Category: Uncategorized

Yeah, THAT’S the problem

This is why the self-styled anti-racists can never be trusted. They would rather permit your daughters to be raped than admit to the fact of genetics-based behavioral differences:

Dozens of men were yesterday charged with a wide range of sex crimes against vulnerable girls after two separate police investigations. Following a ‘milestone’ operation by Northumbria Police, 20 suspects appeared in court to face charges including rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking.

The alleged offences involved 12 victims, including one girl who was aged just 13, with officers vowing to continue their investigation into the abuse of vulnerable children.

In a separate case, 25 men from Halifax, West Yorkshire, were charged with a number of historic and child-related sex offences. Almost all of the men in both cases are from Asian backgrounds, prompting police leading one of the cases to warn that far-Right groups may use the issue to stir up racial tension.

The issue SHOULD stir up racial tension. This is merely the latest in a very long line of evidence that strongly indicates different cultures cannot successfully live together peacefully over time. And contra those who attempt to hide racial differences behind cultural differences, culture is a product of human genetics.

Whether one subscribes to the theory of evolution by natural selection or some form of creationist intervention, both the science and logic of genetic differences is inescapable. And it is not “racist” to be scientifically and logically correct with regards to these matters, as the superiority of one race completely depends upon one’s perspective and favored metrics.

It cannot be denied that if rape, sexual assault, and sex trafficking are the metrics, the Asian population of Great Britain is absolutely superior to the English population. It is only racist if one argues that this factual observation is evidence of Asian racial superiority.

RACISM: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
– Oxford Dictionary

The definition most usefully serves to demonstrate the intrinsic idiocy of the concept; it is limited to binary thinkers and is not even relevant to those who are capable of thinking in probabilistic terms. Indeed, anyone who thinks in probabilistic terms cannot possibly be considered racist, given that no one who does so is going to be inclined to believe that “all members of each race” possesses virtually any characteristic in common.

How the Hugos became a battleground

Nero chronicles the politicization of science fiction and fantasy and explains the reason for the existence of Sad Puppies:

New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia told us that SFF is currently in the grip of a “systematic campaign to slander anybody who doesn’t toe their line,” which is breeding a culture of fear and self-censorship. “Most authors aren’t making that much money, so they are terrified of being slandered and losing business,” he says. The only exceptions are a “handful of people like me who are either big enough not to give a crap, or too obstinate to shut up.”

After years on the back foot, that obstinate handful are preparing to fight back.

Sad Puppies

To the outside world, the Hugo Awards are known as the most prestigious honor that a sci-fi or fantasy creator can achieve. However, inside the community they are widely seen as a popularity contest dominated by cliques and super-fandoms. This can be seen most clearly in the dominance of Doctor Who in the TV award categories. The show’s enormous fanbase has garnered 26 Hugo nominations in the last nine years. Episodes from the show triumphed in every year between 2006 and 2012, save one.

The Hugos have an advantage, though: they are difficult for a single group to dominate if others rise to challenge them. All one has to do to vote in the awards is pay a small membership fee to the World Science Fiction Convention. For the few who are brave enough to defend artistic freedom openly, the Hugos are a good place to make a stand.

That is precisely what is now happening. Ahead of 2013’s Hugo Awards, Larry Correia began making public blog posts about his nominations, inviting his readers to discuss and agree on a shared list of Hugo nominations, and vote collectively. The idea was to draw attention to authors and creators who were suffering from an undeserved lack of attention due to the political climate in sci-fi. The “Sad Puppies” slate was born.

(The original idea was to call it the “Sad Puppies Think of the Children Campaign” – a dig at those who take their social crusades too seriously.)

What began as a discussion among bloggers has turned into an annual event. Last year’s Sad Puppies slate was extraordinarily successful, with seven out of Correia’s twelve nominations making it to the final stage of the Hugos. Among the successful nominations was The Last Witchking, a novelette by Theodore Beale, also known as Vox Day – a writer whose radical right-wing views had put him at the top of the sci-fi SJWs’ hit list. The fact that an author like Beale could receive a Hugo nomination was proof that SJW domination of sci-fi was not as complete as the elites would have liked.

In addition to humiliating the activists, the slate also triggered significant debate. Even Jon Scalzi, the privilege-checking SFWA President discussed above, was forced to admit that works of science fiction and fantasy ought to be judged on their quality, not on the politics of their authors. This greatly upset some of Scalzi’s more radical supporters, who openly called for exclusion on the basis of political belief. The debate also spread beyond sci-fi to the pages of The Huffington Post and USA Today.

