Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • “CURT CAN YOU COMMENT ON THIS ISSUE, AND TIE IT TO THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS?” (

    http://mic.com/articles/107926/one-tweet-perfectly-sums-up-the-big-problem-with-how-we-talk-about-terrorismQ: “CURT CAN YOU COMMENT ON THIS ISSUE, AND TIE IT TO THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS?”

    (long)(important)

    The questioner also asked me to be brief. (I am not good at brevity, I am good at precision, lol) So I will try to make a list of bullet points in an effort to be brief..

    PART I – CONFLATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF DECEPTION

    1) Terrorism is truthfully (honestly) defined as an act of out-group members against in-group members). Rebellion is truthfully (honestly) an act of in-group members against in-group members. Conflating them is dishonest. Conflation is a postmodern rhetorical deception learned from Marxist critique.

    2) The reason that the Cathedral: Academy, media and state have adopted the deceptive strategy of conflating terrorism and rebellion is to attempt to legitimize through postmodern repetition the Cathedral Complex: legitimize the Academy, media and state. And to delegitimize rebellion by labeling it terrorism and thereby conflating it with out-group activity.

    3) Bombing the ATF, Crashing a plane into the IRS building, bombing the NAACP, are all acts of rebellion by internal members. The purpose of rebellion is to change policies by state members when institutional means fail. Rebellion is internal politics by other means.

    4) The various islamist bombings are not acts of rebellion, but they are acts of warfare, by the only military means possible. Terrorism is extremely inexpensive warfare by out-group members against in-group members. That is why small group and poor groups rely upon terrorism: it is inexpensive. States sponsor rebellion(internal violence) and terrorism(out group violence) as discounted means of warfare. States also you proxy wars (financing conflicts with third parties.) These are all forms of warfare: the use of violence to conduct politics by other means.

    5) The purpose of warfare, terrorism and rebellion is to change policy. All forms of political violence harms citizens, infrastructure and politicians. It is dishonest to state that terrorism is for the purpose of changing policy, when changing policy is the purpose of all warfare, whether it is inexpensive warfare (terrorism) or expensive (state sponsored, organized, mechanized warfare). The purpose of war, terrorism, and rebellion is to change policy.

    As Klausewitz said, “War is just politics by other means”.

    PART II – MEDIA

    6) Media is a product that evolved as a means to sell advertising. The purpose of news is to sell product. That product need only be as ‘true’ as it does not harm their ability to sell advertising by associating advertisers with news stories. To sell that news, so that they can sell advertising, they must get your attention. The psychology of attention is a well understood phenomenon. I will not cover it here except to say that the reader must feel righteous – confirmed in his beliefs. During monopoly period, television access was centralized, but during the current period we get our information from television channels that tailor to our moral biases, and we select internet news sources, and information from friends and associates

    7) The media is not warrantied product – we do not warranty it for truth the way that CPA’s must warrant their work for due diligence. Lawyers must warrant their work for due diligence. Witnesses in court must warrant their testimony for diligence. Companies must warrant their products and services for due diligence. Even scientists must warrant their publications for due diligence. But journalism, political speech of public intellectuals, and propaganda are in the category of the few products that is not warranted to be the subject of due diligence, nor are media required to pay restitution for the damages that they cause when they fail due diligence. In our past, we held people accountable for libel, slander and defamation, but allowed dissent as a means of limiting the bad behavior of the government.

    It is quite possible that ‘free speech’ rather than ‘truthful speech’ was a catastrophic mistake in legal history. Truthful speech that causes good, truthful speech that causes harm, and untruthful speech that deceives or causes harm are very different things. There is no reason why we cannot demand that public speech, particularly public speech that is sold as a product in the market, is not warrantied like all other products and services in the market are warrantied by due diligence, and that the manufacturers and distributors of that product are not liable for damages and restitution in the case that they sell defective product.

