[Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.
Form: Reply
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Science Vs Belief – Institutions Of Law Vs Religions And Cults
[Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.
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“WHAT IS YOUR STANCE ON IP?” QUESTION: “Hello Curt. What’s your stance on IP esp
“WHAT IS YOUR STANCE ON IP?”
QUESTION: “Hello Curt. What’s your stance on IP especially taking Kinsella’s arguments into account?” (Derogatory reference to Kinsella’s personality edited out. – Ed.) 🙂
ANSWER:
(Sorry, this ended up in my “Other” email for some reason. If you ‘friend’ me then I will get your emails. I didn’t see this one.)
In the abstract I agree with the principle that easily accessible licenses for limited monopolies are not beneficial for consumers. However, that rational argument may or may not mean much in practice.
1) IP does appear to rapidly affect business willingness to invest. So, just like property rights exclude people from commons to facilitate the willingness to take risks, IP excludes people from opportunities in order to facilitate the willingness of individuals to take risks. So empirically speaking and rationally speaking, these are trade-off questions not matters of truth and falsehood.
2) Humans don’t like free riding and we intuitively dislike direct copying – seeing it as a case of free riding. I think the question is limited to whether you’re fooling someone or not (trademarking). So as long as you’re not violating a trademark, which is a question of ‘weights and measures’, (fraud), then I think it’s hard to argue against copying anything at all. The test is pretty empirically simple – if you can glance at something for two seconds and tell the original from the copy, then it’s not a trademark violation. If you can then it is. It’s a pretty simple test. We have proven it over and over again.
3) For licensed monopolies, I think it is entirely moral to appeal to the ‘people’ asking for a limited monopoly to produce a good that the market cannot reliably produce. This tends kind of thing tends to be limited to very specific goods (health and medicine) or expensive original research in physical sciences, or high risk investments with high benefit to the commons (transportation and infrastructure). All that occurs is that private investment takes risk and reward, with some lottery bonus from the commons, that if they succeed they will recover their costs free of predation from others. Again, this is a purely pragmatic thing. And as long as such things are put out to ‘bid’, so that whomever wins gets the benefit, then I think it’s just a rational choice to get individuals do off book research and development on behalf of the commons in exchange for winning a lottery if they succeed.
However I see these licenses as exceptions on the same level as laws, not grants to be easily obtained without serious discretion.
4) My problem with the rothbardian (ghetto) ethic is that it’s advocating free riding on the work of others, and NOT a matter of competition if you did not conduct the research yourself. Competition is not free riding, since you are doing a better job of voluntarily organizing production and satisfying customers. However, benefitting from someone else’s research and development and capturing the rewards for it is simply free riding.
Again, I see the Rothbardian ethic as simply an obscurantist set of arguments meant to justify parasitism rather than enforcing the fundamental requirement for rational cooperation: that we all contribute to production without parasitism upon others.
Humans punish cheaters. The only way to increase the velocity of production and trade is to increase trust, and the way to increase trust is to suppress all free riding so that every individual is forced to participate in production, rather than engage in parasitism.
Rothbardianism is simply a complex, overloaded, obscurant argument meant to justify ghetto parasitism. It is irrational to choose a stateless polity with low trust and persistent retribution over a stateful polity with low trust and high suppression of retribution. This is why people demand the state: to suppress immoral and unethical people such as rothbardians, so that a high trust society can develop.
An anarchic or private polity will only be possible to form under a high trust society that prohibits all free riding with the exception of kin.
