A "Concept Essay" on Cerrorism ("Care Or Ism")

Pronunciation: \ˈker-ər-ˌi-zəm\
 
"What is Cerrorism?" you ask.  Good!  I invented the word, though I see there are already some examples in use on the Internet.  It is a cross between Care and Error.  It is also a portmanteau of "economic terrorism."  When I noticed that "cerrorism" fits both of these linguistic tricks, I figured I'd have to write about it.

My friend Jeanie is supposed to write a "concept essay" and she has chosen the topic of health in the USA where information that should be available to the masses is not.  We were discussing what might be meant by this term, "concept essay" and I came up with the theory that it is an essay that describes a concept.  So I'm writing my own version even though I suggested that she write one on virtually the same concept.

Her emphasis will be on health in the USA, but mine will be on cerrorism itself.

The fundamental human condition consists of seeking joy.  I recognize two main categories in which we pursue that end.  We seek joy for ourselves primarily, but a significant part of the joy we seek comes from experiencing it vicariously.  Parents and loved ones who feel joy because of something we did cause us to feel joy too.  There is a contention between these two modes of seeking joy, for if we put too much effort into one, the dearth of the other will make us miserable.  Certainly, there are hermit-like people who need no vicarious joy, but they are rare and I choose to ignore their existence, for my good and theirs.

Many of us discover that by solving problems for others, we can create joy in them, and they will often express that joy by providing us with resources. This is the fundamental principle that underpins economic behavior: do something for others in order to receive something in return.  What we receive in return must prove useful ultimately in our own joy-seeking efforts.  If it fails to help, then the original effort to solve a problem for someone else might feel like a waste.  Or it might not.  We can still get the vicarious joy, but is it important enough?

Cerrorism is what you get when the personally experienced joy is so much more important than the vicarious joy that we work to make the problem we solve persist.  Every business that solves a problem has an obvious financial interest in the existence of the problem.  Solve the problem for good, and the business dies.  Corporate personhood institutionalizes cerrorism.

Humans in their natural state work to solve problems and set up systems that prevent those problems from recurring.  Corporate persons in their (un)natural state work to make the problems they solve persistent so that the engines of profit they build on top of those problems don't run out of work.

Doctors, often without realizing it, are pulled in the direction of prescribing medicine that treats symptoms rather than eliminating their cause.  Prescription A (involving behavioral and dietary changes) can be used for the rest of patient B's life in order to eliminate problem C, but prescription D (just a pill; D is for Drug) will reduce most of problem C's symptoms.  Since the pill manufacturer provides financial encouragement to the doctor for prescribing the pill, prescription D exerts psychological pressure on the doctor to ignore prescription A.  This is cerrorism.

The FBI has attempted to foment terrorism.  This is cerrorism.

The FDA has marketed raw milk as "dangerous" even though the effect of the microbes it contains is more generally to strengthen the human body than to weaken it.  This is cerrorism.

Government is essentially cerrorism, for it is impossible for bureaucrats to vicariously experience the joy they (could but do not) create in those who are required (by police officers) to follow their rules.

If you understand what I mean by cerrorism, perhaps you can find an existing word that has that meaning, and which some people already know.  If not, please help me spread awareness of cerrorism.

Go Discriminate!

Discrimination is an important skill that everyone should learn.  Most of us can find numerous examples of a group in which some are better than others.  The ability to identify qualities or features that tend to correlate to the value of a group member often proves remarkably valuable.

Animals serve as an excellent example.  While many animals have nice soft fur which is pleasant to stroke and pet, they fall into two classes, one of which is rather dangerous.  The domestication of cats makes them ideal pets, but bears and beavers do not make such good pets.

More useful examples are found in school, where there are many people who will tell you how to do math problems.  Some of them are young and some are old, but among both groups, you can get bad information ("Just do it this way.  I don't know why, but it works") and good information ("It works for these reasons... but you can also do it this way because...").  This leads me to a very important example.

Subjects of a government are expected to obey its laws, and such obedience requires knowledge of the law.  In many cases, enforcers of the law will permit accidental disobedience of esoteric laws, but for more common laws, ignorance will be inexcusable.  Complicated laws create a different kind of dynamic that encourages most people to imprison themselves in behavior patterns that are recognized as safe and therefore followed.  In this way, complicated laws prevent innovation, growth, and progress, and instead allow governments to grow more oppressive over time.

