Bloody Shovel 4

So the year is near its end. It's been an eventful year. A good year, perhaps. A year of hope. Trump won. The UK voted to leave the European Union and the government is willing to enforce that. Millions of hostile Muslims are roaming Northern Europe, stealing and raping at will. Fortunately I'm not in Germany. But I might come back to Europe during next year. Asia haters can rejoice. I'll have some skin in the game shortly.

2016 hasn't been the most prolific year for this blog, nor the most insig...

There's two sorts of people. The optimists who periodically get enthusiastic about something and feel how everything is going to turn out great, and they're gonna be part of it personally. Then there are the adults who come by and tell you to calm down. It's not gonna turn out great and you aren't gonna be part of it anyway.

The Internet has brought the inner optimist in a lot of people. Bitcoin is a recent example most will know about. But there's also the more general principle, that the Inter...

Surfin' the web yesterday, I come across this:

Penile implants?

What the hell? That must hurt like a bitch. Why would they do that?

Romantic. Right. The Brazilian hookers are thinking about your frankendick aaaall day for months. They just can't have enough of ya li'l Asian dick. But well what can you expect. These people were doing head hunting there until yesterday. What's the average IQ over there, 85? Stupid people do stupid things. They just can't see the world as it is, objectively. Fortunate...

Sorry again for the slow posting, but I've been busy with work et al. It's not only Civ, I swear. I'm a productive member of the community. I don't know quite which one though.

Most of human life can be described using Bell Curves and Pareto distributions. Say blogs and comments. The quality of comments in any given blog is distributed normally, and 20% of the comments have 80% of the insight. The bigger the blog, the more numerous the commenters, the most pronounced this effect is. In any popula...

When I first started this blog, I predicted that I'd run out of things to say about politics quite soon, and could carve up a nice niche by talking of East Asian issues from a neoreactionary perspective. At the moment I've been lucky enough to find a good audience just by speaking my mind on politics in general, and I don't intend to stop just yet, but I sometimes think I'd be more useful by bringing forward some real data on what's going on in this part of the world.

Jim's been making a series o...

The Growth of Justice: Cheap Chalupa's boys link to a "study" which spells out the creeds first article of faith:

Enough said.

Agnostic has been doing some good posts on Jewish religiosity

Brazil's economic growth tanks. You don't say.

Robin Hanson has been doing some posts on long term thinking. "Far mode" that he calls it. Basically pointing out that we don't really know anything about the long term. Well yeah but we gotta do someting, right? Short termism is boring.  Long-term planning is fun, t...

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omg5edz6kIo&feature=player\_embedded\]

Plausible explanations:

hbd1: People are too inbred? Or too outbred? see hbdchick

hbd2: Asians are neotenic egocentric sobs

hbd3: Agricultural societies select for cold, heartless people see agnostic

Culturalism1: urban life´s anonimity free people from having to give a shit

cult2: Commercialism makes people self absorbed

cult3: Americanisation broke the spirit of Japan see Mishima Yukio

cult4: The economy is bad, people are...

Quod Libet: Why recessions happen. AKA The Austrian theory of the business cycles, made easy. It really should be obvious. All those math-geek economists should be flogged.

hbdchick: Why Europe? She quotes a wonderful book on how in Europe, the Church declared war on clannishness and won, in China the Buddhist monasteries declared war... and lost to Confucian clans.

Andor Jakab: Made famous by his Why I don't give you a job, do yourself a favor and read his whole blog. Hungary is quickly devolvi...

I used to read highbrow stuff on the internet, but then one day, reading one of Foseti's random linkage posts, I discovered Business Insider. Which has the most dumbed down layout you can find anywhere, I feel almost insulted on just opening their homepage. But I'm hooked. Now most of my time in the office  is spent reading their hilariously sensationalistic articles. And although Henry Blodget looks like disgusting slime, there's actually quite a lot of good stuff there. Makes you think. Real...