Category Archives: Life
Nearing The Event Horizon
Population keeps on breeding
Nation bleeding, still more feeding economy-Ten Years After – “I’d Love To Change The World”
This Daily Caller piece calls for “de-growth” –
Environmentalists are pushing a new way to deal with global warming and overpopulation: the U.S. needs to “de-grow” its economy.
What is “de-growth”? It means forcing people to work less to make them more equal, consume fewer goods and use less electricity. Think of it like camping, but for the rest of your life.
…“There’s no such thing as sustainable growth, not in a country like the U.S.,” Worldwatch senior fellow Erik Assadourian told Sierra Magazine.
…De-growing the economy means working less and consuming fewer goods and electricity… “If we had a livable wage and could each work a 20-hour week,” Assadourian said, “we’d have time to choose more sustainable options that are also better for ourselves.”
…About a month ago, former Vice President Al Gore suggested that “fertility management” was crucial to fighting global warming and promoting development in poor countries.
The article covers quite a few pages from the Progressive textbook … shrinking the economy, reducing population, forced equality, mandated wages coupled with higher taxes, increased leisure time, and a simultaneous worship and fear of science. But all these are driven by one concern – a belief that everything is zero-sum consumption.
There’s no allowance for replenishment of goods and resources, or that more people might result in more production. Nothing that resembles, you know, work. It’s pure consumption. And they want to reduce the competition.
Red Days And Green Flowers
Uptown
It’s murder
Out in the street
So I’m talking to Allamagoosa while Pandora Radio is playing and this song comes on. “Oh, there’s a cheerful Valentine’s Day song… especially if you consider the massacre.”
Since she’s a fan of anime and many things Japanese, does that make her my Mandarin Plum?
Social Fairness
Brent Parrish on The Inequality of Equality, and questioning the concept of “social justice.” It’s not too long, check it out.
Where most Social Justice types get hung up is confusing fairness for justice. What’s fair is not always necessarily just.
The hot trend among social justice crusaders nowadays is “income inequality.” This parallels another problem, which I believe is just as serious – Traffic Inequality. It’s not fair that Sunshine Mary and Donal Graeme, among others,¹ get more readers than I do.
Clearly, the answer is to redistribute readers. Enacting a Minimum Traffic law would transfer excess readers from high-traffic sites to writers like myself who fall under the Readership Poverty Line. Seriously, does Mary really need all of her (as of this writing) 1,378,008 hits, compared to my 9,923? That’s over one million more hits, and she only started writing about 3 weeks before I did (and if we consider that those numbers only track her current site, I’m actually about 8 months ahead). If she cared, she would distribute some of those hits to the rest of us.
Under the labor theory of value which many SJ crusaders seem to subscribe to, I should get the same amount of traffic as SSM, and more than Donal. So why should they get more traffic?
Readers – like most incomes – aren’t distributed, they are earned. Value isn’t determined by labor, but by the benefit one gains from the product. Other writers post material that readers place a higher value on, and so those readers are more likely to return. More people want to read about traditional sex roles or the definition of Game than about 3D printing firearms or Batman vs. Donkey Kong. One might even argue that they are better writers than I am.²
Those others also post on a more consistent schedule than I do, which attracts and keeps readers. They also promote their work more than I do. They’re the 8 PM show five nights a week and get paid accordingly, whereas I show up Saturday night and hang around the parking lot after hours entertaining a few friends and passersby with off-the-wall stories for tips and free sodas.
No one held a gun to anyone’s head and forced them to read SSM or Donal or whoever over me.³ Unfair as it might be, it’s not unjust. Trying to get readers from them by any means other than writing to suit the existing market – or finding a new one – would be coercion, which is both unfair and unjust.
¹ Waaayyy too many others. A pimp can’t catch a break these days.
² Stop smoking crack. Your mom would be so ashamed.
³ Okay, Donal might have. He’s tricky like that.
The Art Of Capitalism
Jesse Myerson posts at Salon Why You’re Wrong About Communism: 7 Huge Misconceptions About It (And Capitalism).
My favorite part is when he ends the piece with this claim –
…most of the greatest art under capitalism has always come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz, rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the “entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to believe that we are free.
Cafe Hayek (where I found out about this) quickly and efficiently dismantles this claim –
Overlook the questionable claim that most great artists under capitalism were oppressed and alienated. (Were Lennon and McCartney, Berry Gordy, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and Andy Warhol truly “oppressed and alienated”? How about Jackson Pollock? Thomas Hardy? Ernest Hemingway? Lawrence Olivier? Raymond Loewy?) Focus instead on the critical reality that, in fact, there are countless great artists, and Niagaras of profound art, produced under capitalism. The same cannot be said for communism.
The reason is simple. Capitalism supplies artists not only with abundant materials and media for producing and sharing their works, but also with the freedom and personal space for them to create. In stark contrast, communism necessarily prohibits would-be artists from pursuing their muses. All means of production under communism are owned by the state, and, hence, remain off-limits to artists whose individual plans do not mesh with the central plan.
