Tag: mailvox

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.

Mailvox: the Fed imbalance

JD asks about the Fed’s balance sheet:

Fed balance sheet may not return to normal until 2019?  What does this mean to lay people?  Would you enlighten The Dread Ilk, please?

The short version is that quantitative easing, which is the Federal Reserve’s euphemism for “printing money” under the current monetary regime, is not working in terms of returning the economy to full employment or stimulating economic growth. However, the Fed doesn’t dare stop QEn because doing so would almost instantly crash the stock market and hurl the global financial system into crisis, if not collapse. So, the program is going to continue indefinitely, which we already know due to the appointment of Janet Yellen, who is even more expansionary-minded than the man named Helicopter Ben.

Wikipedia has a good definition of quantitative easing: “Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to prevent the money supply falling when standard monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying specified amounts of financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions, thus increasing the monetary base. This is distinguished from the more usual policy of buying or selling government bonds in order to keep market interest rates at a specified target value.

“Expansionary monetary policy typically involves the central bank buying short-term government bonds in order to lower short-term market interest rates. However, when short-term interest rates are at or close to zero, normal monetary policy can no longer lower interest rates. Quantitative easing may then be used by monetary authorities to further stimulate the economy by purchasing assets of longer maturity than short-term government bonds, and thereby lowering longer-term interest rates further out on the yield curve. Quantitative easing raises the prices of the financial assets bought, which lowers their yield.”

This is why the stock market is up considerably since early 2009 and why corporate borrowing is up when the other private borrowing sectors are down. The reason that the QE program has continued for nearly five years now is that it hasn’t had the triggering effect that it was supposed to have in 2009 or any subsequent year. This is exactly what I have been talking about for years, in pointing out that the Fed cannot expand the money supply in the same way that was done in Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe, because there are material and significant differences in the way the Fed “prints” money and the way past governments have printed money.

The Fed won’t simply print money in the traditional manner because the coterie of investment institutions they serve can’t profit that way; it is all inflationary downside without a leveraging upside. The US government could certainly do it, of course, and all it would have to do is completely shake off the chains of Wall Street first. So, needless to say, printing trillions of dollars and distributing them to the citizenry is not going to happen.

Given that they STILL haven’t taken the simple step of forgiving mortgage debt to free up disposable income, it should be obvious that they’re not going to indiscriminately hand out cash to everyone either.

My case for debt-deflation doesn’t rest on the physical impossibility of money printing, but on the improbability of Wall Street voluntarily giving up the goose that has laid so many dollar-filled eggs for 100 years. I think they will kill the economy before they give up control, especially since widespread bankruptcies and foreclosures taking place under the present regime would put huge swaths of U.S. property in their hands. It is very much a heads they win, tails you lose situation.

As for 2019, they might as reasonably have given a date of fiver. If you look at L1, it is very clear that all QE has done for the last five years is prevent the bottom from falling out completely while encouraging an astonishing amount of malinvestment via the corporate and federal sectors. So, I anticipate more of the same until the household sector defaults begin, which should set off the third, and more serious, stage of the financial crisis.

Timing? I don’t do timing. How will the crisis be resolved? I don’t know. These things cannot be known until they happen. All we can know for certain is that the present course of credit disinflation and substitution of private debt for public debt is not going to continue indefinitely, since it would result in the complete socialization of the national economy by 2030.

Mailvox: the wages of public school

MY writes about the problems her family is having with her niece:

I’m writing this on behalf of my sister, whom I’m very close to.  I have a niece who is giving her parents a great deal of grief lately. I debated writing this but I don’t think we could get a perspective like yours from anywhere else, if you would be so kind. X is 13 and on a fast track to making some very bad choices. She is very dependent on her friends and bends to peer pressure to a ridiculous degree. She does not socialize with her siblings unless forced to and is rude and distant.

