YouTube

 YouTube is different from other social media. One had 50000 comments after 3 days? I'm not convinced the algorithm is being honest about that, but it's true, back and forth is less common, not only because of the number of responses, but also because YouTube limits number of response to 3. Anyway, putting thoughts into words in a context is as important as argument. The post in question was an argument, 20 MAGAts vs 1 student younger than any of the MAGAts. It was respectful because of the 1 debater's discipline. The last interchange was about abortion, and these are my thoughts.

I like the idea of consciousness, but I like breathing more. Everyone likes different things, but to define life, mothers rule. Fine if the evoluture is breathing, the mother can't stop that, but before that, it is up to the mother as to when life begins. Probably, the poor will define it later than the rich, unless they are ElonTrump level of anti-life, but fix that with better unemployment benefits. I value motherhood, but I also value other things people do when they are unemployed, as much as art and science.

Economic Conservatives

 Economic conservatives are the worst. Even they admit social conservatives are bad. Why should we let the hide behind the economy? Conservatives are that way because of their biological imperative to hurt others. By hurting others, they believe they are advantaging their selfish genes. I believe the genome is more complex than that. Genocide hurts us all. Economy conservatives defend weapons manufacturers that propagandize entire populations such as Israel into genocidal paranoia. Am I to believe the economic conservative’s self delusion that consumer demand washes all blame from companies whose primary contribution to the economy is the Keeling curve? No, the economy is what it produces, and preventing it from changing is the most harmful thing we could do. Economic conservatives are the worst.

Social Media

 I do think social media has different emergent properties from other forms of communication. Of course, being booted off of it prejudices me against it. But I think a completely different approach might make it constructive. In that way it is the same as everything else; change is not only the only constant; change is the only hope; growth has sufficed til now, but now we are doomed without change. The change I propose for social media is to make it more contextual, and less like call and response. My experience was that any departure from conformity elicited insults. Call and response in real life can be fine, especially when it is spontaneous. I imagine religious call and response is bad, because of pedagogy, or whatever. I think protest call and response is fine in a protest march, since it is just for fun. But call and response in social media isolates users into bubbles, and subjects those that cannot be classified into bubbles to insults. It is the rules of social media that make it toxic. Open source social media imitates the rules of corporate social media, so it is equally toxic. There simply hasn't been time for new rules to be invented by those working on it in their spare time, and those doing it professionally are too busy refining the existing rules to make any new ones. My obsession with an as yet non-mathematical abstraction, forces me to imagine what I suspect would be different rules. Instead of calls for conformist responses by those with lots of followers, how about facet decorations hidden except in specific context. Ideally, context would be the point; taking a decoration out of context would be meaningless, because the new context it was put into would overwhelm the context it was taken from. Whether someone invites discussion in a context, or rejects disagreement in a context, would be as important as the decoration that elicited the discussion or disagreement. It is not possible to lie if the mode of expression is permission or rejection of response. It is only through the rules of communication that people can lie. Written and spoken words can be untrue, because of syntax. Social media calls for response, are even easier to use for disinformation, because the rules of social media are presently geared that way. I think shifting from call and response rules to context rules would decrease disinformation. At any rate, anything would be better than growth of social media without changing its rules, same as anything would be better than growth of the economy without changing what it produces.

