Vox Popoli

The strangest thing about the “whither Republicanism” crowd is that they’re nowhere nearly as intellectual nor as internationally sophisticated as they would have you believe. The difference between a monolingual New York journalist such as David Brooks and three-quarters of the American expatriate community is actually much greater than the difference between David Brooks and the great quantity of grassroots Republicans throughout the country that he and his tiny band of like-minded cohorts so often affect to despise. Neither the genuine intellectuals nor the genuine upper class of the Old World have much use for the upper middle class American wannabees of the media; they tend to regard them as the same sort of hicks as, ironically enough, George Bush. Most of them don’t know who Sarah Palin is and those who do couldn’t care less about care about her… and the average liberal American would probably have an absolute stroke if they heard the way that the Europeans they so admire talk about American’s new African president.

The truth is that most Europeans don’t regard New Yorkers as being any more sophisticated than Nebraskans, in fact, many of them aren’t really all that clear on the difference between New York City and Nebraska. (Minneapolis… is that closer to Los Angeles or San Francisco?) And, given the fact that the average fat, obnoxious, American tourist wearing shorts and white tennis shoes while making their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Florence is much more likely to hail from New York than from Nebraska, it tends to be Nebraskans who are tainted by their national association with New Yorkers.

And as Ed Anger points out, it makes no sense to pay any mind to the nonsensical burblings of the GOP’s moderate wing:

Every since their big get-together last week, everybody’s fighting about “the future of conservatives.” Namby pamby Beltway big shots tell us to dump Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, and get more classy and “intellectual” like them!

Heck, some of these “conservatives” even voted for Teleprompter Jesus himself!

Don’t listen to these stuck up sons of Benedict Arnold. Has Ross Douthat or David Brooks ever won a chili cook-off or fired a few rounds off a .45? David Frum probably can’t even change a tire without his Filipino nanny helping out.

Yes, yes, that last bit did indeed make me laugh.

Yeah, the US isn’t even close to rock-bottom:

Twitter cofounder and CEO Ev Williams is headed to the White House today. The administration invited him to join a “young business leaders” summit to discuss the economic crises.

Of all the people you could ask about economic advice, you’re going to go out of your way to seek advice from an entrepeneur whose company has insignificant revenue and runs at a loss? I spend more time than most in the company of technology entrepeneurs… believe me, none of them know any more about economic principles than the average Tri-Delt majoring in Art History.

In black. Let’s face it, casual fashion just doesn’t get much more incomprehensible to the masses. And it makes me wonder, in light of my ever-growing fan club, if we should think about offering VD-related gear some day. Unfortunately, most of my better aphorisms tend to be too verbose to fit easily on a short, single line, and I’m not at all keen on the generic Cafe Press kitsch.

I always find it amusing that feminist-oriented Americans inevitably get their panties in a bunch over individuals like me who point out the obvious while simultaneously supporting the very multiculturalism that sees European women beaten legally for their own good. There is no such thing as equality, and the current choice facing most of the West is which form of “Patriarchy” is to be preferred, Christian or Sharia. Secular equalitarianism isn’t on the table; it’s already proven itself to be a self-negating demographic non-starter with more internal contradictions than Communism.

It’s amazing in its near-complete detachment from observable reality, but this is the way a typical Obama supporter views the economic situation:

We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Let’s see. The root problem is that government-established corporations borrowed too much government-backed fiat currency, the price of which was set too low for too long by the monopoly established by the government. What, one wonders does this actually have to do with the capitalism described by the classical, socialist and Austrian economists, much less “unfettered” capitalism? Needless to say, the clueless New York Times opinionator is, much like the administration he supports, far less interested in the ongoing collapse of the house of paper cards that is the global financial system than he is in… Rush Limbaugh. “Doomed” doesn’t even begin to describe a country cursed with such media and political “leadership”. Lest you think I exaggerate, note that even one-time Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman is getting concerned:

“Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators. Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.”

It’s interesting, is it not, to see a high-profile left-leaning economist implicitly accept the concept of subjective value… but despite these correct observations, Krugman still has the solution precisely backward. The administration may be dithering, but one cannot rationally describe its lunatic spending or frantic central planning as “inaction” in any sense of the word, however incompetent it might be. And it’s not genuine inaction that will cause the depression to last a decade or more, it’s the very sort of action in which the fiscal and monetary authorities are presently engaging, repeatedly transfusing more blood into the twitching corpses of the zombie organizations, that will do so.

