gettingdialectical-blog

[gettingdialectical-blog]

What if the only remaining option for pulling your sister out of a coma appeared to be Ancient Egyptian medicine? Would you start placing old curios in a circle around your doctor as per his directions? Or could you resist? 

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Obama Circuit Equation

[Wide angle image of Earth from space]

  “Reacting to a {climate truth}-of-spiking-heat" and a backlog of unexecuted rules, the Obama White House has been building statistical C02 equations “unattempted yet by other admins”---symbolizing tailpipe gas and (maybe not) the methane from e.g., each bison. The way the rhythm goes in fine print just released: “Under Executive Order 12866, agencies are required, to the extent permitted by law, “to assess both the costs and the benefits of the intended regulation...”

  What Costs and Benefits? How? Ultimately:

“Maybe the feeble lakes and swamps

Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit   

And not just the major events but the whole incredible

Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off.”

New gases were found to be implied in the Clean Air Act. So, not far off(?): executive orders could allow for some kind of Foundation study of planetary destiny: the statistical, future-tracking of masses, the big equations that say: "This is what's going to happen to all of us" could point toward the existence of free will, etc. In the meantime, could there be mail-in forms with blanks about household resource use? Yes (not now---but soon): If the Common Law is a living thicket---And a(nother) constitutional law professor president and his cabinet can find a way to reread the Clean Air Act and do an end-run around a immobile entity that includes congress.

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Death +/- Gloves

Second One: There's a checkout counter receipt coming: In one vision, there's probably: bisphenol A on the surface of the thermal sheet that just got metal-tooth-ripped and handed over. Thousands, millions of BPAs: two nanohexagons carboned together over and over in ink and the paper's rubbing off on fingers: in another world there they are, the molecules heading dowgullet toward glands. At which point: who knows? Someone says that the nanochains are heading to help some cells build tumors and cancer death cemetery silk flower displays. So, maybe time for work gloves...?

Second Two: “Oh, I don’t need a receipt. Thanks.”

[gettingdialectical-blog]

If you were a dinosaur what kind of dinosaur would you be?

[via]

A  "2030s" asteroid death is casting shade [wwwwwhhhhh-ush]— already:

If I were crunching next to lava flows,

and strangers fiended through the jungle brush:

(1.) “RRRRAAAWR!” / (2.) “Danger! Danger! 

Babies to nest”

then would I think: ‘Oh, yeah,

somewhere Light

above me sparks in in night pictures

from a��metal rock that I’d never eat’?

Would I think to start a night watch team to

slingshot coconut mountains against it

for the safety of the day? Maybe not.

And who would find some bones like mine

 in m[etal/uddy] sha[d/ll]ows

caked and dried and packed and 

baked up into hills:

who/me? and my egg selves saying 

that the dust on

us had something tinny to it?

[gettingdialectical-blog]

400 PPM

[via]

A worldwide climate change legend has a new chapter about 400 ppm - the atmosphere has hit 400 parts carbon dioxide to million whatever the atmosphere is made of - as if this C02-level might do something to the sky—with "red lines" of gassy heat bounced in from the sun/etc snaking upward to the atmosphere where they trapped like birds inside greenhouse glass, heating and distorting the world-under-the-blue-dome: mega(er)-churning hurricanes targeting your coast, mega(er)-wildfires, super(er)-droughts, etc.

Hmmm...in movies we're somehow going to space. In movies about movies, the atmosphere is kind of like that story about the map, the map that is made to cover the entire Empire:

the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it....

And much later:

there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Speaking of which, there could always be new maps to make about the Earth and the atmosphere. So many textures. It could be a hoax like in that one Michael Crichton book about the poles. It could be a hoax like the legend where there's a Michael Crichton-ish writer who realizes that there's demand for a book about how climate change is a hoax. Or C: both A and B. Speaking of map-making, 400 PPM, it could also be like the story of the anarchist wasps and cartographer bees: the heat goes up, the map changes, and the people who don't believe in (the) order end up losing their land to the mapmakers. The conquerors have their stingers ready and give their order: "Write!" 

Moving along.

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Work Time

1. At what point is it better to stop talking about the weight of a lifestyle on what's around it? (Тhe ecofootprint from the time that you bought shrimp, and they ended up clearing some mangroves in Thailand or somewhere to raise more shrimp/tilapia in industrial lagoons and the fisherman who lost their seashore-jungle ended up going inland to clear trees to plant crops and the ambient temperature and temperature extremes possibly went up, which maybe you felt back in America, looking out through the fine dust blowing across the Pacific from Asia, which was the moment when you thought about buying a drink, before you went out to garden and...)

