; all the value judgements we can
 157 make are subjective. We must then rely on irrational human valuations
 158 to determine the value on their own.</p>
 159
 160
 161
 162
 163
 164
 165
 166
 167
 168 <p>Creative works are fundamentally different from concrete works. A
 169 painting may inspire others start a new stylistic movement, the
 170 structure of a story may cause the formation of a new literary form,
 171 an essay may incite a new political movement, etc. Creative works
 172 weave themselves into the mental fabric of each individual exposed to
 173 them in a way that material goods cannot. A book may change your life;
 174 a table will never do that. This suggests that the abstract concepts
 175 which compose a work have a strange nature and great value. Those who
 176 control the distribution of creative works wield great power as a
 177 result of the ability of ideas to change the individual.</p>
 178
 179 <p>After a certain period of time the physical manifestation of a
 180 creative work loses commercial value. New art is being created
 181 continually, and no one can be expected to read every important book
 182 written, see every film, and so on for other areas. When a work ceases
 183 to be profitable to publish distribution ceases. Allowing abstract
 184 works to simply drop from the market creates a serious problem. New
 185 ideas are built upon old ones, and after ideas have assimilated into
 186 the collective concious it is important to be able to go back to the
 187 old ideas and analyze them to understand the present culture. If a
 188 work is no longer available it is impossible to do this. Thus works
 189 that are no longer being commercially exploited should become the
 190 property of the public so that any worth preserving will be preserved
 191 by <em>someone</em> and avoid death.</p>
 192
 193
 194
 195
 196 <p>Copyright manages to work fairly well for ensuring creators are
 197 compensated for their effort, preventing abuse of creator rights to
 198 the detriment of society, and ensuring that works will become public
 199 property after they are commercially unprofitable. Irrational human
 200 judgements over time often work well, and so giving exclusive right to
 201 copy a work makes sense for a period of time to allow society to
 202 determine its monetary value. The fair use provisions of copyright
 203 give society reasonable leeway in the use of the ideas contained
 204 within a work while the work is protected, and this allows society to
 205 continue enriching its creative culture. The limited term of copyright
 206 and ensuing reversion to the public domain prevents the cultural
 207 stagnation and the loss of history that would result from works
 208 becoming unavailable.</p>
 209
 210
 211
 212
 213
 214
 215 <p>The term of copyright must be finely balanced between the need to
 216 ensure creators have enough time to receive fair compensation for
 217 their effort, and the desire to avoid cultural stagnation from
 218 unavailable works. The term must be short enough that a work will not
 219 be unavailable for too long after commercial interest dies. Every year
 220 that passes where the work isn't being published tends to reduce the
 221 number of copies in existence. It must also be long enough that a
 222 creator can profit according to the value that society puts upon his
 223 work.</p>
 224
 225 <p>A term should be just long enough that a work will fall out of
 226 copyright when physical copies are still likely to exist. A man may
 227 keep his book collection unto his death, but his children may simply
 228 sell them off or discard them after he departs the mortal
 229 coil. Intuitive judgement says that things that are worth entering the
 230 public domain will be preserved by someone for at least his life. A
 231 person who has creative works in his posession is often attached to
 232 them and will keep the ones he likes the most for as long as possible
 233 (e.g. my music collection is backed up in flac so that I will be able
 234 to listen to my music forever). After he dies there is a large
 235 increase in the chance that the works will perish unless he by chance
 236 made special arrangements to have them preserved.</p>
 237
 238 <p>A generation then seems to be a reasonable term; how many things are
 239 really commercially viable after thirty years? Some works may be
 240 relevant to the children of the generation who created them; it seems
 241 reasonable then that if a work is still commercially viable after a
 242 generation then the creator deserves to retain copyright for a second
 243 generation. It is questionable whether more terms would be good
 244 (issues of supression of information, right to profit, etc. come into
 245 play), but they can't quite be ruled out. A renewal system with a span
 246 of roughly thirty years ensures that a work will be out of publication
 247 for at most a generation's time. This appears to be a good balance
 248 between the right of the creator and the desire to keep knowledge from
 249 dying (from my eyes).</p>
 250
 251 <p>The works of the current generation, their parents, their
 252 grandparents, and their great-grandparents are still copyrighted in
 253 the US. Works created in the present will be copyrighted for the
 254 lifetime of the author and seventy years after; a span of roughly six
 255 generations.</p>
 256
 257
 258 <h3><a name="sec7" id="sec7"></a>
 259 Fewer Laws Are Better</h3>
 260
 261 <h4><a name="sec8" id="sec8"></a>
 262 Individuals should not have their actions regulated</h4>
 263
 264
 265 <h4><a name="sec9" id="sec9"></a>
 266 Corporations must have their actions heavily regulated</h4>
 267
 268 <p class="first">Corporate power disrupts the functioning of a free society. If the
 269 power wielded by a corporation were merely the sum of the individuals
 270 that composed it there would be little issue; the fundamental problem
 271 is that the benefits of gaining access to mass production facilities
 272 and a huge workforce that can be forced to cooperate on certain goals
 273 gives a large corporation much more power than the simple sum of its
 274 members.</p>
 275
 276 <h5>Corporate Personhood should be revoked</h5>
 277
 278
 279 <h5>Corporations should not be allowed to influence politics</h5>
 280
 281
 282
 283
 284
 285 <h2><a name="sec10" id="sec10"></a>
 286 Social Ills</h2>
 287
 288 <h3><a name="sec11" id="sec11"></a>
 289 Mass Culture</h3>
 290
 291 <p class="first">American culture in the early 1900s began to homogenize, and now there
 292 is a single massive culture that almost all three hundred million
 293 people in the country share. This presents problems to those who do
 294 not fit in; in the days of the self sufficient village one could move
 295 to another location to find people similar to him, but now there is
 296 nowhere to go. Everywhere a <em>social deviant</em> goes he will feel alienated
 297 and have his social options severely limited.</p>
 298
 299 <p>A monoculture reduces the rate of idea formation, and ours is actively
 300 hostile toward anything not falling in line with the
 301 mainstream. People are trained to act as a mass instead of as
 302 individuals; this results in far less creative people. Critical
 303 thinking is not encouraged; no, it is far worse! Critical thinking is
 304 discouraged, and those of us who wish to argue our points with logic
 305 are met with the undefeatable enemy of a closed mind that has been
 306 exposed to propaganda from birth.</p>
 307
 308
 309 <h3><a name="sec12" id="sec12"></a>
 310 The Automobile</h3>
 311
 312
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 332
 333
 334
 335
 336
 337 <h3><a name="sec13" id="sec13"></a>
 338 Learned Ignorance and Weakness</h3>
 339
 340 <p><a href="Old%20Viewpoints.html">obsolete</a></p>
 341
 342 <p><a href="TRUTH.html">TRUTH</a></p>
 343
 344
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 371
 372 <p class="cke-footer">                       We live in a time of revolution
 373                     We swim the silent seas of sanity gone
 374 </p>
 375 <p class="cke-timestamp">Last Modified:
 376     March 13, 2008</p>
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