Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • ON WALTER BLOCK’S ADVOCACY OF GHETTO ETHICS “Turns out he’s mostly wrong. Only c

    ON WALTER BLOCK’S ADVOCACY OF GHETTO ETHICS

    “Turns out he’s mostly wrong. Only chance of future funding streams, is to abandon parasitic ethics. Rothbard’s critique of the state is priceless, and his history is almost as good. But his choice to try to base liberty on the ethics of the ghetto, rather than the ethics of the aristocratic egalitarian polity did the movement more damage than all his other works did good. It’s non-logical, it’s ahistorical, and it’s a demonstrated failure.

    Walter is the most popular justifier of parasitic ethics in the world. And I have learned a great deal from him. But , it turns out that like rothbard, he’s just wrong. The ghetto was a state within a state, acted like a state. And rothbard’s ethics are those of exchange between states, not polities. The irony of that statement is palpable.”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-13 04:04:00 UTC

  • WE CANNOT RATIONALLY CHOSE PRODUCTS, THEN HOW CAN WE RATIONALLY CHOOSE POLITICIA

    http://mises.org/daily/6654/Behavioral-Economics-and-Irrational-VotersIF WE CANNOT RATIONALLY CHOSE PRODUCTS, THEN HOW CAN WE RATIONALLY CHOOSE POLITICIANS?

    (The Mises Institute willfully promotes Parasitic Ghetto Ethics – which is why their funding will continue to decline. But aside from promoting parasitic ethics, their critique of the state and statists is yeoman’s labor.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-13 03:51:00 UTC

  • “…The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment d

    “…The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn’t say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a ‘compelling interest’ in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.”

    — Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate,

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-13 03:44:00 UTC

  • GARGOYLES AND ALL THAT KINDA THING I’m not too keen on the whole Google Glass th

    GARGOYLES AND ALL THAT KINDA THING

    I’m not too keen on the whole Google Glass thing. On the other hand, if I had a video-enabled bluetooth earpiece, or lapel pin, or a pendant that communicated with my iPhone – and did the same thing, then I’d be perfectly thrilled with it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 16:26:00 UTC

  • VOICES IN IN YOUR FINGERTIPS To write strategically, you have to find a voice. I

    VOICES IN IN YOUR FINGERTIPS

    To write strategically, you have to find a voice.

    I tried the conciliatory voice (which in politics is foolhardy). The romantic voice. (Which I adore but is very hard to do in analytic language, and sometimes ruins the argument.) The antagonistic voice (which I’m good at but depresses me). The contrarian voice (which I still use now and then because it captures attention.) The ridicule voice (which doesn’t really suit me because ridicule requires lateral thinking that is really unavailable to me as an aspie – and I see ridicule, correctly, as dishonest). And finally settled on the scientific voice with a mix of tactically romantic, heroic and critical positioning.

    I’ve been writing long form since I was six years old. I still don’t think I’m a very good writer. Mixing the communicative, the romantic and the analytic is terribly hard, and I haven’t figured out how to do it. Hayek does it best of any modern thinker.

    So the trick is that I couldn’t have figured this all out in advance. The point of writing is to write. You can get better at it. But it takes more writing that’s just one word better than the last, than it does trying to write to an abstract model.

    One last thing that I can’t emphasize enough. Americans tend to believe in the nonsense of talent. Yes, smarter people are better at most everything, and less so people less good at nearly everything. But extraordinary practice narrows that gap significantly even if cannot narrow it completely. You may possess talent but anything worthwhile to others is obtained by marginally different skill and marginally different skill is obtained through practice and lots of it.

    To develop that level of skill, you must love what you do. I would rather write than do almost anything else except maybe drive roadsters on backroads in summer, sing Nirvana or something similar, make an aesthetically interesting dinner for ten, and enjoy good sex. And I”m not sure about the last three. 🙂 But writing used to give me headaches, and I used to struggle so hard with it. Until I understood that the typewriter was my enemy – I was afraid of mistakes. And my handwriting is all but unreadable even to me. Computers changed that for me.

    The point being that you have to find the tools that help you master your craft. I”m still amazed at the people who write books by hand -there are plenty of them really. But the old saw that an artist is only as good as his tools, applies to every single discipline.

    And the illusion that you’re looking for ways to express your talent is a dangerous idea.

    Instead:

    1) Work on something that is both rare and fascinates you. Pop nonsense just means you’re too ignorant to find something uncommon but still interesting.

    2) Master the subject matter through repetition and investigation and collection of every possible example and detail. Keep a database. I keep an enormous glossary of terms that I try to restate in propertarian language.

