". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
Curt Doolittle:
WHY? THE FALLACY OF NON AGGRESSION AS JUSTIFICATION.
Why would you develop an ethics of non-aggression rather than an ethic of non-theft, for a philosophical framework that purports to reduce all right to property rights, for some reason other than legitimizing deception and forbidding retaliation for deception?
You see, cosmopolitanism is merely a philosophical framework for justificationism.
ALTRUISTIC PUNISHMENT: “I will bear a cost in order to impose a cost on someone for imposing costs on others.”
Directly, no one wins, it’s a lose/lose/lose; costs all the way around.
Indirectly, we all benefit from the maintenance of a normative commons that discourages people from imposing costs, negative externalities, on others or refraining from contributing to benefits, positive externalities, which are shared.
This is a common human behavior and it is impossible to understand human behavior, or the evolution of societies and polities, without understanding altruistic punishment.
I’m leaving this here so that I can find it later.
“Earlier than many other states, Pennsylvania tried to raise taxes to cover its mounting interest costs. By 1842, total tax revenue was almost twice what it had been in 1835, but this was still far too little to restore the state’s finances. The state also resorted to other tactics to avoid collapse. In April 1840, legislators compelled banks with state charters to lend three million dollars to cover the state’s deficit, but the banks themselves were near collapse. A year later, the state treasury began paying many of its creditors with small denomination relief notes, which were often returned to the state for payment of taxes and did little to improve its ability to pay overseas lenders.
“By the end of 1841 the state was desperate. Philadelphia merchant Sidney Fisher wrote in his diary in early December that ‘the doctrine of repudiating state debts is spreading rapidly, is spoken of openly and boldly defended by many presses and leading politicians.’ A public meeting at the Philadelphia courthouse later that month passed resolutions denying that Pennsylvanians were under any ‘moral, legal or political obligation’ to repay the ‘so-called state debt.’ In early 1842, the state met interest payments by scavenging from the assets of the Bank of the United States, which had collapsed in January. By August 1842, the treasury had nothing but its own relief notes, and Pennsylvania finally defaulted. ‘The substance of our State is swallowed up,’ wrote a correspondent to the local newspaper in Smethport, Pennsylvania, ‘and repudiation stares us in the face.’ …
Progressive Opinion makers: eagnews.org/1000-member-secretive-progressive-journalist-group-uncovered/
Over at the New Scientist Fred Pearce has a nice article, “Local people preserve the environment better than government,” in which he discusses an issue well known to Reason readers – recognzing the property rights of local people protects resources from overexploitation. Pearce is focusing on a new report from the environmentalist think tank, the World Resources Institute. The report, Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change: How Strengthening Community Forest Rights Mitigates Ciimate Change, surveys the literature and finds that private ownership of land by local communities greatly reduces deforestation.
reason.com/blog/2014/08/05/environmentalists-shocked-that-local-peo
“Shame on you for not wanting to get mugged, car-jacked, or assaulted. Bad whitey, bad! If those things tend, on average, to happen in “diverse” areas, well then you’re just required to accept that risk to demonstrate your commitment to “diversity.” What are you, some kind of bigot?”
1. The Enlightenment’s great error was the assumption of universalism. We still suffer from it. Profoundly.
2. The ISIS situation is exacerbated by the brain drain of Arab professionals into the western world. They left behind a critical mass of mouth-breathing knuckle draggers. If you want to spread western values, do it by example, not by opening the borders.
3. Jews have and continue to aggressively advocate open European borders, plus cultural relativism because they themselves have needed to infiltrate European cultures. They’ve gone too far in lowering the ramparts and upending the culture of their warriors with post-modernism. If Europe is colonized and its culture diluted beyond recognition, they will all be killed, and their killers won’t feel bad about it either. They won’t build monuments and museums as Europeans do.
What do I mean by universalism?
Much of the world neither wants nor is capable of individualism, logic, reason, I would also add “high trust” which is a European phenomenon though probably not an Enlightenment discovery.
