Curt Doolittle

Theme: Civilization

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES First, cell phone plans and costs

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : OFFICES WITHOUT PHONES

    First, cell phone plans and costs are absurdly cheap here. I think in the states I tend to pay well over a hundred a month, and close to two hundred. During heavy business usage plans run six to fifteen hundred a month. (And yes, I have enough knowledge of the different phone companies to know how much of that is wasted on marketing to customers who are not loyal, and how much poorly our regulators protect us from penalty pricing. In penatlty pricing the profits are made by enticing customers with low prices and setting low limits on account usage and charging absurd penalties for going over those limits. This violates the principle of asymmetry of knowledge. And it ends up sending the lower classes to collection and further charges. So yes, I think it’s a hazard, and yes, I think it violates libertarian property rights.

    Second, when you go into an office here, at least the offices that I’ve been into, it’s just not a given that everyone will have a company provided phone, unless they absolutely need one for their work.

    Desks, as we know them. are places where you can store clerical equipment. they are workbenches for people who calculate abstractions rather than modify the physical world.

    But if you have a laptop and a cell phone (or a laptop and skype) you pretty much can work lying down on a couch, or standing at a bar, or in my favorite repose, sitting in a chair with your feet up. Now the truth is, that comfortable seating inversely proportional the the impact on your health. We need to walk. We compensate by standing at standing-desks. Some of us have discovereed the abdominal value of sitting on an exercise ball at a desk, which works your abs eight ours a day. Most of us sit in chairs at desks, which if we use reasonable posture is bad for our hearts and waistlines, but that’s all. Ohters of us recline in couches and chairs, because all we have to do is talk or write text, and a desk is unnecessary, but this is the worst possible place to put your body if you don’t get up and move around every thirty minutes or so.

    All that said, if we don’t need phones, at least some portion of us don’t need desks. But that’s probably bad for our health. So, the next work environment I”m going to put together will have desks at the perimeter, and lots of lounges for working comfortably, and ad-hoc, with the people that you need to.

    Now, I realize that technologists are a narrow segment. And that technologists don’t necessarily signal using office spaces. But for some of us, it’s just paradise to sit in a comfy chair and crank out our ideas.

    Offices need not be structured around phones.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-17 03:37:00 UTC

  • SORT OF “Despite this fast growth among “catching-up” countries, the rankings of

    http://www.tutor2u.net/blog/index.php/economics/comments/unit-4-macro-looking-to-2060-a-global-vision-of-long-term-growth?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+economics_news+%28tutor2u+Economics+Blog%29#When:09:48:54ZCONVERGENCE : SORT OF

    “Despite this fast growth among “catching-up” countries, the rankings of GDP per capita in 2011 and 2060 are projected to remain very similar”

    I hate to share a link from one of the two sites that have banned me. But the article and external links are worth it.

    While progressives look for reasons to justify their one world fantasy, those of us who know better see reduced western privilege leading to resurgent nationalism, and permanent friction as large poor countries remain permanently unequal. And as such doom the western lower classes to exactly the opposite future that they and their absurd egalitarian policies fantasizes about.

    Only innovation defeats Malthus. And with innovation comes greater intellectual demand on citizens.

    The fact that we have held Malthus at bay is a temporary product of asymmetric development and the conversion of farm to industrial labor. And that is a temporary conversion since labor is just as rapidly replaced both technically through productivity and geographically through labor competition.

    We will get either a eugenic or disgenic result from our egalitarian universalist fantasy.

    What we will not get is a harmonious egalitarian world order.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-11 07:15:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MOTHERS, USELESS MALES AND MISSING CHIVALRY A country wh

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : MOTHERS, USELESS MALES AND MISSING CHIVALRY

    A country where the men stand around, watch what’s going on, direct the women as if they are somehow adding value to the obvious, and the women humor the men, mollify them sufficiently as if they’re afraid of being beaten, and then do all the work as if the men weren’t there anyway.

    I am not a feminist. I also do not believe that men should willingly abandon their wealth of violence in order to become subjects of a mythical common good. But the fact is, that more than 1/3 of men are unnecessary unless we rely on manual labor, and they are entirely useless to society.

    However, they are born to and raised by mothers whose genes and choice of mates is insufficient for producing individual males capable of production in post-labor societies.

    “Choice” means that a woman has full control of breeding, and that the compromise “peace” that was achieved by the nuclear family under agrarianism, where the farm was a family business, and the family was the smallest tribe that it is possible to form, and where both male and female breeding strategies could be satisfied with limited compromise.

