Curt Doolittle

Theme: Agency

  • EVIL IS NOT STUPID (movies) The Butcher (2014) is a pretty good innovation on Se

    EVIL IS NOT STUPID

    (movies)

    The Butcher (2014) is a pretty good innovation on Seven. Pretty impressed. Hadn’t seen it. Just got it over here where the only way to see English movies is by downloading them.

    I had this discussion with Steven J. Woron back in the early 80’s, I think, when he was working on a script. And of course, I hadn’t grown up in comic-culture so I didn’t understand Steve’s mythos. I grew up in a world where evil was a real thing I had to deal with: stronger, smarter, faster and more powerful in every respect.

    And as I read it I kept saying to myself that “evil isn’t stupid and brutal”. Just the opposite. Any evil to be feared is cunning. And you can see that in the economic failure of scripts that don’t follow that, and the overwhelming success of scripts where evil humiliates us with its genius. The great villains are not stupid, they are brilliant.

    I always think it is a childish disservice, and completely counter to the western mythological tradition, to position villains as impulsive brutes with childlike self interest. I can’t really ever enjoy pop villains brought to screen for this reason. They are paper maché masks worn by bunny rabbits, at a victorian costume party.

    The western aristocratic tradition is quite simple: be wary of hubris, for there are gods. They are evil. And that are cunning.

    There is evil in the world and it is not defeated by deus ex machina. It is not defeated my supermen. It is defeated by the swallowing of terror by men of courage; the use of their wit; and the bearing of great costs, at great personal risk, to defeat it, for the common good.

    The devil is not obvious. There is more evil in as mundane a criminal as Nancy Pelosi than in all the demons of literature. There is more brutality in a Barak Obama’s creation of a power vacuum that can only be filled by world war. There is more immorality in a Google algorithm to suppress dissent than in the arguments of any violence.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-23 08:50:00 UTC

  • NO HE DIDN”T LIE. NOT HIS CHARACTER. BUT WHAT DOES THAT TELL US? This frustrates

    NO HE DIDN”T LIE. NOT HIS CHARACTER. BUT WHAT DOES THAT TELL US?

    This frustrates the heck out of me. I know these people. There is no way these people lied. They believed it, just as surely as you believe what you know very little about but are threatened by, and assume you understand. Based upon Iraqi propaganda meant to intimidate the Iranians, based upon fragmentary information, based upon limited on-the-ground intel, and self-interested informants, both historical evidence, rational motives, limited intel, and informants agreed. These are normal conservatives, with high sensitivity to threats, interpreting information within their own system of cognitive biases. They are moral men who were tragically mistaken, and worse, misunderstood the culture they were dealing with: lying, deception, fraud, boisterous nonsensical empty words of a competing tribal people. Caught with a catastrophic error they justified it to themselves and us. What we have since learned is that much of the world is not ready for democracy, and in fact, democracy as we know it, may be a temporary luxury unique to western people in periods of extraordinary prosperity that occur only once every millennium.

    Does Nancy Pelosi believe her daily lies? I suspect she does in her own twisted way. Does Barak Obama understand that in his effort to reverse US interference in the world, that he is creating the power vacuum that world wars and falls of civilisations are caused by? I think not. We are all fools, constantly the subject of the pretense of knowledge, the pretense of understanding, fitfully trying to justify our priors.

    Of course people had to lie if they made such a ridiculous mistake. But then, everyone who calls them a liar makes the same mistake: propositions made in ignorance in light of hindsight.

    Bush may have been many things, but dishonesty is not part of his character. He believes with full and certain faith that history will vindicate him. I suspect he errs. He errs in that there was any possible solution except punishment. Correction and modernization were beyond our abilities, because they were beyond Muslim capabilities.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-22 07:19:00 UTC

  • My brave mother, with three kids, very little income, and a sadistic drunkard of

    My brave mother, with three kids, very little income, and a sadistic drunkard of a husband, always made sure she had a ‘run bag’ of money to get away with.