The west, both in Britain’s colonialism and today in its open-border policy, continues to act as if everybody is a member of the family (high trust society), continues to act as if peoples living mysticism and superstition can be governed by our greater reliance on logic and reason.
This is a mistake. Many (most) people want collectivism, mysticism, superstition. The Enlightenment will reassert itself by nationalizing it’s values. A fence will be put around it. I hope this happens before a bloody clash of civilizations, and not after, thought it may already be too late.
Much of the rest of the world has been unwillingly and ungratefully dragged out of ignorance poverty and disease by the fruits of the Enlightenment. Their best chance at continuing civilizational progress would be if their intellectuals remained there, instead of joining the western civilization, and voluntarily became a sort of aristocracy.
Trusting outsiders and using ethical code with them. Expecting them to do the same. Only Northern Europeans do so.
^^ as exemplified by the idiotic statement of some Swedish politicians “we have to be nice to the Muslims now so that they’ll be nice to us when we are the minority.”
(www.lostrepublic.com/archives/14590)
Am I anti-semitic?
WTF!
First of all, let’s discuss whether something is TRUE. Not if it’s racist or anti-semitic, or mysoginist. Truth has been lost in the era of post-modernism. It’s Foucault’s vision — language is devoid of meaning, it’s just a struggle for power. As a writer, you should not accept this.
Secondly, the first paragraph above described an error of Christians, the second an error of Muslims and the third an error of Jews.
No more empty accusations, please.
Cultures vary and I won’t be intimidated into silence.
Here’s the scholarly work from UC Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald: www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Critique…/dp/0759672229
Let me restate this because I have a bad feeling that I offended my friends xxx and xxx.
I’m hypothesizing about the cultural degradation which lead to little girls being beheaded . . . in 2014!!!!! Want to see pictures? www.catholic.org/news/international/middle_east/story.php?id=56339
Here is my hypothesis:
1) Christian Europe universalized familial trust — especially protestant Europe, less so Catholic Europe, and I’m not sure but I think Orthodox Europe (my ancestors) are just a border-land civilization. Especially in protestant Europe, every person was considered a relative. This is the high trust society. It’s the only part of the world in which tribalism was defeated. This became the foundation for modern civilization.
But Christian Europe also has a psychopathic altruism which led them to incorrectly attempt to universalize its norms.
They opening Europe’s borders to millions of tribal people and expecting them to reciprocate European universalism. Expecting them to contribute the commons (social norms) by forgoing the opportunity cost of good behavior.
They expecting universalism to spread, along with the Enlightenment triumphs of logic and reason over mysticism, pseudo-science. They take truth for granted. They didn’t guard truth as it needs to be guarded.
They’re making a mistake. Western values will neither be adopted or preserved under these assumptions.
2) Arab Muslims, like everybody else in the world, wanted to live among the riches of modern civilization, under rule of law and private property rights. There has been an enormous brain drain from the Muslim world into Europe. The very people who were most likely to champion logic, reason, universalism, exactly what the hugely tribal, superstitious Muslim world needs, have abandoned their civilization. You’re left with people finding virtue in the beheading of small children, in the destruction of millenia-old monuments, in the genocide of Christians, Yazidis.
The aristocracy of the Muslim world who has fled to Europe is making a mistake, assuming its goal is to improve the prosperity of their own civilization. If their goal is abandoment of their civilization, or worse, destruction of the European civilization, then they’re probably proceeding correctly.
3) For millenia, Jews have been out numbered and far from home, relying on their intelligence for survival. To maintain their place among the warrior cultures of Europe, they’ve promoted, especially in the past 150 years, open borders and cultural relativism (we all bleed red, what’s the difference who your neighbors are?). Because they’re the smartest people in the world, they’ve been very successful. But the Frankfurt School ideas of multiculturalism, relativism have taken on the fervor of a secular religion. Heretics (like me) are mercilessly denounced.
They are also making a mistake. This strategy has not and will not keep them safe. The more they tear down the gates and the social norms of Western civilization, the less safe they will be.
That’s my hypothesis. The obvious omission is the political turmoil the west and Israel has created in the Muslim world which has created a vacuum being filled by ISIS.
