Supply, Demand, and the Interest Rate

I swear, Neo-Keynesians must never look at debt statistics. I mean, they literally NEVER seem to look at them! Our favorite Nobel Prize-winner comments on what is supposed to be the mysterious failure of interest rates to rise in line with the massive expansion of government debt since 2008 and erroneously concludes that this proves his belief in unicornsthe ability of government to borrow indefinitely without affecting interest rates:

I mean, common sense — or at least common sense as the WSJ sees it — would tell you that massive government borrowing would send interest rates soaring. And that’s certainly what the WSJ editorial page told its readers would happen. Only us fancy-schmancy Keynesians said otherwise; and here’s what actually happened:

Yes, interest rates have declined from 4.7% in 2007 to 2.3% in 2011 even as government borrowing has almost doubled, but what Krugman fails to point out is that the neo-classicals at the WSJ were assuming, incorrectly, that the private demand for debt, (a 12x larger factor), would continue to increase, and therefore increased government borrowing added on top of that would cause overall debt to expand in excess of its average annual post-WWII rate of 8.7%. This OVERALL increase in demand for debt would increase the price of debt, thereby causing interest rates to rise. All very sensible and perfectly in line with both post-war economic history and basic economic theory alike.

However, what the WSJ failed to anticipate was that despite the 82.9% increase in government borrowing since 2008, total debt outstanding only grew 4.8% in 2008 and actually SHRANK 0.32% in 2009 and 0.87% in 2010. That’s not a liquidity trap, that’s a 22.5% demand gap between the overall amount of debt anticipated and the actual amount borrowed!

Even an Econ 101 student knows what happens to price when supply goes up and demand goes down. The price goes down. Interest rates are at historic lows for the obvious reason that OVERALL demand for debt, relative to GDP, is at historic lows as well, even though the federal government sector has increased rapidly. The WSJ made what at the time appeared to be a safe and perfectly reasonable assumption, given that between 1946 and 2007, there had never been a single year in which overall debt grew less than 4%. Their assumption also happened to be absolutely wrong, but the incorrect nature of that assumption does not mean that Krugman and his fancy-schmancy Keynesian-imagined exception to the law of supply and demand is therefore correct.

Conan the Torturer

The intrepid Leo Grin isn’t what one would call delighted with the new Conan movie:

Saw Conan the Barbarian last night. Revoltingly stupid, incomprehensibly plotted and edited, and overflowing with the kind of quasi-erotic torture porn (seemingly pulled wholesale out of a serial killer’s wet dreams) that’s become a staple of both fantasy literature and Hollywood films this century. Easily one of the worst films I’ve seen during decades of painfully slumming through mediocre genre fare — I daresay even Uwe Boll (the ham-fisted director commonly seen as the modern era’s answer to Ed Wood) has never made anything this irredeemably rotten.

I daresay we can soon expect to hear from the admirers of the New Epic Nihilism informing us that Leo has once again managed to miss the point, that the new Conan the Barbarian film is, in fact, a brilliant reinvention of a genre that had grown tired and stale, that it is admirably adult in its moral ambiguity and creative depravity, and may be the greatest film since Citizen Kane. Which leads me to contemplate two things. First, since when did “adult” come to imply torture, incest, and rape? I mean, I enjoy spending a quiet Saturday night creeping about the bushes at the local university armed with chloroform and a knife in search of a new friend to bring back to my soundproofed playroom as much as anyone, but sometimes one would like a little escapism in one’s fantasy entertainment. You know, just a simple quest to find the Macguffin, defeat the Foozle, and save the world or something would be nice.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

I also thought Sean Stiennon’s recent post on Elf Opera in Tang China was worth reading. He highlights the same problem with current fantasy fiction, albeit from a different perspective, that I first addressed in my essay published in BenBella’s Reinventing Narnia.

Mailvox: the Muslim myth

The aptly named Sub Specie has fallen for a common legend believed by many of the half-educated and historically illiterate:

“If it weren’t for the goddamn Muslims, we wouldn’t have great ancient literature!!! They preserved it for us, you know. Oh, fcuk, no, you didn’t know…did you? Not only did they preserve all that s#it, but they contributed so much to math, medicine and science (ironically while Europe was a chaotic s#ithole full of rotting bodies).”