    Thankfully, he actually adored her, and he worked hard as hell as an outlet for his frustration. But he never succeeded his father’s approval, in her approval, or ours. His behavior was largely the result of failing to get anyone’s approval. Her disapproval was largely the result of his alcoholism. Ours was simply terror.

    I contemplated killing him for years, usually trying to fall asleep at night while he verbally terrorized my mother – starting at I think 11 or 12. More than a few times I stood there watching him sleep with a hunting knife in my 70-pound hands.

    I couldn’t give a thimble for his life. I was happy to bear the consequences, and was sure, naively, that I would be vindicated. But I thought my mother would never forgive me, and I was worried she would be even worse off because of it.

    I have extraordinary patience under hardship really. And I will work a very long time for my objectives. But what drives me relentlessly in pursuit of freedom it is that experience: we can never tolerate subjugation, because every man is corruptible.

    The only rule is rule by all, and therefore rule by none: the rule of law, property rights, and property en toto: the total suppression of parasitism upon others.

    Kill the evil. Punish the wicked. Advance the productive. Protect the helpless.

    A Plan. A Weapon. Time. Determination. Perseverance. Execution.

    Civilization is very fragile at the moment.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-20 08:36:00 UTC

  • Why do members of the opposite sex cause us to do stupid things?

    Why do members of the opposite sex cause us to do stupid things?

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-12 08:16:00 UTC

  • ADVICE FOR NEW DRIVERS (from elsewhere) RUNNING WITH SCISSORS AND A BIG BAG OF C

    ADVICE FOR NEW DRIVERS

    (from elsewhere)

    RUNNING WITH SCISSORS AND A BIG BAG OF CONCRETE

    I rode a ran a lot, bicycled a lot, drove minibikes, and motorcycles. But when my mother taught me how to drive a manual truck in a school parking lot – even with all that experience – I was surprised at how different it was sitting on, and piloting, all that mass.

    The primary difference that I notice, between each increasingly massive vehicle (up to a B52 bomber, which starts slowly turning a few miles after you move the stick) is that you shift your perception out to the limit of your vision, and slowly pilot the car in an arc toward that limit of your vision.

    Most drivers start out trying to plan movements like they’re walking or riding a bicycle – thinking at ‘human scale’. As if we can turn, weave, stop, when we way a ton or two. It would be awesome if cars turned more slowly, for introductory drivers, so that they were FORCED to drive by slow correction of long arcs. Unfortunately cars are agile (and need to be for slow speeds). But basically the faster you go the longer the arc you have to aim at in the distance.

    Pick up something heavy, run with it as fast as you can, and then try to turn, and try to stop. Feel it. Now imagine you’re carrying twenty times your weight, and trying to turn or stop. The surface area of your foot is roughly equal to the surface area of a tire on the road. In optimum circumstances, the car has four feet touching the ground instead of two. But otherwise the car has the same problem that you do. Now, take the same heavy thing and try to make small adjustments in your course in order to reach the next curve that you can see out in the distance.

    ASIDE FROM MASS – THINK PARANOID

    The other things are (a) you are invisible to everyone else, always. (if you ride in a blind spot (behind to the left or right) you are asking to get hit. Even if you can see the driver’s eyes, it doesn’t mean he sees you. It means only that he might see you. (c) Other drivers don’t drive logically, they drive impulsively, intuitively, habitually, with the least intellectual effort, lowest concentration, and with their minds on something else. (b) If you can’t see into any space, it means something is there that’s trying to kill you.

    ASIDE FROM PARANOIA – THINK

    (c) You cannot ever really take your eyes off the road for longer than it takes you to blink. (d) It takes WAAAY longer to slow down and stop than you think, and so always obey 1 car length per 10 miles per hour of velocity no matter what. (e) passing people is the best way to get into an accident. (f) never hurry when driving. (g) Never try to optimize your drive time within the flow of traffic, only prior to a flow of traffic.

    SUMMARY

    Basically, drive completely paranoid, and in small movements of the wheel, targeting as far in the distance as you can ‘arc’, and don’t try to be cunning. The only smart driver is the one who leaves early enough that he doesn’t have to rush. Keep music and audio books in the car to entertain you.

