Monday, October 31, 2011

A Free Suggestion to the Catholic Church Regarding Marriage

I've recently written about the need to synthesize a Marriage 3.0, one that is closer in spirit to Marriage 1.0 than the Marriage 2.0 that prevails in most Western countries today.  The Catholic Church's orthodoxy and tradition, if perhaps not its current praxis, almost certainly agrees on these points.

Here I have a suggestion for Pope Benedict.  You almost certainly have, through the prestige of your organization, the ability to get the sort of marriage covenants I talk about here:
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/10/mens-rights-activistsmgtow-would.html
enacted in at least several of the states of the US, and possibly in some European countries as well.

You've also got some other cards in your hand that other reactionary elements do not.  For instance, you could decide that the only marriages that your churches will celebrate will be the hardcore form described previously.  If that's too harsh for your sensibilities, there's another option---you could discount the tuition of any child attending a Catholic school whose parents are in a 'covenant' marriage.  I bet you wouldn't even have to discount it much to get quite a bit of adoption of the new marriage standard, especially if you got the ability to easily upgrade an old standard marriage into the relevant statutes.  10% would probably be more than enough to entice the faithful (and frankly, lots of the less than faithful), into it.  You've also got the ability to orchestrate peer pressure that most reactionaries can only dream of, and, should you choose to employ it, even a fairly strong measure of  moral authority.

One other note, because divorce is one of the most financially devastating mistakes most people make, I bet you'll more than make up the cost of the tuition discounts in increased tithes and offerings anyway.  Sometimes the correct moral and doctrinal choice is also the correct financial one.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Question for Readers: Why is such a high fraction of what we teach culturally about the minds of others far more true of non-neurotypicals than of neurotypicals?

First, let me explain what I'm referring to when I ask this question.  As a culture, we implicitly or explicitly teach a model of 'other mind'---that is, a model of how OTHER people think and an estimate of how their internal diplomatic models work.  Those models cover things like what sorts of actions or behavior are likely to ingratiate, intimidate, befriend, or embitter the person they are employed on or with.

A pretty crudely summarized version of the diplomatic model that our culture teaches (I won't speak to any other cultures, because I lack sufficient information and experience within them to do them justice) is as follows:

The diplomatic model that most people use is like an integrator.  Doing them favors slowly builds up their positive feelings towards you and receiving favors deducts from it, like it was money in a savings account.

This model is fairly simple, easy to understand, and, unfortunately, also nearly 180 degrees from reality.  However, it is a fairly good model if you're dealing with fairly non-neurotypical people---e.g. a reasonable fraction of the geek population.

So my question to readers is this:  How in the hell did our culture start promulgating such a model?  Do the neurotypicals actually think they're non-neurotypical? :-)  Or is most of the writing of such topics conducted by the least neurotypical among us, with the exception of such extremely practical literature such as salesmanship training?

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

More encouraging developments for Reactionaries: The Populace Reloads

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/gun-ownership-soars-18-year-high-47-americans-admit-owning-gun

This is fairly significant because of what it says about the population's actual mood.  This is particularly so considering that there's a significant fraction of the population that for operational security reasons will ALWAYS lie on such a question if it is asked by someone without a 'need to know'.  My family fits in that category.  Every question asked by anyone with even a hint of officialdom has an implicit 'that I have a need and a right to know about' appended onto the end of it before it is answered.  I understand there's a long tradition of this among English Catholics, and I'm perfectly happy to be a bit ecumenical.

I recall back in the Clinton years joking that Bill was the best firearm salesman in US history.  Obama, the chosen One, has clearly excelled him.  The prospect of new federal gun control was looming quite a bit more in Clinton's day---right now it is temporarily in the dead letter pile in the DC post office.  So the population is sending quite a different message through its increased gun purchases than it was during the 90s.

