TESTIFY (v.)
late 14c., “give legal testimony, affirm the truth of, bear witness to;” of things, c. 1400, “serve as evidence of,” from Anglo-French testifier, from Latin testificari “bear witness, show, demonstrate,” also “call to witness,” from testis “a witness” (see testament) + root of facere “to make” (see factitious). Biblical sense of “openly profess one’s faith and devotion” is attested from 1520s. Related: Testified; testifying; testification.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 11:08:00 UTC
“Success expands acquisitions, which increases the phenomena to track, which allows for un-meritocratic creep into social and governmental institutions.”
“The aristocracy gradually gets infected by the petty bourgeoisie who desire the material comforts and status gained, but who reject the virtue trials that grant warrior-aristocrats their moral indisputability.”
“As the social and governmental institutions come to be stocked with mere bureaucrats, demands of virtue and competence decline. It becomes a downward spiral of the weak and incompetent struggling to cheaply profit how their petty vision and ability allow them.”
“The republican ideal necessitates selling two products: liberty and security, the former for the virtuous and hungry who want enfranchisement and are willing to accept the rigors and the latter for the plebs who will otherwise ally with a Caesarian-Machiavellian figure against the aristocracy if they aren’t granted their petty needs (and with their subsequent constraints of influence).”
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 11:04:00 UTC
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN POLYTHEISTIC PEOPLE
The Germanic (and older) pagan household and fairy tales. (Regional)
The Christian civic sacred and festival. (National)
The Roman political and legal (Latin)
The Greek scientific and theoretical. (Greek)
Because we have always been DEFLATIONARY people.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 10:53:00 UTC
—“Anyone ever read Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic?”—
I think the intellectual consensus is that weber confused cause and consequence. The protestant ethic was around for 4000 years, but was brought into its peak starting in 7-800 by the use of manorialism starting in holland. Spreading rapidly across the Hajnal line, and roughly in concert with the prohibition on cousin marriage. Protestants possessed the work ethic, but protestantism did not create it. Conversely it appears the work ethic created or justified protestantism.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 10:30:00 UTC
PHILOSOPHY
The search for internally consistent means of decidability within a domain or context.
TRUTH (PROPER)
The most parsimonious most universal method of decidability regardless of context.
SOME FORMS OF ARGUMENT
Analogy – a justification by similarity.
Reason – a criticized and justified argument from experience.
Rational – an internally consistent, non contradictory argument from experience
Logical – an internally consistent, non contradictory, argument from set membership.
Analytic – an internally consistent, non contradictory, verbally parsimonious, argument from set membership incorporating the methods of the physical sciences.
Empirical – a correlative externally correspondent argument for the purpose of limiting human error bias and deceit.
Operational – an internally consistent, existentially possible, subjectively testable, causal, argument from possibility.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 09:11:00 UTC
(Considering starting a politics and philosophy forum that selects articles every day and provides an analysis of incentives and changes in capital. In other words, a balance sheet for any argument. I think this might be very educational and could become popular. There are a very small number of places where you can find grownup arguments. They are in the geostrategic and geo-economic papers and blogs. Almost everything else published every day is moral justificationism (Excuse making) and nothing more. )
——
(unaccepted post in politics philosophy forum)(the host has been effort-spamming forums with uncriticized anti-trump propaganda pieces, which are just more articulate green frogs memes.)
@James Ragsdale
if [this] is a forum for discussion, then it’s a value. Which would require posting both sides of the debate. If this is a form for you to express your frustrations then it is no longer anything to do with theory policy and philosophy, but simply just emotional.
Just create an “I hate trump” forum and put it there. But at present you’re not acting any differently from the alt-right-green-frog folks except your posting pseudo-rational propaganda instead of openly irrational green-frog cartoons.
You have energy and a particular gift. And if you employ it honestly then you can make a contribution to the world.
I’m honest about my work and my bias. (and yes, the fact that The Clinton Foundation defrauded me of $2M they said they would pay me for developing the greenhouse-gas measurement software, after we rescued their efforts in India at Microsoft’s request; and the fact that I have direct experience with these people – including Murdoch’s wife – might color my judgement a bit. These are ‘bad’ immoral, people for whom lying is simply a justifiable means of achieving their ends.)
Anger destroys honesty. Half truths are lies. Half arguments are just half truths.
Hence why I argue in the manner that I do: the only ‘good’ is exchange. The only ‘moral’ is non-imposition of costs.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 08:14:00 UTC
The USA no longer has the financial means of by which to influence the expansion of human (property) rights. The USA no longer has the means of using economic and trade incentives to advance human (property) rights. The USA no longer has diplomatic means of providing incentives to advance human (property) rights. The USA has demonstrated that they cannot use force to advance human (property) rights.
The Russians broke the postwar peace when they invaded ukraine. The muslims have broken the peace of westphalia by sponsoring and using non-state actors across borders. The world will not tolerate iran as the nuclear core state of islam. Turkey would be tolerated but has been engaged in recidivism. And western hopes that islamic nations would be able to evolve to modern states has been abandoned.
China now leads the world in diplomacy, credit, and trade policy, and both russian and chinese powers favor the preservation of totalitarian governments precisely for this reason: they already must confront demographically problematic underclasses at great scale on a daily basis.
Furthermore, the world has observed that while the market economy is the only possible means of providing prosperity, that the totalitarian state is better suited to do so until well after a middle class has reached majority status. In other words, democracy is seen as a luxury good unique to western civilization.
Reading philosophy is like reading fantasy literature. Adults read military, economic, and demographic data, and seek to understand rational incentives.
So no, the USA will remain an major influence upon world affairs trough at least the first half of this century, provided the USA does not balkanize as I suspect it will. At which point the worldwide attempt to fill the power vacuum will likely lead to the first great wars of the 21st century.
It’s economics and demographics.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 08:06:00 UTC
Terror requires the deliberate targeting of non-combatants as a means of altering policy. Sovereignty requires one’s government control non-state actors. Democracy requires one’s people control one’s government such that it controls non-state actors, such that it does not break the westphalian peace, nor the postwar peace. Justice visited upon the muslims to contain them just as the west tried to contain the communists in the twentieth century and the Islamic empires, for it’s thousand years of warfare against the west. And so apparently we must unify china, india, russia, and america to contain islam until it respects the peaces of westphalia (containing non state actors), and of the postwar consensus (maintian borders, develop human rights, and develop consumer economies).
No people yet has transformed from the medieval to the modern without a reformation, and some sort of civil war.
Islam is the only backward civilization remaining. The problem it faces, and south america faces, is that the demographics throughout the muslim world make a rational secular state nearly impossible without the promise of ever-expanding growth under fiat money capitalism.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 08:04:00 UTC
….I think the problem is that the past was honest but justified it supernaturally, because the promise of reward was after death. Whereas the present is dishonest and justified pseudo-scientifically and promised if we can reach a socialist utopia or some variation thereof. The medieval order was hierarchical and honest. The only false promise was after death. We live in a world of loneliness and lies….
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 07:24:00 UTC
Curt Doolittle shared a post.
Source date (UTC): 2017-03-04 07:02:00 UTC