Autopia asks:
What’s the fastest you’ve driven, what were you in (or on) and where were you when you did it? On a track, on a road, doesn’t matter to us. It’s not like we’ll call the cops.
155 MPH, 694, Porsche 944 Turbo.
Depressionistas
HH dives in:
I’m just over halfway through RGD, and I’m really enjoying the read and the information. I’ve just become interested in economics, and I haven’t yet read much from many of the people you discuss in your book, but it blows my mind how Krugman could seriously believe any of what he writes. It would seem more reasonable to think that he has a mental illness or is a sociopath.
And it belatedly occurs to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have sent a copy of RGD to so confirmed a pessimist as Derbyshire:
“The car has already hit the tree and the bumper is already in the process of buckling inward, so there is no time to turn the wheel or fasten seat belts. It is too late to do anything but scream.”
Thus writes Vox Day in his recent book The Return of the Great Depression. Are things really that bad? And going to get that much worse?
I’m betting that they are. That’s a novice bet, as I am not a trained economist. I base it on a complete lack of seriousness among our political classes. It is obvious that our governments, at all levels, are spending far too much; yet there is little evidence of anyone being willing to do anything about it.
I completely understand those who don’t buy into the economic crisis talk; I can remember back in college how Marxists were supposed to have predicted 12 of the last two crises. But this isn’t the usual airy conjecture about the effect of the rise of Japan or the implications of the Chinese currency peg. This is relatively hard economics based on straightforward math. Unless you seriously believe that an economy can support an INFINITE amount of debt, there is a breaking point. Precisely where that is happens to be unknown, but that doesn’t mean the point does not exist.
But it appears, as per Derb, that I am no longer an outlier… alas. It would appear that my days as a rogue contrarian economist defying the staid order of the mainstream Neo-Keynesian orthodoxy in a bold and sexually thrilling manner are at an end.
Mailvox: the loyalty proxy
Renee 84 sees a double-standard at work:
I find it interesting that it seems as if a man’s sexual history doesn’t seem to serve as a practical proxy for their sexual loyalty.
As a Christian, I know that God never proclaimed that ONLY women should be virgins before marriage, it applied to both males and females. So whenever I hear conversations from men around the blogsphere who have admitted to having casual sex themselves, lost their virginity at a young age, multiple partners at one time, etc, who call women sluts for having casual sex themselves, I pretty much think that they’re hypocrites.
I’m not one to look at a cad (basically a male slut) in a positive light. I hear all sorts of reasons for this type of double standard and many of them make sense. But in the end, in my eyes this doesn’t trump God’s Word and morals. They end of being almost excuses in a way.
It’s not so much that a man’s sexual history doesn’t serve as a practical proxy for their sexual loyalty, it’s that women don’t need the proxy because they place a much lower value on sexual loyalty than men do. It is perfectly clear that women are attracted to men with sexual experience and actively dislike men who don’t have it. It is primarily women who make fun of men who don’t have success with women, they are the ones who label such men losers. Indeed, as has often been seen right here on this blog, attacking a man’s sexual history and implying its brevity is a favored form of female insult.
So women are less concerned with sexual loyalty than with sexual status; on average they are very happy to trade an increased risk of sexual disloyalty for higher sexual status in the short-term as well as the long-term. (The reason that women who have sex with Alphas and Betas eventually settle for Deltas and Gammas is because they possess insufficient value to land the higher status men for anything beyond the short term.) There is really not much room for debate on this as there are legions of men with no sexual history and low sexual status available at every geek-related convention and yet not even the most desperate woman would consider seeking a husband there.
I have no doubt that Renee84 regards studs in a negative light intellectually, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t emotionally and physically attracted to them in the same way that most women are. If it were true that women were genuinely repelled by studs, they would flee from rock stars and pro athletes in disgust rather than throwing themselves at them in droves. Now, one should never forget that women possess brains and free will and are perfectly capable of surmounting their biological impulses, but that doesn’t change the basic and observable fact that the impulses are there to be resisted.
