If you see it once you'll never be the same again
After
the vacation, it is interesting to take a look at what the rest of the
blogosphere has been sputtering. Even with a cursory look around, I can
see that even in my absense, politically incorrect thoughtcrime
flourishes, and is allowed to go virtually unchecked! First, the third
item listed in the post "Things I've Noticed Lately" by Dennis Mangan creates quite an interesting combination when read with "The Power of Personality: What Happens When You Give a Homeless Man $100k?" at EconLog.
It is about time to retire the myth that the homeless and the
underclass are just like us, just a bit more unfortunate due to reasons
beyond their control. And perhaps even more noble, former professors,
doctors and businessmen they all are, reduced the wearing a barrel with
suspenders as clothing while they cover their heads with the tattered
rags of their old top hats, grinning with their crooked teeth as they
boil the beans in a can over a makeshift fire.
Speaking of the noble underclass whose exciting moral superiority we boring middle-class normos just can't understand, the new essays "Dependency as Independence?" by "A Little Social Experiment" by Theodore Dalrymple illustrate something that should have been utterly predictable by the simple analysis of incentives. If you get to live in a two-bedroom apartment that would cost 900 grand (in U.S. dollars) in the free market for free simply by being an unemployed loser, what kind of incentive does this set for rational actors? I can only hope that the whole British idea of "social housing" never reaches Canada, as it is more destructive to cities than rent control. (And by the way, if a two-bedroom aparment in London really costs nine hundred grand, I'd say that it's about time to cash out and move on.)
Second, once you decide that you just can't separate the mother and baby simply because the mother happens to be poor, the rest pretty much flows logically from this basic premise. In effect, the mother is holding an extremely valuable hostage that allows her to do pretty much she wants in her life as long as she has such children in her care, and the others have to foot the bill no questions asked, without really being able to demand even token gestures in return. First, the baby can't be expected to live in an alley, so the mother has to be given a social housing apartment for free. Second, the baby has to eat, so the mother has to be given enough free money so that there will be enough left over to feed the baby after the mother has taken care of her needs. With the incentives set up this way, what would you logically predict will happen? Heck, precisely the reality that the good doctor has always depicted in his essays. But of course, we can't possibly say that some forms of living would be in any way worse than some other forms. There are good nuclear families and good single mothers, and there are bad nuclear families and bad single mothers, so what difference does having a baby out of wedlock really make to anything? Nothing. There are many kinds of families out there, and none of them is in any way better or worse than the others, as the leftists never grow tired of reminding us.
On the other side of the social spectrum, the post "Woman $70K in student loan debt with no career" at Half Sigma doesn't make me sneer and say that this woman got exactly what she deserved. Oh no. And I would totally condemn anybody who would even think of making fun of this woman.
Speaking of careers, certain New York Times article seems to be making rounds and eliciting commentary all over the webosphere. (Why some ideas spread quickly is examined in the post "What makes an idea viral?" by Seth Grodin.) Steve Sailer has a whole new essay out, "The NYT Spots the Latest Trend: Dying Alone", in which he connects this article to his other talking points such as the "affordable family formation". At Cafe Hayek, the post "Sex ratios" shows us a couple of interesting graphs about the value of education.
And oh boy, am I glad that our flight home from Vegas left Tuesday night instead of, say, today. Years ago when I was visiting my future wife, the flight was through London, and while I was waiting at the terminal for my connection, massive fog just engulfed the city and cancelled the rest of the flights for that day. The airline put us all in a hotel for that night, but the Heathrow airport was pretty frenetic the next day. But not as frenetic as it is today, I suppose. Or as frenetic as the leftists must be feeling right now, secretly grinding their teeth in disappointment, and publicly calling for the release of this group of desperate and alienated activists who represent diverse strata of the British society. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how this incident will affect the future of commercial air travel, since once it becomes feasible to build bombs that can't be really detected at the security X-ray, I'd say that that's pretty much it. Seth Godin's post "Changing the air travel story" examines the issue. (And why was I not aware of this blog and its excellent little posts until now?) I see that Catallarchy is also on the case with the new post "Liquids of some kind", about the psychological effects of terror.
By the way, speaking of leftists and especially feminists, could you pretty please tell me, just for once in your own words, why it is that you always seem to adore and defend Islam and Muslims so much, considering that even their mainstream stands pretty much in opposition to everything that you guys at least were nominally supposed to represent? For a starting point, you can consider the posts "Norwegian Authorities Still Covering Up Muslim Rapes" and "Gays in Iraq Targeted For Murder By Insurgents And Government". Come on, I know that I have some leftist readers out there. I really wish that one of you bothered to address this question. Just humor me this one time. Do you really think that your life would be better if the white men in western countries suddenly started behaving more like their morally superior and authentic brothers in the Third World, and absorbed their values?
