Archives for category: Basic Principles

Freedom of Speech & Press

November 23, 2022 //

Free speech wouldn’t confuse people so much if they thought a bit more about this term of art in the context of “freedom of the press. ”

Like freedom of speech, everyone — not just “journalists” — has free press rights. But that doesn’t mean that you get to go into the pressroom of your local newspaper and print out your favorite recipes, rants or porn. Your free press rights relate to your owned technology that can be used for transmitting ideas.

If you have a camera, printer, xerox, mimeograph, web press, Internet server, whatever, your free press rights pertain to what you own and may legally control. If the bank comes in and confiscates your press because you have defaulted on the loan, it’s not abridging your free press rights. Though such an act would hinder your press workings, by freedom of contract the bank is OK to do affect your ability “to speak” via the press.

Arguably, though, if the local mafia barges in and steals it, it does abridge those rights — the mafiosi’s theft is more than mere theft if done to squelch your printing about the mafia’s workings. And, by convention, this applies even more to governments, the traditional enemy of freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press is merely freedom of speech translated into the realm of transmitting speech beyond the reach of your vocalizations.

And, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press is not a fundamental right, no matter how primary a concern it be.

Both are terms of art, and one must have some knowledge of the social world to make sense of them. Not all speech is free speech, and not all press activities are free press actions — but the people who make this point most vociferously usually do so to suppress free speech and press. Which is why the issue is difficult.

twv

Summary Postscript: Both rights depend on property and custom. They are both instances of the basic human right to liberty, which includes the right to acquire, maintain, and divest property on whatever terms you may negotiate.

The Twitter-Pepe image, above, is by
Who Knows found on the You Know What.

Categories Basic Principles, Constitutional Concerns, Law, Lexicography

The Pragmatic Theory of Truth Is the Key Error of Dominant Cult Ideation

February 9, 2022 //

Paradigm Maintenance in Institutional Settings

The difference between truth and usefulness is basic in philosophy, though some pragmatists (not all) obscured this. And it is because of the orthogonal nature of these two standards that false ideas circulate, and can even become a dominant paradigm.

The advantage a dominant group has regarding ideas is clear: it can reward people for their bad ideas, and then show the results of the rewards as evidence for the aptness of those ideas.

Insider cultists of a dominant ideology reward each other, and thus reinforce their sense of certainty. And to outsiders? They can malign, ridicule, and heap on other disincentives for belief espousal that have nothing to do with truth-value.

THIS, ah yes, THIS! It’s the oldest trick in the book.

It is positively ancient. Which is why free speech and the scientific method were developed: to protect elites from self-corruption.

You can always tell whether someone practices the virtue of truthfulness: they never rely on social controls to defend their paradigms. Anyone who says they “follow the science,” for instance, but encourages de-platforming of competing ideas is a fraud — not a philosopher; not a scientist. That person is, at base, a Child of the Lie. And the most effective lies are the ones we not merely tell ourselves, but get our peers to tell us. The social reinforcement solidifies false beliefs as effectively as true ones, so that one ceases to be able to tell them apart — in part because one has stopped tallying whether the reason one believes something is its truth-value persuasiveness or its social-advantage persuasiveness.

twv

Categories Basic Principles, Epistemology, Ideological currents

Right Before the Paradigm Shift

February 25, 2021 //

It is fairly easy to maintain a scientific paradigm if you rule out of consideration anomalous data, scorn, badger and shun disputants, subsidize with conscript funds only your position’s adherents, and treat your “findings” as dogma and the whole subject not as inquiry but as conclusions.

Easy, yet what you wind up with is not scientific, no matter how many lab coats.

Categories Basic Principles, Epistemology

Lockdowns as War

November 23, 2020 //

States without lockdown orders, or mask mandates, are not doing spectacularly worse than those with them. Indeed, it ranges from “better” to a wash.

Which makes the policies inexcusable.

So why are these edicts being promoted and followed?

