Ric Locke's Blog, page 4

Terminology

The good folks at Samizdata notice the major root of Western anti-Semitism: (via Instapundit)

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it.

But whenever the King's debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews.

I'm seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom?

The Jews then, and the banks now, will lend you money, but the cinchy bastards not only want it back, they want more back than you borrowed. This is vile and evil behavior, deserving of punishment. The fact that if you punish them you don't have to pay the money back, let alone the interest, is purely incidental, and has no bearing on the criminal charges, right? It all makes we wish I'd posted a private communication, in which I suggested to Norm Geras that the pogrom was imminent. Soothsayers take great pride in finding others who agree with them.

I've noted before that this is a matter of terminology. Most Western and Western-derived religions and all popular sentiment demonize lending at interest — yes, even Judaism, although the Jews handle it by making those passages historical rather than canonical. It ain't right! An example demonstrates why.

Lots of people don't have a pickup truck. They're expensive and big and get lousy gas mileage, and HOAs think they're ugly and don't want them parked where they're visible. Once in a while, though, there's a couch or a fridge or something else too big to fit in the Prius that needs to be taken elsewhere or brought home, and a pickup would be useful. Lots of people have friends who have pickup trucks. Such a person might go to the friend and ask to borrow it to carry the unexpected load, and an indulgent friend might agree to lend the cargo-hauler.

The friend wants his truck back when the borrower is done with it, and a wise borrower will return it full of fuel and possibly offer a few bucks, or a compensatory favor, in return, but there's no quid pro quo involved. If the friend wants to charge for the use of the truck, it creates resentment. That isn't what friends do to one another.

But if the prospective borrower doesn't have any friends who own pickup trucks, there's another alternative. He or she can go to an agency, like U-Haul or Enterprise, and rent a truck. The terms here are quite different from borrowing from a friend. The agency specifies exactly how long the renter can use the truck; it wants something to reassure that the truck will be returned in good order, and (most importantly) it wants payment based on usage. The renter may resent the necessity — it would be much cheaper to borrow from a friend if one were in a position to lend — but the agency itself, and the rental terms, don't cause resentment. It's just perfectly normal business, and even at the height of the anti-usury campaign the Church itself was happy to serve as a rental agency for capital, luxury, and real property articles, and make a nice profit doing so.

As technology and commerce advanced it was discovered that "borrowing" at interest served the needs of both "lenders" and "borrowers". Instead of renting a truck, the person can "borrow" the money to buy one. The "lender" specifies the term of the "loan", wants reassurance that the money will be returned, and charges a fee for the transaction. From the standpoint of the "borrower" there isn't a whole lot of difference. He or she provides assurance of repayment (a "security deposit" or "collateral"), and pays a periodic fee for use of the truck.

In other words, instead of renting a truck, the person rents the money to buy one. The terms may be different in detail, but are identical in principle to the case of renting the machine, and the advantage to doing it that way is that the "renter" gets to keep the truck — a capital good, which can be used for hauling all kinds of things — at the end, instead of returning it to the agency.

Neither Citibank nor The Shady Corner Finance & Extortion Agency "loans" money. They rent money out, on exactly the same terms U-Haul rents out trucks: the user pays a periodic fee, based on the value of the item rented, for the use of that item. SCFEA is not your friend; Citibank is even less so; using "loan" to describe what they do confuses it with transactions between friends that are in reality totally different, both in what happens and in the underlying philosophy behind them.

We would be better off if "lenders" discarded that terminology and used terms that better reflected what was really happening. Instead of renting a house, you can rent money from the bank to buy one; instead of renting a truck, you can rent the money to buy one from GMAC. The terms and conditions for renting the money are the same as for renting the house or truck: security (assurance that the money or the item will be returned in good order), a periodic payment, and a defined period of rental. Getting the words right would make it clearer just what it means when Obama & Co. want to rent a trillion dollars to bestow largesse upon their friends and dependents. It's just too bad that the Medicis didn't think of that when they established the system. It might have saved a lot of heartache for a lot of people over the years.

Best Science Fiction

…according to NPR's listeners and readers. Byzantium's Shores adds comments, as does Violins & Starships (I got there via Dustbury).

