Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

  • Enjoy. 🙂

    http://io9.com/anti-communist-propaganda-is-more-awesome-than-any-horr-1460028336?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow. Enjoy. 🙂


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-07 20:57:00 UTC

  • SLOWLY THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT SPREADS Another social science academic concludes

    SLOWLY THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT SPREADS

    Another social science academic concludes that there is little there there.

    Writing in 1942, the Oxford Professor of Metaphysics, RG Collingwood, said that dismissing academic discussion for insignificant speech is like “scolding little girls for giving dolls’ tea-parties with empty cups and little boys for playing with wooden swords.” Academic discussions, he added, “belong to the world of make-believe.”

    Collingwood was specifically talking about my field, political philosophy, as it is done in universities. Reflecting on his words over the last year, I’ve begun to realise how right he was.

    –Craig Newmark, Newmark’s Door.

    COMMENT

    ————-

    The fallacy of common interest.

    The fallacy of common ends.

    The necessity of common means of achieving opposing interests and ends.

    The enlightenment vision of man was false. It is not mysterious that deliberation over public choice is nonsense, if it is predicated on nonsensical assumptions about the nature of man.

    The market, noy politics, is the only mechanism for cooperating peacefully on means despite conflicting and irreconcilable ends.

    WELCOM BACK FROM THE MATRIX INTO THE REAL WORLD.

    Aristocracy.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-07 09:29:00 UTC

  • Austrian article by non austrian in….ever? Made my day. I can never grasp Hopp

    http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/11/ignorance.htmlBest Austrian article by non austrian in….ever?

    Made my day.

    I can never grasp Hoppe’s argument against Popper. Or rather, he makes the right argument against the wrong man.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 21:18:00 UTC

  • Interesting. Austrian reenlightenment spreads

    http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp13-039Very Interesting.

    Austrian reenlightenment spreads.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 21:14:00 UTC

  • Thought you might get a kick out of this. Seeing the left make a connection betw

    Thought you might get a kick out of this. Seeing the left make a connection between Libertarianism and The Aristocracy.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 12:08:00 UTC

  • THE SOURCE AND PURPOSE OF PAUL KRUGMAN’S INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION (explanatory po

    THE SOURCE AND PURPOSE OF PAUL KRUGMAN’S INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION

    (explanatory power)(important)

    “The Conscience Of An Immoral Man”

    In a series of recent articles, Krugman suggests that there is only one answer for Europe and the world, and that is, for the Germans to redistribute to the periphery.

    But that’s false. The opposite answer is that the periphery borrow to REFORM themselves. And when I say something is ‘moral’ I mean that it forces an involuntary transfer – a theft. One cannot dismiss morality unless one dismisses theft. That’s what it means to be immoral: to steal indirectly, and anonymously.

    Once we include opportunity costs and the subset of social capital we now call ‘moral capital’, we see that material trade and consumption is just a minority of the human economy. And that the economy that makes material trade and consumption possible is the social and moral economy. And that theft of opportunity, or the various forms of free riding, or theft by immorality, are all equivalent forms of theft.

    So, Krugman’s solution is immoral. The conservative solution is of course. moral. Because conservatism in the west is a defense of moral capital. Incentives are incentives. Actions have cumulative consequences. Money is only a unit of measure. Human beings keep account of not only money but opportunity costs. And what Krugman is saying is that Germans pay opportunity costs and should involuntarily transfer them to the periphery.

    The trade is only IMBALANCED because of BEHAVIOR then it is not a trade imbalance, it is an incentive.

    ANALYSIS

    There is a very great difference between the imbalances in trade, education, technology, resources, and infrastructure and the imbalances in trust, discipline, time preference, and hard work.

    And it is IMMORAL and COUNTER PRODUCTIVE if we do NOT use trade imbalances to transform those who have less trust, less discipline, work less.

    The ongoing evolution of social capital requires that we punish free riders. And Free Riding IS THE PROBLEM that all societies must suppress. It is necessary for cooperation.

    SOURCE OF HIS IMMORALITY

    Paul studied trade between different STATES – plus he has deeply internalized both jewish ghetto ethics, and the need to justify the failure of his people to hold land through adoption of land-holder moral codes. (Albeit as a survival strategy.) Furthermore, for cultural reasons, he is an anti-aristocratic activist.

