A Path Forward

A Path Forward

Happy Thursday!

Just a reminder that this blog is not about punditry but solutions.

This letter is an open letter to Antifada.

Dear Antifada,

Hi! Just wanted to put a "Hi!" out there.

Here are my solutions to the question, how do we find a political path forward in 2018?

1. Practice what you preach.
2. Form an MGO (micro-modular governing organization).

Those are the solutions, what follows is the argument for those solutions.

Why Antifada?

I'm familiar with Antifada from the connection with Sam Seder's, "Majority Report" on Youtube.

Before the solutions argument I'd like to give argument for why Antifada.

I listen to the "Majority Report" about once per week or so. I've been familiar with Sam since his days on Air America, and yet I have never been a regular follower. Sam has a political encyclopedic insight that merits his position. I listen to Sam to be educated by his knowledge. However, I do not listen regularly because of the constant mocking and derision.

I am not sending "Majority Report" this open letter because Sam and Michael do not promote solutions. In addition they practice what I call the politics of dismissiveness. For example, they dismiss Sam Harris. Sam Harris has all the flaws attributed to him. Current Affairs magazine gave a lengthy, detailed, well-thought-out  take down of Sam Harris that I agree with. However, Sam's well-being agenda for rebooting moral structure beyond religion is right-on and an experiment worth trying. Sam Seder and Michael Brooks will never be able consider such ideas because they practice the politics of dismissiveness where someone like Sam Harris espouses objectionable, unreasonable, or offensive ideas then that person is completely dismissed. They cannot separate the wheat from the chaff because they cannot get past the chaff. I listen to Sam Harris because Sam has a solution in his well-being agenda and he promotes it constantly. However flawed Sam Harris is otherwise, I give props to Sam for constantly promoting a solution that in my estimation is well-founded and worth exploring as a society.

I'm sure if I were to ask Sam Seder and Michael Brooks if they have any solutions to today's political foundational problems they would say yes. However, unlike Sam Harris, these solutions are not the core thesis of the their work. Best I can tell the Majority Report is just about monetizing political commentary. That's fine. It is a necessary political component and the reason I listen. 

However, when I have listened to Jaime I did not get the same sense of total dismissiveness. Over time Jaime has had asked questions that reflected someone searching for solutions and not just clever criticism. Yesterday I was tooling around Jaime's Twitter time-line and found a solution tweet near the top. That solution was simply stated:  global socialism. Well met!

Good. And that's why this open letter is to Antifada and not the Majority Report. Antifada is looking for a path forward to a solution of global socialism. I have no idea what the Majority Report solution is if there is one.

In Jaime's Twitter time-line I also saw a question: how do we politically move forward with the urgency commensurate required of climate change?

Here you go.

Practice what you preach

A path forward can be found by practicing what we preach. Richard Burton  was a well-known writer before he was a well-known actor. He also lived in the 19th century and as well as the 20th century. The 19th century Burton had no use for journalists. Or better stated, Burton had no use for critics who sat behind a desk. Burton's slamming critics for just being nay-sayers is a time honored trope that critics are invalid in their criticism because they've never done anything. What does a movie critic know about movies if they have never acted, directed, produced, or otherwise made a movie? And there is a certain truth to that. The experienced, educated perspective has more bite than just an educated perspective. A path forward can be found by going out in the world.

A path forward can also be found by separating creativity from editing. Writer's block is a situation where a path forward cannot be found. The common advice given to remove writer's block is to separate creativity from editing. Sit down and write in a stream of consciousness until every single idea and motivation is on paper. Then go back and edit. This is how one moves beyond writer's block.

A political path forward block can be moved by combining these two notions: gather experience that separates creativity from editing. The reason Sam Seder and Michael Brooks will never find a path forward is they have no creativity energy, just editing energy. They have no desire go out into the world like Richard Burton.

The resolution to a path forward is to gather experience practicing your ideas creatively. Get your creativity on. Put ideas to the test.