    8) Propaganda is intentionally defective product, delivered with intent to persuade by deception using rhetorical deceptions including: conflation, loading, framing, overloading, obscurantism, straw-men, and outright lying, for the purpose of obtaining power. The general argument has been that we are all smart enough to dismiss propaganda, but history says that this isn’t true. The various pseudoscientific movements, from marxist ‘scientific socialism’, to Freudian Psychology, to Keynesian economics, the Anthropology of Franz Boas, to the outright fabrications of the Frankfurt School, to the postmodern philosophers, to today’s political correctness, all make use of constant repetition of false statements consisting of various forms of fallacious argument: conflation, loading, framing, obscurantism, straw men, and marxist ‘Critique’ to stimulate our intuitions, and generate confirmation bias, via normative awareness, rather than rational persuasion by truthful means. In other words, its a very complex and innovative form of deception by suggestion, rather than persuasion by reason.

    Propaganda is not warrantied either. If it was, there wouldn’t be any of it. And there is a difference between placebo products,( light therapy,most vitamins) that make you feel better purely psychologically, and products that cause you harm, or justify theft. Most political propaganda seeks to encourage of justifies theft – why not? If you cannot compete in the market, then competing using deception in order to collect rents is often easier. In fact, if we study the evolution of businesses, the most effective strategy is to become large enough that you can seek various rents through limited monopolies. (I can’t link to research on this from my location but it’s available.)

    PART III – THE INFORMATIONAL COMMONS

    10) The Informational Commons”. We treat parks as a commons, we treat the earth, land, and air as a commons, we treat roads, sidewalks, public buildings, and radio spectrum as commons – and most of us treat our traditions myths and rituals as commons, as well as our manners, ethics and morals. We now treat healthcare as a commons. We treat many things as commons. Meaning that we consider ourselves shareholders in some asset that none of us permit one another to consume or destroy but many of us can use as long as we do it no harm, and therefore harm other shareholders.

    The common asset that we regulate most is the market for goods and services. Because we are more dependent upon the market for our health, wealth, and well being than we are upon any other infrastructure. And because it is very easy to lie cheat and steal in that market. We created standard weights and measures, law, contract, guarantee, interest, banking, money, finance, interest. We created minimum warranties. We require truth in labeling. (Although we lose that one all the time and many labels are still deceptive: MSG and various forms of sugar are in everything and both of them are probably equal to Orwell’s ‘Soma’.)

    Aren’t we as dependent upon the informational commons as we are upon the market, norms, roads, air, land and sea?

    So if we can require warranty of all other products in our commons, why can we not require warranty of information distributed in our commons? Why do we need regulators instead of the common law? If we are all shareholders in the commons, why can we not individually or in groups, take individuals, organizations, politicians, and the government bureaucracy to court for damage to that commons.

    The reason is that if truth was required, and if insurance was required, of all products services, and information distributed via the commons for the purpose of profiting my trade, or by political rents and privileges, then it would be very hard for the Cathedral Complex: Academy, Media, and State to sell falsehoods and propaganda.

    Why for example does the Academy not get paid as a percentage of your earnings, rather than selling you education that does not pay off? What would happen if that were the case? That the academy was paid 10% of your 30 year earnings? How would what they teach you change? What if you could sue a university for giving you a bad service?

    Why for example, aren’t public intellectuals required to warranty that their speech is truthful: internally consistent, externally correspondent, existentially possible, free from encouraging theft and fraud, and at least responsibly falsified?

    Why for example, aren’t politicians required to demonstrate strict construction in law, from the initial requirement for property rights and voluntary exchange? Why aren’t laws written as contracts, with expiration dates? Why can we make one law (contract) but the consequent government can break it, and use the money for whatever arbitrary purposes that they wish? Why is it that all money from all taxes is not raised to meet a fixed sum, for a fixed purposes, and finished at the completion of that time?

    Why is it legal for academy, media and state to lie, and pollute our informational commons?

    Isn’t it just legalized fraud?

    PART IV – SCIENCE IS THE LANGUAGE OF TRUTHFUL SPEECH, NOT A METHOD

    We can never know we speak the truth, we can only know that we speak truthfully. And we can only do that if we ourselves apply due diligence to our own thoughts and utterances.

