Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

April 24, 2017

On This Day, as We Reflect Upon a Singular Evil, Let Us Not Forget Those Who Were Virtually Powerless and Still Risked Everything to Oppose It.

More here and here.

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March 20, 2017

Deflation Declination and Dungeon Crawling

The other night, my friend BOB!1! and I were discussing current events, in particular, we engaged in a back and forth over the theory that the reason we've seen limited inflation from the various rounds of quantitative easing over the years is that a majority of the inflation they created has been masking a destructive deflationary cycle. This is a disturbing notion as it puts the world economy on a bit of a tightrope.

Those of us of a certain age remember inflation and the memory is not a pleasant one. The inflation of the 1970s was an anomalous event, coinciding as it did with a general contraction of the economy (stagflation).

Inflation is normally an inevitable byproduct and indicator of a growing economy. More economic activity and more money in circulation means that the real value of any unit of money goes down. After a certain point, this actually encourages investment, since inflation reduces the value of money that is just sitting, eventually overtaking any reasonable interest rate. This means that in order to grow or even maintain one's savings one must invest them in moneymaking enterprises. This is hard on everyone, but especially the poor with no savings, those on fixed incomes and the inert, but having that money reinvested in business ventures expands the economy overall, and that increases job opportunities which mitigates some of the problems.

The '70s were unusual due to a series of problems including the fact that the Johnson administration had printed scads of money specifically to devalue the currency just as the first round of World War Two bonds was about to come due, thus effectively cheating the bond holders out of their investments, but freeing up cash for the great society programs. This was followed by Nixon taking the U.S. off the gold standard and printing yet MORE money while the oil crisis damaged the economy by raising the cost of energy and therefore, industry. This was a dreadful situation, but paled in comparison to events like Weimar Germany and Zimbawe.

Inflation is intuitively bad and we have examples of why this is so.

However, except perhaps in cases of runaway inflation like Weimar or Zimbabwe, Deflation can be much worse than inflation.

Deflation is insidious. The value of whatever is currency increases because the amount of money in circulation decreases (is deflated). This is great in the very short term, especially for the poor, those on fixed incomes and the inert. The problem is that over the long haul money actually gains value when hoarded EVEN IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY INTEREST RATE and thus the risk associated with investing with a business becomes exceedingly unpalatable.

People with money cash out, their businesses close which results in fewer paychecks, which further reduces the money supply causing businesses to go bankrupt or their owners to liquidate them before that happens. People hoard, rather than invest money and the economy slowly, over time, comes to a crawl. The tax base evaporates because there is no money and things like roads, bridges, canals, ports and other infrastructure stop getting fixed, further putting a pressure on businesses and the economy. Gradually, over time everything grinds to a halt, and only those with money in personal hoards are in any way well off, their hoards appreciating in relative value as the rest of the world slips into darkness...but such people would be increasingly isolated by the inevitable uptick in lawlessness and ultimately only those who could defend themselves and have access to food would manage to eek through. Of course, with unemployment rampant labor would be cheap, perhaps as cheap as room and board, and such people could probably be put to work growing food in exchange for protection from the rising tide of lawlessness.

Our back and forth at this point took an unexpected turn. What the end state of our worst case scenario ended up in was...

...Feudalism...

... which, as my friend BOB!1! pointed out, brings us to Dungeons and Dragons.

"Because...of course it does."

This scenario explains the D&D world.

There are ruins EVERYWHERE. There was obviously a great and prosperous civilization (or group of civilizations that shared a transnational economy) and then deflation hit. Most of those dungeons are the hoards of increasingly paranoid rich people who hid their money vaults behind traps and guard animals, eventually, either through the 4 or 5 generation process in which marrying to obtain a dowry self selects for infertility, straight-up inbreeding, or stepping on one of their own damned rot worms, the affluent who did not offer protections to their neighbors or were too autistic to socialize died out and left these "dungeons", ruins of their former mansions and money vaults which have, in addition to their traps, developed their own deadly ecosystems evolved from the guard animals and invasive species.

Feudal lords and the occasional collection of such fiefdoms in a kingdom or duchy, are stable but inherently resistant to change, innovation, and any disruptive developments in thought or technology.

There is only one bright spot economically.

The aforementioned rising transportation costs might serve to juice the economy a tad, but only if the infrastructure was privately owned and only if the return on investment was perceived as good, which might well not be the case with businesses going under left and right. However, an association of businesses in need of transportation services might well band together as a co-op to maintain a transportation infrastructure for their interests and provide mutual protection much like the old Hanseatic League did. These became the guilds. Which are the only (sort of) free market that is not completely the plaything of nobles.

It occurs to me, that there are darker aspects to this too.

As people grow more desperate and fearful, they tend to stay with their own kind, so in many locales, the races self segregated. Those that did not eventually became the "mutts" that are described as human in the game. The differences might be accentuated by starvation selection putting pressure on some groups for small bodies, (Halflings, Dwarves) and in more affluent groups sexual selection favoring beauty (Elves). Such racial balkanization would, in general, be non-conducive to most trade.

However...

What all this means is that adventurers in D&D, whatever level, or even alignment that they are, actually happen to be, by their very nature, saving the world! Everytime they loot a dungeon, they are placing into the economy currency that has not been in circulation in millennia. When adventures begin D&D at level one, the coin of the realm is copper. Then as a party prospers, things get better in whatever locale they frequent and more and better goods become available.

All this money is stimulating trade and competition between the guilds and encouraging wiser feudal lords to invest in and support their resident merchants.

