Fracking is environmentally friendly

The year 1984 was three and a half decades in the future When George Orwell published his famous dystopian novel. When 1984 arrived, I was a brand new father and recently unemployed—an early victim of Ronald Regan’s “trickle-down” economics. George Orwell and Ronald Regan both understood that the critical feature of social engineering was language.  The story is everything. 

Orwell’s “Newspeak” was a way of reframing the storyline to fit reality.  If the story tells you that peace is a valued “good” but you have a culture that requires perpetual war in order to function, the simplest thing to do is redefine your terms: war is really peace, and since peace is good, all is right with the world despite perpetual war—simple transitive logic. 

The idea of trickle-down economics works similarly by redefining exploitation: corporate-capitalist culture requires the maintenance of a sharp disparity in wealth in which the poor are given just enough to keep them productive—and the more productive they are, the more money they make for the wealthy, who are then motivated to continue to keep the poor productive by sharing a microscopic portion of their wealth.

The denizens of 21st century global civilization are far too intelligent to fall prey to Newspeak, of course. We know the difference between black and white. We understand that war is war and peace is peace, and most of us (with the notable exception of a few toothless tea-bagging morons from Alabama) know when we are being jerked around by corporate-political double-speak.

We would never fall prey to the thinly veiled propaganda of corporate marketing, for example. We are far too sophisticated to think that true happiness is somehow tied to smartphone functionality or that the hive-mind banter on twitter is about building community.

We realize that bowing to economic coercion is not really the path to personal freedom. We understand that ubiquitous surveillance is not really for our own safety and convenience.

We know that siphoning the bitumen dregs out of tar sand is not really the key to energy independence and we would never think to call fracking an environmentally-friendly alternative: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/shale-gas-fracking-good-for-environment

Independence Day in the US

An official government holiday in the world’s most oppressive global empire commemorating the empire's independence from the 18th century's version of the world's most oppressive global empire.

True patriots are expected to celebrate by eating food laced with carcinogens, drinking too much corporate mass-marketed beer, and burning a couple hundred dollars in noxious and noisy fireworks made in China.  

I'll probably eat something free-range and organic and wash it down with too much homemade mead. And if I find myself truly in the holiday spirit and feel compelled to burn something in celebration of empire, I think I have a Chinese-made American flag around here somewhere…

The children of civilization

Many aspects of child development that are assumed to be due to natural maturational process are in fact idiosyncratic features of the specific culture doing the assuming. Ethnographic research has shown that many "universals" of child development are anything but universal. Even some of the most sacred cows of Western psychology have been beheaded on the altar of cross-cultural comparison.* 

For example, the notion that a close mother-child attachment bond is absolutely critical has been dispelled by studies of cultures in which only a very weak bond between mother and child occurs. Mothers in one culture rarely speak or engage in eye contact with their children—even while nursing—until the child is able to talk to them. Yet the children grow up apparently without any emotional or cognitive deficits. Another culture engages in what by Western standards would be considered brutally extreme authoritarian child rearing practices. Yet the children grow up with many psychological attributes that are diametrically opposite of those that strict authoritarian parents are supposed to cause.

If there is one thing that can be said about childhood in different cultures it's that it is extremely varied—varied both in the time course and varied in terms of the thoughts, treatment, and expectations concerning children.

But even allowing for this wide variability, the Euro-American approach to childhood is extremely unusual with respect to other cultures both past and present. Our thoughts, treatment, and expectations concerning children are unique in numerous ways (for instance, the fact that children are thought of as "precious little treasures" despite the fact that we have unmatched levels of child abuse, neglect, and abandonment, or the fact that their education is highly structured and state/community-regulated, or the fact that childhood lasts for over two decades and is legally partitioned by arbitrary benchmarks based entirely on chronological age).

Perhaps that's because Euro-American civilization is not a "culture" per se. Civilized children are not allowed to follow the dictates of a natural developmental unfolding that would gently guide them into an emotionally-rich and fulfilling lifestyle embedded in meaningful cultural traditions. Civilized children are not allowed to grow organically into their roles in society. Instead, they are forcefully programmed for insertion into the bureaucratic tissues of a cold inhuman mechanical leviathan.

*See: Lancy, D. F. (2008). The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. New York: Cambridge

Anarchism and the industrial thought-form

The other night I was listening to a young know-it-all (god, was I really that much of an ass 30 years ago?) as he regaled his stupefied audience with a beer-fortified political rant. "Socialism is a good idea," he said as if his was the last word on the subject, "but it would never work." 

I can’t even begin to count the times that I have heard similar claims for Anarchism—only usually without the "it’s a good idea" part: Anarchism would never "work."

It would never work? 

Work?

Work for what? Work how? And, more importantly, work for whom?

The assumption that is hiding in plain sight is that social-political systems (for example, the plutocratic corporate capitalism that sets the parameters for my actions) "work," that is, they have a purpose, a goal, a function—they were designed intentionally and they are meant to do something. The reason that social-political –isms are necessary is to provide a functional order to human interaction. Social-political –isms are technologies, they provide the source code in a master program; they are descriptions of organizational systems for structuring human behavior. That human behavior needs to be structured is an obvious "given," as obvious as darkness follows sunset.

Blame Hobbes, I suppose.

And asking why we need a master program, asking the tactless question "Why is the structuring of human behavior necessary?" is a loud fart at a formal dinner.    

Anarchism—at least in its primal form—seems to me to be different from socialism (and communism, and plutocratic capitalism, and…) precisely because it doesn’t "work."  It is not meant to be a system of social-political organization designed to accomplish something—unless the elimination of massive systems of exploitation and the general proliferation of individual autonomy count as accomplishments.    

Police and handcuffs and prisons and banks and foreclosure offices and payday loan stores are clearly technologies.  But I’m not sure what to call the absence of police and handcuffs and prisons and banks and foreclosure offices and payday loan stores…?

Kill the messenger...

Seems like a simple problem in logic, a syllogism. Let me see if I got this right: 


Snowden gave secret US government information to the public.

Snowden is a traitor because he gave secret US government information to the enemy. 
  
Therefor the public is the US government's enemy.