Monthly Archives: October 2014

Sweden recognizes Palestinian state; Israel upset

Sweden on Thursday became the biggest Western European country to recognize a Palestinian state, prompting a strong protest from Israel, which swiftly withdrew its ambassador from Stockholm.
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The move by Sweden’s new left-leaning government reflects growing international impatience with Israel’s nearly half-century control of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and its blockade of the Gaza Strip. It also comes during increased tensions between Arabs and Jews over Israel’s plans to build 1,000 housing units in east Jerusalem.

news.yahoo.com/sweden-recognizes-palestine-state-100608068.html

Curt: Classical Liberalism failed upon the introduction of women & non-property owners

“However, we must also acknowledge that the classical liberal political system failed upon the introduction of women and non-property owners into enfranchisement. This is because those without property hold very different ethics – if ethics can be used to describe them. And the female reproductive strategy is to bear children and place the burden of their upkeep on the tribe (society). Private property was an innovation, that allowed males to once again take control of reproductive strategy, and the marriage that resulted from that innovation was a truce between the male and female strategies. A truce that feminists and socialists, and communists, and those that lack property, all seek to break. Private Property and the nuclear family, and the high trust ethic are both politically indivisible. And the classical liberal program cannot survive in their absence.

And no one else has provided us with a solution to this problem other than the feminists and socialists – who which to destroy private property, and the anarcho capitalists, who wish to preserve our freedom, and property.”

ISIS belong to a tradition called khajirites — democratizing Islam.

Haille Mariam-Lemar
October 18 at 1:07pm · Edited ·

ISIL/ISIS/IS are actually theoreticians of democracy. Within islamic theology they belong to a historical tradition called khajirites. The khajirites combined radical democracy with literalism. This is why the middle eastern tyrannies are so frightened of them. As anyone familiar with islamic history would tell you the early islamic caliphates viewed islam as a property of the arab aristocracy and opposed mass conversion. The aristocrats were opposed by the khajirites who argued that any man, even a black slave, can become a caliph so long as he has the requisite theological training and is elected.

Curt on Truth

ACCOUNTABLE AND UNACCOUNTABLE TRUTH
(worth repeating)

The analytic and cosmopolitan concept of truth (including Popper’s truth), like the levantine pseudo-truth it arose from, is an UNACCOUNTABLE concept of truth.

Whereas the Indo-European truth, refers to testimony given between warriors whose life or death depends upon the veracity of that testimony. Etymologically, “Tréw” means testimony ‘like an oak”: and therefore, ACCOUNTABLE and WARRANTIED truth given via the spoken word.

Conversely, “true” for cosmopolitans, Jews and Muslims means ‘the mind of god’. Not ‘that which I am accountable for speaking truthfully’.

This was the mistake of the analytic movement’s distraction as well. They tried to improve on truth and found all they could achieve was tautology, rather than spending a century on SPEAKING TRUTHFULLY. Popper sensed this, mises sensed it, but they failed. Just as the christian europeans failed, because they assumed truth and assumed that the problem was logical instead of truthful.

This is why the 20th century was such a failure: the operationalist, intuitionists, and praxeologists all FAILED.

So, now, that is my job. That’s our job. That’s the purpose of Propertarianism, Operationalism, and Testimonial Truth: to restore the purpose of philosophy to the SPEAKING of truth – not how to merely investigate the phenomenon of the physical word. Or not how to persuade people without unaccountable for it.

Discovering the truth is just labor, and doing it morally. Speaking the truth is a skill that must be mastered: Speaking operationally. Giving truthful testimony.

Curt: The Libertine lies about Empiricism

—“1. social sciences cannot control conditions such to test the variables of a hypothesis.”—

This statement is false. It is one of the many libertine lies. As most libertine lies, and like most successful lies, it relies enough on a grain of half truth to be able to fool the audience by suggestion.

Positivism as a movement is false, but empiricism is not. There is no requirement for constructing data, only for observing and collecting data as measurement of one kind or another, because we must be sure that by the use of measurements, we compensate for the frailty of our wishful thinking, our biases, our reason, our perception, and memory.

For example, we can and did hypothesize red shift. We cannot create red shift, only observe it. Likewise, we can construct an theory of the economy, or of any social phenomenon, and exhaustively test the theory against all instances of the collected data.

As long as the data that CORRESPONDS can be operationally DESCRIBED – that is, reduced to a rational series of human actions – then we have conducted both a test of external correspondence as well as a test of internal consistency.

Just why this lie has been so successful I am not sure. I suspect that it is because people WANT to believe the lie, as they want to believe many lies. Because they try to justify what gives them advantage, rather than seek the truth whether it is advantageous to them or not.

But the fact remains, the criticism of empiricism in the social sciences is nothing more than an elaborate lie, that literally through “advertising” by cosmopolitan libertines, has successfully overloaded an ignorant and wishful population sufficient to persist the lie – just as all cults and religions must accomplish, libertines (all cosmopolitans) have accomplished this particular lie.

PHILOSOPHY IS IDENTICAL TO SCIENCE IF WE SPEAK THE TRUTH, AND WE MAY ONLY SPEAK THE TRUTH WHERE PHILOSOPHY IS IDENTICAL TO SCIENCE. BECAUSE THE DISCIPLINE WE CALL “SCIENCE” IS A MORAL ONE – and has nothing particular to do with scientific research, but all human inquiry.

