Tag Archives: epistemology

Altruism versus logic

The initiation of force is good by the standard of altruism, but not as a generalization because generalizations are useful in logic. So what are the special cases altruists prefer?

Democratic and Communist party members agree that to send tax agents with guns to confiscate people’s homes, guns and tools is a good and necessary thing, even if the people voted libertarian and are not represented by the looter politicians declared victorious by secret ballot. This lay coalition does not, however, want men with guns to threaten doctors who safely care for pregnant individuals–even individuals who choose to not be pregnant.

God’s Own Prohibitionists (Republican, Tea, Constitution, Prohibition, George Wallace American parties) agree that to send drug agents with guns to confiscate people’s property, and police agents to arrest (or shoot) doctors who enable individuals to safely not be pregnant are good and necessary things.

Clearly, these agglomerations of special interests believe in altruism. Each agrees that the initiation of force is good when the deadly force threatens THE OTHER coalition. This happened in Germany when lay looters wanted to tax and nationalize everything and religious looters wanted to nationalize and tax everything EXCEPT CHURCH property and select corporations. Conservative socialists wanted religious laws to force people to be christians–and disarm non-christians. Other socialists wanted tax laws to strip wealthy christians of their property through taxation and forfeiture. Adolf Hitler’s national socialists told both coalitions they were right and used the government monopoly on force to eliminate all individual rights. That is the logical altruism that so impressed Hanna Arendt, but not Ayn Rand.

A much better solution would be to agree with today’s lay and religious socialists, but let each faction initiate its own deadly and coercive force against the other, without involving the Political State at all. All each would have to do would be waive its own rights, which is what each asks of the other anyway. If they lack the courage to act on their convictions, then they are parasitical cowards who want us to do their killing for them. There is no sensible reason why we should sacrifice freedom so cowards can use us to bully each other. Instead of war, the President could proclaim a Roman Holiday and stadium owners sell tickets and cable transmission rights to the melée.

I pledge to buy a ticket, no questions asked. Until then, my libertarian spoiler votes will repeal laws rooted in altruism and superstition.

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

Religious conditioning v. science, by Ron

The confirmation hearings with questions from global warming zealots reminded me of Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. The notion of global warming/climate change resembles closely that mythical teapot. People like Lewandowsky and Oreskes psychoanalyze unbelievers. And public hearings are conducted to uncover unseemly heresy inside political appointees. At least when religion is recognized as such, and […]

via The Climate Change Teapot — Science Matters

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

Meta-Persuasion Reality Control

2partysystemDilbert artist Scott Adams is excited about Huxleyan hypnosis as applied to politics, yet misses the most important fact in the whole political scene. The oversight is typical of nihilistic rejection of conceptual thinking:

I don’t believe reality is something the human brain can understand.

Any useful textbook, chemistry, physics, math… contains a definition of chemistry, physics, math… But a government textbook gets right down to nonsense with no objective definition of force, freedom, coercion or law. Nowhere do you find that government is a monopoly on the use of coercive and deadly force, much less a general statement of what such a monopoly is good for. But in the special terms of special interests (e.g. entrenched political parties and their hidden persuaders) government is a source of their government jobs and loot at your expense. Small wonder they value “persuasion” (intimidation) and not clarity or definitions.

To political job-seekers (parasites), the purpose is to provide them (politicians, bureaucrats and hired muscle) with rent and raiment, pelf and perks taken by force from you. The meta-persuasive presdigitation is to get voters (the parasites’ hosts) to accept this view that we’re all in this together. What matters to them is which particular parasites get to wield the deadly force. Why that force is initiated is deemed too trivial to be worth mentioning, but boils down to prophesies of horrible things sure to result from freedom were it permitted to exist. Here’s a summary from Adams:

Keep in mind that most voters are handcuffed to their party’s candidate. That guarantees that most elections will be close, no matter who runs. The winner is the candidate who can move perhaps 5% of voters from column A to B. And the Master Persuader had a year-long election cycle and total media exposure to get that minor task accomplished.

The premises couldn’t be clearer:
1. There are mostly two parties.
2. Only politicians can win, so voters must necessarily lose and like it. This is Stockholm Syndrome persuasion-by-hijacking. The passengers (taxed voters) revere the terrorists precisely because that gang uses death threats to control them and the emergency exits don’t work. It never occurs to Adams or any other entertainer that the function of government is to secure the rights of individuals–their moral claims to freedom of action.