But there's another piece to this puzzle.  In addition to buying tons of guns, the population is buying literally billions of rounds of ammunition.  The volumes of ammunition purchased sends a very distinct message.  That message certainly doesn't indicate confidence in the Cathedral.  I suspect pretty strongly that if such statistics were kept back then, we'd have seen similar spikes in the early 1770s and late 1850s.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Occupy Wall Street's First Potentially Effective Action Against the Banksters

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/10/bank-transfer-day-gains-momentum-on-facebook/

The OWS folks are pushing to get folks to pass their bucks into banks and credit unions that don't apply monthly fees to their accounts and debit cards (BoA being the most notorious present example).  It so happens that there's movement in this direction from hard right circles as well.  Just this morning before worship several folks were talking of moving their accounts out of BoA and Wells Fargo for similar reasons.
Now, of course I'm not against the right of any bank to make any contract with its customers that they agree to willingly.  However, I'm also strongly in favor of the right of their customers to tell them where they can go with their new fees and what they can do when they get there.

Also, the major banks, with the possible exception of BB&T, are our cultural enemies.  They provide vast amounts of money and prestige to the various foundations that are anathema to us.  So anything that hurts them is favored.  The time to boycott is when a target is already weakened and under assault from other sources as well.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Men's Rights Activists/MGTOW: Would the Following Tempt You?

Some time earlier this year I inquired of the MRA/MGTOW crowd what they wanted in order to be willing to play the marriage and child rearing game once more.
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2011/08/mens-rights-activistsmgtow-what-do-you.html

From the various comments, I believe that a reasonable accomodation could be reached between this group and the social conservatives at large.  Here's what I suggest:

Create a new available class of marriage.  This will have a lot of similarities to the 'Covenant Marriage' that is available in several states in the US.  The specifics would include:

1.  Much more difficult divorce--basically only the 3 A's (adultery, abuse, abandonment).  Nothing like no-fault divorce would be permitted.  MRA/MGTOW know very well that most divorce is initiated by women, but this could be sold pretty easily I suspect to social conservatives and would-be white knights as making it more difficult to dump a faithful wife for a newer model.
2.  In the event of a divorce, the children will default to the full custody of the father.  This could be sold based on statistics (children with only a father do better on most metrics than children with only a mother) and as nipping the whole 'deadbeat Dad' meme in the bud.  MRA/MGTOW will of course realize that this puts some shackles on the rationalization hamster by increasing the perceived cost of a divorce to the female partner.
3.  Prenuptial agreement would be mandatory.  In addition, filing for divorce in a state without this flavor of marriage recognized in statute would trigger a provision in the prenup making is VASTLY more unfavorable to the one so filing.  Basically, if you try to get around Provision 1 by divorcing in a state that doesn't recognize this flavor of marriage, the prenup will punish you severely.  The arbitrating agency for the prenup should also probably be required to be defined at time of signing, be it a secular or religious agency.

So would this arrangement tempt you sufficiently?  One could probably get a reasonable facsimile of this via contract + covenant marriage in the states that have covenant marriage presently, and getting something like this codified into law in at least one state is probably not an unachievable goal. 

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

More unwitting allies in the great struggle against the Cathedral: Amazon

http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2011/10/amazon-cutting-out-publishers.html

Now Amazon is almost certainly not a diehard reactionary organization.  But it is serving our ends by hastening the demise of the publishing industry's business model.  It is seriously unlikely that it is an accident that nearly all literature published today has what I call 'authorial affirmative action' and 'histogram distortion' (by this I mean significantly skewing the demographics of who does what in fiction or news relative to the actual frequencies in the real world).  They are in fact effectively part of the mainstream media and their destruction through slowly choking their lines of supply only helps us.  All hail the heroes of Reaction!
Only the founder of Craigslist is higher in our constellation of stars.
Our regular readers know, of course, that I favor gaining support from people by appealing to their actual interests rather than attempting to spin a web of cosmic justice and prancing unicorns over my cause.  Many of our most useful allies not only will not like us as persons or as a group, but will actively dislike us.  So be it.  Those reactionaries that are Christians like myself can use this as an opportunity to love some of those that consider us enemies.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

999 and other Tax Plans that will never happen

Presidential Candidate Herman Cain, whom I dislike less than Rick Perry and probably less than Mitt Romney, has been talking a lot about his 999 tax plan.  In short, he'd like to replace nearly all federal taxes with a 9% sales tax, a 9% income tax, and a 9% corporate tax, all of which he'd greatly reduce any deductions and exemptions for in the attempt at rough revenue neutrality.

