History . . . and now

Under (literally, under) imperialism/capitalism (and all Empires use money as power), things are done *to* us.

Then, the bullying mutates so that things (apparently) in Welfare States (like Bismark's Welfare State: oh! So! Egalatarian! Not!) are done *for* us (not).

Then the mutant of control has to morph again so that, as in the present era of (fake) consultations, things are done, not, to us, or for us, but *with* us (not).

Finally, once we have replaced Imperialism, Capitalism, State 'Communism' (not), Big-House-Matron-knows-Best Welfare State-ism *and* refused to 'Take The Survey' offered to us by Our (not) Housing Association, etc . . .

We will have produced The Wellbeing Society.

For The Common Good.

Oh happy day!

By Tuesday!

Woo-hoo!

in short

Capitalism: the use of money for social control.

And of debt for personal and family control.

My Optimism

Where we are, now, after the Chief Rabbi and The Archbishop's joint, coordinated assault

Co-option, which always happens, can be minimised if we are:

    a) clear in our objectives (system change from exploitation/capitalism to Co-operative Careship/Co-operative Socialism),

   b) how we plan to achieve the change (nonviolence&genuine participatory democracy) and,

   c), crucially, we, briskly, 'keep moving the flag further out': on all three fronts:

        - the politics of protest and awareness-raising,

        - the politics of practical demonstration and good-news sharing,

        - and, of supreme importance, the politics of political proposition, engagement, proposition and push-to-enactment.

Back in the 1960's, when I was a teen-ager, we lost because we got stopped: the 'sit-ins' got infiltrated by the drug-dealing CIA/MI5/etc paid co-opers.

 . . . Because we were not clear on what we wanted then.

Nowadays, the key point is that the comprehensive policy mix that constitutes the (living) plan for Co-operatiive Socialism was not known then.

It is now.

So, then, in the 60's, protest floundered into the 70's co-option.

 . . .  and we ended up with Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet.

It's different now: we know what has to be changed, what its feasible replacement is.

 . . . and we have the necessary public support among us, the 88%.

And jitters among the 10% (ie, capitalisms' Praetorian Guard)

Hence my optimism.

The time is right.

We are the people we have been waiting for.

another take on chemistry and politics

I recollect that the terms Left and Right arose during one or other of the French Revolutions as regards where the Reactionaries (Les Droitists, I guess) and the Progressives sat with rezpect to the Speaker of L'Assembie.

Purely, then an accident following on from whomever sat down, first, in that Chambre.

Now, as to your enquiry concerning Chemistry . . .

The answer is: Everything!

First chemistry is the study and description of everything in the Universe: both 'What is' and 'What is becoming'.

One of the developments in my life-time (and beneficially-so) is that we chemists now include 'the arrow of time' when write chical equations. And even include enthalpic information as to whether enery is released or absorbed.

So, for example, photosynthesis will be written, approximately in a word equation, as:

Carbon dioxide  +  water  +  (light) energy -->  cabohydrates +  oxygen

An Encapsulation That Stands, I think, The Test of Time

The following is a repetition (with a few subedits and an update re Tim Pearce), of an earlier conversation (ie from 2014).

I think that it is, still, a useful encapsulation:

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More on that political diagram

and on Personal Paradigms, too!

I hope it helps.

Thx Ley 4 yr comment.  I add in some of 'mine' at the >j pointers:

Ley : When referring to time, the general accepted method is ''the coil/the spiral''.

>j Interesting!  The idea of a spiral of time is certainly far better than the circle of time 'What goes around, comes around', 'History repeats itself', etc.

In the English-speaking world we read text from the left-hand side to the right-hand side: that's why I prefer to put the Progressive end of the horizontal axis in 'my' diagram on the right – while, yes, the progressive side is often referred to as the 'Left'.

And, correspondingly, the Reactionary (Right politically) as the history end of the horizontal axis.

Incidentally, as I understand it, the political left/right denoters is an artefact of a French Revolutionary parliament: the progressives sat on the left-hand side of the speaker, with the reactionaries on the right-hand side of the speaker.  My guess is that the first person to sit down defined where his friends and opponents sat – it would have been more helpful for 'my' diagram if it had happened otherwise!

Incidentally, 'my' diagram goes back to a posting on a 90's listsev called Co-opnet. My friend and fellow co-operator, Tim Pearce (now, sadly, deceased) pointed out that the Political Compass site had prefigured 'mine'.

Time (as it were!) has moved on and I've found many of these 'two-dimensional/Four quadrant' maps – and I've tried to cross-correlate them in a Pdf of a Powerpoint in the papers at www.interestfreemoney.org , called 'Emotions, Personalities and Politics'.

Ley : (Also, I'm typically bad at explaining things without visual aid, so please bear with me).

>j  Yes – it will be a good deal easier when we can all write/say directly onto Facebook – this world is still obsessed with speech (parliaments etc) whereas, as a chemist I much prefer symbolic language and diagrams . . .

So, back to your spiral of time:

Ley :  It's like a point that starts in the center, starts going out like a circle, and then goes round and round itself. The reaon for this is that the brain will then read it like a clock, and thus it helps processing of the information.

>j  Nice!

Another point is that in thermodynamics (a part of chemistry that tackles the 'why' and 'how' of chemical processes – including life processes and the way the universe works – including how/why it is expanding) a key 'Law' (ie a Truth that is so until we disprove it) is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: a Law that is sometimes referred to as 'The Arrow of Time'.

This says (as does your spiral) that the universe moves on – that going back is not possible (the Second Law has much more to say, but for now it's this time aspect that's important here).

So, whether that forward direction of time is spiral shaped (hard to draw on a computer screen!) or linear, I'm not sure.

