Month: September 2012

It was asserted in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . .”  This belief, in turn, depends upon an active Creator, who is involved in our affairs.  Personally, I see no firm evidence of such a Creator.  Bad things plainly happen equally to good people as to bad people, and in point of fact bad people often rise very high and are very successful.

I do think there is a certain something in the air sometimes, what I have termed “non-statistical coherence” that swings things one way or another, that acts as a factor in both large and small events, but there is nothing like a PERSON who is saying: “I want to bless David, for he is holy to me”.

In conceiving of rights as Given, as Endowed, people are more or less taking the analogy of human legal systems and applying them to the divine sphere, in which a morally perfect judge and jury and Congress and King has established rules of behavior which cannot be transgressed without penalty.

I am actually even willing to accept this.  I do believe we survive the cessation of breathing, that our consciousness goes on, and that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of this hypothesis.  I do believe that the quality of our after-life is affected by our decisions on Earth.  I do not believe that we are judged so much as allowed to settle into a realm appropriate for who we chose to be.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that the concept of rights has no power but what we grant it, here on Earth.  Even a cursory reading of history will show abundant atrocity.  There is no Horror movie that can exceed things that have been actually done by one human to another.

Given this, and given the apparent dependence on words of concepts like “justice”, many modern philosophers have given up on serious moral inquiries.  Academic tendencies like postmodernism can be summed up, more or less, as cognitive rituals designed to free tired minds from the guilt attendant upon the murder of reason, and as congenial pathways towards a new cultural order in which totalitarian rulers will free them from the burden of unwanted freedom–unwanted, because they no longer know what to do with it.

Such tendencies, though, depend upon the rejection of moral ONTOLOGY, which is to say the idea that moral values exist OUT THERE somewhere, presumably as a result of God’s Will.  Now, I don’t fundamentally reject this idea–the idea that there is a larger arena within which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished–but it seems to me that it is the task of good thinking to create as much space for agreement as possible, so my goal here is to create a morally BETTER system of thought than exists currently, and to do so for people who need not believe in God.

My Goodness system is what I term a moral motology, with motology being a word I invented to connote not what IS, but what direction a given system is moving in.  We can’t say what IS in a static, ontological way, but we can plainly observe actually existing systems in motion, and see what they tend to create. 

For example, the concept of rights tends to create far more just societies, if we measure “just” by generalized tolerance, freedom from capricious violence and involuntary servitude, and generalized ability to live life as one chooses.

We have the freedom to choose what we want, what affective states we want to achieve, and use varying moralities to achieve them.  My core contention is that the highest happiness is measurably, observably, consistent with the best behaviors.

I will add that I feel that the point of reason is getting from one affective state to another.  This may seem counterintuitive, but if we posit–as seems existentially valid–that the end goal of human activity is feeling, then reason is the tool we use to get from where we are–presumably less than happy, if movement feels required–to where we want to be.  The task is not to kill feeling, but to perfect it.

There is more, but I need to get going.

 I posted this on one of the Brin threads, on the topic of how to improve national dialogue, and thought it perhaps worth sharing.

The aim is to improve thought in general. No group can be smarter than
the smartest person within it, but given that most everyone has serious
limitations in their perceptual capacity that reside principally in the
emotional realm–usually ego, and excessive attachment to unexamined
ideas–it makes sense to use groups to further effective thinking.

If
the aim is to reduce emotionality, then some form of heuristic is
necessary. Thought cannot be unstructured. Edward de Bono has written
extensively about this, with his Six Thinking hats an excellent example.

For
my own purposes, I have developed a number of heuristics, including
formal use of continuums, and what I call Perceptual Breathing, which is
the constant movement from abstraction to concrete details and back
again.

As an example both the words Democrat and Republican are
abstractions. There is considerable ideological diversity among the
members of both parties, and there is also substantial divergence
between what people THINK the parties stand for, and what the actual
members, when elected to Congress or some other body, do.

