Elsewhere (126)
Christina Hoff Sommers on feminist scholarship:
The problem with a lot of research on women is not so much that the authors make mistakes — we all make mistakes — the problem is that the mistakes are impervious to criticism.
For a flavour of that imperviousness and some feminist reactions to being corrected, see also this.
Glenn Reynolds on unsustainable ideologies:
I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein said about hippies: “Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture.” So too with the academic humanities, which have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture. This, too, turns out not to be sustainable.
That adversarial role-play has been discussed here many times, along with its descent into psychodrama.
And Ed Driscoll discovers there are no socialists in divorce court:
Michael Moore, who has spent his entire career attacking capitalism, wealth, and Wall Street, is suddenly very protective concerning the capital, wealth and investments he has amassed over the years. As Christian Toto writes at Big Hollywood, “Far-left filmmaker Michael Moore is divorcing his wife, and the looming court battle looks ugly already.” Christian links to this Smoking Gun report, which notes that “the couple’s combined assets are likely worth tens of millions of dollars,” including “multiple substantial residences and multiple companies.”
But America’s most outspoken socialist, being an outspoken socialist, deserves nine properties, including an agreeable Upper West Side apartment valued at $1.27 million and, naturally, a mansion. This, remember, is a self-described multimillionaire who told the world, quite boldly, “Capitalism did nothing for me.”
As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.
The car really doesn’t care who owns it or if nobody does at all, it will still go.
Well, no it won’t. Every car that “goes” is owned by somebody: even your stolen car was owned by you, remember? Yet those cars that have been abandoned by their owners do not go at all, and have to be towed away with a truck. Not very technically minded, are you?
“Well, no it won’t. Every car that “goes” is owned by somebody”
But it needn’t be. It will still go without an owner. It will even go without a driver. You need to learn the difference between the map and the terrain.
Its not terribly difficult, she is a worker, even if she identifies strongly with management.
Actually, she’s the Engineering Manager, employed on the same level as the Finance Manager and HR Manager with a similar level of responsibility. She even owns part of the company via share options. But her direct input saves the owners (of which she is one) millions.
Minnow – “If a worker can keep the full value of her increase in productivity, that is a real incentive.”
Sure. And that is what tends to happen over time – wages track productivity. That’s why we earn much more than our grandparents did.
NB productivity is not the same thing as profit. How many people want to be paid a share of their employer’s profits?
Probably all of them, if you put the question that way.
How many people want their pay to fall when their employer’s profits dip, or they hire a bunch of more people without a corresponding increase in profitability?
Almost nobody.
As a matter of fact, there are plenty of jobs out there where you can earn very good money – six figure sums in the right industry – without a degree and where you get a direct cut of your personal contribution to your employer’s bottom line.
They’re called sales jobs.
Amazingly, most people love the idea of making loadsamoney, but not so much the prospect of making very little money some months, or being sacked if you fail to hit target. Maybe not every type of incentive is equally attractive to every type of worker.
“But we could and it would work if we believe in incentives.”
Wages aren’t incentives now?
Capital is essential. Not the people who happen to own it.
The wielding of a spanner or a spade is essential, not the person who happens to be holding it.
“She even owns part of the company via share options.”
If she is an owner she is an owner. You forgot to mention it. But it isn’t hard to understand.
But it needn’t be. It will still go without an owner. It will even go without a driver.
No, it won’t. I have given you the example of a car without an owner: it doesn’t go, and needs to be removed by truck. Cars also don’t “go” – meaning, operate in a controlled manner for a sustained period – without a driver. I know Marxists tend to be a bit thick, but not knowing that cars need drivers to operate is particularly dense.
If she is an owner she is an owner.
Yes, but she is busy working with a spanner in her hand, adding value, alongside the workers in making money for the other owners (who are sipping gins on their yachts). And didn’t you tell us earlier that it is *only* the workers who add value, not the owners?
