THREE COMMANDMENTS
I always thought “Deeds, Not Words” was a nice but not terribly important truism. However, now that I understand it, it sits among the few commandments I have learned:
1) Do nothing unto others that you would not have done unto you.
2) Demonstrate deeds, rather than words.
3) Speak the truth, even if it means your death, and require the truth, or promise death.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-21 13:56:00 UTC
THE LOGIC OF DIVORCE
Data suggests that the no fault divorce was one of the worst legislative failures in history.
Now, my view is that we either relegate marriage to the equivalent of a power of attorney, and eliminate common property entirely, or that we return to fault, for the distribution of common property in the event of failure.
Single motherhood is responsible for the rise in inequality, as much as is third world immigration, and the failure of the education system to create competitive labor, and the university system for selling defective and un-warrantied products.
Propertarianism would recommend that we eliminate common property because it is not in fact a commons: that which is unavailable for consumption. As such marital assets cannot be considered a commons since they are available for consumption. And so this law is a deception.
Conversely, fault based divorce increases the risk of exiting the marriage, and increases the incentives for preserving it.
Likewise alimony and child support are both destructive in that they merely ignore the cost of maintaining two households- especially given that males can no longer trade their productivity, while women can still trade their sex and affection.
My intuition is that marriage with high penalty was an extremely useful institution inseparable from Liberty, capitalism, and the civic society. It forces concentration of wealth and it’s highly eugenic when in nuclear and absolute nuclear form.
We are currently practicing the worst of all possible choices.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-15 03:04:00 UTC
WHITE LIES AS HONEST, ETHICAL AND MORAL
(contrary perspective – truth telling as potential verbalism)
I have a really good lie detector, but I also know who is capable of fooling me. The value of lying increases rapidly under certain conditions, and decreases rapidly under others. So, in my life, under these conditions, I just don’t have an opportunity to work under conditions with the class of people who even desire to outright lie. Nor do I put people in a position where they can lie to me, or would want to. So, in my world, people don’t lie. They negotiate, fail to understand, and they err.
I have no problem at all with white lies and I usually prefer that people tell them whenever possible if it’s ‘good manners’: as means of preserving confidences primarily. Even one’s own confidences. It is a signal that they are trustworthy rather than blabbermouths or social incompetents.
I usually rely on distractions or incomplete truths in order to preserve confidences while at the same time sharing information that is not in confidence. I think, or at least, my experience is, that this is a sort of necessary, well-understood-language if not protocol among those with power.
To some degree, great politicians do nothing EXCEPT tell white lies that convey information while preserving confidences. Great negotiators tell half truths for the same reason. The art is in never lying EVER while at the same time preserving confidences. And confidences are necessary for constructing networks of economic dependencies. The reason is that incentives can be manipulated under truth-telling, for unethical, immoral, and un-earned advantage. So in that case, white lies, particularly, distractions and incomplete information that eliminates the ability for others to use unethical, immoral, and un-earned advantage are both ethical and moral. (Wrap your head around that.)
However, I’ve found that ordinary folk who live in a world of suspicion because they can’t function as good lie detectors, nor can they model incentives of others, get angry with you for this behavior. So it’s somewhat of a problem if you mix class-associations. Because as andy says,we all use only one means of lying.
So, like violence, it is not the action itself that is moral or immoral, but whether one is violating a property right (including a confidence). Lying is never required because it is for one’s advantage – fraud), but distraction, obscurantism, and truth telling (the amount of information communicated) must be present in some terms, because otherwise you are assisting in a conspiracy to gain advantage where the seller does not want his incentives to be considered as part of the transaction.
We have to separate negotiation over demand, for negotiation over supply. Incentives are external to the transaction. The question is only whether what is represented in the transaction is true or not.
For some reason this gets lost in our ethical, moral, and legal theory.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-13 05:10:00 UTC
PROGRESSIVES VS CONSERVATIVES – IRRESPONSIBILITY VS INCOMPETENCE.
(I love how the socialists, progressives and the postmoderns have argued and transformed the language in favor of hedonism, and for irresponsibility for externalities; while conservatives argue for asceticism, stoicism and a prohibition on externalities, without having any idea that’s what they’re doing or why other than their moral intuitions.
Everyone is talking past each other. Progressives are morally blind, and conservatives are rhetorically incompetent. Libertines are morally as bad or worse, and as morally blind as progressives.
It’s no wonder we can’t resolve conflicts. )
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 10:00:00 UTC
DRINKING AGE AND FIGHTING AGE?
(worth repeating)
In war you follow orders, destroy and kill, and are in the constant presence of others who can violently constrain you – even kill you.
At home you have precisely the opposite conditions: you act on your own volition, are prohibited from almost every possible harm, you are in the presence of others who are by law limited in constraint of you.
Liberty requires cognizance and alcohol and testosterone erase it. So no. Drinking at home, and fighting in war are very different environments. The two have nothing to do with one another as long as young males under the influence of alcohol continue to cause a disproportionate amount of damage.
The question isn’t moral, and the environments are not commensurable. It’s empirical and the environments pose opposite conditions with opposite consequences.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 09:56:00 UTC
DECIDABILITY IN ETHICS AND LAW: DYSGENIC, STATIC OR EUGENIC.
