Monthly Archives: July 2015

Progressive Eugenics

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One thing no one is allowed to notice is that Progressives have a deep fascination with eugenics. Every liberal friend I have thinks there are too many people. They blame climate change on over population. The inability to build roads is the fault of too many people spilling out of the cities into the countryside. Even explaining to them the math of population density does not change their mind.

Progressives have a long history with eugenics. A century ago American Progressives were preaching the virtues of forced sterilization as a way to fix the population. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme court case upholding a Virginia law that authorized the state to surgically sterilize certain “mental defectives” without their consent.

In fact, America was the leader in the eugenics movement, not the Germans. This is an example of where fascism relied on an American intellectual development to inform their own views. Margaret Sanger, of course, was a raving eugenicist, in addition to being a nut. She wanted the state to distribute babies based on the fitness of potential parents.

As I said at the start, we’re not allowed to talk about this anymore. Instead, we must pretend that Ted Cruz wants to pack Bibles into the wombs of young women and sew their legs shut. While that’s happening, the Left can force young girls onto birth control in the public school system.

The school in question is mostly minority. According to Great Schools, it is 68% non-white. The demographics of the surrounding area tell me this is where the SWPL’s send the poor whites and minorities. The Feds are paying for this scheme through an anti-poverty program. The map tells me there are a plethora of abortion clinics nearby.

For as long as I have been alive, Progressives have worked to put the poor and black on mandatory birth control. The argument they use these days is that unwanted children keeps poor women poor. Getting them on birth control means they can go to school and get out of the ghetto. The fact that fifty years of doing this has not worked is not seen as a deterrent.

The thing about this is many people reading this would probably agree with mandatory birth control in these schools. I think there is a good argument for making birth control a condition of public assistance. If you’re on the dole, you get fixed. That’s for males too. Vasectomies are reversible so if you want your free cheese, drop trow and look to your left.

Similarly, drug testing the dependent is debatable, even if you are in favor of legalizing drugs. Getting high is a luxury item and people on the dole should not be spending on luxury items. On the other hand, having the idle high on drugs probably makes them more docile so maybe the libertarians will make drug taking mandatory for the dependent.

The bottom line here is that eugenics have always been a big part of the Progressive future. It has always been there. Sanger argued that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” She also wanted to “Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or compulsory sterilization.”

They have softened the language, but scratch the paint of a Progressive and you will also reveal a swastika.

The Ratchet

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Spinoza writes:

A while ago, your theme was cyclical progressive “great awakenings”, wasn’t it? I think you meant by this that reality eventually catches up to progressive excess every generation or so, to be followed by another awakening.
But lately you seem worried that the progressive victory is permanent.
If I am correctly representing two views you have, do you see them as compatible? I hope so.

I’m not sure reality ever catches up with Progressives. They simply exhaust themselves and go into a dormant phase for a while. The Progressive Movement under Wilson pushed through a massive expansion of Federal power, but eventually ran out of steam in World War I. Some of Wilson’s more egregious polices were rolled back, like the Sedition Act, but much of it remained. The movement went dormant in the 20’s, but came back to life in the 30’s with FDR and the New Deal.

Similarly, some of the New Deal was rolled back. The big programs like Social Security remained, but much of the central planning was slowly peeled back. Still, the paradigm had shifted and there was no going back to the pre-FDR ways. The Federal state would play the dominant role in the lives of Americans.

It is the ratchet effect. The Progressive push begins and we get a series of clicks until finally some push-back and the advance is arrested. The core holds for a while and then the advance begins against. Click, click, click and then another pause.

We’re certainly headed to a period of normalization, but there will be no roll back of anything we have seen over the last decade. I’m not even sure there will be any attempt at roll back. Eisenhower talked about a reigning in the military-industrial complex. Reagan talked about a rollback the welfare state. There’s exactly no one in public life talking about a course correction, much less rollback.

The great question is whether we have reached a point where the traditional American core is so weak and so broken that it cannot stabilize. After the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s, there was still a large stable base of sensible, prosperous Americans able to restore sanity to the country. That base is greatly diminished today and may simply be too weak to rally after the latest onslaught.

That said, it is easy to lose sight of the silent majority. In the 70’s, people really and truly thought the country was lost. Jimmy Carter gave speeches about how it was all downhill and we better get used to it. I recall G. Gordon Liddy talking about how he and his coevals thought they were facing a revolution. That did not happen. Things stabilized and we had a nice run of peace and prosperity. You never know what is over the next hill.

Little Green Men

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Over the last week or so I have been going back and forth with a friend about the timeline in the Terminator movies. With the new one coming out, the old ones have been on cable. I either forgot or I was unaware that they had made a fourth movie, based around the John Connor character, so I watched it the other day. That film tries to address the timeline issue, which is what spawned the discussion.

The trouble with time travel, of course, is the paradox. In this case, sending Kyle Reese back in time could alter the timeline in such a way that the future no longer includes the possibility of sending that same guy back in time. That’s the paradox. It is the old bit about going back in time to kill your parents. It’s a logical impossibility.

