Now John Derbyshire, a conservative's conversative (a concon, I guess, hahahaha) is bemoaning the current state of the "conservative" movement.
And damn it all to hell, I can't figure out how to copy and paste. I'm going to have to finish this later. Although I just have to say to conservatives, libertarians, idiotarians, evangelicals, objectivists, John Birch fans, the whole spectrum of what nominally constitutes the right alliance:
1. We will never, ever be able to defeat socialism here on Earth.
2. We will never, ever be able to bring about a return of the Constitution in exile.
3. We will never, ever dismantle the monstrosity that is the United States federal government.
4. We will never, ever be able to convince a substantial plurality of what constitutes the left alliance to abandon their utopian fantasies and come and live in the real world.
5. We are stuck with these realities.
There is again only one solution, but it would take a multi-generation effort of unprecedented scale and scope. It would require that all you conservative intellectuals go back to school and get engineering and physics and particle physics and mechanical engineering and biology and nanotech degrees. It would require every right alliance family to have as many children as they can afford. It would require every conservative moving to consolidate power in a long-term strategic goal of creating not just a political powerbase, but a strategic one as well. And it would require us recognizing that the only way our children and grandchildren will be able to live freely is to leave this planet behind and found colonies within the solar system and within neighboring star systems as quickly as possible. If the energies of the conservative intellectual movement were dedicated to this, possibility, we might actually make it happen.
Otherwise, conservatives should accept what their self-chosen identity really means: that you are left to stand athwart history yelling stop, but not accomplishing anything. In the end, conservatives can only delay socialisms onslaught.
That is of course, why I am not a conservative. There is nothing about our civilization, ultimately that I want to "conserve". To me, the rule of law, market economics, and representative, limited, constitutional government are not conservative ideas. They are revolutionary ideas and will forever remain so. They cannot be institutionalized because there are no institutions to preserve, only the idea itself, and these ideas have expanded over time. The rule of law did not originally apply to all people. Just as today, the rule of law would not extend to a faulty AI that malfunctioned, but one day it will. The market economy of today is vastly different from the one we inherited from our mostly agricultural forefathers. And representative, limited, constitutional government is the most radical idea ever! To value these concepts as highly as I do is to be a liberal, not a conservative. To be a liberal is to be a socialist today and we should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to identification. I say you are not a liberal, you are a socialist and I am a liberal! The dubiousness by which the early 20th century progressives (another codeword for socialists that simply didn't stick after people got tired of all their hewing and hawing and just wanted to do what Americans have always wanted to do, have a good time, make some money, and then have a good time) transformed themselves into the liberals of the 30's sickens me. It sickens me that we allowed a conservative/liberal political axis to develop where before there had been none. Differences were differences of policy, not ideology. Everyone in America shared the same ideology, and that ideology was the ideology of the Founders.
We will never be able to bring that time back, and while with hard work and multiple generations of perservearance we might be able to slowly tilt the pendulum away from the inevitable, ultimately, we will be faced with the stark reality that the America that we want simply is not ever going to be. We will have to live with OSHA and the EPA and all the hated alphabet soup agencies and regulations and forms and bullshit that surrounds our daily lives until, well, until. There are no good solutions, there are only choices. And yes, we have terrible choices. The Republicans and the Democrats. Terrible choices. The Republicans hew and haw the right alliance dogma but do nothing about it. The Democrats just made their first tactical political manuever of the 21st century a couple of weeks ago; let's just say the learning curve on that side of the aisle is apparently stuck on stupid. (I'm talking about the Dems not commenting on the Miers controversy). Live in America and watch our culture collapse or leave and risk our lives in a possibly futile effort to colonize the galaxy.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
contemplating some changes...
I've been reading Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, along with several others, including The FairTax by Neal Boortz and John Linder and The West's Last Chance by Tony Blankley.
