Vox Popoli

Pharyngulans may need to consider doing an intervention soon, as PZ, inspired by his starring roles in “Expelled” and “The Dicky D Rap”, appears to be going overboard with his newly acquired habit of crashing conference calls:

In the “just plain bizarre” category, some “dude,” as our colleague Chris Cillizza, a.k.a, “the Fix,” tells us, got on today’s conference call with Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist Mark Penn, communications director Howard Wolfson and deputy communications director Phil Singer and asked whether Clinton could “talk sexy” in her ads so he could “pinch the squid.”

As a plastic philosopher once said, Math is hard!

Carolyn Kaufman, 33, has a doctorate in clinical psychology and teaches college in Columbus, Ohio. She is a perfect example of a woman who has everything except a date. “I have this crazy belief that I have the right to expect my potential partner to be at least as successful as I am, and to have as many things to offer as I do,” she says….

Even Kaufman’s dream of marrying her equal may be wishful thinking: Experts say that highly accomplished men tend to marry women who are lower on the professional and educational food chain than they are, traditionally choosing women over whom they can exert control.

Spacebunny emailed me this article, which is of the sort that always provides both of us with a good deal of amusement. The first amusing thing is the female notion of success – Kaufman isn’t successful, she’s merely managed to sit through sufficient years of schooling and get a job teaching afterwards. BFD. Second, for the Nth time, what men want and what women want are two very different things. When I look at every successful guy I know, defined as an annual income of at least $500k, I notice four things about their relationships, and they all are in long-standing relationships complete with children, if not necessarily marriages.

A) The women range from pretty to smoking hot.
B) Both the men and the women tend to view their roles as complementary, not identical. It’s a division of labor thing, do-it-all-and-have-it-allers wouldn’t understand.
C) The man doesn’t want his wife to work, he wants her to be available in his rare down time. Her primary complaint tends to revolve around there not being enough of that down time.
D) The women are more likely to not have a college degree at all than to possess an advanced degree.

Believe me, a guy who owns a private company with 45 million in revenue isn’t impressed by a college teacher and he certainly couldn’t care less about the paper she bought from a paper-selling institution. What smart, educated, “successful” women are apparently too stubbornly stupid to recognize is that what they have worked so hard to achieve is not what most men want, and they bring almost nothing to the table as far as successful men are concerned. And it’s not a question of control, that’s ridiculous, as a man has far more control over his employees than over his wife. The strong preference for a non-ambitious mate is much more a matter of allowing him to step out of his driven and competitive existence every now and then and take it easy for a change.

Miss Kaufman is entirely correct, her belief is crazy. It is both crazy and self-defeating how many women believe, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that racking up accomplishments will somehow make them more desirable, when all they’re actually doing is rendering themselves less desirable to the sort of men they want most, while simultaneously reducing the pool of men that are potentially acceptable to them.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with holding out for what you want. But if you’re going to play against probability, it helps to understand that you are doing so. I didn’t like hearing Big Chilly tell me when we were seven that I was never going to be an NFL quarterback – in fact, I punched him, thus setting off our one and only fight – but as it turns out, he was entirely right.

Chad helpfully summarizes Richard Dawkins’s hilariously autistic response to “The Dicky D Rap”:

1. Video posted around 11:00 PM

2. 1 hour and 44 minutes later, Dawkins implores his more intelligent readers to help inform him as to whose side the video is on (his side, or not his side). He then pokes fun at people that think things are funny that he doesn’t understand just in case it turns out to be ‘not on his side’. Comment #151544

3. Dawkins now presumably goes to sleep.

4. Nearly nine hours later, he wakes up and checks the post again. He sees that his fellow scientific elites like the video, but also don’t understand it. Dawkins tries to get in a little dig on postmodernism, but just ends up making fun of his posters. Comment #151685

5. Nine and a half hours after posting, Dawkins wonders how his fellow comrades could laugh at something they don’t understand. He then lauds ‘The Life of Brian’ as the pinnacle of comedic evolution. Comment #151704

6. A couple minutes after the last post, he gets in another jab at Postmodernism. Comment #151713

7. Under chastisement for his humbuggery, Dawkins admits that Daniel Dennett popping his head up from out of nowhere is, in fact, funny. Comment #151715

8. Nearly ten hours after posting the video, someone postulates that the humor is derived from the silly dancing bodies (not the satire). Dawkins seems to accept this theory and thanks the poster for his intellect. Comment #151723

9. Sixteen hours after first watching the video, Dawkins finally realizes that it is, in fact, making fun of ‘his side’. Dawkins defends himself again by saying that he didn’t understand it. Comment #151849.

