Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • RUSSIA: THE WHITE PEOPLE WHO FAILED (use this meme) Why is it, that throughout t

    RUSSIA: THE WHITE PEOPLE WHO FAILED

    (use this meme)

    Why is it, that throughout their history, at every opportunity, Russians consistently make the wrong decision? What is it that Russians incorrectly intuit about the world? Why do they have the lowest trust most corrupt nation of all the white peoples? Why is it that Russians are the one white people who have failed.

    If any people was ever incapable of self government, it’s Russians. If any people was less capable of governing others. It’s the Russians. What is it about the Russian character that causes them to consistently fail? What metaphysical assumption about the nature of man and his relationship to the world is so flawed that unless tightly bound to europe they contribute nothing to legacy of white people? Why is it that western peoples have dragged the entire world out of ignorance mysticism sickness and poverty, while russians try consistently to reverse the trend by dragging those white people near them into their failed civilization?

    Why is it that Russians have nothing to offer the world other than corruption, violence, fear and poverty?

    Why are Russians the only white people who have failed?

    Curt Doolittle

    Kiev

    ===

    FROM ANDRAS TOTH (edited)

    Russian peculiarity, to a certain extent is a consequence of geography – as with any other nation and state in premodern and to a certain extent, lesser degree in modern times.

    1) Few big rivers channeling into closed sees – obstructs trade and industrial development, favours self-sustaining closed economies.

    2) Far away from big cultural centres, which lessened the impact of other cultures, and learning by transactions, copying, emulating and transfer of ideas, new practices.

    3) Russia only entered into European history in the XVIIIth century, when expanded borders westward (absorbing Ukraine and Eastern Poland and the Baltics) and with the advent of railways, which made possible the larger scale involvement in trade and world markets.

    4) Unfortunately for Russia, when technically was able to join to the world economy, key countries moved to economic nationalism, beginning with Germany which imposed custom tariff on agriculture products to save East Prussian Junkers from Russian wheat and agricultural products.

    5) Nothing else left to Russia than turn to imperialism and try to expand to get to the seashore through the Balkans to circumvent German trade barrier.

    6) Hence the I.WW, where Russian expansion was blocked by Austria Hungary backed by Germany.

    7). Bolshevik revolution due to the extreme hardship and delegitimization of Czarist regime as a direct consequence of I. WW.

    8) Communist destruction.

    ===

    To which I’ll add:

    (1) the desert and steppe people are a problem and always have been, and have been exceedingly so for the Rus who sit between us, and those people. The chinese character is likewise informed by that same concern, although the chinese do have a nearly impassable desert between them and the ‘undesirable’ people. So just as we in the west have tried to keep the ‘near east’ at bay since the bronze age, the people in both Russia and China have tried to keep the ‘steppe’ people at bay – and failed most of the time. The mongols the most obvious case.

    (2) When Russians sought to modernize, the had the choice of selecting european or byzantine christianity. They chose poorly. Their main trading partner was still byzantium / Islam. The origin of much of the Rus culture is slave trade with Byzantium / Islam.

    (3) As a large poor backward country, they kept their expropriation serfdom until a couple of hundred years ago, the better of the Czars couldn’t modernize fast enough, the soviets (the underclasses) restored that totalitarianism. It’s a very nihilistic low trust culture that seeks easy solutions to problems and has no problem with the win-lose ethic. The win-win ethic is something they actually assume is some kind of deception.

    (4) Without the catholic church’s ban on intermarriage, the west would not have broken familial and tribal bonds, and we would not have outbred, and created the high trust society. Although one reason we broke those bonds easily was that north sea peoples had already been practicing outbreeding and manorialism, which is the origin of the protestant ethic. Not much protestant about it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-01 04:15:00 UTC

  • CLOSER ON ELIMINATING PLATONISM FROM TRUTH Well thanks to friends here I have go

    CLOSER ON ELIMINATING PLATONISM FROM TRUTH

    Well thanks to friends here I have gotten a bit closer. Close enough that I can say that sure, performative truth is ‘real’ but as used, the concept of hypothetical/ theoretical/ ‘ultimate’ truth is not false or immoral, any more than any other analytically deductive proposition say, of equality, in math, logic, or science is false. Like the term ‘numbers’ in math, is obscurant but useful, and not false in ACTION, even if it is linguistically false. While the terms are false. The deductive operations used are not. And while I am attempting to accomplish in action (operations), what linguistic philosophers have done with language, to improve upon their logic, by avoiding the semantic and correspondent issues that arise in current formal logic, I only need to determine whether the underlying operations are true, not whether the words used to describe those underlying operations are precise.

