Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • GAME OF THE YEAR: “GOVERNMENT ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE” (updated) 🙂 I want to play zom

    GAME OF THE YEAR: “GOVERNMENT ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE” (updated) 🙂

    I want to play zombie apocalypse game where all the zombies are different levels of politicians, bureaucrats, public sector workers. Everyone, in the government, for some reason, is infected with the virus of totalitarian humanism, or maybe it was a verbal information virus created by german postmodernists, or maybe it was put on all government paychecks like in ‘the white plague’.

    Whatever the cause, they’re all ‘infected’ and will turn into unstoppable zombies if we don’t kill them fast enough. The longer they’re zombies, the stronger they are and the harder to kill. In groups they can feed off each other, and ‘heal’, albeit slowly. They chase other uninfected statists, and if they attack them long enough, the statists turn into zombies too. But both the zombies and the statists will try to kill you. The statists to take your money and weapons. The zombies for your flesh. You get all sorts of upgrades for killing increasing levels of statists: you get your constitutional rights back as you kill them and this gives you upgrades (access to find) new sorts of weapons.

    Best if it’s a multiplayer, team based game.

    Freaking hilarious. And it would actually be really fun to play.

    “Left for Dead : Anti-State Version”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 04:25:00 UTC

  • Dear people to give me food. Veronika included. Please do not use ‘seasoning’ pa

    Dear people to give me food. Veronika included. Please do not use ‘seasoning’ packets on my food. They have various forms of salts of glutamate (MSG), which is a byproduct of fermentation (bacterial excrement), and I fall asleep immediately, and wake up in the morning in dream land. As hangovers go, it’s not all that bad. Sniffles instead of headache. More mellow kind of confusion. But it’s still a hangover and I feel like curling up with a warm cat and a blanket, and writing philosophy, instead of working on my business. 🙂

    Besides, I don’t want to eat any excrement, even from bacteria.

    I get enough of that from my government. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:39:00 UTC

  • THE TWO DARK or ANGLO-COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECTS 1) Attack on diversity and

    THE TWO DARK or ANGLO-COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECTS

    1) Attack on diversity and equality as a means of preserving our ability to use historical deliberative classical liberal institutions

    2) Formulation of alternative institutions that make possible the voluntary cooperation between diverse and unequal people.

    THE RIGHT IS DOING THE FIRST.

    I (as a libertarian) AM DOING THE SECOND.

    THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT IS NOT REACTIONARY – ITS RADICAL.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:27:00 UTC

  • ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING (cross posted for archiving) The only argument th

    ON ONE POSSIBLE USE FOR VOTING

    (cross posted for archiving)

    The only argument that I can prove that includes voting is:

    (a) It is necessary for groups to have people who make decisions on behalf of the group (iron law of oligarchy). However oligarchies form whenever leaders are chosen. Therefore the Athenian tactic of Lottocracy appears to be the only solution that we know of that produces leaders who rotate as do juries, and who cannot easily be coerced (special interests) nor can they obtain power. I cannot be certain this wouldn’t exacerbate the problem of renters versus owners, but the evidence from juries is that no, it actually does the opposite.

    (b) If these lottocratic leaders choose a set of policies, we can each vote our tax dollars for or not-for those initiatives. This has a lot of value in that it requires us to pay taxes in order to vote and influence decisions. This keeps taxes relatively flat, otherwise it puts too much control in the hands of the very wealthy. Now, it’s also possible to start discounting ones contributions at some point but I’m still not sure that’s very good. In other words, say a lot of you pay 100$ and someone else pays 1B$. Now, you should be pretty happy that your initiative gets funded and tat you can use your money on LESSER INITIATIVES.

    I won’t go into all the different games that can be played under this scenario, but they’re reasonably easy to defend against if you can’t legislate involuntary transfers ,or taxes, you can only have a group of people get together to spend money for this one year.

