Last week, one of our lawyers, spent thirty minutes telling us how we could obey the law and screw our shareholders. Our legal system has lost all concept of property rights and involuntary transfer. Its time to blow it up and start all over. I don’t want to know what’s legal. I want to know what is right and just, as well as legal.
WTF is wrong with people. F–K.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 16:36:00 UTC
DEAR ASCENTIUM FOLK
(karma)
The investment banker, Erik Anderson, of WestRiver Capital, that destroyed your beautiful company, and even once we’d rescued it from him with the ultimate Hail Mary, pulled all the money out that we’d worked two years to get, and drove it into near insolvency, has been terminated by the parent company, removed from the board, and removed from his duties.
Can’t recreate that one. The window passed. But sometimes there is at least some sense of justice in the world. It’s cathartic to me, at least. And I’m not shy about it. He’s every example of what Americans deservedly hate about the financial sector. And yet another example of why the financialization of our economy was a cultural and economic disaster.
Maybe there is a special cell in hell. 😉
Just sayin’.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 15:37:00 UTC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001EQ4OLA/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkGREGORY CLARK – ANGLO SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
“A Farewell to Arms) discusses the divide between rich and poor nations that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the evolution of particular behaviors originating in Britain. Prior to 1790, Clark asserts, man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.”
“In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. By that according to Clark less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of “downward social mobility” eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap. Clark sees this process also til today as the major factor why some countries are poor and others are rich.”
COMMENT
Now, you might not make the same association. But what I see is that immigration prevents downward rotation. It just promotes dissatisfaction. A body politics is BOTH an extended family AND a system of production. And you cannot just assume the latter universally trumps the former.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-08 14:01:00 UTC
(COURT OF SILLY IDEAS) PROBLEMS WITH ANY NEW CIVIC ‘CHURCH’
One of the primary reasons we live in little isolated boxes is so that we can create our own illusion of status. We hate it when that status is challenged. But it is a status of our own construction. We are sold this fantasy by Government, Universities, Advertisers, and in some cases, lenders.
We could ‘buy’ that status cheaply because the ‘Blue Period’ of american postwar prosperity made it possible to transfer people from farm and apartment, to industry and home. But there is no reason that this can continue. Those conditions no longer exist. We are just spending our heritage, and impoverishing the future thanks to baby boomers. (I am Jones, not Boomer, generation.)
One of the things going to ‘church’ or whatever public ceremony you choose, does, is contextualize your status. And for some people that’s good. For some it’s unnecessary. And for others it’s downright unpleasant because its contradictory.
If some civic gathering (feast ritual) on a regular basis is status producing, personally advantageous, or economically advantageous, then I assume people would go. But the problem is creating that environment in modernity. Right now it’s the false promise of academia. Academia just sorts. It doesn’t teach us anything.
THE CIVIC SOCIETY
What I think all of us want is the true commitment of community. And that institution CANNOT be the state. The state can only apply violence. That is all it can do. WIthout the extended family, we require the civic society and the state has stolen it from us.
NEEDS
1) Rituals (christening, maturity, education, wedding, death)
2) Festivals (holidays)
3) Education (technical, civil-ethical, historical, literary)
4) Banking
5) Personal Financial Management
6) Insurance
7) Elder advice and counsel.
Most of this would be fairly easy to accomplish with the professionalization of teaching, banking and insurance.
MORE LATER.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 08:39:00 UTC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594036438/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkPLEASE READ THIS BOOK: THE INSTITUTION OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY
More development of the thesis that the Anglo nuclear family is central to economic prosperity. (In my view, central to the development of extra-familial trust.)
I think their optimistic vision of the future is worth whatever any other silly person’s vision of the future is worth. Not much. History shows that economics and demographics determine outcomes and our economics and demographics are a serious problem. But their analysis of the nuclear family as the primary means of cultural indoctrination in the anglo model is quite good.
HISTORY OF THIS LINE OF REASONING
Charles Murray
Breaking Apart (2012) (empirical)
Emmanuel Todd:
After Empire: The Breakdown Of American Order (2006)
Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social System, (1985)
The Invention of Europe (1990)
Ostwald Spengler:
The Decline of the West (1918)
LINKS
http://www.amazon.com/After-Empire-Breakdown-Perspectives-Criticism/dp/B00EBFVSOC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
We split English and German civilizations in the 1800’s
We conquered them in the 1900’s.
We figured out they were right all along in the 2000’s.
