Curt Doolittle

Form: Quote Commentary

  • Spinoza: Philosophers Should Have A Trade

    [I]’m not a big fan of Spinoza’s ideas, but am very much a fan both his writing style and his work ethic. Spinoza earned his living as a lens-grinder. He wrote his extremely parsimonious book, taking most of his life, from a musty apartment. It’s what, 200 pages long? A brutally concise work of numbered and ordered sentences. The first statement that struck me was ‘endeavor to speak in a manner comprehensible to the common people’. I’ve always viewed this as my curse. Which is why I work so hard at it. Because I’m aware of my frame of reference, and my near absence of conceptual empathy. The other influential thing that he said, can be roughly translated as “Every man who does not have a trade must eventually become a rogue”. A sentiment I agree with. And have tried to imitate. I’ve always tried to earn enough money that I could research and write either part time or full time. I don’t like the idea of philosophers trying to earn money from their work. I don’t trust it at all. I can barely respect teaching as a way to pay for writing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb reflects this same sentiment when he says: “…as a practitioner, my thinking is rooted in the belief that you cannot go from books to problems, but the reverse, from problems to books.” And I practice philosophy the same way. I’m trying to find a solution to the problem of ethics. In particular, the problem of deception in ethics, politics, and economics. Learn a trade so that you experience the real world. Identify a problem that exists in the real world. Use the accumulated wisdom of centuries to solve a problem in the real world. Otherwise you invent a mystical hammer and go on and endless search for the appropriate nails – which you seem to find all over the place. Curt Doolittle

    COMMENTS by Roman Skaskiw 3 QUOTES ABOUT ACADEMIA ” Learn a trade so that you experience the real world. Identify a problem that exists in the real world. . . . Otherwise you invent a mystical hammer and go on and endless search for the appropriate nails – which you seem to find all over the place.” ~ Curt Doolittle “Every man who does not have a trade must eventually become a rogue” ~ Baruch Spinoza “…as a practitioner, my thinking is rooted in the belief that you cannot go from books to problems, but the reverse, from problems to books.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  • Worth Repeating: The Choice Of Nobility

    WORTH REPEATING : THE CHOICE OF Nobility “Nobility is a choice we make, and a burden we carry, in exchange for the freedom to flourish to the best of our abilities. Yet we cannot ask those whose flourishing depends on collective efforts to adopt individual risk and reward.” Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Worth Repeating: The Choice Of Nobility

    WORTH REPEATING : THE CHOICE OF Nobility “Nobility is a choice we make, and a burden we carry, in exchange for the freedom to flourish to the best of our abilities. Yet we cannot ask those whose flourishing depends on collective efforts to adopt individual risk and reward.” Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Violence Represents A Conclusive Refutation

    —“Violence represents both a conclusive refutation of argumentation ethics and — quite often — a cheaper means of accomplishing the same ends.”— Eli Harman (Eli seems to frequently manage to reduce what takes me 750 words into twenty.) Curt

    COMMENTS Carolynn Smith, David Mondrus and 2 others like this. Tammey Grable-Newton “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” -Twain Shorter is harder. April 23 at 1:47pm Don Stacy How is violence “a conclusive refutation of argumentation ethics”? April 23 at 4:48pm Curt Doolittle I won’t speak for Eli Harman. But this might help. http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-first-question-of…/The First Question Of Politics: Ternary Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics Vs Binary Ghetto Ethics… You have made the error of Argumentation which is that because one must surrender violence to conduct a cooperative argument, that you assume the choice for participants is between cooperation and non cooperation, rather than to assume that the choice is between cooperation, non cooperation, and vio… April 23 at 4:51pm Eli Harman Arguments and ideas are not reality. They are useful to the extent that they help us navigate and make sense of reality. Objectively, AE does not do this, as evidenced by the fact that the use of violence — even aggressive violence — can be adaptive; as evidenced by its ubiquity. Kill the adherents of AE and the argument is refuted. Reality doesn’t care about your arguments. But your arguments should probably take note of reality. April 23 at 5:08pm

