I especially like his “Lucky Ducky” comics in which he explains that welfare benefits replace the benefits of work, but, since the richest of capitalists will always have better stuff than people on welfare, it means that rich people still have privilege and more redistribution is necessary.
Left out, of course, is the working man, who Tom the Dancing Bug, as a Marxist, believes to be of the same class as the guy on welfare. Tom the Dancing Bug’s policies don’t redistribute from the richest of capitalists to the welfare recipients, but from the working man. Who then works for no more benefit than he would get if he was on welfare.
In this one, the capitalist pig-dog tells Lucky Ducky that increasing the price of labor will reduce consumption. Lucky Ducky replies “…but if a monopsonistic firm faces an upward-facing supply curve”, as if all the marginal workers are employed by Wal-Mart and McDonalds. This was written years ago; it reflects the left’s electoral strategy of accusing McDonalds every time it wants to increase the minimum wage. If the left actually cared about increasing the price of labor in this country, they would place a moratorium on immigration. Their hope is that
(1) an increased minimum wage will hold the price of labor up while the new immigrants go on welfare and vote progressive in return;
(2) marginal workers will vote progressive to thank the left for the minimum wage laws that protect their jobs from the immigrants the proggies let in;
(3) the artifical inflation in the cost of labor will cause inflation, which has the effect of taking money out of people’s savings and putting it in the economy, thereby stimulating the economy.
I think the most amazing thing about today’s progressives is that they have ideas about electoral strategy but believe that actual governing is best left protected from politics. Whoever comes up with the public policy ideas, it doesn’t matter, Tom the Dancing Bug’s function is to do outreach by making cartoons about how great they are.
The only step they need to take to be neoreactionaries is to renounce electoral politics completely, arguing that lying is always bad no matter what the cause, and request that the government be accountable.
Astonishing the garbage that people can believe. I mean, I’m a long way from being an uncritical admirer of unfettered capitalism, but that stuff is like something from the 1930′s.
Harper’s Notes: RAND developed the Delphi Method during the early Cold War for estimating thermonuclear warfare casualties among other things. It works well under the right circumstances. Uses anonymity and sequential polling. But the right circumstances are generally difficult and rare. Most recently the Super-forecaster Project (Tetlock) has resulted in several the high-scorers participating in (betting) prediction markets, in which there are both advantages and disadvantages in non-anonymity.
Gaikokumaniakku: I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link: Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)
Gaikokumaniakku: This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake. I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.
TRX: Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank. Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that. While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a...
Isegoria: Lower attendance is what we’re going for.
Bob Sykes: The problem facing all colleges and universities is that the number of white 18 year-olds, the primary consumers of college, is declining rapidly both relative to other races and absolutely. Many small liberal arts colleges are decidedly second rate academically, and so are the students they cater to. So, neither the loss of the schools nor the loss of the students is really a big deal. The health of the college system and the meaningfulness of the degrees awarded is actually better off...
Isegoria: Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park. The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Kentucky Headhunter: Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
TRX: Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones. I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Isegoria: Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.
Lucklucky: “battleship Sheffield” It was a mere destroyer not a battleship…
Buckethead: Adjacent to Atomic Rockets is ToughSF. Well researched and fascinating speculation on space. He posts only every so often, but he did do an interesting series on stealth – and piracy — in space.
Isegoria: Thanks for putting in the work, George. Grok also kept pointing to this blog. Apparently AI struggles with comments repeated across multiple pages.
George: Gemini claims (and I haven’t confirmed) that it’s: …a classic historical description written by the Scottish physician and traveler Dr. John Macculloch in his 1824 book, The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland.He used this vivid phrase to describe the famous and treacherous pass of Glencroe… After searching all three volumes as PDFs, I’m pretty sure Gemini is hallucinating. And substantial time spent searching keeps leading me back to this blog. Cough up the...
Isegoria: I don’t think you’re alone in your struggle, Handle.
Grymalkin: Rudolf Jung (b.1882 – d.1945) was the first principal theoretician of National Socialism, a Sudeten-German trade-unionist and railway engineer who joined the Austro-Hungarian German Workers’ Party (later German National Socialist Workers’ Party, DNSAP) in 1909 and was heavily responsible for both building up the early successes of the movement and for establishing close links in the post-WWI era with emerging National Socialist parties in other German-speaking areas...
Handle: I liked Cal Newport’s World Without Email, but I have proven to be poor evangelist for its message. The default mode of email of permissionless universal access is bad (compare to needed to get affirmative consent for “direct liaison authority” like in the military) and everybody says they hate it but no one is willing to give up even a little bit of that capability, even though it’s essential to any system of attention preservation and disciplined communications. Sorry...
Bruce: Ludendorf’s WWI ‘War Communism’ and Marxist-Leninism rhyme.
Pretty funny. Too bad he’s such a liberal douche on everything but intervening in Syria…
I especially like his “Lucky Ducky” comics in which he explains that welfare benefits replace the benefits of work, but, since the richest of capitalists will always have better stuff than people on welfare, it means that rich people still have privilege and more redistribution is necessary.
Left out, of course, is the working man, who Tom the Dancing Bug, as a Marxist, believes to be of the same class as the guy on welfare. Tom the Dancing Bug’s policies don’t redistribute from the richest of capitalists to the welfare recipients, but from the working man. Who then works for no more benefit than he would get if he was on welfare.
In this one, the capitalist pig-dog tells Lucky Ducky that increasing the price of labor will reduce consumption. Lucky Ducky replies “…but if a monopsonistic firm faces an upward-facing supply curve”, as if all the marginal workers are employed by Wal-Mart and McDonalds. This was written years ago; it reflects the left’s electoral strategy of accusing McDonalds every time it wants to increase the minimum wage. If the left actually cared about increasing the price of labor in this country, they would place a moratorium on immigration. Their hope is that
(1) an increased minimum wage will hold the price of labor up while the new immigrants go on welfare and vote progressive in return;
(2) marginal workers will vote progressive to thank the left for the minimum wage laws that protect their jobs from the immigrants the proggies let in;
(3) the artifical inflation in the cost of labor will cause inflation, which has the effect of taking money out of people’s savings and putting it in the economy, thereby stimulating the economy.
I think the most amazing thing about today’s progressives is that they have ideas about electoral strategy but believe that actual governing is best left protected from politics. Whoever comes up with the public policy ideas, it doesn’t matter, Tom the Dancing Bug’s function is to do outreach by making cartoons about how great they are.
The only step they need to take to be neoreactionaries is to renounce electoral politics completely, arguing that lying is always bad no matter what the cause, and request that the government be accountable.
Those anti-capitalist pieces are so trite, they seem like they have to be caricatures of leftist critiques.
Astonishing the garbage that people can believe. I mean, I’m a long way from being an uncritical admirer of unfettered capitalism, but that stuff is like something from the 1930′s.