It’s beautiful here in Ottawa: Extremely windy, but so warm I saw a guy out walking his dog in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt. I don’t know about the rest of you, but we haven’t had a single snowfall here in Ottawa at all this fall/winter season, unless you count the kind of snow that immediately melts upon touching the ground. I remember waking up once and seeing snow on the street but then the next morning it was all gone so that might have been a dream. I don’t recall a Christmas Eve in Ottawa this warm and it feels somewhat apocalyptic. I’m surprised the liberals aren’t trying to gloat that they were right about global warming.
Hard to get into the Christmas spirit without any snow, but Merry Christmas to you all anyway!
Anthropogenic global warming is real.
it’s real…
but is it a threat?
and if it’s a threat, how much of a threat is it?
it is an unfortunate characteristic of the current political landscape that the liberal range is much more easily climbed than its sherpas claim.
regarding global warming…what you may never hear…
1. the earth is currently in an ice age.
2. for most of earth’s history glaciers have existed only atop the very highest mountains.
so the problem with current presumed anthropogenic global warming…if there is a problem…is that it is going to be VERY FAST…but not nearly as fast as the K-T, dinopocalypse may have been, http://www.radiolab.org/story/dinopocalypse.
but then again human cultural evolution is VERY FAST.
the real issues is AESTHETIC.
do you want a planet with 20 billion people, without any wild nature, where everyone lives on corn, or eats animals who’ve lived on corn?
i don’t.
and almost all developed countries and many developing countries now have below replacement rate birth rates. so maybe it’ll all work out. maybe.
I like the existence of AGW because:
1. It’s a good reason to limit immigration to 1st world countries, and
2. It’s a good reason to limit 3rd world birth rates
I also support aesthetic arguments for environmental protection.
What do you make of LOTB’s obsession with the topic?
His beliefs on AGW are just mood affiliation. Like a lot of conservatives, he rightly associates environmentalism with liberal do-gooderism and government meddling in private affairs (although, environmentalism wasn’t always narrowly a liberal movement. Early conservationists and groups like the Sierra Club were quite conservative). And anything that’s liberal do-gooder is emotionally anathema to Lion’s psyche.
LOTB ironically ignores the science on climate change in the same way liberals ignore the science on racial differences: because it doesn’t fit perfectly with his worldview, he’ll nitpick at any perceived deficiencies in the evidence.
And anything that’s liberal do-gooder is emotionally anathema to Lion’s psyche
Yet he agrees with liberals when it comes to taxing the rich. You would think he would love AGW as a way of further demonizing the well-to-do.
Maybe he’s worried about Israel. Maybe he thinks that if America loses its appetite for oil, it will be harder to drag America into Middle East conflicts and Israel will have to fight its own enemies.
Hahaha, maybe his anti-AGW beliefs do stem from his Zionism. Never thought about that.
I do know his tax the rich beliefs stem from his status-anxieties. Much like chartreuse.
Some of his beliefs seem arbitrarily liberal, others arbitrarily conservative, but few people have completely coherent belief systems. And he’s a unique writer nonetheless.
few people have completely coherent belief systems.
unlike urkel?
a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
what urkel doesn’t get, and can’t, is that consistency is itself an ideological concept.
Hahaha, maybe his anti-AGW beliefs do stem from his Zionism. Never thought about that.
I know you tend to be skeptical that people have ethnic motives, but I find at least in his case, it explains a lot of odds beliefs, not just his anti-AGW views. Also his view that Jesus was a myth also seems to serve a similar function. If Jesus never existed, then Jews can’t be blamed for killing him. Even his obsession with social class seems to be a clever way of combating anti-semitism because instead of people resenting Jews, he gets them to resent this vague category he promotes: SWPLs.
I do know his tax the rich beliefs stem from his status-anxieties. Much like chartreuse.
I think LOTB suffers much more from status-anxiety than chartreuse because Jews are supposed to be super successful so he’s bothered that he comes from Staten Island and annoyed that even with an elite degree and a valuable skill-set, people less educated and less productive are leap-frogging over him financially, sometimes even disproportionately benefiting from the value he adds to the companies he worked for.
