Author: VD

RGD: release the hounds

This is the official starting gun for the Amazon book bomb for The Return of the Great Depression. If you’re interested in buying it, either for yourself or for someone else, I’d encourage you to order a copy from Amazon in the next 12 hours. Its initial ranking was 19,795 overall and 50 in Economic History, so that’s the starting point. If you’re keeping track of the ratings as well as your fantasy team, feel free to post them here as they change on an hourly basis. I think 1,000 and 10 would be an excellent objective; anything above that would be a smashing success.

By way of encouragement, I’d like the Dread Ilk to be the first to know about the dedicated book site, which was developed for RGD by WorldNetDaily. In addition to featuring a collection of my WND columns related to the economic crisis dating back to 2002, it also has some economic prediction trackings – including a rather nice one in 2008 that I’d completely forgotten – scheduled events, reviews, and an economics blog where I will be posting daily. The official publication date isn’t until Thursday, but I believe that WND intends to announce the book site tomorrow. Some additional content, such as YouTube videos, will likely appear on the site in the relatively near future. I also plan to make some of the spreadsheets I used in producing the charts for the book available for download from the site as well.

I very much appreciate the encouragement that people here have shown throughout the writing of RGD and I hope that you will find that it does not disappoint you. It is not a massive book, but it is most definitely a data-rich one. And we should probably all hope that it is a massively incorrect one.

UPDATE – Thank you very much if you participated in the Amazon launch last night. It was a huge success and significantly exceeded my hopes for it by reaching #90 overall and #5 in Economics. You even made it the #1 Mover and Shaker on Amazon! I appreciate the confidence you have shown in the book and will look forward to hearing your thoughts on it after it arrives and you read it.

MFL Week 6

118 Judean Front (5-1)
29 Black Mouth Curs (3-3)

85 Alamo City Spartans (4-2)
35 Valders Valkyries (4-2)

79 Winston Reverends (3-3)
49 Mounds View Meerkats (4-2)

104 Masonville Marauders (2-4)
64 Bane Silvers (2-4)

82 Burns Redbeards (2-4)
54 Greenfield Grizzlies (1-5)

VP-AFL

87.70 Masonville Marauders (5-1)
67.55 South Plains Storm (2-4)

103.25 Village Valkyries (4-2)
88.85 Oakies (2-4)

144.80 The Thunder (4-2)
99.60 Lesbian Dorito Night (5-1)

135.70 Cranberry Bogs (2-4)
62.60 COS McRays (1-5)

146.00 Supernaut’s Jihad (2-4)
126.25 Az Thunder Chickens (3-3)

This will serve as your open NFL thread for today. I know you’re all as excited about Michael Crabtree’s debut as I am. I have to confess to being very nervous about what Big Ben may be able to do against a Winfield-less Vikings secondary. Fortunately, Pittsburgh offensive line is pretty bad, so the big question today appears to be if the Vikings front four can get to the quarterback before the secondary collapses.

The NYT attempts to butch up Obama

Yeah, not so much:

The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players. The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.

I can’t wait until they try to dress him in a leather motorcycle jacket and put him on a Harley. It will be Dukakis-in-a-tank times ten. Love him or loathe him, George W. Bush was a guy’s guy. I despised the man and his disastrous presidency, but I can’t honestly say that I’d object to him coming over to watch the game with the guys. Whereas you know Obama would prefer be in the kitchen drinking white zinfandel and exchanging arugula recipes with the women.

This piece tells you more about the alienation of the New York Times from all things masculine than it does about the Obama administration. It reminds me of the time that the Chilliette’s girlfriends from San Francisco were concerned that her Scandinavian computer programmer fiance was “too macho” If Obama was a real guy’s guy, he’d respond by inviting some of the women who have been critical of him to the next basketball game, then blowing them off the court. And then, in a month or two, hosting a game of tackle football in the snow.

Finishing off Euthyphro’s dilemmas

I was a little disappointed that drj wasn’t able to come back and finish our discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma the other day. Drj made an interesting case for distinguishing between the Dilemma, referring to the Socratic dialogue, and the dilemma, referring to the logical structure of the argument that is the conclusion of the Dilemma. Now, I still take issue with the validity of attempting to utilize the dilemma ex nihilo and ignoring both the integral flaws and specifics of the Dilemma, but since drj and others were willing to concede that a) the Dilemma does not apply to a non-polytheistic situation and b) Socrates was artificially narrowing the definition of “the pious” in order to create the dilemma, I was willing to consider the dilemma in its various modern formulations.