Stirring up debate was, of course, precisely the point of Sad Puppies. As well as ensuring that quality works of fiction made it past the cliques at places like SWFA and Tor.com to be considered by the fans themselves, the Sad Puppies slate also forced radicals to show their true colours. Those who supported political ostracism were outed as a tiny but vocal minority. As Correia explained on his blog, the slate managed to expose the “thought police” of the community before votes had even been cast.

This year, the Sad Puppies slate returns once more, championed by Hugo and Nebula-nominee Brad R. Torgerson. Although run by conservative authors, it includes many authors and creators who are left-wing, liberal, or non-politically aligned. In this way, the slate hopes to protect what radical activists want to eliminate: diversity of opinion and political tolerance.

It’s rather amusing how what is obvious to a reporter has managed to escape the pinkshirts for over a year now. We’ve never been into thought-policing or preventing anyone from getting published. They care more about that than they do about the history of the field, its traditions, or simply writing straightforward science fiction and fantasy.

The end of monetarism

Keynesian economics is a failure. So, too, is the Keynesian heresy known as Friedmanite monetarism:

The entire theory of monetarism is coming undone in spectacular and empirical fashion, which leaves the entire status quo exposed. All that is left in defense is the same old refrain of “it wasn’t big enough.” That’s great for those in the ivory towers blinding themselves to the reality of a lost generation of Italians, Spaniards, French and now even Germans; a listing to which even the FOMC is worried may yet add Americans.

Why anyone ever expected a different outcome is due solely to unrepentant ideology, since these central banks are following almost exactly the Japanese “model.” The global economy is just following along as money dies. Though Greece will be blamed as contagion, it will ultimately be proved as Japanification by monetary proxy.

For those who don’t understand the significance of the graph, both Germany and Italy are subject to the same monetary policy of the European Central Bank. The chart clearly shows that the very low interest rate policy presently being maintained by the ECB is not capable of producing full employment in Italy, contra monetarist theory, thereby indicating that other factors are, as it happens, more significant than the supposedly all-important interest rate.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, the ironic thing about the economist Milton Friedman is that he was much more sensible with regards to politics than economics.

Measles: the actual risks

Since there is so much ridiculous ignorance being blathered about, particularly on the pro-vaccine side, I thought it would make sense to remind everyone of the actual facts of the matter. First of all, vaccines have had even less impact with regards to measles than I’d shown yesterday, because 1912-1916 was not the peak of the pre-vaccination era. From the CDC:

1900-1909:   8377 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1920-1929:   6659 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1953-1962:    444 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.
1959-1962:    404 deaths per year (average) associated with measles.

To be more precise, lets look at the actual annual deaths recorded in the years leading up to the introduction of the vaccine. Remember that the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963.

1950: 468
1951: 683  
1952: 618  
1953: 462  
1954: 518  
1955: 345 
1956: 530  
1957: 389  
1958: 552  
1959: 385  
1960: 380  
1961: 434  
1962: 408

Obviously, the reduction of deaths from 8,377 to 408 is even better than the decline from 5,300 to 450 cited in the Oxford Journals study yesterday. That means that  95.1 percent of the decline in measles mortality had NOTHING to do with vaccination. It could not have. The vaccine had not yet been introduced.


However, even this astonishing reduction in measles mortality doesn’t fully account for the reduction in risk, because the population of the USA was much larger in 1962 than in 1909. 186,537,737 in 1962 versus 92,228,496 in 1909, to be precise. So, the risk of measles mortality was 1 in 11,010 in 1909 versus 1 in 457,200 in 1962.

In other words, 97.6 percent of the population-corrected decline in measles mortality took place prior to the introduction of measles vaccination. And this was despite the fact that 90 percent of the population was infected with measles at one point or another.

It might be tempting to conclude that with a 2014 population of 318,881,992, the worst case scenario for the USA is 697 measles deaths per year. (Just to put it in perspective, this is very close to the 677 annual bicycle deaths per year.) However, this assumes medical care circa 1962, which is obviously incorrect. So, we need a proxy to provide us with an estimate how the improvement in medical technology over the last 53 years would likely affect the rate of measles mortality.

Age-adjusted death rates per 100,000 persons (standardized to the 1940 U.S. population) for diseases of the heart (i.e., coronary heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, and rheumatic heart disease) have decreased from a peak of 307.4 in 1950 to 134.6 in 1996, an overall decline of 56%

As of 2011, the age-adjusted death rate had further declined to 109.2, indicating a probable 64.5 percent reduction of measles mortality. So, the reasonable worst case scenario for a completely unvaccinated US population is 248 measles deaths per year.

