MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Mathematics Is Racist and Sexist Too

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2023

https://substack.com/inbox/post/136703001

Walter Block

I say that 2+2=3. You aver that 2+2=5. Along comes a mathematician. What does he opine? He maintains that 2+2=4. But he does not say this as we say it. Oh, no. He pontificates about it. He can prove it, through arcane methodology that the two of us simply cannot understand. He states it as an intellectual superior, who will brook no objection; as a colonialist, who is accustomed to bossing around members of the local community; as a slave master, who is never contradicted. Worse, he smirks as he announces his claim.

Even worse, he is typically a straight white man. When I refer to the mathematician as a “he” this is all too true. The Fields Medal is to mathematics as the Nobel Prize is to accomplishments in numerous other areas of science and learning. Since 1936 when it was first awarded. 64 people have been given this honor. How many women are included in this august company? Only two. According to an OECD study: “Boys perform better than girls in maths. They scored higher in 37 out of the 65 countries and economies, while girls outperform boys in 5 countries.” Need we say more? Yes, indeed, we do need to do so. And what can be said is that both men and women are of equal ability; they are equal in every imaginable way (to doubt this is to be a sexist). How, then, to account for this wide disparity? Sexism of course. Men are mainly in charge of selecting Fields Medal honorees, and naturally, they favor members of their own gender. As to boys outperforming girls, this is due to sexism, obviously. To mention any other possible explanation, is fascistic and offensive; it makes me feel unsafe.

Secondly, mathematics ignores lived experiences. Everyone knows that there is an important connection between certain racial groups and lived experiences. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, lived experiences are the things that someone has experienced themselves, especially when these give the person a knowledge or understanding that people who have only heard about such experiences do not have. In the view of one commentator: “Lived experiences (are) key to achieve racial justice and equality.” But mathematics completely eschews “lived experiences.” Thus, it undermines the epistemology of such racial demographics. A similar situation applies to “alternative ways of knowing,” and “multiple narratives.” Math gives the back of its hand to these options, also connected to some racial groups. Thus it is totally unconscionable.

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German Electricity Imports Hit New Record As Nuclear Phase-Out Increases Production Cost

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2023

Despite closing its nuclear power plants to focus on renewable energy production, more than a fifth of imported electricity last month was produced from nuclear power…

Must have been an overcast and windless summer. The problem couldn’t be shutting the highly efficient but limited nuclear power supply while simultaneously shutting off Europe’s major natural gas source. No Way! But wait! It must be too much demand.

Fortunately we have Gates’ plans to eliminate excess population and, what WEF’s Yuval Harari describes as, “useless eaters”.

We are truly blessed to have these people.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/german-electricity-imports-hit-new-record-nuclear-phase-out-increases-production-cost

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Germany is importing more electricity than ever before after purchasing a record 6,505 gigawatt hours from abroad in August, according to the Federal Network Agency.

The federal government has replaced much of the electricity produced by its recently closed nuclear power stations with imported electricity, almost half of which was ironically produced using nuclear power and fossil fuels.

This resulted in a significant electricity trade balance deficit, with the country importing €557 million worth of electricity more than it exported to its EU neighbors last month.

Electricity imports typically occur through the construction of transmission lines or undersea cables that connect power grids across national borders. The energy can be generated from various sources including hydroelectric, nuclear, fossil fuels such as gas and coal, or renewable energy.

And despite the German federal government seeking to prioritize renewable energy sources to generate power, evidenced by its policy decision to shut down the country’s remaining nuclear power plants earlier this year, 21 percent of the imported electricity last month was generated by nuclear power and 28 percent was generated by burning coal and gas, according to the Bild newspaper.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz sought to play down concerns over rising imports back in July, claiming that “every year there are phases in which we buy electricity from other countries.”

However, electricity imports into Germany have increased significantly since the closure of the country’s nuclear power plants on April 15.

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The More Inner Work You Do, The More You See How Humanity Is Dominated By Narrative

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2023

I don’t know if our species will snap out of its trance in time to make the adapt-or-perish jump that is clearly being asked of us at this crucial point in history, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that we do have the potential within us to make it. With enough inner work, anyone can recognize this for themselves as well.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/136705163

Caitlin Johnstone

The more inner work you do and the more awareness you bring to your own inner processes, the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. And the more you understand how thoroughly human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative, the more acutely aware you become of how much power someone could gain over other humans by controlling those narratives.

Those who haven’t done a lot of inner work tend to hold the assumption that everyone is basically perceiving reality as it actually is, and is then either forming good worldviews or bad worldviews about reality based on how good or bad they are as human beings — with “good” of course defined as “closely aligned with my own worldview” and “bad” defined as “distant from my own worldview”.

