Category: Uncategorized

Brainstorm is go

After the impromptu, but successful experiment in webinaring earlier this week, and after consultation with a few of those most interested in the concept, I’ve decided to proceed with the Brainstorm concept. Right now, all sessions are limited to 100, but I’m hoping to be able to expand that to 500, especially in anticipation of some of the more popular open events planned. All 100 slots were registered for the test, and most of those registered showed up at some point in time during what ended up being an hour-long session.

The annual cost will be $20 per month, which will comprise at least one closed Brainstorm session per month, plus additional sessions both open and closed. The closed sessions will be between 90 and 120 minutes, and will be comprised of a single main topic, which will usually be announced, plus two secondary topics that will be selected by that month’s panelists. Single sessions will cost $25, but until we get the annual ticket confirmed and set up, it will be $20 per month for everyone. Seats for Brainstorm May are available now and can be reserved at Castalia.

The first open event will be an interview and Q&A with Martin van Creveld later this month concerning his excellent book A HISTORY OF STRATEGY. The second one will be in June with William S. Lind and will address cultural 4GW as well as his forthcoming THE 4GW HANDBOOK and a certain novel whose deceased author he is representing.

As for the closed events, I will announce the three panelists after we set a time and date for the first one, which will take place in the next two weeks. The best time for me is around 7 PM EST, and it doesn’t really matter which day, so if you plan to attend and you have an opinion, let me know in the comments here.  Over half of the 100 spots have already been claimed, so if you’re inclined to participate, best to jump in before they all fill up.

To address four of the issues raised by the experiment, 1) the documentation says the panelists can see the questions, but I want to test to confirm that this is true, 2) there is no audience-to-audience chatting feature, 3) the irritating chimes were caused by people entering and leaving the session and will be turned off next time, 4) a transcript will be provided to all attendees and annual Brainstorm members within two weeks of the session. I do not plan to make transcripts or recordings of the closed events generally available, but transcripts of the free events will be available for purchase from Castalia for those who are interested in them.

The lead topic for May Brainstorm is going to be a discussion of a new hypothesis of a disease class and how it relates to some soon-to-be published research to which I happen to be privy. It’s a matter of particular interest to me and quite possibly to more than a few people here as well. I’d prefer to have one or two of the panelists have either medical or scientific backgrounds, so if you’re registered for the May event, you fit that description and you’re willing to control a mike, please email me and let me know.

I should assure those not participating that this will have very little effect on the blog, as most of what I intend to discuss in the closed Brainstorm sessions are the sort of things that cannot be reasonably discussed in an open, lightly moderated medium such as this one. And everyone is welcome to attend the open sessions, assuming that everyone < 500.

Mailvox: whitewashing history at Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s gatekeepers are up to their usual shenanigans, in this case, attempting to casually brush the topic of Cultural Marxism under the carpet to keep it from innocent eyes:

In case you haven’t noticed the “Cultural Marxism” entry to wikipedia has been deleted and replaced by “conspiracy theory” at the body of the “Frankfurt School” page.

I noticed this a few days ago.  After reading a work on Critical Race Theory which wasn’t inspired by an article I read on the Baltimore riots.  It reminded me a lot of the line of thinking that Pat Buchanan describes as Cultural Marxism in “Death of the West.”  Naturally, I looked up Cultural Marxism on wikipedia and I find that the page had been deleted and replaced.  Orwell would be proud.  To be quite honest, this really has shocked me.  Call me sheltered, but the audacity and dishonesty of it is appalling.

Being an optimist (or a masochist) I looked at the talk page to see if I couldn’t reason with someone.  Turns out that the page replacement took place in November and that a single editor it engages in some serious gate-keeping.

Over the past five months several dozen people have expressed concerns with the page and he dismissed and passive-aggressively threatened them all without answering any arguments.

I decided to engage with him, but the results are about what you’d expect.

Here’s a summary:

Me:I don’t think Cultural Marxism counts as a conspiracy by any reasonable definition and this article leans way left.  Can you please define your terms for Cultural Marxism and give me your criteria for conspiracy theory.

