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Topic: The Red Pill (Read 56885 times) |
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #91 on: 2015-12-26 14:53:13 » |
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The foolish ‘theism’ of government enthusiasts
by George Will
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-foolish-theism-of-government-enthusiasts/2015/12/25/5c623b4c-aa64-11e5-bff5-905b92f5f94b_story.html
Presidential campaigns inflate expectations that power wielded from government’s pinnacle will invigorate the nation. Thus campaigns demonstrate that creationists threaten the creative ferment that produces social improvement. Not religious creationists, who are mistaken but inconsequential. It is secular creationists whose social costs are steep.
“Secular theists” — economist Don Boudreaux’s term — produce governments gripped by the fatal conceit that they are wiser than society’s spontaneous experimental order. Such governments imposed order suffocates improvisation and innovation. Like religious creationists gazing upon biological complexity, secular theists assume that social complexity requires an intentional design imposed from on high by wise designers, a.k.a. them.
In his book “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge,” Matt Ridley refutes the secular creationists’ fallacious idea that because social complexity is the result of human actions, it must, or should, be the result of human design. In fact, Ridley says, “Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organizing, self-changing place.”
What explains the reluctance to admit this? Perhaps the human mind evolved to seek a Designer behind designs. (“On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Ridley says, “Adam and God touch fingers. To the uneducated eye it is not clear who is creating whom.”) Or perhaps people feel anxious if no one is in charge. Ridley’s point is that everyone is in charge of social change. It is propelled by what Friedrich Hayek, echoing Darwin, called “selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits.” This is a broad-based, bottom-up process by which society, like Darwinian nature, is constantly experimenting.
Morality evolves: Religious and other moral instructors base their moral codes on the way people who are considered moral behave — people who are deemed moral because they exemplify rules conducive to human flourishing. Legal systems evolve: The common-law basis of the system under which Americans live had no inspired lawgiver; it emerged from centuries of the Anglosphere’s trial and error.
Describing the way living cells respond to local effects, Ridley, an evolutionary biologist, writes: “It is as if an entire city emerged from chaos just because people responded to local incentives in the way they set up their homes and businesses. (Oh, hang on — that is how cities emerged too.)”
Similarly, no committee or other command-and-control system decreed the rules of the world’s languages. Darwin: “The formation of different languages, and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.” Ridley: “It is as if a human language, with all its syntax and grammar, were to emerge spontaneously from the actions of its individual speakers, with nobody laying down the rules. (Oh, hang on . . . ).”
In 1908, a French philosopher applied Darwinian reasoning to the evolution of fishing boats: “It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied. . . . It is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others.”
Ridley applies to everything the perspective of Leonard E. Read’s famous 1958 essay “I, Pencil.” In it a pencil explains that “I am a mystery” because not a single person knows how to make me. The seemingly simple pencil is wood harvested by loggers using saws and ropes made elsewhere, wood transported by trucks and trains made by many thousands of people, to mills where machines — the products of ore mined by thousands and steel mills staffed by thousands more — prepare the wood to receive graphite mined abroad and the eraser from foreign rubber, held in place by aluminum mined somewhere and smelted somewhere else, before lacquer (castor beans and other ingredients) is applied, and. . . .
Behind a pencil stand millions of cooperating people, but no mastermind. Which is why worshipers in the church of government, the source of top-down authority, disparage a free society’s genius for spontaneous order: It limits the importance of government and other supposed possessors of the expertise that supposedly is essential for imposing order from above.
No one, writes Ridley, anticipated that when Gutenberg made printed books affordable, increased literacy would create a market for spectacles, which would lead to improved lenses and the invention of telescopes, which would produce the discovery that the Earth orbits the sun. No one planned that one particular book’s argument for the fecundity of freedom would bolster the case for limited government the way Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” did when published in 1776.
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #92 on: 2015-12-30 17:12:32 » |
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“The state — or, to make matters more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.”
-- H.L. Mencken
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #94 on: 2016-01-04 17:09:10 » |
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Quotation of the Day is from page 182 of H.L. Mencken’s essay “On Government,” as it is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s essays, Prejudices: A Selection:
"The government can not only evoke fear in its victims; it can also evoke a sort of superstitious reverence. It is thus both an army and a church, and with sharp weapons in both hands it is virtually irresistible. Its personnel, true enough, may be changed, and so may the external forms of the fraud it practises, but its inner nature is immutable."
