Category: Uncategorized

I completely forgot to do it last time, but this time I will be sure to actually get everyone’s blogs onto the blogroll. I’ve had a few requests lately, so if you’d like to have your blog added to the Voxologisti, please let me know in the comments to this post. The only requirement is to put VP in your blogroll and to give me both your blogname as well as the blog URL.

Just a reminder for those interested: the Summa Elvetica surge will take place tomorrow between 12 noon and 12 midnight Eastern, so if you’re planning to participate, make sure you get your orders in between those times. Amazon says out of stock, but ignore that since it’s a print-to-order system anyhow.

I don’t know exactly what time I’ll start pollblogging tomorrow, but Spacebunny and I will be sitting down with a bottle of prosecco or two in front of the television starting sometime around 3 PM EST. In order to maximize our viewing pleasure, we’ll switch between CNN and MSNBC if Obama looks to be losing, or Fox if things aren’t going McCain’s way. Feel free to swing by, hang out, and bask in the schadenfreude however it turns out.

The best part of being a libertarian is never having to worry about how the election turns out.

Over the last week, numerous people have emailed me and asked for my prediction regarding the election. My predictions are of limited value, of course, given my notorious inability to correctly predict either 2008 nomination in 2003, but since I dislike cowardly commentators who refuse to go out on a limb for fear of damaging their precious reputations, I consider myself bound to honor these requests and make a prediction about who will win the presidency tomorrow.

The media experts are pretty much all predicting an Obama win of varying degrees. FiveThirtyEight rates it at a 96.3 percent probability. Ever since the September economic meltdown occurred and McCain blew his handling of the bail-out so badly, I also assumed that Obama would win going away, but as the election has drawn closer and I’ve paid more attention to the details, I’ve noticed a few significant cracks in their basic assumptions. I’m not just being contrary here, I’m basing my prediction on three pre-established factors that don’t involve my instinctive distrust of expert consensus.

The first is my five-point rule. In general, if a Democrat leads by less than five points in the polls, he loses. I was planning to run the numbers today, but the Baseball Savant already did so I don’t have to. He points out:

Look at the states that would flip to McCain if the 5% adjustment holds true:

Colorado: Obama +4.3
North Carolina: Obama +0.5
Nevada: Obama +2.6
Ohio: Obama +2.1
Virginia: Obama +4.4

I haven’t checked the Savant’s math, but he’s a competent guy and assuming that he added the states up correctly, it looks as if McCain will not only win, but will win by a larger margin in the electoral college than George W. Bush did. Also note that during the primary voting, Obama’s exit polling was overestimated by SEVEN percent on average.

Second, I’ve been very skeptical of the polls this time around because they’re based on new and improved models that have not been hitherto used and did not work well in the primaries. Thanks to Alan Greenspan and the Black Swan Boyz, we’ve all had it driven very well home that untested new models seldom work anywhere nearly as well as advertised. These new polling models are predicated on the idea that due to the sheer wonderfulness of Barack Obama, the turnout patterns will be very different than they’ve historically been. The problem is that turnout among new voters, young voters, and Hispanic voters has actually been lagging among those voting early. It’s certainly true that voter registrations have been extraordinarily high, but it must be kept in mind that the ease with which registration can now be accomplished logically suggests that the percentage of registered voters who fail to vote will also be at an all-time high.

Third, the anxious actions of the Obama campaign belie the seemingly serene confidence of the Obama candidate. Obama’s success in building a political career has largely been based on illusion, and I think the air of calm assurance that he’s been projecting is a false one. By all rights, he should be absolutely slaughtering McCain; Hillary would probably be 20 points ahead at this point. But he isn’t, and since he hasn’t sealed the deal by now with such powerful Democratic winds at his back, it suggests that the deal is not sealable by him.

I’m not voting for either man. My considered opinion is that America would be worse off in the short term and better off in the long term with an Obama victory. But based on my observations, I am forced to conclude that despite the way things superficially appear, John McCain will win the election. The two key states to watch are New Hampshire and Virginia, with a particular emphasis on Virginia. If either of them go for McCain, you can safely conclude that it’s over in the GOP’s favor.

