Utopia, you are standing in it!

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. (Sir Steven Runciman, 1954)

Until I read John Julius Norwich’s account of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the devastating sack of Constantinople in 1204, I hadn’t appreciate what a seismic and unmitigated disaster it was.

Norwich’s account of the Latins’ destruction of the biggest, richest city in the world was so harrowing I was depressed for days and found it difficult to continue reading the book in which he describes it, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall.

Like reading detailed accounts of Hiroshima, I just felt that…. after seeing humanity revealed in such appalling colours, why… why go on with anything?

For me, personally, the reason to go on is to understand better. Not to understand perfectly, which I am confident, or acknowledge, is beyond human wit. But just because perfect understanding is an impossible platonic absolute…

Well now. Isn’t this nice. In the middle of a huge fight in which I spend a great deal of my time trying to persuade male people that we’re not just projections that exist in their heads, but are actually, y’know, whole real people in our own right, the trans philosopher Rachel Anne Williams has decided to resurrect an ancient philosophical device and treat us to some imaginings about us.

Let’s see what we say shall we?

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If you’ve ever had the pleasure of getting into an internet debate with “gender critical” feminists when it comes to issues surrounding gender, you’d know that one of their constant demands is for trans women to define “woman”. This is their ultimate “gotcha” — their best attempt to prove that trans activists are full of bullshit.

• Yup, that’s right, our concerns about the definition of the political category to which we belong and…

It is curious that the accusations of sexual misconduct committed by Martin Luther King, Jr., recently published in Standpoint by his biographer, the distinguished civil rights historian David Garrow, have largely been ignored by the mainstream press. I think it’s because the press doesn’t know how to respond to accusations of rape-enabling and abuse of women by someone as distinguished as Dr. King—someone who did more than anyone else to bring civil rights to African Americans in the last century. Given the cognitive dissonance among the Authoritarian Left when two of their values collide (another example is feminism vs. Islamic misogyny), I wondered if King would be given more of a pass than others because of his accomplishments. Although the accusations against King are still under legal seal until 2027, many have been deemed guilty by allegations as unsubstantiated as those against Dr. King.

My own take so far…

Radio and television talk show host Mark Levin interviewed climatologist and Cato Institute environmental studies senior fellow Dr. Patrick Michaels about climate change and climate science. During the interview, Michaels points out the reasons that some environmental scientists he knew used the greenhouse effect resulting from fossil fuel use to try to make the case for nuclear power during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Australian voters just rejected a massive increase in wind and solar, relegating Bill Shorten and his 50% RET to the dusty pages of history.

Having had 20 years or so to convince Australians of the purported ‘merits’ of throwing more than $4,000,000,000 in subsidies at chaotically intermittent wind and solar each year, the rent seekers behind those ‘industries’ are struggling to gain traction these days. And they’re struggling to remain relevant, sane and upbeat about their future, when the subsidies inevitably run out or get scrapped, whichever occurs first.

The “shock” election result has left many of them suicidal, which probably has something to do with the fact that they went after the Liberal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor before the election, haranguing him about his personal vendetta against subsidies for wind power. Now that he’s back in power, they understand that their nightmare has only just begun. Oops!

As to…

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Loukas Karabarbounis, Rohan Kekre in this NBER paper analyse the Greek depression:

The Greek economy experienced a boom until 2007, followed by a prolonged depression resulting in a 25 percent shortfall of GDP by 2016. Informed by a detailed analysis of macroeconomic patterns in Greece, we develop and estimate a rich dynamic general equilibrium model to assess quantitatively the sources of the boom and bust.

Lower external demand for traded goods and contractionary fiscal policies account for the largest fraction of the Greek depression. A decline in total factor productivity, due primarily to lower factor utilization, substantially amplifies the depression.

Given the significant adjustment of prices and wages observed throughout the cycle, a nominal devaluation would only have short-lived stabilizing effects.

By contrast, shifting the burden of adjustment from taxes toward spending or from capital taxes toward other taxes would generate significant longer-term production and consumption gains.

A few years ago, I found myself subbing for the teacher of an urban sociology class. It was the last day so we covered the last chapter in the text book, which talked about policy reforms. The book covered some reasonable topics, such as the need to have better regional government in the US to help coordinate things like transportation.

To spice things up, I added four intentionally provocative proposals that might improve urban life. I want you to guess which proposal triggered the most violent reaction:

1. End the over-policing of neighborhoods by decriminalizing narcotics.
2. Revive dying cities, such as the Rust Belt, by liberalizing immigration. A lot of poor people in developing nations would love to live in Detroit or St. Louis.
3. Deregulate housing construction, so we can have higher density and cheaper homes for working class people. San Francisco – I’m looking straight at you!
4. Surge pricing for…

From JoNova:

A big new study by electricity grid nerds (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) shows that after all the money and pain of 20 years of forced transition Australia’s electricity has shifted from 85% coal powered to 75% coal powered, which cost billions and as a bonus, made electricity more expensive and unstable. We drove out some brown coal, but swapped it for black coal. Instead of ousting coal power, the extra solar and wind power replaced some gas and hydro.

The authors are genuine independent experts, and the report is incredibly detailed — so this is rare — but still suffers from serious drawbacks:

1) The team doesn’t question the need for an artificial expensive transition. Almost all the problems they describe are caused by government policies that task our grid with changing the climate as well as producing cheap and reliable electricity.

Robert P. Murphy writes at Mises Wire Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies. The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of “Pigovian negative externalities” and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch. Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate “mitigation policies”…