The fact that the most effective parties contain a wide variety of races, classes and skillsets that normally do not interact in any meaningful way only serves to further breakdown barriers put up by an eons long deflationary cycle.

Adventurers ROCK!

So what have we learned today?

Deflation is, in the long run, far worse than all but the worst inflationary events due to its insidious nature and the extreme difficulty in reversing it due to its self reinforcing system on perverse and societally destructive incentives.

Against this, when conducting a risk assessment and cost benefit analysis must be considered the potential for providing future generations with elves.

Art by Houtengeki (also here)

May our economists choose wisely.

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1 That's probably the first cogent explanation of why deflation is bad I've read.

Although it leads me to wonder if managed deflation can be useful in a society that already has a declining working population (like say, Japan) to help keep the economy and the population in scale with each other.

Posted by: Mauser at Mon Mar 20 21:18:00 2017 (5Ktpu)

2 Your arguments have some real heft.

I used to get really annoyed by the first-generation MMOs like Ultima Online for their claims of a "realistic economy", in which players could vendor unlimited amounts of gold and gems for high prices, while cheap staples remained available in every town. "Realism", in their mind, meant that massive quantities of spell reagents would go on sale every N hours and be bought up by players who camped the vendor so they could grind their magic skills.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Mon Mar 20 23:41:33 2017 (tgyIO)

3 Excuse me, but what nonsense is this: "Inflation is normally an inevitable byproduct and indicator of a growing economy. More economic activity and more money in circulation means that the real value of any unit of money goes down." The second sentence fully debunks the bogus first sentence!

What does it mean, "more money in circulation"? Suppose it means the M2 or other measure of total money supply. Isn't it obvious, then, that it's not created by "growing economy"?

Remember it: inflation is only a measurement of government activity of emission, and that's it. You can have growing economy with inflation or without.

What your long explanations completely miss is the concept of velocity, or productivity of the banking sector. Imagine that you have a responsible government that is not inflating (of course it is impossible, unless you're in Switzerland, but let's run it as a thought experiment). Imagine also that the manufacturing and services are growing, but banking's productivity remains stagnant. You still have clerks with abacuses writing transactions down into gross-boochs. In this case, as you can easily guess, you get deflation, because growing economy needs money. There is no magic inflation that your first sentence presupposed! None! (This situation, BTW, will put a brake on the economic growth, but not because of deflation itself, but because the interest is going to grow.)

But, if we run the same experiment, but have our bankers start using Merchant calculators, and, later, computers, so their productivity keeps up with the rest of the economy, there may not be a deflation. This increase in the banking productivity is known as "increase in velocity".

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Mar 22 23:56:19 2017 (XOPVE)

4 I've never understood the growth --> inflation idea either myself. If you think of money as any other commodity (and it is - it's just the one we do most of our transacting with), then the obvious relationship should be:

Same amount of money chasing more goods --> more goods/ money --> deflation.
Same amount of money chasing fewer goods --> less goods/money --> inflation.

Stagflation wasn't an anomaly - economies see inflation when they stop producing goods and services. It's when economies are falling apart that anomalous inflation takes off (Venezuala, Weimar Germany, etc...)

This is (very slightly) complicated by saving and spending. If people start spending their savings, that would lead to inflation and a (temporary) boost in economic output. I imagine this is what drives it, as Keynsians tend to think people spending their savings equates to "economic growth." I sort of does, in the short run, at the expense of security and stability long term.

Posted by: madrocketsci at Fri Mar 24 19:42:18 2017 (VF34g)

5 Pete, your points are solid, however, as a practical matter, an increase in economic activity means that the money supply is increased which generally reduces the value of any given unit of currency. The alternative to this is, as you point out deflation which, as you correctly point out, is an arrestor switch on economic growth. Velocity is a real thing, but it is somewhat theoretical because as a practical matter it is quite rare that banking sectors act without government interference and so as a practical matter, inflation is tied to economic growth. This has been borne out historically, in large part because libertarian economic policies are so rarely tried.
Finally, in my defense, while I am in no way an expert on economics, , the long tendentious, and admittedly incomplete explanation was not a serious economic analysis, but merely a set-up for a silly post about the background of the world economy in Dungeons and Dragons.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Mar 26 01:16:04 2017 (1zM3A)

6 Even so, the currency in KonoSuba must be terribly devalued, if Kazuma can earn enough to repair a blown up castle plus 40 million in one afternoon.

BTW, Did you notice you got some spam?

Posted by: Mauser at Sun Mar 26 17:25:49 2017 (5Ktpu)

7 The anime babes <3

Posted by: Elijah Smith at Mon Nov 20 15:57:02 2017 (/bTvQ)

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March 16, 2017

A Roundup of Links that Caught My Eye

Jerry Pournelle relates an interesting exchange on the Science Fiction Writers of America boards that concerned what, if any, constitutional limits there are on federal regulatory authority. (Yes: "if any"...let that sink in for a minute.)

Refreshingly, it doesn't appear that Hitler was ever invoked. In his stead, Henry the VIII makes an appearance.

Read the whole thing (Scroll down about half a page. It's below the WSJ link.) Note that the conversation was declared...traumatic...and deleted by SFWA.

ACE has some very prescient thoughts on the POTUS (trigger warning: Trump)

Via Rand Simberg: A recent judicial decision in Hawaii is not just asinine, it could foment a constitutional crisis.

Oh look. Google is going to down-select anything that they determine is upsetting or offensive. Since progressives take umbrage at vast swaths of what I happen to like, I suppose no one will ever find this blog via Googling again.