But the more inner work you do the more untenable you find this position. After a while you start to understand that nobody is seeing reality as it actually is — including you. Instead, what we’re actually perceiving is a bunch of mental stories we’ve formed about the world based on information we’ve taken in through highly distorted perceptual filters based on our conditioning, biases and cognitive habits. Psychonauts Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson called these filters “reality tunnels”, the theory being that nobody is ever experiencing objective reality, they’re only ever experiencing the inside of their own highly conditioned and totally unique tunnel through which whatever reality might happen to be is perceived.

What eventually becomes clear from examining your own internal processes is that humans are very far from the rational actors we take ourselves to be.

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Escaping the Online Discourse to Burning Man, Then Escaping Burning Man

Posted by M. C. on September 6, 2023

Twitter/X hate is a useful reminder of why people go to Burning Man in the first place.

Our friend stuck in the mud at Burning Man says everyone there is good, taking things in stride and don’t believe the media.

https://www.leefang.com/p/escaping-the-online-discourse-to?r=iw8dv&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Lee Fang

After a treacherous five-mile hike in the sticky playa mud on Sunday, I got to the highway, hopped on a few different buses and made it home safely from Burning Man.

A lot of readers have written to me to see if I’m OK, or just to ask about the experience of leaving Burning Man at a time when flooding made it impossible to leave by car. I’m not only fine — I had a blast. I’m excited to get back to work. I have lots of new reporting, and so much more to build out on this Substack. But let me write just a few quick thoughts about the experience.

Over the last few days, Twitter/X has oozed with schadenfreude, with hundreds of thousands of outsiders mocking the calamity at Burning Man with predictable scorn. The platform is filled with viral tweets gleefully ridiculing the “wealthy elites leaving people behind” and the failures of a “libertarian utopia.”

Earlier today, Jacobin, the self-styled socialist magazine, capitalized on the online furor and recirculated an older article decrying Burning Man as a “dark” event in which “high-powered capitalists — and especially capitalist libertarians” spend a week in the desert creating a society in which “the people who have the most money” make all the decisions.

To anyone familiar with the event, the accusations are laughable. Once you’ve arrived at the festival, everything is free, except for ice. As you walk through Black Rock City — the makeshift town that Burners build every year – people left and right beg you to come into their camp for free smoothies, freshly baked cookies, or a cocktail. When you go to any party, workshop, lecture, or hangout, you are welcome. Strangers immediately dance with you and exchange high-fives. It’s hard for me, as someone who isn’t particularly extroverted. But the expectation there is a warm embrace of every stranger, and the culture is contagious.

The festival boasts a hippy, anything-goes ethos about drugs, sex, and lifestyle choices, but there are also communal rules rooted in shared responsibility that are followed by nearly all participants. It is a model of the kind of high social trust that progressives often valorize in social-democratic countries. If you see trash, you pick it up. If you find someone who may not be having a good time, even a stranger, you comfort them. You bring plenty of supplies and virtually everyone is ready for anything – even the rain storm. 

In short, Burning Man is a community where intense, personal connectedness is palpable in ways that are rarely imaginable in the United States. It’s an especially stark contrast with the very online media universe, in which people remain huddled on screens and immersed in toxic political polarization, accustomed to existing in balkanized boxes where we are primed to hate each other for no good reason.

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Rush’s Geddy Lee

Posted by M. C. on September 3, 2023

A fascinating conversation with one of rock & roll’s all-time greats. Rush’s Geddy Lee welcomes Dan into his home.

https://www.axs.tv/channel/the-big-interview-with-dan-rather/the-big-interview-with-dan-rather-season-5/video/rushs-geddy-lee/

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Don’t Ignore Politics, Just Ignore The Fake Kind

Posted by M. C. on September 2, 2023

Racism serves the empire in multiple ways.

Firstly and most obviously, it’s used to keep people divided against each other so they don’t turn against their rulers who’ve been robbing, cheating and oppressing them this entire time.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/136653012

Caitlin Johnstone

A lot of people wrongly ignore all politics because they rightly perceive the system is rigged. The answer isn’t to ignore all politics, it’s to ignore the fake partisan puppet show and pay attention to the real political game taking place behind it. Capitalism. Imperialism. Militarism. Authoritarian control. Narrative management. Oligarchy. Corruption. Oppression. Exploitation. Extraction. The stuff both parties in the fake political charade of official politics actively facilitate while pretending to advance human interests.

