A diatribe of dismalities

Paul Krugman somehow forgets to take $44 trillion into account:

Menzie Chinn is having a dialogue, or something, with the Heritage Foundation. He pointed out that their arguments against stimulus, aside from being primitive and wrong, would also imply that the fiscal cliff is harmless. They respond in part by claiming that all they’re worried about is the incentive effects — yeah, right — and also by claiming that famous economists made the same arguments.

The latter claim, unfortunately, is completely true. But it doesn’t absolve Heritage; all it shows is that much of macroeconomics, especially but not only at Chicago, has retrogressed intellectually, to such an extent that famous economists repeat 1930-vintage fallacies in perfect ignorance of the hard intellectual work that showed, three generations ago, that they are indeed fallacies.

By the way, Heritage — after totally misrepresenting Keynesian economics (Keynesians never think about investment? Really?) — asks,

    When the government borrows a trillion dollars on global financial markets for a stimulus package, does Chinn believe that zero dollars of that is diverted from investment?

I don’t know for sure what Menzie’s answer would be, but mine is, no, I don’t believe that zero dollars are diverted; under current conditions, negative dollars are diverted. That is, stimulus spending would lead to more, not less, private investment. Why? Because we are in a liquidity trap — interest rates won’t rise — and higher sales would induce businesses to invest more, not less.

Oh, and if you go back to what Heritage analysts were writing back in 2009, they were predicting that government borrowing would lead to soaring interest rates. How’s that going, guys?

There is a very easy explanation for why increased goverment borrowing has not led to soaring interest rates.  Like every good Neo-Keynesian, Krugman gets himself in trouble by completely ignoring the credit market, which is a little ironic considering that he’s talking about the price of credit.

Government borrowing has soared since 2009.  It has exploded from $6.8 trillion to $11.3 trillion.  So, with that obvious increase in the demand for credit, why hasn’t the price increased?  Because government borrowing was only 12.9 percent of the total credit market back in 2009.  It is now 20.4 percent of the market.  The price of credit hasn’t gone up because the OVERALL demand for it has slumped, as I pointed out last week.

This is like asking why the Warcraft servers aren’t being overloaded because you’re playing twice as much now, even though two other players who used to play a lot more than you did are playing quite a bit less than before.

The Heritage analysts assumed, improperly, that the Household and Finance sectors would continue to expand at their 60-year rates of increase.  Instead, both sectors have shrunk, by $1 trillion and $3.3 trillion respectively.  Debt disinflation is why interest rates are not soaring.

Mailvox: illumination and shadow

A physicist notes the way in which Tolkien explicated the distinction between the illuminating fairy tale and the dark deceit of the retrophobic modern fantasy:

I was intrigued by the discussion on retrophobia in fantasy literature, and it made me recall a relevant passage from Professor Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien:

The essence of fairy-stories is that they satisfy our heart’s deepest desire: to know a world other than our own, a world that has not been flattened and shrunk and emptied of mystery. To enter this other world, the fairy tale resorts to fantasy in the literal sense. It deals with phantasms or representations of things not generally believed to exist in our primary world: elves (the older word for faires), hobbits, wizards, dwarves, Ringwraiths, wargs, orcs, and the like. Far from being unreal or fantastic in the popular sense, these creatures embody the invisible qualities of the eternal world — love and death, courage and cowardice, terror and hope — that always impinge on our own visible universe. Fairy-stories “open as door on Other Time” Tolkien writes, “and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, perhaps.” Hence Tolkien’s insistence that all fantasy-creations must have the mythic character of the supernatural world as well as the historical consistency of the natural world. The question to be posed for fantasy as also for many of the biblical narratives is not, therefore, “Did these things literally happen?” but “Does their happening reveal the truth?”

This ties into your discussion of the modern Wormtongues, as well. Wood and Tolkien are essentially saying what you’re saying: modern fantasy fails, because important elements of the narrative do not reveal the truth, and readers know it.

