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Dissecting the skeptics VIII

In the previous section of To Unknow Our Knowing, Delavagus managed to avoid committing any new errors, mostly due to the fact that he wandered off into an irrelevant tangent in such a nebulous manner that it was impossible to pin down any actual claims, much less examine their veracity. However, he does return from his contemplation of contextualism to the topic at hand on the home stretch, and in doing so, commits an error so fundamental and easily proven that it is hard to imagine it not being a willful and knowing deception:

The obvious problem with this sort of contextualism is that it seems to sever the link between knowledge and truth, focusing instead on assertability conditions (which amount to answering the question, “When do we consider it okay to claim to know x?”, as opposed to answering the question, “When are we justified in claiming to know x?”). The Pyrrhonian’s contextualism is different. It accepts the variability of assertability conditions, namely, that common life introduces uses of ‘to know’ that fail to satisfy the philosophical constraints on justification. In an everyday sense, then, Pyrrhonians think they know all sorts of things, the same as anyone else. But, unlike a contextualist such as Lewis, Pyrrhonians will maintain that this sort of knowing is, as Thompson Clarke put it in an influential paper, knowing in a manner of speaking only. As a human being in the world, thrust into a family, a culture, an environment, Pyrrhonians will believe all sorts of things—in an everyday way. And, in an everyday way, they will claim to know all sorts of things. But they will not mistake the degree of their doxastic commitment to x for the degree of x’s objective justification. They will not believe that their everyday beliefs are justified—except with reference to the presuppositions (the brute assumptions) that frame their communal epistemic practices. Like their ‘knowledge,’ the Pyrrhonians’ ‘justifications’ have a merely local force, as do (by their lights) everyone else’s—though non-Pyrrhonians are by and large too stubborn or conceited to admit as much.

Pyrrhonians, in other words, will live adoxastōs—free of the second-order belief that their first-order beliefs are (ultimately) justified.

This might sound like a trivial accomplishment, but I don’t think it is. The desire—the felt need—for objective justification is what leads people to claim to possess it (or at least to act as though they possess it), and I would argue that it is this myopic privileging of one’s own prejudices—the baseless elevation of the parochial to the universal—that has underwritten history’s greatest atrocities and that continually threatens to give rise to any number of fresh horrors.

To unknow our knowing, in the Pyrrhonian sense, is not to rob us of our everyday certainties, to deprive us of something substantial we previously possessed. Rather, it is to adopt a particular attitude toward ourselves, one that opens up a critical distance between what we believe to be true (often what we cannot help but believe to be true) and what we believe we know, a critical distance that allows us to live on the basis of an understanding of ourselves as reflective beings caught in a whirlwind of culture and biology, as consciousnesses at least partly shaped by forces whose power and scope we neither fully understand nor fully control.

As I previously observed, the contextualism tangent is irrelevant and is shown to be so by Delavagus’s assertion that Pyrrhonian contextualism is different. It is both fascinating and a little amusing to see that finally, at the end of his second post, Delavagus abruptly admits that he has been ignoring “uses of ‘to know’ that fail to satisfy the philosophical constraints” long after claiming that no one can know anything. And this leads him to commit his ninth error, a bait-and-switch even more substantial, and even more shameless, than the one he utilized with regards to the definition of knowledge. For what he does is attempt to substitute “first-order belief” for phenomena, “second-order belief” for “belief”, and “free of the second-order belief that their first-order beliefs are (ultimately) justified” for “suspension of judgment”.