Curt Doolittle
PS: I’m sure this will generate nonsense but I’m pretty sure my argument is rock solid. Just how it is. Rothbardians need to get over it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 05:34:00 UTC
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For Tom Woods: On Thick and Thin
Tom, Great of you to weigh in on this topic. You’ve also provided Rothbardians with an ‘out’ that I didn’t think of. That the NAP is fullness of libertarianism but not the fullness of life. I’d thought that the only ‘out’ was that rothbardian libertarianism was sufficient for the moral interaction of states, but insufficient for the construction of a polity. THE PROBLEM IS LAW It’s true that aggression is immoral and it’s true that aggression must be illegal. But is it rational for humans to join a voluntary, anarchic polity, if the basis of **LAW** is “non-aggression against intersubjectively verifiable property”, or must the basis of law be either based on something other than aggression, or broader in scope than intersubjectively verifiable property? What is the minimum basis for the law upon which it becomes rational to join a voluntary, anarchic polity? If we have a choice between: (a) a totalitarian capitalist society, like say, China. (b) a contemporary social democracy, like say the States. (c) an anarchic polity in which one CAN bring suit against immoral and unethical actions (say, blackmail, and fraud by omission). (d) an anarchic polity where unethical and immoral actions are expressly licensed by the law, and retribution for immoral and unethical actions is forbidden. 1) Then which of these will which people of which moral biases, choose? 2) How will members of that polity be treated by members of the competing polities? 3) How will the territory and trade representatives of that polity be treated by competing polities? I think that an intellectually honest analysis of those questions produces an obvious, and remarkably consistent answer. That is, that either aggression is the incorrect test of peaceful cooperation, or intersubjectively verifiable property is an insufficient test of the scope of property that must be protected from violation, or more likely both. The current proceeds of anthropology, genetics, and cognitive science, tell us that violations of the evolutionary preference for cooperation, are reducible to ‘free riding’: that is non-contribution. Since in any set of individuals, if we do not require productive contribution, then some are the victims of free riding (parasitism) and others benefit from free riding (parasitism). MORALITY If we analyze the common prohibitions of all moral codes under all family structures, and we remove moral constraints that are purely ritualistic, these moral codes are universally reducible to necessary prohibitions on what we would call ‘property violations’ in an effort to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation. Moral Prohibition Spectra: 1) Agression: Harm/Oppression, 2) Trust: Subversion/Betrayal/Cheating, 3) Purity: Inobservance of Norms/Behavioral impurity/Pollution All of these are reducible to shareholder rights and obligations. Humans universally demonstrate a greater interest in punishing moral violations than we demonstrate self interest. IN fact, we justify our pre-cognitive moral punishments without even being able to articulate why we hold them. We are wired for morality. We evolved language and punishments violations of these moral intuitions in the form of criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions: 1. Violence (asymmetry of force) 2. Theft (asymmetry of control) 3. Fraud (false information) 4. Omission (Omitting information) 5. Obscurantism (Obscuring information) 6. Obstruction (Inhibiting someone else’s transaction) 7. Externalization (externalizing costs of any transaction) 8. Free Riding (using externalities for self benefit) 9. Socializing Losses (externalization to commons) 10. Privatizing Gains (appropriation of commons) 11. Rent Seeking (organizational free riding) 12. Corruption ( organized rent seeking) 13. Conspiracy (organized indirect theft) 14. Extortion (Organized direct theft) 15. War (organized violence) PROPERTY We can empirically observe that people treat a broad spectrum of things as their property, and that they intuit violations of that property, and act to defend that property. I. Several (Personal) Property Personal property: “Things an individual has a Monopoly Of Control over the use of.” Physical Body and Several Property: Those things we claim a monopoly of control over. II. Artificial Property Shares in property: Recorded And Quantified Shareholder Property (claims for partial ownership) Trademarks and Brands (prohibitions on fraudulent transfers within a geography). III. Kin and Interpersonal (Relationship) Property Mates (access to sex/reproduction) Children (genetic reproduction) Consanguineous Relations (tribal and family ties) IV Status and Class (reputation) Social Status Reputation V. Institutional (Community) Property (i) Institutional Property: “Those objects into which we have invested our forgone opportunities, our efforts, or our material assets, in order to aggregate capital from multiple individuals for mutual gain.” (ii)Informal (Normative) Institutions: Our norms: manners, ethics and morals. Informal institutional property is nearly impossible to quantify and price. The costs are subjective and consists of forgone opportunities. (iii)Formal (Procedural) Institutions: Our institutions: Religion (including the secular religion), Government, Laws. Formal institutional property is easy to price. costs are visible. And the productivity of the social order is at least marginally measurable. ECONOMICS We can judge economic impacts of high trust societies that practice near total prohibition on criminal, unethical and immoral actions. And we can compare those to low trust societies that suppress fewer unethical and immoral actions. CLOSING So under what reasoning, would it be logical to support the Non Aggression Principle under Intersubjectively verifiable property (NAP/IVP) as the basis for the law, which explicitly licenses unethical and immoral action and prohibits retribution for it? The NAP/IVP has been a detriment to liberty wherever advocates argue that it is a sufficient means of determining moral and legal rules of cooperation. Because it’s not. And we cannot pursue an alternative to the existing high trust society without providing people with an alternative that is morally SUPERIOR to the state. And the NAP/IVP fails that test. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev.