2. At what point is it time to stop saying organic and "be like," it's good to eat organic and finally change clothes and start—

3. There are times when worrying about moving tomatoes across state lines seems like something to do: it seems like a time to protect them from the greenhouse heat of a car and take them into the mall to possibly decide against finding "some kind of respectability outfits" ...but then, really, you're driving, and...

[gettingdialectical-blog]

The Desert o[f/r] Los Angeles

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Econometrics

Why spend a "college bookstore amount of money" on an econometrics textbook? That much money adds up to, oh, basically enough to buy a month of eating bulk chickpeas, kale, peanut butter, or something.

Why spend that much? Maybe because when Karl Marx looked at corn and iron and when he looked at a table, he imagined that the ghost of exchange value was hovering behind it, a seemingly arbitrary and possibly menacing value. He seemed to believe that this abstraction runs roughshod over something called use value, the real, raw, sticky, crunchy, directly cravable part of life. Flowing arbitrarily, though? Really? Aren't there reasons for all these prices? 

The prevailing communist solution flowing out of Marx seemed to be a resounding 'yes, but'. "Yes, there are reasons, but they're part of an oppressive and/or surpassable system." How could anyone know that? The ecconometrics book could have this secret.

All this talk about history could mean skirting around the issue: why buy a $175 textbook—aside from the fact that it's a way to guilt-trip toward expertise? Speaking of the means of production, what if there was some kind of electromagnetic pulse from the sun that knocked out communication? All the free material online, like the free online Udacity course in statistics are good and well, but the textbook is the discipline made slightly more concrete. According to Chapter 1: this book may be just the textbook that gives you the skills in regression analysis to understand a wide range of future scenarios. Or, speaking of capitalism, econometrics might "provide accessible ways to describe these problems."

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Surviving a Sunstorm at Home

 So, you try to check your phone for Facebook updates. It feels like the right thing to do.

The phone doesn’t even light up. The battery was full and it won’t even turn on. Hmmm....

You open your computer. You’re going to zombie through the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, whatever.

Nothing. The same thing. Black screen.

You’re at a window and try turning on the lights. Nothing. No light. Which is when you notice: the hum of electronics is missing. No noise from the fridge.

This could sound sensationalist: But maybe there’s something to it: so says the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence in its Global Trends 2030 report; this morning-after situation is up there with climate change and the collapse of China on their list of potential black swans, game changers too radical for people t imagine their impact on the course of world events—and their lifestyles.

There’s a precedent. In March, 1989, a solar flare caused a blackout across Quebec. It happens, and it could happen again on a much larger scale (c.f. one Heritage Foundation legend). Infrastructure could be destroyed in an event that could very well cause $2 trillion in damages. (source?)

Then again, the potential event is such that that $2 trillion price tag could, at least temporarily, be almost meaningless. Go to the store, how helpful is some piece of plastic?

What to do?

Well, for one thing: there’s always the preventive measure of creating robust, self-sufficient local economies: local currency programs so that people wouldn’t have to rely on barter, widespread gardening, both outdoors and under glass and plastic, farmers’ markets, walkable and bikable communities, and a diversified set of skills that would be helpful in the event of other black swans, like massively accelerated global weirding.

As it stands, much of the dialogue about addressing this issue is highly centralized. As Clay Wilson puts it in a Department of Defense white paper: “DOD places new emphasis on the importance of dominating the entire electromagnetic spectrum with methods for computer network attack and electronic warfare.”(2)

This is a threat so destructive that it falls under the heading of "potentially imaginary." According to several dozens or possibly several million chatrooms, the government or some kind of Them invents problems like asteroids in order to cement its control over a downtrodden people. But this may be one of those occasions where a libertarian wariness of America's defense apparatus makes no sense: what kind of conspiracy would scheme to bring about a world where everyday people, at least for a little while, would be living on their own, making decisions without Washington being involved?

In the meantime: who are your neighbors? Maybe they know how to get something going. Who is your local survival team?

[gettingdialectical-blog]

This Article is About Taxing Stock Options?

