Curt Doolittle

Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

  • The Moral Obligation To Disregard Feelings In Political Discourse

    (Silencing the silly people) [P]olitical discourse is not civilized. It is a bloody brutal deceitful affair that is conducted in the pursuit the of power to allocate influence, property and opportunity, using every dishonest, distracting, fraudulent tactic available. Humanities is what it is. And I will let the empirical evidence speak for itself. It is a discourse on norms and morality. Recursive as it may be. It is intuitionist not empirical. Normative not scientific. My point has been a consistent one: we have developed a set of technologies that compensate for the weakness of our perceptions. Debate, reason, measurement, mathematics, science, and economics are fields that only exist to compensate for the limitations of our senses. Our senses are plagued by limitations and by error (cognitive biases). We desire at all times to rely on intuition (memory) rather than thinking (comparison). These are not biases, preferences, opinions. They are empirical facts. They are what they are. Numbers, money, prices, accounting, credit, interest, contract, and rule of law, are technologies just like any other technology that gives us information about the world around us, and compensates for the inability to sense and perceive the world in real time. But that statement alone makes no sense unless we understand also, that the reason we need these things is to coordinate ourselves in a vast network of production none of us could grasp even the simplest part of. The point is that the world is not filled with evil people. It is filled with real human beings who have to survive with fragments of knowledge and resources, but as a collective, we produce the most amazing things, that our ancestors, could not even have imagined could exist. The price for this productivity is that we are in fact, ‘alienated’ by that information: the destruction of our illusion of importance. When the family, extended family, village or tribe was a productive unit, then each persons value was obvious. When all humanity, together, as a collective is the productive unit, then each person’s value is not only not obvious, it is trivialized by the experience. WE don’t like it. We’re alienated by it. We feel alone. And strangely enough we keep consuming to compensate for feeling alone. It’s maddening. So how can we do both? This is the goal of equality. But we cannot have perfect equality for the same reasons that we need numbers: differentiation is necessary for calculation. If I make you feel bad. I am sorry for your feelings. But the stakes are more important than your feelings. Your feelings are a reaction to changes in state. The state of what? your self image? Your perception how the group values you? Your confidence in your grasp and therefore control over the world? What is it that is changing state? Is it Marx’s alienation? It is.

    [callout]It is immoral to make someone feel good for believing something that is demonstrably false. Yet we cannot be prisoners of truths. We must struggle to find solutions even when the truth stops us.[/callout]

    If I had to make everyone feel really bad for a while in order to achieve relative equality and preserve productivity at the same time. I would think that was a fairly low cost. At least compared to the 100M dead from the result of communism. We are not equal. Certain people make me feel really dumb. I don’t feel bad because of it. I’m thankful that the world has smarter people than I am in it. Because it’s certainly too much work for me, or anyone else for that matter, to do alone. A world without people smarter than I am really scares me. It would mean that instead of feeling alone at times, I would in fact BE alone for all intents and purposes. I studied fine art and art history in school. At the end of the semester we had a critique. The professors tore us apart. Most people left in tears. It was the most important thing we learned all year. And we all were better for it. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world. (See Surviving as an artist.How to survive an art critique.) On the other hand. It made me, and all the rest of us, pretty numb to criticism. (And americans are, quite clearly, the most narcissistic people on earth.) (See The Culture of Narcissism.Bibiography of American Narcissism. So I am glad that I received that curative process. Although, living here in the east, in the Post-Soviet system, I am very aware how narcissistic americans are. Aware of how I must alter my speech pattern. And I literally cringe whenever I hear an american accent. Americans talk about themselves and how they feel incessantly. [I] have tried to construct this argument as compassionately as possible. But idealism, impossibility, ignorance, deception, and lying are not, in Kantian terms ‘ethical’ means of discourse. The only ethics I know of that I can prove are a) to speak the truth as best as I understand it, b) rely on instrumental science wherever possible as superior to intuitive sense and reason, and c) to avoid involuntary transfers of any kind from others, and d) to prohibit others from conducting involuntary transfers whenever possible.

