Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: general incoherence and the Tea Party

SS defends Wall Street and blames government:

Yes I agree with both have wrong opposing ideas but, the Tea Party really had a broad based beginning and the Occupy folks are the orchestrated result of Big Union and (y)our “friends” at the Globalist Communist Party that is stirring up strife worldwide to bring down Capitalism and the West.

You know that Wall Street needed bailed out because of political pressure on the banking system to make loans to low income people that had no chance of paying them back. The resulting trading in bundled toxic securities was just a way for Bankers to spread the risk with Our government winking at the practice.

The social architects are the problem not Wall Street. The spending spree of social engineering has brought us to ruin. The government has borrowed and printed money and pushed for more of it into the economy to hide the fact that we no longer manufacture anything, we have exported all the good paying jobs.

What we are left with is a hollow shell of a service economy that is propped up by government spending and borrowing from a country that has taken all the jobs. The Tea Party has it right… it is a over-reaching Federal Bureaucracy that needs to be reigned in to it’s Constitutional boundaries and not what the anarchists Occupiers wanting to punish the successful want us to believe.

The problem is “Big” Government and the social engineering globalists that run amuck in positions of power in media and political parties!…………..

Marty denies that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin:

Two sides of the same coin? Are you nuts? I have been reading you columns mostly with great frustrations for 10 years now but this one takes the cake. You have either stopped reading or stopped thinking one of the two. I know of no tea partier that is for the wars ALL 6 of them! I know they all support our troops and will not denigrate them in times of war. But they are just as anxious to be home as anyone. The WS protesters want full blown communism and the tea party seeks a very limited and constitutional form of government. Is that two sides of the same coin? How about the tea party seeks limited and more fair taxes on everyone and not the confiscation of wealth from the wealthy. Is that same coin? The tea party wants no form whatsoever of socialized medicine and privatization of Medicare and social security. Is that two sides of the same coin? That fact of the matter is you refuse to admit the libertarian party and their philosophy is simply nutty to put it mildly. Very little of your political philosophy on how government should run would work and most of the folks know it which is why we reject your nutty libertarian junk. You are deliberately running a disinformation campaign against the tea party by linking them with Washington republicans. I will grant you one thing, the republican party is a natural home for the Tea Party; there is however no friendship between the Washington Republican establishment and the tea party. Each wishes the other gone. You know this and yet you link them like a two headed beast. If you wrote an article and said the republican Washington establishment and the WS protesters were two sides of the same coin, I would have said you were correct. In fact all the things you ascribe to tea partiers can rightly be ascribed to moderate RINO’s in Washington. The tea party did not support the extra spending. Politics is a game of wills and the simple truth is there are some battles you are going to win and some you will lose. The question in the end is what has been achieved and if the tea party gains prominence the county will be much better off. Your stupid party can’t figure out whether drugs should be legal, what’s wrong with abortion, the correct role of government and on and on. The fact of the matter is libertarianism leads to anarchy. That’s is the other side of your coin!!

Meanwhile, David isn’t inclined to let the Tea Party off the hook:

And don’t forget the Tea Party probably passed the three new job killing Free Trade pacts, too. Nobody gives a damn about saving our Middle Class factory jobs.

I responded to Marty thusly: You’re factually wrong. Not all, but most of the Tea Party-endorsed Republicans voted for the $1.299 budget deficit as well as for raising the debt ceiling. It’s also telling that you don’t give OWS the same benefit of the detail that you give the Tea Party. Both activist groups are rather stupid and incoherent… and both activist groups are correct at the deepest level. This is natural, since both are popular movements, which generally are not known for their intellectual precision. And they are two sides of the same coin, as both groups have correctly identified one-half of the problem. Unfortunately, both groups are also inclined to defend the other half of the problem.

Which is why as long as you subscribe to the Tea Party Good, Occupy Wall Street Bad mentality, you will be serving the purposes of the Washington-Wall Street axis.

Marty responded as follows:

You’re correct to link Wall Street and Washington. You’re the first and only person I have seen make this connection. But you are completely incorrect about the Tea Party and its connection to Wall Street. The tea party is the production of moderate republicans voting for Wall Street bail-out. That and health care reform. The Tea party was 100% against the bailout hence its existence. We wanted the companies to go bankrupt. And you cannot even begin to say that McCain’s running back to Washington to vote for the bailout didn’t hurt him big time. We cannot stand the republicans running this country in to the ground via WS albeit at a slower rate than the democrats via wealth confiscation.

There were 100 new Republicans voted in to congress in 2009. 54 voted against the current budget. That’s the majority of tea party Republicans the way I see it. Had you made that point in your article, you would have severely weakened your argument to the reader. You said “most” making it sound like 60% or more when in fact it was in the 40’s percent. I admit I am not always right but on this you are trying to paint a picture out of what you wish was true but it’s not.

