Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • KISSINGER LAYS IT OUT —“ISIS’ claim has given the millennium-old split between

    KISSINGER LAYS IT OUT

    —“ISIS’ claim has given the millennium-old split between the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam an apocalyptic dimension. The remaining Sunni states feel threatened by both the religious fervor of ISIS as well as by Shiite Iran, potentially the most powerful state in the region. Iran compounds its menace by presenting itself in a dual capacity. On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy, even invoking the safeguards of the international system. At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria; Hamas in Gaza; the Houthis in Yemen.

    Thus the Sunni Middle East risks engulfment by four concurrent sources: Shiite-governed Iran and its legacy of Persian imperialism; ideologically and religiously radical movements striving to overthrow prevalent political structures; conflicts within each state between ethnic and religious groups arbitrarily assembled after World War I into (now collapsing) states; and domestic pressures stemming from detrimental political, social and economic domestic policies.”—

    I don’t usually agree with his prescriptions but I almost always agree with his diagnoses.

    On the other hand, I don’t see the value in NOT crushing BOTH Isis and IRAN, and then going home and throwing up a wall.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-path-out-of-the-middle-east-collapse-1445037513

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 08:26:00 UTC

  • Just under 8 minutes – a vision of hell?

    Just under 8 minutes – a vision of hell?:

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 08:05:00 UTC

  • The moral fringe and lunatic fringe. Freedom fighter and terrorist

    The moral fringe and lunatic fringe.

    Freedom fighter and terrorist.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 07:31:00 UTC

  • GETTING MY MIND IN ORDER : CURRENT TOPICS OF INQUIRY Current topics I’m working

    GETTING MY MIND IN ORDER : CURRENT TOPICS OF INQUIRY

    Current topics I’m working on (obvious probably):

    1) Structure of the presentation of content in the book. I keep coming back to the 48 laws of power, except that each ‘reading’ is from each of our mythic periods.’ This has been with me since the beginning and every time I think differently I come back to it. But I’m also abandoning the essay form, and coming closer to the legal or ‘great book’ form, supported by parables (references). The problem is that I just don’t believe I have the stamina or time to compile those references without employing a grad student or two for every chapter and verse.

    2) What does the next western civic ‘religion’ look like after Democratic Secular Socialist Humanism (Neo-Puritanism) if we are to reconstruct the distributed civic society, and in doing so restore distributed ownership, care-taking, and policing of the commons? I think a few of us have a pretty clear idea of how to construct the institution itself, and provide incentives to participate in it. So my opinion is continuing to solidify on the church/bank/regiment model

    3) Can I articulate sufficiently how the great lies are constructed using obscurant loaded and framed languages distributed in overloaded volumes? I think I have a good sense of it but I feel like if I spent another year on it, that I would nail it. I don’t feel I have that year.

    4) Can I turn strict propertarian construction into a series of lessons that it is easy to learn? I think I was approaching it too editorially and can show how to construct it with a simple process and some examples. . But I think I will do that near the end, once I’ve created many examples to draw from.

    5) Should I bother to write a computer model to demonstrate it even if doing so will incur a penalty of locking the work to a technical period in time? (it’s easy to model propertarianism). I think I might write it for myself just as Axelrod and company have, but I think I won’t reference it in the work.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 06:39:00 UTC

  • THE USE OF SUGGESTION TO HACK OUR REASON AND EXPERIENCE – EVEN OUR SELF PRESERVA

    THE USE OF SUGGESTION TO HACK OUR REASON AND EXPERIENCE – EVEN OUR SELF PRESERVATION.

    While I have trouble with subtle emotions – particularly confusion and fear – which I don’t really feel in combination – I have a very good logic and lie detector. Which is why continental language bothers me so much. It’s like a dysfunctional alcoholic is trying to rope me into some bullshit story in order to sell me shit I don’t want at a discount just for the sake of not offending him. It takes advantage of the suspension of disbelief to use suggestion by bypassing our experience, reason, criticism and judgement, and abusing our western familial altruistic trust response.

    So I basically can’t understand anything because I never suspend my disbelief, abandon experience, reason, or judgement, and as such cannot experience the suggestion.

    Originally, some people may recall, I wasn’t sure I needed to solve the problem of Truth, but it turned out to be the most important problem I did solve, and helped me restate my concept of ‘calculation’ as ‘operationalism.