Somewhere supercomputers are maybe reading this post. Somewhere supercomputers are extracting keywords from this post and aggregating them with keywords from other articles and Twitter feeds. They're tracking the frequency of words and overcoding them with an algorithm that is gaming out the chances that, yes, there will be a stock market  transaction tax in Europe and/or the US and/or somewhere like Japan. Other investment algorithms will have to [be] adjust[ed] accordingly because there will surely be, on balance, less of a profit to make from high-frequency trading, right? The kind of high-frequency trading that supposedly entered an amplifying feedback loop that triggered an emergency at the New York stock exchange and other exchanges around the world. The Flash Crash was somehow markets around the world automatically (read: automatedly) plunging as the software at quantitatively-driven firms responded to the software at other firms. People panicked and some watched icily as their assets plunged and rebounded. 

These algorithms and the former economics and finance majors who run them are all maybe “wondering” in their various ways: where do we go from here? Some people are asking: what are we going to do: we get our Christmas Lexus leases from this HFT money; we were going to send our kids to that boarding school or that somehow-expensive Quaker day school. "We were even thinking of investing in a fixer-upper farm (beach house) out in Hunt Country (the Cotswolds, the Hamptons, etc) But one of them could think that maybe in the long run a Tobin Tax would make it easier to get that dream life that "I’m kind of just pretending to already have(?) Do I like the hypothetically easy money that I can skim off a robo-driven market swing? How do I say that some parts of me are claiming: denomadize this life and the bucking markets that it seems to mirror?"

In that case, it just might be easier to implement an FTT in multiple countries at the same time. But what does someone do in Europe when you’re worried about part of your investment class running off to London, or the Cayman Islands, or New York (visions of France’s finance teens taking the Chunnel to London before François Hollande is even sworn into office)? An old Swedish taxation routine might be a sort of cold comfort, the one that politicians thought that they could try in 1984. Surprise to some, stock turnover declined to a level apparently far beyond what was expected, far beyond a level comprised exclusively of those legendarily impulsive short-term investors. One newspaper called the Financial Times even claims that Swedish traders flew to London and stayed there for several years. Imagine what would happen if only one country did this today since capital can move even faster.  

So many variables could change how a Tobin Tax is implemented. What if the tax was a smaller percentage of transactions, enough to keep some investment robots from buying, selling, holding, putting, and all the other little options that can add up to a 1010.14 point plunge on the Dow Jones on May 6, 2010? What if it were a .005% rate instead of .5%? Meanwhile, is it inevitable that there will be more posterboard mobs holding vigil, more worrying about investment (partial subtext, maybe: these financiers bankrolling my senate campaign)? Surely, of all the vast range of futures that can be covered by one complicated credit default swap algorithm, there is a future where there's a little test Tobin tax just on the principle that a little legislative experimentation could help the EU and save some elusive and omnipresent(?) thing called “the global economy.” There's a future where the EU is willing to experiment even if the United States is somehow not in a position to overcome all of the factors in play that prevent financial reform. And who knows what Japan could do?

In the meantime, a legend from the economists International Monetary Fund has it that in many commodities markets, it's common for the majority of price moves to be in reaction to other price moves. "In late 2008 to early 2009," 75 percent of the trading of oil Brent futures was allegedly endogenous in exactly this same way. In other words, news about a new product or quarterly earnings often take a backseat to the minute-by-minute, second-by-second game of chicken that high-frequency traders keep playing, a game that some might be disinclined to play as speedily if there were a tax levied (though, ironically, the possibility of a lower profit margin and greater loss can be hedged against and be converted into another risky bet).

This is something to calculate. Yes. No. Maybe. Etc. There are all these Tobin tax futures that we could bet on via intrade.com and other venues. Firm number one can trade in reaction to firm two, which is trading in reaction to firm one, and at the speed of T1 Internet connections, they trade faster than the girl that one of them wanted, faster than the paddock of horses on Paris Pike, faster than the dollhouses and the black Audi convertible. Nothing solid can keep up with trading and at this rate, how can anyone invest in these slow, somehow-comforting things? 

You have just experienced an investment scenario. There are others. 

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Semi-Droned Law

Laser-beaming robots could be flying over Yemen now. Or who knows, they could be practice-bombing targets over US soil, launched by guidelines just-discovered-to-have-lurked-there-latent in the Anglo-Saxon Common Law. This semi-droned specter animates an entire legal system whose pasts-that-pass-for-reasons stretch back deep past mead-halls—it stretches back to pasts that are maybe older than a monster-darkened wilderness, with roots that seem specifically to grow from Runnymede where an English King signed vellum on the meadow, where an English King surrendered sovereign rights to barons who'd put together something called the Magna Carta. And the Magna Carta has all these crucial parts in it like: “NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed...” With a seal melted onto the vellum or whatever they used to sign it, every single man (or, like, in some revised spin-off documents: every person) would be subject to the law of the land, one big zone-continuum under the rule of some legitimate paper; and after British law gave birth to a rebel-baby US version—and also after an American version expanded—now the law could be everywhere, maybe out on other planets. Forever.

