Category: Uncategorized

Free trade and the undermining of nations

I understand that many, if not most, of you were skeptical when I pointed out that if free trade were to be implemented on the same scale on the international level that it is on the domestic level, it would necessitate the destruction of the USA as a sovereign nation and the expatriation of nearly 50 percent of its native workers under the age of 35. However, you may be a little less dubious once you understand that I am not the only one who has done the math.

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said. Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural….

Mr Sutherland, who is non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former chairman of oil giant BP, heads the Global Forum on Migration and Development, which brings together representatives of 160 nations to share policy ideas. He told the House of Lords committee migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states”.

As hard as it may be to accept, free trade, mass immigration, multiculturalism, globalism, climate change, and centralized government are all different facets of the same globalist vision of Ein Welt, Ein Volk, Ein Reich. This isn’t some outlandish figment of my imagination, it’s all right there in front of you. The problem is that few have the ability to comprehend the scope of it all, and even fewer have the capacity for putting the various pieces together to see the whole.

John Scalzi still justifying sexism

And droidism. And racism. And homophobia.

In my piece on how not to be a creeper, I made a point that today I’d like to expand on just a little; I’ll explain why in a bit. Here’s the point:

2. Acknowledge that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Which is to say that you may be trying your hardest to be interesting and engaging and fun to be around — and still come off as a creeper to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creeping them out and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep” is their assessment of you, but: Surprise! It doesn’t matter, and if you try to argue with them (or anyone else) that you’re in fact not being a creep and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep” to “complete assbag.” Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.

This apparently has struck some to be dreadfully unfair, with the implication being that other people responding to folks (usually men) as creepers when in fact they’re trying to make an effort to be charming and witty and fun (or whatever) is some sort of special case in the interaction of human beings, and that such mismatches between intent and reception hardly ever happen in other situations.

To which my response is: you have got to be kidding me. Outside of the realm of possible potential creepiness, you don’t get to choose how other people respond to you, either. In any context. Indeed, regardless of your efforts to present yourself in a certain way, it is almost certain you will come across to some other people as not that way at all, and possibly the opposite of that way entirely.

On the one hand, Scalzi is absolutely right. We don’t get to choose how others feel about us or respond to us. John, for example, responds poorly to both this blog and its readers, referring to them collectively as “a feculent miasma of male self-regard”. That’s absolutely fine, it is simply his opinion, just as the idea that a woman who teaches Lesbianism in Hindu Film is convincing evidence that women are every bit as interested in the hard sciences as men is also his opinion.

You may understand if I tend to consider his opinion to be less than entirely dispositive.

So why am I objecting to what Scalzi is saying if I agree with it? Because he doesn’t actually mean it. Not only that, he doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t mean it. He is dimly aware that something is wrong, which is why he is attempting to “expand a little” on his previous point, but he still doesn’t grasp what it is. He’s appealing to a right in which he does not actually believe.

What Scalzi inadvertently did in his point two was to defend the right of free association. Which would be fine, only we know from Scalzi’s smug soft leftism that he supports absolutely nothing of the sort. Whereas he is absolutely fine with telling those condemned as “creeps” that they simply have to live with their rejection by others, I strongly suspect he is absolutely opposed to telling those condemned as “sluts” or “faggots” or “towelheads” or other behavior-based labels to do the same, much less those whose labels are purely identity-based.

And this is the point that he has resolutely evaded with his irrelevant forays into “false equivalence” and “unfairness”, even though his mention of droids indicates that he must have at least a vague idea of what he has done. Despite the fact that he has presented an argument that justifies all sorts of sexism, racism, and droidism, I don’t believe John Scalzi is actually sexist, racist, or anti-droid, he is merely a glib and inconsistent hypocrite who is willing to use an argument when it happens to suit him, then abandon it when it doesn’t. Now, I readily admit that it is possible I am wrong and Scalzi does support the right of those made uncomfortable by the presence of blacks, women, gays, or anyone else to expect those who make them uncomfortable to go away and leave them in peace, in which case I will of course retract the accusation of hypocrisy and inconsistency. I invite Mr. Scalzi to clarify his actual position on the subject.

As for the actual subject of “creepiness”, the problem is that as a gamma male, Scalzi simply doesn’t understand women or the socio-sexual hierarchy well enough to even understand what it is. As this aspect of the discussion is predominantly Game-related, I address it on Alpha Game.

