https://www.quora.com/What-books-should-be-banned-for-being-offensive-to-women
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10185342/Britain-needs-millions-more-immigrants-to-reduce-strain-of-ageing-population.htmlNO WE DON”T NEED IMMIGRANTS
Why should we add immigrants so that we can pay the elderly below-subsistence wages, instead of keeping the lot of them in the work force, as well as the young in the work force, and driving up wages?
Compete for rare intellectual talent. But labor is little value unless its scarce.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 16:35:00 UTC
“Could have been me.”
I cant help but suggest that the world would be a better place if it had been.
Bad meme. Just encourages the retort.
Clueless.
Even worse than Carter.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 14:37:00 UTC
http://romaninukraine.com/a-conversation-with-a-restaurant-manager/STRUGGLE FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN UKRAINE
Defensive lament on the predatory bureaucracy.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 12:40:00 UTC
http://cafehayek.com/2013/07/thomas-sowell-and-immigration.htmlLIBERTARIANS ARE WRONG ON IMMIGRATION. AND IF THEY”RE RIGHT, PROGRESSIVES ARE RIGHT ON DEBT.
(How do you like that one?)
Reposted from Comments on Cafe Hayek.
—————
ACK. POSITIVISM.
How do we measure the cost to current political friction?
How do we measure the cost of the decline in property rights?
How do we measure the cost of the decline in the rule of law?
How do we measure the cost of the decrease in the civic society?
How do we measure the opportunity cost of what might have been?
How do we measure the cost of the decline of the nuclear family?
How do we measure the cost of declining trust due to diversity?
I can generate constant economic growth by conducting two centuries of constant warfare, while increasing credit loads predicated on the ongoing success of that warfare. So what?
How many unmeasured costs of normative, social, and institutional capital are absorbed by immigration?
I can’t take the time address this problem other than to just make a very long list. To which the ONLY response by libertarians would be correlative empirical nonsense. There is no reason if these intangibles PRODUCE the high trust society and the rule of law, that their sacrifice isn’t a COST that undermines the high trust society and the rule of law.
After all, the production cycle of high trust norms it looks like, is from 200-700 years, and the production cycle of an economy is months or years. I mean, just how IRRATIONAL is it to measure the NOISE generated by profit, loss and GROWTH, instead of the SIGNAL of social and human capital? I mean, how absolutely ridiculous… it’s essentially numerology – attributing magical properties to numbers, and falling into the vapid positive error of INDUCTION.
IMMIGRATION IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE GOOD and ECONOMIC MEASURES are contrary indicators of the growth of normative, social and human capital.
If positivism on this scale is right, then the progressives are also right. All you do is confirm the idiocy of the Krugman-Stigliz-Delong left. And their goal is not economic -it’s political. It’s to undermine the aristocratic high trust society and replace it with the totalitarian equalitarian state.
Sigh. It’s no wonder that we lose the ideological battle with even the conservatives. At least they understand it even if they speak in allegorical terms.
Exasperating.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 12:16:00 UTC
RE: Facebook’s “Top Commentator”
I didn’t even know there was such a thing. It just appears next to my name. Hmmm….. Odd. Nice but … I mean, why didn’t I know it?
I have this same problem with Quora, but that Amazon addresses so well: “Gamify” posting so that it’s worth your while as a status perk. It also tends to reduce the idiot factor that you have to deal with when anyone can reply to your posts.
So it’s a real incentive and incentives matter. I might write to for the sole purpose of improving my writing, so that I gain skill at communicating complex ideas in increasingly simplistic terms. (I don’t have the luxury of a classes to teach where I can test my ideas.) But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t more rewarding to contribute to one network than another. It does.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 11:01:00 UTC
http://cafehayek.com/2011/06/quotation-of-the-day-12.htmlHICKS AS AN IMPROVEMENT ON SOWELL
If you’re going to bring up Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions, and his Vision of the Anointed, then the less morally loaded version of the argument is Stephen Hicks’ Explaining Postmodernism. It’s both more accessible to a wider audience and a clearer rendition of the argument. http://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406
Hard to improve on Sowell. But Hicks does a good job of adding a dimension to the argument agains the socialist visions of the anointed.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 10:53:00 UTC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58AWELCOME TO THE STATUS OF FARM ANIMAL: THE STORY OF YOUR ENSLAVEMENT – IT”S WORSE THAN ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM
I am not a libertarian that requires every one of our factions to put forward rigid analytical arguments in pursuit of some absolutely persuasive scripture.
Like Roderick Tracy Long, proposes, I think any advocate of liberty must be accommodated if at all possible, as long as they expand interest in and passion for liberty. We scribblers largely debate other scribblers, but political movements are won or lost by numbers, and ideology aims not to produce either internally consistent argument or empirical evidence for purposes of persuasion. The purpose of ideology is to motivate the passions of the many to act. If religion required articulated reason, and empirical support, the world would be populated by atheists.