After being requested to provide a modern formulation, drj gave us this one: “Is that which is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?”

This formulation avoids several problems with the Dilemma, since the substitution of “moral”, “commanded”, and “God” for “the pious”, “loved”, and “gods”, not only avoids the problem that caused Socrates to twice narrow his definition of “the pious”, but further narrows the key definition by limiting it to actions alone. When I responded that a similar formulation – Is that which is science performed by scientists because it is science or is it science because it is performed by scientists? – does not cause anyone to insist that science does not exist or that scientists cannot perform science, drj argued that it is not the mere fact of the tautology that matters, but rather, the specific implications of which horn is selected for the relevant subjects.

That conclusion doesn’t arise by simply formulating the argument – it is proposed to come about after one picks the second horn of the dilemma. If one accepted the second horn in your science version, than yes, science would then be simply defined as whatever scientists do. If one were to then say the phrase “scientists are very scientific”, it would appear to have lost any substantive meaning.

As for the first horn, I’m not sure it your version has the same issues that the monotheistic dilemma does. It makes sense to pick the first horn, but doing so simply doesn’t raise any controversial issues about the nature of a scientist or science, as it does with theism and morality.

Scientists do practice science because it is science, but not everything they do is science. It poses no problem for the scientist to say that he is constrained in his actions as a scientist, to the rules of science. It however, might pose a problem for certain claims about the monotheistic God, since it suggests that God is actually subject to external rules (just like the scientist).

But first, this explanation removes the idea that the argument’s core logical structure is the relevant part. Moreover, the idea that a scientist is limited to the scientific method in performing science is not quite as uncontroversial as drj suggests, because acceptance of the first horn would eliminate everything from string theory to evolution from the realm of the scientific. Second, another formulation will suffice to demonstrate that the logical structure of the argument poses no theological or philosophical problems for either morality or God.

“Is that which is legal legislated by the legislature because it is legal, or is it legal because it is legislated by the legislature?”

As with the modern formulation, the answer here is quite obviously the second horn of the “dilemma”. Judicial- and executive-branch encroachment on the legislative function notwithstanding, the legality of a law depends solely upon the fact that it was legislated by the relevant legislature. Nor can there be any question that a legislature has the power to set itself above the legality of its own laws since we see Congress doing this on a regular basis. And yet, no sane being would claim that this somehow calls into question the existence or the substantive meaning of either the law or the legislature.

An act which was not legal yesterday is transformed into legality by the act of legislation. So, unless one genuinely wishes to argue that there is no substantive meaning to saying “that which is legal is legal because it is legislated by Congress”, one cannot possibly argue that there is no substantive meaning to saying “that which is moral is moral because it is commanded by God.”

And therefore, Euthyphro’s Dilemma and Euthyphro’s dilemma are defeated, both the Socratic argument as well as the modern logical structure. Should drj or anyone else wish to take exception to this conclusion, I invite them to demonstrate any flaws in my reasoning.

RGD book bomb tomorrow

Are you in? It’s precisely 26 hours away… 12 noon to 12 midnight central. WND mentioned the book in an email last week, which resulted in RGD shooting all the way up to #13 in Economics – two positions above our favorite Nobel Prize winner’s latest – so it will be interesting to see how things go tomorrow. Whether you’re buying the book tomorrow or not, stop by as I’ll be providing a sneak preview of the site where I’ll be doing daily economics-only blogging for the next few months. This will not have any affect on the blogging here as what will be posted there is going to be the more wonkish sort of thing with which I seldom see fit to annoy everyone here.

In other words, we’re talking pure chart-and-spreadsheet porn for the stat sickos. You know who you are. And on that edifying note, I will leave you with Jonah Goldberg’s verdict on the book.

