LEPER COLONIES
Too many university departments are like leper colonies full of groupies looking for conversation as sexual validation – all of which is administrated by zombies. (The slow kind in older movies.) It’s too high a price to pay for working on theory.
I just don’t know how these guys do it. Really. I can’t figure out whether I should be awed by their fortitude or ashamed of them. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 10:48:00 UTC
“…the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law.” – Bastiat. The Law.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 10:27:00 UTC
YOU CAN’T GET AROUND IT.
Equalitarianism requires Totalitarianism.
And women prefer both. They vote as blocks to demonstrate that they prefer both. Always. While some men prefer them, most women prefer them. And between some men and most women, the totalitarians have a slight majority in our republican democracy.
Without women’s votes, women would have property rights equal to men, but not political privileges to vote for totalitarianism, and against the family.
Men may have made western civilization over 5000 years, but women will either convert it to middle eastern, and eastern tyranny, or make us vulnerable to biological conquest by middle eastern tyranny, in less two centuries.
It’s counter intuitive, but paternalism was made possible by the technology and fighting for property: over land and the domestication of animals, was the innovation that allowed the west to escape its matriarchal poverty, by forcing the creation of private and familial property.
Matriarchy is equalitarianism in poverty. And equalitarianism is tyranny. Paternalism is private property and meritocracy. The difference is equality of outcome in maternal poverty or equality of opportunity in paternal prosperity.
(Still working on this argument a bit.)
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 09:54:00 UTC
“YOU HAVE YOUNG EYES”
Thanks. Nice thing to say.
I look at other men my age and they look and think “old”. I have more in common with those in their twenties and thirties than with my peers. Because I see life as open to possibility as they do. And as worthy of risk taking as they do.
There is a whole class of us that will never be old. We will just have older and weaker bodies. And my body certainly has racked up enough wear that even my Norman genes cant cope.
Your view of the world is a choice you make. And you can choose to acquiesce to the wear and tear on your cells, or to preciously make use of them to gain the greatest number of experiences in life.
And my choice is to keep experimenting with life to the last breath.
Damn the torpedoes.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-24 05:44:00 UTC
FIRST REAL PROBLEM WITH KIEV : HEAT
Ottawa isnt any better but its drier and air conditioned everywhere you go.
I get to severe headaches, confusion and problems staying conscious in the heat. Even if I work hard at hydration and avoiding direct sun.
If it hits me i just go home and sleep in the air conditioning for six hours. And so far I’ve left three parties at night and had to spend the day in bed after braving the street for two hours.
Couple days in a row now its been unbearable. :(.
Sigh.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-23 15:28:00 UTC
ITS POSTMODERNISM, NOT SOCIALISM [A]ll generals try to fight the last war. And it seems like all our libertarian intellectuals try to fight central control: socialism. Which is … fighting the last war. A war that we won, by the way, at least against the statist intellectuals. The strategic, political and economic war was won by conservatives. Not by us. Conservatives speak in moral, not analytical language. NAMES MATTER They are shortcuts for ideas and socialism is a dead idea. It has been replaced by postmodernism – an attack on our system of liberty that is correctly termed egalitarian aristocracy. Rothbard and Mises dont matter in the debate between Postmodernism and Egalitarian Aristocracy. Rothbard is wrong on ethics and Mises on Praxeology. Because they ignore the necessity of high trust in making liberty possible. THE CURRENT BATTLE IS AGAINST THE IRRATIONAL [P]ostmodernism – the equivalent of a state religion for empires – is predicated on the same degree of falsehood as was Marx and the labor theory of value. Postmodernism is ideological as was socialism. But instead of trying to argue that socialism is moral and scientific – which we disproved – it borrows from Abrahamic and Zoroastrian theology, which uses the strategy of chanting desirable but patent falsehoods. Whereas conservatives suffer because the form of conservatism is arational, even if its content is beneficial. Postmodern content, like continental philosophy, is irrational and its content economically destructive. But it is wrapped in pseudo rational language that attempts to obscure its deception through emotional and moral loading as well as linguistic complexity. If something cannot be described as human actions, whereupon each action is subject to the test of the rational actor and rational incentives, then it is either incomplete, false, or deception. Postmodernism is deception Libertarians must fight intellectual battles and conservatives, who vastly outnumber us, must fight moral and political battles. But we cannot perform our part of the division of labor if we fight the wrong battle. And socialism is a dead horse. Our ideological battle is postmodernism, post-post, and all the derivative attempts to restore the communal, static, equalitarian, dysgenic poverty of the pre-aristocratic societies. The silly distractions provided by Heritage, Cato, Mises, FEI rely on the failed assumption that liberty is a universal desire. When the data demonstrates that universally, women vote less diversely than men and favor totalitarian equality that is natural to their breeding strategy. And incrementally all democratic societies must incrementally adopt totalitarian equalitarianism under the female vote. [T]he battle is not socialism. The answer is not anarchy. The only solution we have is property rights and the guarantee of violence if deprived of them. The only security against the necessity and expense if violence is to undermine the postmodern ideology and feminism. It does not matter if other groups seek redistributive or communal ends if we employ a political system that allows them to operate as a class, and us to operate as a class. In that political system we can negotiate exchanges with that class. We must understand that this creates a market for trading that is not structurally different from the market for goods and services. Dictatorship gives the majority communalists the advantage, and the free market gives us the advantage. Since it is illogical to ask either side to suffer the advantage if the other, the only compromise position is to create institutions that facilitate cooperation between classes with disparate interests. Hoppe has provided a means of reducing or eliminating state bureaucracy and its attendant monopoly. But the question of how we cooperate with those who have polarized interests had not been solved. Curt Doolittle, Kiev
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/emerging-markets-hitting-a-wall.htmlTHE PROGRESSIVE VISION WILL NEVER COME TO FRUITION
Because it cant.