Either Delavagus truly does not understand Pyrrhonian skepticism on a fundamental level or he is blatantly misrepresenting it in order to provide a false foundation for his own dogmatic opinions. It is simply wrong to say “Pyrrhonians will believe all sorts of things—in an everyday way” or that “they will claim to know all sorts of things”. The genuine Pyrrhonian absolutely will not do this! Sextus is very clear on the distinction between the acceptance of phenomena and the suspension of judgment concerning first-order belief, as can be seen in Chapter VII:

“We say that the Sceptic does not dogmatise. We do not say this, meaning by the word dogma the popular assent to certain things rather than others (for the Sceptic does assent to feelings that are a necessary result of sensation, as for example, when he is warm or cold, he cannot say that he thinks he is not warm or cold), but we say this, meaning by dogma the acceptance of any opinion in regard to the unknown things investigated by science. For the Pyrrhonean assents to nothing that is unknown…. The principal thing in uttering these formulae is that he says what appears to him, and communicates his own feelings in an unprejudiced way, without asserting anything in regard to external objects.”

From this, Delavagus proceeds to his tenth, and overtly anti-Pyrrhonian, error. He rephrases the baseless assertions of Sam Harris and R. Scott Bakker in claiming that the “privileging of one’s own prejudices… has underwritten history’s greatest atrocities”, which is no more than the very claim about the material dangers of certainty that Bakker has been unable to address for eight months and counting. Instead of taking the Pyrrhonian position that certainty is neither good nor bad in itself and neither seeking nor avoiding certainty, Delavagus attempts to contort the Sceptical philosophy into support for his first-order, dogmatic belief in the evils of self-privileged prejudices.

His conclusion simply underlines his ninth error. The entire purpose of Pyrrhonian scepticism is to rob us of our judgment, to suspend it, in the interest of our tranquility. It is not to adopt a particular attitude towards ourselves, but rather to adopt a balanced attitude towards matters of opinion. How Delavagus could show such little understanding of his own supposed area of expertise nearly defies reason, but we are given a clue in his final paragraph. When he describes Pyrrhonianism as “the basis of an understanding of ourselves as reflective beings” rather than a practical method for achieving psychological tranquility, he offers us a reason to suspect that it may only be the common philosopher’s inability to pull himself out of his customary navel-gazing that is responsible for his misunderstanding and consequent misrepresentation of the philosophy. Or, alternatively, he may be simply another shameless and intellectually dishonest academic taking a “by any means necessary” approach to pushing his conventional left-wing dogma. We can harbor our suspicions, but we really cannot express a meaningful opinion on the basis of the information provided.

In any case, I will conclude by observing that I have, as requested, given Delavagus’s posts a fair and detailed reading. I have considered his attempt to defend Pyrrhonism against the charge of peritropē and found it wanting, I have identified no less than 10 specific errors in the arguments he presented, and finally, I have demonstrated that he has either not understood Pyrrhonism or has shamelessly misrepresented it for his own purposes. I leave it to the reader to determine the validity of those four observations.

In the end, Delavagus leaves one feeling rather like Jaime Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda, given that the central message of Pyrrhonism is no more that second-order belief in justified first-order belief is bad by nature than the central message of Buddhism is every man for himself.

Now, some may have forgotten that fourth question I mentioned at the very beginning. What is the author trying to prove? Having finished the reading, it’s easy to see that Delavagus was trying to prove that ancient scepticism supports the modern notion that belief is bad and uncertainty is good. We can further observe that the actual argument was not the one he was purporting to prove in his title or in the introduction.

Previous sections
Dissecting the skeptics I
Dissecting the skeptics II
Dissecting the skeptics III
Dissecting the skeptics IV
Dissecting the skeptics V
Dissecting the skeptics VI
Dissecting the skeptics VII

Related
Exposing the False Skeptic
The “Skeptic” Confesses

If they can do it why can’t we?

Bermuda boots out its longtime immigrants:

A British family who lived in the colony of Bermuda for 20 years were ordered to leave because its government is clamping down on immigrants from Britain. Stephen and Kirsty Tomlinson and their two children were given barely a month to get off the North Atlantic island after his workplace burned down. Now the couple have swapped sandy beaches and sunshine for concrete and drizzle after returning to Mr Tomlinson’s home town of Hull, east Yorkshire. They were ordered to leave despite their daughter Holly, 12 and son Joseph, six, being born in Bermuda, a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic.