Him :Ok go ahead and try to prove your conspiracy theory Mr. Tin-foil hat man.  Oh and Welcome (grumble)…can you please go away…be a shame if someone were to report you for vandalism…..and did you know Satanic, baby eating, white supremacist Anders Breivik used the phrase “Cultural Marxism” in his manifesto…you don’t want to be like him do you…be a shame if you got reported….

You can imagine two days of this I’m sure.  But if you have time, I’d love to know what you think of the debate.  I’ve rarely dealt with someone so completely unwilling to actually argue all the while claiming that the battle was over before I got there and that he’s the victor. 

I’ve finally got him to consider an academic source from Paul Gottfried, but it looks like this will take time.

So, what I’d really like is you to give a shout on your blog detailing what’s happened.  It’s bigger than two guys fighting on the internet considering how many people use wikipedia, if only to get oriented in finding out more about a topic.  I know I do, or before this did.  Just a link would get more people involved.

I’ve decided to ask you because a) Castalia has published work by William Lind, one of the (if not the) coiners of the phrase “Cultural Marxism” to describe the ideology, obsessions, tactics, and behaviors of the Left and their current diffusion in society at large and b) because no one should know better than you that so-called little issues like Gamergate and the Hugos are key battlegrounds in the culture wars and will lead to bigger things. 

Honestly I think keeping wikipedia honest (as far as it’s possible) is even bigger.  This isn’t just a case of “oh no!  Somebody’s wrong on the internet!”

What do I think? I think this is simply SJWs SJWing. And what do SJWs do? The lesson, as always, is this: SJWs always lie. The ironic thing is that Wikipedia has a fairly extensive entry on one of the more important cultural Marxists, Herbert Marcuse, and even quotes him in some detail concerning the cultural Marxism he advocated, and which the SJWs practice.

  • “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”[17]
  • “Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”[17]

It should come as no surprise that cultural Marxists, which is what the SJWs manifestly are, don’t want people to understand their core doctrine or its roots in the misapplication of a failed economic theory.

Islands in a sea of rhetoric

I stopped commenting at File 770 as it proved to be another exercise in demonstrating the truth of Aristotle’s dictum about those who cannot be instructed. Give them dialectic and they shamelessly attempt to pick it apart, some honestly, most dishonestly, while constantly declaring that any errors or falsehoods on their part are irrelevant. Give them rhetoric to meet them at their level and they either cry about it or concoct pseudo-dialectic to explain why it’s not valid.

Example 1
VD: SJWs always lie.
SJW: I told the truth once back in 2007. See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Example 2
VD: I stopped commenting at File 770.
SJW: You said you stopped commenting and then LEFT ONE MORE COMMENT THERE! See, you’re totally wrong. Your whole argument is disproved. Aristotle! You are a bad person. DISQUALIFIED!

Quod erat demonstrandum.

But the SJW theatre of the absurd aside, the continuing Hugo coverage at File 770 makes for interesting reading, particularly as the few remaining commenters possessing intellectual integrity one-by-one throw up their hands and stop trying to force the relevant facts through the SJW’s cast-iron skulls. A pair of neutrals recounted typical experiences, as one of them juxstaposed his treatment at various Puppy sites versus SF-SJW Central:

Brief Side note re: Making Light. I posted there, maybe 4 times in a discussion a month or so ago. Never a name called, never a nasty word, did not attack anyone, and was in the middle of a dialogue with another poster that came across as reasonable. My posts were disemvowelled and the board owner called me a liar. I’ve posted several times here, and at Larry’s, Brad’s, and Sarah Hoyt’s boards. At least one time I got shouted at a little, but no one edited me away to nonsense. That makes me more sympathetic with the folks not grooming their comment sections /shrug

AG on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said: Regarding disemvowelling at Making Light, I took part in the initial discussion about voting rules, which as a mathematician I found very interesting. There was a contributor there (I don’t remember his name) who was an expert on voting systems and made the most valuable contributions. I certainly learned a lot from his posts. Then he made a post where he mentioned his web site (which was on topic, because it was about voting systems and potentially of interest to the people who were taking part in that discussion) and he was disemvowelled, which is something that I had never seen before and found absolutely bizarre.