It’s always interesting to receive what apparently is intended as a history lesson from someone who quite clearly knows nothing of the Eastern Roman Empire. The idea of “the Arab transmission of the classics” is false, as should be readily apparent to those who are aware that most of the ancient works lost to the West were “discovered” in conquered Spain, not the Middle East. Moreover, it is obvious that the Muslims did not contribute much of their own in the interim period when they possessed the Greek classics and the post-imperial Latins did not.

“The Arab transmission of the classics is a common and persistent myth that Arabic commentators such as Avicenna and Averroes ‘saved’ the work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European dark age between fifth and the tenth centuries, had the Islamic philosophers not preserved them by translating them into Arabic, to be passed on to the Latin philosophers in the West after the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims during the twelve and thirteenth centuries. This is incorrect. It was actually the Byzantines in the East who saved the ancient learning of the Greeks in the original language, and the first Latin texts to be used were translation from the Greek, in the 12th century, rather than, in most cases, the Arabic, which were only used in default of these. “

Wängsty is still at it

In which R. Scott Bakker demonstrates that there is more fantasy in his philosophy than there is philosophy in his fantasy.

By way of clarification, no one asked him about the ‘absolute’ of anything. I’m not sure I understand, otherwise (and would welcome clarification). Is he saying he doesn’t believe in the question? Or is he saying the truth or falsity doesn’t matter, so long as people do what he wants them to do? Or is he actually biting the bullet, saying, ‘I really don’t know whether my claims are right or wrong, but I don’t care one way or another, so long as people seem to believe me.”

Or is he simply avoiding the question once again.

It appears I have to write very slowly or Bakker will be again unable to follow what everyone else has understood. I initially ignored the question because I thought it was rhetorical. After he started suggesting I was avoiding it, I gave the only answer I considered to be meaningful. But what I am saying, and what I have believed from the start, is that it is a stupid and irrelevant question. There is no such thing as “certainty” and Bakker’s entire certainty/uncertainty framework is a false one. Not only are there no “Grand Prize Winners” in the sense that he means it, I don’t know a single person who genuinely believes they are a Grand Prize Winner either. The basic philosophical framework he has presented is as fictitious as his novels.

Here is my return question for him. (1) What are ten historical examples of “certainty” causing more material harm than uncertainty?

Now, if I were a follower of Theo, I would like to know what the hell he’s talking about. Why should they take someone who doesn’t care about the accuracy of his views of faith seriously? Or, if he does take the accuracy (as opposed to the consequences) of his claims seriously, why should they trust the claims of someone who doesn’t take the likelihood they are wrong seriously.

They take me seriously because I have a strong track record of being much more accurate than the average commentator or media expert over nearly a decade of writing columns. When your predictions help people make 475% on their investments during a bear market, help them avoid going underwater on their homes by correctly nailing housing prices within $300 one year in advance, and correctly anticipate a global financial crisis several months in advance, it tends to give you a certain amount of credibility. I am always aware that there is a possibility I am wrong. Anyone with an IQ over 80 is. But Bakker can’t seem to grasp the concept of probability. Everyone is wrong sometimes. Pataki anyone? The Lizard Queen? But the verifiable fact of the matter is that I am wrong far less often than most despite the predictive risks I take, and when I am wrong I am still usually in the general vicinity.

For example, I predicted that Obama would not be the 2012 Democratic nominee over one year ago. I said he would be encouraged not to run by the Democratic Party elders. At the time, everyone thought that was absolutely insane and the prediction was much mocked by many among the Dread Ilk. While I still may be turn out to be wrong, no one is laughing at it anymore, least of all Obama’s advisors, now that the Washington Post is reporting the very activity that I predicted last year.

One of the things that seems to make democracy such an effective form of governance, for instance, is its capacity for reform, for adapting to new social realities. It’s ugly, it’s prone to error, but the institution is designed to eventually get it right.