It is ironic indeed that Brits are being kicked out of Commonwealth nations even as millions of Commonwealth citizens are permitted residence in Britain. And it is simply ludicrous that the wealthy Western nations continue to pretend that what other nations are doing to their citizens is either impossible or immoral. Notice that once the British man lost his job, he was given one month to leave despite the fact that they’d been there for 20 years and their children were born there. And furthermore, notice that mere place of birth is not sufficient to provide citizenship.

Dissecting the skeptics VII

Now that we’ve considered Delavagus’s explication of the skeptics’ dialectical strategy, described in To Unknow Our Knowing, we’ll turn to his description of Pyrrhonism’s aims.

[S]kepticism is simply philosophico-rational thought coming to an awareness of its own rational groundlessness. But Pyrrhonism doesn’t stop there, for the conclusion that philosophico-rational thought is rationally ungrounded is itself rationally ungrounded. In other words, for Pyrrhonians, the skeptical conclusion is just one more thing to be skeptical about. If it has any force, it is only as a hypothetical: if x, then y, where ‘x’ is the framework of rationality as we understand it and ‘y’ is the skeptical conclusion (which, of course, wraps back around and consumes ‘x’). Pyrrhonians are willing to accept that philosophico-rational thought may not in fact be rationally ungrounded; they claim merely that, given these apparently unavoidable rational commitments—commitments without which it seems impossible that there could be any such thing as a search for truth—it seems that our justifications fail, that our thinking turns back on itself, like a mother consuming her offspring, that our knowing drops out of the picture.

Where does this leave Pyrrhonians? It leaves them not as some brand of philosophical skeptic, but rather as skeptics about philosophy.

Throughout its history, philosophy has displayed a tendency toward stunning arrogance and pretentiousness, which in turns has tended to give rise to condescension with respect to what I’ll call ‘common life.’ By ‘common life,’ I mean—simply but roughly—ordinary life as lived by ordinary people. From the rarefied heights of philosophical sagehood, common life seems a paltry, precarious, self-deluded thing. Common life is life bound in Plato’s Cave, seeing naught by shadows (appearances), whereas the Philosopher is the Great Man who has thrown off his shackles, escaped the cave, and beheld the Sun (reality).

Pyrrhonians reject the pretensions of a philosophy that would arrogate to itself the right, to say nothing of the ability, to sit in judgment over common life as such. They live according to appearances—without the baggage of a philosophically loaded notion of ‘reality’ undermining it. To Pyrrhonians, common life (that is, the appearances) is a sort of pragmatic-transcendental framework, an immanent, ground-level framework that comes into view only upon the collapse of the illusory philosophico-rational framework built atop it. Common life is ‘pragmatic’ in the sense that it seems as though the appearances (the ways in which the world shows up for us, in all its phenomenological richness) arise from our social practices; it is ‘transcendental’ in the sense that the appearances seem at the same time to underlie or make possible our social practices.

(Consider: the framework-claim that the world did not pop into existence in the year 1900 both arises from various of our practices—in the sense that if we did not have such practices then the claim would not belong to the framework of common life—and constitutes those practices, since doubting it would render impossible, or at least deeply problematize, those practices.)

Throughout his texts, Sextus claims to champion ‘common life’ over the ‘conceit and rashness of the dogmatists.’ But he is also clear that Pyrrhonians differ importantly from those who have not undergone the skeptical therapy. He marks this difference by telling us that, unlike dogmatists and pre-reflective ‘ordinary people’ alike, mature Pyrrhonians live adoxastōs, without beliefs or opinions. What does this mean? I want to suggest that it represents a sort of proto-contextualism.

