I have not been watching Game of Thrones since they killed off every character I cared about, but the recent fuss about rape caused me to watch the latest episode. To see the controversy, fast forward to the end. All the rest is people you don’t know or care about talking about things you do not understand, apart from a scene where the youngest Stark kid gets the beating she has long deserved. Game of thrones piously promotes the Victorian …
Losing Ramadi
Obama is of course a Muslim, progressive, and anticolonialist who hates America and wishes to see America defeated, but allowing Ramadi, and indeed Iraq, to be lost was pretty sensible. The underlying Bush theory was that Iraq would become a well run democracy, like Switzerland, where the Shia majority elected nice moderate progressives, thereby counterbalancing the dangerous influence of the Shia religious crazies in Iran.  The middle east would become moderate progressive, rather than Muslim. As it worked out the …
Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia capitulate and allow the boats.
Since Tony Abbot has been elected prime minister of Australia, no one is known to have successfully illegally immigrated to Australia. Their boat goes back, or if they are unusually stubborn and persistent, they wind up in a military run prison camp in a third world hell hole. From time to time progressives complain about the conditions in these camps. As far as is known, no one has yet wound up in Davey Jones locker, though some have come close. …
A letter to Sunnis facing Shia Democracy
They are going to kill you all. So you had better sign up with the Caliphate. It is inherent in the nature of democracy that you get rule by a religion that has open entry into the clerisy. It is inherent in the rule of a religion that has open entry into the clerisy that it becomes ever more extreme and eventually, ever more left wing. They have gotten rid of all the Christians and such. Every election, every year, …
The Camp of the Saints
The good and the great have announced there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant, in part because anyone who (however implausibly) claims to be a refugee, is legal. Some time ago Australia adopted a policy of turning the boats around,
After white male america
Law enforcement against blacks is inherently racist. Gentrification proceeded under an unprincipled exception. Eric Holder is rolling back that unprincipled exception. Not only does every good progressive know that being black is no indicator of propensity to commit crimes, he also knows that a past history of criminal conduct is no indicator of propensity to commit crimes in future – see “Les Miserables” for the correct progressive position on crime and punishment, which is, pretty much, that punishment is horribly …
The point of the dark enlightenment is to understand the world, not to change it.
Theory is understanding and understanding is theory. Seeing the world as a collection of bare unexplained facts is effectively the same as seeing the world as filled with magic. To suppose that somehow price controls on wages or medical treatment do not behave like price controls generally is in effect to believe in magic. Without theory the world is a collection of magical events, something that defies understanding. Experiments can be faulty. Experience can be faulty, and its interpretation can …
Hiatus till early May
Blogging will be light to nonexistent until early May, as will answering email, approving comments that have gone into the moderation queue, and pretty much everything else.
Evil League of Evil wins Hugo awards.
With assistance from Gamergate. Hugo awards controversy (Actually they dominated the short list, so it is not over yet, but the final outcome is pretty much baked in now)- Politically correct science fiction simply is not science fiction, none of it, not a single recent Hugo award winner until now, because it continually lectures us on the latest issue, even if those delivering the lecture are supposedly martian elves, thus is always about the present place and the present time, …
Chimp politics and Cromwell’s puritanism
Moldbug is a big fan of Carlyle. Carlyle is a big fan of Cromwell. Well I am a big fan of Cromwell also, but Carlyle takes Cromwell’s Christianity seriously. If Carlyle was around today, I would have the exact same quarrel with him as I have with B. Reading Carlyle on Cromwell, Carlyle takes it as simple fact that the Puritans were very sincere and strong believers in God, which obviously they were – but declines to inquire as to …