Bakker must be a historical illiterate. Cicero knew better than this more than 2,000 years ago. The American Founding Fathers knew better more than 200 years ago. Democracy is not “designed to eventually get it right”, it is designed to eventually collapse into dictatorship. Also, of all the “democracies” in the world, Switzerland is the only one that is even remotely democratic in the proper sense of the term. Bakker clearly doesn’t understand that modern pseudo-democracies are structured in such a way as to prevent meaningful reform and periodically release political pressure while ensuring the continued rule of the political elite.

From De Re Publica:

“I have reasoned thus on the three forms of government, not looking on them in their disorganized and confused conditions, but in their proper and regular administration. These three particular forms, however, contained in themselves from the first, the faults and defects I have mentioned, but they have still more dangerous vices, for there is not one of these three forms of government, which has not a precipitous and slippery passage down to some proximate abuse. For after that king, whom I have called most admirable, or if you please most endurable—after the amiable Cyrus, we behold the barbarous Phalaris, that model of tyranny, to which the monarchical authority is easily abused by a facile and natural inclination. Alongside of the wise aristocracy of Marseilles, we might exhibit the oligarchical faction of the thirty despots, which once existed at Athens. And among the same Athenians, we can shew you, that when unlimited power was cast into the hands of the people, it inflamed the fury of the multitude, and aggravated that universal licence which ruined their state.”

The reason science has so outstripped its competitors boils down to creative flexibility in the face of supercomplexity. Multiple researchers with multiple hypotheses, embedded in a system that selects for accuracy. You never ‘go all in’ – rather, you hedge your bets, always realizing the complexity of things is such that you could very well lose. And you listen closely to those making contrary bets around you, realizing that they are at least as likely to be holding the winning hand as you.

This section is simply ridiculous from start to finish. Bakker obviously knows little about how science and scientists actually operate. Scientistry is a corrupt and politicized institution that makes increasingly little use of scientody. He needs to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as he clearly isn’t familiar with the problem of scientific paradigms, nor does he realize that the only reason science has been so astonishingly successful in the West is because it has ridden on the back of free enterprise and technological development. The Soviet Union devoted a higher percentage of its GDP to science than the West did and was still driving 1950s automobiles forty years later.

It may be true that we are all possessed of three-pound brains. It is also empirically and historically demonstrable that some individuals put those three pounds to more systematic and effective use than others.

And I have a second question for Bakker. (2) On what basis does he assume that I am any more certain, or any less skeptical, than he is?

BONUS ANSWERS: Eric asked: If human action on earth is of importance, and that action is shaped by belief (both facts asserted in his answer) then that belief and the correctness thereof must “matter.”

When did I say that human action on Earth is of any importance? I implied precisely the opposite in citing Mises. Human action only matters, it only CAN matter, in the subjective sense, so the belief and the correctness of the belief can only matter to the acting man, except in that there happen to be any material consequences of those actions to others.

How do we KNOW if we are Acting Correctly?

By ascertaining if the consequences of the action accord harmoniously with the results predicted. Or, if you prefer, by their fruits you shall know them.

Publishing update

First, The Deported has been accepted for publication in the Halloween edition of Stupefying Stories. This actually marks my third-ever submission of a short story for publication and my first-ever acceptance, as I had a (dreadful) story rejected by Asimov’s in 1989 and a (pretty good) novella rejected by Black Gate in 2009. (In fairness to John O’Neill, it was a bit of a stretch for BG.) Ten points to the first one to guess what literary lion’s style is being imitated in the story; if you are one of the few who happen to know already, do keep your mouth shut!

Second, I’ve been informed by a publisher that they would like to publish the first book in the Arts of Dark and Light series. I sent them a sample and they particularly liked what they termed the rich depth of the world. Nothing is final yet, but I see no reason we won’t be able to work things out shortly; I was completely surprised to hear they were interested in publishing such a monster. Arts of Dark and Light is set in the same world as Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy, but is more accessible and vastly larger in scope. Translation I: No more untranslated Latin or structural limits set by 700-year old theological treatises. Translation II: we shall see if I can do any better in producing a work of epic fantasy than the authors of the various works I have criticized in the last few months.