Nonaggression is a part of, but not the fullness of, morality. Virtue and excellence need to be cultivated, too. “I don’t punch people for no reason” isn’t the beginning and end of a decent human life.
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For Tom Woods: On Thick and Thin
Tom, Great of you to weigh in on this topic. You’ve also provided Rothbardians with an ‘out’ that I didn’t think of. That the NAP is fullness of libertarianism but not the fullness of life. I’d thought that the only ‘out’ was that rothbardian libertarianism was sufficient for the moral interaction of states, but insufficient for the construction of a polity. THE PROBLEM IS LAW It’s true that aggression is immoral and it’s true that aggression must be illegal. But is it rational for humans to join a voluntary, anarchic polity, if the basis of **LAW** is “non-aggression against intersubjectively verifiable property”, or must the basis of law be either based on something other than aggression, or broader in scope than intersubjectively verifiable property? What is the minimum basis for the law upon which it becomes rational to join a voluntary, anarchic polity? If we have a choice between: (a) a totalitarian capitalist society, like say, China. (b) a contemporary social democracy, like say the States. (c) an anarchic polity in which one CAN bring suit against immoral and unethical actions (say, blackmail, and fraud by omission). (d) an anarchic polity where unethical and immoral actions are expressly licensed by the law, and retribution for immoral and unethical actions is forbidden. 1) Then which of these will which people of which moral biases, choose? 2) How will members of that polity be treated by members of the competing polities? 3) How will the territory and trade representatives of that polity be treated by competing polities? I think that an intellectually honest analysis of those questions produces an obvious, and remarkably consistent answer. That is, that either aggression is the incorrect test of peaceful cooperation, or intersubjectively verifiable property is an insufficient test of the scope of property that must be protected from violation, or more likely both. The current proceeds of anthropology, genetics, and cognitive science, tell us that violations of the evolutionary preference for cooperation, are reducible to ‘free riding’: that is non-contribution. Since in any set of individuals, if we do not require productive contribution, then some are the victims of free riding (parasitism) and others benefit from free riding (parasitism). MORALITY If we analyze the common prohibitions of all moral codes under all family structures, and we remove moral constraints that are purely ritualistic, these moral codes are universally reducible to necessary prohibitions on what we would call ‘property violations’ in an effort to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation. Moral Prohibition Spectra: 1) Agression: Harm/Oppression, 2) Trust: Subversion/Betrayal/Cheating, 3) Purity: Inobservance of Norms/Behavioral impurity/Pollution All of these are reducible to shareholder rights and obligations. Humans universally demonstrate a greater interest in punishing moral violations than we demonstrate self interest. IN fact, we justify our pre-cognitive moral punishments without even being able to articulate why we hold them. We are wired for morality. We evolved language and punishments violations of these moral intuitions in the form of criminal, ethical, and moral prohibitions: 1. Violence (asymmetry of force) 2. Theft (asymmetry of control) 3. Fraud (false information) 4. Omission (Omitting information) 5. Obscurantism (Obscuring information) 6. Obstruction (Inhibiting someone else’s transaction) 7. Externalization (externalizing costs of any transaction) 8. Free Riding (using externalities for self benefit) 9. Socializing Losses (externalization to commons) 10. Privatizing Gains (appropriation of commons) 11. Rent Seeking (organizational free riding) 12. Corruption ( organized rent seeking) 13. Conspiracy (organized indirect theft) 14. Extortion (Organized direct theft) 15. War (organized violence) PROPERTY We can empirically observe that people treat a broad spectrum of things as their property, and that they intuit violations of that property, and act to defend that property. I. Several (Personal) Property Personal property: “Things an individual has a Monopoly Of Control over the use of.” Physical Body and Several Property: Those things we claim a monopoly of control over. II. Artificial Property Shares in property: Recorded And Quantified Shareholder Property (claims for partial ownership) Trademarks and Brands (prohibitions on fraudulent transfers within a geography). III. Kin and Interpersonal (Relationship) Property Mates (access to sex/reproduction) Children (genetic reproduction) Consanguineous Relations (tribal and family