1 – Empiricism: observe, measure, record.

2 – Instrumentalism: reduce the imperceptible and incomparable to the perceptible and comparable by means of formal instruments (physical instrumentation) or informal instruments (logic).

3 – Operationalism: defend against the introduction of error, wishful thinking, bias, and imagination.

4 – Testimonial Truth: it is not possible to testify to the truth of a proposition that you cannot state operationally, as both a means of construction (internal consistency, existential possibility), and a means of use (external correspondence, external correlation).

As far as I know the libertine fallacy stands irreparably falsified by this argument.

Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine

***

Me:

—“1. social sciences cannot control conditions such to test the variables of a hypothesis.”—

It is a problem of precision, but meaningful measurements can indeed be made. Not with the accuracy of Newtonian physics experiments, but that doesn’t mean all meaningful measurement is beyond our grasp.

The fallacies of positivism don’t discredit empiricism.

—“The quest for new “evidence” leads to an unending competition from biased researchers looking to “prove” their theories and the movement becomes locked in paralysis by analysis. “—

What about the endless competition of biased philosophers running amok unchained from any connection to the real, physical world?

Sacred cows die agonizing deaths. They did for me.

I used to quote Hoppe to prove that human sciences are strictly rational: “Every human event is unique and unrepeatable because humans have the ability to learn.”

But this is wrong. Every temporal state of the physical universe is also unique and unrepeatable. That doesn’t make experiments meaningless. The levels of precision may vary, but empiricism has not been rendered meaningless by Hoppe’s observation.

THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF IMMORALITY

Curt:

–“Moral rules are objectively expressible and universal to man. It is more that acting morally is an advantage for groups with superior abilities and resources, and acting immorally is an advantage for groups with inferior abilities and resources. Parasitism is a successful strategy. It’s immoral, but then, all people who practice it, justify their immorality.”—

If others can exercise their competitive advantage by lying, cheating and stealing – even if by complex means, then why cannot truth tellers exercise their competitive advantage by the organized application of violence to ostracize, evict, conquer, enslave, or kill them?

Academia teaches only Cunning

Academia teaches only Cunning — not wisdom, not truth, and certainly not morality. Cunning favors complexity. Think about that next your phd friend explains their incomprehensible thesis.

Curt Doolittle:

CUNNING VS MORAL

–“education makes one cunning, not wise, and not moral”–

I was kind of ‘moved’ by Michael Philip’s post today on the motives of members of the academy. It’s been bothering me all day because not only is it true, but I think it qualifies as a bias, and a formal bias at that. Or rather, I think status-biases are probably a category of cognitive bias that I (we) should investigate, document, expand upon, and communicate with some frequency. Because most of the progressive status signals are constructed of cognitive biases (falsehoods).

Cunning favors complexity. Dishonesty favors complexity. Speaking truthfully is in fact laborious – it requires a lot of effort. Speaking the truth however, is a very simple strategy, that requires very little cunning – maybe none at all. Because prohibiting the imposition of costs is a very simple rule. Voluntary exchange is a very simple rule. The rule of law under Propertarian Property Rights (Property-in-toto), is a very simple rule. That demand for the state will increase if their is a lag in the development of property rights, is a very simple rule. These are all very simple rules.

If all moral propositions are decidable, (under propertarian logic, they are), then there is no room for cunning, except to lie. I fact, cunning is a contrary indicator of truth, and of morality.

Yet cunning is such an attractive means of dominance display. For those of us trying to eliminate cunning, we can temporarily display dominance, but only in the art of refuting loading, framing, overloading and suggestion. And since I have no illusions that the incentives to construct complex lies via cunning verbalisms will ever disappear, then I suspect that the defense against cunning will always require wisdom and cunning.

So I have a new to-do, which is to enumerate the cognitive biases we fall victim to in the pursuit of status signals.

Marxism’s home has always been academia. Why?

THE PERSISTENCE OF MARXISM

—“The persistence of Marxism in the West is a function of its persistence in academe. Without that, it would wither and die. Why does it persistent in academe? Because Marxism satisfies three deep cognitive wants for academics:

(1) It is a complex theoretical system. There is nothing that establishes one’s bona fides as a Very Clever Person more than mastering a complex theoretical system: the denser and more jargon-heavy the prose, the better. And Marx’s writings have plenty of dense, jargon-heavy prose.

(2) It is a system of grand intent. If one lives the life of the mind, then the grander one’s intellectual projects, the grander one’s cognitive sense of self: Marxism not only “explains” human history and society, it “reveals” the final end point of human and social transformation. What could be grander than such a project?

(3) It completely de-legitimises commerce. Under Marxism, the only legitimate economic role is to supply labour. All commerce is de-legitimised and all those engaged in it—including all those people who have far more wealth and organisational significance than academics—are de-legitimised, reduced to “exploiters” who are but immoral dust beneath the heels of academics in no way “polluted” by vulgar commerce.”—

Michael Philip

Curt: Peace is an Idiot’s Obsession

Peace is an Idiot’s Obsession
By Curt Doolittle On August 26, 2014

Peace is an idiot’s obsession.

The only rational pursuit is the positive expression in property rights of the negative prohibition on free riding. Violence toward that end is always rational and moral. Peace is an undesirable pursuit, since it simply justifies whatever level of immorality is currently extant.