Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: you talking to ME?

Serge Tomiko is a rather strange anklebiter who enjoys informing me that I know absolutely nothing about economics, which statement is inevitably followed by an economics-related assertion that indicates he has read the appropriate material, but he hasn’t understood it. He’s very much like Kevin Cline in A Fish Called Wanda; the last time he showed up, he failed to understand that the graph he was citing to dispute my contention was charting the data from the very same Federal Reserve report I had cited in the first place.

This time he felt the need to “correct” my factual statement that deposits are unsecured loans from the depositor to the bank:

Once again, Vox shows he is absolutely clueless about how banking functions. Deposits are NOT loans to the bank. Banks do not in any way require deposits. It is a service they provide.

Banks create money by the authority of the government, which is given to entities in exchange for interest payments. They do not lend money. In this case, the banks are being perfectly honest. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether or not they have deposits. In fact, this kind of policy is intended to discourage deposits. 

Because beating up on Serge feels rather like kicking a toddler in the head, I thought I should give him the opportunity to retract his foolish “correction”.  I wrote: “Serge_Tomiko, I humiliated you the last time you tried to correct me.
Fair warning: I’m going to prison-rape you on this one, brutally, if you
don’t retract this. You have until tomorrow to think this over.”

Not being the brightest bulb on the planet, Serge proceeded to double-down.

What more can one say? It should be blatantly obvious. How could banks charge negative interest rates if their lending was at all dependent upon deposits?

This is a complicated issue, but Vox has it completely wrong.

This would a good, recent work that not only demolishes Vox’s common, yet ill informed idea of banking, it explains the origin of his error. Will he read it? I doubt it. 

As it happens, I did read it. I could have written it. And not only do I completely agree with it, but I note that it has precisely NOTHING to do with my original contention. The article deals with what bankers do with the money they are loaned by their depositors and says absolutely nothing about the nature of that money or the nature of the legal relationship between the depositor and the bank. Regardless of what Serge thinks, the central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself.

On the other hand, the 1848 Foley-Hill case in the English House of Lords said everything that one needs to know about both.

Edward Thomas Foley,–Appellant; Thomas Hill and Others,-Respondents

(1848) 2 HLC 28
English Reports Citation: 9 E.R. 1002
July 31, August 1, 1848.

Mews’ Dig. i. 42, 1007; ix. 76; xi. 988. S.C. In 8 Jur., 347; 1 Ph. 399; 13 L.J. Ch. 182. On point as to relation between banker and customer, considered in St. Aubyn v. Smart, 1867, L.R. 5 Eq. 189; A.-G. v. Edmunds, 1868, L.R. 6 Eq. 390; Moxon v. Bright, 1869, L.R. 4 Ch. 294; Summers v. City Bank, 1874, L.R. 9 C.P. 587; Marten v. Rocke, 1885, 53 L.T., 1948. Distinguished on point as to limitation (1 Ph. 399; cf. 2 H.L.C. pp. 41, 42) in In re Tidd (1893), 3 Ch. 156, and in Atkinson v. Bradford Third Equitable, etc., Society, 1890, 25 Q.B.D. 381.

EDWARD THOMAS & FOLEY, – Appellant; THOMAS HILL and Others,–, Respondents [July 31, August 1, 1848].

Banker and Customer–Accounts not complicated, subject for action, and not for bill.

The relation between a Banker and Customer, who pays money into the Bank, is the ordinary relation of debtor and creditor, with a superadded obligation arising out of the custom of bankers to honour the customer’s drafts; and that relation is not altered by an agreement by the banker to allow the interest on the balances in the Bank.

The relation of Banker and Customer does not partake of a fiduciary character, nor bear analogy to the relation between Principal and Factor or Agent, who is quasi trustee for the principal in respect of the particular matter for which. he is appointed factor or agent.

Is that sufficiently clear? The relationship between the depositor and the bank is the normal one between a creditor and a debtor. Because it is a loan from the former to the latter. In case the Old English legalese is too complicated for you, we can go from 1848 to 2013 and make it even simpler. Last week, the investor Jim Sinclair explained the same thing on Market Sanity:

I think that our listeners need to understand that when they make a deposit in a bank, they don’t have an asset. They become an unsecured lender to the banking institution, that goes back to British law in the 1850s and present law in North America and elsewhere. In fact, it’s universally accepted that once you make a deposit in a bank you’re lending the money to the bank. When you hear that the bondholders and lenders will have to undertake the rescue of any banking institution that faces difficulty to the listener, you are the lender. You are a lender without collateral. You are in a very junior financial position.

