Author: VD

The limits of human attraction

In response to Retha’s attempt to protest that sin is not attactive to Christian women:

Are you trying to say you know me better than I know myself? Vox, when you make comments about women in general, you speak a lot of truth. But do not assume to know how any one particular women you never met will react or have reacted to something. I know from experience that this was not how I reacted to a serial fornicator who tried dating me.

Retha’s response reveals some interesting aspects of the differences between the male and female minds here. First, this is a spectacular example of female solipsism; she is attempting to rebut the concept that Christian women are not immune to female hypergamy by citing a single example of her own failure to be attracted by a sexually successful suitor. Second, it is an blatant theological error to claim that Christian women are not attracted to sin, indeed, the fact that the Bible bans women from positions of leadership within the Church and household make it rather clear that they are to considered more spiritually susceptible to sin, and therefore presumably more attracted to it, than men. Given that all men and women alike are fallen, it is absurd for her to claim that she, or any other Christian woman, is immune to the appeal of the world. As Billy Graham is once supposed to have said: “if you don’t think sin is fun, you’re not doing it right.”

With regards to the question of whether I know her better than she knows herself, I can only answer that because her response is a very conventionally female one, there is little reason to believe that she is a behavioral outlier beyond her creditable commitment to her faith. In other words, given a reasonable portion of the information that she possesses regarding any situation involving male-female interaction, I believe that not only me, but many men of sufficient knowledge of Game would be able to predict her future actions better than she can because they have no rationalization hamster nor hormonal cycle clouding their perceptions.

Women are not static creatures. They are extraordinarily dynamic, which is one of the things that makes them so fascinating and so unpredictable to those who do not recognize the primary motivational factors involved. As economists are gradually coming to accept, human behavior is seldom rational by any exterior metric. And the interior metrics of women tend to vacillate greatly, and more to the point, often without them consciously realizing they have changed. Some of these vacillations are predictable, which is why male predators are able to anticipate and take advantage of female dynamism with such reliable success.

The fact that Retha found one serial fornicator unattractive doesn’t indicate that it was his success with women alone that turned her off unless he was significantly higher status than her. Hence the “a little bit of beta” that is advised for alphas who are slumming. (In such cases, the woman’s rationalization hamster can’t spin its wheel fast enough to convince her that she’ll be able to hold his interest over time, so she rejects him first in proactive self-defense.) Given that Retha has, according to her, rejected literally every man that has ever expressed interest in her throughout the course of her life, it should not at all surprising that she rejected the serial fornicator too. Was the unattractiveness of sin the sole reason for that particular rejection? It’s doubtful, especially since he is neither the first nor the last male sinner she will encounter.

But Retha is not wrong in stating the completely obvious. There are always statistical outliers and when you play the probabilities, you will certainly lose from time to time. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Retha is one of the few women to whom the bad boys genuinely hold negative appeal and that she would be more sexually attracted to a meek and virginal omega than an arrogant and experienced alpha. I don’t buy it for a second, but it is at least possible. Thanks to the Internet, we know the limits of human attraction are disturbingly wide, perhaps even boundless. (You know that somewhere out there, there is a site for people who are deeply attracted to molluscs. With pictures.)

In summary, the answer is yes, unless you happen to be a statistical freak of some sort. One should always assume that a woman is going to behave like a normal woman unless one is in possession of reliable information indicating otherwise, just as one should always assume that a man is going to behave like a normal man. Now, we are not mere animals. We have the capacity to rationally control our behavior. But the very fact that we need to exert that control over our irrational instincts indicates that they a) exist, and b) influence our feelings, thoughts, and behavior in a potentially predictable manner.

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

I suspect that some of you will be interested to hear that I picked up a copy of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris today. I’m planning to finish reading Cicero’s letters before I dive into it, but you can anticipate a review in about two weeks or so. I’ve also sent an email to his publicist requesting an interview; while Sam and I have exchanged email in the past, that’s on a different computer that is presently stowed away. But note that any interview I do will be a non-critical one; it will not be a debate. The point of a literary interview is to help the author accurately get the views expressed in his book out to the public, not to criticize them, and I’m not interested in limiting myself to interviewing authors with whom I more or less agree.

