Shockingly Plausible

This is my attempt to make sense of the world.

1. Power

Why discuss "power"?

  1. Power is definitionally arbitrary. Every time the powerful Follow The Rules, they provide evidence they do not in fact have power and instead are merely actors in a deterministic rules-based system. This is true at all levels: international politics, domestic politics, social relationships.
  2. Politics and other kinds of social relationships cannot make sense without acknowledging the arbitrary nature of power. As I write this in February 2022, in the past few weeks, we saw segments of the population object to cutting off Canadian truckers' and their supporters' access to the the banking system. Many of these same people call for cutting of Putin's access to the banking system. There are lengthy justifications produced for this, but they are a lot of mental gymnastics. We should consider the simpler possibility that power is simply arbitrary.
  3. The powerful take effort to conceal this. When Putin invaded the Ukraine, he labeled it a "special operation" --- not a war! --- that would continue until Ukraine had a "legitimate" government. It was important to Putin that he appear to be implementing a necessary system.
  4. It was the same with the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
  5. Even if the bureaucratic apparatchiks are merely "following the rules" of the intracate brocade of national and international bureaucracies
  6. Leaders may or may not be self-aware that they seek arbitrary power. Regardless, failure to acknowledge the arbitrary nature of power disfigures the political system in a way that causes constituents to take up causes that harm themselves.
  7. My goal here is to argue that the confortable stories we tell ourselves about the pursuit of vague terms like "order" and "justice" are conceal the actual dynamics of power and create tools for actors who hunger for arbitrary power.
  8. Further, acknowledging the arbitrary nature of power frees us to see reality and better acknowledge the trade-offs of the application of power.

The environmental movement as an instrument of power

Modern Liberalism misunderstands power
  1. The advocates of the environmental movement ignores the arbitrary nature of power to the deteriment of their own objectives. Most seem to be unaware of this.
  2. This Tweet by Greta Thunberg encapsulates what the West misunderstands about power --- both political and literal power. The climate change and renewable energy figurehead is protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the net effect of her campaign for decarbonization has been increasing energy dependence on Russian gas and Chinese coal.
  3. The primary threat to the way of life that Liberals value is not a climate crisis. The West has spent so much time fighting non-peer militaries, that we have forgotten that we do in fact have peers and that they

Crypto is not an "exit"

  1. ...
  2. We should not seek an exit. It is not real and will put us back where we started We should embrace the arbitrary nature of power.