Therefore, the only way the movies can make any sense is if the future guy is destined to be a part of the natural timeline. Your attempt to go back and kill your parents always fails, but in the attempt, events are shaped in such a way that you one day decide to go back in time to kill your parents. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In the movie four they try to tidy up this bit of the plot, so they make it clear that John Connor knows how this works. He knows he sends his father back in time to save his mother. The trouble with that is he could roll the dice and decide to just shoot the man destined to be his father, thus scrambling the whole thing, but then that would mean someone else was his father.

The point here is that time travel as a plot devise is fine as long as you don’t think about it too much. The only way to make it work logically is to either accept determinism or the multiverse. The former naturally appeals to humans, while the latter is incomprehensible to most people, so Hollywood preaches a weird form of fatalism in these movies.

There’s a similar problem with space aliens. Logic say that intelligent life evolving on another planet is most likely going to look a lot like us.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.

Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

This is most certainly true, to a point. A planet the size of earth orbiting a sun similar to ours would probably be very similar to earth. In order to support carbon based life of any complexity it will need to look very much like earth. An intelligent species evolving on an earth like planet will therefore come out pretty close to humans. Maybe all the smart people are black instead of Chinese, but otherwise things would be pretty close.

“An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought,” he told The Independent. “The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

“The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement.”

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth’s.

He said: “Certainly it’s not the case that every Earth-like planet will have life let alone humanoids. But if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower. If you want a fly there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to swim, like a shark, there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to invent warm-bloodedness, like birds and mammals, there’s only a few ways to do that.

The missing bit here is we don’t know what we will look like 10,000 years from now. We know, for example, that humans as a whole are about ten points dumber now than in the Victorian era. The main reason for that is stupidity is not as lethal as it was then. Similarly, we are physically weaker as a whole, due to the fact we do far less physical labor.

An intelligent life form on another planet that is able to traverse the stars to reach earth will be vastly more advanced than us and therefore further down the timeline of evolution. If the artificial intelligence people are right, they will have long ago figured out how to upload their consciousness into the machine and will no longer be organic, as we currently understand it.

Of course, a species with the ability to traverse the stars will surely have the ability to cloak their presence from us anyway. Therefore, the only way we will ever encounter space aliens is when we evolve to the point where we can traverse the stars and meet them halfway. Alternatively, we will see the humanoids of another planet when we visit, but they will look like retarded apes to us as we will have evolved well beyond our current meat stick form.

In other words, there are no little green men and even if there were, they would not reveal themselves to us anyway.

David Brooks and the Long War

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One of the ways you tell who is winning and who is losing is to look at which way the advice is flowing. Losers never give advice because no one takes advice from a loser so even if they have something to offer, no one pays much attention. Winners, on the other hand, love talking about how they won and will offer anyone and everyone tips as to how to be a winner.

There’s also something else. Winners are confident. They are willing to offer help to the loser because they are sure they are better than the other guy and have no fear he will use the advice to turn the tables. In other words, it is safe for the winner to be magnanimous as he perceives he has little to lose and will gain much by looking magnanimous. The loser, in contrast, must play close to the vest in the hope of scoring an upset.

That’s why we see in American public debate, a flow of advice and suggestions from Progressives to their alleged opponents. Democrats are always brimming with tips for Republicans. Progressives are always out lecturing extreme right-wing extremists about the folly of their extreme right-wing extremism. Here’s an example from David Brooks the other day.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

You get that? David Brooks is generously offering you his sage advice , which is you need to give up and join the winning team. He wastes a lot of time tarting it up, while casting himself as something other than a conventional Progressive. That’s just part of the act. William Safire perfected this a half century ago and now it has become a feature of Progressive agit-prop.

Of course, this is not advice offered in the spirit of fellowship. David Brooks thinks social conservatives are sub-human and he would gladly sign up to slam the oven door on them. This is mostly gloating. Brooks is taking a victory lap. He also hopes that social conservatives will keep fighting. His cult is reactionary and they need bogeymen. When the day comes that the Left clears the field of enemies, it is the day it collapses.

It’s why the Left is so good at inventing monsters. Its identity is based on struggle, something they inherited from Continental communists. Despite the fact Brooks has never known a time when he and his coreligionists have not been in control of the culture, they still believe they are struggling to set things right and break the spine of the WASP oppressors.

After every battle, the Left celebrates, but then says there is much left to be done. This Brooks column always turns up in the transition phase, They partied and now they are sobering up, being reminded that “those evil social conservatives are still out there, plotting and scheming to take back our victory. If only they would just give up!”

In one of life’s great ironies, America is being cleared of Christians by a religious cult that habitually nails itself to the cross and then blames the Christians.

Life in a Kleptocracy

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It’s tempting to think the lawlessness we are seeing with our government is a new development, but it has been a slow incremental process. Heck, you can go back to the the 70’s and fine court ruling that were plucked out of thin air. Roe is the most obvious example. The court held that if the Founders had thought of it, they would have included abortion in the Bill of Rights so we’ll just pretend they did.