As you know, I refuse to pronounce judgment on a book, any book, without reading it, although I certainly don’t mind expressing my uninformed doubts should I have them prior to doing so. In this case, I have to applaud Sam for having the intellectual courage to seize the bull by the horns; unlike his fellow New Atheists (except Daniel Dennett), he has recognized the weak point of the lack of universal warrant and is attempting to do something about it. As to whether he has the intellectual firepower to successfully make his case, well, that may be another matter entirely. We shall presently see.

I couldn’t quite resist reading the first page or three… and all I’m going to say at the moment is that it is clear that unlike his fellow atheist Michael Shermer, Sam is unfamiliar with the core concepts of the Austrian School of Economics. Those who are familiar with how I operate and can put two and two together should be able to figure out why this seemingly unrelated field is relevant as well as where I’m going with this, in fact, I have even mentioned this specific issue in the past. I also found two major – at this point, I shall merely describe them as points of interest – in the first three pages.

As for that sound you hear, it is merely the blades being sharpened. Just in case they should turn out to be necessary, you understand.

The dryer test

One of Catkiller’s readers poses a dilemma:

You have a matching washer and dryer. The washer breaks down to a point it would cost more or as much to repair as it would to replace. Fortunately, it is under warranty and the warranty company replaces the washer with a very nice new washing machine. However, the washer and dryer no longer match. The dryer functions fine, but it is older and a different brand than the new washer.

Do you replace the dryer? Does it even occur to you to consider replacing the dryer?

In which the verdict is announced

Roissy deigns to issue a bull on the Duke Powerpoint and does not disappoint:

I wasn’t interested at first, having scanned the notorious Powerpoint and concluded that it was just another story of a whore riding the (alpha) cock carousel who happened to forego discretion and publicize her sluttery, nothing to see here move along dystopia down the hall and to your left. But a closer inspection of Owen’s tell-all reveals a river of scorned subconsciousness that the mainstream feminist bloggers have predictably failed to notice – this chick was rejected by each and every one of these high status men she banged.

“But how can that be?”, some of the duller among you will ask. “None of the men turned her down for sex.”

Don’t you know it’s different for women? Failing to get laid is not how women are rejected; they are rejected when they don’t receive romance, love, and long term commitment….

Bottom line: a male Karen Owen would actually see his sexual market value *rise*, while Owen’s value as a girlfriend and potential wife has undoubtedly fallen. This — plus the raw hypergamy on display by her choice of sexual partners and her ability to effortlessly fulfill that limbic impulse — is the underlying message of Owen’s cutesy confessional. And it’s the message that the legacy media, the middle-aged vicars of vicariousness, and the feminists are trying hard to miss.

I didn’t bother reading the Powerpoint myself, having reached that season of life where Cicero and game design documents are vastly more interesting than yet another vicarious rehash of the college years. But this is exactly the same conclusion I reached based on what I saw in the Deadspin and Jezebel articles; a plain, but sufficiently slender 6 with the usual hypergamous instincts fornicating over her socio-sexual value with higher status young men who would never consider dating her, let alone marrying her. Roissy nailed it, right down to the expected manface.

Madonna/Whore is more than a male psychological complex, it is also a significant life choice that women have to make regardless of whether they are consciously aware of making it or not. There are exceptions, of course, as there must be in applying a binary principle to a population of 150 million, but in general, if a young woman has reason to believe she has a reasonable shot at attracting an alpha with whom to settle down, she has to forgo the short-term option of spending four to twelve years riding the alpha carousel if she wants to marry one. And she can’t be tempted into imitating the behavior of the lower-ranking young women who can never hope to do more than take the occasional carousel spin because in doing so she lowers her own rank.

Because all questions of value are intrinsically economic in nature, the vital Austrian question of time preferences – spend now or save and spend later – therefore applies. And it should not be surprising that so few young women grasp this fairly obvious fact, since they are natural and instinctive Keynesians who tend to believe that spending their resources magically creates more demand for them. But one shouldn’t have to study economics to understand that it is scarcity that drives high-priced value.