And I've been thinking. I've been trying to avoid writing too much about anything because I've been thinking so much and I've come to realize that writing is not so much a release of information as it is a distraction from organizing information in your mind. Oh the occasional flash of brilliance appears without thinking about it, simply letting your mind do the talking, but usually, it's just the same old same old. I tell you a story, you read the story, and there we go, that's that.
We're approaching an epochal moment in the history of the human race, and not just epochal in terms of its magntiude, but of the significance to every human being. We are on the verge of being able to ensure that barring some hostile alien invasion force, no longer will we be carrying all of our eggs in one basket. I look at the trivial nature of politics and I shriek in horror that I find so much of it fascinating, that this ho-hum national undebate that is going on because of Harriet Myer, I just cant' believe I let it consume my time the way that I do. Reading what everyone is saying, thinking about the President's strategic goals, wondering if Karl Rove had a meeting with some Indian tribe and maybe smoked the peace pipe...all of this is unimportant to the task at hand: getting ourselves off this god forsaken planet and into infinity.
Oh blah blah, it's too early in the morning for that Star Trek crap. People flying around the galaxy, colonizing thousands upon thousands of star systems, the human race multiplying and bringing order to chaos. But, what about the speed of light? And what about all the damage we've done to this planet, forget about all those others, and don't we have enough problems down here without needing to bring them up there?
Whine, bitch and moan.
I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of hearing that the Pakistanis and the Indians can't agree to just draw a line down the middle of their disputed territory. I'm tired of worrying about whether or not there will be enough Europeans in the middle of this century to maintain their marginally Western characterisits. I'm tired of worrying about when China will invade Taiwan and what will happen to me because of it. I'm tired of the Palestinians, I'm tired of the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunnis, Robert Mugabo, Mexican immigrants, Canadian incompetence, I'm tired of waiting for the right Supreme Court nominee to bring the constitution in exile back, I'm tired of defending Dubya by arguing that it's better than a Democrat would have been, of ungrateful South Koreans and Phillipinos, I'm tired of the whole damn planet and I'm really sick and tired of having my fate determined by individuals who aren't living my life. Oh, but we live in a free society, you can choose what you want to do! More whining. Sure, I can choose within a certain context what I want to do with my life, but I cannot determine what the rest of the human race. There are enough people on this planet who want my way of life to end and the only way to really guarantee that nothing like would happen would require the kind of warfare unimagined in the 20th century, the kind of total, uninhibited by ethical constraints (think about what Ann Coulter said right after 9/11 and I'm paraphrasing: We need to go into their cities, kill their leaders, and force them to convert to Christianity or die themselves.) Short of that, or a genuine self-purge by Muslims, I fail to see how this little "problem" that we have so aptly named the GWOT (rather than officially declaring war on all state-sponsors of terrorism and their affiliates, mandating us to finish this to the bitter end, officially as in an act of Congress, which is the way that war is supposed to be declared and yet another reason to view Dubya as having betrayed the conservative movements trust) is going to go away or that we are going to derail it without removing the three big remaining supporters, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria and without doing so, we are doomed to the inevitable failure that will result as soon as a Democrat is elected President.
So I want off the planet. It's official. Not that it was ever really in doubt for anyone who ever really knew me, but the fact remains that nothing is going to change because change is illusory. What really happens is that the people experiencing the world change, and thus, because they are different from the people who were here before, they believe that things have changed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you could send an email a hundred years ago, hell more than a hundred years ago. It was called a telegram and it got there just about as fast as it does now. Of course, unless you had a switching station at your house you couldn't do it from home and you couldn't expect an immediate reply, but the effect was the same. And the same is true with a letter, you're just sending bits of information, simply at a much slower rate, and the same is true with language. Things have only sped up and now we have the 24 hour news cycle that must be filled with all the meaningless meanderings of an age that thinks that two hurricanes hitting within a few days of each other is "news". That's old hat my fine fellow. News is supposed to be new.