And so I would ask the pro-vaccine advocate, precisely how much human liberty are you willing to sacrifice for a mere 248 deaths per year. If you’re convinced that is a sufficient justification, how can you possibly justify permitting your child to be a passenger in a car, ride a bike, or even take a bath if you believe that the use of government force and the elimination of parent right to medical consent is justified in order to eliminate the 1 in 1,287,026 risk that so frightens you.

NB: “Each year approximately 800 school-aged children are killed in motor vehicle crashes during normal school travel hours.” If you genuinely want to save children’s lives, don’t stop unvaccinated children from going to school, stop ALL children, vaccinated or unvaccinated, from going to school.

I know it was you, Fredo

I always knew that John Scalzi was primarily responsible for the SFWA “expulsion”*, but I didn’t realize that I had proof of it sitting right in front of me the entire time. Consider this statement from page 23 of “Evidence regarding the complaints made against Theodore Beale, Report to the Board of Directors of SFWA”, dated July 1, 2013.

Most prominently, an outgoing Board Member indicated that he intended to let his membership lapse until Beale was no longer a member: “My membership is due and I can’t in good conscience renew it until SFWA finds the means or moral backbone or whatever’s ultimately required to expel someone as hateful and wilfully destructive as Beale—notjust from the organisation but from the culture present within it.”

And from Twitter less than two hours after I announced the Board’s action against “an unidentified member”:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I just renewed my @sfwa membership!
2:18 PM – 14 Aug 2013

P Nielsen Hayden ‏@pnh Aug 14
@scalzi So did I! What a coincidence! @sfwa

Now, you might rightly say that these remarks by the outgoing president of the organization and the most influential member of the organization (Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a Senior Editor at the largest SF publishing house and gives his address in the SFWA membership directory as the Tor Books address on Fifth Avenue in New York City), are merely circumstantial evidence. And that would seem be true, since there were five outgoing SFWA Board Members in 2013. However, only two of those outgoing members were male. Compare the two successive lists of Board Members from the 2013 SFW Directory.

Board Members beginning July 1st, 2013
Steven Gould, President
Cat Rambo, Vice-President
Susan Forest, Secretary
Bud Sparhawk, Treasurer
Sarah Pinsker, Eastern Regional Director
Lee Martindale, South-Central Director
Jim Fiscus, Western Regional Director
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Overseas Director
Matthew Johnson, Canadian Director

Board Members through June 30th, 2013
John Scalzi, President
Rachel Swirsky, Vice-President
Ann Leckie, Secretary
Bud Sparhawk, Treasurer
Catherynne Valente, Eastern Regional Director
Lee Martindale, South-Central Director
Jim Fiscus, Western Regional Director
Sean Williams, Overseas Director
Matthew Johnson, Canadian Director

So, we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that either Sean Williams or John Scalzi was responsible for threatening to quit the organization if I was not purged from it, and that John Scalzi did let his membership lapse precisely as the “outgoing Board Member” threatened to do. We observe that the outgoing Board Member is not a particularly coherent writer. And we also know that John Scalzi has evinced considerably more interest in my career over the last 10 years than Sean Williams, who lives in Australia and has hitherto exhibited no signs of even knowing that I exist.

But although that is sufficient evidence to surmount the standard of reasonable doubt, it is not absolute proof of Mr. Scalzi’s guilt, since it is remotely possible that both outgoing Board Members happened to let their memberships lapse at the same time for different reasons. Therefore, in the interest of historical accuracy, I have contacted Mr. Williams and asked him to either confirm or deny responsibility for the statement quoted.

While we’re on the subject, it is interesting to compare the list of 2012-2013 Board Members to the recent list of Hugo and Nebula winners. Note that last year’s Novelette winner, Mary Robinette Kowal, was previously SFWA’s Secretary and Vice-President. Perhaps award-watchers should keep an eye out for Mr. Gould, Ms Rambo, and Ms Forest inexplicably outperforming in 2015 and 2016.

* Assuming that it was, in fact, a genuine purge. More than one lawyer has looked at the case and informed me that I am still a member in good standing of SFWA despite the public pretensions of the SFWA Board. There was never a vote of the entire membership, which under Massachusetts law, is clearly required to expel a member. This is why I have not filed a lawsuit; I have no damages of which to complain. The “expulsion” was a legal charade concocted to placate certain elements of the membership, as the bylaws under which I was “expelled” did not come into force until 15 May, 2014, ten months after SFWA’s announcement of an SFWA Board vote on 14 August, 2013.