It should be noted, first, that this is from NPR's audience, which is heavily skewed toward those favoring the New York Times Review of Books, which a wag once called "the fanzine of the lit-fi genre". Second, like all such polls it tends to favor the recent — many that I consider true classics aren't in this list because modern readers haven't encountered them (A. E. van Vogt, e.g.). And third, it isn't really "100 books", as many others have pointed out. In some cases long series are collapsed into a single entry; in others (especially Pratchett) individual books from a long series are separate items.

Following established custom, the ones I've read are in boldface, sometimes with commentary attached.

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien — belongs at #1 on anybody's list.

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams — may belong on a "top 100″ list, but not nearly this high. I'm reminded of teaching the computer humor in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: tell it once, you're a wit; twice, you're a halfwit; geometric progression or worse. A few of the lines are golden: "If you don't vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in."

3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card — Excellent, but it's up this high primarily because it's recent. It will survive as a classic, but won't stay in the top 10.

4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert — I read the original Dune as it was serialized in the magazines, and was never inspired to buy a copy of the final version. I consider Herbert dull and pedestrian. On his good days. The books are celebrated by seekers for a Savior who aren't satisfied with the one we got.

5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin — is this the one about the civilization in the valley where the Mediterranean will be? If so, I've read the first and part of the second, and got disgusted with all the public works that would show up like Lady Gaga in a nunnery to even semi-competent archaeology. Suspension of disbelief is all very well, but it shouldn't require renting a forty-ton crane.

6. 1984, by George Orwell — This is looking less and less like science fiction, and more and more like an instruction manual for the statist Left. (Note: the title of the book is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Writing it out as numerals is pure dumth.)

7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury — Overwrought doomsaying worthy of a Twitterer discussing Rick Perry.

8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov — Asimov's prose was always dull; his work is important for the ideas. Most people who rave about the books fail to see the subtext, which would in many cases horrify them.

9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley — see #7. The prose is better, though.

10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman — delightful fun, so long as you keep in mind that Gaiman's a Brit. Neither Tolkein nor Orwell require that consideration.

11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman — read by many people who ooh and aah without understanding any smallest portion of what it's about.

12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan — not boldfaced because I got maybe fifty pages in, put it down, and never went back. "Wheel" is right. Round and round it goes, always coming back to the same point. Some have suggested that that is the point. They may be right, but I'm not willing to invest the time in finding out.

13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell — much better and more pointed than Nineteen Eighty-Four, in my opinion. NPR listeners who voted for it either didn't understand it or have porcine ambitions.

14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson

15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore

16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov — see #8. Asimov's ideas regarding artificial intelligence were advanced for their day, but have been superseded in many ways. As prose, it's tedious to a modern reader.

17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss

19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut — see #7 and #9. Vonnegut was an enormously bright individual who always came up with brilliant insights, then backed away from where they really led like a teenage girl encountering a rattlesnake.

20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley — one of the few readable books from the foundations of modern horror. That's because of the movies, not the book, which has more in common with I, Robot than anything Vincent Price had anything to do with.

21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick — Dick was a dick. He combines outrageous doomcrying with formalistic stylism in ways that have materially contributed to the deterioration of my teeth.

22. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King

24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke — I'm not at all sure why this would be considered important or influential any more. Its vision rests entirely upon the optimism of the late Fifties and early Sixties, which has been soundly rejected in favor of Prii, windmills, and Whole Foods, especially by NPR's listener base. Fun movie, though.

25. The Stand, by Stephen King

26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson — Proper pessimism.

27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury — stylism, very "literary" spits>

28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut — see #19.

29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman — no system for partial boldface. I've dipped into this here and there, but never been inspired to go straight through it.

30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess — again, if the stereotypical NPR listener understood half of what the book is about they'd rage at it.

31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein — this vote had to be based on the movie. Reading portions of it aloud, especially the good Colonel on History & Moral Philosophy, would jam the switchboards at KQED and cut their donations in half.

32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams — I got through it eventually. Useless twaddle.

33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey — That particular volume is early enough in the series to be fun, although the unexpanded short stories printed in Analog were better. Later on, when she tried to turn what is frankly fantasy in an SF frame into something more nearly justifiable from a science fiction point of view, the series went to s*t.

