Your group identity is not your cardinal feature. That’s the great discovery of the west. That’s why the west is right. And I mean that unconditionally. The west is the only place in the world that has ever figured out that the individual is sovereign. And that’s an impossible thing to figure out. It’s amazing that we managed it. And it’s the key to everything that we’ve ever done right
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January 24th, 2018 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
What, might you ask, has troubled this person? Let me adumbrate that the writer is (afaik) a woman, remarking on a lack of respect for women, which is not shown to men. But do not be too concerned, it is not a lack of respect for the particular woman’s professional abilities that drives this, the writer goes on, I parse, for what will be obvious reasons.
So clearly there is sexism going on here. So why isn’t reason working? I have some bad ‘news’ for this disheartened professional. The disrespectful ones are, it turns out, not going to listen to reason, as they are… baboons (4th answer). Which gives me an wonderful opportunity to stretch the evolutionary tree and crowbar in Jordan Peterson and Lobsters, watch and treasure, standing up straight with your shoulders back. January 23rd, 2018 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
As those regimes demonstrated, Peterson’s claim that identity politics is “genocidal in its ultimate expression” is no exaggeration. Hitler’s military invasions and death camps were the ultimate expression of the racialist and nationalist identity politics that spiritually drove Nazism. And Stalin’s weaponized famines and “gulag archipelago” were the ultimate expression of the class warfare identity politics that spiritually drove Soviet communism. – Dan Sanchez, discussing Jordan Peterson January 23rd, 2018 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oxfam have, again, come up with a gross misrepresentation of world poverty which fails to line up with everything else we know about human advancement and income improvements. Demonising capitalism may be fashionable in the affluent Western world but it ignores the millions of people who have risen out of poverty as a result of free markets. – Mark Littlewood, summing up why I would never give a toxic outfit like Oxfam a penny. Oxfam is part of the problem, not part of the solution. January 22nd, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the great tragedies of the NHS is that it has unnecessarily turned health into a Zero Sum Game. Because it has a limited budget, money spent on one treatment means that it cannot be spent on others. It therefore has to make life and death decisions based on what those running it perceive to be its priorities. January 21st, 2018 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
A defendant who makes the wrong choice will wind up in jail; a prosecutor who charges improperly will suffer little, if any, adverse consequence beyond a poor win/loss record. Prosecutors are even absolutely immune from lawsuits over misconduct in their prosecutorial capacity. So I think we should give prosecutors some skin in the game. Let juries be informed that they may refuse to convict if they think a conviction is unjust — and, if that happens, let the defendants’ attorney fees and other costs be billed to the government. Also, let juries be informed that, if they believe the prosecution itself was malicious or unfair, they can make that finding — in which case the defendants’ costs should come out of the prosecutor’s budget. (If you want to get even tougher, you could provide that the prosecutors involved should be disqualified from law practice for a year or stripped of their immunity from civil suit. But I’m not sure we need to go that far). January 19th, 2018 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rather than having a “Minister for Loneliness“, how about not having one? How about the state just maintains basic order, fills in a few street potholes & then minds its own frigging business? The state is not your friend – Perry de Havilland January 17th, 2018 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the NHS, unforeseen demand simply results in more queuing and rationing. Given that budgets are largely fixed by the political process, and resources are allocated to different parts of the service based on highly speculative demand estimates, deviations in demand can lead to acute shortages. Of course, on the margin, having more resources can help. An NHS awash with cash would no doubt be under less pressure than it is today. But no reasonable amount of funding would solve these structural economic realities entirely. There is a reason the NHS has these winter crises regularly, and other countries do not January 16th, 2018 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mercantilists literally believe (even when they deny the belief) that money is wealth – that to accumulate money is to accumulate wealth and that to spend money is to become less wealthy. This mercantilist “reasoning” is why, for example, mercantilists applaud exports (because exports are sold for money) and lament imports (because imports are paid for with money). Thus the mercantilist obsession with the balance of payments. Economists counter this mercantilist belief by pointing out that money is valuable only because it can be exchanged for real goods and services. Ultimately, wealth is not money and money is not wealth; ultimately wealth is the use of real goods and services. People who envy Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Dave the hedge-fund manager across town don’t really envy Jeff’s, Bill’s, or Dave’s possession of billions of Federal Reserve Notes (or of pieces of paper or streams of electronic bits that are easily convertible into dollars or some other currency). What the envious envy is Jeff’s, Bill’s, and Dave’s luxurious homes, luxury automobiles, private jets, top-rate medical care, and regular consumption of other real goods and services that are not affordable in the same quantities by less-wealthy people. January 15th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
When there are no unemployed then the various capitalists are in competition with each other to find the labour they wish to exploit. That competition raising the price paid for the labour, that is, wages go up. Full employment really does mean wages rise. It’s worth noting that minimum wages have somewhere between little and nothing to do with this. The current Federal such is $7.25 an hour. Walmart already pays $10 an hour, from next month $11. Competition in markets is thus very much more powerful than legislation, no? January 14th, 2018 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
That’s a movement I want no part of. Or, as I like to put it—because I’m neither a feminist nor much of a lady: Count me the fuck out. If you’re a woman, I encourage you to join me—count yourself the fuck out of what feminism has become. I have been fortunate enough to met Amy, and she is quite simply marvellous. Added bonus from Alice Smith on twitter. January 13th, 2018 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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