December 2020

The super-rich hate the free market, because the market entails change, and for the billionaires, the only way open to them by any change is down.

They feel threatened because new, more vigorous, and still unknown entrepreneurs constantly arise to challenge their vested interests. If the super-rich could conspire to freeze society and prevent further disequilibration, then their wealth and power would be forever safe. They and their enterprises could then become lazy and conservative and ignore the demands of the consumers, rather like the government Post Office.

We should celebrate the past achievements of the super-rich in getting from rags to riches, thereby making all of us better off, but distrust their present political machinations, aimed as they inevitably are at destroying free competition.

The older Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and so on get, the less competent at business they become, and the more eager they get to enlist the state to protect them from the competition by dangerous upstarts.

We must not allow them to succeed at feudalizing the economy.

I think what “they” are planning for us is a world populated by only two kinds of people: paupers and the super-rich, all happily part of an evenly rotating economy.

Here’s a pretty good article on the Catholic practice of praying to saints.

Here’s the deal: God loves you, but He need not like you. So let Smith be alive, and Jones be in heaven. Smith prays to God for something. God thinks: “You, Smith, are a wretched sinner, a perverted creep, for example. Why should I give you the time of day?”

But it so happens that Jones, being Smith’s old friend or mentor or teacher, does like Smith. And, since Jones is in heaven, by that fact, God likes Jones. So if Smith invokes Jones’ name to intercede for him, God might just grant Smith’s prayer as a favor to Jones which he would not have granted to Smith praying by himself.

God is not a brick wall that he cannot be persuaded by human effort; and man is not so irrelevant that he can’t persuade God. And sometimes it takes a group effort to succeed at it.

Hence prayer to, or rather with, saints, angels, and the like can be more effective than solitary prayer.

Deborah Birx: Don’t you know that laws are for little people, that is, you? You are all just worthless peasants, and the only reason we allow you to exist at all is to pay taxes to profit rulers like me.

As beasts of burden, your job is to shut up and follow orders. You must be really stupid if you think that I serve you. You will serve us your entire life, as will your pathetic little offspring.

If I want to punish you with lockdowns, I will, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you resist, I will make examples of a few of you with ruthless persecution to strike fear into the hearts of others, and then you, like the sheep that you are, will fall in line.

The laws I make have no purpose other than to crush your souls. I am not interested in any greater good, only in power and the loot that I extract from you, my slaves.

Your only task in life is to feed the empire and its overlords like me. Resign? I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.

Congressmen: The Pentagram needs its trillion dollars this year to buy bombs to kill brown people with. How are we supposed to channel our destructive imperial power all over the globe without the bombs?

We can’t afford the COVID relief because the bombs are more important. We love the beauty of our weapons of mass destruction. Consider this matter as a government subsidy for the arts.

Sick, dude, suspending a champion cyclist for using the wrong emoji?!

I don’t even know what the hell’s going on anymore in this crazy country!

Gordon uses the following proof that under the logical positivists’ verification criterion of meaning, every statement comes out as verifiable.

Let p be a verifiable statement like “there is a chair in this room,” and q be a prototypical meaningless statement like “the not nothings itself.” Then

From p, we deduce p or q. … Assuming that a logical consequence of a verifiable proposition is itself verifiable, (p or q) is verifiable.

Further, if p is verifiable, then the negation of p is verifiable… Now, consider this argument:

p or q
not-p
therefore, q

The argument is valid, and each of its premises is verifiable. Then, q is a logical consequence of verifiable propositions, and it, too, is verifiable.

But if “the not nothings itself” is meaningless, then a fortiori, just like “abracadabra,” it cannot have a truth value; it’s not a proposition. Therefore, it cannot be joined to a genuine proposition via a logical operator such as “or.” Its meaninglessness poisons the entire disjunction: (“there is a chair in this room” or “abracadabra”) is not a well-formed formula and, too, both lacks a truth value and is meaningless. Therefore, the proof fails: p or q is not verifiable.

Perhaps the proof can be saved by picking as q a proposition that seems perfectly meaningful to a non-positivist but still is empirically unverifiable. But such a statement would in itself refute positivism without the need for a Gordon-style argument.

Harvard Medical School redefines “woman” as “birthing person.”

Is that a way of destroying men’s sex drive? Who the hell wants to have sex with birthing persons? I don’t want to know what goes on inside that Zerg hive. Damn.

I agree that war can spur “technological progress.” But in the first place, this is a bad thing, because the new technology is used to enhance the state’s power to destroy society.

Technological progress is supposed to be part of economic progress that serves consumer welfare, not be an efficient means to devastating the world.

Second, no one has ever argued that state activities have no useful spillovers whatsoever. But it’s like arguing that since police departments can develop technologies that can be re-purposed in other branches of industry, therefore, it’s a good thing that there is crime.

In any case, if resources hadn’t been absorbed in developing technology X to be used in the war effort, they would have been used to develop technology Y to be used for human welfare. Even from the statist point of view, the government can subsidize X without actually fighting a war.

War is an unmitigated evil, and the futility of victory is no joke.

I have trouble reading Steve Sailer’s blog: the stuff he digs up makes me too mad.