    I was very focused on ‘blaming’ a branch of philosophy or logic for the propagation of platonism. Because all these imaginary and imprecise terms inherited from religion and platonism have been used to create obscurant, anti-scientific means of deceptive language in economics, politics, ethics and law. But it is not so much their fault, as it is the lack of a formal logical test of such statements as a requirement for ethical, legal, political and economic speech.

    I won’t go into all the detail now. It’s more important that I recognize that I do not need to look for blame (because I was angry) I just need to look for the solution, and that solution is that operationalism and instrumentalism are ‘truth and extant’ and that everything else is allegory. But that allegory can lead to true propositions and false propositions. Just as it is possible in formal logic to state that which cannot be operationally performed. Just as it is possible to state in allegorical language that which cannot and does not exist.

    The problem is purely one of ethics and politics: we did not understand the origins of morality or the necessity of morality, and the logical impossibility of any alternative.

    I only need address ethics because ethics is bound to reality in ways that imagination, the imaginary, and the logical and the deductive are not.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-30 06:31:00 UTC

  • WE CAN NOW OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY JUDGE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS AND BAD PHILOS

    WE CAN NOW OBJECTIVELY AND SCIENTIFICALLY JUDGE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS AND BAD PHILOSOPHERS

    (suggestions wanted)

    If we acknowledge that democracy is a failure, and all philosophers who attempted to justify democracy failures, and all philosophers who attempted to expand democracy into socialism and postmodernism failures, we are left with instrumentalists (empiricists) and reactionaries of various fields.

    Philosophy as a discipline, must face the uncomfortable fact, that (a) the metaphysical program failed and was solved by cognitive science, and (b) the democratic program failed and was solved by economists (c) therefore the political program failed, and was solved by heterodox philosophers (d) the ethical problem failed and was solved by economists and heterodox philosophers. The reason for this is obvious: the incentives in Academia to attempt to replace the church’s mysticism with some sort of collectivist democratic rationalism, had it’s predictable influence.

    Philosophers can produce good neutral and bad influences. Unfortunately, the greater body of philosophers that have been influential since the american revolution, have been more destructive than beneficial. We can never forgive Marx and Freud, any more than we can forgive Kant and Rousseau.

    “Thou Shalt Not Harm” not only applies to doctors, but to philosophers, and to all of us.

    I give great weight to computer science because unlike the logic of language and unlike abstract and mathematical logic, computer science does not drop the property of operationalism in real time from its reasoning. As such it has higher correspondence with actionable reality than mathematics, and farm more so than formal logic. And if we seek to make informal logic of any value we must learn from computer science and return the property of operationalism to philosophical discourse. Because without it, it certainly appears to consist almost entirely of nonsense built upon linguistic deception.

    ==

    99. Aristotle

    99. Niccolo Machiavelli

    99. Adam Smith

    99. Max Weber

    99. Emile Durkheim

    99. David Hume

    99. John Locke

    99. G.W.F. Hegel

    99. Friedrich Nietzsche

    (lesser candidates)

    99. Robert Michels

    99. Steven Pinker

    99. Jonathan Haidt

    ==

    99. Rene Descartes

    99. Alan Turing

    99. Karl Popper

    99. Gottlob Frege

    99. W.V.O. Quine

    99. Saul Kripke

    THE BAD PHILOSOPHERS

    99. Immanuel Kant

    99. Ludwig Wittgenstein

    99. Karl Marx

    99. Soren Kierkegaard

    99. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    20. John Rawls

    99. Martin Heidegger

    99. Jacques Derrida

    99. Michelle Foucault

    99. Jean-François Lyotard

    99. Jean Baudrillard

    99. Murray Rothbard

    THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S BAD PHILOSOPHERS

    Max Horkheimer

    Theodor W. Adorno

    Herbert Marcuse

    Friedrich Pollock

    Erich Fromm

    Otto Kirchheimer

    Leo Löwenthal

    Franz Leopold Neumann

    Siegfried Kracauer

    Alfred Sohn-Rethel

    Walter Benjamin

    Jürgen Habermas

    Claus Offe

    Axel Honneth

    Oskar Negt

    Alfred Schmidt

    Albrecht Wellmer

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-30 05:06:00 UTC

  • “BENEFICIALLY NOVEL, GOOD, BAD(WRONG), AND DANGEROUS” (Discussion on Bleeding He

