The universe in 1s and 0s

The upside of a forest fire

When you wanted to hint at the dangerous symptoms of a person’s personality or behavior, you could say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” In the lead up to the 2016 election it wasn’t enough to say, “Where there’s fire, there’s fire,” even with recordings and well-documented evidence. In 1991, when they were hard to make, an entire documentary was made on the unethical business practices of then-liberal Donald J. Trump. A couple more were released before he announced any political ambitions. As such, his con-artist behavior was exposed well before there was reason to conspire against him for political purposes. Another question we should keep in mind is, “How bad is fire, really?”

There has been much skepticism of the government since the Vietnam-era. There have been declassified documents released describing false flag operations to rally support for war. Richard Nixon broke law and claimed on national TV, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” It’s clear that no right-minded person would refuse to question the ethics of wire-tapping and the surveillance state. Those now seem like quaint times. Corruption is such that telling people what they want to hear is not a political ploy, it’s a political necessity. The federal deficit is not the only thing generally growing by year, the moral and ethical deficit grows, too. With it, there’s a lot of deadwood through bloated laws, career politicians, and unquestioned ideas and practices.

Who would you put as the best president of your recent memory? The safest bet might be Barack Obama, because he was moderate, meek, and even-handed enough not to accomplish much of anything at all. Even pathologically leftist documentarian Michael Moore recently stated he would be remembered, “As the first black president. Okay. Not a bad accomplishment. But that’s it.” Say what you will about his manipulative tactics, Moore did outline in an essay with eerie accuracy how conservatives would win the presidency through the rust belt states, describing Trump as a “human Molotov” thrown at the system of government by disgruntled, forgotten blue-collar workers. Obama’s crowning achievement is a healthcare system both parties agree isn’t working. His legacy is of drones and jailed journalists, and bailing out banks from their financial failures and the rule of law. Go back and you have George Bush Jr., whose actions abroad more-or-less saw him criticized into a catatonic state where he now leads a subdued life painting portraits. He may have devolved into the under-achieving child the media painted him as. Behind him is Bill Clinton, whose then-impeachment in the #MeToo era would now see him ousted. This, not ignoring his secret Republic-leaning behavior, his Crime Bill which destroyed minority families that he now regrets, or the wag the dog tactics he deployed as distractions from his sex scandals. George Bush Sr. rounds out the last 30 years. Huffing about incompetent presidencies produces a net loss, there’s not much legacy left to taint.

How bad is fire, really?

An important point people often forget is that the right answer is more than not the least wrong answer. If we were beings in a perfect environment, the biggest struggle we faced would be the struggle of wills, a battle that could eventually be won. Instead, we exist in a state often hostile by way of natural disaster, under threat of disease, under threat from the animal kingdom, and the fights that occur over finite resources. It’s easy to point out fracking as wrong, and to be against a pipeline tearing through cherished U.S. lands inhabited by natives, but when you consider our oil dependence informs our relationship to Saudi Arabia, with their record of human rights abuses, suddenly the answer is less clear and weighing wrongs is more viable. Diplomatic solutions only work when one is agreed upon, if not, in the meantime, the moving train of reality requires consequences for both action and inaction.

Symbolism is a main artery behind any campaign, that’s why every candidate at that time becomes a brand stilted on a few slogans. If symbolism were all that mattered, Kennedy and Obama would be the best U.S. presidents, and Trump easily the worst. Many find it disrespectful to refer to presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” for her unproven claim of Native American heritage. A mean-spirited act, yet pales compared to the level of cynicism and indifference toward Native people you would need to exploit a false heritage for social and political gain. The latter transgression is more insidious and far worse. (Note: since this was written Warren has released a report showing no significant ties to Native American ancestry.) Symbolism is important as it creates an immediate and often visceral emotional response, however what lasts and what people are ultimately defined by is their actions.

The polarization has reached a fever-pitch in the U.S. We are the third biggest country, the third most populated, with the largest economy. Considering these factors, owning up to the title of United will always be a challenge. We are in the midst of a political forest fire. This purge feels the result of a decades-long distrust of government that came along with continued interventionism. It feels the result of the romanticization of revolution, that revels in glory more than blood. It feels the result that as with Western countries, increasing secularization has left a moral cavity to be filled by fervent political affiliation. Government has the most distrust and least perceived effectiveness of any time. The importance placed on hundreds of people to coordinate the lives of hundreds of millions is shortsighted by both sides, with voting booths a hair more effective than wishing wells. But that’s the paradigm, people want change. People want the standard of living lost to them by technology and globalization since the 70s, made up for, somewhat, by debt, women in the workplace, and longer hours. If the system in place to facilitate progress is impeding it, there can be value in a self-destructive act. An amputation is rational if you’re at risk of infection, turning what would normally be a self-destructive act into one of self-preservation.

