DanishGold

Race, Religion, Creed, or Color

2008-05-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

There is a dangerous package deal that emerged on the heels of the civil rights movement: the refusal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, creed, or color. Let us not consider here the question of whether or not the state should be banning any form of discrimination at all in the course of men's private dealings. It shouldn't, whatever the moral status of such acts of discrimination.

The question is whether discrimination on the basis of religion is an immoral act. A religion is a chosen system of beliefs. The fact that most people uncritically adopt the religion of their families does not alter that fact and does not absolve a man of moral responsibility for the consequences of his beliefs in his life and in his interaction with others. If we repudiate discrimination on the basis of religion, why shouldn't we also demand equal consideration for those who believe that two and two is five or that Elvis lives?

Historically, religion has been given a special exemption from critical treatment because of the obvious stupidity of its claims. 'Yes religious dogma is obviously stupid, people realize you're not dumb enough to truly believe it, but don't go upsetting your grandma.' Thinking people basically all got together and voted to make this one a freebie. Sure we'd have to put up with an occasional gynecologist being murdered by anti-abortion wackos, but grandma must be placated.

Now the penitents are crashing planes into buildings. The exemption has to end. Your ideas are your choice. If they result in you helping to blow up innocent people, you cannot be spared the consequences any longer.

Ayn Rand perceived this 50 years ago. Bill Buckley rewarded the achievement of this seemingly clairvoyant insight by turning the conservative movement into something unpalatable for her. Now Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are coming around to see what's really on the line when respectability is granted to stone age metaphysics. Hopefully Europe will not lie bloody and inseminated under a crescent banner before thinking people start catching on.

Some Meta-Geometry

2008-02-07T17:39:00.000-08:00

Geometry, in its original and most basic sense, is the study of distance relationships in the physical world. The concepts of point and straight line are what geometry starts with, but geometric reasoning itself does not tell us *which* line between two given points is a straight line. Whether we define straight lines ostensively, as was necessary in Ancient Greece, or we define them by reference to light rays, as some do today, the concept of straight line is a foundation block of and, therefore, must precede all other geometric analysis.

This is why the basic properties of straight lines constitute the postulates, not the theorems, of geometry. Such postulates are not self-evident primaries. They are inductions from experience in the physical world. If, for instance, we were to construct a very large triangle and measure the sum of its interior angles to be greater than 180 degrees, we cannot just reject the result out of hand because it violates Euclid's postulates. We might have to question these postulates.

If we do in fact define straight lines using light rays, we find that certain triangles wouldn't add to 180 degrees, depending on their proximity to massive objects. This is what is meant by the idea that the universe is non-Euclidean. It is ultimately a matter of physics, because physics is the study of external objects in general (including those used to define straight lines).

Nevertheless, based on the totality of the physical evidence (including observations of quantum non-locality and also subtler indications provided by modern quantum field theories), I do not personally believe that the universe is non-Euclidean. It looks more likely that using light to define straight lines is defective. But this is, again, a question of physics -- not a question to be resolved by scrutinizing standard geometrical concepts.

The True Believer and Western Politics

2008-01-01T15:12:00.001-08:00

I have been rereading parts of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, written in 1951, and am impressed by his insights into the psychology of collectivism. Hoffer identifies the organizing psychological force for man in his sense of individual efficacy. When a man sees himself as efficacious, when his own creative energy is regularly given form in the material world, he is content. Otherwise he is frustrated. And then he seeks to sublimate this frustration by merging his unworthy ego into the group -- the family, the tribe, the church, the nation, the race, or the movement. This closely parallels Ayn Rand's analysis of creators vs. second-handers already in The Fountainhead.

Hoffer proceeds to offer a taxonomy of the frustrated second-hander, dissecting the psychological malfunction characterstic of each variation. He points out that the various social organizations sought as an outlet by the second-hander are inherently competitive with each other. There is only so much social fodder to go around, and what the church gets, e.g., the nation must give up. Hoffer is mainly interested in competition between the more traditional outlets -- family, church, nation -- on the one hand, and mass movements on the other. The movement -- communist, Nazi, environmentalist, or evangelical -- frequently seeks to undermine the hold of traditional social structures. First it must demagnetize the potential convert from his local field in preparation to realign him with its own polarity.

These social forces bring about a certain kind of interesting second-order, cooperative effect. As the revolutionary movement seeks to undermine prior social orders, a reactionary conservative movement may seek to strengthen them simply to defend against the former. This kind of dynamics seems to underly the political landscape of the modern West.

