When we think of pirates we picture them with eye patches, bandanas and at sea. We often see them as having no connection to anything in our own times or outside the world's oceans. But there is a direct connection between:
Offshoots of Piracy | |
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And on a more humorous note:
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It is easy to get confused about the founders. They worked together to create the constitution, but North and South never really understood each other well. Philadelphia, Boston, and New York formed one axis. But the other axis stretched from Georgia to Virginia. They joined to fight the British. Without Unity, there would have been no United States and the States of the North would have gone from Colonies to neo-colonies and never escaped oppression. That unity was formed around economic, cultural and familial ties. But it also was formed around a willingness to embrace the concepts of Federalism, Democratic Republicanism, commonwealth and Democracy.
Some of those principles came from history and philosophers. But some of the sources were more intimate. Formal influences came from experience with the Dutch, the Swiss, Italian City States & Ancient Greece. They also came from enlightenment writers. But additional experience was informed by our own maritime history with piracy and privateering, conscription and militias. And our experience with neighbors like our own Indigineous.
The Indigenous practiced forms of Democracy and Federation, that may have influenced the formation of our country. Politifact quotes Jon W. Parmenter's The Edge of The Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701:
“It is highly probable that Anglo-Americans during the revolutionary era looked to Haudenosaunee governance as a model of a successful collective polity, and borrowed elements of Haudenosaunee practice in developing revolutionary American constitutional governments,”
Politifact also cites a speech given in 1744, by Canassatego, an Onondaga chief, to representatives from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia at a treaty conference in Lancaster, Pa.:
“We heartily recommend Union and a good Agreement between you our Brethren,...Never disagree, but preserve a strict Friendship for one another, and thereby you, as well as we, will become the stronger. Our wise Forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighbouring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.”
However, it wasn't Democracy that made the Iroquois so powerful it was the concepts of Federation. The viral meme about the Iroquois conflates Democratic, Republican and Federation principles. The “E Pluribus Unum” concept is what the Iroquois were talking about and what Benjamin Franklin and others was referencing with his famous and somewhat brutal quote that if the Iroquois:
“capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union," then the new nation of European origin should be able to as well.”
So the idea of Democracy was not central to the indigineous influence on our founders. They were worried about what happens when States start out in disunity; they go to war. Federation is about avoiding and mitigating conflict.
“The concept [of Federation is] based on peace and consensus rather than fighting."
I've found compelling evidence that Robert and Governeuer Morris were pirates. And Hamilton was not perfect either. But I've also found evidence they were nationalists, just as patriotic as the Southerners, abolitionists and wanted a unified nation not a confederacy. His work with Madison and Jefferson gave us a Strong nation that still survives.
Had we been a loose confederacy, the Civil war would have started sooner and never ended. Fractured states are subject to external predation, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Hamilton wanted direct election of the President. He was able to stop the Congress from making the selection of the President by the State Governors or Congress, but the Electoral College was a compromise with Southern Politicians who did not want popular sovereignty.
He also gave us a strong independent judiciary, which has saved us, even when it has been somewhat corrupt at times. As we can see right now, a Judiciary subject to executive and legislature, in the hands of a corrupt factional legislation and executive, would be the death knell of our Republic.
The General Welfare clause has allowed our country to serve its people instead of its oligarchs.
And Morris was the loudest, and pretty much the solo, voice against slavery at the Convention. Had he been listened to we might have avoided the Civil War.
So these fellows, who in some ways were pirates, learned some of their appreciation for liberty from that. Robert Morris ran a pirate fleet during the Revolution. Like I said, pirates tended to be more democratic. Privateers, not so much. As I've noted before Thom Paine also learned something about democracy from crewing on Privateers. The ones that treated people fairly also operated more democratically -- and more like free pirate ships.
Just some thoughts from an article I've been reading.
When we think of pirates we don't usually think of lawyers. We think of hard men with eye patches and peg legs. The basis of all piracy is high seas theft and private warfare. The two have always overlapped. We romanticize piracy because the foundation of many wealthy family fortunes is in piratical behavior. All pirates seek loot, wealth, power, and to fight enemies on the Seas. Privateers confine their piracy to enemies of their country. Pirates don't. But it's not that simple. The legalization of private warfare that enables piracy, makes an incentive to corrupt law, corrupt piratical behavior, and legalized theft.
