BallotsorBullets

Two cheers for exit-as-threat, or dialectical lumpenconservatism

I sure hope Elias Isquith is right about this:

… the Tea Party’s philosophy of government (again, as understood by Salam) has embedded within it an aversion to basic democratic principles that goes far beyond a typical contempt for Washington, politicians and pundits. … He’s describing a childish and essentially anti-political belief that a return to an Articles of Confederation-style U.S. order — in which each state is more of a sovereign unto itself than a member of a larger American whole — will produce 50 mini-nations where everyone basically agrees.

It’s strange to me that someone would object to a pluralistic world in which he could wait months for medical procedures in Bennington while I stock up on assault weapons in Sedona. Call it a patchwork, or an archipelago, whatever you call it we’re dealing with an ambi-ideological concept. Anyway, it must be crushed:

If the basic, irresolvable questions of identity that each generation must answer for itself — What do we value? Whom do we respect? What do we want from each other? What do we demand of ourselves? — are no longer contested, then, really, what’s the point? Just appoint a CEO of State for life, a charismatic technocrat to make sure the trains are running on time, and be done with it.

That isn’t a bad suggestion, but perhaps he doth protest too much. See, it’s not dictatorship he finds so distasteful, it’s that people could peaceably agree to disagree about those questions he says are “irresolvable.” Almost, you know, the opposite of a dictatorship. I asked him on Facebook what he thought about the Hawaiian independence movement, which despite containing the only significant royalist sentiment in America today, is generally supported by the academic left because of its anti-colonial sympathies. I haven’t gotten an answer yet.

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There is no such thing as capitalism

Shot:

Chaser:

Before it is an ideological option, capitalism is a being, with an individual history (and fate). It is not necessary to like it — but it is an it.

Nick Land, Outside In

What is Capitalism? Where do we even begin to define it? When we find Adam Smith describing Capital (as ‘stock’) it already exists. Or does it? Capitalism is believed to be simply the system “in which trade, industry, and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits.” from this we develop a contrary theory ‘socialism‘ – in which they are controlled by public ownership. However, at no point in time does this ideal situation arise; in Smith’s discussion in Wealth of Nations, he documents the effect of tariff changes on wheat prices. That is to say, he documents what is ostensibly a public control on trade. Never do we have a system in which all three of these come completely into the hands of private owners – but who are private owners, anyway? Is a man who serves as an alderman for a time and then goes back to his business a ‘private owner’? Is a King a private owner, or a public owner? Are men like Dick Cheney, who switch between high office politics and high corporate governance private owners? Are they actually public owners?

We can, for some situations, attempt to make a clear delineation. A tariff is a public control over trade, provided it is the government – by which we mean the sovereign and its delegates – that determines the tariff and sees that it is enforced. If the sovereign is a king, we still regard it as a public control in this system; as the king embodies the people or state. But this embodiment, even with democratic sovereigns, is problematic. Granted, in theory it makes sense, but in practice we find regulations pushed by private actors through government to benefit them. Trust busting is notoriously taken on behalf of a monopoly’s potential or real competitors. This is not new – even before there were official incorporated entities like we have, there were private actors using public office and law to benefit themselves. There doesn’t seem to be a non-technical distinction between private and public; or it may be that private and public are not, as we might have assumed, contradictory at all.

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cyberpunk machine

The first conscious machines will probably be on Wall Street

We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity, and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer. In a world operating under this assumption, machines can theoretically have directed cognition, decision-making and consciousness. Even today we see supercomputers owned by financial institutions making trading decisions on behalf of the companies that own them. These are specialized machines that do something that produces similar results to cognition, and the fact that they are specialized thinking machines might lead one to believe that this precludes them from being conscious. I think the opposite is true; human beings are not generalized computing organisms. The machines in question, just like humans, are not general purpose beings, but highly selective imitation devices with an innate dedicated language system.

