But he has no enemies to the left, and no friends to the right, which means that all his friends are his enemies, and all his enemies are his friends. It would seem like there’s a mutual respect and camaraderie between Scott Alexander (and also Scott Adams), who represents the ‘rational middle’ or ‘rational left‘,… Continue reading Scott, Utilitarians, The Rational Middle, Scientism, and Liberals
Month: February 2016
Negative Interest Rates
This idiot, like that loser Peter Schiff who has been wrong about the economy and stock market for years, is predicting pandemonium if the fed embarks on negative interest rates. The last hurrah of central banks is the negative interest rate policy–NIRP. The basic idea of NIRP is to punish savers so severely that households… Continue reading Negative Interest Rates
Trump’s America
From the WSJ, by Charles Murray: Trump’s America In writing for the WSJ, Murray must skirt around ‘IQ’, which is a major contributing factor for the decline of the ‘middle’. Murray knows this, too – he wrote a whole book about it: The Bell Curve. But since people, I guess, are too easily triggered by… Continue reading Trump’s America
Is America Really ‘Dumbing Down’?
It has become a common refrain among pundits on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ to lament that America is in a state of ‘dumbing down’, with examples of pop culture (Keeping up With the Kardashians, MTV, etc) and education (political correctness in curriculum, SJWs on campus, etc) as evidence of America’s alleged intellectual decline.… Continue reading Is America Really ‘Dumbing Down’?
Intellect: The Universal Solvent
In late December 2015, Scott Alexander’s How Bad Are Things article went massivly viral, with accolades from both right-wing and left-wing communities and forums, which got me (and others) thinking about how Scott is consistently able to transcend the left/right bulwark. Normally, people write articles for a specific audience or clique in mind, and spillovers… Continue reading Intellect: The Universal Solvent
Web 2.0 & the Economy: It’s Different This Time, Part 2
In the past month, there have been a plethora of doom and gloom articles about web 2.0, Silicon Valley, the economy, and start-ups. In this series, I address some of the major concerns, arguing that perhaps the negativity is not all warranted. Part 1 From Amerika.org: The coming dot-com 3.0 collapse: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon… Continue reading Web 2.0 & the Economy: It’s Different This Time, Part 2
The Esoteric Celebrity
Intellectualism, wealth, and the entanglement of the two has become the new nobility or religion in America today, with thousand – maybe millions – of disciples and acolytes following in the footsteps of our ennobled intellectual sainthood and priesthood. We aspire to be like them, to emulate their mannerisms because they are the new ‘ruling… Continue reading The Esoteric Celebrity
Defending ‘Theory’ and Rationalism
Some background to understand how the "rationalists" a la Dawkins have a nonscientific view of humans. pic.twitter.com/B4qACpgqgs — NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) February 4, 2016 Lib Nicholas Nassim Taleb takes another shot at Dawkins. As for the passage itself, there’s room for both theory and empiricism, as I explain in an earlier article Falsifiability, String Theory, and… Continue reading Defending ‘Theory’ and Rationalism
He’s Right
From Yahoo finance Martin Shkreli is actually a great guy He’s right: Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) February 4, 2016 A ‘kakistocracy’ is defined as a government run by the incompetent, the opposite of a meritocracy or technocracy, which is the situation we have… Continue reading He’s Right
Millennials leading the alt-right
The Current Chapter There are some positive things to be said for sure about a young, energetic, tech-savvy identitarian movement: Ability to hijack online culture and force the mainstream to pay some attention to long suppressed racialist ideas. Young people are more willing to embrace the radicalism that this age demands. Anonymous culture, beyond protecting… Continue reading Millennials leading the alt-right