Taxation is a great example.  Gary North points out that "Lawyers and accountants of the super-rich find ways of avoiding payment" and also makes the ridiculous claim that "they do not subject their clients to the risk of jail."  What he means, of course, is that their handling of the law tends to be legal (and therefore escapes punishment) even though it violates the spirit of taxation, which is to steal a significant portion of everyone's earnings from them.

Some of us understand that what the lawyers and accountants can do reflects legal implications of the law as written, and that those implications hold whether or not a person has an accountant or lawyer to explain them.  This is a nuance that appears to escape Mr. North.

What Mr. North fails to do is discriminate.  Instead of discriminating between those who actually find ways of avoiding payment, and those who attempt and fail to find ways of avoiding payment, he simply tags one group as "lawyers and accountants of the super-rich" and the other as "tax protestors."  If, like me, you legally avoid paying the income tax and you aren't paying an accountant or a lawyer (never mind about being super-rich - I'm not either), then you are clear evidence of Mr. North's failure here.  If you do pay an accountant or a lawyer who fails, as Wesley Snipes' accountants (and then lawyers) did (he was super-rich, by the way - might still be!), then you are still yet another clear example of Mr. North's failure.

It is important to me that you discriminate successfully.  If more people do it, then they won't have to be rich or hire lawyers or accountants to keep Uncle Sam's hands out of their pants.  They will simply have to avoid engaging in taxable activity to earn their money, and then be patient with the IRS agents who are encouraged to keep their heads where the sun doesn't shine on this issue.  The patience is necessary because they are led to believe that everyone is liable for the tax.  If the agency had to train its agents on the details of the tax code, or only hire people who already understood it, their budget would have to be far higher, and their efficacy at maximizing revenue would be far worse.  Instead, they hire people who believe what you probably believe: Everyone has to pay.

As someone who discriminates, and who also avoids taxable activity in order to prevent the US Empire from profiting off my work (and thereby avoids contributing to its growing menace to the human race), I would like to present you with this evidence showing that discrimination is helpful and profitable.

If you would like to build up your patience and skill in dealing with very poorly trained people (who are poorly trained on purpose so that you pay more in taxes than you owe), you will enjoy reading through the stories of people who worked with IRS agents to help them understand.

Taxation isn't the only example.  The behavior of police officers is far more limited than the police officers want you to know.  Learn the limits of their behavior by googling "probable cause" and "search warrant" and "Am I being detained?"  In many cases where YOU can demand one or both of these things, the cops don't have them and will back down once they realize that you can discriminate.  The trick is to know your rights!

By the way, the racist undertones in my first paragraph are a special kick in the nuts to the nuts who decided to use the word "discriminate" when what they really meant was "generalize."  Once you start discriminating, you see that racism is a foolish application of the principle of generalization, a form of induction which is often useful, but can be dangerous in the minds of those who fail to discriminate.

Some Neologisms

I have some definitions for which I think we need new words.  If you have a better idea for a new word to fit one of these, please leave a comment.

Pugger, n.: A person who wields authority through coercion, a member of a government.  Etymology: Cross between Pig and Thug and Mugger.

Fatalink, ("fatal ink") n.: An element in a concept, idea, or story that so destroys the purity it would otherwise have that its value is opposite in nature.  Etymology: Compressed version of "fatal tincture," connoting a deadly concentrated poison buried within otherwise healthy food.

These new words were inspired by episode 308 of the SchoolSucks Podcast in which Brett talks to Tony Myers, the two of them applying the "Trivium Method" of learning anything by yourself.  The Trivium Method has three steps, the first of which is to define your terms.  If you use terms that are already in popular usage, you are in danger of falling into the traps set by those who would control you.  For example, the popular idea of "anarchy" is chaos and disorder, largely because that is how the term has been used by the public education system and the mainstream media, probably through the propaganda of puggers.

My Bitcoin Nightmare

The Central Banks of planet Earth can print as much fiat as they need.  They can hire people to hire people to hire people to... who will run trading bots against all the largest exchanges, to buy bitcoins incessantly, but slowly in order to stay just below the kind of volume that would be noticed by anyone.  In this way, a Central Bank of Planet Earth can slowly collect bitcoin without anyone taking notice.

Consider this:  If you pay enough attention to the market, there's a good chance you'll be able to identify points at which various opportunities arise, such as: when making a large trade will move the price a lot, when a movement in price will take a long time to be reversed, if it ever gets reversed, and when creating trading patterns can precipitate such opportunities.  Who has the money to do all that?  Why, Central Banks of Planet Earth of course!

