Tag: trainwreck

That’s no statue, that’s Mark Shea!

In which Mark Shea gets trolled so hard, it’s a wonder he didn’t turn to stone. You absolutely MUST read A Reader Writes of his Experience Among the Dark Enlightenment Types:

The thing about nascent movements like this is that it’s hard to know
when to pay attention and when to ignore them. If you ignore them they
can grow in the dark, like mushrooms on dung.  If you make too much
fuss, you can attract idiots–particularly extremist idiots–who
automatically assume that anything normal people find objectionable must
be awesome, radical, and “not PC” and therefore good.  But of course,
cannibalism is not PC either and embracing something simply and solely
on the basis that it is a “reaction” is one of the stupidest things
humans can do. You can’t build a life on protest and reaction.  You have
to be for something, not merely against something.  And at the end of
the day, the only real core of DE “thought” is to be for racialism.

Much of the stuff written above describes a sect that brings out
belly laughs. Eldar? Men of Numenor?  Seriously? Tolkien would have
these overgrown D and D players’ guts for garters if he heard they were
exploiting his work for their deplorable cultus. Particularly since
(which is my main concern about them) they are using his work as a grab
bag of code words for their deep-rooted racialist heresy.

I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or
just “Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and
was interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved
with the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here
is what I learned:

– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith
Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land,
but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed.
They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram
for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).

– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.

– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar
in Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas.
He had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a
pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.

– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists,
monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad
Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they
call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor
points.

– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans)
practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t
deny ethnic identity).

– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet
seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.

– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money
to play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a
major tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day
meeting on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc.
Different forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos,
3-piece suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes,
hoods, etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function
but heard about it.)

– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment,
which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my
phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often
relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I
really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more
impressionable and eager to please.)

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of
Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After
that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while
Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or
Iliad.

– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens
alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and
then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old
German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly
what they were saying.

Now that was some epic artistic cruelty, so much so that one almost suspects the dark hand of Roissy. Thank the Divine Rainbow for Mark Shea, saving the world from nonexistent movements since 2014! Then again, as a media-identified Sith Lord, perhaps that’s merely what I want him to think….

A naked atrocity

There is delusion. There is self-delusion. And then there is Lena Dunham. Now, I have never seen Girls. I have no intention of ever seeing Girls. The idea of spending even a nanosecond watching Sex In The City with ugly New York City girls who are apparently even MORE retarded than Sarah Jessica Parker and company isn’t exactly on my list of Things To Do.

“I remember looking in the mirror as a kid and it would be like for an
hour at a time, and I’d be like: ‘I’m just so beautiful. Everybody is so
lucky that they get to look at me.’ And of course that changes as you
get older, but I may have held on to that little-kid feeling that was me
alone in my bathroom.”

Yes, lucky. So lucky. That’s the first thing that springs to mind. It doesn’t even look human. It looks like something out of Lovecraft. It looks like something that should be harpooned and processed for ivory and oil. It looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy was raped by a dugong. It looks like something that most certainly should not be displayed without clothes anywhere, least of all on television. If there is a rational argument for Sharia in the United States of America, this is it. Say what you will about Wahhabism, but at least in Saudi Arabia, they’d put a misshapen creature like this in a burqah.

Some say that beauty is on the inside. But when there is beauty on the inside, some hint of it always shines through. This abomination is pure self-centered ugliness seeping out from within.

What happened to “never again”?

The Learned Elders of Wye had better speed up their exit plans if they’re going to continue to perpetrate materially traitorous idiocies such as this:

President Obama plans to nominate three people to the Federal Reserve’s
Board of Governors, including Stanley Fischer, former head of the Bank
of Israel, as the Fed’s next vice chairman, the White House said on
Friday…. Mr. Fischer, 70, would succeed Ms. Yellen in her current role. The
Senate confirmed Ms. Yellen as the Fed’s new chairwoman this week. She
will take over from the current chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in February.
…

More importantly for Israel, Stanley Fischer won an appointment to the
Reagan administration’s U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Discussion Group that
dealt with Israel’s 1984-1985 economic crisis. … The U.S.-Israel
Joint Economic Discussion Group fundamentally transformed U.S. aid to
Israel forever.  Before the Reagan administration, most U.S. aid to
Israel took the form of loans that had to be repaid with interest.
 After the input of Fischer’s team, subsequent U.S. aid was delivered in
the form of outright grants paid directly from the U.S. Treasury—never
to be repaid or conditioned when Israel took actions the U.S. opposed.