    “BENEFICIALLY NOVEL, GOOD, BAD(WRONG), AND DANGEROUS”

    (Discussion on Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Measure of an Economist or a Philosopher)

    All,

    A good economists provides us with insights into the state of affairs we live in. A novel economists provides us with new general rules (a theory). A good philosopher explains or re-explains the changes in the world to us in current language. A novel philosopher provides us with a new general rule (a theory).

    It is not better to be good or novel. It is most important that one not be dangerous.

    Freud, Marx and Cantor reintroduced mysticism in the form of obscurantism. Russell compounded that new mysticism. The postmoderns have been terribly damaging to institutions, morality and language. Rothbard did more damage than good. Most of his history is quite good. His ethics were a catastrophe and set us back by decades. A disaster I have been struggling to correct.

    So one can be novel, one can be good, one can be wrong and one can be destructive. I don’t care much about the first three. The fourth quadrant is what I worry about most. Because bad and dangerous philosophy turns out to spread far faster than good and beneficially novel philosophy. Just like bad news spreads faster than good.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute.

    Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-29 10:05:00 UTC

  • SORRY. BUT I LIKE CHURCH. Sorry. But I like church. I like monumental architectu

    SORRY. BUT I LIKE CHURCH.

    Sorry. But I like church. I like monumental architecture. I like Catholic pageantry. I like Protestant ceremony. I wish we still ‘stood and voiced our minds’. I prefer the heroic pagan ethos to that of christian suffering. I prefer the historical narrative of Athens to that of Babylonian mysticism. But mostly I like the whole listening and singing and chanting together thing – because for a few minutes each week I get to feel part of an enormous extended family – a big, safe, pack. 🙂

    It has never bothered me that some people do not distinguish between mystical allegory and historical fact, while others fail to grasp the value of mystical allegory as more accessible, less subject to human error, and less fragile than reason.

    The reason that religion can be a problem is because we can, especially under democracy, use government to apply violence based upon on mythological principles, rather than use religion as a means of including others in our manners, ethics, morals, myths and rituals so that we extend kinship trust to those who are not our kin, and to ostracize those who will not adopt those manners, ethics, morals, myths and rituals. Not because myths and rituals are true, but because the cost of observing those myths and rituals is evidence of one’s commitment to his moral kin.

    Secular ratio-scientific education provides us with myths, but few and infrequent rituals, and ignores the necessity to pay costs to demonstrate and adhere to kinship trust that facilitates the extension of kinship trust.

    Consumerism is a nice temporary alternative to kin, but it’s a devil’s bargain. We are lost and lonely at the end of that selfish satisfaction.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-28 10:20:00 UTC

  • The Problem Of Correcting Philosophical And Scientific 'truth'.

    [I]t’s interesting that philosophical truth is problematic simply because it was scientists and philosophers of science which succeeded MOST in cleansing philosophy of magic, mysticism and platonism. (I am trying to additionally cleanse philosophy of deceptive obscurantism so that we can repair the ethics of cooperation and politics.) But they left logical and mathematical platonism in the philosophy of science. So we have this well respected and highly successful methodology that has drastically improved our understanding of, and ability to interact with physical reality. But in order to correct ethics, I have to FURTHER cleanse scientific philosophy of platonism, and ethics of obscurantism. And I think I have it figured out. The confusion resulted from philosophy’s history as an attempt to create an authoritarian common good via consensual belief, rather than simply improve the means of cooperation by formal institutions. On need not believe in anything. One need only construct formal institutions that eliminate all free riding – or at least, the maximum elimination of free riding that the current family structure and structure of production require. Unfortunately the contract for meaning of terms sometimes needs correction. One can correct meaning out of preference, out of influence on ends, for scientific accuracy, or for ethical reasons. And unfortunately , the meaning of ‘truth’ must be corrected from it’s platonic common usage to its performative and therefore accurate usage. And all other various analogies to truth as made use of in the different methodological disciplines ,demonstrated to be subtractive properties. To some degree, mathematics has already partly acknowledged this problem by calling it’s work ‘proofs’ not ‘truths’. We must unfortunately, get science to do the same as mathematics has done. For ethical reasons. Because it is a moral hazard for science to persist in the platonic use of the term truth instead of performative truth and the completeness of correspondence with reality.

