Bloody Shovel 4

The blog has been slow lately. Part of that is me being on Twitter, wrecking my long term IQ with short term dopamine hits. But man, those dopamine hits are good. If you’re not following me yet, there’s a link at the sidebar.

So anyway, one of the places I rely most recently for commentary is the online mag The Diplomat. It’s some Cathedral foreign policy rag, apparently with some close relation to the Indian government. Lots of Indians shitting on China there, which is funny. But by and la...

https://twitter.com/rafferty\_tom/status/882499670848675840

A 10% cap would be reasonable. Alas China is no stranger to wasteful signaling spirals. Here's hoping they put a stop to the education bubble madness.

Not to learn, certainly.

David Friedman says:

Well if you've been puzzled for long, why don't you think about it? Come on, Mr. Friedman. You're a smart guy. If you don't understand something, just think a bit harder. Or better still: think outside the box.

Some guys out there put theories about humans being wired to pay attention to lecturers, more than to books or videos. I don't know. Certainly didn't work like that for me. A boring lecture is a boring lecture whether on video or in person. I'm n...

Via Vox Day

The feminism angle is funny, but I think there's something more important to it. We all know that higher education is deleterious to female fertility. Probably the most harmful factor of them all. Well in 1900 elite women were already forsaking their beauty and fecundity to play the status game by learning some inconsequential knowledge to annoy their peers with.

It follows that the Western elites' mores have been dysgenic for quite a while then. Which made me think a lot in how little...

It is widely acknowledged everywhere in the civilised world that universities are not a place you go to learn. It used to be that they were a "temple of wisdom" where only bookish people would go to learn real stuff. You needed some real brains to go there.

Now of course the ersatz upward mobility created by democracy has pretty much broken that system. Now everybody has to go to college, because we are all equally smart. But we are not, and as much as we like pretending we are, being able to fil...

Anomaly UK wrote a couple of weeks ago the kind of post I always want to write, but never do. It's really good, and it touches many points that should be obvious to any interested in public policy. For example, on employment:

This is so true it's painful. It should be branded on steel on every libertarian's thigh. Politics is not about policy, it's about power. And power is about patronage. It has been so since at least Roman times, who gaves us the words Patron and Client. Well it happens that t...