Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: homo inedicabilis

Although I am inclined to make heavy use of statistics-based probability in observing human behavior and find that it is a very useful tool in in explaining and predicting individual behavior, I never, ever forget that probability is not certainty and that even a powerful 97% statistical probability means that you can count on rolling boxcars sooner or later. Here are two examples of why I am always careful to distinguish between atheists who merely happen to lack god belief and militant/New atheists who can be expected to exhibit a predictable range of social disfunctionality and political ideology in addition to overt hostility towards that which they claim to be nonexistent.

M writes:

I love your blog. It really keeps me thinking every day. One of the most important things you have done for me is that, while not converting me from atheism, you have taught me that religious people can be just as skeptical and rational, if not more so (probably more so), than atheists. You have also really let me realize how irrational most atheists are. While I already knew most of the flaws, your retorts to their arguments are just so witty, concise, and overall entertaining…. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical of just about everything, from scientific claims to mystical claims to political claims. It’s no surprise that I would find myself loving the skeptics community, a world-wide network of people who embrace rational and critical thinking. Well, or so they claim.

Being a skeptic, I really wanted to go to the Amaz!ng Meeting 8 this weekend in Las Vegas. I forgot something, though. The skeptical community heavily overlaps with the new atheist movement, and they all seem to be, as you call them, “science fetishists”. There’s never enough skepticism about political issues. In fact, skeptics who don’t believe in global warming are quick to be called “climate change denialists.” I myself stay in the camp of “I don’t know, and I doubt you actually do either” but I don’t even say that, because I don’t want to deal with people about it.

It’s obvious that many of these people are irrational, even though they claim to embrace rational thinking. But what can we expect from a bunch of people who think Richard Dawkins has intelligent things to say? I love science. I love skepticism. I also love actually applying my rational thinking to the two. Thank you for writing a blog that actually uses critical thinking. I am glad that while I find one community is lacking, there is another community out there that has the right mindset.

Another atheist, S, writes in response to a previous atheist’s email:

I’m a big fan of your blog and although I don’t agree with everything you write, I think you’ve almost always got something interesting to say. I read your post regarding the comments by one “UberDawks”, and I have to say, I’m surprised that you were so easy on him. (I refer to Rule 1 of the blog- I thought that, given the guy’s total lack of reason or civility, you’d be a lot harsher, though the cartoon was an interesting touch.)

As an atheist, I have to say, I’m amazed at just how bad his “reasoning” really is. Unlike most atheists I find the notion of anthropogenic global warming to be deeply suspect, and I was not particularly surprised to find that the inquiries into Mann and Jones cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing- despite clear evidence that both ignored FOI requests, deleted and manipulated data, and exercised academic privilege to quash dissenting views. One would think that any reasonably literate atheist would at least be able to read those CRU emails.

As for his comments about the Founding Fathers- I think of myself as a libertarian, and I’ve often wondered myself about the religious views of some of the Founders, but I’ve never doubted that the men who built this nation were for the most part Christian in their outlook. It seems to me as though UberDawks has never even read the Declaration- the document makes clear references to Divine Providence and “the Supreme Judge of the Universe” right there in the text. And to ignore the role that Christian theology played in creating the Constitution is to ignore all of the Constitution’s understanding, clearly articulated in the text, of Man’s fallen nature and of the need to protect free men from the depredations of over-powerful governments and less-than-moral men. In other words, one would have to ignore the very reason the Constitution was created in the first place. That’s precisely the kind of leap of faith that atheists are supposed to be above making.

Overall I find UberDawks and his ilk to be mildly worrying. It’s no wonder that atheists can’t be trusted with power- if his email to you is representative of the level of thinking that goes on within the atheist community, secular nations with atheist or humanist leadership are in really big trouble. I also think that the peculiar atheist faith in man-made global warming exists primarily to replace the human need for some kind of faith in something. That still doesn’t make it a good idea; not all faiths are productive, and that particular one is downright absurd (and for once, it’s possible to show this scientifically).