The Federal Reserve refuses to name names:

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on loans to banks and securities firms, the institution said in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Bloomberg News. The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

So, not only are they stealing public money and transferring to giant, zombie banks, they’re claiming that a concern for the reputation of those zombie banks is more important than basic principles of public accounting. How, one wonders, can anyone claim with a straight face that there is any form of free market still extant in the USA anymore? Information is the lifesblood of capitalist free markets; it is the absence of price information that renders socialist central planning impossible.

Now, the Fed is actively hiding extremely important information from investors, who quite rightly have no interest in owning shares in insolvent institutions. This isn’t a solution, it’s merely an exercise in delaying the inevitable reckoning, hoping against hope that external events will somehow intervene before their desperate efforts prove futile.

Not only has his administration begun on a thoroughly entertaining note, stabbing his most loyal supporters in the back while simultaneously showing all his moderate apologists to be morons, but in barely a month, he’s got America’s most inept pundits crying buyer’s remorse:

They may need a support group before the month is out. They could gather in New York or Washington where many victims reside. The meetings would start: “I’m Maureen [or David]. I’m a duped Barack voter. And I’m mad.”

The ranks indeed are filling with the disaffected and the disappointed — Chris Buckley, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, David Gergen, and even that gynecological sleuth and blogger Andrew Sullivan. And then there is the very angry Marty Peretz. Their complaints are varied but expressed with equal amounts of remorse and bitterness. They all have been done wrong by Barack.

Now, if I’m correct and the promised 2010 recovery doesn’t take place, imagine how much gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth there will be.

As one who actually reads books, this report appears to confirm something I have long suspected:

Two-thirds lie about reading a book
It is the dirty little literary secret of which most are guilty but few openly admit: pretending to have read highbrow books like War and Peace to make ourselves appear more intelligent and sexy than we actually are.

I will confess to not understanding how having read War and Peace or Madame Bovary is supposed to make one any more sexy, but otherwise, this common practice of deceit doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve often noted that at parties and other social gatherings, people who don’t even appear to have a library will bring up certain haut literary classics and claim to adore them. At such times, it’s always amusing to ask them about some element of the plot, or a specific scene, and see how they attempt to murmur some generality before swiftly changing the subject. As for the mentioned Great Books:

War and Peace: Read it, loved it, and very much admired Tolstoy’s demonstration of how the great waves which affect human events cannot be explained by the Great Man school of historical thought. I tend to like the Russian classics, but must admit that I haven’t been able to make it through The Brothers Karamazov in two attempts despite it coming very highly recommended by someone I admired.

Ulysses: Read part of it before getting side-tracked in the Wandering Rocks section and never got back to it. The literary achievement is notable and had an influence on how I ended up structuring Summa Elvetica, but I found the story itself to be on the tedious side. Still haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake either.

The Bible: Of course. Regardless of your religious faith, you’re simply not an educated man of the West if you haven’t. I’ve also read the Mahabharata and other Upanashids as well as about half the Koran. I tried reading the Book of Mormon, but couldn’t abide it. You can’t fully appreciate the textual excellence of most of the Bible until you’ve read other purportedly sacred texts.

1984: Of course.

Madame Bovary: I really like Flaubert, although it’s the work of his protégé, Guy de Maupassant, that I really love. Flaubert’s short stories are particularly good and should not be missed.

A Brief History of Time: Skimmed it, was unimpressed. It’s not a classic, and like Sagan, Dawkins, and other science popularizing writers, Hawking will be quickly forgotten as science moves on. Without the circus freak aspect of his act, A Brief History of Time never would have cracked the bestseller lists in the first place.

A Remembrance of Things Past: I’ve only read part of Swann’s Way. It is, however, the source of an ongoing joke between one of my mentors in the game industry and me. We like to pitch publishers on what has to be the worst game concept in the history of electronic gaming: Swann’s Way 3D: The Hunt for the Cooler Side of the Pillow.

The Selfish Gene: I couldn’t have written TIA without doing so. It’s a very good pop science book and Dawkins is an engaging science writer. The problem is that he’s a bad logician, an even more incompetent philosopher, and a close-minded ideologue rather than a true intellectual.

Midnight’s Children: It was good, although I remember suspecting at the time that there would have been a lot less fuss if it hadn’t been written by someone named Salman Rushdie, but Sam Richards.