  • Violence Represents A Conclusive Refutation

    —“Violence represents both a conclusive refutation of argumentation ethics and — quite often — a cheaper means of accomplishing the same ends.”— Eli Harman (Eli seems to frequently manage to reduce what takes me 750 words into twenty.) Curt

    COMMENTS Carolynn Smith, David Mondrus and 2 others like this. Tammey Grable-Newton “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” -Twain Shorter is harder. April 23 at 1:47pm Don Stacy How is violence “a conclusive refutation of argumentation ethics”? April 23 at 4:48pm Curt Doolittle I won’t speak for Eli Harman. But this might help. http://www.propertarianism.com/…/the-first-question-of…/The First Question Of Politics: Ternary Aristocratic Egalitarian Ethics Vs Binary Ghetto Ethics… You have made the error of Argumentation which is that because one must surrender violence to conduct a cooperative argument, that you assume the choice for participants is between cooperation and non cooperation, rather than to assume that the choice is between cooperation, non cooperation, and vio… April 23 at 4:51pm Eli Harman Arguments and ideas are not reality. They are useful to the extent that they help us navigate and make sense of reality. Objectively, AE does not do this, as evidenced by the fact that the use of violence — even aggressive violence — can be adaptive; as evidenced by its ubiquity. Kill the adherents of AE and the argument is refuted. Reality doesn’t care about your arguments. But your arguments should probably take note of reality. April 23 at 5:08pm

  • Reforming Libertarianism Is Pretty Simple Really

    —“I think it’s pretty simple: the NAP has proven to be demonstrably insufficient to use as the basis of the common law, because it preserves and licenses immoral and unethical behavior, which impose high transaction costs on in-group members. As such, no such polity is possible, and that is evidenced by the fact that no such polity has ever existed. … Rothbard’s ethics license parasitism, and the high trust society that created liberty requires contribution to production. It’s not complicated. Rothbard was wrong. Its impossible to form a polity on rothbardian ethics. Period.”– [I]n-group ethics necessary for the formation of a voluntary polity require the standard of moral action be based upon a requirement for contribution, which mirrors the human moral instincts for cooperation. if you want an involuntary polity then you can choose any property rights (or lack of) that you want. If you want a high trust polity that organizes voluntarily, and in which production is voluntarily organized, then you must find an institutional means of resolving ethical and moral conflicts as well as criminal conflicts. The only institution that we have yet developed that is capable of providing dispute resolution without the presence of a central authority is independent courts under the common law, with articulated property rights. If property is well defined such that it mirrors ethical and moral prohibitions on free riding in all its forms, all that remains is the voluntary, fully informed, warrantied, productive voluntary exchange free of negative externalities. You may choose a less moral and ethical society. And I am not sure at what point all humans will demand the state, or a sufficient number to form a voluntary polity will prefer anarchy, but I do know that regardless of that point of inflection, this is the means by which to achieve it that we know of. Cheers.

  • Repositioning Hoppe

    “The failures of Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Argumentation to withstand rational and scientific criticism do not diminish Hoppe’s solutions to the problems of democracy, monopoly bureaucracy, and the private production of public goods.” Cheers.

    COMMENTS Michael Pattinson likes this. Ayelam Valentine Agaliba Quite true. The problem of course is that Hoppe purports to derive his solutions from his meta-ethics and philosophy. An argument may have true conclusions and yet invalid premises. Ayelam Valentine Agaliba If we treat argumentation and praxeology as metaphysical assumptions that are thereby unjustified and unjustifiable, we can now just turn pur attention to the a detailed analysis of conclusions without worrying about meta-theory

  • Repositioning Hoppe

    “The failures of Praxeology, Rothbardian Ethics, and Argumentation to withstand rational and scientific criticism do not diminish Hoppe’s solutions to the problems of democracy, monopoly bureaucracy, and the private production of public goods.” Cheers.