John Scalzi has his own take on things electoral, upon which I’ve commented in some detail in case you’re interested.

UPDATE – Bob Krumm puts significantly more work into his analysis and reaches very similar conclusions. All hail Logic: the lazy intellectual’s shortcut. It’s entirely possible that we could both be wrong, of course, but look at it this way. If your life was on the line, would you bet on the precision of the media’s new polling models?

He regards fairness about as favorably as I regard equality:

With two days to go before the election, I felt it was time to bubble this one back to the top. I do so now because one party in this election has made it a stated goal, if it wins the Presidency and gains fillibuster-proof control of the Senate, to reinstate the Orwellianly misnamed “Fairness Doctrine.”

As someone who once held an FCC broadcaster’s license and was required to learn the Fairness Doctrine as catechism, this disturbs me deeply. The Fairness Doctrine sounds innocuous enough. “Oh, it’s just about making them give equal time to both sides.”

Wrong! The Fairness Doctrine was always, from its inception, about suppressing domestic political dissent, and for 50 years it did so very effectively.

Allow me to backtrack a moment. I held an FCC broadcaster’s license. What this means is that while the station’s engineers held a different class of license, and the station owner held yet another kind of license (and I believe those requirements remain), I — and all other on-air personalities at the time — was required to have a license from the government simply in order to be allowed to speak live and on the air.

Of course, being a government license, it could be suspended or revoked at any time on the whim of a single government bureaucrat, and if it was suspended or revoked, I was off the air. After all, the engineer and the station owner didn’t want to risk having their licenses suspended or revoked for allowing me to speak.

So imagine that. Having to get a license from the government in order to exercise your First Amendment rights, and having to live in constant fear of having it revoked every time you opened your mouth in front of a live microphone. That is what the so-called Fairness Doctrine is all about.

Actually, I suspect the Fairness Doctrine will be among the least of our concerns now that Obama has announced his plans for a New Obamanation Army. And, to be honest, I find it more than a little ludicrous to look to John McCain, the author of McCain-Feingold, as the great guardian of free political speech. The amusing thing would be if McCain somehow won, but then signed the Fairness Doctrine into law anyhow.

Speaking of the presidency, I’ll post the oft-requested prediction later this morning.

That brave, bold atheist, who nevertheless fears to debate Christians on secular radio stations, actually dares to label others as cowards:

Hey, Christian cowards — if you’re going to try again to get this person kicked off youtube, at least be brave enough to ‘fess up here first…and let’s hear you explain why your faith is so weak that it cannot hold up against free speech.

Keep in mind, this is the very same individual who is afraid to go on Northern Alliance Radio because he fears it might be as unsympathetic to atheists as Pharyngula is to Christians. So, fess up PZ, let’s hear you explain why your reason is so weak that it cannot hold up against free speech.

76 Alamo City Spartans (7-1-0)
52 Judean Peoples Front (3-5-0)

63 Mounds View Meerkats (5-3-0)
58 Silver Spooners (3-3-2)

89 Burns Redbeards (6-2-0)
44 Winston Reverends (2-6-0)

74 Greenfield Grizzlies (3-4-1)
60 Valders Valkyries (4-4-0)

76 Masonville Marauders (3-4-1)
37 Black Mouth Curs (2-6-0)

This is your weekly NFL discussion thread. Tennessee is really looking very good now that Fisher has had the sense to give up on the Vince Young Project. Kerry Collins was always a decent quarterback, and Rich Gannon has already showed how a long-time mediocre quarterback can take full advantage of his years of experience towards the end of his career should he find himself with the right team at the right time. They certainly look like the team to beat at the moment. But, as last year’s Super Bowl showed, it must always be kept in mind that the NFL is very seldom a done deal.

