It has always bothered me - astonished me, really - that banks and such are legally able to sell MY debt. It seems to me - at a human level - that if I owe someone - or in this case, a company - money, then I don't owe it to anyone ELSE.
Shouldn't this should be a paramount notion in consumer finances? If a corporate debtor-entity no longer wants MY debt, then it can forgive me the debt - otherwise, I will continue to pay, as agreed. To sell my debt to another entity is - again, at the human level - absurd and truly feels criminal.
And then I remember that nowadays so much money is "made" in exactly that way, by selling and re-selling other people's obligations, from false-front securities entity to false-front securities entity, from here to the Cayman Islands.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Decent Words in a Rotten World (from 2008-01-22)
From 22-JAN-2008....
Decent Words in a Rotten World
Decent Words in a Rotten World
There's something wrong here. And there. Look around the corner - scan the news - recall your folks' life - review your own. Something's wrong. Everywhere. It's called Life, the Big Picture, God and the Devil, Cause and Effect - it has many names. "Adversity" is a favorite one, too.
How can one deal with it? What about state terrorism? What about subversive terrorism? What about nuclear terrorism? What about starvation? What about AIDS? What about torture and the unbelieveable cruelties that are visited on relatively innocent people every day? What can one do about it?
Not a great deal. But the only way you can sleep at night is to NOT WORRY. This is not actually a cop-out. The fact is, it is utterly impossible for you to take care of the whole world, to have an effect on all the hideous swirl of life near and far. You can't even affect a slice of it - it's often impossible to affect even the little world right around you yourself! Since all organizations and mass movements become in one way or another cesspools of chaos, corruption and cruelty, they are not really much of an answer.
So, to stay sane, and to avoid endless combat, you have to draw lines for yourself. Despite how you feel about the evils around you, you have to discern (a) things you cannot control, and (b) things that you can control. This is the starting point for avoiding suicide and madness. These are decentia verba, in my bad Latin, appropriate words for living, for being here.
(2008-01-22)
Politics.... (an old rant from 2009 or 2010)
(An old rant, from sometime in 2009 or 2010)
My head's in a spin.
Reading George Lakoff's 2006 book, "Whose Freedom?", his take on U.S. politics in recent years (post-911, and pre-economic debacle). I'm trying to digest it.
It's disturbing for me, as politics always is. He's describing & giving his personal/ professional analysis of the whirl of ideas, words and meanings that have been found in the politics of what I deem the Reagan Age (1981-present).
Unlike Lakoff, I find that a certain amount of the Progressive notions he holds dear are flawed. For example, it is not true that the "economic safety net" fails to lull people into complacency; it tends to. While the various Conservatives louldly assert that it does so in all cases (and so become liars or fools, just like the men who, during the Depression & the New Deal kept saying that same thing), a lot of Lefties simply think that that in itself is a non-issue (which is equally false). It is not human or humane to simply condone failure and foolishness. To re-phrase an old maxim, "Moderation and prudence, in all things."
These occasional epiphanies nudge me back toward the GOP/Conservative side of things. But that can't last - for every time a GOP/Conservative smear-artist opens his mouth and sounds off in the unmistakable tones of "We're right, you're wrong - anyone who disagrees with us is a Traitor!" I find myself thrown back to the Liberal/Progressive side of things. A "Winners-Only" Wall Street world, surrounded by struggling poor - the object of modern, Neo-Conservative, GOP policies, is simply not a humane or desirable one.
The political center - a conventional wisdom positing that people are (more or less) still people, despite political differences, and that Moderation and Toleration are the key virtues in Society, along with Prudence * - seems to have become a thing of the past, to judge from the media. Everyone - Left and Right - is clinging to his or her Pole, and the poles of the media are more and more articulated, as Lakoff correctly points out, by the lusty, violent, demagogic idiots of 'talk radio' and its much bigger younger brother, Fox News.
I think that the Left has a lot to answer for, even if they do see the world through culturally amoral spectacles. I think there is no doubt that the 60s destroyed the functionality of American private life, shredding traditions and restraints and self-esteem. Its critical thrust may have been overdue in intellectual terms or in terms of enfranchising people held back by prejudice, but it also required a suspension of self-worth in everyone else.
But that was something that rowdies and hotshots are never willing to do.