  • The Problem Of Correcting Philosophical And Scientific 'truth'.

    [I]t’s interesting that philosophical truth is problematic simply because it was scientists and philosophers of science which succeeded MOST in cleansing philosophy of magic, mysticism and platonism. (I am trying to additionally cleanse philosophy of deceptive obscurantism so that we can repair the ethics of cooperation and politics.) But they left logical and mathematical platonism in the philosophy of science. So we have this well respected and highly successful methodology that has drastically improved our understanding of, and ability to interact with physical reality. But in order to correct ethics, I have to FURTHER cleanse scientific philosophy of platonism, and ethics of obscurantism. And I think I have it figured out. The confusion resulted from philosophy’s history as an attempt to create an authoritarian common good via consensual belief, rather than simply improve the means of cooperation by formal institutions. On need not believe in anything. One need only construct formal institutions that eliminate all free riding – or at least, the maximum elimination of free riding that the current family structure and structure of production require. Unfortunately the contract for meaning of terms sometimes needs correction. One can correct meaning out of preference, out of influence on ends, for scientific accuracy, or for ethical reasons. And unfortunately , the meaning of ‘truth’ must be corrected from it’s platonic common usage to its performative and therefore accurate usage. And all other various analogies to truth as made use of in the different methodological disciplines ,demonstrated to be subtractive properties. To some degree, mathematics has already partly acknowledged this problem by calling it’s work ‘proofs’ not ‘truths’. We must unfortunately, get science to do the same as mathematics has done. For ethical reasons. Because it is a moral hazard for science to persist in the platonic use of the term truth instead of performative truth and the completeness of correspondence with reality.

  • The Problem Of Correcting Philosophical And Scientific ‘truth’.

    [I]t’s interesting that philosophical truth is problematic simply because it was scientists and philosophers of science which succeeded MOST in cleansing philosophy of magic, mysticism and platonism. (I am trying to additionally cleanse philosophy of deceptive obscurantism so that we can repair the ethics of cooperation and politics.) But they left logical and mathematical platonism in the philosophy of science. So we have this well respected and highly successful methodology that has drastically improved our understanding of, and ability to interact with physical reality. But in order to correct ethics, I have to FURTHER cleanse scientific philosophy of platonism, and ethics of obscurantism. And I think I have it figured out. The confusion resulted from philosophy’s history as an attempt to create an authoritarian common good via consensual belief, rather than simply improve the means of cooperation by formal institutions. On need not believe in anything. One need only construct formal institutions that eliminate all free riding – or at least, the maximum elimination of free riding that the current family structure and structure of production require. Unfortunately the contract for meaning of terms sometimes needs correction. One can correct meaning out of preference, out of influence on ends, for scientific accuracy, or for ethical reasons. And unfortunately , the meaning of ‘truth’ must be corrected from it’s platonic common usage to its performative and therefore accurate usage. And all other various analogies to truth as made use of in the different methodological disciplines ,demonstrated to be subtractive properties. To some degree, mathematics has already partly acknowledged this problem by calling it’s work ‘proofs’ not ‘truths’. We must unfortunately, get science to do the same as mathematics has done. For ethical reasons. Because it is a moral hazard for science to persist in the platonic use of the term truth instead of performative truth and the completeness of correspondence with reality.

  • The Problem Of Correcting Philosophical And Scientific ‘truth’.