So, if it turns out well, I shall owe a debt of gratitude to Messrs. Abercrombie, Bakker, Erikson, and Martin, as it was reading their work that first caused me to begin thinking “Sweet Silmarillion, I could do better than this.” And by Martin, I expect you understand that I am referring to the last two books only, which are significantly inferior to the first three. Robert Jordan doesn’t count, as I would rather read Jack Torrance’s epic seven times than subject myself again to the deplorable Wheel of Time. I like to think that the name was a result of Jordan being a sadist who gave fair warning; that series should have been listed in an addendum to the Geneva Convention.

Anyhow, if nothing else, we already know Arts of Dark and Light will have a gorgeous cover. So we have that going for us….

Solve for X

If scientists wish to better understand why the rest of humanity sometimes doesn’t view Asimov’s “Nightfall” as a classic cautionary tale, but rather as a cheerful little story with a happy ending, this sort of thing might be why:

The Alliance for Human Research Protection speaks out against a US government-proposed anthrax vaccine experiment on children. Such an experiment would sacrifice children’s welfare, much as canaries sent into the coal mines were sacrificed. The National Biodefense Science Board,convened a two day meeting of the Anthrax Vaccine Working Group at the request of the Department of Health and Human Services. The July 7 meeting was open to the public, followed by a closed meeting on July 8.

I propose a new law that dictates any scientist who seriously proposes experiments on unconsenting children that involves lethal diseases be officially stripped of human status and turned over to cosmetic research laboratories. I mean, precisely how obtuse do you have to be to fail to understand that this sort of thing is simply not done?

“Performing experiments in non-consenting children, especially when they do not have a condition the experiment is designed to address, is carefully regulated.”

Carefully regulated? Why is it regulated, carefully or not? It should be completely illegal. And the Tuskeegee experiment was far from the last time this sort of thing happened, as they’re still doing similar experiments with clueless, uninformed people even today.

The amazing thing is that many scientists genuinely believe they should be running the world. I think a much more relevant debate is whether the rest of the human population should take them out and shoot them in preemptive self-defense now or simply keep a closer eye on the myopic bastards. The usual arguments about the niftyness of technology and increased populations don’t really matter all that much when the only extant threats to human existence have all been produced by scientists.

Since so few scientists, and even fewer science fans, have any capacity for comprehending logic, I will put the argument into mathematical terms. It doesn’t matter how many positive integers you add together if in the end, you multiply the sum by zero.

Here is the test: Sum(1:N)*0 = X. Solve for X. Then explain what value of N will cause a change in the value of X.

Tracking the anklebiters

Because it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of exactly which anklebiter is avoiding what question, I’ve decided to add this handy little reference link to the sidebar so that the keepers of the hammer will know whose comments to continue deleting until they either back up their naked assertions or retract them. It’s always illuminating to see who can actually support their assertions and who doesn’t even make any attempt to do so. Unsurprisingly, it is usually the mindless critics who have proven incapable of constructing the most rudimentary arguments in support of their positions.

BANNED

Beelzebub: Trolls under a variety of pseudonyms. Real name Hunt Stoddard.
Pawn Takes Queen: Aka “passerby”.
Modernguy: hates Spacebunny
Bearded Spock: Also used a variety of names. Appears to be from Finland. Markku’s evil twin?
Will: aka Dan aka Alauda: the SF/F literary troll and legendary committer of “So, what are your names, wayfarers?”
Unger: Free trader given to emotional incontinence and demonstrably false assertions.
Tad: aka “Writer Gawking”. Homosexual with affinity for Paris and 25 comments/post
Phoenician:
Whatever/Pharyngula reader and librarian who favors the term “dipshit”
and can’t tell the difference between California and Massachusetts, or
between science and ethical justifications to not use science.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Holla: Doesn’t know what an “anecdote” is.
George: Doesn’t know what “hearsay evidence” is. Asserts atheists get divorced less often than self-identified Christians.
Depkey: Joseph from CL’s blog. His cunning plan is to troll with what he calls a Taylor persona.
James May: Monomania about certain SFWA writers.

