Vox Popoli

Doesn’t this just make you dream happily about a sex-inclusive military draft with no college exemptions? Because you know that between Zimbabwe, Kenya, and the Congo, a President Obama is going to invade Africa one way or another. Perhaps he’s planning to use his armed, federally-funded civilian national security force. The only question is, will they wear black shirts or brown?

The Obama campaign leads by better than 2-1 in newspaper endorsements from dailies and weeklies, based on our tally so far. But the Democratic ticket has an even more impressive lead when it comes to college newspapers — 63 to 1, according to UWIRE’s Presidential Endorsement Scorecard

There’s no shortage of evidence that most people are idiots. This is fundamental to the most basic understanding of human society. But what’s special about American college students is not that they’re not idiots devoid of wisdom and life experience, it’s that they truly believe they are highly knowledgeable and well-educated despite reliably demonstrating the exact opposite. I despised them when I was in college and I would probably loathe them more now if I ever had to have any contact with them. Thankfully I don’t, as in my decades of experience traveling around the world, I yet to encounter a more reliably foolish group of individualspeople.

One of the things I really enjoy about Voxiversity is seeing the awareness of self-ignorance bloom into full-flower in many of the participants. This is because everyone, no matter how intelligent, is ignorant of most things; the most certain way to conclusively establish that you are a fool is to believe yourself without ignorance. Unless you recognize and accept your ignorance about a subject, you cannot do anything about filling in those voids in your knowledge base. While I tend to despise Socrates and find his deceptive dialogues to be vastly overrated, there is something to be said for his open-handed approach to knowledge, which is both humble and arrogant at the same time.

The problem with the college-educated is that most of them don’t understand that education is not about listening to lectures, being graded, or receiving external confirmation that you happened to possess a certain amount of information about a subject at a specific point in time. The certificate culture is antithetical to a learning one. And, I should point out, being maleducated on a subject is worse than being totally ignorant. It’s much better to know that you have no knowledge than to possess a little and assume you know much.

This is why, all too often, the A-student in college is no better than a C-student of life.

UPDATE – Jonah Goldberg is similarly unimpressed by the would-be opinion leaders of tomorrow:

I find it hilarious how much respect many readers have for the intellectual chops of these kids. Having been to dozens of campuses this year alone, let me tell you that college newspaper workers (I was an editor myself) are not a superior breed of student. Some are impressive. Many aint. Most are just younger versions of grown-up journalists, only more liberal, more self-important, more emotional and more resentful that people don’t care enough about what they have to say.

One of its clients emails from Old Blighty:

Caught the last 20 mins of the radio show. Great stuff, except I can’t believe you don’t think your writing has much influence! The irrational atheist is a key work in the fight against atheist propaganda. There’s nothing more important than doing the Lord’s work, the material cares of this world are nothing compared with the agony of the Soul! Which isn’t to say that you’ve been entirely un-influential in the economic sphere. In fact possibly you’ve played a key role in the chain of events leading to the government action needed to manage the current global crises!

I hadn’t been paying that much attention to economics recently, but when I saw your blog about the bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back in early Sept I immediately saw that was a pivotal moment and got straight on to Gordon Brown about the historic opportunity he had for fiscal socialism…. I know he was receiving similar advice from the Treasury and Bank of England officials, but even so it’s possible a much less optimal set of decisions could have been made if it weren’t for the communication sparked by your blog! You might be skeptical about this… I guess you might not be pleased about this, but hopefully you wont be anti-Keynesian all your life, many great advocates of a system start off by being opposed to it.

I… I don’t even know where to begin with this one. It tends to bring to mind the Deee-Lite video, when Bootsy admits that the band has definitely been known to smoke. Regardless, let me just say that I am very much not a fan of Gordon Brown for all that he has figured in my past fiction, I think Alastair Darling is off his rocker to openly advocate straight Keynesian policies as any sort of solution to the current crisis, and I find it very difficult to imagine any series of events that would lead me to honestly conclude that John Maynard Keynes’s economic theories were correct in any substantive degree.

That being said, it must be admitted that the Prime Minister’s actions were somewhat better than those of his US counterpart. The British responses have been, at least thus far, marginally less toxic than the US actions, since the British taxpayers are getting something tangible for their banking bail-out money. Nationalization may be stupid and short-sighted, but it’s not as astonishingly idiotic as paying for a bank and then not taking it home with you.

