Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • Do you mean speaking the truth has been criminalized?

    Do you mean speaking the truth has been criminalized?


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 22:20:48 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162489412527230976

    Reply addressees: @sleepfight3r @kaitlancollins

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162489032754049024


    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

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    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162489032754049024

  • Aw, c’mon Stephan, that’s just ’cause you don’t make your living click-baiting t

    Aw, c’mon Stephan, that’s just ’cause you don’t make your living click-baiting the paranoid, schizotypal, outraged, and desperately lacking agency, and actually work for a living. Where is your charity for those selling false promises that people want to buy? 😉 -cheers


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 21:27:58 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162476116176711681

    Reply addressees: @NSKinsella

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162465638562107392


    IN REPLY TO:

    @NSKinsella

    Report: Jeffrey Epstein’s cause of death was suicide by hanging
    https://t.co/WqeSc7W8qx I love when my natural anti-conspiratoid skepticism is validated. I’m sure thousands of moron libertarians heads are exploding now.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162465638562107392

  • Why should anyone apologize for the truth?

    Why should anyone apologize for the truth?


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 19:25:09 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162445209634037760

    Reply addressees: @kaitlancollins

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162396127762747393


    IN REPLY TO:

    @kaitlancollins

    Correction: Trump did not apologize, a White House official tells me. He phoned the supporter, left him a message thanking him for his support, but did not use the words “sorry” or “apologize.” https://t.co/0G32RSHI1G

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162396127762747393

  • (…more ) This may be too subtle for you, but I am casting you as a thief, fool

    (…more )
    This may be too subtle for you, but I am casting you as a thief, fool and liar who works against the public good, in order to obtain what you want by deceptive means, rather than what can be obtained by honest voluntary exchange, using the only tools and institutions of cooperation that man has so far invented – those that are calculable, and the institutions that make them so. You are part of the reason democratic capitalism has failed, and why totalitarian capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic force to be employed in the world.


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 12:04:09 UTC

    Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/102626561202065967

    Replying to: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/102626559149003354


    IN REPLY TO:

    @curtd

    (…more) Implicit in your postings (all of them) is a ‘freedom’ that you take for granted, yet do not understand. That is that we grant men free speech, in substitution for withholding our violence, so that we may seek the truth, not simply seek to achieve our ends – violence is a much easier tool for achieving ends. And since a state can only dispense violence — it is its only tool — that violence, and the state, are a continuation of that exchange of violence for seeking truth, not seeking ‘to win’. Therefore if you do not debate rationally, men need not withhold their violence against you. And if they do, they simply allow you to steal from the social order. In other words, if you are not seeking truth and are name calling, then you are both stealing from the public wishing well by which we all pay for the act of free speech so that we may seek truth — not so that we may get what we want. And if it is just to get what we want, then not only can the weak revolt, and return to violence, but so can the strong. Some of us are possessed of petty interpersonal violence, some of us capable of protest and rabblery, some of us capable of slaughter and civil war. That the weak threaten violence is a humor, since the strong are more capable both of its execution, and of paying a minority handsomely to oppress or kill the discontents. You may be one of those people for whom degradation of our ‘group’s’ competitive ability and therefore status and prosperity is acceptable. And if that is the case, then again, you steal from those who seek to perpetuate our advantage and prosperity, by failure to participate in argument. You may be one of those people for whom this is a mask for envy and laziness and simply wants others to take care of you rather than earn for yourself and others. You may be one of those people who is willing to consume cultural capital for current ends, and who is willing to steal from the sacrifices that were made by those generations that came before us. You may be one of those people that thinks, despite the vast ocean of data, that people are infinitely plastic in their behavior, rather than that humans behave in very clear and established manners across all states, nations, civilizations and times, and therefore are a utopian. I don’t know which of these errors you’re making. But I do know that your failure to engage in an argument, is to hide behind an electronic connection as a means of stealing from your fellow man. (more…)

    Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/102626559149003354

  • Doh!

    Doh!


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 10:55:04 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162316842020589570

    Reply addressees: @StevePender @prageru

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162194062348378112


    IN REPLY TO:

    @StevePender

    @prageru How can I pay you grifters to attend your “university”? I want a PhD in grifting so I can make good money like Dennis Prager.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162194062348378112

  • **COMMENTS, VITRIOL, AND BREVITY** From: April 26th, 2009 I have more fun being

    **COMMENTS, VITRIOL, AND BREVITY**

    From: April 26th, 2009

    I have more fun being inspired by the comments on popular economics blogs than I do by the half-hearted, telephone-game-around-the-campfire, noncomittal opinions that dominate the online dialog. The comments are often pithy, vitriolic, and brief. Which makes for good sound bites to use at dinner parties, so to speak.