    [callout]The only ethics I know of that I can prove are a) to speak the truth as best as I understand it, b) rely on instrumental science wherever possible as superior to intuitive sense and reason, and c) to avoid involuntary transfers of any kind from others, and d) to prohibit others from conducting involuntary transfers whenever possible. [/callout]

    That is, acting morally. It is not moral to respect someone’s feelings if it violates those tenets. It is immoral to make someone feel good for believing something that is demonstrably false. Yet we cannot be prisoners of truths. We must struggle to find solutions even when the truth stops us. We cannot construct that we know of an alternative to the pricing system as an information and incentive system. We can however, learn from it and construct alternatives by using it, the same way we constructed morality under capitalism by making use of self-interest. However, the basic problem, which is that the system itself is both incomprehensible and uncontrollable is probably forever beyond our grasp. And I suggest that it MUST be. Otherwise, like the Corporatism of current large scale institutionalized banking is, it would be little more than an instrument of tyranny.

  • The Moral Obligation To Disregard Feelings In Political Discourse

    (Silencing the silly people) [P]olitical discourse is not civilized. It is a bloody brutal deceitful affair that is conducted in the pursuit the of power to allocate influence, property and opportunity, using every dishonest, distracting, fraudulent tactic available. Humanities is what it is. And I will let the empirical evidence speak for itself. It is a discourse on norms and morality. Recursive as it may be. It is intuitionist not empirical. Normative not scientific. My point has been a consistent one: we have developed a set of technologies that compensate for the weakness of our perceptions. Debate, reason, measurement, mathematics, science, and economics are fields that only exist to compensate for the limitations of our senses. Our senses are plagued by limitations and by error (cognitive biases). We desire at all times to rely on intuition (memory) rather than thinking (comparison). These are not biases, preferences, opinions. They are empirical facts. They are what they are. Numbers, money, prices, accounting, credit, interest, contract, and rule of law, are technologies just like any other technology that gives us information about the world around us, and compensates for the inability to sense and perceive the world in real time. But that statement alone makes no sense unless we understand also, that the reason we need these things is to coordinate ourselves in a vast network of production none of us could grasp even the simplest part of. The point is that the world is not filled with evil people. It is filled with real human beings who have to survive with fragments of knowledge and resources, but as a collective, we produce the most amazing things, that our ancestors, could not even have imagined could exist. The price for this productivity is that we are in fact, ‘alienated’ by that information: the destruction of our illusion of importance. When the family, extended family, village or tribe was a productive unit, then each persons value was obvious. When all humanity, together, as a collective is the productive unit, then each person’s value is not only not obvious, it is trivialized by the experience. WE don’t like it. We’re alienated by it. We feel alone. And strangely enough we keep consuming to compensate for feeling alone. It’s maddening. So how can we do both? This is the goal of equality. But we cannot have perfect equality for the same reasons that we need numbers: differentiation is necessary for calculation. If I make you feel bad. I am sorry for your feelings. But the stakes are more important than your feelings. Your feelings are a reaction to changes in state. The state of what? your self image? Your perception how the group values you? Your confidence in your grasp and therefore control over the world? What is it that is changing state? Is it Marx’s alienation? It is.

    [callout]It is immoral to make someone feel good for believing something that is demonstrably false. Yet we cannot be prisoners of truths. We must struggle to find solutions even when the truth stops us.[/callout]

    If I had to make everyone feel really bad for a while in order to achieve relative equality and preserve productivity at the same time. I would think that was a fairly low cost. At least compared to the 100M dead from the result of communism. We are not equal. Certain people make me feel really dumb. I don’t feel bad because of it. I’m thankful that the world has smarter people than I am in it. Because it’s certainly too much work for me, or anyone else for that matter, to do alone. A world without people smarter than I am really scares me. It would mean that instead of feeling alone at times, I would in fact BE alone for all intents and purposes. I studied fine art and art history in school. At the end of the semester we had a critique. The professors tore us apart. Most people left in tears. It was the most important thing we learned all year. And we all were better for it. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world. (See Surviving as an artist.How to survive an art critique.) On the other hand. It made me, and all the rest of us, pretty numb to criticism. (And americans are, quite clearly, the most narcissistic people on earth.) (See The Culture of Narcissism.Bibiography of American Narcissism. So I am glad that I received that curative process. Although, living here in the east, in the Post-Soviet system, I am very aware how narcissistic americans are. Aware of how I must alter my speech pattern. And I literally cringe whenever I hear an american accent. Americans talk about themselves and how they feel incessantly. [I] have tried to construct this argument as compassionately as possible. But idealism, impossibility, ignorance, deception, and lying are not, in Kantian terms ‘ethical’ means of discourse. The only ethics I know of that I can prove are a) to speak the truth as best as I understand it, b) rely on instrumental science wherever possible as superior to intuitive sense and reason, and c) to avoid involuntary transfers of any kind from others, and d) to prohibit others from conducting involuntary transfers whenever possible.