S is correct to be worried about the more rabid species of atheist; their science fetishism and political utopianism is every bit as dangerous to more reasonable atheists and agnostics as they are to Christians and other theists. Still, I didn’t really see any need to kick UberDawk’s teeth in despite his incivility since he was clearly just a drive-by critic and the unreason and ignorance revealed in his email tended to render it self-refuting. One thing that people like him who wrongly perceive me as being intrinsically “anti-atheist” fail to understand is the significance of the difference between one’s religion and one’s political ideology. While they are usually related, they are seldom identical. My religious faith certainly colors my ideology, which is why I describe myself as a Christian libertarian, but the fact remains that I would vastly prefer atheist libertarians with realistic views of human corruptibility in positions of political leadership to both Christian progressives attempting to bring about Heaven on Earth and Christian conservatives seeking to impose Biblical morality through legislative fiat.

Of course, in addition to being imperfectly predictable, Most People Are Idiots, as demonstrated by this commenter at the New York Times. If this isn’t enough to cure you of an instinctive democracy fetish, nothing will.

“I am dismayed that commentators and inquisitors like Chris Matthews let their “guests” get away with the lie that “small businesses, not government, creates jobs.” I can’t believe that these troglodytes get away with pushing such a patently false proposition. As you may guess, I’m a government employee, and my money spends just as well as a window clerk at McDonalds. Spending is spending; buying is buying. I eat food, buy housing and clothing, and pay my utility bills just like everyone else. So why doesn’t keeping my job count just as much as me opening a small business? Let’s stop the lying.”

Yes, let’s absolutely stop all this lying and simply have government hire everyone who is out of work to do… something. After all, since government creates jobs just like small businesses, then there is no reason for anyone to be unemployed ever again! Mises wept.

Day vs Krugman

On Hayek vs Keynes. Krugman redefines the concept of bizarre:

First, Hayek was as bad on the Depression as I thought. The claim that “many of the troubles of the world at the present time are due to imprudent borrowing and spending on the part of the public authorities” — in 1932! — is bizarre.

Yes, this graph of sovereign defaults from 1921 to 1980 quite clearly shows that there was absolutely no problem with imprudent borrowing and spending by the public authorities.  Here is the list of the 25 sovereign defaults covering the time that Hayek and Keynes were debating; from 1930 to 1934.  Notice that the bulk of them happened to come precisely in 1932.

Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Peru, Turkey, Liberia, Austria, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Cuba, Guatemala, Romania, Uruguay, Yugoslavia.

And the Keynesian “solution” to the problem didn’t help much either, since there were 14 more sovereign defaults before WWII ended in 1945:  Colombia, Poland, Brazil, Austria, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, China, Germany, Austria, Japan, Poland, Turkey, Hungary, Japan.

The only thing that is bizarre here is Paul Krugman’s inability to connect “imprudent borrowing and spending by the public authorities” with historical sovereign defaults. Now consider how much panic has rocked the markets due to two mere threats of sovereign defaults by two very small nations, Dubai and Greece. Think about how many banks failed or were nationalized after the credit crunch of 2008. Then think about the possibility that no less than 25 nations default on their debts before 2014. Do you think that just might, perhaps, have some effect on the international financial system? Krugman’s Keynesian know-it-all act was always ridiculous, but now he’s fast approaching self-parody with his astonishing inability to comprehend that debt really is a problem despite the Keynesian model’s insistence otherwise.

Help, help, they’re being repressed!

 Come see the religious oppression inherent in the system!  In tangetially-related news, this email from UberDawks may amuse:

I’ve been reading your blog and I have to say that it is chock full of the most delusional christard fundamentalist bullshit I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading.   Guess what jerkweed, the CRU was just CLEARED, and Penn State found that the “hockey stick” held up. Where is your precious “Climategate” now?! Packed away with the rest of the fundie Christian myths?

Also, the constitution was not based on the BIBLE you historically inept moron. The posters on your site are idiots. The founding fathers WERE deists and DID NOT base the Constitution on your idiotic cracker-blessed bible. You should all educate yourselves by reading Chris Rodda’s articles at HuffPo.

