Curt Doolittle

Theme: Civilization

  • The age of art you recall destroyed the age of art I recall as the VP of the wor

    The age of art you recall destroyed the age of art I recall as the VP of the world’s largest supplier of commercial art supplies. And I recall it clearly.

    The day I saw early desktop publishing and typesetting I told the CEO to sell the company immediately. I left and bought an office supply company and computerized it. His 230-odd location company shrank to five stores barely surviving. But millions who were not skilled or talented enough to produce art by hand were able to vastly scale in numbers by producing so called art digitally.

    At present vast numbers who could not and were not skilled enough to produce digital equivalents of art are creating the post-hollywood industry. Just when that industry is dying of economic and conceptual exhaustion.

    At present gaming is trying to figure out how to add AI to games further competing in the attention economy.

    It takes time, but it just means we all have multiple careers.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-02-03 16:40:13 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2018726227381793068

  • Modern sense as a science of cooperation, but whether the enlighenment, the scho

    Modern sense as a science of cooperation, but whether the enlighenment, the scholastics, aquinas, or Aristotle much of it is consistent and difers only in attribution of causality.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-31 07:56:34 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2017507283534811500

  • Meanie. 😉 (fwiw: I loved living in ukraine and consider them the salt of the ea

    Meanie. 😉
    (fwiw: I loved living in ukraine and consider them the salt of the earth. I might almost love russians as much, but ukrainians don’t tolerate russian BS and in particular their violence and belligerence. And they have made killing russians into an art form that has revolutionized warfare. I mean it took our entire vietnam war to kill as many americans as ukrainians kill russians in a month. At present kill ratios 2.5 to 1, likely higher in the past four months, russia has nearly exhausted its supply of minorities and will have to recruit from the two big cities of moscow and st petersburg which is considered the revolt’s red line. Even so, they are out of hardware, and out of financial reserves, and their economy is at thirty percent inflation. I’m on the side of “russia can’t continue past 2026”. But at this point it’s suicidal for Putin to stop.

    Rock and a hard place.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-30 20:51:33 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2017339926225068215

  • It sounds good until you realize that it’s a short term possibility like spendin

    It sounds good until you realize that it’s a short term possibility like spending down your inheritance, but it’s committing civilizational suicide.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-29 14:57:29 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2016888435693539383

  • You’re nuts. A couple of immigrant cities do not america make. There are plenty

    You’re nuts. A couple of immigrant cities do not america make. There are plenty of us that still don’t need to lock our doors.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-27 20:05:03 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2016241059534405717

  • I remember when we did. It’s just been undermined. On purpose. And the axis of u

    I remember when we did. It’s just been undermined. On purpose. And the axis of undermining has been women, just like the christian destruction of the roman world.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 23:17:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015202246041256289

  • Um. European law at the time was greco-roman law and greek philosophy, reason, a

    Um. European law at the time was greco-roman law and greek philosophy, reason, and proto-empiricism. All of the middle east used mythicism instead. We call it lying but … it’s just their religious tradition. So yes, rabbinical judaism after 300ad was an attempt to copy the legitimacy and organizing principles of a much more advanced civilization: greece and rome.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 23:16:06 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015201975709921757

  • (Interesting) THE REALISM OF MIDDLE CLASS BLACK MEN During my life, the ‘wisdom

    (Interesting)
    THE REALISM OF MIDDLE CLASS BLACK MEN
    During my life, the ‘wisdom of the average man’ started out as farmers, became the working class hero, and is now the middle class black man.

    Black men are awesome at ‘keeping it real’ without the status signaling and conformity nonsense. I mean, watch working class and middle class black men talk about politics, life, and in particular women.

    And they aren’t as off center as ‘angry young white men’. Which I find even more curious.

    I just find it interesting that we have to find ‘truth’ in ordinary people because everyone else is posturing.

    Fascinating.

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 21:15:32 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015171635649859980

  • MORE GENERATION JONES

    MORE GENERATION JONES

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-24 11:08:08 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2015018777017229468

  • Western Vulnerability: Only The West Tolerates “Baiting Into Hazard” Our researc

    Western Vulnerability: Only The West Tolerates “Baiting Into Hazard”

    Our research identifies baiting into hazard as civilizational vulnerability that is not encoded in our law and constitution. Yet it is the means by which the left has used sedition by false promise of freedom from the laws of nature (scarcity, self interest, genetic differences, evolutionary differences).
    The claim becomes tractable if we first operationalize “baiting into hazard” as inducement into non-obvious risk under asymmetric knowledge, where the inducer avoids warranty/liability (so: seduction/entrapment-by-promise, not merely “selling risk”). That is the usage in your corpus. (

    naturallawinstitute.com

    )

