On parties and their coalitions

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Conservatism, Democracy, Elections, Liberalism

Having strayed far from their origins, both of the major parties of the American political landscape have now broadly represent two broad sectors of society.

The GOP, despite the favored leftist narrative, now represents a coalition of the wrongly classes and a broad segment of the managerial elite. Together they form what can properly be termed the Producing Class, brig that they are responsible for the backbone of the mon-information economy.

The Democrats, by contrast, have formed a coalition of the intellectual elites, minorities, elite women, union leaderships and the poor. Together, perhaps more controversially, they can be grouped as the Non-productive Class.

The irony here is, of course, that they are precisely the people whom Marx — whose ghost still haunts the ideology of the party, given the backgrounds of much of its activist base — counts among the social parasites.

The electorate of the nation had become more or less equally divided between these emergent classes, but that is an unstable situation, and for effective governance to emerge in time it will have to be resolved. Lacking a peaceful resolution, 1930s Spain serves as a the truly frightening example of the results of an ever-more radicalized population that forms two armed camps.

On happiness

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Moral Philosophy

Despite the oceans of ink spilled on the subject, much of it in wild contradiction, we are no closer to understanding the path to take out of the vale of tears that is the nature if everyday existence for so many. After much thought and contemplation, perhaps I could way with a few simple rules I have observed to work.

1. Be free from want
2. Don’t want too much
3. Stay busy
4. Have time to breathe
5. Have simple tastes
6. Do not be excessively intelligent
7. Believe as most of your neighbors do
8. Be like most of your neighbors are
9. Have someone else to blame for what goes wrong
10. Be social
11. Take time for yourself

And, finally, do not even think of trying to reach happiness, because the more you do the more you feel the lack of it.

On art, entropy and populism

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Dada, Pop Art, Postmodernism

Since the bulk of the establishment of art criticism — save for a very few exceptions — has abdicated its responsibility to call out quality from imposture, it would seem that it is left to a few bloggers in the wilderness to point out the blatant nakedness of the new art emperors.

The New Republic unearths the source of the disease in the curse of Warholism, and quite rightly so. While Duchamp attacked the idea of “Artiste”  and his unquestioning adulation by the philistine collector with his readymades — and did so with humor and panache that earned him a place among those very same Artistes with good prices paid by the collectors for 
their own satirizing — the Pop Artist adherents preferred to simply wallow in the swamps of the lowest common denominator. Their output (one hesitates to call it “work”), far from being art, despite their prominence in the museums curated by today’s establishment, is the negation of the very concept of art, which by its fundamental nature the opposite of the mass-produced, banal, quotidian. Their worthy heirs, the Postmodernists, doubled down on purveying of the schlock, seasoned as they made it with cheap irony. The present crop does not even pretend to not be charlatans, selling as they do overpriced kitsch to over-moneyed philistines.

It is a truism that each generation of academic art engenders a rebellion among the not-yet-accepted artists, who would seek to negate the academic art’s aesthetic. Let us then hope that there is real movement, subterranean as it may be, that will return us to the realm of art that is not ashamed of its own existence.

On society and entropy

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Democracy, Empiricism, Historical Development, Liberalism

Liberalism, like entropy, tends to increase — at least until the moment of its self-destruction.

On philosophy

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Empiricism, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Governance

Philosophy is a fine pastime for gentlemen because it is so immensely interesting and so entirely without purpose.

On education, on and off-line

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Empiricism, Pragmatism

Despite predictions of its imminent demise — whether or not its inefficiencies can be overcome by new technology — it seems to me that traditional education is not in danger of extinction. The reason for this has less to do with the way students learn, or even with the value of education as a form of signaling.

On fighting without fighting

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Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Iran, Syria

Sanctions offer governments a way to express official disapproval without a commitment to take any sort of action, or — in other words — sanctions are inaction couched in the strongest possible language.

On art and pop art

An act of creation must free itself from the tyranny of popular taste before it can ascend enough to be considered art.

On defensive measures

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Geopolitics, Pragmatism, Regulation, Warfare

Once upon a time, before the advent of the “poison pill” and other suchlike measures, the threat of a hostile takeover was a check on self-dealing and plain incompetence of managements — much like the Right of Conquest was in its own day a check on failing government before the advent of the “international community” and its perpetual defense of the status quo, except of course when it is not convenient.

On war and superior technology

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Empiricism, Geopolitics, Warfare

Ever since did Eisenhower select a nuclear-tipped force that emphasized technologically led quality over brute force quantity in order to obtain security on the (relative) cheap, technical superiority has been the guiding doctrine of procurement and force planning for the US military. While Eisenhower was in charge, it worked — mainly because it was a doctrine aimed toward avoiding war and not its fighting. It is in the fighting that technology has a decidedly more mixed track record.

This is not to say that innovation in materiel is, well, immaterial. When an invention is transformative it can deliver a decisive advantage to its possessor, at least until it becomes well propagated. Not less than big advancements in generalship and tactics, developments such as the use of horses, chariots, siege engines, the stirrup, artillery, hand firearms, machine guns, airplanes, tanks and many others had in their time decided battles and entire wars, and the world would have looked very different today without them.