If you have to ask, you aren’t

The New York Times unwittingly underlines the fatal flaw in the multicultural mass immigration:

In the United States, citizenship once granted is never questioned, said Mr. Overbeek of VU University. “But in Europe it’s never quite established, no matter how long you’ve been here. Here it’s still, ‘When did you get here, and when are you going back?’ ”

East of Amsterdam, in Almere, the youngest city in the Netherlands, 30 percent voted for Mr. Wilders. Shopping in the city center, Raihsa Sahinoer, 24, born here of Surinamese immigrants, was not surprised. “Wilders says we all have to go back even if we were born here,” she said. “It’s not only about Muslims, it’s about colored people, too.”

She lives as the Dutch do, she said. “But they tell us if you’re colored, you’re not Dutch.” Does she feel Dutch? “No,” she said, then paused, then asked: “What is Dutch?”

This is exactly what I have been trying to explain with regards to mass immigration. A woman from Suriname, a man from Mexico, a child from Sweden, none of them has any understanding, or even reason to understand, the various aspects that went into making up historical American society regardless of how long they live in the United States. That is why they are absolutely guaranteed to transform it, to destroy it, even when they admire it, if they arrive in sufficient numbers. A garden that can survive the arrival of ten or twenty grasshoppers without incident will be totally destroyed in rapid order by a swarm of locusts.

The interesting thing is that the Dutch are actively turning against multiculturalism and mass immigration even though the ethnic Dutch are still 80.9% of the population with an immigration rate of 2.55 migrants per 1,000 inhabitants. Contrast this with the USA, where only 72.4% of the population is even white and the immigration rate is 4.18% per thousand.

And, of course, the US immigration debate is going in precisely the opposite direction than in Europe, with Democratic and Republican immigration enthusiasts alike lauding the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting illegal aliens.

Bowing to pressure from immigrant rights activists, the Obama administration said Thursday that it will halt deportation proceedings on a case-by-case basis against illegal immigrants who meet certain criteria, such as attending school, having family in the military or having primary responsible for other family members’ care.

The Wangst that Comes After

I am beginning to conclude that SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi needs to sit Mr. R.S. Bakker down for a remedial lesson in handling criticism. I’m not saying Bakker is quite as wangsty as the hapless Laurell K. Hamilton, as was most famously exhibited in her post-Incubus Dreams meltdown, but he’s definitely beginning to show serious indications of having the potential to go critical.

Consider, compare, and contrast the two.

Hamilton: I’m sure there are other books out there that will make you happier than mine. There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books. They aren’t comfortable books. They are books that push my character and me to the edge and beyond of our comfort zones. If that’s not want you want, then stop reading. Put my books away with other things that frighten and confuse or just piss you off.

Bakker: (1) “These guys are strictly bush league in comparison. There’s nothing anybody’s said that has prickled enough to jarr me from my experimental mindset–yet…. And as far as the books go, I actually think this stuff demonstrates that my writing, for better or worse, is rich enough to support a wild, wild variety of competing interpretations. And most important of all, that it’s actually reaching people who can be outraged.”

(2) “Reading Theo’s review, and you would think someone was being raped every other page (rather than every other other page)! Not only did the sex really, really, really stand out for him, but it really, really, really offended him as well, apparently enough to overpower what he did like about the books. Fair enough, I suppose, but given that the first book is called The Darkness that Comes Before (!), and given that the irrational springs of human action are a primary focus of the book, and given that sex is one of those springs (history and appetite are everywhere: if anything there’s far more ‘history porn’ in the books than sexual porn), you would at least think that he would reference this connection… I guess he missed it.”

You really have to have read Incubus Dreams to appreciate the full humor of Hamilton’s rant. How hard does she believe people have to think in order to keep straight who is putting what where? But first, oversensitive, self-important authors, GET OVER YOURSELVES ALREADY! To quote the immortal words of Robert Anton Wilson, “Nietzsche masturbates too much.” Here is an important guideline for the author who is disappointed with a review: if your response to criticism of your work contains the words “comfort zone”, “interpretation”, or “push”, or if you write more words in response to a review than were contained in the actual review, you are officially engaging in authorial wangst. Cease and desist. It is unseemly and neither enhances your reputation nor improves the content of your books.

