Author Archives: lawofmarkets

Herodotus was right once again

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Bust of Herodotus

My favourite book of all time is Herodotus’s Histories. The first ever book of history, it tells the story of the war between the Greeks and the Persians in the fifth century BC for the survival of Western Civilisation before it had even commenced its journey. A storyteller who travelled everywhere to gather personal accounts of what others had witnessed, but with so much ancillary information and irrelevant tales about everything under the sun – including about the first people ever to have sailed around Africa which you know was true because they had observed that the sun eventually was no longer to their south but at some stage was found to their north. Lots and lots and lots like that, including some of the most astute philosophical, political and historical reflections you will ever read. Amazing book, but I can imagine not to everyone’s tastes. It’s also a reminder that you should get your reading in early since as you get older, you don’t have the patience you had when you were young.

Ah but this is merely prelude to: Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a “baris”.

For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A “fabulously preserved” wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.

“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right,” said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation’s findings. “What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.”

Known as The Father of Lies (as well as the Father of History) because of his many fantastical tales, but appears that this one has turned out to be true. As for the book itself, it tells the story of the preservation of Western Civilisation that might have been snuffed out before it had even begun.

More like the Dark Ages

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With education the way it is, neither the cartoon nor this story will any longer have meaning and resonance: Venezuela returns to ‘Middle Ages’ during power outages.

“We make lamps that burn gasoline, or oil, or kerosene — any type of fuel,” explained Lizbeth Morin, 30.

“We’ve returned to the Middle Ages.”

They have gasoline, oil and kerosene so hardly mediaeval. It is instead late nineteenth century, time travellers back about 150 years, but that is insane enough since they brought it on themselves. Unenlightened self-delusion in the form of Democratic Socialism – that is, in the form of politically-sanctioned theft. Could happen anywhere.

Any politician who will not say the words, “capitalism and the free market are good – socialism is bad”, should never be elected. If they will not say these words, they are themselves mediaeval, wishing to return us to the days of an aristocracy and their dependent serfs. 

“A big juicy target”

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To which may be added this: Christchurch Murders: The Real Accomplices.

The reactions that followed were marked by legitimate indignation. Unfortunately, the attack was also used to launch a campaign both dangerous and treacherous.

Tarrant, in his manifesto, defined himself as an “eco-fascist” and wrote that he admires British Nazi Oswald Mosley and China’s communist regime, and that he rejects conservatism. Even though US President Donald J. Trump condemned the murders, the killer’s remarks were used to attack him.

Possibly because Tarrant opposed Muslim immigration to Western countries (mostly, he wrote, because it leads to overpopulation), many of those who expressed concerns about Muslim immigration to the West, or criticized Islamic violence or anti-Semitism, were immediately accused as having been partly or fully responsible for the massacre — even US President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton.

By contrast, many Muslims, when extremist violence in the name of Islam takes place, state that they cannot be held “collectively responsible” for the actions of their co-religionists, and that to try to do so is unjust and “Islamophobic.” Often, however, it seems as if members of other religions are not held to the same presumption of innocence.

We are in a moment of reprieve

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I finally got to listen to PDT’s whole speech and it was spellbinding. Mark Steyn and Tucker Carlson both watched it and both have had the same reaction. Who else today can give a speech that lasts an hour and a half and leave you sorry it has come to an end?

I will also draw your attention to the last quarter hour, from around one hour and ten minutes in, where the President kind of summarises the themes of the 2020 campaign to come.

It could all have been so different from how it is. Like the market economy, which effortlessly produces the goods, almost making it seem as if there is nothing to it, in the same way you think that things just go right, when they go right, because they always will. For myself, I am too too aware how we are in a moment of reprieve from a deluge, that if it happens, will wipe our civilisation away until there is nothing left.

Turning the lights off in America and everywhere else

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This is a matching political post to the more technical Getting the lights back on in Venezuela. It’s hard to work out the motivations that lie behind the green agenda, whether pure ignorance, malice, envy, stupidity, greed, short-sightedness, or whatever. All are included. The only element left out because none of it is present is enlightened self-interest, of which there can be none at all. And parties of the left are all of a piece. You want the green nude eel in Australia, we have two parties – at a minimum – whose aim is to provide exactly that.

