- Commies propose the government run everything by a central plan. Progressives propose the government run everything with no plan at all.
- 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.
- 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.
Posts Tagged ‘decline of the west’
Progressives are not commies.
Saturday, October 8th, 2011Curious cuddles between the Cathedral and Islam
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011If someone is a called a “moderate Muslim”, he is probably part of the establishment, part of our ruling elite, or spends much of his day in their circles.
If someone is a Muslim, and part of our ruling elite or close to it, he is probably a terrorist, or spends much of the rest of his day in their circles.
There is at most one degree of separation between the elite, and Islam. In contrast, there are several degrees of separation between the elite, and conventional Christianity.
Exhibit A in this story is Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, who spent a great deal of time walking and talking with US presidents Clinton and Bush and the usual parade of the good and the great – and who also addressed terror rallies demonizing the US. In 2004 was an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to assassinate the man who is now King of Saudi Arabia. So Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi is zero degrees of separation between the Cathedral and the terrorists.
Well, perhaps the Cathedral just happened to have one bad apple? But it’s other Muslim apples have smelly connections also.
Suhail Khan: Wikipedia tells us “Khan serves on the Board of Directors for the American Conservative Union, the Indian American Republican Council, the Islamic Free Market Institute, and on the interfaith Buxton Initiative Advisory Council. He speaks regularly at conferences and venues such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the Council for National Policy (CNP), the Harbour League, and the National Press Club and has contributed to publications such as the Washington Post/Newsweek Forum On Faith, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Human Events.”
Suhail Khan is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement, a Christian organization dedicated to religious freedom worldwide.
And yet this same Suhail Khan, moderate, pillar of the establishment, advocate of tolerance, also seems to spend a lot of time with people dedicated to blowing up infidels.
So Suhail Khan is one degree of separation between the Cathedral and terrorism.
Similarly for Imam Feisal Adbul Rauf, of the ground zero victory mosque. So of three Muslims that I noticed as being Cathedral insiders, three had ties to terror.
It does not appear the Cathedral is consciously and cynically cozying up to terrorists – Suhail Khan put quite a bit of effort into appearing to be moderate. Rather, they turn a blind eye to terrorist connections, because to do otherwise would be racism and discrimination – while quite slight and vague connections to conventional Christianity cause them to reel back in shock and horror, like a vampire at the sight of the cross, as they do from Sarah Palin.
They want to include Muslims, but terrorism is as central to Islam as the Eucharist is to Christianity, and so if someone is an important Muslim, he is apt to have important connections to terror, and if a Muslim is in with the Cathedral, he is an important Muslim. In contrast, if a nominal Christian knew what the Eucharist was, the Cathedral would treat him with extreme suspicion.
This is not a pro terror bias, but an anti discrimination bias – which bias in practice means we are not allowed to discriminate against people trying to kill us.
Gabrielle Giffords needed killing
Sunday, January 9th, 2011And so do most of congress, most of the regulators, and most of the businessmen in the revolving door between business and regulation.
All the conservative criticism of her seems to be disappearing off the web, but what the hell, she stank, critics pointed out she stank, so someone killed her. It might have been a leftist who did not think she was left enough, but chances are, was a conservative. Yes, chances are that unkind remarks by conservatives got her killed. Pity it was not someone who mattered more. Her platform was to create lots of high paying jobs in government and quasi governmental activities – in other words, to transfer wealth from productive people who mostly voted against her, to unproductive people who mostly voted for her, thus moving the nation generally leftwards.
As the nation plunges into bankruptcy, as the Cloward–Piven crisis approaches, we might kill enough similar wrongdoers to eventually get out of the crisis. I don’t really see any other path to resolving the crisis other than watering the tree of liberty in the usual fashion.
The end of the road to serfdom
Sunday, December 26th, 2010Hayek, in “The Road to Serfdom” predicted the welfare regulatory state must inevitably become the totalitarian terror state.
Observe: We have arrived. America is now a totalitarian terror state.
In 1992 I visited Cuba. Thereafter, I argued it was a totalitarian state, because when I asked certain questions some people fled, fearing that merely hearing the question would result in them being punished for the thoughts it might elicit, and others answered furtively.