And if you’re still in doubt, it is right there in US law, specifically 12 USC § 1813 – Definitions

The term “deposit” means—
(1) the unpaid balance of money or its equivalent received or held by a bank or savings association in the usual course of business and for which it has given or is obligated to give credit, either conditionally or unconditionally, to a commercial, checking, savings, time, or thrift account, or which is evidenced by its certificate of deposit, thrift certificate, investment certificate, certificate of indebtedness, or other similar name, or a check or draft drawn against a deposit account and certified by the bank or savings association, or a letter of credit or a traveler’s check on which the bank or savings association is primarily liable:

What is an “unpaid balance of money received?” It is a loan. As it happens, it is an unsecured loan, albeit one that is nominally guaranteed by the FDIC, at the FDIC’s sole discretion. Which is exactly what I stated in the first place. Banks are nothing but middlemen, which is why they require loans from their “depositors” in order to make new loans and profit from the difference between the interest they pay and the interest paid to them. The real service they provide is collecting all of the many smaller deposit-loans into a single large credit pool that can then be borrowed from more efficiently in larger loan packages. This is a legitimate function, perhaps even a necessary one, but hardly one that rationally justifies nearly 30 percent of all the operating profit in the country being devoted to it.

As it happens, the ability of the banks to create money is not completely dependent upon receiving loans from the general public. They can also receive loans directly from the Federal Reserve. And, as per the previous post, that $2.5 trillion injection of credit from the Fed is what has produced the $2.1 trillion nominal increase in bank assets since 2008.

The amusing thing about this particular failure to grasp the obvious is that Serge is a self-avowed fascist who flatters himself with the idea that he understands the English Common Law. It appears he is still stuck on the Magna Carta and hasn’t reached the 19th century yet.

Mailvox: an evolutionist response to Fred

An anonymous response to Fred’s long piece concerning his skeptical perspective on evolution by natural selection:

First let me say that while I do believe life on earth has evolved over a large period of time, I am not a militant supporter of TENS. Thus, I read the piece you linked to about evolution written by the gentleman Fred.

In summary, he appears to believe humans and other creatures are too complex to have – and here he repeats a sentiment that I can only assume stems from true ignorance or willful ignorance – “arisen by accident.”

Furthermore, he states something like “it would be easier for me to believe that a 747 assembled itself.” Again, a statement like that implies ignorance at best and use of a strawman at worst.

I’ll assume he is making the common mistake of confusing machines and organisms (life). While life and machines appear to be very similar, they are very different.

Organisms are complex systems which independently adapt and change over time. On the other hand, machines are systems designed and assembled by an intelligent being to accomplish a task. They (currently) lack the ability to independently adapt and change over time. (Is it possible that DNA and RNA were machines that were designed by an intelligence and loosed on Earth? Perhaps.)

So while both possess complexity, a human and a 747 are categorically different. A better comparison might be between a human and a city such as London or New York.

Like a human, a city is a mindbogglingly complex system (made up of millions of smaller, complex systems) capable of adapting and changing independently over time. And like a human, a city didn’t just pop into being one day. One can ascertain this by studying the city and discovering that buildings are built on top of roads that were built on top of canals that were dug through ancient farm land that was cleared from forests by farmers. Farmers that were merely being farmers and had no intention of building a city.

No one person (unit) did or could have conceived of and built the current cities of London or New York, as is, from scratch. More importantly, the “evidence” indicates they weren’t built as is from scratch, but rather “assembled themselves” gradually, and in many ways messily, over time. Furthermore, it would be absurd to claim that New York arose and evolved into its current form “by accident.”

Likewise, a human appears to be a complex system made up of billions of smaller, complex units, each of which is quietly going about its business with no awareness of the bigger – or future – picture of which it is apart, much like the New York farmers.

Could a theoretical super intelligence have built a human, as is, from scratch? Sure, just as one could have built New York or London, as is, from scratch. The evidence, in my opinion, indicates otherwise.

This is an unusual defense of TENS. It is also ineffective because it utilizes an example that is undeniably the product of intelligent design in an attempt to refute the concept of intelligent design. As it happens, one need only read a little about Christopher Wren to understand that the current city of London was, in fact, the result of not only intelligent design, but purposeful design.

The emailer makes two mistakes here. The first is his confusion of two distinct concepts, intelligent design and purposeful design. While there was never a single complete master design for London, and the current city is the unpredictable result of millions of different decisions, there was still intelligence behind every single decision. While the overall result was not designed, every element that comprises it was. I recognize that the emailer was only intending this as an analogical example of the concept of emergent design, not as a literal counterexample, but it is still misleading.

The second, and more important mistake is the claim that Fred is ignorant in pointing out that evolutionary theory requires the assembly of living beings by accident. While Richard Dawkins has convinced many superficial science fetishists that “natural selection is the exact opposite of random”, this is obviously and entirely false because the vast quantity of mutations upon which natural selection repeatedly relies are, insofar as anyone can tell, random.