    Over the past two years I’ve been thinking about the means of our deception – do I need to solve it and do I want to solve it? Why does loading, framing, overloading and suggestion work so well when we are in an audience whether in church, in school, sitting round the campfire, being spoken to directly by someone in authority or whom you respect or whom you love, listening on the radio, watching in a play or movie in the theatre, or cruising the internet? Why are we suggestible (trust) and why are we not suggestible (untrust)?

    I recognized early that overloading caused us to resort to intuition, and that once engaging intuition we had surrendered reason. But I did not understand the trust response, nor the suspension of disbelief response, nor the effect of combining the trust response, suspension of belief response, combined with loading, framing, overloading – and the most important of all: the submission to the pack response when we are members of an audience.

    Basically if you can find a way to directly appeal to our moral cognitive biases you can hack our altruism, reason, experience, and even sense of preservation.

    We are terribly suggestible creatures.

    Hence the value of truth – raising the cost of untruth such that only truth remains. Just as we raised the cost of violence, theft, fraud, and in many cases, free riding, such that only productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer free of externality remains.

    We created the market in steps. First violence. Then Theft. Then fraud. Then free riding.

    It’s time to improve the market again by prohibiting suggestion by requiring truth in all matters of the commons.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 06:24:00 UTC

  • The Perpetual Convention of the International Society of Anomalists Ex Situ (lol

    The Perpetual Convention of the International Society of Anomalists Ex Situ

    (lol)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 06:08:00 UTC

  • One should not underestimate the power of profligacy. particularly of either adv

    One should not underestimate the power of profligacy. particularly of either advocacy or criticism by the continuous refinement of nuance. Environmental saturation is often as or more powerful than precise articulation.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 06:02:00 UTC

  • “I pray the gods, deliver us unto kings, and save us from the people.”

    —“I pray the gods, deliver us unto kings, and save us from the people.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 05:50:00 UTC

  • De Monarchia Liber Europae Reges Magni De Philosophia Aristocratia De Nobilitate

    De Monarchia

    Liber Europae Reges Magni

    De Philosophia Aristocratia

    De Nobilitate et Scriptura

    Viridis Bibliis Arianorum

    The Cult of Heroism

    The Doctrine of Non Submission

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 05:49:00 UTC

  • (personal workflow) (dropbox, evernote, box, mac) (oversing thoughts) In Oversin

    (personal workflow) (dropbox, evernote, box, mac) (oversing thoughts)

    In Oversing, We need to rely on either our own storage technology (as does Slack – which is just Amazon), or use one of Evernote, Box, or Dropbox’s technologies.

    So today I’m working through integrating Evernote into Oversing (or Oversing into Evernote) and as part of the research, I”m going through the new Dropbox apps today. (I am biased toward Evernote because of a similar design philosophy)

    I use Mac “Notes” for quick ideas, notes, reminders and my to-do list. I write long pieces in Evernote’s Web UI, (which is still the best text editor I have found). And for very long pieces and complex work I use Textwrangler. And for business stuff I use Word. Everything is always stored ‘somewhere’.

    For backup and file storage across devices, I use Dropbox. I don’t need any user interfaces other than the one’s I have in the operating system. I put everything I could ever want to save under the dropbox folder, treating it as ‘~/documents’. I don’t use the ~/documents folder, I have changed the default screenshot directory in osx to point to a new directory ~/screenshots to save on performance and desktop clutter. And I have folder shortcuts on my doc so that I can drag items to certain folders without using the Finder app. Also, I do NOT back up my ~/downloads folder, and I clean it every now and then.

    So when I go through the dropbox addins I just don’t sort of get why you need them. Very transparent technology.

    Box on the other hand has taken the enterprise route by providing security and permissions that Dropbox and Evernote dont’

    So you sort of have this hierarchy (which I’m sure most people understand) of Evernote (personal) -> Dropbox (Professional) -> Box (enterprise).

    Unfortunately, the only viable price alternative is to do it ourselves. And that seems a shame. The cost of enterprise applications is not so much the data and servicing the data, but the costs of storage of large volumes of work related files. So you sort of have to price as such. One of the tricks is to only store small things and then send the user to Dropbox/Box/Google account for large file storage but that doesn’t work for IP related work which we have to guarantee providence over, and which must be subject to audits.

    Argh.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-18 05:30:00 UTC