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Tom Veatch
Flames of inspiration often leave smoke signals behind.From mine, these.
| Staking Government | How to snake out the blocked pipes of government. |
| Trolling | If you don't know who the turkey is, it's you. A new kind of speech act, trolling, is seen to have a rich and peculiar structure, analysed here using five imputed participants including as follows: true speaker (the troll), acting speaker, true audience, straight audience, and shocked/reactive (trolled) audience. This collaboration elaborates the intentions and moral views of each, and the social consequences. |
| How are we doing? | From Roman democracy, we have come a long way. |
| EQ-test the police! | Cop = Social worker plus gun, not soldier plus rules of engagement. The character you hire for will be the character of your cop community. So let's stop hiring emotional retards. |
| On Hierarchy and Value | Hierarchy and its emotional opposite, Oneness, are explored. How Jordan Peterson agrees with Karl Marx. Why hierarchy is the compassionate, inclusive solution. The geometry of hierarchy. How dominance hierarchy transmutes into admiration hierarchy, creating communities of shared values. Emotion within social hierarchy. |
| Identity | An argument against all identities, not just in politics. |
| Gun Lessons | Mass murders in our gun-crazy society might suggest we think about it a little, instead of not. |
| Explaining the Mystery of Election Parity | An essay after the Bush/Gore fiasco in 2000, describing a dystopian vision
of a static American polity bound to serve corporate interests in a
2 party duopoly, with seemingly little hope of change. Comparing this Y2K perspective, so crystalline, with the remarkable 2016 Trump disruption, makes for a curious read. Premonitions here include (1) that it DID require a wealthy candidate to spurn corporate funding and change things around, (2) that a new 3rd party that I then called 'Spin' DID emerge, and (3) that the forces behind the 2 party system DID arise to crush things back into duopoly again. (Unforeseen comes realignment of the right from Buckley or Reagan conservatism to reality-show populism, powered by internet rage-o-holism, structured by information-siloing and personality-siloing, bound into a cognitive space of parallel, alternative-facts universes of convenience, and poisoned by a rhetoric of trollery.) |
| Easy Taxes vs the Capital Gains Tax Loophole | Against the wrong and stupid tax cut that you get for not working. Every taxpaying voter should know about this, and get rid of it. |
| A Table of Dictators | A partial listing of murderous dictatorships that the US has (that you and I have) paid for over the years |
| Bullets for Dictators | An argument for activism in fighting dictators |
| Starting a web log, 20 years late. | Every day is the same day, today. So why would anyone care what you said relative to just one of them? Yet, sclerotic with self-importance, we do. |
| Tom's Blog | A blog is a terrible idea, but I have one anyway. Lots of fun short topics here. |
| Psychology of Teen Smoking | and how to prevent it |
| The Seattle Viaduct: Fill it, don't Kill it. | An old polemic in a long lost political fight. |
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