I would trade all of the planetary pleasures the Earth has to offer to be working to terraform Mars right now. Being able to breathe freely on the surface without a suit on, forget about it. Sunbathing, forget about it, except maybe through special glass that filters out what the Earth's atmosphere does for me. Being able to visit historical spots and enjoying viewing what awe inspiring wonders the human race has created. Tut-tut, I need none of that. Forced to live underground, carving out a tiny little sphere of existence on a harsh and alien surface, armed only with my wits and bravado and my nanobots and genetically enhanced body of course, but there, carving out of my tiny little sphere a place where one day people will walk without suits and breathe the air freely. Somebody dig up Robert Heinlein's body and get to work on reanimating it because we need to get moving today. Forget about building oil refineries, our new nuclear power plants. What if the goal of the United States was for it's citizens to become the first citizens of the Solar System and to say to hell with the rest of ya! You guys figure out how to live with each other. We thought we had something pretty good going on down there, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO you had to bring in your international treaties and non governmental organizations and people like PETA and the Sierra Club and the infanticide maniacs and all the other bullshit that comprises so much of what passes for civilization these days. How long do you think it would be before everyone was at each other's throats, because that's how it was for most of human history. Everyone was at each other's throats. There was no PC. There were no mixed messages. Why can't everyone see how ridiculous (except that I see that on Amazon there's a fantastic book I'm thinking about buying....).
Of course, for those of you who do know me, I talk the talk, but would I really be interested in leaving the planet, pretty much permanently, because Martian gravity is less than Earth's it would be unlikely that I would be able to return, ever. I could visit worlds of similar or lesser gravity, but never back home, my muscles would not be able to handle the stress, much less my bones (although there is still substantial debate on how resilient the human body is; we just won't know until we try). As it says over to your left, nothing like recognizing that we're all hypocrites. People so easily mock our flaws, but it's our flaws that I think are our best feature. Without flaws, we would never know virtues, and without flaws, we could never truly appreciate how diametrically contradictory existence is, and that's really the key. We have the technology to do all these things, we could build a fleet of nuclear powered ships to begin traversing the inner solar system and ferrying materials and people to Mars and the moon and the larger asteroids, of which Ceres, might contain more freshwater than our entire planet does!
And yet, the closest I'll probably get to space is any one of the numerous video games that I sometimes entertain and occassionaly challenge myself with.
And that saddens me. To think that we are capable of so much, yet doing so little. To know that the capacity for greatness is there, yet it just holds back, waiting, watching, wondering, ultimately we are more content with dreaming ideas than we are actually doing them. Imagining a great idea is comforting, trying to build it in this world, terrifying, because the threat of annihilation, of retribution, of vengeance plain and simple, of being drafted to fight the Chinese, any of these things, it is what must be overcome and it is what must also be avoided. How to balance on a two edged sword. The answer is jump off the sword you fool.
And I've been thinking. I've been trying to avoid writing too much about anything because I've been thinking so much and I've come to realize that writing is not so much a release of information as it is a distraction from organizing information in your mind. Oh the occasional flash of brilliance appears without thinking about it, simply letting your mind do the talking, but usually, it's just the same old same old. I tell you a story, you read the story, and there we go, that's that.
We're approaching an epochal moment in the history of the human race, and not just epochal in terms of its magntiude, but of the significance to every human being. We are on the verge of being able to ensure that barring some hostile alien invasion force, no longer will we be carrying all of our eggs in one basket. I look at the trivial nature of politics and I shriek in horror that I find so much of it fascinating, that this ho-hum national undebate that is going on because of Harriet Myer, I just cant' believe I let it consume my time the way that I do. Reading what everyone is saying, thinking about the President's strategic goals, wondering if Karl Rove had a meeting with some Indian tribe and maybe smoked the peace pipe...all of this is unimportant to the task at hand: getting ourselves off this god forsaken planet and into infinity.
Oh blah blah, it's too early in the morning for that Star Trek crap. People flying around the galaxy, colonizing thousands upon thousands of star systems, the human race multiplying and bringing order to chaos. But, what about the speed of light? And what about all the damage we've done to this planet, forget about all those others, and don't we have enough problems down here without needing to bring them up there?