    Men are what mothers breed, and make them. While they have innate tendencies that are very different from those of women, most of what we call civilization is creating rules and incentives that direct men’s energies to the pursuit of status and behavior that is beneficial for all.

    So who is to blame for the behavior of men here?

    They have not abandoned their wealth of violence. That’s obvious. Neither domestically, politically, economically or socially. And for that I admire them. HOwever, without chivalry, they have no means of directing their energies to service of others.

    And without mothers who understand chivalry, they have no one to teach them.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-11 03:44:00 UTC

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS:SEXUALITY An advertisement that’s everywhere downtown for

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS:SEXUALITY

    An advertisement that’s everywhere downtown for a strip club that caters to women.

    There are all sorts of strip clubs. Not having moved fully to the Internet, prostitution is pervasive in nightclubs, and according to the local English language newspaper, includes average girls just trying to pay for college.

    I am not a feminist by any means. And as a libertarian I don’t have a problem with prostitution. But the fact they the government has abandoned the common people to a degree that it’s this pervasive is simply an institutional failure of absurd proportions given the literacy and education of the populace.

    Like most countries the political class treats education as a ticket to prosperity and a cheap enticement to earn the loyalty of citizens.

    But the distribution of intelligence, manners and morals guarantees that education is available for use by 20% of the populace and the remainder are saddled with disappointment and debt – neither of which can be satisfied.

    Meanwhile the state uses the disaffection that it created with false promises to justify attacks on the private sector.

    It’s madness.

    Curt

    ( Did you see how I used sex to talk about education and statism? ). Lol

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-10 16:21:00 UTC

  • SPORT CLOTHES FOR FAT PEOPLE The fashion scene here in Kiev is much more interes

    SPORT CLOTHES FOR FAT PEOPLE

    The fashion scene here in Kiev is much more interesting than in the states. While NY may have the runway shows, the stores in the urban centers in Europe have greater variety. Better quality. More ability to demonstrate your identity and taste. And class ‘uniforms’ are not as varied here as they are in the states.

    Everyone used to complain about the prevalence of the “Gap” look – clothes that will tolerate being washed in the permanent press cycle repeatedly.

    But what I’ve notice lately is that there is no ‘fitness’ status symbol. There doesn’t have to be. Almost nobody is ‘fat’ thanks to sushi as a junk food, poverty that keeps 80% of the people from overeating for entertainment like we do in the states, pervasive cigarette smoking, and a lot of plain old walking. People are pretty fit and thin.

    Because there isn’t any fitness symbolism, there really isn’t the same tendency to use sport clothes or casual clothes with sport affectations here.

    Which, of course, simply draws one’s attention to the fact that north americans are a bunch of fat people in faux-fitness clothing. And fitness clothing, being loose and comfortable, is pretty useful clothing for fat people.

    sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-11-06 03:22:00 UTC

  • THE THREE PROPERTIES OF ART: 1) NARRATIVE – VALUE JUDGEMENTS (CONCEPTUAL CONTENT

    THE THREE PROPERTIES OF ART:

    1) NARRATIVE – VALUE JUDGEMENTS (CONCEPTUAL CONTENT),

    2) DECORATION – PATTERN AND FERTILITY (AESTHETIC CONTENT),

    3) CRAFT – MASTERY OF MATERIALS (MATERIAL SCIENCE CONTENT)

    Art carries myth, and value judgment. It is a symbolic narrative. Decoration carries patterns. Or it conveys the idea of fertility, plenty, or evidence of human effort or care, which to humans, are the universal symbols for beauty. Craft is an expression of material science: our mastery of the materials themselves.

    These three differences in content demarcate the fine arts from the decorative arts, from craft. “High Art” combines all three dimensions of concept, aesthetic, and craft, for the purpose of creating cultural unity.

    Almost all educated people can use these techniques to evaluate any artistic creation. a) what is the mythical, political, philosophical, narrative content? b) Are patterns (composition) and beauty (presence of resources such as fertility) rendered with sophistication and insight? c) how craftsmanly is the work produced? if you answer these three questions any work can be judged – and the nonsense that you should just ‘feel’ art and fail to understanding it simply a marketing ploy by hucksters.

    Three pressures have devolved our high arts.

    1) The Medium That Is Movies

    Movies are so profitable, seen so widely, distributed so cheaply, naturally narrative, and aesthetically effective that they have absorbed almost the entire artistic production of the nation. All prior arts seem iconic and quaint by comparison.

