Category: Economics

Social Justice vs. Heterosexuality (and the Problem With ‘Male Feminists’)

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“We must recognize that heterosexuality is also part of the structure of the oppression of women. Sexual repression is one of the ways in which women are oppressed and one of the ways in which patriarchy is maintained.”
— Jane Flax, “Women Do Theory,” 1979, in Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Paula S. Rothenberg (Third Edition, 1993)

“It is a curious fact that feminists who live heterosexual lifestyles — who are happily married to, living with or having sex with men — often find it difficult or impossible to accept the identity ‘heterosexual.’ . . .
“For some heterosexual feminists . . . the contradictions between political ideology and lived experience are acute and painful, and involve constant compromise. . . . No wonder, then, that the identity ‘heterosexual’ is hard to sustain.”
— Celia Kitzinger and Sue Wilkinson, “The Precariousness of Heterosexual Feminist Identities,” in Making Connections: Women’s Studies, Women’s Movements, Women’s Lives, edited by Mary Kennedy, Cathy Lubelska and Val Walsh (1993)

Oppression, repression, patriarchy — guys, if you ever encounter a woman who talks like this, just walk away. She’s deranged, and nothing you say to her is likely to cure her paranoid anti-male delusions.

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and the only way anyone can hope to escape this destruction is to avoid being anywhere in the vicinity of a feminist. Why do feminists hate men so much? Perhaps because the only men with whom feminists ever interact are men too stupid to avoid hanging around feminists. Or even worse, they get mixed up with a “male feminist”:

I thought dating someone who called himself a feminist — who considered himself a “social justice warrior,” who was accepted in these communities, who was introduced to me at a feminist event by a trusted friend, and was sensitive — would be the safest choice I could make for a boyfriend. Instead, he was emotionally and psychologically abusive and manipulative. . . .
He bemoaned how predatory men can be. He was “concerned for me” — not jealous. . . .
He cried when I described my past rape. He hurt for me. He told me about how he hurts for all the women he knows who have been assaulted. I slowly found out that the women he has recently pursued are all assault survivors. . . .

You can read the rest of that, but you get the drift: Left-wing guys are sexual scavengers, always looking for easy prey, and their ostentatious concern for “social justice” issues is a three-card monte hustle that could only deceive a complete fool. However, complete fools are a dime a dozen in the kind of “communities” where feminists gather like wildebeests grazing on the Katanga Plateau, stalked by packs of “male feminists.”

Here’s a clue: Social justice is a mirage, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek said. Anyone foolish enough to pursue the progressive fantasy of an egalitarian utopia is a chump, and getting involved with a political movement of chumps is always a bad idea, because bad causes attract bad people, and the worst get on top:

From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, deception and spying, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual are essential and unavoidable consequences . . .
To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds, he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. . . .
Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous.

The anarchist mobs of thugs who engage in vandalism and violence to protest the election results and to silence dissent on university campuses are symptomatic of this problem, and what kind of woman would get involved in such a movement? A fool or a feminist, but I repeat myself.

A woman who denounces heterosexuality as “the structure of the oppression of women,” to quote the Women’s Studies textbook, is free to avoid this oppression. If the feminist is not a lesbian, however, she must wonder if her politics can be reconciled with heterosexuality. In this, I agree with radical feminists, including Professor Kitzinger, who declare that feminism and heterosexuality are ultimately incompatible.

What does a normal woman want? The American Dream — a nice house in the suburbs, two or three kids running around in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon while her husband grills some burgers. Getting to that American Dream scenario in the 21st century may require different domestic arrangements than it did during the Eisenhower era, but a woman won’t get there through “social justice,” unless her husband happens to be a Democrat politician or a bigwig in some tax-exempt “progressive” foundation. No, ma’am, the way to the American Dream is capitalism. Smashing windows at Starbucks or marching around in pink “pussy hats” waving signs denouncing patriarchy isn’t likely to get you that nice house in suburbia. Reality does not conform to feminist theory.

 

 

 

While the progressive mob keeps marching toward their egalitarian mirage, the people who make America work are busy . . . well, working.

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” as Margaret Thatcher famously said, and how many anti-Trump protesters have jobs in the profit-making private sector? Not a lot, I’d bet.