Non-fuckwits would at this stage understand that owners can (and do) also add value.
“Capital is essential. Not the people who happen to own it.The wielding of a spanner or a spade is essential, not the person who happens to be holding it.”
You have confused the analogy again, because, I think, you find property ownership to be so natural, almost mystical. The wielding of the spade or spanner is essential, yes (just like the ‘wielding’ of capital), but not the person who owns it. It doesn’t matter to me if the spade belongs to Gordon if Jenny is using it to dig my garden. It is still Jenny who has done me the favour and I don’t think I owe Gordon anything just because he happens to own a spade..
I’ve run out of patience with minnows excuse making, sophistry, and general unfounded bullsh*t that no matter how many times it is refuted, s/he simply moves on to more sophistry, excuses, and unfounded bullsh*t. But this is probably my favorite of the zero-sum game fallacy that drives Marxist populism
You must have noticed this, that the more they make the less there was for you?
No. Not just no, but no fucking no. When businesses are successful everyone makes more money. It’s obvious to anyone who has even the most fundamental understanding of economics and to anyone who has been a part of a successful enterprise. Minnow of course would not be in this population sample. This static state economics is a huge lie that these cretins perpetuate.
And also, his Goldman Sachs comment way up above is steeped in bullsh*t as well. Perhaps someone with more time and patience than I can explain how the 10 bill was forced on them and why.
” It will even go without a driver.No, it won’t. ”
Oh lord, please don’t tell me you are engineer? A car really will go without a driver. Just a slight incline will do (ask my friend Natasha who doesn’t have that Metro any more)or turn the key slip it into first and close the door and wave goodbye. Did you think the bum on the drivers seat was having some magical effect that made the pistons go in and out? If you rig the wheel and put a weight on the accelerator it will go even further and faster (and it is fun if irresponsible to do: find a friend with a farm). Google has even made one that will go on long journeys. And none of it depends on having an owner. There is no mystical power of ownership that makes things go.
“Yes, but she is busy working with a spanner in her hand, adding value, alongside the workers in making money for the other owners (who are sipping gins on their yachts). And didn’t you tell us earlier that it is *only* the workers who add value, not the owners?”
That’s right, it’s not hard. Insofar as she is a worker, she adds value as you say. Insofar as she is an owner she doesn’t as you imply. You say she adds millions of dollars of value and takes not millions of dollars home and is happy with that. Well, OK. But some of those gin sippers on yachts will be getting the millions and it is in their interests that things stay that way round. I think you have to be naturally deeply deferential and conformist not to see anything wrong there though.
There is no mystical power of ownership that makes things go.
Cars (and lots of other things) only exist at all because they can be someone’s property, starting with the manufacturer. Take away the (transferable) ownership and what happens?
Nikw211 – I get a lot of religious people coming to my door or sending me leaflets.
I’ve had the Mormons, the Jehovas Witnesses, various Evangelicals, some bumf about free personality tests from the Scientologists, Christmas carol service invites from the Anglicans (which is sweet of them, I love Christmas), and a mysterious group called “TVLIC ENSING” keeps sending me ominous-looking stuff that I bin without reading.
But I’ve been holding out for the day when an earnest looking young man in hipster glasses and scruffy beard will come to my door. The prophesies say he will bear these signs: a rolled up copy of the Guardian in one hand, a skinny latte in the other.
And he will say unto me: “Knowest thou what plan MARX has for thee? Come and follow me, and I will give thee an iPad mini.”
And I will retort: “No way you big spastic. You’re a mentalist!”, then slam the door.
“No. Not just no, but no fucking no. When businesses are successful everyone makes more money.”
Some more than others and only some of the time. And sometimes when a business is a complete failure (Goldman Sachs) some people still make money and some people pay for it. Who whom?
Minnow: “The useful things are made by the poor people, the workers, not the capitalists. The capitalist gets the profit and gets to do the tramping.”
