ARISTOTLE ON DIVERSITY
Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be “a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants”. – wiki
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-19 12:06:00 UTC
CULTURES ARE PORTFOLIOS OF PROPERTY RIGHTS
Cultures are portfolios of property rights. The composition of, and distribution of those property rights, varies from culture to culture. In each culture, those rights are expressed as norms. Property rights themselves are a norm. Those property rights perpetuated by norms may be more or less beneficial than other portfolios of property rights.
But any idiot who thinks that (a) formal institutions don’t matter – such as libertarians or (b) that formal institutions are sufficient – such as progressives, will have history prove him wrong to the chagrin of the people who understand (c) that norms are a form of property – conservatives. Norms are a commons that we all pay for. The tax we pay for them with is forgone opportunity to consume them, and absorbing the risk that no others will absorb them too.
Aristocratic Egalitarian Culture (The West) prohibits not just fraud, theft and violence, but the more deceptive versions of fraud: profit from asymmetry of knowledge, and profit from involuntary transfer via externalities.
Market competition itself, is an involuntary transfer via externality from people outside of the exchange (competitors). This is why humans naturally object to it, and must be trained to respect and practice competition. But this externality provides instruction and incentive to all in the market, such that we all seek greater variety and lower cost of production. It produces beneficial ends. But it is non-trivial to create the norm of respecting and practicing competition. That’s why so few cultures did it.
Rothbard was wrong. The market isn’t sufficient to maintain the norms against fraud theft and violence, and certainly not against externalities. The marginal impact of reputation in the market is lower than the marginal impact of fraud. That’s why only the west developed the high trust society – by out-breeding such that the entire nation to be an extended family – at least within it’s social classes. Without excessive out-breeding that destroyed the perception of extended family through common physical properties, and common normative behavior. In order to retain the sense of extended family, both physical properties and normative properties must be similiar enough that signaling is consisten within the group, and only class (selection quality) within the extended family differentiates between group members.
Trust. The extension of familial trust to all possible exchange partners, by prohibitions on externality and asymmetry, when backed by warranty, is the composition that creates the high – trust society. Only AFTER these informal institutions are enforced by formal institutions, even if only the formal institution of the common law, will trust develop. And with trust, the velocity of trade that makes extraordinary marginal wealth possible for a group, because that group is more competitive than other groups.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-19 01:54:00 UTC
[C]onservatives speak in emotionally loaded, allegorical, (and therefore archaic) language. That does not mean that the content of their beliefs or allegories is irrational, only that it is arational. But it does mean that they can’t articulate their ideas rationally. And worse, it means that their arguments, and their way of life are perpetually vulnerable to criticism. It also means that conservatives cannot find practical solutions to problems that CAN be solved without violating the system of ethics and norms that creates the high trust society. They simply cannot understand their own ideas well enough to know where they apply, where they do not, and where alternative solutions can be found that accomplish a goal through preferred ends. This is the legitimate criticism of Conservatism: that conservative philosophers have, until we P came about, failed to find a solution to the problem of articulating conservatism.
[callout] [Because their language is allegorical, Conservatism does not contain the causal density needed to articulate conservative ideas. And as such] … conservatives cannot find practical solutions to problems that CAN be solved without violating the system of ethics and norms that creates the high trust society. [/callout]
People who follow my work know that this is precisely the problem I’m trying to solve: to articulate Conservatism (Anglo Aristocratic Egalitarianism) in rational terms. Which means Propertarian terms. Because only Propertarianism provides a rational means of discussing political systems and institutions. I have now spent a significant portion of my adult life on this problem and I finally understand how absolutely difficult that problem was to solve. As an example, I’ll use Krugman’s Straw Man Of The Day to illustrate why its hard for conservatives to defend themselves, by attacking a simple, usual meaningless jibe – but one that conservatives can’t easily defend against.
Conservatives and Sewers I see that some commenters on my traffic externalities post are speculating what Republicans would say about sewers if they didn’t already exist. Well, we don’t know about Republicans, but we do know what The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system: Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good. Sewers are socialism! It wasn’t until the Great Stink made the Houses of Parliament uninhabitable that the sewer system was created.
