Tag: society

The return of Chaos Manor Reviews

It’s good to see Jerry Pournelle back on his feet again, or rather, back at his desk. As usual, he is full of technological insight:

As of Summer 2014, a large percentage of jobs – I now believe more than 45% within ten years – can be done by a robot costing no more than a year’s salary to the current human worker. With the government keeping interest rates low this raises the temptation to borrow capital and – instead of paying it to a worker – using it to buy a robot that will pay for itself after a year, and thereafter require only maintenance and power, and when that robot is no longer useful it can be scrapped rather than being paid to retire. This will have an inevitable effect on the economy. It may have a direct effect on you.

I got into the computer revolution when my mad friend Dan MacLean talked me into investing $12,000 dollars in 1978 money – a considerable sum in those days – in an S-100 bus 2 megahertz 64 Kilobyte computer, a large green screen monitor that displayed 16 lines of 64 characters, and a Diablo printer that looked like a huge typewriter and which would print several pages a minute on fan-folded “computer paper”.

My wife thought I was mad, but my productivity increased enormously. No longer did I have to use Correcttape and various liquid paints and carbon paper. What I wrote improved, because I could rewrite sentences when needed as well as fix the torrent of typographical errors I made without having to retype the entire page after an edit.

The system paid for itself in a few months. I had already published a number of science fiction stories by the time I met Carl Helmers and we agreed that BYTE needed a User’s Column written not by a computer scientist but by a writer doing useful work on these little beasts. I still continue that tradition.

The point of that story is that in their forty or so years of existence, affordable small computers have completely changed the writing profession, and the changes continue now. It’s the same with the music profession: before small computers, performers were at the mercy of producers and publishers who had the enormously expensive equipment needed to make professional quality recordings, as well as the means for publishing musical works.

That’s all changed. For the past decade any competent performing group can either buy professional quality recording and editing equipment, or hire that work done for reasonable fees. They no longer have to sign egregious contracts giving nearly everything – sometimes including their own names – to the publisher, resulting in the ridiculous situation of one major performer changing his name to “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince” so that he could publish his own works once he could afford to.

Similar advances in technology are changing the movie industry and the health profession. They have caused the invention of podcasting, and improved many other human activities – and of course technology is changing computer programming.

From Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross to John C. Wright, science fiction writers have contemplated the Post-Scarcity economies, but few appear to have thought very deeply about Post-Labor economies. The two have similar attributes, but they are most certainly not the same. Unfortunately, that extension of the so-called Knowledge Economy appears to be rapidly upon us; there are few things so inaptly misnamed as the so-called “knowledge worker”, who for the most part doesn’t need to know anything at all.

It reminds me of how a friend in the tech-investment sector says that he’s never seen bigger deals, or fewer of them. And of how the mid-list authors are being abandoned by publishers, who increasingly insist their authors go big or go home. It appears we are increasingly living in a winner-take-all world where the robots work and the rest of us are all in the entertainment industry, competing to entertain one another.

How can this be sustainable? And who, beyond the winners taking all, is going to want to sustain it? Compared to some of the nightmare scenarios one can envision, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the 7th century philosophy of the neo-caliphate looks attractive by comparison.

Anti-distributionist racism

Gawker explains the correct way to respond to getting mugged by today’s vibrant youth is not to “have the kid arrested for stealing your phone”:

Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely fuck up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

There is literally no depth to which the Social Justice Warriors of the world will not descend in their interminable efforts to reduce Western civilization to barbarism. When theft is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.

I was a little surprised by what the picture represented, though. When I see a middle-aged white woman posing for a picture with her arms around a thuggish young African, I tend to assume it is a family portrait of a celebrity with her adopted child-substitute. I thought it was Sigourney Weaver.

Peterson is not the problem

It’s remarkable that All Day is being lambasted by the very media that so often laments the fact that most black fathers pay no attention to their children, and in particular, their sons. Apparently it is much better for fathers to simply ignore their children and allow them to grow up feral than risk a single occasion of disciplining them too firmly.