    If a group deals with a single year, and cannot make multi-year commitments, and if their contracts only last a year, then it is very hard for ‘fashionable but bad ideas” to become institutionalized as they do under law and bureaucracy.

    Anyway. If you want voting of any kind, the combination of (a) public intellectuals conducting a debate, rather than politicians (b) lottocratic juries selecting proposed initiatives, (c) and economic democracy for voting.

    I think you’re pretty likely to get to the land of OZ better than any other solution that we have. I mean, parties and politicians have a pretty bad record. And bureaucracies are even worse.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:23:00 UTC

  • LACKING A ‘BOOK’ – YOU NEED A BOOK We benefit from the evolutionary structure of

    LACKING A ‘BOOK’ – YOU NEED A BOOK

    We benefit from the evolutionary structure of aristocracy. But we are harmed by by the loss of Druidic mythos, and the failure to articulate the necessary properties of the aristocratic egalitarian society

    EITHER THEFT IS IMMORAL OR IT ISN’T – THE MANNER OF THEFT OR THEFT?

    Is theft only wrong when it is intersubjectively verifiable? Or is theft wrong, in that it is destructive of cooperation, no matter whether it is visible or not? I think it is hard to convince people of anything but the latter.

    Is ownership determined by action? If ownership is determined by action then institutions that require respect of property are a commons that is paid for by action, in voluntary exchange.

    While I don’t want to, at this moment, write something very long to demonstrate this argument in detail, it is, as far as I know, an impenetrable criticism of rothbardian ethics, and a replacement of those ethics with propertarian ethics as the only LOGICALLY POSSIBLE definition of property rights. It is a replacement of the ethics of the ghetto with the ethics of the aristocracy.

    It is not possible to have an institution of property rights on the rothbardian model, because it is a praxeological disincentive to develop property rights.

    Aristocratic propertarianism is the replacement of rothbard’s individualistic me and my promise of violence with the egalitarian us and our promise of violence.

    It is the corporation. The corporeal-ization of property rights.

    It is not logical that individuals can create ‘possess’ property rights. One can demand them in exchange. But it takes a minimum of two people to create property rights, because they can only be obtained in exchange.

    ORIGINS

    Sitting in Church at the age of 12, I promised myself I would write that book. Yes, we have the (rather pitiful) book of Jerusalem, but Athens didn’t give us a book. Plato’s tried but his book is a catastrophe. Aristotle didn’t survive well enough for us enough to work with as “a book” – although it might be reconstructable in at least small parts. The Monarchies didn’t leave us a book. Although we could argue that Smith and Hume together made a pretty good pass at it democratizing it. Chivalry left us a book: arthurian legends. And I think the reason we don’t have a book, is that the church imposed its book – and that book wasn’t a very good one. Not as good as Aristotle’s would have been. That book, and the church, were a prohibition on writing the book of aristocratic egalitarianism. Albiet, the church is the OTHER HALF of aristocratic egalitarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 02:07:00 UTC

  • ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS (cross posted and slightly edited

    ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN VS ROTHBARDIAN ETHICS

    (cross posted and slightly edited)

    It’s pretty hard to beat non-aggression as an epistemic test. It’s the only intersubjectively verifiable test. We can’t really know anything else for certain. We can very easily see violence and theft.

    But, does that inability to know much else for certain, stop us from developing ETHICAL and MORAL rules?

    LETS LOOK AT ETHICS: The spectrum of Manners, Ethics and Morals.

    1) Manners are immediately visible. Just like aggression.

    2) Ethics are not immediately visible and intersubjectively verifiable. Ethical rules are principles that compensate for the asymmetry of information of both parties. Probability of adherence to ethical rules that compensate for asymmetry of information, is signaled with manners and a contractual property of ALL exchanges.

    3) Morals are not anywhere visible, but are a means of preventing privatization of the commons – involuntary transfer from others. Some are very obvious (having a child our of wedlock and then asking the community to support you), and some are less obvious (promoting a bad idea by arts, writing, speech, or performance: (most advertising).

