Category: Uncategorized

Free trade’s fundamental flaw

It is little wonder that utopians of various flavors, from Communist to libertarian, are enamored of free trade. Because it now requires a utopian-level credulity to believe that free trade is a viable option in a fallen world.

When I was growing up we were taught in sixth grade that Democrats wanted “tariff for revenue only;” Republicans wanted protective tariff to keep manufacturing – and jobs – at home. Abraham Lincoln said of tariff, if he buys a shirt from England, he gets the shirt but the money leaves the country and pays wages to Englishmen; if he buys it from a US manufacturer, he has the shirt, and the money stays in America, paying American workers. This is, according to Ricardo, far too simple an analysis; but it appeals to reason. American goods may cost more without overseas competition, but the money and jobs stay/ cheaper goods are not always appealing to those who have no jobs to give then wages, and must rely in government to pay them for not working; and a sizeable number of “workers” resent being on the unemployment role and getting welfare aid.

The US establishment went to war in 1940, and suddenly produced tanks, rifles, airplanes, trucks, bandages, ammunition, cargo ships and battleships; when the American people rose up they drowned Germany and Japan in war materiel. The German war machine used animal drawn transport to supply much of the Wehrmacht; The United States turned the last cavalry regiments into mechanized units and the Red Ball Express that supplied Patton. I used mules to plow cotton fields during World War II; but our soldiers did not depend on mules for ammunition. If all our plants had been in Frankfurt instead of Detroit, the outcome might have been different.

It’s not as if China is the enemy of the West or manufactures anything  militarily important, right?

Psychologist, heal thyself

This is why therapy is reliably doomed to failure:

Confessions of a depressed psychologist: I’m in a darker place than my patients.

I am sitting opposite my sixth patient of the day. She is describing a terrible incident in her childhood when she was abused, sexually and physically, by both of her parents. I am nodding, listening and hoping I appear as if I appear normal. Inside, however, I feel anything but.

My head is thick – as if I’m thinking through porridge. I find myself tuning out and switching to autopilot. I put it down to tiredness – I haven’t slept well recently; last night I managed just two hours – but after the session I’m disappointed in myself. I’m worried that I might have let down my patient and I feel a bit of  a failure, but I tell no one.

One week later, I am in my car, driving across a bridge. Everything should be wonderful – my partner has a new job, my career as a psychologist in the NHS is going well, plus it’s almost Christmas, the second with our young child, and we’re readying ourselves for a move to London.

Yet, my mind is thick again. My only lucid thought is, “What if I turned the steering wheel and drove into the bridge support? What if I stuck my foot on the pedal and went straight off the edge? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?”

I grip the steering wheel and force myself to think, instead, of my partner and child. They are the two people who get me home safely.

It is the sort of anecdote I have heard from clients time and time again. I became a psychologist because I have a natural nurturing tendency – I never dreamt I would be the vulnerable one. But 10 years ago I found myself suffering from an extremely severe episode of depression that lasted three months, left me unable to work for six weeks and, at my very lowest, saw me contemplating suicide.

Would you go to a plumber whose toilet is overflowing? Would you hire a computer programmer who didn’t know how to use a computer? Then why would you ever talk to one of these nutjobs in order to fix whatever mental issues you might be having? In addition to the 46 percent of psychologists who the NHS reports as being depressed, “out of 800 psychologists sampled, 29 per cent reported suicidal ideation and 4 per cent reported attempting suicide.”

There is very little scientific evidence of the benefits of psychology. I read one recent study which showed that neurotic individuals actually stabilize on their own at a higher rate than those who seek therapy. This is no surprise, as the foundations of psychology are literally fiction. One might as reasonably base one’s economics on Isaac Asimov novels.

How many people do you know that have gone into therapy and never exited it? Those who advocate therapy are rather like fat people testifying to the efficacy of diet plans on which they never lose any weight.