Anglo-Saxon Common Law is basically like the memory of the guy singing in the Third Eye Blind song “Semi-Charmed Life." It's the song with the video that starts at the intersection of legal system and lifestyles: Before we zoom to ground level in San Francisco, before we see the American flag arm patch on some biker's leather jacket, we're orbiting Earth from out past what looks like a telecommunications satellite. And then we hear the nostalgic intensity of the (former?) meth addict channeled by the singer Stephan Jenkins, an addict prowling the streets who is also yearning for a moment whose conditions seem present and lost at the same time: all his ex-boyfriend girl cravings are like jurists' relationship with the imaginary(?) moment when the common law system finally happened in the 1200s.  “I wish I could get back there to the place where I fell asleep inside you...”, Still, he has an eye pointing forward, with a scream of  freedom-craving indignation that has been screaming since Runnymede: “I want something else to get me through this...”). pair When you put the pair together (yeah, you), you get the pyramid of the Great Seal of the United States: Some unitary eye is there to constantly seal the deal, it “annuit coeptis” — it approves the undertakings—although the pyramid, the latticing legal-civil structure may never be complete, hanging in the “Sky-y-y-yyyyyy.”

And this is basically how the White House deals with some kind of justice-rage-network leaders or whoever the alleged defenders are on the ground in Yemen and Pakistan. Breaking the law means trying to turn your back on the system, and the people at the White House making the tough calls about who poses an imminent threat, are a little like the guy that Stephan Jenkins is playing: “I’m not listening when you say ‘Goodbye’.”

What is the law?  The drones are guided by a team of experts from remote locations, and at least in that respect they seem to share some features with the legal system justifying them-and-their-explosive-missions: a semi-droned kind of law, a sort-of-living force, partly automatic (playing out instructions crafted in the past), partly open to a kind of reason—provided that it, the law, flying high over our heads, gets help from the people down below.

This law seemed to be in-view and semi-droning when the Obama White House leaked a memo to NBC News in February:

“Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who may have rights under the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment, that individual’s citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation.  Under the traditional due process balancing analysis of Mathews v. Eldridge, we recognize that there is no private interest more weighty than a person’s interest in his own life.”

Supreme Court precedent after Supreme Court precedent are invoked because this is how killing is supposed to be justified, with language that is half on autopilot, recycled from the past like a family tree and half, well, independently stitched together by people who have their own ideas about how to make sense of this history.

Again, could there be something else (as good) to get us through this? There is Rand Paul on the U.S. Senate Floor, March 6, 2013, saying, “Yes”, saying that the above drone constitutionality memo suggests the possibility of killing Americans since there's nothing in the memo saying that that option is off the table.

And in another possible world, possibly existing on “the future-track” of this time stream, an Obama and his office-klatch could say, “Actually, yes: this memo is out of sync with an ancient continuum and we can’t pretend that this is constitutional." Then, Obama could say, with all cell phones turned off and left outside—or whatever they do—“Couldn’t the provisions for emergency executive powers override the Constitution anyway in this instance?”

A lawyer next to him could think of Abraham Lincoln and company with Confederate army arrows curving like a pincer on a situation-room map up the Shenandoah and Potomac toward the Capital, and say, “Well, yes. But...”

In two parallel worlds, there would be the potential for drone strikes in the United States. The only difference between the two could be the mass of history used to defend it. Meanwhile, there are all these words in “the Press” about how these Terror-Tuesdays at the White House are out of sync with a People’s Truth of general will (like, in other words, did anybody give them permission to set up their own special court?).

But then, who knows, maybe it will seem a little less strange in a few years. Are people up in arms about making sure that talented people can come to America or become assets to this country? Because in one future, drones could tractor-beam alleged jihadis through the sky above the desert or savannah, up into some ship, and then the booking starts, mug shots, fingerprints, dental exams, a delousing even, and then, a college education or whatever seems to best fit their needs. To that end, thee drone courts could represent, in a roundabout way, the stirrings of a new mutation in the common law, which has turned the bluntness of war, the vastness of battlefields into a benign surgical operation that is becoming less painful and more just all the time.