    From there, the shortest causal account I can make that actually explains the pattern is:
    (“We punish after we do not regulate prior”)
    When a society scales cooperation beyond kin/clan, it has two options:
    • Ex ante constraint: prohibit classes of inducement because harms are difficult to unwind once incurred (religious/ethical prohibitions; status penalties).
    • Ex post settlement: allow broad freedom to contract/speak/compete, then punish only the narrow subset that can be proven as fraud/coercion/defect/non-disclosure.
    The modern West biased hard toward the second option because it is compatible with:
    • impersonal markets (strangers transact),
    • pluralism (no shared theology),
    • state monopoly on violence (private retaliation is delegitimized),
    • court-centered remedy (you sue; you don’t feud).
    That legal posture shows up in doctrines like caveat emptor: the buyer bears the burden unless the seller crosses into concealment/misrepresentation duties. (

    Legal Information Institute

    )

    To prohibit baiting as such you must adjudicate things like:
    • what the actor “should have known,”
    • whether the target was competent to consent,
    • whether the hazard was “reasonably foreseeable,”
    • whether the inducement exploited cognition/impulsivity,
    • whether disclaimers were meaningful.
    Those are fact-intensive and psychology-intensive questions. Western legalism historically tries to avoid turning courts into moral censors of persuasion, because the same machinery that can punish “baiting” can also punish dissent, heterodoxy, and market competition. So the system narrows to what it can prove cleanly (fraud, defect, nondisclosure, coercion) and tolerates the rest as “bad deals,” “vice,” “speculation,” or “buyer beware.” (

    Legal Information Institute

    )

    Historically, Western civilization also treated major bait-classes (notably usury/interest) as prohibited or tightly constrained; medieval canon law and church councils did so explicitly. (

    EH.net

    )

    What’s distinctive is the earlier and broader relaxation of blanket prohibitions as credit markets became necessary for commercialization and industrialization; scholarship notes Europe’s gradual abandonment of blanket usury prohibitions from roughly the early modern period, while Islamic prohibitions endured more robustly. (

    ScienceDirect

    )

    So the “Western exception” is less “no taboo exists,” and more: the West converts taboo into regulated permission sooner, because scalable capital formation demands it.
    If the unit of insurance is the family/clan/caste, then one person’s bait-induced ruin contaminates the whole unit’s stability, marriage prospects, status, and survival. So those societies evolve:
    • strong ex ante moral rules (prohibitions),
    • status penalties (dishonor/shame),
    • informal enforcement (boycott, ostracism, retaliation).
    Religious-law prohibitions against riba/usury are a clean example of institutionalized ex ante constraint: interest is treated as exploitative/inequitable and forbidden or tightly bounded. (

    Islamic Law Blog

    )

    In Doolittle’s framing, baiting works best where people are culturally disposed to treat speech/offerings as good-faith and where social life depends on wide-radius trust; you explicitly link susceptibility to “high trust.” (

    naturallawinstitute.com

    )

    Mechanism:
    High-trust + abstract promises + complex systems (finance/ideology) ⇒ cheap inducement at scale ⇒ expensive downstream harm ⇒ weak restitution.
    And because modern Western norms protect broad expression and experimentation, baiting can be presented as “just persuasion,” “just opportunity,” “just your choice,” unless you can pin it to a provable misrepresentation.
    This is the individualist complement to the kin/clan story. Western liberal order tends to presume:
    • adult competence,
    • consent as legitimizing risk,
    • and risk-taking as productive discovery.
    That posture is growth-positive (more experimentation) but also opens the door to systematic extraction under asymmetry—especially once marketing, finance, and politics become industrialized.
    If the above is causal, you should observe:
    1. Baiting rises with: impersonal exchange, urbanization, complex credit/derivatives, mass media/advertising, weak communal enforcement.
    2. Baiting falls when either:
      ex ante prohibitions are strong (religious/status systems),       or
      ex post liability is strong (warranty, restitution, consumer protections that actually bite), reducing the payoff.
    3. The West will show a characteristic pattern: permit first, regulate later (innovation outruns doctrine; doctrine catches up after obvious harm). Caveat emptor gradually shifts toward disclosure/warranty in bounded domains, but never fully generalizes because it would require discretionary policing of persuasion. (

      Legal Information Institute

      )

    1. When you say “baiting into hazard,” are you primarily pointing at credit/usury/financial complexity, political-ideological promises, or sexual/social entrapment? The dominant institutions differ by domain, even if the grammar is shared.
    2. Do you mean “the West tolerates it” as (a) legal permissiveness, (b) moral permissiveness, or (c) enforcement incapacity? These diverge: a society can morally condemn baiting while legally tolerating it under speech/contract norms, or legally prohibit it but fail enforcement.
    https://naturallawinstitute.com/docs/the-prosecution/the-choice-series/the-explanation-of-abrahamism/


    https://naturallawinstitute.com/docs/part-xx-reforms-constitution/the-declaration/declaration/


    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/caveat_emptor


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveat_emptor


    https://eh.net/encyclopedia/usury/


    https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/UsuryCalvinismCredit.pdf


    https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/01/14/navigating-the-prohibition-of-riba-in-the-modern-islamic-world/


    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riba.asp

    Source date (UTC): 2026-01-23 22:45:00 UTC

    Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/2014831760451027175