The libertarian position has always been to go with the left on everything except economic leftism. As the left abandons economic leftism, and at the same time goes lefter and lefter, this leaves libertarians indistinguishable from leftists, and libertarians going lefter and lefter. And as the left goes frothing at the mouth batshit insane, the libertarians froth with equal enthusiasm. The highest point of absurdity so far is Reason magazine …
Tag: decline of the west
Ferguson chimp out
Short recap of the Ferguson story: Michael Brown, a huge black man helped himself to some tobacco in a shop, then strong armed the shopkeeper rather than paying. He then walked down the street, expecting traffic to get out of his way. When a policeman told him to stop jaywalking, he attacked the policeman, forced his way into the policeman’s car, and attempted to take the cops gun. The cop …
Technological decline
Konkvistador has drawn my attention to the Pu238 shortage. We stopped making Pu238 in 1988 You need Pu238 for nuclear batteries. The 2006 New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt was launched without enough Pu238 to keep all its equipment live during the Pluto flyby, and without enough Pu238 to do its Kuiper belt mission, from which I conclude that since 2011 we have been totally completely flat …
Technological decline
If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition based on having a higher corner office than the other business executives. If high art is an aids infested trannie projectile vomiting over the audience, progressives say that we philistines just don’t get high art. But the most important …
mens rea
I have been arguing that social decay is ending technological and scientific progress. In most areas it has strikingly slowed, in some areas, going backwards in the west, as we forget how to do what once we could do. Others, however, argue that technological and scientific progress is still running hot, or that if it has slowed, it is that we ran out of low hanging fruit. But a big …
Tall buildings and the social order
To make and keep the upper stories of a tall building habitable requires routine high technology. The lifts have to work, the water needs to be pumped, the toilets have let the poop down one hundred stories without shattering violence. It is not all that expensive. Current office space costs in the centers of major cities are so high that very tall buildings are immensely profitable. It is simply difficult …
Leftism as cancer
Leftism is to memes as cancer is genes. If the cells of the body mutate, cells that multiply at the expense of the body will be selected. And cells that mutate to a faster mutation rate will be selected, since they will have more fast multiplying variants. In a healthy body, each cell lives for the body, and performs its role in the whole body, making the body one. In …
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 …
Apostolic Succession
According to some branches of Christianity, notably Roman Catholicism, Jesus ordained his disciples to perform certain sacraments, and they in turn ordained others to perform these sacraments, and only the legitimate successors of the apostles can validly perform these sacraments. Â So supposedly most sacraments are invalid unless performed by a priest, by someone who has been authorized by someone who has been authorized … all the way back to …
Progress
In 1900, there were no planes, no space travel. Motorcars were toys that enthusiasts played with, not useful means of transport. There were no computers, no radios, no antibiotics, no rockets, no nuclear power, no knowledge or understanding of the interior the atom, no very useful plastics. In 1961 we had all of this stuff Since 1961, what have we got? The last man on the moon is getting pretty …