So, how did it happen? Richwine, the Harvard intellectual, thought he could discuss perhaps the most radioactive subject in America — a mixture of race, ethnicity, and group intelligence — in the context of another highly controversial topic — immigration — and act as if it were all a matter of scholarly inquiry.
That bastard. He thought for one minute that he lived in a nation run by adults.
Today at this blog we are embracing the word cunt, because there are a lot of cunts out there and my usual policies for keeping them out of my view sprung a few leaks this week. Look no further than Lisa Miller, a cunt. This cunt observes that “the boy who spent hours Friday night hiding in a boat in Watertown could have been one of the charming 19-year-olds at your last backyard party.” Yes people, there are murderers lurking everywhere; you can tell them by their facial hair and penises and that they are probably raping you. She characterizes testosterone as an “aggression drug,” making me wonder whether estrogen isn’t a “cunt drug.”
Here again we see the emerging willingness to acknowledge differences between the sexes when it can be used to attack men. I have another exclusively male set of people about as tiny as the set of rage killers: Fields Medalists. But that’s because discrimination.
I’m a young man, and Lisa Miller’s cunty cunt has made me angry. I have enough self control and enough of a life at stake not to find her and blow her up. But I wouldn’t be mad if someone else who couldn’t be persuaded not to kill himself would go and do it. Because that’s what these guys and all others whom Miller mentioned in her column have done: killed themselves. Lots of young men in Western countries kill themselves—maybe it has something to do with cunts telling them they’re good-for-nothing savages.
Ok. Time to put this in perspective. The “girls can do anything as good as boys” mantra seems benign enough. But what are its direct logical implications? Combine the false statement that women are as good as men at everything with the true statement that men commit more crimes, suffer more mental illnesses, report being less happy generally than women, et cetera, and you get “Girls can do anything boys can do. And boys hurt people. So what do we need them for again?” This isn’t just the particular outlook of some particularly cunty people. It is actually the necessary and valid logical consequence of a particular false proposition—the proposition of sex equality. I have explained this more thoroughly here.
The idea of a minimum income has been around for a long time. (Often introduced with a funny kind of ad hominem, that Milton Friedman was a proponent.)
At any point in time, the recipient is indifferent between a check which has the words “minimum state-guaranteed income” printed on it and one that says “dividend on capital.” To the recipient, there are two main differences between the two. The first is that you can’t sell the government’s promise to pay you the minimum income, but you can sell capital assets. This leads to the idea that the minimum income is either equivalent to, or could be replaced by, a “forced savings” regime in which would-be indigents are not permitted to divest themselves of capital below a certain level. Dividends accruing on that level are the minimum income.
The other difference, though, between capital assets and a state-guaranteed minimum income, is that shares in the nation’s (world’s, whatever) capital assets don’t magically split every time someone has a baby. The promise to pay everyone just for being alive, does. I’m skipping some expository steps here because I doubt very many people will read this, but the unavoidable conclusion is this: no society can collectivize responsibility for the maintenance of a minimum income while privatizing (keeping private) the decision to bear children. It can’t be done, not in the long term anyway.
The minimum asset portfolio or “forced savings” scheme fails to achieve its visible goals for the same reason: the people who need to be forced to save are the same people who will have “too many” babies and dilute their portfolios among their posterity, who will be poor again. Either you start those babies out with a state-issued portfolio, which case reduces back to a guaranteed minimum income program, or you don’t, which case reduces to nothing at all.
One response to this, which I think ought not to be dismissed out of hand, is: so what? Some people will be poor (“poor”) and some won’t. Birthrates among the less productive will be lower than they are in a welfare state but higher than they’d have to be to maintain some arbitrarily acceptable level of consumption. To anyone who says it’s not fair being born poor, the partial response would be to ask whether it was better not being born at all. (There is the mathematical possibility of a Malthusian trap in this scenario, which would force us into a different response.)