Is this really the paternal incentive structure that makes any sense for society?

Peterson has been largely unapologetic and rightly so.  Yes, his four year old son was young, but he also has the same genetics that render his father an athletic freak of nature and it would not be at all surprising if the boy was similarly strong-minded as well. I tend to doubt that any son of Adrian Peterson is going to be much impressed by a single hand applied once or twice to his backside. Peterson may not the best father in the world, but he is clearly attempting to be a father to his various bastards and to raise them more or less correctly.

The problem America faces is not an excess of discipline, but rather, the exact opposite. It reminds me of the way in which the media obsessively worries about anorexia in a nation rife with obesity. Fathers like Peterson, who apply the rod more vigorously than some people would prefer, are part of the solution, not the problem, even if they go too far on occasion. Sparing the rod is straightforward parental negligence, far more damaging to a child in the end than any bruised backside.

If the NFL was genuinely concerned about the welfare of its players’ children, it would suspend the players who have no contact with their children, not those who discipline them harshly.

Systemic decay and the decline of democracy

Since History failed to end, Francis Fukuyama is writing new books. His latest one actually sounds pretty interesting:

Fukuyama’s most interesting section is his discussion of the United States, which is used to illustrate the interaction of democracy and state building. Up through the 19th century, he notes, the United States had a weak, corrupt and patrimonial state. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, however, the American state was transformed into a strong and effective independent actor, first by the Progressives and then by the New Deal. This change was driven by “a social revolution brought about by industrialization, which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old clientelist system.” The American example shows that democracies can indeed build strong states, but that doing so, Fukuyama argues, requires a lot of effort over a long time by powerful players not tied to the older order.

Yet if the United States illustrates how democratic states can develop, it also illustrates how they can decline. Drawing on Huntington again, Fukuyama reminds us that “all political systems — past and present — are liable to decay,” as older institutional structures fail to evolve to meet the needs of a changing world. “The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain so in perpetuity,” and he warns that even the United States has no permanent immunity from institutional decline.

Over the past few decades, American political development has gone into reverse, Fukuyama says, as its state has become weaker, less efficient and more corrupt. One cause is growing economic inequality and concentration of wealth, which has allowed elites to purchase immense political power and manipulate the system to further their own interests. Another cause is the permeability of American political institutions to interest groups, allowing an array of factions that “are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole” to exercise disproportionate influence on government. The result is a vicious cycle in which the American state deals poorly with major challenges, which reinforces the public’s distrust of the state, which leads to the state’s being starved of resources and authority, which leads to even poorer performance.

Where this cycle leads even the vastly knowledgeable Fukuyama can’t predict, but suffice to say it is nowhere good. And he fears that America’s problems may increasingly come to characterize other liberal democracies as well, including those of Europe, where “the growth of the European Union and the shift of policy making away from national capitals to Brussels” has made “the European system as a whole . . . resemble that of the United States to an increasing degree.”

Fukuyama’s readers are thus left with a depressing paradox. Liberal democracy remains the best system for dealing with the challenges of modernity, and there is little reason to believe that Chinese, Russian or Islamist alternatives can provide the diverse range of economic, social and political goods that all humans crave. But unless liberal democracies can somehow manage to reform themselves and combat institutional decay, history will end not with a bang but with a resounding whimper.

The chart below may show the problem with Fukuyama’s thesis. Notice the big postwar spike in percentage of world GDP as measured in purchasing power from 1940 to 1950; that is the consequence of the USA having the only industrial base unharmed by WWII. Since then, it’s been all downhill, while China appears to be returning to its previous pre-18th century dominance. My sense is that by looking more at ideological systems than at the makeup of the people utilizing those systems, Fukuyama may be missing the more relevant points. But since I haven’t read his new book yet, I cannot say if that is actually the case or not.

Whores in the workforce

Once more, women are disemboweling a primarily male occupation by entering it en masse while refusing to accept any responsibility for their actions and lack of job performance:

I am tendering my resignation as we speak, as are some writers for other sites. This industry is beyond corrupt. It is beyond destructive. It’s become a cult, so bloated on its own self-righteousness and loathing of everyone who doesn’t conform to the hivemind that it is that it’s impossible to stay and not become either part of that hivemind or completely fucking insane.