Fox
News is an abstraction. It can refer to Shepherd Smith, Sean Hannity,
the people who own Fox. It can refer both to the newscast and to the
website. Referred to in aggregate, it would necessarily include not
just the hosts, but the people they bring on to represent alternative
views (which they do, often).

Most error in this world is the
result of basic ignorance, which is corrected through education, or from
an abuse of abstraction.

The creation and operation of large
scale systems is impossible without abstraction, but the necessity of
constantly reconciling ideas with realities, intentions with outcomes,
is absolutely central.

If you want people to think effectively in
groups, the most basic requirements are asking the questions: what are
we trying to accomplish; and “is what we are doing working”?

If more people asked those questions with sincerity, we would live in a much better world.

I
will admit to disappointment that the discussion on the other page
ended. I always win–which I define as reducing people opposing my
views to silence in the face of factually accurate and logical
supported, clear positions–but it always disappoints me.

Posted on HuffPo.

 Salient fact: 83% of all doctors have considered quitting over Obamacare (http://dailycaller.com/2012/07/09/report-83-percent-of-doctors-have-considered-quitting-over-obamacare/).  I don’t think further discussion is needed beyond this fact, but I am going to do it anyway.

1. Health costs are rising because more products are being offered, and because individuals are insulated from the costs by employer provided insurance.  Such insurance is the only option in most Blue States, as keeping control over health insurance is a key component of the Union political agenda.

2. Such cost insulation did not occur 20 years ago when most plans were “major medical” (now called Catastrophic) plans with high deductibles, in which most medical visits were paid out of pocket.  Those who claim that putting this back into the hands of consumers would increase costs simply do not grasp how expensive employer plans actually are, not until they are forced by unemployment to choose between COBRA and being uninsured.

3. If the unemployed are forced between choosing a Cadillac plan that pays everything and being uninsured, would it not be logical to grant them an intermediate step of Major Medical coverage, which would mean coverage never lapsed?

4. People with preexisting conditions are not buying “insurance”–which is risk pooling across large populations–but subsidies.  Self evidently, subsidies are expensive, and if they are put in the hands of insurance companies, will inevitably be passed back to consumers, raising insurance premiums, as indeed is already happening. 

5. Obamacare mandates that 80% of all premiums be spent on medical care.  The goal is to bankrupt insurance carriers, who unlike government agencies cannot ask for budget increases.  To make a 5% profit they must keep costs at 15% of their budget.  Medicare operates with none of these constraints, and is in the process of gradually soaking up EVERY LAST FREAKING dollar of the Federal Budget.  It cannot continue in its current form, and plainly Obamacare, as a vast increase in Entitlements, will make things much, much worse, either in cost overruns, or in healthcare rationing.

6. A free market option exists already to ensure no preexisting conditions: make all insurance premiums paid by individuals tax exempt, AS LONG AS they remain covered, with no breaks.  This of course only will work if all individuals can buy Major Medical policies directly from the carriers.

7. Logical health insurance reform, then, will be to use the Federal Government to prevent States from blocking carriers from selling directly to end users, and from imposing unreasonable barriers to interstate insurance competition.  The tax code will be modified to exempt health insurance as long as no lapses occur.

This option will over time lead to competition in healthcare, cost decreases, improved quality; and following reductions in insurance premiums, people who get sick without coverage, and the overall costs of our socialized medicine.

To be clear, preexisting condition people are charity cases.  There is no logical free market solution to them, and if they are to be cared for, we need to do so directly, as an extension of Medicare/Medicaid, and not pretend that we are somehow helping everyone else by altering the system to accommodate them.  They win, everyone else loses.  If we want to invoke compassion, so be it, but for God’s sake not “prudence.”

Ideas that are good work.  Ideas which are bad–like Obama’s plan, and like Romney’s to the extent he fails to reject it in toto–do not.

I find periodically the need to remind leftists that their STATED objective is helping people.  They seem to forget this, and will turn a blind eye if Obama wins and Obamacare gets implemented when costs surge, access to routine medical care declines precipitously, and routine procedures get impossible to get scheduled.

NONE of this is necessary, and I have just shown why.