I give him credit for recognizing that our current tax system is an abomination, dragged up from the hells of complexity that the Elders of the Second Sigma find congenial.  It is precisely because these Elders of the Second Sigma, as represented by lobbyists, tax attorneys, lawyers, et al are so invested in the complexity of the tax system that I predict nothing of the sort will happen on this side of a total collapse of governmental legitimacy and authority.  In their attempt to defend the infernal complexity of the existing system, they benefit from the Fundamental Theorem of Reaction---which is to say that any significant change WILL have winners and losers, and if you control the cultural battlespace, it is easy to provide a parade of sympathetic losers and implicitly demand that no change be made unless it is actually perfect, with no losers.  Reactionaries know that this is impossible, and generally view this practice with contempt, but it wins elections and useful idiots.

But, since we're on the topic of taxation, let me present---only half-jokingly---a proposed Jehu tax plan.  My prediction is that rich neurotypicals, like present day Americans, will loathe this plan because of its open and transactional nature.  Here it is:
Create a ladder of classes, possibly even several ladders that branch off the first ladder.  For instance, your ladder might look like this

Lower lower class, middle lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class, middle middle class, upper middle class, lower upper class, middle upper class, and a ton of flavors of upper upper class.

This class ranking would be 100% A-OK for discrimination.  You could have neighborhoods that living in them required class X or lower, class Y only, or class Z or higher.  There would also be perks associated with upper classes, like the police would ACTUALLY bother to investigate identity theft claims you made if you were of class X or higher, for instance.  You'd also have a few sumptuary laws as well, so you could effortlessly display what class you were for the social and romantic marketplaces.

Now for the tax.  You, the taxpayer decide what class you want to be for the next year.  Your net payment to the treasury determines what class you're going to be rated as---perhaps with a sliding window function covering the past decade or so.  And there you have it, a tax system that has very low complexity and requires next to nothing in the way of auditors.  In addition, it acknowledges the fact that there is a hunger for discrimination---such is just inherent in our status-seeking natures--and chains it to a useful purpose.  It also makes status displays a lot less subtle and costly.  Everything is pretty transparent and above the board.  Historically speaking, this isn't even all that odd of a tax system---it's like a head tax where the upper classes have a surcharge.  I predict this same transparency and open nature would cause most neurotypicals to run screaming in terror.


Thursday, October 13, 2011

If Anti-Racism were in practice more than just anti-white, what would 'Hate Crimes' laws look like in action?

Imagine, for a second, that the anti-racists who control mainstream media and politics were actually something more than just an anti-white group...imagine that they were bona fide universalists rather than the glib hypocrites that we've come to know and loathe.  So what would one of their favorite causes, the 'Hate Crimes' law, look like?

Such seems pretty obvious to me---it would be a sentencing enhancement that kicked in any time the victim and offender were on different sides of an accredited line of potential hatred.  For instance, if the offender was white and the victim black, or vice versa, it'd kick in.  If the offender was Jewish and the victim non-Jewish, it'd kick in.  No determination of whether particular, as opposed to general, hatred was involved would be made, the sentence would just get the enhancement if a conviction was made.  The theoretical justification would be that such crimes, in addition to being unpleasant to the victims, also increase the level of tension on both sides of the accredited line of potential hatred.  Someone who is actually anti-racist, as opposed to anti-white, wouldn't lose any sleep over the fact that the number of black offender sentences thus enhanced would be much greater than the number of white offender sentences similarly augmented. 

