REPUBLIC REBORN

“You can die from someone else’s misery—emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

Those misfortunates among us who have been brought down by circumstances beyond their control deserve all the help and sympathy we can give them. But there are others who are not born to misfortune or unhappiness, but who draw it upon themselves by their destructive actions and unsettling effect on others. It would be a great thing if we could raise them up, change their patterns, but more often than not it is their patterns that end up getting inside and changing us. The reason is simple—humans are extremely susceptible to the moods, emotions, and even the ways of thinking of those with whom they spend their time. The incurably unhappy and unstable have a particularly strong infecting power because their characters and emotions are so intense. They often present themselves as victims, making it difficult, at first, to see their miseries as self-inflicted. Before you realize the real nature of their problems you have been infected by them.

Infectors can be recognized by the misfortune they draw on themselves, their turbulent past, their long line of broken relationships, their unstable careers, and the very force of their character, which sweeps you up and makes you lose your reason. Be forewarned by these signs of an infector; learn to see the discontent in their eye. Most important of all, do not take pity. Do not enmesh yourself in trying to help. The infector will remain unchanged, but you will be unhinged.”

This is a law that I unfortunately have had to learn by experience. I’ve read Greene’s book a number of times, and never considered this one to be of great importance. Laws 3, 4, 16, 18, 20, 28, and 30, have been the ones I’ve given the most thought to. But, some lessons must be learned by experience, not from a book.

Happy, content people are usually good-natured, friendly, and willing to help. But they do have a flaw: their sense of guilt. That guilt is the thumbscrew that is turned by the unhappy individual into keeping their target tethered to them.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the truth of the phrase ‘misery loves company’. Happy people seek out solitude, the congenitally unhappy person needs a constant audience, a constant source of supply. I have no idea why this is. You’d have to experience the reality-warping unhappiness that the truly miserable feel.

It’s really not until you’ve been free of the unhappy individual for an extended period of time that you realize the debilitating effect they have had on your life. You’re former interests and passions return. You sleep better, the nagging feeling of having to buoy the spirits of the persistently miserable is gone, and replaced with a sense of freedom that you haven’t felt in several years.

I think that the goal, whether subconscious or not, is for the miserable person to successfully duplicate their unhappiness in their target. Their inability to accomplish this initially manifests in bizarre emotional states and behavior. When this person begins behaving in a satisfied or content manner, it’s probably time to look in the mirror, and get away as fast as possible.

Quote of the Day

Posted on August 25, 2018August 25, 2018 by S. Smith

Ponder the abyssal strangeness of this nugget from the introduction to G.L.S. Shackle’s Epistemics and Economics:

“Economics is thought endeavoring to understand a world of action based upon thought.”

Writing like this is what draws someone to study economics, not the sterile discussions of the opportunity costs of choosing an apple over an orange, or indifference curves. But Shackle belongs in the Philosophy Department, not the current math/physics-infested Econ departments. Economics itself deserves to be placed entirely within the Philosophy department, because it is philosophical. There is nothing quantifiable about economic life. Ironically, it is the very antithesis of quantifiable activity. An entire graduate program could be developed that would be devoted to the works of Shackle, Henri Bergson, Alfred Shutz, Husserl, Hayek, Lachmann, and Keynes. A program that returns to the ideas of radical subjectivism, that conceived of time as a prison, and us as the prisoner, trapped in the ever-vanishing “present”, between a walled-off “past” and an unknown future. A program that removes the “science as measurement” prejudice from a field that contains nothing measurable.

08/25/18 Overnight Links

Posted on August 25, 2018 by S. Smith

KOCO: Applications for medical marijuana beginning in Oklahoma

Reason: ACLU sticks up for the NRA

DAVID FRENCH: Tech titans made serious mistakes, and more censorship won’t work

Salon: How the US drug war fuels migration, violence, and trauma

STEPHEN KIRZNER: How to interfere in a foreign election

TAC: The dark side of war propaganda

GRACY OLMSTEAD: How’s that swamp draining going?