Anti-Trump rage is an epidemic on college and university campuses, and why? Because so many of the students are living on borrowed money while they pursue useless liberal arts degrees, and are therefore part of a major economic problem in America:

The Department of Education recently released a memo admitting that repayment rates on student loans have been grossly exaggerated. Data from 99.8% of schools across the country has been manipulated to cover up growing problems with the $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loans. New calculations show that more than half of all borrowers from 1,000 different institutions have defaulted on or not paid back a single dollar of their loans over the last seven years. . . .
The policies of intervention haven’t stopped at federal aid, and loan forgiveness is now being offered to those willing to work in the public sector or at a non-profit for ten years. This perverse incentive only serves to drive those desperately in debt further towards government dependence. Productive jobs are created when the needs of others are met in the free market, not by joining the ranks of the state for self-preservation.
The idea that success comes exclusively through attending a university has created a stigma against some of the most valuable occupations. The lack of real skill sets has lead to a shortage of welders, electricians, carpenters, and other trade workers. Instead of learning through experience with apprenticeships, many students have embraced four years of sleeping in, drinking heavily, and getting an increasingly useless degree. While there are many fields that require specialized training, the surge in popularity of degrees like sociology, anthropology, and communications clearly illustrate a disconnect between the needs of the economy and the skills of the incoming workforce.

You can read the whole thing at Zero Hedge. How does anyone expect a Gender Studies major to repay her student loans? Isn’t the $1.3 trillion student-loan bubble directly connected to the totalitarian “progressive” mentality demonstrated by the anti-free speech riots at Berkeley?

“Well, that’s Berkeley,” you say. “Those left-wing lunatics have been in charge at Berkeley for decades.” The problem with that reaction is that the Left’s toxic ideology is on nearly every campus now.

What the hell is going on at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., that this public university has a department of Sexuality Studies which is hosting a lecture by lesbian feminist Professor Jane Ward? West Virginia is not a wealthy state that can afford to throw away taxpayer money on this kind of academic nonsense. The median household income in Huntington, W.Va., is only $29,873, and I rather doubt “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality” is high on their list of problems. “The Tragedy of My Pickup Truck Broke Down” is probably more relevant to their lives.

Imagine the West Virginia redneck — in his garage, trying to change out the busted water pump on his old Ford F-150 — when he finds out the state university spent his tax money to hire a lesbian professor from California to give a lecture on “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.” He’s not going to smash any windows at Starbucks, but he’s damn sure not going vote for anybody he thinks is responsible for such foolishness.

Liberalism has become a luxury that only rich people could afford, were it not for the taxpayer subsidies for idiotic professors and administrators and students who sit around on college campuses constantly whining about oppression and inequality, blah, blah, blah. The good news is, all those vile left-wing scumbags are miserable now:

For some liberals in the United States, the presidential election results have been a total turn-off.
Normally in the first month of the year, the dating site Match.com sees an uptick in the number of active users on the site. January, after all, is a popular month for singles to get back out there.
But this January, Match.com noticed something surprising: a decrease in activity among the site’s more liberal users. In January, “people who call themselves liberals were far less likely to sign up with Match” and weren’t contacting potential matches or checking out new profiles as much, says Helen Fisher, the company’s science adviser.
Meanwhile, conservatives flocked to find new partners in droves. Users in counties that voted for Donald Trump seem to be more interested in dating than users in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton. . . .
The results suggested the election really did have an effect on users’ self-reported dating drive: 29 percent of liberals said they felt less like dating since Trump won. . . .
Fisher, a biological anthropologist by training, suggests a simple answer: “They’re depressed.”

Good. Liberals should be depressed, because they’re losers. And no liberal loser is more pathetic than the “male feminist”:

Male Feminism is a social disease, a gross perversion of a feminist movement which has evolved from the philosophical to the political. Do not fall into the trap of believing that Male Feminism seeks to empower women, when it actually does just the opposite. . . .
Instead of understanding that powerful women, just like powerful men, come from a vast range of philosophical and professional backgrounds, the Male Feminist believes that you have to filter your Facebook profile picture with a Planned Parenthood logo and dye your hair blue in order to avoid becoming a “gender traitor.” . . .
Perhaps most obviously, the Male Feminist loves nothing more than to explain how you’re “doing feminism wrong.”

Never mind whether you’re “doing feminism wrong,” why do feminism at all? In a world of freedom and opportunity for women, why not just go with the old-fashioned idea of “the pursuit of happiness”?