Many people, both those who subscribe to the theory evolution and those who reject it, appear to be under the false impression that evolution happens in response to environmental pressure. But this is not the case; the famous Leiderberg experiment demonstrated that the mutations precede the exposure to the environment that causes the selection process to take place.

From “Understanding Evolution” at UC-Berkeley: “Mutations are random. Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or harmful for the organism, but
mutations do not “try” to supply what the organism “needs.” Factors in
the environment may influence the rate of mutation but are not generally
thought to influence the direction of mutation. For example, exposure
to harmful chemicals may increase the mutation rate, but will not cause
more mutations that make the organism resistant to those chemicals. In
this respect, mutations are random — whether a particular mutation happens or not is unrelated to how useful that mutation would be.”

So, given that the causal factor is random, Fred is entirely correct to say the subsequent process is accidental. It cannot be anything else.

Mailvox: a more reasonable vaccine schedule

CM asks what is a more reasonable vaccine schedule than the current US one:

I have followed your blog for quite some time now and have come to really value your opinion on a wide variety of topics. I recently had my first child and my wife and I have already resolved to home school (largely because we looked into a lot of the information that you discussed on your blog). I want to know what in your opinion would be the ideal alternative vaccine schedule.

The first thing is to understand that many European and Asian doctors think the US schedule is insane. Don’t be moved by the rhetorical appeals to the US medical industry; remember the same people are also telling you to fill up on carbohydrates and fructose to lose weight. The second thing is to realize that your primary responsibility is to your children, not to the collective. If something is better for your child than for the community, then you put your child first.

That’s called being a good parent.

Of course, if you are genuinely more concerned about the community, then go ahead and get yourself sterilized. Because global warming or whatever.

Anyhow, in my opinion, no vaccinations need be given until the child is walking. Then the tetanus vaccine is a good idea since tetanus can’t be treated. Polio is probably the next concern, given its seriousness, and should be addressed some time before the child is likely to come into regular contact with large quantities of people.  If you’re homeschooling, this probably means sometime between the ages of three and five.

Due to the potential risk of blindness and the way immigrants and travelers have been spreading it around so freely, measles is probably a good idea around the age of school, so sometime between five and seven. I would recommend a measles-specific vaccine and not MMR; mumps and rubella are much less serious diseases and the rubella vaccine is, as far as I can tell, completely worthless.

Not only is the disease less serious, but I know of several women who have been repeatedly vaccinated for it and still show no evidence of antibodies, hence the repeated vaccinations. If you don’t have pregnant women or infants around, whooping cough is probably not an issue, although it is a real bitch if your children get it. But if you can’t keep your kids home for two to three weeks straight without a problem, then you should probably seriously consider the vaccination around the age of seven.

Vaccines for chicken pox and other non-fatal diseases are a joke. Forget potential reactions, merely driving to the doctor’s office puts your children more at risk than the disease does.  The point is not to avoid all vaccinations entirely, but rather, avoid overloading the very young child’s system. I know vets who refuse to give dogs more than one vaccine at a time due to the negative effects they have observed over the years, so the idea that the current US vaccine schedule can’t possibly be harming children is ludicrous on its face.

As for the inevitable appeals to science, I will merely point out that no science – ZERO – has been done concerning the safety of the current US vaccine schedule. If anyone wishes to dispute that, I invite them to provide everyone here with a link to the published paper. And as for the appeals to the greater good of the collective, I first note that I’ve never been much moved by Leninist arguments, and second, observe that one could just as easily justify murderously culling the immigrant population on that basis.

Mailvox: studying Christianity

LC asks for reading recommendations to learn more about Christianity:
I read your book, The Irrational Atheist, and I have been reading
your blog for a few months now because I find most of what you say
interesting and some of it comforting. I was raised by Christian
parents. I am young, 21, and have recently gone through a questioning of
my faith.  I have re-committed myself to my beliefs and living in a way
that has resulted in a good life. I have realized that I still have the
faith of my childhood and my understanding of Christianity and the
world in general is very limited. I always have respect for your
arguments because you know what you’re talking about and back up your
assertions. Can you please give me some direction on texts to study
other than the Bible to increase my understanding of Christianity and
religion in general? 
First of all, remember not to get too caught up in the theological extrapolations. No matter what you end up reading, it is always worthwhile to periodically circle back to the original source. Don’t neglect reading the Bible in favor of various men’s interpretations of what the Bible says. In the end, theology is nothing more than philosophy derived from the Bible and it is no more intrinsically reliable than any other logical derivation.