As systems get older, they become bloated, they contain excess baggage and what should be simple and streamlined processes get bogged down, in this case with bureaucracy. This is where creative destruction could provide a net gain. When a system reaches a point where destruction is a more effective, viable option than change through its normal channels, the setting is ripe for and susceptible to this inevitable process. It is not pretty, it is not perfect, it’s a system seeking balance and self-preservation. It’s rarely a matter of the right answer, but a matter of the least-wrong answer.

Change, as was promised in 2008, never came. What happened was the previous Bush-era, again, with a friendlier face. What is happening now is actual change. The problem is the idea of “change” depends entirely on how you interpret it, and it could have quite a negative connotation. When change is promised and the status quo is maintained, it’s not absurd to see why people could switch support from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, and their entirely disparate agendas. The message was clear: anything, at this point, is better than more of the same.

Forest fires have their uses. If controlled, they prevent larger, less controllable forest fires. They clear the deadwood, aid germination, allow for more diverse plant life, increase sunlight and return nutrients to soil. The political forest fire isn’t much different. It forces the hand in moments when stagnation is the least effective answer. This is not to downplay their destruction. It is possible to objectively examine the results, instead of becoming distracted by symbolic failures.

It’s taken as a given the strife between Israel and Palestine will go on indefinitely. This administration cemented Jerusalem finally as the capital of Israel. Blood was shed for the decision, but blood has always been the currency of that conflict. Their border was attacked and defended. There is no plausible perfect decision in a conflict in real-time when human life is always at stake. The upside is that now this involvement is transparent, instead of feigning a diplomatic approach and secretly arming and supporting nations financially. To respect a small and only country, for a notoriously displaced people subject to extreme prejudice from surrounding nations is sound and politically savvy. It comes at a cost, but the cost accumulates in both action and inaction. It is relativistic, unfortunately that often coincides with what is realistic.

The 1,000-mile Dakota Access Pipeline protested at Standing Rock seemed easy to point out as a definitive wrong, when by executive order the construction process was expedited. It’s an issue that pulls at the heartstrings and no one wants to see indigenous people treated any less fairly. It’s also difficult to weigh this against the gains of energy independence, which means more political sway to not bargain with or provide arms to Saudi Arabia. Within the last week, their weapons, made in the U.S., took out of bus of children in Yemen. Only for oil, we are allies with a nation that won’t let women drive, allows corporal punishment, and state-sponsors terrorism.What’s in the diplomatic playbook for two negative outcomes?

This administration reneged on the Iran Deal. It’s important to note it passed without congressional approval, and required U.S. to provide a notice before inspections, which excluded inspections of military sites and allowed their missile program to continue. After the deal was not renewed Iranian MPs stood before their parliament holding up a printout of a U.S. flag, burning it while shouting “Death to America.” A pathetic display considering they did not have the gravitas to even sign the deal when all other nations did. If this is at all indicative of their idea of diplomacy, the right decision was made.

This administration has not done much, but has done more than any other, to alleviate the suffering of people in North Korea and tensions at their Southern border. Brokering peace between the two nations would be the best bit of optimistic world news since the end of WII or the fall of the Berlin Wall. North Korea has propagandized fear and lies of imperialist American tyranny for long enough, what was needed to counter their dictator’s posturing was not a soft touch or diplomacy, but a firm and assertive hand from one petulant leader to another.

This administration is also getting a few things right financially, lowering the the world’s highest corporate income tax rate to be competitive, or at least in parity with the global economy. Potential relief to defense spending has also occurred with NATO allies being held to their financial commitments.

