Thomas Hobbes: the father of "the social contract"

It's a big pic. Click on it if you want to see what a real mature beautiful adult human male looks like. And then bow down and accept your lowliness in his presence.

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679):

His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.

Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.

In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, ethics, and general philosophy.

Hobbes worked as a private tutor in Paris from 1631 to 1637 and later, because of his uncompromising honesty, Hobbes had to flee to France and lived in Paris for another 11 years from 1640 to 1651.

The English Civil War broke out in 1642, and when the Royalist cause began to decline in the middle of 1644 there was an exodus of the king's supporters to Europe. Many came to Paris and were known to Hobbes. The company of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to produce an English book to set forth his theory of civil government in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war. The State, it now seemed to Hobbes, might be regarded as a great artificial man or monster (Leviathan), composed of men, with a life that might be traced from its generation under pressure of human needs to its dissolution through civil strife proceeding from human passions.

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Leviathan was written during the English Civil War; much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.

 Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). The description contains what has been called one of the best known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state mankind would be in, were it not for political community:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

— Leviathan XIII "Chapter XIII.: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.", Leviathan

In such a state, people fear death, and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to toil to obtain them. So in order to avoid it people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population beneath a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority are to be accepted as the price of peace. There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes's discussion. According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical powers.

The Hobbesian origin of Jefferson's idea that "All men are created equal":

Thomas Hobbes also proposed an early variant of equality among men in his treatise Leviathan:

Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself. An as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules, called science, which very few have and but in few things, as being not a native faculty born with us, nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke each took the social contract theory one step further:

Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right in which he explained that the government is based on the idea of popular sovereignty. Thus the will of the people as a whole gives power and direction to the state. John Locke also based his political writings on the idea of the social contract. He stressed the role of the individual. He also believed that revolution was not just a right but an obligation if the state abused their given power. Obviously these ideas had a huge impact on the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The bottom line of human life is that it is a "war of all against all". If you haven't figured that out (as well as the need for a "social contract") then you can't be called an adult man. Hobbes was mistaken about the cure for disease but he got the diagnosis right.

PS BTW If you haven't figured out yet that the perfect "social contract" is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, you're nuts or mentally retarded or a thumb-sucking teenage wanker.

Mitt for Prez

Jonah Goldberg:

A President Romney would be on a very short leash. ... Moreover, Romney is not a man of vision. He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to “fix” health care in ways Massachusetts would like. He was told to fix the 2002 Olympics. He was told to create Bain Capital. He did it all. The man does his assignments.

I usually agree with Jonah 99% of the time. I hope he is right about Mitt. My hunch is that Mitt wants to serve. He's one of the good guys - a bit awkward and easily teased but stronger than is at first apparent. The other contenders may be interesting but they are lightweights compared to Mitt.

Magic mshrooms: "demedicalisation of dying"

I recently read an article about this but it's old hat as this essay from 2004 suggests.

From The Hallucinogenic Way of Dying:

Almost as soon as Dr. Charles Grob secured approval to study the effects of psilocybin on Stage IV cancer patients, he faced another challenge, one nearly as formidable.
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Psilocybin is relatively safe; significantly safer, in fact, than the drug Grob had initially sought to use for the study, MDMA (otherwise known as "Ecstasy"); according to most research, you'd have to ingest your own body weight in "magic mushrooms" to poison yourself. But it's still a Schedule I drug, regarded by the federal authorities as having a high potential for abuse and no medical application.
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Grob hopes to find that, in addition to reducing psychological distress associated with impending death, psilocybin is the rare substance that can safely reduce a cancer sufferer's need for pain medication – not because it blunts pain, as morphine does, but because it "changes one's perception of pain."

The whole essay is worth reading but it just confirms my hunch, after thirty years of working in pharmacy that herbal drugs are illegal because they would cut into big pharmacy's profits. They work better and have fewer nasty side effects and they're basically free - god-given.