    My favorite quote today was posted on [hoocoodanode.org http://hoocoodanode.org ](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhoocoodanode.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1jxWP0Wcr_P8acmozQgUDaitv2WrNX0FEgOviV3jXPUg6rcCY0NwdL63s&h=AT0vYWp5xdL38B-Q3TnbyzPLLNAK8jeecTFK4IAcVSocJUUoVWH_fzYA_LgOuVikBHYRKs0LqMaMxM2OaAl3oehlaA00cfiywI3QddF8Dxs7dfj7E1zOjNznb6EgNSlzL_-DhbM0vH2tsfT7cuMvRneSeN8jOVqEml0vnKRi_gJggE7kZLNs7yzY8pn918ZclXFIrKKFgsjC-NTCQrD0SaVk8IMlAjCZAfRKfLOzfxf9yTfef8pD2vyOysTMW71Zoo8NeoN2z9rTdCFSC1wsGtZ6XEYzt45DadA9iaGAoRaZLi3qhHILE-39t1tRXXheMtOZNvT3FFr8yVuw6dy0pm5G2TF0Uz0u_OHq1bEn5Klx1FE_idJuxoJouVANgs4Bf8hKlFnGAsrIAOCvptz_9Cj6Ghee66ho8v7kBgpLOjP6gdznyyKvwe3UvSEcygWHrHk4zaT2HjIU8HJomNdTw3t-Ai2UnGdRv9gsvNTsYHuf19Gfo19bTV7atEx5VJNL3ELjN2fyW8xxBxrczOUd_C8zn_lEG-wF2D5jQfupSBpm4N1gqIb5Ks3j2DHJ_sEOto_8NW_MYvBkmJ-8zrFgftVvNDsIRMwKFYKrbioF8Q-dEFG3zbttaAExmdcxasv2pslJQZk15VfAgFmwnn4X) by Byzantine_Ruins, in response to a Krugman posting on an L-shaped recession:

    “There are two kinds of recessions that are bad – those that take place because of financial crises, and those that are synchronized around the world,” he said. “In both cases, the recessions tend to last longer and be deeper.”

    And why is that? Go on, Krugs, say it, “because the Austrian model of the credit cycle is the correct one.”

    Of course, this utterance of exasperation illustrates the problem. The “Austrian Model” is simply the most correct model we have yet developed for describing human cooperation. The other models simply propose tools for testing and bending the activity of human beings a bit. But the model, the Austrian corpus, is simply more correct than any other model we have.

    I’ve noticed that, in general, the predictive content (how people phrase their anticipations of the future) is coalescing into a generalized surrender. Of course, any Austrian will tell you that we knew this would be an outcome. Most of us (me too) talked about it for YEARS.

    I blame Hayek for not correcting Keynes. I love the man but am frustrated by the consequences of his decision not to refute Keynes. He could have saved us a great deal of trouble. But Hayek was just another person who, like Popper, warned us that we were not at all aware of the negative impact of the scientific method on our civilization. Its impact on philosophy was to emphasize the linguistic method of diagnosis, which has almost no value whatsoever in itself, only in its use to solve real human problems. It de-legitimized philosophical thought as a means of solving political problems and destroyed our philosophy departments and possibly our civilization. It deprived us of history as the primary means of learning about humans and what they can do by what they have done. It inserted skepticism into the social sciences so that we denied human behavior and embraced an idea of human functional equality despite the fact that the vast differences in human abilities face us every day. It forced economists, or, rather, a few foolish economists, to think that they could derive formulae that describe human behavior that would emerge as rules that could be enforced upon people, so that the religious and legal/political establishment could be replaced with a merchant/political establishment promising, not order or salvation, but prosperity.

    Argument is an extension of politics. Its purpose is political. Reason was developed to solve political problems of consensus and to help each other learn, to calculate that which we cannot without others, and to persuade others or ourselves to act in one way rather than another. If you destroy philosophy, myth, history, and debate, you destroy politics. You destroy cooperation. Politics is human cooperation.

    We have been taking education in the wrong direction for a hundred years. Certainly since the early sixties, and so the claims that the economics profession has been invalidated by this economic crisis is understated, not exaggerated. We not only invalidated quantitative equilibrial economics, we invalidated our belief that science can solve problems of human cooperation. Science is the process of discovery. Cooperation is a process of invention. You discover what exists. You invent what does not. It is not possible to describe in finite terms what does not exist.