VP-AFL

136 Masonville Marauders (7-1-0)
114 The Thunder (4-4-0)

107 Az Hammeroids (6-1-1)
78 Cranberry Bogs (4-4-0)

103 Carpe Oro (3-5-0)
74 Bukkakelypse Boyz (3-5-0)

97 Alamo City Spartans (4-4-0)
66 Supernaut’s Jihad (4-4-0)

92 COS McRays (2-6-0)
28 Village Valkyries (2-5-1)

Doesn’t this just make you dream happily about a sex-inclusive military draft with no college exemptions? Because you know that between Zimbabwe, Kenya, and the Congo, a President Obama is going to invade Africa one way or another. Perhaps he’s planning to use his armed, federally-funded civilian national security force. The only question is, will they wear black shirts or brown?

The Obama campaign leads by better than 2-1 in newspaper endorsements from dailies and weeklies, based on our tally so far. But the Democratic ticket has an even more impressive lead when it comes to college newspapers — 63 to 1, according to UWIRE’s Presidential Endorsement Scorecard

There’s no shortage of evidence that most people are idiots. This is fundamental to the most basic understanding of human society. But what’s special about American college students is not that they’re not idiots devoid of wisdom and life experience, it’s that they truly believe they are highly knowledgeable and well-educated despite reliably demonstrating the exact opposite. I despised them when I was in college and I would probably loathe them more now if I ever had to have any contact with them. Thankfully I don’t, as in my decades of experience traveling around the world, I yet to encounter a more reliably foolish group of individualspeople.

One of the things I really enjoy about Voxiversity is seeing the awareness of self-ignorance bloom into full-flower in many of the participants. This is because everyone, no matter how intelligent, is ignorant of most things; the most certain way to conclusively establish that you are a fool is to believe yourself without ignorance. Unless you recognize and accept your ignorance about a subject, you cannot do anything about filling in those voids in your knowledge base. While I tend to despise Socrates and find his deceptive dialogues to be vastly overrated, there is something to be said for his open-handed approach to knowledge, which is both humble and arrogant at the same time.

The problem with the college-educated is that most of them don’t understand that education is not about listening to lectures, being graded, or receiving external confirmation that you happened to possess a certain amount of information about a subject at a specific point in time. The certificate culture is antithetical to a learning one. And, I should point out, being maleducated on a subject is worse than being totally ignorant. It’s much better to know that you have no knowledge than to possess a little and assume you know much.

This is why, all too often, the A-student in college is no better than a C-student of life.

UPDATE – Jonah Goldberg is similarly unimpressed by the would-be opinion leaders of tomorrow:

I find it hilarious how much respect many readers have for the intellectual chops of these kids. Having been to dozens of campuses this year alone, let me tell you that college newspaper workers (I was an editor myself) are not a superior breed of student. Some are impressive. Many aint. Most are just younger versions of grown-up journalists, only more liberal, more self-important, more emotional and more resentful that people don’t care enough about what they have to say.

One of its clients emails from Old Blighty:

Caught the last 20 mins of the radio show. Great stuff, except I can’t believe you don’t think your writing has much influence! The irrational atheist is a key work in the fight against atheist propaganda. There’s nothing more important than doing the Lord’s work, the material cares of this world are nothing compared with the agony of the Soul! Which isn’t to say that you’ve been entirely un-influential in the economic sphere. In fact possibly you’ve played a key role in the chain of events leading to the government action needed to manage the current global crises!

I hadn’t been paying that much attention to economics recently, but when I saw your blog about the bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in early Sept I immediately saw that was a pivotal moment and got straight on to Gordon Brown about the historic opportunity he had for fiscal socialism…. I know he was receiving similar advice from the Treasury and Bank of England officials, but even so it’s possible a much less optimal set of decisions could have been made if it weren’t for the communication sparked by your blog! You might be skeptical about this… I guess you might not be pleased about this, but hopefully you wont be anti-Keynesian all your life, many great advocates of a system start off by being opposed to it.

I… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. It tends to bring to mind the Deee-Lite video, when Bootsy admits that the band has definitely been known to smoke. Regardless, let me just say that I am very much not a fan of Gordon Brown for all that he has figured in my past fiction, I think Alastair Darling is off his rocker to openly advocate straight Keynesian policies as any sort of solution to the current crisis, and I find it very difficult to imagine any series of events that would lead me to honestly conclude that John Maynard Keynes’s economic theories were correct in any substantive degree.