Yesterday, I asked someone very close to me a question apt to have a politically incorrect answer (I cannot identify him further, for he swore me to secrecy)
He looked around furtively. We were on top of a hill overlooking the Coral Sea in a semi rural area, the other side of the world from his workplace. He lowered his voice. He then proceeded to utter a series of politically correct platitudes, with gestures and grimaces reversing their meaning, his grimaces implying the opposite of the ostensible meaning, the same sort of communication coded against possible eavesdroppers and hidden microphones that I encountered in Cuba, where they would swear loyalty to communism, while making a gesture of their throats being cut.
Like Havel’s green grocer, the truth would destroy his career.
This is the behavior that in 1992 I saw in Cuba and thereafter used as evidence that Cuba was a totalitarian state, a state of omnipresent fear.
So if Cuba was totalitarian in 1992, America is totalitarian in 2010. We have arrived at the end of Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”.
In America, unlike Soviet Russia, we don’t send dissidents to Alaska, and although lots of American psychiatrists are eager to diagnose political deviation as mental illness and treat it with electroshock and lobotomy as they do in Cuba, government has as yet declined to employ them in this capacity. But what government does do is ensure that political deviation blights your career. If a company knowingly employs political deviants, it is apt to be sued by quasi governmental organization for a “hostile work environment”, in which lawsuit, no evidence will be presented of anyone saying unkind things to those for which the work environment was supposedly hostile, but evidence will be presented that employees had subversive thoughts – often evidence that they expressed subversive thoughts far from their workplace, as perhaps on a hill overlooking the Coral sea the other side of the world from his workplace – so the company will be punished, for failure to punish subversive thoughts.
Hayek, in “The Road to Serfdom”, argued that regulatory welfare state must inevitably become totalitarian. Lo and behold, totalitarianism has arrived. Most people, everyone with some position in society, everyone with something that could be taken away from them, are very, very frightened.
And what is totalitarianism? Hayek’s totalitarianism seems to be pretty much Havel’s totalitarianism, and here is Havel on totalitarianism:
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!”
Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think I can safely assume that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and the carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be.
If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone.
The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth.
The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”
Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something is ideology.
If you go into an institutional environment – a government office, a school or college, a hospital or doctor’s surgery, a museum, public transportation – and you observe posters adorning the walls on politically-correct topics such as diversity, fair trade, global warming, approved victim groups, third world aid – remember Havel’s essay, and that the correct translation of such posters is as follows:
“I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”
Such posters are a coded admission of submission to ideology – except in the rare instance where they advertise genuine corruption by ideology.
The frequency of such posters nowadays, compared with a generation ago, is a quantitative measure of the progress of totalitarian government.
The future is Muslim, Mormon, and Catholic
Saturday, December 25th, 2010Anglican Christmas church service, ten attend, eight with one foot in the grave. Sermon is about the other foot dropping.
Catholic Christmas church service, approximately one hundred attend, most of them young. Sermon is about Christmas being a time for children.
Some months ago I checked the graveyards. To judge by the absence of angels, graveyards one hundred percent protestant.
High returns on IQ between countries, but low returns within country
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010If we control for academic qualification, there is zero or negative return on IQ within a country. That is to say, of two people of different IQ but same country and the same academic qualification, the smarter one will have similar or lower socioeconomic success.
If we do not control for academic qualification, IQ still does not make a very large difference. Of two people of very different IQ, but the same country, and academic qualifications typical for their IQ, the much smarter one will not be much richer
I think it likely that this is a manifestation of the observed fact that high IQ people tend to be nerds, socially low status, tend to get in trouble socially.
However, if we compare between countries, countries where people have slightly higher average IQ tend to be much more prosperous than similar countries with slightly lower average IQ.
A two standard deviation difference in an individual person’s IQ predicts only about a 30% difference in his wage. But half a standard deviation difference in a country’s average IQ score predicts a 200% difference in the average wage in that country.
Why do high IQ people do so badly?
Suppose you have a bunch of people together. And the crowd makes a mistake about X, or, which comes to much the same thing, a high status person in the crowd makes a mistake about X. The high IQ kid is going to say “X is wrong”. But no one else in the crowd can tell whether X is right or wrong. They will think it is a matter of opinion, like what flavor of icecream is better, or a matter of authority, an arbitrary rule decreed by someone, and this kid is wrongfully claiming authority to decree that rule.
