Stephen Roney's Blog, page 218

On the Third of Two Debates

 

Clockwise from top: Trump, Biden.

Does anyone else notice how much Donald Trump resembles Muhammed Ali?

Watching the US Presidential debate last week, I thought Biden was leading in the early going, but then Trump came on strong and won on points.

Perhaps this was a “rope-a-dope” strategy. Biden obviously easily gets tired. So, it made sense to save the best ammunition for later, when Biden could be expected to lose focus and be less able to effectively respond. And that’s the way I thought it played out.

In retrospect, though, I increasingly think Trump did better than win on points. He murderated da bum. I think he scored several knockdowns and three virtual knockouts. And still looked pretty doing it.

The first knockout was when Trump brought up the recent revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Biden turned to look straight into the camera, and said:

“There's a reason he's bringing up all of this malarkey. He does not want to talk about the substantive issues. It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family and your family is hurting badly.

“You're sitting at the kitchen table this morning. We should be talking about your families, but that's the last thing he wants to talk about.”

And Trump responded with the uppercut on the outthrust jaw: “That’s a typical political statement. ’Let's get off the subject of China and let's talk about sitting around the table.’ Come on Joe, you can do better than that. I’m not a typical politician. That’s why I was elected.”

Trump here reminded everyone why he got elected. Because he cut through the crap, and promised to drain the swamp. I think he jarred a lot of memories, and cast Biden, convincingly, as the ultimate swamp creature. Are people really ready to go back to that—when they were so fed up with it?

He seemed to follow up with other responses. “All talk, no action.” “If this is a great idea, you’ve been in Washington for 47 years. Why didn’t you do it?”

I think that volley was unanswerable. 

Biden thought he had a counter to the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in claiming, as the media has, that it was “Russian disinformation.”

Trump was ready for that one. He could have made the logical argument that it hardly matters where it came from if the accusations are demonstrably true; and there is no evidence Russia was involved. But many voters might be unable to follow the logic. Trump has a talent for the quick jab. That is why he loves Twitter: “Russia, Russia. So that’s how he’s going to play it. Now we’re back to Russia.”

To my mind, it tellingly made Biden look intellectually limited, like a stage humour with a fixed idea he can’t get beyond. I think it reinforced a lot of people’s concerns about Biden. A talking suit, not a leader. And a liar, who just makes things up. This was on top of swiping away any power the “Russia” claim might have had to counter the Hunter Biden revelations.

Biden did not openly manifest and incoherence. Nevertheless, I think his dementia caused him to land at least two devastating blows on himself, in the later rounds. He was getting tired.

Challenged on fracking, he insisted he had never opposed it, and idiotically doubled down by defying Trump to post the video showing he had. That was remarkably stupid, since he knew Trump could. 

This may have been a manifestation of Biden’s narcissism. M. Scott Peck observes, of narcissists, that when challenged directly they seem to become delusional; he calls them “ambulatory schizophrenics.” For that brief moment, Biden may have sincerely imagined he had never opposed fracking, and there was no such video.

Trump, of course, next day sent out a highlights clip of multiple examples of Biden and Kamala Harris saying they would end fracking. Just as had been advertised in advance by Biden.

Proving to all beyond all reasonable doubt not just that Biden opposed fracking, but that that Biden is a bald-faced liar. Undermining everything else he has ever said, and exposing him again as just another corrupt politician who will say anything.

This was the second knockout blow, although the full effects were not seen until the next day.

I think Biden realized soon after he said it that he had gotten himself in trouble; that the next day the video would inevitably be there and the truth would come out. And I suspect that buffaloed him into making his next damaging statement, in a vain hope it might cover his anterior portions. He then said straight up that, yes, he did in principle want to end the entire oil industry. “Over time.”

Of course this is true, and evident to anyone who looks at the Democratic platform. But many or most voters might not have known it, and Biden might have danced away from the point, unpopular in several critical swing states, had he not already compromised himself with the lie about fracking.

All Trump had to do was to then point out how significant this was.

Had there been no early voting, I think this too would have been a knockout: this would have ended Biden’s chances in Pennsylvania or Ohio, probably needed to win. Because there has been a lot of early voting, he may survive. But reportedly “can I change my vote?” has been trending on Google.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Facing the Heat

 

I have been recently asked on a Mensa discussion list to comment on climate change. Can we all get it together before we fry?

Long-time readers of this blog may know my position on this.

The concept of global warming, or climate change, is based on expert predictions of the middle to distant future, using computer models.

The important thing to understand about computer models is that they are only as good as the data and assumptions: GIGO, as computer programmers used to warn the overly-reverent.