Empiricism is all well and good. It just isn’t enough to build a society upon.
SEE ALSO THE GREAT HISTORIANS
Arnold J. Toynbee
Fernand Braudel
Carroll Quigley
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 06:49:00 UTC
HUMAN BEHAVIOR QUESTION: LOTTOCRATIC BUSINESS PROCESSES?
If you have worked with me before, you know that I have a sort of personal commitment to eliminating overhead bureaucracy and empowering the people who actually do the work. I’ve found that it’s better to distribute management functions to a large number of people, each of whom does just a little bit of it.
The side effects are fascinating. First, you educate a lot of people about how to run a business. If you rotate these duties you basically train most of your staff in how to operate the boring but necessary parts. Second, it makes it impossible for people to use their management duties to obscure information. Third, it prevents stagnation and encourages innovation. People want to eliminate these little process functions rather than expand them. So they tend to invent ways of making them go away.
TIME CARDS AND EXPENSES AS LOTTOCRACY
I have been toying with the idea of lottocratically assigning timesheet approvals around a services company. That is, anyone with one year of experience or more gets X randomly assigned timesheets and expense reports to review and approve. Most of what is accomplished by approvals is error checking. If accounting, upon entering and posting, approves it too, your score goes up, and if they reject it your score goes down.
Now you might think this is crazy. But I’m pretty sure, that if I made it an option. Most people in any company would want to do it. Particularly the less experienced people. And the senior people would avoid it at all costs.
People would want to do it because it increases Sovereignty. They are more in control, and participating more in their environment. And from my perspective, an informed and participatory employee is happier one, who brags about his or her job to others. Which helps recruiting. And customers ‘SENSE’ it. And that ‘sense’ sells.
I’M WONDERING WHAT YOU THINK?
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 01:19:00 UTC
RAISING POLICE QUALIFICATIONS
Officer in the military in a combat capacity with a college education. ( Pretty soon, given the number of lawyers we’re producing, we can hire lawyers for our police ranks. )
You don’t think that putting upper proletarians in charge of law enforcement is going to lead to people respecting legal rights do you? I mean, just TRY to find a policeman that actually knows the law, rather than what they can get away with in court. They know the latter. They practice the latter.
We have a lot of highly paid upper proletarians on power tips running around doing what should be the work of elected and insured private individuals (sheriffs). These people are predators at the service of the state.
They are constantly confused by rules versus harm. If there is no harm, there is no application of the rule.
Why would you forbid someone access to a state park?
NO HARM NO FOUL
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 10:33:00 UTC
NATURE, NURTURE AND CULTURE
Three causal axis.
Our genes and in-utero development. Our family structure, child rearing, and pedagogical methods. Our informal and formal institutions.
One of the most problematic cognitive biases is the tendency to take a single axis of causality – a single explanation – and to apply anywhere and everywhere. It’s the ‘ideal type’ bias.
But human beings are causally dense creatures. And behaviorally plastic creatures. Because the combination of memory and the ability to plan (reason) allows us to forecast the future, and adapt to it proactively. If we are successful, some of the biases in our memories and planning can become incorporated into our genetics. If our plans become successful, they are carried between overlapping generations by imitation and memory.
Further, as creatures who find patterns between different stimuli, we are unable to separate ideas into neat drawers. They bleed into each other. As such we have explicit memories (knowledge) that we possess intentionally, we have habitual memories (knowledge) that we realize varies from group to group. We have unconscious associations and habits and value judgements that we take as physical properties of life, but can at some point become aware of and aware of their variation. We have metaphysical value judgements that CAUSE much of our unconscious biases. And we have genetic differences in our moral intuitions, and cognitive abilities that are the result of both genetic and in-utero experiences.
Nearly all food habits are the result of regional necessity and economics. Almost all clothing habits are the same – the development of excellence in one minor technology or another as a demonstration of status. Almost all family habits are very similar at the same level of economic development. Childrearing seems to have as great an impact as does family structure.
Rituals and religions are a complex topic but our knowledge of the social, political and economic reasons. We know why feasts, military tactics, the problem of uniting tribes, and the problem of constraining power, and in some places, the problem of resigning to difficult environments, found the idea of scriptural religion useful in a social context by transferring the family hierarchy to the ether.
Our genetic makeup is different BECAUSE of these factors. Or rather, some minor biases in our genetic makeup interplayed with these cultural ‘genetics’ and the two together brought us to where we are today.