I would start at the beginning. If your understanding is limited, begin with The Chronicles of Narnia. As we saw in the debate with Luke of Common Sense Atheism, the average grasp of Christian concepts don’t even rise to the level of Narnia. Then read The Tower of Geburah by John White. Once you’ve read the children’s fiction, move onto simple theology like Mere Christianity by CS Lewis and Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton. As a general rule, it’s hard to go too far afield on a foundation of Lewis and Chesterton. I would also recommend the very short, very simple, but intriguing A Defense of the Revelation by Leonhard Euler, who happens to be one of the most legendary mathematicians in history. And my friend Greg Boyd’s Letters to a Skeptic is also recommended.

Once you have a grasp of the theological basics, you may be ready to read up on the actual history of Christianity and some of its leading thinkers. The first volume of the Cambridge Medieval History series, The Christian Empire, is tremendously informative and the epub is freely available for download online. St. Augustine’s Confessions are worth reading for their influence on Western thinking and a good summary of Thomas Aquinas is a necessity as well. I haven’t read it yet, but I have heard very good things about Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide and I intend to review it as soon as I finish the Cantillon.

Any other reasonable recommendations would be welcome. Please note that this is not the right sort of post to either indulge your particular theological peculiarities or exhibit how esoteric your reading happens to have been. We’re talking Christianity 101, not 503.

Mailvox: SF/F’s transideological malaise

It appears it is not only right-wing conservatives, libertarian extremists and Bible-thumping god-botherers who are thoroughly sick of the meatless, mindless, scalzified SF/F that is being pushed on them by the genre publishers:

I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you. I am a Marxist and an atheist, but I didn’t come here to debate politics or religion. Anyway, last year I started writing seriously and I thought I should get out there on the web and see what the “scene” is about right now, sci/fi and fantasy writers and markets and new fiction, especially short fiction. I constantly read sci/fi and fanstasy, but mostly from my collection of old paperbacks, Vance, Herbert, Howard, etc… I read just as much non-fiction from my local library. So I put my finger on the pulse. The experience was disheartening. New short fiction seems to place innovation over all other qualities possible in a particular piece, which means my desire to read a good story is likely to go unsatisfied. Also, the “scene” is completely preoccupied with identity.

And of course, I happened upon the Scalzi/Vox feud. I checked out both blogs. The verdict: Scalzi – rather dull and typical upper middle class views, Vox – incendiary but rigorous, consistent, and most importantly, often funny. As a Marxist I can’t resist good polemic, even from the other side.  I lurk about once a month.

Let me backtrack with a little explanation. Some people out there, perhaps not you, may confuse my radical leftism with the stuff going on out there. They would be wrong. As a Marxist, for me it is class, class, class. Class trumps race, gender, everything. Its all about wealth. The fact that “old white men” are holding alot of it is due to historical forces, not from their “whiteness”. In the 60’s and 70’s, the leftist preoccupation with class was replaced with race and gender issues, to the detriment of all concerned.  Old news, just spelling it out here for clarity’s sake.

So we get to now, and race and gender obsessed “liberal progressives” are such a harmful force in society that I, an actual socialist revolutionary, can enjoy you tormenting them on your blog, even though your political perspective is rooted in basic assumptions that are opposite my own. Strange days indeed. For liberal progressives, this would indicate I am a sexist racist, but as a white male I am already on their shitlist so whatever. I am a Marxist. I believe I am fighting the good fight. I am not going to get on my knees and lick boot, hoping for “ally” status. Eff that. The whole thing is a bizarre repackaging of original sin.

So when you put The Last Witchking out there for free, I thought why not and downloaded it. When it came up in the queue I dived in and I was floored. The stories were excellent. They entertained me. What else can I say? Opera Vita was incredible. There was a poignancy there I was not expecting. Suffused throughout is a certain ephemeral beauty, stately and linked with mortality. The subtlety belies tropes about limitations of the “male perspective” that are bandied about when the writing community weighs in on gender.  I haven’t seen religion done so convincingly and movingly in the genre since Herbert. I went ahead and read Magic Broken and enjoyed it thoroughly and then pulled the trigger on Throne for five bucks and now I am enjoying that.

It is really remarkable that your apparent congenital disorder, the inability to shut up or even tone it down, has disbarred you from the typical path to success as a writer.  I guess there is hope. I found your work via your soapbox. Despite my predilections toward the radical, I never let politics get in the way of personal relationships and now I have to add that it can’t dissuade me from enjoying fiction I like. Thanks for the books. I am hooked on Selenoth now, the antidote for my genre malaise. Please make it your goal to churn out volumes of the stuff for readers like me trying to survive this long winter.