Men, on the other hand, highly prize sexual loyalty and place a very negative value on women with extensive sexual histories. This should be obvious when one considers the contemptuous male attitude towards prostitutes and porn stars. The modern men of the West may not realize that they still place such store in sexual loyalty, but the instinctive fury that can be aroused when a man’s wife is touching another man or otherwise sends unconscious signals of her prospective sexual availability in public tends to indicate that they do, even if they’re not killing each other in duels over petty insults to a woman’s honor any more.
So, I think it’s a misnomer to describe the situation as a double standard when it’s really two different sets of subjective values that underlie two entirely different standards. If women regarded rock stars in the same way that men regard street hookers, then the double standard would be hypocritical. But given the breadth of the divergence in the opposite sexual value perspectives, it really shouldn’t be regarded that way.
Now, given the Biblical acceptance of multiple wives, I don’t think it can reasonably said that male virginity comes with precisely the same premium that female virginity does, although it certainly comes with some premium given the instruction that deacons of the church are to have only one wife. This lower premium does not excuse premarital fornication in any way, of course; I merely note it as a tangent. I see the secular “double standard” as entirely irrelevant to the Christian perspective because, as is so often the case, the Christian view is fundamentally different than the secular one as it is necessarily driven by non-biomechanic concerns that simply don’t apply to the non-Christian. But as one can usefully discuss gravity and its implications without necessarily taking the Christian perspective on it into account, one can likewise discuss Game.
WND column
Winning the War Against Men, part II
In every large-scale military conflict, there is the macro war and the micro war. While the macro war fought strategically by the generals has a great influence on the micro war fought tactically by the individual soldiers, the two wars are nevertheless distinct from one another and must be contemplated separately. In this second column in the series related to the war against men, I am focused solely on the micro war that is fought in the houses, classrooms, churches and night clubs of America.
In the prelude to a battle, the local commander always considers four things. His resources, the enemy’s resources, the lay of the land and the objective. Now, every male individual’s objective will naturally be different: One man may hope to meet a large number of attractive women, another man might wish to marry a specific woman and a third might wish to escape a hellish marriage without spending the rest of his life in court-dictated financial servitude. But regardless of the objective, the same general rules about the lay of the land and the relative value table will apply.
Semis and Finals
I wasn’t surprised to see Holland defeat Uruguay; as I have repeatedly stated from the start, I expect the Dutch to claim the Cup due to their talent, teamwork, and discipline. However, Uruguay put up a great fight and also battled very hard against Germany in the third-place game. Much to my surprise, the Uruguayans became my favorite team to watch over the course of the tournament.
I was surprised that the Spanish managed to beat Germany, but in retrospect it should have been obvious because Spain has the advantage of starting essentially the same midfield that plays together for Barcelona whereas Germany’s midfield is much stronger on the attack than they are in retaining possession of the ball. This high level of familiarity is a huge advantage at the international level, where there is often the personnel problem of two premier players who happen to play basically the same role on their club teams, as is the case with Gerrard and Lampard of England. I assume this is why Ces Fabregas of Arsenal sits on the bench; it’s not that he’s not good enough to start at this level, but starting him would sacrifice one of Spain’s biggest advantages.
That being said, the Netherlands are better at the back and more disciplined than the Germans, whose 5 goals, (really 6, given Lampard’s non-goal), superficially look the same as the five given up by Holland, but two of those goals, by Uruguay and Brazil, came after the Dutch had already won the game and visibly relaxed. They also have a ball-controlling midfield that matches up better with Spain’s. I do very much dislike their tendency to coast at the end of the game when they have the lead, which appeared again in the semifinal and is probably the best reason to pick against them tonight. I prefer teams with a killer instinct, but the rivalry between Schneider and Van Persie combined with the bad form of Fernando Torres and the deadly dangerous left foot of Robben is enough to convince me that this Netherlands team will finally do what the Total Football and Bergkamp-led teams of the past could not and win the World Cup.
