Note on language and usage upcoming.

Though Trump is a vile misogynist and has committed most likely many sexual assaults, the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

It is not referring to physically grabbing a woman by her genitals. It is sales speak and it is used in the same context as “That ad campaign really grabbed them!” What Trump was ineptly referring to is that in his view to get a woman to do what you want, you have to stimulate her prurient urges and not her intellect.

I am not defending Trump. He admitted to sexual assault of another type in the same damn statement. I just like understanding things fully. It pisses people off, I know, but I just can’t seem to stop.

And this is your friendly neighborhood language maven, signing off.

Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in literature. I have so many thoughts about this. No, well, actually they are all the same thought: What. The. Fuck.

In a way, it’s perfect because Dylan is the archetypal American: half-talented, fairly boring, emblematic of a bygone age never to return, and arrogant but at the same time not all that good.

If they had to choose an American, I’d recommend Kelly Link. Her stories are some phantasmagorical blend of Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Edgar Alan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges.

I know, I know — the Nobel Prize committee would never choose anyone who is associated with any “genre” works so strongly as Link (though they did choose Doris Lessing), but Kelly Link is the best American author qua author that I know now writing — her stories are haunting, evocative, thoughtful and never take a false step.

Bob Dylan. What a putz.

If causality were more firmly established in the universe, the study of probability and much of statistics would be either completely unnecessary or vastly different.

Trying to read a scientific paper, but too tired to realize I’m too tired to read it, so keep stumbling over the first few sentences and realizing they are easy but still unable to comprehend them.

Don’t worry, I broke out of that time loop.

I think.

One huge advantage the US has is that no matter what, it won’t face overwhelming waves of Muslim immigration any time soon.

This is going to doom much of Europe and by 2050 due to that and climate change, it’ll no longer be economically competitive and will be mostly a backwater again. Anyone able to flee will have fled.

While the conservative “Eurabia” wil not quite be the case, countries that have allowed high levels of Muslim immigration are going to have absolutely huge problems. Unmanageable ones that will transform and destroy most of their current societal arrangements.

The US’s primary immigration pressure is from people with a mostly-similar culture (Mexico) and so will face no such problems, really.

My grandfather on my mother’s side was also a member of the last generation of traditional sharecroppers. He grew up just outside of Valdosta, Georgia.

He rarely talked about that life or his experiences because most of it I think was so horrible. He did describe to me once how he’d wake up at 5 AM every day, seven days a week, to tend to the animals and to do his chores. Amazing he even graduated high school with that sort of burden.

The post talks about the neo-feudalistic sharecropping economy that is returning. Looking back at history, though, the amount of personal freedom enjoyed by certain swathes of people in Western Europe and the US for a period of time is anomalous.

Feudalism and oligarchs in control seems to be the way humans operate. Suspect the remainder of human history will look that way, too.

I understand, but I also believe this is a terrible reason to vote for Hillary Clinton.

By the same logic, one could pull the lever for Sarah Palin.

Most people vote for a particular candidate for emotional reasons (probably more men than women, actually). But try as I might, I cannot understand it.

I just can’t give a vote to Hillary Clinton because I know all that people overseas she’s going to kill, and I won’t have any part in that. I just don’t value American lives over those of people overseas. I can find no ethical justification to think or behave otherwise.

Can’t understand people who will, and can justify that to themselves.

Lesser evil == still evil.

As for Scalzi, he would have been in most respects a conservative Republican in 1950, and now he’s a “liberal.”

All that remains are pseudo-liberals these days. After GW and the wars that follow due to people like Clinton, all we’ll have is dead ones. Well, that includes everyone, actually.

Voting for Clinton is like licking a dirty toilet. Voting for Trump is being the toilet.

Someone at work was shocked that I knew to within 5% in square meters the size of the average European house vs. the average American one.

But that’s just the kind of thing my brain does. It remembers. It’s why arguments based on anything but emotion are almost impossible to win against me. I have a treasure trove of facts spanning back 35 years, and the urban legends, myths and outright fallacies have been mostly expurgated.

Of course it is mostly useless because 95%+ of arguments are based on emotion and ideological and tribal identification, not facts.

But it’s a fun parlor trick; more than one person has called me “human Google.”

Things people seem to be too dense to understand when they talk about inequality, Trump, and the economy:

1) Relative position matters more than absolute — people are status animals.

2) Volatility and risk matter more than absolute or relative position.

3) Inequality caused and exacerbated by neolib policies directly lead to people like Trump, and worse.

4) Stagnation and/or decreased prospects for themselves and their children lead to Trump, and worse.

5) Open borders/high immigration or welfare state — choose. You won’t get both.

6) Racism and anti-other sentiment in the modern context has everything to do with neolib policies.

7) That inequality and any sort of welfare state or also incompatible.