No wonder PZ Myers won’t debate you, you’re so ignorant that it would be like a mighty bearded hammer fighting a skinny, bald nail.  You don’t understand science, you don’t understand history and I’m pretty sure you are as batshit crazy as Jesus was, I would wait for a response…but you have NO arguments to make.
To reiterate from my previous post, there were only two, at most three Deists in comparison with the 52 Christians, most of them CALVINISTS, who were at the Constitutional Convention.  The same Christian-heavy ratio is true of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  The CRU was “cleared” in a whitewash where the science, such as it was, was not examined in any way, shape, or form and it is a far cry from Penn State finding that Michael Mann was not guilty of professional misconduct to claiming that the university declared that the long-disproven “hockey stick” temperature graph is valid.  When did the myth of Global Warming become adopted as an article of the atheist faith?
UberDawks concludes by demonstrating that impeccable atheist logic which insists that PZ Myers regularly runs away from debating people because he is afraid he will destroy them so utterly.  And to think that these are the intellectual giants who want you to take them on faith that God does not exist.

Mailvox: the hierarchy of female attractiveness

A number of people have been asking me if there is a female equivalent to the Alpha-Omega scale of male socio-sexual attractiveness. I originally replied, rather facetiously, that there is a perfectly useful 1-10 scale that doesn’t strain anyone’s brain to comprehend, but of course, it is obvious there is more to a woman’s socio-sexual rating than her raw physical beauty at a given moment. However, it wasn’t until I read The Sex Risk for Women That No One Likes to Talk About that I realized how the female scale works.

As David Buss says, the modern conditions for mating may have changed significantly, but humans still employ the same sexual strategies. Of the 67 traits men seek in a committed partner, faithfulness and sexual loyalty rank as the most important in every culture ever studied…. While men seek women with promiscuity, sexual experience and high sex drive when selecting for short-term mating, they still retain the preference for a sexually inexperienced wife, or at least one who is less experienced than they are.

In the era of hooking up, this concern is exacerbated as the number of inexperienced woman has dropped dramatically. One of the things I hear most from men like Conflicted is that they have no interest in stepping in to pick up the pieces after women have been “used up” by other men. It’s insulting to their pride for obvious reasons, and many will refuse to marry if they cannot find a woman who meets their requirements.

Now, we already know that men place a high value on female beauty, so if we take into account that sexual loyalty also matters a great deal to them as well as how a woman’s sexual history serves as a practical proxy for that otherwise indeterminable loyalty, we can construct a scale that should reliably describe a woman’s socio-sexual attractiveness to men. The Center for Disease Control reports that women between the ages of 20 to 59 anonymously report their sexual histories as follows.

Slutty: 15+ partners: 9.4 percent
Frisky: 7-14 partners: 21.3 percent
Normal: 2-6 partners: 44.3 percent
Chaste: 0-1 partners: 25 percent

Also according to the CDC, the median number of sexual partners for women of what has lately become the normal age of marriage (25-29) is 4. The report also shows that the sexual history proxy is a reasonable one for future marital prospects; 30.8% of Chaste women are currently married and 6.5% are divorced whereas only 7.4% of Slutty women are currently married compared to 19.1% who are divorced.

To keep things relatively simple, I will next divide women into four categories based on their perceived physical beauty on the conventional 1-10 scale as follows:

Barbie: 9-10: 5 percent
Babe: 7-8: 15 percent
Jane: 4-6: 50 percent
Coyote: 1-3: 30 percent

The key thing to remember here is that men have a very binary approach to women. What they are looking for in the immediate term is almost never what they prefer in the long term. For permanent relationships, which I assume is the hierarchy of interest here, most men prefer to drop down one level on the Beauty side in favor of going up one level on the History side, the possible exception being the Alphas who put a premium on Beauty and for whom the numerical difference between Normal and Slutty is a rounding error in their own telephone book-length sexual histories.

Tier 1: Chaste Barbie, Normal Barbie, Chaste Babe
Tier 2: Frisky Barbie, Normal Babe, Chaste Jane
Tier 3: Slutty Barbie, Frisky Babe, Normal Jane
Tier 4: Slutty Babe, Frisky Jane, Chaste Coyote
Tier 5: Slutty Jane, Normal, Frisky, and Slutty Coyotes

This explains both Conflicted’s negative reaction to his girlfriend’s history and the Hot Wife + Herb combination that puzzles so many observers of human relationships regardless of their sex. Conflicted thought he had scored a Normal Babe, but she turned out to be a Slutty Babe. So, her value declined accordingly in his eyes to such an extent that he is contemplating ending the dating relationship and almost surely will decline to marry her. In the case of the Hot Wife + Herb, it’s most likely an obvious case of a woman having her Beauty value reduced by her History value.