The Intercept: Saudi-led coalition team to investigate civilian casualties is “covering up war crimes” in Yemen

The Federalist: Here comes that Clinton impeachment rerun you asked for

High Times: Poll shows Canadians are more concerned about Donald Trump than legal weed

08/23/18 Links

Posted on August 23, 2018August 23, 2018 by S. Smith

Reason: Higher minimum wages blamed for closure of iconic NYC coffee shop where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked

Boing Boing: The company you hired to snoop on your kid’s phone just uploaded all their data to an unprotected website

Techdirt: Chinese Surveillance State is basically the U.S. Surveillance State apparatus minus Constitutional rights

The American Conservative: Donald Trump’s foreign policy bait-and-switch

Mises: Why we can’t ignore the ‘militia’ clause of the Second Amendment

FEE: Elizabeth Warren’s ‘New Deal’ is closer to National Socialism than ‘democratic socialism

ACLU: The NSA continues to violate Americans’ internet privacy rights

Truthdig: The militarization of sports and the redefinition of patriotism

Motherboard: After Google and Amazon drop anti-censorship support, Wickr steps in

ASCH: A brief history of the opioid epidemic

08/22/18 Midday Links

Posted on August 22, 2018 by S. Smith

The Intercept: The U.S. is building a drone base in Niger that will cost more than $280 million by 2024

FEE: Pediatricians are now writing ‘prescriptions for play’ during well-child visits

Washington Times: A.I.-equipped police: They’re watching, they’re listening, they’ve become the Big Brother we always feared

Reason: This liberal carried an American flag to protest fascism in Portland. Antifa cracked his head open with a bat.

Reason: Air Marshals secretly followed an artsy Virginia mom on flights to make sure she wasn’t going to destroy America

New York Times: The Memphis police spied on activists

Gray Zone Project: Inside America’s meddling machine: The U.S.-funded group that intervenes in elections around the globe

Stay away from my kids, parasite: Army Times: Assisant army secretary sees young teens, college dropouts as next recruiting targets

TAC: Stop comparing Iran to the USSR

DAN McADAMS: My daughter molested by the TSA, me nearly arrested for objecting

JAMES BOVARD: In Washington, the truth has refugee status: “Trump could face a “perjury trap” from Special Counsel Robert Muellerbecause of the unique way that the FBI defines reality — and the truth. The FBI rarely records interviews and instead relies on written summaries (known as Form 302s) which “are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations,” the New York Times noted last year. Though defense attorneys routinely debunk the accuracy and credibility of 302s, prosecutors continue touting FBI interview summaries as the voice of God. Even if Trump made factually correct comments to Mueller, he could still face legal peril if his statements failed to harmonize with FBI “trust me on what I heard” memos containing contrary assertions.”

BONNIE KRISTIAN: The drug war is a moral monstrosity. End it. Now.: “There are many reasons to want to end the drug war. We should end it because it has cost more than $1.5 trillion over half a century and yetaddiction rates have not budged. By both historical and internationalstandards, American drug use is persistently high while taxpayers are being bilked for ineffective drug law enforcement.

We should end it because it wastes limited law enforcement resources, with more than 1.2 million arrests made annually for simple drug possession. One in three new prison admissions are drug offenders, making the drug war a major contributor to our national crisis of mass incarceration.

We should end it because its enforcement is demonstrably a tool of institutionalized racism. Though white Americans and racial minorities use illegal drugs at basically the same rate, minorities are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, charged, convicted, sentenced to prison instead of non-detention punishments, and given longer sentences for the same crime.

We should end it because decriminalizing drugs in places like Portugal and the Netherlands has proven far more effective at lowering abuse rates and making users feel it is safe to seek help. The opioid epidemic has made harm reduction ever more important.

We should end it because it is inhumane. It leads to broken families and tortuous detention practices. It deprives the desperately ill of treatment options. It makes our cities more violent, just like Prohibition before it. It is literally killing people.”

08/21/18 Overnight Links

Posted on August 21, 2018August 21, 2018 by S. Smith

KTUL: Green the Vote president resigns after marijuana petition count controversy Ed: I disagree that his resignation is the right thing. He pursued a last-minute strategy that didn’t make much sense, and was dishonest, but his organization accomplished something amazing. I wonder how many would have called for his resignation had they surpassed the required number of signatures.

NewsOK: Not enough signatures for recreational marijuana in Oklahoma Ed: Still, Green the Vote collected over 102,000 of the 123,725 signatures needed. That is quite an achievement, and makes reaching the goal next year a virtual certainty.