Kevin Drum is the perfect exemplar for how older, financially-secure people in this country are fundamentally disconnected from and utterly ignorant of the issues affecting younger people.

No one cares if Hillary Clinton is honest or not. No one.

What matters is that she represents a sort of chummy coziness with Wall Street and the financial predators who in all of recent history have demonstrably and repeatedly harmed the nation and the lives of these young people — often assisted by those in the same age bracket as Clinton. All the while as the predation, depredation and its results have played out, these same people were accusing younger folks of being lazy, shiftless and not willing to work. This despite their being either no jobs, terrible jobs, or the “sharing economy” existing as the only options available to those under 30.

The problem with Clinton is that she represents the neoliberal consensus, where immorality itself is codified both into the norms and laws of the nation, where the mores themselves are monstrous and inhuman. This is what younger people are rejecting. It has nothing to do with the direct truth value of any Clinton statement. It is the entire Weltanschauung that is being shunned.

Drum is old enough that he’s both been insulated from and directly benefited from this system that is now greatly harming younger people. And he lacks empathy and is a Good Liberal (which isn’t really liberal at all) so he lacks even the ability to see these things.

When Drum was 18, college was either free or nearly so. A job was easy to get (it was often simply a matter of walking in the door). Housing was even as compared to inflation 50-80% less dear depending on where you lived. Health care was also 80-90% cheaper.

As I’ve pointed out before, everything that defines the good life is now much, much more expensive and out of reach to many young people and probably always will be. They are extremely aware of this and it shapes their politics from beginning to end, as it should.

Drum’s duplicitous stupid-ass graphs that show that social benefits spending has actually increased over the last 20 years only show — though he’s a liar so he’ll never write this — that Social Security payments to the elderly have increased because they are increasing in number.

Millennials aren’t giving Clinton the cold shoulder because they’ve been misled by the press, deceived by third party candidates, or because they are immature — no, they are rejecting Clinton because she and the political dynasty and larger movement she’s a part of have been and will continue to be directly harmful to them.

Seems like a good reason for rejection to me.

Clinton is a terrible candidate likely to kill thousands to dozens of thousands overseas. She might also goad Russia into a nuclear war.

But compared to Trump, she looks like an elder stateswoman and a paragon of probity and judgment.

She’s not great, but rather is that Trump is even worse than anyone wanted to believe.

How annoyed or angry should one be at people who are socially incapable?

Speaking as someone who used to be completely socially moronic, I know it is possible to change. It’s a state that can be improved but it does take effort and time.

Once I figured out that it was a system with rules that could be learned (and hacked), it became much easier. I’ll always be an introvert but I can make people think I am perfectly normal for a few hours, and sometimes even seem or be charming and witty.

It takes a toll, though. It’s not my natural state. It’s as tiring as running 10 miles.

What of the people though who just give up and are socially dim-witted their whole lives? How should we treat them or think of them?

I think I tend to be harder on them than needed because I changed, because I bettered myself, and I assume they should be able to as well.

Perhaps this assumption is wrong or unfair but hard to keep from thinking this way.

Holy fuck, Twitter has a $14 billion valuation?

I wouldn’t pay $10 for it. Seriously. At its burn rate and with a lack of a business model, any purpose or vision, it probably has a negative financial value.

Not a stock I trade or am interested in trading (I only trade stocks I can predict, and that one I can’t), so I hadn’t been paying any attention to it.

But damn, mud on the bottom of my shoe has more value than that turd.

Free will and causality are not as strongly supported by the universe as we’d like, but we have to act like both are true anyway.

Is causality valid conceptually if the universe is deterministic?

I hate that the “body positive” movement has been co-opted by the Fat Acceptance loons. Originally, body positivity was about not shaming people with missing limbs or with disfigurement of some sort. You know, good things.

Now it’s about my duty to cheer someone on with a beaming smile as they eat themselves into an early grave. I’m not the kind to cheer on someone’s death, though, unless they give me a reason to kill them myself the hard way (that is, sans cake, but perhaps with the cake pan if it is handy).

When you allow yourself to get beyond a weight where you cannot function and bathe normally (which for most people is ~250 pounds or so), then you have psychological problems and should seek treatment for that. Solving your psychological problems will probably cause you to lose weight naturally.

These people make me angry, mainly because they harm kids (their own and others with their message and practices), but I actually do have sympathy for them: in our society it is easy to be unhappy and isolated, and those reinforce one another.

I guess though that I am still conservative in some ways because I do believe at some point you need to woman up (most FA people are women) and take responsibility for your own life, your own health, your own appearance, your own happiness and not make it the responsibility of others.

Body positivity and fat acceptance now seem to be about propagating harm to others so they can all be miserable and unhealthy together rather than helping anyone, and for all these reasons and more I oppose both movements in their current form.