http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/05/26/holocaust-holodomor-origins-of-anti-semiMORE ON UKRAINIAN HOLODOMOR
(via peter meyers)
(Note: I do not know the history of this region, or its conflicts like I do the larger empires.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 16:19:00 UTC
HOPPE’S STRATEGIC GENIUS
–“For China, it would be a clever move to back the yuan with gold in order to push the dollar from the throne. With yuan backed by gold, the days of America’s economic dominance and the dollar would be numbered. The West will therefore do everything possible to prevent this.–
What can we do to encourage it????
One world government is the ultimate tyranny. My fantasy is to disempower the US military’s world dominance so that it retrenches to north america, sea and air, and to force europe to defend itself, and encourage russia to ally with germany, and foster the breakup of the USA into regional entities.
China can make this happen.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:56:00 UTC
THE JOY OF MATH
(rumination)
My long term business partner Jim was a math guy. Worked at JPL. That kind of thing. Loves numbers the way I love philosophy.
Math is an endlessly fascinating puzzle. I prefer to solve problems instead of puzzles. In fact, because of a deliberate choice in college, I intentionally eschewed all puzzles as ‘character flaws’.
The difference between puzzles and problems is whether the outcome causes material benefit or harm in real time. And that’s partly because you know that puzzles are solvable, and that problems often are not. So you know if you stick with a puzzle it can be solved. But with a problem, you are working against a clock that will run out, and you don’t know in advance that it can be solved.
But that that doesn’t mean that I’m not easily seduced by puzzles. A video game, or a computer game, is a puzzle, not a problem. Puzzles are entertaining.
Jim used to say that he couldn’t get too interested in math because it was just such an entertaining puzzle, but it didn’t produce anything. And in the end it wasn’t a good use of his time.
It’s like crack. Puzzles really are like crack – addictive. And I’m getting that feeling again, working on this rather strange little problem of philosophy. Math is the nerd’s equivalent of world of warcraft, and it may be the ultimate game of world of warcraft – how do we create deductions of all possible relations? It’s fascinating. Is it possible to create a description of all possible relations (a proof)? I don’t see why not. There may not be a route from every position in every field to every other position in every other field; but their might be, and I can’t understand, even if circuitously how their couldn’t be. I mean, maths is just an enormous truth table.
And intuitively I would much rather solve a puzzle. The reason being that all the information needed to solve the puzzle is present. I don’t have to go out and perform empirical tests to guarantee what I sense and what I record are causally related. In math the study of pure relations, independent of time, and under formalism, independent of correspondence and context, I don’t have to concern myself with the cost of tests, the passage of time, or contextual constraints on relations OTHER than whether I can construct a proof (deduction) for those relations.
But it’s incredibly interesting. And just like suppressing the desire to play videogames, I feel like I have to suppress my desire to play with math. Not because it’s unimportant, but because in the division of labor, my particular craft is not pure relations, but those actions which result in the possible and preferable cooperation between individuals and groups in increasingly great numbers.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:43:00 UTC
DIFFERENCES
(quotes from ukrainian women)
“Judge a woman by her feelings, judge a man by his behavior.”
“A woman needs four hours, and man needs two days. Women think about everything at once. A man thinks about one thing at a time.”
“Feminism for Ukrainian women is.. ‘We are the same. I am woman. If you want relationship you must work for it.’
(I translate this roughly as “Men are not above us. We are free. We can live without you. We have dignity. The choice is ours. So if you want us, we expect you to earn us.” And that is a game men actually love to play.)
THE MATING THING IS SO FREAKING AWESOME WHEN YOU DON”T FIGHT IT.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:14:00 UTC
DRIVING FATALITIES AS AN INDEX OF TRUST
(more on notoriously bad russian and ukrainian drivers)
British drivers, after swedish drivers, are some of the best drivers in the world. Because they follow the rules. And rules and costs keep people off the road.
American’s are not such good drivers. They are about average. America is big (like russia) and cars are a necessity, and rules and costs encourage people to be the road. Russian size, rules and cost likewise encourage people to be on the road.
However, data is data is data. Russians and Ukrainians are disproportionately bad drivers.
Russians (and ukrainians) do not adhere to ‘unnecessary rules’. Something which other authors have called ‘rules of low probability’. This is common the further east you go.
My suspicion is that it is a trust measure. High trust societies are more aware of, cooperative with, forgiving of, and tolerant of minor errors on the part of their fellows.
Reasons For Russian Driving Statistics
(a) excessive cultural machismo (which I personally love)
(b) lower observance of (probabilistic) rules,
(c) lower attention to the road – phones etc
(d) lots and lots of alcohol use
(e) Poorer quality roads, signage, and design.
(f) lower quality vehicles (less forgiving vehicles)
In the muslim countries we have less observance of rules, higher speeds and machismo, and … very low IQ’s.