Nothing New

My opposition to reactionaries and socialists is perhaps a love of being different. Perhaps that is also one reason I thought of the solution to climate change without reading it in a book or on a protest sign. True, my idea, to delicense an oil major, follows logically from environmentalism, but no one comes out and says it like me. Everyone else beats around the bush, trying to phase out fossil fuel with subsidies and taxes. Subsidies will not work for the same reason taxes will not work. My reasoning there is perhaps a distortion of other mainstream ideas. Both subsidies and taxes increase GDP, and increased GDP increases fossil fuel production, and every drop produced is burnt, no matter its price. According to MMT, taxes are what gives money value, and I interpret giving money value as a boost to GDP. It's telling that MMTers want guaranteed employment; they don't want us to work less. Leftists may have given us weekends, but they still want us to identify as workers. Work and consumption are two sides of the same Orwellian coin. The problem with degrowthers is that they are invariably undemocratic. They oppose democracy by proposing to use it in corporations; that would destroy democracy as certainly as reactionaries do. Workers are habitual; they would toe the company line, just like share holders do. I even disagree with other new econonomists that I have studied even less. The idea that government causes innovation is only half true. In fact neither government nor economy causes innovation. Innovation is wasted time, plain and simple. There is zero incentive for scientific experiments, or hobbies, that all innovation comes from. If you want more innovation, you need more unemployment. Full employment is business as usual. Corporations grow because their employees, from CEO all the way down, are compassionate and want to spread the wealth that their company affords them. Corporations cannot change because they are hierarchical; if an employee changes, peers, managers, and underlings will oppose the change; it's only external threats against the existence of their company that can change every employee at once. A company's financials statement is like its skin, and like animals, their existence does not end at skin; it extends out into the environment or the economy. Oil companies, more than others, depend on the entire economy to exist. CEOs are the employees most dependent on their company, and oil companies are the companies most dependent on the economy. I don't know if eliminating a CEO would be good for a company, but I suspect eliminating an oil company would be good for the economy. It would be good because, not in spite, of increasing unemployment. Allowing a few powerful companies to exist goes hand in hand with fascism; noting is new. Fighting against fascism just makes it stronger. Instead, destroy one of its puppet masters; delicense an oil major. Why do I call Trump a fascist, and not an authoritarian? I guess fascist has fewer syllables, but also there are authoritarians that are qualitatively different from Trump. Other authoritarians were created by the USofGenocide; they exist to serve weapons corporations in the USG, not in their own country. Even petrostate authoritarians just serve the top dog oil companies, that all call USG home. Oil companies don't compete; they prop each other up in the economy, just like employees prop each other up in a company. Like Hitler, Trump serves corporations in his own country. Killing Nazis did not end the war; destroying the top dog corporations ended the war.

Strident

I've been getting more strident against extremes. Kill me now if I'm getting conservative in old age. But socialism is not better than Republicanism. Just because liberalism has not yet reached its stride on climate does not mean it is not our best hope. Of course, Biden has to fade away before we can cut fossil fuel labor loose, and delicense an oil major. But that is no reason to do anything else first. Destroying an oil major has to come first, or it will never come. Only civil rights rival climate in urgency. Classism is a distant third. Here are some of my responses to ecosocialists on youtube.

Oil companies are like animals with their backs to the wall; they will do anything to survive. Everyone knows the planet is not big enough for both us and oil companies. Some of you repress the emotions caused by the fact that to survive, we must destroy an oil company right away, and destroy them all by the time we want the climate to stop getting worse. Thus, you create elaborate metaphysical mechanisms between climate change and fascism. Hitler and Trump are merely figure heads for the top dog companies. To prevent the climate from getting worse, and incidentally prevent fascism (a lesser threat), stop demanding the end of capitalism or government, and simply delicense an oil major. You calling the problem classism is just as bad as SCOTUS calling oil companies persons. It is not us against individuals that happen to be paid the most by oil companies, it is us against the oil companies themselves. Even KochIndustries would exist without its namesake. Kill what Koch would die for, KochIndustries.

Universal healthcare is not leftist. Democrats are fighting for universal healthcare. Leftists are fighting for strong unions. Not all unions are bad; fossil fuel unions are bad; and teachers unions are good. There is no clear line between manager and worker; managers do a lot of work essential to their company. Whether the manager is good or bad depends on the company; fossil-fuel managers/workers are bad; non-fossil-fuel managers/workers are good. Republicans want less democracy. Democrats want more democracy. Leftists want less democracy. The difference between leftists and Republicans, the two sides of an Orwellian coin, is that Republicans reduce democracy with consumption, and leftists reduce democracy with labor.