I hadn’t seen Myerson’s piece when I did this post of my own earlier, but mine suggests a basic flaw in his claim – would a communist society permit a publishing house to print sympathetic stories about a character who fought for the enemy side in the biggest war it had ever seen?
He’s half right about great artists often being alienated and oppressed. But this isn’t political, it’s social alienation… sometimes actively rejected by peers, other times because of their own issues which have nothing to do with anyone else’s reaction to them. Artists are usually different from most people. If anything, capitalism helps them reach out and speak to other rare people like them.
There’s another way that capitalism has helped artists. In the 1950s, profits from their high-selling horror magazines allowed E.C. Comics to subsidize the science fiction books they wanted to do. Until Congress threatened to censor them, that is (shades of communism).
MegaExtremeUltimate Table Tennis
Long shots, injury, and (literally) demolishing the boundaries of table tennis.
Reframing The Conversation
SCENE: NSR walks into the room just after Allamagoosa has just rolled out of bed, and has not had breakfast yet.
NSR: (walks up behind her to give her a hug) Love you.
Allie’s belly: *bloorrrp*
(beat)
NSR: I’m gonna interpret that as I give you butterflies in your stomach.
The Day After
All across America, people are just now waking up from their New Year’s Eve partying (which often continued well into New Year’s Day), and greeting each other. (Not to be viewed by those with delicate constitutions)
2013
…can be chronologically arranged into 0123. Not for any good reason, though.
Had a terrific year and found me a keeper. We have run into a bit of friction, however…
What they don’t tell you in pre-marital counseling
Happy New Year!
Red Pill Blues
Some notes for any newcomers to so-called “Red Pill” sites.
It seems the term “Red Pill” is well past the point of liquefaction by now.
The term was borrowed from The Matrix to describe “waking up” and realizing much of one’s beliefs and assumptions were wrong. In the Androsphere, it’s long since mutated into shorthand for A Quick Fix Of Truth.
In the movie, all the Red Pill ever did for anyone was incontrovertibly show them that everything they had been taught was wrong. That’s it. No magic knowledge, no automatic grasp of Reality As it Really Is. Much screen time was spent showing Neo after his unplugging, asking questions and being taught what was real.
Many people who “take the red pill” simply trade out one set of canned phrases and buzzwords for a new set of memes and buzzwords. It’s akin to realizing that there’s no Apollo carrying the Sun across the sky in his chariot, and being told that the Sun revolves around the Earth. A growing amount of what passes for “Red Pill wisdom” is based on a pre-packaged set of assumptions derived solely from surface observations.
Much like “taking the Red Pill” does not replace old (erroneous) knowledge with new, it doesn’t undo the cumulative effects of years of Blue Pill thinking. Just because someone knows what’s wrong doesn’t mean he knows what’s right. Referencing the movie again, after Neo was freed he still thought and reasoned the same as before. He had to unlearn all his previous habits and gradually replace them with new ones.
A lifetime of pattern and habit isn’t discarded overnight
The fooferah over Mark Minter was an example of this. A number of guys took the advice to stop placing women on a pedestal – and immediately replaced them with some guy who talked a good game.
Another example around these parts would be Men’s Rights Activists claim society is unfairly tilted against men. I don’t follow MRA sites too closely, so I can’t say how many of their claims are correct or not, but they do seem to raise several good points. However, even if they are 100% correct in identifying problems, they are still rooting their solutions in the prevailing framework of group identity and entitlement.
So what if you’ve saved the entire planet over a dozen times… what have you done for my group lately?
Despite their intentions, the general result is that MRAs aren’t campaigning for justice for all so much as pushing for their group to get identical treatment as other groups. They’re switching one effect for a different one, but it stems from the same cause – still stuck in the same victim mentality as those they fight.
To be fair, not too many people have come to “Red Pill” sites in the past without already having questioned some or most of their beliefs. However, as the androsphere has been growing and getting steadily increasing exposure, more people are tripping over it and thinking “Hey, this sounds good” and claiming to have switched to the Red Pill as easily as changing one’s socks. These, as I noted recently, are generally the ones looking for a purpose, who have no direction in their lives and are searching for someone to give them a readymade one. They accept small, easy-to-swallow fragments of the so-called Red Pill, already heavily diluted by careless parroting into a copy of a copy of a copy – with all the errors and artifacts that creep in – fitting relatively neatly into the pre-existing Blue Pill framework that they’ve been indoctrinated into for years, and that’s the end of it.
The analogy Dalrock has used (I don’t know if he originated it or merely ran with it) was of the sunglasses in They Live. This works better because even after discovering much of what one knows is wrong, one still has to go forth and discern what is right. Much like Roddy Piper trying to navigate the city and constantly finding new things that were previously hidden, a “red pill” person has to continually keep peeling back the layers to find truth.
That, and the idea of glasses helping one see better is pretty fitting.
nightskyradio 