Peter Beinart has an interesting piece which suggests that if you remove the thing that most that holds a society together, feeds the better angels of its nature and restrains its darkest tribal impulses, bad things might happen. Who'da thunk it?

Finally, as a cisgendered honkey male, I'm told I can't have an opinion on the utterly 'woke' Rachel Maddow and her Al Capone's Vault moment. So I'll let these two express it for me.

Note: The linked image encompassing many of the things I like is by Sukabu. The young ladies expressing thoughtful journalistic critiques are from the underrated, yet excellent, Sound of the Sky.

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March 10, 2017

Oh Wow. We Really ARE Living in the Crazy Years.

What disgracious 'channery is this?

CIA documents published by WikiLeaks show that the CIA kept a database of "Japanese style facesâ€ to utilize in online forums.

Exclusive sources (so secret and exclusive that they may not even exist) tell us that in contrast to the impassive public response, the reaction inside Langley to this news was uncharacteristically straightforward...

However, thanks to this completely unexpected development we are now able to accurately recreate the Wikileaks heist of the CIA's secrets!

Have you seen this person?

The database seems to consist mainly of ASCII emoticons. The complete list can be found here.

Do note that the CIA somehow missed one...

more...

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February 26, 2017

Milo

The Milo story broke as I was preparing to go into the hospital and I only became aware of it in the waiting room. I was horrified...though not as much as I was 2 days later.

A bit of background:

Milo Yiannopoulos is an exuberantly gay Catholic Briton of Jewish decent with a black boyfriend. Milo is also a loud, obnoxious, rude and crude advocate for free speech and vocal opponent of both government and corporate censorship.

Naturally this assortment of characteristics got him pegged as a NAZI.

Obnoxious, rude and crude don't actually do him justice, as he has had a tendency to be sadistically catty in a way that only urbane queens can pull off. In his case this caused some anxiety because as we all know, gay men are not actually people, but a variety of animatronic fetish dolls whose only legitimate functions are to provide upper middle class white women with affirmation of their grandeur and opportunities for virtue signaling.

Sadly, Milo did not fulfill this important societal niche, at least not in the approved way. He did not turn his poison tongue against working class pizza waitresses of limited means, but rather against hollywood celebrities, as well as powerful lobbyists and activists in the gaming industry. He said some things that I think were rude and unescessary, and he hurt his argument sometimes through the exquisite sadism of his insults.

He also tended to be on the bad side of some truly loathsome individuals as seen in his habit of going after pedophiles and exposing them. Amongst those were Sarah Nyberg, and Chris Leydon and he was an early voice sounding the alarm about Jimmy Savile.

So it was pretty horrifying to learn that an interview of Milo with him advocating for pedophellia had turned up.

It's at least as horrifying that this story appears to be bunk, yet has cost this man his job, his book deal and his good name.

Here is what was expertly excised from the tape:

Miloâ€™s money quote, which was edited out of the video, is this:
The law is probably about right, thatâ€™s probably roughly the right age. I think itâ€™s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older menâ€¦This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they canâ€™t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most -â€

Well, Milo's been an ass again, but that's hardly a new development. Milo, himself a victim of sexual abuse by a priest, did NOT advocate for pedophelia. He's said numerous times that he considers it to be possibly the worst crime possible.

Milo Yiannopoulos is often not my cup of tea, but he's been nuked from orbit by a false claim and his job, book deal and reputation are currently smouldering ruins.

That bothers me for some reason.

There are a few others who have opinions that diverge from the "It serves him right!" school of thought.

Sarah Hoyt

The charges against Milo are contrived from a) video editing and b) rumor and innuendo and c) pretending no one ever used the word "boyâ€ to mean man, thereby meaning playboy is for 10 year olds and "playing with the big boysâ€ means middle schoolers.
IF the attack on Milo were about, say how outrageous he got before the election (heâ€™s been walking it back since. I suspect he gets a little battle mad as I tend to.) Iâ€™d shrug and say "whateverâ€. However this is a contrived and false attack and one that apparently came from the right but is teaching the left the way to take every one of us down. You might not like Milo or his lifestyle, but you should not under any circumstances, applaud this means of taking him down. And if you do, I hope you experience likewise and get to experience what you like so much. There is a good chance you will. Theyâ€™ve tasted blood with Milo. Weâ€™re next.

John C Wright (Who, it should be noted is a fairly hardcore social con, going to bat for the gay guy whose being accused of child molestation.)

I have been on the receiving end of a coordinated libel Campaign like this but smaller and not this vicious.

The tactic is simple: simply edit what the victim says to make it sound like he said what you want him to say.

Then you have your Newsmen and paid trolls repeat it.

By the time the truth comes out, everyone already believes the narrative and itâ€™s too late.

I realize that if you have never seen a fake edit job before, it will fool you. What you do to do a fake editing job is take parts of one sentence parts of one conversation and clip them to another. In this case you take a conversation about how many times two college students engaged in copulation are required to ask each other about the continued ongoing state of their consent, and then you clip in a discussion of the consent between a 17 year old and a 27 year old gay couple.

You take a sentence where the speaker uses the word â€˜boyâ€™ to refer to a seventeen-year-old and you clip it to a question when someone is asking about a 14 year old boy , clever editing makes it sound as if he is talking about lowering the age of consent to 14

Bookworm Room

Having unloaded these truths, Milo nevertheless completely agreed that the legal age of consent is a good thing and lands on the right age. The unspoken conclusion driving that statement had to have been that, given the broad spread in age of sexual maturation, itâ€™s appropriate for the law to err on the side of caution to protect the maximum number of children from sexual predators.