Notice that SFWA has never officially announced my expulsion. That’s because it never took place. They informed me privately of the Board vote for my expulsion, which was true, but they could not announce my expulsion publicly because “the Board’s decision” was not, in August 2013, sufficient to actually expel a member. Note in particular the reference to “ the existing Massachusetts By-Laws” in the 2013 announcement.

Title XXII, Chapter 180, Section 18: No member of such corporation shall be expelled by vote of
less than a majority of all the members thereof, nor by vote of less
than three quarters of the members present and voting upon such
expulsion.

Fine for me, but not for thee

Jason Sanford attempts the difficult trick of condemning two different Hugo slates while simultaneously trying to defend his own.

For some reason my picks for the Hugo and Nebula Awards are being held up as the opposing slate against the Sad Puppies campaign of Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, and Vox Day. Evidently my nominations, in some deranged way, legitimizes the Sad Puppy campaign to stuff the Hugo ballot box.

Please.

I’ve never organized a campaign to stuff the Hugo Awards ballot. Have I stated the authors and stories I’m voting for? Yes. I’ve done this for many years. Have I encouraged others to consider the stories I liked and, if they also like them, consider them for a nomination? Yes. Because that’s what you do in the marketplace of ideas and beliefs which we call life. It’s part of what we call “Having a damn opinion!”

And yes, I’ve been overly eager about trying to get people to check out the stories I’ve enjoyed and consider them for the awards. I do this because I love our genre and it’s still a kick that I can nominate stories and authors for awards. In my recent post about my award picks, I even used the word “amazing” four separate times, which as an author I find embarrassing. But I used the word so many times because I’m excited about these stories and want others to share in this excitement.

But I’ve never picked my nominations by race or ethnicity or the author’s political views.

First of all, note that Jason tried more egregiously to “stuff the Hugo ballot” than Brad did with Sad Puppies. Jason has five recommendations for every category, Brad does not. Even I don’t have five recommendations in every category, although I do in all the categories that Jason has recommended thus far.

Verdict: If anyone is guilty of “Hugo ballot stuffing” it can only be Jason Sanford. How on Earth can he claim the right to do what he condemns others for doing? Could he be more blatantly hypocritical? Does he really want to openly claim that no one on the SF Right has the right to express an opinion?

Second, Jason is rightly embarrassed about his repeated use of the word “amazing” after I mocked him for it on Twitter. Like all SJWs, he is forced to resort to the use of superlatives to impress the reader, because what he is describing is not sufficiently impressive in and of itself. But he might consider using different superlatives. That would be amazing.

Verdict: SJWs communicate like inarticulate teenage girls and actresses attempting to curry favor with directors. This is not news.

Third, ballot-stuffing is not a function of the basis by which one decides to stuff the ballot. It doesn’t matter why Jason picked his nominations, the fact of the matter is if the presentation of a slate is deemed to be tantamount to ballot-stuffing, Jason observably stuffed the ballot to a greater extent than me, Brad, or Larry last year.

Verdict: Sorry, Jase, still guilty as charged.

The token cuddly liberal

Fourth, Jason clearly did select his nominations on the grounds of race and ethnicity. Sure, it’s remotely possible that he just happened to select works translated from the original Khoisan and available only in the basement of a small Nigerian bookstore in Peckham, but the odds are against it. Neither Larry, nor Brad, nor I did that; we didn’t justify them at all. Latino Larry nominated both white Brad and Native American Vox last year. Brad may be an Indian-hating cowboy for all I know, as he left me (feather, not dot), off his slate. I don’t even know what race or ethnicity most of the writers I recommended are. Hell, I don’t even know what race or ethnicity most of the writers I edit and publish are. 

Furthermore, both the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies slates are observably more politically ecumenical than Jason Sanford’s lockstep leftist list. We both have writers of the right and left. Jason may have had one moderately right-wing writer TWO YEARS AGO, but he doesn’t appear to have any in the slate that is presently being condemned.

Fifth, Jason both predicted and welcomed “The coming Hugo Awards ballot-stuffing arms race” ten months ago. He wrote: “But having everyone engage in this vote campaigning might also be the
only way to force the Hugo Awards to finally change. To force the
reality of our ever-more-diverse genre down Worldcon’s throat. So I welcome the coming Hugo Awards ballot-stuffing arms race.”

