An Ignoramus Opines on Economics

Posted on June 19, 2022 by JC


Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences by Steve Keen
Zed Books, July 1st, 2001 (2007 Reprint)

I have read very little on economics. So little that I think I can list every book I’ve ever read on the subject with less than one hand:

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell 
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek
The Return of the Great Depression by Vox Day

I read The Communist Manifesto once but I’m not sure that quite counts. I did listen to about an eighth of Wealth of the Nations as an audio book but not nearly enough to claim that I have read it. Along with these I’ve read a lot of articles as well as few books on the subject but always at the level of a layman. I have heard of Keynes, the Austrian School, Milton Friedman, Ricardo and many other names but don’t ask me for summaries  on their perspectives or anything they’ve said on the subject. And let’s not forget that reading isn’t the same as understanding and I’ve never formally studied or gone very in-depth on the discipline. The author of the latter work on the list has highly recommended the subject of this review but it has been a decade since he recommended it and I’ve only recently got around to doing so. 

I want to emphasise my ignorance here because I found this book (more so than the others), a rather difficult read and my level of understanding may be poor. This review is something of an exercise at synthesising what I have read. In case it wasn’t already clear — I’m the ignoramus. Continue reading →

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China is in Charge

Posted on June 12, 2022 by JC

Something that feels like it has come on suddenly over the last few years has been not only the rise in power of China but also its rapid increase influence and assertiveness on the world stage. The Chinese economy has been growing rapidly for my entire life but the nation generally wasn’t considered a world power until the turn of the century. This is when people in the West began to notice that their manufacturing base had gone overseas and that they were now almost completely dependent on Chinese made products. This was pacified by the assurance that China was turning towards a liberal-democracy just like us despite many indications this wasn’t the case going back decades. 

As Vox Day has continued to document, the reality is that China is now the leading world power with control over immense industry and wealth. It now has enough power (especially in co-operation with nations like Russia and India), to cripple the Western world. Despite how obvious this might be, it seems to be lost on both Western leaders and the general population — one of the few things they have left in common. 

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The Curse of the Scary Shoulder Pads Lady

Posted on June 6, 2022 by JC

From 1980s to the early 1990s, women wearing jackets with large shoulder pads was a fashion that was hard to miss. This fed into the empowered woman/feminist architype of the time and can be seen in a number of films and television shows including Mr. Mom, Working Girl, Mrs. Doubtfire, Die Hard, Home Improvement and even Top Gun. I am only scratching the surface here as there are plenty more examples I could find if I was inclined to look. In all of these you have variations of a woman trying to break into the corporate sector or a mum working some office job (likely of questionable utility). When a husband is present, the woman always rules the roost. Most of these films/shows are now painfully out of date and indeed some of them would now be criticised by the same sort of people who would have lauded them for their forward thinking at the time. It is worth noting that this is also around the same time you saw more films with men dressing as women beginning with Tootsie. Mrs. Doubtfire had both!

This post will cover three of these.

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Shattering Idols

Posted on May 28, 2022 by JC

I have shattered many idols out along the dusty track,

Burnt a lot of fancy verses — and I’m glad that I am back.

Henry Lawson, Up the Country

I have had a number of posts over the years discussing the ongoing destruction of many popular culture franchises beginning with some brief commentary on the all-female Ghostbusters reboot back in 2016 when I first began writing this blog. I never watched it but by all accounts that matter, it turned out to be just as bad as it looked. This destruction has most often been in reference to Star Wars though I noted in the linked Ghostbusters post that what anything you liked before can’t be ruined by new and inferior products with the same name. The same trend has also been happening with video games as I noted in my review of GEARS 5 in 2019 which I  compared to the terrible Disney Star Wars films. By chance, XYZ had published a related post on the gaming industry in general before I started writing this post.

By now it is as clear as can be that there is a conscious effort at play to subvert and wreck popular media franchises. This of course is denied every time it is noticed and it is claimed merely that these properties are just being made more “inclusive” or words to that effect. This is a lie as nobody has ever been stopped from enjoying anything nor is anybody is really left out if a major character in a story doesn’t share their race, interests or sexual proclivities perversions. And for most of my lifetime, people have been free to create almost anything they like if they found any genre wanting. Countless popular as well as niche works of fiction have been created for these very reasons. Ironically, it is only very recently that this has changed and it is because of the very people who claim to be doing the opposite.

I have also commented on the unhealthy obsession people have with media franchises. A recent example is seeing adults fantasising about Marvel characters joining the fight in Ukraine. Or the evil nasty Putin being compared to Voldemort, the main antagonist from the Harry Potter children’s stories. It is clear that whatever the merits of modern fiction that popular culture has had an infantalising effect on people and this is not healthy for society.

Yet there is more to this destruction than is generally observed. Most commentary either complains about it or defends it. I just didn’t watch it. What is a more interesting question is to ask how God’s plan is unfolding in all of this?

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The Obvious Investor

Posted on May 20, 2022 by JC

The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape, John Wiley & Sons,
December 1st, 2020 (first published in 2016)

Despite sharing my misgivings about the type of books you find in airports before, I have been given (gifted this time), another book from the same source. Though unlike last time, there is some genuinely useful advice to be found amongst corny pop culture references, dad jokes and regular digs at Donald Trump.

