AFFECTION?
Veronica says “I love you, Doolittle. That’s why you’re still alive.”
Not sure I know what to do with that. 😉
Isn’t facebook great for sharing silly things?
Life is awesome.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 16:04:00 UTC
AFFECTION?
Veronica says “I love you, Doolittle. That’s why you’re still alive.”
Not sure I know what to do with that. 😉
Isn’t facebook great for sharing silly things?
Life is awesome.
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 16:04:00 UTC
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT AND ACCURATE
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 10:21:00 UTC
CONSERVATISM AND THE ANIMAL “RIGHTS” MOVEMENT
(chapter excerpt)
Conservative view of man’s relation to nature is heroic:
That nature is ours to modify for our benefit.
That nature is capricious and something we must pacify for our safety.
That the purpose of man’s life is to leave the world better for having lived in it.
This is an heroic view of man that is as ancient as the indo-european peoples.
Meaning:
(a) animals do not have ‘rights’ – this is an absurdity – they are not human. In conservatism (which means “european aristocratic egalitarianism”). Even humans must ‘earn’ rights – which is why we take them away if they misbehave. Animals can’t earn rights. (perhaps dogs to some minor degree.)
(b) that we should care for animals because we desire to, because our world is better to live in if we have them. True. This is the logical reasoning, not ‘rights’.
(c) that disregard for animals that we have normatively chosen to care for, and which are under our control,
(d) that laziness in caring for animals is likely laziness in caring for people. True.
(e) that cruelty to animals is likely cruelty to humans – and therefore you are unfit to live among humans. True.
Unfortunately, this is an argument to NORMS: demonstrating the human character necessary to possess ‘rights’. Conservatives place extremely high value on norms. Progressives do not. The progressive movement is largely an attack on conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) norms. And the progressive movement has managed to, at least in education and other major areas of life, discredit norms. And therefore the progressive movement has lost the ability to market policy that requires adherence to norms. And therefore has, out of necessity, used the specious argument of ‘rights’, because it is the only means of justifying legal action that they have available to them.
Of course, what may not be obvious is that:
(a) it is not possible for animals to possess rights – a right is something that can be reciprocally granted and animals cannot conceive of this (except perhaps for domesticated dogs..)
(b) that the word “right” is an attempt to load, or frame, animals anthropomorphically. in order to misrepresent the normative utility of protecting animals as a resource, as one open to legal rather than normative control. In other words, it’s common marketing fraud.
(c) that caretaking, even anthropomorpized caretaking, provides women with oxcytocin reactions, and that many females are addicted to this reaction. It is not rational. It is drug addiction. It’s just relatively harmless drug addiction. So our political policy is being driven by logically confused drug addicts using a deceptive marketing campaign, not reason. In which case we would simply sell off the management of wild animals to private firms who would specialize in it and figure out how to make it profitable (the way we have with deer hunting in america).
(d) that the female psyche evolved, and cooperation evolved, as a means of controlling alphas by gossip, complaint and excitement, to motivate the non-alpha males to organize against, and punish or kill the alphas, so that the females could control their own breeding rather than be the mere victims of alphas. And that there is a significant correlation between the female members of the animal rights movement and their reproductive status.
(e) That the anti-fur movement is absurd, and counter to the benefit of animals and man. It is a renewable resource. It encourages the protection of the species. It is inexpensive. It is excellent protection against the cold, and it’s beautiful. This same argument applies to hunting. And to wild animals. Because if wild animals were ‘owned’ rather than a ‘commons’ owners would protect them far better than governments do – just like we do with domesticated animals.
This is a fairly damning critique of REASONING USED by the animal rights movement. It is not however a critique of the conservative normative proscription.
The conservative (aristocratic egalitarian) proscription is that if you do not care for animals as if they are the commons that they are, and a commons that we have assumed responsibilty for from nature, that you have not EARNED the right from other humans to administer that commons on their behalf, and therefore they will withdraw your rights, which they reciprocally grant you, because you are unfit to live with rights, among others, who have them.
Conservatives are rational but their moral code is ancient and they speak of it in metaphorical terms not suitable for an era where scientific language has all but replaced metaphor. And this is why I write philosophy – to repair conservatism (aristocratic egalitarianism) by articulating it rationally.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 02:57:00 UTC
RELATIONSHIPS:
HUMOR (STORY OF MY LIFE RIGHT HERE)
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-28 13:30:00 UTC
Just had to show the opposing iconography. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-28 02:55:00 UTC
OK. I REMEMBER LAST NIGHT. REALLY.
Wanted to celebrate getting the first draft of the book done. And we hadn’t been out in two weeks.
Most of my repertoire is hard rock and grunge, which are much less popular to start with – so pickings are slimmer here. But a little Nirvana always gets applause.
We managed to get Kirill into a taxi, although he wanted to sing some song about a grandmother smoking a pipe like Louis Armstrong again. His Rap in Russian is recording quality. It moves him.
I left Alex in a bar surrounded by women – mostly ’cause he was willing to buy them drinks.
Walking home, I noticed it was dawn.
Slept most of the day.
Wrote some.