Participating in politics is a moral imperative; you’re only serving your own oppressors by ignoring it, because they sure as shit aren’t ignoring it. They want you to be a passive witness to their domination of society. The answer isn’t to ignore politics, it’s to pay rigorous attention to the real kind while aggressively attacking the fake kind.

❖

It’s not speculation to say today’s liberals would despise Martin Luther King Jr, it’s a presently observable reality — just look how they shit on Cornel West. The millisecond a black activist leader becomes politically inconvenient, they’re shrieking for his head like hyenas.

❖

American progressives were galvanized and energized by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign because they thought he was talking about fighting the abuses of the oligarchy and ending economic injustice. Then it turned out he was really just talking about voting for shitty Democrats.

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TGIF: Tribalism and the Dark Art of the Package Deal

Posted by M. C. on September 2, 2023

we should be wary about common phrases like moving further to the left/right or becoming more progressive/conservative. The reason is that there is no single-issue spectrum with fixed points to move along. The tribes define, not reflect, what it means to be rightwing, leftwing, conservative, and liberal/progressive.

If you have doubts about this, try stating the principles that unify the conservative and progressive programs or the party platforms. You can’t do it. If you ask a conservative or progressive what principle unifies his program, his answer, write the Lewises, will be a post-hoc rationalization. The tribes could exchange positions (and have) and still rationalize their new programs in terms of their previous answers.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-package-deal/

by Sheldon Richman

Tribalism not only lives; it rules — even more than I thought! I’ve been reading Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis’s book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. It’s certainly clarified my thinking.

The Lewis brothers are a historian and a political scientist. What they show is something that I and many others have only partly understood. But for me, that’s changing now. (Here’s an interview with them.)

Their thesis is that the terms left, right, liberal, progressive, conservative, Republican, and Democrat do not indicate opposing sides of a single basic ideological principle that would make their respective policy programs coherent. Instead, those labels identify two social/cultural tribes that are based on something other than ideology. The disparate components of their respective policy package deals change, depending on contingent events, but the tribes endure with few defections. Compare “right-wing” Republican leaders Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. You can do the same with the “left.”

What do those labels really mean? You can’t say, for example, that the left is for big government and the right is for small government: too many shifts and inconsistencies have occurred. Think of their changing attitudes toward free speech, foreign intervention, surveillance and the intel apparatus, free trade, the rule of law, and even tax cuts.  Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing even future cuts to doomed Social Security and Medicare. Why don’t the media report that the Republicans have moved to the left on entitlements? Anything they do is called a move to the right; anything the Democrats do is a move to the left. How can that be?

Have you heard the cliche “This isn’t your father’s Republican [or Democratic] Party?” Tribal change is not new. (That was lifted from an Oldsmobile advertising slogan.)

When you come right down to it, members of Team Red hate members of Team Blue because they wear the wrong color jersey and vice versa.

The Lewises’ “social theory” explains the scene better than the prevailing “essentialist theory.” If the two tribes had ideologically driven platforms, each side’s members could coherently (but not necessarily correctly) say, “My team’s positions are all good because of our underlying vision, and the opposing team’s positions are therefore all bad. But if their lists of positions are grab bags determined by something other than a worldview, then the members can’t reasonably say that.

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FBI Seizes Jaiden’s Backpack In Predawn Raid

Posted by M. C. on September 2, 2023

https://babylonbee.com/news/fbi-seizes-jaidens-backpack-in-predawn-raid

Article Image

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — A quiet community was thrown into chaos in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as a tactical team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation staged a pre-dawn raid at the home of 6th-grader Jaiden Rodriguez. Reports indicated the boy’s backpack, which has a Gadsden flag patch, was seized in the raid.

“We have secured a highly dangerous item,” said FBI spokesperson Chad Rookstool. “There was an anonymous tip from a concerned citizen in the area who reported a young man at this residence was in possession of a backpack that posed a threat to democracy itself. That threat has now been neutralized.”

Controversy erupted on social media yesterday after it was learned Jaiden had been sent home from school for wearing his backpack, with faculty believing the Gadsden flag was a sign of Jaiden plotting a coup to overthrow the U.S. government. “Thank God it’s been addressed by the authorities,” said frightened schoolteacher Stephanie Dean. “That backpack was just out in public, threatening the lives of everyone who saw it. Democracy is once again safe.”

School officials advised Jaiden to find a new, less-threatening backpack before returning to school. “He can choose from Pride patches, BLM patches, even a sickle and hammer patch,” a member of the school’s administrative staff explained. “However, a backpack displaying an important image from American history has no business at an American school.”

At publishing time, Jaiden was reportedly prepared to return to class with his new, bright red “Make America Great Again” backpack.