Most of the lawlessness in America is a much more mundane thing like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws.

In February 2014, Drug Enforcement Administration task force officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport seized $11,000 in cash from 24-year-old college student Charles Clarke. They didn’t find any guns, drugs or contraband on him. But, according to an affidavit filled out by one of the agents, the task force officers reasoned that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking, because Clarke was traveling on a recently-purchased one-way ticket, he was unable to provide documentation for where the money came from, and his checked baggage had an odor of marijuana. (He was a marijuana smoker.)

Clarke’s cash, which says he he spent five years saving up, was seized under civil asset forfeiture, where cops are able to take cash and property from people who are never convicted of — and in some cases, never even charged with — a crime. The DEA maintains that asset forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool: “By attacking the financial infrastructure of drug trafficking organizations world-wide, DEA has disrupted and dismantled major drug trafficking organizations and their supply chains, thereby improving national security and increasing the quality of life for the American public.”

But the practice has become contentious, in part because agencies are generally allowed to keep a share of the cash and property they seize. In cases like Clarke’s, where local and federal agents cooperate on a seizure, federal agencies typically keep at least 20 percent of the assets, while local cops split the remainder among themselves. Critics argue that this creates a profit motive and leads to “policing for profit.”

There’s a term for this. It’s called piracy. In the age of sail, the crown would unleash privateers on the shipping of another country. One king’s pirates were another king’s entrepreneurs. Today, the privateers get a W2 from the local government and rob the subjects of the crown.

This being 2015 America there’s a non-trivial chance this story is entirely made up or they left out important facts. Sadly, we simply cannot trust our news sites these days. Still, I know of too many similar cases. The pattern is they target people they think are unlikely to lawyer up and take them to federal court. If you’re a lawyer at a white shoe firm you can travel through these jurisdictions carrying bags of cash. The state always targets the weak.

The Future is Not Now

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In my experience, the people most obsessed with disruptive technology, the robot future, AI and revolutionary technology are small bore liberals. These are the sorts who pass themselves off “nerds” having grown up on science and comic books. In reality they have never had much interest in any of that and they are usually innumerate and devoid of science.

It’s why my bullshit detector pegs at eleven whenever I hear someone prattling on about some new thing that will change the world. Inventions that changed the world were almost always accidents. In most cases the inventor did not know he was changing the world. Heck, in most cases there was not an inventor. Things just evolved to an inflection point and then took off like magic.

On the other side of the coin, most “revolutionary inventions” turn out to be Segways. Fifteen years ago Dean Kamen said he was about to change the world. Then he unveiled his two-wheel scooter that only managed to change our airports, letting fat cops on double time get from one doughnut stand to the next.

I’ve always thought 3-D printing was headed down the same path. There will be a narrow use of the technology, but otherwise it will be an expensive toy for hobbyists and weirdos. Exactly no one has ever sat around dreaming of the day they could manufacture their own household products. We used to do that. It sucked. That’s why we had the Industrial Revolution.

My skepticism seems to have been right.

The 3D-printing industry “is choking off its own revolution” with a combination of toy-like machines, over-priced materials and legal wrangles according to Francis Bitonti, the designer behind the printed dress for Dita von Teese (+ interview).

“3D printing has just become incredibly stagnant,” said New York-based Bitonti, who feels that many of the machines on the market are little more than “tinker toys”.

“A toy is not going to create the next industrial revolution,” he said. “The biggest barrier that we have in the studio is just scaling products because the price points are so high.”

Printing materials are too expensive, he added: “You’re paying 65 dollars for a kilogram spool of PLA, which is crappy plastic, and you can’t compete with injection moulding or any other type of production.”

Speaking to Dezeen in New York last month, Bitonti said that the 3D-printing industry needed to open up its intellectual property so that the design and manufacturing community could help drive forward improvements.

“They’ve got to open up,” he said. “It’s not that they need to open up all of their IP, but it’s a lot of things. You see a lot of tinker toys because they’re treating it like a copy machine. I think they need to change their mind and understand that it’s a manufacturing technology.”

He added: “The industry is just completely choked by intellectual property law right now.”

Maybe. It’s also possible that there’s not a lot of benefit to having a 3-D printer. If you are hobbyist who tinkers with things that have a lot of small plastic parts, maybe it makes sense for you. If you are producing volume, then this is a waste of money as you can get the work done better and cheaper by professionals.

The thing is, most people are not very creative or imaginative. Yeah, a creative mind with design skills can create magic on a 3-D printer. The other 99.99% of humans lack the creativity and design skills to create anything. We learned this with the PC. Even today, most people spend their time playing games on them, not doing productive work.

I could not leave this without my other criticism, which is that 3-D printing is whittling for the lazy. If you believe there was a huge barrier keeping a hungry populace out of the whittling game, then 3-D printing makes sense. If you really have an urge to make small things from big things, buy a pen knife and some wood. Put the $5K to better use.