It had always appeared to me an unfortunate historical accident that the advocates of economic freedom are for the most part also the advocates of traditional religion and "family values," i.e. the political Right. But perhaps it is no accident. Having performed the liberal economic revolution of the 18th century in America and Europe, what was once itself a kind of mass movement for individual liberty increasingly faced threats from other, competing movements rather than from the old order itself. When it was in its ascendancy, the liberal movement strove to disassemble extant social bonds, and its doctrine of individualism was a great asset. Having gained power, the liberal movement seems to have jettisoned this doctrine in an act of political expediency.

As in the old order, so in capitalism, the second-hander has a vast numerical majority in society. Now, further separated from the basic chores of his own survival by the fruits of capitalism, and in possession of ever greater amounts of leisure time, his frustration is magnified. The potential for new, contrary mass movements increases proportionately. The second-hander always has the power to shape his own intellect anew, to cultivate and express his own creative energy in whatever field and at whatever level his ability allows. But such a process, even when not begun on a second-handed precursor, is difficult and sometimes painful. The easier and more frequent shunt is a reversion to some form of collectivism.

In order to avert the disaster posed by modern collectivist movements, the liberal order was faced with two alternatives: (i) perfect the psychology of uncountable numbers of frustrated mediocrities or (ii) shunt them away from the revolutionary collectivism of modern mass movements and into the age-old collectivism of family and church. Fight syphilis by microscopic scrutiny of every resident microbe or by the equal-opportunity toxin of arsenic. The former (i) requires a grand, philosophical kind of revolution on at least the same order as the political revolutions being opposed -- a philosophic revolution whose very identity few in the liberal movement have ever grasped. The latter (ii) offers a concrete prospect for the current political epoch, and the liberal movement took it.

The danger is always that a dose of arsenic sufficient to subdue the invading microbe may be too great for the patient to withstand. But at least now I understand why the arsenic was tried in the first place. Ultimately, we need a better immunological technology.

Free Will vs. Quantum Indeterminism

2007-12-11T17:44:00.000-08:00

Many scientists are determinists; they don't believe in free will. I do. Not only that, but I believe it is impossible to consistently deny it. If your thoughts and beliefs are determined by outside forces, then so is your belief in determinism. How do you know you believe in determinism because it is true? The outside forces clearly force a lot of people to believe false ideas, and not only that, but it is the forces themselves that determine whether people will ever be permitted to uncover the falsity of these ideas -- if the forces say no, then too bad, you're stuck with the mistakes forever, and you will have no way to know! Is determinism one of these mistakes? You will never know. This is Ayn Rand's argument against determinism.

A belief in determinism is an epistemic virus that infects any other beliefs you might hold. It is a one-way ticket to radical skepticism and thus equally self-defeating.

It might seem tempting to retort that with the advent of quantum mechanics determinism isn't really on the table anymore. Bohr giveth just as Newton tooketh away, on this view. Here are some problems with it:

1. Quantum mechanics isn't really about indeterminism.

It is true that Bohr and his students were radical indeterminists. What is not so well known is that Bohr held this view prior to even the discovery of matrix mechanics or the Schrodinger equation, much less any kind of semi-coherent formulation of the Copenhagen interpretation. That indeterminism was grafted onto quantum theory was an historical accident due primarily to Bohr's pre-existing philosophical committments, in particular his thoroughgoing rejection of causality. Apart from that accident it seems likely that Louis de Broglie's discovery of what David Bohm later developed into a fully consistent, realist (and also deterministic) interpretation of quantum theory would have prevailed. (The question of how this determinism is circumscribed by man's volition would remain.)

2. Epistemic nature of probability.

There has never been any basis whatsoever to transform what had been the purely epistemic concept of probability into something whose referents are out there in the external world. This transformation requires a kind of conspiracy theory about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Laplace & co. come up with the nice concept of mathematical probability that at the time everyone concedes was purely epistemic, describing our lack of complete knowledge in a given context. Then quantum mechanics comes along and we discover this amazing new phenomenon in nature, and fortuitously the exact concept we need to describe it already exists, with the slight difference that previously the concept had just been referring to stuff in our heads. It's as if a new discovery in electrical engineering brings about a revolution in our understanding of nano-electronics if we just accept the proposition that currents exhibit the emotions of happiness and sadness.