This isn’t just an issue of “whore fucks around and drags down women/sets feminism back.” This is a critical problem with women across the board. Once they get hired they cannot be fired unless they are caught doing something illegal.

Just ask any man who has dealt with HR complaints what women in the office are really like. They can’t be dealt with on any level, because they are treated like rock stars with CEO clout. A lot of guys in STEM are being driven out of their jobs because the ladies in marketing think nerdy guys are “too unattractive” to even be in their presence.

Of course, a significant contributing element is the MALE response to problem employees who happen to be women. Male employees don’t like to complain to HR because it is unmanly while male managers like to play white knight and refuse to hold female employees accountable to the standards they expect of male employees. So until they do, and until men put steady pressure upon HR to discipline and fire women for the same behavior for which they discipline and fire men, absolutely nothing is going to change and corporate America will continue to spiral downhill in an unproductive whirlpool of bureaucracy and paperwork.

But if you find yourself in a similar situation and you are willing to quit anyhow, why not first at least try putting pressure on your employer to get rid of the useless parasite employees. That way, even if they choose the parasites over you, you’ll have forced the executives to realize that they face a situation. Maybe they know and don’t care. But in most cases, they probably have no idea what’s going on.

Those who seriously believe in the equality myth won’t believe that the increased reluctance of men to work for large organizations is a problem, because female employees are every bit as productive as the men who are quitting. Of course, all the observations about falling corporate productivity, the increasing lack of tech innovation, the difficulty of finding high quality employees, and the constant lament about where all the good men have gone would tend to testify otherwise.

Holding the line

One of the Honey Badgers, Hannah Wallen, explains why the SJW hate is so ferocious for the gamers in Gamergate:

The only people who are equipped to fight off that rushing tide of manipulation and control are those for whom potential social rejection doesn’t constitute a threat.

That, gamers, is why gamergate is not about any one of the damseling drama queens receiving the coverage in gaming media that is now spilling over into other news sources. It not about the media themselves, either, or the companies supporting the industry.

It’s about us.

We’re not under attack because we owe anyone anything we have refused to give, or because we’ve done anything we shouldn’t have done. We’re under attack because we’re one of the last shields that human individuality in western society has.

It’s absolutely vital that gamers continue to reject the shaming and demands being launched at us by elitist social engineers in journalism. We’re the line they can’t be allowed to cross, the last bastion of intellectual freedom. Out of everyone, we have the one factor that can stop them from owning the social landscape of the western world. Out of everyone, we have the power of immunity to their weapon of choice. We have the ability to turn that very same weapon around and use it against them by not only refusing to adopt their narrative, but making our rejection of it hurt them financially.

This is how we’re going to hold the line and begin pushing back. It’s going to be ridiculously ugly. The beast that is social justice elitism is not going to go peacefully, nor is it going to change its tactics. We’re going to see that  monstrous, flailing attempt to shame us into compliance continue. We’re going to see the accusations and whining, damseling and demonization all accelerate as the elites try to smash the resistance without understanding why it exists. And then hopefully we’ll see like-minded individuals joining the ranks of resistance as they realize they don’t have to be adopt the victim narrative to be part of a community. If we can achieve just that one thing by standing our ground and defending our territory, we can push that bullying force out, take our community back, and get back to gaming in peace.

It’s not a bad piece. Only the geeks of Gamerdom are not as alone as they think they are. Those who have followed the SFWA saga of the last two years will recognize the pattern that is at work there, that is at work in places as diverse as NBA team ownership and the executive offices of the tech industry. The SJW jihadists are attempting to drive out every heretic who dares to violate their equalitarian dogma anywhere one can be found.

But it is not only low-status rejects and outcasts who are impervious to their social pressure. And those of us who are neither rejects nor outcasts, but lone wolves by preference and temperament have the ability to build rival structures, rival institutions, and rival organizations that have the distinct advantage of operating in accordance with science, history, and objective reality rather than dogmatic fantasy.