Whine, bitch and moan.
I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of hearing that the Pakistanis and the Indians can't agree to just draw a line down the middle of their disputed territory. I'm tired of worrying about whether or not there will be enough Europeans in the middle of this century to maintain their marginally Western characterisits. I'm tired of worrying about when China will invade Taiwan and what will happen to me because of it. I'm tired of the Palestinians, I'm tired of the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunnis, Robert Mugabo, Mexican immigrants, Canadian incompetence, I'm tired of waiting for the right Supreme Court nominee to bring the constitution in exile back, I'm tired of defending Dubya by arguing that it's better than a Democrat would have been, of ungrateful South Koreans and Phillipinos, I'm tired of the whole damn planet and I'm really sick and tired of having my fate determined by individuals who aren't living my life. Oh, but we live in a free society, you can choose what you want to do! More whining. Sure, I can choose within a certain context what I want to do with my life, but I cannot determine what the rest of the human race. There are enough people on this planet who want my way of life to end and the only way to really guarantee that nothing like would happen would require the kind of warfare unimagined in the 20th century, the kind of total, uninhibited by ethical constraints (think about what Ann Coulter said right after 9/11 and I'm paraphrasing: We need to go into their cities, kill their leaders, and force them to convert to Christianity or die themselves.) Short of that, or a genuine self-purge by Muslims, I fail to see how this little "problem" that we have so aptly named the GWOT (rather than officially declaring war on all state-sponsors of terrorism and their affiliates, mandating us to finish this to the bitter end, officially as in an act of Congress, which is the way that war is supposed to be declared and yet another reason to view Dubya as having betrayed the conservative movements trust) is going to go away or that we are going to derail it without removing the three big remaining supporters, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria and without doing so, we are doomed to the inevitable failure that will result as soon as a Democrat is elected President.
So I want off the planet. It's official. Not that it was ever really in doubt for anyone who ever really knew me, but the fact remains that nothing is going to change because change is illusory. What really happens is that the people experiencing the world change, and thus, because they are different from the people who were here before, they believe that things have changed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you could send an email a hundred years ago, hell more than a hundred years ago. It was called a telegram and it got there just about as fast as it does now. Of course, unless you had a switching station at your house you couldn't do it from home and you couldn't expect an immediate reply, but the effect was the same. And the same is true with a letter, you're just sending bits of information, simply at a much slower rate, and the same is true with language. Things have only sped up and now we have the 24 hour news cycle that must be filled with all the meaningless meanderings of an age that thinks that two hurricanes hitting within a few days of each other is "news". That's old hat my fine fellow. News is supposed to be new.
I would trade all of the planetary pleasures the Earth has to offer to be working to terraform Mars right now. Being able to breathe freely on the surface without a suit on, forget about it. Sunbathing, forget about it, except maybe through special glass that filters out what the Earth's atmosphere does for me. Being able to visit historical spots and enjoying viewing what awe inspiring wonders the human race has created. Tut-tut, I need none of that. Forced to live underground, carving out a tiny little sphere of existence on a harsh and alien surface, armed only with my wits and bravado and my nanobots and genetically enhanced body of course, but there, carving out of my tiny little sphere a place where one day people will walk without suits and breathe the air freely. Somebody dig up Robert Heinlein's body and get to work on reanimating it because we need to get moving today. Forget about building oil refineries, our new nuclear power plants. What if the goal of the United States was for it's citizens to become the first citizens of the Solar System and to say to hell with the rest of ya! You guys figure out how to live with each other. We thought we had something pretty good going on down there, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO you had to bring in your international treaties and non governmental organizations and people like PETA and the Sierra Club and the infanticide maniacs and all the other bullshit that comprises so much of what passes for civilization these days. How long do you think it would be before everyone was at each other's throats, because that's how it was for most of human history. Everyone was at each other's throats. There was no PC. There were no mixed messages. Why can't everyone see how ridiculous (except that I see that on Amazon there's a fantastic book I'm thinking about buying....).