The idea that such a semantic maneuver is permitted by the open-ended nature of concepts misses the point. The question is not whether one is permitted to include these new referents under the concept of probability, the question is what new facts could possibly give us a reason to include them. Paraphrasing John Bell, both the observer-created-reality and indeterministic aspects of quantum mechanics are the result of premeditated theoretical preference, and are not in any way necessitated by experimental discoveries. The whole QM101 attitude of having to transform one's basic philosophy only grudgingly in recognition of new data is an affectation and a canard. (Zeilinger and Wheeler are perhaps the loudest living advocates of this canard.)

3. The actual meaning of quantum indeterminism.

Let's suppose for a moment that quantum indeterminism were the basis of free will. What would this mean exactly? Because the indeterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics are all terribly vague. The seat of indeterminism is supposed to be the wavefunction collapse event. And what causes this event? The "observer," answers quantum indeterminism. So there is no real physical foundation for free will provided here, there is only a vague, misplaced reference to some sort of consciousness. Yes, consciousness is an axiomatic concept that, logically, is irreducible. It is not, however, a concept that belongs in the axioms of a theory of physics, unless you want to posit mind as a new physical substance. Do not however presume that quantum mechanics provides some new, technical, empirical justification for this maneuver. There is not a single experiment that reveals anything unique about the physical matter of the brain in this regard. There is only an old theoretical preference that can be dressed up in modern clothes, and smeared with some gaudy quantum lipstick.

But another kind of interpretation of quantum mechanics exists (Bohm's), one that explains every experimental result in terms of, and situates every mathematical formulation within, a conventional kind of physical account -- an account that does not vaguely posit some new substance (mind-icles) for which no evidence exists. Only a desire to instantiate premeditated metaphysical beliefs could motivate the rejection of such a theory in favor of quantum free will.

Where does this leave us? Free will exists. Quantum mechanics doesn't tell us anything about it. Looks probable that free will and the mind are emergent phenomena -- emerging from a sufficiently complicated brain. We have barely even begun to understand the brain enough to have a clue as to how this works.

Ron Paul

2007-12-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

Profound ambivalence is my reaction to the Ronvolution. What has always struck me about Paul is something that's not quite intellectual honesty, but intellectual earnestness. I am convinced this man wants to have justice done. When he's in one of his finance committee hearings with Greenspan or Bernanke, you can hear in his voice a plea to be understood -- sound money, not government paper, it's so simple.

And yet Paul also holds that 9/11 is in some important measure our fault, or at least the fault of our government, which has maintained military installations in Saudi Arabia and friendly relations with Israel. These are the canards that Osama bin Laden proffers as grievances when attempting to confuse and divide Western enemies.

Paul has bought into this as a way to reduce the problem of global jihad back to the previous problem. For big-L Libertarians like Ron Paul, the previous problem is always the U.S. government. It is an understandable mistake when your intellectual foundation goes only as far down as politics (the non-initiation of force principle). If the most basic good for man is freedom to pursue his own values, then the most basic evil is force directed against those values. And in terms of dollars expropriated, the U.S. government is the greatest transgressor in human history.

But when you realize that political ideas ultimately derive from a view of man's nature, in particular the nature and role of his reasoning mind, a more basic alternative can be perceived. The jihadis are not motivated by a desire for liberation from American interference, they seek a global Islamic revolution to enforce world-wide spiritual submission. Their current stance is mostly defensive only of necessity. But the existence of transportable nuclear weapons transforms the long-term strategic equation. The anti-intellectual straitjacket of Libertarianism makes it difficult to grasp the jihadi's actual goal and how serious he is about finding a means capable of achieving it.

N! in the Classical Partition Function

2007-11-22T00:48:00.000-08:00

I remember sitting through an undergrad stat mech lecture, I think in my senior year, when the professor wrote down the classical partition function for an ideal gas, and made the comment that despite popular misconception this N! appearing in the denominator really didn't have anything to do with the quantum mechanics of identical particles.

Now this sounded like a good philosophic kind of question to sink my teeth into, and I kind of enjoyed the bravely reactionary nature of his comment. I mean if you have an easy 1/N! from QM, why not use it, eh? He must have had a profound reason, although one he didn't seem able to share with us at the time.