10. Seventeen hours after posting, Dawkins attempts to comprehend the humor by equating similar scenes of incongruousness that Monty Python has also done. Dawkins has apparently not yet pondered why, if this were the only thing funny about the video, he did not ‘catch on’ before this. Dawkins chalks this up to the video not being funny, and dismisses the obvious conclusion that his head is too big to see the satire behind it. Comment #151889

11. The next day, Dawkins chimes in again to defend his Ph.D. status to a poster who dared presume questioning it. Comment #152142

12. Nearly 36 hours after posting, Dawkins discovers what a ‘grill’ is and waxes philosophic as to why Sam Harris would have one in the video. The conclusion he comes up with is that it adds no humor to the video and should not have been put in. Comment #152168

13. After a full three and a half days after first watching the video, Dawkins (obviously perturbed at the fact he didn’t get that he was the butt of the joke, when every other non-elite who saw it could tell in an instant) attempts to equate the video with ‘The worst poem ever written’. He then satisfies himself by settling on the conclusion that this is the only reason why people might like it. The final analysis is that it’s not only ‘not good’, and not even ‘pretty bad’, but so incredibly bad, that it is in fact, good. He gets in a snobbish comment about the Bible for good measure. Comment #153061

This tends to support what I have suspected ever since reading The God Delusion. The scientist-king has no clothes; Richard Dawkins is simply not very intelligent. He’s a mere popularizer, not a creator, and I’d be willing to bet that every single successful game designer of my acquaintance has a higher IQ than him, in fact, I’d even bet that their average IQ exceeds his by a standard deviation. After all, it takes a particularly deluded individual to not only make EIGHT glaring errors in the central argument of his landmark literary contribution, but to simultaneously claim that refutation of the logical train wreck is impossible.

Dawkins betrays every sign of the 1SD-2SD IQ individual, who tends to think that because he is rather more intelligent than the average, he is therefore brilliant. He isn’t, as his dependable inability to perceive the glaring flaws in his own arguments and his hilarious failure to understand when he is being blatantly mocked illustrates very nicely indeed. It’s no wonder Dawkins shies away from debating anyone brighter or better-trained than journalists and decrepit Anglican priests, he knows perfectly well that if he did, he’d get abused so badly that Child Protective Services would have to be called in to pick up the pieces.

Also, anyone who thinks The Life of Brian is funnier than Monty Python and The Holy Grail is clearly a blithering chowderhead.

Helicopter Ben can’t quite bring himself to admit the obvious:

“Recession is possible, but recession is a technical term,” he said, during testimony to the powerful Capitol Hill committee. “I’m not ready to say whether or not the US economy will face such a situation. It’s clearly a period of very slow growth extending back to the fourth quarter of last year, and we are trying to set our policies appropriately for that situation.”

Here’s yet another prediction. GDP will not only retract in Q1, but will continue to retract in the third and fourth quarters of 2008, contra the publicized estimates of most professional mainstream economists:

most forecasts suggest the first quarter will be the most difficult of the year and that in the back half of the year … we will see the economy perform a lot better,” Gutierrez said.

I’m not in the least bit concerned about a recession. They happen and they’re no big deal. What I’m concerned about is the increasing probability of a serious depression thanks to Helicopter Ben’s inability to learn anything from his studies of the Great Depression.

This week’s interview is with Dr. Frank Shostak, Chief Economist at MF Global and a noted scholar of Austrian economics. Download Voxonomics 1-3.

Related Reading:

An Introduction to Austrian Economics by Thomas C. Taylor

In Defense of Austrian Theory

The Fallacy of Inflation Fighting

Money and Inflation: The Tendency to Deny Reality

How Much Money Should There Be

I’m just going to warn you right now, tomorrow’s Voxonomics will be a bit more esoteric than the previous two. But I really enjoyed the interview, I mean, if you’re not genuinely amused at the ironic prospects of what could almost be described as Austrian econometrics, well, you’re probably not in my profoundly miniscule target audience.

Although, if you’re clueless about economics and wonder what the difference between Keynesianism and monetarism is, you may want to consider giving it a whirl anyhow.