The fires must die out eventually. As suggested, this was the perfect opportunity for people on the left to realize where their rhetoric went wrong and prop up more moderate voices. Instead of working as an antidote, the left’s loudest voices have doubled down. More vitriol is more fuel for the fire, and that’s exactly what will spiral things out of control. If an irrational vocal minority can be quelled, it’s quite possible this all can have been for the better. If for the time being, America has been made to care again. Photos of children at our border kept in cages in 2014 received no outrage until 2018, once the people had construed the false and insulting narrative of a dystopian, neo-Nazi uprising in America. What was revealed is that journalism was asleep, sedated by articulate but vapid Obama-era symbolism.

Legacy media is losing viewership and essentially dying. Their problem is increasingly informed and skeptical masses. They are wed to the idea they are the sole gatekeepers of what is fit to print, and by its nature, what is assumed the general public can handle or decide for themselves. This paradigm is lost in the information age, especially among free countries in an ever-more connected world. The desperate way to try to control this power of information is to shout even louder, get meaner, cut at their enemies deeper. It could be the reason for our extremely polarized views, shouting at the moon is the only way to be heard anymore, and it’s inevitable the rational masses will take a step back and notice these vocal minorities are, in fact, shouting at the moon.

That climate can change, but the prerequisite is having the intellectual honesty to concede fair points to people you disagree with. There’s more political discourse and involvement, but it could be tilted on its axis in a transitory period by voices who put agenda before fairness. It would not harm anyone to acknowledge that some worthwhile things could or have come this administration, even if only incidental. The bigger threat we face is not the somewhat controlled demolition of decayed segments of a republic, but hysterical masses pushing an over-correction so far any semblance of a balanced political future becomes impossible.

ES Zires

On the importance of free speech

The world has interesting parallels. It’s often said that people are inherently good, innately full of love. Admittedly it seems this way, but it isn’t true. At the very least, a large part of the decency you find in people is the result of self-preservation. The common good is motivated by selfish or overlapping means (you scratch my back...). There has yet to be an experiment where you could truly gauge how humans would react and interact with the knowledge that they could get away with all of their ambitions, no matter how sinister, in this life and any others. Because of this, the general thread of human decency that usually bonds us together is incredibly fragile. This is how construction is a very difficult and involved process and destruction is easy. When you construct, you are aiming, often with peers, toward a goal of creation usually revolving around a shared ideal of making something better. To destroy, all you need to do is take a hatchet at any attempt others make to co-exist. Chaos is the easy part. Co-existence is an uncanny and difficult exercise.

But there is a parallel to the ease in which man can destroy. It’s not overt. This one is not of the physical but the psychological. It’s ideas. Good ideas spread like wildfire. All thoughts and ideas face intense scrutiny, because ideas are cheap. They are in infinite supply forged from the cosmos, or birthed as the result of the best summation of your lived experience and genetics. Bad ideas can catch on, but they are only as good until they face their first deconstructing argument. Once a bad idea is mocked, belittled, or effectively satirized, it no longer can exist in the face of evidence or laugh-inducing contradictory logic. A good idea or argument is impossibly to slay. They are spread about in idioms or maxims or memes and shared as internal knowledge without citation or copyright. This is the only counter-balance we have to the easily-imposed destruction people would wish to bring on the planet.

Two things worth dying for above all others:

1. Free speech.

2. The right to die (this topic will be spared).

Free speech is used in place of the idea of “the right to live.” The right to live is too vague. It’s too vague to imply bad men deserve the right to life, as it would imply that right should never be revoked. It also implies the right is not universal, making it worthless as a grandiose axiom. Free speech is more important, as it’s a more pure form of freedom which self-evidently suggests what every person born with cognizance is entitled to: freedom of thought. At the very least, free speech says, you can speak your piece. No one may listen. You may not get to speak at your preferred venue to your preferred audience, but the right, with as little concessions as possible, is the bare-minimum modicum of empathy that should be afforded to every living person. The more constricted your speech, the more constricted and subject to influence is your mind, and the mind is the vital requirement for every conscious human being. If you can’t speak freely, you can’t think freely, you can’t be.

Who we are is what we think, what we say, and do. By placing arbitrary limits on the first two, we’re building a powder keg out of the latter. When we try to control what people say, we are attempting mind-control. It’s no different from the aims of MKUltra. Notice there’s less intent toward action-control. We want to be Nostradamus and prevent problems before they start, giving us the curious problem of Minority Report which asks us if intent alone is enough to warrant a conviction. With our endless endeavors to create a safer world we must also ask, in doing these social experiments, whether enforced by law or social shaming, if the tools and methods of the experiment themselves are causing unintended and unwanted consequences. If the result of seemingly well-intended actions causes backlash by virtue of an opposing reaction that is potentially more harmful than the malevolent actions it aims to cease, the hypothesis is broken and the effort is a loss.