The nasty part of this question is that, even forgetting about QM for a second, it seems to put a hard-nosed stat mech result square in the middle of a grand metaphysical problem. Gibbs justified the 1/N! by asserting that the particles are identical (albeit in a merely Luddite, classical way) and that two configurations which differ merely by, say, an exchange of two particle positions aren't "really" distinct. Well why not? I mean they are two different particles. Suppose that we probe a bit deeper and found that no two electrons are really identical, that at a very small scale they had little scratches or barbs or something that were unique little fingerprints. Doesn't matter how small the scratches -- if there are scratches -- blammo! the 1/N! has to go away. Apparently then even the approximate validity of classical stat mech is a metaphysical beacon signaling to us that every single goddam electron is exactly the same.

However, there is a less metaphysical possibility: the particles aren't particles, they're excitations of some kind of field. Then it's not really the case that particle1 here and particle2 there is distinct from particle2 here and particle1 there. What we really have is just field excited both here and there, symmetrically. Now I won't bother here about the fact that this is precisely the state of affairs described by QFT. Could just as well have been a classical field, same result. Bottom line is, stat mech isn't subtley warning us about the inherently quantum nature of our universe, and it isn't telling us something about the metaphysical sameness of all electrons. It's telling us, it ain't particles at all -- it's fields.

Another Missfire at Bell's Inequality

2007-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

[Adapted from an HBL post] Yet another claimed refutation of Bell's Inequality surfaces here, this one on the part of someone named Joy Christian. Bell's Inequality, together with certain well-confirmed experimental results, demonstrates faster-than-light (in physics parlance, 'non-local') causation in nature, one important feature of quantum mechanics.

However, Christian's conclusions aren't supported in his paper. What he does is to suggest an experiment that is distinct from Bell's and then argue that this experiment can be explained by a local theory. But that doesn't change the fact that Bell's original experiment cannot be explained in such a way.

Christian's experiment involves measuring variables, the Clifford Algebra elements denoted by A_n(mu) in his paper, which are mathematically more complicated than Bell's original ones (simple binary numbers). Christian seems to be equivocating between a change in these measured variables and a change in the "hidden variables" used to define a theory, as if simply defining a new experiment with new variables to measure were somehow equivalent to explaining the original experiment with a new set of hidden variables, i.e. a new proposed theory.

Incidentally, New Scientist has become a meaningless publication insofar as claims of new ideas in physics are concerned.

Anti-Jihad, Pro-What?

2007-11-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

The recent spat amongst anti-jihad bloggers resembles the fault line in the American right separating individualists from religious evangelizers since the beginning of the movement in the 1950's. Since then, the amalgam of intellectuals originally bound together by opposition to Soviet communism has proven unstable, melting away in the aftermath of the Cold War.

The present amalgam is also defined by a negative, now opposition to the rising Shari'a horde. And like before, the unifying tendencies provoked by a common enemy can obscure a basic incompatibility only for so long. The Buckleyites hated Soviet communism so much that they didn't mind confiscating a quarter of the wealth of their countreymen in order to cajole the political opposition into letting them confiscate another quarter to outdo the Russian military state. Half our wealth is confiscated, to defend the principle of non-confiscation.

Now we face the uma of totalitarian Islam, and some believe that the only way to defeat it is to build our own uma in the pattern of a more familiar religion. Many with this opinion are simply unaware of any alternative. To fight lunatics who are willing to explode themselves for the promise of virgin slaves in a mysterious afterlife, it is believed we must find an equally potent vision of the supernatural. Who is going to stand against the approaching horde? Ghandi? Cornell West? Noam Chomsky? Against these choices, the God of the Old Testament seems at least a plausible candidate.

However, if you look at what kind of society the Old Testament produced, namely Judea circa 1AD, its military prowess leaves something to be desired. The religious environment of the post-Renaissance West, on the other hand, is characterized by a more restrained authoritarian impulse. And it had to be to unleash an era of scientific inquiry and technological progress. For centuries, Christianity has been an ideological force in decline, its doctrine one of forgiveness, humility, and surrender.

So when Mohamed skewers my cheek, shall I turn him another? When I have one of Allah's warriors in my sights, shall I wonder whether I am really fit to judge him, lest I be judged? Shall I humbly ponder over the sinfulness of my own society, the very sin, the lust, the materialism, the wordliness, that these invaders are opposing? Ultimately, isn't my desire for freedom a selfish one?

Are you thinking that it will work out as long as the virtue of self-sacrifice is practiced in moderation? Where then are the principles we need to fight for our lives and freedom? If the uplifting power of our moral code is squandered in such admonitions as 'be nice to your parents' and 'help the homeless,' what chance do we really stand against Allah's warriors? We do need a code. It is not enough that freedom merely be permitted or tolerated. Because defending it will require a profound sense of moral rectitude.

