Terminal velocity

The Swedish bottle is in the equalitarian forefront and is rapidly plunging towards the floor:

In Sweden, 16% of all newborns have mothers born in non-Western countries. Employment rate among immigrants: 54%. Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States. Statistics now suggest that 1 out of every 4 Swedish women will be raped. In 2003, Sweden’s rape statistics were higher than average at 9.24, but in 2005 they shot up to 36.8 and by 2008 were up to 53.2. 

This indicates is what Ed Trimnell and those who identify themselves as conservatives while simultaneously subscribing to the equalitarian ideals of the French Revolution have failed to grasp.  Disequalitarian elitists do not believe that the genie of female suffrage is going to get stuffed back in the bottle in any modern quasi-democratic society.  My position is not conservative because there is nothing left to conserve.

I describe feminism and equalitarianism as being unsustainable because they are ideologies that cannot be sustained for more than a short period of time once they become tangible policy measures.  Once equalitarianism attains a certain amount of influence in a civilized society, that society is doomed, although the collapse is not necessarily instantaneous and the particular form it takes will vary.  The speed with which the society collapses entirely depends upon the circumstances.  It only took 15 years for Germany to go from democratic suffrage to totalitarian rule, whereas it took 72 years for a different equalitarian ideology, communism, to run its course in the Soviet Union.

The average process appears to take about 50 years, which is the length of the time it took for the post-WWII European quasi-democracies to go from regaining their freedom from occupation to the loss of national sovereignty.  In the USA, the process has taken considerably more time due to its size and founding traditions that are intrinsically hostile to the equalitarian ideals, so hostile that large-scale immigration from nations more amenable to them was necessary to overcome them.  That is why I count from 1973, which is the year that the effect from women entering the workforce finally surpassed the number of old and teenage men leaving it, rather than 1919.

To put into perspective how little the average individual understands what is happening, I asked a non-American who works for a high-profile international NGO how many Hispanics there were in the USA, given a total population of 310 million.  He guessed about one million and was shocked to learn that the correct answer was 52 million.  In like manner, most Americans can’t grasp that Sweden will no longer be anything remotely identifiable as Swedish civilization in fifty years, barring the sort of upheaval and chaos that often trails economic contraction.

In other words, I don’t expect the genie to go back in the bottle, I anticipate the shattering of the bottle.  I am pointing out the process as it happens, in the hopes that in the future, others will be able to learn from the consequences of our massive ideological mistakes.

It’s a bold strategy

Let’s see if it pays off for him.  I’m left to reflect that it is just as well that Bane is dead.  This would have killed him.  There is no doubt in my mind that he would have died laughing on the spot.  The artist certainly did a magnificent job of capturing the essence.

UPDATE: A Whatever rabbit likes the Gamma Rabbit almost as much as I do:  I kind of want to get this tattooed on me just to watch the gibbering howls of Alpha rage, which I would enjoy with a nice rum and coke.

I kind of want him to do it too.  Better yet, I want John Scalzi to do it.  In fact, I will pledge ONE DOLLAR towards funding the cost of Mr. Scalzi getting the full-color Gamma Rabbit tattooed on his body.  Let’s see if he truly cares about diversity, gender equality, and the poor little gay black girls or not.  Is his commitment even skin-deep?

Glenn 1, GOP 0

Glenn Reynolds considers the “natural conservative” argument in light of Kaus’s zero-sum Game of President:

“The race to control the Presidency is a zero-sum contest, like a football game. One party wins, and one loses. Both can’t win. Immigration amnesty (or gun control, or spending cuts) might help Democrats dominate national politics and lock up the presidency for generations to come (as some believe) or it might help Republicans by allowing them to increase their dismal share of the growing Latino vote. But both sides can’t be right. Even if they both think immigration amnesty will help them, one of them is wrong.”

If the GOP thinks this is going to get them Latino votes, then the GOP is wrong.

This really isn’t that hard.  There are two mainstream parties in Mexico.  One is Partido Revolucionario Institucional.  The other is Partido de la Revolución Democrática.  Both are members of the Socialist International.  Which means that the growing Latino vote in the United States is going to vote socialist.