    [callout]The only ethics I know of that I can prove are a) to speak the truth as best as I understand it, b) rely on instrumental science wherever possible as superior to intuitive sense and reason, and c) to avoid involuntary transfers of any kind from others, and d) to prohibit others from conducting involuntary transfers whenever possible. [/callout]

    That is, acting morally. It is not moral to respect someone’s feelings if it violates those tenets. It is immoral to make someone feel good for believing something that is demonstrably false. Yet we cannot be prisoners of truths. We must struggle to find solutions even when the truth stops us. We cannot construct that we know of an alternative to the pricing system as an information and incentive system. We can however, learn from it and construct alternatives by using it, the same way we constructed morality under capitalism by making use of self-interest. However, the basic problem, which is that the system itself is both incomprehensible and uncontrollable is probably forever beyond our grasp. And I suggest that it MUST be. Otherwise, like the Corporatism of current large scale institutionalized banking is, it would be little more than an instrument of tyranny.

  • A SHORT ESSAY ON THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO DISREGARD FEELINGS IN POLITICAL DISCOUR

    A SHORT ESSAY ON THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO DISREGARD FEELINGS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE.

    (Silencing the silly people)

    Political discourse is not civilized. It is a bloody brutal dishonest affair that is conducted in the pursuit of power to allocate influence, property and opportunity, using every dishonest, distracting, fraudulent tactic available. Humanities is what it is. And I will let the empirical evidence speak for itself. It is a discourse on norms and morality. Recursive as it may be. It is intuitionist not empirical. Normative not scientific.

    My point has been a consistent one: we have developed a set of technologies that compensate for the weakness of our perceptions. Debate, reason, measurement, mathematics, science, and economics are fields that only exist to compensate for the limitations of our senses. Our senses are plagued by limitations and by error (cognitive biases). We desire at all times to rely on intuition (memory) rather than thinking (comparison). These are not biases, preferences, opinions. They are empirical facts. They are what they are.

    Numbers, money, prices, accounting, credit, interest, contract, and rule of law, are technologies just like any other technology that gives us information about the world around us, and compensates for the inability to sense and perceive the world in real time. But that statement alone makes no sense unless we understand also, that the reason we need these things is to coordinate ourselves in a vast network of production none of us could grasp even the simplest part of.

    The point is that the world is not filled with evil people. It is filled with real human beings who have to survive with fragments of knowledge and resources, but as a collective, we produce the most amazing things, that our ancestors, could not even have imagined could exist.

    The price for this productivity is that we are in fact, ‘alienated’ by that information: the destruction of our illusion of importance. When the family, extended family, village or tribe was a productive unit, then each persons value was obvious. When all humanity, together, as a collective is the productive unit, then each person’s value is not only not obvious, it is trivialized by the experience. WE don’t like it. We’re alienated by it. We feel alone. And strangely enough we keep consuming to compensate for feeling alone. It’s maddening. 🙂

    So how can we do both? This is the goal of equality. But we cannot have perfect equality for the same reasons that we need numbers: differentiation is necessary for calculation.

    If I make you feel bad. I am sorry for your feelings. But the stakes are more important than your feelings. Your feelings are a reaction to changes in state. The state of what? your self image? Your perception how the group values you? Your confidence in your grasp and therefore control over the world? What is it that is changing state? Is it Marx’s alienation? It is.

    If I had to make everyone feel really bad for a while in order to achieve relative equality and preserve productivity at the same time. I would think that was a fairly low cost. At least compared to the 100M dead from the result of communism.