How should we do this? Should we be like Richard Burton and disguise ourselves and go to Egypt? ::smile::

The point of reading Richard Burton's history is that practice provides the experience perspective, energy, and creativity. Get out and experience culture and people first-hand in some fashion. Another example is Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens followed in Richard Burton's foot-steps and visited war-torn countries and the world at large. This experience greatly enhanced Hitchen's writing and eventually led him to his path forward and his world political solution: educate women around the world. Hitchens discovered that anywhere women were educated and empowered, even with just $20 loans,  then secularism rose and everyone in society prospered.

To be sure Hitchens solution is just a beginning for impoverished countries. Still though, his solution is a path forward where no else seems to have any today.

Antifada is not the only group experiencing political block. The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) recently put on a conference where one of the panels was entitled, "A Path Forward". The IDW represents the "adults in the room" generation as opposed to Antifada. By that I mean older than forty, established public figures, and financially well off. What was most telling is a question during Q&A. Someone stated they had heard only analysis and no solutions and asked what were the solutions? Not one on the panel put forth a solution, even as the panel title is "A Path Forward".

To whit, everyone in the world today is experiencing political block. Well, everyone except me, of course. Which is where forming an MGO comes in.

Hitchens discovered his solution by exploring the world and engaging the world. In addition Hitchens also did deep dives into very specific topics such as Mother Teresa and Thomas Jefferson. Research of a specific topic can also enlighten.

What does it mean to practice what we preach politically? Be a politician?  Being a politician is an opportunity open to few and one runs the risk of getting bogged down in the swamp of failure. What else? One could expand ones political public presence and taking on a career such as Sam Seder. However, if you end up as financially successful as Sam then you will be Sam, or perhaps Rhandi Rhodes. Nothing wrong with that, not at all, but I get this feeling that Antifada is searching to change government and not just to critique it. Therefore the reason I'm writing this letter is to open the minds of Antifada to a new possibility: to form an MGO (micro-modular governing organization).

Form an MGO

The MGO is the heart of Irreni World Scale, a political laboratory invention of my own making.

What is Irreni? Irreni is path forward to political innovation. What does that mean? The invention is a political laboratory. Irreni is a political laboratory. We need a political laboratory for experiments.

I'm going to quote Donald Rumsfield here. Ouch! What we are experiencing politically today can be analyzed using a knowledge matrix of 2x2: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. Our political block is coming from the last of these overwhelming the other three: unknown unknowns. For example, how will climate change play out? Yes, we have all four categories of this 2x2 knowledge matrix, but the fourth one, unknown unknowns, is far and away the most exasperating. How do we react to unknown unknowns?

Easy. We experiment. Or rather we create a laboratory that is ready to go for required experiments. When unknown unknowns transition to known unknowns we need to be at the ready with political laboratories already established and ready to start at the initial second when an unknown unknown transitions to a known unknown.

MGOs are such laboratories of political experiment. The key aspect for them being ready-to-go at a moment's notice is their modular configuration. MGOs are fixed groups of thirty people who have previous experience working as a group. Groups of MGOs are then created under new political auspices to meet new political demands. Groups of MGOs create a readiness of political experiment.

This is the path forward. We need political laboratories that can be assigned new political experiments in real-time where today our governments operate at a glacial snail pace.

If this sounds intriguing and some of merit to you folks, then here's my proposition for a path forward at this very moment. The Antifada folks get together and we have an hour long chat or so. I'd actually recommend an open ended time allocation because my experience has been that the design of Irreni leads to ten questions for every one question answered.

Practice what you preach coupled with form an MGO can be a path forward for global socialism, or restated an ongoing laboratory for political experiments to test global socialism hypotheses even as situations on Earth change dramatically in the future as climate changes, albeit political or environmental


Learn more about Irreni:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/you-are-here.html


Freethinkers unite!

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!