The reason so much modern fantasy fails so spectacularly is not because it is soulless and derivative, although it is, but because it quite literally hates the heart.  It is written out of hatred, it is based on lies, and it is designed to obscure rather than reveal.  Take R. Scott Bakker’s series, The Prince of Nothing.  The events chronicled within it did not literally happen, but their happening, quite intentionally, obscures the truth, indeed, it claims that there is no such thing as truth.  The ugliness of the disgusting Face Dancers is an apt metaphor for the ugly incoherence at the core of the modernist vision for the series.

This is why GRR Martin will never be the American JRR Tolkien.  What are the truths revealed by A Song of Ice and Fire?  That people of good will are stupid?  That everyone is pointlessly sadistic? That no good deed goes unpunished?  That sex is either rape, incest, or prostitution?  The only truths to be found in Martin are negative; there is nothing beautiful or mythic about Westeros.  There is death, cowardice, and terror, but where is the love, courage, and hope?  When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that decline of the series observed in the two most recent books are merely the flowering of a retrophobic seed that was planted at the start.

My point is not that those who write in the older tradition are better writers.  If anything, it is remarkable that those who handicap their narratives so severely with their moral blindness and ideological retrophobia manage to produce works that are still compelling in some way.  The problem is that, no matter how highly skilled they are, genuine greatness will always elude them and their works, despite their merits, will rapidly fade into the forgotten dust of history because they do not speak to the eternal truths at the heart of Man.

The delta moment

Just to forestall any concerns or conspiracy theories, I let WND know today that I’m ending my column there as of December 31.  There are no problems, no differences of opinion, or anything like that.  I haven’t taken a job with the IMF or a K-Street lobbying firm.  I have no plans to write a column anywhere else.  I am appreciative of the platform WND gave me for 11 years and I very much respect and support Joseph Farah.  But I feel the quality of my columns has not been up to their previous par over the last two years; today’s column reminded me of what they used to be.

So, rather than phone it in, I’ve asked WND to give my place on the Commentary page to someone else.  I will continue to blog both here and at Alpha Game, as before.  I don’t know what effect that will have on my readership, but that really doesn’t matter.  Sometimes, you just know it is time for a change.

Mapping Selenoth

JartStar didn’t find it easy to map out Selenoth, mostly because I don’t think in spatial terms.  This map to the right is from a very early version when the book was only half-written and we were kicking around the idea of eventually creating a VASSAL wargame around the story.  I’ve long been interested in combining the zone-based game mechanics of War at Sea with a Divine Right system that combines diplomatic intrigue with battle, and perhaps one day I’ll even get around to designing it.  The primary challenge he faced was translating locations into map terms from my description of events; if it takes 30 days to go from Amorr to Elebrion and one passes through an uninhabited forest, then that provides a certain amount of information about how things have to look.

I’m sure there were times he desperately wanted to beat answers out of me, but the problem was that because I am spatial relations-challenged, I couldn’t really provide them until I had figured out exactly what I required for the story to work as conceived.  Was Lodi travelling west or east?  If Theuderic was traveling to Amorr, why did he have to go through Malkan?  The plot affected the geography and the geography affected the plot; as JartStar noted himself when he introduced the map to his Cartographer’s Guild.

“The map took nearly a year to do as author didn’t know where certain
locations would be until he had worked out the plot! It meant a lot of
revisions all of the way until the day it was literally going to press.”

The particular challenge was how to portray the allies and provinces of Amorr, since they were too small to show up on the continental map.  The first attempt proved a little confusing; the editor at Marcher Lord actually got it backwards. But the zoom lines he suggested worked very well.  It did lead to one minor problem in the text, as Falerum was described at two points in the original text as “the largest ally”, which is quite clearly not the case.  But that was cleaned up in the errata.

As for rivers and lakes, they were left off for legibility reasons.  In general, it can be safely assumed that every major city is built on a river, as is the case with regards to nearly all medieval European cities. Most fantasy maps that contain rivers are entirely misleading, as they only feature one or two rivers when the number of cities shown would indicate the need for an order of magnitude more; for some reason most fantasy lands don’t contain a reasonable number of lakes either.  Given my ferocious hatred for long literary river journeys, it is totally appropriate that the rivers are not shown on the map as they will never, ever, feature in such a regard.