Imagine a moral code that extols individual liberty, that condemns human slavery once and for all -- whether it is slavery to a state, to a class, to a race, or to someone else's delusions of a supernatural dimension. Imagine a code based not on delusions and commandments but on an honest, objective survey of man's actual nature, the requirements of his survival on this earth. Imagine a code that renders morality as a tool for the benefit of your own life, and a weapon against those who would enslave you. Such is the moral code necessary for a real war in defense of civilization, because it is the unacknowledged root of all the grandeur that civilization has achieved.

Unnatural Interest

2007-11-20T06:52:00.001-08:00

[Adapted from an HBL post] It's not possible to quantitatively isolate Fed-induced distortions in our system of interest rates. Why this is so, even apart from issues of idiosyncratic credit risk, is an insight of Austrian monetary theory.

The Fed effectively controls short term interest rates by fiat, which it has the power to do by creating "money" (i.e. electronic deposits in a federal reserve bank) out of thin air (i.e. government IOUs). Since an interest rate is really just the price of credit, this is basically a price control. In particular, the Fed is capping the price of credit. Usually when the government perpetually forces a producer to sell the fruits of his labor at sub-market levels, he goes out of business. But here what's being sold is a time-limited right of disposal over a given sum of paper money. Virtually no labor was required to create the paper, and the fruits are owned not by the lender (a federal reserve bank) but by all the dupes who unknowingly accept a perpetual debasement of their money.

As Hayek emphasized, the price system is a means of disseminating the particularized knowledge held within the mind of each individual producer-valuer to a sea of other such individuals who might better coordinate their activities with his own. Price controls, on the other hand, are only a means of destruction, and what they destroy is primarily this knowledge. To abolish a market price is an act of censorship. When the price is one so basic as that governing the economy-wide trade-off between present and future consumption, an entire realm of cooperative discovery is disintegrated.

Volumes of information pertaining to people's actual preferences in regard to this trade-off -- the information that would have been discovered and disseminated through countless acts of consumption and abstinence, of planning and hedging -- this information simply does not exist. There is no way to retrieve what never was.

Anti-Jihad in the Blogosphere

2007-11-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

Something that has caught my attention recently: anti-jihadis abroad and at home, who used to be on civil terms, have recently ceased friendly relations and proceeded to "throw mud" as Hillary might put it. Now, I'm all for mud when there's an adobe house that needs building. And that is about the architectural equivalent of current anti-jihad movements around the world.

In short, European anti-jihadism had been relegated to political obscurity by the multiculturalist ostriches who have most of the continent under their yoke. Only the ostriches didn't realize how repulsive that yoke might be to small but noticeable minorities of reactionary conservatives in their midst. And so, from obscurity the reactionaries rise, bringing with them bits from the tribalist miasma of Euro-conservatism. Ironically the real nature of this miasma is obscured by the ostriches themselves, on account of the ostriches' supposed anti-racism laws that end up legally barring the reactionaries from uttering their real views both informally and through various political parties (like the Vlaams Blok/Belang in Belgium).

Another ambiguator is that nationalistic parties like Vlaams Belang (Flemish nationalist in this case) have morphed their traditional anti-Semitic paranoia into a much more plausible anti-Muslim message. The VB is now unique across the political landscape of western Europe in its support for Israel, as the last outpost of Western civilization among the Shari'a slave states of the Middle East. From the current VB platform, in fact, it is difficult to discern much off kilter. I guess the seemingly incongruous call for granting amnesty to relic Nazi collaborators might raise an eyebrow. But what's an eccentric sympathy or two between ideological allies, right? Well, if you listen to this interview with VB front man Filip DeWinter, eyebrows may give way to garlic cloves and mirrors. Yeah, seems that old remark of Fil's that "We [the VB] choose a white Europe." -- and another about how he wouldn't look too kindly on his daughter bringing home a Negro boyfriend -- both of those were really misinterpreted. You see "white Europe" is just a metaphor.

Charles Johnson of the American anti-jihad blog Little Green Footballs had no truck with this kind of nationalism and said so, precipitating the break with Paul Belien of the Euro anti-jihad blog Brussels Journal and the mysterious but eloquent Fjordman of BJ and Gates of Vienna (and formerly of LGF as well). Kudos to Charles for doggedly pursuing these things despite credible smoke screens raised by his now-adversaries. They are clever too -- they make a point of attributing suspicions of racism to the tried-and-true leftist disinformation gambit.

