BLM Activist Arrested for KNEELING on the Neck of a White Baby.
Polling: Cancel Culture Is Real and Silences Conservatives Most.
Irony in the news
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Author Archives: lawofmarkets
Sometimes you just gotta laugh
For Trump voters only
No one else could bear it. For the rest, it will make you laugh. I just hope we keep laughing after 3 November.
Frauds, snares and delusions in the age of the rhetorical virus
Just picked up a quite excellent book in our local second-hand bookshop. It is titled, Fallacy: the Counterfeit of Argument, and was written in 1959. By happenstance, this is part of the introduction:
The triumph of rhetoric is like the spread of a virus infection. When an epidemic spreads through an area, it is said to prevail there, and local measures may be taken. But to say that it prevails does not mean that everyone is infected. Some persons may escape infection; others are immune. It is not necessary to labour the analogy in order to show that it would be a good idea if the community could somehow develop a serum against some forms of persuasion.
Few can hope to become immune to all the tricks of persuasion since, like viruses, there are too many of them. People are daily exposed to appeals to blind faith, self interest, fear, prejudice, fancy. This book cannot discuss persuasion in all its variety and complexity, but it can attempt to describe and illustrate some of the most dangerous strains.
Logic is the defence against trickery. The kinds of argument with which logic deals are the reasonable ones. Mistakes are possible, even frequent, in applying the forms of logical argument, and these mistakes are regarded as fallacies, many having been noted as early as Aristotle. We shall wish to guard against them. But the most common fallacies today are of a very different sort. It is a small comfort to know that an argument is entirely logical but that its validity derives its conclusion from its premises, and that all the rules of the syllogism, or whatever, are observed to a nicety, if it turns out that the premises are frauds, snares, delusions. There are brilliant tricks for getting people to accept all sorts of false premises as true (some of these tricks have been spotted since the time of the ancient Greeks), and these tricks are so prevalent that even when people realise that something is being pulled on them, they tend to let it pass.
Which brings me to this: The COVID Coup by Angelo Codevilla. It is the best political discussion of the political dimension of Covid-1984 I have come across so far. It was also posted at Instapundit where the “best” comment reads, in full, “Fantastic article”. From the article’s intro:
What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Just read it long though it may be. If anything is needed more than reasoned discussion at this time, I cannot think what that is.
How do Democrats get a single vote?
Hours before what is expected to be the 53rd straight night of protests in the city, the head of the Portland police union said the community has “had enough.” Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner, surrounded by 20 faith leaders, business owners, police officers and neighborhood residents, held a news conference in front of the union’s offices in North Portland. On Saturday, protesters broke in and lit a fire inside. The building itself was covered with graffiti.
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At least two people were arrested in Seattle and a police officer is in the hospital Sunday after a march through downtown devolved into property damage and looting, police say. Police said Sunday evening the demonstrators had broken out several windows of the East Precinct, then threw a device into the lobby that ignited a small fire. The fire was later extinguished and no injuries were reported, police said. The demonstration started between 2 and 3 p.m. near the intersection of 3rd Avenue and Pine Street. A photo posted on Seattle’s DOT traffic channel showed crowds blocking an intersection.
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Members of the left are upset that Attorney General Bill Barr has appointed an immigration judge who actually respects and believes in America’s immigration laws. “The judge, Matthew J. O’Brien, was officially named to his new position in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) in June — but was just formally inducted into the largest ever corps of immigration judges along with 45 others,” Law & Order, a far-left news website, complained Saturday. “‘From 2016 to 2020, he served as the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform.’ … The group, known in immigration law circles by its acronym, FAIR,
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These were the latest three posts at lucianne.com
The Seven Deadly Sins and the evil of the modern left
This chart put out by the Smithsonian in Washington disappeared too rapidly since it really does say what needs saying about the modern left. It is evil to its very core. Everything listed on that chart are seen as bad. White Culture is seen as bad. If you want to understand politics in the West today, you need to absorb what you are being explicitly told. These values, these beliefs are bad for you and bad for any society in which these occur.
What you see in this chart is the explicit rejection of the Seven Virtues and the adoption of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here they are in order as represented by the moral vultures seen everywhere on the left.
Envy is the resentful covetousness towards the traits or possessions of others.
Sloth is a habitual disinclination to exertion, a desire for something for nothing, the belief that the world owes them a living.
Greed is a rapacious desire and pursuit of material possessions but without first attempting to produce the valuable goods and services that could be exchanged for what they want.
Wrath is uncontrolled feelings of anger, rage, and even hatred. In its purest form, wrath presents with injury, violence, and hate.
Pride also known as hubris is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of other people. It is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins.
Lust is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire. However, lust can also mean unbridled desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things.
Gluttony is the overindulgence of anything to the point of waste.
“I have unfettered legal power”
“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said. “I have unfettered legal power.”
The quote is from Stephen Conroy and may be found here: Conroy plays down ‘red underpants’ comments. They love the power, these totalitarians. Daniel Andrews has never shown himself as anything other than stoopid. But he likes the power to tell everybody else what to do. He has screwed up every single thing he has done since becoming Premier, and especially the lockdown, but he gets to give the orders. He has even sold out Victoria to the Communist Party of China to cover his fantastically large deficit expenditures. Disgusting.
Meanwhile: Coronavirus: Levels of herd immunity in UK may already be high enough to prevent second wave, study suggests.
“The outbreaks look similar at the beginning. But in the heterogeneous population, individuals are not infected at random.