    There… that’s my good deed for the day. lol

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-12 03:37:00 UTC

  • IMMORTALITY AND IDENTITY Was DaVinci an artist or an engineer? Was Spinoza a Phi

    IMMORTALITY AND IDENTITY

    Was DaVinci an artist or an engineer? Was Spinoza a Philosopher or a Lens Grinder? Was Jefferson a philosopher or a lawyer? What about Thomas Paine?

    I don’t mind being positioned as a technology entrepreneur. Or as an analyst of business processes. Or as a software architect – which is what I often did to make money – and I am good at it, in no small part because it is marginally indifferent from the kind of philosophy that I practice. I am not comfortable with the label programmer. My first technical job was as a CTO, and architect of software – very complicated software. I have never really been a programmer in the typical sense of the term – I’m just not that good at it. It requires short term memory and textual precision that is not in my nature – my memory is biased in the long term and synthetic instead. And worse, I find programming nearly as addictive an obsession for my autism as opiates would be for my emotions. It consumes my life.

    I have been practicing what we call philosophy since the age of twelve, and written philosophy casually since college and seriously since 2009. And it took the sum total of my life until that point to solve a problem in philosophy worth talking about. My vocation pays for my habits. It has made me wealthy. My vocation supplies emotional gratification from the act of working on a team with others. But in practical terms, since around the age of twelve, vocation has been a means to an end. My avocation is quite different from my vocation. I will not be remembered for the ten companies I have started. There is no immortality there to be had. I will be remembered, if at all, for unifying philosophy (the discipline of speaking truthfully), and Science (the procedural means of warrantying that we speak truthfully) and all the disciplines identity, logic, mathematics, physics, economics, law, and politics into a single language and forever dispelling religio-‘right’ argument, ratio-moral argument, and psychological argument, to the dustbin of intellectual history history.

    What I prefer to be known for is something else, yet to come. If I live long enough. We are remembered for our greatest achievement. If we are remembered at all.

    Immortality exists. Heaven exists. They are constructed in the memories of living man, transferred between generations, and hosted there as surely as any digitalized representation of our minds, and with far greater influence than we as individuals could have by direct action.

    It is the memory of the demonstration of our will that grants us a seat among the heroes. And our heroes are our only true gods – they drive our minds, and as such drive our hands.

    Engage in production. Speak the truth. Punish the wicked. Exterminate the evil. Seek to be remembered. By leaving this world a greater place than when you entered it.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-11 06:32:00 UTC

  • HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF (from elsewhere) I describe myself as any of the fo

    HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF

    (from elsewhere)

    I describe myself as any of the following:

    – A Conservative Libertarian

    – A Classical Liberal Libertarian

    – An Aristocratic Libertarian

    – An advocate for aristocratic liberty

    – A Propertarian (in my technical sense of the term).

    Reasons:

    1) It is impossible to possess property rights in demonstrable fact, except in voluntary exchange of them in the form of reciprocal insurance.

    2) It is illogical to forgo aggression, violence, fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and free riding, unless one obtains the same promise to forgo those parasitic actions in exchange. Our original exchange was permission to participate in the market. At present, given the advent of generations of labor saving technology, combined with rapid reproduction by the lower classes, has led to an oversupply of labor with nothing to sell in the market, and therefore no incentives to forgo aggression, violence, fraud, deceit, conspiracy and free riding.

    3) It is illogical to abandon the production of commons when the western competitive advantage has been in the production of the commons made possible by our most important commons – the total prohibition on parasitic, and even unproductive actions.

    4) It is only possible to produce commons by prohibiting their privatization, or the free riding upon them.

    5) The classical liberal political model under an independent judiciary constructed a loose market for the facilitation of exchanges of benefits between classes by means of constructing commons. Our failure was in not adding a house of proletarians when we enfranchised them. And thereby allowing them to circumvent the common law. The collapse of the church, which had previously provided an independent taxation system, insurance, education and care-taking for the proletarians, exacerbated the problem of creating demand in the state. And the usurpation of moral argument by the academy, intellectuals and media in lieu of the church created malincentives for everyone. The ability to sell advertising on the back of distribution of the content that generated the greatest agitation, created yet another set of malincentives.