Ostensibly the reason was for spamming, although as I said the poster was the one who had made the most valuable contributions to the discussion and the link was not off-topic. Talking about it, he got several more posts disemvowelled. I respect owners’ right to moderate content in their sites, but I found the practice of disemvoweling abusive and humiliating, more indicative of a petty bully in charge showing her power than of a serious moderator, and it convinced me that I did not want to have anything to do with that site.

The Making Light crew is what it is, and what it has been for the past decade. Another former neutral expressed some degree of surprise at the insistence that the Puppy tactics have been in any way worse than past tactics utilized in the SF field:

Steve Moss on May 14, 2015 at 3:20 pm said:

David W. @ 3:08 pm- So log-rolling is acceptable, with all that implies, but slates are not?

Accepting for argument’s sake the definitions of some, a slate is a list of public recommendation with a common political interest. That’s bad.

Log-rolling, quietly horse-trading votes based on self-interest (I want to win and need to be “strategic”), that’s okay.

Leaving aside the debated to death argument on slates (which I disagree is bad), it occurs to me the greatest sin the SP/RP have committed is exposing the Hugo process to the light of day. Now that more fans know: 1) that it didn’t/doesn’t take much to get a nomination; and, 2) about the behind the scenes chicanery, the Hugo loses some of its luster.

I think the position of some in fandom is laughable. What SP/RP did is the exact same thing; they just did it better and publicly. And that’s unforgivable.

It’s not surprising that the SJWs are already working very hard to change the rules because we’ve shown up and operated in an above-board manner. Instead of playing coy and disingenuous and plausibly deniable, we simply said “hey, vote for these works.” Note that it wasn’t all that long ago that SJWs in SFWA changed the Nebula rules to HIDE the evidence of all the log-rolling that was taking place there. They are always determined to hide what is actually taking place under the rocks where they dwell, which is why our straightforward tactics are so abhorrent to them.

UPDATE: While this will no doubt set the rhetoricals spinning again, it was too painful to watch people opining ineptly about whether Scalzi’s LOCK IN was a relative failure (truth) or a massive success that only proves that John Scalzi is a massive success in everything he does (SJW narrative). So, against my better judgment, I pointed out the completely obvious that had somehow managed to elude the rocket scientists commenting at File 770:

Forget Old Man’s War and all the
hardcover vs softcover vs audio and so forth. The reason both Scalzi and
PNH were so disappointed by Lock In’s sales is obvious:

“Lock In’s sales are for the first 8 months”: 10,000

Redshirts first seven months: 26,604

As every writer here knows, success is a) relative and b) takes
trajectory into account. Doing one-third the numbers with considerably
more marketing expense than your previous book is not, in most quarters,
considered a desirable trajectory.

Scalzi is an inflated midlist writer. He has likely peaked at a point
much higher than most SF writers ever reach. It’s an incredible
accomplishment, especially if one takes into account how little talent
or originality he possesses. There is no shame in that.

Where there is shame is claiming that you have 2 million pageviews
when you truly have only 305,000. Where there is shame is aggressively
campaigning for nine Hugo nominations, and then campaigning for more
because two more than Arthur C. Clarke is not enough.

That is an apples-to-apples comparison. Hardcover to hardcover. And if that simple recitation of relevant facts isn’t sufficient to convince you, then obviously no information is sufficient to instruct you or change your mind.

Interview with the Green Thumb of Evil

Viidad’s Q and A with David The Good concerning the latest Castalia House release, the number one gardening bestseller on Amazon: COMPOST EVERYTHING: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting:

Viidad: Why did you write COMPOST EVERYTHING?

David The Good: I suppose I should say “because I love our mother the earth” or “because I want to world to reduce, reuse and recycle” or something stupid like that, but really, it’s because I’m a cheapskate and I hate following all the rules that tell me I should throw out stuff that could be added into my gardens as fertilizer.

Viidad: Like dead bodies.

David The Good: I wish people would stop bringing that up. One or three times does not a pattern make.

Viidad: But the precedent is there…

David The Good: I will not answer any more questions along these lines. I am VFM, craven servant of the Dark Lord, serial number 0156…

Viidad: Are not! That’s my number!