Clearly then, it seems that if you have infinite financial resources (like Central Banks do), you can mess with the price of bitcoin.  I suppose that as a market matures, the frequency and size of these opportunities will decrease, though I suppose they never disappear entirely.

However, if you have a counterfeiting machine, which is the essential definition of a Central Bank of Planet Earth, then you don't care if you will lose money.  Instead, you care that some other currency is going to replace the fiat that you produce and then you won't be able to control the people in your country.  So you spend whatever you need to spend to make the value of that new threat fall.

Whenever they've accumulated enough to have a strong effect, they can dump their bitcoins, pushing the price into a nosedive.  I know of people who do this and they aren't Central Banks of Planet Earth or even hired by them under some kind of Black Ops meant to stave off the impending demise of the world's reserve currency.  They're just currency manipulators who will get mad at me if I publish their names.  I don't mind them because at least they are honest.

So regardless of who might be doing it, when does this strategy stop working?  Or do you think it can continue forever?  I don't think it can.  In the worst case scenario, my "Nightmare Scenario," the Central Banks of Planet Earth keep doing this until they and I are the only ones left who have any bitcoin.  No one else will want it, because it will be worthless.

They would hold all of the bitcoins except for the few (thousand?  million?) I still have because I like to keep my savings equally split between gold, silver, and bitcoin.  That leaves me as the only non-coercive being that has any bitcoin, and I don't think that would be such a nightmare after all.  It apparently worked out pretty well for the early miners of bitcoin, whoever they are, and I don't think I'd mind going through that.  Bitcoin would be my own personal pre-mined cryptocurrency.

Of course, any reader who catches my drift here would join me in the group of the only non-coercive people who hold bitcoin.  The combined bitcoin savings of all the people who hold bitcoin right now is worth just under 5 billion dollars (minus whatever coins have been lost).  That's a lot to split up between us and the CBEs, but it's less than 1% of the value of the centralized corporation called Apple.  That's something to chew on.

Odd Mouse Behavior

I did several Internet searches to try to find someone else experiencing the problem described below:

"two mousepointers"

"circle square mousepointer"

"odd mouse behavior"

"trapped mousepointer"

I tried some others that I can't remember now, but I never got a description like the one I'm about to provide.  Hopefully I've described it well enough that someone who has the same trouble and does a Google search will find my post.

Sometimes, while I'm using my laptop, the mouse pointer turns kind of invisible.  It's still in the same place, and as I move it, it shows up, and I can click on things and use the mouse just like always, but if I stop moving it, it disappears.

Actually, it doesn't really disappear.  It moves to the middle of a geometric shape about one inch to the right of the left edge of my screen, and about four inches below the top edge.  The shape is sometimes a circle, sometimes, a square, and sometimes a circle that pulses with circular shading, as if it is a pond into which a pebble was dropped (but the "waves" are much faster).  So if I don't move the mouse, it sits there in the middle of that shape.

Once I start moving the mouse, its position goes back to where it was last time I was moving it, and it appears in the old position and the new places into which I move it.

This mousepointer behavior is very annoying, but only because I can't see where the mouse is unless I'm moving it.  That is the only symptom I've found.

The shape that "holds" the mousepointer while I'm not using it is generally a solid white outline with a translucent white background, sitting on top of everything else.  If I move a window in such a way as to cover the shape, the window goes "under" the shape.  I found a few hits on the Internet about a mousepointer getting stuck in a box during some kind of remote access, so I just changed my password.

I did a scan with Malware Antibytes a few days ago, which found and quarantined something, but the mouse problem still occurred after that.

If you found this post by doing a google search, please let me know what you searched for.  I'd like to add to the list of search terms that people can use to find information about this peculiar behavior.

Illegal U-Turn

I would like to make (or see made) a video with the following as a basic script.  I want the interaction to be realistic.  Ideally, people who watch the video will not realize that it was created from a script.  Hopefully, this kind of thing will start happening in real life.

