Category: Uncategorized

John Scalzi justifies sexism

Mr. Scalzi attempts to defend female rejection of men as “creepers”, amusingly without realizing how perfectly it can be turned around and applied to male rejection of women in a manner that he would probably consider sexist:

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 creeperstupid slut to someone else. Yes, that sucks for you. But you know what? It sucks for them even harder, because you’re creepingpissing them outoff and making them profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable. It may not seem fair that “creep”“stupid slut” 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 creepstupid slut and the problem is with them not you, then you go from “creep”“stupid slut” to “complete assbag”“complete bitch”. Sometimes people aren’t going to like you or want to be near you. It’s just the way it is.”

Congratulations to John. He has managed to concoct a soundly sexist argument for simply banning women from DEFCON or any other predominantly male gathering. After all, if the dorks there don’t like women or want them near them, it’s just the way it is…. Men have precisely the same right to arbitrarily label women “stupid sluts” and treat them accordingly as women have to arbitrarily label men “creeps” and do the same.

Now, some men are genuinely creepy and I’m certainly not defending anyone’s right to behave in an uncivilized manner. But at the same time, it should be noted that women cannot be granted a right to free association that is denied to men.

UPDATE: Scalzi is either too lazy or too much of a pussy to think through his own arguments. He writes:

You know, I saw in a Google search that you wrote on this piece at your blog, and I thought to myself, “oh, great, now I go have to deal with some dumbass comment from him on the site.” And I was right! For your next trick of bad equivalence, why don’t you put the word “droid” in parentheses and congratulate me for coming up with a valid excuse for banning R2D2 from the Mos Eisley cantina?

If this is really what you’ve come to say, don’t really need to be on this thread, VD. Shoo. Everyone else, best to leave VD uncommented upon.

He also added this:

[Deleted because the point this jackhole was purporting to make was just an excuse for him to call women obnoxious things on my site. Hi there, trolls from VD’s site! Just because you wallow in a feculent miasma of male self-regard over there doesn’t mean you get to port it over here — JS]

It is fascinating to see that John Scalzi has devolved into such an intellectual pussy that he almost immediately concludes those who disagree with him must be trolls. And in support of my earlier charge of his sexism, what a sexist assumption to assume that all of the readers at VP are men! This is what happens when you run an echo chamber, you get sloppy, lazy, and eventually become unable to defend your opinions. It’s particularly embarrassing in this situation, because I am simply pointing out the obvious logical consequences of his statement, which can be easily understood by looking at the word “creep” as a variable rather than being distracted by his “false equivalence” defense.

The equivalence or lack thereof is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how Scalzi defines “creep” or to whom he applies the term. His argument works just as well for justifying the social stigmatization of “droids”, “negroes”, “homosexuals”, “girls with cooties”, or anything else that might make an individual uncomfortable. That’s not bad logic, and if he genuinely think it is, then I certainly invite him to identify the specific logical error or logical fallacy in it… if he can.

It is amusing to see him talking about “bad logic” as there is a reason I tagged this under “trainwreck” in the first place. Of course, this is the genius who once cited a female professor teaching “Lesbianism in Indian Film” at the University of Minnesota in order to defend the idea of female interest in the hard sciences.

A Christian case against Game

1. Game isn’t what you think it is.

2. Game means more than you think it does.

3. Christians don’t need Game.

My short response: 1) Game certainly isn’t what Cane thinks it is. 2) It most certainly does. 3) Yeah, they do.

A more substantive response is at Alpha Game.

Obama’s bag boy gets off

Corzine is officially deemed above the law:

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

Remember that excuse the next time you’re facing an audit. Just tell them it was the result of “chaos and porous risk controls” and that will eliminate any possibility of legal wrongdoing.

The vibrant conundrum

A Cincinnati man violates the Derbyshire Principle and pays the price:

Pat Mahaney was walking home Saturday with a six-pack of beer, looking forward to a quiet evening watching sports, when something hit him in the back of the head.

“The next thing I knew I woke up on my neighbor’s front step and the life squad was there,” the 45-year-old North College Hill resident said Wednesday.

Six teenagers “were just bored and were looking for something to do,” a police report said, when they ambushed Mahaney as he turned off Simpson Avenue onto Dallas Avenue. He was immediately knocked unconscious.

The report says “The first five arrestees were: twin brothers Tyree and Terrell Mizzell, Lamont Champion and Daquan Cain, all 13-year-olds; and Michael E. James, 14.” Remarkably, it is even noted deep within the text that “the suspects are black”.

The problem is that there is simply no easy and politically acceptable solution to the challenge presented by these bored young savages. They are still not civilized after more than 150 years of full immersion in quasi-European civilization and the historical pattern suggests they cannot be for at least another six to eight centuries. It increasingly appears they never will be, given the demographic and economics patterns that indicate European civilization in the Americas is much more likely to collapse than survive in its present form. Partition and segregation is probably the optimal post-collapse outcome at this point.