    We are not equal. Certain people make me feel really dumb. I don’t feel bad because of it. I’m thankful that the world has smarter people than I am in it. Because it’s certainly too much work for me, or anyone else for that matter, to do alone. A world without people smarter than I am really scares me. It would mean that instead of feeling alone at times, I would in fact BE alone for all intents and purposes.

    I studied fine art and art history in school. At the end of the semester we had a critique. The professors tore us apart. Most people left in tears. It was the most important thing we learned all year. And we all were better for it. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world.

    http://artandperception.com/2006/11/surviving-as-an-artist.html

    http://faso.com/fineartviews/18528/how-to-survive-an-art-critique

    On the other hand. It made me, and all the rest of us, pretty numb to criticism. (And americans are, quite clearly, the most narcissistic people on earth.)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism

    Bibliographic references: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=3271

    So I am glad that I received that curative process. Although, living here in the east, in the Post-Soviet system, I am very aware how narcissistic americans are. Aware of how I must alter my speech pattern. And I literally cringe whenever I hear an american accent. Americans talk about themselves and how they feel incessantly.

    I have tried to construct this argument as compassionately as possible. But idealism, impossibility, ignorance, deception, and lying are not, in Kantian terms ‘ethical’ means of discourse. The only ethics I know of that I can prove are a) to speak the truth as best as I understand it, b) rely on instrumental science wherever possible as superior to intuitive sense and reason, and c) to avoid involuntary transfers of any kind from others, and d) to prohibit others from conducting involuntary transfers whenever possible.

    That is, acting morally. It is not moral to respect someone’s feelings if it violates those tenets. It is immoral to make someone feel good for believing something that is demonstrably false. Yet we cannot be prisoners of truths. We must struggle to find solutions even when the truth stops us.

    We cannot construct that we know of an alternative to the pricing system as an information and incentive system. We can however, learn from it and construct alternatives by using it, the same way we constructed morality under capitalism by making use of self-interest. However, the basic problem, which is that the system itself is both incomprehensible and uncontrollable is probably forever beyond our grasp. And I suggest that it MUST be. Otherwise, like the Corporatism of current large scale institutionalized banking is, it would be little more than an instrument of tyranny.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-29 06:31:00 UTC

  • NATIONALISM Higher Tribalism Returns – now that universalism is unmasked as an a

    NATIONALISM

    Higher Tribalism Returns – now that universalism is unmasked as an attempt to obtain status without producing anything. The Vision of the Anointed finally fades.

    (The boomers can’t die fast enough.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-26 14:57:00 UTC

  • MADNESS American foreign policy is predicated on self determination. People can

    MADNESS

    American foreign policy is predicated on self determination. People can choose what government they want. But the Americans will hold the government accountable to a variety of standards – including consumer capitalism, and human rights. Assuming a country moves in both of those directions, or at least doesn’t regress against them, there isn’t a policy problem.

    If the government is ‘bad’ then even if the people select it and want it, obviously something is not right, so the government can be replaced.

    But this is confusing, and unnecessary. First, it’s a two step process. We tell people ‘you have freedom to choose what you want, but don’t choose badly.’ Except we don’t tell them what bad is. And we don’t tell them not to choose it, or we’ll blow up their entire country.

    Secondly, there isn’t a lot of evidence that people use democracy wisely. In fact, it looks pretty much the opposite. So our whole self determination and democracy fetish turns out to, scientifically anyway, be wrong.

    For example, African and Muslim tribes have used democracy to legitimize taking power to oppress other tribes. Sometimes to commit genocide.

    Even, and especially here at home. In america, democracy is just a means of conquering the Protestants.

    It’s no different in America. Not at all. It’s just legal violence rather than physical violence.

    What’s the difference?

    There isn’t any.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-25 16:37:00 UTC

  • “[AMERICAN] FEMINISM IS A HATE MOVEMENT” Not sure I want to go that far. But it’

    “[AMERICAN] FEMINISM IS A HATE MOVEMENT”

    Not sure I want to go that far. But it’s good propaganda for the men’s rights movement.

    I’m a libertarian and I support equal rights FOR EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING. But that isn’t american feminism’s goal. It’s goal is either communism and socialism: that women can appropriate men’s assets via the state. And we even have a woman on our supreme court who supports that view.