A few weeks ago her dad asked to look through her iPad, something they randomly do from time to time. X refused and ran out of the room with it. When they finally got it from her my sister says she couldn’t figure out why X wanted to hide it as there was nothing incriminating on it. I told her I thought she erased things. We know this to be true now.

As punishment her parents took the iPad away. They caught X sneaking into their room at 3am, stealing it back. She is now indefinitely banned from her iPad.

A few nights ago my sister noticed her phone missing. On a hunch she decided to check X’s room after X fell asleep. She found the phone and a series of texts from a instant messenger site on it. The texts were to a couple people. One was a boy and of course, the text had a vulgar sexual nature to them. The boy was asking her if she twerked and X was flirting back with him. The other texts were to a girl, making plans to hang, and X noted that she had to make sure to call the friend on a land line so her parents wouldn’t get suspicious about her texting.  Another text was from a high school boy. I’m not sure what he said to her but this particular boy is known to have fathered a child by another middle school girl. So my sister puts the phone on her night stand and waits. X sneaks back in and takes the phone again back to her room. At this point mom and dad both get up to confront her. They go take the phone back and find not only has X erased the texts but she also took the app off the phone.

-My sister substitutes at the school X attends. Another mom who works there, mother of one of X’s friends, showed my sister a series of texts on her daughter’s phone from X. The texts were loaded with crude song lyrics, f-bombs, and the word “bitch” in all its uses.  The girlfriend did not use the vulgarities that X used.

-X has, obviously not taken any responsibility for her behavior. She claims the texts to the middle school boy about twerking were just jokes and she has never met the high school boy, etc. She can’t explain how the high school boy knows who she is. She is sulky, short-tempered, self-obsessed, entitled, and generally lazy at home.

My sister and her husband have gone through some major financial upheavals in the last 5 years. My brother-in-law now works for my dad but is not making enough yet for my sister to quit her job again. My sister is thinking of pulling them all out of school next year. I note this because my first response was to suggest pulling X out of school among other things. They have removed all the electronic toys from the house and store them at my dad’s office. They also took the door completely off her room.

They are a traditional family that regularly attends Latin mass and my sis is just stunned by this behavior. I am too honestly. None of the other three kids are like this. Her behavior is very self-destructive for her age. Short of pulling her out of school, how to you change a 13 year old’s character? How can they provide consequences in a way that will get a positive response instead of this nasty, passive aggressive sulking? How do you get a child this self-obsessed to stop focusing on herself and show empathy and affection for her family? What resources would you recommend?

It’s important to note that this sort of thing is always a possible consequence when children are abandoned to a public school environment. It’s not an inevitable consequence, to be sure, but there are always going to be those children who are, by character, more susceptible to it than others, regardless of their upbringing. I strongly favor homeschooling for all children, but especially for those with weak, easily-influenced characters.

My recommendation would be to pull X out of school immediately. The nature of the problem exhibited is serious enough to justify drastic action, especially in light of her blatant lying, stealing, and other Machiavellian actions. The other children can probably wait until next year if they are not showing any signs of similar behavior. But the school year has barely begun and there is a very good chance that X will get herself into trouble of one sort or another in the next eight months.

As SB pointed out, these problems aren’t something that started overnight. They are character problems, they are firmly implanted, and they will require a long period of boot camp-style attitude readjustment.So, in addition to pulling her out of school and the solid steps the parents have taken to deny her communications and privacy, they should rely upon the method proven to work by various militaries throughout the world. For the next six weeks, they should put her to work until she is too exhausted to find trouble.

By Christmastime, X should be an expert in grouting, deep-cleaning, and every surface in the house should be sparkling. And then there is a credible threat hanging over her head when the strictures are gradually relaxed; every time she is tempted, she’ll be weighing whether it is worth another six weeks of hard manual labor.

All socialization outside the house and parental supervision should be barred until further notice. X is a child, she is a dependent, and as long as her parents are legally liable for her actions, they have the right and the responsibility to prevent her from indulging in her short-sighted, self-destructive tendencies.

