Thursday, November 29, 2018

The Differences between Models of Power and Models of Persuasion

In summary:
Government as we have here in the U.S. has a legal monopoly of the use of force and violence only allowing the citizens the right to use force in their own defense, in certain and specific situations. Governments are organized into (in the case of democracies) legislatures, courts and executive bureaucracies to carry out all its functions and logistics. Government is therefore a model of power and organization, able to compel its citizens to obey the laws by threat of force.

Business has no ability to use force to compel a citizen to purchase any of its goods and services. Businesses use advertising and salesmanship to convince the citizen to patronize them. Their purpose is to create wealth and make a profit. Businesses can further be organized into bureaucratic like managerial structures to handle large scale complex and specialized operations. Business is therefore a model of production and persuasion.

Business can only persuade or influence government but at all times, it must be noted that government has power which can be used against a business or individual and therefore always has the upper hand.


Further:
It is a widely held belief that there is a golden rule where the man with the gold makes the rules. This is mostly false. Mao Zedong was more correct in noting that power flows from the barrel of a gun.

In the first case, the man with the gold, absent any means of force, i.e. the means or ability to kill others or otherwise make credible and enforceable threats, is limited to using his gold to persuade people to obey his will or influence their actions. Hence, this is a model of persuasion or influence. Businesses, from the one man shop up to the largest corporation or any bank, are primarily models of production and also of persuasion and/or influence. One is free to, or not, purchase any goods or services and the business or bank has no recourse by which to coerce the recalcitrant citizen into making a transaction or taking out a loan.

The man with the gun, or means of force whereby he can kill others and has some kind of monopoly on the use of force and violence is a model of power. Governments have a monopoly on the use of force in so far as they can punish their citizens for transgressions of law by means of fines (forcibly taking money)  and imprisonment (forcibly restricting freedom of movement) or by execution and are therefore models of power. '


How this affects us in NYC:
We need to understand these distinctions in order to have a clear view of the current situation we face as New Yorkers and as U.S. citizens. In order to solve a problem, one must first identify and understand what the problem is, the components making up the system, how the components are related to each other and how they function together.

We here in Queens can rightly see the developers and real estate industry (REBNY) as problematic in light of the current residential building rampage with ever rising housing costs and an infrastructure insufficient to the ever increasing population density. We may be tempted to believe that REBNY  actually runs the political establishment with all city officials as being their employees. This is a convenient smokescreen for the city government, which as a model of force which always has the upper hand but acts as the passive victim and REBNY, like corporations, banks and Wall Street brokerage houses play the villains. REBNY can only buy influence which as the Knights Templar learned with King Philip IV of France or more recently Martha Stewart, that influence not only has its limits but can be revoked at the pleasure of the man with the gun.

In conclusion, we must hold our elected officials accountable for the actions of business interests that are detrimental to our community and responsible for reigning in the excesses.


Donald Cavaioli





Wednesday, November 28, 2018

The Great Guy Syndrome

Here in New York City as in the rest of the country we have a problem with the elected political establishment not being responsive to the will of the citizen voter. One of the most important reasons is that elected politicians have an incumbent re-election rate of 90% or more. In many cases, we give electeds a virtual lifetime appointment to office no matter how they behave in office. Then worse, when the elected either retires or dies in office, we vote for another member of their family making an entrenched political dynasty.

Call it "the great guy syndrome". If one were to ask their neighbors' opinion on politics they would invariably say that all politicians are crooks, incompetents or in the pockets of their donors and would express amazement that people in other districts or states are such idiots to vote the wretches back into office. All the wretches except their politicians because their politician is a great guy and they can't wait to vote him (her or it) back into office.

What the great guy voter never realizes that all the other people he views as idiots who keep re-electing losers to office also think their politician is a great guy and can't understand what's wrong with everyone else as well. So we end up with re-election rates of 90% or more and nobody can ever figure out why nothing changes.

The great guy syndrome also causes voters to treat their electeds like rock stars because they're great guys rather than employees hired by the people of the district or the state to represent the community and it's interests.

Really, the important thing to remember is the people are the boss and elected politicians are our employees, hired by us in elections, and whose paycheck comes from our tax dollars. (H/T Mitch Waxman)

The problem with this current situation is that an entrenched politician with a virtual lifetime sinecure, like any employee the boss does not watch over, will begin to slack off of his responsibilities. If the employee realizes the boss will never fire him, he will lose any and all respect for his boss who he will then take every advantage of and virtually rob blind.

What should be done is for we the people to grow some backbone, take charge, and act like the boss.

Watch over your elected employee and hold him accountable if he fails to represent your interests or follow through on campaign promises. If he doesn't work up to standards, vote him out no matter how much you personally like him or his party affiliation, the platitudes or ideology. Vote for a candidate of another party if necessary to send a message to your preferred party and let them know why. Better luck then to the next candidate. No excuses.

