the view from the tower


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These youngsters get to me. I know it is weird to revile people scraping a living by trying to be relevant online, trying to attract enough eyeprints or earprints to get by... to eat and be engaged with things that interest them... to opine for pay... to be versions of Jon Stewart, making a killing by cracking wise on this banquet of life and death being fed to us whole.

You know I am crabby about the sudden proliferation of "voluntarist" political rhetoric everywhere I turn. It was nice to hear Michael Tsarion rant about it, to hear a man doing the rhetorical equivalent of kicking bozos in the pants, because I knew he had a spiritual point to make clear to people who have great, great difficulty cutting out spirit from the idiot ideas about it, seekers everywhere being left benighted as ever, even when they think they've finally nailed it.

And I know someone mentioned the distinct possibility that money may be changing hands to help insure this stuff gets mucho airplay out of a few of our most popular podcasters and radio hosts. I don't know about that. I hate to think it, but I also noticed the sudden drop in pleas for donations and subscriptions when this started up in earnest.

Now we have smart guys talking about permutations in the history of delusions of nefarious intent so much that we can quell our aching nerves on it, get the relief of smoky wisps of intellectual nuances to console us the whole world has not gone insane... more tamping down of any motive aggravation by giving these hours of frustration relief.

I keep hearing Sheridan saying, "I was duped." Welcome to the club. Do you realize how you are helping people who don't mean well dupe others now? Do you grok that your engagement with the times, your decision to put your brains on show to eke out your niche, is only helping leave people with the notion that brainy good people are hot to reject the control mechanisms so they can be quit of not only the drag of the controllers but of the people who need their services?

Do you know how many heroes have been on welfare in their lives? Do you know how many more people whose lives are as dear to them and to their relatives and friends as yours are will be spit out by your way of voluntarily not remembering them? Nobody ever answered me about living on a shared driveway, a road not maintained by the county. Right there seems to me to be the vivid illustration to libertarians where their plan goes wrong. If stuff like that ever gets brought up at all, it's glossed over as though it's Goldilocks' ghost suddenly taking over their mouths.

And, it's stupid stupid stupid Roman-style oppression to engage in this partisan crap, even if you won't call it what it is. It's divisive! It's the exact divide and rule that has worked like a charm for all these centuries you guys are still blathering on about as though somebody's going to come up with the perfect thing to only say that will unchain humanity and let us move forward.

Beside all that, it's a cul-de-sac, all this intellectualizing over what you've read and what you make of it and what you think you know, and most of all what you think somebody will pay to hear, or pay to read, or pay to keep seeing and hearing however it comes, and all flowing against the dread egalitarian perfection you take to mean you don't get to be better than the lazy people anymore.

That and the vogue of dissing the snot out of their parents for fucking up the 60s movements, despite having to overlook all manner of facts living people actually witnessed to do it, just keeps on getting on my nerves. Outright puerile and people are making a living on that crap too.

I just met Henrik in person the other day, and saw him handling his job as host or emcee at the conference. He did a really, really good job. I was tickled to see it, but I keep hearing him bitching about us not being equal, that some of us really are better than others, that people don't get equal treatment because people aren't equal. Not only do the psychopaths he reviles think the same way, and always have, but people are equal! No life is more precious than another's. Period.

What you do with that life is a measure of your heart, your energy, your desire to add to the benefit to living beings, not your rightful slot on the hierarchy of the in crowd, the set of all people scraping out their niches and consumed enough by it to want to make everything else drop away. The value of keeping people alive to end up providing it to you and/or others just like you in ways you never dreamed is incalculable, and you ought to know it. How can you even start to think it can be otherwise?

All are created equal. I'm not just agreeing with the forefathers. I'm stating the one thing that ought to be utterly vividly apparent even to the biggest dolts on earth by now. I'm talking about something your ego is so damnably easy to bullshit on this score. I try to place my faith in the purity of intent of young men like Henrik, ones who've shown they have the wherewithal to lead, and I don't mind stating plainly, weird as it might seem, it scares me to hear them talk this way.

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Two days later: confirmation. Thomas Sheridan's in the "voluntarist" axis for real.

Don't get me wrong. I love to hear men and women talking about alternatives to this fucked up system, ways to get free of it and build some sanity and ability to function back, but this whole business, except for the parts about taking responsibility for yourself, is not only way too callow and heedless for all its pretensions to adulthood, but it is dangerously unformed and already too powerful. The exact perfidious control mechanisms these guys' businesses have gone into exposing swim around in this agar like dolphins.


always and any time....