to be or not to be
It would be so easy to just become a progressive – to join the chorus of Leftists all quoting the same bad science, the same dead end economics, the same top heavy political and labor groupthink that follows leadership in lock step without dissent. What a simpler existence! You take all of the messy bits of reality that don’t fit the progressive agenda, and just forget about the lot of it. Who cares if it means ignoring that pesky scientific method with its difficult cause-and-effect that requires evidence to found a conclusion. What a royal pain. Forget all that stuff. They don’t use it anyway.
The planet is not warming up. Peak energy gets freshly refuted every month. Top down dictatorship, whether its religious or political spectacularly fails like clockwork every time it’s tried. Human creativity and invention just ruin the rationing/postcarbon/degrowth agenda. But none of it matters to progressives. All of it just rolls off their backs like water off a mallard.
Inside the climate controlled atmosphere of progressive armor, the weather is fine. The days are pleasant, not too hot or cold. And when dissonant ideas attempt to penetrate the ramparts, a ready made script of rules for radicals, like leukocytes to a wound, closes the breach, and obviates the necessity for further thought.
You almost have to admire the simplicity of a system capable of a-priori refutation of all competing ideas without ever having to actually construct a cogent counter argument. And the substitution of physical force for intellectual reason is a stroke of brilliance. Might is right. Who knew? Who would’ve thought that a group could actually succeed on brute force alone! I mean, most groups in history who gained power through force and suppression at least paid lip service to some novel idea. But not progressives!
Ideas just gum things up and get in the way of their experiencing the quiet contemplation of pure power. Best not to break stride. Just keep marching. Keep chanting. Keep demonstrating. Keep shouting. Keep fighting. Cause harm, and if necessary, kill. The willingness to kill gives them all the edge they need. Barbarity works.
History contains many lessons for winning strategies that don’t require intellectual honesty, provable science, fairness, justice, or moral approval. The progressives learned to get their way by walking through the opposition, not around them. And it doesn’t matter what the opposition is saying. Just shut them up, shut them down, ignore them, ridicule them, stomp them, and march on.
The pleasant weather around the well insulated powerful progressive is worth protecting. It is its own reward – a tautological compact of self-referential and self-reinforcing happiness that will not be disturbed.
And just look at what you have to look forward to if you don’t join them. Those who don’t join the progressive movement are an enemy to be crushed. They get to receive every indignation and insult known to man on a daily basis. They get to have all of their reasonable world view, proven in science, demonstrated in unrevised history to maximize real human progress and wealth, ridiculed as insanity.
So this is why I say maybe it would just be easier to join them. Take the blue pill and get with their program because the real world is full of nasty progressives who don’t want you messing with their matrix.
the Sultan speaks
Here we go
From:
Roman v. Yampolskiy and Joshua Fox, Artificial General Intelligence and the Human Mental Model, Chapter 7 of Singularity Hypotheses.
“Hall* classifies future AGIs [Artificial General Intelligences], making the point that we should not expect AI systems to ever have closely humanlike distributions of ability, given that computers are already superhuman in some areas. So, despite its anthropocentric nature, his classification highlights the range of possibilities as well as the arbitrariness of the human intelligence point of reference. His classification encompasses
- hypohuman (infrahuman, less-than-human capacity),
- diahuman (human level capacities in some areas, but still not a general intelligence),
- parahuman (similar but not identical to humans, as for example, augmented humans),
- allohuman (as capable as humans, but in different areas),
- epihuman (slightly beyond the human level), and
- hyperhuman (much more powerful than human).”
*Hall, J.S. (2007). Beyond AI: Creating the conscience of the machine. Amherst: Prometheus.
I know what some of you are thinking. So and so is definitely hypo. Come on now. . .he’s talking about machines.
Chris Abani
Mr. Abani begins at 11:25.
Zoned Out
Why and how we should seek to restore a free market in land
MARCH 18, 2014 by NATHAN SMITH
I once knew a man who was finishing his basement so that his daughter and son-in-law could live there. I spent a lot of hours down there with a nail gun before the city planners nixed the project. My in-laws in Modesto, California, had to move out of their house into a mobile home on their own farm, because their kids needed a place to live. The law, for some reason, allowed them to put a mobile home there if seniors would be living in it, but not to accommodate a young family.
