Author: VD

Live by the consumer, die by the consumer

It is not looking good for Q1-2013:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. had the worst sales start to a month
in seven years as payroll-tax increases hit shoppers already battling a
slow economy, according to internal e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News.

“In
case you haven’t seen a sales report these days, February MTD sales are
a total disaster,” Jerry Murray, Wal- Mart’s vice president of finance
and logistics, said in a Feb. 12 e-mail to other executives, referring
to month-to-date sales. “The worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7
years with the company.”

“Have you ever had one of those weeks where your best- prepared plans
weren’t good enough to accomplish everything you set out to do?” Geiger
asked in a Feb. 1 e-mail to executives. “Well, we just had one of those
weeks here at Walmart U.S. Where are all the customers? And where’s
their money?”

It sounds as if an awful lot of people just got the harsh wakeup of the Christmas-related credit bills combined with their tax and insurance hikes.  The “substitution” effect can only work so long before the consumer can’t even afford Wal-Mart.  The problem with kicking the credit can instead of addressing the problem is that the can keeps getting bigger every time it is kicked down the road.

Iceland has already shown the way out.  Default.  The fact that the politicians and bankers so vigorously prefer attempting to inflate their way out demonstrates that they don’t give a damn about the economy or the people, and that inflation in a sufficiently orderly manner is not always possible.

Sure, the government could borrow and spend $100 trillion tomorrow.  But the effect of that would be even worse than default.  So the Federal Reserve finds itself in between the Scylla of hyperinflation and the Charybdis of default, without an Odysseus at the helm.

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought
about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis
should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further
credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the
currency system involved.” 
– Ludwig von Mises

The Left’s reluctant racists

A bien-pensant progressive reluctantly admits that vibrant multiculturalism and immigration has made a reluctant racist of her:

In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of any kind of community – that word so cherished by the Left. Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent years has created communities throughout London that never need to – or want to – interact with outsiders.

It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But, over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate peoples walking the same pavements but returning to very different homes – something the Americans call “sundown segregation”.

But now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists, wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by the white population – the rate of white flight from our cities is soaring….  I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m a stranger on these streets and all the “good” areas, with safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond my reach. I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.

It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to escape something. I wonder whether I’ll tell the truth, if I’m asked. I can’t pretend that I’m worried about local schools, so perhaps I’ll say it’s for the chance of a conversation over the garden fence. But really I no longer need an excuse: mass immigration is making reluctant racists of us all.

It’s not an accident that the loudest liberal voices still preaching the glories of immigration and multiculturalism live in safely lily-white enclaves.  The vocal anti-racist McRapey lives in Bradford, Ohio, which the 2010 Census describes as “98.9% White, 0.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 0.2% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from other races, and 0.3% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.9% of the population.”

Meanwhile, tends of thousands of progressive and pro-affirmative action liberals with children who can’t afford to live in an elite, heavy-security White Zone are fleeing their increasingly vibrant communities for the very communities that their kind have spent the last fifty years decrying.  Their actions speak much, much louder than their words.  And their actions are far more intrinsically racist and segregationist than the words of George Wallace or Enoch Powell ever were.

Immigration in very small numbers tends to strengthen a society.  Mass immigration, on the other hand, is simple invasion and it destroys a society through occupation, disruption, and displacement.

Falsification

A scientific gauntlet is hurled:

It started like any other morning, and then we all learned that we would soon be riding cloned dinosaurs to work. All it took was a single benevolent billionaire to pay for the science stuff to get done, and boom — dinosaurs are no longer extinct. Of course, it was a pipe dream from the beginning, but these stories of cloning prehistoric creatures come up from time to time, and most people (reporters especially) don’t want to tell you how impossible it is.