Literally Who admits defeat

The Ralph Retort takes a victory lap as the first fraud of anti-GamerGate finally gives up:

In case you missed it, Zoe Quinn dropped the harassment charges against Eron Gjoni yesterday. It almost brings the long legal saga to an end for Mr. Gjoni, although my understanding is the appeal that was filed against Ms. Quinn’s gag order (Fall 2014 report) will continue. That’s good, because it’s important that we set precedent against this sort of thing happening again. There’s another problem that unfortunately won’t be settled by the courts, though, and that’s the trashy and unethical mainstream media. Honestly, I don’t mind the trashy part. It’s the lies that make my blood boil. I roll around in the dirt here fairly frequently, but I always tell you the truth as I know it at the time. That’s something that will never change. Our opponents on the other side can’t claim that with a straight face.

The mainstream media and the SJW blogosphere have no interest in the truth. They simply want to spin dishonest narratives and get paid for it…. She asked for the charges to be brought and she asked for them to be
dropped. It’s called “loss by forfeit,” you fucking idiots. The first
thing I thought after reading The Mary Sue post was: “How stupid do you have to be to write something like that?” Then, the second thing that ran through my mind was: They aren’t stupid, that was just the best spin they could come up with. Whatever the case may be, it’s asinine. Zoe lost, Eron won, and GamerGate gets the last laugh.

Still, we can’t fool ourselves completely. Ms. Quinn receives
thousands of dollars a month for doing absolutely nothing. She doesn’t
even pretend to make games anymore and has instead switched over to the
“online abuse” racket.

As usual, the truth will out. Sometimes it just takes a while. And that’s why persistence is all that is required for ultimate victory, because SJWs Always Lie.

The decline of the West

I’ve read part of Spengler’s magnum opus, and to be honest, despite being a Hesse fan, I have a very hard time with all the German mystical babble. But in light of recent events, I feel as if I should probably return to it soon.

Political Epochs in Autumn and Winter

    1. Domination of Money (“Democracy”). Economic powers permeating the political forms and authorities. 1800-2000 AD.

    2. Victory of force-politics over money. Increasing primitiveness of political forms. Inward decline of the nations into a formless population, and constitution thereof as an Imperium of gradually-increasing crudity of despotism. 2000-2200 AD.

    3. Private and family policies of individual leaders. The world as spoil. Egypticism, Mandarinism, Byzantinism. Historyless stiffening and enfeeblement even of the imperial machinery, against young peoples eager for spoil, or alien conquerors. Primitive human conditions slowly thrust up into the highly-civilized mode of living. After 2200 AD.

The Future, Echoing Roman Civilization

In the Winter of Roman politics there was a shift from the Roman Republic to Caesarism, or government led by a charismatic strongman. Eventually, the idea of representation broke down and there was a shift to bloody “force politics.”

Of course, our current government is modeled on the Roman system. There are even similarities between the two dominant parties. In Rome, the two dominant parties were the Optimates and Populares, the Republicans and Democrats of their day. This form of representative government eventually stops working because the system of checks and balances interfere with each other, causing gridlock. Force politics (killing people) eventually comes along to break the gridlock. (As an aside, some historians say it’s possible we entered this era in 1963 with the assassination of JFK by the military-industrial complex.) Arguably, this predictive model is spot-on with the current situation in the Western world. So, if Spengler’s model is correct, we are awaiting the rise of a dictator to come along and smash the rotten edifice of democracy sometime this century.

Regardless, I very much doubt that Oswald Spengler could possibly have imagined the descendants of his co-nationals being anywhere nearly as stupid as they have been under the suicidal leadership of Angela Merkel.

Mailvox: they boldly ran away

 A Canadian reader is amused by rabbits doing what rabbits do:

Over Family Day weekend someone torched the rainbow flag at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.  The response of the campus SJWs was to…cancel their own parade.

The Pride Collective at UBC cancelled a Wednesday parade as part of OUTweek celebrations in response to what it called “a suspected hate crime” on campus over the weekend.

A rainbow pride flag was found burned off the flagpole – located between Brock Hall and the old Student Union Building — where it was raised Friday to kick off OUTweek, an annual event aimed at celebrating gender and sexual diversity

The Pride Collective announced its discovery of the incident and plans to cancel the parade in a statement posted to Facebook late Tuesday.

“Needless to say this event has not made us feel safe on campus and affirms the continual need for more to be done in regards to support,” read the statement. “OUTweek 2016 is about creating safer spaces and we are incredibly disappointed that this has happened during our celebrations. This speaks to why we need OUTweek in the first place as well as to the history of terrorization of LGBTQ+ spaces on campuses – and how this plays into a larger culture of homophobia and transphobia.”

