I misread the word “affluent” as “effluent” in this article twice, and that was wickedly appropriate.

A completely unrelated thought: if housing prices in large cities continue their upward trend, the world is going to look like it does pre-collapse in Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy not too far down the pike.

One of the most disappointing experiences since I’ve been paying attention to politics (which for me was around 1982 or so) has been to watch people I formerly thought of as intelligent and progressive array behind a warmongering neoliberal.

No, I’m not talking about Trump.

I’m talking about Hillary Clinton.

One of the reasons I started researching how ideas dominate the discourse and how other ideas are eradicated is from this experience, as I realized that even people who thought they remained untainted and unsullied by neoliberal modes of thought were in fact some of the people most in thrall to them. Prior to this being made so apparent, I’d written a little about how there was no discourse possible outside of the neoliberal one but that was just an intellectual examination.

But the realization became a much deeper one with watching bizarre behavior from Sarah Kendzior (and many others) who insists on believing despite all the statistics so easily available that the Sanders campaign was the resurgence of the KKK and was only supported by white men. The numbers just don’t bear this out. The true divide was by age. (You can always tell you are on the right track the proper appellation an ideology when people insist that the word not be used any longer, as with Kendzior and her supporters and the word “neoliberal.” Just as with racists and the “I’m not racist, but….”)

Ok, let’s rein this back in.

The evidence is overwhelming. Arguing that neoliberal thought hasn’t captured everyone is impossible, and “captured” isn’t even the right word as being “captured” implies for most that there is somewhere else to run. In this case, all I see is that those who believe they are fleeing from it run right back into the wolf’s mouth all the while thinking that they are free.

By the way, this even applies to me. There is no complete extrication from neoliberal ideas. Scientists claim brainwashing doesn’t exist, and the movie kind indeed does not; but this kind very much does. To break out of it — even a little — I have to imagine as hard as I possibly can that I’m a 15th Century Incan whose economy and cosmos operates so very differently that “neoliberalism” would be an inconceivable atrocity to living a good life, and that it would not make the least bit of sense as a mode of sustaining a civilization.

And then, it only barely works and only while I’m actively attempting that metempsychosis. Otherwise, I’m just as prone to “market solutions” and believing that living no other way is possible, with neoliberalism’s insistence of it is the natural state, with it as the tabula rasa of the universe itself, and that humans haven’t lived in hundreds of different societies of thousands of different sorts of social arrangements over hundreds of thousands of years.

Has ever a mode of discourse been so dominant as the one we have now? Has ever one so precluded and demolished other methods of inquiry, especially outside of a large religion?

Alas, I am doing a poor job of expressing what I’m attempting to state.

So let me try again: the ideas of neoliberalism have successfully swallowed up entire arenas of human thought and endeavor that were once seen as being outside such considerations. The reification of these ideas is “privatization” and treating the market as if were some actual entity, a Platonic ideal of human society.

But there are three other levels (at least) to what I’m actually concerned with. The first more surface-level one is that ideas and practices that successfully work in other countries and cultures and have done so for many years are seen as laughable, ridiculous, and so absurd as to not even be worth discussing. But again, this is just the alluvium.

The bedrock below is much more interesting, and that is the almost-unavoidable tendency that even when someone realizes that they are having a reflexive neoliberal reaction to then declare another solution that is just as firmly embedded in that accepted dogma while believing that they are rebelling against it.

That and the level below that (which I don’t yet have proper words for) is what I’m actually interested in. Not to trivialize mental illness, but in many ways neoliberalism’s adherents (which is in reality nearly everyone) seem to have the symptoms of a mental illness brought on by trauma, or the threat thereof. Or perhaps at least the behavior of a cult member before attempted deprogramming.

Oh, this is getting way too long.

In short, I’m arguing in the realm of politics (though that’s what I’m actually least concerned with but provides a toehold) that the rejection of candidates like Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein is a reflexive reaction, no different than how at the end of 1984 Winston Smith is no longer simulating love for and utter devotion to Big Brother — he is actually and deeply experiencing it as a reality with no alternative even possible to consider.

The only economic reason for extraterrestrial invasion would be for permanent colonization. There would not be another.

Not that everything need be governed by economics, of course. Weird alien religions might be at play.

But the most likely reason we’d be invaded from without is for colonization after some civilization has destroyed their home world — as we will likely do to ours. Fortunately for any habitable planets out there, we have no starfaring capabilities nor are we likely to develop any within the next 500 years.