Back in the old country, Tommi's recent post said that
Speaking of the noble underclass whose exciting moral superiority we boring middle-class normos just can't understand, the new essays "Dependency as Independence?" by "A Little Social Experiment" by Theodore Dalrymple illustrate something that should have been utterly predictable by the simple analysis of incentives. If you get to live in a two-bedroom apartment that would cost 900 grand (in U.S. dollars) in the free market for free simply by being an unemployed loser, what kind of incentive does this set for rational actors? I can only hope that the whole British idea of "social housing" never reaches Canada, as it is more destructive to cities than rent control. (And by the way, if a two-bedroom aparment in London really costs nine hundred grand, I'd say that it's about time to cash out and move on.)
Second, once you decide that you just can't separate the mother and baby simply because the mother happens to be poor, the rest pretty much flows logically from this basic premise. In effect, the mother is holding an extremely valuable hostage that allows her to do pretty much she wants in her life as long as she has such children in her care, and the others have to foot the bill no questions asked, without really being able to demand even token gestures in return. First, the baby can't be expected to live in an alley, so the mother has to be given a social housing apartment for free. Second, the baby has to eat, so the mother has to be given enough free money so that there will be enough left over to feed the baby after the mother has taken care of her needs. With the incentives set up this way, what would you logically predict will happen? Heck, precisely the reality that the good doctor has always depicted in his essays. But of course, we can't possibly say that some forms of living would be in any way worse than some other forms. There are good nuclear families and good single mothers, and there are bad nuclear families and bad single mothers, so what difference does having a baby out of wedlock really make to anything? Nothing. There are many kinds of families out there, and none of them is in any way better or worse than the others, as the leftists never grow tired of reminding us.
On the other side of the social spectrum, the post "Woman $70K in student loan debt with no career" at Half Sigma doesn't make me sneer and say that this woman got exactly what she deserved. Oh no. And I would totally condemn anybody who would even think of making fun of this woman.
Speaking of careers, certain New York Times article seems to be making rounds and eliciting commentary all over the webosphere. (Why some ideas spread quickly is examined in the post "What makes an idea viral?" by Seth Grodin.) Steve Sailer has a whole new essay out, "The NYT Spots the Latest Trend: Dying Alone", in which he connects this article to his other talking points such as the "affordable family formation". At Cafe Hayek, the post "Sex ratios" shows us a couple of interesting graphs about the value of education.
And oh boy, am I glad that our flight home from Vegas left Tuesday night instead of, say, today. Years ago when I was visiting my future wife, the flight was through London, and while I was waiting at the terminal for my connection, massive fog just engulfed the city and cancelled the rest of the flights for that day. The airline put us all in a hotel for that night, but the Heathrow airport was pretty frenetic the next day. But not as frenetic as it is today, I suppose. Or as frenetic as the leftists must be feeling right now, secretly grinding their teeth in disappointment, and publicly calling for the release of this group of desperate and alienated activists who represent diverse strata of the British society. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how this incident will affect the future of commercial air travel, since once it becomes feasible to build bombs that can't be really detected at the security X-ray, I'd say that that's pretty much it. Seth Godin's post "Changing the air travel story" examines the issue. (And why was I not aware of this blog and its excellent little posts until now?) I see that Catallarchy is also on the case with the new post "Liquids of some kind", about the psychological effects of terror.
By the way, speaking of leftists and especially feminists, could you pretty please tell me, just for once in your own words, why it is that you always seem to adore and defend Islam and Muslims so much, considering that even their mainstream stands pretty much in opposition to everything that you guys at least were nominally supposed to represent? For a starting point, you can consider the posts "Norwegian Authorities Still Covering Up Muslim Rapes" and "Gays in Iraq Targeted For Murder By Insurgents And Government". Come on, I know that I have some leftist readers out there. I really wish that one of you bothered to address this question. Just humor me this one time. Do you really think that your life would be better if the white men in western countries suddenly started behaving more like their morally superior and authentic brothers in the Third World, and absorbed their values?
Back in the old country, Tommi's recent post said that
Religion is a hot topic these days, but I am sure that the demographic group that used the Internet about 15 years ago is still completely inreligious in practice. After that the poster population was widened and people started taking things seriously (by the way, I support methodological sobersidedness in things that are prescientific, but more on this maybe later).
