Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • All that said, the geostrategic argument he is laying out is in fact what the tr

    All that said, the geostrategic argument he is laying out is in fact what the trump administration is advancing: we can control the resource that constrains china, we can use our navy to prevent its receipt of that resource, or we can fight over the results of it maintaining access to that resource.
    At present the administration is driving chinese expansion out of our hemisphere as well as the middle east.
    This is effectively ‘denying your opponent the field’.
    Whether one agrees with it or not and how it is done or not is something very different from the strategy itself.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-08 19:22:49 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2030725947746594830

  • I know. But you will never find a world of peoples more powerful than you is wil

    I know. But you will never find a world of peoples more powerful than you is willing to sacrifice its ambitions on your behalf unless you have something to trade them. As such defense is your only viable option. The problem is a population must be able to defend itself against all forms of attack on their capital. And baiting into hazard is an attack that succeeds because people want to be baited into those hazards.
    It’s not the hazarder’s responsibility – it’s the fool who is baited by it. So how do you prevent your people from taking the bait?
    That’s the whole problem with defending against the abrahamic means of warfare.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-03 23:24:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028974744033476992

  • Why would you think I was speaking in reference to individuals rather than state

    Why would you think I was speaking in reference to individuals rather than states? How did you make that leap?

    The US is visibly sovereign by every measure, but if you mean are citizens sovereign, they are more so in the USA than elsewhere, but are they sovereign in the pure and complete sense – then no.

    I know these subjects are emotionally loaded and conservatives are right to be emotionally activated, but I’m not (and Martin is not) a trivial thinker. It is better to ask questions when you object than to exhort accusations, because while I might lack sufficient clarity at times due to practical brevity, I’m not wrong very often – it’s more likely that your interpretation is.

    My difference from martin is caused by my frequent conflation of multiple issues that I often falsely assume are obvious: the natural law, the natural law reforms necessary for the anglosphere, and the natural law reforms that would be helpful for any and all of mankind. In my mind I think this is obvious but it’s not.

    So, as martin and I frequently state (and which I find extraordinary value) is that I”m cleary from an anglo naval background and hold that optimism (higher risk tolerance) because of it, while Martin is from a small continental background that holds pessimism (lower risk tolerance). In effect the natural law is the same, but each polity still needs to develop a strategy that suits its circumstances.

    To some degree this applies to you. I’m at the latter end of a long life of relative success and prosperity despite treating occupations as a means of funding my avocation. You are perhaps not to fortunate in your life as I have been in mind. As such my risk tolerance is higher than yours. This means you are acting correctly ust as martin is acting correctly, and I am acting correctly because of my and my country’s risk tolerance.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-03 23:21:21 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028974034864750931

  • Trump is a predicable reformer president. We have them about every 80 years, jus

    Trump is a predicable reformer president. We have them about every 80 years, just as we have economic cycles every 50 years. He just happens to be president when the two cycles are converging.
    The US Political system can accomodate reformer presidents and still return to republican government afterward.
    In the past most reformers produced unification of the states under a stronger federal government in response to world and domestic pressures. This time it looks like we are returning to 19th century form in response to changes in world events.
    Our challenge is that we need him for two terms if not three for the process to complete in domestic ‘settlement’ (conflict reduction). So the process may remain undone and conflict continue.
    I’ll stay on record with the problem being not only immigration but the introgression of women in to voting – which appears to be a biologically instinctual problem we cannot overcome. Male bias favors truth before face which is stressful in time but evolutionary over time. But female bias favors face before truth to avoid stress in time and is destructive over time.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-03 18:55:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028907203747561613

  • Russia cant win. But exhausting them is preferable to defeating them

    Russia cant win. But exhausting them is preferable to defeating them.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-02 20:38:44 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028570724643033325

  • little choice. They do it or lose the east to china

    little choice. They do it or lose the east to china.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-02 20:36:35 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028570183858802872

  • Because (a) forcing europe to pay her way instead of free riding on americans (b

    Because (a) forcing europe to pay her way instead of free riding on americans (b) depleting the russian war machine (c) depleting the russian economy (d) depleting the russian political class (e) in the hope that unification of russia into a federation with europe is possible.