I worked. I worked long hours with some highly unpleasant bosses who I saw from time to time, and alongside even more unpleasant union louts who I saw every day. I was in several unions too as they had a habit of ‘amalgamating’ with some other bunch of losers. Believe me, when it came to tramping then the unions did it best of all. You try not holding your hand up in a meeting when all the firebrands are checking who is “for the filthy rich bosses” and who is “for our version of democracy.” Actually, wait, I did that once. Yes, futile gesture as it happens. The strike went ahead (and utterly futile gesture it was too) but several stout union members refused to talk to me for months afterwards. Still, no one can bear grudge like a lefty.
But please carry on with your fantasies, Minnow. The rest of us will try to see the world as it really is.
“Cars (and lots of other things) only exist at all because they can be someone’s property, starting with the manufacturer. Take away the (transferable) ownership and what happens?”
Well that’s right, although it is a different point to the one in contention, and it shows where the analogy breaks down (unless you think workers are one of those things too).
From the book of Minnow:
Meaning envy drives Marxist and hence Minnow’s ideology. With envy comes Minnow’s projected covetousness. We should establish this as a baseline:
The only way to drive all boats to the same level is not to refill the basin, but to drain it.
And yet in Minnow’s Marxland this has never played out, but there of course history and human nature and even arithmetic and basic definitions are right out. What’s in is blind faith and new definitions for old realities.
Er, try 80bn a month for a few years. But still Minnow’s covetousness zero sum game reemerges: The only way to drive all boats down is to drive all boats down. We’ll call it the rich worker’s paradise – the next one in the long line of a quarter billion souls killed by their own paradises in the last century alone.
Minnow also conflates this crony oligarchy with capitalism, showing that Minnow has no authentic definition of capitalism, just as Minnow has no authentic view of wealth except that all must share its reduction – and its concurrent destruction of rights and property – by force.
To be absolutely sure the political right’s biggest failing is not recognizing the phenomenal corruption of the banking industry and the present monetary system, but again, that’s not capitalism. Redefining same as capitalism is Minnow’s ace up the sleeve. It’s not, it’s Progressive oligarchy and its class warfare-based economic segregation.
Why is it that the Progressive insists on such class warfare and the anti-people ruin of justice?
Minnow’s problem here is similar to that s/he has with other definitions: Having failed to define wealth, force, and the economic mean, Minnow finds it no big step to rule out anti-trust law. Or the entire court system. Finding, for example, that capitalism can’t work for want of justice, it’s easy to say that justice can’t work because “capitalism”. Fallacies but handy fallacies for the Marxist.
Kind of like Detroit Michigan, destroyed by collective bargaining and a socialist central executive. Seems the rest of the nation, for what freedom it may still possess, didn’t make that same choice.
In other words in a unfettered, capitalist economy when the evil bosses systematically rape the workers – a system of courts and all anti-trust legislation suddenly having magically evaporated in reality and in theory and by way of elections of sound legislators – demand simply shifts and production resumes elsewhere.
Here again Minnow rules out both functional, technical capitalism in the same breath as s/he rules out the system of courts and remedies. The Marxist zero sum game must win if ersatz justice by unilateral central force is to hold, even if we have to destroy other traditional people’s remedies available to actual capitalism to do it.
No, I’ve never noticed that. Not ever in 40 years. I did, however, notice the quarter billion lost last century to collectivist worker’s paradises.
The irony. All this, like the rest of Minnow’s platform, is a complex myth s/he usees to destroy both authentic, functional, just wealth creation by way of production as well as any reasonable definition of it.
I’ve thought about them plenty and what I regularly come up with is is a whole solution to human nature sharing wealth, assuming any external force may ever influence individual wealth. Minnow’s is a solution to envy – the Marxist means to indulge it, inflate him or herself, and call it fairness.
Such fairness issues from arbitrary power and not, interestingly, from the basis of the people’s real justice, which is precisely what a system of real legal justice erected to protect not Marxist fantasy but the unfettered capitalist real opportunity allows.