Every time we refuse to back down, every time we refuse to accept their dogma as truth, we win. We reduce the amount of social pressure they are able to bring to bear. They know that. And it makes them furious. One need only read the foam-flecked rantings of their more outspoken members about me or about other members of the open resistance to see that. What makes them so angry about our very public resistance to their dogma is that their social pressure becomes less effective when it is seen to be resistible. That is why it is so important to  resist openly rather than to do so in a private and covert manner.

Because regardless of what you think in the privacy of your own mind, the public acquiescence of your silence causes others to believe that you are in accordance with the dogma and thereby adds to the social pressure placed upon others.

Sarah Hoyt talks about despair and how it is not only debilitating, but a sin. And perhaps some feel an amount of despair when they finally see how the cards are stacked against them simply for committing the crime of believing what their own eyes can see. But I see despair as being primarily a combination of ignorance with a failure of imagination. Things will not always be this way because the world is not, and has never been, a static place.

Maybe they will get worse. Maybe they will get better. But they won’t get any better while one sits and laments one’s losses and disappointments. One can ALWAYS accomplish SOMETHING positive, even if it is no more than refusing to be moved by lies, blandishments, and social pressure. Learn to take pride and pleasure in the small victories and you will find yourself considerably less inclined to worry overmuch about the disappointments and defeats.

The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy

To the contrary, the slippery slope is observably a predictive model with occasional success, particularly with regards to sexual matters:

Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and “unnatural” but is now widely accepted.

He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having [a] sexual partner,” the judge said.

“If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone….

“The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become ‘free’ when the second relationship broke down. The only thing that might change that is the fact that they were a brother and sister but we’ve come a long way from the 1950s – when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful.”

This should make it clear to everyone who is not a sexual deviant that the position of the English Common Law was correct, and that all of the various deviancies that have been legalized and normalized and declared no longer indicative of psychological sickness since the 1950s should promptly be returned to their former status.

There is no middle ground. What devotees of one particular immorality or another believe is a reasonable stopping point – here, and no further –  is nothing more than a waystation on the road to total depravity of the worst imaginable sort.

We libertarians were wrong. Societal liberty simply cannot be maximized through sexual anarchy any more than it can be maximized though unrestricted immigration, unrestricted government, or unrestricted voting. In retrospect, this should always have been obvious: if everything goes, then literally everything will go. This is no longer a hypothetical objection on the part of traditional conservatives, it is an undeniable reality. It is human nature to push at the boundaries; there will always be those who cross the line. Therefore, the line needs to be set firmly along boundaries that are undeniably eucivic and proven by centuries of tradition to be sustainable in the long term.

There will be those who disingenuously insist that the clock cannot be turned back, that humanity is doomed to an endless future of sodomy, incest, rape, necrophilia, and bestiality. This is provably false; the current period of sexual anarchy in the West is hardly the first in human history and it is very short by historical standards. And this particular clock most certainly will be turned back, one way or another, because everything from birth rates to the transmission rates of sexually transmitted diseases indicate that the current state of near-sexual anarchy has already reached the point of unsustainability.

Technology can never trump Creator-imposed morality any more than science can surmount the physical laws of Nature. It may appear to do so, for a short time, but that is nothing more than an illusion based on incomplete understanding.

What could go wrong?

Steve Sailer contemplates a possible reason for the rigorous Islamic patriarchy:

“I’ve often wondered if the reactionary strictness of Islamic family
morals that irritates us sophisticated Westerners so much has something
to do with Islam originating just north of the edge of the black world,
with its high levels of familial chaos so evident on this graph. For
example, Amman, Jordan has had its own black slum for a long time. The
Arab slave trade introduced lots of blacks into Middle East (although
the black population didn’t grow quickly like it did in the American
South because Arab slaveowners tended to castrate the men and generally
work slaves to death).