Of course, for those of you who do know me, I talk the talk, but would I really be interested in leaving the planet, pretty much permanently, because Martian gravity is less than Earth's it would be unlikely that I would be able to return, ever. I could visit worlds of similar or lesser gravity, but never back home, my muscles would not be able to handle the stress, much less my bones (although there is still substantial debate on how resilient the human body is; we just won't know until we try). As it says over to your left, nothing like recognizing that we're all hypocrites. People so easily mock our flaws, but it's our flaws that I think are our best feature. Without flaws, we would never know virtues, and without flaws, we could never truly appreciate how diametrically contradictory existence is, and that's really the key. We have the technology to do all these things, we could build a fleet of nuclear powered ships to begin traversing the inner solar system and ferrying materials and people to Mars and the moon and the larger asteroids, of which Ceres, might contain more freshwater than our entire planet does!
And yet, the closest I'll probably get to space is any one of the numerous video games that I sometimes entertain and occassionaly challenge myself with.
And that saddens me. To think that we are capable of so much, yet doing so little. To know that the capacity for greatness is there, yet it just holds back, waiting, watching, wondering, ultimately we are more content with dreaming ideas than we are actually doing them. Imagining a great idea is comforting, trying to build it in this world, terrifying, because the threat of annihilation, of retribution, of vengeance plain and simple, of being drafted to fight the Chinese, any of these things, it is what must be overcome and it is what must also be avoided. How to balance on a two edged sword. The answer is jump off the sword you fool.
the shot heard round the Sphere...
Much of the BlogoSphere has been stunned by the news of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court. Much has been said about the President, and much has been said about the current state of the conservative movement in this country, without much of anything really having been said at all.
First there's this, which was a few days ago, but arguably needs to be read to put you in the right mindset. The second term doldrums have already started, everyone whines (all you have to do is look at the vacillating meanderings of say those at The Corner or to Hugh Hewitt's incessant and unnecessary realpolitik support of the GOP) to see that really the problem is that everyone gets up everyday and decides its time to write something about what's happened, even though I really don't know much about what has happened, or haven't thought about it very much, or talked to anyone else...
It's the Sphere's first and biggest problem. Andrew Sullivan fell victim to something similar when he attacked Miers as supposedly being part of an organization whose mission is to "cure" people of homosexuality. So far, there has been only one measured response to the Miers nomination, and frankly it is so persuasive in its' simplicity that I can't believe I didn't think about it first.
The article comes from The American Thinker, which I highly recommend, but enough of that. The author, Thomas Lifson, demands that we step back from our pajama clad refuges and realize that there's more at work here than we care to admit. The President is not an ignoramus, as many of his enemies and allies have been led to believe. He was educated at Harvard Business School, which apparently among other things, emphasizes group dynamics, and while yes, I would have preferred the President nominate Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig or McConnell, he has chosen someone whose abilities she brings to group will make her the most valuable member of the US Supreme Court. I don't Scalia or Thomas or even Roberts bending over backwards to help fulfill the needs of the group, or getting Ginsburg tea or any of the things that a woman of Miers capabilities will be able to do: breakdown the personal and emotional barriers that many of those on the court have against the other side.
Let us also not forget that nominations to the Supreme Court are political calculations. Bush is almost certainly aware of the fact that by disappointing those on the Left who secretly yearned for Brown or Luttig or Estrada nomination he has succeeded in only making them more pissed off. "How dare the President nominate his personal lawyer, how dare he subject the nation to such cronyism, why, she's never even been a judge before!" Some of the best Supreme Court Justices were not judges before coming to the court, several come to mind, Byron White and Robert Jackson first instance. By pissing the Left off more, Bush forces them to do front and center combat on his terms, because they will be the ones out there scouring Miers' records for anything that they can criticize her for...you can almost sense how they're just waiting to accuse her of being a lesbian...shhhh...don't say it yet, they're not ready. Although Drudge's main headline is indeed the first signs.