And will conclude that the smart kid is inappropriately throwing his weight around, is acting inappropriately for his status, they will be insulted, offended, and angered at what they incorrectly perceive as a claim of status and authority. And so will attempt to correct his swelled head, will tell him his status is low, and his status claim inappropriately high.
So the smart kid in the group, like the stupid kid in the group, is going to wind up at the bottom – and very likely with an income to match. The high IQ kid is going to be a social failure in a group where the majority is stupid.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is at the bottom.
So if you want society to be run by smart people, that society has to stream the kids, group smart kids with smart kids, and dumb kids with dumb kids, and get its leadership from the leadership that emerges from leading the smart group.
If, on the other hand, society thinks that everyone should go to university, and the elite universities select their students primarily on political correctness and cultural similarity to the existing elite rather than smarts, then your society is going to wind up being run by people who are not much brighter than average, and most of the wealth and power is going to be in the hands of people who are not much brighter than average for that country.
The smart group will do well, but the smart individual will do badly. Thus a smarter country is much richer, but a smarter individual is little richer, and may well be be poorer.
It follows that the way for the smart kid to succeed is to get in with a smart group of about his own intelligence that is in charge of its own destiny, get in on the right track early, and the way for a country to succeed is to make the formation of such groups easy and natural.
The war with Islam was lost on the playing fields of Sidwell Friends
Sunday, November 28th, 2010Roissy reports how when the Washington school to which the elite send their children made a poor sporting performance, their response to losing was childish, unsporting, and unmanly.
Pajamas Media reports how unsportsmanlike attitudes are inculcated, and masculinity treated as a mental defect caused by testosterone poisoning.
If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, America was lost on the playing fields of Sidwell Friends.
The childish and unmanly response of the kids from Sidwell Friends very much reminds me of the unmanly British response to military defeat in Basra.
Decline of the west
Friday, November 26th, 2010The last man on the moon left in 1972
The tallest building in the united states was finished in 1974.
Cars are becoming humbler.
US electricity production was growing exponentially until 1972. After 1972 it grew more slowly. Per capita electricity consumption seems likely to have peaked around 2007 or so.
Supposedly GDP is still growing rapidly, just as supposedly inflation is zero, but it seems improbable that GDP is growing when per capita electricity consumption is not.
One could present all sorts of rationalizations for the decline in manned space exploration – for example that manned space exploration was a polite way of demonstrating superior capability to nuke the other side, and supposedly we are so much more civilized and mature now that the need for such chest beating has diminished.
However, by 2000, we have more compelling evidence of decline. The buildings damaged or destroyed in 9/11 have not been repaired or replaced.
The west is the past. America sinks into Eurosocialism, while Europe becomes the western satrapies of the new Persian empire. Every rising civilization was a lender, innovator, and investor, every declining civilization a borrower. California used to be the place where the future was invented, but no longer.
The west’s lead was California’s lead. And California is no more.
Where, for example, was the netbook commercialized? Who invented and built the “Amazon” Kindle? Who is today creating the blue light lasers that are the core of every DVD reader and writer?
The Kindle was developed in Taiwan, by Eink. It is some standard computing parts wrapped around a new display technology invented, developed and manufactured by Eink.
Indians looking to study abroad rate Melior in Singapore higher than Stanford in the USA.
Today, our universities turn out people trained in political correctness and “diversity”. Every male CS graduate can parse a boolean expression, but most female CS graduates cannot, indicating that a male needs to be able to parse a boolean expression to get a CS degree, and a female does not. The end stage of this process is that no one needs to be able to parse a boolean expression, but everyone needs to be able to hate dead white males.
China leads the world in coal to liquids technology.
China leads the world in internet based transactions.
The simplest explanation for the fact that western research seems to have fallen off a cliff is that we are now reaching the point where hating dead white males is a more important academic qualification than anything else. Doubtless it is in reality more complicated than that, but the simplest explanation works quite well: Consider, for example, the recent demonization of Chagnon. The most striking factor was the ignorance and stupidity of the academic associations condemning him. They just did not know stuff. It was as if they don’t read books by dead white males, as if they feared that reading such stuff might contaminate their minds with dangerous thoughts.