I find it interesting that to shoehorn Marx’s bullshit into contention by deception and unending redefinition all other fair definitions, fair measures, and real nature have to be lined through. It’s as ironic as our era’s endless projecting the Progressive’s rather spectacular personal dysfunctions onto society countless times – the Progg will invariably return to old failures to insist we try them one more time, baldfaced and unashamed.
It’s almost like there’s an agenda there, one that includes the unmitigated, dysfunctional arrogance to write all those millions of lost innocent lives off to some sick necessary experimentation in Utopia-making, an experiment that at its core we already knew every time was based on the lie, on envy, on coveting, and on arbitrary, unjust, irrational sheer force.
I like the ‘Book of Minnow’, I wonder if I could get a few fee-paying disciples.
Ever noticed how the ‘ambition’ we admire in capitalists becomes ‘envy’ when we talk about workers? How our words betray us.
Well that’s right… and it shows where the analogy breaks down
It’s where Marxism breaks down.
“It’s where Marxism breaks down.”
Only if we agree with you Anna that workers ‘only exist at all because they can be someone’s property’. But I don’t think many will (or many will own up to it anyway).
Only if we agree with you Anna that workers ‘only exist at all because they can be someone’s property’.
Now you’re just making things up. You really are a lying piece of shit, aren’t you, Minnow?
It’s the Minnow Show! Proving every syllable of David’s oft-made point about certain types of personality being impervious.
Is your brain actually, literally coated in Teflon? Or what?
I’ve got to go now sadly. It’s been fun as always. I have to say that this is just about the only blog I know where someone like me can get away with posting so much counter to so many without getting either banned or piled on or both. Maybe there is something to be said for cynical capitalist exploitative instincts after all.
[ Sticks head round door, checks lock on liquor cabinet. ]
Well, that was… interesting. Someone fetch Anna a drink, stat.
God, no. Not booze.
Snork!
He was a cop, and good at his job. But he committed the ultimate sin — and testified against other cops gone bad. Cops that tried to kill him, but got the woman he loved instead. Framed for murder, now he prowls the badlands…an outlaw hunting outlaws…a bounty hunter…a MINNOW.
Maybe there is something to be said for cynical capitalist exploitative instincts after all.
Or perhaps for simply being a thinking human being and not, say, a bigot who categorises people – complete strangers – according to a cartoonish and criminally inflexible worldview.
Anna, he’s been making things up and twisting words since this thread started. I believe this whole thread is my fault by pointing out his/her/its logical/thinking/economic understanding flaws. At the very start my words were twisted, totally and completely misstated to fit minnow’s world view. We’re reaching the point here where, as Twain’s adaptation of Proverbs insturcts us, “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience”.
Soviet Union 70 years
North Korea post-wwii
China
Myanmar
Cuba
Poland post-war to 1990’s
Bulgaria post-war to 1990’s
Romania post-war to 1990’s
Czechoslovakia post-war to 1990’s
Hungary post-war to 1990’s
East Germany post-war to 1990’s
Venezuela today
hell, the vast majority of Latin America
Bangladesh
Zimbabwe
Mozambique
Somalia
Lybia
hell again, most of Africa
on the softer side:
Pre-Thatcher UK
India
ahh, hell. google it yourself.
Oh, yeah…forgot Detroit.
Minnow (socialist):
A car really will go without a driver. Just a slight incline will do
Tim (engineer):
Cars also don’t “go” – meaning, operate in a controlled manner for a sustained period – without a driver.
I think what Minnow means to say is that, without owners, factories will experience a similar trajectory as a driverless car rolling down a hill, presumably with similar results.
Insofar as she is a worker, she adds value as you say. Insofar as she is an owner she doesn’t as you imply.
Ah. So the split between workers and owners isn’t clear-cut then is it, as owners can also simultaneously be workers. And managers can also be workers, and owners. Hey, it’s almost complex enough that silly soundbites about who contributes what shouldn’t be applied, eh?