    It’s been working flawlessly.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-03-02 17:53:40 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2028529184604303774

  • NLI On The Eileen Gu Matter This article argues that the Olympics is best unders

    NLI On The Eileen Gu Matter

    This article argues that the Olympics is best understood as an international political institution—an engineered forum for peaceful rivalry between polities—rather than as a private entertainment product or a mere sporting spectacle. On this view, sport is the instrument, but representation is the operator: athletes compete not as transferable labor or as identity-expressive individuals, but as delegated stand-ins for a polity under shared constraints.
    The controversy around nationality switching (e.g., Eileen Gu) is therefore framed not as a morality play about personal loyalty, but as evidence of an institutional drift: once Olympic participation is optimized around personal advancement, commercial monetization, or medal-maximization, the Olympics’ objective function is privatized—converted from “peace-through-interstate-contest” into “win-through-acquisition”—and the predictable endpoint is a market for athletes in which capital-rich actors can purchase competitive advantage, collapsing the legitimacy of national representation.
    1) The Olympic operator (telos).
    The International Olympic Committee Olympics is not merely a sports festival that happens to use flags; it is a political-institutional forum that uses sport as an instrument to convert interstate rivalry into bounded, rule-governed contest. This forum is necessary for peaceful competition because it provides: (a) mutual recognition among polities, (b) shared adjudication, (c) status competition as a substitute for coercive competition, and (d) a recurring, legible ritual of constraint-following rather than force.
    2) The representation constraint (what makes it political rather than commercial).
    Because the forum is interstate, the core unit is not “the athlete” but     representation: the delegation of standing to compete for a polity under shared rules. Representation is neither employment (a private contract for services) nor identity expression (subjective affiliation). Representation is a delegated public role, and it therefore requires anti-market constraints; absent those constraints, representation becomes fungible and priceable.
    3) The privatization failure mode (conversion of objective function).
    When Olympic participation is treated primarily under (a) personal career optimization, (b) commercial monetization, or (c) sport-performance maximization, the system’s objective function is converted from “peace-through-contest among polities” to “win-through-acquisition of scarce talent.” This conversion is privatization in the operational sense: not private ownership, but substitution of public purpose with private selection criteria (money, brand, medals).
    4) The predictable selection outcome (athlete market → capital competition).
    If representation is allowed to behave like a market, then the selection dynamics converge on the same attractor as professional sport: actors with the most capital, bargaining leverage, and brand infrastructure acquire the most scarce talent and therefore win disproportionately. Under this regime, the “nation” degenerates into a franchise with a flag, medals become a function of capital allocation efficiency, and the forum’s legitimacy as interstate representation collapses. The Olympics then ceases to serve as peaceful political contest and becomes entertainment-driven capital competition.
    5) The remedy (restore non-fungibility of representation).
    If the Olympic telos is peaceful interstate contest, then the institutional design must prevent representation from becoming a transferable commodity. The minimally sufficient design choices are:
    • Separate categories: a strict National Representation Olympics (non-fungible eligibility) and an Open Olympics (unconstrained excellence). This preserves both values without conflation.
    • Anti-arbitrage eligibility: require a high-cost, long-horizon tie to the polity (citizenship + durable residence/training base + long lock-in for switching).
    • Capture-prevention: impose caps/quotas or developmental constraints to prevent wealthy systems from externalizing athlete-development costs and internalizing medal benefits.
    6) Application to controversies (including Eileen Gu) without moralism.
    Under this framework, the athlete is not the primary object of judgment. The primary question is whether the institution permitted a choice architecture that converts public representation into private optimization. If so, the fault is systemic: rules failed to preserve non-fungibility of representation. The solution is rule design that restores the Olympics’ political function, not rhetorical accusations of betrayal.
    Objection 1: “The Olympics is just sport; treating it as political is ideology.”
    Counter: The Olympics is political by construction because it is organized around polities, flags, anthems, medal tables, and interstate symbolism. A forum that ranks nations publicly and recurrently is an interstate status mechanism. Sport is the instrument; representation is the operator. Denying the political operator is a category error.
    Objection 2: “Athletes are individuals; they should optimize their lives freely.”
    Counter: Individual freedom is compatible with the Olympics only if we keep domains separate. An athlete may optimize commercially and personally; that is private life. But representation is a delegated public role. If you dissolve representation into individual preference, you dissolve the forum’s function. The clean reconciliation is two categories: National (representation) and Open (individual excellence).
    Objection 3: “Restricting switches is unfair; it reduces the quality of competition.”
