BTC: A GOLDEN CALF
I’m begin to see Bitcoin as a libertarian golden calf.
—
(Maybe I need to go find a bush, set it afire, and pull out some rhetorical tablets. But nah… people hate it when you expose their gods.)
(Sigh.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 08:49:00 UTC
THREE WEAPONS OF INFLUENCE
1. OSTRACIZE(SHAME), 2. BUY(COMPENSATE), 3.FORCE(THREATEN)
We have spent a century shaming them.
We have spent three quarters of a century trying to buy them.
And neither has worked. They redefined morality with Postmodernism. And our efforts to buy them off only encouraged them.
The only remaining choice is to threaten them. To harm them. To kill them if necessary.
Violence is the source, and sustenance, of private property rights.
Use it or lose them.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 07:32:00 UTC
MORAL CAPITAL, ECONOMICS, CONSUMPTION
(a table)(insight)
The Long Term – The Medium Term – The Short Term
Conservatives…- Libertarians ……….- Progressives
Moral Capital….- Productive Capital.- Consumption
The Tribe……….- The Family…………- The Offspring
Militia……………- Industry…………….- Services
Law……………… – Trade……………….- Religion
Force…………… – Remuneration……- Words (shame)
Male……………..- Neutral……………..- Female
Order……………- Wealth……………..- Care-taking
Warrior………….- Merchant…………..- Mother
THE INTER-TEMPORAL DIVISION OF LABOR
We aren’t engaged in a dialectic, but a tri-alectic, between the production cycles of the tribe, the family, and the child.
WE ARE A LOT CLOSER TO ANTS AND BEES THAN WE ADMIT.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 06:12:00 UTC
DRAMATIC VIDEO OF SUNDAY’S PROTEST
(this is how it’s done right)
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 05:59:00 UTC
SOCIAL CAPITAL : THE CONSERVATIVES : HOMOGENEITY=TRUST
The conservative vision of man, is that he is a wild beast that must be tamed through constant training, and adhere to social structures that encourage his good behavior – particularly marriage. In the Mormon community for example, I have often heard is “An unmarried male between 17 and 22 is a threat to society.”
But this is incorrect really. It’s the negative statement, not the positive. The positive is provided by Fukuyama (better than all others I think) “..shared norms or values that promote social cooperation, instantiated in actual social relationships..”
Again, that’s still distracting, because it doesn’t address the behavioral issue that they mean to develop: TRUST. Social capital is the set of shared norms, values, habits, traditions that facilitate cooperation by increasing TRUST. Trust meaning predictability of taking risk with persons outside of your family group, without fear of loss attributable to one party taking advantage of the other through deception (fraud, lying) or asymmetry of information (fraud by omission).
The west is a high-trust society. It is actually the ONLY high trust society. It is so because westerners have outbred (protestants at least) such that they actually were an extended family, with very rigid norms, and as such adaptation to norms demonstrated trustworthiness and avoidance of them untrustworthiness.
There is nothing different about trust in any given society other than how far it extends outside the family.
SO, conservatives, although they cannot articulated it, are constantly engaged in the process of fighting to maintain the homogeneity of the absolute nuclear family, and a set of conformative rules around the absolute nuclear family, and particularly prevention of free riding and cheating, because these ‘bad behaviors’ reduce trust and the ability to form dynamic and frictionless relationships for cooperation and mutual benefit.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 05:39:00 UTC
SHAVED MY BEARD : VERONICA WON”T KISS ME
(silly)
I do it once or twice a year, and it lasts for a couple of days. So, if I keep it like 2mm long it’s ok. Longer than that she complains that it hurts. And when I shave it off, she complains that I don’t look like the same man, and so she won’t kiss me.
I think it’s just that she doesn’t want to kiss me at all. lol
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 05:09:00 UTC
MORAL CAPITAL, ECONOMICS, CONSUMPTION
You know the problem is that conservatives are economically illiterate so that you can’t really use libertarian reasoning when talking to them. They focus on moral capital, we focus on economics, and the left focuses on consumption.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 04:55:00 UTC
MINIMUM WAGE LAWS ARE EUGENIC
I just became a fan of high minimum wages. Immigration isn’t really very useful if low wage jobs are forced into the black market, and unskilled labor can’t find ANY work.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 04:49:00 UTC
GET AWAY WITH WHATEVER WE CAN WHILE WE CAN.
The progressive economic and political strategy.
(eh… we’ll fix it later.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 04:27:00 UTC
UKRAINIAN DEFAULT
“In order to prevent a default, someone is going to have to give Ukraine a bunch of money.
It seems small minded to worry about dollars and cents in a revolution-like scenario, but Ukraine’s economy is a shambles and is only going to get worse in the short term. Even with the ongoing chaos in Kiev, Yanukovych recently took a trip to China to sign some trade agreements and to try to arrange a desperately needed short-term injection of cash. That a president would leave while his government did not fully control the capital city should give some indication as to just how dire the situation is.
However the China deal, while helpful, won’t be sufficient for Ukraine’s short and medium-term financing needs. Some entity (the EU, the IMF , or Russia) is going to need to provide Ukraine with a sizable amount of financing, but there are obvious political constraints that bind each actor. The EU won’t help Yanukovych so long as he stalls on the association agreement, the IMF is unlikely to help unless the Ukrainian government promises to get serious about economic reform, and the Russians won’t pay a dime unless Ukraine fully scuttles any talk of an association agreement with the EU. I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly how this would play out, but this is one of the most important questions facing Ukraine at the moment and it seems as if it’s being almost entirely ignored by most media coverage.”
– Forbes
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-09 18:23:00 UTC