Source: Facebook

YOU DON’T DEBATE AN INTELLECTUALLY DISHONEST PERSON, YOU PROSECUTE HIM.

(and further criticisms of abrahamism)

—“If I organized a debate between you and Jared Howe would you do it?”—

Well, you know, I spent a whole day on the guy, and (a) he didn’t read anything much I posted, (b) he clearly didn’t understand it if he did, (c) I am not sure he understands himself what he’s saying (d) he resorted to simple chanting accusations without demonstrating how they applied to my argument, (e) he blocked me when it became increasingly difficult for him to not answer.

Now add to that (f) that it is pretty hard to write and read analytic philosophy because it’s turgid, and it’s harder to speak it and listen to it. And add (g) the audience will much more easily be bored with long chains of reasoning.

But you know, there are psychological reasons people favor kantian rationalism, just as there are reasons people favor theology. One of those reasons is preservation of cognitive investment. The other is that while science (what I do) doesn’t allow you to ignore any argument, rationalism (what jared does) allows you to ignore many arguments, and theology allows you to ignore any argument. Kant was trying to recreate theology in secular verse, and this was his reason: to resist the scientific revolution.

So I think if you asked me to debate hoppe on it, then we would show something important to the community. I think if you asked me to debate david gordon or walter block maybe. Because then the audience could follow. But none of them will debate me. They know better. And they cannot afford defloration in public.

So it’s not so much I wouldn’t do it, as I am not sure he’s capable of the argument, or intellectually honest enough to engage in it.

So when you ask me to debate him, I would enter a debate, but I would end up being a prosecutor: “If everything you say can be explained with science but you cannot explain everything sciences says with what you say? Why do you employ such a system of thought? Why is it you fear science just as theologian fears science?” The answer is because, kant reformed abrahamic lying from supernatural to ideal. Just as marx,boaz,freud reformed abrahamic lying from the ideal to the pseudoscientific. Just as the french(rousseau, Derrida) reformed pseudoscientific to outright fiction: reality by chanting.

Mises applied the same pseudoscientific reasoning as marx did he just chose different half truths in order to reform marx when marx ended failing. Marx had stopped writing after he read the marginalists because his labor theory of value was now dead. Mises updated marx by inverting universal common property ignoring externalities to universal private property to the exclusion of common property ignoring externalities. He did so by abandoning the labor theory of value for the mengerian subjective value, and abandoning the universal underclass strategy in favor of universal middle class strategy. He replaced the pseudoscience of the labor theory of value, and ignoring the darwinian revolution with the pseudoscience of (a) casting science as justificationary(constructive) rather than critical (subtractive), (b) conflating axiomatic(necessary) mathematics with theoretic science (contingent). (c) conflating truth(science) and morality(volition). Which is precisely the technique used by the abrahamists: conflating myth with history, advice with command, wisdom with law, dysgenia with good.

This does not mean marx and mises did not contribute to intellectual history. it just means like everything else Abrahamists do, it’s cherry-picking of half truths and half deceits, wrapped in exceptional mythological storytelling so that through overloading people can be ‘convinced’ by suggestion when they intuit that it’s reasonable. When in fact, the purpose of the argument structure is to bypass all reason. Suggestion is just ‘hacking’ the brain. And that is the purpose of Abrahamism: deceit.

FWIW: You can tell everything about an individual or group or civilization by their definition of truth. And in particular, whether that truth employs the fictional(supernatural), the cognitive(analytic), the ideal(logical), the empirical(existential), or the operational(actionable), or all of the above.

-Curt Doolittle