    Counter: “Quality of competition” is not the Olympics’ highest-order variable if the telos is peace-through-interstate-contest. If you want maximal excellence unconstrained by representation, you already have professional circuits—or you create an Open Olympics. The National Olympics must privilege legitimacy of representation over unconstrained optimization, otherwise it becomes a purchased tournament.
    Objection 4: “Countries have always recruited; nothing new here.”
    Counter: That is an argument that the system has been drifting toward privatization for a long time, not an argument that the drift is harmless. The question is whether drift has crossed a threshold where capital capture dominates representation. Once capture dominates, the institution’s stated purpose is no longer satisfied, and reform becomes necessary to restore function.
    Objection 5: “In a global diaspora world, identity is complex; strict rules are exclusionary.”
    Counter: Identity complexity is real, which is exactly why identity cannot serve as the eligibility primitive. Representation must be defined by durable, high-cost, observable ties (time, residence, training base, civic commitment). If you want identity expression unconstrained, again: Open category. The National category must preserve non-fungibility or it collapses into a market.
    Claim: The Olympics is not “a sports event with flags.” It is a political-institutional mechanism that uses sport as its instrument.
    Operational definition (telos):
    • The Olympics exists to convert interstate rivalry from violent contest to bounded contest under shared rules.
    • It thereby produces:
      peaceful coexistence (coordination under constraint),
      mutual recognition (legibility of sovereignty),
      status competition (nonviolent outlet),
      international commonality (shared adjudication of disputes).
    This makes the Olympics a forum of interstate relations by proxy, administered by International Olympic Committee as a quasi-constitutional operator for that forum.
    So: sport is not the point; sport is the means.
    Once you treat the Olympics under:
    • personal interest (athlete self-realization),
    • commercial interest (sponsors, endorsements, monetization),
    • sporting interest (club-like optimization for medals),
    …you have changed the underlying operator from interstate representation under constraint to resource acquisition for victory.
    That substitution produces a predictable selection dynamic:
    If countries may “buy” elite competitors, then outcomes converge on:
    • capital concentration,
    • recruitment advantage,
    • arbitrage of weak eligibility rules,
    • and the conversion of national teams into “franchises with flags.”
    Result: the Olympics ceases to be a forum of nations competing as nations, and becomes a tournament of capital allocation efficiency.
    That is exactly the same problem professional sports already exhibits: money selects talent, talent selects winners, winners attract money.
    To preserve your argument you need this discrimination:
    • Employment: private contract for services; transferable; priceable.
    • Identity: subjective affiliation; expressive; plural; not reliably enforceable.
    • Representation: delegated standing to act for a collective in a bounded forum; requires eligibility constraints that prevent conversion into a market.
    The Olympics only functions politically if representation is treated as representation (a delegated standing), not as:
    • an athlete’s personal brand choice,
    • a federation’s medal-maximization strategy,
    • or a sponsor’s global marketing channel.
    We’re using “privatized” correctly when we mean:
    Privatization = substitution of the public function (peaceful interstate contest) with private selection criteria (money, career, brand, audience).
    Not “private ownership,” but “private objective function.”
    So the critique becomes:
    • The Olympics purports to be a public international institution (peace-through-contest),
    • but increasingly behaves as a private entertainment marketplace,
    • and therefore destroys the institutional legitimacy of “national representation” by permitting market capture of teams.
    If we claim the Olympics is political-institutional, then we must accept constraints that look “unfair” from a pure sport-performance lens but are necessary to preserve the political function.
    Concrete constraint options (choose the minimal set you can defend):
    A) Strong nationality representation rule (anti-arbitrage)
    Representation requires a high-cost, long-horizon tie to the polity:
    • e.g., citizenship + multi-year ordinary residence + training base within the country.
    • long lock-in periods before switching (one switch per lifetime; 8-year lock).
      Purpose: make representation       non-fungible.
    B) Developmental capture prevention (anti-poaching)
    If a country did not bear the cost of developing the athlete, it cannot easily capture the benefit at the Olympic level.
    • e.g., “developmental credits” or compensation mechanisms (analogous to transfer fees in some sports), except tuned to public fairness rather than club profit.
      Purpose: stop rich systems from externalizing development costs.
    C) Cap on naturalized/converted athletes per delegation
    Hard quota:
    • e.g., X% of the delegation must be “domestically developed” by a defined test.
      Purpose: prevent full conversion of the national team into a bought roster.
    D) Separate “Open” category from “National” category
    Two parallel competitions:
    • National Olympics: strict representation constraints.
    • Open Olympics: athletes compete as individuals/teams without national flags.
      Purpose: preserve both values without conflation.
    Your argument is strongest if you propose D, because it makes the tradeoff explicit: “You can have commodified excellence OR national representation, but not both under one label.”
    Under this framework, the question is not “Is Gu loyal?” but:
    Did the Olympic system allow a choice architecture that converts representation into an individual optimization problem?
    If yes, then:
    • blame migrates from the athlete to the institution,
    • and the cure is not moral condemnation but rule design that restores the forum’s function.
    That’s clean, non-histrionic, and consistent with our Natural Law Volume 1 thesis about systems being corrupted by measurement failures: if the governing metric is medals + money, the selection process will produce medal markets.
    A strong opponent will say:
    • The Olympics has always been political theater and commercial entertainment.
    • Athlete mobility is consistent with liberal freedom and diaspora reality.
    • Restricting representation is exclusionary and reduces excellence.
    All of these are simply justifications for the ‘theft’ by privatization which is our underlying criticism.
    Our response is:
    • Excellence is not the Olympics’ highest-order value; peaceful interstate contest is.
    • If you want unconstrained excellence, create or use the Open category / professional circuits.
    • Representation requires constraints or it becomes priceable.
    • Priceability collapses symbolic legitimacy and converts public contest into capital competition.
    Definition:
    Voluntary exit from an association, office, role, contract, or polity without violating a binding obligation.
    Necessary conditions:
    • There exists an association or membership.
    • Exit is permitted under the governing rules or contract.
    • No classified information, strategic asset, or binding fiduciary duty is violated.
    • No hostile intent toward the former association is required.
    Structure:
    • Action: withdrawal.
    • Constraint: rules of exit.
    • Selection outcome: separation without sanction.
    Examples:
    • Resigning from employment.
    • Renouncing citizenship where legally allowed.
    • Leaving a political party.
    Departing is neutral. It may be inconvenient or disliked, but it is not inherently disloyal.
    Definition:
    Abandoning an allegiance or organization in order to join or assist a rival, typically involving transfer of loyalty.
    Necessary conditions:
    • Prior allegiance.
    • Shift of allegiance to a competing entity.
    • Usually political, military, intelligence, or ideological context.
    • Often (but not always) involves transfer of information or strategic advantage.
    Structure:
    • Action: exit + realignment.
    • Constraint: allegiance expectations.
    • Selection outcome: gain for rival, loss for original entity.
    Defection implies betrayal of expectation, but not necessarily violation of criminal law.
    Examples:
    • A diplomat switching sides during war.
    • An intelligence officer seeking asylum in a rival state.
    • A high-level executive leaving for a direct competitor and bringing proprietary knowledge (this may also breach contract).
    Defection may be:
    • Legal but stigmatized.
    • Illegal if it violates specific statutes (e.g., espionage laws).
    • Morally ambiguous depending on context.
    Definition (legal):
    A narrowly defined crime consisting of levying war against one’s own state or adhering to its enemies by giving them aid and comfort.
    In the United States, this is defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution.
    Article III, Section 3
    Necessary conditions (U.S. standard):
    • Allegiance to the United States.
    • An “enemy” in a state of declared or recognized war.
    • Overt act of levying war or giving aid and comfort.
    • Testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or confession in open court.
    Structure:
    • Action: hostile assistance.
    • Constraint: constitutional definition.
    • Selection outcome: criminal liability of highest order.
    Treason is intentionally narrowly defined to prevent political abuse.
    Notably:
    • Criticism of government ≠ treason.
    • Mere departure ≠ treason.
    • Even defection ≠ treason unless it meets statutory criteria.
    • Departing = Termination of association within permitted constraints.
    • Defecting = Transfer of allegiance under conflict conditions.
    • Treason = Criminalized hostile action under sovereign authority during conflict.
    The escalation is not emotional but structural:
    1. Defection is not automatically treason.
      A person may defect from an authoritarian regime to a liberal one and be seen as morally justified, even if prosecuted by the original regime.
    2. Treason is defined legally, not morally.
      Moral betrayal and legal treason are distinct categories.
    3. Departing can be loyal.
      Resignation can preserve integrity and avoid conflict rather than betray it.
    The piece concludes that if the Olympics is to retain its political function as an international commons—substituting bounded competition for coercive rivalry—then it must be governed as such, with eligibility and representation rules designed to prevent representation from becoming fungible and priceable. That implies institutional remedies rather than rhetorical condemnation: restore non-fungibility through strong anti-arbitrage eligibility (durable, high-cost ties), capture-prevention mechanisms, hard limits on converted athletes, or most cleanly, a structural separation between a strict National Representation Olympics and an Open category that permits unconstrained excellence without flags. Under this architecture, “departing,” “defecting,” and “treason” remain analytically distinct—because the core question is not criminal allegiance but the protection of reciprocity between athlete and investing polity—while the central claim remains: commodifying representation is not a neutral modernization; it is a functional theft by privatization that converts a peace institution into a capital tournament.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-26 17:26:04 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/2027072687840100534