Now, we’re going to acknowledge that as usual, a conservative protestant Englishman doesn’t understand his own traditions well enough to articulate them. He can sense that something is wrong, with the circumstance, but not articulate what that is, nor how to find an alternative solution to the problem. And that’s understandable. I’m not sure without both Bastiat and Hayek, that we would understand them either. Without Rothbard and Hoppe, I wouldn’t know how to find solutions. However, that doesn’t mean that conservatives and libertarians can’t intuit that ‘something is wrong here’, even if they cannot articulate it. So, aside from the fact that Dr Krugman is a political propagandist, lets look at his logic, and articulate the conservative criticism of it: 1) It doesn’t follow that a one-time expense, followed by fees for usage is the same as redistribution that creates dependencies. Fees require action and therefore ‘ownership’ in the management of the [glossary:commons], the redistribution does not require action. The free-rider problem is different from the progressive-fees problem. Free riding is a negative [glossary:signal] that says free riding is a ‘right’, while progressive fees illustrate that this is not a ‘right’, but a ‘charity’. This sends ‘truthful’ signals to both parties. And truthful signals are necessary to retain the universal cultural prohibition on [glossary:involuntary transfer]s. 2) It doesn’t follow that investment in a commons is the same as state-mandated redistribution. If that was true, there wouldn’t have been factories, universities, churches and roads without a state. But there are. 3) It doesn’t follow that investment in a universal commons (infrastructure) is contrary to conservative dogma. Only that to do so out of charity at a cost, with nothing in exchange, is different from doing so out of opportunity for profit, or out of necessity for the correction of harm. (It doesn’t) 4) it doesn’t follow that taxes must be levied other than fees. (They don’t need to be.) 5) It doesn’t follow that taxes should be put into a general pool and open to use OTHER than the purpose levied. (they shouldn’t – that’s involuntary transfer – and fraud.) 6) It doesn’t follow that the monopolistic state is more efficient than competitive private administration. (It’s not. Ever.) The advantage that government provides is its ability to prohibit privatization of investments in the commons, and therefore make a commons possible. It is not that commons cannot be created without government. It is that the range of commons that can be created without privatization of them is very limited, and therefore very expensive. Since privatization of a common investment is a form of theft. The left is a kelptocracy. It is theft rather than exchange. That is the difference between the left’s vision of society and the right’s vision of society. THe right requires exchange, the left takes by theft. If conservatives understood this one idea, they would use it all the time and win arguments most of the time. Seeking exchange means that solutions are possible. Conservatism without solutions is simply a blocking agent. 7) It doesn’t follow that funding the bureaucracy won’t produce externalities that are of intolerable cost. (it does – one of which is forcing us to spend time defending ourselves against other people’s political movements, as they seek to control the predatory state) These criticisms are possible using Propertarian ethics. In fact, I often argue, that any ethical system OTHER than Propertarianism, is an attempt to obscure the transfers occurring in politics. And therefore arguing by means other than propertarianism (particularly using empathic appeals, and moral statements) is an act of fraud for the purpose of committing theft. CONSERVATISM TRADES STATUS SIGNALS FOR REDISTRIBUTION [C]onservatism is expressed in metaphorical language. And in that language, Conservatives have one ‘curse word’ with multiple meanings: “Socialism” – state control of property and production and b) “Democratic redistributive socialism” – state ownership of the proceeds from limited private control of property. This ‘curse word’ is a catch-all for ‘those people that use the state to destroy aristocratic individualism and the status signals that each of us gets from individualism regardless of our rank. And this is important. Conservatives do not feel victims, because they obtain positive status signals from other conservatives regardless of their economic rank. This status obtainable in human societies only through religious conformity and it’s consequences, or economic conformity and its consequences. Conservatives do not object to investment in the commons. Conservatism places higher value on delaying gratification than immediate gratification – the formation of moral capital – which is an inarticulate expression meaning training human beings to enforce a prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds. Conservatism includes the argument that we should not fund the expansionary bureaucratic state that out of deterministic necessity subverts our property rights and therefore our freedom, and therefore our ‘character’ – a euphemism for the prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds – because it is our universal prohibition on involuntary transfers both within our families and tribes and without, that is the source of western exceptionalism: the high trust society. Our high trust society is unique because we CAN trust others to avoid involuntary transfers, because of the pervasive prohibition on involuntary transfer that we developed under Manorailism by demonstrating fitness needed to obtain land to rent. Partly as a rebellion against the Catholic Church, partly because the church forbid cousin marriage and granted women property rights, in order to break up the tribes and large land holding families. Partly as an ancient indo-european tradition of personal sovereignty in the nobility, which became a status signal, and, thankfully remains a status signal in conservatives. Small homogenous polities are redistributive. Large heterogeneous polities are not. This is because trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities. And trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities because of the different signals used by different groups, and the fact that signals in-group are ‘cheaper’ (discounted) that signals across groups with differing signals. A strong state in a small homogenous polity that functions as an extended family and therefore with high redistribution, is entirely possible. But by creating a powerful state in a heterogeneous polity, it becomes necessary and useful for people to compete via extra-market means using the state by seeking redistributions and limited monopoly (legal) rights in order to advance their signaling strategy. (Which is what Dr. Krugman does, daily – advance an alternative strategy. A strategy that he does not recognize is from the Ghetto. And would cause a return to the low trust society. And **IS*** right now, causing a return to the low trust society. Because the low trust society is natural to man. That’s why it exists everywhere but the aristocratic west.
CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: UKRAINIAN BEAUTY
Kiev Edition.
Yes, women are really beautiful here. It’s true. Yes they are the most prized women in the world. But why?
10 Reasons Why Ukrainian Women Are Beautiful:
1) Women neither believe they are inferior nor feel afraid. Men are just strong gorillas that need to be kept as properly trained pets through careful management, just like children. Women are not weak. They are not afraid. They are not oppressed. They are powerful and they act like it.
2) Women do not deny their emotions, but they also do not treat them as ‘truths’. They are physical manifestations that must be exorcised and ‘put’ somewhere so that rational thought can prevail. Western women, as a charter from the feminist movement, have adopted the posture that their emotions are both rational, justified, and often, the source of truth. (Which is my only explanation for why so many western women are literally both miserable and ‘crazy’.) Women are confident because of this. They do not fight with themselves or doubt themselves. They are not in conflict. They just experience the emotion. Exorcize it. and move on.
This has an interesting effect on relationships here. Men are more understanding because they can separate the irrational and emotional reactions of women from the rational – providing comfort or acquiescence in the first, and friendship in the second. It’s accomplishing what western women desire, but through natural means rather than attempting to create a gender free society and denying our differences.
3) Classes are evident but class signaling is not. You dont’ signal what you ‘are’ as much as what you either ‘have’ or ‘have control of’. This creates a very interpersonally open society. (friendly and calm.)
4) Women dress to kill. This is because they (correctly) understand the power women have to wield, and that in an world where violence is no longer a currency, it may be true that men will hold the top positions due to loyalty and specialization, but that women will hold MOST positions because in a clerical economy, few if any positions require strength or violence. Even if they are poor, they dress well, and they are confident.
5) The Sport-Look (clothes that allow you to be fat), and the Brittany-tramp look (close that are sport-sexy for when you aren’t fat) and the masculine-look (close that signal you can play in a man’s office world) don’t exist here (yet). That would be sacrificing feminine power.
6) Women have relaxed faces. I don’t now if it’s a holdover from Serfdom, or from Communism, or if it’s biological, but if your face isn’t all that expressive, and you are more expressive with your body language than your face, you will look more peaceful and elegant. And the women look peaceful and elegant. (Well, aside from the shambling little babushkas that still show up now and then.)
7) Long headed slavic tribe’s jaws are narrow which increases femininity and accentuates the size of eyes. There are round heads here too. And round heads with asian influences. But the tall thin fine featured women are a definite gene pool.
8) They walk a lot. Cars and gas are expensive. The subway costs about a quarter (23 cents or so.) It’s safe to walk outside. Even in absurd heels.