I have to confess that I am impressed with the Germans, though. Some of the finest and most intelligent individual actions I’ve seen in the tournament have been on the part of German players, Bastian Schweinsteiger’s idiotic insistence on playing around with the ball in dangerous positions notwithstanding. I love how their defenders are taught to turn around and run with the ball-handling attacker, thus preventing them from being outrun. And Mueller’s anticipation of the rebound from Schweinsteiger’s shot on goal was beautiful; every striker should closely watch how he begins his run towards the goal area as soon as the shot is taken. Being in the right place at the right time like that is not a matter of luck, it’s a straightforward matter of persistence and probability.
UPDATE: Spain 1, Holland 0. Okay, so I guess I got that one wrong. I thought the Dutch were fell apart tonight, the goalkeeper excluded. They really were a bunch of whiners to boot. Schneider seemed to be tired, while Robben was simply terrible in front of goal and blew at least four solid chances… I couldn’t believe it when he didn’t square the ball to a wide-open Van Persie, who could have practically walked the ball in. Unlike previous games, they weren’t putting shots on goal but were trying to dribble the ball in as far too many teams did this tournament. And the Spanish goal wasn’t even close to being offside, so I have no idea what the Dutch were crying about there.
Mailvox: homo inedicabilis
Although I am inclined to make heavy use of statistics-based probability in observing human behavior and find that it is a very useful tool in in explaining and predicting individual behavior, I never, ever forget that probability is not certainty and that even a powerful 97% statistical probability means that you can count on rolling boxcars sooner or later. Here are two examples of why I am always careful to distinguish between atheists who merely happen to lack god belief and militant/New atheists who can be expected to exhibit a predictable range of social disfunctionality and political ideology in addition to overt hostility towards that which they claim to be nonexistent.
M writes:
I love your blog. It really keeps me thinking every day. One of the most important things you have done for me is that, while not converting me from atheism, you have taught me that religious people can be just as skeptical and rational, if not more so (probably more so), than atheists. You have also really let me realize how irrational most atheists are. While I already knew most of the flaws, your retorts to their arguments are just so witty, concise, and overall entertaining…. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical of just about everything, from scientific claims to mystical claims to political claims. It’s no surprise that I would find myself loving the skeptics community, a world-wide network of people who embrace rational and critical thinking. Well, or so they claim.
Being a skeptic, I really wanted to go to the Amaz!ng Meeting 8 this weekend in Las Vegas. I forgot something, though. The skeptical community heavily overlaps with the new atheist movement, and they all seem to be, as you call them, “science fetishists”. There’s never enough skepticism about political issues. In fact, skeptics who don’t believe in global warming are quick to be called “climate change denialists.” I myself stay in the camp of “I don’t know, and I doubt you actually do either” but I don’t even say that, because I don’t want to deal with people about it.
It’s obvious that many of these people are irrational, even though they claim to embrace rational thinking. But what can we expect from a bunch of people who think Richard Dawkins has intelligent things to say? I love science. I love skepticism. I also love actually applying my rational thinking to the two. Thank you for writing a blog that actually uses critical thinking. I am glad that while I find one community is lacking, there is another community out there that has the right mindset.
Another atheist, S, writes in response to a previous atheist’s email:
I’m a big fan of your blog and although I don’t agree with everything you write, I think you’ve almost always got something interesting to say. I read your post regarding the comments by one “UberDawks”, and I have to say, I’m surprised that you were so easy on him. (I refer to Rule 1 of the blog- I thought that, given the guy’s total lack of reason or civility, you’d be a lot harsher, though the cartoon was an interesting touch.)
As an atheist, I have to say, I’m amazed at just how bad his “reasoning” really is. Unlike most atheists I find the notion of anthropogenic global warming to be deeply suspect, and I was not particularly surprised to find that the inquiries into Mann and Jones cleared the scientists involved of wrongdoing- despite clear evidence that both ignored FOI requests, deleted and manipulated data, and exercised academic privilege to quash dissenting views. One would think that any reasonably literate atheist would at least be able to read those CRU emails.