I have prescriptions for quite a few drugs that have "a high potential for abuse" but they are not classed as Schedule I drug because they are manufactured by big pharmacy. The problem is their side-effects which affect one's "quality of life". Most man-made drugs are two-edged swords. Think about the TV commercials for minor irritations like itches and sneezes. They all end up by saying that there is a "possibility" that you will piss your liver out through your kidneys. I'm sorry; but even nausea and constipation (side-effects of many man-made "painkillers" like morphine and codeine and all opiates) is a "quality of life" issue.

From Using 'magic mushrooms' to reduce anxiety in the final hours of life:

A medical ethics expert has said hallucinogenic drugs could be used to enhance the experience of dying.

The controversial suggestions include using ecstasy and 'magic mushrooms' to encourage closer bonding with family members and reduce anxiety in the final hours of life.

Robin Mackenzie, director of medical law and ethics at the University of Kent, will speak out at a workshop in London today to call for people to be given more choice over how they die.

Dr Mackenzie told the Independent newspaper: 'We have the technology to enhance the experience of dying.'
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She said: 'My research into the demedicalisation of dying suggests that there is a groundswell of people wanting to exercise choices in dying beyond euthanasia and palliative care options.

'We are encouraged to manage our lives and managing our deaths could be part of that.

'I can see good reasons why doctors don't want to be involved. But that will increase the demand for self-help measures.'

For a "real life" story read Stairway to Heaven: Psychedelics Soothe Dying.

I'm all for the "demedicalisation of dying." Or at least the de-institutionilization of death. It's the difference between dining in a fine restaurant and getting an intravenous infusion of "nutrition" in hospital. Anybody got any "magic mushrooms?"

Occupy Wall Street: the "herbal tea party"

I know where they're coming from - but...

Do you want chamomile or patchouli in your hot water?

I was born and raised in Africa and to me these "impoverished" neo-hippies are risible.

Taylor Marvin checks the math of the above image, which has been making the rounds:

Is this true? Is the income of the bottom 99% of US citizens in the top 1% of world income? Short answer: maybe. From the World Bank, World Development Indicators dataset, in 2009 per capita US income was $45,989, compared to a world average of $8,599. Plugging this into the Global Rich List income comparison tool tell us that the average American falls into the top 1.43% of humanity, suggesting that the 99 Percent graphic’s claim is just off.

Adbusters behind "Occupy Wall Street"

We all know that the kids camping out in NY are "useful idiots" but who are the agents provocateurs Marxist/Leninist puppeteers manipulating them?

Adbusters!

A friend sent me over a well thought-out critique of the event from Mother Jones. When I saw the third word in the article, "Adbusters," I immediately looked away from my screen and said out loud "Oh dear God. The poor kids..." The article clearly states Adbusters' hand in perpetuating this into being, which is exactly the problem. Adbusters makes caviar socialists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn look like the salt of the earth, saviors of the working class. They basically prey on college students and twenty-somethings unsure of themselves but with distrust in authority, selling their massive and expensive glossy magazine. The pages reek of anarchist navel-gazing and wankery and self-important "down with corporations/big business/capitalism" screeds that really say little if anything at all.

But worst is Adbusters' method of "protesting," called "culture jamming."

It's a cross between an elaborate prank and choosing not to do something voluntarily. "Buy Nothing Day," a protest to Black Friday by buying...nothing? "Digital Detox Week," a protest to technology by not using it for a week? To anyone else, these "culture jams" look really silly. But Adbusters sincerely believes that performing these acts of "protest," rather than confronting and attacking the institutions that harm culture directly, is the best way of changing the culture. Really. And when you ask how the culture should change, they blather without outlining a specific agenda. Hell, Adbusters' whole existence seems bent on the hopes that nobody will notice that when challenged, they are incapable of making a coherent and compelling argument defending their beliefs and politics, or seeing that their actions may not have an impact. They live in a detached fantasy world similar to Sarah Palin's, only much bigger.

Were Occupy Wall Street an organic creation, then I'd be slightly more sympathetic to the cause. But this is Adbusters' wet dream: Twisting and diluting the positive and overwhelming force of the Arab Spring (even name-checking Tahrir in their announcement of Occupy Wall Street), even going as far as warping the definition of civil disobedience, to create a slightly more advanced form of culture jamming that might give them the attention they so crave. Of course the people in Occupy Wall Street don't have clear reasons or goals. Adbusters made it that way. And that alone fills me with rage.

