Category: General

“Significant drain”

Billy/ / Gender Politics, General

The postal vote survey on same sex marriage is causing a significant drain on the LGBTIQ community, apparently.

Let’s just unpack that statement, shall we?

Firstly, definitions.

LBGTIQ apparently stands for;

L = Lesbian

B = Bisexual

G = Gay

T = Transgender

I = Intersex

Q = Questioning

So, the vote survey is only directly relevant to 2 of those groups then; lesbians and gays. As an aside, one wonders whether it might save significant ink and keyboard wear and tear for intersectionalists if they were to refer to lesbians and gays as homosexuals and use an H instead. But we digress.

Transgender people will be unlikely to be bothered about same sex marriage until they’ve completed the medical procedures and then, presumably, decided they are attracted to members of the gender they’ve transitioned to.

Similarly, intersex people will have fewer concerns too.

“Questioning” people are presumably still on a journey of discovery so may or may not arrive at the conclusion that they wish to marry someone of the same sex. Hopefully, this questioning is using a robust methodology such as Socrates’.

So, just the lesbians and gays then.

Why does the journalist write about the LBGTIQ “group” as if they were an amorphous lumpen mass with exactly the same desires, concerns and needs?

Lastly, what is a “significant spike”? The only numbers we’re offered are from the Reachout website service; they claim 1.5 million unique visitors a year and a 20% increase since August. So about 800 more a day then, (presumably not independently verified).

Given that Reachout are currently running an advertising campaign in favour of same sex marriage and this is their website’s landing page, perhaps there’s an alternative explanation behind the increase in traffic?

Bill’s Opinion

To suggest that there is a single common opinion held by people falling into the manufactured categories of LBGTIQ is a red herring (“furphy” in Australian vernacular).

There is an agenda behind the users of theses acronyms; to shut down debate on the issues by suggesting that there is a much large demographic with a single common opinion than there actually is.

The author of the article could have spent his/her/zhe’s 400 words arguing the pros and cons of same sex marriage instead. It speaks volumes that Adam Gartrell chose not to.

G’day sport

Billy/ / Cultural Marxism, Gender Politics, General

We’ve previously explored the issue of transgenderism and whether it is cruel or kind to agree with a mental delusion that one is “born in the wrong body” absent any compelling physical or scientific evidence.

Consider then, the case of Hannah Mouncey, who is hoping to be the first transgender player in the Women’s Australian Rules Football League (AFLW).

For readers not familiar with Australian Rules Football, it needs to be explained that it’s a contact sport with similarities to Rugby and Gaelic Football. The tackles are big hits; height and physical strength are a significant contributing factor to success. One cannot play this game without being able to deliver, and also tolerate taking, a solid bodyslam.

So, if your daughter played this sport, how keen would you be for her to be lining up in a match against Hannah next weekend?

No, that’s not a picture of a young Lars Ulrich, drummer from Metal-licker, that’s the potentially latest AFLW player, “Hannah”.

To prove the point that she’s a lady, here she is in in a classic little black dress channeling her inner Holly Golightly.

The AFLW rules require that, to be qualified as female, Hannah needs to prove that she has less than 10 nanomoles of testosterone per litre in her bloodstream. Hannah is confident that she can pass this test.

Bill’s Opinion

This will be a fascinating case to follow especially as the AFLW has recently had significant commercial success, attracting large crowds of up to 51,000.

Whether or not the spectators continue to follow the women’s version of the sport if a bricklayer in drag is allowed to beat up women will be an excellent bellwether of the success or failure of the intersectionality narrative of the Cultural Marxists.

Shame doesn’t scale

Billy/ / Free Speech, General

There are many reasons to celebrate the internet, not least the availability of the vast majority of written human knowledge at the fingertips of anyone with a browser and a connection. We are only scratching the surface of the possibilities of this incredible increase in the “velocity” of ideas and the interconnections between previously-disparate areas of study. The marketplace of information and thought has become exponentially more free in this generation. Who knows what marvelous inventions and discoveries might result?

There are many well-documented negative consequences of the internet too; groups of people with destructive or malicious intent can more easily find each other and work together.

There seems to be a growing trend, uniquely facilitated by the internet which, on the face of it, has the appearance of being positive and for the good of society but perhaps has regrettable long term consequences.

The concept of “shame” is a highly-efficient mechanism developed though evolution  to ensure socially-compliant behaviour by people in small groups. A tribe will ostracise and shun a member who acts against the common good, not using the designated latrine area, for example. This shaming has served us well as a species over thousands of generations, enabling us to live and work together far more effectively with surprisingly few conflicts. If you think that last sentence sounds incorrect, consider how many more fights and blood feuds we’d have in society if we did whatever we wanted without considering what the neighbours might think.

Perhaps shame loses its utility with scale, that is, the damage done by shaming a behaviour becomes too extreme compared to the benefit it may bring?

The most recent example that springs to mind is that of James Damore and his now infamous dossier as a response to a request for feedback following his attendance at several internal Google diversity seminars.

