One of the qualities of an insane person is the inability to differentiate things that are different–to say that two things that are actually different are instead similar or identical.

Consequently, insane people (or at least, evil people) tend to take two things that are different and say they are the same. A classic example of this is the mis-use of words in the naming of organizations or the incorrect identification of two political movements with each other. It’s also used by various groups to claim that they are in fact another group.

For example, the word “Nazi” means “National Socialism.” The Nazis were maybe extreme nationalists (though I wouldn’t say a group that murders a huge part of its own nation is truly “nationalist”), but they were definitely as far from being socialists as you could get–they were fascists. They even used to be called the “German Workers Party,” another clear attempt to incorrectly identify themselves with the then-popular Marxist movements happening throughout the world.

Most of the people that I know would now acknowledge Nazi-ism as an insane philosophy, so this is a good example of how an insane group of people will confuse the issue by using words that make them sound like they are something else.

Similar examples exist in American history. The States’ Rights Democratic Party was the official name of the group that most people now know as the “Dixiecrats,” a group most famous for attempting to stop black people from voting in the South through methods that are now not only illegal, but which people of conscience would have considered to be immoral even then. And yet, here they are calling themselves “democrats,” a word based on the concept of democracy–a concept that is basically all about voting.

The “National States Rights Party” was supposedly about states’ rights–a valid concept of Constitutional Law as expressed in the Tenth Amendment. But really the National States Rights Party was led by a person who was also a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The only “rights” they cared about was the “right” to deny everybody other than white people their rights. It’s not even a party that supports anybody’s rights–it was explicitly about removing the rights of other people, a concept that is forbidden in almost all legal systems everywhere in the world. (That is, almost all legal systems, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, forbid using the concept of “rights” in order to destroy or deny the rights of others.) This isn’t reasonable, it’s evil. It’s insane. It’s also a lie–the name of the organization is not really what the organization does.

Even Communism ultimately became the opposite of what it claimed to be. Instead of being about empowering workers, communist countries became the most absolute dictatorships the world has ever seen.

One of the problems that human beings have when confronting this is that it’s very difficult to confront evil and insanity. People want to justify it. They want it to make sense when it doesn’t make sense. They don’t want to see evil or believe that it exists. So they say, “Well, I suppose those people really did just care about states’ rights and they all just went a little astray,” or something. But no, they were never about states’ rights, really. Not only weren’t they, but they did nearly-irreparable damage to the very concept of states’ rights by associating it with racism. They were harming “states’ rights,” not helping it.

Nowadays you see white supremacists use the term “alt-right” to describe themselves. But this is just evil, insane people hijacking the word “right” to mean “racism.” It doesn’t really matter to them which word they hijack. Remember that they already hijacked the word “socialism,” which is about as left as you can get. In fact, even “alternative right” could have meanings that don’t have to do with racism; it’s just been so confused by modern-day Nazis (and the media that loves to use them to sell papers and TV shows) that now the phrase means only “racist agenda.” Just more insanity from insane people.

In reality, racism isn’t political. It’s just evil, stupid, or insane.

I love how people are like, “Oh yeah, let’s all be peaceful and respect everybody,” until something that they think is evil shows up, and then they’re like, “Oh yeah, hit that person!”

And what’s funny is that you usually think the evil person is evil because they are all like, “Oh, we want to hurt people!” So when your response is “Right, I want to hurt these evil people!” you should perhaps take a moment to reflect on how stupid that is. 

The arena of politics is fraught for a lot of reasons.

It’s the subject of power, a subject on which humanity as a group is pretty much insane, from a historical perspective. Very few people ask themselves why they want to be in power, assuming that power is its own end and that one has “won” in life by getting to “the top.”

Because it is the subject of power, various control mechanisms (themselves mechanisms to attempt to gain power) such as manipulation (read: marketing, news, PR, agent provocateur, etc.) are used to accomplish it. This obscures the actual subject of politics (the efficient organization of large groups of people and their stuff within particular boundaries of space) and replaces it with push-button topics that are used to manipulate populaces into placing certain individuals in power, without any consideration of what power or politics actually are.