My immediate thought is: Who's behind Adbusters?

Here's their website.

Wikipedia:

Adbusters Media Foundation is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The foundation describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

The Adbusters Media Foundation publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism.

Lasn and Schmalz sound like "useful idiots" too. Where do they get their money? Or maybe just typical opportunistic predators:

In 2004, Adbusters began selling vegan, indy shoes...The V2 is designed by Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog. It is made from organic hemp and recycled car tires."

Even though the founders are "Jews", they have been accused of anti-semitism. Sounds just like the opportunistic "Jews" in Hollywood.

Culture Jam:

Adbusters is the brainchild of Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-born documentary filmmaker. He spent his childhood in a German refugee camp and in Australia. Lasn founded a market research company in Tokyo in the 1960s and eventually moved to Vancouver, Canada. For twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. Then, as he tells it, a “realization” hit him.

Lasn stood in a Canadian supermarket parking lot frustrated because he had to insert a quarter into a cart to shop there. He jammed his quarter in so that the cart became inoperable. This was the first “culture jam” (quite literally). “I didn’t stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not,” Lasn would later explain in his book. “I just let my anger flow.”
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Adbusters magazine began as a local quarterly in 1989 with three full-time volunteers and a circulation of 5,000 copies. Now an international bi-monthly (still advertisement-free), it boasts a dozen editors, over 250 freelancers, and a circulation of 120,000. Two-thirds of those readers are American, but there are subscribers in more than 60 countries. The magazine is the top-selling Canadian title in the U.S., and can be found at mainstream outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Leafing through a copy of Adbusters, however, the typical book-browser is likely to be shocked. The publication is a sort of MAD Magazine for the pretentious -- but much more sinister. There are always parodies and rip-offs of well-known ads. There are articles on how to be a better activist, and justifying the targeting of activism’s latest disfavored industry. And there is art: sometimes obvious, sometimes incomprehensible. One recent issue included a picture of adolescents giving the finger, and a photograph of hair being plucked from a human nipple.
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At the heart of Adbusters is hatred of big business, in any form. As Naomi Klein writes in No Logo, “Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID [identity politics] warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.”

This leads Adbusters to its animus: the desire to make corporations extinct.
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Self-described culture jammers are typically also rabidly opposed to economic globalization and harbor virulent hatred for multinational corporations. Don’t call them “lefties,” though. Lasn thinks the Left is too “establishment” these days.
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Despite all its bluster about the virtues of an advertising-free world, Adbusters uses the very techniques it excoriates corporations for. It uses marketing to try and kill marketing.
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Why do Adbusters writers and editors hate personal choice so much? Because their utopia would be a nightmare for most Americans. “What makes you think you have the right to drive around with a ton of metal wrapped around you,” asks the September/October 2003 issue, “the right to twist a tap and get hot water, the right to flick a switch and get your house warmed up?” Were the Adbusters group to get its way, hundreds of years of progress would vanish.
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Adbusters generally prefers rage to discernment. “Let your anger out. When it wells up suddenly from deep in your gut, don’t suppress it -- channel it, trust it, use it. Don’t be so unthinkingly civil all the time,” Kalle Lasn advises. “Rage drives revolutions.”

The very name of the group implies destruction of private property. This is specifically advocated in nearly every issue of the magazine. Of course, its leaders prefer to couch this directive in lofty rhetoric, thinking of themselves as freedom fighters. “Consumer capitalism is by its very nature unethical,” Lasn writes, “and therefore it’s not unethical to jam it … liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do.”
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The slick glossy has a cover price of $7.95 -- more than twice the price of People, Vogue, or GQ. The Adbusters website features a plethora of products for sale, including videos, posters, calendars, postcards, books, and even a 3x5-foot “corporate” flag -- the American flag with the stars replaced by corporate logos. In 2002, Adbusters suggested substituting its version for the real Stars and Stripes on July 4 in front of stores, schools, and embassies.