    Like many people with specialized knowledge he uses overwhelming bis in all his arguments to mask the very simple, but catastrophic errors he makes on a daily basis: that it is necessary to conform to germanic high trust behavior and institutions if one desires a high trust society, and the economic productivity of the anglo-german sphere.

    Conversely, and much more importantly, it is IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY by policy and will rather than culture and incentive. Free riding is the primary problem of economic and social development and why the nuclear family is so important (if fragile.) If people see free-riding, then they will punish it. If free riding is pervasive, people will STOP over-contributing.

    I cannot really tell if Krugman understands the importance of the high trust ethic, or if his ghetto ethics, hatred of white europeans, and his fascination with states and trade simply serve blind him to it.

    But given his obvious joy at expressing ridicule, and his facility with intentionally OBSCURING the moral and necessary constraint of free riding, with the status signals obtained from using charity as a means of conspicuous consumption, I would say that Krugman is nothing more than one more exceptionally verbally talented man, using loaded and obscurant language, as a means of conducting MacDonald’s insight into the damaging nature of

    Each expression of Krugman’s rhetorical glee, is a status perk he obtains, demonstrating both his conspicuous consumption, and therefore his status, while at the same time destroying the western high trust society by encouraging, in every way possible, free riding, rent seeking.

    THE BROADER CONTEXT

    If Noam Chomsky is the high priest, then Paul Krugman is the parliamentary head of the “Culture Of Critique” that, by use of obscurant language, is a systemic means of conducting intentional fraud: it is ‘the prestige’ in the verbal sleight of hand; the gesture that hides the true action: **Obtaining status by demonstrating conspicuous consumption using other people’s money, to increase free riding and rent seeking, in order to destroy the high trust society – which is the FIRST CAUSE OF ECONOMIC EXCELLENCE.**

    Once the speaker is possessed of status, then the ‘virtuously destructive’ cycle is complete. He has free reign to use that status, obtained by fraud and theft, to continue and expand his theft.

    Understood in this light, we see both the legitimacy of Paul Krugman’s insight into interstate trade, and the moral criminality of his rhetoric as an expression of the ongoing damage of the Cultural of Critique to western civilization and the high trust society.

    One can use verbal intelligence to articulate the truth. Or one can use verbal intelligence to construct obscurant language that by ‘the prestige’ – the award of status – under the rubric of care-taking, by encouraging people and policy makers to do just the opposite of what they intend: to destroy their high trust society by facilitating in every way possible the rent seeking and free riding that make the high trust society possible.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    ——–

    Note: I’ll improve this argument a bit. This is my first draft. But I’ve pretty much got the idea down. And I think I’ve united finally, Popper and Praxeology through operational language, fixing both of them. I am not sure how successful that I will be with the argument that obscurant (unscientific, non-operational) language is required for moral speech, because operational language places a high barrier for knowledge on any speaker. But if one makes public speech, about public matters, he is offering a product to the market, and is bound by warrantee.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 03:20:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100244023/the-left-is-trying-to-rehabilitate-karl-marx-lets-remind-them-of-the-millions-who-died-in-his-name/


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-05 15:28:00 UTC

  • FOR THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES (good)(attack on academia) (Disclaimer: I have

    http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7629REASONS FOR THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANITIES

    (good)(attack on academia)

    (Disclaimer: I have a fine art degree: art history and theory. Aesthetic philosophy. Although I am also educated in economics, philosophy, history and computer science.)

    [Warning: Harsh words follow.]

    1) COST. Now, if I paid 10K for this degree, or even 20K, that would be one thing. But these degrees are too expensive for the cost of the education. Humans make cost benefit analyses and the data is in: there isn’t a return on them.

    2) CONTENT. Philosophy departments can alight with the humanities and religion (which is a death sentence) or align with science, economics, politics, business and law (where it is terribly useful).

    3) FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHICAL PROGRAM. The academic humanities bear much of the responsibility for their plight having tried fitfully to prove via the metaphysical program on one hand (a demonstrated failure), via the logical program on the other (a demonstrated failure), by the mathematical program (a failure at least at the set level to correct mathematical platonism rather than justify it), that philosophy is a science in itself, rather than the means by which we interpret the findings of the sciences and therefore to inform and alter our perception and understanding, such that we adapt our actions to the new knowledge. Philosophy then is a moral discipline, where morality is the study of action. It is not a means of attempting find justification that philosophy is a science. It is not. It cannot be. Because science requires that we use instrumentation to confirm our senses.

