Brainstorm debate: Free Trade

As I mentioned, tonight at 7 PM Eastern I’ll be debating Dr. James Miller, Associate Professor of Economics at Smith College, on the topic of free trade. Dr. Miller has a PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of Game Theory at Work and Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World.

There are 440 seats left, so if you’re interested and you plan to attend, you can register for the free event here. 

This promises to be interesting. PhD from THE monetarist school vs BS from a econ department of Keynesians and socialists. Game Theorist vs Game Designer. Academic vs gamer.

The folks on Twitter don’t appear to like my chances of success. The worst odds that have been given against me are 68-1. On the other hand, Nate refuses to throw in the towel: Speaking as someone who’s actually debated you. I’m going to say the poor bastard has no idea what he’s in for.

So, whose chances do you like better? Looking at it objectively, I’d have to say that if I can somehow manage to win this one in a convincing fashion, I’m probably smarter than I think I am. There is only one way to find out.

The Second Law in effect

Anti-GG writer Jesse Singal points-and-shrieks at the SJW List at New York Magazine. Needless to say, being the author of the Second Law of SJW, I am entirely unsurprised.

Ever been worried that you might accidentally hire or interact with a “social-justice warrior”? SJWs, as they’re known to the free-speech warriors of gaming message boards, look and often act like anyone else — until they start screaming about lesbian rights in the middle of a meeting. Luckily for those concerned, there’s now a list of known SJWs. Because, generally, making lists of people based on their political and social alignments has worked out well in the past.

On Saturday, the far-right writer Vox Day (“The Jews in Europe are doomed because they spent the last 70 years undermining European nationalism and supporting the transformation of European population demographics”) noted in a blog post that it would be useful to create a list of known SJWs, or social-justice warriors.

And now, voilà, such a list has materialized in the form of a helpful wiki that Day himself likely created (it links to his book, SJWs Always Lie, as well as to his original post). The author cutely implies that the list should be used by SJWs to hire like-minded folk.

I’ve interacted online with many people who fly the anti-SJW flag, including plenty of GamerGaters. They’ll tell you that they didn’t start this fight — it was brought to them by SJWs invading their cultural spaces. These anti-SJWs, of course, have no political agenda of their own: Their views are common sense, and by definition apolitical. They simply want SJWs to stop trying to make everything about wacky far-left politics. Anti-SJWs are for free speech and, unlike SJWs, righteously opposed to the idea of lobbying to get people with unpopular views fired (well, sometimes). They are also sick of how SJWs are constantly trying to launch online shaming campaigns, which they, the anti-SJWs, are opposed to (well, sometimes).

Anyway. Creating an enemies list composed almost entirely of progressive and feminist voices seems like a really smart way to express these sentiments and show the world just how reasonable and commonsensical and apolitical anti-SJWs are.

The amusing thing about SJWs attempting to write hit pieces like this is that they simply don’t know very much about the relevant topics. He’s trying to make my opinion on the future of European Jewry sound controversial, perhaps even anti-semitic, when it happens to be more or less shared by, among others, the Prime Minister of Israel.

And I’m not being cute when I say that I genuinely hope that SJW-converged organizations will learn about the SJWs featured on the list and hire them. From the anti-SJW perspective, there is literally no better outcome.

That’s some great journalism there too. He writes of “a helpful wiki that Day himself likely created”. He could have simply done 10 seconds of research and he would have learned that I did not create it, and that all of the content has been created by the Dread Ilk, not me.

UPDATE: The SJW journalists are belatedly beginning to realize that not everyone is quite as enthusiastic about social justice as they are:

Tess Townsend ‏@Tess_Townsend
This is f-d up. Combing for quotes to harass folks is the opposite of promoting any kind of speech period.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
We don’t have to comb for SJW quotes, Tess. You do it for us. Now stop harassing me.

And who said anything about promoting speech anyhow? The SJWs identified can still push their Narrative and pursue people’s jobs if they wish, it’s just that, for better or for worse, everyone is going to know precisely what it is that they have done.

UPDATE II: Jesse Singal tries to check all the boxes. He doesn’t care, but I do, but he was only joking, but I’m a crybaby. It’s like an object lesson in Gamma. 