Bankrupting the big banks

The Great Foreclosure Fraud is not about clerical errors or defaulting homeowners. It never was. It’s about the way in which the U.S. banks selling mortgage-backed securities fraudulently ripped off the pension funds the taxpayer-owned GSEs, and the foreign banks.

In addition to Fannie and Freddie, there are millions… billions… trillions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities out there that are now very much in doubt. And the pension funds have been pushing for some time now for information about the securitizers, the big banks who bought the mortgages and put them in pools and sold the MBS, whether they should have to buy back the mortages for not meeting the contractual requirements. Those may have varied from contract to contract, but I guarantee that every one of them required that there be proper paperwork and a right to foreclose if the debts aren’t paid. If those banks have to buy back all that stuff, it’s a big liability….

There’s a pretty good chance that if they had to buy back a lot of those mortgages because they did not meet the contractual representations and warranties as it’s called, the mortgages were not what they were required to be and in almost every contract if they weren’t what they were required to be the back was required to buy them back, that’s probably more than they can buy back. We may be back where we were two years ago. There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday morning where someone said this is going to be so bad for the banks we might have to have another TARP. That ain’t gonna happen, not in this lifetime…. we certainly aren’t going to give the banks, or lend the banks, more money to get them back to solvency.
– Congressman Brad Miller (D-NC)

The reason the giant banks are desperately trying to avoid turning over the mortgage-backed security documents and resisting subpoenas is because they will be forced into bankruptcy as soon as any of the investors get their hands on them.

UPDATE: Citi delineates the three possible outcomes:

Levitin articulated three possible outcomes to the aforementioned issues and assigned an equal likelihood to each. In his best case scenario, these issues are deemed merely technical in nature and are successfully resolved but it takes at least year to do so and all foreclosures are delayed by at least a year. Levitin disputed the claim by banks that these issues can be resolved in a month or so and attributed the banks’ claims to “legal posturing.” In the medium case scenario, litigation ensues and it takes years to sort out these matters. In the worst case scenario, the aforementioned issues become a “systemic problem” which causes the mortgage market to grind to a halt as title insurers refuse to insure mortgages involving existing homes.

He left out the fact that in the medium scenario, all of the MBS-selling banks go bankrupt. Which is to say, the big four with their $7 trillion in assets, (45% of which I have estimated are worthless), at the very least.

The murders Americans won’t commit

Exhibit A in the Ricardian argument for the free movement of labor:

Chandler police are investigating the bizarre case of a man who was stabbed, decapitated and left in a pool of blood in a central city apartment. One man has been arrested and police are seeking three more suspects in what may the city’s first beheading. “We don’t go to many cases where the victim has been decapitated,” said Chandler Police Det. Frank Mendoza.

At some point, I wonder if people are going to begin to realize that a) there are more immigrants than ever before, and b) the economy is not growing in proportion with them as the Ricardian argument predicts.

She’s back

Welcome back to the Internet, Rachel Lucas. It’s nice to see she’s posting again, even if she has come out of the closet as a belated mobile Macintosser:

On my birthday this past spring, Rupe surprised me with an iPhone. He quickly regretted it because I spent the first day staggering around the house clutching the phone a foot from my face, sporadically bursting into loud improvised songs of praise.

On a tangential note, I was ever so happy to have the chance today to tell a game developer that no, I absolutely would not check out his new, just-released iphone game app. Android, dude. iPhone is so… 2008.

Mailvox: the global consequences of Ricardianism

S asks a follow-up question of his own:

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions regarding the Ricardian doctrine of free trade from an Austrian perspective last week, and for answering EJ’s follow-up as well. I do have an additional question to ask on this subject. I agree with you about the problems with the “Ricardian Vice” of freezing all but a few variables in place and then coming to conclusions on the assumption of ceteris paribus. I agree that the doctrine of free trade does not take into account temporal limits on the acting man’s preferences. And I agree that these two problems combined reveal that the logical foundation of free trade is more than a little unstable. The question remains: what can be done about it?