34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein — Excellent, one of the best Heinleins.

35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller — part of the mirror-image of Arthur Clarke, also very fashionable at the time. Nuclear War Will Kill Us All So We Must Join The Soviet Union! was a very important trope among the literary doomsayers. The book is still worth reading, but Matheson (I am Legend) is better.

36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells — Difficult for a modern reader, perhaps. Read Kornbluth's The Marching Morons for essentially the same story.

37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne — one of the Founders.

38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys — If you can read this without crying, I don't want to know you. Actually, the short story ("novelette") version is better because there are fewer distractions from the main thrust. I didn't Google it, but I think there's another "e" in the author's name ("Keyes").

39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells — another Founding Document. By modern standards it creaks, but it's easy enough to project your imagination back in time and enjoy it.

40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny — the first couple were fun. Zelazny clearly got bored with it toward the end, and so did I.

41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings — puffery, but Hell for enjoyable. Every single sub-trope in the "poor boy discovers he's really the Savior" theme is trotted out, elaborated, re-elaborated, bored, stroked, and chrome-plated,  complete with not one but an entire host of Amusing Sidekicks, and Eddings makes it all fun.

42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley — more "literary" c*p.

43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson

44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven — a look at human evolution that may be a little disturbing. The Ringworld itself is dynamically implausible; Niven made lemonade in the sequels.

45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin — see #42. Purports to be a paean to Acceptance of Otherness; ends as The Superior Morality of Homosexuality, which is why it's beloved in a certain set.

46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien — Hunh? Publishing an author's research notes can make money, I guess.

47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White

48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman — delightful.

49. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke — Nevah happen.

50. Contact, by Carl Sagan

51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman — Lovely.

53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson — Delightful, but if you don't take notes you're likely to get lost. It would help to have the computer handy so you can use a search engine.

54. World War Z, by Max Brooks

55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman — Uh huh.

57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett — one of the best of the Diskworld books.

58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson — self-indulgent garbage about a self-indulgent butthead.

59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold — Find the Easter eggs. Most don't. Shards of Honor is jewelry, and belongs on this list by itself. The Curse of Chalion, too.

60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett — good fun, but on this list only because it's recent.

61. The Mote In God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — O noes! We're the Moties! Stop driving that SUV right now!

62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind

63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson — undoubtedly the best of the "After Nuclear Doooom" stories.

66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist — dense and ultimately superficial.

67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks

68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard

69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

70. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson

72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne — another Founding Document. Very disappointing to the modern reader, in the same vein as the fellow who objected to Shakespeare as "…just a collection of old sayings."

73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore — no boldface because I read the first two pages and put the book back on the shelf.

74. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi — this is really good, but (again) makes the list only because it's recent.

75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson

76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke — tedious technogeekery. The Big Ideas impress, I suppose.

77. The Kushiel's Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey

78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin — LeGuin's consistent theme is that human beings and human culture are inferior to anything else that might be encountered. (Of course, Posleen never occurred to her.) This is another celebration of that notion.

79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury — see #27.

80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson

82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks

84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart — delightful. Read it.

85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson — worth the trouble, despite the complexity.

86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher

87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe — Jack Vance did "the last days of Earth" much better, but his protagonists aren't any more sympathetic. I did enjoy many of the images, especially doing stratigraphy in a world-wide garbage dump.

88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan

90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock

91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury — see #27, #79

92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley — McKinley == good. Take your time with it, though.

93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge — fireworks by Vinge. Like others from him it's a read-once, but a damned impressive one.

94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov — Read it long ago. E. M. Forster did it first ("The Machine Stops") and Vance did it better ("Ullward's Retreat"), and both of those are short stories.

95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson

96. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — just re-read this one recently. I don't think Southern California would come out nearly so well in a remake.

97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis — one of the few from Willis I haven't read, other than excerpts. Lincoln's Dreams is just as dark. She gets more cheerful (and more enjoyable) later.

98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony — Popcorn. Read one, you've read 'em all. As one of a Top 100? Insanity.