It’s been years since cloned animals first appeared, so why aren’t we able to reach back to the Cretaceous yet? Well, this isn’t just a question of improving our current cloning methods. We lack the fundamental materials to clone anything from 65 million years ago. Taking into account the influence of Hollywood, you could be forgiven for thinking that dinosaur blood is flowing like rivers in labs all over the world. The fact is, we don’t have dino DNA.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s there were a wave of scientists claiming small samples of ancient DNA could be extracted from fossilized bones, eggs, and insects in amber. You probably remember that from a certain dinosaur movie of the era. In the end, all these claims were debunked. It turns out that DNA does not survive that long. The estimated life of a strand of DNA is no more than 1 million years, and even then only if it is in very cold conditions.

If I ever become the insanely wealthy supervillian nature clearly intended me to be, you can be certain that cloning a dinosaur is going to be on my shortlist of things to do.  If nothing else, only to hear the frantic revisionism and witness the attempts to somehow uphold the status quo scientific consensus.  The question is: would the estimated life of a strand of DNA be revised or would the dating methods themselves be called into doubt?

Turgot and the myth of progress

I had already read a considerable amount of Milton Friedman, declared my Economics major, and had two years of university classes under my belt when I first read Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis.  That book, more than any other, changed my perspective on not only economics, but how I regarded the world.  It was the first time in my life that I ever felt overwhelmed concerning a subject in which I was genuinely interested and believed I had a reasonable grasp of the issues concerned.

I understood, and shared, Schumpeter’s contempt for Ricardo and Keynes.  I was hardly surprised by his respect for Mises.  But I was shocked, in a way that I am very seldom shocked, by what almost appeared to be disdain for Adam Smith, the man I had always considered, and been taught to consider, the grand pinnacle of homo economicus.  And in Smith’s stead, Schumpeter praised, indeed, almost seemed to revere, a French nobody named Turgot, a man of whom I had literally never heard, not in any book, paper, or class lecture.

With Richard Cantillon, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, should arguably be considered one of the finest and most brilliant economic thinkers in human history.  It borders on criminal that he is, even today, dismissed as a mere physiocrat and royal minister, it is an injustice that his name is not mentioned as one of the Great Economists while lesser minds such as Ricardo, Smith, and Keynes are celebrated and provide the theoretical source of present economic policies.

Turgot was not infallible.  Of him, it is written: “Turgot believed in
progress and in the perfectibility of man. The human mind, including
the exercise of reason and volition, has the potential for
progression. He predicted the future of reason and the inevitable
advancement of the human mind.”

And yet, Turgot’s own example, and the way in which knowledge of the law of diminishing returns was lost for over a century,  ironically demonstrates his misplaced faith in progress and human perfectibility.

One of Turgot’s most remarkable contributions to economics, the significance of which was lost until the twentieth century, was his brilliant and almost off-hand development of the law of diminishing returns, or, as it might be described, the law of variable proportions. This gem arose out of a contest which he had inspired to be held by the Royal Agricultural Society of Limoges, for prize-winning essays on indirect taxation. Unhappiness with the winning physiocratic essay by Guérineau de Saint-Péravy led him to develop his own views in ‘Observations on a Paper by Saint-Péravy’ (1767). Here Turgot went to the heart of the physiocratic error, in the Tableau, of assuming a fixed proportion of the various expenditures of different classes of people. But, Turgot pointed out, these proportions are variable, as are the proportions of physical factors in production. There are no constant proportions of factors in agriculture, for example, since the proportions vary according to the knowledge of the farmers, the value of the soil, the techniques used in production, and the nature of the soil and the climatic conditions.

Developing this theme further, Turgot declared that ‘even if applied to the same field it [the product] is not proportional [to advances to the factors], and it can never be assumed that double the advances will yield double the product’. Not only are the proportions of factors to product variable, but also after a point, ‘all further expenditures would be useless, and that such increases could even become detrimental. In this case, the advances would be increased without increasing the product. There is therefore a maximum point of production which it is impossible to pass…’. Furthermore, after the maximum point is passed, it is ‘more than likely that as the advances are increased gradually past this point up to the point where they return nothing, each increase would be less and less productive’. On the other hand, if the farmer reduces the factors from the point of maximum production, the same changes in proportion would be found.