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The Continuing Decline of Big Tech

Posted on May 14, 2022 by JC

This will be something of a sequel to this post last year about breaking away from big tech. Though, I will focus more on how bad so much big tech software has become and some alternatives I’ve begun using. What makes is actually making it easier to breakaway is that so much software is getting progressively worse at doing what it is supposed to do. What ties people to much of this software is a mixture of familiarity and dependence. The former is more for products such as Microsoft Office and the latter with so much being tied to mandatory accounts connected with these companies. This is not so much to do with the “cult of free” as many of these products do still cost money but this still comes into it to some extent.

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Robert E. Howard in Film

Posted on May 7, 2022 by JC

Robert E. Howard’s writing has been a source of inspiration for countless works across all forms of media. Though he wrote extensively in his short life, there have been relatively few direct film adaptations of his work. What makes this surprising is that fantasy films and television shows have seen multiple surges in popularity. Since Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy released twenty years ago, they have remained consistently bankable. Comic book films also continue to be popular and Howard’s stories have been appearing in comic form for around half a century now. Yet there are very few films based on Howard’s work and all have been made within the last forty years.

What follows will be short reviews of each of the live-action films based on Howard’s work as well as one based around Howard’s life. Some general observations before proceeding are that most of these are origin stories except for the one direct Conan sequel. In Howard’s writing, his characters were seldom given origin stories with the one exception I know being Sword Woman who is part of the inspiration behind the character Red Sonja. Howard generally thrust readers into the action and readers learned what details they needed about the character efficiently in flow with the narrative. Another is that none of these films directly adapt any of Howard’s work. They all use ideas, characters and general themes but not one of these films is purely based on one of his stories. This is hard to believe especially since so many could make for an excellent 90 minute fantasy action film. As many have been adapted directly (and quite faithfully) as comics already — a lot of storyboarding has also already been done too. Yet, amazing as it seems, this has not happened even in more recent history with both technology and consumer tastes being otherwise aligned for success.

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The Evil of Contract Law

Posted on April 6, 2022 by JC

Any society featuring rules and mores based on contract law is inherently evil and is inevitably bound to devolve into rule by charlatans and thieves.

It is not an accident that Satan prefers to operate by binding contract.

 

Contract law is literally demonic. It amounts to rule by corruption and fraud.

What sort of madness is required to make contracts the basis of both a) societal economics and b) societal morality?

Vox Day (taken from SocialGalactic)

 

The observations above as well as recent personal events have led me to think more carefully about contract law than I ever would have otherwise. After all, it seems perfectly reasonable as an idea. Two parties make a written agreement that both sign on it. Most of the time the parties follow through n this agreement and if one doesn’t, the wronged party seeks some sort of legal arbitration to settle it. A major function of the state then is to enforce contracts between individuals. We are taught in the West that this is all a very good thing and a sign of the superiority of our society over others. Indeed, the written constitution that my (and many other nations) have is considered to be of so great benefit to us is a contract. 

The problem of course, as observed above, is that contracts actually favour the most ruthless and dishonest. The spirit of the agreement is broken down into semantics and the dishonest will take every advantage they can while the honest party — that is one who is unwilling to deceive — is left at a distinct disadvantage. This isn’t always the case as many people will obey the spirit of agreements made without getting into technicalities or trying to reinterpret the agreement to their advantage. One doesn’t have to look far to find plenty of counter-examples though.

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Beyond Donkey Kong Book Review

Posted on March 31, 2022 by JC

Beyond Donkey Kong: A History of Nintendo Arcade Games by Ken Horowitz, McFarland, November 30th, 2020

I have previously reviewed Ken Horowitz’s first book Playing at the Next Level and also been a long time (though not regular), contributor to his website Sega-16. I also read his second book The Sega Arcade Revolution and enjoyed it just as much though I didn’t write a review. Beyond Donkey Kong is his third book and his first to focus away from Sega’s legacy in the home console and arcade business.

Most histories of Nintendo or video games in general will dwell briefly on the early history of the company with playing cards, toys, mechanical games and then once they get to Donkey Kong will jump straight into the history of the home console market. But as the title implies, there is a lot more to Nintendo’s arcade history than this and this book sets out to cover it in detail from the early beginnings to the company’s quiet exit in the early 1990s. Continue reading →

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Fisking Dreher and Skojec

Posted on March 26, 2022 by JC

As with a previous fisking of mine, this one is coming almost a year later but I felt compelled to do it given the subject matter. It will mostly be taken from this response by Rod Dreher to a highly emotional post by Steve Skojec who is the founder of the Catholic blog One Peter Five.  It was already responded to in a timely fashion by Edward Feser here and then again when Dreher briefly responded to his first post. This was all over a few days in late May, last year. 

Before moving forward, I want to comment in general on Catholic writers, journalists and anyone who has a prominent position whether paid or not in the church. Feser, Dreher and Skojec all fit into this category. And even I do at a lower level and in a way, everyone who is a Catholic also bares witness to the faith in their own way however small. This is especially the case for public figures though who I would say are putting themselves under similar judgement to priests with their very visible status within the church. What they do and how they behave in public can cause far more scandal than the average layman can.

You may love Catholicism and want to promote and write about it but it isn’t hobby writing like I do with video games or others do with train sets, stamp collecting, crafts and so on. It has significance beyond even that of  political and social commentary. I should hardly need to emphasise how important it is. And I believe that the very public way that both Dreher and (it seems Skojec), have left the church have greatly discredited them in my eyes and caused immeasurable scandal.

I am not in a similar position to them but I imagine if I had similar misgivings that led me away from the church, I should keep this all as private as possible for the sake of the audience I had. Of course, as I am not in such a position, you can only take my word for it.

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