    We never know anything for certain. The world is far too complex. Only know that we accumulate lots of perishable knowledge, largely in the form of history, which must be constantly reinterpreted in every generation. We can only reinterpret that knowledge by debating each other. And, while a simple person can learn the application of a formula, debate is a complex process and fewer of us can use it effectively. Formulae are part of the democratic mythos. Debate is part of the mythos of excellence, not egalitarianism. But egalitarian results can only be produced by the pursuit of excellence.


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 09:25:00 UTC

  • **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY** April 1

    **THE SENTIMENT OF THE BRITISH AND THEIR PSEUDO INTELLECTUAL HYPOCRISY**

    April 18th, 2010

    I read a number of the UK papers every day online. They are better than US papers for a variety of reasons.1

    US papers in general, formed to create homogeneity in the community. That community-centricity is why they’re going out of business in this post-community era. The web allows communities to have disparate voices (like normal people do) rather rather than having a self-centered referee edit, and dramatically bias their opinions toward the fantasy of democratic secular humanism. UK papers are more like the web: they represent factions.

    Our only ‘faction’ is the financial press. The rest, of the papers are almost universally are left-leaning along with our universities, that by and large, teach the religion of democratic secular humanism, as do our grade schools – a notion notion that has something to do with the fact that our children start to lose competitive ground in education about the time we start teaching them the religion of democratic secular humanism.

    If a religion has such a negative competitive impact can it be useful for any productive reason? Is not the measure of any philosophy the competitive standing of it’s practitioners? Of course, these ‘priests of democratic secular humanism’ attribute the a supposed american exeptionalism to their religion. But american exceptionalism is clearly false.

    Differences between US and european productivity are accounted for by differences in the number of working hours. While this productivity generates a lower cost of living in the united states, and while american government consumes less of the GDP than governments do in europe, and while americans live generally better lives, even if they live RISKIER lives, than do europeans, there is no exceptionalism to the culture that is caused by democratic secular humanism. American exceptionalism, which is almost entirely the product of selling off a continent, the military strength to do it, the system of private property rights that allows us to do it quickly and easily, and the use of those profits from selling off the continent being directed to the maintenance of the system of international money, defense and trade and the demand for our primary product: “dollars”, and the profits made by selling those dollars because of that militarily constructed system of money, trade, and soldiery. In other words, “property”, which is the prerequisite for trade, and the conversion of violent efforts at acquisition to peaceful efforts at production and trade, is created by vast military expenditure. The system is prolonged like any social system, by the promise of violence if it is broken. Unlike other systems, it is a system that increases production and makes the ‘pie bigger’ rather than decreases production by wealth transfer.

    Militarism for the purpose of ENFORCING PROPERTY RIGHTS is part of capitalism’s virtuous cycle of dividing labor, increasing granularity of property rights and types, increasing production and decreasing prices, instead of the use of violence to abuse the system of property rights. Militarism is, and can be, a good thing, depending upon how a culture defines it’s property rights. And the more granular the property rights and the better enforced, the more prosperity that people in a culture can generate by virtue of being ABLE to calculate USES of that property.

    People are not pacifist by nature. Humans are the most successful super predator that has ever occupied the planet. People are pacifist because they are weak.2 They are predatory by nature when they are strong. Only by maintaining violence over this system do we make the system one where participation in the game of the virtuous cycle is the only possible solution to the improvement of one’s life and resources. And membership requires two payments: respecting property and control of, and responsibility for, your breeding.

    So, in today’s Times Online there is another article about the desire of the Taliban to start peace talks with americans. The reason for these talks is that Pakistan is no longer allowing the taliban safe haven, and that they are perfectly willing to wait until the Americans leave to reassert their power over their society. By giving the americans a reason for virtuous exit they buy themselves time to regroup, rebuild their numbers, rebuld the poppy and heroin trade, rebuild tehir finances, and retake social positions in the gangster state of afghanistan.

    America took over the British Empire, it’s trade routes, naval bases, currency position, after the first world war. Americas policy difficulties stem almost ENTIRELY from british and french colonial history – the foolish organization of territory by other than tribal boundaries, in the foolish presumption that humans do not act, and prefer to at, according to tribal preferences.

    If America STOPPED maintaining that system, does anyone live under the illusion that there would not be VAST and VIOLENT attempts at filling the vacuum of power? It would be the greatest commercial land grab in human history. It would be bloody. It would be violent. It would involve massive wars, starvation, trade interruption, an the only choice for those that choose not to participate would be to participate or be doomed to poverty and ignorance.

    As an island nation lacking the resources to support itself, with a culture of feminized men so comfortable in their weakness that they have lost the Civic Republican Tradition of the Fraternal Order Of Soldiers (where the British ‘mates’ cultural concept comes from) how would the UK fare in this new world? It would collapse into either switzerland or return to it’s historical position as a backwater.