As for his comments about the Founding Fathers- I think of myself as a libertarian, and I’ve often wondered myself about the religious views of some of the Founders, but I’ve never doubted that the men who built this nation were for the most part Christian in their outlook. It seems to me as though UberDawks has never even read the Declaration- the document makes clear references to Divine Providence and “the Supreme Judge of the Universe” right there in the text. And to ignore the role that Christian theology played in creating the Constitution is to ignore all of the Constitution’s understanding, clearly articulated in the text, of Man’s fallen nature and of the need to protect free men from the depredations of over-powerful governments and less-than-moral men. In other words, one would have to ignore the very reason the Constitution was created in the first place. That’s precisely the kind of leap of faith that atheists are supposed to be above making.
Overall I find UberDawks and his ilk to be mildly worrying. It’s no wonder that atheists can’t be trusted with power- if his email to you is representative of the level of thinking that goes on within the atheist community, secular nations with atheist or humanist leadership are in really big trouble. I also think that the peculiar atheist faith in man-made global warming exists primarily to replace the human need for some kind of faith in something. That still doesn’t make it a good idea; not all faiths are productive, and that particular one is downright absurd (and for once, it’s possible to show this scientifically).
S is correct to be worried about the more rabid species of atheist; their science fetishism and political utopianism is every bit as dangerous to more reasonable atheists and agnostics as they are to Christians and other theists. Still, I didn’t really see any need to kick UberDawk’s teeth in despite his incivility since he was clearly just a drive-by critic and the unreason and ignorance revealed in his email tended to render it self-refuting. One thing that people like him who wrongly perceive me as being intrinsically “anti-atheist” fail to understand is the significance of the difference between one’s religion and one’s political ideology. While they are usually related, they are seldom identical. My religious faith certainly colors my ideology, which is why I describe myself as a Christian libertarian, but the fact remains that I would vastly prefer atheist libertarians with realistic views of human corruptibility in positions of political leadership to both Christian progressives attempting to bring about Heaven on Earth and Christian conservatives seeking to impose Biblical morality through legislative fiat.
Of course, in addition to being imperfectly predictable, Most People Are Idiots, as demonstrated by this commenter at the New York Times. If this isn’t enough to cure you of an instinctive democracy fetish, nothing will.
“I am dismayed that commentators and inquisitors like Chris Matthews let their “guests” get away with the lie that “small businesses, not government, creates jobs.” I can’t believe that these troglodytes get away with pushing such a patently false proposition. As you may guess, I’m a government employee, and my money spends just as well as a window clerk at McDonalds. Spending is spending; buying is buying. I eat food, buy housing and clothing, and pay my utility bills just like everyone else. So why doesn’t keeping my job count just as much as me opening a small business? Let’s stop the lying.”
Yes, let’s absolutely stop all this lying and simply have government hire everyone who is out of work to do… something. After all, since government creates jobs just like small businesses, then there is no reason for anyone to be unemployed ever again! Mises wept.
Day vs Krugman
On Hayek vs Keynes. Krugman redefines the concept of bizarre:
First, Hayek was as bad on the Depression as I thought. The claim that “many of the troubles of the world at the present time are due to imprudent borrowing and spending on the part of the public authorities” — in 1932! — is bizarre.
Yes, this graph of sovereign defaults from 1921 to 1980 quite clearly shows that there was absolutely no problem with imprudent borrowing and spending by the public authorities. Here is the list of the 25 sovereign defaults covering the time that Hayek and Keynes were debating; from 1930 to 1934. Notice that the bulk of them happened to come precisely in 1932.
Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Peru, Turkey, Liberia, Austria, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Cuba, Guatemala, Romania, Uruguay, Yugoslavia.
And the Keynesian “solution” to the problem didn’t help much either, since there were 14 more sovereign defaults before WWII ended in 1945: Colombia, Poland, Brazil, Austria, Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, China, Germany, Austria, Japan, Poland, Turkey, Hungary, Japan.