I ask because on most questions about economics, applied praxeology dictates that government attempts to “manage” the economy or allocate resources will lead to inefficient outcomes. Why, then, should the same not apply to trade economics? How is the government to know exactly which industries should be slapped with tariffs and which industries should be left alone? Since Hayek proved that no single individual or government entity can ever have enough information to know everything about the economy at any given time, what then is the “correct” Austrian conclusion regarding trade tariffs?

The first thing to point out is that government-imposed trade restrictions are not synonymous with either “managing the economy” or “allocating resources. For example, a uniform 15% tariff on all imports doesn’t do anything except to provide a competitive advantage to all domestic producers. It doesn’t favor one sector over another, except to the extent that one sector is more dependent upon foreign inputs than another, and it doesn’t involve any government management or allocation of resources at all.

Applying the correct Misean-derived logic regarding the impossibility of socialist calculation, (Hayek only refined the concept first conceived by Ludwig von Mises), we can conclude that government cannot and should not be involved in making decisions regarding which domestic industries should be protected from foreign competition and which should be abandoned to it. However, it is a complete failure of logic to conclude on this basis that domestic industries should not be protected from foreign competition because the impossibility of calculation does not go so far as to preclude a government’s ability to distinguish between foreign and domestic production, let alone a foreigner and a citizen. And to deny that a national government can justly prefer the well-being of its domestic producers and citizens to that of foreign producers and non-citizens is no different than denying a national government’s right, (to say nothing of its responsibility), to defend its borders against military invasion.

It is, of course, no accident that the Ricardian supporters of free trade usually refuse to recognize either the USA’s right to defend its borders from foreign migration or the right of foreign nations to defend their borders from US military attacks. After all, what is the substantive difference between an “invasion” by a sufficient number of foreign soldiers to impose a new government by force and the “immigration” of a sufficient number of foreign civilians to impose a new government by their voting preferences? What is the logical rationale for resisting one and accepting the other?

There is strong empirical and logical support for a uniform protection of domestic industry; the fact that the Ricardian crowd has been reliably dishonest about the historical effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the positive effects of tariffs during the 19th century, and the probable effects of free trade agreements like NAFTA should give serious pause to those who, like me, have tended to assume that free trade was an unmitigated societal positive without stopping to seriously consider all of the logical consequences.

If you stop and carefully think through the matter, it eventually becomes obvious that unfettered globalism is both the underlying conceptual foundation as well as the ultimate consequence of Ricardian free trade. To accept the concept of free trade and its necessary consequences such as open immigration and universal citizenship, it is therefore necessary to reject the U.S. Constitution and the idea of limited government as well as everything that history has taught us about cultural, ethnic, national, and religious differences.

Ricardianism is a doctrine no less utopian, and no less ultimately destructive to society, than Marxist scientific socialism, feminist equalitarianism, and the pseudo-scientific New Atheism. Note that its primary justification of collective enrichment at the expense of certain individuals is virtually identical to the Marxist justification of socialist distribution and is one of the many theoretical connections between Marx and Ricardo. This will be a hard lesson for many conservatives and libertarians to accept, as the idea that the doctrine of free trade is ultimately and inevitably anti-liberty is somewhat counter-intuitive. But the verdict of the logic is inescapable.

A noble opportunity to contribute

I am confident that the American people, being staunchly committed to their hallowed and time-honored principles of diversity, social justice, and the sanctity of public union contracts, will welcome this opportunity to ensure that no retired government employee is denied the right to live large while not working at home instead of not working at the office:

Democrats in the Senate on Thursday held a recess hearing covering a taxpayer bailout of union pensions and a plan to seize private 401(k) plans to more “fairly” distribute taxpayer-funded pensions to everyone.

This is precisely why I never contributed a dime to any 401(k) plan. Even in my misspent youth, I understood that which Congress gives, Congress will take away the moment it decides it wants to do so. Fortunately for those who have been diligently salting away their retirement money in these plans, since 2008 we have repeatedly been shown that Congress is much more prone to listen to the voice of the outraged masses than to a statistically insignificant but wealthy and politically influential special interest group that is demanding large sums of money.

Wait a minute….