In my previous post, I mentioned a few schools of epistemological thought, namely, foundationalism and coherentism, internalism and externalism. Contextualism is another. It comes in a variety of forms, but roughly, contextualists hold that the truth or justification of a claim is determined or constrained by various contextual factors. David Lewis, for instance, (in)famously argued that ‘conversational contexts’ are defined by rules, the last of which he calls the Rule of Attention, which holds that any possibility that is in fact entered into a conversation is thereby not properly ignorable, even if the possibility (such as, e.g., that we are all living in the Matrix) was properly ignorable prior to the possibility being raised. What this means is that we might know all sorts of things one moment, then in the next moment—after the unanswerable Matrix possibility is raised—no longer know anything. On this view, philosophy is actually in the business of, as Lewis puts it, ‘destroying knowledge.’ To philosophize, in other words, is to unknow our ordinary knowing.

In part VI, I showed that Delavagus shows no understanding of the Pyrrhonian skeptic’s responsibility to exclusively utilize the beliefs, convictions, and assumptions of his interlocutors, and also illustrated how Scepticism is a direct attack on human reason. In this section, Delavagus admits the latter, but then qualifies his admission by noting, correctly, that the Sceptics are open to the possibility that they might be wrong about the unreliable nature of rational thought. Is his claim that this transforms them from philosophical skeptics to skeptics about philosophy also correct?

Yes and no… but ultimately, no. I will not count this as an outright error, however, since it is simply a complicated repeat of his mistaken claim that Scepticism is not a philosophy. Let me explain by first noting that Sextus explicitly asserts that Scepticism is not only a philosophy, but one of the three major schools of philosophy. So, it’s much more accurate to say the Pyrrhonian possesses one philosophy about which he is skeptical and a second one by which he attempts to live his daily life than to say that he does not possess one at all. The first is a sort of Schroedinger’s Philosophy, which is either valid or not valid depending upon something that the philosopher does not know. Ironically enough, one could point towards this sort of if/then approach being in practice much more akin to my probability-oriented perspective than to the Uncertainty dogma championed at Three Pound Brain. What, really, is the material difference between the highly rationalized Pyrrhonian arguments against philosophy and rational thought and the common, instinctive observation that philosophy is nothing more than useless mental masturbation committed by navel-gazing perverts? Furthermore, because the Pyrrhonian observably possesses two distinct philosophies, one focused on opinion and the other concerned solely with phenomena, the potential invalidity of the first philosophy says nothing about the existence of the second.

Indeed, the attempt to simultaneously champion the common life while holding themselves superior to the unsceptical masses appears to show that Pyrrhonianism is an intellectual drug for the philosophy addict, who recognizes the sterility and enervating uselessness of his addiction, but cannot bear to give it up for fear that doing so would render him one of the common herd that he despises. That this attempt to separate himself from the philosophers and the ordinary people alike is doomed to failure can be seen in the impossible metric that Sextus imposes upon the sceptic, since it is quite obvious that no one manages to live adoxastōs. For example, Delavagus may call himself a modern Pyrrhonian, but he is quite clearly not a mature one since he has expressed more than a few opinions and beliefs, while despite his constant advocacy of uncertainty, Scott himself pretends only to “skeptic naturalism” rather than Scepticism.

Delavagus next makes a fascinating and revealing statement that is of far more interest than his subsequent attempt to engage in another definitional switch. He brings up David Lewis’s assertion that philosophy is not in the business of truth, but rather “destroying knowledge”. Which, combined with Delavagus’s earlier definition, means that philosophy exists in order to destroy justified true belief. However, this is Lewis’s view and is not necessarily shared by Delavagus, especially since he promptly switches definitions and claims that to philosophize is to unknow our “ordinary knowing”, which is the very sort of knowledge he specifically precluded through his choice of the philosophical definition. Now, it’s important to recognize that a) Lewis may not be referring to Delavagus’s knowledge, and b) there is no conflict between Delavagus’s assertion about the purpose of philosophy being the destruction of “ordinary knowledge” in favor of “justified true belief”. However, what is completely lacking is any justification or logical support for the legitimacy, or even possibility, of that goal, especially in light of the Sceptical argument that justified true belief does not appear to exist.