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
TIL @voxday is a delicate, sensitive soul It’ll be okay man 🙁

 Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
I triggered Vox Day. He’s upset. His response is longer than my jokey post

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
.@peterb @CountUlairi @voxday yeah that’s what gets me a/b it. Was such a mild post! If you have ANY self-esteem that shit rolls off you

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
tfw you’re Vox Day and you’ve been triggered by a brief mildly critical blog post and the only person you can tag in is…Mike Cernovich

Jesse Singal ‏@jessesingal
Rare video footage of Vox Day responding to a brief blog post mildly critical of him

Roran_Stehl ‏@Roran_Stehl
why do you guys (i.e. you, @Popehat or @scalzi ) care about that person? I fail to see his relevance.

Jesse Singal@jessesingal
I don’t! He freaked out that I wrote the mildest blog post ever. It is funny! Don’t mistake it for caring about.

The best part: his “jokey post” is 332 words. My response to it is 147 words. No wonder SJWs hate STEM.

The fence-sitter’s lament

Status 451 makes it clear that they are NOT on our side:

As many will now be aware, a certain person whose handle makes an unfortunate monogram has entered the LambdaConf controversy.  Like many on the SJ side of this long-running conflict, he appears to be making his living as a culture war profiteer, only by selling books rather than consulting services to monetize the tribal conflict he has stoked.  Now, just like some on the other side, he is compiling a targeting database of ideological enemies.

Lately the use of mobbing and ostracism tactics by SJ advocates has been a matter of much concern for me and for this blog. However, we must make it clear that our interest is in opposing these tactics and the mentality of total cultural war they arise from, rather than siding with the opposing tribe.  They’d be just as vicious if they had equivalent influence, as VD’s McCarthy-esque enemies list illustrates.

This is ridiculous. Criticism is not merely irrelevant, it renders the critic irrelevant, when it is not accurate.  I don’t fight the culture war because I am a “culture war profiteer” or because I expect anyone to agree with me, I fight it because the SJWs in science fiction and gaming were not content to leave me alone to write my books and columns, or design and develop my games, in peace.

These are ignorant words from someone who hasn’t been seriously targeted for discrediting and disemployment yet. And when she is, I expect she’ll come running and crying to those like me, who are willing to stand up and defend those who have been attacked for nothing more than their beliefs.

The SJW List isn’t about belief. It is about action. Every single person on that list belongs there, and is there for a sound and solid and documented reason.

Now, if Status 451 can recommend more effective tactics, I am entirely willing to listen. What I am not willing to do is give any credence or respect to someone who considers themselves above the fray, or believes that leading by example, or being the better person, will lead to anything but submission to the SJW Narrative.

But she is wrong. We have no desire to denounce her or even think about her at all. We don’t want moderates and fence-sitters and equivocators. Nor do we shoot at them. Unlike the SJWs, we ignore them. So let her run to her refuge. The only reason it will survive is because there are men and women who are willing to stand, take the heat, and take the battle to the other side.

Open borders is anti-libertarian

It turns out that even Murray Rothbard turned against open borders before he died, as evidenced by this essay published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in the fateful year of 1994, the year NAFTA went live.

On the recent edition of Mises Weekends, Jeff Deist interviews Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann.  The topic is “Nation, State, and Borders.”  It is a worthwhile interview.  Fair warning: Hülsmann offers views similar to those of Hans Hoppe on these matters.  Quite importantly, he makes the distinction of nation vs. state.  It is a distinction worth internalizing for those who want to consider the application of libertarian theory in this world populated by humans.

From the interview, I learned of an essay written by Murray Rothbard in 1994, entitled Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State.  As is often the case, when I discover something of Rothbard’s I find myself torn between excitement and depression: excitement because I have somehow worked my way to a conclusion similar to his, and depression because all I have done is somehow worked my way to a conclusion similar to his.

It’s a very interesting essay, all the more so due to it being almost entirely unread in libertarian circles. To his credit, Rothbard, despite his dedication to praxeology, admits that his reason has been demonstrated to be wrong on the basis of events:

Open-Borders, or the Camp of the Saints Problem

The “nation”, of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country”. He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area….

The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples.

Previously it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As culture and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.

It is even less easy to dismiss in light of the 61-million strong invasion of the USA and the recent European migrant crisis. But it was always an observably stupid dismissal in the first place, a logically fallacious appeal to subjective incredulity.

It’s very satisfying to not only be confident that I was correct to reject the open borders position – although I did so on purely logical grounds – but that one of the great libertarian thinkers eventually came around on the very important issue as well, although I am rather less certain that the same can be said of Mises. It increasingly appears that National Libertarianism, as I describe it, is the only viable libertarianism.