And what country is being defended by these drones? Like Jenkins says toward the end of the song, "When the plane came in, she said she was crashing..." The body that went up in the sky comes down to Earth, and with the basis of law gone, he feels that he is in trouble: And he is. "Now I'm struggling to survive." Maybe this is the innate struggle of anyone who tries to read the Common Law wherever it is in the realm of Forms. The addiction, longer lasting than meth, is hard to break and seems to be functional. As always.

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Video Games

You weren’t going to play video games. This could have to do with vibes that some lifestyles were out of touch with a future truth(?), an ancient truth(?), the truth of some kind of economic base between the electronic things: "I've been hearing about Karl Marx..." Somehow the truth was like one of those magazines, the ones where they show teens who are enmeshed in some sort of flows of capital, and somehow playing video games vampires their lifeforce because they go up into a simulation and don’t think about how Super Mario or whatever is a blooping, scrolling light interaction that is distracting from some story about how the people who made the game in China all sleep on cots in some sort of 8000-person dormitory (prison?) and maybe eat concrete in their food and can’t get their union recognized and no one will hear about their picketing, and it'll just be reported as some crowd getting in a fight outside the factory gates, etc.

Some people play some video games because of some legend about how they force you to focus on the present rather than rushing, concepting off into "cloud country" of some world of forms where there are all these tweets about Marx and what can you do with them? 

You’re going to play some video games because of some legendary truth about what happens to people who don’t play video games. Maybe they’re like people who watch Wheel of Fortune, eat TV rays, eat Werther’s butterscotch candies, think about being babies, zero in on a baby, and somehow they’ve come unstuck in time, grandma—grandpa—uncle whoever, and can’t deal with: "where are my keys?"

Somehow some major-experts bear this out: there are all these studies showing that people who play memory games are less prone to dementia or...

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Thrift Shop

"Thrift Shop”'s on the radio somehow. On the radio in Kentucky, on the radio in Indiana and {>>>}: there's this Macklemore clubrapstrutting new-old clothes.

This could be a song about dangerous cravings out of sync with the moment on the radio, when the DJ is, like: "50 straight minutes of all-the-top-hits. DJ, turn it up-Up-UP. There's an Easter Sale at Macy's."

Whatever. Macklemore has some vibes, maybe: coming in the doors, saying “WUDDUP, I’ve got a [rooster noise]..." 

And maybe someone at Clear Channel and Cumulus Broadcasting is worried enough to share it. Somehow: why couldn't there be another summer-time 2011 London free-for-all: kids ransacking discount racks at a northside high-street H&M, the neighborhood JD Sports, KFC, McDonalds. Like the turnover of clothes and flash fashion chains and looking-good were part of some pre-planned high-velocity machine that could misfire and get kids to coordinate break-ins via txt and throw rocks to get some new overalls or the new chrome-plated jorts or whatever.

"Next slide": when the [whoever-those-people-are] burn down your London data centers how can you microtarget them with craveables?

This could be a partial misreading. The song could have a nice horn riff. Like, it's a novelty song. "Next: Justin Timberlake - Mirror etc...You’re just like a mirror/whoa-oa/mirror staring back at me/whoa-oa.”)

But, OK. Still: "The Salvation Army in town has piles of 99 cent Danielle Steel novels."// "wlkng thr nw."

[gettingdialectical-blog]

The Asteroid That Will Kill You‽

The asteroid Apophis will hit the Earth in 2036‽ Then you'll die‽ Most of us will‽

Maybe would-be-friends-we'll-never-meet will get to feel vibrations from the rock if they end up flying shuttles in from other planets. The impact dust - and waves - and flames will somehow feed some life-unfriendly clouds around the globe before they part and let in sun in 2037‽

The Earth might miss the rock. But the sun cooks up some waves that blows the stuff in outer space around in mystery-patterns, so there's still this chance...

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an actual(?) astrophysicist and reveals this possible future in a Wired Magazine article, "We can Survive Killer Asteroids - But It Won't Be Easy". Wired.com commenters maybe read about how Apophis "could fill the Rose Bowl" and then they started sorting out some crucial facts involving Sarah Palin, the Republican Party, or possibly the Liberals, or some Plot-Against-the-People. Also: would conservatives have been loyal to the King during the American Revolution(?):

So anti-war libs would have fought the war of independence and pro-constitution conservatives would have stayed under Barack (I mean George) III?  To think they let folks like you vote and have children.  (Well, abortions.)