But obviously, this isn't what we see.  Hate crime statutes are applied with much much greater frequency as a fraction of interracial crimes when the white person is the offender.  It takes a massive hue and cry to even get such considered when the offender is black, and it is rarely applied even then.

The take away here for any honest anti-racists or universalists---assuming any such even exist, is that you're in a bootleggers/baptists alliance with anti-whites, and they outnumber you so incredibly massively in that alliance that it makes no sense to call it a Baptist concern.  Some years ago, when I was in college, I proposed exactly such a hate crime law to many bootleggers from the first and second sigma.  Needless to say, they weren't enthusiastic at all about it.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

I envy the True Finns the quality of their leadership

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlsNRa7vqVw
Timo Soini addresses the world in English regarding the Greek bailout.  He speaks to us like we're adults.  He clearly lays out the toxicity of allowing banks and corporations to socialize their losses while privatizing their profits.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

So you say you want to end zero sum competitions?

Aretae over on his blog writes:

Incidentally...why I disagree wholeheartedly with the pro-white folks:
Race-based group conflict is fundamentally zero sum, which sucks. If you play zero-sum, you are making the deep problem worse. Trying to make an improvement in your current game position while making the game worse for everyone (including yourself) is a position I universally oppose.

http://aretae.blogspot.com/2011/10/potd_10.html

Obviously I disagree pretty strongly with his position.  I'll explain why I disagree first, and then, in the spirit of charity, offer a potential mechanism with which to make his position work.

First, Race-based group conflict being zero sum.  I'll actually go further than that---nearly all group conflict resulting in transfers of wealth isn't just zero sum, it is actually negative sum, if for no other reason that it requires resources to defend against it and to administer and enforce the transfers.  So I have no particular reservation to saying that such competitions suck.  Indeed, I'll go on the record as saying that this is the primary reason why diversity (in the sense that most people today use the word) sucks---it virtually guarantees tons of negative sum conflicts like this.

But here's the rub, you only get to decide (to high efficiency) what YOU will do in such conflicts, and to a much lesser extent what your group will do.  You have very very little influence over what other groups are going to do.  This is why tribalism is interested in you.  If you have another group competing with yours in your society and it doesn't do as well as yours according to some metric, which need exist only in their own minds, it is a good bet that it is going to try to go negative sum on you.  If you're not organized to resist it, you're going to get rolled.  This is why so many transfers take place away from non-elite white males---they're forbidden socially from organizing for their interests as such.  It leads to such pathetic spectacles as MLK or Herman Cain worship, where white males feel compelled to launder the legitimate expression of their own group interests through a minority front man.  Compelling white people (and only white people) to couch their interests in universalist terms when they clearly don't believe in them has resulted in an epic harvest of hypocrisy.

If you actually wanted to clamp down and eliminate such competitions, as Aretae professes to desire, you'd need a stable majority who were willing to precommit to punish severely any attempt at such intergroup transfers, even when such punishment was costly to them.  Aretae cites the example of the gun rights war, and such is actually fairly instructive---Gun Rights were only advanced when the NRA, GOA, and others stopped relying on moral suasion and cranked up the punishments for their enemies.  By basically saying any politician that stands in our way is our enemy, and we'll pursue you into every area feasible to do your career harm, they made the issue largely radioactive for the Democratic party and took it off the big screen legislatively.  Such an aggressive consensus doesn't exist for ending racial transfers.  Even the most anti affirmative action types rarely pursue the issue personally against their political enemies, and if they did, they'd be villified as...guess what...Racists.  And a group willing to punish white people who attempt to tribalize defensively already exists---it's called, nearly everyone in mainstream media or politics, and such onesided mobilization is worse than useless.  So while perhaps not an Impossible Dream, it is a highly improbable one.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Steve Sailer's Strategy

http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-sailer-strategy-updated-three-steps-to-save-america

I don't identify much with the Republican party, and the Republican party doesn't employ Sailer as a campaign consultant, but that's because the Republican party is the stupid party.  Sailer's strategy is the best strategy available to them in the short term (because it would be wildly popular) and in the long term (because it would drive demographics towards a state more favorable to their party).  It is extremely doubtful they'll embrace it openly though, at least at the elite level, because they're afraid of being called nativists and racists.