And he’s a unique writer nonetheless.
Indeed.
I don’t believe in EGI; i do believe people to different degrees form in-group/out-group biases, and race is the most salient way of categorizing groups in the modern West. So people form in-group/out-group biases around race.
Sometimes, certain people form in-group/out-group biases around other categories, like religion. Even in the West, some people form strong biases for sports teams or social classes that have nothing to do with race per se.
That blog is a front.
i’ve never known anyone whose motivation for wanting to do away with the carried interest loophole or the preferential treatment of passive investment income over income from labor was status anxiety or envy. not one.
such people may exist, but more likely they’re just a fiction made up by conservatards to confuse stupid people like urkel and themselves.
most rich people want their taxes to be raised. most rich people are democrats. they must envy themselves? mitt’s dad didn’t graduate from college and mitt’s a mormon.
no. the problem is as explained by gypsyman. the pushy, obedient, strivers from humble backgrounds who aren’t poor but aren’t rich either. they want every red cent so that some day they can be rich too…and change their party registration to democrat. ha, ha, ha.
these types has moved up in the US since WW II and they’ve been 100x worse than the thurston howell III types they replaced.
economic conservatism isn’t a system of thought or a worldview or a philosophy. it’s a perversion or neurosis.
the punch line is…
it is actually contemporary american conservatism which has its roots in class envy and status anxiety, in striving and pushing.
Are most rich people Democrats? I know LOTB is always saying that but this article implies otherwise:
Of the 50 richest families, 28 mainly donate to Republicans and only seven contribute mainly to Democrats. Not all families stay on the same side of the political spectrum — 15 support candidates from both parties
http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2014/07/09/are-americas-richest-families-republicans-or-democrats/
yes. but that’s families and that’s over what time frame? the rich also tend to live in democrat areas. in both 2008 and 2012 the upper east side went for obama. the only part of nyc that went for the republican was staten island.
at any rate that only 28 or 56% are apparently allied with the GOP is much less than one would expect based on the assumption that people merely vote their economic interests.
and giving mostly to GOP politicians doesn’t necessarily mean agreement with the GOP. it may only mean that the GOP has the most corrupt politicians.
lion’s experience at penn was that those students who self-identified as “conservatives” were all on financial aid.
i’m a pragmatist on taxes, but the verdict is in on supply side economics, what G H W Bush called “voodoo economics”…namely, it’s been an total failure. the experiment’s lasted for more than 30 years. but economic conservatives love theoretical arguments and hate facts. so it continues.
median household income in USD PPP top countries.
1 Luxembourg 52,493
2 Norway 51,489
3 Sweden 50,514
4 Australia 46,555
5 Denmark 44,360
6 United States 43,585
7 Canada 41,280
tax revenue as % of gdp top countries.
1 Denmark 49.0
2 Sweden 45.8
3 Belgium 45.4
4 Cuba 44.8
5 France 44.6
6 Finland 43.6
7 Norway 43.6
…
Canada 32.2
United States 26.9
Australia 25.8
the current secular stagnation isn’t cyclical. it’s structural. it’s going to last. there is no bubble in bonds.
my guess is that family money gives to the GOP, because they have one issue, the estate tax.
peepee describes herself as an “atheist christian”…
like the head of the union theological seminary i imagine. she was on charlie rose recently.
so peepee believes there was a guy who said some of the things in the new testament but he didn’t do any miracles and he definitely wasn’t resurrected.
and…? this isn’t so uncommon a belief among ministers and priests peepee.
the difference comes down to whether one believes that right and wrong are merely human categories or are real things. if one believes the latter, then one must believe that all wrongs are eventually righted and thus in life after death. one must believe that monty python was making fun of itself…but wasn’t that already obvious?
christianity properly understood has always been rather esoteric imho…that is, a religion which is absurd at the level of its everyday expression, but is as refined as any ancient philosophy for those who know.
peepee might also watch/audit the following…on why every good christian MUST BE THE MOST THOROUGHGOING ATHEIST:
Merry Christmas from Russia. +7- +10 here, snowdrops ,..