Another timestream involves studying physics (for free online or wherever) and deflecting a large object - or maybe writing camp songs about teens and asteroid physics. Obama might be an "Illuminatus", "Communist", "Republican", and even an "Islam". And somehow it turns out he could have been giving relevant advice (and living a soap opera) in State of the Union addresses when he said Americans could stand learning more math and science skills. 

[gettingdialectical-blog]

Living With Coal

[via]

Last year, a crowd surrounded Kentucky's State Capitol, a parade of teens and grandmas holding signs: "Topless Mountains are Obscene" / "Support the Clean Streams ACT" "End Mountaintop Removal" "RENEWABLE ENERGY". This one gravel-throated man in the thick of it shouted all the way up Capital Avenue: "My daughter's lungs are black! My eyes are burning too! Dear Mister Governor, Happy Valentine's to you!" 

Maybe they were mad about some scientist legends.  There's that one connecting mining to high rates of cancer and poverty - and some story that coal-fired power plants  are killing the world we know. 

The thing is, even if a carbon-heavy “biosphere” gets too wild, hot, or toxic for some oxygen breathers, some of us could still live under bubbles or upload our minds into a new kind of digital lifestyle. Right now, greenhouse gas-emitting plants are powering America’s grid and helping scientists create new creatures. Nanobots, cyborgs, and probably some other programs are (on the verge of) taking up residence in silicate and airborn Internet zones.

Meanwhile, coal plants are helping support the market that can produce a future where we join them. That one 2011 study may have shown that the coal industry places a 571 million dollar net burden on Americans every year in diseases and environmental damages, but these “damages” are another name for gifts. With hospital bills and cleanups people have new ways to make money and boost economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product. 

This could make sense. Apparently, Alan Blinder is a Princeton economist and he says we’re already supposed to be money-chasing programs. He also has this vision that we can thrive in correlation with a rising National Product. So, the year could be 2080 or "835 Flavor Zone$" in coal-powered cyber-simulations, and we're really working our algorithms to help currency spin faster. 

In the meantime, the prophecy stands that we’re approaching a singularity: somehow we'll no longer create machines who serve us, but will just serve machines. This might be news if the world weren’t already full of systems beyond our control.

Speaking of which, to judge by the crowd in Frankfort, Kentucky, some people are really attached to the bodies they already have. 

[gettingdialectical-blog]

How could a teen dialectician approach making New Year's resolutions?

Time is probably rolling by. And years, too? 

Somehow years could be relevant. Recycling that one Donovan song, we could also end up with this:

First there is a New Year's

Then there is no New Year's

Then there is.

Lifestyles supposedly happen because there's some latitude for action. Real teens may not make history just as they please, but New Month's or New ____'s are milestones, good points to believe that things are gonna be different now. 

[gettingdialectical-blog]

National Holidays

[photo via]

Thousands of Argentines disappeared between 1976 and 1983. Friends and family tend to blame the military junta that ruled the country, but who knows? They may have gone on vacation. Given the level of state secrecy at the time, we're free to imagine crowds of missing dissidents on the beach, at resorts, really getting it going.

The new National Defense Authorization Act could help more people could go on indefinite holiday in a mystery zone outside the public sphere. You could be held, for reasons unknown (to you), at Guantanamo Bay - 'til death do you part. 

The United States would seem to be a little different from Argentina in that it has a tradition of habeas corpus: people accused of crimes have the option of formally challenging their imprisonment. This could be one of those traditions that many of us find nice. The widespread protests against the NDAA would suggest as much, also suggesting that the future legitimacy of the federal government's actions rest on using these powers with discretion. Otherwise, the formulation that they're protecting us from violent fiends could quickly invert and teens could start saying, "They are the fiends infringing on our special freedoms!"

Both of these views may be overlooking a secret truth: that infringing on the sanctity of other lives is always already a part of life. You could be making an executive decision right now affecting millions of belly bacteria, Kobe beef, celery, Canada geese. But, conveniently, the legal persons described in the U.S. Constitution are ostensibly humans. Otherwise, adjudication could be significantly more complicated.

If you don't identify as a sentient fern or some "non-human life form" then this could be a part of reality that seems irrelevant. But even if the repression of chickens doesn't factor into our decisions, this same possibility of surplus-repression may still give us pause. What are some good reasons to support a legal framework whose benefits we can't enjoy? Even if we enjoy them now, the NDAA may fail the Veil of Ignorance test: if we're unsure who we might become or who our future bureaucrats might be, would we want to endorse a policy that could force us to be subject to the law without having any chance to contest it? Maybe you're already an enemy combatant without knowing it.