    So, the failure to establish means of regulating ethics and morals, other than the NAP, is simply a license for unethical and moral action in any and all exchanges. Rothbard’s argument is that the market is sufficient to constrain ethical and moral behavior. But the EVIDENCE is that this isn’t true. It’s VIOLENCE that constrains it. And violence is constrained by the number of people who can be allied to either support unethical and immoral actions, or to support ethical and moral actions. The rothbardian answer to this problem is to resort to courts. But if NAP alone is the ethical and moral rule in exchanges, then, as Rothbard argues in For a New Liberty, there is no means of court resolution of fraud and immorality: theft by other than visible means.

    In other words, rothbard gives us the low trust society, and aristocracy, with a higher constraint than NAP, gives us the high trust society. Rothbard’s ethics are ‘what you can get away with in an exchange, called voluntary, but asymmetrical in knowledge.’ Aristocracy gave us ‘what you can get in a voluntary exchange under warranty that knowledge is symmetric’.

    This is why rothbardian ethics are intolerable to western christians. Demonstrably, at least our version of human beings, find that insufficient.

    Under aristocratic ethics, ALL involuntary transfer is forbidden EXCEPT that which takes place in the market for productive goods and services, fully under warrantee of symmetry of knowledge. And the further difference is, that fraud by asymmetry (omission) is not just a theft from by one party from another, but a theft from ALL PEOPLE who constantly forgo opportunities for fraud by omission – and in doing so create the HIGH TRUST SOCIETY.

    In other words, theft or violence (aggression) is an attack on all the institution of property. Property which has been paid for by constantly paying the high cost of respecting others’ monopoly of control. A control over that which they settled, made or obtained in exchange. An attack on any property then, is an attack on, and theft from all SHAREHOLDERS IN THE INSTITUTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS. As such all men who respect property rights, as shareholders in paying for that institution, are being stolen from, and as such have standing to enforce, by violence, any offense of property rights by any person, at any time.

    In most human societies, the “OTHERS” are biological extensions of the family. In yet others, adherents to the religion. But under aristocracy the ‘in-group’ members are those who reciprocally grant and defend property rights regardless of family membership, and the “OTHERS” are those who do NOT reciprocally grant property rights, and defend them.

    THAT IS THE MEANING OF ARISTOCRACY: a shareholder in the corporation whose assets are private property rights, and the obligation and right to prosecute and demand restitution on the part of either himself OR THE CORPORATION of ALL members of the contract of private property.

    As such, the contributors to property rights in fact, are owners of the economically productive society, its norms and institutions, and those those that do not equally take responsibility for property rights are the ‘others’: non-family members.

    Under aristocratic egalitarianism, the high trust WITHIN the genetic FAMILY is extended to the CORPORATE family of fellow shareholders. Thus the family is contractual rather than genetic. that is how the ‘high trust society’ unique to northern europeans was made possible.

    The title “SIR” meant you had earned the right to carry weapons and enforce property rights. The “right to carry arms’ is identical to ‘the right to private property’. These two are ideas are inseparable. The source of property rights is the organized use of violence to create them.

    The source of property rights is not some, mystical grant of god or nature, or some necessary natural right – since private property is rare if not unique in the world, it cannot be ‘natural’. In fact, private property is UNNATURAL, which is why it is so IMPORTANT. Without it we cannot form the incentives nor perform the calculation necessary to crate a vast division of knowledge an labor in real time. Aristocracy is the system of social order where by we enter a voluntary contract to use violence to institute, and maintain, private property rights. And we struggle to enfranchise as many people in this UNNATURAL system as possible, so that we have the strength of numbers. This system, private property, is so effective, and has such an affect on status, and the ability to reproduce, that everyone wants to join the societies that have it.

