DEAR KIEV
Please get the government to run this:
“If you want a rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition, bring your passport and $250, take a four hour course with 100 other people, we’ll stamp your passport, and you can have an AK47 fresh out of storage. One stamp per person. Period. Training held twice a day right in the main square until people stop coming.”
Welcome to freedom. The militia. The only guarantee of freedom a people ever has.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-19 07:56:00 UTC
KIEV, UKRAINE IS A LOT LIKE OTTAWA, CANADA.
Three days of spring. Three days of fall. An uncomfortably hot summer. And a bitterly cold winter. I love the cold really. The heat though, makes my brain shut down. I hate it. Seattle has spring from the second week of January to the first week of july, and fall from the third week in August to the second week in december. You get just enough winter and summer to know they exist.
I need a beach.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-19 07:52:00 UTC
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/ukraine-young-partisans-106411_Page2.html#ixzz32A17JQrCUKRAINIANS LEARN FREEDOM THE HARD WAY, AND THE RIGHT WAY: MILITIA
Freedom is obtained, and maintained, at the point of a gun. Pacifists are free riders, liars and thieves.
—“Kyiv has a large strategic reserve of Kalashnikov assault rifles and other light weapons—around 5 million pieces—as a mobilization reserve dating back to Soviet times. It has made clear to the Kremlin that it is now considering the possibility of opening up this stockpile to its citizens in East Ukraine. At least half this reserve is concentrated near Sloviansk and it is the reason that Russian special forces were sent there to secure the area.”—-
Read more:
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-19 07:38:00 UTC
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9f6_1399588813&comments=1
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-19 07:19:00 UTC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K9FYT62REVIEW OF POPPER BY WAY OF REVIEW OF ‘MISREADING POPPER’.
Great book. Got a chance to read it this morning.
THOUGHTS
I do not know if it is fair to say that people misread popper, or that popper failed to make his case, but that he failed to reduce his ideas to general assertions that obviate the need to sympathetically (intuitively) agree with him in the first place in order to understand his case. Popper attempts to speak analytically at times, but he remains (as Alex Naraniecki has pointed out) a cosmopolitan author. The Popperian work that needs to be written is the one that this one ALMOST is, and that is to construct assertions that render the criticisms unnecessary.
The historical parts of this book are exceptional and contextual, and in my view the best to date. A few of Rafe’s insights are in the book and they are insights that I learned from him years ago. The most important of which was the project to develop a philosophy of the social sciences, and the multiple authors who failed to succeed at that project, and the consequences for all of us, not so much scientifically, but politically an economically , precisely because they failed to succeed in that project.
However, of those authors, Popper appears, perhaps not so well as Hayek did with law, but better than Mises with his pseudoscience of praxeology, to have come closer to articulating general universal statement of epistemology than anyone else. None the less, all of these authors failed to complete the project. (I think I understand why now.)
So, Popper did not, like Hume (or Kant who I despise) take us across the finish line. And I suspect, that as Rafe points out in the book, it is because he did not lay out his project, because he was unsure of what it was. He wanted to criticize a prevailing trend, and he succeeded in that criticism. But a criticism in itself is not a positive assertion reducible to analytic terms describing an analogy to experience: a usable theory.
CR/CP can be reduced to a list of assertions. Falsification is not the central proposition, but a contingent one, and as Rafe points out, an unfortunate choice of words. The scientific method can be generalized as the universal epistemological method, independent of purpose. And perhaps solve the problem of the social sciences. However, that project is incomplete. Given that Popper was largely correct, and that Hayek was largely correct, ( do not value the other authors terribly much), it should be possible to complete this project. But as yet, no one has.
So again, I think it is an unjust burden to place the error of interpretation upon readers, and instead, to place the failure to organize, prosecute, and articulate the program and his solution to it.
It is instead, proper I think, to state that Popper made correct assertions, in CR/CP, left his effort at falsification incomplete, and failed to complete the program he intuited but could not articulate. Most of this I believe, is a problem of language and culture. He had the right pieces. But our minds are structured by the language we use, and the culture that we live in, and he could no more escape his than we ours.
Hopefully someone will write that book. Hopefully the person who writes that book will complete the program. As someone who tries to complete the overarching program myself – although I do not see it as Popperian but as a general problem of false distraction by extant platonic concepts, and the near magical results of the mathematical program despite its platonic concepts and language – legitimizing Popper is not terribly interesting to me. Nor is further promotion of his work as it stands. Nor is suppressing the absurdly persistent human cognitive bias toward justification. The matter at hand is to complete the research program. Hero worship is for priests. Some of us are out working in the mines. And the answer lies there not in hermeneutic interpretation of Popper’s extant works, or those of his successors.
Great book. I wouldn’t have given it this much thought if it wasn’t. 🙂
Cheers
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-19 06:17:00 UTC
http://www.libertychat.com/2014/05/violent-u-s-revolution-look-like-today-compared-1776-ian-cioffi/IT WOULDN”T BE THAT VIOLENT. IT DOESN”T HAVE TO BE. ITS FRAGILE.