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #95 on: 2016-01-07 11:35:06 » |
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http://cafehayek.com/2016/01/quotation-of-the-day-1580.html
Quotation of the day is from page 92 of the 1978 collection, edited by Eric Mack, of Auberon Herbert’s essays, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State; specifically, it’s from Herbert’s March 1884 Forthnigtly Review essay “A Politician in Sight of Heaven”:
"You may use your own reason when you say that compulsory education, or compulsory temperance, is good for certain people, and proceed to carry it out; but in so acting you disallow the existence of reason in those whom you compel. You have placed them in a lower rank to yourself, you retaining and using your reason, they being disenfranchised of it."
People who, obsessing over current differences in monetary incomes or wealth, call for forced ‘redistribution’ are blind to nearly all diversity and differences among people. Not only are such ‘redistributionists’ blind to the differences in ages that account for much of the difference in incomes (for example, young people do not earn today as much as middle-aged people, or as much as these same young people will earn 30 or 40 years from now). And not only are these ‘redistributionists’ blind to the different tastes and preferences that exist in any human population (for example, the person who chooses a career as a college professor chooses to take much of his or her income in the form of leisure and job security compared to the person who chooses a career as a hedge-fund manager). Such ‘redistributionists’ are blind also to the inequalities of power necessarily created when some people, using the force of the state, assume the authority to compel others to do their bidding. And this inequality is no less real or worrisome if those who have a disproportionate share of it are exercising power for their own narrow ends or are exercising power ostensibly to ‘help’ those over whom it is wielded.
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Fritz
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #96 on: 2016-01-09 16:15:08 » |
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http://www.strike-the-root.com/nietzsche-and-state
<snip>
Therefore, Nietzsche believed the state was an artifice invented to serve a political class, based on the myth of a shared culture and past.
Who did the state serve? “The history of the state is the history of the egoism of the masses and of the blind desire to exist,” Nietzsche wrote in his notes in 1873. He again echoed those sentiments in Thus Spake Zarathustra, writing, “All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented.” Everything about the modern state was corrupt: education (“they steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the sages for themselves”), the media (“they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper”), and most of all, politics. Nietzsche characterized politics as a mad rush for power, which squandered the talents of great men, who were forced to pander to the lowest common denominator.
<snip>
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #97 on: 2016-01-13 09:49:56 » |
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Quote of the day...
"The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."
---Allan Bloom
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #98 on: 2016-01-13 17:27:40 » |
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http://blog.independent.org/2016/01/11/us-drug-laws-destabilize-other-nations/
US Drug Laws Destabilize Other Nations
By Randall Holcombe • Monday January 11, 2016 4:00 PM PST
This article in USA Today is headlined, “El Salvador: World’s New Murder Capital.” El Salvador’s murder rate is 104 per 100,000 population, and as the article notes, this is a national average. “If you start looking at where the pockets of violence are, it’s shocking.”
Why are things so bad in El Salvador? The article says, “All countries south of the U.S. border face the same problem: cartels and gangs fighting to control smuggling of drugs and people to the United States and infiltrating government institutions to help them.”
It should be difficult for Americans to support domestic policies that have such pernicious effects overseas.
The effects spill over at home too. The article says, “The surge in violence explains why thousands of Salvadorans and other Central Americans have fled to the United States and why immigration officials are stepping up efforts to send them back home.”
The drug war clearly compromises individual liberty at home. Freedom has no meaning if people are only free to engage in activities that meet with government approval. I could list a host of other negative consequences stemming from the war on drugs, but I will save that for another time, to emphasize how our domestic policies have had such negative consequences for our neighbors.
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Fritz
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #100 on: 2016-01-15 23:56:35 » |
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Quote of the Day:
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew"
- Marshall McLuhan-
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #101 on: 2016-01-17 21:52:25 » |
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Quote of the day...
"Finally, the concluding essay is a cry from the heart on the
basic reason why a person should be a Libertarian: not as an
intellectual parlor game, not from the utilitarian weighing of
costs and benefits, and not because there will be X percent
more bathtubs produced in the free society. The basic reason
for one’s libertarianism should be a passion for justice, for
sweeping away as quickly as possible the tyranny, the thiev-
ery, the mass murder, and enslavement, which statism has, for
too long, imposed upon mankind. It is only such a concern
for justice that can inspire the Libertarian to try to abolish, as
quickly as he can (and far from the Marxian sense), the
exploitation of man by man."
-- Murray N. Rothbard
1974
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Fritz
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #102 on: 2016-01-18 11:04:32 » |
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Quotes of the day...
Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
-Kurt Vonnegut-
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
-Margaret Atwood-
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Fritz
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #103 on: 2016-01-19 11:36:01 » |
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Certainly orthogonal takes on the invasion from the Middle East are growing and an chemistry that won't work is being fermented.
Cheers
Fritz
President of the Czech Republic speaks on Islam's non-miscability with the West
Source:Liveleaks
Author: Eeyorevladtepes
Date: 2016.01.17
There are only a few leaders willing to speak the truth about islam, let alone not criminalize the truth about it. The president of the Czech Republic is one of the chief among these. This is well worth the time to watch.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e27_1453140329
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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David Lucifer
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Re:The Red Pill
« Reply #104 on: 2016-01-19 16:27:42 » |
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Quotation of the day...
http://cafehayek.com/2016/01/quotation-of-the-day-1592.html
… is from page 91 of the 1978 collection, edited by Eric Mack, of Auberon Herbert’s essays, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State; specifically, it’s from Herbert’s March 1884 Forthnigtly Review essay “A Politician in Sight of Heaven”:
"Moreover, physical force in a man’s hand is an instrument of such brutal character that its very nature destroys or excludes the kindlier or better qualities of human nature. The man who compels his neighbor is not the man who reasons with and convinces him, who seeks to influence him by example, who rouses him to make exertions to save himself. He takes upon himself to treat him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not."
Government (so-called) is force. Force has its place and uses – namely, to protect one’s self and one’s property from aggressions initiated by others. In a world with people willing to resort to force to achieve their ends at others’ expense and without others’ uncoerced consent, force must be employed by non-aggressors to defend themselves against aggressors. But nearly all that government actually does is unable to be explained, even through the most skillful legerdemain, as being consistent with this appropriate use of force.
Subsidies to farmers and to Boeing? Tariffs on foreign-made clothing? Prohibiting low-skilled workers from competing for jobs by offering to work at wages below the government-stipulated minimum? Prohibitions on Uber? FDA’s refusal to let individuals choose to use whichever medicines and medical devices they wish? Taxing “the rich” simply in attempts to make the ‘distribution’ of monetary incomes more equal? The vast array of occupational-licensing restrictions?
None of these, and not many other, government projects is a use of force to protect innocent people from the forceful aggression of others. Each of these, and many other, government projects is the initiation of force against peaceful others in order to oblige those peaceful others to do, or to refrain from doing, as the force-wielders command.
In some cases the force wielders might indeed be aiming at ends that most people regard as desirable. In most cases, however, the force wielders – though they always attempt to disguise their venal motives with fine words – have no goal in mind higher than to profit materially at the expense of others. And in many cases, as Bruce Yandle famously explains (here and here), the force is wielded by conniving rent-seekers conveniently allied with people who fancy themselves to have ‘higher’ motives. The latter are typically dupes for the former (as when, for example, professors and preachers, thinking themselves friends of poor workers, support minimum-wage legislation the benefits of which redound to higher-skilled workers or to the owners of relatively capital-intensive firms and the costs of which are inflicted upon poor workers).
Force is primitive. It’s the way of the thief, the vandal, the arson, the kidnapper, the thug, the pirate, the terrorist, the warmonger, the rapist. It’s the instinct of every ill-mannered child on the school playground who envies a schoolmate’s toy. The first, because it most primitive, thought that occurs to the child is to snatch the toy from the schoolmate. It’s such a simple solution. No reason is involved. The thought here of the child is practically identical to that of the dog, the weasel, or the shark. But, of course, even a child is a human with higher intelligence. He can form a coalition with other children, thus forming a stronger force against the children with better toys. Negotiation among the gang involves some higher powers of thought; the gang – amongst themselves – compromise and exchange. But when they finally turn their power against the weaker children whose toys will be seized, the gang of children act as animals. No negotiation, no reason, just force.
Force is among the most primitive of human instincts and behaviors. In essence, force is idiotic, for it is the primal urge of the idiot who demands to have his way.
And yet, we today, when such force is instantiated into a large gang and given the trappings of elections and flags and anthems and columned buildings, and its leaders given deceptive titles (“Hon.”), the force often becomes so powerful that, in most cases, it merely needs to be threatened rather than actually used in order that the gang gets from others what its members want. And so we forget that it’s force. We mistakenly call the state “government,” and we call its dictates “law.”
In this way, primitive, unreasonable, and uncivilized brutality is made to appear to be something that it is not and by its nature cannot possibly be.
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