Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • PAINFUL TRUTH. IT’S NOT RACISM. IT’S REALITY

    PAINFUL TRUTH. IT’S NOT RACISM. IT’S REALITY.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 23:27:00 UTC

  • PAJAMA PARTY? No kidding. Today, two women who barely know me invited me to a pa

    PAJAMA PARTY?

    No kidding. Today, two women who barely know me invited me to a pajama party. (!?)

    Is this really my life?

    I love this country. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 14:35:00 UTC

  • LIBERTY IS NOT A PACIFIST PURSUIT I’m not sure but I suspect that the disconnect

    LIBERTY IS NOT A PACIFIST PURSUIT

    I’m not sure but I suspect that the disconnect between liberty and violence was initiated FIRST by the enlightenment need to justify the taking of power from the landed nobility, and SECOND, by the need for women to justify obtaining the right to vote.

    (Reposted from another comment that I’ve posted elsewhere:)

    Liberty isnt’ ‘inherent’. Liberty is created by force and held by force. And no people without an armed militia to obtain and hold liberty by violence has even had liberty.

    Property is ‘inherent’ in the sense that it’s necessary for complex economic production, and it’s ‘inherent’ in that the mind is organized to make use of it.

    But liberty, which is defined as the universal prohibition on the involuntary transfer of property, is a construct made by and held by the will to use violence. Just as every other form of property is made by and held by the will to use violence.

    Liberty, as in, private property, is unnatural to man. That’s why it doesn’t exist outside of a few cases in western history. Those who are unproductive will always make claims against the productive by claiming that their resources or their labors are a commons.

    Liberty has nothing to do with pacifism. Liberty produces peace because conflict must be resolved in the market, rather than by fraud or violence.

    Pacifist libertarianism is not only illogical, and counter to the evidence, but it’s suicidal.

    Don’t buy into the christian nonsense in libertarian theory. Or rothbard’s jewish nonsense. Both are appeals by the week to a non-existant divinity.

    Liberty is created by man. Liberty is a product of the application of violence. It always has been and it always will be.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 11:38:00 UTC

  • Property: “..the three [necessary] elements of private property are: (1) exclusi

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/armen-alchian.htmlPrivate Property: “..the three [necessary] elements of private property are:

    (1) exclusivity of rights to choose the use of a resource,

    (2) exclusivity of rights to the services of a resource, and

    (3) rights to exchange the resource at mutually agreeable terms.”

    (We libertarians tend to say that Private property is a monopoly on the use of the self, those things that are homesteaded, or which are obtained by voluntary exchange.)

    The Third Law of Demand: (Shipping Out The Good Apples): “…when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is true because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.”

    (For those who don’t know the three laws of Demand, here are 1 and 2.)

    The Second Law Of Demand: (Price Elasticity Over Time) “…demand is more responsive to price in the long run than in the short run.”

    The First Law Of Demand: (Supply vs Demand) : “..all else being equal, as the price of a product increases, a lower quantity will be demanded; likewise, as the price of a product decreases, a higher quantity will be demanded.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-20 02:32:00 UTC

  • MUCH MEDICINE?

    http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-in-half/TOO MUCH MEDICINE?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-18 16:15:00 UTC

  • GIVING BIRTH TO SOFTWARE It’s so rewarding. It’s almost like the real thing. Or.

    GIVING BIRTH TO SOFTWARE

    It’s so rewarding. It’s almost like the real thing. Or. Well. It’s actually kind of better in a way. Without all those bodily fluids, and all. 😉

    No screen shots yet. Nope. Not. Gonna. Happen. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-18 13:23:00 UTC

  • DUALITY : GUILT WHETHER WRITING OR ‘WORKING’. When I was writing full time I fel

    DUALITY : GUILT WHETHER WRITING OR ‘WORKING’.