Industrialization is over.
The world will be divided like spain and catalonia. The northeast and the heartland. West and east ukraine. Protestant and catholic europe.
Logic would suggest nation states return to city states but the military value of debt, and strategic value of resources will prevent it.
These increases in economic diversity will continue to expand.
—–
“Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, refers to the internationalization of the supply chain as “globalization’s second unbundling.”
“He sees the new world as one of “development enclaves,” in which parts of countries will stand out as advanced or wealthy, without fundamentally transforming the entire economy.”
See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/emerging-markets-hitting-a-wall.html?
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-23 07:46:00 UTC
CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS
Proverb:
“There are four things a man can watch indefinitely:
1) fire
2) water
3) other men physically laboring.
The fourth is obvious .”
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-22 16:21:00 UTC
(Following up on Salman Rushdie’s argument that Islam is a weaponized and militarized religion) Serious Stuff – The New Republic [T]he author reiterates the point that Islamic fundamentalism is a totalitarian political movement. I’ve been saying this for years. And it’s true. It may be structured as a religion, the way marxism was a religion structured as a science, but it’s a political movement. We had to defeat the east repeatedly in our history. The greeks held the east at bay, and the romans conquered it to keep it at bay. We arguably lost to christianity until the Germans freed us from it. We could have lost to marxism and communism, but we spent the west coming to a stalemate. We have lost our will to keep islam at bay. Partly because Heroic Aristocracy is alien to the majority. Totalitarianism is man’s preferred state. We should observe the actions of those who say otherwise. Because man demonstrates an interest in the fruits of the market. But he does everything possible to avoid participating in it. And women in particular seem to love it to their own detriment. For some reason, women seem to confused: their desire for collective opinion is in fact, a desire for totalitarianism. They are the same. It’s genetic. Women just havent been responsible members of the political universe long enough to incorporate that reality into their oral history. Women have taken the country left. Period. End of story. 🙂 (how much trouble will that get me in?)
FALSEConservatives and Sewars – The NYT 1) It doesn’t follow that a one time expense, followed by fees for use is the same as redistribution that creates dependencies. the first requires action, the second does not. THe free-rider problem is different from the progressive-fees problem. Free riding is a negative signal that says free riding is a ‘right’, progressive fees illustrate that this is not a ‘right’, but a ‘charity’. This sends ‘truthful’ signals to both parties. And truthful signals are necessary to prohibit involuntary transfers. 2) It doesn’t follow that investment in a commons is the same as state-mandated redistribution. If that was true, there wouldn’t be factories, universities, churches and roads. 3) It doesn’t follow that investment in a universal commons is not conservative. Only that to do so out of charity at a cost, is different than to do so out of opportunity for profit. 4) it doesn’t follow that taxes must be levied other than fees. (They don’t need to be.) 5) It doesn’t follow that taxes should be put into a general pool and open to use OTHER than the purpose levied. (they shouldn’t) 6) It doesn’t follow that the monopolistic state is more efficient than competitive private administration (it’s not) 7) It doesn’t follow that funding the bureaucracy doesn’t produce externalities that are of intolerable cost. (it does – one of which is forcing us to spend time defending ourselves against other people’s political movements, as they seek to control the predatory state) [C]onservatism is a metaphorical language. Conservatives have one ‘curse word’ with multiple meanings: “Socialism” – state control of property and production and b) “Democratic redistributive socialism” – state ownership of the proceeds from limited private control of property. This ‘curse word’ is a catch-all for ‘those people that use the state to destroy aristocratic individualism and the status signals that I get from individualism regardless of my rank. And this is important. Conservatives do not feel victims because they obtain positive status signals from other conservatives regardless of their economic rank. This is obtainable in human societies only through religious conformity and it’s consequences, or economic conformity and its consequences. Conservatives do not object to investment in the commons. Conservatism places higher value on delaying gratification than immediate gratification – the formation of moral capital – which is an inarticulate expression meaning training human beings to enforce a prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds. Conservatism is the argument that we should not fund the expansionary bureaucratic state that out of deterministic necessity subverts our property rights and therefore our freedom, and therefore our ‘character’ – a euphemism for the prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds – because it is our universal prohibition on involuntary transfers both within our families and tribes and without, that is the source of western exceptionalism: the high trust society. Our high trust society is unique because we CAN trust others to avoid involuntary transfers, because of the pervasive prohibition on involuntary transfer that we developed under Manorailism by demonstrating fitness needed to obtain land to rent. Partly as a rebellion against the Catholic Church, partly because the church forbid cousin marriage and granted women property rights, in order to break up the tribes and large land holding families. Partly as an ancient indo-european tradition of personal sovereignty in the nobility, which became a status signal, and, thankfully remains a status signal in conservatives. Small homogenous polities are redistributive. Large heterogeneous polities are not. This is because trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities. And trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities because of the different signals used by different groups, and the fact that signals in-group are ‘cheaper’ (discounted) that signals across groups with differing signals. A strong state in a small homogenous polity that functions as an extended family and therefore with high redistribution, is entirely possible. But by creating a powerful state in a heterogeneous polity, it becomes necessary and useful for people to compete via extra-market means using the state by seeking redistributions and limited monopoly (legal) rights in order to advance their signaling strategy. (Which is what Dr. Krugman does, daily – advance an alternative strategy. A strategy that he does not recognize is from the Ghetto. And would cause a return to the low trust society. And **IS*** right now, causing a return to the low trust society. Because the low trust society is natural to man. Thats why it exists everywhere but the aristocratic west.