Status Report

Agora, which means simply: open place of assembly, has been proven to be the only thing needed for a free and open market.
http://www.ancient.eu/agora/

It’s all well and good to discuss all manner of other things. We’re all free to do so.

But at the root of the root. I’m fairly confident we are willing to settle for a truly free market. The most important issue is: Why do we want this free market. How do we get enough of us doing what is required to make this market a reality.

That is where our focus should be, I believe.

What is this market like. How is this market established and sustained. What can be done to bring this about in the short term. What is needed to be done for it to be resurrected and kept open in the long term.

This market hasn’t existed in the form we’re seeking since Aristotle advised Alexander the Great on how to turn Ancient Greece into the Greek Empire.

To the best of my knowledge, the markets you see in the developing world are faux free markets. They’re made to look like open agoras, but the reality is, they’re sponsored by some offshore industrialist who manufacturers trinkets in bulk.

Most things that have happened in the 25 centuries since its fall aren’t likely to be especially relevant to our cause. At least not the things that are common knowledge. We’ll have to scour the internet and seek out the hidden story of the Agora through the years. Or we’ll have to go so far as to create our own theories of Agoras and prove them on our own.

The crucial difference between faith and institutions of religion; and politics and institutions of government:

Faith: the art of using lies, fear, emotions, and euphemisms to dupe average people into accepting–or demanding–their own enslavement.

Politics: the art of using euphemisms, lies, emotions and fear to dupe average people into accepting–or demanding–their own enslavement.

This is not to say you shouldn’t develop or adopt various belief systems about the universe, people and history. You are free to adopt anything that’s peaceful.

This is not to say you shouldn’t develop or adopt various interpersonal systems regarding property, decision making, and public interaction. You are free to adopt anything that’s peaceful.

This is to say you shouldn’t be a slave to your beliefs. Nor work to enslave others to honor your beliefs. Doing that is not O.K.

Doing that makes you an asshole and completely unwelcome around freedom loving people.

Lawsuit against passenger who urged friend to drive faster has been allowed to continue.
http://blog.sfgate.com/crime/2015/06/24/urging-friend-to-drive-faster-can-be-costly/

The TPP is about to pass. It will make using the internet super-highway the exact same police state quagmire you experience when you drive your car on a regular highway.
http://i.imgur.com/wha1Jxl.jpg

But what can you do about any of this? You’re not to blame. Why contribute your money or time to this website. The age of heroes has ended. Might as well watch Transformers Cartoons, there’s an episode with your favorite autobot Negatron in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1n0SVjZ_d8

Free To Any Willing Home (Roanoke)
http://roanoke.craigslist.org/pet/5081333122.html

The allure of the Holy Words of God, or of the Great Man, are they provide a Prior Certainty of Consciousness

Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor – a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine: “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness—which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform.

What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor’s blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—then of perceptions—then of sensations.

When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.

This irrationalism reached its peak with Immanuel Kant and the philosophy of subjectivism.

Subjectivism is the belief that reality is not a firm absolute, but a fluid, plastic, indeterminate realm which can be altered, in whole or in part, by the consciousness of the perceiver—i.e., by his feelings, wishes or whims. It is the doctrine which holds that man—an entity of a specific nature, dealing with a universe of a specific nature—can, somehow, live, act and achieve his goals apart from and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality, i.e., apart from and/or in contradiction to his own nature and the nature of the universe.

This is the “mixed,” moderate or middle-of-the-road version of subjectivism. Pure or “extreme” subjectivism does not recognize the concept of identity, i.e., the fact that man or the universe or anything possesses a specific nature.

The subjective means the arbitrary, the irrational, the blindly emotional.

In metaphysics, “subjectivism” is the view that reality (the “object”) is dependent on human consciousness (the “subject”). In epistemology, as a result, subjectivists hold that a man need not concern himself with the facts of reality; instead, to arrive at knowledge or truth, he need merely turn his attention inward, consulting the appropriate contents of consciousness, the ones with the power to make reality conform to their dictates. According to the most widespread form of subjectivism, the elements which possess this power are feelings.

In essence, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts, and therefore men’s primary tool of cognition. If men feel it, declares the subjectivist, that makes it so.

The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity—an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing one’s attention outward to the facts.

The subjectivist denies that there is any such thing as “the truth” on a given question, the truth which corresponds to the facts. On his view, truth varies from consciousness to consciousness as the processes or contents of consciousness vary; the same statement may be true for one consciousness (or one type of consciousness) and false for another. The virtually infallible sign of the subjectivist is his refusal to say, of a statement he accepts: “It is true”; instead, he says: “It is true—for me (or for us).” There is no truth, only truth relative to an individual or a group—truth for me, for you, for him, for her, for us, for them.

Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: “It is, therefore I want it.” They say: “I want it, therefore it is.”

They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness—they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.

There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.

In Ethics

Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s. Whatever else they may disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality.

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.

If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical history—that you must challenge.

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an “emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

Ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or a whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and “compromising” with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine.

The subjectivist theory of ethics is, strictly speaking, not a theory, but a negation of ethics. And more: it is a negation of reality, a negation not merely of man’s existence, but of all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heraclitean universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action—that reality gives him a blank check on values—that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do—that a man’s whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is how to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present state of our culture.

In Aethetics

A work of art is a specific entity which possesses a specific nature. If it does not, it is not a work of art. If it is merely a material object, it belongs to some category of material objects—and if it does not belong to any particular category, it belongs to the one reserved for such phenomena: junk.

“Something made by an artist” is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

“Something in a frame hung on a wall” is not a definition of painting.

“Something with a number of pages in a binding” is not a definition of literature.

“Something piled together” is not a definition of sculpture. “Something made of sounds produced by anything” is not a definition of music.

“Something glued on a flat surface” is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of grass glued on a sheet of paper to represent grass might be good occupational therapy for retarded children—though I doubt it—but it is not art.

“Because I felt like it” is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity—if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product.

Perception of reality as opposed to subjective imaginings of reality

The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further.

Man’s senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.

Although, chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual—epistemologically, the base of all of man’s knowledge is the perceptual stage.

Sensations, as such, are not retained in man’s memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts.

A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery.

Man’s senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate. . . . His senses cannot deceive him, . . . physical objects cannot act without causes, . . . his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort . . . the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives.

Let the witch doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception.

The arguments of those who attack the senses are merely variants of the fallacy of the “stolen concept.”

As far as can be ascertained, the perceptual level of a child’s awareness is similar to the awareness of the higher animals: the higher animals are able to perceive entities, motions, attributes, and certain numbers of entities. But what an animal cannot perform is the process of abstraction—of mentally separating attributes, motions or numbers from entities. It has been said that an animal can perceive two oranges or two potatoes, but cannot grasp the concept “two.”

The range of man’s perceptual awareness—the number of percepts he can deal with at any one time—is limited. He may be able to visualize four or five units—as, for instance, five trees. He cannot visualize a hundred trees or a distance of ten light-years. It is only his conceptual faculty that makes it possible for him to deal with knowledge of that kind.

Many years after his death. The Ellsworth Toohey archetype is mythologized into a shining founding father who deeply loved his nation and only wielded his political power in the most benevolent of ways.

He’s every bit as unreal as any Sky Stalin or Airborne Pasta Deity. But perhaps even more dangerous, because he’s respected and revered as both a God and a Man.

The Fountainhead – Howard Roarke and Ellsworth Toohey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h2ZixoCCWI

How to Rule Souls – Ellsworth Toohey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O6uacXDAHg

If you put your faith in an conscious creator of the universe. That is not an error. If you put your faith in a true cooperative of like-minded comrades and call your union a micro-nation. That is not an error.

But if you put your faith in an institutional religion or government, that is most assuredly an error. These entities have been perverted and corrupted beyond all reason and they are undoubtedly an individual liberty lover’s mortal enemies.

The crux of the matter isn’t whether your notion of a benevolent deity or founding father is false or not. It’s has to do with your personal code of conduct. Your individual life philosophy, as it were.

As Nietzsche put it in “Beyond Good and Evil”:

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it.

It is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.

The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing.

We are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions – to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong – are the most indispensable to us.

That without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.

That the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To recognise untruth as a condition of life.

That is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

– That is what Ayn Rand, the inventor of the NAP, meant by her notion of “the virtue of selfishness.

There is no rigorous way to define rationality, except a risk-management and cost-benefit one.

The key to rationality isn’t merely to reject falsities. It’s to embrace a philosophy that gives you a means to live well on the planet Earth.

Rationality is what prevents you or your species from extinction. What Nassim Taleb calls the foundational Precautionary Principle.

All other definitions fail under rigorous formalizations and model expansion.

Psychologists fail us because most of the stuff the label “irrational” is overly verbalistic and ignorant of probability and necessary linkage of words to objective reality.

Most of us are, to put it blunty, very bad at knowing what “makes sense” before an event actually occurs. We are only able to make so after an event has occurred and we have time to digest what has happened after the fact due to survival instincts and limbic processing.

This is what is called “Skin in the Game.”

– I may not have complied with hardly anything at this website. But I’ve read all the blogs from the people who mention them here. I’ve researched all the concepts. I’ve followed all your stories, and worried over most of you; who I’ve found, I’m able to dox you about 90% of the time if you post here and either give your real name, or else, have a sufficiently unique user ID.