WND column

Why Romney Will Win

Intrade says Romney is going to lose. Nate Silver, the expert meta-pollster of FiveThirtyEight fame, says Romney is going to lose. Rasmussen Reports has the Electoral College count at 247 to 206 in favor of Obama, with 85 votes in the toss-up category. With the exception of Gallup, most of the major polls are predicting an Obama victory in November.

I don’t think so. I think the Republican Romney/Ryan ticket is going to win in November.

Mailvox: a subscription, canceled

A former Gary North subscriber writes to share his experience:

I joined garynorth.com a few months ago in hopes of learning why I should believe in free trade. Dr. North and I immediately locked horns as he would not answer my questions. Every time I cited another scholar’s position he dismissed them as a statist or a mercantilist.

He said I wanted to stick a gun in someone’s belly. I was stunned at his behavior. So I cancelled my subscription.

Only recently did I discover your ongoing debate with him over free trade. What a pleasure to see an intellect of your capacity dismantle Gary North for the intellectual fraud that he is.

Not only are the economics better here, but it’s really hard to beat the price. As for North, one shudders to consider the psychosexual foundation for what appears to be his favorite metaphor. And for those who still find the free trade position entirely convincing, I hope you will note that unlike its defender, I am quite willing to answer questions concerning the subject.

50 Shades of Paedo?

There is fantasy and then there is fantasy that goes too far. While all of us would draw the line of what is acceptable fantasy and what is not in distinctly different places, I think most fans of the SF/F genre would agree that pedophile fantasies definitely cross that line. I’d also throw in elderly vampires that spend their days in high school and sparkle in the sun myself, but clearly millions of readers disagree. So does 50 Shades of Grey go too far? Not on the surface, as according to its description it is little more than John Norman’s Gor brought back to Earth, minus the sword battles and the awesome tarn birds. And it’s not a question I can legitimately even try to answer, since I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey nor do I have any intention of doing so.

Read the rest at The Black Gate

Fascinating

The NYT appears to be feeling the need to turn against the teachers unions and the educational status quo:

“When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?” asks a union leader (Holly Hunter) in the movie. I don’t know, but that’s indeed the state of play when it comes to teachers’ unions, and it’s a dangerous one….

Better teachers, better teachers, better teachers. That’s the mantra of the moment, and implicit in it is the notion that the ones we’ve got aren’t nearly good enough. “It’s a historic high point for demoralization,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University.

We have to find a way out of this. Weingarten noted that most public school children are taught by teachers with a union affiliation, if not necessarily a union contract. That won’t change anytime soon. So a constructive dialogue with those unions is essential.

But so is real flexibility from unions, along with their genuine, full-throated awareness that parents are too frustrated, kids too important and public resources too finite for any reflexive, defensive attachments to the old ways of doing things.

Now, I happen to believe that the combination of technology, propaganda, and politics has rendered the 19th century system of schooling obsolete, intellectually inimical, and societally devastating. So it is fascinating to see those who have been the system’s most staunch defenders moving from a stubborn defense of the status quo to what is clearly a fighting withdrawal.

“The Last Testament of Henry Halleck”

In honor of the publication of the August issue of Stupefying Stories, I’m posting my story that was published in the March 2012 issue. Seven points count against your sanity if you can correctly identify the author whose style I attempted to imitate here – an effort I think met with rather less success than the story written in the mode of Guy de Maupassant. If you enjoy fantastic fiction, there are few better values out there than the increasingly well-regarded Stupefying Stories anthologies.

The Last Testament of Henry Halleck
Stupefying Stories, March 2012
Vox Day

At the request of the Cardinal Prefect, I have forwarded this document to you, Cardinal, which according to our records, has been in the possession of the Congregation since 1885. I trust you will find it of some use in your present investigations concerning the historical suppression of Humani Generis Unitas. I should also like to call to your attention the series of files on the Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft das Ahnenerbe, particularly the one concerning a 1939 expedition led by Dr. Otto Huth on U-41, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Gustav-Adolf Mugler, which I believe is already in your possession.