Now, as Spacebunny points out, these are merely general guidelines based on statistics and there are always individual exceptions. But it explains why even the prettiest porn stars don’t marry Alphas and why relatively unattractive women manage to marry highly desirable men like Piers Brosnan and Matt DamonDenzel Washington. It also shows the clear choice that young women have to make between their short-term hypergamous instincts and their long-term marital prospects. And to me, one of the more interesting things is the way women tend to share this hierarchical view of their own sex with men, whereas men are often contemptuous of the smarmier sort of Alpha and simply cannot believe women put such a high value on them.

Attempting to redefine reality

To say nothing of blowing a hole right through Divine Exceptionalist theology:

A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman. Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage law violates the Constitutional right of married same-sex couples to equal protection under the law and upends the federal government’s long history of allowing states to set their own marriage laws.

And now that the one man, one woman definition has been arbitrarily struck down on nonsensical grounds, there can be absolutely no question that the one man, one woman part will be challenged and struck down as well. All of the homogamy supporters who claim otherwise are already wrong, as anyone who happens to have read a pro-polygamy press release will know. That’s a done deal. It’s a bit more of a stretch to be able to tell if people will also be able to marry animals due to the presumed consent issues, but you can bet that some horse-loving freakshow is going to try. It’s legal in New Zealand, you know.

Of course, the licensed tripartite entity that the government calls marriage isn’t actually marriage anyhow, which is why I’m personally quite relaxed about this sort of thing. Two or three or ten men can call themselves a school of fish if they want to, but their self-application of the title doesn’t make them so.

Now, I tend to think that America is doomed because of its addiction to debt, but the social engineers are certainly building an impressive argument on behalf of the various religious eschatologists. It takes a pretty sizable set of historical blinders not to see the signs of a diseased and decadent society approaching its final days.

Progress to the precipice

It only looks like you’re going onward and upward until you go over the cliff’s edge:

Who has driven America to this precipice? Certainly part of the blame belongs to the politicians, primarily Democrats, who created and enlarged these entitlements without imposing taxes anywhere near sufficient to sustain them, and otherwise seriously mismanaged the programs’ finances. On a deeper level, however, the blame belongs to the late-19th- and early-20th-century Progressive movement. Despite recent claims that the Progressives had little impact upon the development of liberalism in the New Deal and beyond, including in the realm of social insurance, the Progressives were in fact the founding fathers of social insurance in America. Far from making a break with Progressivism, accordingly, the enactment of these programs during the New Deal and Great Society represents the clear policy fruit of the philosophical revolution as to the end of government, and the fundamental conception of morality underlying it, that the Progressives fought so vigorously to effect.

Of course, persuading many Americans that Progressivism initiated a struggle over the soul of America is a hard sell. For decades, liberal scholars and politicians have attributed the 20th-century growth of government to changes in the mere material circumstances of American life. The Progressive era’s progressive reforms, we have been told, were the necessary and inevitable response to problems created by the closing of the frontier, the rise of huge corporations and a transition to large-scale factory production, population shifts out of the countryside and into the city, large waves of immigration, etc. The New Deal, in turn, was simply a response to the economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. By attributing these periods’ reforms to America’s changing material circumstances, the orthodox view implies that there was no change of philosophical or moral import likewise under way. More to the point, it implies that the Progressives’ reforms were guided by the principles of the American Founding.

And yet this is demonstrably false.

How I love those two words. “Demonstrably false”. That, all ye of the Dread Ilk, is the hallmark of a writer who knows what she is talking about and is calling her shot. It’s a very good article showing how Progressivism is intrinsically hostile to natural and individual rights and has replaced them with government-granted, situational privileges. And she even shows how it is ultimately self-limiting given the inexorable requirements of increasing debt involved.

The Three Billion Images of Eve

They downloaded all the porn? It would appear so, seeing that The Artist Now Known As Prince Again has declared that “The internet is completely over“. I suppose this moment was always inevitable. Isaac Asimov even wrote a story about what would happen when the picture of the last woman on Earth to display her naked talents was finally posted on the Internet. Or something like that, anyhow.

Around the world, without any fuss, the servers were going offline.

You’re crude, Mr. Krugman

And ignorant. And most importantly, demonstrably and provably wrong.

I’m Gonna Haul Out The Next Guy Who Calls Me “Crude” And Punch Him In The Kisser….