    4) REPLACING THE CHURCH: It is not lost on those of us who are critics (even those few of us who write philosophy nearly full time), that Academia, originating as an extension of the church, has sought to replace the church’s influence over moral and political life. It has done so. It has done so largely by a) promoting both socialism, communism, postmodernism and totalitarian humanism, social democracy, and therefore bearing the responsibility of both the decline of the west’s aristocratic mythos, and the death of nearly one hundred million people. If that is not an indictment I don’t know what is. And rather than extend rights to all, academics encouraged extraordinary rights, and in particular supported feminism as a means of increasing revenues and attracting women to previously male dominated universities.

    However, the feminist program has been successful in undermining the nuclear family, and are the voting force that allows socialists, democratic socialists, and totalitarian humanists produced by the university system, to obtain political power, by which to both undermine the 14th amendment, the Absolute Nuclear Family which is the necessary component of the high trust society, and to undermine the western model through forcible large scale immigration. Even now, the supreme court is populated by non-protestants. And that matters. Because protestants are the keepers of the Absolute Nuclear Family, and the High Trust, Individualist, Risk taking, Experimental society.

    5) FRAUDULENT PRODUCTS: The source of much of our political trouble is the fascination in the humanities introspection and self reinforcement rather than external evidence and adaptation, combined with its fascination with totalitarian humanism, and philosophy with postmodernism and socialism. Economics departments don’t teach Marx. It’s bad economics, and really bad philosophy. Furthermore, the evidence is in, and is decidedly against democracy – we cannot seem to make all men aristocrats. So much of the philosophical tradition is not only demonstrably false. It is not only false. But it is harmful.

    6) CRIMINALLY DEFECTIVE GOODS: It is not lost on us that academic wares are not warranted, any more than religious wares are warranteed. If they were I suspect academia would rapidly change. The fact that the state gives license to academics who sell faulty goods, but punishes ‘thought crimes’, is evidence enough to demonstrate that academic humanities has in fact, succeeded in replacing the mystical religion of christianity, discrediting the church, only to replace aristocratic egalitarianism and christianity, with totalitarian state humanism – effectively communism by other means.

    7) INCENTIVES: It is not lost on any of us that the INCENTIVES in academia are (in economic terms ) ‘perverse’. That we have spent two generations now exchanging personal retirement accounts of parents, for overpriced education of children, most of which ends up in rapid expansion of academic administration, diversion from teaching professors to research faculty, physical capital, and endowments. That graduate students are little more than slave labor, that their work products are almost universally shoddy, that the quality of writing in the humanities is offensively bad, and that obscurant language is used consistently to mask weak, false and unsupported thought.

    SO BEFORE YOU JUSTIFY THE HUMANITIES PERHAPS AN *EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS** WOULD HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THE BENEFITS ARE SOLELY RESERVED FOR ACADEMICS AT TRAGIC COST TO SOCIETY. AND THAT BY AND LARGE, THE HUMANITIES HAS BEEN THE SOURCE OF MORE HUMAN SUFFERING AND CORRUPTION THAN THE CHURCH EVER MANAGED TO MUSTER.

    That’s what SCIENCES tell us. So choose whether you will be part of another tragic religion, or move into hard science with the rest of us. 🙂

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-05 05:52:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.oublio.com/


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-04 18:13:00 UTC

  • HICKS ON OUR MORAL DUTY TO IDEOLOGY OR TO REALITY (quotable) –“The Thompson-Kol

    HICKS ON OUR MORAL DUTY TO IDEOLOGY OR TO REALITY

    (quotable)

    –“The Thompson-Kolakowski conflict is an instructive example of a true-believer-apologist in conflict with an intellectually-honest thinker. While Thompson and Kolakowski were men of the Left, it’s important to note that the same psychological dichotomy runs through most intellectual movements. It’s the difference between those whose first loyalty is to a belief system and who will ignore or bend the facts to maintain their belief — and those whose first loyalty is to reality and who will alter or abandon their belief system to fit the facts.”–

    Stephen Hicks


    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 11:51:00 UTC