I would simply assume that this was some sort of joke, were it not for the fact that I’ve had more than one battle in Alterac Valley interrupted by telephone calls from Congressmen this year. And people wonder why my sense of reality tends to run a bit askew at times….

And we’re off again with Voxiversity II, this time with the focus on economics, specifically the Austrian theory take on the Great Depression. ProProfs has significantly changed its system, mostly for the better, but due to some flaws in its open statistical reporting I’d encourage everyone to take the quiz before getting into the discussions here or poking around in the statistics. I really don’t care if people cheat or not, but doing so is pretty self-defeating since it’s not as if the results are going to show up on your PERMANENT RECORD. At the Voxiversity, failure indicates nothing more than a gap in your knowledge base, thus allowing you to rectify the situation.

If you have questions about anything or wish clarification, don’t hesitate to ask questions here. I’m sure someone will answer them and it’s entirely possible that they may even be correct. Also, this post will remain at the top of the page throughout the day, so scroll down for any later posts.

The reading for next week is Chapter 1, pages 3-37 on the positive theory of the business cycle.

Rachel Lucas points us to Iowahawk’s latest satirical masterpiece. Now, whoever can he possibly be describing?

If you are a conservative like me, you guffawed when you heard John McCain announced this declasse rube as a running mate, followed by good-natured applause, thinking it was some sort of whimsical campus prank he was reenacting from his Annapolis years. This was, of course, quickly followed the shock of realizing that he wasn’t joking, and all that Hanoi unpleasantness had finally driven him around the bend.

It’s an inescapable conclusion that this woman has, in 6 short weeks, single-handedly destroyed the Republican party. Certainly George Bush may share some of the blame; but we conservatives must remember how our hopes were buoyed by his impressive bloodlines and Yale degree before we realized his excursion to Texas had caused him to “go native.” But la Palin offers true conservatives no such extenuating graces. I mean, my God, this woman is simply awful; the elided vowels, the beauty pageantry, the guns, the crude non-Episcopal protestantism, the embarrassing porchload of children with horrifying hillbilly names, the white after Labor Day. As fellow conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan quipped to me the other day outside a Martha’s Vineyard antique shop, it’s gratifying to know the Gipper isn’t alive to see what has become of his party.

But it’s not just American conservatives who are appalled. Just last week conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks and I were enjoying an apres-badminton apertif at the family weekend house in Montauk with my good friend Viscount Klaus-Maria Von Wallensheim, the conservative EU Agricultural Pricing Minister with whom I shared an Alpine chalet and manservant during our years as classmates at a Swiss boarding school. “Kloonkie” (my old school appellation for the Viscount) reported the growing dismay of the Continental Right over Palin’s embarrassing enthusiasm for childbirth and Israel.

“Coddsie, old chap,” he warned, “You know I’ve always been America’s biggest defender in Monaco. But if you elect this ill-bred charwoman, I will be forced to move anchor to St. Tropez out of pure shame.”

David and I were left nodding silently, for how else could we respond? If Palin has lost Kloonkie, she has surely lost the entire conservative movement.

I have spoken contemptuously of the New York-Washington Axis that dominates the so-called conservative commentariat. The truth is, they aren’t conservatives, they aren’t libertarians, and they might as well go back to the left where they have always belonged. Why, one asks, should any man or woman of the Right pay any attention to what the “conservatives” who make up The New York Times and two-thirds of National Review think any longer?

“Just like the Democrats, only a little less,” is not a functional political strategy. It barely even qualifies as a coherent tactic, for crying out loud.

As Passport noted a few months ago in our podcast conversation, the Chinese economy is nowhere near as strong as it looks from the outside.

Stratfor has seen anecdotes, from problems with trade credits to issues related to the real estate sector, suggesting that the image of China being insulated from the global crisis is in part a fabrication by the Chinese government. For this reason, we believe China bears closer inspection.

