Following last week's consumption of some serious food for the soul, much of my past week has been immersed reading Trilema, following links, and reading all manner of Pantsuitist produced histories. Some Trilema pieces I might have read recently before the re-reading, but others have been a while. Pantsuitist histories were read to get the cancer's perspective on the its own metastasis. For my own reference, several points about how the world works are collected below.
Mostly I just want to organize a portion of my own context for "What Bitcoin Is Disrupting"
Currency
For much of civilized human history money meant coins minted from scarce materials. Foreign trade was possible because a battery of tests could discern what a coin was made of and what's its worth per the local unit of account. The values of coins made from different metals and different alloys would float to the pain of anyone who tried to fix a ratio. People in possesssion of these scarce metals could take them to a lord's mint in exchange for standardized coinage with the lord taking a fee for issuing the coins.
Eventually the success of Spanish Latin America introduced a standard in the form of the dollar, a silver coin of certain physical specifications which enjoyed wide acceptance to the point everyone else had a dollar. In the US as late as 1873 silver could be traded to the mint for dollar coins, a practice that ended when advances in silver extraction meant fixing a ratio between gold and silver was about to become an exercise in still greater futility than ever before. Gold is scarce in absolute terms while silver is scarce in terms of being a low yeilding but valuable part of many ores primarily yeilding other metals. Gold mining produces gold, but silver with some exceptions comes from copper and lead mining.
The US mint continued minting silver coins whose intrinsic value was less than their face while further introducing a "Trade Dollar" coin to use for trade with Oriental markets. A populist "Free Silver" movement emerged demanding the right to trade silver metal for silver dollars without cost. The Federal Reserve Bank was born under Woodrow Wilson. The Ef-deer banned private ownership of gold bullion and coins among other crimes. The US had some boom years on the strenth of the rest of the world's industry being wrecked. When Europe got its shit back together the paper US Dollar and Gold drifted too far and Nixon untethered the USD from anything at all in 1973.
The USD survives on the strength that some kinds of orc prefer them much as late 19th century China preferred silver. In the interim all sorts of other paper currencies which were once functionally equivalent dollars and pesos have diverged wildly. Also occurring in the interim substantial USD flowed to China financing their development of sufficient industrial prowess to raise the cost of verifying the authenticity of standardized gold and silver bullion products immensly.
Thankfully Bitcoin emerged in 2009 and matured in 2013. Bitcoin is the reserve currency against which the rest of the world moves. Unlike Gold the cost of veryifying Bitcoin is low1 and unlike USD the monetary mass is not only measurable, but known.
The present insanity where altcoins pretending to be national currencies avoid crashing to zero through exercise of religious faith is an incredibly recent experiment. 2019-1973=46 which is more years than I've been alive, but not many years at all from a historical perspective. It isn't unreasonable I to hope to still be breathing to see the end stage of the experiment.
Law Enforcement
Law enforcement, as an organized profession lacks precedent. Instead order was maintained by Patriarchy and feuds between partriarchs were legal instruments. Crime meant harm, and an interplay of a Patriarch's whims and social convention dictated punishment. The Urban-Rural dispute is informative of the actual underlying demand for what may be commonly thought of as policing.
Law was either handed down by a Patriarch or determined through arbitration of actual disputes by a patriarch or an agent of the Partriarch who was authorized to do so.2 The idea of a punitive prison sentence is alien to history because why are you feeding this dork? Jails were a sort of ransom arrangement holding human cattle until they could be disposed of, hopefully for a profit.
Doom came about when England decided that as part of their effort to develop a chunk of the New World, they would send their troublesome weirdos over the Ocean. The weirdos did what weirdos do, and decided to enforce all sorts of silly ideas as laws. By the time the colonies split, British weirdos had become an entrenched and relatively powerful interest group. The seed for the proliferation of insanity had been planted, the idea of crime was decoupled from harm while law ceases to be limited to disputes capable of, much less needing adjudication.
In parallel the melting pot of the US gave old women a voice while Lincoln's war of Northern Aggression cemented the fate of the US as a slave empire. Old women and all manner of betas were united by a desire for "nothing bad to happen" and the destructive power of Democracy went to work.
The Anglophone democracies that survived war with Hitler's German Democracy proceeded to replicate the Nazi tools of population pacification with their hands while condemning those same methods with their words. The pretense of rule of law has left the USG bankrupt of men.
The Femstate As Enemy Of Everything Good
English language Trilema has continued to target this very cutting point. While I have had several moments of clarity reading and re-reading trilema on this point. I lack the energy to organize an outline on this point tonight.
- But not free, requiring a full node and literacy to carry out. [↩]
- Slave empires are discounted as exceptions for their known failure modes. [↩]
> Law was either handed down by a Patriarch or determined through arbitration
http://trilema.com/2015/why-representative-democracy-doesnt-work-and-doesnt-make-sense/ very much apropos.
It is indeed very much so. Rather than fire that link now, I'm working out how to drop it more destructively in the attack on dry old bags and their formalism.
[...] only prevents new good things, it forces the unwinding of good things. All of them. The connection between currency and a physical reality broke in under a century.2 Successful societies organized in ways that respect what is now called [...]
[...] resignation, however nationalist they may profess to be, is now driving their memes. Never mind dollars and pesos were once coins of standard composition and weight. That the Latin Monetary Union was once a thing and foreign exchange not a particular problem in [...]