There are no guarantees, of course. Despite her parents’ best efforts, X may become an overweight mudshark with a meth habit and two abortions under her belt by the time she is 18. Or she may turn it around completely. Regardless, the probability is that if her parents don’t directly and forthrightly address the situation with consistency and resolve, she will destroy her life in one way or another. Unfortunately, some people are just naturally self-destructive.

One of the hardest things to accept as a parent is that we cannot make our children’s choices for them. What we can do is decide upon the primary influences upon them. In the case of the child who is greatly susceptible to peer pressure, the answer is straightforward: take care to ensure that her peers are positive influences rather than negative ones.

Mailvox: 25 reasons for Trinitarian skepticism

PB actually emailed me 100 reasons why he feels my skepticism concerning the Trinity doctrine are correct. But the first 25 are more than sufficient for the purposes of discussion.

1. Because
Jesus Christ is represented by the sacred writers to be as distinct a
being from God the Father as one man is distinct from another. “It is
written in your law, that the testimony of two men is true. I am one who bear witness of myself, and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me” (John 8:17 and 18).
2. Because he not only never said that himself was God, but, on the contrary, spoke of the Father, who sent him, as God, and as the only God. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). This language our Saviour used in solemn prayer to “his Father and our Father.”
3. Because he is declared, in unnumbered instances, to be the Son of God. “And lo, a voice from heaven, saying, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Can a son be coeval(the same age) and the same with his father?
4. Because he is styled the Christ, or the anointed of God. “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power” (Acts 10:38). Is he who anoints the same with him who is anointed?
5. Because he is represented as a Priest. “Consider the ….High-Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus” (Heb. 3:1). The office of a priest is to minister to God. Christ, then, as a priest, cannot be God.
6. Because Christ is Mediator between the “One God,” and “men.” “For there is one God, and oneMediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).
7. Because, as the Saviour of men, he was sent by the Father. “And we have seen and do testify thatthe Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14).
8. Because he is an Apostle appointed by God. “Consider the Apostle,…Christ Jesus, who was faithful to him that appointed him” (Heb. 3:1 and 2).
9. Because Christ is represented as our intercessor with God. “It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:34).
10. Because the head of Christ is God. “I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3).
11. Because, in the same sense in which we are said to belong to Christ, Christ is said to belong to God. “And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:23).
12. Because Christ says, “My father is greater than all” (John 10:29). Is not the father, then greater than the son?
13. Because he affirms, in another connection, and without the least qualification, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).
14. Because he virtually denies that he is God, when he exclaims, “Why callest thou me Good? There is none good but one, that is God” (Matt. 19:17).
15. Because our Saviour, after having said, “I and my Father are one,” gives his disciples distinctly to understand that he did not mean one substance, equal in power and glory, but one only in affection and design, as clearly appears from the prayer he offers to his Father in their behalf, –“that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21).
16. Because the Father is called the God of Christ as he is the God of Christians. Jesus saith unto her, “….Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my Godand your God” (John 20:17).
17. Because an Apostle says of God, in distinction from the “Lord Jesus Christ,” that He is the “onlyPotentate,” and that He “only hath immortality” (1 Tim. 6:15 and 16).
18. Because it is the express declaration of the same Apostle, that the Father is the one God, and there is none other. “Though there be that are called Gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) yet to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things” (1 Cor. 8:5 and 6).
19. Because the power which Christ possessed was, as him affirmed, given to him. “All power isgiven unto me” (Matt. 28:18).
20. Because he positively denies himself to be the author of his miraculous works, but refers them to the Father, or the holy spirit of God. “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John14:10). “If I cast out devils by the spirit of God” (Matt. 12:28).
21. Because he distinctly states, that these works bear witness, not to his own power, but that theFather had sent him (John 5:36).
22. Because he expressly affirms that the works were done, not in his own name, but in his Father’s name (John 10:25).
23. Because he asserts, that “him hath God the Father sealed,” i.e. to God the Father he was indebted for his credentials (John 6:27).
24. Because he declares that he is not the author of his own doctrine. “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me” (John 7:16 and 17).