Despite the fact that the original document (here, complete with the charts and citations most media reports edited out) reads as a well-argued counter argument as requested, the internet outcry was intense enough to result in Google firing him.

The vast majority of criticism (maybe use alternate search engines to look for it) was ad hominen rather than explaining where Damore’s arguments were flawed.

Similarly, Justine Sacco was subject to an internet campaign of shame following an ill-advised poor taste joke on Twitter. She too lost her job as a consequence.

Regardless of whether or not the content of Damore’s dossier was accurate or had worth or whether Sacco’s joke was in poor taste, in an earlier age the consequences of both would have been unlikely to be so extreme.

There is a tendency to “pile on” on social media to shame individuals with whom we disagree. The left-leaning are particularly adept and enthusiastic in this but it is not exclusive behaviour by any end of the political spectrum.

Shame does not scale up well.

What might be the consequences of this increased consequence to shame at scale?

Bill’s Opinion

This blog itself is a great indication as to the consequences; anonymous and hosted in a country with some of the better internet privacy laws. I’d prefer to write this under my own name but the risk to my livelihood and privacy is too great.

But more broadly, how many of us have witnessed situations on social media where you would have wished to make a contrary statement or at least debate the point but were conscious of the risk of being subject to being labeled with one of the words with the ‘-ist’ suffix. My personal LinkedIn timeline is a classic for this; I see so much that I take issue with and would want to call out as incorrect or at least logically-flawed but the risk of collateral damage is too great.

So, the consequence is silence.

Note, the consequence isn’t that the contrary opinions go away, just that they are not aired in the company of those who will disagree with them.

So the ultimate consequence is increased polarisation of opinions where opposing views are rarer exposed to each other in the marketplace of ideas to compete to discover which is contains more truth.

It’s fashionable these days to suggest reasons for Brexit and Trump winning and often these might be only tangentially-related , but this silence of the shamed might have a very strong correlation.

Believe the action not its promise

Billy/ / Climate Bollocks, General, Whither Government?

China joined the club of countries vowing to ban diesel and petrol vehicles. France and Britain have made similar assertions.

In typically hubristic European style, the French and Brits even put a date by which it would happen… in both cases, at least 5 general elections’ time. To quote the pederast Keynes again, “in the long run, we’re all dead”.

China have been a little more circumspect; “in the near future“, was the inscrutable statement. By an amazing coincidence, this is precisely the timetable parents the world over offer in response to the question, “when can I have a pony?“.

Let’s assume the Chinese are going to follow the Anglo-Franco timetable and bring the ban in for 2040. What are the possible outcomes?

1. Automobile manufacturers will fast-track any existing R&D projects that will result in hydrogen/electric/cow manure cars in time to sell in 2040 at the same price or cheaper than the equivalent petrol/diesel vehicle… and they are successful.

2. Ditto (1) but they are unsuccessful; the cars don’t go as fast, far or cost more.

3. The current R&D projects are already due to complete well before 2040.

Looking at these in a not so random order;

Option (1) is all good, win/win for everyone and even the planet, with the not minor assumption that the Chinese can produce electricity without recourse to those pesky fossil fuels by then, otherwise we’ve just centralised the pollution.

Option (3) is pretty good for everyone too, but would suggest that government mandates don’t drive innovation, markets do.

Option (2) is a bit of a problem though, depending on the type of commitment made. In a country with a properly-functioning rule of law, there might be some delicate unwinding of legislation made by politicians who may be long departed to the retirement home or their final destination (presumably carried by eco-friendly hearses) .

If there’s a compelling feet to the fire type of commitment in place or an ideological bent to the governing party when the 2040 New Year’s Eve light show (the emissions from fireworks will surely be banned by then) happens, we might see some subsidies/tariffs/taxes given or imposed to get to that stated goal. i.e. more government intervention due to a “market failure“.

Bill’s Opinion

Originally, this part of today’s post was going to quote the story of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. The trouble is, upon further research, it looks like that might have been horseshit and was most likely to be an urban myth.

But perhaps there is still a lesson to be learned from the invention of the car?

Consider the major steps in the development of human transport:

  1. Human power – we could only move as fast and as efficiently as our own bodies.
  2. Horse power – we could only move as fast and as efficiently as horses or other beasts of burden.
  3. Steam power – we could only move as fast as a steam engine powered by coal could drive us.
  4. Refined fuel power – we could only move as fast as a petrol engine could drive us.

Those last 3 steps weren’t invented as a response to a crisis but as an innovation to realise an opportunity.

The hope that innovation will be sparked as a result of creating a purely false crisis (i.e. a new law) is not supported by strong historical evidence. Perhaps opportunity drives innovation more often than crisis?

 

 

One does not like green eggs and ham

Billy/ / Cultural Marxism, Free Speech, General

Our recent investigation into the accidental UK Conservative Party leadership contender, Jacob Rees-Mogg, led us to discover the perfectly rational, balanced and sober Guardian columnist, Suzanne Moore.

One of her recent offerings was on the subject of “hate crimes” and “online hate”.

Something must be done, she opines, there must be consequences.

Definitions are always a handy starting point when searching for the truth of a statement.

Firstly, what is “hate“?