 

Yeah, “Love Trumps Hate,” but you’re probably not going to get that house in the suburbs, ma’am. Maybe ask your Gender Studies professor why you’re exempt from “the structure of the oppression of women.” Male feminists are losers, but they can’t be that desperate, can they?



 

 

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Oh, @Jack Dorsey and @SarahSilverman Sharing Coup d’Etat Fantasies?

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Further evidence Twitter is being run by a delusional megalomaniac:

The CEO of Twitter seemingly believes America is currently experiencing civil unrest comparable to the Arab Spring, a series of revolutionary protests, coups and civil wars in the Arab world a few years ago.
While the social media company appears to be treading water after a rough past few months, which includes a number of high-level staff departures and a relatively sinking stock price, Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey sees his platform’s influence in society remaining largely the same, if not growing.
“A lot of the same patterns we’ve seen during the Iranian Green Revolution and the Arab Spring,” Dorsey said Wednesday at a tech conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, according to Fortune. “It was stunning to see how Twitter was being used to have a conversation about the government, with the government.”
Dorsey recounted the first time he got the impression that Twitter was so integral to American society: the protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.
“As a culture in the U.S., we’ve focused on things that didn’t matter as much,” Dorsey said, according to Fortune. “Now, everything is brought into perspective, and Twitter is at center of the most important conversations.”

Yeah — inciting race riot is an “important conversation,” but Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos for saying rude things to an overrated actress. Speaking of overrated actresses, Sarah Silverman fantasizes the U.S. military would join a “resistance” against President Trump.

 

Twitter lost another 39 cents per share today. The company lost $457 million last year, and the CEO is sharing the Sarah Silverman fantasy of a left-wing coup d’etat. We’d be living under an SJW junta led by Anita Sarkeesian, Leslie Jones and Zoe Quinn if it were up to Jack Dorsey.

(Hat-tip: @groupwbench on Gab.)



 

Since @Jack Put SJWs in Charge, @Twitter Has Lost $457 Million

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A year ago, my @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter because I had been criticizing feminists. I’d been on Twitter since 2009 and my account had tens of thousands of followers, but the claim that I was “participating in targeted abuse” was offered to justify my banishment, even though Twitter never said what the alleged “abuse” was, who had been “targeted,” or how I had been “participating.” This act of censorship exposed how Twitter had decided, in an election year, to surrender control of its platform to a crew of feminist social justice warriors (SJWs) designated the “Trust and Safety Council.” This secretive group of Soviet-style commissars included the notorious anti-male hatemonger Anita Sarkeesian, and soon Twitter began purging conservative accounts.

When my @rsmccain account was banned during this SJW-led purge, the #FreeStacy hashtag went viral, but Twitter executives (including CEO Jack Dorsey) refused to address the reality — I was among the perceived “enemies” of Hillary Clinton who were being banned from Twitter during a presidential election year. Jack Dorsey had made his company part of the Democrat Party’s campaign team and four months later, when Twitter banned popular commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, the partisan nature of “Trust and Safety” became transparent.

Banning conservatives from Twitter was Dorsey’s contribution-in-kind to the Democrats, but beyond the failure to elect Clinton, how did this political venture work out for Twitter stockholders?

Twitter shares sank Thursday after the social media company reported quarterly revenue that missed Wall Street’s expectations and issued guidance that fell far short of estimates. . . .
“While revenue growth continues to lag audience growth, we are applying the same focused approach that drove audience growth to our revenue product portfolio, focusing on our strengths and the real-time nature of our service. This will take time, but we’re moving fast to show results,” CEO Jack Dorsey said in a statement.

How badly does Twitter’s pro-Democrat SJW business model suck?

The social network’s active user base has been stalled around the 300 million mark for about two years, while younger rivals like Instagram pass it. Facebook (FB, Tech30), once thought to be the closest comparison for Twitter, is now approaching two billion monthly active users.
In an attempt to boost its bottom line, Twitter has gone through two rounds of layoffs since Dorsey returned as CEO in 2015.

Twitter is laying off staff and, also, banning popular users to appease feminist SJWs, while burning through investors’ money:

Twitter continues to be a loss-making company, reporting a net loss of $167 million in the quarter and a net loss of $457 million for the full financial year.

Holy crap! Losing nearly a half-a-billion dollars in one year? That’s $50,000 an hour, 24/7 — $8.8 million in losses every week.