The only thing that is bizarre here is Paul Krugman’s inability to connect “imprudent borrowing and spending by the public authorities” with historical sovereign defaults. Now consider how much panic has rocked the markets due to two mere threats of sovereign defaults by two very small nations, Dubai and Greece. Think about how many banks failed or were nationalized after the credit crunch of 2008. Then think about the possibility that no less than 25 nations default on their debts before 2014. Do you think that just might, perhaps, have some effect on the international financial system? Krugman’s Keynesian know-it-all act was always ridiculous, but now he’s fast approaching self-parody with his astonishing inability to comprehend that debt really is a problem despite the Keynesian model’s insistence otherwise.
Help, help, they’re being repressed!
Come see the religious oppression inherent in the system! In tangetially-related news, this email from UberDawks may amuse:
I’ve been reading your blog and I have to say that it is chock full of the most delusional christard fundamentalist bullshit I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading. Guess what jerkweed, the CRU was just CLEARED, and Penn State found that the “hockey stick” held up. Where is your precious “Climategate” now?! Packed away with the rest of the fundie Christian myths?
Also, the constitution was not based on the BIBLE you historically inept moron. The posters on your site are idiots. The founding fathers WERE deists and DID NOT base the Constitution on your idiotic cracker-blessed bible. You should all educate yourselves by reading Chris Rodda’s articles at HuffPo.No wonder PZ Myers won’t debate you, you’re so ignorant that it would be like a mighty bearded hammer fighting a skinny, bald nail. You don’t understand science, you don’t understand history and I’m pretty sure you are as batshit crazy as Jesus was, I would wait for a response…but you have NO arguments to make.
To reiterate from my previous post, there were only two, at most three Deists in comparison with the 52 Christians, most of them CALVINISTS, who were at the Constitutional Convention. The same Christian-heavy ratio is true of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. The CRU was “cleared” in a whitewash where the science, such as it was, was not examined in any way, shape, or form and it is a far cry from Penn State finding that Michael Mann was not guilty of professional misconduct to claiming that the university declared that the long-disproven “hockey stick” temperature graph is valid. When did the myth of Global Warming become adopted as an article of the atheist faith?
UberDawks concludes by demonstrating that impeccable atheist logic which insists that PZ Myers regularly runs away from debating people because he is afraid he will destroy them so utterly. And to think that these are the intellectual giants who want you to take them on faith that God does not exist.
Mailvox: the hierarchy of female attractiveness
A number of people have been asking me if there is a female equivalent to the Alpha-Omega scale of male socio-sexual attractiveness. I originally replied, rather facetiously, that there is a perfectly useful 1-10 scale that doesn’t strain anyone’s brain to comprehend, but of course, it is obvious there is more to a woman’s socio-sexual rating than her raw physical beauty at a given moment. However, it wasn’t until I read The Sex Risk for Women That No One Likes to Talk About that I realized how the female scale works.
As David Buss says, the modern conditions for mating may have changed significantly, but humans still employ the same sexual strategies. Of the 67 traits men seek in a committed partner, faithfulness and sexual loyalty rank as the most important in every culture ever studied…. While men seek women with promiscuity, sexual experience and high sex drive when selecting for short-term mating, they still retain the preference for a sexually inexperienced wife, or at least one who is less experienced than they are.
In the era of hooking up, this concern is exacerbated as the number of inexperienced woman has dropped dramatically. One of the things I hear most from men like Conflicted is that they have no interest in stepping in to pick up the pieces after women have been “used up” by other men. It’s insulting to their pride for obvious reasons, and many will refuse to marry if they cannot find a woman who meets their requirements.
Now, we already know that men place a high value on female beauty, so if we take into account that sexual loyalty also matters a great deal to them as well as how a woman’s sexual history serves as a practical proxy for that otherwise indeterminable loyalty, we can construct a scale that should reliably describe a woman’s socio-sexual attractiveness to men. The Center for Disease Control reports that women between the ages of 20 to 59 anonymously report their sexual histories as follows.