If this sounds incoherent, it is because Delavagus has deviated from the argument he was originally presenting, and is now meandering off course into tangential issues that have little relation and no relevance to his defense of Pyrrhonism. We’re rapidly approaching the end of his second post here, so in part XVIII, we shall see if he’s able to somehow pull it all together into an argument that is at least coherent, if not necessarily convincing.

Next section
Dissecting the skeptics VIII

Previous sections
Dissecting the skeptics I
Dissecting the skeptics II
Dissecting the skeptics III
Dissecting the skeptics IV
Dissecting the skeptics V
Dissecting the skeptics VI

WND column

Immigration and Unemployment

Long before there was a Republican Party, the idea that free trade and immigration foster economic growth was a staple among many Americans. Even today, there are few on the right side of the political spectrum who have bothered to review this centuries-old logic or examine the considerable amount of empirical evidence that has been gathered from decades of quasi-free trade or 47 years of mass foreign immigration.

Last month’s unemployment report was not good. While the U3 unemployment rate was only 8.1 percent, which is bad but not disastrous, the number of Americans not working was actually much higher than it would appear due to the statistical games being played by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since the unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed people by the total number of people in the labor force, the BLS keeps the rate down by reducing the size of the labor force. For example, in the April unemployment report, it was reported that the size of the civilian labor force shrank from 154.7 million to 154.5 million.

The cracks widen

The French half of Merkozy is now out and the Greek technocrats get demolished:

Greek voters dealt a blow to eurozone hopes that Athens will stick to its austerity commitments as parties opposing more cuts, including neo-Nazis, won almost 60-percent support in an election Sunday. According to updated exit polls, the two main parties suffered heavy losses, with the conservative New Democracy and the left-wing Pasok getting just 32.0 to 34.5 percent between them, down from 77.4 percent at the last polls in 2009.

This should end the can-kicking in Europe, but we’ll see. It’s pretty clear whom the global elite fears most, as the Golden Dawn did two points better than its projected 5 percent despite being falsely painted as Neo-Nazis. The charge is particularly ridiculous as Greece was occupied by the Nazis during World War II, and if anyone can be reasonably described as Neo-Nazi, it is the unelected dictators in the ruling European Commission. Things could get very interesting if the Dutch and Irish elections maintain the theme of rejecting the EU and IMF architects of the European financial system.

The dangers of day care

Is a mother’s career really worth the loss of a child? And whatever happened to the liberal’s customary “if it saves just one child’s life” standard?

A Star Tribune examination of hundreds of public records shows that the number of children dying in child care has nearly doubled in the past five years — reaching the rate of one per month. Nearly all the deaths have occurred at in-home providers (also known as family care), and most involved a child sleeping. The newspaper’s investigation also found more unsafe-sleep citations, such as lack of training or children in unsafe sleep positions, at in-home settings than at large child-care centers.

The Department of Human Services (DHS), the state’s top child-care regulator, is treating the rise in deaths as a public health crisis. “It’s huge,” said DHS Inspector General Jerry Kerber. “It makes it clear that something has got to be done. What that something is, I think, is going to take the work. … It’s completely unacceptable.”

Using a state licensing website, the Star Tribune reviewed 217 licensed family homes and 185 child-care centers that have been cited since July 2010 for violations of state regulations. Some 20 percent of these family homes were cited for having children in unsafe sleeping positions — such as sleeping on open beds or in mechanical swings — or sleeping with heavy blankets that present suffocation hazards. About 12 percent of the child-care centers were cited for such violations.

What should be done is that married women with young children should be encouraged and given financial incentives to stay home and raise them. What will be done, I suspect, is a useless increase in regulation, perhaps combined with a ban on family homes that will no doubt be strongly supported by the corporations that own the large child-care centers.