There is no mystical power of ownership that makes things go.
True, but there is a very non-mystical ownership that makes things go. *Somebody* has to put in the time, money, and resources to make a car go and empirical evidence (which knocks your Marxist theory into a cocked hat) shows that if a car does not have an owner this won’t happen and it doesn’t go. This is why your glorious factories in the Soviet Union didn’t work half the time, you lot couldn’t even figure out who was supposed to do the maintenance.
You don’t need much capital to start a small business, Minnow.
In many cases, you don’t need any capital.
People have started with nothing and become billionaires, and along the way they have provided livings for millions.
Not to mention all the goods and services and comforts that life in the 21st century west has to offer, uniquely in human history.
The fact is, some people don’t have the brains or the balls to do that sort of thing, I guess you being among them, and that’s fine.
Just get out of the way of those who do and everything will be alright.
The wielding of the spade or spanner is essential, yes (just like the ‘wielding’ of capital), but not the person who owns it.
Well, yes it does. Because the availability of the capital, spade, or spanner is very much dependent on who owns it. If nobody owns it, it will not be available – as can be demonstrated when a useful item like a spade is abandoned in a public place overnight.
Michael Moore is a tit, a pompous and dishonest one.
Whilst I dislike the self righteous piety of dogmatic, simplistic, middle class armchair revolutionaries like Micheal Moore, Penny Laurie and Russell Brand I think they highlight some serious issues.
One of my favourite podcasters is Dan Carlin and he does a good job of presenting the lefty view of the West minus the dogma and piety. Take away the crap revolutionary pomposity that Laurie, Moore and Brand bring to the table and the lefty critique of the status quo has some serious legitimacy.
I sometimes wonder what the people who are here, reading and commenting, are actually supposed to be doing instead. You can’t all be ladies and gentlemen of leisure. Obviously, I’m happy that people do drop by and join in – yes, even Minnow. But given the number of people reading blogs during office hours, and during office hours is when most blog reading seems to happen, I can’t help wondering if blogging is actually a measurable drain on productivity and the economy in general. To say nothing of all those neglected wives and husbands, and all those unfed barefoot children left wandering the streets.
Just sayin’.
Freshverbal – it’s funny when he shouts “knickers!” though.
You can’t all be ladies and gentlemen of leisure.
I work for a major oil company, and I have been waiting all day for access to a folder on the server containing the documents I am supposed to review. Without access I can’t even start, and I asked for it sometime around Friday lunchtime. Nobody ever accused oil companies of being efficient.
Tomorrow I am probably going to have to get something done, but I have an uncanny ability to do my job and write blog posts/comment at the same time.
and all those unfed barefoot children left wandering the streets.
I taught mine to forage. If the worst happens we can always adopt more.
the way minnow goes on.. its religion.
if youre an ‘owner’ then you are tainted with original sin.
to the degree that you are also a ‘worker’, then the sin is absolved.
its fucking mentalist!
David – I’m supposed to be talking to my clients. But I can talk and type at the same time. Nobody really cares so long as my numbers are good. Just not too good, or they’ll raise my target and do me out of money. I got stung for a few tens of K last year for having the audacity to finish a couple of million over target. Never again! To the barricades!
You, sir, are a menace to the British economy.
You can’t all be ladies and gentlemen of leisure.
Ehn, I’ll keep an eye on the commentary in passing, in between everything else—Still need to get back to those two Star Wars notes from Friday—, and then occasionally lob when the comment comes to mind.
‘course, some circumstances are dead easy: Oh, it’s minnow again,
I’m going to be ignoring, mostly, again.
Me, I slog through hipsters in person when going to and from the paycheck, and other places and among other adults also having to slog through the hipsters, and online is even easier . . .
“You must have noticed this, that the more they make the less there was for you?”