That an avowed Marxist would enjoy my fiction is less surprising than it might sound. I am, after all, a radical, merely one with very different assumptions and objectives. And I’ve always gotten along much better with the hard left than with the soft, squishy, bourgeois progressive left; one of my independent studies was done under a hardcore Canadian socialist who regarded McDonalds as the capitalist devil incarnate.

Of course, this may be because the hard left is about the only group that hates the progressive left more than I do. One of the great satisfactions about being on the right-wing is the knowledge that even if we lose and the revolution finally arrives in its fullness, the useful idiots are going to be the first ones lined up against the wall and shot. And who can look at the way Wall Street has been raping the country and not feel the urge to raise a revolutionary flag; if that is capitalism, then I don’t want any part of it and I’m a libertarian!

But besides our obvious ideological and religious differences, I have to take some issue with the writer’s idea that it is my unwillingness to cower before the PC gods of publishing that have prevented me from following the conventional path. While my notoriety would presumably have made it easier for them to decline to publish me – which is theoretical anyhow because I do not have an agent and I have never submitted my work for publication to any of the various genre publishing houses – this actually has the situation backwards.

One reason that I have been so uncompromising and so unwilling to play along with the progressives is because I have known from the start that the substance of my fiction would prevent the mainstream publishers from publishing it. And I also knew I had no interest in writing the sort of tedious political crap they wanted to publish. So, there was no reason to muzzle myself because I knew there was no chance that they would publish books like The Chronicles of King David or Summa Elvetica no matter what I did or did not say. I can’t pose as either a hero or a victim because I never had anything to lose in that regard.

In fact, I consider myself incredibly lucky to not only have such strong support from intelligent readers across religious and ideological lines, but to be writing at a time when the gatekeepers are so impotent. All of us who write should be deeply grateful, whether it is to God or to History and the class struggle, to be alive at such a fascinating time! To be able to write exactly what one wants and be able to make it readily available to those who are potentially interested in it is all that any writer can really ask for. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

Mailvox: don’t struggle

TS writes of his difficulties in attempting to find belief in the existence of God:

Vox, I’ve read your blog for quite some time now and have enjoyed it immensely. Right now I am a struggling theist. More and more I am doubting the existence of God and it’s plaguing my thoughts and causing some serious depression.

My biggest hurdle in my mind right now is the fact that you can’t see God. You come across as very intelligent so I ask you personally: what helped you get past the fact that you can’t see God or hear from him. My mind continues to tell me I am being irrational for believing in a life form I can’t see. Am I missing something?  Is this truly a matter of “blind faith” as an atheist would mockingly say? Your thoughts are much appreciated. I genuinely want rational reasons that can help me get past this mental hurdle

It has become apparent to me that there are three primary causes for atheism. One is a simple neural anomaly where the atheist lacks something in the brain that is necessary for some forms of belief. This doesn’t merely relate to belief in God, but also in the ability to connect with other beings, hence the strong correlation between atheism and higher levels on the autism spectrum.

The second cause produces the most common and irritating variety, the intellectual perma-adolescent. This is the Religion Minus variety, which is nothing more than a parasitic Do What Thou Wilt Society. Combine it with the first cause and one has the typical New Atheist: smug, juvenile, and socially autistic.

The third cause is what I would describe as a failure of understanding. It is, I submit, a category error at its core. To me, it seems quite literally crazy to refuse to believe in ANYTHING simply because one has not seen it or heard it. We live in an age of virtual reality, where what we see and hear are entirely false. We live in an age of quantum physics, where what happens on one side of a galaxy has chaotic and unknown, but theoretically observable effects on the other side of it.

So, to think that because one has never personally seen nor heard something is any sort of indication that it doesn’t exist strikes me as solipsism of the first order. As for me, I have absolutely no problem whatsoever in believing in God’s existence. There is nothing to get past. Perhaps this paragraph explaining why I am a Christian, taken from my exchange of letters with Luke of Common Sense Atheism, will help you understand my perspective on the readily observable fact of God’s existence.

Why am I a Christian? Because I believe in evil. I believe in
objective, material, tangible evil that insensibly envelops every single
one of us sooner or later. I believe in the fallen nature of Man, and I
am aware that there is no shortage of evidence, scientific,
testimonial, documentary, and archeological, to demonstrate that no
individual is perfect or even perfectible by the moral standards
described in the Bible. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus
Christ is the only means of freeing Man from the grip of that evil. God
may not be falsifiable, but Christianity definitely is, and it has
never been falsified. The only philosophical problem of evil that could
ever trouble the rational Christian is its absence; to the extent that
evil can be said to exist, it proves not only the validity of
Christianity but its necessity as well. The fact that we live
in a world of pain, suffering, injustice, and cruelty is not evidence of
God’s nonexistence or maleficence, it is exactly the worldview that is
described in the Bible. In my own experience and observations, I find
that worldview to be far more accurate than any other, including the
shiny science fiction utopianism of the secular humanists.