    6) The attempt by (profligate) jewish intellectuals (the cosmopolitans) to justify immigration in order to maintain their ‘separate-but-apart’ culture, and, for various other producers to obtain discounts by immigrating labor at the cost of: social norms, traditions, history, language, intergenerational conflict, political polarization, has been destructive not only to the rule of law, to truth telling, but to the vast consequences of that immigration. We were able to indoctrinate the wave through 1925 by 1960, but in no small part because of the militarism of the war. Conversely, the only honest non-parasitic exchange is to export capital to locations where there is excess labor, and pay the cost of adapting the local norms to commercial and libertarian ends, rather than forcing others to bear the cost of increased transaction costs in every walk of life, and the consequential destruction of the civic society, liberty and truth telling. In other words, the argument to free immigration is an act of fraud in an attempt to privatize the gains produced by the commons.

    7) The common law, truth telling, and the jury (of which the classical liberal model of government is an evolution) are responsible for western exceptionalism. The reason being that prohibitions on parasitism (involuntary transfer of property en toto – and in the extreme, the prohibition on profiting from non production), (a) deprive people of all possible means of sustenance other than productive participation in the market, and (b) produce what we call ‘trust’ (reduction of transaction costs), (c) allow the rapid identification of new prohibitions on parasitism BEFORE such behavior can develop into a norm, and institutionalize even the subtle parasitism of rent seeking or free riding.

    So neither Hayek nor Hoppe solves the problem of identifying causality. Of the two, Hoppe gives us the full transformation of social science into statements of property rights, but he is misled by his heritage (as well all are), his education (as we all are) and likely by his friendships (as we all are), by incorrectly identifying property as the object of consideration, instead of an institution that suppresses parasitism, and forces all of us into productive labors.

    It is irrational – at least for the strong – to abandon violence, theft, fraud, fraud by omission, deceit, theft by indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of commons, conspiracy, and outright conquest, unless others grant us the same. When the weak ask the same, they are merely seeking to preserve means of theft by the only means available to them anyway. A hollow exchange if there ever was one.

    The reason man developed cooperation was that it is a multiplier on productivity that is unmatched in living organisms. The problem with cooperation is that it invites parasitism in all its forms. The reason we have moral intuitions is that evolution needed to guarantee that we punish free riders (parasites) even at high cost (altruistic punishment).

    Austrian economics is best understood as a research program into the institutions by which we improve voluntary exchanges. Whereas mainstream economics is best understood as the means by which we maximize consumption regardless of individual volition. The Austrian method makes use of all available information in society. The democratic and mainstream economic method does not. It aggregates this only in a single measure: consumption. And the consequence is rapid expansion of the population. So we practice moral economics and the mainstream practices immoral economics.

    But in this same light, the abandonment of the means of producing commons, when commons are one’s greatest competitive advantage is merely an admission of failure to solve the intellectual challenge of recreating a market for commons equal in productivity to the market for private goods and services.

    Either that or it is something much worse: yet another version of marxism, socialism, neo-conservatism: elaborate means of justifying parasitism that our civilization was more successful than any other in eradicating.

    Group evolutionary strategies matter. Liberty is but one. But do we mean aristocratic liberty, or libertinism?

    Western liberty is inseparable from the requirement for truth telling. And the Rothbardian Hoppeian model is specifically (conveniently) designed to preserve the utility of deceit and conspiracy, yet prohibit retaliation for deceit and conspiracy. Whereas for law to provide sufficient means of resolving conflict, we must resolve all possible sources of conflict. Otherwise, demand for the state fills what the does not.

    The levant remains a low trust society because it practices low trust property rights. The west evolved a high trust and wealthy society because it practices high trust property rights. The levant remains a center for high demand for authoritarian government. Because the common law cannot function where people are so comfortable and free to engage in deceit.