David The Good: Surely The Most Evil One could not have made a mistake…!

Viidad: Never! But… well… hmm… I… whatever.  Okay, weird.  Back to the interview. What about this question: who should really give a flying fetid flip-flop about composting?

I told you he was nuts. Read the rest of the interview at Castalia House.

The secret of sports

Throughout The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons writes repeatedly about The Secret, and identifies specific NBA teams like the Bad Boys Pistons, the Russell Celtics or the Duncan Spurs that knew it and gained success by it.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen the same thing on the soccer field with my veterans team. My first two years, we were the champions, I was the number five striker, and we simply overwhelmed our opponents by scoring five or six goals almost every single game. But then age and injury began to strike, and at one point, I ended up the number two striker for an entire season, and when the number one striker went out, found myself trying to carry the scoring load up front on my own.

We brought in a number of new players, but despite them being quite skilled, we found ourselves not only being beaten by the best teams in the league, but unable to defeat lesser teams we should have been able to beat without any trouble.

At the beginning of the spring season, things looked really bad as our second-best player and new captain had to have surgery on his hand that rendered him hors de combat for the entire season. Not only that, but our best player has been injured and we’ve only gotten one-half out of him.

And yet, somehow we managed to not only win our local derby two weeks ago, but trounce them 3-0, with all three goals coming in the first half. Last night, we were playing the league leaders, who feature one former international and a fast-paced, highly skilled attack that has scored twice as many goals as we have this year.

But what is different now is that we have a group of players who don’t quit and who don’t give up on each other. We went down 1-0, then 2-1, and were still down 2-1 when I got in at halftime. Their defense had been stifling our new top striker, who’d recently come up from the first team, but once I scared them with an otherwise useless run or two, they started putting two on me and giving the new guy more room to work. I did very little but pull defenders away from him, but that was enough to help him level the game at 2-2.

In back, the defenders were just about killing themselves as well as the faster, better strikers and midfielders from the other side. They gave up two penalties, but our keeper made brilliant saves on both of them to keep us in the game. I stole a ball from a defender, but then didn’t see a wide-open midfielder to my left, and passed instead to my off-side fellow striker, ruining what should have been an excellent chance. Overall, it was a pretty poor game for me… except on this team, everyone keeps encouraging you to keep running, keep working, keep trying, keep doing your job. My job isn’t to score, or even to make assists, my job is to stretch the field, occupy the defense, and create space for our better players.

So, despite all my screwups, our right wing didn’t hesitate to put a long through ball for me towards the corner with only a minute or two left. And I didn’t give up when the defender tried to obstruct me as I started to go by him, as when he put his arm across my chest, I simply pulled it behind me and fought my way past him. When I broke free, the referee finally blew his whistle and correctly called the defender for the initial foul, which he probably wouldn’t have done if I’d backed down. The right wing stepped up and put a beautiful 25-meter free kick in the upper corner. 3-2. Game over.

There was no way we should have won that game. They were absolutely the better team in at least 8 of the 11 positions. And they play together well too; there were several strings of 10+ passes where no one on our team even touched the ball. But they have too many skilled technicians and not enough petty role players. The secret of sports is that the team where everyone accepts his role and throws himself into it 100 percent is usually going to beat the better team where the pecking order and the responsibilities are not as firmly established.

Irrelevant equilibriums

While I agree with Ari Andricopoulos’s observation of the danger of the Taylor rule as well as the utter ineptitude and irrelevance of the whole orthodox macroeconomic profession, this post somehow tends to remind me of Princess Leia pointing out how the tighter the Empire grasped, the more star systems would slip through its hands.

Equilibrium: γ*ES  = (1-αd)*d + (1-αi)*i + (1-αw)*w + (1-αC)*C  (3)

This means that the spending of existing savings exactly matches the amount being saved without any new debt being taken out. This is the true equilibrium in an economy that we need to aim for.

In any case, you can see how the dividends, interest and wages from GDP at time t, as well as the external sources of money (from existing savings, new loans and new central bank money) make up the next period nominal GDP.