The map of Selenoth can’t hold a candle to the beautiful map of Middle Earth that I once owned in the form of a much-loved jigsaw puzzle.  I can’t think of a single map that does.  But I hope the readers find it both attractive and useful in following the story; thanks to JartStar’s heroic efforts, I think it is more geographically credible than most of the maps one sees in the genre.

WND column

Standing Firm for Freedom

It was not a surprise that the response of the New York Times to the Connecticut public-school shootings was to run, not one, not two, not three, but four editorials calling for yet another push for gun control. The mainstream media have been waiting literally years for something like this to happen, and they are not about to let such a crisis go to waste.

VPFL 2012 week 14

78 Suburban Churchians (4-10-0)
58 Moundsview Meerkats (10-4-0)

68 Bailout Banksters (8-6-0)
46 D.C. Hangmen (4-10-0)

70 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-7-0)
65 RR Redbeards (5-9-0)

58 Fromundah Cheezheads (9-5-0)
40 Bane Sidhe (8-5-1)

90 Luna City Gamma Rays (6-7-1)
64 ’63Mercury Marauders (8-6-0)

The Meerkats clinched their third regular season championship, but can they finally get the job done in the playoffs.  It was remarkable; both Mounds View and Fromundah finished at 1031 points after both scoring 58 the last week of the season.  And the Churchians finished strong, going .500 over the last half of the season after getting off to a winless start.

The Meerkats face the Marauders and the Cheezheads play the Banksters Bane Sidhe in the first round of the VPFL playoffs.

UPDATE: Adrian Peterson is post-homo sapiens sapiens.  Also, MVP.  That is all.

Speaking of rhetoric

“Killer was home schooled” is a subtitle of an article in the Daily Telegraph.  “Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed his mother and 26 people at a primary school in Connecticut, was “very, very bright”, his aunt claimed as she disclosed his mother had chosen to home school him after “battling” education authorities.”

And yet, in the article itself, it refers to former classmates, his junior high school basketball team, the English class in which he read Steinbeck at 16, his membership in the high school computer club, how he sat alone at the table in the school lunchroom and on the school bus, and the way he graduated in 2010 from a high school with a yearbook.

This is not an accident.  A dialectic reading of the article will rapidly cause one to conclude that the bright, but mentally unstable kid should have been homeschooled from the start.  Instead, he was thrown into public school hell, socially rejected, and eventually took vengeance upon those serving as proxies for the individuals he perceived to have harmed him.  It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had serious issues at school dating back to first or second grade; there is a reason he went after the little ones even if we don’t know what it is. 

But the intended rhetorical effect is for one to draw a connection between being homeschooled and being a murderous freak.  Which is deeply ironic, considering that homeschooling would help solve the problem from both ends, first by making it much less easy to slaughter large numbers of young children gathered in a single confined and defenseless place, and second by reducing the amount of abuse suffered by mentally unstable social rejects in their most formative years.

Mailvox: the utility of rhetoric

NorthernHamlet objects to the rhetoric inherent in the post Homeschool or Die.  He writes, in response to my explanation:

“Trying to talk about big pictures or summoning statistics is about
as relevant as reciting the Iliad. [Rhetoric] is not petty politics or point
scoring, it is the only possible form of dialogue.”

We both can run through this line of thinking easily.

Your
public audience, at least some of it, knows you could have it both ways
in a blog post, the rhetorical argument, the statistical reality,
and the meta-argument. You yourself admit that the situation has already
been politicized; suggesting that you are purposefully furthering that
politicization process for argumentative gain, and nothing more. You can
claim all day that the only audience you care about is your own (a
claim easily disputed) or however you choose to put it, but from an
outside perspective, the post comes off as extremely petty.

I’m
sure more of your public audience than you realize would appreciate both
the amusing rhetoric you are known for and which I’m sure sells books
and gains site traffic in addition to the insightful observations you
are equally known for peppered in to the post as opposed to the
comments; leaving room for even better conversation in the thread.

