Category: Thoughts

[I]t really doesn’t matter what an author says or intends. What matters is whether its true or not- and I do not mean internally consistent, I mean externally correspondent. When we roll a bag of conceptual marbles down the hill, we do not control them – reality does. When we roll our sentences into the…

[T]he progressive pre-cognitive need for false consensus bias confuses them into thinking that everyone else is likewise as susceptible to false consensus bias. But that is a female genetic ‘defect’ – an adaptation necessary for primitive survival, and one that evolved in concert with ‘gossip’, which is meant to appeal to (take advantage of) false…

(Guest post by Michael Phillip) Postmodernism (Pomo) is an intellectual blight, and a moral one. For, as Norman Geras has pointed out, if there is no truth, there is no justice. If there is no truth, there is also no heritage. Creating, in reaction to progressivist post-modernism, PoMo conservatives who are so unaware of the…

Guest post by Michael Phillip The liberal right are attracted to order and plurality (e.g. F. A. Hayek), the anti-liberal Right are attracted to order and unity (e.g. Auguste Comte), the liberal Left to turbulence and plurality (e.g. John Stuart Mill) and the anti-liberal Left to turbulence and unity (e.g. Karl Marx).

(worth repeating) [I]n political philosophy we separate the use of proactive force (aggression) from reactive force (defense). So force can be put to positive (defensive) or negative (aggressive) uses. But then this approach requires that we define what we can aggress against, in order to know what we can defend against. In libertinism they refer…

(draft)[I] tend to see Propertarianism as Post-Neo-Reactionary. Although, it may be more accurate to position NRx as a rationalist program in the continental and moral traditional, and Propertarianism as an analytic program in the anglo scientific tradition – but both making the same criticism: the evolution of the cathedral, the failure of the enlightenment program,…

[U]nfortunately you ‘aren’t’ anything other than a bag of mostly water, and rights only exist when they have been created by an act of promise or contract. As such you may DEMAND, or WANT to be treated as the owner of your body, and therefore are seeking CUSTOMERS for your offer, and those customers will…

[E]ntrepreneurs innovate. Property is necessary for calculation and incentives. Trust is necessary for economic velocity (rates). As complexity expands so does the means of free riding and theft, so legal prohibitions must expand in criminal, ethical, moral, conspiratorial coverage at a marginally indifferent rate from the complexity of associations in order to maintain trust and…

[F]or new friends and followers, please understand what I do here and on FB. It is my sketch pad. I work in public like a village blacksmith where you can peer into the forge and see the experimental work being done – good and bad. Propertarianism is a very special thing and you can learn…

(worth repeating) –“The whole anglo philosophical and political fantasy of equality has been a disaster for mankind. We must be equal in property rights and equal under the law, but that’s so that we may coordinate our actions as specialists, and succeed as specialists – not so that we can act as equals.”–

(h/t Andy Curzon )(edited and revised) [I]f we look at Austrian business cycle theory as merely an instance of the cycle of ‘flocking and schooling’ that follows any kind of change in knowledge that as a consequence produces an opportunity, then the century of pseudoscience was just another business process by which to exploit a…

[I] couldn’t care less about social justice and equality. I despise the terms and the feelings that inspire them.But when a young man who is willing and able to work, and work hard, to feed his family cannot find work, and the only reason that he cannot is low trust, no credit, and low economic…

[I] would present it (as I do) as a last ditch desperate  attempt to reach the enlightenment utopia embodied in both cosmopolitan middle  class universalism, and anglo puritanical middle class universalism. But that both movements were failures and had to be, because universalism and equality are merely utilitarian merchant philosophies of self interest made possible…

UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIAN STATISM [C]alifornia. A very desirable geography. The best other than France. In both cases the geography is a natural resource exploitable by the state. As I said to Ron Manners: natural resources make you a slave because States must defend them. Diasporic peoples avoid these high costs at the expense of permanent insecurity. The golden mean…

[Y]ou know I feel guilty criticizing culture after culture – other than the germans – even though I am more critical of my own people’s universalist stupidity than I am of anyone else’s behavior. The only thing that continues to strike me and drive my bias is the economic technical and artistic results that a…

(Profound) [I]f language evolved for us to negotiate with, then it’s no wonder that it is so unsuitable for use as an internal language to understand truth with – to think with. Language wasn’t invented to lie with. But it was invented to negotiate with.    

[P]ropertarian reasoning is a formal logic. Once you understand it, it isn’t like dodgy philosophy or dishonest mysticism: you don’t really need to be very cunning. Either some proposition is constructable out of human operations on property or it isn’t. Once you know the four categories of property that humans demonstrate and the different reproductive…

Guest Post by Anonymous –“The founding fathers knew that freedom is wasted on those who are not pursuing virtue. They envisioned America, not as a hedonist utopia, but as a place where one was free to pursue a virtuous life. The French, on the other hand, began their revolution as a revolution our modern progressives would love to implement now: they executed all the priests and…

Guest Post by Eli Harman [M]en and women are different, with different priorities, values, motivations, interests, and reproductive strategies (on average.) The family is a compromise between male and female reproductive strategies. It isn’t what either men or women would choose if they had their druthers. (Men would build harems and women would be promiscuous…

[W]e spend all this time, text and talk on the individual, women, government and economy. But we took the structure of reproduction for granted. We compete, using 1) the structure of group competition, 2) the structure of reproduction, 3) structure of pedagogy, 4) structure of production, and 5) structure of commons. Liberalism has been nothing…

(humor) [Y]ou know, it’s funny, but Propertarianism is no longer a solo effort. I have a manager, an editor, and multiple advisors, helpful critics, and in some cases, people who are better than I am at USING propertarianism. And it feels a little bit like I’m an engineer on a project trying to create infrastructure.…

[T]he only energy technology that we are going to use and depend upon is nuclear, helped by water, and as a minor contributor – solar, because it’s the only source of energy strategically tolerable to depend upon.  And while teenage boys like to fantasize about star trek technology, adult men only spend vast amounts of…

Regarding: http://kinsella.liberty.me/…/hoppe-on-property-rights-in-p…/ [A]ll property must represent value to its owner or the statement ‘own’ has little sense. –“a common mistaken belief is that one has a property right in the value, as opposed to the physical integrity of, one’s property.”– Correctly stated: Others cannot promise you that the value of any property will remain constant.…

[W]illiam L. Benge just pointed out to me that “Dennett and Hawkins” have pretty much demonstrated the end of the Cathedral’s fallacy, and have moved beyond it. I think if you watch Hawkin’s talk, then Haidt’s talk on moral blindness, then my talk on The Inter-temporal Division of Reproductive Labor. Then you begin to see…