Pretty nice, eh?
Merry Christmas, all!
Thank you! Merry Christmas to you too!
No problem! It was really warm in Connecticut, too. It was 65 degrees or so. I was raking leaves.
another example of how complicated the real world is. https://vimeo.com/6780321.
comments: 1. jews tend to be short, so this may mmotivate them to compensate with high status 2. the very recent world beating height of the dutch has been explained as resulting from sexual selection…but why haven’t women selected taller and taller men in other countries?…sounds like the typical soc sci bullshit.
of course regarding the fair sex. my guess is there is an aversion to short men much more than there is an attraction to tall men.
the two most attractive women i’ve known, both unavailable when i knew them: one had a white latino boyfriend from ecuador who was shorter than she was, and the other had a boyfriend who was 6’5″.
people have been getting taller, but my guess is that the max of male attractiveness all else being equal is still less tha or equal to 6’3″.
and height per se may not be the only thing tall men have in their favor. there’s another phenomenon. that is, merely standing out can make one more attractive…assuming one doesn’t stand out for some disfigurement or shortness. so, for example, a brown eyed woman might be more attractive in norway all else being equal, simply because there are so few of them.
it’s very interesting that people, or at least women, may be driven by forces they aren’t even aware of.
the half jew amanda peet married a 6’3″ jew. the half jew jennifer connelly married a 6’3″ gentile. but then ingrid married the at most 5’10” Roberto Rossellini.
the moral of the story is Roberto Rossellini was taller than michael bloomberg.
I prefer linear theories on the height-attractiveness correlation, not threshold theories. I’m like pp.
The only things that really matter at all are height, shoulder-waist ratio, and penis size (per the study mentioned on several blogs recently.) basically confirming my personal intuitionsthat Game matters little.
so an 8′ tall man is more attractive than a 6’5″ man…A LOT more…by as much as the 6’5″ man is more attractive than the 4’10” man.
and a man with a john holmes is more attractive than a man with a james deen?
or…
what women want is a black nba player. they’re rich too.
whatever.
you’re a moron.
after steve shoe goes to bed, i will post a picture of a huge black dildo on his blog.
he should be flattered. he will be the second blog to be “black dildo-ed”.
the sign of the four of anti-hbd-tard-ism.
and it so happens that one of my collaborators is an andaman negrito.
and that’s …james deen… the porn star, btw.
Well, i take that back. Actually i think the study found a non-linear correlation betwern penis size and attractiveness. And also there were interactions with height, such that the short didn’ t benefit as much from a big schlong.
Height probably does have diminishing returns but prolly above the 6’3″ you mentioned. At about 6’10” or so height brings increasing health problems. A lot people above this height also have various developmental issues.
NBA players don’t move in the circles of normal women, but i’m sure they would do well with them. With the caveat that most women in the West prefer men of their own race.
Funny that you mentioned mr. Deen, given the recent allegations against him. Always seemed like a complete phony, but then most porn people are prolly a bit crazy.
And please don’t deface dr. Hsu”s blog 😐
deface?
i’m just gonna schlong him. like obama schlonged hillary.
I’ve always been a big man, but what I know for sure is that many, many girls aged 16 – early 20 did not like my 6’3”, extremely broad-shouldered frame (220+) when I was that age (=women in their reproductive prime). Elder women is different. You have to take into account that there are assortive mating aspects, e.g. 4’10” Asian women and 6’4” Europid man did not meet millenia ago and mixing them will result in serious birth problems. Modern nation states are a gigantic mosaic of people (not even talking about races, but groups within races) meeting, that wouldn’t have even met until a few generations ago. So a linear height=attractive idea is wrong, people have to “fit”.
A broad shoulder 220 pound teenager will look too old to attract girls his own age. Had you been equally tall, but skinny, you would have looked like a teenager and fit right in.
Perhaps. But oddly enough, there are a lot more 18 – 20 year old girls that are into me, now. I am in my late 20s. Perhaps because my looks are now more “homogenized” and not such a weird mixture of mature and infantile?