Category: left vs right

Politics

On By nalexIn 2012 US Election, left and right, left vs right, PoliticsLeave a comment

The need for people to assert their ideas and own the consequences is invested in monumental sculpture as the preservation of memory is the stamp on history. Deep in our inner-child the need to be ahead of others can assert itself, core beliefs lead to a sense of oneness with a tradition of thinking. There is no fundamental reason that today’s left-right paradigm will be remotely similar to that fifty years on.

There is no guarantee that any of the many parties of Western democracies will be the same as they are now. Politics is a system of pools of clout and passages through which diplomatic pressure may be asserted.

Our model is like that of the herd animal – we create a flow to go with and democratically decide to lurch one way or another. In the current UK lurch, we have a Conservative-Liberal coalition. And lets abbreviate their gormless flight into obscurity with the epithet ConDem. Mainly as DemCon sounds like some video game marketing label and that would amount to mis-representation.

See also – Politics – Disturbing Trends history

Competalism

On By nalexIn capitalism, left vs rightLeave a comment

Communism is dead! Capitalism is killing itself, rapidly. We need a better system: maybe Competalism*?

The Agora of the Competalists is documented from 250BC:

The Competialists were freedmen and slaves of Italian descent who took their name from the annual Roman festival of the Lares Compitales, the gods of the crossroads. The agora that bears their name was built in the 2nd century BC, and the offertory box decorated with snakes dates to c. 150 BC. The Stoa of Philip was dedicated to Apollo by Philip V of Macedon c. 210 BC.

Citation/References: Bruneau, P. and Ducat, J. Guide de Delos (Paris: Ecole Francais d’Athenes, 1965).

Manifesto

  1. The Competalist believes that all economic actions benefit by competing with others, without the destruction of ideas but the fostering of ideas in discussion and examinations of truth or utility.
  2. It is true that competence is derived from training and education.  When two similar forces compete, there is clearly going to be a winner and a loser – the loser being the one that wins less or does not survive the battle of wits.
  3. Competition is the crossroads of success and competence building.
  4. A failure of competence is not a sign of weakness, indeed the preservation of truth does not imply that other less successful truths may have value in a complex world or at a future date.  It means that another force, has been able to adapt to the present circumstances and those that trained them in this competence should now be able to train the loser.
  5. Weakness is giving up, not contributing, doing less to survive than is done for you.  Those who made this their practise shall be considered to be criminal or negligent or both.  They shall bear greater pressure on taxation.
  6. The state is the collective might of captial.  Those with more must invest it to make those in whom they rely upon for competence more able to pay their own way.
  7. Slavery is a crime.
*Competalism was first identified on Twitter from http://twitter.com/#!/nicotatz

Left vs Right

On By nalexIn left and right, left vs right, PoliticsLeave a comment

Sister Toldjah » Tom Friedman: We need a 9/10 president in a post-9/11 world

Sister Toldjah won’t take no nonsense from this lefty diatribe emiting – lefty…

another 9/10 lefty, still doesn’t understand is that those barriers weren’t meant to keep the good people out – they’re there to keep people who aim to do us harm from getting in

Sister – someone is going to say you are feeling paranoid about your safety inside the barricades of protected USA soil. Protected by international loans financing a huge internal monitoring machine of people employed to detect a flicker of an eyelid out of place on the concourse, or the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time – whatever that may mean.

The true cost of terrorism is the reaction of grief and anger. The USA is well known for its most excessive citizens – it is just that they have rather a lot of them can afford plastic surgery to cure their minds of eternal boredom. The super-super wealthy worry about the dynamic placement of the decimal point at the end of a day or week more than the hunger of the children of their lowliest employee. It is unfortunate that the values that were borne of the New Deal (post Depression egalitarian recovery) did not survive the years of excess, nor was that generation exposed to building leaping poverty in quite the same way.

The last fifty years or so have been a success story in so far as wealth creation in the USA is concerned. Unquestionably. But how much of that wealth is being corroded by military adventures such as Iraq and Vietnam, that America would have been better off to avoid, perhaps.

What is being protected is the sense of success and empowerment over the rest of the world. Is that a good thing? Probably not. The USA needs to come out of this adolescent need for self adoration and obsession with appearances. Real wealth is not dependent upon attacking the rest of the world. It is reliant on the good faith of your friends and neighbours.

Also, as a comment on the Sistertoldjah.com site:

I think Friedman has a point – there is little point in America spending hundreds of billions of dollars on paranoid security if it stops investment that would a) stop bin Laden and b) encourage democracy and free trade everywhere.

The mistake is to think that war will achieve either goal. The left and right are both guilty of attacking each other for being what they are. Both sides of a political view are right and wrong. The war on terror has not achieved its basic objectives and seems to be feeding terror rather than destroying it. The US Government has no result for this war and that is why Friedman does have a point.

“Let’s fight terrorism until we win, we will prevail!” is not reasonable strategic planning. Neither is sudden withdrawal, neither is continuing to fight. Americans need to stop criticizing each other and think more carefully about their country’s strategy and direction.