    COMMENTS Michael Pattinson likes this. Ayelam Valentine Agaliba Quite true. The problem of course is that Hoppe purports to derive his solutions from his meta-ethics and philosophy. An argument may have true conclusions and yet invalid premises. Ayelam Valentine Agaliba If we treat argumentation and praxeology as metaphysical assumptions that are thereby unjustified and unjustifiable, we can now just turn pur attention to the a detailed analysis of conclusions without worrying about meta-theory

  • Transnational Insurgencies Have Something In Common : They Win

    Pocket Advice —“Although transnational insurgencies comprise highly diverse groups across different conflicts and eras, they still have much in common. For one, such forces are winning: transnational insurgencies have won nearly half of the civil wars in which they have fought, almost twice the success rate of insurgencies overall. Several Israeli prime ministers have acknowledged that Israel’s victory in 1948 relied on the World War II veterans who aided the fledgling state against Arab armies. In other conflicts throughout history, prominent foreign fighters were either instrumental in extending insurgencies or making them costlier to suppress: the Marquis de Lafayette, the French general who fought for the American rebels during the Revolutionary War; the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, who supported the Republican uprising in Brazil in the 1830s; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who formed al Qaeda in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. “— –“The patterns of recruitment for such disparate fighters are broadly similar and, because of that, they all have the same Achilles’ heel…. Insurgent groups … use despair rather than optimism to recruit members. Generally, they tell recruits that they are losing a war of survival and that they face an existential threat.”– –“It might not seem like the most persuasive pitch, particularly for fighters who, if they join, must violate a number of laws and take up arms in an unfamiliar territory. But it works. …. The strategy works best with foreign recruits who share the movement’s ideology, ethnicity, or religion but who, unlike local fighters, do not have immediate communities and families in the line of fire.”– –“Such fighters are often persuadable because of their weak affiliations with their own country and national identity,”– –” In these conflicts, the foreign fighters, driven by the belief that they are fighting a desperate battle to the end, act more aggressively than local insurgents — even when their side is actually winning. It’s no accident that most suicide missions in Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by foreign fighters rather than local militants. “– –“Some insurgent groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, have taken advantage of this dynamic by using foreigners to target civilians when the local combatants will not. “–

  • Transnational Insurgencies Have Something In Common : They Win

    Pocket Advice —“Although transnational insurgencies comprise highly diverse groups across different conflicts and eras, they still have much in common. For one, such forces are winning: transnational insurgencies have won nearly half of the civil wars in which they have fought, almost twice the success rate of insurgencies overall. Several Israeli prime ministers have acknowledged that Israel’s victory in 1948 relied on the World War II veterans who aided the fledgling state against Arab armies. In other conflicts throughout history, prominent foreign fighters were either instrumental in extending insurgencies or making them costlier to suppress: the Marquis de Lafayette, the French general who fought for the American rebels during the Revolutionary War; the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi, who supported the Republican uprising in Brazil in the 1830s; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who formed al Qaeda in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. “— –“The patterns of recruitment for such disparate fighters are broadly similar and, because of that, they all have the same Achilles’ heel…. Insurgent groups … use despair rather than optimism to recruit members. Generally, they tell recruits that they are losing a war of survival and that they face an existential threat.”– –“It might not seem like the most persuasive pitch, particularly for fighters who, if they join, must violate a number of laws and take up arms in an unfamiliar territory. But it works. …. The strategy works best with foreign recruits who share the movement’s ideology, ethnicity, or religion but who, unlike local fighters, do not have immediate communities and families in the line of fire.”– –“Such fighters are often persuadable because of their weak affiliations with their own country and national identity,”– –” In these conflicts, the foreign fighters, driven by the belief that they are fighting a desperate battle to the end, act more aggressively than local insurgents — even when their side is actually winning. It’s no accident that most suicide missions in Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by foreign fighters rather than local militants. “– –“Some insurgent groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, have taken advantage of this dynamic by using foreigners to target civilians when the local combatants will not. “–