Monsignor Damiano Marzotto Caotorta
Palace of the Holy Office
The Vatican

I have burned the memoirs I once thought to leave to posterity. I have also destroyed my correspondence, public and private, and can only hope that my fellow conspirators will see fit to follow my example and do the same. I have only preserved my books and my translations, which I have concluded are harmless, and I pray that if I am remembered, it will be through them and not for my crimes or the monstrosity I played a part in releasing upon the world. I shall leave behind only this letter, in the hands of Bishop McCloskey, whom I charge with the duty to ensure that it reaches whatever Papist order or society watches over things of this nature, as I have been told exists somewhere in the heart of Rome. For the evil we unleashed half-unwittingly is neither dead nor vanquished, it merely slumbers, waiting patiently for its next awakening.

To Seward must be laid the greater portion of the blame. I do not excuse my own misdeeds in stating this, but state a simple fact. He had long possessed grandiose dreams of world conquest, but they were inflamed by the thought of having another century or two to realize them. This, I did not know until afterward, but when I was living in California in 1860, I saw the man twice, before and after his first fatal trip to Russian America, and upon his return I even remarked to my dear wife upon what a changed man he was. He had always been ambitious and vainglorious, but after his northern excursion, he carried himself with what I can only describe as a Messianic demeanor. I do not hesitate to admit that I fell under his spell, and upon receiving the promised promotion from the California militia to major general in the United States Army, I believed I could trust him implicitly.

I did not know the terrible truth of the reason behind this change in the Secretary of State until the autumn of 1861, after traveling to the city of St. Louis and accepting the command for the Department of the Missouri. Seward met me there and he was much agitated, as the President and the Cabinet were much concerned about the prospective loss of the war following several defeats in Virginia, while I feared that my own career as a Union general would be a short-lived one, since the federal forces for which I was now responsible had been repeatedly defeated by the rebellious State Guard. How foolish our petty fears now appear in light of the events that subsequently took place! It was vanity, nothing more, that led us to meet at the Masonic temple in St. Louis, where Seward promised that he would reveal to us a discovery that would change the course of the war.

There were four of us who met in secret that cold October night; the Secretary of State, myself, a promising young general I had inherited from John Fremont who is presently the President of the United States of America, and the commander of the Department of the Cumberland. Why Seward chose us rather than any of the much better-known generals from the Eastern states, I cannot say, but I assume it was because Grant, Sherman, and myself were all well outside the federal military establishment and any disasters could be safely attributed to our lack of conventional credentials. Perhaps more importantly, our distance from the circles of power in Washington meant that his experiment in occult warfare could proceed without criticism and with little risk to his reputation.

He swore us to secrecy first, and then unveiled the treasure he had discovered in the northern territory. It was a little idol of a fat, seated man wearing an octopine helm, carved from ivory by the Esquimaux people and small enough to fit in a man’s hand. We thought him mad when first he showed it to us, but as he was our benefactor, we gave him the opportunity to explain himself nevertheless. He claimed that the figurine spoke to him, which we did not initially believe, and then said that it would speak to us through him. To our immense surprise and horror, after he placed both hands around it, his eyes lost their focus and he began speaking with a distinctly different voice. It was indescribable, and none of us had any doubts that it did not belong to Seward.

The voice identified itself as a representative of a race of ancient beings. It refused to name itself, but declared itself to be possessed of such powers as would permit the Union to win the war if we would only provide it with the sustenance it required to wake its fellows. It said it came from a planet very far away and assured us that neither it nor its race had any interest in the affairs of Man. We were none of us religious men, but even so, we placed it upon a Bible and Seward immersed it fully in holy water he had obtained for just such purposes, which was sufficient to satisfy myself and Grant, although Sherman still harbored reservations about its nature, particularly when we were told that the sustenance it required was atmospheric, being a psychic substance released by intelligent minds at the moment of their death. Human minds, although apparently somewhat deficient in various ways, would suffice, which was why it was interested in military men like ourselves. Sherman and Grant both examined it closely. I did not touch it, as something about it struck me as unclean, if not unholy. And yet, we were desperate and ambitious men, disinclined to turn our backs on any device that might serve our ends, however strange.