25. Because he represents himself as having been instructed by the Father. “As my Father hath taught me, I speak these things” (John 8:28).

Regardless of what your opinion on of the matter is, I think it is important to keep in mind that Christians should not elevate theological understanding to an overly sacred status. It is repentance and acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior that are the central issues of our faith, not an ability to see more clearly through the glass than others. Jesus, you may recall, was never overly impressed with intellectual ability.

Mailvox: The Hydrogen Sonata

TT notices what I’ve been reading recently and has a question or two:

A couple of years ago I tripped across Iain Banks’ Culture series and fell in love with it.  I used Player of Games as the gateway to get my friends hooked. I was greatly saddened by Banks’ far too premature death.

Have you read the others in the series?  Are you enjoying the Hydrogen Sonata?

But for the consciousness uploading, I think we’re getting close to the technology that could create the Culture.  Or, at least, put an end to want.  That idea really excites me. What are your thoughts on the subject?

I have read most of the others in the series. While I quite like the concept of the sonata and I found it initially intriguing, the book itself has thus far proved to be remarkably tedious. Part of the problem is that the central plot device, which is the Subliming of the non-Culture race, is almost totally uninteresting to the reader; with precisely one exception that I will not mention for spoiler reasons, there is literally no reason why he should care about it one way or another. That being said, I’m only halfway-through it, so I cannot honestly say that I have an opinion on it until I finish the book.

The problem with the Culture series is the same problem that Star Trek has faced for decades. First, imagine that all the Earth’s problems are solved! Okay… so now what?

The answer, apparently, is to go outside the area in which the problems are solved and then recreate those old problems using new and different cultures to take the place of the divisions inside the amalgamated culture. What this represents is a failure of the imagination; neither Banks nor Roddenberry were ever able to actually present a credible future of the sort they were nominally envisioning.

It’s remarkable how much war and violence there is in these officially peaceful cultures, is there not? Why, it’s almost as if the alternative it literally too boring to imagine!

Because he was considerably more talented and imaginative than Roddenberry and his heirs at the helm of the Star Trek franchise, Banks’s Culture feels much more rationally credible than Roddenberry’s UN Stormtroopers in Space nonsense, but it is still, at the end of the day, an artistic and imaginative failure. In fact, it is a testament to the man’s skill as a science fiction writer that he managed to make such a comprehensive failure so interesting.

As for the potential end of want, I have been thinking about that a lot lately and will reserve my thoughts on the matter for a future post. Post-scarcity economics is a fascinating topic, but I would not consider the Culture to be a serious take on it for reasons that should be discernible in light of what I have written above.

Congratulations are in order

Jill is rather pleased with her new cover for her book Anna and the Dragon. She writes: “Check out the book cover [JartStar] made for me. I think it’s beautiful.”

It is, indeed, an unusually pretty cover. I particularly like the rich colors and the ur-Celtic pattern underneath the dragon. And, let’s face it, who doesn’t like slender redheads?

So congratulations to her, and congratulations to JartStar as well. It’s always good to see readers collaborating in such a productive and mutually beneficial manner. There is a lot of talent here, so whether you’re looking for a writer, an artist, a programmer, a physicist, a lawyer, or any number of other specialties, it might surprise you what can be found here.

I am, of course, always available for consultations concerning gratuitous cruelty, should my own artistic services ever be required. “Look to Wowbagger” will probably be the title of my autobiography.

Top 10 SF/F lists

Ryan and a few others requested lists of my favorite books. You can read a top 50 list I put together a few years ago on Black Gate, although it’s limited to SF/F.   But I thought about it a little, and upon further review, I don’t think it makes sense to put science fiction and fantasy on the same list; one might as reasonably compare romance and mystery.  So, here are two top ten lists, one science fiction, one fantasy. I’m limiting myself to one book, not an entire series, and one book per author.

