George Rebane
Mr Ben Emery is a regular RR reader who vigorously defends his Left/liberal ideology in these pages. He recently issued a complaint about the content, viewpoint, and perhaps the form of this weblog. His general lament is that RR’s scope of topics is too narrow and doesn’t cover the substance of the ideas discussed. I believe his comments deserve a more extended answer that may also be of interest to other readers of this weblog. This follows BenE’s complaint repeated below, which is also his ‘8nov11 09:12 AM’ comment to ‘The Liberal Mind – How much socialist, before being a ‘Socialist’?’.
Basically the content on this blog is how Socialists don't get it. In Socialist it means anybody left of the tea party.
It is very tiring to have the same dialogue no matter what issue is being discussed. It degrades into partisan politics and generic broad brush ad hominems almost 100% of the time.
Seriously, can you please try and have a real discussion on what are democracy/ republic/democratic republic are and what is their importance or downfalls.
I'm pretty sure that most people in the US don't have any real idea what the differences are outside of saying someone is a communist, fascist, or anarchist. Supporting democracy doesn't make someone left or a communist but at RR it is implied. For that matter what is a capitalist? I talk to people all the time who work low wage grunt labor jobs who claim they are a capitalist. I ask them "A capitalist in the fact that you support capitalism or that you personally are a capitalist?" More times than not they say the latter or both. I know this plays into your point that people don't have the intellect to understand what they are voting on. If we actually had a government that represented the people instead of special interests we would have a system that had real news, schools that worked, and an economy where a vast majority of the people would have enough. None of these are the case and it is due to the fact everything in our government is controlled by these special interests distorting their policies.
Ben 912am – I truly regret that you have such a narrow view of RR's subject matter and the way that I select/treat topics. I hope that you are not confusing my words with those of other readers in the comment streams – we all see the world from a different angle. Even though RR is of a conservative/libertarian bent, as an older technician with a range of interests, and one who has seen quite a bit of the world in widely different forms, I try to keep the subject matter more than less eclectic.
RR is now a collection of over 1,250 posts to which almost 17,000 comments have been appended in the four years that this weblog has been published. If you do even a cursory review of the categories and pieces posted herein, you will see a wide variety of topics, many of which have indeed covered in depth the important issues that you list. In the current pieces I do my best to cite my previous writings as appropriate, but I don’t always succeed. Therefore I do invite readers to use RR’s search function in the upper left column to find what has been said previously herein by me and my readers. Sometimes I have found that Google search does even a better job when you use ‘keyword1, keyword2, …, george rebane (or) rebane's ruminations’.
All of this material is still valid and a matter of record to be dissected, disputed, and deconstructed by one and all. I especially would like to have readers discover inconsistencies/errors in my ideology and credo (the tenets of which appear infrequently in snippets, see below). And I challenge you to find many blogs that go to the pains to define and debate meanings of commonly mis/used terms and ideas as you will find on RR – and more such semantic surgeries are always invited.
As for the direction that comment streams may take – and also the issue-specific comment threads that fan out from these streams – I cannot or will not control. As long as the discussion remains semi-civil (and it’s been getting better over the years), I feel that they should continue at the pleasure of my readers. From what I observe in the local blogosphere, RR does provide a unique forum for those who at least attempt to penetrate my sometimes dense prose. So again, please don’t mistake the topics and the taken tacks of other readers for what I write. And, to mix a metaphor, most certainly don’t put unwritten words in my mouth, as a techie and former pedagogue I try to be precise. Supplying implied and contrary meanings is a source of unwanted and unwarranted heat which I have frequently addressed in posts and comments.
Having said that, I believe that the world in these pre-Singularity years is heading for an epochal change, the aftermath of which does not guarantee the survival of Homo Sapiens. (See tag line in RR banner.) And in these years we are witnessing the inevitable resurrection of worldwide collectivism as technology accelerates and widens the gulf between those who can and those who can't or won't.
My own education and experience guide me to ascribe the most plausible cause of human misery to the attempted application of collective forms of governance at scales too large to support a salutary quality of life for earth’s populations. The systems sciences teach us that such 'systems' cannot survive when applied to the human condition. (Its Pareto optimal operating point is at a low level of aggregate wealth production.) And in corroboration, these attempts at over-collectivization have exhibited all the predicted modes of failure, and continue to do so a fortiori with every passing day as the world becomes more interconnected. Nevertheless, this proposition is a (the?) major source of contention and a topic of intense interest in the ongoing debate between the educated Left and Right. Apparently that is why we find so much of it today during an epochal time in our nation’s history.
Finally, I am also a transcendentalist, but fashioned in a perhaps unique form that demands spirit and science fly in tight formation. I believe in aseity and, from our human perspective, in the existence of an asei God. Some may prefer to call God the Universal Intelligence, Prime Mover, …, but you get the idea. The cosmos – all that is and that can be studied scientifically (e.g. Princeton’s John A. Wheeler) – is part of the ‘Game of God’, in the sense of the Srimad Bhagavatam (q.v.).
In the cohort of other scientists of similar persuasion, this demands that my credo includes the notions of an intelligent creation and purposive (teleological) maintenance of the very space in our universe as the substrate of all existence (not to be confused with the ‘spot creation’ taught by fundamentalist religions). We are not the only sapient and/or sentient life in the cosmos. Sapient, and perhaps even sentient, critters exist in manifolds (spaces) that are more complex and highly dimensioned than supported by our visible universe. That makes us have the potential of transcendence as an alternative to oblivion. I pay obeisance to all this as a Christian, albeit one which many of my fellow Christians will view with a disapprovingly gimlet eye.
I overexpose my readers to all this because it is the provenance of my interpretations of all that I experience, and thus might better illuminate my insights (delusions?), and invite a better understanding and/or contention of their merits. Further details will be provided as interest warrants.
rebanesruminations.com 
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