    The first problem is, (a) THAT THEY WANT IT FOR FREE. And (b) once property rights are a norm, they feel it’s free, because they don’t have to EARN IT any longer with visible payments, only invisible payment (constraints). So the contract isn’t visible and is abused and taken for granted.

    As such to maintain property rights requires that we perform some ACT of maturity and COGNIZANCE in order to obtain them.

    Cities in the west were not organically created markets, but deliberate islands of PROPERTY RIGHTS crated by the organized application of violence by the nobility. The island of property rights was crafted out of a land populated by free riders who actively SUPPRESSED the desire of any individual to concentrate capital behind his ideas or wants rather than that of the free riders and rent seekers around him.

    Which is why Rothbard had to resort to CRUSOE’S ISLAND. On that island, the ocean forms the walls of the ghetto, beyond which is the aristocratic society. Crusoe’s island is one of the reasons libertarianism has failed to gain adoption. The western ethic is to “Make all men aristocrats”. That is what ‘egalitarian aristocracy’ means. That the fools in the enlightenment though men DESIRED to be aristocrats was a catastrophic error. But the fact that MANY do, is enough to form a high trust society.

    As such, NAP, is “peasant” or “ghetto”, or “gypsy trader” morality. The morality of people who cannot ally to hold land, and develop fixed capital, heavy production systems (metals) and formal institutions of dispute resolution. It not liberty, but the return to partial barbarism.

    Rothbard gave us the ethics of the traveling merchant, the ghetto, and organized crime. Aristocracy gave us the ethics of the extended family warriors, farmers and shopkeepers – the high trust society. The only people to created liberty as a formal and informal institution were aristocrats.

    Just how it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-13 01:49:00 UTC

  • THE REASON YOU USE THE WORD ‘LIBERTY’ AND NOT ‘ARISTOCRACY’? Because you are car

    THE REASON YOU USE THE WORD ‘LIBERTY’ AND NOT ‘ARISTOCRACY’?

    Because you are carrying around the enlightenment error that anyone other than egalitarian aristocracy actually desires liberty. They don’t.

    Aristocracy:

    1) Private Property Rights in exchange for contributing Perpetual Military Service in the defense of private property rights of all who have earned them.

    2) Egalitarianism: anyone willing to also grant rights and contribute service can also gain those rights by contributing that service.

    3) Denial, by promise of violence, of any and all concentration of power sufficient to alter the distribution of property and property rights.

    4) The Absolute Nuclear Family and Prohibition on inbreeding.

    5) Chivalry: Social Status Through Charity, and service as well as through arms.

    6) Decision Making by majority vote of those who have earned property rights.

    Aristocracy is tribal paternity and property rights, open to all who will equally grant them, and defend them.

    LIBERTY EXPRESSED AS A ‘RIGHT’ IS AN ATTEMPT TO GAIN PROPERTY RIGHTS AT A DISCOUNT, AND NOTHING ELSE.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 12:02:00 UTC

  • DOES IT MATTER? HEROES When I was quite young Pinocchio was my favorite book and

    DOES IT MATTER? HEROES

    When I was quite young Pinocchio was my favorite book and my mother would read it to me over and over again. I have very clear memories at maybe, age four or five, of her reading that big blue book sitting on my bedside.

    The sword and the stone came out, and mom took me to see it. It was, well… it was like that feeling of seeing the opening sequence of Star Wars.

    The next ‘biography’ that grabbed my attention was the novel Johnny Tremain. Must have been third or fourth grade. And from that book I became pretty evangelical constitutionalist. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood that just perhaps, the British were right, and the colonists were trying to skate on paying Britain’s war debt for defending the colonies.

    I read the biography of Samuel Colt, a good ten times, every few months or so, through about seventh grade. It was sort of a life-recipe for me. Not intentionally. I just found the inventiveness and persistence fascinating. And the fact that stuff went bang made it even better. I had no one else to imitate.