Neo Neocon hits on what I think is the real problem with Milo's nosehair curling rant...

As an abuse survivor, Yiannopoulos thinks he can say that consent can be given in such a case, apparently because he thinks he gave it. But that shows one of the problems with sexual abuse, and itâ€™s not just the problem of an adult exploiting a child sexually. Itâ€™s the problem of an adult messing with a childâ€™s mind. Because the relationships Yiannopoulos describes are actually betrayals of the child/teen in the guise of "helpingâ€ the child, betrayals that may even feel good to the child/teen in certain circumstances but exploit the child/teenâ€™s psychological, emotional, and physical vulnerability.

Kate Paulk's piece contains this brief passage that's almost free of obceneties.

Let me be absolutely clear here. The stickybeaked moralists who are claiming that Milo Yiannopoulos somehow brought this shitstorm on himself because his lifestyle squicks them are endorsing lying to eliminate a person. They are endorsing show trials and guilt by association and all the evils of every fucking Communist regime ever. They are endorsing the tactics both the Soviets and the Nazis used to crush dissenting voices and enemies of the regime.

I'm a southerner and, arguably, a variety of social conservative, so I'm not exactly a Milo fanboy, but I do note that in general, Milo, as a reporter, as well as a rabble rouser, gave considerable discomfort to the powerful, and defended the innocent.

He may well deserve criticism's. Lets make damned sure they are for things he actually did.

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February 14, 2017

A Study in Civic Integrity

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November 27, 2016

Does Anyone Know...

...what this picture represents?

It was picture for the headline at Drudge yesterday which concerned Hillary effectively withdrawing her concession and going with recounts in multiple states. I am struggling to find the connection.

more...

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November 09, 2016

A Few Quick Thoughts on this Mornings Upset

I was pleasantly impressed with Trump's magnanimous acceptance speech, which has, at least for a time, tempered the very mixed emotions I had voting for him.

In fairness, I was also pleasantly surprised with Madame Secretary's prompt and congenial concession.

The U.K. Independent, which is certainly NOT on the Trump train, has some surprisingly reassuring thoughts.

Sarah Hoyt, who, like me held her nose tightly and voted for the fellow, has some very somber thoughts that deserve to be read in full.

(Update: Kelly Anne Conway really is the acme of political consultants.)

This.

I should note that as much as we here at Brickmuppet Blog disagree with President Obama, when he was elected, we did not mock him and we defended or spoke up on his behalf on those rare occasions he did something we thought to be good, proper, sensible or at least defense-able.

So we can only react with mockery to this.

"Mock mock mockety mock."

A lot of people are worried. Even many of us that voted for him believe that Trump warrants considerable vigilance. Rest assured though that the press will provide that oversight with verve and a sense of urgency in exactly the same way that they wouldn't have for his opponent.

So lighten up.

Finally,

Takumi Yanai's work may not be the only evidence of time travel....

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HOLY CRAP!

We are actually less utterly screwed than I thought we would be this morning!

I remain deeply skeptical of Trump, but credit where it is due, he has done what most thought impossible. Whatever his flaws (and they are legion) I can, with considerable confidence, wholeheartedly and without reservation agree that by far the lesser of two evils won this election.

Hillary Clinton wasn't just singularly corrupt. She was the standard bearer for a group, a party and an self-appointed faux aristocracy that not only feels unwarranted entitlement to rule over us, but despises us with every fiber of their being.

We're in for a rough ride as a nation. Trump quite scary in his own ways. However, there is another bright side to this; the intensity with which political correctness got a kick in the groin this morning.

And that, at least, unambiguously rocks!

***********************

On a rather less serious note. It is infinitesimally less improbable that Takuni Yanai, is in fact a time traveller.

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November 05, 2016

Good Hunting, but do Be Careful

J.C. Carlton (whose blog you should be following) has a thoughtful disquisition on the state of political discourse. Out of consideration for our readers, we'll post our quibbles below the fold and post a picture of Best Oni here.

Because she's relevant.

more...

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November 03, 2016

Hoyt On The Election

Sarah Hoyt has thoughts on next Tuesday's Russian roulette session.

My own thoughts on the matter are that...

What?

"Oh God...Not politics PLEASE!"

Oh.

They're brief, but out of concern for those who are suffering from induced politicophobia, they are below the fold.

more...

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1 The Tea Party was a petition; ignored by both sides of the aisle .
Trump is a warning; hated by both sides of the aisle
What comes next against the oligarchs...?
I've two teenage daughters. I'd rather they not see the "Kosovo-ization" of America.

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Thu Nov 3 20:30:49 2016 (ug1Mc)

2 For what it's worth, here's my reasoning for why not voting for Clinton is the least-worst choice for US voters:

It's highly likely that Russian and Chinese cyberspies have copies of all the emails Clinton sent and received on her illicit email server back when she was Secretary of State; if Clinton becomes President, it would be highly likely that the Russian and/or Chinese governments will attempt to blackmail her with those emails, in an effort to bend US policy to their will. If this does happen, I'd wager that she would not take being blackmailed very well, and that she would act out by provoking a confrontation with her blackmailers ("You can't push me around, Mister Putin!!")--a confrontation that could degenerate into a shooting war.

Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Thu Nov 3 21:17:28 2016 (jS1F0)

3 I figured out months ago that there is no argument either in favor of or against either candidate that can not be convincingly refuted. I'm a bit disappointed but not surprised that Hoyt tried to reason her way to her current position...advocacy for either defies rationality. You can argue for chance, luck, or faith. But I believe the only aspect of the next for years that can be reasoned is how to deal with the aftermath, as reason has already failed in this election for President.

Posted by: Ben at Fri Nov 4 10:08:53 2016 (Q8qgB)

4 My reasoning is simple. If Trump wins, the SJW contingent will totally lose their minds. If Hillary wins, they will become even MORE insufferable.

Makes the choice easy.

Posted by: Mauser at Fri Nov 4 17:44:01 2016 (5Ktpu)

5 I'm tempted to stock up on ammunition and sell it when prices go up...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Nov 4 23:40:17 2016 (/lg1c)

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August 08, 2016

The Talking Heads Are Pondering

...if Trump is a symptom of a larger issue facing the country.

After Saturday's post on one of Trump's apparent...eccentricities, I'm wondering if these brilliant minds are focusing on the right issue.

Well, I guess we now know what H-15 is.

If, gentle reader, you feel this post to be in poor taste, please place the blame where it belongs...on Dustbury, who irresponsibly linked to this site, from which I shamelessly nicked these pictures.

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August 06, 2016

Endorsement, Or Warning?

You be the judge...

When people on the news call Donald Trump a racist, I find that statement difficult to believe. Like myself, Donald Trump is a life-long New Yorker. Donald Trump lives, works, eats and employs people of all races and religions. Like many of my fellow New Yorkers, Donald Trump speaks his mind and that type of behavior can easily be misunderstood by people who are not New Yorkers.

Emphasis added.

"So...Trump...Steaks..."

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July 05, 2016

Pithiest Take on The Days Events That I've Seen

Via

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June 25, 2016

Two Middle Aged Women Sitting Down For an Hour Talking About Girl Stuff

No, we've not been hijacked or changed out format, despite the fact that the post title is mostly true..

It's Christina Hoff Summers and Camille Paglia, two first class minds chatting about the state of education and free speech for 57 minutes.

I fear we as a society will soon reap the whirlwind over this mess.

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June 21, 2016

The Deterioration of Discourse

After a long day of work and school I dealt with an epic traffic jam by ducking into a pleasant Ramen shop in Norfolk.

The waitress, knows I'm a rightie and felt quite chuffed at the opportunity to needle me on the current Republican nominee, who, to avoid triggering any of our readers we will refer to as Whale Vomit for the remainder of this post.

Anyway, she was quite happy that his campaign seemed to be imploding and noted that since Whale Vomit was the Republican nominee, we on the right had no moral authority whatsoever.

Now...it had been a VERY long day, and I was really not in the mood to be thinking about Whale Vomit while attempting to appreciate my Miso Ramen, so I asked her what she thought of her party's nominee (who, in the interest of decency, we'll refer to as the She-Goat of The Forrest With A Thousand Foetid Young). The waitress got annoyed that I would even bring that up. Since nobody in the Democratic party actually likes that individual.

I'll leave the obvious inconsistency to the reader.

The conversation turned to the violence at the Whale Vomit events and the fellow who had tried to shoot the republican nominee...After looking that news tidbit up the waitress was overcome with the blue county giggles and finally broke into laughter, suggesting that the would-be assassin ought to get a medal, or should have done better and if he'd died doing that he'd be a martyr. She also said that any violence at the Republican campaign events was entirely the fault of those rotten enough to show up to support the nominee.

Absolutely no indication was given that she thought this was in any way unreasonable sentiment despite this being a representative republic as opposed to a recital of the Lord of the Flies.

My dismay at the results of the Republican primaries is Brobdingnagian, but I can say with considerable certainty that I hold anyone who is supportive of these thugs and would be assassins in even less esteem than I have for Whale Vomit.

This wasn't the faculty lounge or a meeting of the Weathermen, this was a Ramen shop and there was no hint of awareness that any line had been crossed.

Our civics has end stage cancer.

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May 28, 2016

This, Gentle Readers....

...is why I say "no" to Vox Day.

I keep telling people this and keep getting blown off because "Vox is smart and hates the right people" or somesuch.

...and while this post languished in "draft" part two dropped.

I urge you to read both in full.

Then tell me, is this what you want conservatism to become?

This is actually one of the most pernicious and vile problems with political correctness. When you define racism down, when you declare vast swaths of discourse off limits and smear everyone who expresses a political disagreement with the label of bigot, then you actually normalize people like this guy, and in doing so give them a way to ooze into our national discourse.

It doesn't help when some of his critics are SO vile that he can look good by comparison to them.

To wit: It used to be that if someone was accused of being a racist and their retort was "Well, I'm against child rape! SO THERE!" that the public could point out that such a defense is not only a non-sequiter, but an utter straw man. Pretty much everyone was in agreement that having sex with children is wrong. Alas now we have his vocal critics amongst the current Sci-Fi luminaries, who can't quite denounce a NAMBLA advocate on one side and a whole bunch of people on the other side who have been victimized over the years and for whom Vox Day is, ironically an advocate who is not only affirming the fact that they have been hurt, but is hated by, and reciprocates the animosity of those who caused them so much suffering.

So yes. Some of the people that dislike us, and that Vox Day also dislikes are truly vile pieces of work. I would go so far as to call them monsters.That doesn't mean he should be allowed to define who we are or not be called out by us for espousing views unrelated to child abuse that we not only find abhorrent, but that the left has been slanderously ascribing to us for decades.