9) Women will not tolerate being fat any more than they will tolerate dressing poorly. Seriously. Four random women in any given restaurant here look like they’re out for auditions or photo shoots. You can tell the Americans by who is loud and dresses badly. (Guilty of the second but not the first.)
And they are happy, friendly, and rational. It’s easier to be happy when you love yourself. And its easier to love yourself when you feel beautiful.
10) Women choose to be beautiful. In reality, Ukraine is a melting pot of many different tribes, high middle and low germans, celts, scandinavians, poles, russians, czechs, and a mix of the south slavic peoples too (although I can’t identify them yet.) . … the list goes on. And the women aren’t, at least numerically, physically different from any other european country. But its our actions that determine our appearance. One can cultivate it or ignore it.
Beauty is a record of good choices. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-07 11:57:00 UTC
Western (protestant christian) values are aristocratic values. (Aristocratic egalitarian values).
The western male did not adopt aristocratic values because he desired them. He adopted them because they were to his advantage.
They were to his advantage because they were the values of the land holding aristocracy. He had to have them if he wanted to join the economy.
These values are minority values. THey will always be minority values.
And we are a minority in the country were we were once the majority.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-02 18:51:00 UTC
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2013/02/28/suffering-for-fashion-not-in-seattle/THE REASONS FOR CASUAL DRESS IN SEATTLE
From; http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2013/02/28/suffering-for-fashion-not-in-seattle/
There are some pretty understandable reasons why Seattle dresses casually.
a) Scandinavian heritage – we don’t signal ostentatiously.
b) When we do signal, we do so with sport or fitness. This signals that we are ‘locals’, not ‘those uncouth people.’
c) Because we signal with sport or fitness we wear clothes that signal recreation.
d) It’s changing, but it used to be that when you asked someone what they did, they replied with their form of recreatoin, not their job.
e) We have a tradition of rebelling against the ‘east’ and clothing was one of those ways of demonstrating our special-ness.
f) We imported a lot of engineers directly out of college and often attracted them with persisting the college lifestyle.
g) The hippie movement that drove population into the northwest, with more communal to portland and more work oriented to seattle, perpetuated our natural biases toward comfortable clothes.
h) people around the world generally signal with clothing if they have taste but less money. In the USA we signal with cars and houses. In the northwest we signal our effeteness with casualness.
i) Our young professionals are largely from the middle class already and they work in the suburbs and drive cars, instead of walking in the city where signaling with fashion often grants you access to dating opportunities..
j) In general, white (protestant) people signal with complexity (intellectual expression) rather than more base emotions – and seattle is the whitest large city in America.
k) Fashion dress (street fashion) is a preoccupation of the lower middle and upper proletarian classes (most consumers.) Seattle doesn’t have an old aspiring working class looking to demonstrate their fitness for inclusion.
l) in the attached map of the states, you’ll notice that high style over comfort areas are hispanic, and high comfort over style areas are anglo-germanic.
In simple terms, we view ‘trying hard’ at style to be ‘gauche’. For all the reasons above.
Source date (UTC): 2013-03-01 02:42:00 UTC
http://www.propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/THE ‘WEIRDNESS’ (UNIQUENESS) OF WESTERNERS – AND AMERICANS IN PARTICULAR
(You Should Read This Post. It’s a reply to the Pacific Standard article at the end of the post.)
Dear Ethan Walters:
Welcome to the Uncomfortable Enlightenment (or the Dark Enlightenment).
History, Economics and Anthropology have addressed this issue for decades:
RICHARD DUCHESENE: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization
MARIjA GIMBUTAS: (Everything she has written)
SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: The Great Transformation
(Or See the reading list at: propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/)
We’ve learned that our enlightenment view of humanity is flawed. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power from the landed aristocracy and the church, by the emerging middle class of northern european merchants.
That political change may have been necessary in order to create the industrial society that we live in. However, the aristocratic view of man and mankind was accurate. And our ‘enlightened’ view of the perfect natural man if only ‘set free’ is simply an error. Man is an animal that must be trained to participate in one society of another.