For the same reason politicians send us to war and we go. For the same reason there is war fervor and excitement. For the same reason crowds shout in triumph upon the death of millions elsewhere.

The State with its claim of sovereign authority tempts everyone, and it encourages us to be reckless, bloodthirsty, moralistic, self-righteous, and worse . . . out of fear, first, and some imagined advantage, second.

This similarity between war and the lockdown orders is fairly clear, is it not?

The “moral equivalent of war” is immoral, and we, like sheep, almost always go astray to the bad shepherd that is the State.

The State’s a mind-trap. It messes with your heads. It takes your fear and makes you do crazy things, like think prohibiting people from engaging in commerce and normal human interaction because some even peaceful interactions play against what is said to be the general welfare. But obviously, in the case of the threats that start most wars and the menace that is this pandemic, the “cures” are worse than the disease — in part because our benighted species has been infected by a far worse virus than SARS-CoV-2: that worse infection is statism. Political messianism, in other words.

Thinking that salvation comes from authoritarian force.

It is amusing how rarely anyone brings up the First Amendment; the freedom to peaceably assemble, one of would have thought, was something to be protected, not squelched. But oh, how politicians lust to squelch freedom in any form! It’s in their memes and maybe their genes.

And give them an excuse . . . well, don’t.

The proper response to a pandemic is caution, courage, curiosity and conscientiousness — all within the field of persuasion and property rights. Not state edict.

And by the way, “edicts” are not laws, in some jurisprudential theory, and the distinction is understandable. I won’t go to one local store that put up a sign mandating masks because of “Inslee Law.” Inslee’s our idiot governor. He cannot make law. Ascribing law to him is a kind of heresy to republicanism. I’d rather play anarch than subservient swine to Inslee’s edicts.

But maybe we can avoid accelerating our grimace. When I hear a person chide Trump and Trumpians for breaching the “rule of law” but in the next breath insist upon the need for lockdowns, I do indeed laugh.

Yet, should jackbooted thugs with badges come to take me off to the gulags my leftist friends seem itching to create in their drooled-about “Truth and Reconciliation” re-education camps, from my mouth may come bitter, not mirthful, laughter.

But of course the peace-lovers will no doubt gun me down instead. You know, “for the public good.”

Which they cannot explain on rational grounds. For this epidemic does not justify tyrannical proclamations and a general totalitarian response. Not even plausibly.

But add in fear and subtract sound judgment, and of course: anything goes.

As long as it is statist. That parasite meme is firmly running people’s brains now.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year, Basic Principles, Death Race 2020, Ideological currents, memetics, tyranny

Q&A: Ignorant People & How to Handle Them

November 18, 2020 //

What are some ways how to not be bothered by people’s ignorance?

Develop the ability to enjoy explaining things, which would work against their ignorance. Then realize that were they not ignorant you would not have much occasion to educate.
Realize that everyone is ignorant, as Will Rogers wisely explained, only on different subjects. Try a little humility!
Impute responsibility for their ignorance correctly — on forces outside your control. As Hellenistic philosophers sagely advised, there is no point in getting worked up about things you cannot appreciably change.
Develop a grand theory of knowledge and nescience, and take comfort in the fact that though people are largely ignorant, we can at least understand why. Once you have a grasp of the reason for something, it becomes easier to handle.
Feel superior to the ignoramuses. If you are proud in your knowledge, you cannot really be bothered by their ignorance, since their ignorance performatively proves your superiority. Revel in their ignorance!

Hmmm. That fifth method seems a bit suspect, eh?

…as answered on Quora, June 10, 2018….

Categories Basic Principles, Epistemology, information vs misinformation vs disinformation, Quora

The Law of Nemesis — a Codicil

September 16, 2020 //

We train our enemies.

This seems to me the most important lesson of conflict.

So if you see your enemy going berserk, you should wonder if you drove your enemy to extremity. And your enemy, likewise, drove you to the place where you drove him bonkers.

The Law of Nemesis may seem mysterious, but its working have been noticed since ancient times.