    When I was writing full time I felt guilty about not ‘working’. And now that I’m ‘working’ I feel guilty about not writing. I have to make time for it. :/

    RESEARCH SOFTWARE ON THE MAC?

    Well, honestly, I just save everything to a directory on my laptop. Dropbox copies it. And once in a while I organize it.

    But it’s pretty easy really. In the case of libertarian political philosophy, the canonical works are pretty limited. And conservative philosophy even more so. One might argue that the entire conservative body of work is a demonstration of a failure of conservatives to undertand themselves. I understand that they’re relying on heroic, inspirational language that is effectively structured as a traditionalist or legendary religion. But they’re just indefensible against secular socialism because they don’t really understand their own belief system.

    On top of that limited amount of canonical information, we’ve incorporated economic thought pretty thoroughly into our philosophical framework and pretty much figured out the problem of measurement. So, I don’t really have to address those issues. Our problems are institutional. It’s not that we haven’t accommodated economics.

    Libertarians are still lagging because we haven’t solve the problem of ethics – rather, we haven’t articulated the full scope of ethics necessary to describe the moral framework of aristocratic egalitarianism used by Conservatives. And Rothbard’s little side-adventure into ghetto ethics has both provided the means to solve the problem of ethics, and at the same time, done it so badly that we haven’t been able to either gain the cooperation of the conservatives, or solve the problem of political systems in heterogeneous polities.

    Hopefully I’ll fix that. 🙂

    But all that said, the problem of writing libertarian philosophy isn’t so much one of academic research. The problem is reordering our thinking back toward aristocratic ethics, and away from the ghetto, while at the same time realizing that we have extended the scope of the market to include those who do not share such aristocratic ethics, and for whom those ethics pose a genetic hindrance that forever will keep them out of our quarter.

    So my work isn’t so much one of citations, but of articulating what we have failed to articulate to date, about aristocratic egalitarianism on the one and, and the totality of human political requirements in a market society on the other.

    TOOLS I USE ON THE MAC:

    Scrivener

    WordPress (I sketch a lot of my ideas online – my entire glossary is up there.)

    Notepad/Wordpad

    Skim

    Papers

    Dropbox and Evernote

    I’m considering moving into DevonThink.

    And Alfred for searching.

    My biggest technology problem seems to be copying text in and out of Kindle, now that I’ve switch to buying on Kindle whenever possible. (Maybe someone has a bright idea on how to help me with this?)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-18 07:05:00 UTC

  • TIME ZONES AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Ten hours of difference. Brutal. Thanks to t

    TIME ZONES AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

    Ten hours of difference. Brutal. Thanks to the software gods for coming up with a management structure like Agile, and management tools like Jira, and communication tools like Skype and Google Video.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-18 05:17:00 UTC

  • FOR MY UKRAINIAN FRIENDS: THE MEANING OF “GEEK, NERD AND DORK” 🙂

    FOR MY UKRAINIAN FRIENDS: THE MEANING OF “GEEK, NERD AND DORK” 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-17 08:56:00 UTC

  • ROTHBARD’S FOLLY – THE WALLS OF THE GHETTO A system is determined by its limits.

    ROTHBARD’S FOLLY – THE WALLS OF THE GHETTO

    A system is determined by its limits. Limits are causes. Rothbard’s system of thought is based upon ghetto ethics, and the assumption that the ghetto can be extended to all human orders. But the ghetto is a product of the city that contains it. The ghetto cannot exist without the city. The circular folly of that reasoning – despite Rothbard’s extraordinary literary production, never seems to have occurred to him.

    Aristocratic egalitarianism (classical libertarianism) is caused by the necessity of a minority of professional warriors to use cooperation on rapid tactics while at the same time retaining their sovereignty. It is an alliance of small businesses. A group of shareholders. And their strength increased as they increased enfranchisement.

    There are limites to this system too: those aristocratic egalitarians must continue to fight for sovereignty.

    And the only criteria for sovereignty is private property.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-17 03:44:00 UTC