Interesting prognostication. Not one that is supported by the evidence. At no time in history has communication and coordination been available to so many, nor has the systemic infrastructure upon which a society rests, been so fragile. If it were true what you say, the DC Sniper would have had no economic impact, and the rise of professional international insurgents would not have become the de facto means by which war is being conducted. Multiple books, some fairly popular have been written on this subject. Not only is it effective to use systemic facility to drive an efficient economy into shock, and a government in to visible discredit and failure, it’s cheap, and it takes fewer people, a shorter time, than at any point in history. The problem americans face is actually (a) a catalyzing event, and (b) general awareness of a possible solution or alternative to the current order.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 19:44:00 UTC
FEEDING THE DEEP STATE ITS FAVORITE FOOD
—“In light of the new security situation created by Russia’s illegal and illegitimate aggression against Ukraine, we have taken immediate measures to enhance collective security in the air, at sea and on the ground. … The Ukraine crisis has compelled the alliance to refocus on its core mission of defending its members after years in which its main effort has been far away in Afghanistan.”—
So stupid. Russia could have led the western world. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
The white people who failed.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 17:45:00 UTC
Raisinwits 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 17:41:00 UTC
[I] guess, I just assumed that it was so obvious that I didn’t need to say it. But apparently it’s not. So why would you try to rely on all this Kantian nonsense, in order to justify human action? Instead, why wouldn’t you base the philosophy of human action, on human action? What is the difference between, say, justifying something aprioristically, and simply stating that it appears that we are able to use description, deduction, induction, abduction given the amount of information available to us. But that deduction is possible only when describing constant relations? What is the difference between stating, the obvious falsehood, that categorical descriptions of human actions are axiomatic, as in mathematics, and therefore not bounded by reality, rather than that any general description of human actions is theoretical, parsimonious, with broad explanatory power, but remains bounded by reality? Why would one want to appeal to an authority using verbal contrivances, instead of honest descriptions of human actions? Why would you base the theoretical system upon which we analyze human actions on anything other than human actions? Especially when to do so you must misrepresent that which is ‘axiom-like’ but not axiomatic, as that which it is not? Unless you were trying to justify an appeal to an authority? To grant to that which is empirical, scientific and theoretical, the authoritative content of mathematics and logic, which because both are axiomatic, are fully tautological and unbounded by reality? Misesian reasoning, and rothbardian ethics, could be simply an intellectual error. Or it could be a dishonest use of obscurantism to hide the fact that human actions are observable. Even introspective actions are observable by the actor who makes them, and if communicated, observable by others. And as observable, those actions are empirical. Theories may be very hard or very weak. Some theories are very hard, in that under most conditions they are true. But because of time and space, no economic theories are axiomatic. They are bounded by reality. This does not mean that they need to be tested. That is a fallacy of positivism. It means that there are always the possibility of conditions under which they may or may not apply, for any given period of time. In axiomatic systems this is never true. That is what defines them as axiomatic. Operationalism solves the problem of reducing all statements to empirical (observable) and therefore sympathetically testable terms. Praxeology is either an empirical science for the purpose of determining the rationality of human actions, and the voluntary exchange of property, and therefore it is the test of moral action – or it is another of the many, many, cosmopolitan and continental fallacies. If you cannot explain human actions as human actions, then you are either unsure of what it is that you speak, or engaging in obscurantist deception. Continental and Cosmopolitan authors were (and are) trying to preserve traditional authority in the face of science, for the purpose of maintaining group homogeneity. We must treat their arguments as specious. Because they are. All we need is property rights, a contract for their fullest expression enforceable under the private, common, law, and the willingness to organize and use violence for the purpose of obtaining the opportunity to construct those property rights, contract, and private common law. Everything else is obscurant nonsense. Science won. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev.
[I] guess, I just assumed that it was so obvious that I didn’t need to say it. But apparently it’s not. So why would you try to rely on all this Kantian nonsense, in order to justify human action? Instead, why wouldn’t you base the philosophy of human action, on human action? What is the difference between, say, justifying something aprioristically, and simply stating that it appears that we are able to use description, deduction, induction, abduction given the amount of information available to us. But that deduction is possible only when describing constant relations? What is the difference between stating, the obvious falsehood, that categorical descriptions of human actions are axiomatic, as in mathematics, and therefore not bounded by reality, rather than that any general description of human actions is theoretical, parsimonious, with broad explanatory power, but remains bounded by reality? Why would one want to appeal to an authority using verbal contrivances, instead of honest descriptions of human actions? Why would you base the theoretical system upon which we analyze human actions on anything other than human actions? Especially when to do so you must misrepresent that which is ‘axiom-like’ but not axiomatic, as that which it is not? Unless you were trying to justify an appeal to an authority? To grant to that which is empirical, scientific and theoretical, the authoritative content of mathematics and logic, which because both are axiomatic, are fully tautological and unbounded by reality? Misesian reasoning, and rothbardian ethics, could be simply an intellectual error. Or it could be a dishonest use of obscurantism to hide the fact that human actions are observable. Even introspective actions are observable by the actor who makes them, and if communicated, observable by others. And as observable, those actions are empirical. Theories may be very hard or very weak. Some theories are very hard, in that under most conditions they are true. But because of time and space, no economic theories are axiomatic. They are bounded by reality. This does not mean that they need to be tested. That is a fallacy of positivism. It means that there are always the possibility of conditions under which they may or may not apply, for any given period of time. In axiomatic systems this is never true. That is what defines them as axiomatic. Operationalism solves the problem of reducing all statements to empirical (observable) and therefore sympathetically testable terms. Praxeology is either an empirical science for the purpose of determining the rationality of human actions, and the voluntary exchange of property, and therefore it is the test of moral action – or it is another of the many, many, cosmopolitan and continental fallacies. If you cannot explain human actions as human actions, then you are either unsure of what it is that you speak, or engaging in obscurantist deception. Continental and Cosmopolitan authors were (and are) trying to preserve traditional authority in the face of science, for the purpose of maintaining group homogeneity. We must treat their arguments as specious. Because they are. All we need is property rights, a contract for their fullest expression enforceable under the private, common, law, and the willingness to organize and use violence for the purpose of obtaining the opportunity to construct those property rights, contract, and private common law. Everything else is obscurant nonsense. Science won. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute. Kiev.