Limit electing any candidate for office to two terms only! Maybe he is a great guy working miracles for your district so let him run for another office and be a great guy there. Don't let them sit in one office too long becoming indolent and disrespectful of the constituents.

It can be done.


Donald Cavaioli

Monday, November 26, 2018

Bill de Blasio: Progressive Liberal. Man of the Left. Deal With It.

To my fellow New Yorkers, denizens of Queens County still clinging to the "muh real progressive liberalism" nostrum and desperately promulgating the notion that our mayor is some kind of counterfeit progressive liberal in the vain hope of salvaging your political cult and snowflake egos from ruin: You're wrong. de Blasio is a progressive liberal and meets or exceeds all left wing checkpoints.
All you're doing is making yourself look pathetic.

All that you see before you in our city today that dismays you, causes the most deepest existential angst, shaking the core of your belief system, is exactly what a Marxian collectivist ideological system of government would bring: Equality and justice defined as equality of outcome requiring wealth redistribution and elevating the stupid and incompetent to positions they cannot achieve through merit, economic strip mining through highly regulated, select crony capitalist vassals and foreign investors, that the delusional are accorded high social status and the rest of us must validate their lunacy, and multicultural balkanization turning us into a third world borough. It's a socio-economic slow motion train wreck that can't end well.

What you're mostly whining about based on comments I have read in other blogs, is that although you've all drank the progressive kool aid and paid lip service to these programs, even virtue signaled your asses off in hopes of gaining good thinker brownie points, it has not worked out to your benefit. Your little tin gods took no notice of you and your prayers.

In fact, in some cases, you find yourself on the wrong end of the stick. You were hoisted on your own liberal petard and are now suffering a severe case of butthurt aggravated by sour grapes. Sorry you didn't make the cut but that's socialism: Where you're more likely to end up as the zek in the camp or the body in the ditch rather than the commissar or apparatchik living the high life with the beautiful people. Luckily, it hasn't gone that far...yet..., but it still sucks to be you. Maybe if you just keep mindlessly babbling about republicans' fault and "Orange man bad" then you'll feel better.

de Blasio never fails to support any of these progressive liberal points and as a member of the ruling elite, the boss, he gets to decide proper interpretation of the liberal religion, what to give to whom and who gets royally fucked over to pay for it all. You, me and the rest of us are just plebs who are expected to sit down, shut up and do what we're told by our betters who alone decide what's best for us.

So don't hate the player, hate the game.



Donald Cavaioli



Sunday, November 25, 2018

The Peasant Mindset

To open, a brief summary of the following post would be this: Most people are inclined to be followers, live within the collective rules of the herd under the control of a strong man leader, rather than be free thinking individuals. I call this the peasant mindset. For as Gaius Sallustius Crispus is quoted as having said "Few men desire liberty, most men wish only for a just master".

The original Americans of the colonial period were exceptions with a nearly half the population being free thinking, I don't want to obey anyone, individuals. This is why such a substantial percentage of the colonists were such people, 40% to 45% of whom actively supported or actually fought the American revolution, were here to get away from the strictures of the old world. But subsequent waves of immigration brought more of the average population of the peasant mindset into play and this is, to some extent, responsible for the size and power of our present managerial state.

I would correct Sallust in that most men wish only for a just master but cannot imagine their existence without one and will demand to be ruled by any master, just or not.

The original Americans, who can be thought of as ethnic Americans (mostly WASPs) differed from their more servile British Isles and continental European cousins in one crucial way more so than their ethnic differences. It was his independent, non serviam attitude. The sort of people who could not tolerate a master to obey or betters to grovel before even if they were an ocean away and fought a war of independence to have nothing to do with the old world and its strong man monarchies.

However, after gaining independence from Britain, the ethnic Americans, mostly WASPs, though, in the early to mid nineteenth century needed more people to settle the frontiers as the United States expanded under the imperative of manifest destiny and more low-skilled workers to fill the factories springing up as a result of the industrial revolution. And although the WASP ethnic Americans may have wrinkled their noses in disgust (perhaps arguably with good reason) at the waves of German, Irish Catholics and later Southern European, mostly Italian Catholic and Eastern European Jews, the WASPs couldn't get enough of them. What they perhaps had no way of knowing was that the immigrants they imported were more different from them than appearances or language would suggest. Not simply ethnically although that is a significant difference, but more that the large majority of immigrants were of the peasant mindset and could never be (or even want to be) the go-it-alone, leave me alone, non serviam individualists that generally characterized the ethnic Americans.