That being said, it must be admitted that the Prime Minister’s actions were somewhat better than those of his US counterpart. The British responses have been, at least thus far, marginally less toxic than the US actions, since the British taxpayers are getting something tangible for their banking bail-out money. Nationalization may be stupid and short-sighted, but it’s not as astonishingly idiotic as paying for a bank and then not taking it home with you.

I would simply assume that this was some sort of joke, were it not for the fact that I’ve had more than one battle in Alterac Valley interrupted by telephone calls from Congressmen this year. And people wonder why my sense of reality tends to run a bit askew at times….

And we’re off again with Voxiversity II, this time with the focus on economics, specifically the Austrian theory take on the Great Depression. ProProfs has significantly changed its system, mostly for the better, but due to some flaws in its open statistical reporting I’d encourage everyone to take the quiz before getting into the discussions here or poking around in the statistics. I really don’t care if people cheat or not, but doing so is pretty self-defeating since it’s not as if the results are going to show up on your PERMANENT RECORD. At the Voxiversity, failure indicates nothing more than a gap in your knowledge base, thus allowing you to rectify the situation.

If you have questions about anything or wish clarification, don’t hesitate to ask questions here. I’m sure someone will answer them and it’s entirely possible that they may even be correct. Also, this post will remain at the top of the page throughout the day, so scroll down for any later posts.

The reading for next week is Chapter 1, pages 3-37 on the positive theory of the business cycle.

Rachel Lucas points us to Iowahawk’s latest satirical masterpiece. Now, whoever can he possibly be describing?

If you are a conservative like me, you guffawed when you heard John McCain announced this declasse rube as a running mate, followed by good-natured applause, thinking it was some sort of whimsical campus prank he was reenacting from his Annapolis years. This was, of course, quickly followed the shock of realizing that he wasn’t joking, and all that Hanoi unpleasantness had finally driven him around the bend.

It’s an inescapable conclusion that this woman has, in 6 short weeks, single-handedly destroyed the Republican party. Certainly George Bush may share some of the blame; but we conservatives must remember how our hopes were buoyed by his impressive bloodlines and Yale degree before we realized his excursion to Texas had caused him to “go native.” But la Palin offers true conservatives no such extenuating graces. I mean, my God, this woman is simply awful; the elided vowels, the beauty pageantry, the guns, the crude non-Episcopal protestantism, the embarrassing porchload of children with horrifying hillbilly names, the white after Labor Day. As fellow conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan quipped to me the other day outside a Martha’s Vineyard antique shop, it’s gratifying to know the Gipper isn’t alive to see what has become of his party.

But it’s not just American conservatives who are appalled. Just last week conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and I were enjoying an apres-badminton apertif at the family weekend house in Montauk with my good friend Viscount Klaus-Maria Von Wallensheim, the conservative EU Agricultural Pricing Minister with whom I shared an Alpine chalet and manservant during our years as classmates at a Swiss boarding school. “Kloonkie” (my old school appellation for the Viscount) reported the growing dismay of the Continental Right over Palin’s embarrassing enthusiasm for childbirth and Israel.

“Coddsie, old chap,” he warned, “You know I’ve always been America’s biggest defender in Monaco. But if you elect this ill-bred charwoman, I will be forced to move anchor to St. Tropez out of pure shame.”

David and I were left nodding silently, for how else could we respond? If Palin has lost Kloonkie, she has surely lost the entire conservative movement.

I have spoken contemptuously of the New York-Washington Axis that dominates the so-called conservative commentariat. The truth is, they aren’t conservatives, they aren’t libertarians, and they might as well go back to the left where they have always belonged. Why, one asks, should any man or woman of the Right pay any attention to what the “conservatives” who make up The New York Times and two-thirds of National Review think any longer?

“Just like the Democrats, only a little less,” is not a functional political strategy. It barely even qualifies as a coherent tactic, for crying out loud.