The Oct. 31 announcement by the PBoC is the first official acknowledgment that China could be facing a domestic credit crunch. The bank’s predictions suggest not only that real estate prices are dropping drastically because of falling demand but also that the effect on real estate companies, especially in urban areas, is now amounting to tightened capital flows. Moreover, the PBoC warned that the situation poses “a relatively large risk” to the commercial banks that have made loans to the construction and development companies because these companies use property as collateral and their collateral is now losing value. Anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of the total loans granted by these commercial banks have been devoted to the real estate sector, according to the PBoC.

The common assumption has been that China has “room” to grow and will be the beneficiary of any U.S. retrenchment on the world scene. But, since the Chinese government doesn’t allow its citizens to effectively save, much of its investment has been based on the same fraudulent debt basis that America’s was. Also, its cheap labor is far from limitless because production also requires capital to take advantage of that labor.

I’ve always been skeptical that a centrally-directed economy could possibly function as effectively as China’s is supposed to have run. I also know from my contacts in the financial industry that the reason they invest in the West is because the banking and finance systems are very unreliable. So, this may not be the Chinese century any more than the 1990’s were the Japanese decade.

But I understand why David Brin is:

1. Who are you voting for in November? For not a single “liberal” reason, I am voting not only for Obama, but for the GOP to be utterly spanked and sent into exile, where, perhaps, sincere men and women may remember Barry Goldwater and resurrect some kind of healthy, libertarian Conservatism.

2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? I could tell that the neocons were mad in 2000 and that their allies were fanatics or thieves. It was blatant in 2004. Those who act shocked (shocked!) and betrayed today were fools then and are likely fools now.

The important thing to remember is that Obama will make things worse. Make no mistake, he will make things much worse. But, so will McCain. The reason that a McCain victory is so much more problematic for libertarians is that there are salvageable elements of a Republican party purged of the neocons and liberals that have destroyed it. There is no hope, on the other hand, for the Democratic Party.

Notice how the architects of the Republican party’s destruction always try to claim that opposition to homogamy, abortion, and stem-cell research, all proven vote-winners in numerous state elections, have fatally harmed the party’s image, then turn around and push hugely unpopular issues such as foreign occupations, police state policies, enormous government bail-outs, and open immigration. It’s not only incredibly dishonest, but one would have to be almost completely ignorant of American politics to buy into their nonsense.

More on this later, as on a related note, I intend to explain why David Frum’s critique of Rush Limbaugh’s blueprint for future success is fundamentally flawed.

Also, if you want to know one reason why I don’t read Reason anymore, consider this bit from its current editor-in-chief: Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? John Kerry and Ralph Nader! I’ve had a bad decade….

The OC considers an issue raised by the good Fraters, who quote Al Gore:

“[T]he stakes this year are too great for any of us to sit it out. We’re facing two wars and an economic meltdown. The climate crisis, in particular, is worsening more quickly than predicted and without strong leadership from the next president, we could face consequences right out of a science fiction movie.”

No one knows science fiction movies like Al Gore.

Perhaps so, but the all-important and thus far unasked question is: which science fiction movie? Silent Running? Soylent Green? Lord of the Flies? Godzilla vs The Smog Monster?

Personally, my money is on The Manchurian Candidate.

I don’t think it’s science fiction at all. The way things are going, it looks rather more as if it will be some blend of The Grapes of Wrath, The Killing Fields, and Red Dawn.

I’m going to be a guest on the Straight Talk with Jerry Hughes show today at 4 PM EST in case you’re interested in listening live, where we will be discussing the aforementioned.

And on a not completely unrelated note, you may be amused to read yet another left-liberal “it’s for the children” plea, albeit in this case, it’s a unique one that’s actually made on behalf of legalized homogamy. Oh, and I regret to inform you that if your perspective happen to be in accordance with social norms that have prevailed for the entire course of Western civilization, then you are “monstrous, horrible, hateful and bigoted“.

Just so you know.

UPDATE – Added bonus. Folks had to pay six grand to see Chad Orzel dance on the Internet, but Mr. Scalzi is kind enough to do it for free!

Spacebunny passed along a request from a friend who is interested in publishing a novel. Among other things, the issue of an agent came up, and whether one should pursue one or not. On this particular issue, I think it really depends upon what one’s goal is, but in general, do as I say and not as I do.

I have only been represented by a literary agent twice. The first time, I did so primarily because every professional author I knew said that I should and in retrospect, I should have ignored the experts. It was a totally pointless thing to do since I’d already secured the publishing deal, the agent hindered the process more than he helped and has subsequently failed to sell a single foreign translation or produce any revenue at all in the twelve years that he has “represented” those two books.