When we argue that genetics is ‘all there is’ or culture is ‘all there is’ we are just confusing the Nature, Culture, Nurture argument further. we are making the same mistake that the ‘nurturists’ do but from the opposite end of the spectrum.
Since we know that Nature, Culture and Nurture are three extant causal axis, then a simple application of Ockham’s razor for any demonstrated human behavior prevents us from being people wearing tin foil hats. All our behaviors are the product of these three axis.
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 04:17:00 UTC
CULTURE OR GENES: IT’S A MUTUALLY DEPENDENT PROCESS
(from elsewhere)
I study cooperative institutions they way hbd_chick studies familial institutions. And as such I’m sure that my bias in determining causality is toward cultural rather than genetic factors.
I’ve always been suspicious of suggestions of genetic transmission of those biases that can be transmitted by habits, norms, traditions, myths, institutions, and those that are the product of organizations: family or extended family. Maternal or Paternal. Hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, post-industrial as well as Ritual, temple, church, voluntary civic order.
But the universalist bias in indo-europeans seems to transcend those external forces. We can tell now that we have an interesting combination of :
1) Lower testosterone and therefore lower impulsivity.
2) Lower Impulsivity and therefore longer (lower) time preference.
3) Higher verbal intelligence and therefore hIgher median intelligence.
4) Higher energy levels and higher rates of burning calories, so more action oriented.
This means that our activity is more evenly distributed than more impulsive gene pools.
And our vision of man, as represented in our art, is as beautiful. And our metaphysical objective is to transform nature to our will.
The east asians have much lower testosterone and impulsivity than we do, but lower verbal intelligence intelligence. I can’t find data on their energy levels, but it appears that they are more even-tempered laborers than ‘whites’. Although their vision of ‘man’, as represented in their art is as evil in contrast to nature, which we must submit to.
These factors are not cultural transmissions. They are genetic transmissions. Just how much of that genetic transmission is caused by cultural necessity, and how much it produced that cultural necessity is very hard to determine.
But regardless of FIRST cause, there is certainly a relationship between the two, such that genetic and cultural factors are self reinforcing over time.
As far as I can tell, Gimbutas was right, and the structure of military tactics is the cause of western, northern european, (white) cultural differences. And those differences have been gradually encoded in our genes over the centuries as biases.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-05 05:14:00 UTC
ENGLISH EXCEPTIONALISM: THE NUCLEAR FAMILY, COMMON LAW, CIVIL ASSOCIATIONS, PROTESTANTISM, WIDESPREAD LAND OWNERSHIP.
Emmanuel Todd is getting mainstream attention.
“That English, later Anglosphere, exceptionalism, is very real. That the rise of our language and culture to their current unprecedented dominance – what one commentator terms “Anglobalisation” – is based on a series of properties that are either unique to the English-speaking peoples, or shared only with a handful of kindred cultures in northwestern Europe. Among these properties are the common law, representative government, Protestantism, dispersed landownership, civil associations separate from the state and – of particular interest to these authors – the unusual nature of the family.
“They show that the Anglosphere dispenses with the extended family structures which, in most places, have legal as well as cultural force. In many societies, the peasant family has traditionally been treated as a kind of collective landowner, within which there are reciprocal responsibilities. Children, even in adulthood, have been expected to work on the family plot, receiving board and lodging. Marriages are typically arranged, and daughters-in-law come under the authority of the head of their new household. Even when the law recognizes individual autonomy, custom is often slow to follow.
“The Anglosphere scarcely resembles the Eurasian landmass in its family structures. Our notion of the family is limited and nuclear. Most English-speakers in most centuries wanted to set up home on their own, independently, with just their spouse and children – although economic circumstances did not always allow that aspiration to be fulfilled.
“The notion that the limited family underpins Anglosphere exceptionalism – which draws heavily on the work of the French anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd – is intriguing. I see the cultural difference all around me in the European Parliament. In most Continental states, your social life is largely taken up with your extended family: you have an endless stream of weddings and christenings to go to, sometimes of very distant cousins. Britons and Americans, by contrast, expect to leave their parental home in their teens, either to go to university or to work. We make friends away from home, and they become the core of our social life. Indeed, the word “friend” carries more force in English than in many European languages, in which it is bestowed quickly and generously, but often means little more than what we mean by a Facebook friend. When a Spaniard says of someone “es muy amigo mío”, he simply means that he gets on with the chap.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 16:15:00 UTC