The important thing to understand about expert predictions of the middle to distant future is that they are usually wrong. Studies show they are less reliable than random chance, than flipping a coin, or than asking the average man in the street.

There are reasons for this. In the real world, most times, things go on as they have been going on, in more or less a straight line on a graph, or with regular oscillations, without changing radically. But if an expert says this, it has no news value. Nobody will be very interested, and nobody will see much use in their expertise. If, on the other hand, they forecast a dramatic change coming soon, it attracts attention—it attracts business.

Better yet if they forecast a pending catastrophe, that can only be averted by strenuous investment in their special expertise.

So there is a built-in incentive to forecast outcomes that are worse than what is likely.

This is reinforced by the human tendency to forget any dramatic predictions that did not come true, and only remember those surprising ones that did. So experts can afford to be wrong, repeatedly. Astrology works the same way.

Back in the Sixties, the experts were telling us we were going to run out of food and clean water within twenty years. In the Eighties, we were less than a decade away from “peak oil,” and a collapse of the world economy from a lack of energy. Also in the Eighties, we were all going to die of AIDS. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? The sky has been falling for a very long time.

The really dire predictions about global warming may be true, but what are the odds?

The thing we call “climate change” or “global warming” is a set of assumptions, not just one. At least, if you reject any one of them, you are a “climate change denier.” We do not have the expertise nor access to the data to evaluate these for ourselves; we must rely on experts.

1. That the earth is getting warmer year by year.

2. That this is on balance a bad thing.

3. That human beings can realistically do something about it.

4. That the cost of doing something about it is less than the cost of letting it happen.

5. That we, as individuals or as a nation, can realistically do something about it.

6. That some technological advance will not eliminate it without government intervention.

Now let’s put aside the observation that expert predictions are usually wrong, and just give them all fifty-fifty odds. Then, for all of them to be true, the odds are 1.5 out of a hundred.

How much money are we prepared to invest on a 1.5% chance of coming out ahead?

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Real Roots of Racism

 

Scott Adams made a vital and often misunderstood point in his latest YouTube video: he makes the necessary distinction between “white supremacist” and “white racist” by observing that people are never racist because they think they are inferior to the group they hate. Racism comes from thinking you are inferior, or at least threatened.

I think the same may go for hatred and discrimination in general.

Hitler and the Nazis and the Germans who supported them hated the Jews because the Jews seemed to run everything; they did not really think the Jews were inferior, although that might have been their alibi. The South African whites, in the days of apartheid, hated the blacks because they were vastly outnumbered. Moreover, the Zulus were famously fierce and effective warriors, who had not long ago “broken the British square.” 

Black slavery in the US South was probably nothing personal, and not really about racism. It was about money, and cheap labour. The hostility to blacks after the Civil War probably had to do with the fact that freed slaves constituted half the population; and they had, at first, the aggressive support of the federal government. They looked like a constant danger; whites no doubt feared being raped or murdered in their beds.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A River in Africa

 

Someone on a social group email list to which I belong asked yesterday if anyone liked Trump.

I volunteered that, were I an American, I’d probably be prepared to crawl over the proverbial broken glass to vote for him now.

He responded,

“I can understand that some might prefer Trump over Biden, but not to such an extent. Is there a particular issue where you think it so important that Trump wins over Biden? How do you envision that life in America would be so much worse under Biden?

Just asking.”

I responded to the invitation with a list of points.

Might as well reprint them here:

There are several issues.

To begin with, the mobs in the streets. The Dems have been calling to defund the police, and Biden will not denounce Antifa, let alone Black Lives Matter. People are losing livelihoods and lives, and this is liable to devolve into civil war if it continues. We must restore order, not encourage the mobs.

Next, the growing climate of censorship and blacklisting. This is coming from the left; the political right is being shut down. For the sake of democracy, this must be resisted in any way possible; so there is a moral obligation to vote for the right.

Next, the fact that a cabal of media, big tech-social media companies, and elements within the civil service have been prepared to ignore all the rules, and even risk their own reputation, business, or career in order to defeat Trump, is alarming. It looks again as though there really is a swamp, that they are in process of seizing complete control of government, and supporting Trump is the only way to stop them.

Next, Trump has promised to give all American families school choice. This could at a stroke dramatically improve race relations and reduce poverty for future generations, and reverse what seems a general civilizational decline. And Trump has a track record of keeping his promises.

Next, Biden seems senile. It seems wildly irresponsible to vote someone suffering from dementia into the presidency.

Next, it was clear even before the recent revelations from his son’s laptop that Biden has long been in the business of selling his office. It is bad enough that he had been selling out to the banks and insurance companies, but it is alarming that he has been selling out to foreign interests and perhaps foreign powers. America is currently in a dangerous struggle for dominance with China. They dare not have someone compromised at the helm.