My advice to TS is to stop struggling to understand how God functions or why God hasn’t submitted to a personal belief audit and start simply experiencing the effects of God in this fallen world.

Stand outside in the cold autum breeze, close your eyes, spread your arms, and feel the unseen wind on your face. Read the Book of Proverbs, read the latest professional manual on child-rearing, written with the benefit of more than two thousand years of collective human experience, then go to a park and observe the children interacting with their parents. Go drop one rock on top of another 500 times and do your best to convince yourself that all the life you see around you began as a result of a singular accidental collision. Go to a funeral of a stranger, observe the grief of the friends and family, and tell yourself that the rearrangement of atoms involved in the transition of the deceased from life to death was of no more material import or significance than the shattering of a rock into dust.

Speak to a murderer and ask him to tell you why he committed his horrific crimes. Look at the pictures of the aftermath. Then look deep into his eyes and try to tell yourself that neither good nor evil exist.

Immerse yourself in the atheist arguments with your eyes and your mind open. Not until you fully understand them, not until you reconstruct them from their foundational assumptions, can you grasp how superficial and foolish they are from a purely rational perspective.

Empirical mysticism isn’t a path I would recommend for everyone, but the excessively logical often struggle with the reality of the mystery. They simply cannot accept that Man is not capable of formulating the questions, let alone finding the answers. That is why allowing themselves to experience and accept the manifold mysteries of life, the universe, and everything can be necessary for them to permit themselves to be convicted of things not seen.

In the end, one is advised to make The Castrate’s Choice: It is so or it is not so. Because the life lived seated on a fence makes for a poorly lived one. Choose, and then live accordingly.

Mailvox: A European perspective

A Spanish reader weighs in concerning my comments on the different challenges faced by Western civilization in Europe and North America:

I have been following your posts for several years and, although I never had an interest in fantasy, I just started reading The Wardog’s Coin. (I figured that since I enjoy so much your thoughts on economics, politics, and gender issues, I should also check the fiction.)

After reading you post titled “Why there is hope for Europe” I would like to share some thoughts with you about the differences between the situations on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps I should begin this by mentioning that I am European, Spanish to be precise.

In your article, you enumerate these three differences:

1.    Parliamentary systems
2.    Trans-ideological nationalism
3.    No popular pro-immigrant mythology

I agree with the first, not so much with the other two. But, most importantly, I would add two that I consider crucial.

1.    America’s immigration problem is with Spanish-speaking (mostly) Christians, whereas Europe’s is with (mostly) Muslims. I am really surprised that you did not include this one among your three differences.

The Americans’ memory of the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War is nothing compared to the Europeans’ memory of centuries fighting against Islam (almost 800 years in the case of Spain). Not to sound patronizing, but can an American wrap his head around the idea of a national identity forged in a conflict that triples the age of the United States of America (711 A.D. to 1492 vs. 1776 to 2013)? Some things are so big that they are routinely overlooked.

An American notices a South American moving into his neighborhood and he may have some very valid concerns, if nothing else, as a taxpayer. But he never really fears that Juan Garcia is going to show up one day in a subway station and blow himself up killing dozens of innocents. Our American John Doe has never witnessed Juan Garcia peeing in broad daylight on the façade of an American church. John might fear that his baby girl will marry Juan and then he’d have to attend a Catholic wedding, he does not fear that his baby girl will spend the rest of her life in a burka. He may fear that his grandchildren will play soccer rather than American football, he does not fear that they will learn how to behead infidels (like John himself).

In Europe, you find croissants, which were created in the image of a crescent to be eaten in defiance of the Muslim invaders centuries ago. You find Spanish families named Matamoros, literally ‘Moor-slayer’. And so on. In Europe, a nationalist party has plenty of symbolism to use against immigrants. There is absolutely nothing in the American culture against South Americans even remotely resembling that deeply rooted pathos. The closest thing being what? The ballad of El Álamo?

Plus, a South American is not going to tell our John Doe to stop eating burgers, but a Muslim cannot tolerate jamón, and to a Spaniard jamón is several orders of magnitude more important than the national flag, the national anthem, and the King, combined.

Worse still, after two devastating world wars and a traumatic cold war dividing the continent, Europeans happily (hippily?) embraced this kumbayah idea that if you don’t annoy others then they will leave you in peace. This was not meant only between France and Germany or between the metropolis and the former colonies, but in a vaguely general universal sense. So it is now particularly vexing to receive so much animosity from some immigrants (while the official politically correct tune goes on unaltered). America has not at all gone through such an emotional roller-coaster; you see, it happened over there.