Sherman was troubled by the notion of feeding it death, but Seward pointed out that this incorporeal scavenging was no different than the birds of the air and the insects of the field that fed upon the dead and transformed them back to the dust from whence they came. Therefore, he argued, there was no reason to ascribe either nefarious or beneficial purposes to the idol despite its morbid hungers. When Grant reminded Sherman that our profession was intimately concerned with killing as many men on the other side as possible, Sherman reluctantly relented. It was agreed that we would put the strange device to the test as soon as possible, and Seward left the strange little idol in the possession of Sherman prior to his return to Washington the next day.

The experiment was an unexpected success. I arranged for one of my colonels to carry the idol into battle unbeknownst to him, and much to our surprise, he dealt the State Guard their first defeat of the war at Fredericktown. The men were greatly heartened by this success, as the Missouri rebels had beaten them four times previously. Grant then insisted on taking his turn with it, and with its aid he managed to overrun the Confederate camp at Belmont, killing nearly a thousand rebels at a stroke. He lost nearly six hundred dead himself, the significance of which we did not truly understand until our next meeting, when Sherman picked up the idol and was unable to remove it first from his hand, then, as he struggled frantically to escape it, from his chest.

Sherman lay prostrate and speechless for nearly a month before rising from his sickbed and resuming his duties as if nothing had happened. He would not talk about the device, nor would he permit himself to be approached by doctors, but instead applied himself to his duties with a vengeance. But he told me once that when he slept, he dreamed of swimming through oceans of blood, and climbing over white mountains of lifeless flesh. Grant, too, was affected by the dreams, which thankfully left me untouched. He took to drink to cope with them, but like Sherman, he too began to drive himself and his men relentlessly. The two men became increasingly close, until I was finally forced to assign Sherman to the Army of West Tennessee so he could serve under Grant.

The immediate consequence was Shiloh. Nearly four thousand men died and if there were not oceans of blood, there were at least rivers. Battle followed battle, victory followed victory, and though I did my best to restrain their increasingly erratic behavior and hide their indifference to the fate of their men, others eventually began to notice. One newspaper in Ohio even described the pair of them as a drunkard advised by a lunatic. But they were victorious. I was summoned to Washington by President Lincoln himself and named General-in-Chief over the entire Union; Grant and Sherman too won promotions despite the whispers that followed them everywhere they went. The madness and bloodshed finally culminated in The March to the Sea and the dreadful Wilderness Campaign, where entire cities were burned and Grant sacrificed 55,000 of his own men to our secret god of victory.

I never learned when the idol came into the possession of the President. But I began to suspect something was amiss when I overheard him ordering Grant to begin destroying plantations and even entire villages throughout the Shenandoah. He had become obsessed with the tremendous amount of deaths to which both sides were being subjected and he took to wandering the halls of the White House late at night, looking more than a little like a bearded corpse himself. His eyes burned with the same haunted fire that Sherman’s had after his spell of silent madness and he carried himself with uncharacteristic delicacy. Mrs. Lincoln openly expressed her fears to me one night after he spent the entire evening sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth mumbling to himself, and to my everlasting shame and regret, I had not the courage to share my own doubts with her.

It became clear that we needed to intervene after the meeting at Hampton Roads. The Secretary of State was badly shaken when the President refused to countenance the Confederate offer of surrender, and his concerns deepened when I shared with him a letter from Grant in which he confessed that he had handed over the idol to the President. But our every attempt to broach the subject with Lincoln met with rebuff. And our hopes that the end of the war would have a salubrious effect upon him disappeared when the President came to me and asked me to draw up plans for repopulating the conquered southern States by settling the freemen of the North there. Astonished at his choice of words, I looked into his eyes and saw nothing human there. At that moment, I knew he would die rather than give up the idol, in fact, I began to wonder if the man I had once so admired even existed anymore.

As with so much that had gone before, the assassination was Seward’s plan. He contacted the actor and arranged for the seats at the theater. It all went as anticipated, including the false attack on Seward, except for the escape of the actor. But we had bigger concerns that evening than mere exposure of the plot, for when we brought the President back to the White House, we found that he was still alive despite being shot directly in the head at close range with a large caliber pistol. Imagine our horror when the thing that the President had become opened his eyes and smiled at us. He seemed to know everything we had done, for he rose from couch upon which he had been placed and attacked Seward, and such was the violence of the assault that he very nearly slew the Secretary of State before Phineas Gurley, the Chaplain of the Senate who had been summoned to pray for the President’s soul, drew a strange object from his waistcoat that caused the demon animating the President to desist.