Maybe they should #FreeStacy and #FreeMilo and get rid of the “Trust and Safety Council” that has made Twitter such a disaster.



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

Great Again: Dow Hits Record High

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Thank you, Mister President:

Dow 20,000 is finally here.
After weeks of close calls, the Dow made history on Wednesday by blowing past that key level for the first time ever.
The historic milestone leaves the Dow up a stunning 1,667 points since President Donald Trump’s victory in November. The achievement is evidence of how optimistic investors have become about the prospects for the U.S. economy.
“The stock market has given him this extraordinary vote of approval. Happy days are here again,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research.
Wall Street is clearly betting that Trump’s plans to slash taxes, ramp up infrastructure spending and cut regulation will make the American economy grow faster.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Amid Dow Boom, Liberal Media Gloom

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In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 8 election, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) warned of economic disaster if Donald Trump won.

“Economists: A Trump win would tank the markets,” was the Oct. 21 headline at Politico, and on Nov. 6 — two days before the election, when some polls showed Hillary Clinton’s numbers had sagged — the headline at Huffington Post was, “Donald Trump Has Caused A Historic Drop In The Stock Market,” with writer Ben Walsh warning:

Deporting some 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall along the border with America’s third biggest trading partner, starting a trade war with Mexico and China that would destroy 4 million U.S. jobs: These are all deeply harmful economic policies.
Moody’s says Trump’s policies would throw the U.S. economy into the longest recession since the Great Depression. Citigroup thinks a Trump win could cause a global depression. By a different measure, Trump in the White House would cause the American economy to shrink by $1 trillion over five years, according to British research firm Oxford Economics.

As Democrat campaign propaganda, this may have been effective, but as financial journalism, it has proven woefully incorrect. The day after Trump’s stunning victory, the Dow gained more than 250 points, and by Nov. 22, hit a record high above 19,000 points. This “Trump boom” shows no sign of fading. The Dow jumped 100 points after the opening bell this morning and, as of 11 a.m., was at 19,260. And yet the media are still looking for gloom amid the economic sunshine:

“It’s hard to know how President-elect Trump will be in 54 days or 53 days when he is President Trump,” Joann Weiner, director of the department of economics at George Washington University, told Circa.
“I think the biggest worry for anyone getting out of college is, ‘Will these policies tip the economy into a recession?'”

What liberals don’t seem to understand . . . Well, they don’t really understand anything very well, but they especially don’t understand economics, having paid little if any attention to the subject, except to seek justification for their crypto-Marxist antipathy to profit.

Communist protesters at the GOP convention in July.

It’s bad for companies to earn profits, the liberal believes in his heart, because profits are the result of capitalist greed, and this is bad for women and children and racial minorities and spotted owls. Liberal hostility toward capitalism — expressed in a discourse where “big business” and “corporate America” are used as pejorative terms — is an emotional reflex, closely related to the liberal’s hatred of America. Anything that is distinctly American, including college football and the U.S. military, must be a force for evil in the world, the liberal believes.

“They always blame America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick said of the Democrats’ typical stance during the Cold War and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Democrats have devoted themselves to destroying the America that sent the Bolshevik dream to “the ash-heap of history.” Instead of honestly admitting the destructive purpose, however, Democrats now speak in poll-tested phrases about “Hope and Change,” promising to “fundamentally transform” America — into what?

Questions like that don’t get asked often enough. What was so bad about the America that twice elected Ronald Reagan by landslide margins? If Democrats believe the America of 1984 was evil, why?

The problem with Republicans is that they are too polite. It would be rude to confront the phony “journalists” at CNN, to crowd one of those liars into a corner and ask: “Why do you hate America so much?”

No, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t want to admit the real nature of their own irrational prejudices, and Republicans are too polite to call them out on it. Has anyone in the Republican Party asked, for example, how much federal aid to education goes to elite private schools like Swarthmore College (annual tuition $49,104), where students enroll in “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology”? Why should the devout Catholic or Baptist be taxed to support such nonsense? Where are the GOP senators and congressmen demanding to know what kind of “education” taxpayers are being required to subsidize?