What we have had for some time in academia is theocracy, not meritocracy, and theocracy tends to promote those whose faith is most zealous and reliable. It is easier to have zealous and reliable faith if you are dumb as two planks glued together.
Who is at the top of Academia: I suppose the tip top crust are the people who condemned Chagnon, and people like the leading scientists of global warming, Mann and Phil Jones, who are demonstrably not nearly as smart as I am. Mann, for example, keeps making ludicrous and amateurish mistakes in his statistics, and any time Phil Jones wants something scientific done, he summons a post grad, and tells the postgrad to produce a chart that proves such and such, suggesting that Phil Jones cannot produce such charts, nor tell if the chart actually does prove such and such.
Mann’s work demonstrates he is simply stupid. Mann’s power over other scientists demonstrates that simply stupid people are on top. Stupid people on top provide a simple explanation of why science does not get done.
How did Mann get to the top? By telling the state what it wants to hear, by political correctness.
Demonstrably, the people in charge of science and research are not the tip top crust. They got where they are by hating dead white males more than anyone.
The fact that undergraduates are marked on the basis of race, gender, and political correctness is fairly harmless. That academics get power over other academics on the basis of political correctness has not been so harmless, and we are today paying the price, in that western research is failing.
Singapore has sustained its rate of growth. Taiwan has sustained its rate of growth. Therefore China is likely to sustain its rate of growth.
Assuming China grows like Singapore from now on, and the US grows like Europe (counting European growth as real, even though such growth as occurs is government employees, whose product is valued at cost, which cost grows at astonishing rate) then China should surpass the US in total GDP by 2019 or so.
China should surpass the US in GDP per head, as Singapore already has, by around 2045 or so. Taiwan should surpass the US in GDP per head in 2018 or so.
The financial system of the west is collapsing because the fed and its bureaucrats have the mission to replace financial panics with wise regulatory authority – which might work if wise regulatory authority had the will to punish elite wrongdoing the way financial panics did, and resist the desire of politicians to use the financial system as a piggy bank for vote buying the way bankers threatened by financial panics did. Since brave regulators are not to be found, the replacement is not working.
The last time the west stalled, it stalled for four hundred years under intellectual stagnation induced by theocracy, from 1277 to 1648.
We are seeing multiple simultaneous crises. Academia is a thousand loudspeakers controlled by one microphone, and that microphone in the hands of an idiot.
All the massive financial crime that the financial crisis exposed <http://blog.jim.com/economics/mortgage-fraud-predatory-borrowing.html> continues unpunished and unabated, foreshadowing another, even bigger financial crisis coming up fast.
The graffiti on the buildings that are now owned by the Federal Reserve foretells our future.
We are also seeing an explosive gold rush in government as rent seeking monopolies multiply. Thus it used to be, for example, that the local council gave itself a monopoly of water and sewage, though there is in practice no rationale for the sewage monopoly – septic tanks and highly localized sewage farms are more economical. Large centralized sewage facilities beloved of councils and council unions suffer severe diseconomies of scale due to the high cost of piping sludge any reasonable distance. Seeing the lucrative flow of money, every other level of government gets into the act. Just as to get anything done, a private individual needs multiple permits from the council, each requiring him to hire numerous “consultants” at $400 per hour, the council needs multiple permits from state and federal governments, requiring the council to hire numerous “consultants” at $100 000 per hour. The tip is emitting methane! Oh the horror. Someone official comes to officially look at the methane, charges $100,000 for looking, and issues an enforceable “recommendation” for an open ended and indefinite series of remediation measures, each of which will require another look.
Oh what did we do before there were people to officially and highly scientifically investigate the fact that tips are apt to pong? What would we do without government to supervise government? And surely any problems that might occur can be easily remedied by providing yet another layer of regulatory authority to regulate the regulators that are regulating the regulators that are regulating the local council.