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What the Central Bank Cartel has Planned for You | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on September 1, 2023

Whatever comes from states pursuing their own monetary interests, we should not get our hopes up that the states will provide sound money to the people. If states monopolize money production, they will use it predominantly to serve their own needs.

https://mises.org/library/what-central-bank-cartel-has-planned-you

The Austrian(TA): What is the global currency plot, and who benefits most from the success of this effort?

Thorsten Polleit (TP): The global currency plot denotes a rather inconvenient truth: the existence of states (as we know them today) sets into motion a dynamic process toward creating a single world fiat money controlled by a world central bank, and most likely a central world government. The beneficiaries will be the very few—the “elite”—in charge of running the state and those few privileged by the state, such as big business, big banking, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. However, the great majority of the people will suffer a very great disadvantage. In fact, a single world fiat currency would most likely entail tyranny.

TA: The first half of the book is largely focused on economic theory and method. Why is economics so important to understanding the global fiat currency threat?

TP: I would argue that thinking about the method of economic science is actually the most important part of all of this. You know, economics is not an empirical science but must be conceptualized as a science of the logic of human action—or “praxeology,” as Ludwig von Mises called it. The logic of human action allows us to understand that there are regularities in human reality to which we must adapt our actions to succeed. It also makes us understand what will happen if— under certain conditions—actions that are contrary to the logic of human action are taken. For instance, we can know in advance (without having to resort to any kind of testing) that a state—defined as a coercive territorial monopoly—will (other things being equal) continue to expand no matter what; that it will seek control of money, replacing commodity money with its own fiat currency; and that states will form a cartel and strive to eventually establish a world government with its own world fiat currency. The logic of human action reveals these dynamics that many people are most likely unaware of.

TA: What role do central banks such as the Federal Reserve play?

TP: It may be hard to swallow, but central banks were not created for the greater good but to support the state and special interest groups. After World War II, the US became the dominant economic and military power in the world, and the Federal Reserve (the Fed), founded in 1913, became the world’s most powerful central bank, issuing the US dollar, the world’s leading reserve currency. It is fair to say that the Fed does indeed call the shots in the international financial and economic system. The Fed acts as the unofficial world central bank. Central banks play a crucial role in making a fiat currency system possible, and if they form a cartel, they can basically create a single world fiat currency.

TA: The dollar has played a central role in the global economy for decades. Does the dollar’s global hegemony help or hinder efforts to create a single global currency?

TP: The dominance of the US dollar is certainly helping to push the world toward a single fiat currency. Just imagine a major crisis that will eventually hit us. When the worldwide fiat currency regime starts to unravel, the US dollar will likely be the last man standing. In such a situation, it is also very likely that many countries will try to peg their currency to the US dollar (i.e., effectively adopt the US dollar as base money). It may not sound realistic right now, but imagine a scenario in which the United States and China join forces and endorse exchange rate fixing through the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, later declaring the exchange rates irrevocably fixed. The world would be closer to a single world fiat currency than ever.

TA: What would it look like if the dollar were replaced by some sort of new international currency?

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Is Vivek Ramaswamy the Only Republican Presidential Candidate Who Understands the Constitution?

Posted by M. C. on September 1, 2023

Is Vivek Ramaswamy the Only Republican Presidential Candidate Who Understands the Constitution?

By Laurence M. Vance

I can’t pronounce his name, but I think I’ll just call him Mr. Constitution.

Vivek Ramaswamy is “unapologetically pro-life,” but won’t sign a federal abortion ban on constitutional grounds.

Good for him.

Said Ramaswamy:

My view, as someone who is running for U.S. president, responding to the question about the Supreme Court case, was that Roe v. Wade was correct to be turned on constitutional grounds. It was made-up jurisprudence … it leads also to the path to moving forward, which is, that I think the federal government should stay out of it.

I think I’m the only Republican candidate in this field who has come out and said, “I would not support a federal abortion ban of any kind.” On principled ground, because I am grounded in constitutional principles, and I think there’s no legal basis for the federal government to legislate.

I don’t believe a federal abortion ban makes any sense, and I say this as somebody who is pro-life. This is not an issue for the federal government. It is an issue for the states. I think we need to be explicit about that. If murder laws are handled at the state level, and abortion is a form of murder, the pro-life view, then it makes no sense for that to be the one federal law.

Like Ramaswamy, I am unapologetically pro-life, but have been saying these things for many years.

And so has Ron Paul:

Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but not because the Supreme Court presumed to legalize abortion rather than ban it. Roe was wrongly decided because abortion simply is not a constitutional issue.

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