Next, until COVID appeared, either an Act of God or of the CCP, Trump was presiding over the best US economy in memory. I suspect this had something to do with his push for deregulation and his renegotiation of trade deals. There is reason to suspect the economy would not do so well under a different regime.

Next, Trump’s approach in foreign policy has been effective: no new wars, ISIS erased from the map, now Arab-Israeli peace deals. There is every reason, on past performance, to expect that much of this momentum toward peace would be lost under Biden.

And my interlocutor responded with one line: “What a complete crock of s***.” 

No counter to any of the arguments. All he can do is swear in response.

Isn’t this what we have seen more generally? Those opposed to Trump, the left generally, do not engage, but just shout. They do not want to hear facts or reasons.

The problem is the problem of denial. They are spiritually ill. They are in headlong flight from truth.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Naked and Afraid

 

Francis Dashwood, founder of the Hellfire Club

Rumours are rife on the Internet that Hunter Biden’s abandoned hard drive includes images of him not just smoking crack, but having sex with underage girls.

When, during his recent “town hall,” Trump was asked to unequivocally denounce Q-Anon, he avoided doing so. He claimed he did not know that much about them, but that they were against pedophilia. And so was he.

That sounds as though the rumours are true. If Trump knew that there were photos of Hunter Biden having sex with underage girls that were soon going to come out, he could not say Q-Anon was entirely wrong.

It seems weird that so many powerful men would have a thing about sex with underage girls; yet we know already about Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring. We know many prominent people were involved. And we know, surely, that Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. That implies a powerful conspiracy.

We know there were things called Hellfire Clubs in the past. Prominent people would meet for various scandalous activities; we do not really know who or what, but we know the clubs were real. The facile assumption is that they did this because they could get away with it; perhaps also to show that they were above the law, and so above the common rabble. But this also would build an intense group identity, with ample opportunity for blackmail should anyone stray from the fold.

It seems only too probable that such a group would form in any elite at any time. Only their individual consciences would prevent it, and any who lack such a conscience could quickly take over from those who had one, thanks to their ability to work secretly together.

If this is real, this would explain Trump Derangement Syndrome: the problem would be that Trump was never a member, and so cannot be controlled. And may expose them all.

How could such a conspiracy last for very long without someone blowing their cover, you object?

But then, we know this has happened in the past. And perhaps somebody has blown that whistle. Isn’t that what Q is claiming to be doing?

I wonder whether that was something Stanley Kubrick was doing, too, with Eyes Wide Shut. Pity he died immediately after finishing that film …

This would explain why the anti-Trumpers have been going to such extraordinary measures to defeat Trump, and now to suppress the Biden revelations. They are spending a lot of their credibility here. It makes no business sense for the social media platforms to be acting as they are: they are driving away content creators and consumers, and almost demanding regulatory authorities come in and legislate. What could be worth it? High-ranking civil servants are compromising their cushy positions to battle Trump—violating their expected ethic of self-preservation at all costs. Mainstream media are squandering the coinage by which they trade, that people can trust them for the news.

It looks as though only the need to suppress some major scandal in which many of them are implicated could be worth this.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

From my walkabout today, evidence of the growing climate of racism. Most of this is indecipherable, but the last line is "no deal with white guy."

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Shapes of Things to Come

It is interesting and informative that all of the charges the Democrats level against Trump are true of the Democrats, and untrue of Trump.

They accuse Trump of habitually lying. In fact, the foundation of Trump’s popularity is that he is a straight talker who does what he says he will do. In the meantime, Biden’s entire campaign, by his own account, is based on a blatant lie: that Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people.”

They accuse Trump of racism. Yet what he has garnered record-high support for any Republican among both black and Hispanic voters.

They accuse him of antisemitism. Yet he has moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and brokered two Arab-Israeli peace deals that involve no new concessions to the Palestinians. In the meantime, the left has grown increasingly antisemitic. Orthodox Jewish meetings are being harassed in NYC, for example.

They accuse Trump of not caring about the poor, and only governing for the rich. Yet Trump was voted into office by the working class, who understand him as their champion. By contrast, the rich technocrats of Silicon Valley are trying to suppress all Republican messaging. Bloomberg is trying to buy votes in Florida. Biden is pulling in record-high campaign funding. The wealthy elite is clearly desperately opposed to Trump. One must ask why. In the meantime, the Democrats are insistent on keeping the economy shut down. The rich can weather this, and are apparently even becoming richer during the shutdown. The poor need to work, or they cannot eat or pay the rent.

As Nancy Pelosi shows off her well-stocked wall-sized home freezers on video.