Today is the last day of the year (I wrote this at the end of 2018). I started to watch "Atlas Shrugged" on a lark. Folks often mistake young libertarians for liberals. Looking at NETFLICKS promotions this morning I realized, someone there is very so! They offer the Cheesy, updated, modern version of 'Atlas Shrugged.' I've tried to read it over and over again but it is a cheesy story with a cheesy plot & a misleading message. It is poorly written, unresearched. Worse the story is offensive to any understanding of reality, causality and not in a good way. This was like watching a Superman versus Bizarroman flick.
The story starts with people demanding work. The headlines ask, "who cares about the inventories", while noting gasoline shortages. It shows images of black people striking for a Job. It has people saying "there is plenty of oil in the ground." It sounds like a Donald Trump campaign commercial. Trouble is, these are management decisions. She blames common folks for the responsibilities of her heros in management.
The logical error that Ayn Rand committed was that of ascribing false causality to the dysfunction of reality. In the world of Atlas shrugged nobody works & that is the fault of,... drum roll ... workers. Management is somehow not responsible for their own decisions. She sees the pirates as heros while calling those workers looters.
And the plot lines act like we still have competitive rail lines. In real life Passenger rail were looted & abandoned to airlines, bus lines & freight rail years ago, by the entrepeneurs. Those remaining were given to the State via bankruptcy courts. Mexico is promoting jobs not nationalizing rail. She describes a world of Monopolists & pirates, & then makes them heros.
None of this was new. But what I found fascinating was the Pirate Motiffe. As depicted the line "who is John Galt" was a recruitment call to managers & elites to desert their posts & work for John Galt & join his war.
The Book talks about allies of John Galt making war on US Shipping. It became obvious to me that she was advocating privateering. Anything goes capitalism is pirate capitalism, given a thin veneer of respectability by relabeling private warfare, private government of public assets and theft as legal privateering.
It also occured to me that the owners strike was really a lock out. Especially after rereading the end. Scientists don't lie about the safety of "rearden metal", but con artists do. Years ago I wanted to write a parallel story where the safety testers were the heros & rearden metal full of plutonium & radioactive metals. In bizaaroland exec's & managers sabotaging their own business, are heros.
Trump thinks he is John Galt. He doesn't need "gubbornment" so he can just "shut it down" to get his way. To his thinking it should be run for, by & of oligarchs. He loves the Russian model!
Galts Gulch is Panama or Cyprus banks. Treason is just business. After all it is our own fault we don't live in a libertarian paradise like Somalia.
Ayn Rand was advocating thieves rules.
This was written 1/1/2019, for some reason when I updated it, it changed the date.
Maryland, following Virginia's lead, auguring similar failures and inequities, is moving to put in toll lanes as it seeks to expand 270 to accommodate exurban commuters from Frederick County and further. At the same time, it is depreciating it's already depreciated commuter train service. Lexus lanes sound attractive until you study their full implications.
Lexus lanes are premised on notions that private monarchal government is somehow better than public government, “privateering” of public infrastructure. This false argument was setup in the 1880s and has been in operation since then. It is very lucrative for the Privateers, not so much for actual capitalists and workers. The results of privatization often look good in the immediate aftermath. But they rarely are sustained. This is because the capital and labor necessary to sustain private systems is often secondary in importance to profiteering.
Worse, the financial benefits of privatization are illusory for other reasons.
Those are the theoretical reason why Lexus lanes and similar privatization schemes fail. What is happening in Virginia illustrates how that plays out. Nothing like paying 60$ to use lexus lanes during rush hour times. They will claim they aren't price gouging. But does anyone believe them?
The irony of the times is that what is happening to us in America, is not new. Like the spooky refrain in the Battleship Galactica reboot,
“It has happened before”
The only real difference is that some of us understand what is happening to us.
In the movie Agora, Hypatia, then, like now:
“is a 2009 Spanish English-language historical drama film directed by Alejandro Amenábar and written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The biopic stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, a mathematician, philosopher and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it.”
The movie Agora is fictional. We don't know for sure how advanced science was in 415 AD, but we do know that much was lost to history during that time. Thus the movie is probably is more accurate than its critics like to admit.
”Surrounded by religious turmoil and social unrest, Hypatia struggles to save the knowledge of classical antiquity from destruction. Max Minghella co-stars as Davus, Hypatia's father's slave, and Oscar Isaac as Hypatia's student, and later prefect of Alexandria, Orestes.”
The secrets of the PaRDeS, religious interpretation, lay behind most of the religious traditions of the Common Era, and those secrets include deep psychological insights into the value and uses of myth, narrative, emotion and belief.