100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis — Very good, very deep. If you try to treat it as light reading you will be very disappointed.

——————–

Did you notice that I don't care for Bradbury or LeGuin? Good on ya.

Hick Perry?

Paul Rahe at Ricochet is concerned, or concern-trolling, that Rick Perry's down-home folksiness may not play very well in venues where the people consider themselves more sophisticated. [h/t Simberg]

Perry was folksy throughout [his announcement speech - ed.] – and that worries me a bit. The tone of the speech and the manner of delivery were pitch-perfect for Texas. I am not, however, certain that this will play for a national audience. [...] Perry will have to pitch his argument to an audience that thinks itself more sophisticated. I am not arguing that the city slickers really are more sophisticated; I am arguing that they are in the grips of a powerful prejudice against people from places like Paint Creek.

Rahe need not concern himself. Rick Perry is an Aggie — a graduate of Texas A&M, and a member of the Corps of Cadets there, which is a sort of Aggie's Aggie. Even as a (self-declared) Oklahoman, Rahe may not be fully aware of the dynamic involved.

Aggies have always been considered "hick", crude, unsophisticated, since the time the school was founded as the Agricultural & Mechanical College. There is a long list of "Aggie Jokes", mostly recycled putdowns of the Polish and Italians. Test scores and grades in higher mathematics at Texas A&M have gone down precipitously. What happened? — the professors started making the students wear shoes to class. That sort of thing, and worse, is current in all seriousness at the University of Texas — which, by no coincidence whatever, is located in Austin, the Capital. The folks at UT are pretty much an existential definition of "…an audience that thinks itself more sophisticated…"

There are a fair number of Aggies who have made a living off that prejudice, with the exemplar being Judson "Lou" Loupot, founder of a bookstore that was the official University franchise until B&N paid high for that privilege. Loupot's always carried a wide range of Aggie-joke material, from books and pamphlets to posters and costumes, and based on that example, Aggies are the prime fount of Aggie jokes — and become, more or less in self-defense, adept at damaging critics using self-deprecation.

Rick Perry is very definitely in that tradition. He could not have gained any statewide office, let alone Lieutenant Governor or Governor, without being so. As such, he is highly skilled at adjusting his delivery and presentation to fit the audience. It is only on rare occasions that he will trim the material or the point to fit expected prejudice, but if you expect him to cower when attacked on grounds of lack of sophistication you have a big surprise coming. Whether the surprise is pleasant or not will depend on your political orientation, of course.

Rahe goes on to make some recommendations regarding future tactics, many of which are good to excellent. They are probably pretty much wasted, though. It would be very surprising indeed to discover that Perry or his staff haven't thought of most of them, and more, already. Aggies do that.

 

 

A Use for Windmills

A very nice graph from Robert Bryce at National Review. In Texas at least, the relationship is clear: When power is needed, there ain't no wind. When wind is available, the need is minimal. This matches what I see when I drive by the two "wind turbines" my neighbor-up-the-road has installed. He originally intended to sell wind energy installations, and got a couple of customers, but I notice he's taken the sign down –

However, all is not lost. What we need to do is put up a couple or three frickin' huge nukes. Then we can run all those propellers in reverse. When it's 110°F plus, a nice whole-state fan would be just the thing.

 

Government Guards The Rich

Norm Geras considers the role of Government, beginning with a quote from a friend:

On Twitter yesterday, a friend put up a tweet carrying this quotation from Adam Smith:

"Civil government…is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor" [Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk 5, ch 1, pt 2]

It's an idea that's probably more familiar to many in its Marxist variants, amongst the best known of which is this one from the Communist Manifesto:

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

He goes on to maintain that whatever the purpose(s) of Government, that's at worst only one of them, and offers a list of things a Government should do. I could of course quibble with his list of priorities, but what's amusing to me is that he doesn't seem to see the inside-out applicability of those quotes to Socialist aspirations.

It was perhaps clearer in the days before modern agriculture, when a return of 10:1 on the seed planted was cause for rejoicing. One of the many threads that make up the origin of Government was the necessity for guarding the seed grain. Here is this enormous store of food — but if the group eats it, or Feeds the Children, there is no crop next year and everybody dies. A guard must be posted, lest shortsighted (and hungry) individuals get into the store and kill everyone whilst satisfying their hunger.