In a follow-up to the initial statement, the collective said it may consider holding the parade at a later date but added: “At this time we feel unsafe organizing and leading an event that has a high amount of external visibility.”

Whoever the magnificent bastard was, he got the SJWs to punch themselves while running away.  Ah rabbits.           

The best part is that there are better than even odds that the rainbow flag was torched by an SJW seeking to play the victim and drum up outrage.

Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Graphic Story

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Graphic Story Hugo:

As always, the humor to be found in the File 770ers isn’t in the fact that they are so observably stupid, but that they are so firmly in the grip of Dunning-Kruger that despite that observable stupidity, they genuinely believe they are the smarter, better-educated ones. Tasha Turner comments on yesterday’s Best Dramatic Performance recommendations:

All games? Really? Well the category should be RP free as its always well nominated.

Kurt Busiek corrects her: THE MARTIAN and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON are not games. The other three are.

*head desk* well I was wrong. Sorry VD. I should have checked before commenting. In the future I’ll try to be more careful before mocking you. It’s always bad to mock someone else and I really shouldn’t do it at all.

Keep in mind this was someone who was attempting to mock my Hugo recommendations. But she didn’t know, without looking it up or noticing the fact that I specifically mentioned that three of my five recommendations were games, that The Martian and Avengers: Age of Ultron are movies.

Forget whether it is bad or not, if you can’t mock someone without looking almost indescribably stupid, it’s probably an activity you should avoid at all costs.

Fighting rhetoric with rhetoric

An author who appears to be in transition one way or the other (it’s hard to tell) provides a salutory lesson in how NOT to do it:

As Movement Conservatives consolidated their power in the Republican Party their appeal became more and more emotional and less and less rational. By the time of the George W. Bush administration, it no longer reflected, as one of Bush’s advisers put it, the “reality based community.” But, like any other myth, its lack of reality made it more emotionally powerful than ever. The good guys are pure and virtuous, and they are under attack: Christianity is under siege in a country that is 70 percent Christian, for example, and those who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are fighting to kill the big government that gives “subsidies” to lazy black people despite the fact that they themselves have received subsides — and one of the occupiers an outright loan. And the bad guys are really bad. Donald Trump has famously asserted that Mexican immigrants are rapists, and his attacks on black Americans are so inflammatory that the Ku Klux Klan uses them as a recruiting tool. Indeed, all Democrats are demons: Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina has asserted—all evidence to the contrary—that Democrats support Planned Parenthood because they want to kill babies and sell their body parts. The emotional punch of these allegations stays with supporters despite the fact they are false.

The national triumph of this Movement Conservative narrative explains the present political moment. Republican leaders who were previously focused on consolidating voting blocs now face two very real voter insurgencies. On one hand, those like Ted Cruz argue that rank-and-file voters feel betrayed because Republicans have not actually shrunk the government. Cruz promises to see that destruction through. On the other, Trump voters have absorbed the racism and sexism in his candidacy and are following it in pure rage. Cruz and Trump have a clear narrative. Republican Party leaders do not.

But, like Republican insiders, establishment Democrats have also suffered for lack of a narrative. The Movement Conservative story has made America a hostile place for minorities, women and those falling behind economically. Democratic voters are angry at leaders who have stayed largely quiet as the government has befriended Wall Street, gutted the middle class, slashed social programs, and endangered their health. While Clinton still works to line up narrow voting blocs, Sanders offers an alternative: a narrative of America that gives Democrats a national vision to counter that of Movement Conservatives.

Voters on both sides are angry, and neither cares much what the political establishment says, especially an establishment that on both sides is notably white, elitist and male—aside from Clinton’s refreshing candidacy– and clearly has no idea what life looks like for those outside its bubble. If establishment figures want to regain leadership, they should try articulating a narrative for their vision of America, a narrative that lets voters choose a direction for their country.

Until then, they are preaching to a choir that has lost its audience.

 The Rhetorical Test:

  1. Is this rhetoric, dialectic, or pseudo-dialectic?
  2. What is the most effective way to refute it? 
  3. Why is this likely to be ineffective?

