evolution

Via Hot Air, a 1981 news spot about “getting your news via home computer.”

As the wise and powerful AP notes, the funniest part is toward the middle when they talk about the economics of it.

I guess Thomas Murray is hoping to get Paula Martin and the prosecutorial B-team this time. Hopefully he gets smarter this time if he gets the new trial — jurors said last time that he and his people presented not a shred of evidence that wasn’t contradicted by the evidence.

See ya in 25, pal.

I saw this over at Insty’s a few days ago, and a lengthy passage from one of my favorite novels came to mind:

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people’s brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation’s capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell’s 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a “radio” built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, “Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband / my boss / my church / my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?” This little voice the Freudians call “The Superego”, which Freud himself vividly characterized as “the ego’s harsh master”. With a more functional approach, Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as “a set of conditioned verbal habits¹”.

This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials)² united with a logogram (this “set of conditioned verbal habits”). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as can still³ be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart — that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom⁴ suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram — what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants — is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions also become less “real.” They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume that they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, “a tool, a machine, a robot.”

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid⁵, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile classes — the web of perception, evaluation, and participation in the sensed universe — is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his⁶ victim. Communication is only possible between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

— Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.; Never Whistle While You’re Pissing (which, of course, was heavily plagiarized⁷ by two former Playboy editors named Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson for their “works”, known the Illuminatus! trilogy.)

It will be interesting to see whether, as I believe is likely, those mouthing denunciations of government power over the last eight to ten years suddenly, for “no reason at all”, clam up.

1. I don’t think any phrase more succinctly summarizes the state of political discourse and the allowed bounds of acceptable speech as well as this. [↩]
2. Essentially a blend of instinct, natural desire, and free will. [↩]
3. this book was published in 1975 [↩]
4. citizens. [↩]
5. Politicians, the media, bureaucrats, and El Borak’s pirates [↩]
6. or her [↩]
7. That’s a joke. And you know how I hate explaining jokes. [↩]

Alternate title: “Who’s up for a little blog sorbet?”

Kansas may be close to allowing grocery stores and convenience stores to sell “full-strength” beer whereas they can only sell beer with 3.2% alcohol content today.

I admit — I try to put some effort into understanding the intended purpose behind “blue laws”, but I never got this one. It’s stupid — especially now — and it should be wiped off the books.

Along with a whole host of others, I’ll add, but I’ll take what I can get.

The issue of abortion comes to mind today – Joel brought it up¹ at his place, and it’s in the news via State Rep. Lance Kinzer, who just hasn’t quite finished tilting at this particular windmill.

Purely by accident², I happened to be thinking about this topic over the weekend, in the context of a post I wrote two years ago, in which I wrote that social conservatives had forever lost the battle against abortion. In fact they have lost it to the point to where precious little outrage can be ginned up for people in certain circles who believe that your rights to privacy are forfeit if you oppose abortion.

In my previous post linked above, I discussed what should be done going forward without saying why they lost. I’ve always darkly hinted that I’d alienate the last remaining shreds of my readership if I ever said why — so, of course, it’s time now to do just that.

There are three main reasons that the social conservatives (did, are, and will) lose the battle against abortion, and they are related; so much so that they may be thought of as the same argument. What say we be real with each other, okay?

The first has to do with the arguments and tactics put forth by anti-abortion advocates, and they are ineffectual, because they address the wrong problem. It is also the most provocative.

Kinzer in the KC Star link above provides us with just such an example; he introduced legislation that will require sonograms to be offered to the people undergoing the procedure. This is fairly common among this set, and equates to the argument that people having abortions and people championing it do not understand the implications of what they are doing, and if they could be made to understand it, the lights would come on and they would become opponents.

People who believe this are fooling themselves. Most of the public is educated and can think through the logical consequences of such an act. Certainly the most strenuous supporters of abortion rights are educated. These people are fully aware of what they are doing or advocating for, and do not care a bit for the consequences. People that actually have abortions (there were nearly 11,000 reported in Kansas in 2007, the most recent year for which there is data) are or probably become more aware of them as time goes on, and no doubt there are some that have been placed by Fate into a double-bind trap. It is (or should be) difficult to lack compassion for such people. The rest (which I dare say are the majority) are 100% aware of what they are advocating, and it doesn’t bother them. Intersect this with your own over-reaches and blunders, and a media that is part sympathetic on one hand and part conflict-driven on the other, and you have a situation that does not redound to your advantage.

The second reason represents the gap between you and them. It is borne out in a variety of arenas and not just on the issue of abortion, and it is the very same complaint that anyone who pushes a law “for the good of society” but is opposed by large numbers of people faces, and that is that you can get people to think about something — you can even force them to obey it³ — but you can’t make them care about it. For most, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”.

Finally, the legality of abortion is the default position and has been for over thirty years. (In fact, I believe a recent anniversary of Roe v. Wade was cause for celebration in some circles — see Reason #1.) Serious, organized opposition exists only in isolated pockets and in the fevered dreams of advocates. Furthermore, I think abortions are like nuclear weapons — there is no place that they exist now in which they will not exist in the future. The genie cannot and will not be put back in the bottle.

This “war” is over, and the social conservatives are again the losers. Not only that, they have sacrificed other important principles — ones that could have been won — in order to pursue this pipe dream. I urge them — for their sanity’s sake and for the sake of what remaining principles there are — to let it go.

1. Feel free to blame him. [↩]
2. and I do mean purely [↩]
3. and as should be obvious by now, forcing anyone to do anything is not my way [↩]

It’s the place where Gene Hackman can’t say “I’ll see you in Hell, William Munny,” but Clint Eastwood can shoot him in the face with a shotgun.

[From the Smile Like You Mean It collection, now three years in the making.]

I see her sitting
at the bus stop
on the other side
of the street.

She is also
waiting for something
that isn’t coming.