Seattle in the 90’s. Wow. Just to think of it. We knew it was great. It was soooo good. But in retrospect it was one of the great experiences in history. The SF run-up is bigger but that’s what makes it ‘less so’. We were just a little city on the edge of nowhere, in the midst of the northern wilderness and so provincial. And everything just exploded. The arts were awesome. Architecture. Business. Everything.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-07 14:41:00 UTC
Why are there so many visible mentally ill people in America and I never see them here? Or rather they are quiet and civilised when you find them. Is it the beggar culture each country encourages?
I mean you can get the shit beat out of you here for rudeness.
Is it that they tend to be near the churches? Or that the die off more quickly from self medication? Or the poverty and lack of institutions keeps them in villages?
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-07 03:29:00 UTC
THE WEST’S OTHER FIRE: THE FIRE OF THE MIND: “TRUTH”
Prometheus may have stolen fire. But we gave mankind the Fire of The Mind: Truth.
And from the Fire of the Mind, we gave mankind debate, reason, rationalism, science, physics, medicine, and testimonialism. We gave him testimony, the jury, natural law, the common law, the independent judiciary, the constitutional order: the contractual-order of mankind.
To hell with equality and those who appeal to it – it’s a deceit by the weak to return us to dysgenic barbarism. We domesticated the human animal, and raised him from mysticism, ignorance, poverty, starvation and disease.
We domesticated man through the incremental suppression of his natural parasitism, leaving productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange in the market as his only possible method of survival: survival through the service of others. Using the common law, we changed the behavior of those we could. And we hung those we could not. And we built walls and armies to resist those who wish otherwise.
We have no equals. We either rule or are rule by and preyed upon by our inferiors, who, by their sheer numbers, like locusts, are parasites upon this earth, that with every birth, prevent man from achievement of his promise: godhood.
Kill them all. Revel in your defense of man from another dark age of dysgenia, mysticism, ignorance, and suffering.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-07 02:50:00 UTC
We are all that stand between man’s evolution into gods, and another dark age of ignorance, mysticism, and suffering. We are the superpredators of the superpredator man. It is our gift.
Revel in it. Master it. Use it.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-07 02:22:00 UTC
I know that it’s just because I am tired, but tonight I miss the civilized world.
Where things are clean. Where people are clean. Where you can drink the water. Where things work. Where I can speak to someone of reasonable intelligence about something reasonably intelligent. Where our self effacing American humor is appreciated.
Btw. I forgot how much fun it is to write code every day instead of solve people sales and money problems. lol
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-04 15:00:00 UTC
http://johnquiggin.com/2016/07/04/anti-militarism/I think those of us who study comparative civilizations take the opposite approach, and that is, that one of the reasons that western civilization has advanced FASTER than the rest, in each epoch, is precisely BECAUSE of frequent conflicts between smaller states. And that the central issue that has faced us since the french revolution, is the attempt to create massive states on the chinese model (meaning America and the EU) rather than continuing our western evolutionary process of religioous, philosophical, commercial, legal, and military conflict. Competition in the production of goods and services, in the production of commons, in the production of high arts, and sciences, is arguably impoverished by consumptive stability.
Lets look at the reasons for the great war: Napoleonic expansion of the fiat state, and the rest of europe’s reaction in defense of it. This caused the rise of germany out of the european heartland of three hundred princedom’s. The hansiatic germanic expansion in to estern europe had achieved on the continent what russia had achieved in the orient, and the atlantic nations in the new world.
Three great pressures built: First was the failure of the slavs to create a core state from either Lithuania or poland so that the eastern European civilization could rise to an enlightenment of their own. Second was Russian messianic expansion after the fall of the ottoman empire, and their attempt to restore orthodox civilization. Third was the fear by the UK that further expansion of Russia (or Germany) would result in an imbalance to the existing balance of powers.
Now, heterodox or not, because it conflicts with the self-congratulating western virtuous narrative, it’s pretty clear in hindsight that we were wrong to interfere with german attempts at expansion and in doing so we English speakers doomed western civilization because of our conversion from moral landholders to utilitarian mercantilists.
And that is what I ‘hear’ when you’re making the above argument: that you have not yet learned the lessons of history. That the law of diminishing returns occurs very quickly, over 10M people.
The eradication of the military elite from the government of the USA since the late fifties (for the first time in western history) largely at the will of the left, has in no doubt exacerbated the military industrial complex by removing the ability to alter policy to control it.
War is not bad, or good. Any more than Violence is Bad or Good. Any more than the proxy for violence we all democracy is bad or good. Democracy, War and Violence can be put to immoral or moral use.
The question is whether we put our efforts into moral or immoral uses.
The destruction of the family and the hybridization of cultures is not a good no matter how much consumption it produces – and we know that from the data.
But mainstream economists are very happy with their measures, and so they seek to expand their measures, without realizing this measure is a methodological selection bias.
We are not happier than we were in 1960.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-04 04:18:00 UTC
THE PROCESS OF GROWING MAN, TRIBE, CULTURE, AND CIVILIZATION IS NOT ONE OF MANUFACTURE.
In every era we use the dominant model of complexity as an analogy for that which we cannot directly explain by operational means.
Humanity has gone through the natural provision era, the agrarian era (things are grown), the irrigation era, the horse era(things are disciplined and trained), the hydraulic era(hearts pump), the gear and pulley era(mechanical), the steam era(big,scary,dangerous), and the industrial era (leading to our friend socialism), and now we are in the computational era and transitioning to the information era in both physics and social science.