    [I]t’s interesting that philosophical truth is problematic simply because it was scientists and philosophers of science which succeeded MOST in cleansing philosophy of magic, mysticism and platonism. (I am trying to additionally cleanse philosophy of deceptive obscurantism so that we can repair the ethics of cooperation and politics.) But they left logical and mathematical platonism in the philosophy of science. So we have this well respected and highly successful methodology that has drastically improved our understanding of, and ability to interact with physical reality. But in order to correct ethics, I have to FURTHER cleanse scientific philosophy of platonism, and ethics of obscurantism. And I think I have it figured out. The confusion resulted from philosophy’s history as an attempt to create an authoritarian common good via consensual belief, rather than simply improve the means of cooperation by formal institutions. On need not believe in anything. One need only construct formal institutions that eliminate all free riding – or at least, the maximum elimination of free riding that the current family structure and structure of production require. Unfortunately the contract for meaning of terms sometimes needs correction. One can correct meaning out of preference, out of influence on ends, for scientific accuracy, or for ethical reasons. And unfortunately , the meaning of ‘truth’ must be corrected from it’s platonic common usage to its performative and therefore accurate usage. And all other various analogies to truth as made use of in the different methodological disciplines ,demonstrated to be subtractive properties. To some degree, mathematics has already partly acknowledged this problem by calling it’s work ‘proofs’ not ‘truths’. We must unfortunately, get science to do the same as mathematics has done. For ethical reasons. Because it is a moral hazard for science to persist in the platonic use of the term truth instead of performative truth and the completeness of correspondence with reality.

  • Truth Vs Promise : Some Examples

    —“It is worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has the same content as the sentence “It is true that I smell the scent of violets.” So it seems, then, that nothing is added to the thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth. “—(Frege?) I disagree. “I smell the scent of violets” has the same content as “I attest that I smell the scent of violets”or “I promise to you that I smell the scent of violets.” Whether it is true or not has nothing to do with your utterance. –“The snow is white, if and only if the snow is white”– The snow can’t ‘be’ anything. It cannot act, nor perceive the passage of time, which gives rise to the ability to determine changes in state. Instead the operationally correct statement is “I observe that the snow appears white in color. I promise that if you observe the snow, that you will also agree that it appears white in color. If both of us observe that it appears white in color, then we can agree that all observers of the snow will also observe that appears white in color.” [N]ow, this is extremely burdensome language. That’s why we don’t use it. But it is a mistake to take an aggregate “the snow is white in color” and attribute the same logical meaning to it as “I observe that the snow appears to be white in color, and I promise that if you observe the snow that you will also agree that it appears white in color.” All aggregates launder (lose) information. That’s the problem with aggregates. It’s not only a problem when we create a category, or when we add numbers together to create a sum, or call the square root of two a ‘number’ when it is a function, but it’s also a problem when we summarize informationally dense statements for the sake of brevity. Operational language is burdensome. But it prevents the evolution of what appear to be complex problems, from that which is merely a byproduct of aggregation (laundering). MORE ON PROMISES AND TRUTH –“Other philosophers believe it’s a mistake to say the researchers’ goal is to achieve truth. … When they aren’t overtly identifying truth with usefulness, the instrumentalists Peirce, James and Schlick take this anti-realist route, as does Kuhn. They would say atomic theory isn’t true or false but rather is useful for predicting outcomes of experiments and for explaining current data. Giere recommends saying science aims for the best available “representation”, in the same sense that maps are representations of the landscape. Maps aren’t true; rather, they fit to a better or worse degree. Similarly, scientific theories are designed to fit the world. Scientists should not aim to create true theories; they should aim to construct theories whose models are representations of the world.”– [T]his is a wordy paragraph that simply states that better theories correspond to and explain reality, than less good theories. But theories can never be identical to reality, since they are always representations (I would call them ‘aggregates that exclude information’). I can promise you that I followed the scientific method, and that my theory is internally consistent, externally correspondent and falsifiable (and perhaps a few other things). If you agree that my theory is useful, internally consistent, externally correspondent, and falsifiable, (and perhaps a few other things) then you can say that I spoke the truth. You may, for sake of manners and brevity say that the theory is then true. But that is merely an abbreviation for the fact that the theory is true, and useful. As far as I know this is the limit of our ability without entering the fantasy world of platonism.