In the English language it can have several related but different meanings; the opposite of love, for example. An extreme dislike of something or someone, perhaps. Without wishing to put words into Ms. Moore’s mouth, she seems to be defining it moore (see what I did there?) as an action than a feeling. Online hate, is the term she uses to describe this version of the word, suggesting the use of the verb rather than the noun version of hate.

Presumably she isn’t suggesting all hate must be banned? Hatred of olives, for example, would be a frivolous and difficult thing to legislate against. It might be straightforward to enshrine in law a ban on publicly-expressing one’s hatred for little green and black fruits however. Would that make the olive-haters suddenly, or even gradually, become lovers of olives? Of course not.

Defining the standard for what is hateful is equally tricky. Are you calling me rude names on the internet because you disagree with my point of view (here’s a few hundred words from Ms. Moore doing exactly that to JRM, without ever once critiquing his arguments)? At what point does that name-calling become online hate or even a hate crime? On Planet Guardian, it seems to be once we invoke certain physical, religious, racial, gender or sexual attributes.

At risk of invoking the slippery slope fallacy, who gets to define the limits of this definition and where does one apply for the job?

We might speculate that the flip side of online hate is offence. If the recipient of online hate takes offence, the hurt is amplified, which is perhaps the original motivation of the online hater?

Maybe there’s a clue in the way we phrase offence as a verb in the English language; we say that people take offence, suggesting that it’s a choice made by the recipient, not the hater offering it. The power is actually with the recipient.

Bill’s Opinion

Although we all know that we should strive for civility in our online discussions, we don’t always hold ourselves to that standard. However, to legislate to shut down those who are abusive risks collecting those with dissenting opinions or those with arguments we simply find uncomfortable in the same net.

Those of us who attract the attention of insulting or abusive online hate have several options available;

  1. Report threats of violence or incitement to violence to the police; this is an actual crime and has been for generations.
  2. Use the block button on whichever social media platform the abuse is arriving from.
  3. Log off, make a cup of tea and get on with real, not virtual, life like a grown adult.

Paris Accord good, Trump bad?

Billy/ / General

The coverage of President Trump’s refusal to re-commit the USA to the Kyoto Protocol is conspicuous in its dearth of analysis of the details of the agreement itself. 

Perhaps such analysis doesn’t fit the “narrative” we are being offered?

It is possible the media editors believe the public aren’t suitably skilled or qualified to comprehend the details. If so, perhaps they might remind themselves that one function of professional news journalism is to act as the intermediary between complex ideas and an uninformed audience.

As with all enquiries into objective truth, there is no substitute for doing your own research. Accepting the first position offered as authoritive without question is both dangerous and illogical.

Let’s see if we can fill the void;

What is the aim of the Paris Accord?

 

· To keep global temperatures “well below” 2.0C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times and “endeavour to limit” them even more, to 1.5C

· To limit the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity to the same levels that trees, soil and oceans can absorb naturally, beginning at some point between 2050 and 2100

 

How does the Paris Accord intend to achieve this?

 

Well, the 2nd bullet point above is the main method, which suggests it’s an action not an outcome. It also suggests that human emissions are the majority factor in the forecasted increases in temperature. We won’t investigate that assumption here today but let it go unchallenged for the sake of our “whither the Paris Accord?” subject.

 

Specifically, the Paris Accord sought a commitment from all signatory counties to reduce their emissions. In the case of the USA, this would require a reduction of around 27% from the 2005 level by 2025 (i.e. a quarter reduction in emissions in less than 8 years). The USA would also be required to transfer around $3bn per year to developing countries to aid their emissions reduction programmes.

 

These commitments would be non-binding and there would be no consequences for failing to achieve them.

 

How much would it have cost the USA?

 

$3bn in a straight transfer to developing countries and a (assuming a reduction of 25%), a further $4bn reduction in GDP.

 

What guarantee was there that other major polluters would have held to their commitments?

 

None. 

No, really; none.
 

Specifically, what is the track record of the next two biggest polluters, China and India (ignore the confusing “EU” line on this Pareto as the EU countries are also shown individually and there is little evidence that the EU regulations will be adhered to by many of the countries)?

 

Woeful. China can’t even bring herself to tell the truth about GDP.

 

Was it a good deal for the USA?

 

$7bn per year, almost half of which would have been redistributed via the UN to developing countries will little or no oversight or consequence to confirm that it arrived at the intended end point or outcome?

 

No, it’s an awful deal for the USA but, more importantly, anyone who truly wants to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases. It’s a great deal for anyone who wishes to redistribute global wealth, which is perhaps the more pertinent point.

 

Bill’s Opinion

 

Donald Trump was elected by the American people for the American people. The deal on the table didn’t have their best interests at heart, even considering the place in the world as so-called global citizens. In fact, a recycling of $3bn into the economies of the 3rd world via their, largely undemocratic and often highly corrupt, governments would likely result in very little difference to the developing world’s emissions either.

 

In addition, the effective hamstringing of one of the world’s most innovative countries is likely to reduce the rapid progression to more environmentally-friendly energy.