What is particularly unfortunate about this incident is that it made almost no financial sense for the baby to be in day care anyhow. “The Fletchers’ tragedy started with a dilemma faced by thousands of working parents across Minnesota. Just weeks after Blake was born, in February of that year, Amanda was making plans to return to her $9-an-hour job as a medical records clerk. “It’s kind of the American way,” she said. “You have the baby, you stay home with them and then you are back to work to support your family.” So they began looking for child care. They weighed cost, convenience and availability of providers in Park Rapids. They found that a local child-care center would charge $120 per month more than in-home providers. That’s not unusual in Minnesota, where the average annual cost of infant care in a center is $12,900, third-highest in the nation.”

In other words, Amanda Fletcher had to work 1,433 hours per year – 35 weeks – simply to pay for average child care. Factor in the payroll and income taxes at approximately 20 percent of her income, and she’d have to work 1,791 hours, or 45 weeks, simply to break even. Even with the cheaper and substandard family home day care, at $7,350 per year she had to work 1,020 hours, or half the year, just to pay for it. If that is the American way, then the American way is as economically illiterate as it is unsustainable.

In the absence of action

Breivik happens:

Nearly every time I read something Breivik has said about Europe’s “Islamification” being enabled by the Euro left’s ideology of multiculturalism I find myself thinking: “He’s right.”

This defines me instantly as a “right-wing racist extremist” and therefore both “insane” and “evil.”

I am not alone in my insane and evil right-wing racist extremist thoughts. I reckon that most Europeans think exactly the same way as me. It is merely that they are too afraid, or not allowed, to say so. But I am also certain that neither I nor the majority in Europe are right-wing racist extremists, nor are we insane or evil.

We are simply normal. It’s multiculturalism that is abnormal.

I live in Europe and I’m not sure that I know anyone, left or right, who still genuinely believes multiculturalism is viable. I know some very left-wing people who wish that it was, and who would vehemently oppose any attempt to fix the problems they reluctantly admit, but even they will confess, when pressed, that they don’t hold out any hope of Muslim and African integration, much less the happy vibrancy promised by the multiculturalists. They mostly don’t want to think about it and prefer to hope that the problems somehow goes away on their own.

But they won’t. And in the absence of thought or action by people of generally good faith, action by the more extreme and violent is assured.

I note that the French election results tend to support my assertion, in the immediate aftermath of the Utoya shootings, that Breivik’s actions would be seen as an early harbinger of popular nationalism rather than a tactical blunder that increased popular support for the multiculturalists.

Mailvox: evolutionary ideology

Anonymous Conservative writes of an amusing spin on the “science says conservatives are crazy” theme:

I’ve done a ton of research into the linkage between r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology and political ideology. The short of it is
ideology looks like it’s just an intellectual expression of the underlying psychologies motivating r/K behaviors. Obviously, this likely speaks to the mechanism by which our ideologies evolved. That ideology and r/K behaviors are both related to the same DRD4 gene, and that the brain
structures which govern these behaviors is also the same also raises interesting questions about their evolutionary linkage.

This material is pure gold, if you’ve ever wondered why our species has this psychological divide within it. It even answers where exactly
Liberals came from, given their obvious reduced ability to function in what we often call “the state of nature” (ie a K-selected, competitive
state of nature – they would thrive in an r-selected stated of nature, where competitiveness is disfavored).

I’ve run this work by liberals, and it devastating to them, on a visceral level. They do not want to be the bunny-rabbit people, embodying a prey
species psychology within a highly K-selected, competitive species. I posted for a bit at TED, very benignly on this, just to test my
presentation in a hostile, more Liberal environment. I got the feedback and insight I needed (every liberal abandoned any thread this was posted
to), and then I left for six months. When I went back every one of my postings referencing this had been quietly deleted, despite the fact I
purposely was hyper-civil and cited everything I asserted. I don’t think they’ve ever done that to anyone else. Liberals are horrified by this
work, and the implications which naturally arise from it.