    Scientists do this by what we call the scientific method. But that method is not a method at all. It is a warranty that they have been diligent in their testimony about their observations and theories.

    1) Internally consistent (that it is logical). This warranty requires tests of reason, logic and mathematics.

    2) Externally correspondent (that it corresponds to reality) This warranty requires that we demonstrate that the actions we take, or the measurements we make, or both, correspond to what we say they do.

    3) Operationally Defined (that what we say exists does, and is possible). In science this means that every step in a process is listed, and its measurements captured, so that we know whether real changes in reality are recorded or our imagination of reality is recorded. In economics, politics , accounting, and law, operational definitions require that each transaction (movement) is transparent, audit-able, and open to human perception).

    4) Objectively Moral (that each transfer is rational and voluntary). Under This is particular to law and to economics, where in law, something cannot be legal if it cannot be agreed to, and it cannot be ‘true’ economics if deception is required. This is the complaint about Keyensian ‘dishonest’ economics, both in Monetary/Credit policy, and in Fiscal (Spending) policy: that manipulation of prices of money and credit, constitute ‘lies’ used to motivate business, industry and consumer to spend, and that instead the purpose of economic policy should be to assist us in cooperating truthfully, and voluntarily. The ‘dishonest’ economists are unfortunately, the current mainstream economists, and the ‘honest’ economists are marginalized.

    5) Falsified (even if the above are all true, that we have tried to disprove our theory, our action, by testing if it is possibly erroneous by either of the previous four methods. This gets away from the problem of confirmation bias.

    Truthful speech requires that we testify to having performed due diligence by giving all five warranties on our speech. This is why science has been so productive. This is also why reason, rationalism, and philosophy have been so successfully employed in lying, deception, power accumulation, and theft: philosophers, academics public intellectuals, politicians, propagandists, and media personnel have learned not as the greeks asked us – to tell the truth. But how to lie. And they have become masters of it.

    CLOSING

    It is a very simple problem to fix really: information as a commons, universal standing, warranty of truthful speech, and restitution for damages.

    There is no reason we cannot cooperate truthfully in speech, just as we do in the market.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 12:37:00 UTC

  • should read this article to gain an understanding of the Broken Window strategy

    http://thefreethoughtproject.com/nypd-proving-exist-revenue-generation/You should read this article to gain an understanding of the Broken Window strategy of policing, just as much as to understand that the police are a source of revenue generation. Broken Window works. That’s the problem. It works.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 11:44:00 UTC

  • OPINION IS THAT MAN’S ACTIONS ARE NOISE IN THE SUN’S SIGNAL. “If you look at the

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/MY OPINION IS THAT MAN’S ACTIONS ARE NOISE IN THE SUN’S SIGNAL.

    “If you look at the literature, the specific meaning of the 97% claim is: 97 percent of climate scientists agree that there is a global warming trend and that human beings are the main cause–that is, that we are over 50% responsible. The warming is a whopping 0.8 degrees over the past 150 years, a warming that has tapered off to essentially nothing in the last decade and a half.”

    Thank you Skye Stewart

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 09:01:00 UTC

  • Curt Doolittle shared a post

    Curt Doolittle shared a post.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 08:04:00 UTC

  • JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN CONTRACT VS EXPLORATION (from elsewhere

    JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN CONTRACT VS EXPLORATION

    (from elsewhere)

    James Stevens Valliant :

    Just wanted to say that you argued this topic quite well. And I was trying to think if I could give you any language that would help you in the future.

    You have one position that I think is correct, and one that I think you should consider modifying. First, I agree that knowledge is reconstructed from information, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

    Second is the problem of conflating (a)awareness, (b)risk, (c)truth content, and truth content consist of two additional properties: (c.i)persuasive power, and (c.ii)parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

    The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

    “Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

    –“If you think that knowledge is something other than true belief, then we also strongly differ. For that old fashioned kind of knowledge, contact with reality is required. But at least you know that I know what we normally call “science” already assumes a mountain of knowledge.”–

    So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

    And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

    For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

    For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as awareness, all knowledge theoretical, where theoretical contains both persuasive power in an honest discourse(risk reduction), and truth content( parsimonious correspondence with reality).

