Inflation adjusted price of oil shows no obvious trend, suggesting that limits on oil production reflect social decay and technological slowdown, rather than physical exhaustion of resources. Oil prices rose, and rose, to 2008, and in 2008, it looked like the peak oilers were, like a stopped clock, finally correct. And then prices fell, a lot. They have risen since, but not to their 2008 peaks. From 2010 to the present oil prices have been high and steady in nominal …
Radish on anarcho tyranny
Radish is excessively unkind to anarcho capitalism, though he is correct to point out that a lot of anarcho capitalists would be quite horrified by an anarcho capitalist polity in which, because the police and judiciary were in large part the direct employees of shopping malls and suchlike, capitalists had a lot of legal authority, and even more horrified if, because suburbia was protected by heads of households, and organizations paid by heads of households, each head of household had …
Equal opportunity
Whenever someone announces that they are in favor of equal opportunity, in favor of equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome, they have usually a few paragraphs, or a few comments away, defended some outrageously unjust inequality of opportunity implemented and enforced by state power to destroy group X, as punishment for group X privilege. Everyone is in favor of equality of opportunity. I am in favor of equality of opportunity. But, realistically, you are not going to get …
anti anti anti anti reactionary faq
Scot Alexander has answered the anti anti reactionary faq. The anti anti reactionary faq argument to which he replies is that leftist have a dreadful record of misgovernment, terror, tyranny, artificial famine, and leftists tend to get lefter over a time. It is a slippery slope, the slope gets steeper and steeper, and at the bottom of that slope, a deep pit filled with sharpened stakes. Scot’s reply is that these bad things done by leftists were a response to …
The anti-anti reactionary FAQ: war and democide
Scott, good progressive that he is, assures us that with the rise of democracy, war has diminished. He gets this bizarre conclusion in two ways:Â By starting the clock at Zhang Xianzhong, after which violence diminished, and by starting the clock at World War II, after which violence diminished. But Zhang Xianzhong was a radical leftist, not an emperor, and violence diminished after Zhang Xianzhong, because everyone was so horrified by the bloodthirsty record of leftism that they did not …
Pilgrim socialism
By now everyone knows the real story of thanksgiving. The pilgrim fathers attempted socialism, as usual famine ensued, followed by mass die off, they appointed a new governor who concluded that when God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, God ordained private property in the means of production. Famine solved, prosperity ensues. Pilgrims ordain a day of thanksgiving to thank God for their prosperity. But strangely, the New York Times, and the left generally, is fighting back, attempting to …
Moore’s law ends. Technological singularity postponed indefinitely
The fabs will soon be delivering “16nm” chips. But they are not in fact 16nm chips. That is just marketer spin. The wire to wire spacing, the pitch, is still 64nm, as it has been for some considerable time. There have been substantial improvements in power consumption, and this and that, but chips have just stopped getting denser. There are no more transistors per unit area than in previous technology generations. They are 64nm chips, and we have been stuck …
Black Privilege
No Limit Nigga This is a picture of No Limit Nigga. If he does not much resemble the massively photoshopped image of Martin Trayvon you see everywhere, he nonetheless is a good match to the pre photoshopped image. The knockout game You have doubtless heard of the knockout game, where a black suckerpunches some random white in the street. Is the knockout game happening everywhere all the time and the press and police are politely ignoring it, or is it …
The history of the left
This is a relatively short recap of Moldbug on the origins of leftism. Leftists like to trace leftism to the people who sat on the left hand of the French assembly, which traces back the left to its very first pretense to be something other than a religion, and then traces it no further. The French left, before they were “the leftâ€, were Gallicans, and before they were Gallicans, were adherents of the false Popes of Avignon. Yet no sooner …
Predicting collapse
I am a prophet of doom. There tends to be an oversupply of prophets of doom, and the proportion who turn out correct is quite small. Equally, there are also a large number of prophets of non doom, for example the numerous prophets of complacency during the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, who assume that everything will continue as today, often even when spectacular collapse is under way, they assume that everything has now stabilized, or will …