In short, Turgot had worked out, in fully developed form, an analysis of the law of diminishing returns which would not be surpassed, or possibly equalled, until the twentieth century.  (According to Schumpeter, not until a journal article by Edgeworth in 1911!)

The Mises Institute has a collection of the works of Turgot, which at 525 pages, are barely more than half the length of my most recent novel.  To return to the earlier topic of the fear of failure, it is deeply humbling to read the man’s writings and realized that even now, more than 230 years after his death, this is an individual who has been widely ignored and dismissed as a failure, when there may not have been 500 men of his intellectual accomplishment in the entire history of the species.  If that is failure, who needs success?

This would be hilarious

If it weren’t for the dead victims of “law enforcement”.  The Cleveland police make the arson-happy LAPD look downright competent by comparison:

A November car chase ended in a “full blown-out” firefight, with glass
and bullets flying, according to Cleveland police officers who described
for investigators the chaotic scene at the end of the deadly 25-minute
pursuit. 

But when the smoky haze — caused by rapid fire of nearly 140
bullets in less than 30 seconds — dissipated, it soon became clear that
more than a dozen officers had been firing at one another across a
middle school parking lot in East Cleveland.
Soon after the shooting stopped, one officer rushed to check the two
occupants of the 1979 Chevrolet Malibu that the cadre of Cleveland
cruisers had followed into the lot.

Officer Wilfredo Diaz, a former city EMS worker, had fired the first shots at the Malibu after bailing out of his car. He felt for passenger Malissa Williams’ pulse.
There wasn’t one.

Diaz moved Williams’ leg slightly to look for a gun. Again, there wasn’t one. Dead next to Williams in the driver’s seat was Timothy Russell, 43.  No officers were injured. 

My favorite part is the way they were so desperate to find a gun in order to try to pin the blame on the corpses that they sent divers into the river, never mind that a gun in the river couldn’t have been involved in the parking lot shootout.

Mailvox: where are the miracles?

DL has a question concerning the apparent absence of Old Testament miracles:

I would like to say that I have been reading your blog for over half a year, maybe a little bit longer now. You write about a lot stuff that I have thought for years, it has just given me the evidence and confidence to speak my opinions besides just sitting quietly by while people say stuff I don’t really agree with.

The point of this email is to ask your opinion on a problem I came across during a debate I was having with a friend over the existence of God. This debate has been going on for a while and slowly the tides is turning from him controlling the debate to about a mutual battlefield. The idea of God being omniderigent really put a cap over some of his arguments.

Things were going ok until I was asked the question of “Why doesn’t God do any of the big miracles that he did in the bible today?” What he meant by this is the parting of the Red Sea, destroying a city with fire, and raising people from the dead. I was unable to come up with a completely logical solution for this question. I done some research on apologetic websites on why God would do this and the answers are a little unsatisfactory and doesn’t really answer the question in a logical way.

I would think the answer is fairly obvious.  First, God clearly does miracles for specific reasons.  Consider the repeated response of the Israeli people to His miracles; they kept returning to their false idols and their evil ways, and rejected Him for an earthly king.  Why would it surprise anyone if He stopped bothering to intervene on their behalf when they repeatedly turned their backs on Him after witnessing them?  Jesus himself had the people turn on him despite his miracles and even pointed out that people would not believe regardless of what they had seen with their own eyes.

Second, what would the point of any such divine miracles be?  The Bible makes it clear that there will those who believe without seeing, and Richard Dawkins makes it clear that even if God Himself appears and tells him that he is wrong about His existence, he will not believe.

When X doesn’t happen, the correct question is not “why did X not happen?” but “why does X happen and is there reason to have expected it to happen in the first place?”

Striking back, ineptly

Darth Vader’s failure at the Battle of Hoth:

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.