This is not rocket science.

Mailvox: an erroneous summary

Ed responds to my previous post on sexual inequality.  Unfortunately, he tries to leap past the specific issues raised and summarizes them incorrectly:

Your
arguments, gentlemen, all boil down to one essential realization: When
you open up the gates of universal suffrage, the results become more
unpredictable and difficult to manage.

This is
totally incorrect.  When the gates of universal suffrage are opened, the
results become entirely predictable and deleterious.  This is both
logically obvious and empirically demonstrable, since the consequences we are
currently experiencing were correctly anticipated by a wide variety of
men and women who opposed suffrage.

[H]ere
is a point I believe you overlook: We live in the twenty-first century.
Women are taxpayers, voters, and fully integrated into our educational,
corporate, and political institutions. A significant number of men
(myself included) believe that they have the right to equal
opportunities in our society. Even if it is possible to prove that women
are marginally less (or more, a la Tom Peters) capable than men, an
inexorable fact remains: Female participation in our society is firmly
established; and barring some cataclysmic counterrevolution, it is here
to stay.

Considering that I’m on record as expecting
the collapse of the USA in the 2033 timeframe, I don’t think I
can be reasonably said to have overlooked the point.  I understand that female
participation in our society is firmly established; that is precisely
why I expect our society to collapse and shatter.  This will not be the first
time this has happened, and human nature being what it is, I tend to
doubt that it will be the last.

Roissy’s observations on this score are reliably astute: “We are the front lines of a grand sociological experiment the fruits of which are just now beginning to ripen. There is no way to know the exact contours it will trace, because nothing of this precise nature on this gargantuan scale has befallen an entire civilization of our size, until now. But if past performance of similar civilizational devolutions is indicative of future returns, there is little cause for optimism. The omens are everywhere.”

 One,
even if it is possible to demonstrate that a particular group (men,
women, whites, blacks, Asians, etc.) is marginally more
intelligent/aggressive/etc. as compared to its counterpart(s), such
differences are statistically marginal, at best. Within my personal
circle of acquaintances, there are plenty of Asians who are poor at
math, and at least a dozen African-American engineers. The marginal
characteristics of a particular group (if they are provable and
demonstrable at all) do not enable you to make accurate predictions
about an individual member of that group.

Secondly, we
live in a pluralistic society. Fairness demands that we accept the equal
rights of all individuals (as opposed to the group rights advocated by
the extreme right and the politically correct left); and practicality
demands that we (I am speaking for conservatives here) construct a
message of small government and individual liberty that is free of
religious, ethnic, and gender biases.

In practice, arguments about race and/or and sex-based innate abilities do little more than offend people.

First, the inability to make accurate predictions about an individual member of that group are irrelevant since we’re not discussing the hypothetical disenfranchisement of individual voters, but rather the disenfranchisement of an entire class of voters.  And the marginal characteristics of a particular group most certainly allow one to make accurate predictions about their future collective behavior.

Second, fairness is irrelevant.  This is the expected retreat to metaphysics I anticipated and it is not applicable to the practical argument in which we are presently engaged.  Nor does practicality demand a message free of biases, indeed, the entire written history of Man demonstrates precisely the opposite.  Nor could it, given that my argument is a practical and empirical one.

Third, it is no concern of mine if people are offended or not.  The truth often offends people.  It is no surprise to me that women dislike the historical fact that their collective involvement in governance has historically led to the rapid loss of national sovereignty, to economic contraction, and other consequences generally deemed undesirable.  But history is as it is.  The facts are as they are.  Simply wishing things were otherwise is neither realistic nor a rational approach to the issue.

No one who is capable of grasping the concept that permitting children to choose their meals is not always and necessarily in their long-term best interest should have trouble understanding that permitting an increased influence in governance to any particular group is not always and necessarily in the best interest of that group or anyone else.  Nor is it necessary for a society to collapse entirely before the positive or negative effects of a specific group’s increased involvement in government to be ascertained.

A debate challenge is issued

My recent opponent on the issue of sexual equality, Ed Trinmell, has presented a debate challenge, which I have accepted:

Within eight hours of the debate challenge I issued to feuding bloggers John Scalzi and Vox Day, Vox responded positively in the comment threads of the original post.