Top 10 Science Fiction novels

  1. Dune, Frank Herbert
  2. The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  3. The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury 
  4. Count Zero, William Gibson
  5. Anathem, Neal Stephenson 
  6. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
  7. Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov
  8. Embassytown, China Mieville
  9. Tunnel in the Sky, Robert Heinlein
  10. VALIS, Philip K. Dick

I suppose can quibble with whether Das Glaspernspiel is truly a science fiction novel or not, but it fits much more comfortably in the SF subgenre than in fantasy or anywhere else. I consider it to be a better and more important book than Dune, but Dune is the best pure science fiction novel and thereby merited the top spot. In the same way, Dandelion Wine is the better book, but The Martin Chronicles are more purely science fiction. As for Heinlein, one could just as easily have put three or four other novels there, from Starship Troopers to Stranger in a Strange Land, but Tunnel in the Sky is the most purely Heinlein at his best, in my opinion. (Although I regard either “The Man Who Sold the Moon” or “The Menace from Earth” as the pinnacles of his fiction.) And while Foundation is Asimov’s best series, I think Robots of Dawn is the best single novel.

Top 10 Fantasy novels

  1. The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien
  2. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
  3. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  4. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  5. A Game of Thrones, George RR Martin
  6. The Book of the Damned, Tanith Lee
  7. The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander
  8. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
  9. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
  10. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

The Two Towers was actually my first exposure to Tolkien, at the age of 10 at a Boy Scout slumber party. While everyone else was running around, I picked up a book belonging to one of the other Scouts and was instantly transfixed. Even after several re-readings, it remains my favorite volume of the trilogy; Gondor and Rohan have always interested me more than Mordor, Rivendell, or the Shire.  Again, Watership Down is a book that many might not consider fantasy proper, but it is an astonishingly great book that is in a class of its own. And the greatness of A Game of Thrones only underlines the disappointment of the way in which the series has plodded steadily downhill. There are a plethora of books I would have preferred to put in the place of Interview with the Vampire, but both the concept and the execution were excellent and only Tolkien has proven more influential over time.

Not everyone is going to agree with everything on these lists, but if you’re at all interested in the genre, I think you are unlikely to regret reading any of them.  There are obvious omissions too. For example, many writers adore Jack Vance; Tanith Lee’s Tales from the Flat Earth are clearly inspired by Vance’s Tales from the Dying Earth, but despite his inimitable style and enormous influence on the genre, I find that his stories tend to leave me a little bored. I had The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke on the list, but I couldn’t possibly leave off PKD and VALIS is the best of his vast contribution to the field.

Later this week, I’ll post two more lists, one of the best non-SF/F novels, and one of the books that have most influenced my writing. Needless to say, a number of these books will be on the latter list.

UPDATE: Speaking of fiction, I belatedly noticed that Amazon is giving away free copies of The Last Witchking today.

Mailvox: the challenge of reading graphs

Phoenician attempts economics again, hilarity once more ensues:

Brief clue, Dipshit, if your argument is based on a discontinuity –

(” And in fact, the deleterious effects on wages of women entering the work force was largely hidden until 1973, when men finally stopped leaving the work force in numbers sufficient to conceal what was happening.”)
– and the actual data shows no such discontinuity but a fairly smooth and continuing trend instead, then your argument is disproven.

You’re
in the situation of someone who claims that rising icecream sales in
May are caused by the Easter Bunny and, when shown the Easter Bunny
doesn’t actually exists, goes out to prove that more icecream is being
sold than you originally stated.

Yes, that may be true – real
wages may be actually less than you stated before – but your
‘explanation” for that has been shown to be crap.

Because you’re a misogynist little dickhead who can’t let go of your bigotry, Dipshit.