Now, Molyneux’s attempts at analytical philosophy are pretty weak. But his sentiments, his analogies, his narratives, and his advocacy advance ideological and sentimental liberty, even if they don’t really contribute to analytical rigor in our field.
Stefan’s recent video “The Story Of Your Enslavement” is exceptionally well done. It promotes a very simple meme by analogy to farming, that unites the sentiments and aggravates the passions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A
It’s great work. And please share it. Even those of who dismiss ideology and seek the certainty of the ratio-scientific can appreciate the craftsmanship – the ARTISTRY, in this kind of message.
It’s brilliant.
Curt
(PS: If you don’t think so, then you’ve never seen the effect of Schoolhouse Rock. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 10:31:00 UTC
(Legal Equality is Necessary, Economic Equality is Unattainable, and Genetic Equality is Undesirable – Your Genes Matter) A friend posted an interestingly common white lament, that provides an excellent jumping off point for criticizing postmodern values.
Lee: I am in the top 1% economic class of the world. This is due purely to an accident of birth and nothing more. … Whatever intelligence or resolve I may have is due to the genetic lottery. … But these genetic endowments do not mean that I have been randomly placed in the economic hierarchy by the greedy powers that be. My limited intelligence and conscientiousness is actually worth something to my employer. Jeorg: Unless conscientiousness is also genetic. Lee: Yes… It is likely that we have some control. Setting an alarm clock requires forethought … François-René: “is genetic” and “we have some control” are not mutually incompatible. At all.
[W]e have many genetic predispositions that we override. We do this through incentives via habits, traditions, myths, norms, laws and institutions. But there is a very great difference between redirection, avoidance and suppression through incentives and changing or eliminating genetic dispositions. The statement that you have no right to advantage because of the accident of your birth, is logically interesting because its the down side of western individualist thought. You cannot exist without your familial relations.
[pullquote]You are a reflection of a long sequence of choices.[/pullquote]
Does it make sense to you that humans can instinctively identify those traits and reward them? Does it make sense that the evolutionary consequences of not doing so would be detrimental? Even suicidal for a species? It is important in disputes that law treat us equally because it is necessary for the preservation of suppressing violence by forcing all competition into voluntary exchange. Otherwise the institution cannot provide the incentive to suppress our instincts and redirect our efforts. But [pullquote] the western illusion that those values necessary to create incentives for us as an individual economic unit can insulate us from our family, and clan, and the necessary operation of our reproductive evolutionary system is a postmodernist, socialist fiction that assumes economic and legal equality can be extended to genetic equality[/pullquote] – contrary to all evidence and reason. The rawlsian veil of ignorance is a complex rhetorical device for the neurolinguistic programming of the masses precisely to confuse them into the illusion of biological equality and to divorce the individual from his ancestry so that his loyalties are to the state and rather than to his familial genetic heritage. The blank slate, likewise is a device for the same purpose. So are diversity and open immigration. Other civilizations do not make this error. Ours is in numeric decline partly because of it. So no you are not an individual comparable to other individuals except to the blindfolded statue of justice under the law and the gavel. Socially you are the representation of a sequence of choices embeded in genes and are the recipient of more opportunities for influence and reproduction because of it. And dysgenia, and even extinction would of necessity occur if humans acted otherwise. We are in a constant battle against the evolutionary red queen, and against reproductions regression toward the mean. The only solution is assortive mating and the concentration of influence, opportunity, capital and reproduction behind such genes. [O]ne more thing. Time preference, and ‘frustration budget’ are genetically determined. IQ is significantly heritable (it’s complex though), and social classes are organized almost entirely by IQ. Variation in social classes is determined by time preference, frustration budget, or what we tend to call the discipline-impulsiviness spectrum. Variation in the social classes is also determined by attractiveness: symmetry, height, thickness of skin, clarity of skin, and a variety of other factors that suggest genetic fitness. Economic classes vary from social classes because under consumer capitalism, a Watkins or Crick does not produce as many paying customers as the designer of velcro, or fast, consistent, cheeseburgers. Economic outliers are determined by lottery. But that is not to discount the value of lottery. If the lottery reward does not exist, then there is no motivation for high risk. So yes, discipline and looks matter in society because they matter to our genes, and they matter to humanity as a species.
PILLOW HEDONISM
There was a time when Doolittle family Puritanism made me feel helplessly guilty if I slept past nine AM.
Today we gloriously slept until one. And my body is thanking me for it.
Glad that particular environmental bias has finally worn off. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 07:04:00 UTC