What has gone wrong:

I would say that during the 1945 to 1975 period, a period of excellent growth across the developed world, we were broadly in equilibrium. The savings broadly matched the spending of exisiting savings. Governments, using Keynesian policy tools would increase their spending (the government component of L) when savings were too high and reduce when more savings were being spent than new savings made. It all worked pretty well.

What changed in the 1970s was the rise of credit. Looking at the Equilibrium equation (3) above, the share of GDP going to interest and dividends went up relative to the share going to wages. The coefficients of consumption (α) for the interest and dividends is lower than that for wages so we had the following inequality:

γ*ES  < (1-αd)*d + (1-αi)*i + (1-αw)*w + (1-αC)*C

This means that the economy is out of equilibrium. The GDP shown in figure 1, will now go down because of the excess savings.

Previously fiscal policy would have been used to stimulate growth and return the system to equilibrium.

Increased government debt is far more efficient at stimulating the economy than increased private sector debt. I show here that a 10% net increase in private sector debt stimulates the economy and adds approximately 1.1% to GDP growth in the year that the debt is taken out. So the multiplier of private sector debt to GDP here is 11%. However, the cost in future years due to the increase of interest repayments at the expense of wages is 0.15% of GDP for every year going forwards.

The same amount of increased government debt costs only 0.9% of GDP going forwards, but crucially the multiplier on this spending is much higher. Therefore much less government debt is needed to create the same amount of economic stimulus as private sector debt. In fact, I estimate that government debt is an order of magnitude more efficient.

 One problem with the Taylor rule is that it uses a linear trend extrapolation. But the increase in debt means that the growth potential of the economy is lower each year so trying to keep it at the previous trend means more and more debt.

Another point which I disagree on, is that the inflation targeting does not separate inflation with a domestic source compared to that with a foreign source. I discuss the error that I believe that they are making here.

But the main problem is that, as with the whole orthodox macroeconomic profession it seems, is that IT IGNORES PRIVATE SECTOR DEBT.

I can not stress how obvious this is. It assumes that debt can grow indefinitely. It assumes that previous debt has no impact on growth. It creates a positively reinforcing feedback mechanism that ends in stagnation.

This is the real danger of the Taylor rule, Dr Bernanke.

Far from the mainstream notion that private sector debt is irrelevant, I would argue that it makes more sense to measure the macroeconomy – to the extent that we bother pretending it even exists, which is the subject for another day – in credit money. This method would have its flaws, of course, because credit money can evaporate in a heartbeat, but it would have the benefit of providing a much more accurate snapshot of any given moment in macroeconomic activity than the woefully irrelevant Samuelsonian GDP model.

This observation on the negative correlation between private sector debt and GDP growth by Dr. Andricopoulos should be particularly educational for empiricists:

A few weeks ago I wrote this post which showed the results of my empirical study on the effect of private sector debt on the economy. It found that a 10% increase in the level of private sector debt corresponded to a 0.15% decrease in GDP growth every year going forwards. Considering that the levels of private sector debt in many advanced economies is around the 200% level, this is a pretty big drag and on its own would explain the current secular stagnation.

Now, according to the Keynesians and Neo-Keynesians, this shouldn’t be any more possible than the stagflation of the 1970s. Once more, even by its own supposedly empirical standards, Keynesianism, or more properly, Samuelsoniansim, is seen to be a failure.

It’s also worth noting that even Dr. Andricopoulus’s history is an inaccurate summary, at least as far as the USA goes. Below is a chart showing the annual growth of total public and private sector debt, aka “credit money”, in the US economy from 1948 through 2014. Where is this sudden “rise of credit” that is supposed to have taken place in the 1970s? Is it the increase from 8.58 percent in 1969 to a peak of 16.03 percent in 1985?