Because the Republicans are too polite (or too stupid) to call attention to what’s going on in our taxpayer-funded schools, a generation of young people has been indoctrinated in the anti-American prejudices of the Democrats who control university campuses. Meanwhile, Democrat operatives in the teachers unions who run the K-12 education system ensure there is No Child Left Believing in Christianity or Capitalism. Public schools teach atheism and universities teach “Queer Theology,” and nowhere in the educational process does a child ever encounter the arguments of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek or Thomas Sowell. Therefore, in their continuing crusade to “fundamentally transform” America, the Democrats are always moving to the left. If a Democrat wins the White House — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — he will appoint a left-wing administration to implement a left-wing policy. However, when Democrats lose elections, they invariably interpret their defeat as evidence that they aren’t far-left enough.

This post-election demand for a “Radical Vision to Defeat Trump” comes from Zack Exley, whose resumé includes six years as a labor-union organizer, a stint with MoveOn.org, a gig with the doomed 2004 John Kerry presidential campaign and, most recently working for Bernie Sanders — the avowed socialist who would have won the Democrat nomination, were it not for the blatant cheating of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Zack Exley speaks for the majority of Democrat voters, the mobs of dangerous lunatics who riot in the streets, openly avow their Marxist hatred of capitalism, and proclaim “America Was Never Great.”

If Trump succeeds, these fringe-kook extremists will lead the Democrats into political oblivion. If Trump fails . . . Well, good-bye, America.



 

Gay Marxists Hate Donald Trump

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Who hates Donald Trump? Communist homosexuals, that’s who!

Two separate Marxist groups — the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and the Workers World Party (WWP, a/k/a ANSWER Coalition) — have been prominent in anti-Trump protests since the election.

“Don’t collaborate” with the president-elect, RCP tells Americans.

The RCP is a Maoist cult led by Bob Avakian, while the WWP was founded by a disgruntled Trotskyist named Sam Marcy in 1959. I first became familiar with these groups when I covered anti-globalization rallies in Washington, D.C., in 1999, and they were also prominently involved in anti-Iraq War protests circa 2003-2006. The use of “front groups” and phony “coalitions” to conceal their anti-American origins is a tactic Communists have used since the 1930s, and this has continued in the post-Cold War era. Ten or 15 years ago, many anti-war protests were led by a group calling itself Refuse and Resist which was, in fact, a front led by RCP member Clark Kissinger:

Kissinger, who supported Mao Zedong’s Communist regime in China, continues to enjoy strong support from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), which, in its own words, “upholds the revolutionary communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” and views the Chinese Cultural Revolution as “the farthest advance of communism in human history.” MIM seeks to achieve its ends “by building public opinion to seize power through armed struggle” and full-fledged “revolution [in] North America.”
A devoted backer of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Kissinger in 1979 traveled to Iran when Ayatollah Khomeni seized power.

So the RCP, which supported totalitarians in China and Iran, dares to condemn the United States as a “fascist” government. And when the RCP protests against Donald Trump, they are supported by gay people. Never mind the Iranian regime’s monstrous brutality against homosexuals:

The tragic hanging of two “sodomites” in Iran [in August 2014] may seem, in theory, like an obvious cause for U.S. concern and U.S. action. (Sign a petition! Demand human rights!) Yet in practice, those most attentive to LGBT concerns may be the least eager to pick this fight.
As Nina Strochlic reported . . . the two men, Abdullah Ghavami Chahzanjiru and Salman Ghanbari Chahzanjiri, were hanged in southern Iran on August 6, possibly for consensual sodomy. Their deaths are part of a wave of executions in Iran, with more than 400 in the first half of 2014 alone, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights. . . .
Despite Iran’s state anti-Semitism, the recent arrest of U.S. journalists, and the continued oppression of women, the Obama administration has been attempting a rapprochement with the Iranian regime.

Why are left-wing groups pro-Iran? Because they are anti-American.

The basic organizing principle of the Left is their support for America’s enemies, a principle which produces such bizarre contradictions as gay people turning out for anti-Trump protests led by Marxists who endorse one of the most notorious anti-gay regimes in the world. Marxists are always looking for some way to divide and conquer America:

On Saturday, November 19, at least 200 more protesters gathered on Chicago’s Federal Plaza to begin a march down the city’s famed Magnificent Mile shopping district, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Most of the protesters focused their wrath on President-elect Trump, but some also aimed at Democrats whom they say have ignored them.
“The Black Lives Matter protests rose up largely against Democratic mayors, and then you have an open racist running on the other side against a woman who played a key role in the mass incarceration boom — what sort of choice is that,” activist Andy Thayer said during an address to the small crowd.
“My point is we don’t just have to take this crap,” Thayer warned as he urged people to continue protests and activism.
Protests outside Chicago’s Trump Tower began immediately upon the conclusion of the 2016 election and have continued with protesters blocking traffic, harassing bystanders, and engaging in property destruction.