Unfortunately, our education system remains a product of industrialism. And it is a disaster. Our social science remains in industrialism, and it is likewise a disaster. And our political and legal systems also remain in antique form, and are equally a disaster.
Human minds and bodies grow and genetics tell us how to grow, and we are the product of the PROCESS of growing. As is our knowlege, as are our cultures, as is mankind.
And just as the operations that we use to move our limbs are invisible to us, the operations that nature uses to grow us are at present only in the initial stages of observation.
We do not need to wait for the mechanism of growth to be better understood before we alter our institutions to rely on growth rather than manufacturing, and on growing humans like trees rather than manufacturing parts for factories.
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-03 11:01:00 UTC
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY ENCOUNTERS GERMAN IDEALISM
Intellectuals matter, becasue intellectuals teach. And a lot of intellectuals teaching the same thing, transforms generations.
—” in 1836 of Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter’, which posed Russia’s relationship to the West as a central philosophical problem, maintaining that Russia’s historical separation from the culture of Western Christianity precluded its participation in the movement of history towards the establishment of a universal Christian society. Chaadaev’s version of the march of progress was much indebted to French Catholic conservatism, while the nationalist riposte to his ideas drew heavily on the Romantics’ critique of the Age of Reason and Schelling’s organic conception of nationhood: the Slavophiles held that Western culture was in a state of terminal moral and social decline, suffering from an excess of rationalism, which had led to social atomization and the fragmentation of the individual psyche (see Chaadaev, P.I.; Schellingianism, Russian). These divisions could be healed only by religious faith in its purest form, Russian Orthodoxy, whose spirit of organic ‘togetherness’, uncontaminated by Western rationalism, they presented as a model for Russian society and a beacon for mankind. They thereby laid the foundations of a distinctively Russian tradition of cultural and religious messianism which includes Dostoevskii’s political writings, the Pan-Slavist and Eurasian movements (see Dostoevskii, F.M.; Pan-Slavism and Eurasian movement), and the apocalyptic vision of Berdiaev, whose philosophy was highly popular among the Soviet underground.”—
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-03 05:13:00 UTC
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY (From Routlege)
—” ‘Russian Idea’ – … the most distinctive feature of Russian philosophy – can be explained in terms of Russian history. The Mongol yoke from the twelfth to the fourteenth century cut Russia off from Byzantium (from which it had received Christianity) and from Europe: it had no part in the ferment of the Renaissance. Its rise as a unified state under the Moscow Tsardom followed closely on the fall of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, and the emerging sense of Russian national identity incorporated a messianic element in the form of the monk Philotheus’ theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, successor to Rome and Constantinople as guardian of Christ’s truth in its purity (see Medieval philosophy, Russian). ‘There will not be a fourth’, ran the prophecy: the Russian Empire would last until the end of the world.
Russian thought remained dominated by the Greek patristic tradition until the eighteenth century, when the Kievan thinker Skovoroda (sometimes described as Russia’s first philosopher) developed a religious vision based on a synthesis of ancient and patristic thought. He had no following; by the mid-century Russia’s intellectual centre was St Petersburg, where Catherine the Great, building on the achievements of her predecessor Peter, sought to promote a Western secular culture among the educated elite with the aid of French Enlightenment ideas.
But representatives of the ‘Russian Enlightenment’ were severely punished when they dared to cite the philosophes’ concepts of rationality and justice in criticism of the political status quo (see Enlightenment, Russian). The persecution of advanced ideas (which served to strengthen the nascent intelligentsia’s self-image as the cultural and moral leaders of their society) reached its height under Nicolas I (1825–55), when philosophy departments were closed in the universities, and thought went underground.
Western ideas were the subject of intense debate in small informal circles of students, writers and critics, the most famous of which in Moscow and St Petersburg furnished the philosophical education of such intellectual leaders as the future socialists Herzen and Bakunin, the novelist and liberal Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Belinskii (from whose ‘social criticism’ Soviet Socialist Realism claimed descent), and the future Slavophile religious philosophers Kireevskii and Khomiakov (see Slavophilism).
As a critic has noted: ‘In the West there is theology and there is philosophy; Russian thought, however, is a third concept’; one which (in the tsarist intellectual underground as in its Soviet successor) embraced novelists, poets, critics, religious and political thinkers – all bound together by their commitment to the goals of freedom and justice.”—
Like I said, russian philosophy is literary, not rational(rousseau), not rigorous (Kant), nor empirical (smith and hume), nor legal ( jefferson ). Russian philosophy is one of LAMENT OF LOSS. But loss of what? Byziantine fall? Why does russia tolerate islam if it is islam that caused byzantine fall?
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-03 04:36:00 UTC
MORE ON SPAIN: WELL SAID
—“After Spanish nationality was constituted under the Catholic Monarchs (1474–1516) on the basis of a single, unified faith, philosophy was destined to become closely linked with religion. During the sixteenth century, this gave rise to a burgeoning of philosophy of the very highest order, which followed two separate paths: that of the Erasmian-style Renaissance, featuring Luis Vives, which developed in line with the vanguard of the European Renaissance; and that of Spanish Scholasticism, which was fuelled by the thrust of the Counter-Reformation on the one hand, and by the discovery of America on the other. After the reigns of Charles I and Philip II (the chief protagonists in the creation of the empire ‘in which the sun never set’), the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a relentless decline which, towards the beginning of the twentieth, seemed to come to an end. “—
Source date (UTC): 2016-07-03 03:21:00 UTC