In run-ins with zoning laws, ordinary people encounter the perversity of government firsthand in ways that should make them receptive to the message of freedom and property. [Read more…]
Go to the sources, get answers
Okay. So the Prairie Times Advertisers are the reason I get this political fishwrap in my mailbox free – unrequested – every month, featuring diatribes and screeds from every present and past Elbert County Democrat Party official, Leftist candidate, former Leftist candidate, anti-oil&gas fractivist, and private-property-confiscating communitarian planner.
Fair enough. At least now I know who to talk to about it.
Maybe if each person out there picks just one advertiser to encourage, perhaps this excuse for news can develop into something worth reading some day.
Volcano Eruption in Papua New Guinea
Starlings came by today
Evan Sayet
customers eat, beneficiaries starve
Human nature is imperfect. It always was, and so long as we remain human, it always will be. The American Founders built a government system adapted to our imperfect human nature. No other system of government contains mechanisms to mitigate the harmful effects of our imperfect human nature.
The free market also resolves human imperfections. Suppliers and demanders imperfectly attempt to maximize their worth by agreeing on a price for a given exchange of goods or services. Price is the flexible point where they voluntarily meet, and price can be moved by either party to a transaction depending on how each deals with their imperfect circumstances.
The market flexibly harmonizes imperfections while providing the necessary incentives for trade to occur. Without trade, without a market, no substantial incentives exist. Without incentives, goods do not get made and trade does not occur. When trade does not exist, buyers don’t have anything to buy, and everyone stays poorer.
Humans are motivated by the opportunity to benefit themselves more than they are motivated by the opportunity to benefit others. The Left use the pejorative of greed when speaking of our human nature of self interest. But this is our nature. It is neither good nor bad. It’s just the way humans generally are.
With equal validity you could say that it’s human nature to have sex and therefore sex is bad. Oh wait a minute; a lot of people do say that. Let’s not kick that sleeping dog just now.
Which makes more sense to advocate – political and economic systems that offend our human nature, or ones that work with our human nature? The question answers itself and the overwhelming evidence affirms the answer.
Where humans have worked out their differences, their disequilibriums, their inequalities, and their variances through objective, constitutional, rule-of-law-based governments and associated free markets, they have done best.
Where humans have had their political and economic incentives removed through command economics and totalitarian governments, they have done worst.
This is the most important lesson of history, and the Left has still not learned it.
I read Jean Ziegler‘s Betting on Famine. Ziegler is a Social Democrat who worked for the UN and answers the question in his book, “Why the World Still Goes Hungry?”
He reasons that global corporate food oligarchies control food and associated supply-chain product markets to maximize profits, that these same markets inhibit subsistence farming around the world because it competes with their control of food, that sufficient food is a basic human right, that there is more than enough food produced to go around so that no one should starve, and that the free market misallocates food and causes starvation.
Aye yai yai.
Ziegler’s solution – “In parliaments, in international regulatory authorities, we can decide that there must be change; we can decide to make the right to food a priority, to remove food from the realm of market speculation, to protect subsistence agriculture in the name of national heritage and invest in improving it worldwide. The solutions exist; the plans and projects are already drafted. What is lacking is the will of governments.”
Ziegler, the Social Democrats, and the Left think we can just decide to change human nature. You might think, “But this has never been done.” And you’d be right. It’s never been done because it can’t be done. Our nature is our nature. Denying it will only result in predictably negative consequences that come from denial.
If you want to see starvation really take off and become much worse than it already is, put government in control of the food supply. Governments have already re-allocated food resources toward energy production. Governments are funding the growth of food, only to turn around and burn it up.
When governments make mistakes, they create invested constituencies who have financial incentives to resist changes to the government policy. Moreover, government programs are funded from taxpayer revenue which continues to flow regardless of the success of the program. There’s no outcome feedback loop to correct a government mistake. And there’s always the shouting constituency narrowly focused on their government benefit to drown out more sober analysis.
When markets make mistakes, they quickly self correct because no one buys the mistake and it quickly becomes unfunded and goes away.
Unsubsidized markets would have abandoned wind, solar, and food-robbing ethanol long ago. And fewer people would be starving today.