Now, I tend to regard all of this evo-psych as a ludicrous joke, especially since I am a confirmed evolutionary skeptic. Because there is so little scientific evidence in support of evolution by natural selection, I conclude it is unlikely to be the mechanism distinguishing the liberal Bunny People from the conservative Wolf People. And, of course, being a libertarian and rejecting both big government ideologies, I have neither a wolf nor a rabbit in that hunt. That being said, this is certainly a potentially useful rhetorical response to the faux-scientific rhetoric so often presented by liberals in a misguided attempt to somehow shame conservatives out of their psychologically inferior ideological perspective. (The very attempt betrays both the intrinsic intellectual flexibility of liberals as well as their inability to understand the other side.) And it certainly explains the way in which liberals are constantly looking to the government as a way to rein in their more successful competitors; because the Bunny People can’t do anything to control the Wolf People themselves, they need to appeal to the Hunter… never stopping to think that the Hunter is just as pleased to shoot bunnies as wolves… and may in fact prefer eating rabbit meat.

Anyhow, if you happen to find this sort of thing interesting, you can read a related paper on it.

No-Growth Nation

I no longer pay any attention to the headline unemployement rate, which is presently reported at 8.1 percent for U3. But it is relatively meaningless due to the statistical shenanigans that are being played with the labor force participation rate, as various commentators are now noting. For me, the more important and less easily gamed statistic is the EPR, or Employment-Population Ratio, which has remained essentially flat, between 58.5 and 58.2 percent, since October 2009. Needless to say, this is not indicative of a growing economy, since it reflects a ratio not seen in the USA since the recession of the early 1980s. One wonders how low the EPR has to fall before people begin to connect their unemployment to the 60 million population increase since 1990 – more than the entire population of the UK – most of which is the result of the post-1986 immigration wave.

Suffice it to say that the present economic depression will eventually kill the claim that immigration is good for the economy as dead as the 1970s recession killed the Keynesian claim that it was impossible to simultaneously have inflation and unemployment.

Mailvox: the fifty trillion dollar question

KJ offers the opportunity to ask a question of some European functionaries:

The former and long-serving vice chancellor of Germany (Dr Joschka Fischer) and the EU’s High Representative for Common and Security Policy (Dr. Javier Solana) are here… debating the economic situation (and potential solutions). The Spaniard is (in summary) saying the situation is looking pretty shit right now and it could be fixed by Germany “opening up” to the rest of poorer/less-productive Europe (when pressed he confessed that includes offering up more of its – i.e. Germany’s – money).
The German is (in summary) saying the situation is looking pretty shit and what we need is to centralise and consolidate political power in Europe. Lol! 4th Reich anyone!? According to both, the Euro breaking up would just be catastrophic. We can ask questions but I don’t have the heart to ask any. It’s so depressing listening to this glossy, typical politic speak from which no straight answers can be extracted. Do you questions for the German Vice Chancellor or EU’s High Representative?

I wrote back: Yes. Since inflation or default are the only way to escape debt of this magnitude, which is the vice-chancellor’s preference? If you get a second question, ask why the successful bank defaults in Iceland have not been permitted to take place in the EU.

Completely admits that historic 1920s inflation destroyed the German middle class, and admits not a result of market developments but intentionally by German central bank to write off war debt, so accepts inflation is going to have to play its part in the current situation!! Greek default, (and kicking them out), is not an option apparently, not forthcoming as to why other than that it would be “hugely detrimental to the rest of Europe”. No luck on the second question; earlier on he had alluded to “endless lawsuits” and “serious capital restrictions” to anyone taking the opt-out of paying their debts which he implied would make that option not viable. I didn’t hear Iceland mentioned at all.

This lends further support to what most of us here have always assumed, that the central banks and governments will inflate. The question is, can they do so? This is where the question of the nature of money, and if credit is more properly considered money or simply the accounting of money, becomes the 50 trillion dollar question. Nate and I will be debating this in the reasonably near future, but I’ll leave you with this thought: given their performance over the last four years, what are the chances that the core monetary assumption of the central banks and governments is correct?