    But the internationalization of movies has forced the eradication of the western mythological narrative from our scripts. Western heroism is appealing to males everywhere. But western exceptionalism is a curse. This problem is fascinating and threatens the industry because only blockbusters draw large crowds, but the heroic content of movies is limited to either familial sentiments, zombies, or aliens, because we can no longer criticize or demonize the competing heroic symbolism of other cultures given the need to exploit their population as a market.

    2) Economics

    The demand for decorative arts in the home, and craftsmanship (design of household goods) because of the vast numbers of the populace that have joined the consumer (middle) classes, has created demand for inexpensive decorative arts for every social class, each of which has different value judgements. The decrease in prices from industrial production has made it possible for more people to enter the arts, but at the cost of an inability of the market to sufficiently filter out would-be artists incapable of synthesizing art, design, and craft.

    3) The European cultural loss of identity and self confidence.

    The combination of socialism’s pressure for equality rather than excellence, feminism’s pressure to demonize christian white males, and the postwar self hatred of our aristocratic western origins have conspired not only to take power in government but to redefine beauty not as excellence but as rebellion.

    The myths that gave rise to our desire for excellence, greatness, and the high-trust-society, have been driven out of fashion by consumerism, socialism, feminism, and self doubt.

    We have, as a tribe, race, and people, surrendered our myths to the age of skepticism – when all cultures, along with their arts, go to die.

    But that should not prevent the few of us who aspire to excellence from acquiring the skill with which to analyze, interpret, and make judgements about the arts, using the very simple method I have outlined here:

    Narrative and its value judgements.

    Design and it’s aesthetic devices.

    Craft and it’s material devices.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-10-27 05:47:00 UTC

  • UKRAINE I feel like a cultural anthropologist studying white people in their nat

    UKRAINE

    I feel like a cultural anthropologist studying white people in their natural habitat.

    Most of us understand that this is the cauldron in which the west was cooked.

    As student of mankind, being here with these wonderful people is a spiritual as much as intellectual experience.

    All this talk of corruption is nonsense. The west is at least as corrupt. All the talk of the underground economy is true. But what other choice do they have? The black market and religion are the best means of peaceful rebellion available to a poor people.

    I suspect that they are our future more than we are theirs.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-10-12 09:17:00 UTC

  • “Women Do Everything Here” : The Absence of Chivalry In The Byzantines

    “Women Do Everything Here” : The Absence of Chivalry In The Byzantines http://www.capitalismv3.com/2012/10/11/women-do-everything-here-the-absence-of-chivalry-in-byzantines/

    Source date (UTC): 2012-10-11 18:31:14 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/256461975796715520

  • “Women Do Everything Here” : The Absence of Chivalry In The Byzantines

    “I cook, I clean, I work, and my husband sits on the couch demanding beer. Women do everything here. We want to be soft. But we can’t be.” – Nikka.

    [C]hivalry is yet another positive western value constructed by the church. I often write how the church granted women property rights, and forbid cousin-marriage out to six or eight degrees, in order to make it more difficult for the clans to maintain consolidated property holdings and associated financial and political power, while at the same time making it easier for the church itself to acquire lands. But the forcible introduction of the myth and philosophy of Chivalry is as important to the development of the unique western character, in suppressing paternalism and tribalism, as the forcible implementation of property rights by the church. Humans have existed in excess since the advent of domestication of plants and animals. The germanic princes and their retinues were not as barbaric and predatory as secular fantasies argue. However, the militarism of the Carolingians and Vikings, and the power of the states that they constructed in western Europe were impossible for the trading states of the south, and the church to resist. So, just as the church had used its power of literacy and legitimacy to manage the Christian monarchs, they used the crusades and the myth of chivalry, to direct the energies of these professional warriors to productive ends. This ethic of chivalry conveyed status upon those who served christendom. It codified service of others as masculine. It could be obtained through demonstrated action, and spiritual reflection, as well as daily posturing, rather than the more expensive requirement of land holding, and was therefore more widely available to retinues. It also provided a code of conduct that the aspring classes could imitate, making the ethics pervasive. The need for commoners to rent land from land holders, participate as infantry, and to demonstrate their capacity for honorable hard work, before marriage and reproduction were possible, reinforced this set of chivalrous values – allowing laborers and craftsmen to also adopt the chivalrous ethic, and to demonstrate their status signals through conformity to it. THe corresponding delay of childbirth and consequential inclusion of women into the work force, as well as their possession of rudimentary property rights, worked along with suppression of the breeding of the lower classes to create the european universalist and commercial character. This code of chivalric conduct does not exist here in the east among the men. Service is immasculine. It violates the primary principle of manliness which is independence from external direction. Whether that external direction come from service to an employer or service to the commons – society. Manliness, and masculinity have not been hybridized. It is not even as mature here as it is among the peacock strutters of the mediterranean — even if it is less ignorant, brutal and barbaric than that of the Arabs, and less familial and hierarchical than that of the Asians. And while we will certainly argue that masculinity has been overly feminized in much of the west, so much so that lower class males are returning to their individualistic migratory roots, the ethic of masculinity through service remains — for now. There are a few lessons to be learned from this that westerners might want to remember: 1) The church made what is unique about the west, and did so without monopoly powers of violence that are possessed by the current secular west. 2) The west is unique for artificial reasons. it is not a natural social order. It was forcibly constructed by wit and wisdom due to the weakness of the church. Whereas the paternalistic orders in the rest of the world were forcibly constructed by violence. 3) The west is unique because we were a small, weak, poor minority in the world who relied upon technology to compensate for our numbers, and property rights and the denial of centralized power to any and all. WE were lucky to inherit from the greeks the tool of reason which allows warriors to debate and science to develop. But it seems we are reversing our trend and denying our history. As for the Byzantines: without the church, I see no means of introducing chivalry into the civilization quickly, and we must hope that the commercial society eventually provides men with the incentives to build a high trust society of service like that of the west. Affections to all. Curt Doolittle