The financial industry is always on the bleeding edge of technological application. Always. Beyond ticker tape, the telecommunications revolution and mere computer algorithms, today’s Wall Street is the first and perhaps only industry putting artificial intelligence toward actual productive ends. Machine trading, which today mostly falls under high-frequency trading, (HFT) accounts for 73% of US equity trading volume, an increase from 25% of equity trading volume only five years prior. HFT machines make dozens or even hundreds of trades within a second, which far outstrips the ability of a human or any group of humans to make such a decision. The Sharpe ratio, which is used in the financial world to indicate reward against risk, is much higher with HFT than with traditional strategies. Vast profits can be made by these trades being made before others, whether it is a few milliseconds before competing traders, or executing trades before others even realize it. The supercomputers executing these strategies look for various signals, such as volume, volatility, changes in global interest rates and tiny economic fluctuations. But beyond quantitative data, news articles, tweet and other qualitative information accessed through the internet is taken into the calculations by use of natural language processing system that convert mined text into meaning for the machine. A recent example of this artificially intelligent news analysis happened when Associated Press had its twitter account hacked, making a tweet on April 23, 2013, falsely asserting that there was an explosion at the White House. The S&P Index lost $136 billion in a matter of four minutes, though it was recovered just as quickly. Wallace Turbeville notes:

Most trading of securities and derivatives is accomplished using supercomputers wired directly into exchanges and other venues. They operate at trading speeds well below milliseconds so no human is involved. The trades are dictated by artificial intelligence software… pattern recognition software that infers motivations and other characteristics of other traders in the markets to pick which ones to exploit. Another element of the system is software that reads data, including Twitter traffic, for key word combinations so that the supercomputers can fly into action within, let’s say, one ten thousandth of a second of the appearance of the words. I am going to go out on a limb, here – I suspect that a tweet that comes from a “verified” Twitter account and includes “Obama”, “White House”, and “bombs” might qualify as a sell-triggering word combination.

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Screen-Shot-2014-06-27-at-8.42.38-AM-e1403873126449

A brief programming interruption

I know, I know, this is a place for very serious discussion. But Rob and I have been busy taking the piss out of Salon the last few days:

If you’ve been on Twitter at all the last several days, you’ve likely seen some bizarre headlines coming from handle named @Salondotcom. While that seems like progressive site Salon’s real user name, it’s actually a parody account, and it’s been retweeted and praised by media folk across the spectrum.

In just four days of existence, the account has accumulated an impressive roster of fake Salon headlines, parodying the site’s infamous contrarian-at-all-costs progressive commentary on each and every issue.

Have a look here.

Sacred Harp 79: ‘That Old Ship Of Zion’

From 1980 in Florida:

And here’s a funny, swung version from Poland, in 2013, the second year of the Polish convention. They get the hang of the tune eventually:

What ship is this that will take us all home,
Oh, glory hallelujah,
And safely land us on Canaan’s bright shore?
Oh, glory hallelujah.

’Tis the old ship of Zion, hallelujah.

The winds may blow and the billows may foam,
Oh, glory hallelujah,
But she is able to land us all home.
Oh, glory hallelujah.

She landed all who have gone before,
Oh, glory hallelujah,
And yet she is able to land still more,
Oh, glory hallelujah.

If I arrive there, then, before you do,
Oh, glory hallelujah,
I’ll tell them that you are coming up, too,
Oh, glory hallelujah.

Exit / No Exit

Shot:

Chaser:

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.

-GK Chesterton, The Last Hero

This is a developing discussion, of which I feel a great need to take part. As a reactionary-without-portfolio I often find myself in between differing extremes in Outer Right opinion. On the one hand, the concept of Exit is sometimes considered to be “post libertarian” ephemera, which is just a byword for “crypto libertarian” or “insufficiently reactionary”. This is a way of saying it is an idea that does not belong to our Thede or Folk or Religion; foreign and verboten. In this case, we have more of “being in the service of the ideas of foreigners.” Given the recent history of information warfare (Alex Jones’ Infowars site specializes in creating poisonous rumors to insinuate their worldview into the common consciousness) it is not an unwise criticism.

On the other hand, we have among actual Libertarians such an extreme position on Exit as to view it a good over all other goods (see Slate Star Codex’s archipelago.) That logic may lead to a perverse place: A world of quasi-sovereigns that cannot prevent people from leaving their own borders, but where no one can exit the greater entity. This issue is typical of monomania – without another balancing principle, trying to maximize the desired thing often results in negating it. Take for instance the current movement for sexual liberation: in order for some to maximize their own sexual liberation they must by definition restrict the liberation of others (in this case, women->men.) It is the strange idea of ‘guaranteeing’ exit that creates the distortion; this is like if Gideons put bibles everywhere thinking they could guarantee each person access to Jesus Christ. Even if this were true, this access might be to their condemnation, not to their salvation. Imagine a man who has just murdered someone going into a hotel and finding the bible, then reading Revelation. Maximizing one good at the expense of others decreases overall goodness.

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