The guardians of the seed grain are "rich" — they control a lot of food. They are even authorized to dip into it for their own sustenance, especially during times of privation. Guards who are listless from lack of nutrition won't be effective. There must, in the past, have been many groups who found that offensive and took steps to spread the wealth. They don't appear in the modern record, because they died out before leaving any traces.

Capital is the modern, industrial-society equivalent of the seed grain. It is resources, wealth, taken from society and embodied in the means of production. Like the seed grain, it is there before the society, clearly visible, but cannot be consumed, because if it is consumed the means of production no longer exist, and their products cease to be available. Like the seed grain, it must be guarded against the shortsighted — and the custodians and guardians of capital are "rich". This is true independently of the means by which the guardians and custodians are selected.

"The People" is an abstraction, incapable of any real action. As a practical matter, The People form a Government to act in their behalf. That Government must, of necessity, take on the responsibility of guarding capital against opportunists and the shortsighted. If capital is converted to consumption, the means of production cease to exist and the society can no longer support itself.

But the guardians and custodians of capital are "rich". Even if they aren't specifically authorized to do so, they will inevitably dip into it a bit for their own sustenance — and in fact they are so authorized. The Cadre, the Vanguard of the Proletariat, must of course support itself in order to do the Work of the People.

So however socialist its ideals may be, the Government thus formed is obliged by sheer necessity to defend "the rich" against "the poor". Is it not delicious?

Disintermediation, British Style

One of the major innovations that form the basis of Western civilization is what might be termed the collectivization of retributive justice. Every society wants to see retributive justice done — people who do Bad Things should have Bad Things done to them. In tribal and tribal-descended societies, this is done by the victim and/or the victim's relatives, friends, and neighbors. However, there is no guarantee that the victim has any relatives, friends, or neighbors willing to go to the necessary effort, so many offenders suffer no consequences, and there is the ever-present danger of escalation, resulting in retribution all out of proportion to the original offense. Combined, those disadvantages and others make it difficult to create a large, cohesive society which can build wealth by cooperation.

Europeans were once as tribal as any people on the planet. For good or ill, Europeans also were (and remain) some of the most murderous b*ds to be found anywhere. The result of that was millenia of wars, beginning with intertribal conflicts that weakened the tribes, causing them to coalesce into larger groups composed of the remnants of tribes; those larger groups then fought, weakening them to the point that they coalesced into even larger groups, which fought one another… rinse and repeat. The reason Europeans were such formidable conquistadores is that they'd had thousands of years of practice on one another. In the end, except for some remnants like the Scots, the tribes of Europe had been for all practical purposes wiped out. The people survived, but their groupings were no longer tribal except at the very top level ("nations").

Lacking a tribal structure to implement the revenge system, Europeans assigned retributive justice to the nascent States. This turned out to be very useful. A Government is (at least in theory) relative, friend, and neighbor to all its subjects, so no person need suffer the lack of retributive justice because no-one was available to provide it. A Government also (again, at least in theory) puts together an impartial structure under which retributive justice can be performed without running into re-re-revenge: the Rule of Law. The theory actually worked well enough to enable widespread cooperation, without the danger of either friendlessness or rampant escalation.

Western Governments of the "liberal" or Progressive inclination have been reducing their role in providing retributive justice for a long time. Prisoners have rights! The accused deserves a fair trial! All of the rationales provided are individually plausible, but the net result is that the average citizen can no longer expect his Government to provide retributive justice. Violent offenders get slaps on the wrist or no punishment whatever; people attempting to defend themselves are sanctioned instead. The United Kingdom has been in the forefront of that development. There is no doubt that the anecdotes we hear in Westpondia are selected and/or exaggerated, but when a society that once announced "An Englishman's home is his castle" prosecutes even one householder for unkind treatment of burglars the notion of the State as an instrument of retributive justice goes out the window.