How the rhetoric in the relevant post comes off to conventionally-thinking conservatives who happen agree with me on the issue of the primacy of gun rights is totally irrelevant, not only to me, but to the argument.  I mean, I harbor very little concern for what most people think anyhow, as per MPAI, but the group whose opinion least concerns me is the most rhetorically impotent and argumentatively challenged group in American political discourse today.

It tends to remind me of those who used to insist that Ann Coulter would be more “effective” if she was only nicer and less strident.  Never mind that no one would have heard of her or that she didn’t really have a whole lot to say other than ruthlessly pointing out the hypocrisy and malicious intent of the American Left.

First, note that the post was linked to by Instapundit.  Why?  Because Instapundit recognizes an effective rhetorical argument when he sees one even though his primary public response was dialectic.  Does anyone think that his perfectly rational, perfectly correct argument about the false sense of security provided by gun-free zones will have any effect whatsoever on the minds of women who are posturing about how hard they are crying and how they are “hugging them close today”?

Of course not.  The dialectic cannot reach the rhetorically-minded.  Yes, it is logical nonsense to say “if you do not homeschool your children, they will die”, just as it is nonsense to say “because one crazy individual shot 27 people, we must forcibly seize 300 million privately owned firearms that prevent government tyranny.”  And yet, these logically nonsensical rhetorical arguments that shamelessly play upon the emotions of individuals are the only ones that the majority – the majority –  of the electorate find credible and convincing.  And so they must be made.

Is this rhetorical assertion a genuine surprise to NorthernHamlet or anyone else: “Standing up to the gun lobby is the best way to honour the innocent victims.”  If so, it shouldn’t be.  This is hardly our first shooting-inspired gun control rodeo.  In the past, the pro-control crowd reaped a rhetorical harvest in the early days while the pro-freedom crowd remained silent out of fear of politicizing the tragedy or limited itself to weakly protesting in a dialectical manner.  Those days are done.  We know the drill.

As I’ve already explained, any argument that focuses on the rhetorical aspect of “homeschool or die” can be easily turned against the rhetorical arguments made by the other side.  That is the power of the meta-argument that utilizes both rhetorical and dialectical arguments; the other side can either lose on rhetorical grounds, or, after attacking the rhetoric and stripping itself of its own rhetorical arguments, lose on the more substantial dialectic grounds.

There is nothing petty about it; to claim that it is petty is to fundamentally miss the point that the argument being won and lost on petty grounds because it is mostly being fought on ground that primarily consists of petty little minds.

Mailvox: Free will and Romans 1:24

JJ asks about an approach to omniderigence that is new to me:

I’m a long time VP reader and a believer in both God and free will
who has encountered the latter part of Romans 1 as an argument against
free will. My opponent claims that either God prevented jews before from
committing the various sins listed, or caused them by making them sin
as a punishment, when the Bible says that He gave them over to sin.

My take on the question is as follows: Paul does not explicitly state
that God was preventing the jews’ free will either before or after. By
abandoning them to their sin it simply means God gave up hope on them
and the sins listed after weren’t his causing nor will, and God didn’t
prevent them from committing the various sins listed at any time. This
raises the question if the listed sins were even happening only after
God abandoned them or did they go hand in hand with idolatry and
suchlike?

Am I twisting the Scripture to suit my wish to see free will when
there is none? What is your view of the latter part of Romans 1?

P.S. Please pardon my english if it’s clumsy, it’s not my native tongue.

 The obvious thing is to look first at the entire section, beginning with Romans 1:18 and titled “God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity”.  Romans 1:18-25 states:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  

For
since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal
power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from
what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave
thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts
were darkened.  

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

There are a number of interesting points raised by this passage.  First, God doesn’t treat everyone equally.  He deals with them in response to their actions.  Second, our thoughts are not always futile nor are our hearts always dark.  Third, our sinful desires are from our hearts, which are somehow distinct from God.  And fourth, this passage is indicative of the existence of free will, not evidence of its absence.

When one “gives X over to someone else”, one is not dictating their actions, one is withdrawing one’s own influence over X and permitting other influences to take precedence.  If Man had no free will, God would have nothing else to give him over to; He would simply be giving Man over to Himself.  But that would be to make God the author of the very sinful desires and wickedness that inspires His wrath. which would indicate a schizophrenic Supreme Being.