Perfect.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-27 17:41:00 UTC
TRUE NERD HUMOR (SURVEY)
(from email today)
—–
Mr Doolittle. We are conducting a brief survey. …. What are the things that trouble you most during the work day?
Amir
—–
Mr Amir,
Two things trouble me.
1) The natural incentives held by human beings are self interest and the conservation of energy, so that energy is reserved for what gives them pleasure. And the effort required to focus their energies on the work at hand sufficiently that all members of the group are able to produce a competitive advantage in a product or service in the same time period using the same resources, as other groups at competitors, is counter to their nature and physically and mentally daunting. Therefore work, must be, as well as possible, constructed as a game, the process of which provides entertainment as the way to provide incentives to produce competitive results. However, constructing such a game, requires that we do not create even greater incentives to produce even less visible free-riding, rent seeking, and what we would call ‘corruption’ than whatever disciplinary and reward structure we use at present to facilitate their productivity. It is this primary problem that I try to solve during my day.
2) The primary purpose of any executive is to allocate scarce capital such that the productivity of people and resources, reduces the scarcity of capital, without at any moment, running entirely out of capital.
These are the two things that trouble me.
Curt Doolittle
LAUGHING.
NERD HUMOR.
{hit send}
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-27 16:41:00 UTC
(From Another Thread:
Very Meaningful Ideas in this post)
DEMOCRATIC SECULAR HUMANISM IS A RELIGION
It is based upon false premises, and counter to observable fact.
It is no less mystical or absurd than an omniscient omnipotent, artificial deity.
It’s purpose is to accumulate power.
IT IS A WAR ON AN OLD RELIGION BY A NEW RELIGION.
The equality of man, the relativity of values, the irrelevance of norms, the equality of cultures, the permanence that technical innovation will ‘save us’, and a dozen other mythos, attribute untrue properties to man and society, in an effort to cast the extended order of human cooperation and competition as an extended family.
Humans do not act in this way. Even practitioners of the religion do not act this way. If they did, they would tolerate the old religion. But they don’t. And, in fact, they only tolerate any religion with lower status signals than their religion.
TRADING THE HIGH TRUST SOCIETY FOR FALSE, FREE STATUS SIGNALS
And those free status signals are the ‘psychological device’ that provides the incentive for adopting the new democratic religion, rather than the old religion’s promise of life after death.
This is the technological innovation of democratic secular humanism: it has replaced false promise of afterlife, true status signals, true suppositions about human nature, and true economic principles, with false status signals, false suppositions about human nature, and false economic principles.
The net of this new religion has been the destruction of the nuclear family and a the slow regression away from the high trust society that the west built by local outbreeding over more than a thousand years.
Because trust in *kindness*, which is an emotionally loaded term for the human need for acceptance and positive status signals, is counterproductive to the economic requirement for trust in trade and contract. [IDEA: positive signals for mere existence versus positive signals for economic action.]
The innovation of the west that allowed it to create greater relative wealth at lower rates of corruption, and to tolerate higher risk and innovation, finally consumer credit, was the high trust society. And we can demonstrate empirically that increases in diversity of norms and culture, even race, cause accelerating decreases in trust. Our governmental conflict is just an expression of this difference.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to create a civic religion without status signals. Humans value status more than money. No civic religion will ever exist that does not. However, the question is, what actions do those signals produce in the real world?
SIGNALS OF TRUST
Absolute respect for the commons and private property, Competition, Individualism, the nuclear family, truth telling, adherence to contract, and conformity to commercial norms, were innovations adopted by the western cultures under manorialism (feudalism), as people sought to demonstrate that they were fit to rent land. Males embraced chivalry because it allowed them to achieve status signals without fighting, and in turn, it allowed them to achieve status through service. Further it did not require extraordinary wealth to do services, as did fighting.
That it takes a long time to change signaling strategies once the capture of fossile fuels permits industrialization, therefore freeing the woman from the drudgery of the home and the man from teh drudgery of the field, and gives us enough free wealth and time to afford to educate our young is certainly good reason to extend property rights to women, and to extend political enfranchise to all consumers and laborers. This is true.
But the practical reality is our goods and services may be cheaper and the least of us we may live better than nobility of the past, but that does not change the reality that we are vastly unequal in temperament and ability, and most of us require extraordinary training and reinforcement by others to maintain the high trust society that we buit by accident was counter to intuition and behaviorally expensive to maintain. People universally demonstrate a preference for the benefits of material productivity. Always. Yet they long for the behavior of the tribe and family, despite universal and inescapable tribal poverty, and despite universal and inescapable low trust in family-dominated, in-breeding-in-extended family societies.
Be careful what you wish for. You’re getting it.
Progressive ideology is a longing for a return to the tribe. It is cheap false status signals that produce negative economic consequences. Cultures are empirically demonstrable to be unequal, and democracy only works in the west because the west started out as aristocratic. Without western culture the west will be like every other barbaric low trust civilization on the planet.
Progressive ideology is to the west what christianity was to rome. There is no difference.
It is mysticism in different robes.
-Curt
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-25 02:07:00 UTC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PropertarianismWIKI! – Wikipedia Entry on Propertarianism
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 13:50:00 UTC
http://darussophile.com/about/
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-24 13:23:00 UTC