    Like a lot of nerds I read encyclopedias. Over and over again. I wish I could say why but it think it was boredom? The info-vore problem. Its probably also that encyclopedias use the Neutral Point of View and it’s less challenging for me than trying to understand all the emotions in literature, or all the loading in intra-disciplinary language – most of which is obscurant.

    Out of encyclopedias I got the unconscious philosophy of aristocracy. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know that NPV was an attempt at scientific speech. I just sort of developed this idea that there was a sort of superior way to think about the world. But what affected me most was that I became aware of just HOW LITTLE most people know about the world. And that became a source of power for me. I was pretty consistent in the choice of my ‘three wishes’ if I ever were to get them: (1) to know the contents of every book in the library (2) to drive a little red sports car. (3) To have personal freedom to explore the world. (Although that last one I had a hard time articulating)

    And then, science fiction, or at least hard science fiction became a natural obsession. Science fiction was, and its classics remain, a libertarian mythology. The best mythology I’d found. The fact that aristocracy and technology are interdependent wasn’t that clear to me at the time. Small numbers of people need technology to compete with bigger numbers. That’s one of the west’s great incentives – sitting out on the periphery of the land mass.

    Later, I was fascinated by Alexander the great, like a lot of young men. He and his mother struggling for power and survival. Taught by Aristotle. And the idea of such a vast world to explore. It was awe inspiring. The closest to a religious experience I can ever recall.

    When I was in college I studied the Mongols. Read about everything that there was. It’s not hard to be fully educated about them. There isn’t that much to read really. The life of Temujin fascinated me. Because I saw him as struggling to protect his mother, and his family. Trying to add order to a bitter and painful world.

    I read quite a bit about Napoleon, because to some degree I work by similar methods: bury myself in information until I have a model of everyone’s incentives. From that point on, it’s pretty easy to use indirection, misdirection and inception to reduce the costs of achieving your objectives. I ended up disliking him tremendously for his principle role in undermining western civilization in practice just as the french philosophers had done in theory. But what I empathized with, was his ambition driven by the need to protect mother and family. It isn’t lost on me that this is probably one of Adolph Hitler’s drivers as well.

    In adult life, I don’t remember many heroes. I suppose I didn’t have many. If I had the choice to have been Aristotle or Alexander, I would have chosen alexander. Although that doesn’t seem to be the wise choice. It is the most interesting one – at least for me.

    At this point in my life, I kind of feel an emotional love of Hayek, who, when I read him sounds like I’m talking to myself – he was just a nicer and more reserved German man than I am as a rather unreserved, obsessively silly Anglo American. 🙂

    But if I had to say who influenced me most, that’s an artificial question. I don’t have a favorite color, flavor, or hero. I’m a pagan after all. 🙂 The more the merrier. 🙂

    One thing I am sure of though: subject a boy’s mother to stress and fear, and there will be very severe consequences: he will conquer the world to compensate for it. To demand restitution for it. To punish for it. To control for it. 🙂

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 08:58:00 UTC

  • We use both informal and formal institutions, to transform descriptive ethics, t

    We use both informal and formal institutions, to transform descriptive ethics, to prescriptive ethics, to norms.

    We can bend these natural ethics. But we cannot break them.

    Ethics are systems of incentives.

    It is non-rational to expect people to adopt ethical systems that are to their disadvantage.

    And not only is it non-rational, it is counter to praxeology.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 07:15:00 UTC

  • Ordinary people in this country are sweet. But every professional I encounter is

    Ordinary people in this country are sweet. But every professional I encounter is a walking criminal enterprise.

    Its like the french had their revolution so that they could act like effete totalitarians, and the Ukrainians got their independence so that they could act like fucking Boyars.

    You can take the peasant out of the manor but you cant take the peasant out of the peasant.

    Its not that the governments is more corrupt than the american, its that the culture of the east remains a peasant culture.

    Its a purely predatory society.

    Argh.

    You cant help them. Just cant.

    Too bad. Very sweet people.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 03:55:00 UTC