Stillwater News Press: Stillwater City Council approves medical marijuana zoning

Huffington Post: ACLU: Alex Jones social media bans are ‘worrisome’

Washington Examiner: Silicon Valley bias is real, but Trump shouldn’t pursue a big gov’t fix

LA Times: Forget ICE, the real problem is Customs and Border Protection

The American Conservative: Not one more American life should be expended for Afghanistan

FEE: The pernicious impact of government intervention in healthcare, captured in one chart

Consortium News: Fifteen years of forever wars

Reason: After China complains, Apple removes thousands of ‘illegal’ gambling apps

Antiwar.com: Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery dead at 94

CNET: Google sued over tracking user location amid privacy concerns

The Week: The future of your license plate

Tragedy and hope

Posted on August 21, 2018 by S. Smith

Researchers out of Oxford published a paper several months ago, Dissolving the Fermi Paradox, which attempts to confirm what many, including myself, have feared: that extraterrestrial sentient life does not exist, and not only in our galaxy, but in the universe itself. We should have heard them by now, we should have detected a trail, evidence of some kind. But it’s not there. We may very well be alone, in the infinite void. It’s almost impossible to approach the almost Lovecraftian strangeness of the idea. Better that we turn back to our phones and ignore it. And the absurdity reaches greater proportions when it’s realized that, here we are, alone on a watery blue dot in a vacuum devoid of life, slaughtering, enslaving, and otherwise lording it over others at every opportunity. Is there any picture more pathetic than that? U.S.-made missiles obliterating other people’s children of our species that happen to reside in poor-as-dirt Yemen, on a rock floating in an empty auditorium that has no Creator and has no purpose nor end. And so I marvel at the depravity of our species. But then I listen to this:

Did any other species in this universe produce anything close to Johnson’s masterpiece before extinguishing itself in an orgy of totalitarianism and genocide? Were there any equals to Heifetz or Paganini that arose before their alien governments ripped apart hydrogen atoms over their cities? Will ears in another galaxy, ten billion years from now, hear Cliffs of Dover? Or will we be the only witness? If we govern, regulate, or nuke ourselves to death, at least let the record show that when we were here, that we reached closer to an absolute concept of beauty than anywhere else. That seems to be the tragedy of our race, that, in the midst of the wanton acts of self destruction, Freud’s death drive on a planetary scale, some of us are able to produce art, music, and culture of incomparable beauty.

The idea that we are alone in the universe has a postscript: We are the beginning of life in the universe. The universe in not old, but young, and we are the first explorers, the first creators, the first engineers of other forms of life. And what appears to be an inevitable self-destruction of our species is just a phase that we will soon outgrow, as we evolve into something more.

Hayek on the meaning of “justice”

Posted on August 20, 2018 by S. Smith

From Chapter 8, The Quest for Justice, from Hayek’s indispensable, yet largely forgotten, trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty.

“Strictly speaking, only human conduct can be called just or unjust. If we apply the terms to a state of affairs, they have meaning only in so far as we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to come about. A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust.2 To apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake. Only if we mean to blame a personal creator does it make sense to describe it as unjust that somebody has been born with a physical defect, or been stricken with a disease, or has suffered the loss of a loved one. Nature can be neither just nor unjust. Though our inveterate habit of interpreting the physical world animistically or anthropomorphically often leads us to such a misuse of words, and makes us seek a responsible agent for all that concerns us, unless we believe that somebody could and should have arranged things differently, it is meaningless to describe a factual situation as just or unjust. But if nothing that is not subject to human control can be just (or moral), the desire to make something capable of being just is not necessarily a valid argument for our making it subject to human control; because to do so may itself be unjust or immoral, at least when the actions of another human being are concerned.”

I’ve been pondering lately the correlation I’ve noticed between writing that can’t qualify as “good” in any critical sense, and the originality of a creative genius. I regard Hayek’s trilogy as a true work of genius, yet it is overlong, repetitive, meandering in places. It’s like a road trip along an unmapped highway filled with tourist traps and side quests. Yet without these qualities, would Hayek’s points come through? I think not. I know not. I’ve read books that have been heavily edited, and they are terrible. Yes, there is a sterile perfection about them, clean as a dentist’s office, but the soul of the work has been bleached to death. There are books, however, that are terribly difficult to read, yet burn with ideas and insights, originality and ephemera and charm. A difficult book that happens to be product of a true creative genius getting his entire, big, messy idea down in print in raw, and relatively coherent, form, is a treasure. This isn’t to say that Hayek is a bad writer, but that his writing has been mostly spared the crippling effect that editing has on works of genius.

This reminds me of the introduction to Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, which I will leave here:

“I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.”