In the USA, and to a lesser extent in England, European civilization has been noticeably degraded in the last thirty years by African culture. This process can only continue, given the birth demograpics, and a melange of African, Hispanic, and European culture is the most probable outcome if the expected collapse does not occur. Such melanges can be positive, after all, the mix of Celtic, Saxon, Danish, and Norman cultures produced America in its original form. But something on the order of Brazil is probably a best case scenario, which anyone familiar with the South American nation would probably agree is at least a step or two downward, its soccer, supermodels, and samba notwithstanding.

Now, European culture will likely win out again in the North American continent, but after retreating to a post-collapse rump and going through a long revitalization process. We’ve seen both the Germans and the Russians go through the first part of this after WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union, respectively, and now it appears the American turn is approaching.

Women ruin everything: DEFCON edition

From atheist conferences to hacker conferences, women are complaining about them:

[E]veryone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Yes. Absolutely. The conference should do everything it legally can to dissuade “amazing women” from attending. Because what this foolish woman, in her obvious ignorance of cause-and-effect, is asserting that the absolute highest priority of the conference should be that women feel comfortable. The problem is that once that principle is established, the seeds of the conference’s destruction will have been planted, because women will always find a reason to claim they are uncomfortable. No one at DEFCON would benefit in the long term from more women attending, at least not under that principle, because it only creates more opportunities for women to feel uncomfortable. Therefore, more female attendees would eventually eviscerate DEFCON as the small core of male attendees who actually make the conference valuable would stop attending as their activities increasingly infringed upon female comfort. History is very clear on the way women degrade every male institution they successfully invade that they do not succeed in destroying entirely.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the policy statement recommended by one of her commenters: “This conference is for everybody and everybody visiting this conference should feel comfortable, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.” That’s not a hacker conference policy, that’s one establishing a comfort conference. The priority defines the purpose.

And lest you think I exaggerate concerning what might be erroneously dismissed as a slippery slope argument: “These guys can rationalize until they’re blue in the face but IT IS NEVER OKAY TO GIVE A LADY THE HEEBIE JEEBIES!”

We’re not even 100 years into the great equalitarian experiment and Western civilization is already on the verge of economic and demographic collapse. This is not a coincidence. Consider that it only took 79 years for the United Kingdom to go from granting all women over the age of 21 the franchise to voluntarily surrendering its national sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. When the Sports Guy said “the lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything”, he spoke nothing but the bitter truth.

The IMF on no-reserve banking

Karl Denninger digs up the document:

In a financial system with little or no reserve backing for deposits, and with government-issued cash having a very small role relative to bank deposits, the creation of a nation’s broad monetary aggregates depends almost entirely on banks’ willingness to supply deposits. Because additional bank deposits can only be created through additional bank loans, sudden changes in the willingness of banks to extend credit must therefore not only lead to credit booms or busts, but also to an instant excess or shortage of money, and therefore of nominal aggregate demand. By contrast, under the Chicago Plan the quantity of money and the quantity of credit would become completely independent of each other. This would enable policy to control these two aggregates independently and therefore more effectively. Money growth could be controlled directly via a money growth rule. The control of credit growth would become much more straightforward because banks would no longer be able, as they are today, to generate their own funding, deposits, in the act of lending, an extraordinary privilege that is not enjoyed by any other type of business. Rather, banks would become what many erroneously believe them to be today, pure intermediaries that depend on obtaining outside funding before being able to lend. Having to obtain outside funding rather than being able to create it themselves would much reduce the ability of banks to cause business cycles due to potentially capricious changes in their attitude towards credit risk.

Read that however many times you need to until it sinks in folks, because this is what I and a few others have been saying now for a long time — and our ideas are not only not really new, they’re also factually correct.

The “extraordinarily privilege” referenced above, were you or I to engage in it, would be called what it is — counterfeiting. “Generating their own funding, deposits”, is exactly that — creating money out of “thin air” though the unbacked emissions of credit. It is exactly identical in form and effect to you running off $100 bills on your office copier. And for every other entity other than a bank, it is a felony.

But it is Congress that has this power according to our Constitution. A commercial institution that operates for profit should never have the right to literally steal from you at its whim, but that is exactly what unbacked credit creation empowers a bank with — the ability to take everything you have by debasing your purchasing power to the point that you are forced to hock, or even sell and abandon, any asset you possess.

This is important if you want to understand the financial crisis and the inflation/deflation issue. Contra what you’ve been taught, loans don’t come from deposits. The loans come first. This is the “credit money” of which Mises wrote and is the reason that the mainstream economists are so confused by their continual focus on M1/M2, which are just a small fraction of the real money supply, which is Z1+M1/M2.

So, the inflationistas are correct in one sense. Inflation has been worse than is reported by the CPI-U. Vastly worse. However, this also shows why the central bank has been talking about the need to fight off deflation via “quantitative easing” despite the fact that M1/M2 have continued to increase; Z1 has been flat for four years despite the heroic efforts on the part of Washington to prop up spending by taking on a larger share of it.

As I showed in RGD, the USA is closer to a no-reserve banking system than the textbook ten percent fractional-reserve one. The credit money is pure digital counterfeiting, but it spends as readily as legal tender.

Mailvox: oh noes!