He didn’t read the book

Marc Andreessen discovers that an apology is never the end:

Facebook just lost an important legal fight in India, and now one of its board members has complicated its next steps. The mess started when Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen took to Twitter to criticize India’s decision to block Facebook from offering free but limited Internet access to poor areas. At one point, when a critic likened Andreessen’s position to “Internet colonialism,” he shot back, “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?” recounts the Wall Street Journal. That sentiment drew widespread condemnation and prompted Mark Zuckerberg himself to quickly distance himself from it. And in a series of tweets, Andreessen apologized for his “ill-informed and ill-advised comment.”

On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg used stronger language, describing the tweet as “deeply unsettling” and making clear that the company “strongly” rejects it. The controversy revolves around a program called Free Basics. As CNET explains, an Indian court declared that the concept violated Net neutrality rules because it would have provided free access to the Internet but only to a limited number of services.

It’s amazing how Mark Zuckerberg continues to find ways to be a prissily annoying little punch-face. I don’t care how rich and influential he is; you couldn’t pay me to trade places with him. His spineless, parasitical existence strikes me as an absolute living hell.

Rabid Puppies 2016: Dramatic Presentation (long)

Although the ancient geezers of fandom don’t seem to know it, or are just too old to either know or care about games, both computer and video games are eligible for the Hugo Award for Dramatic Presentation Long Form as they are included in the definition of “any medium of dramatized science fiction or fantasy” that lasts more than 90 minutes. Ergo, my recommendations for the category will probably look a little different than most this year.

  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
  • Until Dawn
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron
  • The Martian

I should mention that this is NOT my list of the three best games of the year, because not all games are dramatic presentations nor are they all science fiction and fantasy. These are simply the best dramatic presentations of science fiction and fantasy longer than 90 minutes, three of which happen to be games.

Other 2016 Hugo categories

UPDATE: If you still haven’t received your pin number from MidAmericaCon II, email them at hugopin@midamericon2.org and request it.

In other news, lest you doubt that the SJWs in SF will do anything and everything they can to ensure that their stacked decked remains stacked in their favor, the Hugo administrators at MidAmericaCon II have announced, contra previous promises, that they will not release nominating data in any form to anyone… except those to whom they have already given it.

Other than the EPH validation, it is not our intention to release nominating data in any form, even to other people wishing to test software under an NDA.  The Hugo administrators already have sufficient software to handle the needs of the awards even if the nomination counting rules ends up being confirmed as changed at the business meeting in Kansas City.

This statement completely lacks credibility, as do all of the public statements of those to whom the data was given, because “the people they gave the data announced on file 770 that they had not
only ran Single Vote Transferable on the data, but had examined the data
to count puppy ballots and slate discipline.”

The behavior of the Hugo administrators is dishonest and downright antiscientific. If the data is not open and cannot be replicated, it must be ignored. Nothing the Hugo administrators’ pet investigators announce should be taken at face value by anyone, pro or con. It can be easily dismissed by a simple statement of fact: “So you say. Where is the evidence to support that?”

I’m not saying this because I oppose EPH. To the contrary, I support it, because EPH enshrines the Rabid Puppies as one of the five primary factions in science fiction and gives us equal status with the Tor Cabal. So, I fully support the decision of the fandom to give the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil the right to at least one nomination per category in perpetuity. It gives the Tor Cabal the same, of course (which is why it was a cabal initiative), and initially the other two or three factions will reliably favor Tor in reaction to the establishment of the Puppies, but that will change over time, as deals are made and new alliances are formed.

As I have said, I am a patient man.

    Two down, five to go

    Christie and Carly are out of the running for the Republican nomination:

    Chris Christie dropped out of the race for president on Wednesday afternoon, two hours after a rival candidate quit. Carly Fiorina, one of only two women in the U.S. presidential race, left her quixotic pursuit of the White House on Wednesday after a seventh-place New Hampshire primary finish in a field of eight candidates.

    And Christie, the governor of New Jersey, soon followed suit after rumors of his campaign’s demise swirled all day.

    Spokeswoman Samantha Smith confirmed the news to the Associated Press, saying that Christie broke the news of his decision to staff at his campaign headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, late in the afternoon.

    Interesting that neither of them endorsed anyone. That either indicates that they think Trump has a chance or the GOPe hasn’t settled on its anti-Trump replacement for Jeb Bush.