  • “Women Do Everything Here” : The Absence of Chivalry In The Byzantines

    “I cook, I clean, I work, and my husband sits on the couch demanding beer. Women do everything here. We want to be soft. But we can’t be.” – Nikka.

    [C]hivalry is yet another positive western value constructed by the church. I often write how the church granted women property rights, and forbid cousin-marriage out to six or eight degrees, in order to make it more difficult for the clans to maintain consolidated property holdings and associated financial and political power, while at the same time making it easier for the church itself to acquire lands. But the forcible introduction of the myth and philosophy of Chivalry is as important to the development of the unique western character, in suppressing paternalism and tribalism, as the forcible implementation of property rights by the church. Humans have existed in excess since the advent of domestication of plants and animals. The germanic princes and their retinues were not as barbaric and predatory as secular fantasies argue. However, the militarism of the Carolingians and Vikings, and the power of the states that they constructed in western Europe were impossible for the trading states of the south, and the church to resist. So, just as the church had used its power of literacy and legitimacy to manage the Christian monarchs, they used the crusades and the myth of chivalry, to direct the energies of these professional warriors to productive ends. This ethic of chivalry conveyed status upon those who served christendom. It codified service of others as masculine. It could be obtained through demonstrated action, and spiritual reflection, as well as daily posturing, rather than the more expensive requirement of land holding, and was therefore more widely available to retinues. It also provided a code of conduct that the aspring classes could imitate, making the ethics pervasive. The need for commoners to rent land from land holders, participate as infantry, and to demonstrate their capacity for honorable hard work, before marriage and reproduction were possible, reinforced this set of chivalrous values – allowing laborers and craftsmen to also adopt the chivalrous ethic, and to demonstrate their status signals through conformity to it. THe corresponding delay of childbirth and consequential inclusion of women into the work force, as well as their possession of rudimentary property rights, worked along with suppression of the breeding of the lower classes to create the european universalist and commercial character. This code of chivalric conduct does not exist here in the east among the men. Service is immasculine. It violates the primary principle of manliness which is independence from external direction. Whether that external direction come from service to an employer or service to the commons – society. Manliness, and masculinity have not been hybridized. It is not even as mature here as it is among the peacock strutters of the mediterranean — even if it is less ignorant, brutal and barbaric than that of the Arabs, and less familial and hierarchical than that of the Asians. And while we will certainly argue that masculinity has been overly feminized in much of the west, so much so that lower class males are returning to their individualistic migratory roots, the ethic of masculinity through service remains — for now. There are a few lessons to be learned from this that westerners might want to remember: 1) The church made what is unique about the west, and did so without monopoly powers of violence that are possessed by the current secular west. 2) The west is unique for artificial reasons. it is not a natural social order. It was forcibly constructed by wit and wisdom due to the weakness of the church. Whereas the paternalistic orders in the rest of the world were forcibly constructed by violence. 3) The west is unique because we were a small, weak, poor minority in the world who relied upon technology to compensate for our numbers, and property rights and the denial of centralized power to any and all. WE were lucky to inherit from the greeks the tool of reason which allows warriors to debate and science to develop. But it seems we are reversing our trend and denying our history. As for the Byzantines: without the church, I see no means of introducing chivalry into the civilization quickly, and we must hope that the commercial society eventually provides men with the incentives to build a high trust society of service like that of the west. Affections to all. Curt Doolittle