Who is “activist Andy Thayer”? A middle-aged anti-American socialist, who founded a group called Gay Liberation Network in the 1990s. Thayer’s support for anti-American causes led to him being raided by the FBI in 2010 under suspicion of giving “material support of terrorism.” Search warrants reportedly mentioned Hezbollah and the Colombian revolutionary group FARC, both of which are designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. government. No arrests were made in the case, but certainly Thayer’s past activities — including his involvement with the 2011 “Occupy” protests— indicate his profound hostility to America, and especially his opposition to capitalism.

Let me cut to the chase here: Capitalism is good for gay people.

Why? Because capitalism is good for all people.

Just yesterday, while explaining to my 15-year-old son Emerson the history of Cold War politics in Latin America, I gave him about a five-minute lecture on why private property rights and the rule of law are necessary to economic prosperity. “You can’t have capitalism without capital,” I explained, “because investors won’t invest in places where their investments are not protected by the rule of law.”

The point I was making had to do with Mexico’s ill-advised nationalization of the petroleum industry — basically stealing the investments of American, British and Dutch companies — in the 1920s, but this principle is true everywhere at all times. Without the rule of law, if property rights are not guaranteed, there is no economic freedom, and if you don’t have economic freedom, you have no freedom, period.

Before human beings can do anything else in life, we must first provide for our basic material needs — food, clothing, shelter, etc. — and so the ability to get a job and earn wages, to acquire property and goods, is absolutely essential to our survival. When governments restrict activity, or interfere in the market economy in such a way as to thwart the ability of private companies to make profits for their investors, the results are always harmful. Both in terms of people’s ability to feed their families, and in terms of basic political rights, socialism is antithetical to freedom and human happiness.

If you’ve read the great Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, you understand this and guess what? Lots of gay people do understand Austrian economics, and therefore many gay people (14% of 2016 voters, according to exit polls) do vote Republican. Prominent among the supporters of Donald Trump were gay businessman Peter Thiel and the flamboyant Milo Yiannopoulos. Every individual has different reasons for their political commitments, and I cannot speak for Mr. Thiel or Mr. Yiannopoulos, but I believe both of them understand the vital importance of economic liberty and the rule of law in terms of their own rights, as well as everyone else’s rights.

Being a heterosexual conservative Christian, certainly I understand how important economic freedom is to those of us with families to support, and also how a government-controlled economy is anti-Christian. Go read Revelation 13 and tell me what it says about the power of the Beast.

“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
— Revelation 13:17 (KJV)

What is described here is system of political, religious and economic totalitarianism imposing an anti-Christian regime on the entire world. By controlling the economy — deciding who “might buy or sell” anything — the Beast enforces its satanic power on everyone. Different people have interpreted Revelation 13 in different ways, but you do not need a Ph.D. in theology to see that government control of economic activity is the key to the Beast’s power. Therefore, everyone who is fighting to preserve a free economy is in some sense serving in the Lord’s army.

“But Stacy,” the reader says, “I don’t believe in all that apocalyptic Bible stuff.” OK, but what if it’s true? Do you think it was just a coincidence that, nearly 2000 years ago, the imprisoned Apostle John had this vision of an evil world super-power? You don’t have to be paranoid about “The End Times” to recognize when prophecies are coming true in your own lifetime, and you don’t have to be a Bible-thumper to pause and think, “Hmmm. Maybe there is something to this Christianity business.”

My friend Bob Belvedere calls his blog The Camp of the Saints, a reference to Revelation 20, describing the climactic battle of human history, when those who serve the Lord will be besieged by the armies of evil. God shall destroy His enemies, and “the devil that deceived them” will be “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.” Selah.

Scoff all you want, dear reader, but I do not believe in coincidences.

Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, you know.



 

Capitalism is a beautiful thing, and God hates Commies.

The future U.S. ambassador to Vanuatu knows what he’s talking about.