Charles has also rightly emphasized the critical difference between the two sides here: nationalism vs. individualism, concluding that what we must fight to preserve is not ethnic or national or religious identity, but individual liberty. More on this later, in particular on how this very idea is not widely understood on the American right either, laying the groundwork for future schisms closer to home.

What then do we make of a party like Vlaams Belang, whose explicit agenda against the Islamization of Europe is laudable, but whose leaders seem to be trying to cover up their roots in the tribalist far-right? There may come a time -- and perhaps that time is already upon Europe -- when the alternatives are unacceptable. And there is no need, even while voting for and supporting a party like VB, to aid the cover up. One can vote for them and also agitate against any lingering racist elements. Parties can change, and party leaders will sooner or later be replaced. If they themselves have tacitly conceded the moral case, the road may be clearing.

Emergent Phenomena in Economics and Physics

2007-11-18T19:29:00.000-08:00

The way I characterized Austrian economics as reducing everything down to individual action is kind of funny. One might call it "reductionist." In physics there are some people who use this word too, and they use it pejoratively. The funny thing is that insights they have obtained about the character of a mighty chunk of the physical world are eerily similar to Hayek's insights about markets, and the terminology is similar too.

The physics bit is about how a mess of complicated interacting components can spontaneously exhibit large scale order that looks as if it were (i) composed of a bunch of coherent larger objects, and (ii) organized according to elegant rules about how those larger objects behave. The problem is just that these larger objects don't exist except as slavishly repeated patterns of behavior of the underlying components, and the elegant rules don't seem to have anything to do with the rules actually governing the components.

If the components are atoms, and the larger objects are waves in a crystal lattice, you get the slavish conformity of ice always having the same specific heat. If the components are people, and the larger objects are dairy markets, you get the price of milk in Idaho slavishly imitating the price of milk in Manhattan (or vice versa). At any rate, emergent physics and emergent economics are pregnant ideas.

Menger, Mises, Hayek and All That

2007-11-18T19:28:00.000-08:00

One of the systems plugged into that philosophic substrate is Austrian economics, which is the school of economics founded in the desire to reduce all economic knowledge down to its origin in the values and actions of individuals. Its founder, Carl Menger, is best known for solving elementary paradoxes like "If an apple is really worth $0.50, why bother to buy one rather than just holding onto your $0.50?" and "If water is so essential to your life why is it so much cheaper than diamonds?"

Ludwig von Mises was the first guy to realize why collectivism can never work, and here's a hint, it's not because people are inherently selfish. Mises also revealed exactly why collectivism in banking (i.e., secretive little groups of bureaucrats who have arrogated the right to push an entire nation full of savers and investors into a preconceived, rigid, and arbitrary pattern of interest rates) is so dangerous.

Motivated by these results, Friedrich von Hayek is the first man to have properly defined the central problem of economics, despite having been born centuries after the discipline began. Nice trick. One might venture to define economics as the science whose hardest problem is figuring out what its hardest problem is. The defining problem is basically: how does an entire economy full of people coordinate their manifold activities as if they all knew exactly what everyone else was doing? Contemplate, for instance, the twinky you just bought. A rubber manufacturer in Ohio contributed the tires that supported the rig that a truck driver from Sacramento purchased ten years ago so he could carry a combination of Oklahoma starch and Wisconsin cream two thousand miles into the back door of the 7/11 only four days before the exact moment that you needed it. Rube Goldberg behold!

Overture

2007-11-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

The primary purpose of this blog is to record noteworthy ideas I have or hear before they fall into the memory hole.

So let's start with my place in the intellectual landscape.

First, I am an Objectivist. Objectivism is the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand, which asserts, to paraphrase her, that reality exists independently of anyone's beliefs or wishes, that reason is man's means of knowing reality, that "rational selfishness" is a redundancy, and that "political entrepreneur" is an oxymoron. The core of Rand's system is not political or even moral, but epistemological, and is best characterized by a kind of orientation that, when confronted with an ambiguous abstraction or principle, always wants to ask "What facts gave rise to that?" -- rather than starting from a commandment, social convention, or emotional reaction, perceived as itself irreducible. The foregoing will not help you much if you don't know anything about Objectivism, but I enjoyed writing it anyway.

Objectivism provides the philosophic substrate on top of which various other, more specialized systems reside in my mind. The next couple posts will probably get into some of those.