Now, having obscured the subject with emotionally-charged manipulation, a sort of definition change occurs—it makes “politics” into “emotionally-charged hot-button topics,” almost definitionally. It makes it impossible to discuss, and actually even makes the actual subject of politics (a social science which is known and does work) itself into an emotionally-charged hot-button topic.

In fact, anybody bringing up the subject of actual politics gets their position attacked more than any other supposedly “political” position, because attempting to put any sanity or actual politics into the subject goes directly counter to any attempt to manipulate populaces. That is, actual politics is not the subject of manipulation, fear, divisiveness, etc. It provides freedom to the individual and supports the group. It does not lead to autocracy, domination—these things that humanity thinks are “power.”

It’s not just autocrats that practice these attacks on people. They have educated the populace extremely thoroughly, by taking a few push-button topics and making them the basic pillars of “politics,” saying that nobody could really know anyway and it’s all just opinion, and then pushing forward from these pillars as though they were the fundamentals. The populace then accepts these new “fundamentals” as the most senior data in the subject of politics and they push these ideas themselves, because they are subjects that are emotionally important to people. It doesn’t matter whether the new “fundamentals” are right or wrong. The best ones have some truth in them–it makes them more defensible, which leads to more arguments and confusion. As long as they are not truly fundamental but you make them “fundamentals,” you can get the effect you’re going for. And that effect is to (a) make the subject impossible to resolve, leading to endless arguments, (b) make the subject so emotionally charged that nobody can think straight about it, (c) cause people to defend their positions either irrationally (since they have no basic principles to work with) or with tremendous complexity (since it’s very complex to explain a subject that has no basic principles), and (d) allow the subject to be manipulated by any person who can sufficiently establish themselves as an “authority” on the subject (something easily accomplishable with sufficient funding and marketing power).

So yes, sometimes when you talk about politics, humans react in a strange way.

You know, once in a while I see people post about immigration into the US, or get unhappy about it, or something, and I wonder if they understand how immigration into the United States works.

Here’s a reasonable summary here of ways to legally immigrate into the US.

I find it amazing that we live in a world where it is so easy to directly hear what people are saying, to directly see places that are far away from you, and to get first-hand accounts from numerous individuals of what is happening, and yet people still choose to get filtered, edited information second-hand from organizations whose first responsibility is provide entertainment and serve their advertisers and stockholders—businesses that believe the only way to make money is by following a writing formula of shock and conflict.

As a side note to this, it still amazes me that people think there are only two sides to any question or situation, and that if one side is right the other must be wrong. No, they can both be wrong. They can be talking about something irrelevant. They could be asking the wrong questions. You can put two liars in a room and have them accuse each other of lying–neither of them have to be telling the truth just because one accuses the other of lying.

To an honest person, it is hard to imagine that somebody would form an organization that claims to be providing information but is actually focused on entertainment. But to the formers of these organizations, it is hard for them to imagine that anybody really believes them fully.

In short, I think there is a lot less conflict in the world than there is portrayed to be, but a LOT of conflict reported. That is, a lot of the conflict and things that you are angry at are actually the media channels giving you the information, even though you might have believed you were actually angry about the thing being reported. Usually if you go directly to the source, you’ll find things are a lot less dramatic than than they are represented to be.

If you are angry now after the 2016 election, it is because there was a year-long news cycle that prepared one half of the country to be violently angry NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED. If you don’t think this is true, you don’t have enough friends who were on the other side of the election or have been very carefully feeding yourself only the news stories that agree with your ideas. Think about it—half the country was going to be FURIOUS no matter what. That seems odd, doesn’t it?

Who in the world would want to make SURE that half the country was violently angry about its government, no matter what? What would anybody stand to gain from that? Whatever it is, I have no interest in being manipulated in such a fashion.

If you want to attack something, figure out why somebody would want you to be so mad and attack that—not your own government. I have some ideas of what it might be, but nothing really concrete enough.

Now, as a side note, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everybody that SEDITION IS ILLEGAL.

Here’s the definition of “sedition” from the Oxford American Dictionary:

sedition, n., conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch.