Can you even imagine the widespread outrage if Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan was appointed to the Fed and he promptly began sending billions of dollars to Japan? Or if Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China was named vice chairman and he subsequently began repaying US debt to China in gold and advanced weapons technology? Now keep in mind that Stanley Fischer is already guilty of literally giving billions to Israel!

It’s long past time for the USA to take two immediate measures. First, shut down all financial aid to Israel. The USA is bankrupt. So is the Federal Reserve, if its newly expanded balance sheet was marked properly to market. If Israeli citizens are convinced that inflation is good for the economy and they want to print money, well and good, but let them print shekels, not U.S. dollars.

Second, ban all dual citizenships. There is no such thing as a “dual loyalty”. It’s very clear that Stanley Fischer has no loyalty to the USA. His loyalty is to Israel. That’s perfectly clear. It’s even admirable. Would that his American counterparts felt so strongly about serving their own country. But it also means that he has no more place in a decision-making capacity for the US monetary system than Christine Lagard or Mario Draghi.

Now, let’s preemptively deal with the usual reaction. Are you tempted to call my position antisemitic? That’s not merely incorrect, that’s totally insane. Do you truly not see where this is leading? For the love of the God of Old Testament and New, the reason I’m speaking out against this is precisely because I don’t wish to see an American holocaust. I don’t want the children of my Jewish friends being made the scapegoat in reaction to the dreadful behavior of an insatiable, unconscionable elite. What is sickening, what is ominous, what is materially antisemitic is what the federal government has done by permitting Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Fischer to financially rape the American people.

This is all astonishingly short-sighted on the part of the Elders of Wye. Setting aside whether they can reasonably hope to successfully transfer their traveling game of three-card monte to China or India, even a bankrupt, post-collapse America will be filled with hundreds of millions of the same people who conquered the world in the 20th century, more or less without trying. And they are going to be very, very angry. They are going to be even more full of hate than the 20th century Germans were, because they are going to feel deeply betrayed. If an unfair post-war peace settlement created a sense of national fury, how much more anger will the bankruptcy and collapse of the union provoke?

In fact, having grown up in an End Times-conscious church, I can recall the eschatological enthusiasts discussing whether the King of the North was the Soviet Union or a united Europe. They often cited this passage from Jeremiah:

Behold, a people shall come from the north,
And a great nation and many kings
Shall be raised up from the ends of the earth.
They shall hold the bow and the lance;
They are cruel and shall not show mercy.
Their voice shall roar like the sea;
They shall ride on horses,
Set in array, like a man for the battle,
Against you, O daughter of Babylon.
The king of Babylon has heard the report about them,
And his hands grow feeble;
Anguish has taken hold of him,
Pangs as of a woman in childbirth…”(Jeremiah 50:41-43)

And yet, when I look at the events of recent years, it increasingly looks as if the most powerful nation that is the most likely to bear a tremendous populist grudge against Israel in the 21st century will be the United States of America.

Suboptimal rhetoric

In which America is less than entirely astonished to learn that Pajama Boy is a self-described gay-loving “liberal f—“ with no morals, a predilection for attacking others, and a superiority complex:

Ethan Krupp, the little man who played “Pajama Boy” in a widely mocked Obamacare ad, once characterized himself as a “liberal f—.”

Krupp, an Organizing for Action (OFA) content writer who became the face of progressive America while wearing a onesie pajama suit, also remarked that gays “are all liberal f—-” and criticized a “conservative gay prick” on his now-deleted WordPress blog, entitled “Not Being Creative.”

“I am a Liberal F—,” Krupp wrote in one post. “A Liberal F— is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while make the opponents feel terrible about themselves. I won every argument but one.”

Sure you did, Pajama Boy. Sure you did. Notice that his approach is entirely rhetorical. The reference to sarcasm and feelings make it clear that he’s not even remotely interested in proper dialectic per se. One hallmark of this sort of individual is that he always thinks he wins an argument because his combination of self-delusion and total lack of regard for objective truth means that he can easily self-define the result of ANY argument as a win.