We should study this, carefully. It is in all of our interest to do so.

But the first step is to consiser the possibility that you are almost certainly at least partially in the wrong.

As is your enemy.

This truth, however, isn’t nearly as shocking as its inverse: that your enemy is likely at least partially in the right.

Where can we learn of this? Sun Tzu; von Clausewitz?

One might turn from conflict theory to metaphysics:

We too often forget that not only is there “a soul of goodness in things evil,” but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous. While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually a nucleus of reality, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing judgment on the opinions of others. A belief that is finally proved to be grossly at variance with fact, is cast aside with indignation or contempt; and in the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief which commended it to men’s minds. Yet there must have been something. And there is reason to suspect that this something was its correspondence with certain of their experiences: an extremely limited or vague correspondence perhaps; but still, a correspondence. Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image. And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may appear, the implication is that they germinated out of actual experiences—originally contained, and perhaps still contain, some small amount of verity.
More especially may we safely assume this, in the case of beliefs that have long existed and are widely diffused; and most of all so, in the case of beliefs that are perennial and nearly or quite universal.
Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862; 1867), opening argument.

Categories Basic Principles

Basic Rules

July 12, 2020 //

Be polite to polite people. Be cuttingly, bitingly polite to rude people. Avoid violent people, but be prepared for violence if avoidance is not an option.

Approach each encounter offering the best . . . but be ready for the worst. The rule, after initial encounter, is reciprocity, tit for tat. When asymmetry appears inevitable, defend, be prepared even to destroy. Anything else risks encouraging the worst behaviors.

We train strangers and even our enemies. As well as our friends.

Some might say this is what it means ‘to be a man.’ But I am unclear how this would not apply to women.

twv

Categories Basic Principles, Ethics, manners

According to Law

June 28, 2020 //

The Law of Nemesis holds that you conjure up your own destruction — at least when hubris is your modus.

And sometimes your nemesis is your very dear self.

In war, the obvious problem is: to fight your enemy you become more like your enemy. The United States, in fighting two empires in World War II, became more imperial; in fighting the Soviets in the Cold War, the U.S. became more tyrannical and deceitful — even setting up disinformation bureaus.

In fighting racism, Americans are becoming more racist. Admittedly, it is a new kind of racism. Which makes the putative anti-racists look . . . ridiculous.

The turning point is when enough people see that white anti-white racism is utterly stupid, and its willing victims risible.

The “resistance” to Donald J. Trump is similar, but not just by an invisible hand process: it is by design. Sure, the center-left and the center-right conjured up their nemesis in the form of Trump. But Trump is savvy enough to know how to play his opponents. He makes his opponents oppose him in ways that make them look ridiculous.

That seems to have recently changed, in the context of the pandemic panic and the race riots. But I expect Trump to get his game back.

Because, I think, he instinctively — and perhaps consciously — understands the Law of Nemesis. And his enemies do not. They think he is ridiculous and that they look better for pointing it out.

That is part of their hubris.

Pride goeth before a fall.

twv

Categories Basic Principles, Political Theory

A Point of Clarification: Privilege

June 8, 2020 //

It is not “privilege” to possess “justice.” If some people are treated justly and others aren’t, calling the former “privileged” corrupts the meaning of the terms.

And when the language becomes corrupt, the corrupt triumph while the innocent are abused — or are themselves corrupted.

Master Kung was right. Words matter. Whether through slovenliness or guile, when the meanings change of key words, we are endangered.

Semantic drift is like inflation: meaning shifts are like newly created money, the new meanings benefit early adopters at the expense of those late to the change.

If some are not treated justly, the proper response is not to attack the just as “privileged.” The proper response is to extend the reach of justice.

Word of caution, though: justice in society depends upon reciprocity.

Now, those who are indeed privileged at the expense of innocent victims, the abused, they should be subject to criticism, and their privileges taken away. Just do not pretend that privileges are justice. That is an excuse for injustice.

twv

Categories Basic Principles, Ethics, Ideological currents, Lexicography