“Vox Day is a punk rock Jeremiah who knows how to use a spreadsheet. In The Return of the Great Depression, he aims his voracious mind at our economic predicament and makes a powerful and well-documented case for why Faulkner was right: The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”
—Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism

The “conservatives” editing NRO

NRO’s Editors acted like panicked little girls who knew nothing about economics, history, or politics when they endorsed the banking bailouts last November. Now that the government has spent hundreds of billions on the financial institutions and assorted other corporations, and in some cases owns them outright, they want to suddenly rediscover their long-lost principles in order to argue that limiting executive pay is somehow a sin against capitalism and small government:

Three things about the Obama administration’s publicity-seeking move to curb executives’ pay at bailed-out companies: It is inevitable, it is stupid, and it is inevitably stupid…. TARP was an emergency measure. The emergency has subsided, and the first order of business is restoring at least some separation between Washington and Wall Street, between political power and the private economy. The love of power can prove at least as corrupting as the love of money, and the American political class does not seem likely to resist either temptation, much less both at once.

Given that the “emergency measure” cop-out has been a known scam since Marius was scaring the Romans into throwing out their law against repeat consulships with the threat of a German invasion, that little bit of attempted posterior-covering isn’t convincing. The sell-outs supported the bailouts, which tells you all you need to know about the depth of their commitment to capitalism, small government, the Constitution, and American liberty. Obama’s decision to slash executive pay at bailed-out companies falls far short of what he should do – shut the corporations down and prosecute those guilty of committing fraud – but interrupting the executive feeding frenzy is far more justifiable than the original bail-outs ever were.

This column is a disgusting display of true colors by false conservatives who sold out whatever conservative principles they once held in service to Wall Street. Where on Earth do they think these “talented” executives are going to go if they are legally prevented from shoveling millions in taxpayer dollars to themselves? Move to Swaziland and utilize their highly refined lobbying “skills” there?

Speaking of bailed-out, government-owned banks, Karl Denninger notes something very fishy is going on at Citi and suspects another financial meltdown is in the works:

* Standard “purchase” interest rate is going to 29.99%.

* The “default rate” is also now 29.99%.

I have since confirmed that this letter is not just going to people who have had credit “challenges”. Indeed, this appears to be a blanket change on the part of Citibank. I now have multiple copies from people who assert that they have 750+ FICOs and have never missed a payment on this or any other obligation – the “paragon” of so-called “responsible” credit use. All of the letters are identical…. Perhaps what we’re really seeing is a business reacting to hidden deterioration of asset bases that are not known by investors and the public due to the legitimation of bogus accounting that happened this last March, but which is known by company executives!

Why do I believe this is a plausible, even likely explanation for this behavior by Citibank? That’s simple: This sort of “terms change”, which is an effective declaration of default even against those who haven’t defaulted (see above; the same 30% rate is being applied to defaulted and non-defaulted accounts!), will drive two consumer behaviors that could ultimately destroy Citibank’s credit card business and perhaps the bank as a whole:

1. Those who can transfer balances out somewhere else and/or pay them off will immediately do so. Nobody is going to pay a 30% interest rate and an imposition of default rates on non-defaulted balances willingly and on purpose unless they have no other choice.

2. A significant number of people, on receipt of this notice and understanding what it means (a declaration that non-defaulted accounts are being charged the same penalty rate as a defaulted account!) will immediately go out and charge up the entire unused balance on their card and then intentionally default.

This whole “recovery” theme and corresponding market rally has stink, stank, stunk like putrifying fish from the start. I don’t know how much longer the Fed will be able to prop it up, but I very much doubt it’s going to last another six months.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism IV

Dear Luke,

I’m pleased that we appear to be getting back on track. But before we delve into the substance of the discourse, I must first point out that the reason you could not count the insults in my previous letter to you is because there were none. While you may find it embarrassing to have some of your claims to knowledge exposed as false, it is no more insulting for me to declare and subsequently demonstrate your ignorance about basic concepts of mainstream Christian theology than it was for you to imply that I have never thought about how my beliefs can be justified, or to declare that my statements about evolution are discredited, that my assertions about the Christian worldview are absurd, that I repeat many common distortions, and that my concept of morality is terrifying. This is particularly true in light of the fact that the first four of these “insulting” statements were false, whereas the case for your theological ignorance is conclusive. Please also keep in mind that the only reason it became necessary to publicly demonstrate the limits of your theological knowledge was because you made the charge of obscurantism.

