The American government dropped a science fiction bomb on two Japanese cities, invaded, and then dictated the rules of the Japanese state. They continue to have military bases on Japanese soil. Arrogant paternalism?
The most immediately effective thing parents (or anyone) could do for longevity is begin to see the ground of being itself as divine, and then join a religious community of other people who see the divine life in a similar sort of way. People who belong to these kind of transcendentally oriented communities enjoy longer lives....according to SCIENCE itself.
I also find New York City to be extremely depressing, and radically subpar urbanistically compared with Berlin, where I currently live. You can take an S-Bahn in 30 minutes or so to S-Bahn Schlachtensee and swim clean, chill and easily accessible lake - a journey to the water in New York will take much much longer, involve more walking, and involve dirtier water.
It is easy to find scapegoats for the poor urbanism of the United States, but very difficult to think of a solution without a radical change in the nature of governance.
I'm outraged at how accurate this is. Why do we have to live in a world where corporations becoming sovereign is a relatively happy option! Give me my money back.
We are writing this in the sanest and calmest periods in our adult lives. Both authors are married and live conventional-ish life patterns; the attribution of personal mental illness to creative writers, though, is a good example of the vicious behavior patterns of shallowland. We are sorry your world lacks the vertical dimension, and invite you to open it up BAMN.
Abstractly, you're right, but in the concrete instance of the united states, there's an oligarchy that currently (mis)rules the country, and if you want to replace an oligarchy, bottom-up/discoordinated efforts probably won't work.
Out of curiosity, who reading this believes that the ground of reality itself is sentient? You don't have to call this basic sentience "God" but this is generally what the better theologians identified as God, the all: the all that is, in a very classic phrasing from the Vedic philosophies characterized as "satchitananda" - being, conscious, and bliss. That is, the ground of reality exists (there is reality) it is conscious (which is the basic experience of our lives, consciousness, in different forms, we never step outside of this consciousness, even when we are imagining ourselves to be material) and finally, it is bliss.
But back to the question at the beginning: do you think the ground of reality is conscious? That is, at the most basic level, is Being Love?
Yes, Joe had a lot to do with his son's actions. Joe's position in power enabled his son to sell connections. You can deny this, if you want, anything can be denied, but the on-the-ground evidence seems quite secure. If only they had just put the laptop contents directly on p2p servers and not tried to use the Rupert Murdoch smear machine.
It is important to stress that China was ruled, at the time, by a government that was widely seen as "Nonchinese" -- this sense of external rule surely had a great deal to do with the emergence of mass addiction, as the Ching state that imposed the laws had serious legitimacy issues (and would collapse less than a century later.)
One thing to keep in mind is that the Ching government had already launched an opium war before the British began their narcopolitics. This is from P.E Caquet's "Opium's Orphans"
“n the leafy town of Taiyu, Shanxi, an inland Chinese province southwest of Beijing, the district magistrate Chen Lihe had a stele put up for public display. The date was 1817 and, four years earlier, the emperor had issued a raft of regulations against opium, including severe punishments for handling, selling or consuming it. The stele read:
Opium is produced beyond the seas, but its poison flows into China. Those who buy it and consume it break their families, harm their own lives, and violate the law. Treachery, licentiousness, robbery, and brigandage all arise from it. Both the young and vigorous and the old and weak die from it. Wealthy and luxurious houses are impoverished by it. Brave and bright sons and younger brothers are made stupid and unfilial by it. People who dwell in peace in their houses well stocked with delicacies feel the heavy blows of the bamboo and the weight of the cangue because of it; they also suffer strangulation, exile, and banishment at the hands of the law because of it.
As for its injurious effect on custom, opium destroys the five natural relationships, and its harmful effect on individual character is even more unspeakable."
Perhaps there are virtues to weak law enforcement that are difficult to see, and perhaps instead of trying to make financial crimes more like (say) drug crimes, it would be wiser to make drug crimes more like financial crimes.
Primarily a commercial context, think about how much click money that a 5 dimensional political compass could make. We're talking maybe hundreds of billions of Vietnamese dong here!
But who will be the new FDR? One name that Yarvin continues to mention (albeit half-seriously) is Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West. One of the Red Scare hosts insisted that Ye, as a “man with bipolar disorder” wasn’t capable of the sustained attention required to be president-king. This may be the case, but it may also be the case that Ye will stop using medicalized language, and come to believe that the infinite healing powers of Jesus (and some enforced separation from the schizoid nightmare world of the Kardashians) have restored balance and focus to his mind, and that he does, indeed, have the attention needed to bring America together again. One of the authors of this piece has the questionable “honor” of being the first to seriously suggest West for public office. Instead of running for Mayor of Chicago on a municipal libertarian communist platform, West married into America’s ruling reality television family. The wisdom of this strategy will only be revealed in the fullness of time. If anyone associated with West is reading this and wants a very detailed strategy analysis of how he can become president, they can email pityless at tutanota dot com.
Nice motive, seriously, very prosocial -- which parts seemed most culture warrish to you? The whole network state program feels very unhinged to me from what an actual state is, but I also don't have a nice phone.