SJWs always cheat

The Making Light SJWs are upset because Tor isn’t collecting its usual Hugo tribute for its predictably mediocre romances in space, sanctimonious PC space lectures, and red-hot necrobestials, so naturally they are lobbying hard to change the rules. WCJ points out what they’re up to:

The method that the Making Light cabal used to evaluate these satisfaction formulae was to simulate elections using the different formulae and look at the outcome. They decided in advance which outcomes would be considered “satisfying:” those that closely replicate the 2013 Hugo shortlists given the known data from the 2013 ballot, and those that excluded or reduced the quantity of nominees of a hypothetical collection of Sad Puppy voters added to the simulations. A “satisfaction” function was regarded as good by the Making Light cabal if it answered positively to that criterion.

This isn’t just sinister, it’s diabolical. Because what they’re doing, quite literally, is defining “satisfaction” not to be YOUR satisfaction, but rather THEIR satisfaction. The function that is supposed to model your happiness as a voter was chosen by someone who is not you, based on criteria that were designed entirely for their benefit and not yours, without any reference whatsoever to your opinion.

It’s vastly amusing that they are doing exactly what we predicted and are trying to change the rules even though no one has won anything yet. However, speaking as a game designer, I can tell you that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about stopping intelligent exploits without a process that allows for dynamic responses. For example, let’s say they manage to ram through the 4/6 plan, whose author, Chris Gerrib, foolishly believes is somehow magically capable of preventing Rabid Puppies from locking the SJWs out of the awards again in the future.

The answer is entirely obvious. You didn’t seriously think there was no shadowy purpose behind the numbering of the minions, did you? Am I not your Supreme Dark Lord? And are you not entertained?

The bitter harvest of feminism

Cadders explains it in the comments at Alpha Game:

Feminism is already a dead woman walking. All feminism has is shaming language and the State (ironically, ultimately other men) to keep men to the feminist line.

But now, increasingly, the shaming doesn’t work. And men are disengaging from society in general to avoid entanglements with the state; if you don’t get married, you can’t be divorced, if you don’t co-habit you can’t have half your stuff appropriated, if you don’t have children, you can’t be on the hook for child support, if you don’t enter the corporate world you can’t be be accused of ‘harassment’ and if you don’t date you drastically reduce your chance of a false rape accusation.

These are genuine threat points for men in the modern world that didn’t exist before feminism. It speaks to the feeble minds of feminists that they would think that men will simply carry on as they did when these threats did not exist. For the last 50 years men (mostly) still did. But that’s over now.

So men are doing what they have always done: survey their environment, understand it, and behave rationally according to it. Which means, increasingly, living their lives without regard to what women want. This does not mean living without sex, relationships or female company. Just that the investment men make in all these areas is being dramatically reduced.

As feminism reduces the value of women (in men’s eyes), so men are reducing the amount of time, effort, attention and money they are willing to spend for the declining benefits modern women now bring to their lives.

But the real news is that the true cost of feminism, first born by men, and then children, is now being passed on to women. Record numbers of women are living alone, record numbers of women are childless, record numbers are on psychiatric medication, record numbers are facing a life-time of wage slavery in grinding jobs that they can never leave. And still feminism spins these outcomes as the conscious choices of these women and as ’empowering’.

And yet, women’s self-reported happiness, across all classes, all races, all demographics is lower than ever since records began 50 years ago. Tellingly, for the first time ever, their happiness is also now lower than men’s.

But you do not need to read ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness’ to know this. Just talk to the increasing number of 30 and 40 year old childless spinsters one on one – not in a group – to get the REAL story. The REAL effect of feminism in the REAL world. These women don’t give two hoots about feminism, they are just wondering where all the good husbands, hell, ANY decent man, went.

Mostly, disgusted with what feminism has done to women, he walked away.

For the truth is that men don’t want to fight women, it goes against the core of what it means to be a man. But feminism thrust men into a fight that they neither started nor wanted. To the point that feminists are reduced to crowing about ‘winning’ battles that men never turned up for.

And even now, as feminism pushes and pushes and pushes to ever more absurd levels, as ever more restrictions are placed on normal masculine behavior, ever more insane definitions of ‘rape’, ‘assault’, and ‘aggression’ are drafted into law in increasingly desperate attempts to somehow, anyhow, cast women as perpetual victims – even now – men are still refusing to be drawn into a real battle.

That’s how deeply men do not want to fight women.