His strategy, in brief, is:
Promote affordable family formation in groups that vote for you.  Obviously I agree with this---it's also the central pillar of the Reactionary Plan for Victory.
Get most of the Hispanic category to self-identify as white.  I've previously suggested peeling away white people with Spanish surnames.  His proposal is to demolish the category as a whole for AA purposes, which is considerably more ambitious.  What can I say except Amen?
Stop importing people who are going to vote against you.  Here Sailer acknowledges the electoral importance of demographic hegemony.

Lee Atwater, were he to rise from his grave and pronounce campaign strategy, would almost certainly give Saler's strategy two big undead thumbs up.  Atwater, you see, actually probably had a positive expected value as a strategist for the Republican party, something few modern consultants for the Republicans can claim.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

How Violent are Anti-Choice Christianists Anyway?

First let's start with an estimate of how many of these folks there actually are in the US.  Anti-Choice and Pro-Death split close to 50/50, so we can estimate that there are somewhere on the order of 150 Million anti-choicers.  Note, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm using the more derogatory name for both sides.
The article below by Gallup indicates that a little less than half has self-identified as pro-life, but only between a quarter and a third supports abortion for any reason.  By many people's definitions, this would make 2/3 to 3/4 of the population anti choice.  But we'll go by their self-description on the poll where they were asked to make a binary choice.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/118399/more-americans-pro-life-than-pro-choice-first-time.aspx

This shouldn't be terribly surprising.  The pro-deathers have generally had to defend their gains and make advances through the courts, something they wouldn't have to do if they had a majority.

Now, a lot of attention gets paid to anti-abortion violence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
Since Roe v Wade in 1973, there have been 8 murders of abortionists, abortion employees, or escorts of same.  On Wikipedia you can read about every single case, making this a terribly accurate statistic---it is an actual enumeration.

From our friends in the FBI's UCR---they've made their stats available back to 1960 through
http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/


Estimated murder rate * Year United States-Total
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1973 9.4

1974 9.8

1975 9.6

1976 8.7

1977 8.8

1978 9.0

1979 9.8

1980 10.2

1981 9.8

1982 9.1

1983 8.3

1984 7.9

1985 8.0

1986 8.6

1987 8.3

1988 8.5

1989 8.7

1990 9.4

1991 9.8

1992 9.3

1993 9.5

1994 9.0

1995 8.2

1996 7.4

1997 6.8

1998 6.3

1999 5.7

2000 5.5

2001 5.6

2002 5.6

2003 5.7

2004 5.5

2005 5.6

2006 5.7

2007 5.6

2008 5.4

2009 5.0
Notes: National or state offense totals are based on data from all reporting agencies and estimates for unreported areas.

* Rates are the number of reported offenses per 100,000 population

United States-Total -

The 168 murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 are included in the national estimate.

The 2,823 murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, are not included in the national estimates.
Sources: FBI, Uniform Crime Reports as prepared by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data

From this we can see that the homicide rate per 100k is between about 5 and 10 throughout the period of interest.  A reasonable average estimate might be 7.5 per 100k.  We're also talking about a period of approximately 37 years.  So the expected number of homicides per 100k people over this span of time would be about 7.5*37, or about 277.5.