Jamie just passed out from envy after watching this video which a UK reader emailed to me today. As I have repeatedly stated, the backlash is only beginning. I had no idea it would be so much fun, though.

He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!

I suspect this wasn’t quite what the Four Horsemen of the Bukkakelypse had in mind in that rather smug roundtable discussion wherein it was concluded that there was no need for respect to enter into the religion/atheism debate. Of course, thanks to the social autism that pervades scientistry, it’s not exactly hard to send a convincing message that science is deeply uncool and undeservedly arrogant.

UPDATE – While Derb demonstrates that he has both a) a clue, and, b) a sense of humor, one of his NRO readers manifestly does not:

So the argument here is that people who spend their lives working in scientific research are arrogant buffoons if they claim to know more about scientific topics than non-scientists? And this is funny?

I wonder if this guy realizes that Dawkins hasn’t done any science for a long time, he’s literally a professional propagandist now. Dennett is a philosopher and Hitchens is a journalist, so they’ve never done any, although PZ Myers does apparently torture fish from time to time when he’s not busy haranguing the religious faithful. It is science! On the other hand, give the guy some credit as unlike Richard Dawkins and his little cult, he did at least manage to grasp that it is expressing a perspective that is critical of both science and atheism.

“If anyone can understand a single word of this, don’t bother to translate, just tell me whose side it’s on.”
– Richard Dawkins aka The Uncockblockable

“i just want to assure everyone that everyone is looking very deeply into this, and it isnt necessary. i understand this kind of thing very well, and i can say with no doubt that the intent is to flatter a pro-science stance.”
– random Richarddawkins.net commenter

Divisions still matter:

No changes appear to be coming in the way NFL teams are seeded in the playoffs. Adam Schefter of NFL Network reports that owners today tabled the proposal for re-seeding the playoffs, deciding not to bother taking a formal vote on the issue because the clear consensus of the NFL executives in the room was that it had no chance to pass.

The NFL’s Competition Committee had proposed a change in the way the six playoff teams from each conference are seeded. Instead of guaranteeing all four division winners of at least one playoff home game, the proposal would have allowed a wild card team to host a first-round game if it finished the regular season with a better record than a division winner.

Now that they’ve shot down that bad idea, perhaps they can get around to addressing the absurd rookie pay scale that defeats the entire purpose of the worst-to-first draft order. Fix what is broken, don’t mess around with breaking what is manifestly working very well.

Jonah Goldberg rightly hammers the symbol of the smug science fetishist:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers. The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.

I personally find the Darwin fish to be more of an amusingly stupid gesture than anything, mostly as a result of having been a resident of post-Christian Europe for a very long time. Unlike the American secularist who fails to understand the vitality fueled by the religious society that surrounds him, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that the secular culture represented by the Darwin Fish is an evolutionary dead end. And on some level, the Darwin crowd must know this, otherwise they wouldn’t be so fearful and constantly worrying about the way a sticker on a school textbook or exposure to an alternative point of view is capable of entirely undermining their entire belief system.

ND-TENS is now little more than a scientific model that is barely related to its Darwinian original; not only does it owe more to Mendel than Darwin, it’s even less precise than its dysfunctional counterpart in the Neo-Keynesian economic model. I’m confident that both Neo-Keynesianism and Neo-Darwinism will eventually be thrown out entirely in favor of superior models that reflect the observable empirical evidence much more accurately. I’m not sure what those models will be, but I think the conceptual blend of Austrian economics, socionomics and econometrics points the way towards one potential replacement, while game theory, AI design and evolutionary stable strategies may provide us with a way towards developing the other.

Although he clearly doesn’t understand what plants do in greenhouses:

On not taking drastic action to correct global warming: “Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

I’d bet Ted Turner that in ten years, the Earth will probably be colder than it is now, it certainly won’t be the 2.65 degrees warmer it would have to be to be 8 degrees warmer in 30 years. “Global Warming” is unscience, it’s nothing more than bad software design and badly flawed computer modeling. But you’d think he would understand that plants tend to grow very well in greenhouses. Hence the name.

Turner hungers after one-world government, so this “WAAAHHHHHH WE WILL ALL BE CANNIBALS” nonsense is just emo-screeching in order to try scare the stupid into supporting it. It’s one of the most encouraging things I’ve seen from the global warming alarmists in some time, as they are clearly panicking over the way in which their alarmism has totally failed to gain any traction except among the silly science fetish crowd.