    The rule of law, the common law (organic poly-centric), strictly (Operationally) constructed, the jury, and the decidability of property-en-toto: the prohibition on all non-productive actions that create demand for retaliation. A market for the commons that divides individuals into classes (and genders) based upon the categories (scale) of property under their control – wherein all contracts can be negotiated, not monopolies imposed.

    It’s not complicated. Or at least, it isn’t once you know it.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-11 04:07:00 UTC

  • IN FAIRNESS TO BOTH SEXES – WE MISREPRESENT EACH OTHER’S PERSPECTIVES> So true.

    IN FAIRNESS TO BOTH SEXES – WE MISREPRESENT EACH OTHER’S PERSPECTIVES>

    So true. Women want, and often need, to vent their emotions. And to organize them, so that they can self-correct them. It’s much harder to be a woman than a man. Our minds are much less cluttered. I think of our function in a relationship as helping women bail out the boat, so that it’s floating on it’s own enough that they can pilot it in the waves. Once we’ve bailed out the boat, you can often suggest ideas. but it is important that women feel the solution is their own, and that they do not have to fight their emotions to adopt it. A woman cannot suppress the chaos in her mind and emotions, any more than we can suppress our anxiety about various threats. In our case we need care-taking so that we can restore our energy and therefore will to continue fighting. Women need to have their emotions bailed out so that they can think straight. It’s the same problem for both sides. It’s just that our stress is low level and pre-cognitive, and theirs is high level and dominates their ability to think. So we both need ‘restoration’. The problem in both cases is to provide one another with the energy with which to deal with stresses. It is not in itself to solve the problem. We can usually solve our problems if we have the emotional wherewithal to solve them. It is this wherewithal that we give to each other. Albeit in different ways.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-04-07 04:58:00 UTC

  • Pinker’s Criticism of Group/Multi-level Selection

    [F]irst, both Pinker and Haidt are making the enlightenment error of equality of individuals, and of individualism instead of a population of man as a division of intertemporal knowledge and labor. (See my video on the subject.) We evolve first under this inter-temporal distribution of biases, and second under cultural adaptation, and third under everything else. Genders, distribution of gender bias, and the fact that genders are constructed from a female base, guarantee that.

    Second, as far as I know, Pinker is making an argument against the evolution by multi-level selection of altruism. This is the purpose of his article. And I agree with him. And in Propertarianism I explain why.

    Third, (if you read the comments it’s obvious) is that group and multi-level selection are pretty rigorous mathematically described facts. Pinker isn’t saying that it isn’t. He’s saying that we can’t fantasize that altruism developed because of group selection (I argue that aggression defeats altruism and is currently doing so – high trust westerners are not aggressive enough.)

    Fourth, (if you read the comments) the argument is partly a problem of verbalism. And to some degree, pinker is playing too much psychologist and telling us not to think in fuzzy terms, and not so much that multi-level selection doesn’t occur. It’s that it doesn’t occur the way we think it has. Now, it is this point I disagree with since as far as I know, the very great differences between the competing populations is determined by a wide variation in the distribution of only four things: (1) intelligence, (2) aggression, (3) impulsivity, and (4) fear of unfamiliar people. And that list may be in fact reducible to two: impulsivity and intelligence. Just as a wide variety of behavior is reducible to the solipsistic(female bias) and autistic(male bias) spectrum. Great complexity arises from the interaction of only two or three spectra. Emotions are a great example: as far as I know, we have only three, and our rich range of emotional experience is produced by combinations of levels of those emotions. And as I have written extensively, all of these emotions can be explained as reactions to change in state of property-en-toto (reactions to acquisition or loss).

    Fifth, and I think this isn’t terribly complicated: norms are sticky and group strategy is sticky, and populations breed to take advantage of status under norms. This is just a mathematically describable problem and as far as I know it’s pretty solid:

    Sixth, as far as I know, Haidt’s correct identification of moral intuitions, holds under Propertarianism. So whatever Haidt’s justification for these traits, it is immaterial. In my first few propertarian arguments I made the point that MY CONTRIBUTION was to tie Haidt’s OBSERVATIONS and descriptions, to CAUSALITY. And that Propertarianism correctly describes that causality: acquisitiveness, and the utility of cooperation only in so far as it improved acquisition.