To which I responded: You’re not counting correctly. Not all of the new Republicans were Tea Party-endorsed and not all the incumbents were not Tea Party-endorsed. Again, you are factually incorrect.

Of course, even if only 40% of the Tea Party-endorsed Congressman had been successfully corrupted within 12 months of their election, it would suffice to prove that the Tea Party strategy will not succeed.

Mailvox: they have eyes

But they really don’t want to see. LH writes about a response to yesterday’s column:

I forwarded your most recent article to a friend of mine who happens to be a supporter of Herman Cain. Rather than address issues listed in your article, his response went ad hominem.

That WND commentator…. likes to hear himself talk… what exactly did he say? I quit reading him long ago… he laid out a pretty good outline with no substantiation. He’s a Libertarian AND a Southern Baptist who claims Italian residency… a pot-smoking, tax-evading foreigner who plays church??? LOL… (I deduced that from his bio) 🙂

I do agree Cain needs to come more clearly on his involvement with the Fed… and I question his objection to a full audit, but he did not say he was against an audit… only that a “full” audit would be cost prohibitive and is not necessary… and I can agreee with that… whenever the government goes on a witch hunt, someone ends up being a scapegoat and it is not usually the one whose head should be offed. By setting parameters to the audit, the field of potential scapegoats is narrowed… I believe that is what he was alluding to…

I totally agree with Cain on whose fault it is if companies succedd or fail… in the context of “it’s not government’s place to decide…” I think the commentator got that one wrong in the end analysis.

keep watching…. The more popular Cain becomes, the more you’ll hear about his faults… Did we hear much of him before the Florida Straw Pole?. Funny how they ignore Santorum. I see a pattern.

The pattern is that if you can’t even win a Senate race, most people will conclude that your national appeal isn’t likely to be significant. There’s nothing funny about it. But it is funny how the Cain supporter cannot see that Cain is contradicting himself by claiming it’s not the government’s job to decide who wins and who loses while he is defending Wall Street and the banking bailouts.

By the way, here’s the final Facebook score from yesterday’s WND columns:

Day on Cain: 40 Likes
Cain on Cain: 823 Likes

Remember this the next time you are wondering how Wall Street and the big banks managed to get bailed out yet again by Republicans in the future. The lesson, as always, MPAI.

Mailvox: too much negativity

I found Felix’s ode to the blog to be more than a little amusing. I will, however, correct his mistaken assumption that the comments are unmoderated here. They have always been subject to moderation. I have never pretended otherwise.

I check back here for the first in months, sick of the negativity and the thinly-veiled attempts at conceiling post-moderation behind subjective “rules”. And what do I find? Still, 9 out of 10 posts are negative, and nearly that many are self-congratulatory. “Thousands come to hear what I have to say”. Oh, please. Your writing is so terrible, serving only to assuage your own insecurities, that some of us visit only periodically to see if you’re still on the internet. Your blog has became so played, so utterly formulaic and predictable (1. find some person enjoying their 15 minutues of fame 2. mock them and point out that they will never be successful, never be president, etc, 3. lather rinse repeat). The only thing you could write that would be interesting and uplifting for most of us is a suicide note!

His statistical infelicities notwithstanding, I can’t honestly say Felix is all wrong. The vast majority of the blog posts are negative in some way, but then, I am a reasonably sophisticated economics observer and we are in the early stages of a very large scale economic contraction. I’m still pointing out pretty much the same thing I’ve been pointing out since the spring of 2008, the difference is that now people like the Governor of the Bank of England are saying exactly what I’ve been saying, even if their prescriptions are very different than the ones I would suggest and are doomed to failure. Drat, there’s that negativity again!

But what else can I say? Either economic policies will work or they won’t work, and in the case of the UK’s latest quantitative easing, it won’t work, just as all the other proposed fixes didn’t work, and for much the same reason. What, I wonder, is there to be positive about in the world these days? The so-called Arab Spring? The woeful collection of Republican presidential candidates who won’t even talk about the real issues at hand? The death of Steve Jobs? I suppose I could write long and cheerful posts about how my soccer team won its last game, how good the salmon that Spacebunny made last night was, how the Vikings are going to turn it around, or how pretty the long-legged young girl who was selling her services on the suburban street in broad daylight at noon in Spain was – bloody hell, that’s a negative economic indicator too – but happy substance-free pop culture isn’t my idiom.

The main reason this blog is predictable is because I am a) consistent and b) usually correct. And the reason I am usually correct is because the behavior of human beings tends to fall within a small and relatively predictable range. Most people are not only idiots, but the particular form their idiocy takes tends to be predictable. Look, the moment a powerful banker or politician proposes something that is actually viable, I’ll be pleased to say so. But until one does, I will continue to be negative and subsequently proven correct.

Mailvox: No True Scientist?