ties) IV Status and Class (reputation) Social Status Reputation V. Institutional (Community) Property (i) Institutional Property: “Those objects into which we have invested our forgone opportunities, our efforts, or our material assets, in order to aggregate capital from multiple individuals for mutual gain.” (ii)Informal (Normative) Institutions: Our norms: manners, ethics and morals. Informal institutional property is nearly impossible to quantify and price. The costs are subjective and consists of forgone opportunities. (iii)Formal (Procedural) Institutions: Our institutions: Religion (including the secular religion), Government, Laws. Formal institutional property is easy to price. costs are visible. And the productivity of the social order is at least marginally measurable. ECONOMICS We can judge economic impacts of high trust societies that practice near total prohibition on criminal, unethical and immoral actions. And we can compare those to low trust societies that suppress fewer unethical and immoral actions. CLOSING So under what reasoning, would it be logical to support the Non Aggression Principle under Intersubjectively verifiable property (NAP/IVP) as the basis for the law, which explicitly licenses unethical and immoral action and prohibits retribution for it? The NAP/IVP has been a detriment to liberty wherever advocates argue that it is a sufficient means of determining moral and legal rules of cooperation. Because it’s not. And we cannot pursue an alternative to the existing high trust society without providing people with an alternative that is morally SUPERIOR to the state. And the NAP/IVP fails that test. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev.
Nonaggression is a part of, but not the fullness of, morality. Virtue and excellence need to be cultivated, too. “I don’t punch people for no reason” isn’t the beginning and end of a decent human life.
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Property? – It Wasn't Scarcity. 🙂
Curt Doolittle : so you agree with Tucker here? http://youtu.be/83se-G-9SeU?t=23m26s (Jeffrey Tucker AMA Hosted by Mike Shanklin)
[W]ell, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause has been replaced with an evolutionary spectrum. The evidence now appears that: (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.) (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property) (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools. (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock. (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor. (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules. As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property. As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property. The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family. I won’t address the evolution of shared intentionality and cooperation here. Too may different paths. But either way I think this is the correct evolution. I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution. But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.) [A]ctually, now that I think about it, this is a good example of why crusoe ethics are a mistaken distraction (another ghetto-ethics error) because the evolution of cooperation and property did not occur in the island-as-analogy-to-walled-ghetto, but among an extended family conducting pervasive redistribution.
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Property? – It Wasn’t Scarcity. 🙂
Curt Doolittle : so you agree with Tucker here? http://youtu.be/83se-G-9SeU?t=23m26s (Jeffrey Tucker AMA Hosted by Mike Shanklin)
[W]ell, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause has been replaced with an evolutionary spectrum. The evidence now appears that: (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.) (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property) (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools. (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock. (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor. (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules. As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property. As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property. The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family. I won’t address the evolution of shared intentionality and cooperation here. Too may different paths. But either way I think this is the correct evolution. I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution. But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.) [A]ctually, now that I think about it, this is a good example of why crusoe ethics are a mistaken distraction (another ghetto-ethics error) because the evolution of cooperation and property did not occur in the island-as-analogy-to-walled-ghetto, but among an extended family conducting pervasive redistribution.