Verdict: Guilty, guilty, guilty on all counts. And racist against Native Americans to boot. For shame!

The vaccine scaremongers

It is increasingly obvious that the hysterical scaremongers among the pro-vaccinists are either pharma propagandists or probability-challenged:

Inquisitive Mind ‏@livebeef
Your decision to not vaccinate your children puts my children’s health at risk. You are the worst kind of person.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Your decision to drive your children in your car puts their health at much greater risk. You are an even worse person.

Vox Day @voxday
Deaths from measles in last 10 years = 0. Automobile deaths in last 10 years = 383,542

Vox Day @voxday
Deaths from measles in last 10 years = 0. Deaths from bicycles = 6,770. ONLY A MONSTER WOULD LET KIDS RIDE BIKES!

Inquisitive Mind ‏@livebeef
What the hell is WRONG with you people? (Posts scary propaganda cartoon.)

Vox Day ‏@voxday
We’re just not idiots like you who embrace totalitarian government because someone said BOO! Measles deaths in 2014 = 0

Inquisitive Mind ‏@livebeef
Do you not understand what the concept of “almost eradicated” means? Look up the death count it used to have.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
I have. And most of the deaths stopped long BEFORE widespread vaccine availability. You are misinformed.

Inquisitive Mind ‏@livebeef
Prove it.

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
Measles deaths dropped 91.5 percent by 1960, 2 years BEFORE vaccinations. You are misinformed.

 In the unlikely event that anyone is interested in the actual historical facts of the matter:

In 1962, immediately preceding the licensure of the first measles vaccines in the United States, when measles was a nearly universal disease, Alexander Langmuir described the medical importance of measles to the country and put forth the challenge of measles eradication. Although most patients recovered without permanent sequelae, the high number of cases each year made measles a significant cause of serious morbidity and mortality Langmuir showed that >90% of Americans were infected with the measles virus by age 15 years. This equated to roughly 1 birth cohort (4 million people) infected with measles each year. Not all cases were reported to the public health system; from 1956 to 1960, an average of 542,000 cases were reported annually. By the late 1950s, even before the introduction of measles vaccine, measles-related deaths and case fatality rates in the United States had decreased markedly, presumably as a result of improvement in health care and nutrition. From 1956 to 1960, an average of 450 measles-related deaths were reported each year (∼1 death/ 1000 reported cases), compared with an average of 5300 measles-related deaths during 1912–1916 (26 deaths/ 1000 reported cases).

Note that even in the ABSOLUTE WORST CASE, which is a completely unvaccinated scenario with 90 percent infection rates that assumes absolutely no improvement in health care in 55 years, we’re talking about 450 deaths per year.  Realistically, we’re probably talking around 200, given the advancements in medical technology. THAT is what all the pro-vaccine scaremongers are going on about. Americans would do better to ban bicycles, as they would save three times more lives per year.

The pro-vaccine propaganda is just more creeping totalitarianism, albeit one of bizarre appeal to the supposedly conservative and libertarian right. But it cannot be rationally defended on any material grounds, nor balanced against its infringements on personal liberties and human rights.

UPDATE: Sweet Salk, but the pro-vaxxers are stupid.

Utes Byfive ‏@Utesbyfive
Natural immunity produces carriers: Typhoid Mary, Someone vaxxed can’t be infected. CANT FUCKING CARRY

Science and the Middle Ages

Tim O’Neill explains why the false view of science coming to a halt during the Middle Ages is not merely incorrect, but is the result of anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda.

The
standard view of the Middle Ages as a scientific wasteland has
persisted for so long and is so entrenched in the popular mind largely
because it has deep cultural and sectarian roots, but not because it has
any real basis in fact.  It is partly based on anti-Catholic prejudices
in the Protestant tradition, that saw the Middle Ages purely as a
benighted period of Church oppression.  It was also promulgated by
Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire and Condorcet who had an axe to
grind with Christianity in their own time and projected this onto the
past in their polemical anti-clerical writings. By the later Nineteenth
Century the “fact” that the Church suppressed science in the Middle Ages
was generally unquestioned even though it had never been properly and
objectively examined.

It was the early historian of science, the
French physicist and mathematician Pierre Duhem, who first began to
debunk this polemically-driven view of history.  While researching the
history of statics and classical mechanics in physics, Duhem looked at
the work of the scientists of the Scientific Revolution, such as Newton,
Bernoulli and Galileo.  But in reading their work he was surprised to
find some references to earlier scholars, ones working in the supposedly
science-free zone of the Middle Ages.  When he did what no historian
before him had done before and actually read the work of Medieval
physicists like Roger Bacon (1214-1294), Jean Buridan (c. 1300- c.
1358), and Nicholas Oresme (c. 1320-1382) he was amazed at their
sophistication and he began a systematic study of the until then ignored
Medieval scientific flowering of the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries.

