Source: Facebook

  • WERE THE CONSERVATIVES RIGHT ALL ALONG? (interesting) We cannot, like mathematic

    WERE THE CONSERVATIVES RIGHT ALL ALONG?

    (interesting)

    We cannot, like mathematicians tried to do, define something into existence. We can define rules of deduction, but not define something into existence. Truth consists of correspondence and cause, not definition. Definitions are our choice. Truth is not. That is the entire purpose of ‘truth’ – that which we cannot choose.

    So, if instead of some artificial scheme, we understand that PROPERTY is nothing but what remains, after we suppress all possible DISCOUNTS, by every means possible. Then, does that mean that the conservatives were right all along?

    That, since discounts, as a spectrum, are suppressible by a spectrum of actions which include the organized threat of violence, ostracization, boycott, reduction of opportunity, and the consequential limits on consumption, then the conservatives, correctly value NORMATIVE CONFORMITY TO SUPPRESSION OF DISCOUNTS, and that the model of property articulated by rothbard, taken as it was from the low trust society he was familiar with,

    In effect, Rothbard’s ethics are an attempt to preserve ‘cheating’ as a viable means of profiting from others, whereas conservative, aristocratic, ‘high trust’ ethics are an effort to suppress ALL cheating. Rothbard masks this cheating by stating that competition will suppress such cheating. But empirically, and praxeologically, this is demonstrably and logically false. So what are we left with no possible conclusion that either he committed a significant error or, that Rothbard’s ethics are an attempt, intentionally, to preserve cheating: which is precisely what the left correctly argues – albeit in their amateurish terms.

    The formation of a government, which is a monopoly that suppresses violence and theft, and then by taxation, suppresses free riding on the government’s suppression of violence, then, as a consequence, because of its monopoly, only displaces free riding with rents.

    The formal question remains the same, which is that rule of law, or liberty, is a prohibition on discretionary compulsion, but is only possible by the prohibition of all discounts. And the only possible means of both suppressing discounts, and preventing the conversion of free riding into rents, is to rely on competition for the suppression of these discounts.

    That is, I think, the fundamental equilibrial analysis of political order.

    The sequence is:

    1) Suppression of discounts results in property rights.

    2) Property rights lead to the division of labor, and prosperity.

    3) Property (capital) and prosperity lead to greater opportunity for discounts.

    4) The cost of suppressing discounts increases demand for specialized suppression.

    5) The specialized suppressing discounts leads to free riding (fee avoidance)

    6) The specialized suppression of free riding (taxation) leads to opportunity for rent seeking.

    7) Opportunity for rent seeking leads to bureaucracy.

    8) Bureaucracy leads to subjugation and expropriation.

    9) Expropriation leads to circumvention (Religiosity, black markets, tax evasion, nullification, secession and revolt and revolution)

    10 (fragmentation)

    The only solution is rule of law: no state, merely laws, and judges who resolve disputes. Governments must be local and under direct democracy. Everything else provided competing firms.

    CHEERS


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-07 06:54:00 UTC

  • MAYBE, THAT LIBERTY COMES OUT OF THE BARREL OF A GUN True, maybe that libertaria

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/search/label/libertarianismTRUE MAYBE, THAT LIBERTY COMES OUT OF THE BARREL OF A GUN

    True, maybe that libertarianism is applied autism.

    That doesn’t change the fact that conservatives just aren’t terribly intellectual. And if you’re a conservative intellectual, its pretty hard not to work with the libertarians.

    So, how does one, build an intellectual movement in the conservative river of discourse? I gotta tell you that I don’t believe you can. Mencius did a pretty good job, but honestly, it’s hard to find a even a libertarian that can understand anything terribly complicated.

    And it’s impossible to find a conservative.

    And that’s exasperating.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 17:42:00 UTC

  • THOUGHTS ON TRUTH THE TWO QUESTIONS OF MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY –“If you ask a p

    https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/philosophy.htmlMORE THOUGHTS ON TRUTH

    THE TWO QUESTIONS OF MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY

    –“If you ask a philosopher what the main problems are in the philosophy of mathematics, then the following two are likely to come up: what is the status of mathematical truth, and what is the nature of mathematical objects? That is, what gives mathematical statements their aura of infallibility, and what on earth are these statements about ?” —

    ON THE PAPER

    Nothing new or interesting. I still can’t figure out if the problem of what mathematicians consider ‘arbitrary precision’ is one that they are conscious of or not. (Correspondence and utility in context. )

    What I can tell you is that mathematicians do not define truth, that philosophers do. Conversely, the craft of math requires a language for the production of proofs that humans can manipulate symbolically. Just like we need language that humans can speak and use, not language which would be more ‘true’.

    However, if at some point we want to test whether our mathematics or our language is in fact ‘true’ – in that whatever content we construct corresponds to reality – we must be able to express it in operational language. If we cannot, then it is not in fact ‘true’. I can tell a story about a fantasy world with a certain form of gravity. I can write a proof using certain assumptions. However, these cannot correspond to reality, and therefore, can be consistent with their definitions (internally consistent) but they cannot ever be ‘true’ (correspondent).

    This is important otherwise truth has no meaning, and reality is indistinguishable from dream.

    More later.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 16:54:00 UTC

  • ON UKRAINIAN HOLODOMOR (via peter meyers) (Note: I do not know the history of th

    http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/05/26/holocaust-holodomor-origins-of-anti-semiMORE ON UKRAINIAN HOLODOMOR

    (via peter meyers)

    (Note: I do not know the history of this region, or its conflicts like I do the larger empires.)


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 16:19:00 UTC

  • HOPPE’S STRATEGIC GENIUS –“For China, it would be a clever move to back the yua

    HOPPE’S STRATEGIC GENIUS

    –“For China, it would be a clever move to back the yuan with gold in order to push the dollar from the throne. With yuan backed by gold, the days of America’s economic dominance and the dollar would be numbered. The West will therefore do everything possible to prevent this.–

    What can we do to encourage it????

    One world government is the ultimate tyranny. My fantasy is to disempower the US military’s world dominance so that it retrenches to north america, sea and air, and to force europe to defend itself, and encourage russia to ally with germany, and foster the breakup of the USA into regional entities.

    China can make this happen.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:56:00 UTC

  • THE JOY OF MATH (rumination) My long term business partner Jim was a math guy. W

    THE JOY OF MATH

    (rumination)

    My long term business partner Jim was a math guy. Worked at JPL. That kind of thing. Loves numbers the way I love philosophy.

    Math is an endlessly fascinating puzzle. I prefer to solve problems instead of puzzles. In fact, because of a deliberate choice in college, I intentionally eschewed all puzzles as ‘character flaws’.

    The difference between puzzles and problems is whether the outcome causes material benefit or harm in real time. And that’s partly because you know that puzzles are solvable, and that problems often are not. So you know if you stick with a puzzle it can be solved. But with a problem, you are working against a clock that will run out, and you don’t know in advance that it can be solved.

    But that that doesn’t mean that I’m not easily seduced by puzzles. A video game, or a computer game, is a puzzle, not a problem. Puzzles are entertaining.

    Jim used to say that he couldn’t get too interested in math because it was just such an entertaining puzzle, but it didn’t produce anything. And in the end it wasn’t a good use of his time.

    It’s like crack. Puzzles really are like crack – addictive. And I’m getting that feeling again, working on this rather strange little problem of philosophy. Math is the nerd’s equivalent of world of warcraft, and it may be the ultimate game of world of warcraft – how do we create deductions of all possible relations? It’s fascinating. Is it possible to create a description of all possible relations (a proof)? I don’t see why not. There may not be a route from every position in every field to every other position in every other field; but their might be, and I can’t understand, even if circuitously how their couldn’t be. I mean, maths is just an enormous truth table.

    And intuitively I would much rather solve a puzzle. The reason being that all the information needed to solve the puzzle is present. I don’t have to go out and perform empirical tests to guarantee what I sense and what I record are causally related. In math the study of pure relations, independent of time, and under formalism, independent of correspondence and context, I don’t have to concern myself with the cost of tests, the passage of time, or contextual constraints on relations OTHER than whether I can construct a proof (deduction) for those relations.

    But it’s incredibly interesting. And just like suppressing the desire to play videogames, I feel like I have to suppress my desire to play with math. Not because it’s unimportant, but because in the division of labor, my particular craft is not pure relations, but those actions which result in the possible and preferable cooperation between individuals and groups in increasingly great numbers.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:43:00 UTC

  • DIFFERENCES (quotes from ukrainian women) “Judge a woman by her feelings, judge

    DIFFERENCES

    (quotes from ukrainian women)

    “Judge a woman by her feelings, judge a man by his behavior.”

    “A woman needs four hours, and man needs two days. Women think about everything at once. A man thinks about one thing at a time.”

    “Feminism for Ukrainian women is.. ‘We are the same. I am woman. If you want relationship you must work for it.’

    (I translate this roughly as “Men are not above us. We are free. We can live without you. We have dignity. The choice is ours. So if you want us, we expect you to earn us.” And that is a game men actually love to play.)

    THE MATING THING IS SO FREAKING AWESOME WHEN YOU DON”T FIGHT IT.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 08:14:00 UTC

  • DRIVING FATALITIES AS AN INDEX OF TRUST (more on notoriously bad russian and ukr

    DRIVING FATALITIES AS AN INDEX OF TRUST

    (more on notoriously bad russian and ukrainian drivers)

    British drivers, after swedish drivers, are some of the best drivers in the world. Because they follow the rules. And rules and costs keep people off the road.

    American’s are not such good drivers. They are about average. America is big (like russia) and cars are a necessity, and rules and costs encourage people to be the road. Russian size, rules and cost likewise encourage people to be on the road.

    However, data is data is data. Russians and Ukrainians are disproportionately bad drivers.

    Russians (and ukrainians) do not adhere to ‘unnecessary rules’. Something which other authors have called ‘rules of low probability’. This is common the further east you go.

    My suspicion is that it is a trust measure. High trust societies are more aware of, cooperative with, forgiving of, and tolerant of minor errors on the part of their fellows.

    Reasons For Russian Driving Statistics

    (a) excessive cultural machismo (which I personally love)

    (b) lower observance of (probabilistic) rules,

    (c) lower attention to the road – phones etc

    (d) lots and lots of alcohol use

    (e) Poorer quality roads, signage, and design.

    (f) lower quality vehicles (less forgiving vehicles)

    In the muslim countries we have less observance of rules, higher speeds and machismo, and … very low IQ’s.

    Native American indians are interestingly terrible drivers, at nearly three times the black/white/hispanic fatalities. Theory is that this is alcohol driven. No way to know. Good spatial perception, but low IQ. But, gIven the disparities in IQ between whites, blacks and hispanics, and the high availability, and high use of vehicles, it’s pretty clear that driving is not an IQ problem. It appears that higher IQ countries are able to develop high trust more easily.

    The question is why is eastern (byzantine) europe (and russia) a low trust culture – lower than southern europe, and nearly as low trust as in islamic countries, if not as low trust as tribal countries in Africa.

    BAD DRIVING IS A LOW-TRUST PROBLEM

    That’s pretty interesting. We can measure social trust by driving fatalities, rather than surveys. But interestingly enough, surveys correlate driving fatalities (mostly).

    What I find most interesting here, is that while they disregard the rules and assume all other drivers are likely idiots or drunkards, they are as easily helpful to people in duress as americans.

    I like people here better. Period. in my view, they pay more attention to each other than to rules. Americans (And most western europeans) signal with their adherence to rules.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-06 05:21:00 UTC

  • RUSSIAN DRIVERS 1) “You can actually see the answer in most videos posted on You

    RUSSIAN DRIVERS

    1) “You can actually see the answer in most videos posted on YouTube. It’s the complete disregard for all traffic rules.”

    2) “Russian cultural bias to ‘go with your gut’ rather than follow the rules.”

    3) “Russian fatalities are not much above the world average.”


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 20:51:00 UTC

  • Rothbardian ethics preserve the ability to ‘cheat’ by all but violence and the c

    Rothbardian ethics preserve the ability to ‘cheat’ by all but violence and the crudest of frauds – and rothbard supports that preservation with the argument that the market will naturally suppress that cheating. However, transaction costs alone, ensure that such suppression can’t occur. And that’s before we add in the remaining external costs of low trust.


    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 18:52:00 UTC