Half of the debating lineup is on board. But what about the other man?

Within an hour of my debate challenge post, John Scalzi mysteriously posted an ad hominem attack against his opposition. Scalzi now states that he will make a charitable contribution at the end of 2013 in lieu of further acknowledgements of Vox Day, who has agreed to debate him in a neutral venue….

Should John Scalzi agree to this debate for the benefit of Children International, I will volunteer to function as moderator. My ground rules will be as follows:

  • This will be a civil, professional, and dignified debate. I will not allow ad hominem attacks, profanity, or excessive sarcasm from either man.
  • This debate will be fair and ideologically balanced. The questions will be equally weighted so as to favor neither Vox Day nor John Scalzi.
  • Specifically, I will challenge Vox regarding his views of women in the political process (which I am on record as opposing). I will challenge John regarding the premises behind his now-infamous “straight white male” essay—which generated a lot of controversy on the Internet last summer.

It’s certainly an intriguing challenge.  Can I present a credible and convincing case for opposing equality in the political process?  Does McRapey have anything to offer in support of his claims of racial, sexual, and orientational equality beyond false game analogies and repetitive ad hominem attacks?

And then there is the question that all impartial parties will surely be asking: does John Scalzi possess the courage required to take the risk of having his spinal column metaphorically ripped from him in public?  My guess is that he does not.  He’s a rabbit.  He’s a gamma male.  His blog readership is smaller than mine.  His intellectual influence is miniscule in comparison with mine. He has no original ideas; he’s little more than a parrot.  I strongly suspect that he cannot credibly defend his assertions, which is why he merely repeats them over and over again.

Just as PZ Myers disheartened his supporters by twice backing down, I assume that Scalzi will find a way to rationalize his inability to defend his views in public.  That lack of courage, that manifest lack of confidence in the strength of his positions, is one reason my influence will continue to grow in comparison with his, as was the case with regards to the Fowl Atheist, who is increasingly regarded as a joke even within the atheist community.  Dr. Myers tried the “I’m too important to waste my time on a crackpot” approach back in June 2008, when my readership was 38.5 percent of what it is now.  It may be worth noting that Mr. Scalzi’s fans appear to be woefully ignorant concerning the facts of the situation.  Consider this tweet directed to my attention earlier today:

“just a thought, but “superintelligence” doesn’t need to mooch off real thought leaders ( @scalzi ) to get people to notice you.”

How, one wonders, can John Scalzi possibly be considered a “thought leader” of any kind?  He has no ideas of his own.  Even his fiction is openly derivative, whereas my original concepts have been cited in science journals, on Wikipedia, and provided scientists with hypotheses for which their subsequent experiments have found empirical evidence.  Furthermore, I have no need to mooch off anyone, least of all Mr. Scalzi, in order to get people to notice me.  Not only did he first come to my attention as a result of him and a number of other SFWA members reacting to one of my WND columns, but my blog readership first surpassed his in 2011.

This failure to understand that there are two sides to the political spectrum is apparently a common misapprehension on the part of the left; some in the SF/F community have publicly complained about Black Gate giving me a platform despite the fact that nearly a quarter of its annual traffic in recent years has come from VP alone.

Mailvox: errors of the equalitarians

Boris rejects my proposed liberty metric:

“So my question to Mr. Trimnell is if he accepts the number of laws and regulations in effect as a reasonable metric for measuring human liberty in this regard?”

This is a terrible metric. The content of the law is far more important wrt liberty than the actual number of laws. It can hardly be argued that American society is less free today than in 1919.  In any case, a more complex society will always have more laws, so your metric is not well thought out at all.

Boris’s objection is nonsensical on its face.  How can he reasonably compare the content of a single law to the total number of laws?  Alternatively, if by “the content of the law” he means “the cumulative content of all the laws”, how can he possibly ignore the fact that since all laws contain restrictions on human behavior, the larger the number of laws, the larger the number of restrictions on human behavior that they collectively contain?

It is true that the cumulative content of restrictions imposed by all the laws is a better metric than the mere number of them, but the latter is much easier to calculate, harder to dispute, and is demonstrably a reasonable and effective metric even if not the ideal one.

