Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

(from elsewhere) Serious people on the margins challenge people to fights as a means of marketing. It works. It’s always worked. It’s just easier today with the internet not gating those challenges and arguments. Serious people in general use some version of ‘either put up and show you understand, ask questions in order to try to understand, or shut up until you can do one or the other rather than virtue signal to yourself that you can render a decision upon that which you clearly and often admittedly don’t understand. Lastly, there is a maximum distance across which semantic relations can be transferred. And frankly it’s pretty hard to ‘think like a dumb or common person’. Just as it’s hard to think like a ‘chimp’. Language (grammar) creates an illusion of commensurability and relative equality. Semantics invalidate that illusion. Which is why classes and disciplines use different vocabularies. And frankly, it’s a form of ‘theft’ when you try to guilt someone into investing the effort in educating you rather than you investing the effort. I’ve spent more than a decade trying to ‘talk down’ to ‘normies’. And frankly, other than improving my prose slightly, I’m not sure it’s been a good investment. So I sympathize with Chris. On the other hand, I am about as anti-abrahamic as one can get and suspect that if I delve into Chris’ work he is relying upon Pilpul at the axiom and law level, even if I would agree with his deductions from it. In other words, it is possible to justify high correspondence and coherence with reality and still not demonstrate high causal relation with reality. That’s what I did with Hoppe and Rothbard and others did with Marx: observations were true and justified falsely, leading to incorrect theories of causality.