Now, let's further assume that anti-choicers are like motorcycle gangs---i.e. only 1% are HARDCORE.  That gives us a radical anti-choice population of 1.5 Million.  We'll assume the other 148.5 million are just poseurs.
So if we assume that this radical anti-choice population is as murderous on average as the average American, we'd expect them to produce 277.5*15, or 4162.5 murders.  If we further assume that this group's murderous rage has only a tithe directed at abortionists and their collaterals, we'd expect to see 416 murders.  These are terribly weak assumptions when one considers them---I mean---only 1% of the group being considered at all, only having a murder rate equal to the population as a whole, and only directing 10% of their total red-handed wrath at their supposedly hated foes?

So how many abortionists and minions of abortionists did they actually kill again?
8.
That's it, less than 1/50 of what we'd expect even under these ridiculously low assumptions.

Clearly this group is a LOT less violent than they're given credit for being.  One would almost think there was an organized media effort to skew the public's histogram of perceived violence by groups.



Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Tyranny of the Glib, Scourge of the Second Sigma

Nearly all major politicians in the US fall into that band of intelligence between around 120 and about 135, in short, the second sigma.  You can add to this most major cogs in the bureaucratic section of the Cathedral.  Both Bush the Younger and Kerry, for example, fell in this band per their military IQ tests.

People can generally relate and communicate effectively within about a two sigma range, so it shouldn't be too surprising that so many politicians are clustered here.  I know it's popular in this section of the blogosphere to say that 2 sigma isn't very smart, but let's be real here---2 sigma is about 98th percentile.  Someone at that level is the smartest person an awful lot of people know personally.  It is a lot smarter than the average.  A person at this level honestly can aspire to pretty much any profession with reasonable chances of success.

Of course there's a serious dark side to this...the tyranny of the glib.
People in this range are NOT like average people, but they don't trigger the 'scary smart' defensive mechanisms of said ordinary people.  So they don't typically have it rubbed in their faces on a daily basis that are not representative of the set of average people.  Most people in this range also have no significant daily contact with anyone of below average intelligence, and a lot of people in this range have no significant contact with anyone below about +1 sigma of intelligence.  I don't begrudge them this, as I enjoy it myself but it has huge implications when you consider that this is the class that rules America.

They generate a tax code and other rules of unholy length and complexity.  Even the agencies that enforce their rules don't understand them.  They generally think that if they can handle or outsource the complexity, that everyone else can too.  Excessive complexity is a poison in society, and they pour it out by the barrel---probably not realizing that it hurts them also, although not as much as it hurts the center of the bell curve, let alone the left tail.

They believe that anyone can handle college if they're willing to work moderately hard at it, so everyone should.  This is mostly true in the segments of society where they dwell, but a woeful mistake elsewhere.  They also believe that everyone's kids can learn like theirs do---and nothing could be further from the truth, different methods work for each range of intelligence, and 1950s and earlier teaching textbooks at the college level will actually tell you this.  In short, a lot of the contradictions of the PC, blank slate view of man in the educational sphere are largely invisible to them.

They're at the optimal range for glibness, and they love to morally posture and erect shibboleths that are painfully ridiculous to anyone in tangential contact with reality while imposing the costs of their moralizing on their lessers.  Ever notice how nearly everything they do just HAPPENS to favor them in status competitions?

It is rare to find a politician or major bureaucrat who is smarter than this---most people who are 3 sigmas or above rarely have such roles, partly because they are alien to the general population and they know it, hell, most of them aren't even neurotypical.  They don't expect the experiences of the general population to match theirs, so they're on the whole a good bit more humble about the prospects of reshaping their fellow man.

I believe that there is profound wisdom in the general population's distrust of any politician that does not fairly strongly profess a fair bit of religiosity.  How else is one to constrain someone far smarter and more glib from running roughshod over you?   I suppose there are always pitchforks and torches.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Occupy Wall Street?

So a bunch of fairly extreme leftists are trying to 'occupy Wall Street'.  Normally I've little sympathy for said group, but in this case I can spare a bit.  Wall Street in coordination with Washington has spewed an unprecedented amount of moral hazard in the past 4 years--basically since the beginning of 2008 before the elections, so this isn't purely an Obama thing.  I dare say that the best investment available to large companies is Congressmen, and that is a dire problem.

