politologie

[Wilhelm] Weitling urged installing communism by physical force with the help of a 40,000-strong army of ex-convicts. A prelapsarian community of goods, fellowship, and societal harmony would then ensue, directed by Weitling himself.

Much to Marx and Engels’s annoyance, Weitling’s giddy blend of evangelism and protocommunism attracted thousands of dedicated disciples across the Continent.

The lying liberty [known as “freedom of the press” should be suppressed in favor of a single public opinion] as [desire for liberty is] an error, a vice, a grave evil, born of violent hatred.

Etienne Cabet, Voyage to Icaria

The more I think about it, the less I can justify the destiny of woman outside the family and the household. Between harlot or housewife, I see no halfway point.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1846)

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/my-anti-drug-is-alcohol-10771

The pushers who hang around the playground behind my school are always going on about the amazing high you get from drugs. But I don’t see how it can compare to the pure, natural, 100 percent legal high I get from drinking alcohol. Who needs the artificial escape drugs provide when a good, stiff belt of Jim Beam or José Cuervo can put your head in the clouds while keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground?

Sure, at first, drugs may make you feel pretty good. But it’s not real. Before long, you’re using more and more, even as you’re feeling worse and worse. Then, other things will start going wrong for you, too: Your friends won’t seem to hang around you anymore, and you’ll have new friends who only care about the drugs. Your grades will start to slip. Your memory will go. And your health will fade. All because of drugs.

Don’t take that risk: Find something healthy, like alcohol, to take the place of drugs in your life. So, the next time you feel the urge to smoke some marijuana, try reaching for a big bottle of Bacardi instead.

The sneaky thing about drugs is how they make you feel like everything’s okay when it’s not. Drugs alter the way you perceive things. They change the way you behave and cause you to lose control of yourself. Who wants that? I don’t know about you, but I like being in control of my actions. That’s why, whenever I feel tempted to wander down the wrong road, I pour myself a nice, stiff drink, thanking my lucky stars that I’ve got alcohol, my personal anti-drug.

It’s your life, and you have to learn to make your own choices. But choosing drugs? That’s no choice at all.

Nothing beats the adrenaline rush that comes from knowing you’re drug-free. And, if you’re drug-free, you’re free, period. I like that feeling, and I like myself. I’m high on life, because I’m high on alcohol, my anti-drug.

And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of x and a one-in-four chance of y, the probability of both x and y occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.

Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/everybodys-an-expert

Review of the book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip Tetlock

spoiler alert:

the best experts did only slightly better than chance at predicting outcomes. When asked to assign probabilities to their predictions, experts proved systematically overconfident; for example, events predicted with 100% confidence happened less than 80% of the time 

The primary constituency of the Democratic Party throughout the twentieth century and right up to the present — including its “socialistic” New Deal heyday — has always been one wing of the corporate capitalist ruling class.

The “Progressive” movement at the turn of the 20th century was the ideology, not of the blue collar working class, but of the managerial and professional classes who ran the newly arisen giant corporations, government agencies, universities, charitable foundations and school administrations. Far from being motivated by Marxist ideas of class conflict, they saw society at large as a process to be managed like an industrial engineer would design the production process in a factory. For them, managerial expertise would transcend class conflict, labor militancy and other forms of “irrationality.” In other words, their ideology was closer to Herbert Hoover than to Karl Marx. As for the Progressive regulatory agenda, according to Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko it served mainly the interests of the regulated industries themselves.

Much the same is true of the New Deal itself. As Thomas Ferguson argued in Golden Rule, the main financial backing for the New Deal Democratic Party was the most capital-intensive, export-oriented segment of American industry. Because of its capital-intensiveness, labor costs were a modest part of the total cost package; but long planning horizons meant management needed stability and predictability on the shop floor. Hence the leadership of these industries was prepared to offer significant wage increases, seniority-based promotion and a grievance process in return for buying the cooperation of the establishment union leadership in enforcing contracts against its own rank-and-file and suppressing wildcat strikes and other forms of direct action. FDR’s “progressive” labor legislation fully reflected this. It’s no coincidence that a major influence on New Deal industrial policy, General Electric CEO Gerard Swope, pioneered a labor policy (under the name “American policy”) in his own company that prefigured the Wagner Act in many ways.

Kevin Carson,  It’s Official: Reason Has Become a Self-Parody

Kolko piece: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/29/the-new-deal-illusion/

The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.

H. L. Mencken

All the sophisticated syllogisms of the ponderous volumes published by Marx, Engels, and hundreds of Marxian authors cannot conceal the fact that the only and ultimate source of Marx’s prophecy is an alleged inspiration by virtue of which Marx claims to have guessed the plans of the mysterious powers determining the course of history. Like Hegel, Marx was a prophet communicating to the people the revelation that an inner voice had imparted to him.

Mises, Human Action

Who says Mises.org doesn’t contain great content? http://mises.org/library/shaving-cream-racket

Legislators confounded in one code the two currents of custom of which we have just been speaking, the maxims which represent principles of morality and social union wrought out as a result of life in common, and the mandates which are meant to ensure external existence to inequality.
Customs, absolutely essential to the very being of society, are, in the code, cleverly intermingled with usages imposed by the ruling caste, and both claim equal respect from the crowd. “Do not kill,” says the code, and hastens to add, “And pay tithes to the priest.” “Do not steal,” says the code, and immediately after, “He who refuses to pay taxes, shall have his hand struck off.”

Such was law; and it has maintained its two-fold character to this day. Its origin is the desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage. Its character is the skillful commingling of customs useful to society, customs which have no need of law to insure respect, with other customs useful only to rulers, injurious to the mass of the people, and maintained only by the fear of punishment.

Peter Kropotkin, Law and Authority