So John Doe is not that concerned; certainly not as concerned as his European counterparts.

2.    If I am not very mistaken, immigration in the US is very concentrated in the Sunbelt. Whereas In Europe, immigration in Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany is as much an issue as it is in Spain and Italy. This would be equivalent to Alaska, the Dakotas, and Vermont having as much an issue with immigrants as Texas and California. Clearly, they don’t. (Again, this is not to overlook the federal fiscal implications.)

Plus, European towns are typically much more densely populated and geographically contiguous, so much so that you can actually walk from one neighborhood to another, so when a neighborhood suffers it is much more evident to all and so it is easier to genuinely worry, to empathize (even if the media tries to ignore it). But urban sprawl in the US, I suspect, has had a detrimental effect on what Ibn Khaldun called Asabiyyah, the nation’s social cohesion, by creating some sort of watertight compartments. An American neighborhood goes to hell and the people over the county border do not even notice because, to begin with, they’d need to drive there to notice but they never go (and the media dutifully ignores it). By the way, I think this phenomenon also helps explain why American Conservatives in the last presidential election where so mistaken about their real chances, they have lost sight of the nation by living inside a monochromatic bubble (Dems too, but their aggregated Blue State bubbles are demographically larger, it seems).

I think these two points are much more powerful than the pro-immigrant mythology. Indeed, it was, in part, because of the strength of this mythology all across Europe that so many nations made it so easy for immigrants to move in.

Finally, all this relates to perceptions, not necessarily actual threats, and to how easily and how much political parties can gain from that fear and what they do with that. Almost every Muslim I have personally met in Europe is too busy making a living to spoil it by going radical. And since they often live in several European countries before they settle down it is quite normal for many of them to speak several European languages. And let’s not forget that it was not them who drafted or even voted for all the idiotic legislation that’s gotten us into this mess (ditto for South Americans in the US). Obviously if it was all bad news then all the continent would be soaked in blood once again. But the really amusing twist (and isn’t History rich in amusing twists?) is that these growing nationalist parties have much more in common with what most adult Muslims have seen in their own homelands than with the political parties that have dominated Europe since 1945. Perhaps they will feel more at home? It’s not a cruel cheap joke. After all, General Franco, won the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) with the help of the African volunteers, his beloved Moorish Guards. Perhaps the key to real multicultural understanding was not to be found in kumbayah Social-democracy but in something better time-tested.

He’s entirely correct to call me to account on my failure to mention the demographic differences concerning the two invasions, especially since I’ve written about them in the past. Most Americans are astonished to learn that Muslims make up less than 5 percent of the European population, whereas Hispanics make up around 20 percent of the U.S. population.

As one American friend was surprised to observe, she saw more Muslims on her last visit to Minneapolis than she did in Rome.  Londonistan and Amstarabia no more indicate the Muslim occupation of Europe than New York City proves that most Americans are Jews.

That being said, our Spanish friend is incorrect about the invasion of the U.S. being primarily concentrated in the Sunbelt. It is certainly most severe in the four Sand States, but when Somalis are being elected in St. Paul and entire neighborhoods are being renamed to reflect who is now controlling them, the idea that the problem is localized is clearly incorrect. To put it in the proper perspective, there are only about 4x more Muslims in Europe per capita than there are Somalis in Minnesota. 

Mailvox: Are Christians “required to be dicks”?

LudVanB objects to the idea that atheists should be expelled from Christian organizations:

“Not all Christians are required to be dicks, Vox”

To which Myrddin responded:

Actually, if we behave the way Christ and his apostles behaved:

  1. To honest seekers: Be gentle.
  2. To scoffers in private: Avoid them.
  3. To scoffers in public: Humiliate them.
  4. To people who claim to be part of the church, but are willfully and proudly disobeying: Kick them out.
  5. To false teachers: Silence them and/or kick them out.
  6. To those who repent: Welcome them back.

Notice under churchian definitions, in four of those six situations, Christians are required to be dicks.

Let’s see if we can  find Scriptural justification for Myrddin’s claims. I’ll start with the two that are relevant to yesterday’s discussion, numbers (4) and (5).

(4) 2 Thessalonians 3:6: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us.”

1 Corinthians 5: 11-13 “I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.””
 
(5) James 3:1: “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”

2 Peter 2:1: “But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves.”

The lesson, as always, is this: never listen to an atheist attempting to lecture you on theological matters. They literally do not know what they are talking about.

