Technology capitalism: libertarianism As the left gets ever lefter, it gets every crazier. Since the libertarian tries to make a separate peace with the left on behalf of capitalism, its craziness necessarily flows into libertarianism. Libertarians notice that capitalism, in particular the joint stock corporation based on double entry accounting, provides a great, humane, and highly productive system for creating wealth, advancing technological progress, and maximizing liberty. They therefore propose …
Arab Spring
The Cathedral, believing itself to be the holiest of them all, unleashed a power struggle in the middle east to be the holiest of them all. At present, their religion is worse than ours, but the appointment of a Caliph, elected for life, may stabilize them, while we continue to drift to ever greater heights of holiness.
Secularization
Eric Kraufman argues that the religious are inheriting the earth. The religious are reproducing faster, and despite the fact that many of their children are captured by progressivism, the number of people who say they are religious is increasing. According to Kraufman the number of people who adhere to moderate religions is decreasing, and shows every sign of altogether vanishing. The proportion of the religious, and the absolute number of …
The great silence
There seem to be no great obstacles to intelligent life devouring the galaxy. So why are we here. If life on earth arose on earth , and produced humans in a few billion years, why not on some other planet ten billion years ago? Simplest and most likely explanation is that life is unlikely – requiring a stupendously improbable assemblage of molecules to form. No one has constructed a plausible …
Why the art, literature, and science of decadent civilization is decadent
Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reasonâ€. Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist. Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the …
Death of Christendom
Calvinism in New England was scorned by the heresy of Unitarianism, which deemed itself holier, but Unitarianism only lasted about a generation before it collapsed into Emersonian subjectivist Transcendentalism, which then swiftly (in less than a generation) collapsed into politics (abolition, feminism etc). If we look at the New Testament position on slavery it is of course passivist and pacifist. Christians are encouraged, but not required, to free their slaves. …
Demonic possession and Donald McCloskey
I am a materialist. I don’t believe in demons that come from outside. Demons come from within, a part of oneself that hates life, hates the living, and, most of all, hates oneself. Sometimes people indulge such a part of themselves, and it takes them over, possesses them. This happens a lot to leftists. It happens one hell of a lot to transexuals, hence the high suicide rate. Spandrel recent …
Who is allied to Israel?
Egypt proposes a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in which everyone ceases to fire. The (Jewish) US Secretary for state proposes a ceasefire in which Hamas gets a new route to import rockets, now that Egypt is trying to stop them from being smuggled through Egypt, and a big pile of money with which to import them. There are a lot of things wrong with Jews, but being sneakily cohesive …
Need to kill a lot more civilians in Gaza
One of the things that the fans of the theory of Democratic Peace, the theory that democracies tend to be at peace with each other, tend to forget is that Gaza and Israel are both democracies. If you are a Muslim, you demonstrate superior holiness by voting in favor of wars with infidels that may well result in your death, just as if you are white, you demonstrate superior holiness …
The cure for IQ shredders
Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce. Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus. Just as the cure …