I’ve probably given the art of attempting to describe fictional battles in a realistic manner a little more thought than most, given the heavy military elements in my current series.  What I find interesting is how little thought goes into most such portrayals, and how obviously unfamiliar with the various military strategists most authors and filmmakers are.  Now, obviously some things are just there because they look cool or allow the hero to do something heroic; the Imperial Walkers are totally ridiculous in literally every single way.

Most “military” science fiction shows no sign of having ever encountered even the most basic military concepts such as unit cohesion, leadership, and morale.  This is fine in today’s SyFy world, where the readers are inordinately female and more interested in the vicissitudes of the romances of the beautiful and tactically brilliant United Nations of Earth major with naturally curly hair, who has never lost a sporting competition, a fight, or a battle, and is torn between her attraction to the handsome enemy general with executive hair and her affection for her rugged, loyal, African company commander.

The amusing thing is how these “military” writers don’t even pay attention to the most fundamental facts of militaries in the real world.  For example, over 10 percent of the women in the U.S. Navy have to be shifted to shore leave every year due to pregnancy, and then receive a one-year reprieve from ship deployments or combat zone assignments after giving birth.  But when is the last time you saw or read about a single female warrior getting pregnant in order to escape a deployment?

The worst example of pseudo-military action I can recall seeing was in The Return of the King, when Faramir leads a cavalry charge against Osgiliath.  Now, as a general rule, even the charge of the Rohirrim against Saruman’s Uruk-Hai at Helm’s Deep was more than a little dubious, since horses resist charging towards disciplined bodies of infantry bristling with long pointy objects.  But horsemen charging towards archers safely ensconced in a fortified position could only be topped by a naval invasion of Topeka by the Imperial Japanese Navy.  In military history terms, it is a straightforward category error.

One of the things I’m enjoying about writing A Rash of Blings is exploring the different military doctrines, especially in light of how the availability of magic and other elements affects them.  The Amorrans were obviously based on Vegetius, with just a dash of Maurice, but I will be very impressed indeed if anyone is able to identify the historical model upon which the elvish doctrine has been built.

A new blog and some book reviews

Zero Sum inaugurates his new blog with a review of A THRONE OF BONES:

This book is monumental. The sheer size of the hardback version is simply staggering. On the cover, there is an intricate array of bronzed scrollwork surrounding a skull. Its quality, finish, and attention to detail are readily apparent. It sits on my bookshelf and carries a commanding presence that is only rivaled by Webster in mass, and very few in quality. Each chapter has a header using the skull and some artwork, it’s a nice touch.

But you don’t buy the book for its cover, so onto the details. The book uses multiple points of view throughout the book highlighting and interlocking web of storylines…. The book to me was initially very complex, between the characters, terrain, alliances, politics and military strategy.

I should probably mention that the second print run of the hardcover does not feature the skull from the cover as a chapter heading, but replaces it with new artwork by the cover artist featuring a pair of wyverns with their tails intertwined.  The dustjacket is also now gloss rather than matte, and the errata from the first run has been corrected.

Didact’s Reach reviewed the novel and actually found it superior to Martin’s series.  I wouldn’t go that far myself, but it’s certainly encouraging to know that it at least merits the comparison.

I’ve read every one of the books in A Song of Ice and Fire, and this beats the pants off all of them. Even A Storm of Swords. Seriously. It’s that good.

This book works because it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is- an epic historical fantasy novel. The utterly depressing and frankly pointless moral nihilism of ASOIAF is nowhere to be found; in its place is a powerful and uplifting vision of faith and republican virtue, challenged as it is on every side by civil war, dark magic, and loss of faith. The frankly ludicrous “realistic” sex scenes in ASOIAF are thankfully nowhere to be found here; in fact, the sex is kept largely out of sight, which I think is a good thing, as it reduces the number of distractions significantly. It doesn’t try to do anything other than tell a truly epic story. And if you’re an avid reader of historical fiction and non-fiction, of the Ross Leckie/Robert Harris variety, then you’re in for a real treat.