These newly arrived and minted Americans would live together in their own ethnic enclaves and even after generations and most would move out of their ghettos but many would still cling to the "old country ways" and refer to themselves as hyphenated Americans. This might be a survivable problem as mostly they at least adopted a veneer of ethnic American WASP culture, work ethic and sensibilities yet they were still of the peasant mindset. Them and most of their descendants. This would eventually break the American experiment in self-governance and a constitutionally limited republic, concepts for which the peasant minded had no use for.

So these new Americans wanted and needed a master and could not imagine a world where they did not cower before their betters. If a strong man ruler and his court was not provided, they would select masters from among their own ranks. From here arose machine politics and identity politics with all its attendant corruption and the unaccountable to any law ruling class who we now see today. This does not trouble much the peasant minded then as now as long as master is of their hyphenated American or whatever identity group, gives them a pat on the head once in a while or an extra crust of bread now and again.

Of course, this was with the full cooperation with the ethnic Americans, especially the northeastern blueblood establishment types, who in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, saw this as a vehicle to protect their power and interests from the socially mobile and the nouveau riche upstart plebs (whom they smeared as Robber Barons) with the progressive era and the New Deal. In effect, jumping out in front of the immigrant imported socialist parade and leading it themselves. In doing so, the Blueblood Masters began eroding wealth creation in favor of wealth redistribution and free enterprise gradually replaced with centrally planned managerialism. Liberties and natural rights were gradually curtailed while the U.S. Constitution was stood on it's head where the Bill of Rights are not restrictions on the power of government but privileges grudgingly doled out to the pleb masses by the federal government. Throughout it all, the peasants neither noticed nor cared. They had their strong Master to watch over them.

If the peasants wanted a strong master in return for meager entitlements and doled out privileges, the self-appointed blueblood WASP overlords and later the hyphenated American machine politicians who supplanted them would be more than happy to crack the whip.

But in their zeal to embrace various shades of Marxism, both the WASPs and hyphenated American machine bosses failed to realize that in the aftermath of the 1965 Hart Cellar Act, they themselves could become the target of the new waves of peasant mind immigrants that they championed. They once again used their old tried and true trick of jumping out in front of the latest My Nation of Immigrants parade in the hopes of leading it. It would become the identity politics parade.

Through all this, those loyal peasants of European descent are increasingly being discarded in favor of  more pliable third world peasants more accustomed to strong man dictatorships. It has always escaped the notice of the peasant minded that when the master finds better slaves or the old slaves are no longer of any use, then the master will dispose of the old slave with not a single care or concern.
It will not, however, diminish the loyalty of the descendants of earlier waves of European immigrants. They will never learn.

So here we stand today with a managerial state growing in power inevitably from authoritarianism into totalitarianism, run by a ruling class increasingly socially and culturally isolated from the plebs over which they govern. All with the consent and full approval of the peasant minded majority. However, with identity politics gaining more power, supplanting the old left-right paradigm, the old, white democrat party leaders will be increasingly pushed aside in favor of the new Identity/Grievance Masters. These new Masters will denounce new identity enemies- judged by the color of their skins, not by the content of their character and further discard wealth creation in favor of even more wealth redistribution and wealth extraction all to benefit their own identity group. Blissfully unaware of, or incapable of understanding the dangers of destroying opportunity for the competent and productive, punishing success and the danger of ever growing public debt and fiat currency. That their policies will cause the jobs of the working class and middle class to be lost to other countries is of no concern to them. Somebody will have money they can leech off of and the enemy must be destroyed. The concept of fishing out the pond never occurs to them.

They will also grant a series of special rights and privileges for the benefit of and to placate various identity/grievance groups and set them on disfavored identity groups. The European descended peasants will desperately try to virtue signal and try to keep up with the ever shifting narrative to show their continuing fealty to the new ruling class with spaniel like fidelity but to no avail. The old enemy, the bourgeois entrepreneurs, have been long destroyed and their descendants, the crony capitalists are servile, tithe paying vassals (the managerial state always needs a rich source of other people's money) so it's on to destroy the new enemies: The middle class and working class of European descent.

An enemy class against which to struggle is a necessity of any Marxian ideology. It's divide and conquer to maintain ruling class hegemony. But yesterday's noble heroes will be morphed into tomorrow's implacable villains and the pattern later repeated yet still, the peasant minded will never learn. They will continue to play the new Master's game, never realizing he could be next for the block as the Master tries to evade the consequences of his foolish and greedy policies which will eventually cause the downfall of us all.

We are heading for interesting times indeed.


Donald Cavaioli



Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Left from Right and Nationalism too

It's a curious thing when you think about it.
Most people do not know or are confused about what is the political left and the political right but it is really simple.