Slutty: 15+ partners: 9.4 percent
Frisky: 7-14 partners: 21.3 percent
Normal: 2-6 partners: 44.3 percent
Chaste: 0-1 partners: 25 percent
Also according to the CDC, the median number of sexual partners for women of what has lately become the normal age of marriage (25-29) is 4. The report also shows that the sexual history proxy is a reasonable one for future marital prospects; 30.8% of Chaste women are currently married and 6.5% are divorced whereas only 7.4% of Slutty women are currently married compared to 19.1% who are divorced.
To keep things relatively simple, I will next divide women into four categories based on their perceived physical beauty on the conventional 1-10 scale as follows:
Barbie: 9-10: 5 percent
Babe: 7-8: 15 percent
Jane: 4-6: 50 percent
Coyote: 1-3: 30 percent
The key thing to remember here is that men have a very binary approach to women. What they are looking for in the immediate term is almost never what they prefer in the long term. For permanent relationships, which I assume is the hierarchy of interest here, most men prefer to drop down one level on the Beauty side in favor of going up one level on the History side, the possible exception being the Alphas who put a premium on Beauty and for whom the numerical difference between Normal and Slutty is a rounding error in their own telephone book-length sexual histories.
Tier 1: Chaste Barbie, Normal Barbie, Chaste Babe
Tier 2: Frisky Barbie, Normal Babe, Chaste Jane
Tier 3: Slutty Barbie, Frisky Babe, Normal Jane
Tier 4: Slutty Babe, Frisky Jane, Chaste Coyote
Tier 5: Slutty Jane, Normal, Frisky, and Slutty Coyotes
This explains both Conflicted’s negative reaction to his girlfriend’s history and the Hot Wife + Herb combination that puzzles so many observers of human relationships regardless of their sex. Conflicted thought he had scored a Normal Babe, but she turned out to be a Slutty Babe. So, her value declined accordingly in his eyes to such an extent that he is contemplating ending the dating relationship and almost surely will decline to marry her. In the case of the Hot Wife + Herb, it’s most likely an obvious case of a woman having her Beauty value reduced by her History value.
Now, as Spacebunny points out, these are merely general guidelines based on statistics and there are always individual exceptions. But it explains why even the prettiest porn stars don’t marry Alphas and why relatively unattractive women manage to marry highly desirable men like Piers Brosnan and Matt DamonDenzel Washington. It also shows the clear choice that young women have to make between their short-term hypergamous instincts and their long-term marital prospects. And to me, one of the more interesting things is the way women tend to share this hierarchical view of their own sex with men, whereas men are often contemptuous of the smarmier sort of Alpha and simply cannot believe women put such a high value on them.
Attempting to redefine reality
To say nothing of blowing a hole right through Divine Exceptionalist theology:
A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman. Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage law violates the Constitutional right of married same-sex couples to equal protection under the law and upends the federal government’s long history of allowing states to set their own marriage laws.
And now that the one man, one woman definition has been arbitrarily struck down on nonsensical grounds, there can be absolutely no question that the one man, one woman part will be challenged and struck down as well. All of the homogamy supporters who claim otherwise are already wrong, as anyone who happens to have read a pro-polygamy press release will know. That’s a done deal. It’s a bit more of a stretch to be able to tell if people will also be able to marry animals due to the presumed consent issues, but you can bet that some horse-loving freakshow is going to try. It’s legal in New Zealand, you know.
Of course, the licensed tripartite entity that the government calls marriage isn’t actually marriage anyhow, which is why I’m personally quite relaxed about this sort of thing. Two or three or ten men can call themselves a school of fish if they want to, but their self-application of the title doesn’t make them so.
Now, I tend to think that America is doomed because of its addiction to debt, but the social engineers are certainly building an impressive argument on behalf of the various religious eschatologists. It takes a pretty sizable set of historical blinders not to see the signs of a diseased and decadent society approaching its final days.