Our ‘progressive’ view of humanity is flawed as well. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power by women and the working classes. The ‘progressive view’ was put forth by Marx and Freud.
But as Friedrich Hayek said, the trend in 20th century political ideology, which was the product of Marx and Freud, will eventually be seen as a new era of mysticism – with no basis in fact. In fact, counter-to-fact.
And that will mirror the warnings of most of the great historians: Toynbee, Gibbon, Braudel, Spengler, Quigley, Durant, Burnham, McNeil, Keegan. That we are unique and unique for circumstantial reasons, and that all of science and reason are the product of our uniqueness.
It has only been since the progressive ideology has become received wisdom due to the ‘revisionist history’ put forth by the last generation of academics, and then followed by the collapse of western economic uniqueness, that we have begun to see scientists, and a new generation of academics begin to undermine that ideological view of man.
Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate.
Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader.
Then, the church created individual property rights, and created the universalism which led to the high trust society when it tried to break up the noble families, outlawed cousin marriage, and gave women property rights. Western high trust is a produced within the Hanjal line and the Lotharingian kingdom at the bottom, and the english and scandinavians at the top.
Manorialism: or the ownership of land, and the need for men to demonstrate their conformity and reliability, as well as participate in military when needed, in order to gain access to land, created the protestant ethic. It encourage the working classes to adopt the ethics of the nobility.
Chivalry provided a means for men regardless of land-holding to demonstrate their socials status through service -which is a unique means of status achievement we thing of as ‘heroism’ that no other society has in such abstract, non-familial terms.
The need to ‘keep the east at bay’ using the germans, and therefore preserving german militarism was a intentional choice of the catholic countries. The western high trust society is the product of this aristocratic egalitarian individualism.
Culture is a set of property definitions, property rights, relying upon myths, traditions and rituals to propagate those rights. It is a set of rules for sending status signals. Status signals are those things that we imitate because they give us better access to mates and opportunities. Property definitions vary from the individual to the commons on one axis, and administration of it from the individual to the state on the other. Cultures matter. Our culture matters most. Cultures are not equal, and ours was (not is) unique.
Northern European (protestant) Americans (at least to some degree) carry this ancient aristocratic tradition with them today. It isn’t well understood that the anglo-celtic and german populations were about equal in america until the progressive strategy to take over ‘white’ america through immigration was put in place in the 60’s. (But that’s why American english speech is flatter than UK english – it’s merged with the flatter german tonal structure.)
Americans did not have an ‘aristocracy’ or a landed church to rebel against. There was no opportunity like in europe to create a popular “US vs Them”. We retained our distaste for government, where the europeans saw themselves as taking over the government from the aristocracy and church. Instead, it became feminists and the lower classes against white protestant male culture. This is one of the reasons why other cultures think our male-female relations are ‘businesslike’ rather than intimate and affectionate.
And quite contrary to the revisionist progressive historians, it was not luck that made we westerners successful in our ‘great divergence’. The west was a poorer, less numerous people on the edge of the bronze age who used technology, cooperation, speed and strategy to give their inferior numbers the advantage against an east that was always more brutal, totalitarian, numerous and wealthy.
Americans have the lock on the world’s speculative capital, because we are the people least likely to abuse it through various schemes of privatization. In abstract terms, we own the stock market. and the Brits own the Bond market. The brits lend and the americans risk. You can trust an english speaker or one of the varieties of german speaker with your money. But you pretty much can’t trust anyone else in the world. And that is a cultural value that runs back 4500 years.
We westerners apologize for our conquest and colonialism, but we have spent the past five hundred years dragging humanity out of ignorance, mysticism, totalitarianism and dirt-scratching crushing poverty, hunger and disease. We should not feel guilty for it. We should instead, require others thank us for it. For while we did it sloppily at times, we did it none the less.
(In essence, that’s the Dark Enlightenment philosophy.)
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-26 03:29:00 UTC
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/
Ethan Walters:
Welcome to the Uncomfortable Enlightenment (or the Dark Enlightenment).