Back then one used to make his words more serious with the words jihad and fatwa and in the discussion groups of mathematical logic use playful slogans of "Skin the Christians" and "Hail Satan" as signature lines. But I would say that religions (the same also applies to leftism) have no real doctrinal content. They are simply externally measurable behavioural patterns that are typical for certain groups. That is, groups that tend to have a minority of white males of scientific orientation.
I also have personal reasons to continue that leftism and religiousness are most likely directly reducible to the physiology of the brains of their advocates.
One of the following two is genuine, the other taken from The Onion: "Ozzie Guillen Fined $10,000 For What He Just Thought" and ""Ranking the girls": a note on teaching and an ugly side of homosociality".
In the anti-Stalinist front, the new essay "Desperate Grandmas" by Kay Hymowitz examines what happens when feminists grow old. At "Mirror of the Soul", the post "The Men Have Left The Building"
tells us what happens when men who are not allowed to make demands and
are considered responsible for every social ill respond the only way
they can: they simply walk away.
At the Freakonomics blog, the post "Why Do Beautiful Women Sometimes Marry Unattractive Men?" casually gives us a statistic that is nothing short of devastating to certain worldviews and ideologies if it's true:
According to this news article, “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”
Beauty is apparently just one “female” trait. Kanazawa has done previous research suggesting that nurses, social workers and kindergarten teachers—those with “empathic” traits—also had more daughters than sons. Meanwhile, he found that scientists, mathematicians and engineers are more likely to have sons than daughters.
Indeed. By the way, nobody should be surprised that the professors in humanities tend to be predominantly leftists (being themselves essentially powerless in the real world, they tend to worship brutal power, as explained in the troika of excellent essays "Treason of the Intellectuals, Volume 3", "Why Intellectuals Love Marx" and "Today's treason of the intellectuals"), whereas in the more reality-based fields, this tendency towards leftism is not so dominant. The reasons behind this general disparity in academia are discussed in the post "The Liberal "Bias" in Academia" by Jeffrey Miron. I shall leave the analysis of the real reasons for this disparity for others to dig up, but I can't help but point out how curiously the leftist rhetoric and argumentation swings wildly to answer the question "Why are X vastly overrepresented in the halls of academia?" when X flips through the values "leftists" and "white males". Perhaps some groups are just inherently less intelligent than certain other groups, or perhaps they are not. You can't have this both ways depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment, so please tell me, which way do you really want it?
By the way, speaking of leftists and especially feminists, could you pretty please tell me, just for once in your own words, why it is that you always seem to adore and defend Islam and Muslims so much, considering that even their mainstream stands pretty much in opposition to everything that you guys at least were nominally supposed to represent?
Ooh, I'd love that to hear that one too. For me, the cognitive dissonance proved way too much and I left the sinking ship, by being practically kicked out.
So I suppose there it lies, once you start criticizing Islam you no longer represent REAL leftism/feminism, and cease to be one, and soon find out that you'll be better off finding allies elsewhere.
Posted by Tuomas | 4:41 PM
ooh i'd love that to hear that...
First that=typo
Posted by Tuomas | 4:42 PM
By the way, speaking of leftists and especially feminists, could you pretty please tell me, just for once in your own words, why it is that you always seem to adore and defend Islam and Muslims so much, considering that even their mainstream stands pretty much in opposition to everything that you guys at least were nominally supposed to represent? For a starting point, you can consider [...] "Gays in Iraq Targeted For Murder By Insurgents And Government".
Thanks for the link to my blog.
So what, exactly, in my post about the targeting of gays in Iraq do you think even remotely "adores and defends" the Islamic fascists who do this sort of thing? Or were you not aware that I'm a feminist?
I shall leave the analysis of the real reasons for this disparity for others to dig up, but I can't help but point out how curiously the leftist rhetoric and argumentation swings wildly to answer the question "Why are X vastly overrepresented in the halls of academia?" when X flips through the values "leftists" and "white males".
Interesting that you don't point out how right-wing rhetoric and argumentation swings wildly when answering the question depending on if the value of X is "conservatives" or "black people."
Perhaps some groups are just inherently less intelligent than certain other groups, or perhaps they are not. You can't have this both ways depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment, so please tell me, which way do you really want it?
You're argument is flawed, because people who believe that conservatives are stupider, on average, than liberals, are not making an argument based on inherancy, because being a conservative is a chosen trait, not an inherent trait.
So it's logically consistent for someone to believe that racial groups are not inherently smarter or dumber, and nonetheless believe that conservatives are on average stupider than liberals. (I'm not saying that I personally believe that, just that it's not a logical contradiction to hold both beliefs).
Posted by Ampersand | 7:04 PM
So what, exactly, in my post about the targeting of gays in Iraq do you think even remotely "adores and defends" the Islamic fascists who do this sort of thing? Or were you not aware that I'm a feminist?