--------

In a car, looking out the windshield heading toward a red left-turn arrow.  There is a cop car in the background.
There is no traffic.  The car makes a U-Turn ignoring the stoplight.  There is a siren in the background.  The car pulls to the side of the road.  The cop exits his vehicle and approaches the car, knocking on the window.  The view changes to look out the driver's window from the passenger's seat.  The Driver rolls down his window.
"Hi, How're you doing?" says the driver.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?" asks the cop.
"Uhh... Because you wanted to talk to me?"
"License and Registration, please."
"Oh, right.  Your job requires you to write me a ticket, right?"
"Yes sir.  License and Registration please."
"Right, you need my license and registration, I get it.  Like how long do I have to give it to you?"
"Excuse me?"
"I mean, are you in a rush?"
"No sir, you take as much time as you want."
"Ok, great.  You know, when I saw you behind me, I thought you wanted to get by.  Do you mind if I keep asking you questions?"
"Sir, I have a job to do.  I just need your license and registration to do it.  The law requires you to comply."
"Right, and if I don't comply, then you have to like arrest me or something, right?"
"Look sir, this doesn't have to be so complicated.  You just show me your license, and your registration, and then you'll be on your way."
"Ok, but do you mind if I ask you some more questions?"
"It's pretty simple sir.  What's the problem?"
"Well I don't want to make you worry about having to chase me or arrest me or whatever.  What's it called, 'escalation', right?"
"We don't want that now, do we?"
"Well of course not, but your job demands it, if I don't comply.  Ok, I see that I'm making you uncomfortable.   I just wanted to understand the possibilities better."
"Sir, I'm not uncomfortable at all.  If you want to sit here and talk about it for a while, that's fine with me.  I just need your license and registration."
"I understand.  But you have information I want.  Can you describe how the escalation might go if I am utterly non-compliant?"
"Trust me, sir, it's an area you don't want to know about, but you're awfully close to finding out.  Are you refusing?"
"I haven't refused and I don't intend to refuse.  I just wanted-"
"Then what's the problem?"
"I just wanted to understand what happens.  Can you walk me through it?"
"No sir, you'd have to refuse my request.  Are you refusing?"
"You said I can take all the time I want, didn't you?  So I'm using that time to understand you better."
"Sir, this isn't about me, it's about your failure to comply with the traffic laws.  If you are refusing to provide me with your license and registration, then I'll have to move on to the next stage, and neither of us wants that."
"Yeah, I think that stage dehumanizes both of us, doesn't it?"
"Is that what you want?"
"Like you said, we'd both like to avoid that.  Your method is to proceed with writing me a ticket, and my method is to have a conversation.  Maybe we'll end up doing both.  Your job requires that second stage, but only after I choose not to comply, which I probably won't- I mean, I will probably comply because I'm scared of you.  It sucks.  But I guess you have a quota or whatever, huh?"
"Sir, we don't have quotas here.  They are illegal."
"So what motivates you to stop people?"
"They break the traffic laws.  It's my job to enforce them."
"Well sure, but if they don't comply, then you have to dominate them.  Why not just avoid the whole problem... I mean, you could stop them, tell them 'Hey, you ran that light - be more careful.'  Or whatever, you know?  And then let them go.  No second stage, no domination, no feeling dehumanized for you or the other guy."
The driver continues after the cop says nothing for a few seconds.
"Doesn't it change you?  I mean, they hire you guys to dominate people, and doesn't it change how you view us?  Like we aren't equals any more, but more like enemies.  I mean, after you started giving people tickets, did you start to feel more isolated from them?"
"This isn't about me.  I'm going to need your license and registration."
"Dude, it's totally about you.  When you knocked on my window, I was like 'Whoa, this guy really hates having to dominate people.'  You didn't even wanna describe stage two.  I think you're doing it right now - trying to stop thinking of me as a fellow human being and looking at me as a ticket you need to write, some kind of pressure from your boss or whatever.  It's horrible, and I don't think it's right.  I wanna help.  I'm part of this group that's trying to improve working conditions for cops."  The driver hands the cop a business card.
The video shows a close-up of the card on which the following is written:
    POLICE OFFICER REHABILITATION PROGRAM (PORP)
    Most cops start out as great guys.
    "We have to hurt innocent people."
    "Becoming a bully makes being a cop easier."
    Both the dominator and his victim become less human.
    There's no such thing as "humane enforcement."
    The PORP video: http://...
    Please don't chase me.  I'm trying to help.

We Allow Evil

I would like to illustrate a thesis.  My thesis is that most of us are allowing bad people to succeed in doing bad things.  Most of us agree on a few basic principles:  It's bad to strike someone without provocation.  It's bad to take something that belongs to someone else.  It's bad to step on someone else's sandwich, juice box, puppy, child, or foot.  It's bad to push someone into a cage, and then lock it so that they can't get out.  It's bad to break a promise.

Most of the things I've described as bad don't seem so bad when certain people such as authority figures do them.  For example, a parent spanking his or her child doesn't seem as bad as anyone else spanking the child.  A police officer pushing someone into a cage and then locking it doesn't seem as bad as someone who isn't a police officer doing it.