Another response which I’ll deal with quickly is that “charity” could be called upon to raise consumption levels among this population. This doesn’t affect my point. Either the charity comes without strings, which makes it, for the purpose of this discussion anyway, the same as the state-guaranteed minimum income idea, or else it does come with Victorian Era-type strings on it, which validates my point that collective responsibility for consumption levels necessitates a collective stake in the baby-making decision. (Which, if it is to have any teeth, means denying compassionate charity to people who do certain things like bear bastards or abuse drugs. The libertarian policy on this point is usually to not discuss it.)
Another thing to do is acknowledge my conclusion from the other end: collectivize the baby-making decision among the indigents. Make sterility a condition for receiving minimum-income checks. This is another idea that has been suggested many times before and shouldn’t be rejected out of hand. We have very cheap, safe, effective technologies for keeping women from getting pregnant for extended periods of time.
The thing I’m getting at here is that welfare payments are not simply transfers from a static population of responsible productive people to a static population of ¬responsible ∪ ¬productive people—and the effects go far beyond the normally-discussed labor substitution effect of taxation. There’s no way to effect those transfers without subsidizing baby-making among the latter and literally taxing it among the former. Hence, dynamic population effects.
The whole discussion should highlight an important general point: You can’t do economics without thinking about sex and babies. The basic Solow model includes population growth but only in a basic way: population grows exogenously at a linear rate, and, of course, all babies are the same. As a simplifying mathematical device, this is acceptable; as a statement about the world, it’s idiotic. The Solow model is a triumph, but like anything its limitations are as important as its insights.
This post has direct implications for immigration. It also tells you something about the glorious progressive future: the cultural inertia that protects the relationship between parents and children and the freedom to reproduce won’t hold out forever, because mathematically it cannot. This is already happening.
Steve Sailer — To fight sexism, Coachella should have Celine Dion headline
Some cunt:
… Still, this doesn’t excuse Coachella [for offering mostly male-fronted acts]. Each of these measures [some measures of mainstream popularity that the cunt cites], chosen not by planners but by unplanned democratic consensus, celebrates many more female voices than that festival does.
[...]
As the festivals expand beyond their narrow roots, maybe fans and organizers should start to take the commercially and critically successful female acts they currently deride more seriously.
Steve’s summary:
The basic issue is that rock music traditionally celebrates artistic diversity and innovation, which comes overwhelmingly from men. Women are more conformist and less driven, so they are less likely to push the envelope. This is a general conundrum in culture in the 21st Century: We are supposed to celebrate diversity and we are supposed to admire the épater le bourgeois spirit that motivated Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and so forth. No problem, right? Except that the épater urge and achievement was — and remains — strongest in white males.
My summary: How about you cunts stop telling people what to like? (And what relevance could “democratic consensus” have to a ticketed rock festival? People are paying to go there precisely because they don’t like the shit on the radio. Further proof of the monolithic nature of the commie/femmie/prog establishment.) Music is not safe. Nothing is safe. If you don’t get that by now, you deserve it.
Here a picture of the person who wrote the article. Worth a thousand words.
Forrest Wickman, paid professional cunt
So the bitcoin coverage has officially gone mainstream, with articles from tons of the big publications. I was planning to post when the price reached $100 but I missed that milestone, and the damn things are $140 a pop as of this morning.
Connecting bitcoin to the madness in Cyprus: Bitcoin prices surge post-Cyprus bailout
Even The New Yorker chiming in: The Bitcoin Boom
The two big questions remain:
Is bitcoin a viable currency for storing wealth as well as spending? A ton more people would be apt to answer yes today than at the time of my previous post last year. It’s not enough to just look at its flaws and conclude that it’s no good. You have to compare those flaws to those of the “default” state-issued currencies. Sure, bitcoin isn’t tangible, or backed by anything, but guess what: Neither are most of our US dollars. Forget being backed by gold; they’re not even backed by paper. It’s mostly just computer entries too. The marvels of fractional reserve banking.
Can bitcoin survive a government crackdown? I don’t know, and it looks like the jury’s still out on this one. Here’s a qualified reservation from Jim’s favorite curmudgeon: RIP Bitcoin, I think
One thing is clear: If states do come down on bitcoin and its users with full force, that ought to convince a whole new segment of the population that the government is not our friend.
Here is a recipe for you. It is not complex but does call on a few basic skills. It produces an attractive, delicious dish which is nutritionally pristine, unless you’re avoiding dairy.