Furthermore, it can very easily be argued, indeed, it can very easily be proved, that American society is considerably less free today than in 1919.  I invite Boris to either attempt to prove that American society is considerably more as free today than in 1919 or retract his assertion.

Finally, what is “a complex society”?  Wikipedia defines it as: “the extent of a division of labour in which members of society are more or less permanently specialized in particular activities and depend on others for goods and services, within a system regulated by custom and laws.”  Since a complex society features a regulated system by definition, it should be clear that the complex society’s inevitable tendency to have more laws not only fails to disprove the metric, but instead underlines its effectiveness.

I also asked The Great Martini about his preference for democracy or limited democracy:

“Question for you: what better expresses the will of the people, direct
democracy or representative-limited democracy? And which do you favor?”

Direct
democracy would be preferable if a practical system could be devised to
implement it. There’s the question of whether it would even be
feasible to run a government by constantly consulting all the people
every time a decision had to be made. If everyone were versed in
everything and if everyone would actually agree to a process of constant
polling it would no doubt be a very effective expression of the will of
the people. The internet has made that more feasible, but still I
think impractical.

What does feasibility have to do with the more perfect expression of the will of the people?  Is direct democracy via the Internet truly LESS feasible or a less perfect expression than the system of limited representative democracy when it took weeks for information to travel from Washington DC to the various Congressional districts across the nation?  Is it even less perfect than the present system that involves gerrymandered representatives voting on giant bills consisting of thousands of pages that they have not even read?

The point I am making here is that even the most die-hard equalitarian favors strict limits on democracy.  They might appeal to feasibility, practicality, voter ignorance, or any number of other factors, but at the end of the day, every single one I have ever encountered favors concrete limits for the electorate.  Therefore, this is a purely practical debate and the metaphysical arguments upon which the pro-suffrage equalitarian rhetoric is based are irrelevant and inapplicable.

Congratulations Cris Carter!

It’s two years overdue, but Cris Carter, the third-best WR of all time in my opinion, finally makes it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  It was a privilege to watch him play, and the Three Deep lineup of Carter, Moss, and Reed may have been the most dangerous receiver set in NFL history.  He may have been a possession receiver who only caught touchdowns, but the man was an artist on the sidelines.

This is your Super Bowl thread.  My pick: Ravens.  The 49ers defense looks shaky, the 49ers kicker even shakier, and the quarterback is a runner and a rookie.  If you favor NFL conspiracy theory, Ray Lewis’s Last Ride is a far superior storyline than 5 Super Bowls, 5 wins for the 49ers.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Randy Moss got a ring.  But doesn’t Moss finishing his career without one fit the NFL narrative a little better?

Saruman: the misunderstood hero

Adrian Simmons presents an interesting and unusual take on The Lord of the Rings:

The more you know about Sarumon, the more sympathetic to his situation you become. He is the first picked to go, and the first to arrive in Middle-earth. He journeys to the east with Aratar and Pollombo, and those two don’t return (not much is said about the blue wizards, but honestly I get the feeling they kind of flake out altogether — a very real danger with volunteers who get to bring their friends along).

But Sarumon’s always second fiddle. Right from the start Varda makes it clear that he’s not in charge, and later when the White Council is formed, Galadriel doesn’t want him in control of that august body either. And he learns that that weenie Gandalf (who comes to Middle-earth one hundred years later) gets one of the three rings of power the day he freaking lands. Ugh! The humiliation! You’d retreat to the fastness of your ancient tower, too.

Sarumon’s activities are not well defined, but there are hints that he tangles with ring wraiths, and he is in the thick of it when the White Council goes to Dol Guldur to deal with the Necromancer. After Dol Guldur, he withdraws a bit, but even then he is still working on the Sauron problem, and his solution is as awful as it is cunning. You have to keep in mind, he’s come to Middle-earth, he fights the good fight (for over a thousand years), stress causes his hair to turn from black to white, he gets the keys to Orthanc, and he discovers the palantir. And after Dol Guldur is where the Big Plan starts.