What
he and later modern historians of early science found is that the
Enlightenment myths of the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age
suppressed by the dead hand of an oppressive Church were nonsense. 
Duhem was a meticulous historical researcher and fluent in Latin,
meaning he could read Medieval scientific works that had been ignored
for centuries.  And as one of the most renowned physicists of his day,
he was also in a unique position to assess the sophistication of the
works he was rediscovering and of recognising that these Medieval
scholars had actually discovered elements in physics and mechanics that
had long been attributed to much later scientists like Galileo and
Newton.  This did not sit well with anti-clerical elements in the
intellectual elite of his time and his publishers were pressured not to
publish the later volumes of his Systeme de Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic
– the establishment of the time was not comfortable with the idea of
the Middle Ages as a scientific dark age being overturned. 

One thing I learned in writing The Irrational Atheist was to never trust “what everybody knows” about history. It’s more than MPAI, it’s more than a general ignorance about history; the fact is that most people who consider themselves to be educated with regards to history are, in demonstrable fact, maleducated. They’ve been given a false narrative that is belied by the actual documentary evidence.

This is good news

In light of the terrible first-round games this year and the fact that a team with a losing record not only made the playoffs, but made it to the second round, the NFL appears to be backing away from the stupid idea of further expanding the number of teams that make them:

At his pre-Super Bowl press conference last year, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that he thought there were a lot of benefits to expanding the postseason.

Among the benefits he cited were a “more competitive” league with better matchups as the regular season nears its conclusion and “more excitement” for the league’s fans. Talks about adding two teams to the postseason never came to a vote with the owners last spring and there was debate about the need to involve the NFLPA, but Goodell continued to sound optimistic about it when it came up in 2014.

He didn’t sound so optimistic about it during Friday’s pre-Super Bowl press conference.

“The possibility of expanding the playoffs has been a topic over the last couple of years,” Goodell said. “There are positives to it, but there are concerns as well, among them being the risk of diluting our regular season and conflicting with college football in January.”

The latter concern wasn’t aired last year and the better matchups that Goodell mentioned would seem to run counter to the risk of diluting the regular season, so it seems significant that they were specified while the positives were left undiscussed. Owners like John Mara of the Giants and Art Rooney II have come down against the idea since it was broached last year and Goodell’s tone may suggest he’s heard likewise from other owners heading into this offseason.

There is absolutely no good reason to expand the playoffs. If anything, they should be further limited; half the teams in the first round were uncompetitive and didn’t belong there. The games are really only reliably interesting at the divisional round anyhow.

Regardless, the current system did manage to not only match up the two best teams, but clarify a pecking order that had been modestly in doubt with regards to the Packers, Cowboys, and Seahawks, and Broncos, Ravens, Colts, and Patriots. It is working, even if the first weekend tends to be a bit boring, so for once Goodell should stop his incessant meddling and stop trying to fix what is quite clearly working.

Fortunately, the fact that the league’s more traditional and influential owners are against it should suffice to kill the dumb idea for the rest of Goodell’s bumbling reign.

Soft equalitarianism

Fred Reed points out how flawed assumptions lead to bad policy:

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.

They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal. Not even close. Further, people with barely a high-school education and low-voltage minds regard any intellectual task with utter discouragement.

Some commentators urge letting people invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf, Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t.

This affects a lot of smart people. My father used to constantly get on my case because he felt my MPAI philosophy was too contemptuous. And yet, he constantly ran into problems because he overestimated the capability of the average individual. At one point, we had an argument about calculus. He felt that it was easy and that anyone could learn it, because it was easy for him. I pointed out that the opinion anyone who’d been finishing an engineering PhD at MIT when he was hired out of school by a tech giant was not relevant to the average human being.

That sort of soft equalitarianism is nothing more than false humility. There is nothing arrogant about the simple observation that X is smarter than Y, anymore than there is in the observation that X is taller than Y, or X is heavier than Y. We know these things before we quantify them, and to pretend otherwise is not sane.

It harms people to pretend they have capabilities they don’t have, because we set them up for failure. To help someone be all they can be, the focus has to be on the word “can”. Sometimes we can do more than we think we can, but more often, we can’t do as much as we fancifully imagine.