Do Not Accept the Weak State of Mind in Our Time

The Basis of My Philosophy
The Current Economic and Political Structure Is Broken
The Government of the Unites States
Healthcare Reform
Capitalism is Intrinsically Evil
Misc
Long Term Copyright Causes Harm to Society (Draft Revision 2)
Fewer Laws Are Better
Individuals should not have their actions regulated
Corporations must have their actions heavily regulated
Social Ills
Mass Culture
The Talking Heads
The Automobile
Learned Ignorance and Weakness

I have views that could perhaps be seen as odd. Do note that I am not a liberal; nor am I a conservative. I do not buy into the traditional socieconomic dipole scale, and I also reject the political compass two dimensional scale; my political belief system could best be described as curmudgeonly bastard if you must have a label for it. This is only because being a curmudgeonly bastard isn't an ideology, but rather a broad set of ideas centered around the rejection of traditional political and social structures (i.e hating everything). I reject the ressentiment (lookit I'm Nietzsche) of traditional anarchism and believe not that every man should have no master (for then all would be weak), but rather that he should be his own master (does that even mean anything? Eh, it sounds nice so who cares).

These short essays are mere stubs I wrote a long while ago, and each will perhaps be extended in the future.

The Basis of My Philosophy

I read some things and thought they were cool. Now I can make people think I'm smarter than I really am.

The Current Economic and Political Structure Is Broken

The Government of the Unites States

I feel that the government in the United States is very close to being broken beyond repair (perhaps this is a bit conservative, but one must hope). As it stands the government above the local level (and even there!) ignores the individual citizen and instead is only forced to do anything by large scale action. As far as the individual is concerned we no longer live in a Republic, but rather in an Plutocracy which is quickly descending into something far worse.

Healthcare Reform

Upon airing my objections to the current Healthcare Reform bill, I was asked: did you read the bill? To which I replied with action and read the official summary of the bill. And now I ask those who asked me if I had read it: have you read it. I received as a reply an unequivocal: why should I have to.

Fun fact: it isn't as bad as some people make it seem, but guess what? It does nothing beneficial to the individual. All it does it require that anyone over 30 purchase insurance, severely restricts the usage of Health Savings Accounts (which, may be not so bad—I have no opinion on their usefulness... but Republicans created them so they must be evil), and is generally a piece of hey-look-I-did-something (but nothing goes into effect until I am out of office) legislation. This has never happened before, obviously. We are on the surface of Mars now too didn't you know.

Meanwhile there is what amounts to no price controls, an actual ban on the formation of State run healthcare (until 2017, and then only at the discretion of the HHS secretary), and token (unfunded) support for the formation of healthcare cooperatives. There are some taxes on large drug makers, but the research required by the FDA for drug approval is tax deductible (and so the larger drug makers can avoid most of the new taxes, har). And... an excise tax on overly fancy healthcare plans... more or less, a nice bill that, if it manages to not be overturned by 2018, will do absolutely nothing one way or the other.

It is obvious that I am indeed a dirty Nazi redneck terrorist teabagger Republican piece of shit who hates the poor and black people. I guess it's time for my white ass to move to Iran and see how I like it there!

Capitalism is Intrinsically Evil

Cooperation is better than exploitation. How can one justify an economic system based upon paying others as little as possible in an attempt to make the most profit from their labor so as to make some profit?

But then again, what does evil mean?

Misc

Long Term Copyright Causes Harm to Society (Draft Revision 2)

It is straightforward to calculate a fair cost for material goods. The material cost follows from the materials, and the labor cost generally derives from the complexity of construction. The fixed price for each item consists of both of these factors. Thus it is trivial to ensure that a craftsman is fairly compensated for his effort.

Creative works must have their value calculated via a more circuitous route. The physical form of a creative work is of little importance; the ideas it represents are. The material and direct labor costs (printing, binding, etc.) are thus so small as to be of negligible importance when calculating value. There is effectively no objective way to place value on abstract work; all the value judgements we can make are subjective. We must then rely on irrational human valuations to determine the value on their own.

Creative works are fundamentally different from concrete works. A painting may inspire others start a new stylistic movement, the structure of a story may cause the formation of a new literary form, an essay may incite a new political movement, etc. Creative works weave themselves into the mental fabric of each individual exposed to them in a way that material goods cannot. A book may change your life; a table will never do that. This suggests that the abstract concepts which compose a work have a strange nature and great value. Those who control the distribution of creative works wield great power as a result of the ability of ideas to change the individual.