ATOB is set in the same intriguing fictional world of Selenoth as SE, a world that fuses the best traditions of the ancient Roman Republic with many of the ideas of the Christian Church as embodied by the Holy Roman Empire. The world is both strange and familiar, and as a literary device, I have to say, this is damned effective. I’ve read my share of Roman history too, so I really appreciated the little details that Vox put into the book. For instance, the scene in which Valerius Corvus observes the “coronation” (if that is the correct word) of the new Holy Father is exactly what I would expect from the martial and spiritual traditions of a Roman Republic, where god-kings were cast aside in favour of Republican rule, combined with the clear separation of Church and State that is a founding principle of Christian theology. The battle scenes are particularly effective displays of Vox’s thorough command of military history; he switches almost effortlessly between individual perspectives of the horror of battle to large-scale tactical views of the conflicts, without losing coherence or purpose.

This thread at r/Fantasy is more than a little amusing.  I’m really enjoying “A Throne of Bones.” Best not to read about the author first. It’s a delight to see the always-open minds of the fantasy-reading rabbits at work. I particularly enjoyed this remark: “I just googled the guy and I already hate him.” But I quite appreciate reluctant praise from those who dislike or even despise me, as it is arguably the most meaningful.

Allusions of Grandeur also reviewed the book, but you may want to think twice about reading the review as it does contain a spoiler or two despite the reviewer’s apparent desire to avoid them.

A Throne of Bones is a long, remarkably dense work of fiction.  That it is well-written and compelling helps to hide this fact, especially when you read this in the Kindle format, for once you start reading, it is very difficult to stop.  As such, the sheer entertainment value coupled with Vox’s need to constantly propel the plot forward at a rather fast clip (much like what you would expect from the TV show 24), makes this book seem shorter than it is.

I will not attempt to summarize the plot, as a) I don’t want to reveal spoilers and b) doing so would almost be a novel unto itself.  Nonetheless, the plot of this book revolves primarily around war, and most of the subplots revolve around this as well.

What makes this book both an entertaining and fascinating read is that Vox draws on his rather tremendous depth of knowledge and literary theory to create a world that is quite imaginative and “realistic,” which is in turn populated with characters that are interesting, sympathetic, and multi-dimensional…. a good portion of the plot conflicts are moral conflicts, which make the
conflicts meaningful.  The characters are not random actors that exist
simply as plot devices.  Rather, they are characters with their own
beliefs, motivations and moral codes.  Whether you agree with any given
character’s motivations or not, you cannot deny that any given
character’s motivations are what make the story so compelling.  In fact,
the constant moral conflict found with Marcus Valerius is what makes
him such a compelling character.  Watching him struggle with him
adjusting his theological studies to the real world of war causes you to
sympathize with him.

Mailvox: an ex-cop’s take

A former police officer emails his perspective on the end of the Dorner manhunt:

Observations/Questions

I’m not sure of the circumstances concerning what the media said as to why the truck had burned, but why would Dorner have burned out his own truck along with survival gear, etc. knowing he would be on foot in snow territory? He wasn’t worried about concealing evidence of a crime.

When my wife and I saw the first pictures of his truck days ago, she said…. “his body will be found in a burned out building.”

I was watching media coverage of what was called a “raid” on Dorner’s mothers house.  I don’t recall the timing, but my first thought was..”they should have been there days ago.”  During the raid, the camera angle was from directly in front of the house. The “team” that was moving in on the house was one of those you see that are wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and tennis shoes as opposed to the “black ops” with helmets and shields and battering rams…..

They ALL walked up to the front of the house… the front door….  My thought was…. they KNEW this guy wasn’t in there. The other cops are shooting at ladies in trucks and these guys walk up to the front door of Dorner’s mothers house??? Go figure.

We are entertaining the notion that they got him earlier (drone practice?) and the rest was for show.

People do strange things when they are on the run.  Foolish and insensible things that in retrospect look downright crazy.  And Dorner might have been marginally more intelligent than the average LAPD member, which quite clearly isn’t saying much.  And knowing that Dorner isn’t at his mother’s house shouldn’t be confused with knowing where he was or his health status.