Jane Austen: I generally like her stuff and have read all of it except Northanger Abbey, which I’ve never been able to finish. Actually, I haven’t read Persuasion either.

Charles Dickens: I’ve read about a third of his works. I like them and quite appreciate his particular style, but the overly precious characters do get a bit tiresome after a while. A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities are my two favorites, although Uriah Heep has to be considered one of the great villains of literature. I think my complete abhorrence of obsequious individuals owes a lot to Dickens.

The Brontë sisters: I can never remember which is which. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are the only two I’ve read. I seem to recall liking the former, while viewing the latter with somewhat of a jaundiced eye. It was all a bit too overwrought, in my opinion.

Ironically, I genuinely liked six of the 10 books on the Pretend list, (and rather liked a seventh, Proust, of which I’ve only read part), while Dick Francis is the only author on the 10 Most-Liked list whom I enjoy.

Michael Ledeen unexpectedly takes time off from advocating useless wars that are used to justify continued encroachments on American liberties to cite a wise old warning about soft totalitarianism in America:

These extreme cases help us understand Tocqueville’s brilliant warning that equality is not a defense against tyranny, but an open invitation to ambitious and cunning leaders who enlist our support in depriving ourselves of freedom. He summarizes it in two sentences that should be memorized by every American who cherishes freedom:

“The…sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.”

Equality is not only an immaterial fabrication and an abstract concept, it is a monstrous and unnatural ideal primarily of use to those who are attempting to establish themselves at the top of a very unequal pyramid.

If you are a Christian, you cannot rationally believe in equality, except in the belief that all are fallen short of the glory of God. If you are a rational materialist, you cannot believe in equality except for that of the grave. If you are, on the other hand, an irrational materialist like most self-proclaimed rational materialists are, you probably believe very firmly in equality despite the fact that there is almost infinitely more evidence for God and the immaterial than for the idea that two human beings are, or could ever be, equal in any way.

The practice spreads from China and India to Vietnam:

Birth history statistics indicate that the SRB in Viet Nam has recorded a steady growth since 2001. Starting from a level probably close to the biological standard of 105, the SRB reached 108 in 2005 and 112 in 2006, a value significantly above the normal level…. These results suggest that prenatal sex determination followed by selective abortion has recently become more common in Viet Nam.

How fortunate that Oppressive Patriarchy is no longer an issue. I’m sure that the brave new age of Secular Science will be much better for women… assuming, of course, that they’re permitted to live in the first place.

Meredith Levinson writes what is quite possibly the most ridiculous column I have read in the last year, which in this age of Monetarists and Keynesians attempting to get their heads around the ongoing financial crisis, is really rather remarkable:

I’m tired of career experts advising job seekers to “play it safe” online by not posting any photos, opinions or information on blogs and social networking websites that a potential employer might find remotely off-putting. I understand where these career counselors are coming from: They’re in the business of dispensing advice that will help people land jobs. Recommending that people “play it safe” is as anodyne as it gets.

But instead of cautioning job seekers to censor their behavior and the information and pictures they post online, we job seekers and defenders of civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and stop judging our behavior outside of work. What we do, say and believe in our personal lives in most cases has no bearing on our ability to do a job, barring criminal behavior, of course.

This is utterly stupid, and I say that as someone who has been repeatedly warned by other authors that I will never be published by publishers such as Tor due to my personal opinions published on the Internet. But why shouldn’t Tor publish whoever they want? If they want to publish only fiction written by fat feminists and the aging drones that cater to them, that’s their call. It was interesting when, within minutes of my starting a high-profile consulting project last year, a few employees at the company began emailing the management to complain about my political views. That backfired a bit, ironically, because it turns out that in difficult times, amazingly few executives are interested in continuing to pay employees who are more concerned about trying to enforce their personal ideological prejudices than they are about the survival of the company.

It is not only an employer’s right to search online for information about their prospective employees, it is their duty! The fact that Ms Levinson doesn’t like the idea that any pictures she might post of herself exposing her breasts at Mardi Gras or taking part in an interspecies erotica festival in Tijuana could inhibit her future employment possibilities is totally irrelevant. The employee has the right to choose for whom he wishes to work, and the employer has the right to choose whomever he wishes to employ, selected by whatever metric he elects to choose.

But give the woman some credit. At least she had just enough sense to avoid calling for Congress to pass a law prohibiting employers from accessing Google.