While I understand the desire to claim that bifurcation has reached the point where the "America is not really a single “nation state” anymore" it is, in fact, still a nation state, in the same way that a family that fights a lot is still a family. Only this family, uh, rules the world. And unfortunately it also rules the world while pretending it doesn't rule the world. Acknowledging that you rule the world would be a good first step towards doing a better job at ruling it, but this acknowledgement is impossible within the given parameters of discourse, so a new discourse will likely emerge?
This pattern goes back to Napoleon: the idea being that the democratic states created by the invading armies were more legitimate/self-determined than the existing monarchal states. However the idea didn't work: monarchal rule returned, and returned in a stronger and more powerful form. There's at least 200 years of experience to suggest that liberal/democratic imperialism is not viable as a strategy, and in fact, provokes more reaction.
Invading a country is the opposite of self-determination, and justifying invasion based on an abstracted universalism was also used by the British empire.
Actually, they have a lot to do with each other, as the violence that the United States did to Central and South America was always justified with anticommunist rhetoric, like this. A Peter Kingsley quote, more about spiritual perception, also applies to the political:
"The only possible way to understand is by standing back in the stillness that lies underneath thinking and sees things as they really are. It's like watching hundreds of colors, each of them trying to persuade you it happens to be the most important one-then stepping back and seeing they all form a single rainbow. Thoughts in themselves are always leading to division and separation. But all thoughts, together, are a single whole." (from "Reality")
Bad care comes in many forms. Pill mill doctors. Doctors who collaborate with patients in obvious self-diagnosis. Overprescription of pain medication in general. Collaborating with delusional behaviors, such as Munchausen's. Extreme waits for competent physicians. Doctors who refuse to listen to their patients when it is essential that they do. Molestation. Disregard for the patient's comfort. Adverse drug reactions. Surgical mishaps. Botched medical procedures. Inflating costs of procedures. The many different forms of negligent malpractice that can occur when you ignore or disregard a patient. Pushing drugs as an agent of a pharmaceutical corporation. Everything Doctor House does. The list goes on and on.
Not only do these increase administrative and liability burdens for doctors to bear, they also create a class of people who are simply unwilling to participate in the healthcare system without a dire emergency, thus worsening costs and outcomes.
These people come to exist in an oppositional, anti-expertise mode, where they have seen the outcomes of managerial society, and while they may not understand it, they may just blame 'doctors' or 'that doctor' or 'that hospital' or 'insurance companies,' they certainly see that modern medicine is dysfunctional in the extreme. They have no relationship and are unreachable by even well-meaning, scientific, or well-practiced public health interventions.
Another note from the author: it is interesting to me that so many of the commentators seem to think that I believe management to be evil. There are relatively obvious reasons for why readers might come to this conclusion: the start of the piece compares it to other "oppressive systems" (capitalism, racism.) Most people tend to think of oppression as evil or bad because they inhabit a slave morality - that is, a form of ethics designed to undermine the power of rulers and boost the power of the oppressed. It is very difficult not to inhabit some kind of slave morality: it's in our language.
Like all social systems, Managerialism has victims. But unlike many other social systems, we don't have a word for these victims, or the experience of being victimized. For many, only a faint memory of life outside of Managerworld remains.
Oppression is very natural: the moral value of "nature" is quite complex, so it seems inaccurate to say that oppression equates with evil, or badness, although certainly it does in many contemporary political cultures. This is a sign of the shallowness of these political cultures, their tendency to think in polarized/binary ways. You are doing that here too, with your question about whether managers are 'always bad' -- that isn't the question, managerialism is an oppressive/violent system of rule and domination that emerged, that became dominant, and that hides itself. It hides itself because people have a hard time grasping complex historical systems. They want to moralize them, either from anti or pro positions. Such moralizing doesn't accomplish very much. Surely I am guilty of it as well, too, but seek to be aware of my own moralisms, which your comments have helped with. Thank you!
Burnham's prediction shows his Marxist background: instead of thinking about social formations as alliances, he sees them inevitably as conflicts with a single dominant victor, in Marx's case the victorious class is the proletariat, in Burnhams, the "manager' --- but what actually seems to have happened is a fusion of managers and the capitalist class to create a new kind of social formation -- something we wrote about here: https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/clocking-out
Managerialism can work with both capitalist and state socialist structures. This kind of pragmatism is a great strength of the so-called "manager-fractal" - it doesn't matter, really, what the content of management is, because management is formal -- an absolutely new SHAPE of organizing human beings, one whose novelty and brutality we do not consider enough.
Evil wasn't mentioned in this article, only oppression. If you don't think that the managerial system is oppressive, perhaps it isn't to you, but many people around the world find administrated life unbearable.
Money laundering, tax evasion and speculation are parts of normal market life; their existence does not challenge the vitality of the commercial sphere. This vitality arises from the constant need for novelty that (this kind of) market structure introduces.
There are plenty of positive aspects to all oppressive systems, that's why they exist, but these positive aspects are typically overmentioned: this is a critical piece, and so that's why it focuses on the negative/oppressive aspects.