Mailvox: where to find motivation

AL is seeking to get out of a rut:

Do you have any words of advice or inspiration for someone in their mid-20’s that feels the drain of being stuck in a rut?  I’ve found myself and others around that age stuck in the same sort of endless downward spiral.  The stress of work and trying to “make it” simply makes it seem too hard to work on the things necessary to get out of the rut.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in a situation like that, but I am sure you’ve observed others that have been.  Hell, I get the impression more than a few of the Dread Ilk find themselves in such a mess.

I think that most people start to lose any sight of their dreams at this point in life, or when they are 35 or 40 always wished they had made a few moves to change their situation when they were 25 and still had time.

Is it the economy that’s really making things hard?  Is it just a lack of motivation?  I don’t know what it is, but I’m determined to get out of this and I’m sure others that read Vox Popoli feel the same.

It is always hard to separate the urgent from the important. My rule is to always devote at least 15 percent of my work time to things with long-term possibilities. Such as, for example, my fiction. It’s not my job, it’s not my career, and it’s not a reliable way to make a living, but every book has upside potential, however remote the odds, whereas the average contract job that pays the bills does not.

It’s so very easy for hard-working young men to simply put their heads down and think that by working hard, they will naturally get ahead. But we’re not living in a Horatio Alger novel and it doesn’t work that way anymore, in part due to the economy, in part due to the feminized workplace, and in part due to the increased societal imbalances of wealth distribution due to increased government intervention in the economy. Those who win, win bigger now, but fewer people win.

One of the factors in the mid-life crisis AL mentions is the realization that time is running out and one’s options are increasingly limited. There is no more time for mistakes, for finding yourself, and for screwing around, what you do will dictate the way you will live for the rest of your life. And the sooner you understand that, the more time you have to actually do something, to take several chances, to fail, to fail again, and then to ultimately succeed.

Failure is the norm. I can’t stress this enough! You’re usually going to fail, so fail as fast and as often as you can, because failure is the seed for future success. By the same token, because it is the norm, it is nothing to fear. Nothing! And each time, you learn more and you learn how to go about the next opportunity more effectively.

I can’t tell AL how to motivate himself because everyone is motivated differently. Motivation tends to be related to how we surmount our natural weaknesses. Because my primary weakness is laziness, I tend to be most effectively fueled by negativity and by competition. For example, I very much doubt I would have been driven to make VP a more popular blog than Whatever had the competitive comparison not been repeatedly waved in my face. There were days when I didn’t feel like blogging, there are still days when I don’t feel like it. But I do it every single time, and fortunately, the motivation will be there as long as Whatever is deemed to be a competitor of some kind.

It’s the same motivation I draw upon on the soccer field when it’s the second half, I’m worn out, I’ve just sprinted 50 yards down the sideline to be cut off by the sweeper, and I look back to see an opposing striker and the left midfielder marked by our right defender at midfield as the goalie punts the ball towards them. Part of me is arguing, quite logically, that I’m too old and too tired to run, and it’s not as if the World Cup is on the line anyhow. And then I hear that snarling voice inside saying “that’s my guy and that motherfucker isn’t going to score on my fucking watch!” And then, somehow, the energy to run back magically appears. Which is why, in ten games this season, (five of them defeats), no left midfielder or outside defender has scored a single goal. I don’t think I’ve even allowed a single uncontested shot from that side, with the exception of a free kick resulting from a defender’s foul.

But that’s my motivation. I know what it is and I know how to draw upon it. AL has to figure out what works for him. Maybe it is praise. Maybe it is money. Maybe it is a sense of serving others. Maybe it is social status or even just pure envy. It can be positive or negative, but it has to be identified before it can be purposefully utilized. If AL is determined to get out of the rut, he will get out, he simply has to determine what gives him the strength to run when he would rather walk.

Mailvox: Porky predicts Obamacare

I find Porky’s political wise man act to be a little tedious, so I’m going to make sure I don’t forget this prediction by posting it here.  Porky wrote:

Are you incapable of seeing that the Obamacare rollout was a planned failure? Do you not understand the progressive tactic of lowered expectations?

The website will be functioning reasonably well by December (I suspect they’ve had the fix all along) at which time Obama will announce his glorious Christmas gift to humanity is “not perfect, but it’s improving every day and children and pregnant women are safe now.” The argument will have been successfully shifted from “should there even be socialized medicine” to “how can we make socialized medicine work.”

Mission accomplished. Another brilliant progressive tactic made possible by the type of foolishness we see in the OP.

So, Porky predicts there will be no delayed implementations, the Obamacare site registrations will be working smoothly within 30 days, and Obama will make a public announcement to that effect.

If he’s correct, I will congratulate him and take his predictions more seriously in the future. If he’s not, we’ll be able to safely dismiss his particular brand of political conspiracy theory.