You no doubt heard “Judge Blocks Trump’s Ban on Transgender Troops in Militaryâ€. But Trump’s seeming surrender was threedee chess, not surrender. The word transgender deliberately confuses people with very different kinds of problems, grouping unlike people together, and making distinctions without a difference. Actual transgenders: Crazy people who clearly of one sex, but suffer the delusion that they are of a different sex in the same way that some people who are clearly not Napoleon the First, Emperor of …
Republicans voters losing interest in voting.
Recently there was a big upset in formerly Republican safe seat, and Democrats told themselves it is because Trump is such an ultra extreme right winger who hates women. And now another close result in a formerly safe seat looms. Trump won Arizona by 21%, yet Republicans are in danger of losing in Arizona. Is this because Trump the president revealed himself to be far more racist, sexist and right wing than Trump the candidate? Well, that is what the …
Don’t vote
No matter whom you vote for, the uniparty gets elected. Electing Trump has made a big difference. But he has has not made a big enough difference to prevent the government from electing a new people. Trump’s rust belt program was undoing the great centralization. Lo and behold: Back in June 2009, in one of our earliest posts in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we took a “random walk down Madison Avenue” and found empty storefront after empty storefront …
There are no utilitarians.
Whosoever claims to be a utilitarian is lying. Whosoever lies, is lying because he is defecting on those he lies to, seeks to harm, or is harming, those he lies to. In the case of utilitarianism, the lie is the claim to care about far, in order to cover actions or intentions harmful to near. By nature, we don’t care about far people. We care about ourselves, then our close kin, then our friends and allies, then members of our …
China passes the US
The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots. Some people may say that the most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is nukes, but after all these years, who knows if they work any more? We can no longer make tritium, we can no longer make Pu238, why should nukes have fared …
Externalities
About twenty percent of a car is, or should be, high quality specialty steel which is not made in America. Because there are no local sources of such steel, it is organizationally difficult to make such parts in the US, so the parts tend to be made overseas. Or, disturbingly often, made out of crappy steel. When Jobs was creating the smartphone, he went to Corning to talk to the people who make specialty glass. If we had been importing …
Protectionism
Trump, in accordance with his campaign promises to the rust belt and flyover country, has just slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum. If you look at the Nucor product catalog, you can see that the USA has ceded high end steel production to foreigners. Ceding high end steel production to foreigners is militarily unwise. Ceding the high end is also likely to have externalities. A network of skills unravels. If company A does something high tech, it cultivates employees, …
The ruling underclass
Hanson, once a neoconservative, finds himself a second class citizen in a California that is increasingly strange, alien, and dangerous. I and one of my sons have mostly fled Silicon valley. The other lives in a shrinking island of whiteness that is ever more dangerous and ever more expensive, in San Francisco near the Embarcadero, near where Kathryn Steinle was murdered for being white, and her murderer acquitted, because high status people can get away with shooting second class people. …
School shot up because murdering white kids is OK
The Florida school shootings did not happen for lack of gun control. They happened because of refusal to enforce law and maintain order when blacks and hispanics attack white children. Back in 2015 I said: > Difficult to say what will happen to Mestizos and Indios. In Mexico, the old gods walk again, but this has not happened in the US, Well now the Old Gods have walked from Mexico to Florida, and spoken to Nikolas Cruz. Nicolas Cruz had …
Five more years
Scott Alexander’s predictions for the next year have become ever more cautious, thus ever more boring and ever less likely to be falsified. And then he came up with a pile of wild assed stuff for the next five years: AI will be marked by various spectacular achievements, plus nobody being willing to say the spectacular achievements signify anything broader. AI will beat humans at progressively more complicated games, and we will hear how games are totally different from real …