  • THE MORAL RADIUS There is some basic rule I haven’t articulated that’s along the

    THE MORAL RADIUS
    There is some basic rule I haven’t articulated that’s along the lines of the geographic scale of morality you can afford is the geographic scale of morality you can afford – meaning if you’re strong you can seek cooperation at scale or predation at scale. If you’re within the cooperative envelope (trade is possible) then the choice is both yours and your opponent’s. If they’re weaker it’s yours. If they’re stronger it’s theirs. The European problem is assuming that the world conducts war on the same terms europeans do with one another. They don’t. (See Keegan and Van Creveld).
    Europeans are as naive in the belief their cultural biases are normal for humans when they are the opposite. Every culture believes its biases are normal or good for human beings … but that’s false.
    Every culture other than europe failed by 800AD despite the agrarian revolution. And europe only succeeded because it restored Classical Thought and reconstructed greco-roman law around the north sea beginning in about 1000ad, as the muslims who preserved those works fled the rise of fundamentalism and it’s mandate of supernatural ignorance.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-25 16:37:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2026698148161495188

  • Founding Beliefs Were Not Universal (a) Man’s nature is not fixed but utilitaria

    Founding Beliefs Were Not Universal
    (a) Man’s nature is not fixed but utilitarian and adaptive and follows incentives – what is rational and advantageous varies by circumstance (b) reason accelerates adaptation and more so negotiation of adaptive cooperation at increasing scales (c) Man’s abilities, education, and experience are unequal – making incentives vary. (d) Man’s behavior then is not universal (a holdover from Christian universalism – not from European aristocratic tradition) but particular to the individual, to the sex, class, group, polity, and civilization that creates the portfolio of incentives man adapts to. (e) The founders were not bound by shared beliefs but shared problems and they represented a distribution usually described as Hamiltonian and Hobbes vs Jeffersonian and Locke, but is more varied on that spectrum.
    The cause of their generation’s myopia was the ratio of aristocracy (martial, governing) and nobility (clerical, administrative) proper, to the “lesser aristocracy” (Elites) that founded the country, to the emergent middle class due to expansion of trade during the age of sail, to the agrarian majority whether northern (small scale) family farmers or southern ‘industrial’ (large scale) plantation farmers. As class sizes change the realities and incentives of classes adapt – usually distributing influence (power) to alter outcomes across classes.
    Amplify their divisions by the fact that the continent was settled by four different fundamentalist groups from four different regions of Britain. This meant that the constitution had to be largely secular due to English (England, Wales, Scotland) tradition on the one hand and in order to mediate differences between sectarian justifications on the other. It was not just a matter of enlightenment prose but incentives. It’s also why the constitution was written in both English and German – because of the large number of Germans in the population.
    I’m not really trying to overthrow any argument here other than the presumption of a shared mind and set of beliefs, rather than shared interest given the incentives of the time, and the rather natural outcome of legal prose that sought to mediate differences between the parties founding the federation.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-23 16:30:59 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2025971661485531642