This, like the housing boom is unsustainable. A single monopoly will charge inefficiently high prices and produce inefficiently low product, which is indefinitely sustainable. Multiple layered monopolies suffer a coordination problem that results in them charging infinite prices and producing zero product, as each attempts to get the majority of the squeeze.
This problem is remediable only through collapse or foreign conquest. As I have remarked several times, the reason that Dubai can build high towers and we no longer can, is that in Dubai, you only need the approval of one theocrat and one holy religion.
I hope for collapse, since foreign conquest is likely to be unpleasant. Last time around, however we had stagnation for four hundred years. Collapse would be preferable.
Democracy is self destructing, as it inexorably moves further and further to the left – the fate of the past democracies of Athens and Rome.
The end is in sight
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010For the last hundred years or so, people have been predicting that the welfare and affirmative action state would collapse eventually.
Well, it seems that “eventually” is getting close. Arnold Kling has a list of links showing that all the welfare state social democracies are going to hell in a handbasket, with everyone else in even worse trouble than the US.
Arnold Kling predicts a US debt crisis between 2015 and 2035. Public sector pensions are unpayable.
The welfare state has made a pile of promises it cannot fulfill, and like a debtor in trouble, has been rapidly escalating the promises.
When the president and the most prestigious academies are out of contact with reality, then the path to advancement is to deny reality. As the housing debacle illustrates, the elite is incurably insane. The process is self reinforcing – any contact with reality, or tendency to engage in reality testing, disqualifies you for membership of the elite. Only lowly contemptible insignificant people engage in reality testing, and as everyone knows, they are boobs and disgusting racists.
In beauty contests, the contestants are asked to demonstrate allegiance to progressivism, by asking them questions on which America is divided. They must side with the Cathedral, or else they lose. Similarly in a job interview for any important position. If an executive doubts the Cathedral, the company is likely to be sued for a “hostile work environment”, so a precondition for employment in any substantial corporation in any important position is sincere zeal for the holy faith of the Cathedral.
The tea party is not actually all that rightwing. They are right wing in that they support the extreme left status quo ante and oppose the even more extreme left status quo. They want to turn the clock back to Clinton, not 1950, but to save the day, would have to turn the clock back to 1900.
People planned on social security and medicare being there for them. They see the government blowing all the money on pork barrel spending and dud mortgages for non asian minorities, and they suspect that the welfare state on which they intended to rely is going broke fast. They want to preserve the quite left wing status quo of the Clinton years.
Hence the progressive parody of the tea party: “get the government out of my medicare”.
Only the most extreme elements of the Tea Party movement leadership (Sharon Angle) actually propose to put social security on a sound footing, propose to make it a forced saving program, where you individually and personally own your social security trust fund, rather than a welfare program.
The welfare problem is a necessary result of the universal franchise. Singapore, and only Singapore, has a non catastrophic solution to the welfare problem. They were able to get away with a non catastrophic solution only because of the Singaporean/Confucian attitude that the rulers have the right to rule, provided things are going OK, which rewards long term orientation by politicians.
The stupidity of the voters, and the short term orientation of politicians means that a universal franchise guarantees social, economic, and political collapse once government becomes large enough to drag everything down with it.
The least radical solution that could actually work, could make the welfare state viable, is to implement Singaporean style welfare, social security and healthcare, and to restrict the franchise enough that such a solution wins majority support from those few entitled to vote – which solution is a lot more radical than anyone in the tea party will advocate.
We can divide the major political programs into three:
- The ignorant and unthinking, who are the great majority, since there is no point in knowing this stuff or thinking about it.
- Those who doubt the expansion of the state can go on forever, and fear the end is nigh: these are the tea partiers, who want to stop the boat right by the edge of the waterfall.
- Those who believe the state can expand forever, because state expenditures are so much more productive than mere private expenditures: these are the elite, to whom thinking like the state thinks is a badge of status, and who therefore confidently believe that going over the waterfall will be fine because the boat will fly like a bird without any need for external support.
The practical solution, of course, is to back the boat away from the waterfall – a long way back from the waterfall, but it is too fiscally late to do that without blowing off most of the state’s financial obligations, and politically impossible to do that without radically restricting the franchise. A program of recognizing bankruptcy, and throwing most of the population off the voting rolls is unlikely to be very popular.