At Gurley’s instruction, I slashed away the President’s coat and shirt, revealing the terrible truth. The idol was embedded into the dead man’s chest like a large, spiderish creature, the octopine tentacles pink and pulsing with parasitic life. It was with some difficulty that we managed to remove the demonic thing, being of course most careful not to touch it. At the very moment we pulled it from his flesh, the alien light faded from the President’s eyes. It was the most peaceful I had seen him in months. I repent of my many sins and confess them freely as I prepare to meet my end, but the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was neither a sin nor an act for which I can repent. Had Lincoln lived, I am certain he would have become one of history’s greatest monsters. Lincoln kept the Union together, but it was Seward who saved the nation.

I arranged for David Farragut to take the chest in which I secreted the idol on his next voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Somewhere at sea, no one knows where, he weighted it with iron and dropped it into the depths. There, I believe, it will stay, forgotten until the end of time, its rapacious hunger for death unassuaged. You who read this, know there are evils lurking in the deep shadows of this world beyond the comprehension of men, and that it is ever the duty of those who are cursed to look into those shadows to remain vigilant against them.

Henry Halleck
Louisville, Kentucky
January 1, 1872

An atheist critique of Sam Harris

A former Muslim, Theodore Sayeed, writes a long article criticizing Sam Harris and his godless militarism on Mondoweiss:

For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their “reflexive solidarity” with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work. The End of Faith opens with the melodramatic scene of a young man of undetermined nationality boarding a bus with a suicide vest. The bus detonates, innocents die and Harris, with the relish of a schoolmarm passing on the facts of life to her brood, chalks in the question: “Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion?”

To which historians will answer: Because it is not….

It occurs to me that as much of a renegade as I am from Islam, I’m not alone in my betrayal. Sam Harris too is an apostate from the intellectual atheist tradition of Russell and Mencken that was built on the twin pillars of anti-mysticism and anti-militarism.

I found it interesting that Sayeed begins with precisely the same quote from The End of Faith that I did, and notes precisely the same blunder which many atheists unsuccessfully attempted to defend back in 2008. One thing Sayeed caught that I did not is Harris’s tribal identification with Israel and his continued attempts to defend Israeli militarism despite his repeated condemnations of tribalism. Readers may recall that in my own email exchange with Harris, he admitted that he was actually attacking tribalism rather than religious faith; the primary danger of religious faith was that it had the potential to create and exacerbate tribalism.

But, as Sayeed demonstrates, despite his atheism, Harris himself appears to be subject to a tribalism that is older than either Christianity or Islam, the two religions he primarily criticizes. And it is potentially significant to note how little he criticizes either Judaism or Israel, despite the fact that there is considerable criticism of the latter from secular Europeans who share his atheism.

Now, I don’t dislike Sam. Unlike Dawkins and Myers, I don’t think he’s an intrinsically dreadful individual. But his primary problem, aside from his apparent tribalism, is that he is simply not sufficiently detail-oriented or logical enough to be capable of successfully addressing the intellectual challenges he sets himself.

The Lizard Queen must rule!

Of course she turned down the offer of Number Two. She must be Number One!

“Up until just a couple of weeks ago the White House was putting out feelers to see if Hillary would accept the vice-presidential nod and replace Joe Biden. Bill Clinton was, I’m told, urging his wife to accept the number two slot. He saw this as a great launching pad for her for running in 2016.”

I note that my prediction of an Obama drop-out is still in play…. I mean, why were the Democratic elders trying to drop Biden if it weren’t for their concerns about the electoral problems of his boss?

TIA: the meme spreads

Courtesy of Scott Atran, the argument that religion does not cause war has now reached both Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education:

it’s not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it’s the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature “Why I Am an Atheist” on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that “attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea.” It’s proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that “only a small minority of recorded wars” have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. “Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science,” says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. “Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful.”

The Science article is entitled “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict” and appears in Science 336, 855 (2012). The relevant passage cites The Encylopedia of Wars and states: “In fact, explicit religious issues have motivated only a small minority of recorded wars. There is little religious cause for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts and world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international conflict.”

Given the absurd assertions by science fetishists who insist that I do not understand science, I find it more than a little ironic that a number of real scientists are not only making use of my ideas, but my methods as well, in publishing professional peer-reviewed science.