Book of the Week


I’m pleased to be able to announce that Martin van Creveld’s Equality: The Impossible Quest is now available in audiobook.

Read by Jon Mollison, who also narrated A History of Strategy, the audiobook is 10 hours and 34 minutes of delving deep into the historical development of the concept of equality.

From the reviews: In his exploration of the
development of the idea of equality from antiquity to the present day,
Dr. van Creveld provides both an important analysis of one of the major
touch stones of modern thought and rhetoric, as well as some hard
lessons concerning the reality of attempts to impose utopia upon a world
“red in tooth and claw.” He leaves us with the warning:

“Equality,
certainly the equality of the kind Plato, Nabis, Caligula, Rousseau,
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tze Dong, Pol Pot, and not a few present-day
proponents of political correctness and diversity have envisaged, is a
dream. When we keep in mind the costs that dream demands, the
contradictions to which it inevitably leads, and the horrendous amounts
of blood that are often shed in its name, we would be wise to ensure
that the quest for it does not become a nightmare.”

Alt-Tech and Alt-Society

Eventually, the Alt-Right is going to transform into an entirely alternative society. The reason this will happen is due to the totalitarian nature of social justice. Notice that I used the term social justice, and not SJW.

Social justice inherently requires totalitarianism because it demands both total convergence and total compliance. This is why SJWs are just as likely to attack Stephen Fry as they are to attack Curtis Yarvin despite the vast ideological and identitational differences between the two men. The sin both men have committed are the same: a refusal to submit to the current social justice Narrative.

The reason societies devolve into civil war, split up, and eventually segregate is because it is no longer possible for one group to live in close quarters with another group. And it appears we are rapidly approaching the point where SJWs and non serviams can no longer occupy the same social media space because the latter are not permitted, as The Ralph Retort reports:

I had been trying to spend more time on the subreddit I setup lately, which is called SJWsAtWork. After Twitter suspended the account I had made for it, due to false spam reports, I kinda got out of the habit of posting stuff over there. Last night, I made a new account (@SJWAlert) and then went to post some new stories on SJWsAtWork itself. One of those was a link to Vox Day’s new site, SJW List. I had no idea this would be a controversial move, but it ended up getting my entire Reddit account suspended.

Honestly, Reddit is sort of a shithole, so I’m not too broken up about it. Still, I’m kinda pissed for the small community we have going on over there. I’m still going to continue posting with my new account, and I will get put back on the mod team by one of the other mods, but it’s just annoying. There was no sort of warning at all, just a straight permanent suspension.

The Alt-Right is still taking shape. But unless it develops the Alt-Tech and successfully creates its own alternative technological and infrastructural institutions, it will suffer the same fate as other minority groups that have been subjugated and forced to choose between submission and elimination.

Reddit isn’t the only SJW-owned institution to act this way. Facebook just no-platformed A Voice For Men yesterday as well:

The A Voice for Men FaceBook page was unpublished by FaceBook today. No reason was given other than a generic inference that we were in violation of their community standards. I find no reason to believe that this means anything but the fact that we were in violation of their feminist based rules for speech.

This does not yet mean an Alt-Society is necessary. We can still drive the SJWs out, and indeed, their insistence on converging the organizations they infest significantly improves our chances of reclaiming control of society so long as stop supporting them and we keep them out of the new institutions and organizations. That is why they are so terrified of the SJW List and that is why they have been attacking it relentlessly almost since the moment of its creation.

Stop using Facebook. Stop using Reddit. Stop using Wikipedia. Only use platforms that play fair – say what you will about Google, but they are not in the business of no-platforming and silencing people – and start building and supporting and using alternatives to the fully converged platforms.

Takeover attempt at Eagle Forum

Phyllis Schlafly alerts the media:

“At 2:00 pm today, 6 directors of Eagle Forum met in an improper, unprecedented telephone meeting. I objected to the meeting and at 2:11pm, I was muted from the call. The meeting was invalid under the Bylaws but the attendees purported to pass several motions to wrest control of the organization from me. They are attempting to seize access to our bank accounts, to terminate employees, and to install members of their own Gang of 6 to control the bank accounts and all of Eagle Forum.

“The members of their group are: Eunie Smith of Alabama, Anne Cori of Missouri, Cathie Adams of Texas, Rosina Kovar of Colorado, Shirley Curry of Tennessee, and Carolyn McLarty of Oklahoma.