History, Economics and Anthropology have addressed this issue for decades:
RICHARD DUCHESENE: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization
MARIjA GIMBUTAS: (Everything she has written)
SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: The Great Transformation
(Or See the reading list at: propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/)
We’ve learned that our enlightenment view of humanity is flawed. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power from the landed aristocracy and the church, by the emerging middle class of northern european merchants.
That political change may have been necessary in order to create the industrial society that we live in. However, the aristocratic view of man and mankind was accurate. And our ‘enlightened’ view of the perfect natural man if only ‘set free’ is simply an error. Man is an animal that must be trained to participate in one society of another.
Our ‘progressive’ view of humanity is flawed as well. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power by women and the working classes. The ‘progressive view’ was put forth by Marx and Freud.
But as Friedrich Hayek said, the trend in 20th century political ideology, which was the product of Marx and Freud, will eventually be seen as a new era of mysticism – with no basis in fact. In fact, counter-to-fact.
And that will mirror the warnings of most of the great historians: Toynbee, Gibbon, Braudel, Spengler, Quigley, Durant, Burnham, McNeil, Keegan. That we are unique and unique for circumstantial reasons, and that all of science and reason are the product of our uniqueness.
It has only been since the progressive ideology has become received wisdom due to the ‘revisionist history’ put forth by the last generation of academics, and then followed by the collapse of western economic uniqueness, that we have begun to see scientists, and a new generation of academics begin to undermine that ideological view of man.
Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate.
Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader.
Then, the church created individual property rights, and created the universalism which led to the high trust society when it tried to break up the noble families, outlawed cousin marriage, and gave women property rights. Western high trust is a produced within the Hanjal line and the Lotharingian kingdom at the bottom, and the english and scandinavians at the top.
Manorialism: or the ownership of land, and the need for men to demonstrate their conformity and reliability, as well as participate in military when needed, in order to gain access to land, created the protestant ethic. It encourage the working classes to adopt the ethics of the nobility.
Chivalry provided a means for men regardless of land-holding to demonstrate their socials status through service -which is a unique means of status achievement we thing of as ‘heroism’ that no other society has in such abstract, non-familial terms.
The need to ‘keep the east at bay’ using the germans, and therefore preserving german militarism was a intentional choice of the catholic countries. The western high trust society is the product of this aristocratic egalitarian individualism.
Culture is a set of property definitions, property rights, relying upon myths, traditions and rituals to propagate those rights. It is a set of rules for sending status signals. Status signals are those things that we imitate because they give us better access to mates and opportunities. Property definitions vary from the individual to the commons on one axis, and administration of it from the individual to the state on the other. Cultures matter. Our culture matters most. Cultures are not equal, and ours was (not is) unique.
Northern European (protestant) Americans (at least to some degree) carry this ancient aristocratic tradition with them today. It isn’t well understood that the anglo-celtic and german populations were about equal in america until the progressive strategy to take over ‘white’ america through immigration was put in place in the 60’s. (But that’s why American english speech is flatter than UK english – it’s merged with the flatter german tonal structure.)
Americans did not have an ‘aristocracy’ or a landed church to rebel against. There was no opportunity like in europe to create a popular “US vs Them”. We retained our distaste for government, where the europeans saw themselves as taking over the government from the aristocracy and church. Instead, it became feminists and the lower classes against white protestant male culture. This is one of the reasons why other cultures think our male-female relations are ‘businesslike’ rather than intimate and affectionate.
And quite contrary to the revisionist progressive historians, it was not luck that made we westerners successful in our ‘great divergence’. The west was a poorer, less numerous people on the edge of the bronze age who used technology, cooperation, speed and strategy to give their inferior numbers the advantage against an east that was always more brutal, totalitarian, numerous and wealthy.
Americans have the lock on the world’s speculative capital, because we are the people least likely to abuse it through various schemes of privatization. In abstract terms, we own the stock market. and the Brits own the Bond market. The brits lend and the americans risk. You can trust an english speaker or one of the varieties of german speaker with your money. But you pretty much can’t trust anyone else in the world. And that is a cultural value that runs back 4500 years.