At the same time that development was in progress the notion of social justice began to be accepted. Social justice demands that the Haves give to the Have-Nots, and must be implemented by force because the Haves are rarely ready to give up their possessions. However, it is accepted to some degree in every society that taking things away from people by force is a Bad Thing. Fortunately there is a loophole: One of the ways of punishing people who do Bad Things is by taking things away from them. Social justice practitioners therefore uniformly declare that having things is a Bad Thing done by Bad People, who can therefore be justly punished by having their things taken away. Because retributive justice is a function of the State, punishing the Bad People by taking their things away from them is something the Government should do.

The rioters in England have all been steeped in the concepts of social justice since infancy, and take its tenets for granted. People who have things are Bad People, who must be punished by taking their things away. They have also been taught that the Government will do that on their behalf, so they needn't bestir themselves — but they have also learned that the Government cannot be trusted to provide retributive justice. The Government has promised to act as an intermediary, taking things away from the Bad People and giving them to the Good, but it is no longer a trusted intermediary. It will neither punish housebreakers, muggers, rapists, and the like, nor tax the Bad Rich People enough that they no longer have things. Its members are also quite clearly opportunists who rake off a substantial percentage of the take from the Bad People without passing it on to the Good Ones.

When an intermediary is no longer trusted it will be bypassed whenever possible, and if you read their Tweets and proclamations that's exactly what the rioters are doing. The proprietor of the electronics shop has plasma televisions, and the Government isn't punishing this evil being as he deserves, so the People ignore the intermediary and do it themselves. Her Majesty's Government, having discarded the principle of State provision of retributive justice, finds itself no longer trusted to provide retributive justice in the service of social justice, obliging the People to act on their own behalf.

People attempting to defend their homes, shops, and possessions have been accused of "taking the Law into their own hands", but in fact it's the rioters who are doing that. The Government isn't punishing the Bad Rich People sufficiently, so the Good People must do it themselves. As Vonnegut said in a different connection, the prospects for peace are awful.

Anti-Capitalists

There are two categories of anti-capitalists: murder/suicides and liars.

The first can be divided into two categories: negligent (the majority) and intentional (the lunatic fringe). The negligent simply don't know what they're talking about, and should they succeed will be incredulous for the few seconds before they join the 6.5+ billion people their negligence killed off. The intentional are actually desirous of destroying the facilities that provide the necessities of life for the vast majority of the people on the planet, but since they've never been farther than ten steps from a sidewalk when outside, their delight (should they win) will be quickly replaced by the same expression as found on the negligents' faces.

The second category, the liars, is populated by those who understand that "capital" is the resources diverted from living expenses to provide the means of production, and intend that that should continue to be the case. They simply want all the capital assets to belong to a single entity, with themselves and their friends in charge of that entity — which is to say, they aren't anti-capitalist at all (hence "liars"), they are monopoly capitalists on a scale that would give John D. Rockefeller pause.

Protest as you will. The analysis stands.

The Dawn Light Gets a Little Stronger

The only thing really wrong about Janet Dailey's Telegraph piece is the idea that "moving toward a command economy" will "ensure the survival of the world as we know it". It won't. All that does is convert a "crowdsourced" multiply-redundant system with one having a single point of failure, and handing control of the crucial nexus over to people who have already demonstrated that they're incompetent.

That's not a slam, however it sounds. Nobody is "competent" in that context. But at least we might find people who would screw up in new and interesting ways!

As usual nowadays, the action is in the comments. Several people provide us with the usual Marx-derived line that capitalism isn't "compassionate".

It is time and past for those of us who support "capitalism" (meaning, in this context, distributed ownership and control of the means of production rather than Government monopoly) to admit that yes, that's true. Capitalism contains not one atom of compassion. That's the whole f*ing point.

The Universe isn't compassionate. If the Sun should produce a massive solar flare, wiping out all life on Earth and Harry Reid, it would be because some particle zigged when we would have preferred it to zag. The particle wouldn't give a damn because it doesn't have a damn to give; neither it nor the gazillions that follow it to produce a disaster (for us) would have any compassion, because they don't have anything to be compassionate with. The flare would propagate through interplanetary space as directed by conditions as existing without exhibiting or encountering a scintilla of thought, let alone compassion, and would wash over the planet according to the inexorable Laws of the Universe.