I very much doubt they got him earlier and were simply going through the motions for public consumption.  This is my opinion: The police bumbled around until Dorner’s carelessness caught up with him.  Having already been outshot by him twice, and with the police-only body count standing 3-0 in Dorner’s favor, (remember that the daughter’s fiance was a cop), they weren’t about to take any chances with him.  So, they chased away the media and set fire to the building, hoping that he’d either come out and get shot or shoot himself before the flames got too hot.

That is, of course, assuming that Dorner isn’t much more clever than he appears to be and the body in the building is a black man of similar build that he took hostage.  But there is no reason to believe that to be the case, unless LAPD police suddenly start dropping dead in a few months.

I’m a little surprised Dorner tried to go to the wilderness when he could have simply stocked a hiding place somewhere in the city, then emerged only at night to hunt police.

Mailvox: “McRapey and me”

EGA writes to describe how l’affaire McRapey has caused him to rethink his opinion of the theory of Game, particularly as it concerns the socio-sexual hierarchy:

I have read your blog for some time. Your posts at Black Gate during the fluffle started by Leo Grin’s descriptive essay on the “bankrupt nihilism” of the current wave of epic fantasy were my start. You made me laugh and cringe while arguing with R. Scott Bakker, and I enjoyed your posts on economics, about which I admittedly know very little and found many of your posts challenging, yet enlightening.

I read your blog mostly for the economics posts, and enjoy much of what you write on other subjects. I never exactly agreed with your writing on a few subjects. I am very skeptical about much of what is written about “game,” about human biodiversity and a few other subjects. In fact, I didn’t think that your breakdown of the sexual market place hierarchies synced, at all, with my own experiences or observations. And while I do enjoy some of what is written in the manosphere, Heartiste and others set me on edge.

So when the posts on John Scalzi started, I cringed worse than I ever did when you had a similar argument with Mr. Bakker. And I wanted for Scalzi to win, at least in some fashion. I was the one who commented on his blog, trying to point out how much he was only proving you correct. Every chance he gets, he manages to do almost as you (and I) might predict, almost as if he were following a script. You know because of your experience and observation. I know how to predict him because, honestly, I am him.

I didn’t want him to lose that fight because I didn’t want to believe that what you wrote about the “gamma male” was true, which is perhaps indicative of how weak my intellectual opposition to the idea was in the first place. You wrote that it is a good thing to lose well. I don’t know how to do that. I am that guy and I hate myself for it. You wrote that it is a good thing to use knowledge you share to improve your lot, but I don’t even know how to start with that. Few things I have ever read have ever scared me or caused me to question what I’m doing with myself, but I am lost here. Hence, I’m writing to you, asking for any advice on what to do with myself now that I’m ready to admit that I’ve been looking at the whole subject of male-female relations, intellectual argument and epistemic pursuit hopelessly backwards.

P.S. I recall that in my exchanges with Scalzi, I claimed that you were
enjoying an echo chamber of sycophants. This was unfair and untrue. I
apologize for that.

His apology is accepted, of course.  Unlike the rabbit warrens, VP has never been an echo chamber and even the Dread Ilk cannot be reasonably described as “followers”, much less “sycophants”.  And EGA’s ability to admit that he was wrong is the first step forward in the journey upon which he is about to engage, in consciously developing his self-respect and improving his status as a social creature in a social hierarchy.

How does one learn to lose well?  One puts oneself in competitive situations where one is going to lose, regularly and frequently, until the sting of defeat disappears and the fear of failure is gone.  That is the point at which progress towards becoming a true competitor begins.  It is also why non-athletes are disproportionately represented among the gamma population; few athletes reach 10 years of age without experiencing a considerable amount of defeat.  I may have been a NCAA D1 sprinter who played for a #1 ranked soccer team in high school, but I was also a member of a church basketball team that lost its first game by 47 points.  (Note: if you’re a white kid without a jump shot who is going to play in a church basketball league, a Lutheran league is your best bet.  Baptist leagues, not so much.)