Ingredients:
Arrange the beets in a roasting pan. I used my extremely versatile 8.5 qt aluminum “dutch oven” pot from Calphalon, which I’ve had for ten years. Brush the beets lightly with olive oil and put them in the oven uncovered at 425°F. Start the clock. Dice the shallots finely. Pick the leaves off the sage and chop them up. Remove the stems from the spinach. At about 20 min, put the pork in the pan with the beets. Salt and pepper everything. Stick a kitchen thermometer in to the thickest piece of pork, axially. Now you have to check this periodically until the pork gets up to about 160°F. When it does, place the pan on the stove, remove the pork and the beets. If there is an excessive amount of liquid fat there, dump some of it out. Add the shallots. Apply high heat. When the shallots are brown, deglaze the pan with the vermouth. This is accomplished by splashing the vermouth around the inside of the pan while scraping up all of that crap which will be stuck to the surface of the pan with a wooden (or plastic) spatula. When you have all of that up, and the steam no longer smells like booze, reduce the heat. Add the sage and gradually add the cream. Add salt and pepper. Reduce this sauce, slowly. Now you can peel and chop the beets. This was my first time doing that and it was kind of a pain, but you may have better luck because my beets were underdone. Slice the pork. Don’t forget to stir the sauce. When it has reduced and started to look somewhat thick you can dump it on the pork and throw the spinach in. This will cook in no time, and then you’re finished. Eat. You could garnish the pork slices with chopped green onion or parsley or whatever.
So, this is a pretty reliable general formula. You roast some meat in a pan (with a thermometer!) with some root vegetables of some kind. You sauté a green vegetable. You create some kind of sauce from the pan. You can deglaze with lots of different liquids, usually something acidic like wine, cider, lemon juice. You can use different spices besides sage. Here’s how you choose: smell the spice, smell the meat (yup sniff the raw meat, imagine how it tastes when it is cooked). Go back and forth like that until you decide whether you’re on to something. Instead of shallots you can use garlic and/or onions. You can use celery. You can use mirepoix. You can use mushrooms. You don’t want to use cream every time; after sautéing whatever you go with, add butter and possibly some kind of stock.
I just taught you how to cook better than 90% of your peers. You’re welcome.
Roosh is entering his late or high period. He has moved on from points that were innovative but also assured of a broadly good reception, and started to post things that many of his readers are pushing back against. Here’s one post that I disagreed with and that long time commenters and forum members rebuked.
Roosh’s cultural sensitivity remains poignant:
When an American girl turns 21 and begins to hit the clubs in stride, unburdened by her college social circle, she is unsure how exactly to take being approached so much. It may initially seem neat to her, but then she goes onto Jezebel to read how game is stupid and how even nice guys are evil. She reads advice columns telling her that she can have it all while playing the field in her twenties and even early thirties. She reads a news report about how important Slut Walks are in empowering women. She hears Obama saying how it’s unfair that woman make less than men. And finally she sees a book in Barnes & Noble about how men have turned into little kids that need to man up.
Her mind is unable to resist these influences since they come in the form of a nonstop assault that happens to confirm with what she’s learned about men in her university elective courses. Enabling now takes place. She will begin to see men approaching her as inferiors and as a nuisance, treating them with disdain and disrespect. The uglification process begins soon after, giving her faux self-esteem and confidence in being ugly and masculine. When she hits 25, she is stronger and more empowered than men her age.
She stays single and sleeps with the men who can keep her turned on for a couple hours without saying a bad line. These men are not as handsome as those who approached her when she was 18 and 19, before she began shopping at Lane Bryant, but the marginal cost of being skinny would only get her a guy one point higher. The result is a fat girl who mildly hates men, never reproduces, and has well over 50 sexual partners by the time her body gives up releasing eggs.
Dalrock — The Long March of Envy
I endorse every word of that post. This man Dalrock understands the central dogma of feminism: 100% choice, 0% obligation. While many billions of words have already been transmitted about the recent symbolic decision to allow women in combat roles, these words deal with a particular kind of naïve reaction to it, and cut more clearly than anything else I’ve read to the real issue.
