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.) Read the rest of this entry »
Affirmative action and lies
August 15th, 2011Ruling majority underclass
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Duggan did not shoot
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
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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London riots
August 9th, 2011The police shot Mark Duggan in London, as they beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles. Likely Mark Duggan needed killing, and it was instant justice, or possibly not. There is disagreement over who fired first.
Real violence, not astroturf mock violence, ensued. There have been three days of rioting, looting, and racist assaults by blacks on whites over much of England, and the riots continue.
The size of the difference between universalism and communism
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.
Communism or universalism
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
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.
US federal government burn rate is 8% of GDP
August 5th, 2011The burn rate is a eight percent of GDP. Total debt is one hundred percent of GDP.
Science stagnating in the west
August 3rd, 2011How many new drugs, Dr. Lajos Pusztai asks, were approved for breast cancer treatment in the past decade? His answer: seven. None was much different from drugs already on the market.