Sure you can hire out your military service. But you can’t hire out your life. You can only externalize the risk to your life at a large discount. So how about this: you’re welcome to hire out your service, but if your mercenary is killed we kill you and take your stuff and give it to his family?
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 07:06:00 UTC
TAXES FOR THE COMMONS
I have no problem paying for commons – when they’re in fact commons. I have a big problem with paying extortionary rents. And I have an even larger problem with paying for damage to the commons that we have built over millennia. People have no problem paying taxes that they agree with and many problems paying for taxes that they don’t agree with. The solution of course is to let people pay for what they agree with and not for what they don’t agree with. Representatives are for sale. Remove the agent from the principle agent problem. (Conversely I have an equally large problem with free riders on the commons.)
I think I’m going to put together a web application with a budget model of the US Government and your extant taxes, and we’ll see how people would vote their money.
That is a wonderful social science experiment. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 07:05:00 UTC
We have grown used to our luxuries – spending our heritage. Spending down our normative capital. And we have been able to spend it down only because of a temporary technological advantage. We have inserted tremendous risk into our civilization by assuming that the economic advantage of fossile fuels, upon which industrial and post industrial modernity is built, is something that we can perpetuate – which seems at least possible – and that we will retain our advantage over the rest of the world, and that all others in the world will not equilibrate that advantage – which seems impossible.
The problem is that we cannot exit the risk that your assumption places on the rest of us, while you can internalize the opportunity of your preference without exporting the risk onto us.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 04:54:00 UTC
VERBAL PICKPOCKETS
You object to propertarian constraints on political speech? Well, what you really mean, is that you will be deprived of your ability to conduct cunning verbal deceptions and thefts, that you have come to see as your privilege. But I fail to see how wit and soft thefts, is materially any different from violence and hard thefts. Thefts are thefts.
The Cathedral’s academy trains legions of conceptual pickpockets, petty thieves, and brigands. Education that makes men cunning is no the same as education that makes men moral. Moral men eschew all theft, cunning men seek it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 04:03:00 UTC
Libertines can’t handle the truth. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 03:33:00 UTC
OK. Too much salt in the food last night. I had nightmares all night. Woke up with a headache. And I still managed to crank out a good idea. Now it’s time to go to the office and work on Oversing.
We need ten more guys working on the product. At this point that’s all we need.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 03:24:00 UTC
TRUTH
The question: how do we speak the truth, given any subset of properties of reality?
“Truthful” – Testimonial Truth – A Warranty, but of what?
1) meaningfully expressible ( hypothesis )
2) internally consistent (logically consistent)
3) externally correspondent ( physically testable )
4) existentially possible (operational construction)
5) voluntarily choose-able (voluntary exchange)
6) market-survivable (criticism – theory )
7) market irrefutable (law)
8) irrefutable under original experience (True)
The Warranty:
I. *TRUE*: Assuming elimination of the barriers of time, space, scale, and observability, a promise that one would come to the same conclusion if equally truthful in his actions.
II. *TRUTHFUL*: the criteria for such a warranty to be made.
Criticism of Intellectual History:
we have been obsessed with science and math rather than seeing them as simple subsets of the more complex problem. And in the west, we took truth telling for granted, when it is the first principle upon which all other western advances were made.
(Next. Information Differences Necessary in Verbal Expression)
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 03:17:00 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBNg4NpDTxMMORAL SPECIALIZATION AND THE REPRODUCTIVE DIVISION OF LABOR
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 02:55:00 UTC
THOUGHTS ON OPERATIONALISM AND FALSIFICATIONISM
Still thinking because I can’t quite grasp ..hmm.. and I think it’s like falsification – that if an argument (a theory) isn’t falsifiable then it isn’t scientific. And that …. well, that something isn’t ‘scientific’ is a non-operational statement – its like saying it’s good or heavenly, but that doesn’t tell us anything. Internal consistency, external correspondence and existential possibility do tell us something.
—“operationalise a concept likes suppression”–
Damn…. finally… I know how to talk about it…. YAY!
Thank you Ayelam Valentine Agaliba. For some reason you always give me the most helpful breadcrumbs…. the only people in this world worth anything in epistemology are CR’s.
I am too under the weather this morning to write something meaningful. But I can now show that the way I am using operationalism is as a further extension of falsificationism for those cases where our sense and perceptions are sufficient for decidability (social sciences). Or I would invert it: that falsification is a lower standard of operationalism for those cases when our sense and perception are insufficient for decidability (the physical universe).
Well that is a good way to start off a day even if it’s a day with a headache…
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 02:54:00 UTC
(Guest post by Michael Phillip)
Postmodernism (Pomo) is an intellectual blight, and a moral one. For, as Norman Geras has pointed out, if there is no truth, there is no justice. If there is no truth, there is also no heritage. Creating, in reaction to progressivist post-modernism, PoMo conservatives who are so unaware of the heritage they are supposed to be preserving that they actively undermine it. PoMo conservatism is another manifestation of the destructive intellectual and moral emptiness postmodernism’s attack on truth creates. A conservatism that is not founded in some strong sense of truth, heritage and consequence—but is mere attitude—is not merely pointless, it is vicious and destructive.