A thin elite understood the world, almost as well as educated people understand the world now. Deep understandings buried in myth and fable enabled a thin elite to live lives of value and learning. Mystery religions taught people to understand deep psychological truths within themselves through meditation, study, and parsing out the allegorical meaning within religious text. The myths themselves were of value as entertainment and the fantasies gave comfort to the sick, dying, enslaved and suffering.
The Gnostic bible texts used the power of interpretation to preach equality, make people see nuances of reality and open them up to enlightenment. Such texts are only secret because those reading them don't read past the fictional vehicle to their inner truth.
These Bishops also understood the tools that we know today as propaganda and marketing, and how to use religion to manipulate people. Homilies meant to comfort and sick and dying, could turn people into fanatics, or make them angry at rivals or enemies. Any tool can be used for good or evil purposes and the early church used its power to manipulate people. The early church was, for the well educated bishops and priests who converted to Christianity, in part, to ride its opportunities for wealth and power, such a tool.
The Romans had a problem. Religion had been chaotic, paganism was losing its power to motivate people, and the Romans needed to control their empire. Christianity appealed to people who were oppressed, enslaved, and to whom the old Gods were no longer speaking. Ironically this was a mostly urban phenomena, so the Bishops accommodated rural beliefs even as they sought to craft a religion that enhanced their power. In the process they created a bigger problem.
Unfortunately the tools of myth and interpretation were used to turn people into fanatics, demonize rivals and stir up mobs to attack enemies of Christiandom. Those early Christians taught people to be fanatic, and the fanatics burned the books that had made Roman Culture tolerable to the educated. Whether they were sincere, true believers, or simply manipulative sociopaths, but the result was not peace.
Instead people fought over religious issues. They converted and then fought with "heretics." They attacked fellow citizens as Pagans, Jews, or members of heretical religions. The internal wars were what made Rome weak. Dropping standards of hygeine. Baths shut down as "pagan" followed by plagues caused by parasite vectors and spread due to poor hygeine. The Vandals may have looted and burned Rome, but they were fighting fights motivated as much by their Arianism's conflict with Catholicism as by tribal identity. Religion enhanced tribalism. Tribalism used religion.
The replacement of Graeco-Roman culture with Christian culture was led by people who understood secrets and misused them. As a result, the secrets were burned or buried with the books and educated people, like Hypatia, who understood them. The movie depicts the Barbarians at the Gate, as being ordinary Roman Citizens in the Gate. That is all too accurate about now, every bit as much as then. The author Joshua J. Mark in the Ancient History Encyclopedia writes:
“The anti-intellectual stance of the early church is attested to by early Christian writers themselves and so, if the Christians in the film are depicted as ignorant it is because they were so by choice. St. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 CE) was openly hostile to classical learning and claimed that all the important values and thoughts expressed by writers like Plato were stolen from the Christian Bible’s Old Testament.” [ancient-eu]
The early Christian apologist Tertullian (c. 160-230 CE) also rejected classical learning and famously stated:
“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from "the porch of Solomon," who had himself taught that "the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart." Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.” Tertullian
The Barbarians were inside the gate.
The Mueller report did not exonerate Trump. But he, his co-conspirators and co-dependents in the GOP, with a little help from the corrupt Attorney General William Pelham Barr, created a propaganda campaign to make it look like it did. They succeeded enough so that Trump decided he'd beat the rap and been "exonerated." Instead Trump shakes down the newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky, in a shakedown over delivering promised military assistance. He does this, knowing that Ukraine is fighting trench war within it's country on the border with its Donbas provence, where the Russians have Tanks and military forces and regularly shoot at any Ukrainian who raises his head out of the trenches or happens to be in the path of an artillery shell. The USA promised to let them buy Javelin Anti-tank Rockets. Trump deliberately held up those missiles, after the State Department had certified that they'd complied with anti-corruption requirements to try to force investigations into 3 subjects:
It turns out there is a whole lot of corruption going on. I was trying to draft mock up articles of impeachment based on what I knew when we found out about what Trump is doing in Ukraine. It just keeps getting more surreal. The latest news is that Giuliani is in Ukraine making a movie “documentary” about all this, a sort of Citizens United 2.0 Biden edition. That Barr is going around the work trying to put the USA Intel community on trial, put the 5 eyes intel sharing agreement into the shredder, and dig up dirt on those who informed the Mueller investigation so they can be discredited, prosecuted or driven out of office.