The sound of the final battle between the sexes will not be heard in the streets or legislatures. It will not be televised or reported. There will be no flags hoisted or victory parades. Because it is already in progress. It is happening all around us in plain sight, for those with the eyes to see it.

And men are deploying the most devastating weapon of all – indifference. In this final battle who cares least wins.

The time has come to reap the harvest of feminism, and for women the fruit will be bitterest of all.

It’s pretty simple, women. Either abandon feminism or abandon all hope of being wives and mothers. Because men will not abide feminism and you cannot force us to accept it. 70 years of a totalitarian government could not make communism work. And no amount of resorting to State force is going to make a feminist society viable.

Eco on the animal soul

Umberto Eco reviews an anthology of ancient works devoted to considering the ensoulment of the animals:

On the animal soul

Acording to the ancients, animals possessed rational knowledge. But
they also had feelings. And, according to this theology, they can
therefore go to Heaven.

Einaudi published a lovely anthology of ancient writings on “The
Soul of the Animals” (at 85 euros it is an expensive book but it is
a really nice one.) It is not only we of contemporary times who are
preoccupied with our dog or decide to go on a vegan diet in order to avoid killing animated beings. The ancients already considered the problem
of when an animal possessed reason. In his Historia animalium,
Aristotle said that in many animals could be seen traces of the
quality of soul, by which animals demonstrated gentleness and
courage, timidity, fear, and slyness, and even something that bears some similarities to wisdom.

It is in a stoic form that an argument appears, unanimously
attributed to Chrysippus of Soli, that was destined to be of great
popularity. It exists in two versions, but we will cite the more
notable, that of Sextus Empiricus, in which he recounted a dog that,
upon arriving at the meeting point of three paths and recognizing
with its sense of smell that the prey had not taken two of them,
deduced that it must have gone the third way. He thus proved that the dog
knew reason according to the principles of logic.

Another fundamental text is “de sollertia animalium” by
Plutarch, in which it is admitted that animal rationality is less
perfect than human reason, but also notes that diverse grades of
perfection are also found amongst human beings (an elegant way of
insinuating that we are beings who reason like the animals.). In
another text, “Bruta animalia ratioe uti”, to those who objected
that one could not attribute reason to beings that did not have an
innate notion of the divine, Plutarch responds by recalling that
Sisyphus, too, was an atheist. It is on that basis that he rejects a carnivorous diet, albeit with many exceptions,

We have a radical vegeterian thesis in the “De abstinentia” of
Porphyry. For Porphyry, the animals express the ideal interior state
and the fact that they don’t understand us is no more embarrassing to
them than the fact that we don’t understand the language or the
thought of the Indians or the Scythians.

It is too bad that the Einaudian account ends with Porphyry, although
the volume has more than 500 pages as it is. It would have been interesting to
have an anthology series in multiple volumes that contained the
succeeding discussions, from the beautiful pages of Montaigne
refuting Cartesian mechanics to the long and protracted polemics
involving Leibniz, Locke, Cudworth, More, Shaftesbury, Cordemoy,
Fontenelle, Bayle, Buffon, Rousseau, Condillac and others.

I don’t know if all dogs go to Heaven or not. But frankly, it is very, very difficult to imagine a place that could be reasonably called Heaven, or be considered anything even remotely akin to a paradise, without them.

Testing Brainstorm

UPDATE: We’ve hit the 100 registrants max, so we won’t need anymore volunteers.

This is the test of Brainstorm Alpha
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

This is going to be a short test of the system I’m considering. If you want to help out by seeing if it works, register and we’ll give it a shot. Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing with the software.

In totally unrelated news, a member of the Ilk is looking for a church near Chicago. If you have any suggestions, comment below.

“Hoped I’d found a good church very close to my location (Lemont IL). 
Went yesterday, on Mother’s Day.  The pastor began by focusing on women.  Fine, a “topical theme”, there’s no shortage of good topics.

But, you can guess how things went.  Had he pointed out any responsibility of a Christian lady, even one,
I’d not be writing you.  Instead, after a few Scriptural verses, he
turned gleefully to some book titled “Christ Feminist”.  And so on ad
nauseum.”