Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

http://angrybearblog.com/2013/05/starving-the-beast-aka-drowning-the-people-in-the-bathwater-seattle-bridge-edition.htmlA THREAD ON STARVING THE BEAST (GOVERNMENT)

(Just logging it here.)

NOTE: For those who aren’t aware (a) our infrastructure is in dire repair. (b) a bridge fell into the river north of seattle yesterday. (c) the cause was the driver of a truck carrying an oversize load of very heavy equipment running into the bridge and destroying it’s structural integrity.

My comment here is over the politicization of this incident as a complaint against starving the beast, rather than the fact that it was human error and accident.

———–CURT DOOLITTLE

Starving the beast is cheaper than the alternatives: secession, revolution, and civil war.

Conservatives simply prefer one set of externalities and progressives another.

That the difference in these preferences is eugenic vs dysgenic albeit stated in moralistic language is the only topic worth debating.

And in that debate, i am fairly sure conservatives are correct.

———–STEVE ROTH

@Curt Doolittle: “Starving the beast is cheaper than the alternatives: secession, revolution, and civil war.”

1. Not sure what you mean by “cheaper.” See SRW on accounting profit vs economic profit: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4043.html

2. An interesting tradeoff you’re suggesting You’re saying that if we increase government revenues (currently the lowest in the developed world, and far below the average) by a couple or few points, the result will be “secession, revolution, and civil war”?

Really??

“i am fairly sure conservatives are correct”

Chicken Little was undoubtedly correct as well.

———–CURT DOOLITTLE

@Steve Roth,

Explanation: One of my interests is understanding ideological strategies, ideological arguments, the moral sentiments that drive those arguments, and comparing those sentiments to reproductive strategies. Net is that family structure, or rather, reproductive model, increases in diversity as we become economically independent individuals. Our ‘interests’ diverge as the tribe, family, nuclear family dissolve – the distribution of our morality therefore does not remain constant. This change is what we see in voting patterns. (It’s why single women determine the current election cycle – all other things being equal.) Men don’t change, but women increasingly express their natural reproductive strategies in daily life, and their biases in voting patterns. And they vote more often and in greater percentages than males.

I understand conservative morality, ideology, and reproductive strategy (status signaling, mating, child rearing). And as such I try to explain to the moderate left that wants to understand the other side’s motivations, how the conservatives think, but in rational terms (libertarian terms) rather than the allegorical, historical, and morally loaded terms used by conservatives.

RE: 1) It’s not a matter of calculating profit, but of born losses. 🙂 From the conservative point of view the cost, to them, of progressive ideas is infinite. Starving (bankrupting) the beast is the cheapest way for them to fight it. Just as incrementalism, undermining the constitution, and most recently, postmodern ideology (liberal philosophy) are inexpensive means of accomplishing political goals of the left.

To conduct a war over the definition of the distribution of property rights between the individual (the right) and the commons (the left) and the structure and value of signals, one can use ideology, religion, civil resistance and disobedience, immigration and emigration, secession, revolution, and civil war to achieve one’s ends. And in that sequence, ideology is the least expensive strategy and it’s available within a democracy without the need for escalation. Conservatives understood in the 70′s and 80′s that the assault on the family, on morality, and on meritocracy would win, and that is why they developed the think tank network and adopted libertarian economic ideology. The tea party is the middle class equivalent resistance movement, and interestingly makes use of both conservative, classical liberal and libertarian ideas.

RE: 2) I’m saying that (a) the conservative strategy is to bankrupt and block and therefore delegitimize the state. ‘State’ and ‘government’ being technical terms – the first corporal, the second organizational. (b) That religion is the oldest means of determining the limits of governance, and that the right, especially outside of the coastal immigrant cities, embraces religion and moral argument as a means of opposition to the attack on the family, the status signals, and the ability to use boycotting and ostracization to sustain their expected norms. On the left, the Liberal ideology of postmodernism is expressly contra-logical in an effort to use the strategy of monotheistic religions using false statements about the nature of man instead of false statements about man’s relation to nature. It is an attempt to use religious strategies in an effort to compensate for the failure of socialism in theory and practice. It is just as absurd as the right’s strategy. But both right and left are more influential than we empiricists, because they speak in moral language accessible to the many. Policy is not made by empirical analysis of a supposed common good. Anything but.

The point is, that both left and right strategies WORK because of the distribution of talents of individuals and the distribution of their interests, and those of us who make intellectual arguments, for the benefit of a population with an assumed homogeneity of interests, fail to understand that at the reproductive level, and therefore the moral level, there is no homogeneity of interest between these groups once the nuclear family is sufficiently weakened and the mores and norms associated with that nuclear family also weakened.

Data is data. Voting data at the national level (which is what campaign strategy makes use of) is the only empirical data we have to work with and that data is telling us some very uncomfortable things – there is no ‘we’ in the normative sense, only a ‘we’ in the legal sense.

Cheers

——– COBERLY

@Curt Doolittle

perhaps you should do less, or say less.

i have to guess that by eugenic vs dysgenic, and moralistic, you are trying to say that helping people stay alive weakens the gene pool.

that topic is not worth debating. if for no other reason than your complete failure to understand Darwin, and the history of “eugenic” thinking, including that which inspired the late Adolf Hitler.

if, that is, it’s okay for me to mention Hitler in this context.

———CURT DOOLITTLE

@Coberly

You do realize that your comment translates to a postmodernist raspberry?

Whether you like something or not is not relevant. Whether you want to engage it or not is not relevant. Displaying your disapproval and disengagement is not an argument. It is the very definition of failing to make one.

I take great pride in never fearing or surrendering an argument. On the other hand your reputation as a troll is well earned, and my time is precious.

I’ll agree to ignore you if you’ll do the same.

Cheers. 🙂

———–COBERLY

@Curt

if you don’t want a raspberry you need to be a little more careful how you say things. your reply to steve roth above merits a little more nuanced answer than the one i gave you.

i am afraid it will come to the same thing in the end, intellectual pretension notwithstanding.

i am afraid your definition of troll doesn’t quite meet the situation either. but like you i don’t have time at the moment to “debate.”

———–CURT DOOLITTLE

@Coberly,

Thanks. Although I suspect that you confuse the rigor of analytical language in expressing causal relations with pretension, and absence of rigor in morally loaded language as something other than the lack of articulated causal relation – and therefore a lack of comprehension. 🙂

Analytical philosophy: It’s how the discipline is done.

As to “The same thing”…. that is, I assume, whether there is a transfer of reproductive frequency from the middle to the lower classes, and the requisite impact on normative, political, legal institutions, and consequential economic impact. I’ll leave it to Flynn et al to argue whether the Flynn effect (omnipresent scientific language and measurement) compensates for the drop in mean IQ. So far, it is beginning to look like it doesn’t. But the jury is still out.

But then, I”m not making moral statements. Just descriptive ones. 🙂

Cheers.