Despite your admission of relative ignorance in your last letter, the salient point still appears to have escaped you. The relevant fact is not that you are unfamiliar with popular children’s literature, a science fiction novel, or even the Western literary canon that includes Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno, but rather that you are insufficiently familiar with the text of the New Testament and the orthodox interpretations of it that have been the mainstream Christian perspective for most of the last two millennia. Vox Day Christianity, as you call it, is indistinguishable in the vast majority of particulars from mainstream Protestant Christianity, so there is no justification for attempting to create any distinction between the two because my theological idiosyncracies are of little relevance to this discussion. You require a much better grasp of mainstream theology than you possess in order to determine which of my beliefs are exotic and which are entirely orthodox, and anyone of reasonable familiarity with the Bible will find my Christian theology to be entirely in line with Scripture even if they happen to disagree with a few of my conclusions and conjectures. Nothing I have mentioned in my previous letters, with the possible exception of the extent of God’s knowledge, can be reasonably characterized as being outside mainstream Protestant Christianity. And even in the case of Open Theism, that is a debate that is taking place entirely within that mainstream.

This leads me to the inconsistency demonstrated in your ill-considered attempt to plead the Courtier’s Reply. While a lifelong atheist could reasonably admit ignorance of a particular theology based upon the existence of something he does not believe, this is not true in the case of an atheist who presents himself as a former believer, especially not one who claims to be not only well-versed, but “too familiar” with the relevant theologies. The analogy fails because even if you are now an atheist who considers theology akin to the systematic study of imaginary fabrics, you presented yourself as a former expert on those very fabrics. You may come from a tradition that values clarity, argument, and evidence, but thus far you have exhibited little more than ignorance, logical incompetence, and inconsistency. Lest you be tempted to cry insult again, please note that this conclusion is merely an observation based on the evidence of your four letters and I believe it is one that is very difficult for the objective reader to avoid. Fortunately, all three conditions can be remedied as they are not terminal.

For example, it was logically false to assert that the answer to the question “Do you believe in evil?” was somehow dependent upon my definition of evil. As was indicated by the subsequent questions regarding the nature of evil, the question clearly applied to your belief in any form of evil, not your belief in evil as I happen to define it. I did not ask “Do you believe in evil as I previously defined it?” If you are an NFL fan and I ask the question “Do you like football?”, the correct answer is “yes, I do like football” even if you suspect that I may be thinking of the sport which is called soccer in the States. Regardless of whether I am talking about soccer or NFL football, the fact remains that you are a fan of the sport of football. Since you eventually declared that you believe in an evil that “thwarts more and stronger reasons for action than it fulfills”, it appears that your answer is yes, you believe in evil. If I have misinterpreted your answer and you actually do not believe in any form of evil, please correct me.

While it is true that there are many different definitions of objective and subjective, the philosophers’ concept of mind-independence is no more relevant to the subject at hand than the grammatical concept pertaining to the use of a form as the object of a transitive verb. Applying the relevant definition of objective to your answer – “not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion” – regarding the nature of evil clearly indicates that you believe evil is a fundamentally subjective concept. In fact, based on your explication of desirism, it is apparent that in your view, evil is not only subjective, but dynamic and transitory as well. Unfortunately, this rejection of the concept of objective evil renders it impossible for us to compare the Christian view of evil with other accounts of it because neither of us can possibly know what your definition of evil is for any single act or individual at any given point on the space-time continuum. Since we lack any fixed and coherent metric, no comparisons are possible. I am open to hearing any suggestions you might have for an objective measure by which the Christian concept of evil can be compared with other religious and philosophical concepts of evil, but as it stands, given your rejection of an objective standard of evil and your preference for a subjective and transitory one, we can no more compare the Christian definition of evil to other accounts of it than we could compare our respective heights by utilizing variable centimeters. If you have any ideas for a reasonable and objective measure by which we can judge these competing concepts, please feel free to suggest them. My suggestion is that if you could even identify a single act that you believe to be objectively evil that is also deemed evil under the Christian moral code, such as the act of rape, we could at least make a partial comparison of religious and philosophical moral codes.

But in the meantime, I will say that I find your moral perspective on good and evil to be both fascinating… and familiar. You describe it as desirism, which is a term that is new to me, but based on your description it appears to be little more than a collectivist variant on an older moral code that is perhaps best exhibited in the commentaries that a young philosophy student once wrote on A System of Ethics by Friedrich Paulsen.

“I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. . . . [People like me want to] satisfy our hearts to the full and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me. . . . I have my desire and act on it.”