But, in a political sense, the arrow can, as in 'my' diagram, be pushed backwards in a reactionary direction, politically – at immense cost in terms of natural forces (entropy, enthalpy, etc) – ie in an unnatural way.

And that certainly seems the case if I look at the past 50 years – from the positives of the 60's to the catastrophe of 'now'.

Ley :  The other reason your graph falls short is that you have the right and left political axis inverted, which makes this ungrokkable (being grokkable means ''to understand without explaination''). Because of the inversion, the viewer has actually read the graph and 'remember' the inversion, taking away from the impact and time put into self-debating the points you make.

>j Agreed somewhat, but I still think that this effort is worthwhile.

Let me give you a hazy recollection: at one time electricity was deemed (quite arbitrarily to flow from the positive pole of a battery (+) to the negative pole (-).  The experimental reality seems, better, to be that electrons (which are negatively-charged – negatively in an arbitrary sense, too) flow from the negative pole (negative since it is populated by ad excess of negatively-charged electrons) to the positive pole (positively-charged since it has a deficit of electrons over the positively-charged atomic nuclei there).

This is a characteristic of human learning - we often get it 'right' but 'back to front!

(BTW a) a good way of thinking about anything is to, first examine it 'back-to-front' and then at right-angles to what is being proposed.

For example, capitalism says that owning economic resources ('property') is a good thing.  The reverse, that owning economic resources ('property') is a *bad* thing is worthwhile considering – as is the perpendicular concept (perhaps) that  that owning economic resources ('property') is neither a good thing nor a bad thing (but a nonsense!).

Ley : I really do think you have a good idea, and I really appreciate the good natured intentions. I just think it's worth making a second revision or experimenting with it so that it's more accessible to everyone on an immediate basis.

j> Thx! In those papers at www.interestfreemoney.org, I've placed an essay called 'How Rigid is your Paradigm?'

That points out that human knowledge is better discussed a paradigm rather than belief, that paradigms evolve – sometimes by paradigm shifts of direction and sometime, even, paradigm inversions (ie that which we thought was right has to be inverted by 180 degrees).

The story of phlogiston and oxygen is a good example: at one time chemists thought that fuels released phlogiston into the atmosphere when they burnt, whereas the oxygen theory says/shows that oxygen if combined from the atmosphere when fuels burn.

Oh, and that essay 'introduces' the idea that we all have a personal paradigm.

'My' personal paradigm is extended by your comment that time is/may be spiral not linear – or even jerky (in either a spiral or linear sense – maybe as the arrows on 'my' political diagram speculates!

And, I guess that's what we're partly here to do – to learn, share, give!

Ley : (Regarding Grokkable, it's also that sensation you get when you see something and it just ''makes sense'', and you wonder why others haven't done it that way before. Intuitive is another similar word).

The Past and The Future

History and the future

My friend, Alphée Michaud, points out that the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons are war-loving bullies (I paraphrase: I hope he doesn't mind).

So I offered the following history:

We, the indiginous English, were left, still here: as before their arrival, when the Romans left, about 500AD.

Quickly, the various Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived from eastern Denmark, as now is.

Then the other Northmen, The Normans, took over, five hundred years' later in 1066AD.

Then the usurers took over, five hundred years' later, in 1545.

All through this, there were indiginous people in England who did the work.

Not the fighting.

Though we did try fighting in the 1640's ('The English Civil War') but quickly realised that war, violence, revolution simply replaces one set of bosses for another.

So, by 1918, we'd managed to get the other route, the vote ('the ballot box, not the bomb'), more-or-less completed (the poorer women had to wait another ten years: to allow the bully women to take control of 'womens' politics').

But, of course, the danger for the bosses was that we, the indiginous English, along with the poorer immigrants, would vote capitalism into oblivion.

So, in 1974, the bosses worked out that if they made voting pointless (by imposing the EU on us) then we'd be put back in our place: which is what Thatcher, Blair and Cameron&Clegg did: all capitalist-funded.

So, now, here we are: we the indiginous English, telling the capitalists' bullies (the Tories, Fibs, New Labour and the Nationalists) that we don't want to be ruled by capitalism in Europe.

Next, we will tell them that we don't want to be ruled by capitalism here, either.

Hence our plan for no-bosses: the living plan for Co-operative Socialism.

Thus: Year 0 the romans arrived, 500 years later they left and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived, then 500 years later the Normans arrived, then 500 years later the usurers took over, then 500 years' later (ie now) we'll have got rid of all of them.

By implementing the no-bosses, living plan for Co-operative Socialism!

Quite straightforward, really!

This election and some likely outcomes

Time for some courage.

Is any of the following true?

This election and some likely outcomes
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As to who might win here, I reckon it's fifty-fifty. Labour will gain votes. Especially since the BBC is anti-Brexit and, so anti-Boris.

So,

a) if the Tories win, Jeremy and John will be toast and Labour will likely become a Remain, Communist-lite irrelevance.

b) If Labour win, it will also become a Communist-lite Remain Party.

But in power.

That will create a puzzle for capitalism: it won't try to sink a Boris-led Brexit if he wins (he's their man) so he'll say,  'See, I told you it wouldn't be a catatrophe.'

And, then, he'll push on with the poor-bashing neocon agenda.

Which would mean the the Labour Remainers will say, 'See, poor people, we told you so: vote for us and, in four years' time we'll reapply for EU Membership (which is what the capitalists want).

Should Labour win, the Remainers will fiddle a Remain, poor people will join right-wing populism and then bloodshed.

Or, before all that, there will, in the next month be a surge for Co-operative Socialism, a Labour and Co-operative government will be elected, then, either they will implement it and capitalism will try to crush us, and The Commonwealth will have to come to our aid.

Or, they won't implement it and there will be riots followed by a Military coup.