– I know I seem all over the place, but it’s because I am scared to death to link my real world existence to this blog any more than has already been done against my will by the various technologies of the worldwide police state.

– I also know I’m terrible at accepting criticism and thus, would regret divulging personal details about myself that I really cared about, because if anyone made a negative comment about me, I would get upset, and start writing more poorly than I already do.

– I’m not a marketer, but I was able to send a lot of traffic this way via reddit. And I’m still having some effect by way of facebook, twitter, and liveleak; though not even a 1/10 of what I was able to send here before being shadowbanned for spamming this website too frequently.

— I know our stunted Jingoistic Judeo-Christian hive minds can’t comprehend how bad it will be until it really happens. But trust me, we’re really going to miss this website after we’ve waited too long to donate and it’s gone.

There’s nothing else out there like this place anymore.

Walmart to stop selling Confederate flag merchandise
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/22/politics/confederate-flag-walmart-south-carolina/

It’s time to put away the superstitious nonsense. The issue isn’t which flag should be flying over us. The issue is no flag should be flying over us. Primitive totems have no place in a libertarian’s life whatsover.

David’s vapid claptrap about his flavor of Calvinism being better than the other religions is less than useless. It’s corrosive and mentally debilitating to waste your time thinking about. So is wondering which flag you should revere and worship. The clear answer, is none at all.

Worship whatever you like in private. Do whatever irrational things you wish on your time. Me, I like to read books, watch movies, and write in my spare time.

That doesn’t mean I should evangelize about reading, watching, or writing to others. If you like to work in your garage or garden great. That doesn’t mean you belong on a high horse claiming to be superior to those who play video games or watch reality TV.

Each person contributes in their own way. Maybe most of us can be the at our best, merely by leaving others alone. If you want to fill scrapbooks full of pictures of boybands. Or pray to the your God 10 hours each day. You are free to do so.

What isn’t helpful is to intrude into others lives and tell them they can’t use their time the way they want to. Even to say working is superior to engaging in recreation is superior is not an objective truth.

It doesn’t really take that many people to provide for everyone any more. Most jobs, if you really look at them, are completely unnecessary. Or very nearly so.

If you’re a Christian, you still only deserve credit for what you actually accomplish. You get no credit for what every other Christian does.

If you’re an American, you only deserve compensation for your own value production. You have no claim on everything done by Americans. If you are a white person, you have no claim on what other white people do. If you’re a German you had nothing to do with what the Germans collectively have produced.

If you prefer one flag over another, you are should take a long skeptical look at yourself. Those living under confederate flags can’t be lumped together. Nor can yankees. Nor North Koreans. Nor Saudi Arabians.

Flags, nations, races, most of what they are is lies and superstitions. Just like religion. The way out of this mess, is to go cold turkey and stop engaging in magical thinking all together.

This has nothing to do with subjective preferences. You are free to like blacks more than Mexicans. Italians more than French. Texans more than Californians. But what you mustn’t do, is assign things to these groupings that have no basis in reality.

What you shouldn’t do, is spread confusion among those you want to ally and cooperate with. Refraining from shilling and flowery speechifying It’s a social skill you’ll need to teach yourself, no one in power is going to do it for you.

If you wish to live under the NAP, you have to put away all these mystical and false moral pretenses away, and no longer use them in your reasoning. They have no more place there, than does Vishnu or Crom.

All false Gods, false Governments, false authorities, and false reasonings, must be stricken from your life, if you want to live in a world with freedom and honest dealings with your fellow man.

Looking a little lean this month, you’re only half as far along as you should be at this point it seems. Hope it improves soon, some of us need this place.

There’s not really a word for it, but what I think you’re trying to do here could be consider social-didactics or something.

We’re each trying to teach each other what we uniquely know, and what we think other should also know.

There’s still some wasted effort trying to decide who belongs where, who’s good and who’s bad, and who we could appoint to do our thinking for us, and who’s to be our white knight in shining armor, but it’s a lot better here than most places.

What’s needed doesn’t exactly exist yet. But’s it’s starting to emerge. It’s something we’re each going to have to help create and develop, and it’s only going to matter how much we pass on to each other.

Most of us are awful at it. And a lot of what we have to offer is mostly worthless. But at least we’re making the necessary effort. And many important things have been pretty much settled.

Where else is there, really. Most places aren’t even worth going to. The same dull blades and wet firecrackers pop in and out still. But every so often, something good happens here, and I find that very encouraging.

Whatever knowledge you have, you can’t take it with you. What we do today, might help a long while from now. This is a long term process, but you’ve made a great start here, and I think you’re hitting your stride now, and bigger and better things are soon to come.