Rest easy, though — the fact there is no archaeological evidence of past invasions implies the probability of that occurring is extremely low. It is not a real risk.

But it is more fun to think about than the fact that we are far, far more likely to do all the hard work of extinction and extermination of ourselves to ourselves.

Maybe the aliens are just letting that play out.

Found a really interesting-looking book I’m going to read this weekend.

Gonna have to drop some of the other books I’m reading as my brain is now too overloaded.

This book is paused, for now, though it is exceedingly good.

Aren’t you impressed with all the very smart books I read? Probably wouldn’t be if I listed all the YA I read, too.

Saw these charts today in a tweet.

Someone should really show that to Kevin Drum because he just can’t understand why young people wouldn’t want to vote for more neoliberalism and war. The Millennials have perfect lives, according to him.

The charts disagree.

So I’ve been doing research on how certain ideas develop and then dominate the discourse, squeezing out all others. I doubt I’ll ever publish it. It’s just for my own interest. It’s the kind of thing I do all the time in one way or another, but I’m not an academic so no one will care even if the scholarship is excellent, anyway. (Wouldn’t a world without pervasive credentialism be nice?)

But I’ve been skimming through or sometimes reading dozens of older economics books to trace the genesis and development of ideas over time. I classify any economics books over twenty years old as “older” for my purposes.

Noticed this today in The Next Twenty-five Years of Public Choice, Charles K. Rowley, Friedrich Schneider (auth.), Charles K. Rowley, Friedrich Schneider, Robert D. Tollison (eds.) as a chapter title:

“Health care, education and the cost disease: A looming crisis for public choice”

So I read a little. Here’s what I found.

If the citizens of these countries are willing to do what is necessary for the supply of educational, health care and other related services to keep up with the expansion in overall economic output made possible by rising productivity, then, if my analysis is correct, a difficult choice will be required: either ever more of gross national product will have to be channeled through the public sector, with all the problems we know that to entail; or, alternatively, these services will have to be transferred to private enterprise, in fields where private business firms can hope to succeed only if granted an (improbably) immunity from the temptation of unwise governmental interference.

Nice false dichotomy the author has going there.

But it was indeed an accurate prediction and creation of the future; that is exactly what happened. (Of course to some extent it was already occurring, but has greatly accelerated since 1993.)

Impressed with this?

You shouldn’t be. Yes, he’s quick on the hammer but he’s shooting blanks at balloons less than 10 feet away. I could teach myself to do that in a few days because it just involves pulling the hammer back quickly.

There is no skill in this, really. Literally anyone with normal motor functioning with some time and some blanks could learn this.

If you want to read about someone who could really shoot, check out Annie Oakley.

A friend of mine said this, and it’s very astute (because she is): “Goddamn so much politics is old people’s housing prices.”

At least 70% of the recent and invidious primary imbroglio can be explained by that one statement.

I’m the same way as this person about math.

In every other field, concepts slide naturally into my mind and I can manipulate them however they want, like fitting a bunch of Lego blocks together to make limitless possibilities.

But math is like constructing a Lego set on a picnic table outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. I grope blindly in the pouring rain for the first piece, and finally put it in place, but by the time I’ve found the second piece and move to connect it to the first piece, the first piece has blown away and is nowhere to be found, and the instructions are sopping wet, and the picnic table has just been carried away by a tornado.

Part of it just that I’m not interested in it and it is taught really poorly almost everywhere. But the other factor (heh) is that I’m just absolutely terrible at it, and it feels to me just like the above extended metaphor of the storm and the picnic table.

Thousands of hours spent on math and I’ve learned really nothing. Not for lack of trying. It just is all meaningless garbage to me at the non-conceptual level; a language I will never understand and is so far from anything I can understand that I can’t even discern it as a language.

I wrote about the Miller Analogies Test yesterday. I score 4 1/2 standard deviations above average on that test, which is somewhere around a 160+ IQ. (Has in most people an extremely high correlation to other IQ tests, which is why all high-intelligence societies accept it.)

Yet you give me a math-ish IQ test, and will reliably I score at a 70 IQ or so. People start trying to fit me with helmets so I don’t accidentally hurt myself after I take one of those.

I do wish I had the math ability that others of similar intelligence seem to possess, but it’s like imagining being able to fly under my own power. It’s just not going to happen. I’ve studied so much math in so many different ways for so many years that I know this is true. Sometimes the universe just is how it is.

People say things are “impossible” because in their limited vision they cannot foresee them occurring.

But consider that many people can’t foresee what they will have for dinner tomorrow.