I seem to recall someone else describing a similarly “successful” rhetorical approach to debate:

“The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn’t help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn’t help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn’t remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.

“Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck.

“I didn’t know what to be more amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

“Gradually I began to hate them.”

If the consequences of your self-declared victorious approach to intellectual disputation is to make formerly indifferent people hate and despise you, then perhaps it is time to consider an entirely different rhetorical approach.

The scouring of The Hobbit

This review of the second part of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy does not sound at all promising:

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them….

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes
foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female
elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be
the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the
dishy elf or the hunky dwarf?

Ye cats. It is becoming abundantly clear that Jackson’s biggest blunder was choosing his co-writers. Seriously, he couldn’t find anyone better than HIS FREAKING WIFE AND HER FRIEND?

This is rapidly approaching Star Wars prequel-levels of absurdity. Permitting Pink SF to invade MIDDLE EARTH is a crime against literature. It’s a crime against HUMANITY. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Pink SF is a cancer. It is an infectious disease that ruins everything it touches. Defiling the literary grave of Tolkien goes well beyond girls doing their usual shitting in the boys’ sandbox, this is the Pink SF equivalent of suicide bombers.

Why not throw in an orc-human romance while he’s at it? Why not lasers and lectures on global warming? Or, even better, an UNDEAD ORC-human-werewarg love triangle!

An amusing revelation

Keep in mind that Alex from London is the sort of Englishman who invariably mocks American ignorance of the world:

This is the terrifying moment a trio of gunmen stormed into a disco and opened fire on a crowd of terrified dancers.CCTV captured the moment when the men pull out their guns and push past bouncers to get inside the disco in Cali, Colombia, before they start spraying bullets around the room.The victims’ blood flowed out of the nightclub and into the street after the gruesome 20-minute long attack.

 Alex, London, United Kingdom, 2 hours ago
“Absolutely horrific! Hopefully Obama will be able to change their gun law. It can’t carry on the way it is.”

It should certainly be fascinating to see what Obama can accomplish with regards to the gun crime in Cali, Colombia. This should take place not long after David Cameron deals with the pressing issue of the undercapitalized banks in Athens, Greece.

PJ O’Rourke on the Baby Boomers

Here is one Baby Boomer who appears to be willing to cop to being a member of the worst generation ever, but as is his generation’s wont, he ends up trying to spin the facts on his generation’s behalf:

We’ve reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We
are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest
contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault.

This
is every generation’s fate. It’s a matter of power and privilege and
demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs
the bill for it. And the baby boom, seated as we are at the head of
life’s table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y and the Millennials
all saying, “Check, please!”

To address America’s baby boom is to
face big, broad problems. We number more than 75 million, and we’re not
only diverse but take a thorny pride in our every deviation from the
norm (even though we’re in therapy for it). We are all alike in that
each of us thinks we’re unusual.

Now, before Ryan launches in with his usual generational public defender routine, I readily admit that every member of a generation is not identical or even in step with the generational norm. But we are talking about a collective here! And more importantly, we are talking about a proudly self-identified collective here. So to bring up individuals in this context is not merely moot, it is a basic category error.

They claim they changed the world. We agree. We merely observe that they changed it for the worse.

Some Baby Boomers try to smugly point out that Generation X is also responsible because we have not fixed the problems they caused. They tend to ignore the fact that they are actively standing in the way of any and all attempts to do so. I was correct about the 2008 financial crisis and correct about the failure of the Federal Reserve and the Congress to successfully fix the situation. Did the Fed turn to me or any other GenX economist who correctly observed these things?

No, they appointed yet another Baby Boomer, one who will step up the intensity of the failed policies of the previous Baby Boomer. So what more can I, or any other member of Generation X, now do except point, laugh, and look forward to the day when we can shut off the generational parasite’s life-support machines.

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.

The MIN campaign

From Wikipedia circa 2023:

Moar Inflation Now (MIN) was an attempt to spur a grassroots movement to stoke inflation, by encouraging personal borrowing and unrestrained spending habits in combination with expansionary public measures, urged by Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and Secretary of the Treasury Paul Krugman. People who supported the mandatory and voluntary measures were encouraged to wear “MIN” buttons, perhaps in hope of evoking in peacetime the kind of solidarity and voluntarism symbolized by the V-campaign during World War II.