Just as many on the left have missed the point that 1984 is a cautionary tale and not a how to manual, so do many of Vox Day's apologists not quite grok the lessons of Faust (or Elric for that matter). The alt-right (which is actually old school, Wilsonian progressivism) currently has an undeniable energy and has attached itself like a suckerfish to the (valid IMHO) backlash against political correctness.

However, allying with them comes at too high a price, for these toxic remoras will either drown us by their weight of their odious views, or in the worst case, use us as a platform to spread and legitimize their loathesome beliefs. The results of that are not likely to be good, either politically, or morally. I for one won't have it on my conscience.

When fighting monsters it is important to not become one yourself, for that rather defeats the purpose of the exercise.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:41 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 There wasn't much wrong in that linked transcript, on the part of Vox Day anyway. Or at least I can't see it. I stopped following his blog because he was much too racist a few years ago. It was in the blog posts. But the transcript seems fairly innocuous to me.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jun 1 10:36:31 2016 (XOPVE)

I was "what's the hullabaloo all about" until I got to the point where he said that the Holocaust wasn't important because it happened more than forty years before people today were born anyway. Or some such.

When the leftist starts sounding reasonable about Jews, it's generally a warning sign....

Posted by: ubu at Thu Jun 2 16:04:28 2016 (SlLGE)

3 I found the whole thing rather tedious reading, but his point about the Holocaust seemed to be "young people don't give a damn about it any more, because to them it's ancient history". I'd say that's a true statement, poorly expressed. The point gets rather muddled when he gets into comparing how long people cared about different massacres and why this one stands out, but that just says that he's not good at live debate and went down a rat-hole.

Personally, I've never seen any reason to pay attention to what he says. The Leftists who created him deserved what they got, and I have no interest in watching them fight it out.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thu Jun 2 16:38:07 2016 (CLiR9)

4 This where I've been on Vox for a while. It doesn't matter that he represents a small faction of people when he is successfully presented as *the* face of Christian Conservatism.

Posted by: Ben at Fri Jun 3 16:31:28 2016 (STcIm)

5 Unfortunately, he's right about the Holocaust. A couple of decades ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and WWII came up. And after a while, his young housmate interrupted us, and in all bright-eyed innocence asked us, "Who's Auschwitz?" He hadn't really been taught about WWII in school, and I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.

It's seems strange that a generation whose go-to insult is to call someone Hitler has no idea who he actually was.

Posted by: Mauser at Fri Jun 3 19:23:50 2016 (5Ktpu)

6 I had much the same question asked of me ("What's an Auschwitz?") in a historical methods class...meaning that everyone in the class was a history major, indicating a passing interest in history.
The notion that there is a great lack of any understanding of the holocaust is, in fact true. However, my reading of VDs take on this troublesome development is that it is a good thing, which I find unnerving.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Jun 3 23:44:28 2016 (/4jFR)

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May 04, 2016

Ruminations Upon The Kobayashi Maru and Such

While there is a considerable amount of elation in certain quarters today....

....rest assured that the inevitable disappointment of these bird brains is unlikely to provide sufficient schadenfreude to compensate for the woe their efforts will bring upon us all.

more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:02 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 Honestly, at this point it's fair to say that the Republican establishment isn't interested in the principles of the Republican electorate. In those circumstances, a Republican victory is almost meaningless anyway; sure, they might pass one or two pieces of symbolic legislation about the moral issues I don't care about in the first place, and the particular recipients of government boodle might be different, but it won't arrest the degeneration, or even meaningfully slow it at this point.

Cruz might have been more effective than Trump at carefully cutting away the fat and loose skin while preserving more of the healthy tissue. But he was always a long shot, simply because of that - the Republican elite feared the prospect of a Cruz administration more than they did of a Clinton one and acted accordingly. And at this point, things have progressed to the point that a scalpel is less appropriate than a chainsaw.

Trump has one tremendous virtue - he simply isn't afraid of the media. He's not worried about coming out with an unpopular opinion or saying something that will be twisted into an attack ad (or more like, he spits out so many of them that it's practically like chaff at this point - attacking him on policy is difficult because so much of it is obviously blather and media-bait that it's hard to hit anything solid.) And that defuses the Democrats' most powerful weapon. We've gone through years of overspending precisely because the Republicans are too afraid of media perceptions to exercise their power where they have it; against that, Trump is essentially immune.

He's got the potential for vast damage to the Republican party. A lot of that damage is necessary.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thu May 5 14:31:05 2016 (v29Tn)

2 In the primaries you try to get the candidate you want. In the general you try to keep out the candidate you don't.

I am no Trump fan, but at this point, the only objective is to make sure that Hillary does not get into the White House.

As a plus, his policy position is completely random and subject to change a a whim, I am finding this preferable. Hillary, OTOH, Has A Plan, and we're not going to like it.

Posted by: Mauser at Thu May 5 20:18:41 2016 (5Ktpu)

3 You forgot a couple of other misdeeds:

- Trump sent a rabidly gay man to judge a beauty pageant (which naturally resulted in a national scandal). There is of course nothing wrong with being gay, just look at Milo. But his fitness to judge beauty pageants was obviously absent. His only qualification was that he belonged into the Trump empire. Ergo, Trump is motivated by tribalism rather than capabilities in personnel choices. Well, most people are like that. But there are limits.