(very dense but very important argument) (edited and reposted)
From David Hamilton:
—“Why not just admit that ethics is ultimately about our being in fundamental states of conflict with each other – that we are all simply trapped in the same metaphorical room preferring either Matisse or Picasso to hang on the common wall, and that ethics is ultimately about our agitating to impose our aesthetic tastes and preferences on everyone else, lest they impose theirs on us?”—
Well written, common frustration, but, No.
Determination of criminal, ethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions are universal. There exists only one universal law: the prohibition on free riding (imposed costs / lost time and effort).
It’s true that by analogy, we refer to contractual obligations, commands, and regulations as law, to grant them the same standard. Just as we refer to a host of signals as ethical or moral, when they are only analogies thereof. But this analogy conveys import by analogy not truth content.
MORAL THEORY RESULTS IN LAW
So while you are correct that we are, outside of kin, ultimately in conflict on ends and means, we can develop rules – Like monogamy, for Nash equilibria – that allow us to cooperate on means if not ends: to engage in productive conflict rather than unproductive conflict. That is, after all, the function of the market.
And if such rules are sufficiently internally consistent that (a) they can be used as general rules (b) applicable to all, for (c) a multitude of conditions we can then use such rules deductively. If these three (a,b,c) properties exist then such a general rule can be embodied in law, under rule of law. And only under such deductive, universally applicable, general rules can we live under rule of law, rather than arbitrary decision predicated upon the biases of an authority.
So ethics, politics and law constitute reasoning by which we can construct general rules of cooperation (competition:productive conflict) WITHOUT relying on individual bias, given the reality of our conflict.
So the question becomes one of ensuring that such general rules are decideable. Which is the central problem of all general rules in all logical models. The only means of decidability, is either dysgenic (socialism: the female reproductive strategy) or eugenic (libertarian meritocratic) or static (authoritarian).
As far as I know that is a logical box without exit.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-08 02:26:00 UTC
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE NORTH SEA AND THE LEVANT.
Action vs verbalism
Operations vs meaning
Testimony vs Platonism
Recipe vs allegory
Promise vs convenience
Warranty vs irresponsibility
Innovation vs criticism
Landholding vs migrants
Commons vs parasitism
Honest Debate vs loaded gossip
Warriors vs priests
Liberty vs authority
Public truth vs private pragmatism.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-06 05:02:00 UTC
AGGRESSION VS HARM VS COST
Sequence:
1 – I have no agreement with you, and therefore no constraint.
2 – I will not aggress against you.
3 – I will not cause you harm.
4 – I will not cause you to bear a cost.
5 – I will bear costs of reciprocal insurance.
6 – I will bear kin selection costs.
Aggression leaves open unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial action.
Harm leaves open the problem of relative costs – and therefore is not an objective and sufficient means of measurement.
Costs are universally applicable independent of scale, not relative, and prohibit criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial action of all kinds.
—–
The fact that so many people are fooled into the fallacy of aggression as sufficient criteria for the formation of a voluntarily organized polity, is evidence of the frailty of rationalism.
The purpose of rationalism is justification. The purpose of scientific methods is to prevent justification.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-05 04:48:00 UTC
http://justification.th/Aggression vs Harm vs Cost
I have no agreement with you, and therefore no constraint.
I will not aggress against you.
I will not cause you harm.
I will not cause you to bear a cost.
I will bear costs of reciprocal insurance.
I will bear kin selection costs.
Aggression leaves open unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial action.
Harm leaves open the problem of relative costs – and therefore is not an objective and sufficient means of measurement.
Costs are universally applicable independent of scale, not relative, and prohibit criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial action of all kinds.
—–
The fact that so many people are fooled into the fallacy of aggression as sufficient criteria for the formation of a voluntarily organised polity, is evidence of the frailty of rationalism.
The purpose of rationalism is justification. The purpose of scientific methods is to prevent justification.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-04 04:15:00 UTC
PAINFUL REALIZATION: THE FAMILY AND PROPERTY RIGHTS
I’ve been wrestling with this problem for a few days now. That is, that :
(a) While intuited morality corresponds to the atomicity of the family structure;
(b) AND therefore determines demand for the state (authority to resolve conflict, prevent conflict, or prevent retaliation);
(c) AND only the absolute nuclear family can EVOLVE individual property rights, and liberty,
(d) AND the absolute nuclear family, as normative and legal, is fragile, and subject to conquest by more familial, tribal, national, and religious organizations;
(e) AND absolute nuclear families facilitate easier movement of human resources to capital (rather than moving capital to resources);
That does not mean that:
(f) An aristocratic, familial and tribal society cannot adopt legal individual property rights, and institute formally in law, and therefore in norm, total suppression of criminal, unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions.
(g) And therefore eliminate the need for absolute nuclear and nuclear families, thereby returning to aristocratic families.
(h) Furthermore, that only it is only by violation of rights by the formal institution of immoral and conspiratorial actions, that aristocratic families (natural aristocracy over 3+ generations) are exterminated by competitors.
Therefore,
(i) It is possible to possess both aristocratic families, outlaw persecution of aristocratic families, (inheritance taxes, etc, income taxes for the purpose of redistribution), and individual high trust property rights.
(j) In fact, since violation of the family is a violation of moral and conspiratorial property rights, then of necessity, one cannot suppress the aristocratic families and yet preserve property rights.
THEREFORE
(k) The enlightenment era, particularly the cosmopolitan enlightenment (socialism, libertinism, and neo-conservatism) is a war on the exceptional families by the unexceptional families.
Source date (UTC): 2014-10-02 11:54:00 UTC