JJ’s opponent’s argument is easily dismantled because it depends upon the idea that the Jews were not committing the sins referred to in this passage prior to the giving over.  I don’t believe that to be the case, given the numerous references to sexual immorality in the Old Testament.  But the argument is also erroneous on the basis of the passage itself, as I suspect even some of those belonging to Team Calvin will agree.

A GoodReads review

D.M. Dutcher reviews A THRONE OF BONES:

It’s hard to sum it up since so much goes on in the book. At 800854 pages,
it’s long, and the first MLP hardcover release. The length doesn’t feel
too tedious though, with only the start of the book dragging a bit. Once
it gets past discussing the upcoming goblin fight, it gets much better,
as each new character has their own story and part to play.

The
world is very interesting too. It’s sort of a fusion of Rome and
medieval Europe-imagine Rome with its legionnaires and patricians with a
church like in Thomist times and Vikings mingling with supernatural
creatures like elves and werewolves. The main focus is on Rome though,
and it adds a lot to the book by setting it apart from the generic
fantasy land it could be. It’s not just the gladiators and phalanxes,
but he gets the ethos of each nation and group right. You get inside
their heads, and it’s well done indeed.

I also found that it
fixed something that I didn’t like about Game of Thrones. One of the
issues I had with the first book in that series was that the
supernatural and fantasy aspects felt tacked in, as opposed to purely
human drama. Vox though always makes the fantasy part noticeable if not
prevalent. This isn’t just “let’s make it fantasy because we really want
to tell a historical fiction story and ignore the parts we don’t like,”
but magic and fantasy have as much a part to play as the intricate
machinations between nobles. If anything, you wish there was a bit more
focus on it. The elves in particular….

All in all, it’s a good, epic fantasy novel. It was better than I
expected. If you like more traditional Christian fantasy fare that is
clean and more aggressively spiritual (if not evangelistic) you may not
like this. But people who like well-written fantasy and Christians who
are okay with more realism and edginess to their books will probably
enjoy it quite a bit.  

I’m pleased to see that readers are understanding that THE ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series is not traditional Christian fantasy fare.  It was never intended to be, any more than it was intended to be a mindless attempt to do to GRR Martin what Terry Brooks did to JRR Tolkien in his Shannara series.  I’m still amused by the charge that I am simultaneously mimicking Edward Gibbon and R. Scott Bakker(1); while it would still be wrong, one would do significantly better to assert the book is the bastard love-child of J.B. Bury and Joe Abercrombie.  If critics want to claim that I am a derivative writer in the vein of the retrophobes, that is certainly their prerogative, but I would expect they might at least have the perspicacity to get the genuine influences right.

The reviewer is correct.  The ethos of the book is definitely more concerned with the martial values than the Christian ones.  This is the natural result of half the perspective characters either being military officers or what could reasonably be described as military intelligence.  When I write my characters, I always attempt to focus on their current concerns rather using them as a vessel for some larger point.  This is why the Marcus Valerius who is actively engaged with theological matters as part of a Church embassy led by a pair of noted ecclesiastic intellectuals is simply not going to be anywhere nearly as concerned with such elevated matters while commanding a cavalry wing in the middle of a battle involving some 30,000 combatants.

(1) In all seriousness, Bakker would probably be the last of the epic fantasy writers that I would attempt to mimic. Well, no, that would definitely be Jordan.  Then Erikson, simply because I don’t even know how I would go about trying to imitate him. But I can’t mimic the best thing about Bakker, his florid, but absorbing style, and I can’t imagine wanting to imitate any of his plots or his characters.  His worldbuilding is competent and reasonably substantial, but it doesn’t take a form in which I have any interest whatsoever, nor does it have anything in common with mine.  Moreover, a simple look at the publication date of Summa Elvetica should make it obvious that Selenoth(2) is a world I created long before I’d ever heard of R. Scott Bakker.


(2) I will send a free hardcover to the first person who correctly guesses what computer game served as the original inspiration for the name of Selenoth.  This offer will stand for one week.