 

The Error of Comparing Group Averages

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One of the basic tricks of Lying With Statistics is to use certain characteristics — age, race, sex, etc. — to define a group, and then report some data about the group as an average. CNN does this:

Working class white men saw their income drop 9% between 1996 and 2014, according to a new report from Sentier Research. This group, who Sentier defines as having only a high school diploma, earned only $36,787, on average, in 2014, down from $40,362 in 1996.
Meanwhile, college educated white men saw their income soar nearly 23% over the same period, from $77,209 to $94,601.
Published by two former Census Bureau officials, the Sentier report shines yet another light on the fortunes of the white working class. This group has become a force in the 2016 presidential election, serving as the backbone of Donald Trump’s support. And the Republican candidate’s campaign has tailored much of his campaign to the working class, with promises that he will bring back the manufacturing jobs that once allowed them to support their families.
The study first looked at the 1996 incomes earned by 10 groups of men in two-year cohorts ranging in age from 25 to 26 to 43 to 44. Sentier then looked at what men earned 18 years later, when the youngest cohort were 43 to 44 and the oldest were 61 to 62.
The results varied greatly by age. The youngest group of working class white men, who were 25 to 26 in 1996, saw their incomes rise by 19%, from $32,677 to $38,803, over the 18-year period. However, their college educated peers enjoyed a 133% explosion in their incomes, from $40,487 to $94,252. . . .
In addition to showing the tough times the working class has faced, the report also shows the big income boost that comes with a college degree, [study co-author Gordon] Green said.
“People say it may not be worth it to go to college. These numbers show that isn’t true,” he said.

You can read the rest. Whatever these statisticians have discovered, it does not explain much about any individual person’s life, because the groups — men with or without a college diploma — are so large that their “average” incomes are essentially meaningless.

If you are college-educated and your income has not “exploded” since 1996, why not? That’s because this group is so large and diverse, including both computer engineers and English majors, that to make generalizations based on their “average” income tells us very little.

This is something you would understand if you have read, for example, Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, or Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

To generalize as broadly as does the CNN story — to describe college-educated white males as if they constituted a uniform class — implies that they necessarily share the same fate on the basis of those particular characteristics. But is it really true that having a college degree (any degree) automatically confers a “big income boost”? And what about that category “white”? This includes 247 million Americans — 77% of the U.S. population — and attempting to make economic generalizations about “white males” (i.e., more than 120 million people) doesn’t tell us much of anything about “the backbone of Donald Trump’s support.”

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Bungling, Inc.: Yahoo Sold to Verizon

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Yahoo is arguably the worst-run major company in the history of high tech. In 1998, Yahoo could have bought Google for a mere $1 million. Four years later, after Google was already crushing Yahoo’s search-engine business, Yahoo offered $3 billion for Google, and was turned down. Google wanted $5 billion, but Yahoo wouldn’t pay that much. Google is now worth more than $350 billion. In 2008, Microsoft offered $44 billion for Yahoo, an offer Yahoo rejected. And then on Monday, it was announced Yahoo would be sold to Verizon for a mere $4.8 billion:

Yahoo was once the king of the Internet, a $125 billion behemoth as big in its time as Facebook or Google are today. Now it’s being sold to Verizon for comparative chump change.
On Monday morning, Yahoo announced the end of the long process to extricate itself from a mess of its own making with a sale of its core operating business to Verizon for $4.8 billion in cash. The transaction ends the independence of one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic pioneering companies. Yahoo’s seventh and final CEO, Marissa Mayer, will reportedly depart upon the deal’s conclusion with severence pay worth more than $50 million.
The sale will unite Yahoo with another fallen star, AOL, the first web portal Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion. The United States’ largest wireless provider is betting nearly $10 billion that combining the two formerly dominant websites will give it an edge in mobile content and advertising technology it can leverage across its more than 140 million subscribers.

Yahoo’s record of disastrous decisions is arguably the worst business bungling since Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage. Instead of evolving into a modern media powerhouse, the company repeatedly stood still while agile competitors rushed to capture highly profitable new online markets. While rival networks busily monetized mobile app ecosystems and secured premium ad placements from high-traffic digital entertainment sectors like the best bitcoin casinos, Yahoo remained paralyzed by executive indecision. The pioneer brand possessed both the massive capital reserves and the initial user base necessary to dominate almost any emerging vertical on the web, yet it systematically squandered those early advantages and watched its digital empire crumble into irrelevance.