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Property? – It Wasn't Scarcity. 🙂
Curt Doolittle : so you agree with Tucker here? http://youtu.be/83se-G-9SeU?t=23m26s (Jeffrey Tucker AMA Hosted by Mike Shanklin)
[W]ell, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause has been replaced with an evolutionary spectrum. The evidence now appears that: (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.) (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property) (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools. (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock. (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor. (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules. As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property. As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property. The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family. I won’t address the evolution of shared intentionality and cooperation here. Too may different paths. But either way I think this is the correct evolution. I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution. But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.) [A]ctually, now that I think about it, this is a good example of why crusoe ethics are a mistaken distraction (another ghetto-ethics error) because the evolution of cooperation and property did not occur in the island-as-analogy-to-walled-ghetto, but among an extended family conducting pervasive redistribution.
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Property? – It Wasn’t Scarcity. 🙂
Curt Doolittle : so you agree with Tucker here? http://youtu.be/83se-G-9SeU?t=23m26s (Jeffrey Tucker AMA Hosted by Mike Shanklin)
[W]ell, I think the scarcity-as-primary cause has been replaced with an evolutionary spectrum. The evidence now appears that: (a) Property evolved for preventing free riding during cooperation (along with mating – we dont’ know which was first – cooperation or pairing off, but it looks like cooperation was first.) (b) Language evolved to control mating (pairing off conditional monogamy – mates as property) (c) Property matured to facilitate the retention of goods and tools. (d) Property matured to facilitate capture of livestock. (e) Property matured to facilitate inheritance in families (f) Property matured to facilitate the division of labor. (g) Property evolved as a means of forming cooperative networks and positive expression of legal rules. As far as I can tell, it is the prevention of free riding needed to maintain incentives to produce that was the source of the evolution of property. As far as I can tell, it is probably more accurate to say that scarcity forced retention of redistribution within family and tribe, it did not cause the evolution of property. The hard problem that only Northern Europeans have solved, is to suppress redistribution in the tribe and family. I won’t address the evolution of shared intentionality and cooperation here. Too may different paths. But either way I think this is the correct evolution. I don’t think this is a meaningful revision of libertarian theory. It’s a correction. But the order of development doesn’t change the importance of property rights for the purpose of incentives, calculation, and dispute resolution. But it does reinforce my argument that the purpose of property is the prevention of free riding necessary for cooperation. So that property evolved a positive expression of the negative prohibition. Not as a good in itself in response to scarcity. In fact, I am pretty confident that the scarcity argument is a CROSS-GROUP problem not an in-group problem. (Again, this is why ghetto ethics were a failure – wrong problem. In group evolved prior to out-group.) [A]ctually, now that I think about it, this is a good example of why crusoe ethics are a mistaken distraction (another ghetto-ethics error) because the evolution of cooperation and property did not occur in the island-as-analogy-to-walled-ghetto, but among an extended family conducting pervasive redistribution.
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SPLIT CURRENCIES —“A poster writes: Split the currency. 1. International Trade
SPLIT CURRENCIES
—“A poster writes: Split the currency.
1. International Trade Dollars
2. National Dollars
3. State Dollars.
That way the success of a State is for the Benefit of the State. International Money Giveaway schemes do not crash the National Dollar. Those who want to inflate their Dollar, will not take others down with them.”—
You know, the amount of economic knowledge that the average libertarian has is utterly amazing. I don’t mean the “moral NAPpers” but the rest.
I get so buried that I take it for granted. And I forget that for most people simple economics is indistinguishable from chemistry, formal logic, or some other symbolic language.
But it’s the one they most depend upon. And they’re ignorant of it.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-07 11:49:00 UTC