Orthodox Christianity — I don’t know. They haven’t really exported any cultural norms as Protestant Europe has. They’ve sort of learned some rationalism from the Enlightenment, but are still very superstitious. I see them as middle shade in the cultural gradient. What are their defining characteristics?
1. Keeping the Mongols / Ottomans away?
2. Being a cultural buffer?
Incidentally, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the enormous contributions of Jewish thinkers all came from individuals at least two generations out of the insular ghettos and into the Western, Aristotelian paradigm.
We should all concern ourselves with how to spread good ideas. I think you’ve answered it with “giving people responsibility before they prove capability is asking for trouble.”
I think Europeans fail to recognize the fragility of their civilization. They assume that everybody universalizes trust. They don’t regard this as a norm that needs to be defended with violence. Enforced.
This is the “European miracle” that dragged the whole rest of the world out of poverty, ignorance and disease. It’s an anomaly. It didn’t happen anywhere else in the world.
Hell, it’s not even a European norm, but a Northern/Western European norm.
Only the nuclear family cultures achieved this. The extended family cultures of southern and eastern Europe remained more tribal. They have a dual loyalty — one to your kin and one to society. It’s no coincidence that the extended family cultures of southern and eastern Europe are much more corrupt than the nuclear family cultures of northern and western Europe.
Southern and Eastern Europe just had an excellent, nearby example to follow.
I’m rambling. The point is:
1. Recognize norms as something special and defend them — with violence.
2. Doing so — protecting your culture — will serve as an example for surrounding culture.
Eli Harman:
It’s very simple.
The bullshitters can bullshit faster than you can shovel. So if you don’t want to drown in the stuff, you had better make them stop.
Free speech was a nifty idea. It didn’t work.
People can make war upon you, your freedom and your property with verbalisms, moralisms, pseudoscience, sophistry, shame, obscurantism, loaded questions, false framing, and 101 other kinds of lies.
When you catch them at it, punish them.
When people do violence to you with their words, do violence to them.
An Israeli official has called for concentration camps in Gaza and ‘the conquest of the entire Gaza Strip, and annihilation of all fighting forces and their supporters’.
Moshe Feiglin, Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, posted the inflammatory message on his Facebook page at the weekend.
He lays out a detailed plan for the destruction of Gaza – which includes shipping its residents across the world – in a letter he addressed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The message, which received more than 2,000 likes on his page, lists four action points which he wants to be enforced as soon as possible.
Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2715466/Israeli-official-calls-concentration-camps-Gaza-conquest-entire-Gaza-Strip-annihilation-fighting-forces-supporters.html#ixzz39Ylce7PF
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Of the Forbes 400 from 1987, 327 people have dropped off the list. Of the remaining 73 people, those with the highest annual rates of return are generally self-made entrepreneurs and investors—not heirs—with an average annual real rate of return of 5.6 percent over the last 26 years.
– The rate of return for the Forbes 400 as a whole, 2.4 percent, is roughly equal to Piketty’s estimated returns for the entire population.
– Wealth today is largely generated by entrepreneurial skill, with the number of entrepreneurs on the Forbes 400 list rising from 40 percent in 1982 to *****69 percent in 2011*****.
– The role of inheritance has diminished over the last generation; the share of the Forbes 400 that grew up wealthy has fallen from 60 percent in 1982 to 32 percent today.
www.aei-ideas.org/2014/08/how-did-superrich-americans-become-superrich-americans/
Tell the truth: Anglo
Do your duty: German
Find a way: Jewish
What I am supposed to say: Chinese.
DUCHESNE : RE-NATIONALIZE CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
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Evolution is now being played out in the arena of cultural conflict, but there are still winners and losers in the strict Darwinian sense as Western lands are opened up to all the peoples of the world.
Duchesne concludes that
–the way out of the crisis of Western nihilism is to re-nationalize liberalism, throw away the cultural Marxist notion that freedom means liberation from all identities not chosen by the individual, and accentuate the historical and natural-ethnic basis of European identity.–
I couldn’t agree more.
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