    But, I don’t see that ‘kinda feminism over here. Feminism means equal legal rights. It means the right to be the most amazing woman you can be. It doesn’t mean ‘we hate men’. In America, at least for Generations 1-3 it means ‘hate men’.

    Sad. Very sad. Because feminism destroyed the family in the lower classes. Killed it. And poverty is running at an expanding rate in its wake.

    Equal rights are not ‘privileges’ or socialism. That’s just theft.

    If you demonstrate a gender bias in the work place you’re an idiot. All people in the market are the color of whatever currency you use.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-24 09:49:00 UTC

  • I LOVE THE LOYAL OPPOSITION Carville has a job to do. And a role to play. But yo

    I LOVE THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

    Carville has a job to do. And a role to play. But you get pretty honest stuff out of his mouth. And that works for me. I don’t have a thing against liberal ambitions, just liberal methods. Compare Carville to Krugman, who is exactly the opposite kind of character. If Krugman’s talking he’s lying. It may be that he believes the lie. But he’s lying, and doing it with such art, that it fools almost everyone.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-23 00:58:00 UTC

  • AND WHY LIBERTARIANS SHOULD ENTER POLITICS

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/08/bitcoin_and_the.htmlBITCOIN. AND WHY LIBERTARIANS SHOULD ENTER POLITICS.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-22 14:01:00 UTC

  • I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives w

    I’d feel differently, perhaps, if I had ever met a bureaucrat whose incentives were to help the customer rather than engage in rent seeking. I haven’t. The people who deal with the tradesmen and permits are much better than the rest. But none of them is anywhere near the service provider of the worst discount store, or the best coffee shop.

    If you spend any time with government at all (I was in the justice department) it’s pretty clear that aside from perhaps judges and short term members of the house of representatives, that everyone’s a rent seeker. Everyone. And they want expansion of powers so they have access to expansion of rents.

    I don’t know yet how I feel about condo and neighborhood associations, but from what I’ve been able to collect (and it’s not easy) a town of ten thousand people is probably the maximum scale where bureaucrats act anything like citizens rather than rent seekers.

    Once you’re out of the city-state, everything collapses rapidly into corruption. In america, corruption is systemic and procedural, and takes advantage of the fact that the voting process cannot correct a bureaucracy. The competition to a bureaucracy is the court, not the vote.

    I actually prefer the corruption here in the east. I dont mind increasing the payroll of policemen and bureaucrats if they provide service for it. I do mind increasing the budget of the bureaucracy when they DONT give service for it.

    Russian friends always told me this was true but I couldn’t put my arms around it. They’re right. It’s MORE CORRUPT in America than in the east. It’s just that the corruption in systemic, not interpersonal.

    The rule of law is good government. Bureaucracy is bad government. The problem of government is bureaucracy.

    If a government wants to conspire to achieve my preferred ends, then it is not a government that’s hired labor. If it wants to conspire to use the products of my labor to achieve ends I disapprove of, then that is not government that is slavery.

    I am having a hard time defining good government. Unless government is hired labor under the law, rather than dictators in charge of the law.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-20 03:34:00 UTC

  • know its painful to accept, but politics like all other human behavior is bounde

    http://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/18/krugman-keynes-kalecki-konczal1/comment-page-1/#commentsI know its painful to accept, but politics like all other human behavior is bounded by morality more so than ignorance.

    There is too much search for cognitive error in this thread, and too little understanding of morality.

    Austerity worked in Europe. It is working in America. Because it

    is accomplishing moral ends – according to the moral criteria of citizens.

    Humans will suffer greatly to punish the immoral. And that is what they are doing.

    It may be difficult to grasp but morality in the political context is as important as prices and incentives. If people do not think the world is moral, they will not act morally. And they hate the idea that the world might be immoral. Morality and norms are the original human currency. People are masters of its accountancy

    Conservatives place higher value on norms than consumption. And their view is that empowering the government is rewarding immorality. Conservatives understand morality. They speak in moral language and they win moral arguments. And the control the public discourse with moral arguments.

    I have been arguing since ’08 that the only way to push spending through would be to limit it to moral channels. And the progressive argument is always the same: morality doesn’t matter and its all nonsense.

    But its not. Its as necessary as law. More so.

    If you had told me this as a student I would have laughed. But there it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-19 03:30:00 UTC