“If you are from Sweden, the ideas of women working outside the house,
divorce, non-marital childbearing, etc. doesn’t seem too threatening to
Swedish culture’s stability and efficiency. You look around and ask,
“What could possibly go wrong?” On the other hand, in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the
Middle East, if you ask what could possibly go wrong if we loosen up our
family mores, you look to the south and and say, “Oh, yeah, a lot …””

This consideration of the discivic implications of single motherhood is rather timely, as over at Alpha Game, I was observing that when successful men are asked about what lessons they learned from their fathers, the lessons appear to be much the same whether the father is a wealthy corporate magnate or a postman. But it should be alarming to see that the USA’s percentage of children being raised by one or fewer parents (and by parents, that generally means mothers), is already worse than Ethiopia, Mexico, and Nigeria.

Millennial marriage, or the lack thereof

Bryan Preston points out what appears to be a very ominous statistic concerning the Millennials:

Millennials are slower to marry than previous generations. They have moved the median marriage age up to 29 for men and 27 for women. They are largely delaying marriage because they are loaded down with massive student debt, and because there are few jobs available to them upon which they can build their lives. The current Democratic administration’s anti-jobs policies are largely to blame for the latter. The lack of accountability in university practices and tuition is largely to blame for the former. Millennials are being squeezed by the Obama economy. Yet they remain more likely to vote for Democrats, if they vote.

I’m not here to slam single parenthood, but single parenthood has proven to be a very strong predictor of one’s economic outcome and one’s politics, meaning, one’s relationship to the government and the policies one tends to vote for. Simply put, single adults tend to vote in a certain way, and children of single adults tend to have poorer economic outcomes, which leads to a certain voting pattern. Marriage is a strong predictor of political behavior.

Currently just 26% of millennials — those between age 18 and 33 — are married. At the same age, 36% of GenX and 48% of the Baby Boomers were married. And 69% of millennials say they want to get married, but the lack of jobs is holding them back.

However, one thing that is often left out of the equation is that the racial demographics of the Millennials is very different than those of GenX and the Baby Boomers. It is risky to base too many conclusions on the generational data without first breaking out the various racial sub-groups. For example, I have seen data that suggests white Millennials don’t actually vote very differently than white GenX voters, which, based on the historical age-shift, would tend to indicate that white Millennials are trending to the right of white GenXers.

Why rabbits utilize exclusion

Ostracism is actually more harmful than bullying:

The famous quote claims the only thing in life worse than being talked about, is not being talked about – and a new study may have proved this to be the case.  Being ignored at work has been found to be worse for a person’s health than people who are harassed or bullied.

Researchers found that while most consider ostracism less harmful than bullying, feeling excluded is significantly more likely to lead job dissatisfaction, quitting and health problems.

‘We’ve been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable – if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,’ said University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business Professor Sandra Robinson, who co-authored the study.

‘But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they’re not worthy of any attention at all.’

It would be interesting to learn if the effects of ostracism are similar on men and women, and if they are similar on the r/selected and the K/selected. My guess is that the effects are stronger on women and the r/selected than on men and the K/selected.

Rabbit people obviously find ostracism extremely painful. Years, even decades later, they still speak of being crippled by it. I can’t speak for all non-rabbits, but I tend to find being surrounded by people and being obliged to pretend to take their every inanity seriously much more painful than not having to deal with them. I suspect ostracism is harder on the extrovert than the introvert. I feel drained after spending more than three hours at a social event. Friends are great, but one can always have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it would bother me greatly to be expelled from my team or to have everyone ignore me in the clubhouse on game days. So, I suspect the negative effect on the ostracized individual does not come from the intent of others to ostracize, but rather, is derived from degree to which the individual wishes to be part of the group.

So, perhaps it isn’t enough to not be cruel to individuals with lower social status and to leave them in peace, perhaps it is necessary to be civil to them, even friendly if one can find the wherewithal within oneself to make the effort. And, of course, it’s a useful anti-rabbit weapon, as whenever they resort to their usual tactic, one can point out that what they are doing IS WORSE THAN BULLYING and that THERE IS NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for terrible people like them.