http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/08/why-a-living-wage-will-not-help-the-economy/SENTIMENTAL ARGUMENT. NOT SUPPORTED BY ANYTHING. BUT I AGREE. AND IF WE CLOSED TH BORDERS I WOULD SUPPORT IT.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-12 04:00:00 UTC
Source: Facebook
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No. I don’t know anything. I just make arguments. Like any other intellectual ma
No. I don’t know anything. I just make arguments. Like any other intellectual makes arguments. We don’t choose whether our arguments are true or not. We try to construct them as honestly as possible, if we are honest with ourselves, and then see wether, like so many experimental products, they survive in the market for criticism. I get a little frustrated with people who assume one moral bias or strategy is preferential to all. I ‘think’ I’m right. But I don’t know. I can just follow the only strategy that seems to work: prosecute a set of ideas until they succeed or fail. The minute you try to persuade an audience rather than test your ideas to see if they fail, you’ve stopped acting as a scientist and started acting as an advocate. It is probably possible to advocate what you think may be true. But the minute you claim you’re right, then, well, that’s not advocacy that’s politics.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-11 16:38:00 UTC
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“Libertarian Moral Diversity Denialism” Increases in wealth under manorialism an
“Libertarian Moral Diversity Denialism”
Increases in wealth under manorialism and the forcible ban on intermarriage, forced a shift from kindreds to lineages, which in turn forced a shift towards nuclear families. As a side effect there was a delay in marriage and reproduction, more assortive mating (romance), the extension of the kin ethic to all potential family members.
Property is inseparable from the nuclear family. Because property gives males control over breeding. You can add women to the economy. You either can add them to the voting pool, OR you can undermine the nuclear family and assortive mating, through child support, alimony, and redistribution. But you can’t do both and keep property rights. Property is the antithesis of the female reproductive strategy. The feminists are right, which is why the feminists and the socialists are allies. Or rather, the feminists give the socialists ethical air cover.
But if women can vote to control their reproduction and at the same time control the productivity of males through political expropriation, then you will NEVER EVER have the institution of private property. EVER.
Property was created by the application of organized violence. It put reproduction in control of the male. And eventually led to eugenic reproduction.
If there is anything that puts a stake in the heart of libertarian hyper-individualism (moral diversity denial) then that’s it.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-11 14:26:00 UTC
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You know, some of us spend all this time tilting at windmills. You can’t even te
You know, some of us spend all this time tilting at windmills. You can’t even tell who is a crank or genius until well after he’s dead. WTH is the point? Really. 🙂
I read up on a few ancestors who were fire breathing Puritans. If you met my Grandfather, you’d think no time had passed since the English civil war. Maybe since the middle ages. Except he knew physics and chemistry. But the personality was the same.
I sit here obsessed with morality and ethics for no reason of my own choosing other than some strange mechanism drives me to.
And you wonder how much of life is in our genes? I don’t.
I don’t think I’m much different from that man 400 years ago. And I kind of doubt that he was much different from the man 400 years before him. Or the one two hundred years before him. A thousand years of genes doing the same thing. And if we met we’d recognize the same traits in one another.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-11 10:44:00 UTC
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LANGUAGE CHANGES TO REFLECT OUR CHOICE OF SPATIAL FREEDOM : BY OURSELVES AND UNH
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/changes-in-language-reflect-our-247626.aspxOUR LANGUAGE CHANGES TO REFLECT OUR CHOICE OF SPATIAL FREEDOM : BY OURSELVES AND UNHAPPY ABOUT IT.
“a gradual rise in the use of “feel” and a decline in the use of “act,” suggesting a turn toward inner mental life and away from outward behavior. She found a growing focus on the self, with the use of “child,” “unique,” “individual” and “self” all increasing from 1800 to 2000.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-09 10:51:00 UTC
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RATS? Food chain funnies
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/08/the-animals-are-also-getting-fat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29FAT RATS?