    So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality). If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting. In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

    In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility.

    The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

    The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of it epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as practices, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses. Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms is contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society. So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science. This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contracts.

    And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

    As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    NOTE: I have Kenneth blocked for personal attacks in defense of his ideological position, so I can’t see his posts. But I can understand your frustration. There is a reason why people feel they want to externalize responsibility for actions. And there is a long standing tradition of attempting to treat imaginary concepts as existential rather than experiential. And worse, in German, Jewish and Islamic cultures (not Anglo or Sinic) this is an attempt to create authoritarianism by abstracting the existential into the spiritual (metaphysical or platonic world.) So you have to look at such arguments as non logical, non-truthful, but mere justificationary attempts to establish traditional textual authority – something learned from monotheism. I am not really finished with my analysis of suggestion, loading, framing, overloading, conflation, and obscurantism as rationalist means of deception. I think a quick read of Kevin MacDonald’s analysis of the deceptive argumentative technique of Critique is probably very helpful to most – we can trace monotheistic argument, through greek, christian, and enlightenment, german and jewish counter-enlightenment thinkers. But the more I study the problem the more obvious it is that the purpose of science is to eliminate authority and the purpose of rationalism in all its forms, is to construct scriptural authority out of cunning but deceptive arguments. Science uses logic(internal consistency), experiment (external correspondence), operational definitions (existential possibility), falsification (parsimony), to create a testimony that one is speaking truthfully and non-allegorically, and his work is as free of imaginary content, whether it be error, bias, habituated (unconscious) deception or intentional deception – even if we never know if we speak the most parsimonious theory possible.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-10 07:39:00 UTC

  • NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW (followup) Shannon, Thanks for the reply. I have a s

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html#comment-170243ON NATURAL LAW VS POSITIVE LAW

    (followup)

    Shannon,

    Thanks for the reply. I have a sort of job to do, and it is both easier and more educational to criticize those with whom we have small differences, than those whose ideas require vast effort to differentiate and render comparable. This means it is often more illustrative to criticize one’s allies on tertiary points than it is to make long wholesale arguments against direct opponents. So my apologies. But the end is that we must provide conservatives with the means to argue their ancient group evolutionary strategy in ratio-empirical terms, rather than the metaphorical and intuitionistic terms that they are stuck with – and which no conservative thinker has been able to use to elevate conservatism out of the subject of oft justifiable ridicule.

    My objection was three fold – although obscured by my often-criticized philosophical density:

    First, your article positions the choice between divinely ordained, and rationally chosen social contract. However, that I know of, there are three justificationary positions: divinely ordained (magical, authoritative and conservative), logically necessary for voluntary, peaceful, cooperation(scientific, voluntary and libertarian), and socially contractual(preferential, communal and equalitarian-socialist). (Jefferson was certainly not a Deist. Anything but.)

    Second, that if we look at the data, the demographic correlations show that the origins of these different justifications reflect family structures, and family structures reflect agrarian social models (even crops), and that these persist even when immigrants migrate from the old world to the new. (See Emmanuel Todd).

    Third, that the consistent thread throughout history, from the Stoics to the present, through various magian, rational and empirical expressions, does not position natural rights as equivalent to Moses’ tablets (albeit the ten commandments are translatable into an early list of property rights), but instead, that the there is an optimum natural order of things – a ‘divine order’ that we must adhere to as a defense against our hubris, and the hubris of those in power in particular if we are to flourish (cooperate peacefully) and govern beneficially. It so happens that we can capture these rules as property rights: life liberty and property. Or conversely: ‘impose no involuntary costs upon others’.

    So whether we justify that optimum order as god’s will, justify it as rationally or empirically utilitarian, or abandon the prohibition on hubris with positive law (legislative commands), is largely a product of our heritage – a reproductive bias that suits our evolutionary strategy, and which quite possibly exists as a bias in our genes. And while there appears to be little chance of persuading others to change the justification they use for their arguing in favor of their preferences, the entire planet has adopted the language of science as the universal language of truthful speech. And if indeed the only difference between the allegorical and ratio-scientific arguments is the means of justification, then it is in our interests to argue using the universal language of truthful speech, and maintain metaphors for the pedagogy of our offspring for whom such language is inaccessible.