A hard scientist casts a skeptical eye on those outside her discipline:

You’ll find this quite interesting. It’s in line with your assertions about corruption in the sciences. However, you’re making an error to apply charges of significant corruption and professional laziness to all of science. Perhaps you are in possession of evidence of which I’m not aware*, but based on what I know you’re committing the same error as atheists when they make blanket assertions about atheists vs. religious people. As you have pointed out many times, there are important distinctions within these groups. Likewise, there are important distinctions within the sciences. No field of science is free of flaws, but I have good evidence that corruption is significantly lower in physics and its sub-fields, and that research proceeds as well as can be expected for any human endeavor. I strongly suspect the increase in retractions noted by Nature traces the increased and alarming politicization of some specific fields, namely biology, medicine (including psychiatry/psychology), and climate science.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the different sciences, because developments in physics and even chemistry actually demonstrate that these fields are relatively healthy. Several discoveries in this year alone show that physicists are quite willing to abandon cherished ideas (after only a modest degree of initial resistance) in the face of new data. Also, look at the Nobel prizes announced for physics and chemistry. Both were for experiments that overturned accepted ideas, and in both cases it was only a few years to go from discovery to implementation. That’s unprecedented in other sciences.

There is no question that physics has been the gold standard of science since Isaac Newton. And I’m under no illusion that all science is created equally or that fraud pervades all of it to an equal degree. It hasn’t escaped me, after all, that Daniel Dennett and others have attempted to justify their belief in the predictions of biologists by appealing to the accuracy of predictions by physicists, which is about as sensible as claiming that one should believe psychics due to the accuracy of predictions by economists.

And the response of the physics community to the news of the superluminal neutrinos has been encouraging to those who are accustomed to witnessing very different behavior from scientists in other, softer fields. Moderate skepticism and an expectation that the experiment will be independently replicated before the existing theories are considered to be overturned is entirely reasonable and very different than the way biologists and climatologists have regarded theoretical upheavals in their scientific fields.

The division between hard science and soft science is perhaps better described as the difference between actual science and non-science designed to look like the real thing.

Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can’t truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won’t. And I’ll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it’s wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won’t stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I’ll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There’s the difference between probable and plausible that you’re unable to grasp. There’s a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you’ll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It’s called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don’t refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states “don’t jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself.”

The amusing thing about this atheist’s example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”.

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won’t enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in “the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons” than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don’t understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one’s use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.

Mailvox: holding scientists accountable

BT wonders if the Italians are taking a science fetish one step too far in holding scientists accountable for their failure to correctly predict an imminent earthquake:

I know you are skeptical about the scientific community. But don’t you think that this is an extreme step- unless somebody can prove that they deliberately did not carry out their duties, isn’t it unfair to expect them to be superknowledgible? Can we see this as a result of the secular society going too far by putting science in an infallible pedestal that they are now expecting the scientists to answer every question? Just like may be how the priest sorcerer would have been held accountable for any “false prophesies” in the old clans on questions of winning battles or where to cultivate?

This actually represents an interesting attack on Naturalism. If we are to take the Naturalist perspective, which insists that science is not only the “most reliable source of knowledge” but “the best description of reality”, then obviously scientists must be held more responsible than other individuals who depend entirely upon less reliable sources of knowledge such as personal experience, testimonial evidence, hearsay, and documented historical evidence.

If an accountant can be held liable for failing to properly advise his clients about the probable consequences of information he possesses on the basis of one of these less reliable sources of knowledge, than obviously scientists should similarly be held liable for their similar failures when damages are suffered by the public, especially when the public is paying their salaries.

It would certainly be interesting to see a scientist who subscribes to Naturalism, or more likely, a science fetishist, to simultaneously attempt to argue that a) science is the most reliable source of knowledge but b) scientists should not be held responsible for avoidable damages suffered by other parties caused due to the inherent unreliability of science.

It’s an intriguing question, because this dichotomy between claims made on the behalf of science and the legal responsibilities of those who utilize it fundamentally calls into account the basic validity of science as a source of knowledge.

Mailvox: bad script

GS and others using IE have written to tell of a problem:

Since Sept 7th I have been repeatedly getting the message “A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly….” and locks my browser on your web/blog page. I am not having this problem on other pages. I have internet explorer 8.0 on windows 7.0 professional 64 bit.

I just removed one Facebook “pagetracker” script from the template. The other possible culprits are Mises, CoComment, and Google Analytics, but there aren’t that many scripts on the site. If you’re using IE and getting the “A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly” message, go to this Microsoft site and click the “Fix it for me” link. Please let me know if that takes care of the problem.

Mailvox: the benefits of post-mortem battery

RM appreciates the number performed on the Dead Horse of 2004:

Back in ’04 you went adnausem on “Me so Michelle” about why the INJ could never have invaded the US. The other day I read a post on a blog about the “Rifle behind every blade of grass” quote attributed to Yamamoto. I confidently called BS based on your blog from ’04 based on what I learned. Took little other than a brief search of WND archives to get the pertinent facts from a column.

And here some of you thought it was a wasted month!