I get banned from leftwing websites constantly.  Most recently David Brin deleted comments asking either for the $100 he bet me I could not respond to him, or ANY form of substantive response.  I’m used to the use of force to suppress ideological others.  It is the only option they have, and since their creed is based on hate and irrationality, they see nothing morally or intellectually objectionable in it.

Here is my honest belief: having spent more time than 99.99% even of those who are interested in politics testing my views against opposition, I have more defensible views than virtually anyone I COULD meet on the internet, or elsewhere.  It is like building a castle, then asking someone to attack it.  You take that feedback, then do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for up to four hours a day for years.  The result at the end is defensible.

I mentioned David Brin.  He is wonderful and brilliant (just ask him or one of his fawning acolytes).  Best selling author, futurist, savant, bon vivant, and the inspiration for the Dos Equis commercials.

What is about to follow will be a bit lengthy, but I will summarize it here: the best and the brightest on the left have been reduced to repetition of tired talking points, and the on-going invention of lies which WOULD be true if their version of reality had any validity, but which DON’T because their worldview rests upon misunderstandings compounded by long habit.  

Here is a repeat of the crux of a longer Peter Bauer quote: 

In academic study unwarranted claims are apt to inhibit the
advance of understanding. Attempts to justify unfounded claims, or to
mask the failure to live up to them, encourage the proponents of such
claims to shift their ground. For example, when certain policies widely
canvassed by development economists as necessary for raising living
standards, such as large-scale public investment, domestic production of
capital goods, or the collectivization of agriculture, fail to bring
about the expected results, the policies themselves come to be regarded
as the very stuff of progress rather than as what they are, unsuccessful
instruments for its promotion.

The policies themselves become the object of veneration, even idolatry.  I would further submit that one of these ideals, one of these idols with feet of clay, is the very notion that the Left CARES about the poor.  They don’t.  “By their fruits ye shall know them”.  Their fruits are “fleurs du mal”.


As I now realized, even sybaritic leftists are prone to the necessity of groupthink that defines Cultural Sadeism.  They are pre-zombies, who have rejected in principle the Enlightenment pursuit of rational discourse, and the idea that all minds are equal, if they pursue reason dispassionately. 

But they have not rejected the IDEA that they are rational.  On the contrary–Dr. Brin.  Let me quote you this eminence grise:

we may have a chance to
create a fantastic new civilization on this planet, by returning to and
enhancing the Enlightenment methods that brought us to this party.
 Methods like transparency and reciprocal accountability and divided power and pragmatic negotiation that
have nothing whatsoever to do with “left” or “right” but that are
deeply threatened by one side in our current culture war.[note that he says they have nothing to do with “left” or “right”, except that the “right” is by definition wrong.  Irony is apparently above his intellectual capacity, a common enough affliction among such savages.]

Again: one wing of
American political life — the same one that was wrong in all the
previous stages of civil war — has veered away from the logical,
courteous, cautious, pragmatic and intellectually cogent conservatism of
giants like Goldwater and Buckley, into fevered fact-aversion
unparalleled in the U.S. since the pre-1861 Know Nothing party. I’d love to see a mature conservative or Libertarian movement present at the negotiating table, standing up sensibly for the role of competition in a mixed and agile civilization.  

These are nice ideals, are they not?  But does he practice them?  Of course not.  Here is one response from him, his last one which even attempted lucidity:

Mountain Goat, you are just as crazy on the right as Akra is on the
left. You declaim counter-facts with blithe assuredness that is simply
astonishing. But it is flat out nonsense.

Tax rates are at near
their lowest levels in 70 years. That is a flat-out fact. It is a fact
fact fact and no armwaving you do can even remotely make actual real
facts go away.

Supply siders have said repeatedly that lowering
taxes on the wealthy would result in investment in plants and equipment
and productivity that would result in increased tax revenues and thus
lower public debt. NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS EVER EVER EVER EVEN REMOTELY
CAME CLOSE TO HAPPENING. The rich, especially, do not invest tax
largesse in plants and equipment and productive assets. They… do….
not.