“The highly susceptible people are more likely to get infected first. As a result, the average susceptibility gets lower and lower over time.”
She added: “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent. It’s very striking.”
I only wish there was herd immunity against voting for socialists. There is, of course, but only after the voting is over plus around half a dozen years. And even then, it’s always only temporary.
NOW COMING TO MELBOURNE:
Covid risk edition
Explaining what is wrong with Magic Money Theory [MMT]
This was from Beachcomber in the comments:
Hi Steve, I just read a fascinating essay by Peter Smith at Quadrant: Money printing in the age of Covid
In the essay it states:
In the age of COVID-19, bonds sold to finance deficit spending are being largely or wholly bought up by respective central banks. This is manifest in banks’ holdings of deposits with their central bank and of treasury notes or bills.
In comments the question is asked as to from where the “central bank” garners the money to buy the bonds.
To which Peter Smith answers:
It creates it out of thin air cos it can.
The central bank simply issues a cheque or like instrument, drawn on the central bank, which allows the holder of the bond (assume it is a non-bank – the process is short-circuited if the holder is a bank) to lodge the cheque in its bank account. The bank correspondingly lodges the cheque with the central bank and sees its deposts with the central bank increase accordingly. The central bank now has an asset – the bond – and a corresponding liability – the bank’s deposit. It can go on doing this till the cows come home. Or, practically speaking, until inflation rears its ugly head.
Is this true? Can this continue forever? With shrinking incomes and the associated shortage of money supply, inflation seems unlikely. Peter Smith makes a distinction from Modern Monetary Theory without explaining how it is different. Can the creation of money from nothing by the Government continue forever? If so, then Andrews can reign forever!
First, if there is an authority on the banking system in Australia outside and beyond the reach of government, it is Peter Smith. He was, when I first met him, the economist for the Australian Bankers’ Association, then became the Chief Economist for the State Bank of Victoria and finally was the first Chief Executive for the Australian Payments Clearance Association. No one gets this stuff better than he does.
But let me buy into this because this is part of my expertise as well. And to follow this with any understanding you have to divide the economy into two halves. On one side is production, the actual goods and services produced, which also includes the production of inputs into the production process, such as iron ore and natural gas.
And on the other side there is the monetary side of the economy which is completely distinct. This comprises:
- money as a medium of exchange, say a $100 note, but represents the value of goods and services so that we can sell what we produce to buy what others produce
- money which we set aside as a store of value, such as bank accounts or superannuation savings, and
- money which we use as a unit of account so that businesses can calculate how much things cost to produce so that they can determine what to charge so that they can calculate whether they are making a profit.
And it should be emphasised that only profit-making businesses create more value than they use up in production. Loss-making enterprises – which include virtually every activity run by governments – slow the economy, using up more value than they create. Loss-making enterprises cause the economy to contract. Only if there are other enterprises making profits – almost always private sector enterprises – can the economy expand. Without understanding that, you cannot understand the first thing about how an economy works.
Creating more money does NOT create productive resources. Giving more money to governments, or allowing them to print more money out of thin air, lets governments spend on non-productive activities which they inevitably do. Spending more on non-productive activities means less is spent on productive activities.
And adding to the problems, when the government expands the volume of money by just printing the stuff up, they undermine each of the uses money has: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and as a unit of account. The economy can no longer be run as productively as it might have been and often even leads to a fall in real income across the entire community.
Virtually no politician I have ever met has understood this. Virtually no political leader I see in the news today understands this. All of the others are Keynesians now, who believe the mere spending of money creates jobs, growth and higher real earnings. On this they could not be more wrong.
We will be paying for this ignorance for a very long time to come.
Is this the worst journalism you have ever read?
It’s a good thing that The Age is still around so I don’t have to depend on the hysterics at The Oz for my news. Take this today by someone classified as the Associate Editor: Code red for Premier Daniel Andrews as coronavirus crisis reignites. He starts:
Daniel Andrews’s premiership has been smashed and his legacy imperilled. He has had a horrible month; in normal circumstances the Victorian Premier might already have walked.
But for complex social and psychological reasons the Andrews experiment is on life support rather than in the political mortuary. His community is still more interested in beating the virus than in revenge politics.
In his own obtuse way, he has put his finger on the problem: there is no opposition party or leader in Victoria. My favourite party trick at the moment is to ask people to name the Victorian Opposition Leader. Virtually no one can do it. But back to the article as The Oz does everything it can to beat up this dead horse for reasons unknown to me:
Just as the behaviour of the COVID-19 virus can be unpredictable, so is the state of mind of Victorians as they confront their gravest challenge since World War II. The latest record numbers have stunned an already stunned city, with deaths certain to rise [they certainly cannot fall].
“We are in the fight for our lives,” Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos says.
Today the community’s narrowed eyes are focused almost completely on suppressing the killer virus that is marching through the metropolitan area.
He finishes with this:
This once-in-a-lifetime event has entered a highly emotional phase. The economy was retrievable until the fresh outbreak but is now under even greater threat. We are staring at potentially large-scale loss of life. If this crisis deepens and the government is nailed by the judicial inquiry, how long could the Labor caucus justify retaining Andrews at the helm?
Of course Andrews is going to resign, in just the same cowardly way that John Cain left the mess he was responsible for to Joan Kirner. Some legacy! Andrews is the worst premier Victoria has ever had, and that is really really saying something.
Law of Markets 