It is NOT protected by the First Amendment and you CAN go to jail for it. Peaceful protest, the right of assembly, all of these are fine. You are welcome to disagree with the government as much as you want, which is one of the great things about the USA. However, since you’re my friend and I care about you, I’d like to remind you that no matter how angry you are, you don’t want to call down the full force of the government on you by actually doing something illegal.

Most of the time, things happen for a reason. Once in a while there are accidents, but when we have something of the scale and scope of something like a national election and how the media reports on it, it’s very unlikely that what you are looking at is a coincidence. In fact, usually thing things that happen are in fact _intended_ to happen. So the thing to look at is–what is happening? Well, what it looks like is happening, to me, is a lot of people becoming unhappy and dissatisfied about presidential candidates–people who are likely to be highly dissatisfied when EITHER of them win.

So rather than argue about the candidates or what we know about them through the media channels, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to do a few other things:

1. Consider: what groups or individuals would benefit from Americans being hateful or dissatisfied about their government? Do any of those groups have influence over the media, political parties, or other groups?

2. What can we do to make our lives and the world a better place? Is the government going to do that? I don’t think that there are too many governments in all of history where you would look back and say that they were as effective as various historical individuals have been who intended to do something about the society. There are certainly exceptional individuals within governments from time to time. And certainly people like Gandhi went on to be in government. But why would you look to a government as a whole and actually EXPECT the group to be making the world a better place? That’s something we expect of Greenpeace, or the Volunteer Ministers, or the Red Cross. So why are we so worried about the government making the world a better place? It usually doesn’t. It does some good things here and there. But the world does not belong to it. The world belongs to you, and me, and anybody else who chooses to make a difference. Vote, please. But maybe the time that any of us are spending being outraged about the government would be better spent making the world a better place by helping ourselves, our families, our friends, our groups, even random strangers. I’d rather make one person smile than spend a SECOND thinking about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I’m not saying they are totally unimportant, or that we shouldn’t spend time on politics. It is important that we care about our group and its future. But we have a choice about where we spend our physical and emotional energy, and I think it’s better to spend _more_ of it on looking at how we can make the world a better place by the simple things we can do every day than spend hours or days worrying about what is so terrible about one politician or another and posting it all over Facebook. That is not making the world a better place to live.

Hi hi. So, wow, politics! Apparently that’s a thing. But really, here’s what’s up:

In the USA, there is only one major political party. It is called the Money And War Party. It has two faces: the Angry Party and the Sympathy Party. Both of these are really just ways of making the Money And War Party appeal to different sorts of people.

These parties both have some good people in them. They have some bad people in them. Very little of this gets communicated, though, because the USA also has two other things: The Angry People News Companies and the Smiles and Lies News Companies.

The Angry People News Companies are angry! They are so angry that the Sympathy Party is being sympathetic! How pathetic and ineffective those sympathy people are! Everybody and everything sucks and everything about the government is bad! Grrr, anger!

The Smiles and Lies News Companies are so upset that everybody else is lying! They’re liars! Look at what terrible people everybody else are! The world is a dangerous place! It’s really scary and we should feel bad for how terrible everything is for people. Isn’t it so sad and weird that the Angry Party is angry? And that they are lying? Probably we should feel nervous about the world. The Sympathy Party is all right, though, because they feel bad for people who are in bad situations! And the world is full of people in bad situations! Here are some pictures of people from the Sympathy Party smiling. Doesn’t that make you feel less nervous now?

And then you pit those two factions against each other, and it really looks like there’s a wide choice! Wow, such difference! Do I want to be Angry About The Government or do I want to Help People In Need? Weirdly, those emotional messages seem to reach a pretty good number of the voting population (though I don’t think they really have mass appeal, given usual voter turnout).

But then what really happens is that you elect them and they spend money and wage war. But even that is hard to see because the Angry People News tells you that they are waging war and NOT spending money and the news companies that support the Sympathy Party tell you that they are NOT waging war but that they are spending money. In addition to telling you lots of other irrelevant information.

So, since we’re all talking politics ANYWAY, apparently, and no matter how many times I click “Hide” on the total BS that the Angry People News and Smiles And Lies News writes, the articles keep popping up here and there in my news feed, I figured I might as well start talking about politics too!