It angers me a little bit to see parent's strike their children because it teaches violence and control, rather than reason and self-control.  However, I view this problem as a side-effect of something much worse.  After all, parents love their victims most of the time, not because they can extract resources from the children, but because they enjoy the happiness that those children can feel, and they are fun to be around, and they're family.

It angers me a lot to see police officers taking advantage of this acquiescence to authority because it teaches violence and control rather than reason and self-control.  The love a police officer feels for his victim is laughable when compared to that of a parent for his or her child.  Yes, I hear your "butts".

"But it's their job to enforce the law," you think.  Let's start there.  If I hire you as an assassin, then it's your job to murder someone.  Does that make it right?  Is murder transformed into a morally sound activity by virtue of being a service rendered for payment?  Of course not.  So from where does this objection come?  I think I've got it: The enforcement of laws is what keeps society from becoming disordered.

If it were true that the order in society comes from the enforcement of laws, then I would agree with you.  I don't think it does, however.  As a personal example, I have broken many laws and not had any enforcement action taken against me and my life seems to be a bit more ordered than most.  I have had enforcement actions taken against me, and they are nearly always quite disruptive and disorderly.  I will assume that this is true for most of my readers simply because they were smart and curious enough to read this far.  However, I bet that my assumption about "other people" is different from yours.  I think it's true for most people.  If they are left to break laws willy-nilly, they find a way to have a pretty ordered life, but as soon as law enforcement starts acting against them, it becomes disorderly.

One of the best examples I can think of is the black market.  Black markets exist all over the planet, and they do so only because laws are not enforced.  They may be dangerous and even lethal, but they are orderly for the most part.  Markets that are not orderly, whether in full compliance with laws or not at all compliant, soon disappear.  There are some fundamental reasons for this, I think.  These reasons apply not only to markets, which are simply the aggregate of individual participants, but to the individuals themselves.  In fact, the operations of these reasons in individuals is what causes them to operate on the market as a whole.

When an individual either isn't aware or doesn't care that others will make him suffer for particular behaviors, it is very easy for that individual to undertake those behaviors.  If there's a law against something, a lot of people who would do it otherwise will not do it.  Their true nature is hidden by the law.  Controlling people hides them from us.  The true nature of other people is hidden from us when they are afraid to show themselves.

Additionally, if a law is enforced, then the natural consequences of the prohibited behavior are often submerged in the effects of the enforcement.  The enforcement of laws warps reality so that it is harder for people to understand it.  The learning cycle is broken.  Human beings have a natural learning cycle, constantly at work in infants.  Seemingly random behaviors are willed into existence, and they produce various effects.  The brain of an infant correlates the willed action with the effects in a constant effort to learn how willing can alter reality in a desirable direction.

Enforcement of law is generally based on pain, either financial, physical, social, or some combination of those three kinds of pain.  Pain causes fear and embeds itself in the memory as a warning against repeating whatever actions may have contributed to the pain.  Fear retards the learning cycle.  Pain causes this fear, and law enforcement causes the pain.  This is true for both manmade law and natural law.

Vertigo is an unpleasant feeling that many people feel when they perceive a great distance in a downward direction.  This mental effect is an evolved trait that protects us from the natural law of gravity.  However, there is no punishment for looking down.  The punishment comes from actually falling, and we learn to be more careful, or we become acrophobic, or both.

We also have an instinct to distinguish between pain that comes from another human and pain that comes from the natural world.  As children, we learn the word "blame" and tend to overuse it.  Hell, we keep overusing it as adults too, unless we figure some stuff out, like how blame tends to prevent us from improving ourselves to avoid pain in the future.  But when a punishment does bring us pain because another, an enforcer, whether a parent or a cop or a justice system, has decided that we ought to be punished, we know there is nothing there to learn except fear.  So we learn to fear and be controlled, and our own tendency to reason and strengthen our self-control atrophies.

I am comfortable calling that evil.  We allow it.  Well, YOU allow it, I suspect.  I tolerate it and write essays like this one to try to minimize it.  I'd like to see blame and punishment go away.  They are harmful over the long term.  They weaken people and encourage individual self discipline to atrophy.  They are demoralizing.  They introduce suffering into existence that could have been avoided.  They may prevent some suffering, but there is more joy prevented by them so that the net effect is negative.  They are evil.  Stop allowing them.  Stop engaging in them.