Left political singularity

October 22nd, 2011

The French Red Terror, the Soviet Great Terror, the Cambodian autogenocide, and many others were all examples of what I call left political singularities.

Left wing repression tends to make things lefter, which tends to worsen left wing repression, which makes things even lefter, which …   The process only stops when the latest despot starts to realize he is not left enough, he is being outflanked on the left, is going to be overthrown by those even lefter than himself, and promptly gets rid of everyone important who is even lefter than he is. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in politics | 22 Comments »

Fun hate fact about the bell curve

October 21st, 2011

Today’s hate fact is hyperexponential decay.

The normal survival function (the number of cases in a normal distribution that are more than x, one minus the cumulative distribution) approaches zero as x increases hyperexponentially, which is to say, very fast. This often makes it possible, under many common circumstances, to draw conclusions about individual cases, to infer a particular person’s character and or ability from his race or sex, and to infer a particular individual’s race or sex from his ability or character, to draw conclusions about particular identifiable people from average racial characteristics. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in politics | 14 Comments »

Government hires protestors to demand more government

October 17th, 2011

Powerline found an interesting job advertisement in Craigslist:

Under the job category “new york craigslist > brooklyn > jobs > government jobs”, people looking for a government job are invited to: “ FIGHT TO HOLD WALL STREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE! GET PAID!”

I knew they were getting paid to protest, but until now there was some deniability – students were being turned out to protest by their professors, employees of government unions were being turned out to protest by their union bosses, ngo employees were being turned out by ngo bosses, rather than a flat out overt offer to get paid to show up and protest.

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Posted in party politics | 5 Comments »

The cause of the decline

October 16th, 2011

Lately there as been a lot of concern about the increasingly visible decline of the west, notably Peter Thiel on “The  End of the Future”: Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in culture, economics, global warming, liberty, politics, science | 13 Comments »

Short summary of “Fast and Furious”

October 15th, 2011

Many blogs have covered all this for a long time, in great depth, among them Human Events.  I am not going to do so, but I need to mention such an important event, if only for my own records: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in culture, war | 1 Comment »

The Great Recession

October 14th, 2011
The Great Recession

The Great Recession

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in economics | 8 Comments »

Pinker on violence

October 11th, 2011

Pinker argues that there has over time, been a great decline in violence, mistaking progressivism for progress. “The better angels of our nature” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in culture, politics | 20 Comments »

Herman Cain wrote his own book

October 9th, 2011

Often when a politician campaigns for an important post, he promotes a book about his life. And almost always that book is ghost written.

I compared the partial transcripts of his interview with O’Donnell, with an extract from the book discussed by O’Donnell. They are similar in style. Likely the book was edited by a white editor, because most English language books are edited by a white editor, but if so that editor did not do enough editing to change the style or vocabulary much.  If it is ghost written, the ghost limited himself to transcribing large chunks of Cain’s own words. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in politics | 3 Comments »

Progressives are not commies.

October 8th, 2011
  1. Commies propose the government run everything by a central plan. Progressives propose the government run everything with no plan at all.
  2. Commies believe that underdevelopment is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against poor people, and propose to fix this by commanding stuff to be developed. Progressives believe that development is a sin committed by wealthy capitalists against Gaea and the trees, and propose to fix this by prohibiting stuff from being developed.
  3. Commies believe in democracy, and indeed believe in it so much that they will shoot anyone who votes incorrectly. Progressives believe in democracy, and if large numbers of people keep voting incorrectly, will import a foreign underclass to outvote them.

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Posted in politics | 41 Comments »

US dollar rises, because Euro smells even worse

October 3rd, 2011

The value of the US dollar has risen, as valued by gold and by the fiat currencies of countries that are relatively solvent.

The apparent cause of this is not that there has been any improvement in the prospects for the US dollar, but that a chaotic dissolution of the Euro zone looks likely, so traders are switching to the most liquid asset that there is. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in economics | No Comments »

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