But that same conceptual trap can actually free you because context has changed. For the past 45 years there have been mostly two parties. The Libertarian Party defends freedom through individual rights, hence rejects the initiation of harmful, coercive, deadly force. The Kleptocracy is an agglomeration of looters fragmented into Republican, Democrat, Nationalsocialist, Prohibitionist and Communist. Why? Because the dishonest cannot trust each other, and small faction platform planks leverage spoiler votes to affect election outcomes. Looters also have good reason to fear each other because the initiation of harmful, coercive, deadly force is precisely what they are all about–what all parasites are all about.

The Democrats won in 1932 because they copied the Liberal Party plank to repeal the Constitutional Amendment that made light beer a felony.  The Democrats lost in 2016 because they ignored the LP and offered to continue to use the law to rob, jail and shoot children for plants that were legal in 1932–just like the Republicans.  Unlike the Republicans, they promised to also rob and coerce parents to subsidize totalitarian China through energy strangulation–sacrifice to the mystical pseudoscience of Misanthropic Global Warming. They were led into this error by copying econazi planks. Why? Because Green party spoiler votes cost them government jobs and loot in the Y2k election.  Spoiler votes can work either way: they can either strengthen coercion or enhance freedom.

Libertarian Spoiler votes are the rudder that guides government toward greater freedom (meaning less coercion). Toward greater freedom also means toward greater wealth. Such a rudder existed briefly in 1930-32, and the Liberal Party steered the economy away from communism, the dole and prohibition and toward recovery. For the past 45 years the Kleptocracy has struggled to defeat its heirs, assigns and successors, thereby causing crashes, depressions, unemployment and war.

If you were able to follow this line of reasoning, you will probably have no trouble following my simultaneous interpreting. Coming soon to a courtroom or conference near you.

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog…

Translating political expressions

A translation website explains how libertarians can skirt actual points of disagreement when “talking” to belligerent fundamentalists (“conservatives”)
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=103158

The first problem here is that politics and law are all about the use of harmful, coercive and deadly force. Force only serves freedom if limited to the suppression of actual “victimizing” (as opposed to “victimless”) crime. Belligerent fundamentalists, Christian or Mohammedan, see coercion as their friend and tool of policy, which to them boils down to prohibitionism and indoctrination. The whole idea of not initiating the use of force is as alien to the fundamentalist mindset as the notion of geologic time, or of women as individuals.

Science-fiction writer Jack Vance illustrated this in “The Dragon Masters,” an interplanetary war story in which dragons raise captured human children as slave-warriors of their own. A philosopher explains to a human protagonist that no meaningful communication was possible with those humans bred and raised as slaves by an alien race for use in war against mankind. Arguing with mystics is pointless precisely because mystics have nothing but scorn for the facts of reality or formal reasoning–unless exploitable for purposes of coercing females or waging a Holy War. Would you debate a believer who is flying a passenger plane into a building?

Instead, as zoon politikon we cast about for something else they value. In the democratic systems surrounding these bewildered bigots, the ticket to laying hands on unearned money with which to purchase the votes of politicians turns out to be the votes of individual citizens, including airline passengers or people who work in tall buildings. By getting these people to vote against the taxes, coercion, torture and war so valuable to fundamentalists–thus threatening their hold on the reins of deadly force–individuals multiply the bargaining power of their puny individual votes. Conscientious voting aggregates ballots into something more akin to the power of votes wielded by politicians–those “some” animals who are “more equal than others.”

Voting “against” a watered-down version of populist communism offered by one looter party by propping up the watered-down Christian national socialism of the other major contender makes no sense when one has the opportunity to cast a powerful libertarian spoiler vote against “both” variants of creeping totalitarianism. Votes are the coin that can buy you some freedom (if used wisely) or turn you over to the worshippers of death (if squandered foolishly). More: search “The case for Voting Libertarian“, now available in two languages.

As working linguists we of course have to interpret different speakers or writers’ handling of concepts the way they intended that they be expressed. Nothing in the job description, however, bars us from having an objective understanding of what is actually going on. Linguists shift into and out of different characters as needed to convey the meaning and intent of different messages, but that does not require that we buy into them. To a witness lying on the stand or a politician hypnotizing the masses, their subjectively understood message is the important thing.

For details on how prohibitionism crushed the U.S. economy and brought on the Great Depression, why not download Prohibition and The Crash–cause and Effect in 1929? The book is live on Amazon Kindle and you can read it on a cellphone for the cost of a craft pint at a pub.

cause and effect