The campaign began in earnest with the establishment by the Federal Reserve, of the National Commission on Inflation, which Yellen closed with an address to the American people at Jackson Hole, asking them to send her a list of ten inflation-increasing ideas. Ten days later, Krugman declared deflation “public enemy number one” before Congress on October 13, 2017, in a speech entitled “Moar Inflation Now”, announcing a series of proposals for public and private steps intended to directly affect supply and demand, in order to increase inflation to the desired rate of 10 percent per annum. “MIN” buttons immediately became objects of ridicule; skeptics wore the buttons upside down, explaining that “NIW” stood for “No I Won’t,” or “Not In Weimar,” or “Need Immediate Wank.”

In his book What the Fucking Fuck Was I Thinking?, Ben Bernanke admitted that the thought “This is unbelievably stupid” crossed his mind when Moar Inflation Now was first presented to the Clinton administration by his successor at the Federal Reserve. However, according to revisionist self-historian Paul Krugman, increasing the money and credit supplies was never meant to be the centerpiece of the pro-inflation program and the mass corporate bankruptcies, collapse of the US debt markets, and subsequent catastrophic failure of the global financial system only prove how much worse the economic situation would have been without the triumphant success of the MIN campaign.

PZ wrestles with SMV, loses

There are few things more amusing than watching a Gamma attempt to criticize some aspect of Game. In this case, PZ provides a fascinating critique of Rollo’s SMV graphic:

The whole concept of “Sexual Market Value”. What does that even mean? It’s dimensionless. He doesn’t have a way to look at any person and say, “Your market value is X”. It doesn’t even make sense to put this into a chart; my sexual appeal to my wife is huge, but negligible to everyone else. Scarlett Johansen may have a reputation as a very sexy woman, but her sexual “market value” to me is zero, and not only is it offensive to propose that her sex is purchasable for some imaginary sum of a million quatloos or whatever, it probably isn’t even a real commodity.

Read the whole thing, including my response, at Alpha Game. But the concept of Sexual Market Value is not a difficult one. The two women on the left are prime examples of women with very high SMVs. They are paid literally millions of dollars every year simply because they happen to represent what most people who are attracted to women find extraordinarily attractive. TL;DR: Brazilian supermodel = high SMV.

What I found most interesting about PZ’s post is an aspect into which I will delve into here rather than at AG since it is more relevant to economics than Game, is the way in which his post reveals that he genuinely does not grasp even basic principles of economics. Let’s take a look at his example of Scarlett Johansson.

Even if we take him at his word and accept that he finds her so totally unappealing that she holds no more attraction for him than an infant or an 85 year-old woman, that does not mean everyone else feels the same way. Hence the use of the term “Market”; SMV intrinsically describes the average of everyone’s subjective perspective concerning an individual. It’s not a literal market complete with prices because prostitution is illegal, but that doesn’t change the fact that the same rules of supply and demand that apply to literal markets measured in prices apply to the sexual market.

So, even though PZ’s sexual appeal to his wife is reportedly huge, because it is negligible to everyone else, his SMV is low. On the other hand, Ms Johansson’s SMV is high despite PZ’s deprecation of her because so many people find her to be exceptionally attractive. I am not one of them myself, but because I no more dictate global SMV than PZ or anyone else, I can recognize her high SMV despite the fact that I, personally, would rate her considerably lower.

These are simple principles of supply and demand. I place a much higher value, monetary and otherwise, on an Intellivision PAL system, than the vast majority of people on the planet. Many people place no value on console games, many people with an interest in console games place no value on long-outdated consoles, and most people who place value on long-outdated consoles live where NTSC is the standard.

So I will obtain a PAL Intellivision console for much less than I would be willing to pay for it because so few others value it as highly. In like manner, PZ is fortunate that he has apparently found a woman who happens to overrate his negligible sexual appeal in the converse of the way that PZ underrates Ms Johansson’s. So, it should be readily apparent that the fact value is subjective in no way means that objective observations and determinations cannot be made about the collective average of those individually subjective values, even when they are relative rather than numerically quantified.