Second, Bakker is demonstrating an increasing degree of delusion in repeatedly claiming that no one has presented any arguments to him. He has required basic factual correction about nearly everything he assumed about me, all of which was part of a totally irrelevant ad hom response anyway. (One wonders what his response would have been if I’d actually ripped his three books as I have in the cases of Jordan and Goodkind.) Bakker is too parochial – and I mean that in the original sense of the term, as he is quite literally a provincial and for all I know still lives with his mommy in his childhood Canadian home – to grasp that the scope of my international perspective absolutely dwarfs his “I went to grad school in America and my professors told me all this neat stuff” point of view. What Bakker has only imagined and theorized and read about second-hand is part of my actual experience; the most remarkable thing about humanity around the world is how strikingly similar the attitudes of the Japanese rice farmers are to the dialect-speaking mountain clans of northern Italy and the tobacco-growing farmers of southern France. The same holds true for the self-overrated educated classes from Harvard and ToDai to Oxford and the Sorbonne. Seeing a guy who didn’t manage to complete a doctorate at Vanderbilt and can’t tell the difference between a libertarian and a fascist attempt to strike the conventional pose of the latter is simply… well, it’s a little ironic, anyhow.

Two days ago, I was having dinner with a European ambassador to a large South American country and attempting to convince her, and the international hostage negotiator on my other side, that trained, intelligence-enhanced sharks equipped with laser harnesses were the answer to the growing Somali ship-jacking problem being discussed.* Yesterday, I was lifting weights with an unemployed African who lives on social benefits and is hoping to somehow avoid eventual deportation. Today, I’ll go to the recycling center to ask the captain of my calcio team, who is one of the trash men, what time we play our first game of the season. This range of experience does not tend to lend itself to a closed mind. Bakker doesn’t realize that what he decries as “certainty” is actually nothing more than experience-informed probability calculation and pattern recognition. There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.

Third, Bakker can afford to pretend – and it is a pretense, nothing more – to be uncertain about everything because he is a fantasy writer and his positions on pretty much everything are inconsequential. Those of us who deal with objective real-world issues such as the current price of gold, the ForEx rates, and the $53-trillion inflation/deflation question on a regular basis understand that there are situations concerning which one must make black-and-white decisions even though any degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow is utterly impossible. To claim that any sane economist, or any trader, is prone to an unusual degree of epistemic arrogance is not merely stupid, it is profoundly ignorant. Take that most iron-clad law of economics, the Law of Supply and Demand. I can cite multiple exceptions to it, beginning with Veblen and conspicuous consumption, off the top of my head. Even that most closed-minded of economists, Paul Krugman, may sound absolutely certain in his assertive, Nobel Prize-winning pronouncements, but he sounds that way even as he changes his definition of inflation from one column to the next.

This is why Bakker’s entire attempt to respond to the Black Gate review in the form of an ad hominem attack is not only irrelevant and pointless, it is also incorrect. Note that Bakker’s pretentious blathering about “epistemic arrogance” is simply a variation on the left-wing meme du saison, epistemic closure. I would venture to bet, as Nate has already noted, that I have publicly changed my mind about more intellectually significant issues than Bakker ever has about anything. That’s a verifiable claim of fact: has Bakker ever a) changed his public position on the legitimacy of a war, b) changed his public position on a core element of his philosophy as I have with regards to Ricardian free trade, the core mechanism for the Austrian business cycle, and before that, Chicago School monetarism or c) actually made a substantive case for any of his ideological assumptions such as human equality, female suffrage, or what he describes as “moral realism”? Should Bakker’s fanboys be able to demonstrate otherwise, I will readily admit I am wrong… but if they cannot, will they admit that Bakker is?

