Curt Doolittle

Form: Quote Commentary

  • YOU NIAL FERGUSON. ( Or should we call you St George? ) Krugman: a dishonest man

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2014/07/14/is-paul-krugman-leaving-princeton-in-quiet-disgrace/?fb_action_ids=10152560886224106&fb_action_types=news.publishesTHANK YOU NIAL FERGUSON. ( Or should we call you St George? )

    Krugman: a dishonest man who we should never take seriously.

    “Where I come from … we do not fear bullies. We despise them. And we do so because we understand that what motivates their bullying is a deep sense of insecurity. Unfortunately for Krugtron the Invincible, his ultimate nightmare has just become a reality. By applying the methods of the historian – by quoting and contextualizing his own published words – I believe I have now made him what he richly deserves to be: a figure of fun, whose predictions (and proscriptions) no one should ever again take seriously.” – Nial Ferguson.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-14 10:04:00 UTC

  • Sean Gabb , if you took the moral loading out of this and put it into NPOV, it’d

    http://www.seangabb.co.uk/?q=node%2F773Damn Sean Gabb , if you took the moral loading out of this and put it into NPOV, it’d be even better. I’m going to borrow huge chunks of it (citation of course), but it’s just about right. Right voice and everything.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-13 08:29:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/opinion/the-trouble-with-brain-science.html?referrer

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-13 01:13:00 UTC

  • WE CAN CHANGE THAT…. “The primary problem of politics is the lag in the develo

    WE CAN CHANGE THAT….

    “The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social and economic change”– Huntington.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 18:18:00 UTC

  • POLITICAL PREFERENCES ARE GENETIC – YOU DON”T CONVINCE ANYONE. As I’ve been argu

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/opinion/thomas-edsall-how-much-do-our-genes-influence-our-political-beliefs.html?ref=opinion&_r=2&referrerOUR POLITICAL PREFERENCES ARE GENETIC – YOU DON”T CONVINCE ANYONE.

    As I’ve been arguing, since it is impossible to change political preferences, all political debate is wasted. People vote morally. our moral differences reflect our evolutionary strategies. It’s our genes talking to us. And we talk on behalf of our genes. As such all we can do is cooperate on means, not ends. A Democratic government is, unlike the market, a monopoly an a dictatorship. The solution is to allow people to construct exchanges, not to use majority rule. Since that is only a partial solution, the remainder of the problem is only solved by devolving the central government into states or city-states that allow us all to live as we desire, and to have the market reward and punish us for living as we desire.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 16:54:00 UTC

  • (TRIBE) NOT IDEOLOGY (GOVERNMENT) IS MOVING THE WORLD. Or let me put it this way

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-identity-not-ideology-is-moving-the-world/2014/07/03/631ff338-02d7-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.htmlIDENTITY (TRIBE) NOT IDEOLOGY (GOVERNMENT) IS MOVING THE WORLD.

    Or let me put it this way first:

    Tribalism is more important than ideology, since we’ve all adopted some form of consumer capitalism.

    Or let me put it this way second:

    The nonsense that america is an ‘idea’ (an ideology) is dead, and likewise, america’s tribes are asserting themselves in reaction to the death of ideology.

    A friend reminded me tonight that The Big Sort continues, and that americans are moving into culturally and tribally oriented areas. Meanwhile, we are also reproducing into castes on a scale that has never been possible before.

    The old political order of the nation state cum-heterogeneous empire, cannot survive this change. so we will either see more empire (tyranny) or more tribalism (city states). I prefer the latter, obviously.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 15:27:00 UTC

  • PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS NOT PUBLIC PARASITES “The character of the presidency is su

    PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS NOT PUBLIC PARASITES

    “The character of the presidency is such,” the British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote in 1967, “that the majority of the people can be persuaded to look to it for a kind of leadership which no politician, in my opinion, should be allowed, let alone invited, to give. ‘If people want a sense of purpose,’ [former British Prime Minister] Harold Macmillan once said to me, ‘they should get it from their archbishops.’”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 14:09:00 UTC

  • WANT TO FIND FAULT WITH CANTWELL’S ARROGANCE BUT I CAN’T. HE’S RIGHT. We’re righ

    http://www.christophercantwell.com/2014/04/08/top-10-reasons-libertarians-arent-nice/I WANT TO FIND FAULT WITH CANTWELL’S ARROGANCE BUT I CAN’T. HE’S RIGHT.

    We’re right and they’re wrong. That’s just how it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 12:40:00 UTC

  • [Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obt

    —[Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the [mystics] by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.— Unknown via “Tricky Prickears”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 03:45:00 UTC

  • APART – FOR GOOD REASONS. I have spent my life studying this problem and arrived

    http://www.salon.com/2014/07/04/we_the_people_are_violent_and_filled_with_rage_a_nation_spinning_apart_on_its_independence_day/COMING APART – FOR GOOD REASONS.

    I have spent my life studying this problem and arrived at a much more simplistic conclusion: that it is diversity and scale that are the cause of our conflict, and only dissolution of the empire, and devolution of the central government’s power to the states, that reflect regional values will cure the ill. The european project is failing precisely because of different values exemplified by the protestant north, catholic south, and orthodox east. Not that these religions are the cause, but the values of the different polities, their family structures, their degree of trustworthiness, and their different levels of taste for corruption. The natural course of a divided people on a vast land is to choose between chinese and russian totalitarianism, or european small-statism. And given the empirical evidence, the european model produces the highest trust, most redistributive, polities on earth. Diversity of states is apparently good, and diversity within a state is apparently bad. The reason being that diversity decreases trust. This does not apply only to ethnic diversity, but to political diversity.

    The cure is dissolution of the empire, and devolution of the central government, not the construction of a new monopoly religion to rival christianity or islam – which is the secular religion that the author is promoting consciously or not.

    No one implements totalitarianism out of ill intention, but out of desire for the suppression of conflict. However, the opposite cure for suppression of conflict is secession and devolution of central power.

    But then, as far as I know, only progressives want totalitarianism. Both in American and everywhere else.

    Interestingly, out of all factions, its the Tea Party that recommends the devolutionary solution. Strange as it may seem, they are the ones who are correct.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 01:18:00 UTC