Of course I was aware that you are a feminist and a socialist (which in practice are the same thing, really). I was simply using your post as an example of the reality of Islam, the same way that I used Fjordman's post about the Muslim gang rapes in Norway.
In this light, and since you are somewhat of an authority of feminism, I would be interested to hear your opinion/explanation of why the Western leftists and feminists generally seem so very lovey-dovey with Muslims, at least compared to their attitudes towards, say, the American Christians who, by every objective measure you can think of, stand much closer to your side than even the mainstream Muslims. For every post that crucifies Christians as "assholes" and worse, why is it that I haven't seen similar postings about Muslims?
Now that I know that you are reading this, I do also have a few other questions for your side that I have previously asked in my blog:
First, considering the misery that socialism caused during the 20th century, why should self-proclaimed socialists be treated any differently than self-proclaimed pedophiles? Why do socialists think that their socialism makes them morally superior, when we look at the death and misery toll that socialism has caused?
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:09 PM
Ampersand: Interesting that you don't point out how right-wing rhetoric and argumentation swings wildly when answering the question depending on if the value of X is "conservatives" or "black people."
Admittedly, both sides are being selective here when they admit the possibility of systematic discrimination.
However, as Steven Pinker pointed out in his debate against Elisabeth Spelke, if there is systematic academic discrimination against some group, we would expect that group to be underrepresented in the soft sciences, whereas if this underrepresentation is due to that group simply being less intelligent, that group would be underrepresented in the hard and reality-based sciences.
And lo and behold, conservatives are more underrepresented in the humanities and soft sciences, whereas women and blacks are underrepresented in the hard and reality-based sciences. Draw your own conclusions about this asymmetry.
because being a conservative is a chosen trait, not an inherent trait.
This depends on the definition of "can", but I don't believe that people can choose their worldviews that easily. If you do, you could perhaps demonstrate this by choosing to become a conservative, at least for a month or two.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 10:40 PM
"being a conservative is a chosen trait, not an inherent trait."
When you look at the original data in Bouchard's paper on identical twins reared apart (Science, 1990), at least religiousness inside the society is highly inherited. Why not conservativism?
Posted by Anonymous | 3:29 AM
On the question of leftists, feminists and Muslims:
I know that I don't qualify as leftist and never have, but I used to call myself a feminist and also used to have a fairly positive view of Muslims, so here goes:
The idea that everyone else in the world is a person quite similar to oneself, that everyone can live in peace with each other and that most problems stem from misunderstanding (and therefore can be fixed by trying to understand) is in fact quite pleasant and attractive, and makes one feel both safer and more righteous than one otherwise would.
The problem is that in many cases this idea does survive an actual attempt to understand or learn more, or an actual contact with another culture. For me this illusion did not survive the first contact with a large group of Muslims. I ran into a large Muslim demonstration in London in summer 1998, read the posters they were carrying and the leaflets they were giving out and realized that they were the enemy of, well, me. After that I tried to understand, and the more I tried to understand the less I liked them.
I suppose that most leftists who really like Muslims (as opposed to pretending to in order to get cookie points) are either people who don't run into them very often (or know a few perfectly normal secular Muslims and extrapolate this experience to the rest of the Muslim population) or people who tend to have problems with reality as such.
Most, I think, are just pretending.
Posted by Vera | 8:35 AM
Perhaps we all could have different airoplanes for muslims, so there would be no problem anymore.
If they want to travel in peace, it is OK, and if they want to explode themselfs, they can do it together and everybody else is saved.
Posted by Anonymous | 12:26 PM
However, as Steven Pinker pointed out in his debate against Elisabeth Spelke, if there is systematic academic discrimination against some group, we would expect that group to be underrepresented in the soft sciences, whereas if this underrepresentation is due to that group simply being less intelligent, that group would be underrepresented in the hard and reality-based sciences.
And lo and behold, conservatives are more underrepresented in the humanities and soft sciences, whereas women and blacks are underrepresented in the hard and reality-based sciences. Draw your own conclusions about this asymmetry.
Well, clearly this is because those oppresive, racist, patriarchal males will have to have their white, heterosexual, masculine etc, privilege extracted from them by force. You surely don't expect them to give it up voluntarily do you?
Posted by Loki on the run | 4:19 PM
To Anonymous
excelent idea. I have been saing that for long time. We have in the city stadium that take 100000 spectators plus another 50000 on grass. Round up all Mohameds,Mahmouds,Abduls etc and then "KABOOOM" strait to heaven to their virgins. Everybody will be happy.
Pumpkin
Posted by Lexcen | 12:20 AM