The primary difference between Bakker and me is that he insists on operating in relative ignorance while avoiding the use of objective metrics that can be verified by third parties. I do not. I read his books before I reached any conclusions about them. He merely scanned my blog before retreating to his fainting couch. La, such fascism , such conservatism, among the radical libertarians – Mussolini wept! I tend to doubt Bakker has ever given as serious credence to someone whose foundational assumptions fundamentally challenge his own as I did in my recent interview with the Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen. I suggest Mr. Bakker should listen to that interview before he further embarrasses himself with more idiotic accusations concerning my “epistemic arrogance”; even if he doesn’t understand economics well enough to comprehend the vast gulf that separates the Austrian from the Post-Keynesian, he is intelligent enough to be aware that there is a substantive difference between the two competing viewpoints.

The fact is that Bakker’s books, while intelligent and laudably ambitious, are nowhere nearly as deep and complex and sophisticated as he would apparently like to believe. The fact that the reader does not pick up one aspect or another doesn’t make a book brilliant or render its review incorrect; the Black Gate reviewer of Summa Elvetica erroneously, and rather hilariously, concluded that the philosophical arguments for the Elvish soul that were presented in the structural form of the arguments from the Summa Theologica were actually written by Thomas Aquinas, and yet his review was a fair and judicious one that managed to precisely identify the primary flaw in the book.

Bakker needs to grow up, both intellectually and emotionally. He’s not a misunderstood genius whose transgressive work outrages the morally repressed plebs even as it opens their conservative eyes to astonishing new philosophical insights. Hell, judging by the Internet reaction, my WND columns are far more outrageous and eye-opening than anything Bakker has ever written. The concepts he is utilizing are neither new nor difficult for anyone with a +1SD IQ to grasp. His inclination for sockpuppetry is childish and misguided, his sensitivity rivals that of an emo chick, and his philosophy is juvenile. And yet, he has genuine talent for writing intelligent fantasy. So, there is still hope for him, as he certainly wouldn’t be the first writer to look back on what he once considered deep and meaningful brilliance with a mortified shudder.

Any idiot can be uncertain. “I dunno” is not an indicator of superior intelligence and there is nothing intrinsically intelligent about doubt. The imperative is to learn enough to be able to ask the relevant questions, which then provide a solid foundation for ascertaining the highest-probability answers.

*Much hilarity ensued when the hostage negotiator pointed out the fatal flaw in my plan. He expressed a certain disinclination to find himself 20 years from now wearing an armored scuba suit while negotiating underwater with superintelligent, laser-armed sharks in order to get his client’s ships back.

UPDATE – Sweet Friedrich Nietzsche, but R. Scott Bakker really can be a wangsty little girl. Now he’s whining that I have “lot’s and lot’s of theories” about him, which is ironic considering the amount of erroneous psychobabble he has been directing in my direction from the start. I have no theories, I have merely read his books and observed his behavior. But, since I make a practice of answering questions, I’ll go ahead and answer the one he wrongly imagines I have been avoiding.

“What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

As for belief, I don’t concern myself in the slightest with the perfect correspondence of my beliefs with What Is So or not. They either do or they don’t, but regardless, the Absolute Truth of Creation doesn’t depend upon what I happen to believe it to be at the moment and I don’t think such correspondence is even theoretically possible. Bakker simply doesn’t understand that I don’t believe his opinion, my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion matters in the least, except in how they happen to affect our decisions and subsequent actions. See Human Action for details. If Bakker genuinely wanted to figure out my core outlook on life, he should have simply listened to Sunyata in the first place rather than waste his time on perusing the blog.

Mailvox: book assistance

AA is searching for a book:

In the 1970s, I read a dystopian novel that I’d like to find again. It was one of the First wave of “Eco-Disaster” novels, I think. The only things I remember are everybody wearing filters on their mouths, so they could avoid breathing in (and possibly killing) gnats and bugs, and a version of the Model T Ford being the only “allowed” form of transport.

The Characters used the Model T to get to and from some “Quasi-Religious” meetings that took place in the forest. Thin info, I know. I remember it as being a depressing, and sad book. That said, I’d really like to find it and read it again.

Do you have any Idea what it might be. Maybe someone in the Dread Ilk might have a Clue?

No clue. I’m sure I never read anything like that. Anyone among the Dread Ilk recognize his description?