There is no more a correlation between energy use and well being than there is between gdp and energy use or well being and gdp. The reason physicists have graphs is for social reasons that they don't understand, because society is not precise. I'm not an atom in a black body experiment. This is not a zero sum game. The only thing we know for certain is the one thing physicists refuse to bring to consciousness. They are afraid because of the emotion the realization brings. They are afraid of emotion because they think it is contrary to reason. In fact the emotion you feel when I propose to disband an oil company helps you to reason correctly.

Right and Wrong

 A couple of decisions throw this society's stability into question. One time a California judge ruled in a city's rights case that climate is political, not a matter of justice. Other times the justice system has ruled corporations are people. The disrespect for language those decisions demonstrate scares me about whether courts are upholding the constitution that is constituted from language. Of course climate is a matter of justice; indigenous people are the first to demand we keep the oil in the ground to protect water. Of course corporations are not people; not only are they brainless, but they don't even breathe. You could claim the courts were not being literal, but I claim that is disrespectful of the language, and therefore unconstitutional. Why would an institution ostensibly based on truth be non-literal? Math is not literal because there are not words for the things it decides. But there are plenty of words for matters of justice; there is no excuse for courts to be not literal. They are plenty literal when it suits them. If words can be taken out of context, they they can mean literally anything. It is almost certainly a more literal interpretation of the constitution to treat corporations as collectives than to treat them as persons, if only because the constitution consists of language. It is literally impossible to respect the language, and treat a corporation as person. The constitution certainly does not mean to be ignored, so it certainly does not allow collectives to be persons. Similarly with climate justice, if the constitution is not to be disregarded, then we have to interpret it to mean judges must dispense justice, and not defer it to congress. In fact, the judge is dispensing justice by deferring it to congress. I'm certain the citizens in that case felt as ruled against as I did, when there was no justice against the oil company. No justice against an oil company is injustice against the citizens; the judge cannot hide behind congress, and will go down in history as a criminal against humanity. I'm not saying the legal branch of government is inherently bad. I'm just saying that if it wants to survive, it has to rule against oil companies at every opportunity. Just because that would not be sufficient for survival is no excuse. Certainly we could vote an oil company out of existence, and no other action would be needed to stop the climate from getting worse. But we should not have to fight against other victims of oil companies to get there.

Why not Y?

 I left Twitter before the name change; those I followed did not like the change of management. How do I reconcile my premise that CEOs have no control over their company with my departure? To me, it makes sense that a brainless corporation would rebrand itself and change its CEO at the same time; both are smokescreens for the substantive changes it is making. What of the X in other companies ElonTrump has benefitted from? Again, that is more misdirection; the company wants us to believe Musk has control over the company. I suspect the substantive change it is covering up is its promotion of Trump, despite his ouster. Trump represents Republicans, and Republicans represent consumers. Before I joined, and maybe a little after, Twitter allowed underrepresented to release emotions in overrepresented, thus allowing the overrepresented to engage in more rational morality, self-interested or otherwise. An example of self-interested moral reasoning that de-repression of emotion can allow is that closing swimming pools to hurt the underprivileged hurts the privileged too. An example of other-interested moral reasoning that de-repression of emotion can allow is that theorizing about race is hurtful and unnecessary. Twitter became increasingly supportive of consumerism, not by selling us stuff, but by repressing our emotions, thus preventing us from reasoning. Prevention of reasoning can go in two ways, habituation or impulsiveness. Consumers are impulsive, and workers are habitual. Republicans like consumption, and socialists like labor. Democrats like neither of those things; they want voters to be deliberative. Unfortunately, corporations have so much control over the separation of powers, that Democrats cannot do anything surprising, so deliberation is boring; vote blue, no matter who. Corporations dislike change, because it threatens their existence. With each change, one large corporation disappears, and many small corporations take its place in the economy, if not in the industry. I measure the size of a corporation by how much power it has, not by some pretend bottom line. Just as an animal's life is not limited to its own skin, a company's actual bottom line is not restricted to its own books; it extends out into the whole economy. Thus, oil companies are the biggest, and to blame for Democrats not suggesting to eliminate one of them.