    CLOSING

    So the debate here is not concrete. Pinker is doing no more than making a cautionary argument against the development of altruism by selfish creatures, as anything other than yet another selfish act. And he is correct.

    Everyone else is saying that cultural norms drive reproductive adaptation. And they are correct. And that multi-level selection is the product of cultural biases incorporated in genes.

    So this whole argument is a lot of nonsense between geeks as to the effect of their as-yet-imprecise language on the non-scientific community. And it is not so much a debate about facts.

    And furthermore, you have to look at these men as part of the REACTION to postmodern lies – they are all engaged in trying to overthrow the deceits of 150 years of postmodern reactionary thought. I am not sure that they have (As I have) joined The Dark

    Enlightenment, in trying to overthrow not just the postmoderns and the pseudoscientists, but the enlightenment fallacy of equality and democracy. They are concerned about the consequences of language because they are well aware of the consequences of language.

  • The Human Operating System

    [S]omething I wrote yesterday helped me clarify my argument on human anti-equalitarianism.

    – First: with very slight hormonal variation, we are able to reproduce in a distribution (division) of inter-temporal perception, cognition, knowledge and labor. And, that the initial division of perception cognition knowledge and labor began as a reproductive division of labor.

    – Second, that our information system consists of mutually beneficial consent through demonstration of voluntary exchange.

    – Third, that through denying people sustenance by other than market means, we forcibly incorporate them into this information system.

    – Fourth, that western truth telling, common law, property rights, rule of law, and forcible expansion of rule of law, construct the most efficient and therefore rapidly adaptive system by which we expand and enforce the quality of our information system.

    – Fifth, the side effect of this enforcement of market participation is the constant improvement our our genetics in no small party by the allocation of reproduction to the productive.

    – Sixth, that insuring individuals provides incentives that keep them within the information system.

    – Seventh, but reproduction via redistribution cannot be a ‘right’ because it is a forcible cost put upon others. In other words, your right of reproduction and insurance is predicated upon your ability to pay for your offspring. Or in moral terms reproduction without production is ‘a lie’ inserted into our information system.

    This list explains a great deal. Forgive me for using analogies, but it is a fairly short and tight description of the properties of the human operating system.

    With this understanding, Keynesian credit expansion for the purpose of increasing employment is suicidal. And by contrast, the Propertarian “shareholder” system is a natural extension of the human information system. In Propertarianism, I suggest inserting liquidity through the consumer directly, but limiting reproduction for dependents to one child, and limiting immigration to highly skilled individuals, and moving and therefore exporting capital and Propertarian institutions to groups of people, rather than moving people to capital.

    We have spent most of our scientific history (our search for truth) considering problems of mass and velocity. We have spent much of our economic history considering money and credit. But in both cases, we were mistaken – as the physicists and as Hayek have informed us. The model for all human understanding is that of information. Physics must be understood as information, and mass as a generalization of it. The economics of human cooperation must be understood as information, and physical representations a generalization of states of information.

    Hoppe’s criticisms of Hayek are purely psychological, and only half right. Hayek correctly unites physics and economics by combining information and institutions. And yes, Hayek placed his emphasis on the institutions without fully appreciating property. Hoppe places emphasis on property without fully appreciating institutions – particularly norms. Hoppe incorrectly defines property to suit rothbardian separatist ends, rather than as a general and universal rule of human evolution. And very likely, without fully appreciating the distribution of human character traits – he is an odd, somewhat angry and frustrated duck himself – so it is no wonder. Hayek understands man correctly – and is a saint of a man if there was one. But neither man of either character grasped the very great specialization in our perception and cognition – nor that they are both useful and necessary.

    The only end to our evolutionary development is to increase intelligence, decrease impulsivity and aggression, to the point where we still perform our different reproductive functions relying upon our emotional intuitions, but where we are able to rationally observe them for what they are, and enjoy them, rather than be driven by them. Thankfully this requires only increasing our median intelligence by a standard deviation. Unfortunately for other groups, it means they are nearly prohibited from it.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine