Curt Doolittle shared a post.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 15:15:00 UTC
Curt Doolittle shared a post.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 15:15:00 UTC
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/when-should-we-interfere-in-another-countrys-internal-affairs-posner.htmlCONTRA POSNER ON US POLICY
@Posner
This breach of peace is because that lesson has atrophied into a moral conviction expressed as policy.
a) People have the right to self determination.
b) Self determination is limited to good citizenship in the pattern of production and trade.
c) That destabilization of the pattern of production and trade that influences commodities that could encourage warfare is equal to the waging of war against a neighbor.
d) That if a people choose a government that abridges a, b or c, then we, the USA, will punish that government and the citizenry for their poor choices.
We are not a peer nation. We are an empire. We act like an empire. We act like an empire in no small part because we must out of economic self interest, and in no small part, because our main trading, political, and cultural partners, actually WANT us to, so that they can participate in the reconstruction of Europe, after the first world war that destroyed human civilization as we know it, and from which we only begin to emerge in the present decade – albeit over a century behind what might have been.
So, in closing, I’m a little uncomfortable with harkening back to historical reference of equal states, when our empire is run pragmatically for pragmatic purposes, and our policy has been reduced to ideology
Curt Doolittle
THe Propertarian Institute
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 14:41:00 UTC
“The issue today is not communism or socialism versus capitalism; it’s how much regulation of capitalism is optimal. ” – Posner
I DON”T THINK SO
I think the issue today is, regardless of regulation, what norms produce the benefits of capitalism and what norms threaten it.
But then I see the world in decades and centuries so I’m a little more attuned to the long run.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 13:54:00 UTC
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/has-capitalism-revivedsurvived-posner.htmlCHALLENGES TO CAPITALISM
“The major modern challenges to capitalism came not from that or any other depression, but from the two world wars of the twentieth century, without which it is hard to believe that the European nations would have lost their colonies, experienced a great depression (in the 1930s), or (in central and eastern Europe) become communist. Without World War I, it is very doubtful that Russia would have become communist; and without the Soviet conquests in eastern and central Europe in World War II, neither would Poland, Rumania, etc. have become communist.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 13:51:00 UTC
http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2013/09/the-humanities-are-not-your-enemy/THE DISASTER OF POSTMODERNISM: TOTALITARIAN HUMANISM
“Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 12:50:00 UTC
CAUTION TO NEW FRIENDS
Please keep in mind what I do. OK? I write political philosophy. Aristocratic, Conservative, Libertarian philosophy. I use Facebook as an historical sketch pad, where I try ideas out until I get them into compact and digestible form. There are all sorts of benefits to doing this. Not the least of which is that other people get to see how the sausage is made so to speak. But also because the act of speaking in public produces very different work from speaking in private. And when I just ‘write to myself’ in private, its even harder to comprehend the results. 🙂
Thanks for your love and friendship.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 12:31:00 UTC
I am pretty good at critiquing what ‘is’, but I am also pretty bad at critiquing what other people think ‘is’, and I don’t see much value in critiquing what other people prefer ‘is’ unless what they prefer is harmful to others.
The literary critics, and those who conduct an analysis of others works, always impress me. Because I just can’t do it. I can do my thing. But I can’t do their thing.
Why is that so frustrating?
In art school I studied painting primarily because I am bad at it. Which annoys me no end. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 12:07:00 UTC
Hi Curt. Wrote this poem about an experience in Turkey. I am sure you have many things to say about it;)
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 03:08:00 UTC
Jan 01, 1973Place: Canandaigua (city), New York (42.8861, -77.2817)Address: Canandaigua (city), New York
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-23 00:55:00 UTC
PRIOR WARNING TO MY FEMALE FRIENDS
I have to kill off the ideas of Universalism, Postmodernism and Democracy, not morally, but rationally and empirically. In doing so I must criticize feminism and democracy, and some of the emotions that women intuitively hold dear.
Unlike other reactionaries (aggressive conservatives) I don’t recommend returning to the past. Like a libertarian, I recommend freedom. But I also recognize the difference in reproductive strategies and moral sentiments between men and women.
Given that it is no longer necessary for women to be exclusively bound to home and child rearing, and that women both participate in the work force and dominate it’s middle ground, the past arrangement between men and women under agrarian society is no longer necessary even if it were preferable.
GIven this change from a male economy and a female homestead, to a pre-agrarian female homestead, with transitory males, now that he feminists have succeeded in destroying the family, by forcing economic cooperation between men and women via marriage, through the proxy of the state via taxation. It seems prudent to attempt to construct a social order that recognizes the heterogeneity of our interests as males and females.
One thing is deterministically certain. If we the long term monogamous family is indeed a dead or at least marginal institution, the current remnants of family (child support and spousal support) will disappear along with that institution. Largely because large members of men will continue to lack incentive to work and pay taxes, or to signal status by familial conformity. And the increasingly disturbing rate of single mother hood will continue to reduce the majority of women and children into single parent poverty, until the system of redistribution is perceived as not only unfair but destructive, and overwhelms both the tax system, the economy and the political system.
We see this slowly happening now. And the economic luxury we possessed when first the socialists, then the feminists, then the multi-culturalists, banded together, no longer exists and is no longer possible due to the flooding of the world workforce with billions of laborers after the fall of communism and the failure of the socialist project.
So what does this have to do with me? I think it’s possible to take what we have learned from the market and technology and to produce a political order that allows us to cooperate on means even if we have opposing ends.
But in order to make a new idea both understandable, and desirable, I must criticize and show the failure of the existing ideas.
I must criticize it so that I can replace it with something better.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-23 00:50:00 UTC