We westerners apologize for our conquest and colonialism, but we have spent the past five hundred years dragging humanity out of ignorance, mysticism, totalitarianism and dirt-scratching crushing poverty, hunger and disease. We should not feel guilty for it. We should instead, require others thank us for it. For while we did it sloppily at times, we did it none the less.
(In essence, that’s the Dark Enlightenment philosophy.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-26 03:19:00 UTC
ON BEAUTY: A CRITIQUE OF ISLAM
(From a post elsewhere, where someone very gracious was criticized as being racist. When she is anything but.)
~Aphrodite,
You are one of the most tolerant people out there. Don’t sweat it.
Arguing against a religion is not arguing against a race. You cannot change your genes. You have the volition to change your ideas. If arguing against a religion is racism then arguing against Christianity is anti-white racism. This whole line of reasoning makes no sense.
Islam is not a religion. It is a political system structured as a religion. It is the highest evolution of monotheism, which successfully institutionalized mysticism as law. That we grant this political system the same status as religion out of tolerance is a convenient trick of marketing that we could call deceptive if it were applied to any other product or service. It is perfectly logical, and perfectly consistent with western secular tolerance to criticize a political system – even if it is structured as a religion. That is because the western concept of tolerance is predicated on the requirement that the purpose of any government is the production of prosperity for its people.
Islam reduces people to poverty. It always has. It always will. It must. It is intellectually closed. And the market economy which is what produces wealth, requires constant disruptive innovation through that process of competition. One cannot have prosperity and certainty. Islam promises certainty and delivers what certainty must: poverty.
Therefore we are perfectly legitimate in criticizing Islam as a political system whether or not people treat that political system as a religion. In the west, democratic secular socialist egalitarian humanism has risen to the status of unquestionable religion – an act of faith that is contrary to the evidence. Yet we allow ourselves to criticize it. We encourage ourselves to criticize it.
You are the author of an artistic sentimental publication stream. Whether consciously or not, the dominant properties of the beauty you admire and promote are a) ‘the presence of resources’, and b) ‘there is always plenty’, and c) ‘humans are capable of creating beauty and as such we should wonder at the marvel of it’. These are the conceptual concepts that you work with whether you articulate them rationally as I have just done, or whether you intuit these properties without being able to articulate them.
However, the underlying problem with beauty is that it may contain a false promise, just as do religions: the promise of the absence of scarcity. The absence of scarcity means we do not need to compete. It means we do not need to constantly calculate for the purpose of producing something which others will trade for us.
Islam makes a similar promise: that we can be seduced by certainty. That we can avoid the problem solving that science provides us with the tools to constantly bear. That innovation in thought thought he competition of ideas is not only unnecessary but undesirable.
It may be possible to tolerate the myth of the absence of scarcity, because that myth provides us with the desire to create beauty by creating plenty – prosperity. But it is not possible to tolerate the myth of certainty – because it produces poverty. It can only produce poverty.
It is certainly within our moral code to criticize Islam on political and material grounds. And whomever argues that Islam is a religion rather than a political system hiding under the cover of a religion, is either engaging in deception or error.
And whomever argues that stasis, certainty and poverty are preferable to innovation, uncertainty and prosperity.
Islam is institutionalized ignorance and poverty. It is a failed economic system. And there is nothing beautiful or plentiful about it.
That may be too deep a bit of philosophy for Facebook, but it is pretty solid logic all the way ’round. Maybe, it will help you assuage your conscience. You’re a wonderful person and I”m glad that you make the world a better place by reminding us how beauty makes it so.
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-11 05:39:00 UTC
UKRAINE IS EVERYTHING AMERICA IS NOT
Thank god. I love it here. The people are human. They are what we are meant to be. It is beautiful. It is human. It is real. It is what we used to be. It is what we long for. Its what taunts us in our dreams.
It is the absence of credit.
No man understands the meaning of that statement better than i do.
It is us. In our natural state. Prior to the state.
Loving each other. Rather than loving credit.
It is a miracle that by accident, I can experience it.
Thank you God. I understand and appreciate it. :).
Source date (UTC): 2013-02-05 21:30:00 UTC