The fundamental issue is that the unspoken rules of engagement for the nation have been horribly defiled in an unusually public fashion.  If a small business or an individual makes bad investments, they suffer.  Unfortunately, really large businesses, and in particular banks, get bailed out or have the rules bent in their favor.  This makes it really hard to justify enforcing the rules against the little people----on things like, for instance, strategic defaults.

So I understand fully why there's so much rage against Wall Street.  They basically own the Federal Government, which is screwing over the general population, especially white people in a manner that really can't be ignored.  Fortunately, these leftists unwittingly serve the cause of Reaction, as any damage they inflict on the prestige of the present system only helps us.  Once the crisis of confidence comes, truly Reactionary proposals can be advanced.  Lenin called such a state a prerevolutionary condition.

More parody from Dalrock on socializing away my disadvantages while retaining the status effects of my advantages

http://dalrock.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/special-needs-employees/
In this case, socializing away the career disadvantages of being a woman with an unknown predilection for actually having a family.  Naturally, you're not allowed to ask questions like this to your employees.  Predictably, if you take leaves of absence to raise your children, you're not going to advance as rapidly, all other things equal, as you would otherwise.  It is a trade off, and many women choose family over career---so much the better IMO.  The issue comes when, as a result of this trade off and others, people start complaining about 72, 75, or however many cents on the dollar that women make as a result of 'discrimination' and 'sexism'.  It is aggravated by the constant use of moral and shaming language.  Such language shouldn't be used in what amounts to a division of spoils, or, rather, we shouldn't give any additional deference to the users of such language.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Society should socialize away the status effects of my disadvantages, while allowing me to continue to reap all the status effects where I have the advantage

Most talk of redistribution and fairness strikes me this way.  Obviously, most people lack the self-awareness to recognize this even when it perfectly encapsulates their revealed preferences.
For instance, the very smart tend to want raw intelligence to be a big part of the metric according to which society hands out its goodies.  They call it meritocracy.  There are certainly arguments of efficiency, but there's no moral reason why, for instance, someone with a 3 sigma IQ and a 0 sigma level of physical development should be favored over someone with 2 sigma IQ and 1 sigma of physical development for spots at say, Harvard.  Those who have the power to do so or control over the cultural battlespace get to define the formula and then afterwards we all are expected to pretend that it is henceforth sacred.

But back to redistribution.  Few of us would deny that height, for instance carries significant perks.  I've benefited quite a bit from my own.  But when someone proposes something like this:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/04/optimal-taxation-of-height.html

We all get apoplexy.  Or, God forbid
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Warrenresponse2.png
someone suggest that sexual access is an acceptable avenue for redistribution.  Despite the fact, of course, that redistributing status does also in fact redistribute sexual access, since social status is catnip for neurotypical women.

Now, I'm not going to say that redistribution is inherently evil.  I'm terribly uncomfortable with calling all or mostly everyone evil after all---call it humility if you like, or simply a reluctance to expand words such that they become useless for prediction or categorization.  Instead, let's call it what it is---attempts to aggrandize the status of groups, generally at the expense of other groups, since status is generally a zero-sum game.  Practically by definition, someone must ride in the back of the bus.  Even if we outlaw sitting in the last 2 seats, that won't matter, because we'll define the next rearmost seats as, 'the back of the bus'.  We do that because it is our nature as human beings, and I have neither the belief that I or anyone else can perfect or fundamentally change them nor the belief that I have the right to do so.  I do believe that there is someone who DOES, but that's a matter for one of my more theological posts.  Suffice it to say that for efforts of such redistribution, go ahead and try however you like, but please don't attempt to wrap what you're doing in moral language or a veil of righteousness.  You've got no more standing than the two absurdities I've linked morally.  Most advantages, after all, have very little that is actually 'earned' about them, including the ones that the redistributionist actually favors.

Saturday, October 1, 2011