Sarah Palin isn’t invited to speak at the Republican convention? This outrage must not stand! We must do something! John Hawkins sends an email:

As you may have heard, Sarah Palin isn’t being given a speaking slot at the Republican National convention. Not only is Sarah Palin the single most prominent woman in the Republican party, a strong advocate of the Tea Party, and an electrifying speaker, she was the also VP candidate in 2008 and was one of the biggest impact players for the Republican Party during the 2010 elections. Not only does Sarah Palin deserve an opportunity to speak, she would be a tremendous asset at the convention.

Towards that end, I’m going to try to collect 10,000 signatures from conservatives who think Sarah Palin should be given a speaking slot. If you’re one of those conservatives, your signature, your link, and any help you can give on Facebook and Twitter would be much appreciated.

Won’t you please help? Think of the children!

Blitheringly stupid

Rush Limbaugh needs to untie the other half of his brain. The half he’s using now is clearly dysfunctional:

Radio giant Rush Limbaugh says he’s “jazzed” about Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate, and he expects an instant economic recovery if the Republican ticket wins in November.

“I guarantee you, if Ryan and Romney win this election, you’re gonna see the stock market go through the roof,” Limbaugh said this afternoon. “You’re gonna see small businesses start to hire. It’s gonna happen so fast, you’re not gonna believe it, the moment it’s known that Obama’s out of office.”

Limbaugh, the top-rated voice of the political right in America, says a true conservative is finally on the presidential ticket.

So, if Romney and Ryan are elected, the machines that make up the bulk of the stock market trading are going to kick it up another notch? And who is this “true conservative”? It certainly isn’t the guy with the voting record that belongs to Ryan (WI). Limbaugh is putting the Stupid in Stupid Party with this inane commentary. I’d be very interested to know precisely how Limbaugh thinks Romney and Ryan are going to make a 350 percent debt/GDP ratio disappear overnight.

Atheists abandon “religion causes war” argument

Scott Atran is the first atheist to publicly come out and admit the historical nonexistence of the oft-claimed connection between religion and war in Foreign Policy:

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored “God and War” audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Not only does Atran accept the argument I originally presented in a WND article before refining it in The Irrational Atheist, but his article is actually much less of a Fighting Withdrawal than the misleading subtitle – What we don’t understand about religion just might kill us – would lead the casual reader to believe.

Atran doesn’t mention either me or TIA, but TIA is clearly the source as not only is the argument the same as the one I first presented in 2004, but the war count of 123 also happens to be uniquely mine. The actual count from The Encylopedia of Wars index is not 123, but 121 – they made some errors, in my opinion, counting some non-religious wars such as the Fourth Crusade as religious and vice-versa – but the authors of the encylopedia actually failed to fully recognize the implications of their historical catalog concerning the historical irrelevance of religion to war. This can be seen in their Introduction:

“Wars have always arisen, and arise today, from territorial disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and strivings for commercial and economic advantage, and they have always depended on, and depend on today, pride, prejudice, coercion, envy, cupidity, competitiveness, and a sense of injustice. But for much of the world before the 17 century, these “reasons” for war were explained and justified, at least for the participants, by religion. Then around the middle of the 17th century, Europeans began to conceive of war as a legitimate means of furthering the interests of individual sovereigns….

The [French] revolution increased the size of the armed forces for European states from small professional outfits to huge conscript armies, whose citizen-soldiers needed more than reasons of state to risk their lives and fortunes for their rulers. The objectives of warfare were broadened from the conquest of this or that sliver of a kingdom to the spread of revolutionary ideals, and through this ideological backdoor something like the fervor of religion slipped back into war along with the mass of conscripts. Once again wars needed to be in some sense “holy” or, in the more secular lexicon of the times, “just”.”

Now, it doesn’t bother me terribly when people actively seek to avoid giving me credit for my more original ideas. I’ve learned to expect it, which is why you’ll never find this argument on Wikipedia even when everyone eventually comes to accept it as the historical fact that it truly is. I only find it genuinely irksome when others subsequently try to take credit for them or to claim they were always part of the status quo. The important thing is that the ideas are getting out there and the memes are spreading, and removing that specific arrow from the atheist’s rhetorical arsenal was always my main polemical object in presenting the argument.

That being said, I do find it amusing that The Irrational Atheist appears to be one of the more influential books that no one of substance will publicly admit to reading. In addition to the Atran admission – to say nothing of the informatively abrupt silence of Dawkins and Harris on the subject of religion and war – let’s not forget the Boston University study that offers initial confirmation of my hypothesis of a link between atheism and Asperger’s Syndrome.

WND column

Ryan is a RINO

Many Republicans are understandably pleased by Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as a running mate. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan is a natural-born American citizen and actually eligible for the office. Unlike Tim Pawlenty, he is not a spineless coward with all the charisma of fat-free vanilla yogurt. And unlike Robert Portman, he is not a member of the extended Bush family. He is intelligent. And unlike the current presidential administration, he’s capable of actually putting a budget together, which is a talent that should not go unremarked considering that the country has been operating without one for more than three years now.

Thanks to Slurtebrautfust for the list of Ryan votes. And there was one more well worth noting: YES to Budget Control Act of 2011 that raised the debt ceiling.