    As such the debate is between the deist(ancient), scientific(modern), and 20th century (postmodern) strategy, and the deist and the scientific both retain the prohibition on hubris, while the postmodern (leftist) abandons it.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use your post as an example. I hope you appreciate my good intentions.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 18:29:00 UTC

  • You can’t use a philosophical model unless you can reduce it to a moral intuitio

    You can’t use a philosophical model unless you can reduce it to a moral intuition. It’s too expensive to rely upon reason.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 06:40:00 UTC

  • TO RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA, IT WAS A SUPRISE

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/world/europe/ukraine-leader-was-defeated-even-before-he-was-ousted.htmlCONTRARY TO RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA, IT WAS A SUPRISE

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 04:27:00 UTC

  • NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW Shannon, No. That isn’t quite right. Natural rig

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.htmlLETS NOT CONFUSE GOD AND NATURAL LAW

    http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/america-is-divided-positive-vs-natural-law.html

    Shannon,

    No. That isn’t quite right.

    Natural rights were conceived as NECESSARY rights governments must respect in order for humans to flourish.

    A benevolent God would not create a world where flourishing was impossible, only a world where we must observe certain rules in order to flourish. But God did not give us the rules to obey, we discovered them by trial and error. If we fail to observe those rules that we have discovered, then we will not flourish.

    A right must be possible, and it must be enforceable or it cannot exist. Natural rights are enforceable by uprising or revolution, and natural rights were enumerated to construct a moral license given to the population by the church to demand from their governments, and prohibitions placed upon the Spanish in particular for their abuses in the new world.

    All rights are reducible to property rights, where property includes mind, body, kin, physical property, common property and norms we have sacrificed to create. All rights then are limited to prohibitions upon others – rights are positive statements of negative prohibitions: things we must NOT do to others, and others must not do unto us. Rights are stated positively so the injured can lay claim against violators. Duties (prohibitions) are stated negatively as prohibitive laws. But whether positively or negatively stated, all rights and duties that are necessary for human flourishing (cooperation produces flourishing through the division of knowledge and labor) can be, and have been expressed as property rights.

    We have constructed positive demands upon one another using commands (legislative law) not natural law (property rights) – no positive duty can exist, only negative restrictions. This is because while we can all refrain from something we cannot all supply something – that is impossible. We cannot grant someone the right to that which individuals do not have to supply him. We can only state a preference that under conditions of possibility that we will exercise that preference.

    So just as legislative commands masquerade as necessary law, positive rights masquerade as necessary rights.

    The charter for human rights consists of all but (I think) three statements of property rights: prohibitions on government violations of individual’s natural rights. The last three ‘positive rights’ were added to mollify the communists at the time so that they would sign the charter. But positive rights are impossible. They are merely ambitions that all governments should strive for.

    The difference between the american right and left is the difference between the absolute nuclear, and nuclear families, and the responsibility for self-sustaining life (prohibition on parasitism) and the traditional and pre-traditional families where parasitism is encouraged both inside the family and across families as a means of insurance.

    The uncomfortable truth is that that difference is between the moral traditions of the productive eugenic nuclear family, and the dysgenic parasitic moral impulses of other forms of family – the majority being now the dramatically parasitic single parent family.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Lviv Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 04:03:00 UTC

  • (worth repeating) —“There is no reason we cannot create a market for (a) the c

    (worth repeating)

    —“There is no reason we cannot create a market for (a) the construction of commons, just as we have created a market for (b) the provision of goods and services, and a ‘market’ for (c)the provision of mates: marriage. But to create a market for the construction of the commons, we must give up on the monopoly of decision making that we gave up under alpha monopoly of reproduction, that we gave up under totalitarian monopoly of organizing agricultural production in the fertile crescent – and now give up on monopoly of production of commons in government.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-09 02:11:00 UTC