Archive for January 15th, 2007

Alan

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What exactly are you saying Bob, I have a hunch, but I am sure like usual it’s probably wrong. The only picture I see is this, the entire establishment and all the sub units all operate like a religion. They all have a god, a hierarchy, a holy bible, priests and a loyal congregation. The entire world runs on worshiping something and will fight like hell to protect this something. Establishments survive by refusing to admit failure, they twist reality or slowly conform to a new twist of fate. My guess is, evolution of truth and knowledge is retarded by the bias and fear establishments have for anything that may dethrone their gods, what else would they do.

Comment by Alan

ME:

You have made an excellent statement here, to the point and covering a huge amount of territory. It deserves that people do what I am doing, chew it over.

Good stuff. I await a book from this outline.

AND you made me think of restating what I have said before. You are NOT supposed to put in, a la Shari, those apologetic first sentences that say you are merely repeating the Master’s words. You are picking up the ball and going with it.

It is not really flattering to a person who has made his living for decades as a professional writer, “What exactly are you saying?” But I understand what you are getting at. But remember you aren’t asking me what BOB is getting at. You are asking me how YOU should understand what I say.

Like all of us, I have spent a major of my life teaching myself things. To do that, I have to take a text and state the proposition in a way that makes sense to me. The original writer of the average calculus textbook would be baffled by the way I stated his proposition to myself to make sense of it. He is used to statements like “Let us make six assumption, now let y approach v as t is held constant where 1),2),3)…”, and so forth.

This is not MY language, so I translate it into MY terms. Is he trying to say, as I do, “I am trying to estimate the rate of change of brick relative to clay. I need a way to do it. I know that while the calculations trail away, they are constant, so I can get on the other end and see how it comes out. Now how will I do that?”

This is NOT what the mathematics textbook is “trying to say.” It IS what BOB needs from it.

So you see Pain busily building around my structure. If he says anything I think is wrong I will point it out in my usual diplomatic fashion: “Pain, you silly ass …” and so forth. But Pain is NOT saying what I am TRYING to say. He is going ahead of me. If not AHEAD, at least applying what I made him think of in new areas.

That is the fundamental difference between this seminar and the college professors you have been enslaved by for so long. There is no Whitakerism here. You are not graded on meticulously repeating what I am trying to say. I am talking and following a line of thought.

The dead ends are when someone says, “So what you are trying to say is that IQ is the measure of EVERYTHING.” Or, “You are in the area of Gobdooble’s 1905 book when you say…”

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“And Now a Word From Our Sponsor…”

I was watching a documentary that made me nostalgic. It was about the coming climate disasters, global warming/cooling. I was bit surprised when the “And now a word from our sponsor” bit was left out. In past decades, exciting documentaries on the catastrophic potential of climate change, complete with footage of hurricanes and so forth, were fun, but you had to pay for it.

At the end of each such documentary came the commercial: “We must hire millions of bureaucrats and spend trillions of dollars on any program our ‘intellectuals’ come up with to avoid this, and we must do it NOW!!!!!!”

Noticing that the commercial ending was absent reminded me of decades of watching documentaries with “and now a word from our sponsor” at the end. Just as commercial television required listening to the Colgate Toothpaste jungle for the thousandth time, each documentary required one listen to a final ten minutes or so of absolutely parrot-like Political Correctness, delivered by an announcer who very honestly believed, as all PC people do, that he came up with it himself.

Not that this climate-change disaster piece was wholly free of its Politically Correct commercial content. One Jewish PC artist said that climate change would cause enormous changes, and he added, “This is not a society that copes well with change.”

This society does not cope well with change? So the American Indians coped well with change? Or does he think the Pharaohs would have handled the 2YK crisis better? This society copes routinely with changes that would DESTROY any culture in any century before the West rose.

What he was trying to do was add the commercial: “We are not a society that copes well with change, so we need a million “intellectuals” and a few trillion bucks to deal with it.

Yea, right, chief, like the USSR, one solid mass of governmental regulation and “intellectuals” in charge dealt with Trenobel! But he wants that same socialist approach to teach US to deal with CHANGE!

I am not arguing with this clown, I am showing how the threads of twentieth-century thought are so laughable, but so hard to laugh off.

I remember in the 1960s when every filmmaker would say, “I try to do my part in adding ‘social messages” to my films. This was at the height of the ascendance of what calls itself The Greatest Generation, and while some of them didn’t agree with these “social messages,” ALL of them took it for granted that anything a professor advocated should be pushed at public expense.

FINALLY society as a whole is beginning to ask why in the HELL we should fall down in admiration of a filmmaker who throws Hollywood political views into the film we went to and paid for entertainment. How in the HELL does he assume that we NEED his politics. We often ALLOW it, but we do not ACCEPT it the way the group that called itself The Greatest Generation did.

So the clown who insists that the Pharaohs really knew how to deal with change simply is allowed no opposition. He could stand on his head in a chair and documentary crowd could say this was a great social comment, and there would be no opposition. But The Greatest Generation would have simply assumed it did not UNDERSTAND the DEPTHS of that social commentary.

Let’s BURY them. And above all, let’s bury their MENTALITY.

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What Do You Do With Twentieth Century Assumptions?

When I said that we cannot assume that non-whites have the same “self” we do, I remembered that that exact point was reached thirty years ago in Public Choice theory, in which Nobel Prizes have been given out. Before Public Choice, a graduated income tax was justified on the basis on the higher marginal utility of money. It was agreed that the SAME PERSON needed his first dollar more than he need his billionth dollar.

A person needs his first dollars just to stay alive. He uses his first dollars for what he needs most, and his later dollars progressively less urgent purposes. So far, so good.

But with Public Choice, it was realized that, while this principle works fine for a rational individual, it does NOT work BETWEEN individuals. An old-style Trappist monk had no use at all for those extra dollars, though the first ones were essential. Some people literally LIVE for money. Others, once their basic needs are met, literally couldn’t care less.

Even leftists in the field agreed with this.

One critical thing about this decision that one could deal in interpersonal utility was that it was a conclusion reached on absolutely, purely twentieth-century assumptions. They knew nothing about the huge proportion of sociopaths in our society. Everybody assumed that under every skull, and not just human skulls, there was a self exactly like you and me.

And I didn’t say “under every HUMAN skull.” In the twentieth century, a bird had a self just like yours and mine, but without the frontal lobe:

1) All animals were equal except for IQ;

2) Among humans, IQ was not important AND was all the same, both.

Taken together, this reflects a mentality of exactly the same level that bled a patient to cure pneumonia.

You don’t COMPROMISE with a doctor who uses bleeding to cure pneumonia. You institutionalize him.

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