After a certain period of time the physical manifestation of a creative work loses commercial value. New art is being created continually, and no one can be expected to read every important book written, see every film, and so on for other areas. When a work ceases to be profitable to publish distribution ceases. Allowing abstract works to simply drop from the market creates a serious problem. New ideas are built upon old ones, and after ideas have assimilated into the collective concious it is important to be able to go back to the old ideas and analyze them to understand the present culture. If a work is no longer available it is impossible to do this. Thus works that are no longer being commercially exploited should become the property of the public so that any worth preserving will be preserved by someone and avoid death.

Copyright manages to work fairly well for ensuring creators are compensated for their effort, preventing abuse of creator rights to the detriment of society, and ensuring that works will become public property after they are commercially unprofitable. Irrational human judgements over time often work well, and so giving exclusive right to copy a work makes sense for a period of time to allow society to determine its monetary value. The fair use provisions of copyright give society reasonable leeway in the use of the ideas contained within a work while the work is protected, and this allows society to continue enriching its creative culture. The limited term of copyright and ensuing reversion to the public domain prevents the cultural stagnation and the loss of history that would result from works becoming unavailable.

The term of copyright must be finely balanced between the need to ensure creators have enough time to receive fair compensation for their effort, and the desire to avoid cultural stagnation from unavailable works. The term must be short enough that a work will not be unavailable for too long after commercial interest dies. Every year that passes where the work isn't being published tends to reduce the number of copies in existence. It must also be long enough that a creator can profit according to the value that society puts upon his work.

A term should be just long enough that a work will fall out of copyright when physical copies are still likely to exist. A man may keep his book collection unto his death, but his children may simply sell them off or discard them after he departs the mortal coil. Intuitive judgement says that things that are worth entering the public domain will be preserved by someone for at least his life. A person who has creative works in his posession is often attached to them and will keep the ones he likes the most for as long as possible (e.g. my music collection is backed up in flac so that I will be able to listen to my music forever). After he dies there is a large increase in the chance that the works will perish unless he by chance made special arrangements to have them preserved.

A generation then seems to be a reasonable term; how many things are really commercially viable after thirty years? Some works may be relevant to the children of the generation who created them; it seems reasonable then that if a work is still commercially viable after a generation then the creator deserves to retain copyright for a second generation. It is questionable whether more terms would be good (issues of supression of information, right to profit, etc. come into play), but they can't quite be ruled out. A renewal system with a span of roughly thirty years ensures that a work will be out of publication for at most a generation's time. This appears to be a good balance between the right of the creator and the desire to keep knowledge from dying (from my eyes).

The works of the current generation, their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents are still copyrighted in the US. Works created in the present will be copyrighted for the lifetime of the author and seventy years after; a span of roughly six generations.

Fewer Laws Are Better

Individuals should not have their actions regulated

Corporations must have their actions heavily regulated

Corporate power disrupts the functioning of a free society. If the power wielded by a corporation were merely the sum of the individuals that composed it there would be little issue; the fundamental problem is that the benefits of gaining access to mass production facilities and a huge workforce that can be forced to cooperate on certain goals gives a large corporation much more than this.

Corporate Personhood should be revoked
Corporations should not be allowed to influence politics

Social Ills

Mass Culture

American culture in the early 1900s began to homogenize, and now there is a single massive culture that almost all three hundred million people in the country share. This presents problems to those who do not fit in; in the days of the self sufficient village one could move to another location to find people similar to him, but now there is nowhere to go. Everywhere a social deviant goes he will feel alienated and have his social options severely limited.

A monoculture reduces the rate of idea formation, and ours is actively hostile toward anything not falling in line with the mainstream. People are trained to act as a mass instead of as individuals; this results in far less creative people. Critical thinking is not encouraged; no, it is far worse! Critical thinking is discouraged, and those of us who wish to argue our points with logic are met with the undefeatable enemy of a closed mind that has been exposed to propaganda from birth.

The Talking Heads

Poison the well. Burn a strawman.

This is real argument. Real thought.

The Automobile

Learned Ignorance and Weakness

obsolete

TRUTH

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Last Modified: January 21, 2013