All through this debate, a recurring theme among anti-Keynesians has been that Keynesians like me or Brad are ignorant primitives who don’t know anything about modern macro. It’s really hard to see where that comes from, since I’ve done plenty of intertemporal optimizing in my time

Bring it on, Internet tough guy. Tell you what. I won’t even duck. And then, in the immortal words of one River Tam, my turn.

Oh, and as for why people think you are an ignorant primitive, this display certainly belongs on the list.

You’re not part of the solution

If you want to know why there is no hope for America, it is because “conservatives” like Roger Simon have successfully managed to put themselves forward as the Right when in fact they are, and have always been, nothing more than the right side of the Left:

When I was young, early twenties, I felt tremendous guilt about what happened to black people in this country, even though my family arrived here fifty years after the freeing of the slaves and were themselves escaping the pogroms of Europe. Those feelings — and a sense of what was right, of course — propelled me into the civil rights movement and I am very proud to have participated. When I moved to Los Angeles and began making money in Hollywood, I still wanted to do something and started to help finance the Black Panther Breakfast Program. The Panthers did seem a bit on the tough side, but somehow I thought it was the right thing to do. Those kids in Watts were hungry, weren’t they? The “black supremacy thing” was just a “phase.”

Well, soon enough it became obvious that I was wrong. The supremacy thing was the least of it. Or a charade. The Panthers were thugs. Even worse, they were murderers and drug dealers. Worst of all, they were a horrible example to their community, a straight line ticket to oblivion.

And when I look at the videos of the New Black Panthers menacing voters in front of the polling place, I see the same thing, the same guys. Any African-American who really cared about his people would want those thugs prosecuted. He wouldn’t want them on the street as am example to the children of the community.

Mr. Simon, you are as wrong today as you were wrong then. You clearly haven’t learned anything about tribal loyalties since you were so magnanimously attempting to structurally alter the very place that offered your family a place of refuge. The easily verifiable fact is that despite your totally irrelevant opinion about what African-Americans should care about or think, no African-American wants to see a few Black Panthers prosecuted for voter intimidation any more than he wanted to see OJ found guilty of murder.

Mr. Simon’s personal history offers a very clear case against the immigration he supports. Notice that he is actually proud of having worked to increase Federal power while successfully weakening individual property rights and the Constitutional right to free association. As Hayek pointed out regarding “social justice”, “civil rights” are not and cannot be unalienable rights endowed by a Creator. They are nothing more than politically inspired, government-granted privileges. While a small amount of immigration can certainly strengthen a society, mass immigration does nothing but alter, weaken, and eventually destroy it. There is no “strength through diversity”, only “conquest through division” a fact that most of history’s great conquerors have known and utilized. You will note that the diversity and immigration advocates never cite any historical examples for the obvious reason that migration, as mass immigration is more accurately labled, has long been the death knell of the societies inundated by it.

For those who missed it before, I note that “the melting pot” is ahistorical fiction written by a hypocritical Zionist and no one who cites it as some sort of societal ideal should be taken any more seriously than a guy wearing a red Star Trek uniform and calling for the establishment of the United Federation of Planets. Moreover, the melting pot ideal is at its core nothing more than the usual utopian Marxist transnationalism: “Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man.”

Kicking the Krugster

David Brooks is ever so polite as he expresses his doubts about the Neo-Keynesians call for a Third Stimulus, but there’s no question as to whom he is putting his genteel, moderate boot:

These Demand Siders have very high I.Q.’s, but they seem to be strangers to doubt and modesty. They have total faith in their models. But all schools of economic thought have taken their lumps over the past few years. Are you really willing to risk national insolvency on the basis of a model?

Moreover, the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron. But, in fact, many prize-festooned economists do not support another stimulus. Most European leaders and central bankers think it’s time to begin reducing debt, not increasing it — as do many economists at the international economic institutions. Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.

No, they don’t. Nor will they have one for the next ten years. They’ll have an explanation all right – the bitter-end liquidationists didn’t let us spend enough money – but it won’t be a good one or a correct one.

UPDATE – And Krugman is forced to immediately start lying in response. “Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.”

Krugman hopes we’ve all forgotten that he calculated a $600 billion stimulus was needed before the Obama administration championed the $787 billion stimulus passed by Congress.