More here on the same thing from Powerline: DEMOCRATS PUNT ON THE GREEN NEW DEAL. The conclusion:

Climate change alarmism is a joke. It exists only for purposes of domestic politics, and as an excuse to feather the nests of “green” entrepreneurs who support the Democratic Party.

Comes with this as one of the comments.

An “end to global warming” has never been the point. The point of all of this is that “saving the planet” is a fantastic rationale for injecting social warrior justice politics into virtually every aspect of both society and private life. It is a doorway to POWER and this lust for power is the only reason for this zeal to “fight climate change.” As others have more eloquently said, if you accept the premise that that human actions damage the planet (cause global warming) then it stands to reason all human actions must be controlled. And, if you are a social justice warrior, you are willing to countenance the lie to achieve power because you are so good, your motives are so pure and are just so much morally and spiritually superior to “Them” that the lie is justified. It represents a view of the universe where “the natural elect” should have the right to do whatever they want.

And on it goes

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I wish the news wasn’t almost always so dark with menace. The left never admits fault, never relents and never seem to learn from history. They just stay the course and events just keep moving their way. These are from The Top Twenty Mueller Report Memes where they overlap with Jussie Smollett, whose charges have just been dropped! It’s not just that they are corrupt, but they don’t even try to hide it any more.

But I’ll add this just in case you haven’t seen it already.

The science is unsettled

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When I was growing up, feminism ran with the line that males and females were in all respects identical so that different outcomes were proof of sexism. And so far as I could see, unless men and women were identical in all important respects, then differential outcomes could not be sheeted home to bias but might just be how things are. And then there was Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus which basically said that men and women were different which, to my amazement, no one objected to, but which seemed to ruin the narrative. And now just today, this: Proof that girls and boys are born to be different: Controversial study finds that brain differences between the sexes begin in the womb.

In a scientific first, researchers claim to have found that differences between men’s and women’s brains start in the womb.

The conclusion is likely to be controversial, with some experts claiming social influences are more important.

But scientists who did brain scans of 118 foetuses in the second half of pregnancy to analyse the links between gender and the connectivity of a developing brain believe the differences are biological.

Well, how unexpected is that! Not the conclusion, of course, but that it was ever published.

Plus this, if common sense is your kind of thing.

To which may be added this: Denying the Neuroscience of Sex Differences which many are prone to do. From the article:

For decades neuroscience, like most research areas, overwhelmingly studied only males, assuming that everything fundamental to know about females would be learned by studying males. I know — I did this myself early in my career. Most neuroscientists assumed that differences between males and females, if they exist at all, are not fundamental, that is, not essential for understanding brain structure or function. Instead, we assumed that sex differences result from undulating sex hormones (typically viewed as a sort of pesky feature of the female), and/or from different life experiences (“culture”). In either case, they were dismissable in our search for the fundamental. In truth, it was always a strange assumption, but so it was.

Gradually however, and inexorably, we neuroscientists are seeing just how profoundly wrong — and in fact disproportionately harmful to women — that assumption was, especially in the context of understanding and treating brain disorders. Any reader wishing to confirm what I am writing can easily start by perusing online the January/February 2017 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Research, the first ever of any neuroscience journal devoted to the topic of sex differences in its entirety. All 70 papers, spanning the neuroscience spectrum, are open access to the public. 

I can also now see how all of this has ended up being published since not recognising that these differences exist is “in fact disproportionately harmful to women”. Without that, there is no way these conclusions could have seen the light of day, as the author notes himself.

But the remarkable and unprecedented growth in research demonstrating biologically-based sex influences on brain function triggered 5-alarm fire bells in those who believe that such biological influences cannot exist.

Since Simone de Beauvoir in the early 1950s famously asserted that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and John Money at Johns Hopkins shortly thereafter introduced the term “gender” (borrowed from linguistics) to avoid the biological implications of the word “sex,” a belief that no meaningful differences exist in the brains of women and men has dominated U.S. culture. And God help you if you suggest otherwise! Gloria Steinem once called sex differences research “anti-American crazy thinking.” Senior colleagues warned me as an untenured professor around the year 2000 that studying sex differences would be career suicide. This new book by Rippon marks the latest salvo by a very small but vocal group of anti-sex difference individuals determined to perpetuate this cultural myth.

So, it is now clear that if you want to promote some idea, you have to show it conforms to some major cultural myth of the left. How’s this: “free markets are the most important ingredient in a socialist economy”.