Finally, Bush will almost certainly make at least one more appointment. John Paul Stevens is 85. Scalia and Kennedy are both 69, Souter is 66, Ginsburg is 72 and has had cancer, Breyer is 67. The youngest are of course Roberts who is 50 and Thomas who is 57, with Miers at 60. If Stevens makes it through to January of 2009 I'd be really, really surprised. As well with with the others. Bush will make at least one more appointment, possibly two, and possible three more. Life's little vagaries are never predictable. But this I will predict. Miers will be on the bench with a vote of at least 75-35 and possibly 80-20 and Stevens will be dead before the midterm elections of 2006, giving both Roberts and Miers time enough to prove to the conservative movement that they have the right stuff and time for Bush to nominate someone like Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig.
Now if I can only convince the administration that the way to really move forward on domestic issues is by moving forward on foreign ones, like bombing Syria for instance.
First there's this, which was a few days ago, but arguably needs to be read to put you in the right mindset. The second term doldrums have already started, everyone whines (all you have to do is look at the vacillating meanderings of say those at The Corner or to Hugh Hewitt's incessant and unnecessary realpolitik support of the GOP) to see that really the problem is that everyone gets up everyday and decides its time to write something about what's happened, even though I really don't know much about what has happened, or haven't thought about it very much, or talked to anyone else...
It's the Sphere's first and biggest problem. Andrew Sullivan fell victim to something similar when he attacked Miers as supposedly being part of an organization whose mission is to "cure" people of homosexuality. So far, there has been only one measured response to the Miers nomination, and frankly it is so persuasive in its' simplicity that I can't believe I didn't think about it first.
The article comes from The American Thinker, which I highly recommend, but enough of that. The author, Thomas Lifson, demands that we step back from our pajama clad refuges and realize that there's more at work here than we care to admit. The President is not an ignoramus, as many of his enemies and allies have been led to believe. He was educated at Harvard Business School, which apparently among other things, emphasizes group dynamics, and while yes, I would have preferred the President nominate Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig or McConnell, he has chosen someone whose abilities she brings to group will make her the most valuable member of the US Supreme Court. I don't Scalia or Thomas or even Roberts bending over backwards to help fulfill the needs of the group, or getting Ginsburg tea or any of the things that a woman of Miers capabilities will be able to do: breakdown the personal and emotional barriers that many of those on the court have against the other side.
Let us also not forget that nominations to the Supreme Court are political calculations. Bush is almost certainly aware of the fact that by disappointing those on the Left who secretly yearned for Brown or Luttig or Estrada nomination he has succeeded in only making them more pissed off. "How dare the President nominate his personal lawyer, how dare he subject the nation to such cronyism, why, she's never even been a judge before!" Some of the best Supreme Court Justices were not judges before coming to the court, several come to mind, Byron White and Robert Jackson first instance. By pissing the Left off more, Bush forces them to do front and center combat on his terms, because they will be the ones out there scouring Miers' records for anything that they can criticize her for...you can almost sense how they're just waiting to accuse her of being a lesbian...shhhh...don't say it yet, they're not ready. Although Drudge's main headline is indeed the first signs.
Finally, Bush will almost certainly make at least one more appointment. John Paul Stevens is 85. Scalia and Kennedy are both 69, Souter is 66, Ginsburg is 72 and has had cancer, Breyer is 67. The youngest are of course Roberts who is 50 and Thomas who is 57, with Miers at 60. If Stevens makes it through to January of 2009 I'd be really, really surprised. As well with with the others. Bush will make at least one more appointment, possibly two, and possible three more. Life's little vagaries are never predictable. But this I will predict. Miers will be on the bench with a vote of at least 75-35 and possibly 80-20 and Stevens will be dead before the midterm elections of 2006, giving both Roberts and Miers time enough to prove to the conservative movement that they have the right stuff and time for Bush to nominate someone like Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig.
Now if I can only convince the administration that the way to really move forward on domestic issues is by moving forward on foreign ones, like bombing Syria for instance.
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