Food chain funnies
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-08 13:26:00 UTC
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INFINITY Out of the three possible definitions of infinity that i can understand
INFINITY
Out of the three possible definitions of infinity that i can understand today, I am going to choose to define infinity as the point at which the last marginally different value is followed by a marginally indifferent different value. Ie the first marginally indifferent value. More simply as the smallest unit which would affect change in state. Or as stated traditionally as a “limit.”
This definition does not require we stipulate any platonic infinity. It simply states that the value is unknown, and for our purposes indifferent to the calculation.
In practice, this is the operational definition as applied in practice in scientific experiment and argument.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-08 09:06:00 UTC
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Capitalism is necessary. That does not mean it is sufficient. And sufficient doe
Capitalism is necessary. That does not mean it is sufficient. And sufficient does not mean preferable. And preferences are not universal.
My political argument is that human beings are generous to kin. And that states must be small enough to function as kin even if kinship is merely cultural.
Redistribution without dicatorship requires multiple competing societies. Because in-group diversity of normative preference is a bad thing for any group. Because it causes people to restrict their domain of kinship trust.
I am against a redistributive society wherin we are forced into conflict oner norms rather than voluntarily join a society with the norms we prefer.
And a society i agree with i will sacrifice for. And kinship is the society we evolved to sacrifice for.
The only value of large states is cultural, economic and military conquest of those who differ both in and out if its boundaries.
Its Not complicated.
Small is good.
Family is good.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-07 11:34:00 UTC
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How does cancer change you? In many ways, for the good. Although, not everyone a
How does cancer change you?
In many ways, for the good. Although, not everyone around you might agree. It takes a while, and we all feel it differently, but something we all share is an increased appreciation for every day. And, frustratingly for others, a little more intolerance for wasting time on things we don’t want to.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-06 18:16:00 UTC
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TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism,
TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT
In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism, and possibly put at least one nail in the coffin of Postmodern thought, Ive come up with two avenues of argument :
1) Operational language: Operational language (action) forces us to distinguish between platonic and real. The moment something must be described as actions, it becomes scientific. If it is not described as actions, and observable actions, then it’s not. It’s fantasy. (Platonic)
2) Ethics: I am pretty sure the requirement to speak in operational language is not a matter of ‘truth’ but of ‘ethics’. In other words, its unethical not to speak in operational language, precisely because it allows us to confuse the platonic and the real. This approach is consistent with the ETHICAL constraint libertarians demonstrate as a preference: the visibility of voluntary and involuntary transfers.
It is much easier to argue using BOTH of these lines of argument at the same time. Mathematical and logical platonists can have their cake imaginary cake, but they can’t actually eat it. Because if you use mathematical and logical platonism to cross the line into economics and politics, you’re now a crook. Worse, you’re advocating thievery.
In this case, the first platonic argument that I want to kill off is the constraint that ‘magical numbers’ (infinity) and magical sets ‘infinite sets’, place constraints on theories. (They don’t) Semantic ally meaningful combinations open to sympathetic testing are very low in number. And as I’ve said elsewhere, our problem in the construction of theories is one of words, but cognitive bias, instrumentation and measurement.
Kenneth Allen Hopf has helped me with this argument, by positioning Popper’s advice as moral, or perhaps more narrowly, ethical. Just as, I would argue, is Nassim Taleb’s improvement on Popper, and Poincaire, and perhaps those of Mandelbrot as well.
This school of thought is called ‘finitism’ in mathematics. The finitist movement stalled with Russell, Cantor and set theory, at which point it became impossible without using operational language, to prove finitism. So mathematical and set theory today is platonic. Most mathematicians and logisticians are platonists.
Of course, I’m working on moral and ethical theory, because any political system must rely upon some ethical basis, or it’s not logical to discuss ‘politics’ (persuasion) – it’s just engineering of human beings as if they’re cattle.
Source date (UTC): 2013-08-06 14:07:00 UTC