I’ve written before about my favorite kids team.  I was their coach for all three years they were in the scuola calcio, from 6-8.  The first year, we had one 7 year old and we were winless, losing most of our games by double digits.  It was brutal, but by the end of the season, there were no more tears and losing didn’t faze them.  The second year, they started to become competitive, winning games here and there, although they were still beaten badly by the two big teams attached to the professional clubs.  But the third year, they went undefeated, and I have never seen a more fearless and ruthlessly competitive team play any sport at any level.  It was like watching a squad of sharks dispassionately ripping apart everything that crossed their path.  It was one long glorious bloodbath.

Before the first game, some of the parents complained that I was only bringing the 8 year olds and the best seven year olds to the tournament.  So, I brought everyone and started all the little kids.  We were down 3-0 within three minutes, two of the little ones had been hurt and had to come out of the game, (they weren’t hurt badly, they’d just been hit by the ball), and my playmaker cried out, in genuine anguish, “what are you doing?”

“I’m making a point,” I said, loudly enough for the problematic parents to hear.  Their ringleader promptly stepped forward and explained that the point had been taken, so I signaled the ref and mass substituted the entire team.  The boys cheered as they ran onto the field, visibly alarming the other team, and went after them with all the gleeful fury of weasels in a hen house.  We won that game by four goals. 

In the championship game of the big tournament, it was tied 1-1 at halftime.  I knew we would win, and even told a Brazilian acquaintance whose son played for the other team as much, because my kids knew how to lose and didn’t fear it, while some of their opponents had quite literally never lost a game in their lives.  I knew that if the other team scored next, my kids would try all the harder, whereas if we scored, they would quit.  Sure enough, we scored the next goal, every head on the other side went down, fingers started pointing, and their voices started sounding accusatory and panic-stricken.  We ended up winning 5-1, beating the very same team that had beaten us 14-0 two years before.  More importantly, we had beaten a club that had beaten ours for literally generations.

One defender’s father was openly in tears at the end of the game.  I asked him what was wrong and he shook his head and smiled.  He said: “They always beat my grandfather.  They always beat me.  But my son, he has defeated them!”

The best thing was that the competitive culture the kids created was, for a short time, passed down to the younger kids.  We went undefeated the next year too; four of my boys ended up being recruited by the top pro program, which was three more than in the previous 20 years.  And their pride in having been a part of that team was such that when the big club played against our club in subsequent years, they refused to take the field.  In one star striker’s case, he even put on his old training jacket over his uniform and sat on our bench for the entire game.

They weren’t any better than the kids from the best programs, in fact, they were mostly smaller, slower, and less skilled.  Two of our three biggest players were rejects who didn’t make either of the elite teams.  But they were fearless, so perfectly fearless, that it was a joy to watch them and a privilege to coach them.  I quit coaching a few years later when I found I couldn’t replicate their success to the same extent.  I definitely played a role in their success, but I now believe it was mostly the result of the tempering they had received during that season of unending defeat.  Looking back, I realize that my three most valuable players were, ironically enough, the least talented; the miniscule defensive rock who couldn’t kick the ball ten yards, but reliably brought down attackers twice his height, the single-minded lupolino who couldn’t do anything with the ball but put it in the back of the net, and the emotional leader of the team, who had two left feet and berated his own failures more ferociously than anyone else’s.

They were magnificent.  I’ve had my share of victories in athletics, as an individual and as part of a team, in a variety of sports, but I couldn’t forget those kids if I tried.  If you ask me what is a champion, I think first of them.

Just as the seeds of future failure are often sown in success that comes too easily due to good fortune, the seeds of future success are planted in our failures.  Don’t be afraid of them.  Admit failure and attempt to understand it, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.  Even when you can’t reasonably expect to succeed, you can try to fail for a different reason.