    3) Play by reorganizing those details into multiple types of organization. This is where you’ll come up with something creative.

    4) Find tools that help you overcome your weaknesses, not ‘express your talents’.

    5) Then go through and just try test yourself. Now if you’re a nuclear physicist then it’s expensive to run tests. The reason I like philosophy is that my only cost is food, water, and an internet connection. It’s cheap to run tests consisting of arguments.

    What I’ve found is that I am not so much a good writer: because good writing requires a lot of empathy for the reader. But I am good at figuring stuff out.

    And in politics, the problem we face is figuring stuff out so that we can win arguments and defeat the opposition.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:34:00 UTC

  • marco for the humor.)

    http://thevikingtest.com/(thanks marco for the humor.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:28:00 UTC

  • CRUSOE ECONOMICS AS THE NON-LOGIC OF THE GHETTO I suppose I can’t say this enoug

    CRUSOE ECONOMICS AS THE NON-LOGIC OF THE GHETTO

    I suppose I can’t say this enough, but Crusoe economics is useful for the analysis of economics between states, but is entirely useless for the deduction of the properties of a social order.

    It should be obvious by now that Crusoe’s island is an analogy to the medieval ghetto, of a state within a state. The sea constructs the borders and walls of the ghetto.

    Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all.

    They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism.

    Only white people can be this stupid.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:27:00 UTC

  • ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PROPERTY Ever since google started buying up AI firm

    ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PROPERTY

    Ever since google started buying up AI firms, I keep coming back to my previous argument that (a) humans are acquisitive, and (b) the unit of commensurability is property, (c) prices determine ‘value’ and many things are priceless, and (d) our emotions are changes in state of inventory, (e) an AI constructed in, and reasoning according to those those terms would of necessity operate as humans would.

    I think others will beat me to it. But if I lived long enough I would like to try something of that nature.

    Now, most of us who studied this topic back in the seventies, eighties and nineties understand that google has the necessary properties to create the first really superhuman AI. A “Neuromancer” scale intelligence. Because the first requisite for intelligence is memory.

    But memories must be commensurable.

    And the unit of commensurability is property.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:22:00 UTC

  • DEHUMANIZING – LIKE A VIDEO YOU CAN”T LOOK AWAY FROM? 🙂 (from elsewhere)(edited

    DEHUMANIZING – LIKE A VIDEO YOU CAN”T LOOK AWAY FROM? 🙂

    (from elsewhere)(edited)

    Explaining the Propertarian perspective to an inquirer:

    –“The fundamental difference in my perspective is that I reduce almost everything to a particular calculus using a particular grammar, after having observed that humans are, in the large part, acquisitive – even if acquisitive of non material things.

    It’s a physical necessity that expensive life forms like ours remain acquisitive of so many things: experiences, knowledge, opportunities, relationships, mates, offspring, insurance, material goods – and particularly anything that we can inventory for later use.

    Our emotions are reactions to changes in state of our assets. Our language is a process of aggregation and loading necessary to increasingly compress complexity. And our arguments largely justification and framing for both internal and external social protocol.

    And that’s actually humiliating somehow. I find my work a bit like a video you can’t look away from: it’s both fascinating and, well, somewhat like discovering that the earth and man are not centers of the universe. Because in the end, it turns out we’re pretty simple. And most of what we do is social-dance protocol that signals conformity to norms while pursuing our self interest: acquisition.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 03:14:00 UTC

  • DEFINING GHETTO ETHICS Ghetto Ethics: quite literally, the ethics of the medieva

    DEFINING GHETTO ETHICS

    Ghetto Ethics: quite literally, the ethics of the medieval urban ghetto.

    As a ‘state within a state’ residents of the ghetto can conduct exchange as if they are state actors by relying upon high trust exchange in-group, while using low trust exchange out-group.

    However, in any polity, each of us cannot act as a ‘state’ by applying low trust with some and high trust with others because the net result is a near universally low trust society for the vast majority.

    In such an environment demand for the state and its interventions as a proxy for trust remains high, since low trust is by definition the use of cunning and deception to obtain discounts and premiums that the opposite party would not tolerate willingly.

    In other words, low trust ethics are parasitic, and impose high transaction costs on the population.

    The underlying point I’m making is the absurdity of using the model of a state within a state to advocate for a stateless society. In that lens the entire rothbardian project is… well, absurdly illogical. Laughable even.

    Aristocratic egalitarianism (the protestant ethic) suppresses all cheating such that demand for the state is low because transaction costs and conflicts are minimized, while the velocity of production and exchange is high.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-12 02:56:00 UTC