They accuse Trump of profiteering off of the presidency. Yet Trump’s net worth has gone down as a result of being president. Biden’s net worth, during his years of public service, mysteriously rose to multimillionaire level. Go figure.

They accuse Trump of colluding with Russia to swing the 2016 election. That charge suspiciously came up, as I recall, on the night Trump won. We now know, through the Durham investigation, that the Clinton campaign was colluding with Russia at the time. In the meantime, after exhaustive investigation, there is no evidence of collusion from Trump or his campaign. I, for one, suspect the Clinton involvement with Russia was far greater than we yet know—why was she failing to secure her emails? Mere incompetence does not seem like a sufficient explanation. Why was she storing her emails in a server in the Ukraine, of all places?

And why a large payment to Joe Biden’s son from the wife of the mayor of Moscow?

They impeached Trump over supposedly trying to influence the government of the Ukraine for his own benefit. For a routine-sounding phone call, for which the transcript was released immediately. We now know, from the newly released Hunter Biden emails, assuming they are legitimate, that the Bidens were involved deeply in influence peddling in the Ukraine, and in influencing Ukraine government policy for their own benefit.

They are rioting in the streets, night after night, and blaming Trump for the rioting in the streets.

All this illustrates an important point about human evil. When one commits to evil, one spontaneously begins to say the opposite of the truth, because it feels safest to stay as far away from the truth as possible. At the same time, it becomes urgent to scapegoat someone else for the very thing you are guilty of. Ideally, you want to scapegoat the one person least guilty of it. That absolves you most completely, after all. If a sinless man were to appear, your instinct would be to crucify him as the worst sort of criminal.

Every value is turned upside down.

The same tendency, within a family, is what produces mental illness in family members—within the family, every value is turned upside down, and a sensitive child will be aware of the loss of equilibrium, whether or not he or she becomes the designated scapegoat. As is almost certain to be the case.

When it happens in the body politic, the entire country can go mad. It happened in Weimar Germany, or in China before and during the Cultural Revolution.

It seems an urgent matter that Trump win re-election in a few weeks. As looks unlikely to happen, based on the polls. If he does not, things are liable to get very unpleasant in the US, and perhaps for the world.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Third Person Singular

 

While languages find it natural to assimilate new words for things—content words—the grammar is pretty fixed. It is the grammar, for example, that identifies English as a Germanic language, although most of the actual vocabulary is Latinate. When the French-speaking Normans poured in, the vocabulary changed, but the grammar was more resistant to political control.

It is because it violates grammar that a term like “ain’t” has never been accepted as correct, even though it has been common for centuries. Or “youse.”

A standard current text on teaching English vocabulary notes:

“Content words are an open set: that is, there is no limit to the number of content words that can be added to the language. Here are a few that have been added recently — airbag, emoticon; carjacking, cybersex, quark. Grammatical words, on the other hand, are a closed set. The last time a pronoun was added to the language was in the early sixteenth century. (It was them.)”

This throws into stark relief the extremism, indeed the absurdity, of the current demand, by Canadian governments, for everyone to use an unlimited number of new pronouns.

It would be hard to come up with a more extreme intrusion on the culture.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Sex as Original Sin

Friend Xerxes interestingly simply assumes that the sin in the Garden of Eden was sex. He is not alone. As another friend of mine used to jape, “It wasn’t the apple on the tree; it was the pair on the ground.”

There is no textual warrant for this. Whatever “eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” might mean in literal terms, there is no reason to see sex there. One would presumably need to assume that the Bible follows a strict Victorian morality, insisting on speaking of sex only very obliquely.

This is anachronistic. The Victorians were historically quite unusual in their prudery. And, after all, Genesis has no trouble naming the act in Genesis 4.

More significantly, there is the obvious point that, for any Jew or Christian, there would have been nothing sinful about Adam and Eve having sex. Their union had been formally declared before God. What conceivable moral system would object?

I suspect that this nonsensical association of sex with the original sin is a Trojan horse—pun not intended― to justify general immorality. Precisely because Adam and Eve having sex would be perfectly innocent, the implication is that all sin is really okay.

Xerxes himself goes on, ominously, to assert that the existence of sin is entirely God’s fault. He complains of “sins that grandpa God set up in the first place.” Note the plural.

Then Mr. X objects to the notion that God would play favourites in war. God has no righteous reason, then, to fuss over whether Hitler won World War II, or the South won the US Civil War. He presumably would not or should not take sides, either, if some gang breaks into your home to rape and steal. Or he is just being a troublemaker.

One can perhaps see from this, in miniature, why we have rioting and looting in the streets in the US right now, and where this all came from. We can trace it back through the sexual revolution of the 1950s, to Freud’s application of Darwinism to the human soul.


'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.