Two fascists: only one is self-aware

We have many contradictory values. Again, the world has interesting parallels. Obviously, anti-fascism is a great on paper. If you’re willing to engage in fascism to stop fascism, you may have lost the plot. Some can chalk it up to the fog of war, where under the banner of the “greater good” Asian-Americans were rushed into internment camps by a liberal president. Former secretary of defense Robert McNamara would agree with the old adage: “In order to do good you may have to engage in evil.” The live-action role-players of Antifa would likely label this man a warmonger, all the while using the creative destruction so often justified by his likes. The question becomes is peace peace if it’s peace at knife-point. If peace is complacency and order, anyone can create peace with terror, that’s the nature of the master-slave relationship. You have strange bedfellows when you realize the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchism end up on the same end of the spectrum: they are both intolerant ideologues where the end justifies the means. Neither, undoubtedly, is capable of seeing the other’s “bigger picture.”

In the endless wish to impose impossible, utopian values upon the planet people have created much destruction. Value systems where everyone is told to be equal are ironically the most damaging. Somehow, there’s always a small group of top-down enforcers relaying to the rest of their society how equal everyone is. It doesn’t work and never will, because even if by some coincidence for a moment we ended up equal, we’d still be different, with different needs. It’s a childish, fantastical notion only the most tepid and literal-minded could possibly believe in. No one would say a child is the same as an able-bodied adult or an elderly person, but everyone in between is meant to have the same merit genetically, physically, and intellectually. When you deny people have different abilities, you also imply they have the same needs, and that’s the point where utopia becomes nightmare. It’s not as simple as saying, “Some people deserve more.” It’s saying, “Some people need more, and some require less.”

To reiterate, the idea people are innately good is harmful. It just so happens, self-preservation is aided by the great tool of peace. Sticks together are harder to break. Every society that promotes free speech inevitably gains free thought and the free flow of information. It’s less attractive to tyrants, but more attractive to masses of people who want to live in a kind and successful environment less susceptible to danger. As has been stated, with freedom comes eternal vigilance. We are free to flirtation with disastrous ideas of forgotten history, and they can be combated and easily dismissed by better ideas. An attack on free speech itself is a great threat. A silencing of speech and the media is a favorite among authoritarians throughout time. Slowly, it’s becoming the tool of the imagined oppressed masses. The radical ideas of the us vs. them political mantra that has been so intoxicating throughout history is so compelling people need to be reminded what a lack of freedom might actually look like. To see trans-people or other marginalized groups against free speech is a tragic irony and displays an ignorance of history, as it’s the main artery of any free society. These very people historically would be denied the conditions that allow them now to exist.

Some imagine there are no caveats when it comes to free speech. Someone don’t understand that calls for genocide are not protected and libel is subject to law, there are also exceptions for “fighting words” and some matters involving copyright law. Jokingly expressing your desire to kill your friend is protected speech, as well it should be. Hate speech is protected, because that is on the spectrum of emotion, and while it’s unfortunate anyone might say, hate Asians, hate is a natural human expression and a prerequisite for discussing yellow cars. More seriously, to police hate speech provides an easy path to tyranny, as it allows any authoritarian worth their salt to censor and silence anyone they wish to oppress with the claim of hate speech.

 In the modern times at the start of the 21st century, a vocal minority are trying to put forth the idea of limiting any speech on the basis of causing offense. This is an unfortunate, slippery slope of an experiment that will not pay off in the long-term. The mind is an indeterminate space. What causes offense is highly subjective. It’s quite likely, literally every phrase and type of language is offensive to someone. This is not hyperbole, it’s likely many people exist put-off by other foreign languages themselves, nevermind the words therein. While most people might take to kind being called “sweetheart,” undoubtedly it’s been whispered by predators during their unwelcome caresses of molestation. Everything is a trigger of offense or distress to someone. It’s the price we pay for the novelty of subjective opinion when we engage within a free society. Those who have a problem with it, shouldn’t engage. Problem solved. Or, realistically, they could seek psychiatric help and realize the world does not revolve around the individual. The more we sway the world that way, the less inhabitable it becomes for a population of more than one.

ES Zires