White Americans (especially men) found themselves saddled with a permanent general burden of putative guilt based on things that other men had done in other times. The conventional wisdom had shifted to: men are bad, families are bad, white people are bad, heterosexuality is bad, restraint of any kind is bad, etc. That, along with increased drug-addiction, was the negative legacyof the 1960s. White American men were seen simply as 'the bad guys', or even as 'the defective guys', in favor of every other group imaginable. To be 'okay', the media and schools implied, you had to be non-white, non-male, or - if a white male - you had to be queer. So after years of that implicit denial of human value to plain old white guys, there came - from Reagan forward - a re-reaction, an insistence and a rebuke, an assertion that decent men should hold up their heads as people.
Surprise! - harassed native virtue joined with vicious ignorance & barbarism - and rebounded as anti-Liberal rage, and the GOP's Neo-Conservative & Wall Street & Bible Belt coalition was born. (At least that's as far as I understand it.)
* It's interesting that even the word "Society" has become a dirty word for the Right. Apparently, in their mental universe, Society and Freedom cannot co-exist.
My head's in a spin.
Reading George Lakoff's 2006 book, "Whose Freedom?", his take on U.S. politics in recent years (post-911, and pre-economic debacle). I'm trying to digest it.
It's disturbing for me, as politics always is. He's describing & giving his personal/ professional analysis of the whirl of ideas, words and meanings that have been found in the politics of what I deem the Reagan Age (1981-present).
Unlike Lakoff, I find that a certain amount of the Progressive notions he holds dear are flawed. For example, it is not true that the "economic safety net" fails to lull people into complacency; it tends to. While the various Conservatives louldly assert that it does so in all cases (and so become liars or fools, just like the men who, during the Depression & the New Deal kept saying that same thing), a lot of Lefties simply think that that in itself is a non-issue (which is equally false). It is not human or humane to simply condone failure and foolishness. To re-phrase an old maxim, "Moderation and prudence, in all things."
These occasional epiphanies nudge me back toward the GOP/Conservative side of things. But that can't last - for every time a GOP/Conservative smear-artist opens his mouth and sounds off in the unmistakable tones of "We're right, you're wrong - anyone who disagrees with us is a Traitor!" I find myself thrown back to the Liberal/Progressive side of things. A "Winners-Only" Wall Street world, surrounded by struggling poor - the object of modern, Neo-Conservative, GOP policies, is simply not a humane or desirable one.
The political center - a conventional wisdom positing that people are (more or less) still people, despite political differences, and that Moderation and Toleration are the key virtues in Society, along with Prudence * - seems to have become a thing of the past, to judge from the media. Everyone - Left and Right - is clinging to his or her Pole, and the poles of the media are more and more articulated, as Lakoff correctly points out, by the lusty, violent, demagogic idiots of 'talk radio' and its much bigger younger brother, Fox News.
I think that the Left has a lot to answer for, even if they do see the world through culturally amoral spectacles. I think there is no doubt that the 60s destroyed the functionality of American private life, shredding traditions and restraints and self-esteem. Its critical thrust may have been overdue in intellectual terms or in terms of enfranchising people held back by prejudice, but it also required a suspension of self-worth in everyone else.
But that was something that rowdies and hotshots are never willing to do.
White Americans (especially men) found themselves saddled with a permanent general burden of putative guilt based on things that other men had done in other times. The conventional wisdom had shifted to: men are bad, families are bad, white people are bad, heterosexuality is bad, restraint of any kind is bad, etc. That, along with increased drug-addiction, was the negative legacyof the 1960s. White American men were seen simply as 'the bad guys', or even as 'the defective guys', in favor of every other group imaginable. To be 'okay', the media and schools implied, you had to be non-white, non-male, or - if a white male - you had to be queer. So after years of that implicit denial of human value to plain old white guys, there came - from Reagan forward - a re-reaction, an insistence and a rebuke, an assertion that decent men should hold up their heads as people.
Surprise! - harassed native virtue joined with vicious ignorance & barbarism - and rebounded as anti-Liberal rage, and the GOP's Neo-Conservative & Wall Street & Bible Belt coalition was born. (At least that's as far as I understand it.)
* It's interesting that even the word "Society" has become a dirty word for the Right. Apparently, in their mental universe, Society and Freedom cannot co-exist.
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