Lasn is Estonian i.e. born and raised under Soviet socialism and, just like his fellow former communists, the Russian kleptocrats, is not human but a cockroach. Sadly the "useful idiots" will keep buying his bullshit at $7.95 a pop.

Anders Breivik - "A little learning is a dangerous thing"

Was Anders Breivik a troll?

I’m sorry if that seems a flippant question to ask about a man who killed dozens of Norwegian teenagers, but you can’t read his 1,500-page “manifesto” without being struck by how thoroughly he trawled the web. Whatever the explanation for his murderous actions, this was definitely a brain warped by the blogosphere.

For readers unfamiliar with blogs, I should explain what I mean by “troll”. The word can be used to describe two types of commenters who write underneath published posts. There are simple-minded folk with jokey nicknames who fling insults at each other for hours at a stretch, amusing no one but themselves. My own blog is infested with them.
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These trolls aren’t confined to the far Left or the far Right: some of the most noxious internet bores turn out to be Liberal Democrats. It’s true that, on the whole, their views tend to be controversial, but the essence of their trolling is their rhetorical style: in particular, an insistence that they know the truth about everything. All they really have in common – apart from an aversion to deodorant – is hysterical omniscience.
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He knew where to look to find statistics to support his vicious theories. He knew that the far Right can succeed only by exploiting public anger at political correctness and immigration, avoiding the idiocy of neo-Nazism, about which the manifesto is scathing. Above all, he revelled in the special hysteria of the internet, which allows its users to bolt together whatever ideas turn them on, while ruthlessly excluding inconvenient data. (This new hysteria taints even the most trivial internet discourse – you should have seen the way supporters and opponents of vibrato-free Mahler were squawking at each other after Roger Norrington’s Prom on Monday.)

I don’t know why Breivik made the leap from propaganda to mass murder. I don’t think he was mad, in the sense of suffering from psychotic delusions, but there’s no doubt that years spent in the echo chambers of cyberspace can cause psychological damage.

In the months leading up to last Friday’s atrocity, did he join in the internet discussions he read so avidly? Given his verbosity, it’s more than likely. The manifesto is written in the self-righteous, autodidactic style of a troll; it will be interesting to see whether, following Breivik’s arrest, one of the anonymous contributors to Right-wing websites suddenly disappears off the map.

Sounds about right. I actually knew a troll in person. He used to stalk me on the Web after I contributed to an anti-cult Web group. He believed that the government was poisoning us with contrails and a bunch of other paranoid nonsense. My hunch is that Breivik is also some sort of twisted closet case like a child-molester or coprophiliac or something unhealthy like that; not insane but definitely solipsistic, intellectually-challenged and half-educated.

As Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) wrote in An Essay on Criticism:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

No Medicare for ex-pats so Uruguay is out of the question

I thought I'd better check on whether I can get Medicare as an ex-pat. Nope. Of course the Medicare premium is garnished from SS before you even get paid but Medicare will not pay for any health-care outside the USA. And of course Medicare is mandatory. If you chose not to have Medicare, you forfeit your entire SS. Who the hell thought of this? Stalin? It's no wonder that only the very rich can afford to retire outside the USA.

The Norwegian Nazi

John Derbyshire quotes Ralph Peters' “The ‘Eurabia’ Myth":

Peters prophesied that John/Jean/Josef/José/Giuseppe Q. European will eventually get in touch with his inner fascist:

Don’t let Europe’s current round of playing pacifist dress-up fool you: This is the continent that perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing, the happy-go-lucky slice of humanity that brought us such recent hits as the Holocaust and Srebrenica. The historical patterns are clear: When Europeans feel sufficiently threatened — even when the threat’s concocted nonsense — they don’t just react, they over-react with stunning ferocity.

I lived in Europe for 8 years and soon found that, if you scratch a European socialist deep enough, you'll find a national socialist aka Nazi. The Norwegian nutcase may claim to be anti-Hitler but he is an unadulterated racist Nazi.