Native American indians are interestingly terrible drivers, at nearly three times the black/white/hispanic fatalities. Theory is that this is alcohol driven. No way to know. Good spatial perception, but low IQ. But, gIven the disparities in IQ between whites, blacks and hispanics, and the high availability, and high use of vehicles, it’s pretty clear that driving is not an IQ problem. It appears that higher IQ countries are able to develop high trust more easily.
The question is why is eastern (byzantine) europe (and russia) a low trust culture – lower than southern europe, and nearly as low trust as in islamic countries, if not as low trust as tribal countries in Africa.
BAD DRIVING IS A LOW-TRUST PROBLEM
That’s pretty interesting. We can measure social trust by driving fatalities, rather than surveys. But interestingly enough, surveys correlate driving fatalities (mostly).
What I find most interesting here, is that while they disregard the rules and assume all other drivers are likely idiots or drunkards, they are as easily helpful to people in duress as americans.
I like people here better. Period. in my view, they pay more attention to each other than to rules. Americans (And most western europeans) signal with their adherence to rules.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 05:21:00 UTC
RUSSIAN DRIVERS
1) “You can actually see the answer in most videos posted on YouTube. It’s the complete disregard for all traffic rules.”
2) “Russian cultural bias to ‘go with your gut’ rather than follow the rules.”
3) “Russian fatalities are not much above the world average.”
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 20:51:00 UTC
Rothbardian ethics preserve the ability to ‘cheat’ by all but violence and the crudest of frauds – and rothbard supports that preservation with the argument that the market will naturally suppress that cheating. However, transaction costs alone, ensure that such suppression can’t occur. And that’s before we add in the remaining external costs of low trust.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 18:52:00 UTC
Conversation with Libertarian Friend (LF)
(happiness)
LF: “Curt, that means property rights aren’t binary, but a spectrum.”
CD: “Yes. That’s right. It means that property rights increase as we suppress increasing categories of discounts. It means that different societies can, because they are homogenous or heterogeneous, suppress different levels of discounts, and benefit from those increasing discounts – or lose if they cannot obtain discounts.”
(Later)
LF: “You know that, this means that libertarians can’t claim the moral universal high ground? Liberty is just something you want or don’t.”
CD: “Yes.”
LF: “There are a lot of moralistic libertarians that won’t like this.”
CD: “Yeah… Well. Just how it is. I don’t get to choose whether something is true or not.”
(Later)
LF: “This is big. This is going to revolutionize……”
CD: “Yeah. Maybe. I think so..”
(Wonderful to be understood.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 18:47:00 UTC
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/political-reasons-for-leaving-the-eu/EXCELLENT CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC REASONS FOR BRITAIN NOT TO JOIN THE EU
(from Sean Gabb)
“England is bound by its trade, its markets, its food supplies to the most varied and often very distant countries. Her activity is essentially industrial and commercial not agricultural. She has very strong, very individual habits and traditions. In short, the nature, structure and circumstances peculiar to England are different from those of the other continental countries.”
“The difference is temperamental and intellectual. The continental[s] like to reason from the top downwards, from general principle to practical application … the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Anglo-Saxons like to argue from the bottom upwards, from practical experience … the tradition of Bacon and Newton.”
“The EU doesn’t respect the rule of law.” …. “The EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights purports to ‘give’ Britons rights we’ve enjoyed under Common Law for a thousand years! But a sinister clause allows the EU to ‘suspend’ these rights if it deems that to be in its collective interest.”
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 17:39:00 UTC
MARRIAGE STRUCTURES AMONG NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES
(Note: basically what we get out of history is that women are in greater control when we combine both property rights and high male morality due to warfare. You’d think if the feminists figure this out they’ll renew the draft and vote to send us off to war in large numbers. lol )
“Exclusive monogamy was the rule among the Iroquois and a few of their neighbors. This is to be expected in cultures in which matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence were coupled with female ownership and control of agricultural land and houses, not to mention the unusual authority of women in political affairs. Here the men literally moved in with their wives, who could divorce them merely by tossing their personal effects out of the door of the longhouse….”
“The only other area where female dominance approached this level was that of the western Pueblos in the Southwest. Here the picture was similar, and exclusive monogamy prevailed. The other instances of exclusive monogamy were scattered and occurred in both bilateral and patrilineal societies. They do not lend themselves to any ready explanation.”
“Sororal polygyny — that is, the marriage of a man to two wives who were sisters — probably occurred wherever polygyny was to be found. A number of Plains tribes had no other form. A man in this society was especially anxious to acquire an eldest sister as a first mate, with an eye on acquiring her younger sister if and when he could afford them…. [I]t is easy to see that polygyny had more utility in societies where male mortality in hunting and warfare was high. The Plains was one of these areas. Among the Eskimos, where a man had more difficulty in supporting multiple wives, the extremely high male mortality was offset by female infanticide. This partially explains the more modest amount of polygyny present in the Arctic.”
(Note: Equilibria in everything)
-HBD CHICK
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 17:03:00 UTC