You appeal to nonexistent facts. You appeal to authority.
You make grand declarations about your superiority as a debater… all
of which are cheap tricks of high school freshmen and I tell you now,
you are a very bad debater.

I CHALLENGE YOU AGAIN with money
behind it. If you cannot come up with one counter-example to my broad
accusations, then you leave those accusations on the table as the
assumed leading hypotheses.

I have defined terms perfectly well.
I have asked you to name ONE clade of intellect not under attack by
Fox. ONE unambiguous metric of national health that improved under
Republican rule. Name one. Name it now.

Start with Clinton’s
surpluses and debt payback. Now subtract the iraq and Afghanistan wars
and Bush’s tax cuts. That leads directly to precisely the debt you are
now screaming about. Show us how the math comes out any different in
your world. Show us.

Show us now. I offer you $100 to show us. Do the math. (I can. I have. You’d lose.

This is 100% a GOP deficit.)

I responded substantively.  You can read the full thread here.  Even now, if anyone reading this who wants to challenge anything I said, have at it, here.  I take all comers and always will.  My claim to want to learn, to be rational, is quite sincere, as I show over and over and over. 

I won’t summarize all my responses (I will note in passing that I am using I a lot.  Since I am talking about me, it is hard not to), and post his contribution to show in his own words his attitude and overall tone, which are not at all consistent with civil discourse, or respect for Enlightenment ideals, or even the concept of FACT.  I offered him sundry facts, and he didn’t respond AT ALL.

I will note, first, that I asked him at least 4 times to define “Progress”, since he self defines as a “practical/pragmatic progressive”.  He refused repeatedly, then falsely claimed he had done it.  I came up with what I felt and feel was a good set of definitions–one per cultural activity–which I posted in the last week or two under “Progress”, I think.

The details are boring.  They amount, among other things, to pointing out that Fox, per se, includes dissenters like Alan Colmes, and that calling every news story on every day an assault on the intellect is ITSELF an assault on the intellect.  All you have to do with leftists is wait for them to accuse you of something, and you will know what moral or cognitive norm they are violating.

Budget: no President before Obama has spent $3 trillion.  What else do you need to know to falsify the farcical claim that Bush even now is the cause of our deficits?

Etc.  The details are there, and include an 11 page refutation of Keystone Cops Economics, aka Demand Side, aka Keynesian, aka Anti-Rationalist economics, which I also linked on a post in the last week or two.  Net tax revenues went up under Bush AFTER the tax cuts, which the Demand-Siders claim, counter-factually, is impossible.  We know what income tax receipts are.  There is no need for theoretical speculation.

Again, the story here is not another failure of a high-IQ, highly educated leftist to fail to defend their ideas.  It is common.  I just want to emphasize that what you see here represents ALL THEY HAVE.  There is NO argument that they make which withstands scrutiny.

When you look at modern China or the Soviet Union, or Cuba, what you see is the physical expression of intellectual psychopathology.  The question is not whether or not leftist ideas work or not: they plainly do not.  The question is why sane people continue to advocate them, and the answer is that either they are not sane–the core meme generators–or they are complacent, and never actually ask hard questions about the doctrines they are taught from an early age.

Oh: the task of the rational is a hard one.  You have to face down frothing hatred with equanimity–which often fails me, as in the Brin “debate”–and do far more research and thought.  On the left, they are handed talking points at school, and merely need to repeat them. 

Finally, I will note that the right also has talking points.  The LARGE difference is that the talking points of the right survive under a microscope, and leftist ideas cannot.  They die in the light.

That’s enough for now. 

 

I like to debate.  It sharpens my mind, forces me to learn my topic, and develops emotional stamina and humility when practiced with sincerity. I have reached a point where I would RELISH the opportunity to take on ANYONE on the planet that wanted to cross swords.  Krugman would be easy, but I would even be willing to take on Stephen Hawking or Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins on the topic of ontology. Worst case I learn something, best case they learn something.  Usually what happens in practice, of course, is my opponents (and it is an agonistic enterprise: truth telling almost of its essence involve emotional violence, since setting aside complacency and unexamined but core assumptions is painful) first try to change the topic, then insult me, then shut up.