Capitalism is scientific and rational, an intellectual construct that attempts to mimic the way things really work rather than how we would prefer them to work. It is and has been enormously successful, and people who allow their emotions and "feelings", including "compassion", to override the successful mechanisms can only destroy the very basis of their lives. By doing so they do not demonstrate that they are the best and brightest, fit to decide the minutiae of life for everybody on the planet. Instead, they demonstrate their intellectual incapacity, their failure to understand the process, and continue to do so daily and viva voce.

President Fred

I've always been a supporter of women's emancipation, but not from egalitarian sentiment, although that thought is present to some degree. What it comes from is the observation, made at an early age, that women had privileges over men and predilections that worked to my disadvantage. I freely admit that in large part this is a case of sour grapes. I am not, and have never been, a sexually attractive male, and my experience is perfectly encapsulated in the old, cheerful ditty:

Keep your mind on your driving and your hands on the wheel

Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead

We're having fun sitting in the back seat

Hugging and kissing with Fred.

Fred, of course, is glamorous and charismatic, probably a jock or a rich asshole, and the chirpy ladies are always massively disappointed when the driver hangs the effort up and it turns out Fred doesn't even have a car and doesn't know how to drive. When $PRETTYGIRL asked me for "help with her homework" it always turned out that what she wanted was for me to do her homework, leaving her with enough free time to fuck Fred.

Virginia Postrel observes that at least a few happy fun chicks (of both sexes) are unhappily coming to the conclusion that President Fred's glamo(u)r and charisma are no substitute for an ability to drive. For those of us more or less of my disposition this comes as no surprise. Women's lib == own it, girls, whether you're actually concave or convex.

The Light Begins to Dawn

Instapundit reader Dave Ivers almost gets it:

"Having just had a discussion with a close friend on the Left, I truly believe that Obama and probably all of the Left think that 3.5% GDP growth year on year is some sort of natural phenomenon and that no matter what they do it will happen. They then proceeded to trash the things that make that 3.5% growth happen."

It's not a case of thinking that "3.5% GDP growth year on year is some sort of natural phenomenon". It's a case of thinking that nothing people can do affects the existence of wealth. It's the worldview of the hunter-gatherer-scavenger tribe: food (wealth) exists Out There Somewhere and can be found, but nothing they can do will change what is available to a sufficiently alert and diligent searcher.

You can't even call it "belief" as we generally use the word. Even the most rock-solid believer has his/her belief in the conscious or semiconscious support of his/her mind, and can be induced, de minimis, to assert that it exists. Nobody "believes" in gravity in that sense. Things fall down, and our every conscious moment is underlaid by that assumption. Belief, as such, requires thinking about it. We don't think about gravity when we take a step, or lay an object on a table instead of simply releasing it.

Leftoids take production for granted in the same way. It happens out of sight and out of mind,  by processes and under the influence of forces that are not comprehended, not comprehensible, and in any case not affected by anything they do. They are therefore free to make whatever changes they care to make in the processes and forces that they can see and affect, because since nothing they do affects the existence of wealth, by definition if they can do it it doesn't change anything important.

The hunter-gatherer-scavenger tribes of North America had a large hand in exterminating the woolly mammoth. They set up plunges where they could drive herds of animals over a cliff, kill the ones that were only injured, and feast on the abundance, because it didn't matter — mammoths came from somewhere beyond their control, and nothing they did could affect that. Autoworkers are free to demand higher pay and play silly tricks on the production line, because the Company has money and nothing they can do on the shop floor affects that. Woolly mammoths reproduced slowly, so killing off whole herds of them reduced their population below replacement levels and increasingly desperate hunts for the few survivors finished them off; auto companies get money by selling cars, so making the product increasingly expensive and of lower quality eventually means consumers go elsewhere and the Company has no money.

It's at least possible that a sufficient number of sufficiently diligent time travelers could convince the tribes of North America that their hunting techniques did, in fact, affect the supply of woolly mammoths and should be changed. I see no prospect of convincing modern leftoids that they're shitting in their own messkits; so long as there are herds of "the rich" or even a few lonely survivors they'll continue to hunt them down and feast. If they were the only ones affected I, personally, would be pleased to let them go about it and suffer the resulting famine. Unfortunately the rest of us are in it for the duration as well.