“This kind of conduct will not stand and I will fight for Eagle Forum and I ask all men and women of good will to join me in this fight.”

Always be wary of those who are eager to help. And don’t give them power simply because they are useful. Entryism takes places in various forms and in every organization, from the children’s church to the Catholic hierarchy. SJWs are the worst entryists, but they are not the only ones.

It is interesting to observe that the Eagle Forum entryists are all female.

A voterless victory

Ted Cruz wins what is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory in Colorado:

It was last August when officials with the Republican Party in Colorado decided they would not let voters take part in the early nomination process.

The Denver Post reported Aug. 25: “The GOP executive committee has voted to cancel the traditional presidential preference poll after the national party changed its rules to require a state’s delegates to support the candidate that wins the caucus vote.”

The Cortez Journal reported: “Cruz had 17 bound delegates ahead of the Republican state convention. Another four delegates are unpledged but publicly expressed support for the candidate, who hopes to curb momentum seen by front-runner Donald Trump.

“Cruz declared victory in Colorado, pointing out that he won all 21 delegates from the state’s seven congressional assemblies. Another 13 delegates were awarded at the state convention on Saturday. An additional three delegates in Colorado’s 37-member national delegation are unpledged party leaders.”

Remember, this is the same Republican party who said we had to invade Iraq to bring democracy there and waxed ecstatic over purple fingers. Now they’re running with the “it’s a representative republic, not a democracy” line. And if you still believe that they care about anything but maintaining their own power, you’re a fool.

Of course, given that he is ineligible for the presidency anyhow, Cruz probably doesn’t care that he is now regarded as an illegitimate candidate for the nomination.

Challenge accepted

A professor of economics with a PhD from the ultimate monetarist school throws down a gauntlet, albeit in a considerably more civil manner than I’ve come to expect from my critics:

I’ve recently started a podcast called Future Strategist and I would love to interview you by Skype audio.  We could discuss political correctness and debate free trade.  While I do not support open borders for people, I do support free trade in goods and while I doubt I could get you to change your opinion I hopefully wouldn’t underwhelm you as have other economists.

James Miller
Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College
Phd University of Chicago

I have accepted Dr. Miller’s challenge to debate free trade. More details to come.

By the way, he’s the author of Game Theory at Work, so he’s obviously a smart guy. We’re going to do one podcast discussion of political correctness first – he obviously won his 2003 tenure battle – and then we’ll do the debate, Game Theorist vs Game Designer.

UPDATE: Dr. Miller and I have decided to simply do the free trade debate, and we’ll do it at the Brainstorm on Wednesday. Invitations have already gone out to the Brainstorm members. Once all the members interested have taken their seats, I’ll open the remaining ones up to everyone else on a first-come, first-serve basis.

This is the sort of thing that Brainstorm makes possible, so if you want to be a part of it, consider signing up for an annual membership.

Civil war in Europe

A Danish professor’s warning:

Writing in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Professor Helmuth Nyborg, who is an expert in the connection between hormones and intelligence, discussed his previous research on how, “The effect of Europeans having few children and immigrants with low IQ” would lead to “Westerners (being) a minority in Europe, and that the average IQ drops so much that prosperity, democracy and civilization is threatened”.

Nyborg has previously asserted that low IQ migrants arriving from non-western countries leads to a decline in the average intelligence of western societies and therefore a drop in living standards and rising crime rates.

“In 2016, the current immigration policy gives us three alternatives – submission, repatriation or civil war. Unless Europe starts to lead a responsible family, immigration and integration policy, stated by the theory of evolution, I think civil war is most likely,” writes Nyborg.

Nyborg goes on to caution that simply referring to “right-wing extremism” will not make the chronic problems caused by overpopulation and failed multicultural policies disappear, warning that ethnic Europeans will be a minority in their own countries by 2050.

Ethnically homogeneous, civilized and democratic societies in Europe will be a thing of the past unless there is an “honorable repatriation” of migrants, warns Nyborg.

I concur. And I’ll go much further. I think civil war in the USA is even more likely. The war in Europe isn’t going to be much of a contest; Reconquista 2.0 will take 1/100th the time that its predecessor did. But the USA is considerably more divided, and considerably more muddled, than even the most heavily invaded European nation.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. As Martin van Creveld demonstrated in “Migration and War”, mass immigration is almost invariably connected to war in one way or another.