—“What a stark contrast to the realities of our present, co-opted, american system, wherein “redress of grievance,” by the body of people is rejected as “not having standing,” and where the judiciary remains unconvinced (biased) that harm has been imposed upon an individual – when in actuality, injury by (previous) government action was imposed upon all.”— William L. Benge
(edited for clarity)
Source date (UTC): 2014-11-02 18:21:00 UTC
—“Robert Reich argues that if you DONT VOTE, then you have no right to complain. Conversely, others claim that somebody who HAS VOTED has no right to complain. Which illustrates how voting does not change in any way one’s right to complain.”— Pierre Lemieux
(ed for clarity)
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-30 18:09:00 UTC
–“Women are not damsels in distress who need men to save them. They are oppressed victims who need men to save them.”–Joshua Strodtbeck
(That one is just too damn good….. )
–“Make stronger women not weaker men.”– Curt Doolittle
(My general position on every feminist fallacy.)
–“Feminists: not enough agency to pay for their own rent seeking.”– Eli Harman
(OMG. Econo-sarcasm.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-30 10:42:00 UTC
CHRIS REARDON ON THE CENTRAL ARGUMENT
—“A progressives says says with confidence: ‘…liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.’ But, can you blame a fish for not knowing it’s in water?” — Chris Reardon
“A fish knows not that it is in water” – moral blindness.
“The frog stays in the pot until it boils” – incrementalism and experiential blindness.
Progressives can have no say in the future of man, since they are morally incapable intellectually incapable of making inter-temporal judgements.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-30 08:59:00 UTC
(from elsewhere) (worth repeating)
The problem is one of scale. Families operate on non monetary internal signals, but families still operate as an economy. That economy simply makes use of kin selection. But outside of the family it is nearly impossible to construct kin selection without an island or a northern european peninsula.
****You cannot break the Dunbar number without an information and incentive system to compensate for exceeding human cognitive ability****
Cults rely on expensive rituals and verbal contrivance in order to attempt to construct some alternative kinship alliance. This is why only very eccentric cults with high costs of entry and ritual persist beyond the original founders.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-29 11:06:00 UTC
—“…From a strictly evolutionary perspective, any human is capable of more creative production than another animal, and capable of contributing to the orderly distribution of resources in free exchange. But because of at least a century of success-shaming, poverty-praising, and subsidizing, coupled with accelerating automation, there are a mass of people who are zero-sum in the economy, who need not be. How we appeal to them without giving them something undeserved is the big question.”– Steve Pender
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-28 02:18:00 UTC
–“Even if the whole world is telling you to move , plant yourself beside the river of truth and say, “No. You move.”– Matthew Ross Funk
Create Wealth. Speak the Truth. Punish the wicked. Never surrender. Show no mercy, give no quarter. Defeat your enemy completely. And if needed, kill them all and let god sort it out.
Excellence: The True, The Good, The Beautiful.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-28 02:15:00 UTC
FROM ELI HARMAN
—“People demonstrate that they are willing, sometimes, to go so far as to kill to prevent the disclosure of certain information.
***In so doing, they demonstrate that information to be their property, that which they consider to be their own and that they will fight to defend.***
The matter then becomes merely a contest as to who shall prevail, those who wish to prohibit blackmail or those who wish to perpetrate it.
But there is no reason to suppose the latter will win. Blackmail is not a productive behavior but a parasitic one, engaged in by parasitic people. And what someone stands to lose from blackmail generally increases in proportion as they produce.
I’ll take their side both for principled as well as pragmatic reasons.
“—
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-27 09:34:00 UTC
–“The allegiance of worthless people is fleeting, uncertain, and not worth having. ….. But their defeat is.”–
Eli Harman
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-27 06:05:00 UTC
TODD ON FAMILIES AND PARTICULARLY LIBERTY:
—“communitarian countries … against foreign occupiers chose to be communist. The communist vote in India (including recurring communist governments of certain states) appears to largely correlate with the communitarian family.
As with liberal-egalitarian countries, these countries embraced a pseudo-universalist ideology that explicitly rejected racism of the Nazi type.
Whereas all the other family types tend to favor one or other aspect of modernity, Todd finds that the communitarian family appears to correlate with stability (or “backwardness”), remaining peasant nations even as other modernize around them, until the tensions become such that they are (often brutally) jolted out of their conservatism. The overwhelming majority of humanity (i.e. Eurasia) is communitarian. ***Todd speculates that as this family type develops it then slows down historical development***, leaving only peripheral non-communitarian areas to be dynamic (i.e. Western Europe, Japan).
***Liberty alone characterizes absolute nuclear countries.*** The child leaves the family household as soon as he reaches adulthood and parents are free to dispose of their property as they wish. He sees a connection with the Lockean vision of liberal, non-egalitarian and contractual nature of government (which also characterizes America, with the added propensity for westward emigration and “fleeing” problems).
Todd argues that the perception of autonomous and different individuals within the family translates into ***Anglo-liberal politics, a preference for isolationism and a high tolerance for ethnic “ghettos” (that is, as “normal,” not necessarily considered a problem (as the French do)). Anglo-segregation and Dutch Apartheid are the norm whenever these peoples come into contact with non-whites.*** (Ed: My position as well – curt.)
Todd argues: “The English conception of the nation is particularly tolerable because it is tolerant. Unlike the French and German visions, which deny the right of peoples to an autonomous cultural existence.”
Otherwise the main characteristics of pure liberal nations appears to be a certain atomization of individuals, a certain political stability and respect for liberal oligarchic regimes (most monarchies in Europe are in pure liberal nations and have been rarely if ever toppled). There is little hard ideology. British Labourism is for Todd a “zero-socialism,” an organized labor movement which in practice very early accepted an unequal and individualist society as tolerable. “—
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-26 15:52:00 UTC