Nope, never noticed that. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every company I have ever worked with has given some small bonus when a project went well, sometimes just pizza & beer, occasionally a little extra cash, one time the whole office went to Dublin & got pissed. Minnow’s bitter & twisted perspective, however, rings no bells at all.
“Capital is essential.”
And it usually just appears, magically. But if it doesn’t it can just be stolen from anyone who has ‘too much’. Wow Minnow’s right. Socialism is bloody great.
I work for a major oil company, and I have been waiting all day for access to a folder on the server containing the documents I am supposed to review. Without access I can’t even start, and I asked for it sometime around Friday lunchtime. Nobody ever accused oil companies of being efficient.
I work in the IT department of a major oil company, and I have been waiting all day for my manager to sign off on the reapplication of administrative privileges, which must be renewed every 6 months godknowswhy, so that I can address an issue in my queue regarding some poor schmuck’s inability to access a folder. Damn users are always b*tching about one thing or another.
I sell equipment and services to major oil companies, and minor ones too.
And I have to tell you, they’re bloody great as customers. I LOVE those guys.
Except when they want me to help them get stuff into Angola, Nigeria or the Stans. That’s a nightmare thanks to the Bribery Act.
And he will say unto me: “Knowest thou what plan MARX has for thee? Come and follow me, and I will give thee an iPad mini.”
And I will retort: “No way you big spastic. You’re a mentalist!”, then slam the door.
Heh.
I’ve already slammed the metaphorical door in Minnow’s face.
I appreciate a good argument – what she’s been doing since late last week isn’t that; it’s just a frenetic outpouring of ad hoc responses that inevitably add up to a pile of bullshit peppered with Whataboutism and Marxist boilerplate (which I assume she thinks we have never heard before … but there’s a lot of 101 content in there).
If she actually goes back to making sense, I might be tempted to open it again but not before.
I sometimes wonder what the people who are here, … are actually supposed to be doing instead.
Heh. I ask the same question – mainly about myself!
I work freelance now, so am generally flexible with time. It seems to work out somehow. In fact, in spite of the time I spend on here, it’s still a fraction of the time I used to waste in the seemingly endless and almost totally pointless meetings I had to go to at my former employer’s (a publishing house).
Minnow – Do you appreciate that Marx’s labour theory of value is now rejected by most economists? Joan Robinson, who was considered an expert on the writings of Karl Marx, argued that the labour theory of value was largely a tautology and “a typical example of the way metaphysical ideas operate”. In other words, your premise is shot.
David – I am semi-retired. At present, I am spending a month beside a quiet beach in the southern Peloponnese. *raises glass of local red to lips*
Self-employed programmer & musician. Also a very hands-on Dad.
Also poorer than I used to be, though this is not the fault of this blog. Yes I should probably be working harder, but I make enough to get by.
One (very bad) future money-spinning idea I have is writing. No, we don’t need more writers, but we do need more writers with the capacity for rational thought.. (or so I flatter myself – hey, you need a decent-sized ego to succeed). The blog comments are actually good practice at getting arguments across concisely.
I once had to deal with a seriously annoying troll under something I wrote elsewhere – the kind that just wouldn’t give up, made stuff up so much it couldn’t have been simple stupidity, skipped from one subject to the next, wouldn’t be pinned down as to what he actually thought.
I don’t know if Minnow considers her?self a troll, but she does seem to give some idea of what she thinks – sometimes unintentionally, as with the “harder with Shakespeare remark above”.
Architect with own practice and spare time musician of sorts. Taking breaks between visit to construction site of new £2M private house and, so far, half-successful attempts to design a brise-soleil, to laugh at Minnow’s naivety whilst simultaneously marvelling at her/his slipperiness.
BTW, people here still insisting on branding all self-labelled ‘feminists’ as mental cases could do a lot worse than to type Factual Feminist into YouTube – her short videos touch on a lot of issues discussed regularly here including the exagerated campus ‘rape’ epidemic. (Found via Liberty Pen)