Most people view nationalism, fascism and nazism as belonging to the political right. This is incorrect. In order to have totalitarian systems like fascism and nazism on the right of the political spectrum, said spectrum must be bent into a horseshoe or circle to mate them up with totalitarian communism.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Looked at this way, if A. (nazism, fascism) = C. (totalitarian collectivist state)
                               and B. (communism) = C. (totalitarian collectivist state)
                             Then A. (nazism, fascism) = B. (communism)

Therefore all three systems belong on the left of the political spectrum where left is defined as centrally managed and controlled economic and social, collectivist states. Otherwise the political spectrum twisted into horseshoes, circles, pretzels and mobius strips can tell us nothing as they have no definable left or right nor a coherent definition thereof.

The purpose of this spectrum is to organize data into an easily readable form  and allow for new systems to be easily identified on the spectrum as any good graph or chart should do. Bad charts, graphs or spectrum lines are invariably the work of grifters and mountebanks working to deceive others.

This horseshoe, pretzel, multidimensional axis tesseract construct is usually the argument of leftists who at the political family function do not want to be seated at the same table with cousin Adolf and cousin Benito. Nobody likes losers, especially leftists who are obsessed with being "on the right side of history" but they are part of the left, or alt-left if you will, so suck it up, leftie.

An Aside: The Z-man, no leftist he, had a recent blog post podcast on this subject, buying into the fascism is on the right notion in a way which I found to be a bit obscurantist, in that he emphasized the economic aspect and totally ignored the social aspects of individual liberty and property rights. So by claiming the spectrum is not universally applicable, considered only economics, and can only be understood within some arbitrary frame of reference, he renders the entire concept irrelevant and it should logically be discarded in favor of "some guys who think one way" and "them other guys who think another way". Further conflating the bad rhetoric of "progressive liberals are the real Nazis" used by conservatives with the political spectrum itself and appeal to academic authority as support is a fallacy. Had he proposed that identity politics has now rendered the old left-right paradigm obsolete, then there is something to consider and debate.
Now I like the Z-man and read his blog daily and will continue to do so finding much to learn or better articulation of ideas I already had and usually agree with him but this time, I respectfully disagree.

So what is the political right?
Simply put, those who want smaller governments with more emphasis property and individual rights. This would make libertarian anarchists (not to be confused by leftist fake anarchists who want a totalitarian communist state) the extreme right and the diametric opposite communists.
Then the right is less based in an ideology to arguably none at all and is really more of an attitude or preference. What organizational ideology can describe "leave me alone"?


This is not to say that a right wing government cannot arguably be authoritarian as long as it is a one party system that practices laissez-faire social and economic policies and only controls political dissent. Such a government would be placed nearer the center right.

 However, Burnham's and Francis' works regarding the managerial state would predict that eventually the State apparatus will grow and move towards greater control over economics and social matters developing a more comprehensive governing ideology and thus morph into a left-wing state. Even minarchism faces this prospect over the long term unless the citizenry takes the effort to prevent it. The United States today faces this problem due to the long term apathy and complacency of its citizens.

So what is the political left?
The left can be said to be based on organizational ideologies as a necessary blueprint to create a centrally controlled and managed collectivist state. The collectivist state, in order to manage and control not only the economic system but the social system, must use the force of an authoritarian or totalitarian government apparatus to enforce the dogma of its governing ideology. Control can only be maintained by force to ensure complete compliance with the State.

Again, this is not to say all left-wing governments are necessarily totalitarian but some amount of force, be it government force of law or social pressure from the majority of citizens who desire this form of government with its attendant political and social controls. We must also recall that there is a center to the political spectrum with shading to the moderate left or moderate right is necessary.


Now we have an actual straight line left-right political spectrum that makes sense where the extreme opposite ends are in fact the opposite of each other: totalitarian collectivism opposite libertarian anarchy, with shadings in between. And so we can see that fascism and Nazism belong on the far left of the spectrum and just to the right of totalitarian government controlled communism at the extreme left.

That is unless National Socialism with the emphasis on Socialism wasn't your first clue and no, Mussolini and Hitler were not kidding when using it.

Now on to nationalism.
Nationalism is not an political ideology at all but a preference much like being a fan of a sports team. It does not belong on the left or the right as either can be a nationalist as much as a fan of, say, the NY Giants can be someone of the right or the left, Democrat or Republican or whatever.
Even Stalin pursued a policy of socialism in one country and blatantly appealed to Russian nationalism during the second world war or as the Soviets called it: "The Great Patriotic Struggle".

To call nationalism a right wing ideology and tie it to those two most serviceable villains, Hitler and Mussolini, is the result of the post World War II European left's attempt to smear nationalism and even today to make it a scare word in order to sell their globalist/internationalist snake oil.

Once you look at this logically, this way is simple, coherent and makes the most sense.

Donald Cavaioli

Fear Response

On the internet, there is no end to conspiracy theories on any topic imaginable and there is no serious or concerted attempt made to censor ...