    Just as there are plenty of silly americans in daily press, there are an almost unlimited of silly, ignorant, self deluding brits commenting as well. And these comments are important because they express popular sentiment.

    One of the comments left on this article is by a nobody named Peter Codner who aside from being a barrister and apparently confusing analytical psychology for something other than another post-christian cult of absurd metaphysics, states that “The semblance to Vietnam which was an humiliating defeat for the americans is uncanny. the yanks will run away.”

    While I understand that short time preference is a result of social class – meaning that we can educate people to use advanced tools and logic but not if we do not extend their time preference so that they can think beyond their experience, and learn that their experience and ability to comprehend that experience is profoundly limited – I fail to understand how one can live in today’s society and not grasp the problem of extending time preference so that we see all actions and outcomes in both their short, medium and long term contexts.

    Running from an unnecessary battle for political reasons is very different from both running away from your history, and your own failure as a nation, and your responsibility as a nation for the problems you created.

    The Yanks won almost every battle in Vietnam. The loss was political, because of home political tensions not a military or economic defeat. And it still achieved it’s strategic ends. As did subverting the soviets in Afghanistan.

    Democracies lack the stomach for sustaining war. And they do so because of people like you. Of course, such sentiment comes comfortably to Brits, who lost their entire empire trying to stop Germany from taking it from them. Frankly the world would be better off if we had let them. Certainly Americans would be – we would not have to become an empire and live under a government-of-empire, if we did not have to take over the British empire when Britain collapsed, like reed. We would not have to protect a world trade and financial system that only served to inflate our entablements. We would not have to deal with the after effects of poor British (and French) judgement that left behind a post colonial Network of violence and poverty around the world.

    Brits are a silly, petty, pointless people who inhabit little more than an empty client state living off it’s heritage, and propping up it’s ridiculous system by immigrating it’s way into a temporary fictitious prosperity, by fomenting consumption at the expense of it’s heritage and culture, at the expense of producing increases in productivity, where the government consumes 50% of GDP, the military is only slightly less of a Potemkin village than is the laughable Canadian.

    I expect this kind of behavior of the french, who ceased being a world power when the effects of killing off their aristocracy and descending into Bonapartism ( democratically justified totalitarianism ) and are happy today to simply rest on past glory, consume their accumulated historical investment in a single century, and who because of it are simply obstructionists – obstruction is the only political power they have – so it is the political power that they exercise.

    Brits are happily self-congratulatory to live under the US common man’s soldierly umbrella of protection, and his society’s necessary militarism while criticizing him on a daily basis. 3 A “thank you” might be more appropriate than your petty slander. But then again, while no man is a hero to his debtors, a decent man does not slander his debtors. Only an indecent one. False wisdom is the last refuge of the weak whose current technique is to hid behind the cloak of intellectual and moral fraud.

    But then, isn’t that the purpose of all religions?

    In the current ‘intelligence system’ it’s recommended that americans read Al Jazeera, Pravda, China News Daily, BBC News as well as the NYT. All are biased but the important issue is to know how biased our own papers are.

    See Kagan in Power and Weakness, as well as Sorel in Reflections On Violence, as well as Keegan’s History Of Warfare.

    What will happen if the middle-american cultures who supply military talent ever figure out how much contempt that they are held in both by their coastal and international critics?


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 08:59:00 UTC

  • IT’S BRILLIANT. Really. Geostrategically it’s brilliant

    IT’S BRILLIANT. Really. Geostrategically it’s brilliant.


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 02:59:37 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162197188807708672

    Reply addressees: @fuggirls

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162136636995428357


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    Original post on X

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    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162136636995428357

  • There were many very fine conservatives there. The fact that Richard (what’s his

    There were many very fine conservatives there. The fact that Richard (what’s his name’s) nazis crashed the party despite the wishes of the organizers merely played into ‘your’ hands.


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 02:55:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162196039656513536

    Reply addressees: @SistaCitizen @qrayjack @CovfefeGun @AnnaApp91838450

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162164073061969920


    IN REPLY TO:

    @SistaCitizen

    @qrayjack @CovfefeGun @AnnaApp91838450 Lol, from someone using a racist photo as their avatar. Or, what about these, “very fine people” as described by Trump, chanting “Jews will not replace us?” Hypocrisy much? https://t.co/IBxITKluFi

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1162164073061969920

  • Untitled Image Post

    Untitled Image Post


    Source date (UTC): 2019-08-16 02:48:37 UTC

    Original post: https://gab.com/curtd/posts/102624376762873180