And here is the tragedy of it all, as Sauron and Sarumon were co-workers back in the day, they have a remarkably similar ‘corporate culture’, and a pretty similar worldview — and this is why the wise don’t really want Sarumon in charge — because his answer to Sauron will be to become Sauron, Ring or no.

Sauron, of course, knows all this, and that’s why it is so easy for him, via the palantir, to pluck at Sarumon’s pride and ensure that, like the gung-ho fireman, he overestimates his own abilities and underestimates the situation, and his teammates have to burn valuable time and resources bailing him out.

And since Sarumon can’t force Men or Elves to fight his Big War, he comes up with the idea of the half-orcs/Urik-hai. The injunction by the gods? Doesn’t say shit about orcs, does it? Hell no it doesn’t! So, really, it was only a matter of time before Saruman realized that he could raise an army of his own orcs to take on Sauron’s. Give him another hundred years and he won’t need the damn Men or the Elves. It really has a whole Stalin vs. Hitler vibe, doesn’t it?

I guess it just goes to show that no one likes a “letter of the law” guy.  Wizard or no.  Read the rest at The Black Gate.

Paging Helicopter Ben

Apparently no one has alerted the government of Zimbabwe about the magic of the printing press:

Zimbabwe’s finance minister has taken a hard look at the cash strapped country’s bank accounts – and discovered it only has £138 and 34 pence left. Tendai Biti made the announcement at press conference yesterday declaring: ‘Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 in government coffers.  Mr Biti went on to tell the shocked news reporters that they were individually likely to have healthier bank balances than the state’s.

Ah, my mistake.  It appears they do have a central bank and a printing press; this is merely a currency translation problem.  The government has ZWD 46.6 quantillion in the bank, which is the equivalent of $217 at the official exchange rate.

Although I do have a vision of the Dollarific Duo, Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman, two econoheroes helicoptering into countries with contracting economies and rescuing them before riding off into the sunset on their tandem Neo-Keynesian cycle.

Come see the violence inherent in the system

Help, help, I’m being threatened!  And by the SFWA South-Central Regional Director, no less.  At 3:30 AM, I was returning from a late night out with Silvio and the boys when I noticed literally hundreds of entries coming from a site belonging to leading science fiction author and international cross-dressing star Jim Hines.  Naturally, being the secure and self-confident image of modern masculinity, I immediately hastened to scour his site for every reference to me.

Imagine the horror and fear that struck me when I read the following:

lee_martindale wrote:
Feb. 1st, 2013 04:19 pm (UTC)
Ah, yes. Mr. Beale. When I decided to run for re-election as SFWA South-Central Regional Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr. Beale won the Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to start a bail fund.”

Naturally, I was panic-stricken by the violent implications of the Regional Director’s threat.  After I got off the phone with the local police, Homeland Security, the FBI, and Interpol, and managed to compose myself following an intense round of aromatherapy, some yoga exercises, and about a gallon of green tea, I posted the following in the Questions for Candidates section of the SFWA Forum:

Two questions for Lee Martindale: It was brought to my attention that
yesterday, you wrote the following on SFWA member Jim Hines’s web site: “When
I decided to run for re-election as SFWA South-Central Regional
Director, someone asked me what I would do if Mr. Beale won the
Presidential election. I replied, “Ask my friends to start a bail
fund.””

1. What did you mean by indicating that you would need a bail fund in the event of my election as SFWA President?(1)
2. Do you believe that threatening criminal activity and violence is appropriate for an officer of the SFWA Board?

I note that this is the second implication of violence an SFWA member
has directed towards me since I declared my candidacy. Two open
questions for everyone else:

1. Are these implied threats of criminality and/or violence acceptable behavior on the part of SFWA members, and in the case of Ms Martindale, current Board members?
2. Should Ms Martindale resign her position and terminate her candidacy due to her implied threats of criminal activity?

I find it hard to see how I, or any other elected SFWA official, could be
expected to work in a productive manner with Ms Martindale in the
knowledge that she may resort to criminal activity and physical violence
over a mere difference of opinion.

(1) Ms Martindale explained that she was, in fact, implying violence,
although she claimed that she only meant violence of the self-defensive
variety.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Bane.