- Before the JFK assasination thing, Trump's campaign tried to smear Cruz with having 5 mistresses.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri May 6 10:54:24 2016 (XOPVE)

4 The one argument in all of this that I do not understand is the "but Hillary is worse" argument. I have yet to be able to convince myself of that. The only statement that leaves room for favor in this regard is "we don't know what Trump will do, but we do know what Hillary will do, and it will be bad." As Brickmuppet pointed out, he reflexively responds as a despot, first thinking of his intention to apply absolute power. NOT ONCE during the campaign has expressed the intent to allow the Congress to do what it's supposed to do, at which point he will either veto or sign and enforce. His expressed intent is to MAKE the congress do what he wants it to do...IF he has to go through Congress.

I have believed that Hillary at her worst would be no worse than Barack Obama. In fact, I have believed that her cowardice and sense an self-preservation would lead her to hide behind Congress as much as possible, while Obama has acted in his own interest and then blamed Congress when people pointed out that his actions did not follow the law. In that regard, I predict that Trump will be *worse* than Obama.

Purely on the grounds of "pick your dictator", I feel that Trump is the worst of the lot, and Hillary will be marginally better than what we've had. I do not debate that she will be miserable; *practically* as bad as Obama, if you will. But then I further consider not only my own conscience, but where any possible gathering of opposition will be situated in four years. Everyone on the right to any degree will carry the stigma of Trump for decades. If doesn't even matter if he miraculously became a great President...he will never become a great man. His soul, if you believe in such things; his legacy, demeanor or aura if you prefer those concepts, is already black. He would have to accomplish something truly great to overcome this extreme handicap. He has shown himself to possess no trait, neither intelligence, nor decorum, nor bravery, nor character, nor wisdom, nor cunning (he has demonstrated that he purchases it in a consultant's bottle; he himself repudiates it and prefers blunder and deceit) that demonstrates any capability for greatness. He must blunder into it or have it handed to him.

Failing that, he will be the death sentence.

I can not vote for Trump, or Hillary. I see no benefit in one over the other, and I refuse to support either the Republican Party or the Democrat Party in this fiasco.

Posted by: Ben at Fri May 6 12:23:03 2016 (DRaH+)

5 From the RKBA perspective, Trump is incomparably better than Hillary. It is a simple tie-breaker for me. Remember that a President is there to introduce legislation (such as Obamacare) and to appoint SCOTUS justices. I'm not looking forward to Hillary packing the court with libs like "the wise latina" (in her own words), who are sure to replay Keller. We have the ruinous taxes on ammo coming up that we sure to end before the court. So yeah... The two may be alike on most issues, but very different on few critical issues.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri May 6 16:08:23 2016 (XOPVE)

6 Pete, I'll grant that Trump has been consistent, if somewhat simplistic in a "not sure he knows what he's talking about" way. But I find it concerning that all of his properties ban concealed carry, even when it's not mandated or encouraged by local law. And then, of course, he named several anti-second amendment justices as good Supreme Court nominees, before claiming he was joking when this was pointed out, and switching his opinion to a Justice "just like Scalia." I don't trust him. He's lied about everything else; I don't see a reason to support him just because he gets some of the words right on one issue.

Posted by: Ben at Sun May 8 09:41:39 2016 (oRNYh)

7

Ben's comment #4 is close to where I am, though I disagree that Clinton would be better. She is as much a narcisist as Trump, she is extraordinarily corrupt, hates the military men and women, and is a totalitarian through and through and doesn't much care about the nation. As Pete correctly points out she is worse, possibly far worse on 2A.
There is hope however.

Not a sane rational hope mind you, but the completely improbable notion that all of this madness means that Takumi Yanai is indeed a time traveller so we might get elf chicks out of the deal, in exchange for the death of the republic.

http://brickmuppet.mee.nu/images/DTWMAR.jpg

So...aside from America possibly electing Trump, is there any evidence to support this crazy idea? Well...at the intersection of desperation and special pleading there is this story about how the Russians appear to have been doing seminar calls and Tweetsorms for Trump.

Now, a Debbie Downer skeptic might ask, "What the hell does the involvement of Russia have to do with...that?"

Well, doomsayers...there's the little matter of Natalia Poklonskaya.
to wit...

Yeah...but it's all I've got in the way of cheer-uppery.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun May 8 20:49:23 2016 (/4jFR)

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May 03, 2016

The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire

And one of those will be our leader

For the state of our civics is dire.

"[expletives deleted]"

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:45 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1 I've been called ******* nuts these evening when I patiently explained (for the 100th time) that I wasn't opposed to Donald Trump because I didn't like his toupee. It is not clear to me at all that Donald Trump is a superior choice, regardless of the letter he's choosing to represent himself as. And of course, if I don't believe Trump in the oval office is relatively superior to Clinton, or at least not to any compelling degree, then I just accept the long view and choose not to compromise my ethics. I can make a long-view argument that Hillary will be better for the country in the end, but I'm still not sure how comfortable I am with it.

Posted by: Ben at Wed May 4 01:25:31 2016 (DRaH+)

2 I've been a Cruz supporter since shortly before Walker got out (and boy was Walker a disappointment), and I've come to the conclusion he'd have been among our best Presidents. Unfortunately, Cruz always had the deck stacked against him. The Elites on both sides of the isle politically and in the MSM have been routinely changing their shorts about the idea of him winning since Rubio bailed. They think they can control Trump better and that a loss by Trump (more likely to happen in their opinion) would discredit the other Republican factions and give them back the reigns of power. I think they are wrong on both counts, Trump won't be controllable in the way they think and he will do better in the general then people are currently willing to credit him, especially against Hillary or Bernie.

