Suppose group A and group B differ in mean and distribution in some desirable or undesirable quality. Chances are that there is a lot of overlap in the middle, but when you select the very best, perhaps for some prestigious and well paid job, and the very worst, perhaps to lock them up and get them off the streets, the bell curve, the normal distribution, implies not much overlap. Because not much overlap, if the state enforces affirmative action there will be very little overlap between those who earned the prestigious job, and those affirmative actioned into the prestigious job. Most of the affirmative action job holders, on casual inspection seemingly all of them, will be incapable of fulfilling the normal requirements of the job. (For a notorious recent example, female firefighters during the 9/11 fire.) (more…)
Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
Affirmative action and lies
Monday, August 15th, 2011Ruling majority underclass
Saturday, August 13th, 2011Following the British riots (which have not exactly ended, but have diminished to merely routine levels of violence, robbery, and arson) the British Labor Party went trolling for looter and arsonist votes, while the conservative party tried to get the votes of those members of the underclass that were worried about being robbed or burned out of the homes – the parties acted as if taxpayer votes were irrelevant since they could be taken for granted, the objective was for the conservatives to split off enough underclass votes. (more…)
Mark Duggan did not shoot
Friday, August 12th, 2011Mark Duggan’s gun was not fired, and before his death, he expected to be murdered. This suggests that his family’s account of his killing is true – that he was not killed in an exchange of fire, but was murdered by police, in which case the attacks on police that started these riots were legitimate, no matter how illegitimate the ensuing arson, looting, and random racist assaults.
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Obama says it is not his fault
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011In a boring and unusually uncharismatic speech, Obama explains that America’s credit rating downgrade is not his fault, and it is not his job to fix it.
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The size of the difference between universalism and communism
Monday, August 8th, 2011Moldbug points out that universalist regimes such as the US government and its satellites, suppress dissent too, though by means less drastic and obvious than communist regimes, and that universalist regimes had disturbingly cozy relationships with communist regimes, were full of fellow travellers until there was no one left to travel with. He proposes, therefore, to call them all communist.
But, (more…)
Communism or universalism
Sunday, August 7th, 2011Mencius Moldbug proposes to explain what is wrong with the current political order by pointing out what it has in common with communism, thus he proposes to call the current regime communist, in that genuine opposition is for the most part successfully repressed. According to Moldbug Communism is “Democracy without authentic political opposition”.
Not so. Communism is primarily an economic system.
The prehistory of the left
Saturday, August 6th, 2011Vladimir, Moldbug, and Foseti discuss the prehistory of the left, also known as the United States Government. Prehistory ends, and history starts, in the 1950s, because history before then got rewritten beyond recognition.
The debt limit charade
Sunday, July 31st, 2011US politicians are engaged in passionate debate and confrontation over the debt limit and spending. The question is whether to “cut” two trillion over the next ten years, which is to say, about two hundred billion dollars a year, which is to say, whether, after ten years, spending will be five or six trillion dollars a year more than it is now, or whether it will be five or six trillion dollars a year more than it is now, assuming that the US government still exists in ten years.
How well run is Oslo?
Thursday, July 28th, 2011According to the bloggers who speak for our ruling elite (such as Matthew Yglesias) Norway is wonderfully well run. But according to the terrorist Breivik, it is run much like Chicago, where the ruling party’s political mobilization of the disproportionately criminal underclass has produced a criminal party. (more…)
Rational terrorism
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011A lot of people, myself included, have suggested that Breivik’s terrorism was unlikely to be effective, but he has information we did not. (more…)