It appears that the only substantive difference between your desirism and the desirism of Mao Tse-Tung is that your moral code is, ironically enough, more collective than the infamous communist leader’s. Whereas Mao distinguishes between good and evil on the sole basis of the comparative strengths of the individual desires, you add to this comparison the additional component of a majority vote. Even if we leave the consequences of this utilitarianism aside, which you will note you have not done in some of your previous references to Christian morality, this is a rationally untenable position that is even less defensible than Sam Harris’s happiness/suffering moral metric. I believe you already suspect as much due to your quixotic attempt to define certain desires as not-desires in order to avoid the uncomfortable logical conclusions to your moral reasoning.

When you assert, for example, that racism is evil under the desirist code, you are therefore required to assume that more and stronger desires are potentially thwarted than fulfilled by it. But this assumption is easily shown to be a false one. In materalist terms, the desire to live is observably no stronger than the desire to propagate one’s own kind, this is why most people will risk fatal diseases in order to engage in sexual relations, why a woman will carry a child to term even when doing so risks her own life, and why men will sacrifice their lives to preserve the lives of their women and children. This indicates that the strength of the collective racist desire for racial purity is stronger than the collective non-racist desire for a multi-racial culture and may even be stronger than the collective desire of the minority races to survive. This is supported by an examination of your chosen example of Triumphant Nazism, which proves precisely the opposite of what you believed it did.

“Turn this knob to the right, and racist desires strengthen throughout the population. Turn this knob to the left, and racist desires decrease. To say that racist desires are evil is to say that turning this knob to the right thwarts more desires than turning this knob to the left. If we turn the knob to the right, many racist desires are fulfilled but the desires of minorities are thwarted. If we turn the knob all the way to the left, no racist desires are thwarted (because they don’t exist), and also the desires of minorities are not thwarted.”

This reasoning led you to an incorrect conclusion because you failed to realize that turning the knob all the way to the right means that racist desires are fulfilled and no desires of minorities are thwarted – because they don’t exist either! As you wrote, turning the knob all the way to the left means that no racist desires are thwarted and no desires of minorities are thwarted. But because a failure to thwart desires is not equivalent to fulfilling desires, this means that turning the knob all the way to the right would not only fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than it would thwart, it would fulfill more and stronger reasons for action than turning the knob all the way to the left even without the numerical requirement of a majority of the population possessing the racist desires. Therefore, under the desirist moral code, the Nazi extermination program is confirmed to be good and opposition to it, or even mitigation of it, is a definite evil.

Moreover, the intrinsically totalitarian aspects of your moral code are intimated even in your incorrect interpretation of the example. If, for example, turning the knob all the way to the left would fulfill more desires than it would thwart, then it would be a moral good to eliminate the racist desires from those harboring them and a moral evil to fail to do so. It is no coincidence that this is precisely the reasoning that the Maoists used in attempting to eliminate “false consciousness” by the use of Laodong Gaizao, “re-education through labor” in prison camps. And this logical consequentialism does not even begin to address desirism’s fatal structural flaws related to the impossibility of establishing precisely what the divergent and opposing desires are, measuring their relative strengths, ennumerating their respective adherents, or accounting for the incontrovertible fact that desires fluctuate and change within every individual.

While you may not be troubled by the fact that your chosen morality is definitionally Satanic from the Christian perspective, I would at least hope the fact that it can be accurately described as collective Maoism and utilized to logically justify the moral goodness of the historical Endlösung would encourage you to reconsider your enthusiasm for it. While the truth or falsehood of desirism may not be determined by the consequences of the actions it dictates, they must nevertheless be taken into account by anyone who is willing to state an opinion about the truth of Christianity on the basis of the actions of Christians or the Christian God.

With regards,
Vox

This was written in response to 4th Letter to Vox Day

The charlatans are failing

The public is rejecting the AGW/CC scam:

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says…. The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming. A federal government report Thursday found that global warming is upsetting the Arctic’s thermostat. Only about a third, or 36 percent of the respondents, feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That’s down from 47 percent from 2006 through last year’s poll.

Brainwashing and appeals to scientific authority only go so far when Joe Public’s car is buried by snow in early October. No doubt the true believing scientific community will respond with calm reason and logical persuasion, by which of course I mean that we can look forward to the usual suspects shrieking about how stupid everyone is for daring to think for themselves and wistfully dreaming of PhDoctocracy.