The second time, I arranged to have The Chronicles of King David represented by a more influential agency that was also representing a series that happened to be the best-selling novels in the world at that time. Over the course of a year, they manage to dredge up a single offer from a publisher for only two-thirds the money that I’d received to NOT write a book on a different book contract that I’d negotiated on my own. Also, the publisher wanted to compress the trilogy into a single novel. The agency and I amicably parted ways after 18 months; I’ve since signed two book contracts, published three books, and have had no problem finding publishers interested in looking at my next non-fiction book despite having put in no more effort than making two phone calls.

So, you’ll understand if I am deeply skeptical of the supposed utility of literary agents.

However, as John Scalzi points out in a post well-worth reading, agents who are actually capable of placing books in other languages are extremely useful. I have not managed to do that, not even once, although it must be admitted that “desultory” would probably be far too strong a word to describe my efforts in that regard. In fact, I’m currently intending to find a literary agent for precisely that purpose.

So, in the end, my advice would be to pursue an agent if you cannot reasonably expect to find a publisher willing to sign you to a book contract on your own. However, I would also encourage you to not waste too much time on the entire process as not only is the average advance much smaller than you might think, but very few authors ever earn out their advances. In general, agents are better equipped to exploit success than they are to help generate it; note that John Scalzi and Raymond Feist, two novelists who are far more successful than the average, began by self-publishing themselves in one form or another.

If you want to write, then write. Just do it! There is no substitute for simply doing something instead of contemplating it, talking about it, marketing it, selling the concept, and posing thoughtfully in coffeeshops. Most first novels aren’t very good anyhow, so you might as well get it out of your system and publish it via Lightning Print or whoever; they’ll list it on Amazon and allow you to be disappointed with your Amazon rank immediately instead of waiting nine months to be disappointed by your royalty statements. I highly recommend reading the OC’s posts on the general subject. In the vast majority of cases, you’ll achieve 90 percent of what you want to do by self-publishing anyhow, all that’s missing is the vanity of having your writer status affirmed by an external source.

Which is nice, but believe me, the thrill of seeing your name on the spine of a book wears off faster than you’d think.

UPDATE – The OC himself suggests a previous post he’s written on this very subject at the Ranting Room, and it would behoove the would-be writer to peruse it. And don’t forget, what works well for one writer won’t necessarily work well for another since circumstances are often different.

Some readers didn’t understand why I included two chapters dealing with science in TIA. This endorsement of Obama should suffice to explain their relevance to those who didn’t grasp the connection between science fetishism and the New Atheists. Read it and see if you don’t agree that each and every individual who endorses it should be stripped of their science degrees and their intellectual pretensions:

Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.

Science, is there anything it can’t do? It sounds amazingly like the parody of the Corinthians-style ode to science I pointed out in the chapter entitled “Darwin’s Judas”. Even more amazing, these fetishists truly don’t see how they have made a quasi-religion of the object of their adoration. On a closely related note, one of our more thoughtful critics, Dominic Saltarelli, emailed me yesterday:

While I’m sure there’s plenty for us to disagree on in other matters, I just took a swim in some “secular, liberal, progressive” waters, and am still washing the sewage off. I tried talking a little sense into them regarding economics, because this is a crowd that sees the current economic situation as a fundamental failure of capitalism. So I tried injecting some facts into the discourse

It was like hitting vampires with sunlight. The venom some of these people resorted to in defense of just a damn economic model was, disheartening, to say the least. Having had this experience, whenever some refers to “Atheism as a religion” or to an “atheistic religion”, I think I know exactly what they’re talking about now, and it isn’t pretty nor something I wish to be associated with.

Just wanted to let you know, that I feel your pain.

He does indeed. Science fetishists, economically vacuuous secularists, liberal progressives… they’re not precisely the same, but there’s certainly a significant amount of overlap. And in each and every case, there is a near complete inability to apply even the most rudimentary logic to the subject at hand as well as an intense, emotional reaction to having their ignorance punctured with the verifiable facts.

And all of this is setting aside the obvious absurdity of the idea that the scientific socialist Obama could possibly be a champion of Reason and Science.