Some readers don’t understand why I often respond directly to Phony and would prefer that I simply ban him from commenting. But he serves a useful purpose, which is to illustrate the way people on the Left often communicate in a dismissive, superior, and insulting tone that is meant to convince people that they know what they are talking about.

It’s related to the way that they are forever claiming that their opponents are stupid without providing any evidence for it, thereby implying that they themselves are much more intelligent. But the fact of the matter, as Phony often demonstrates, their level of knowledge doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia and it is usually quite easy to show that they don’t understand what the evidence they have mustered in a brief Google search actually means.

What Phony was attempting to do here is try to salvage his incorrect position that “if women are producing more value than they get paid for, as seems
reasonable in a capitalist society, then the wages paid will go up”.  This is exactly backward, as it happens, because increased productivity actually reduces wages, as it reduces the amount of labor required to produce the same amount of goods, thereby reducing demand for labor as well as its price.

And in his desperate flailing about to attempt to defend himself by prove both me and the law of supply and demand wrong, he cited this graph from the Federal Reserve while claiming it showed me to be “a liar AND a fool.”  Which is bizarre, since it shows exactly what I described, a continuing plunge in the male labor participation rate from 1950 to the present.

What Phony didn’t understand is that my argument isn’t based on any discontinuity and that to understand the net effect of female employment on wages, it isn’t enough to simply look at the declining male participation rate, however continuous, one has to take into account the increasing female participation rate and the population growth rate as well.  Or, better yet, do what I did back in 2006 and actually do the math rather than simply looking at the pretty pictures.

It’s not enough to note that the lines appear to cross, which they actually don’t. Wages didn’t stagnate from 1950 to 1975 because the number of men leaving the labor force in excess of the growth of the population was roughly equivalent to the number of women entering it. Consider: 45.8 percent of 65+ men worked in 1950. By 1980, only 19 percent did, a number that has remained basically flat ever since. With women, the biggest change was from the 25-34 demographic, as only 34 percent worked in 1950 compared to 65.5 percent in 1980.  In sum, by 1980, 27 million additional women had entered the labor force and the female percentage of the labor force rose from 29.6 percent to 42.5 percent. And don’t forget that inexperienced female workers tend to command considerably less salary than the most experienced male ones; a simple exchange of younger women for older men would tend to reduce wages in itself.

The current female share of the labor force is 46.9 percent. So, it is easy to see that the larger part of the male-to-female labor exchange took place prior to 1980. In fact, we can safely conclude that the crossover point was reached in 1973 because that’s when average wages peaked.  As the first chart indicates, men were still leaving the workforce, and women were still entering it at that time, but combined with the slowdown of economic growth that began in the 70s, the point at which the net wage-depressing effect had become statistically obvious had been reached.  If you look at the actual data, you can see that the crossover point was likely sometime between Q4 1972 and Q2 1973, when men temporarily stopped leaving the labor force for two years even as the pace of women entering it jumped up by two percentage points in a matter of months.

The Phonies of the world can point their finger and call names all they like. But it should be abundantly clear that what they call misogyny and bigotry is simply economic reality. The facts are what they are.  The addition of 55.3 million women to the labor force since 1950 has done exactly what one would expect a 315 percent increase in the supply of female labor to do in driving down its price. Whether one thinks that is a good thing or a bad thing depends upon one’s perspective, but what one cannot reasonably do is to deny that it happened.

UPDATE: Perhaps the graph below will help those who can’t seem to understand anything but pictures. Probably not, but if you still can’t get the concept after seeing this, I have to conclude you’re simply incapable of it. Note that these are based on the actual BLS numbers, adding the male and female participation rates as a percentage of the actual civilian population that year. The magic number with regards to wage rate growth appears to be around 60, as the 59.85 percent in January 1973 marked the very last time the total labor participation rate as a percentage of the civilian non-institutional population was below 60 percent.

It should be fascinating to hear Phoney and others attempt to explain the mysterious inverse correlation between the labor force participation rate and the weekly wages while simultaneously denying the law of supply and demand.