And self evidently, most of the time that silence is nothing like acquiescence or learning: it is first brooding, then forgetting.  Einstein posited that human stupidity is infinite.  It is not: human VANITY is, and vanity, when wounded, does not adapt through thinking new thoughts, but in anger at the unwanted intruder in a once-happy home. I know this.  I continue to debate to make my own arguments stronger, and to learn new things.  I am often forced into learning things I did not know.  This is a good outcome. I also come across new thoughts, which is VERY useful even when the discussion itself had no persuasive value at all.

That is the prologue.  I would simply, here, like to ask once again that in regard to a debate started on this thread that David Brin, the author, either respond to me with arguments based upon actual facts, and proper use of reason, or pay me the $100 he wagered me that I could not address what, truth be told, were some childishly inane and even propagandistic themes, that scarcely rose to the level of argument.

But SUCH IS THE STATE OF DEBATE IN THIS COUNTRY, and in large measure around the world.  Educated, VERY educated people with 150 plus IQ’s say demonstrably STUPID things, over and over, and over.  How are the less educated, less intelligent supposed to sort through the horseshit on NBC and NPR and New York Times?  They can’t, and they don’t, which is why it is ESSENTIAL that the people capable of dealing skillfully with abstraction DO SO.

All they do is posit, once and for all, that, say, Medicare is the best way to protect the health of the old, then simply repeat it.  The abstractions they propose depend upon assumptions they are eminently unwilling to examine.  As I have said often, one stops deserving the label moderate, or liberal, when one no longer CARES about the effects of policies, and focuses all effort simply on the implementation of those policies.  Mao’s agricultural policies killed tens of millions, but he DIDN’T CARE.

I keep seeing that “Republicans have no jobs plan”.  This assumes that it is the job of politicians to create jobs.  But ask yourself: when a local architectural firm decides they need a new draft engineer, did the government make that decision?  When a Wendy’s franchise owner decides to build a new location, employees several dozen entry level workers who would otherwise be without jobs, does the government make that decision?  Of course not.

I keep getting accused of repeating talking points.  To the extent I use talking points, they are my own.  Here is today’s: The government can only create jobs it first stole from the private sector.

Look at the deficit projections for nearly any nation on Earth (with the possible exception of China, whose economic situation is interesting, but far less robust than commonly supposed) and you will see burgeoning debts for decades into the future.

At the same time, the Bank for International Settlements group is planning to increase required banking reserve ratios over the next decade.  A shrinking money supply and growing debt will collide in about 5 years.  How this will not result in a financial meltdown is far from clear to me; nor is it clear that this is not the desired outcome.

Given that monetary policy is set entirely by an entirely unelected and unaccountable set of bankers, would it not be accurate to describe the monetary component of our economy as centrally planned?  The Fed more or less determines interest rates, reserve ratios for banks, and sets banking policy generally.  It is in charge of our banking system, but does not answer to Congress or the President.  A small group–a Politburo, shall we call it?–meets and decides, and thus it is done.

On a tangentially related note, consider Fort Knox.  The Federal government bought up hundreds of tons of gold or more, using taxpayer money.  It did this because until 1934 or so dollars were technically redeemable in gold.  It did this because until 1972 or so foreigners could technically redeem their dollars in gold.  Then we went off the gold standard.

Who owns the gold?  The Federal Reserve, which is to say a committee representing the interests of the largest banks in the United States.  So, it was paid for by the American public–much of it confiscated at what amounted to gunpoint by FDR–and then abandoned rather than sold.  Why?  It’s a good question.

And given that the Fed answers to no one, reports to no one, why should we not assume they simply sold the gold off for their personal enrichment?  What would stop them?  Why wouldn’t they?  Were there any laws governing the matter?  I seriously doubt it.

Hell is a thorn within your soul which you nurture, embrace, and feed.