Unfortunately I think Trump managed to make opposing Ted personal to a significant segment of the rebellious voter population that Ted needs to build into a coalition. The 'Lying Ted' and 'Canadian' smears are going to stick, damaging Ted going forward and be difficult to shake. Ted also did himself no favors in the end by going for broke on this election by stacking his entire chance on rules lawyering the delegates and appearing to try to make truce with the establishment against Trump. It give him an unfortunate, and I believe inaccurate, air of being just another greedy politician.

Unfortunately I think Ted's, and the country's, best option at this point would be to get him on the Supreme Court as he won't be granted the advantages of being 'next in line' that other Repub candidates have had.

As for Trump, I do think he will be better then Hillary, though that is a low bar indeed. There is at least a chance he could surprise us and be honestly good or great, but no such chance for a known commodity like Hillary. Also, I have little doubt that with Trump we'll at least finally get our wall built. Whether it is a physical Great Wall of China or a virtual surveillance wall remains to be seen, but I have no doubt something will be built which will at least be an improvement over the last 30 years.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wed May 4 07:47:55 2016 (5YSpE)

3 I'm not particularly thrilled by Trump, but it's pretty obvious that he's not interested in fundamentally transforming the country like Obama and Hillary are.
And while I've flirted with the "burn it down" school of thought, in the end I remember that history is replete with examples that what comes later is more likely to be worse.

Posted by: Rick C at Wed May 4 17:57:45 2016 (FvJAK)

4 All that matters is keeping Hillary out of the White House. If that means suffering through one term of a Trump Presidency, so be it, and with the resulting embarrassment for the Republican Party, maybe they will learn their lesson and things will be better after that.

Posted by: Mauser at Wed May 4 22:01:46 2016 (5Ktpu)

5 I'll probably end up voting for some joke candidate like Gary Johnson or whomever the Libertarians put up as a clay pigeon, assuming they don't run an actual Satanist or the like, but between Clinton and Trump, I think I'd give the edge to Clinton. I've more confidence that she won't provoke a shooting war with the Chinese, and I have no such confidence in Trump. On the off chance that Clinton turns out to be even more frothingly incompetent at campaigning than she already has shown herself to be, and that orange clown ends up in the White House, he'll have such a collection of re-treads, adventurers, and sly-eyed con-men working for him that you might as well have a magic 8-ball running his policy desks.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Thu May 5 08:56:58 2016 (jwKxK)

6 That's about where I am, Mitch H. Johnson won't win; I honestly don't think Trump has a change in heck, either. But, Hillary is a very easy target. And while I generally don't support the idea that standing in opposition is better than compromising to win, that's the way I'm leaning this year.

Posted by: Ben at Thu May 5 10:12:26 2016 (DRaH+)

7 I don't want to get into a fight in the comments here so this is the last I'll mention it, but you are advocating for malice over incompetence. The latter seems better from where I'm sitting.

Posted by: Rick C at Thu May 5 10:17:34 2016 (ECH2/)

8 Oh...While I typed, the conversation was down here.
Yeah, this is a mess.
I've gotta say that I'm generally inclined to lean towards incompetence than malice. Where it gets complicated is when one throws a malevolent incompetent into the mix as that messes up the equation...and I'm not sure where the greater value of either characteristic lies in this set.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu May 5 11:04:50 2016 (/4jFR)

9 I mean, we've got one person who says "I like veteranss, I just don't want street vendors in front of my classy, snobby building" (which somehow gets turned into "I hate veterans"), again, compared to someone who went out of her way to be rude and demeaning to her Secret Service detail. I can feel that Trump will be less bad for the country while still not actually liking him.

Posted by: Rick C at Thu May 5 14:32:23 2016 (ECH2/)

10 My rule since the Eighties has been "I only vote for Republicans because Democrats destroy the country faster". I have yet to see evidence that undermines this theory.

Now, if Trump could actually take California in the general election, it would be worth voting for him to watch the head explosions. Otherwise, it doesn't really matter who I vote for.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thu May 5 15:15:28 2016 (CLiR9)

11 Clinton and Trump... it's like they split Nixon and LBJ each down the middle and set all the dials to 11. Clinton got the Machiavellian evil, Trump took the sour populist hatred of the establishment, both of them took a fair helping of petty self-dealing corruption, while Trump ran away with LBJ's incandescent crassness and, I fear, foreign-policy pugnacious recklessness.

After eight years of Obama, either one of them will cement our status as an elective dictatorship. Domestically I suspect it'll be a kleptocratic congealed drift towards the entitlements/debt cliff - whether the congressional Republicans lose their majority or not, the only real difference will be whether Congress joins in on the petty cultural war harassment, or continues to leave it to an increasingly lawless executive. And anyone who thinks Donald Trump has the bureaucratic ability or inclination to keep any of that from happening hasn't been paying attention. Either he keeps within the letter of the regulatory apparatus (I hesitate to refer to it as "law" anymore) and gets rolled by the bulletproof, amorphous eternal bureaucracy, or he tries to play despot and lays about with the firing stick, whereupon he's going to find out just how little traction rule by temper tantrum really has in the face of a skilled and self-interested apparat.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Thu May 5 15:52:04 2016 (jwKxK)

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April 02, 2016

This is Not a Change in Format

...nor a trend.

However, this discussion by Milo Yiannopoulos and some less exuberantly gay fellow about current political trends and especially political correctness is well worth an hour and a half of your time.

I obviously don't agree with Milo's sanguine take on Trump, particularly regarding his proposals about libel law, but this is a very good, thoughtful, and topical discussion.

more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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