Half Sigma

How Jews feel left out at Christmas

This is something that a lot of the gentiles reading this blog refuse to get, but Jews feel very unhappy and left out during Christmas, especially children. For example:

Christmas was one of the most difficult times of year for me as a child. From age 9 on, my brothers and I were the only Jews in a rural Ohio school system. Pastors led us in prayer at annual Christmas assemblies, and my peers and I sang about our love of Jesus in school Christmas concerts. I never knew how to respond when strangers asked me, “What do you want for Christmas?” or even “Are you done with your Christmas shopping?” I wished that I could just play along and make up answers. But Christmas put me on edge, making me feel even more different and angry.

And I think that’s pretty typical, even for Jews who live in the New York City area.

And here’s a much more emotionally wrenching story that’s a must-read:

My muscular grandfather walks into the living room. “What did you do?” he rages at my mother. She shrinks before him like a child. My beautiful Nana hides behind her, wringing her hands, muttering in Yiddish. Poppop puffs up with rage.

“It was a Chanukah bush. We did it for Ellen,” my mother whispers. “She was jealous of the other children. I hated to see her suffer, so…”

“She’s jealous? She’s suffering? There’s no such thing as a Chanukah bush. You just confuse the child. She’s a Jew and Jews don’t have Christmas. Make her Chanukah like a real Jewish mother, and she won’t be jealous.”

8-year-old kid wants in-app purchases for Hanukkah

I missed this in the NY Times last week. Parent agonizes over whether she should buy her son what he wants for Hanukkah, which are in-app purchases allowing him to get ahead faster in his favorite iPod games.

She called up a “professor of health promotion and behavioral science” to ask if in-app purchases are good for a child or if they are like cheating (do normal parents to that to help with these sorts of parenting issues?) and the professor responded Socratically:

If you are struggling with math and your parent gets a math tutor and he or she teaches you shortcuts, is that the same as an in-app purchase?

Good question.

Nancy was trying to have Adam committed

And here a Fox News exclusive. Nancy was taking steps to have Adam involuntarily committed, and that’s is a possible motive for why he snapped and killed his mother and a bunch of teachers and children.

And the motive for killing the teachers and children is jealousy that the mother was volunteering at the school. And I think this made sense to Adam because with both Asperger's Syndrome and congenital analgesia, he had complete lack of empathy for both the emotional and physical pain that this would cause others.

I think this casts Nancy in a different light. People are blaming her for some reason, but this new evidence shows that she realized he needed to be committed to a mental hospital, but the system prevented this from happening quickly enough. Because from a legal perspective, Adam was an adult whom Nancy had no legal control over.

More congenital analgesia evidence

From a NY Post article published yesterday:

At home, Adam often stayed in his room, said family friend Ellen Adriani. Nancy would plan his vegan meals days in advance and was teaching him to cook.

“His house was a safe place for him,” Adriani added.

The shooter, she said, had a medical condition in which he couldn’t feel pain.

“Nancy was teaching him to cut up fruit. Because he couldn’t feel any pain, he had to be careful with the knife,” she said.

And from the Daily News, a bar friend of Nancy said:

“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”

This pain thing sounds like congenital analgesia, or congenital insensitivity to pain, and not like any sort of symptom of autism spectrum disorder.

The MSM has not connected the dots on this yet.

Powerful corporation controlled by liberals

As reported by Infowars:

Facebook is suspending user accounts that question the official narrative behind the Sandy Hook school massacre, following a warning by Connecticut State Police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance that “misinformation” posted on social media sites could result in prosecution.

1. Big powerful corporations like FaceBook and Google are controlled by leftists. As you may remember, Google banned my blog from AdSense, presumably because of the politically incorrect content that they would probably call “racist,” but they gave me no explanation and would not respond to my protest.

2. It’s scary that we have a police spokesman threatening prosecution for people who engage in free speech. And Infowars correctly points out how badly the MSM mangled the facts and reported false information as it if were Truth.

Congenital analgesia and weird ugly faces

It was commented upon many times that Adam Lanza had an ugly weird-looking face.

The two guys at this website who have congenital analgesia also have weird-looking faces. And so does the girl in the recent NY Times article with that condition.

I think there is a connection between congenital analgesia and an ugly weird-looking face, and I think this is further evidence that Adam Lanza had this very rare condition. Both of Adam’s parents look normal, but Adam didn’t.

Before this Newtown massacre, people have wondered whether those with congenital analgesia feel the same amount of empathy for others. Perhaps a person with this condition, who also has Asperger’s syndrome, has a complete lack of normal human empathy and therefore is more likely to commit such a heinous crime.

* * *

However, I disagree with the take of this article which says:

Dr. Wendy Roberts says the vast majority of people with Asperger’s “are real law abiders, and I think that’s the most important message.”

“There is no good evidence that any targeted violence is associated with Asperger’s,” said Roberts, a developmental pediatrician and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

In fact, until Friday, Adam was a very law abiding person just like the vast majority of others with Asperger’s. People are confusing different types of violent behavior. Aspies do not engage in the kind of criminal behavior typical of blacks which Lawrence Auster often blogs about. Mass shootings and certain other types of violent behavior like what serial killers do are driven by a completely different kind of psychology. The typical person who commits these crimes is described as a loner and usually with other adjectives which overlap Asperger’s syndrome.

Clueless Amy Chozick

Amy Chozick cluelessly writes in the NY Times about a “generational food gap.”

But the gap she writes about has nothing to do with generations, it has to do with social class. Her parents are high-prole or middle class, and she moved to New York City and learned to mimic the eating habits of her SWPL friends. If she had stayed in Texas and got a job as a nurse, there woudn’t have been any sort of gap.

Not that I necessarily mock all SWPL foods. Most prole food tastes pretty crappy; the emphasis is on huge portions rather than taste. But occasionally there’s a baby floating around in the bathwater of prole food, as long as you don’t mind eating the food in an aesthetically unpleasing environment. Although you will never get a decent salad in a prole restaurant, not ever; proles only know iceberg lettuce.

The congenital analgesia mystery

Finally, some other news source discusses the possibility that Adam Lanza had congenital analgesia (or congenital insensitivity to pain). But you read about it first at Half Sigma.

Congenital analgesia is such an extremely rare condition that nothing is known about how it mentally impacts its victims. Or what it might be like like to have congenital analgesia combined with Asperger's Syndrome.

Conservatives should fear psychiatrists more than gun control

I find myself agreeing with the comments who say that conservatives should fear giving power to psychiatrists. It’s easy to imagine a future in which people are institutionalized for being “racist,” and because HBD bloggers are considered “racist,” it means that I could be institutionalized.

In contrast, I don’t see how a ban on a certain category of guns defined as “assault weapons” is going to change anything. They're not something anyone has any use for in daily life. If you’re going to have an armed revolt against the government, then just do it already and stop imagining it. And if you don’t want to have that revolt right now (which of course is the reality, no armed revolt is happening this year), in the future you will still be able to kill government agents with hunting rifles.

And a hunting rifle is just fine for home defense. Better even. If you kill a home intruder with an Uzi, they will just think you're a gun nut so you must be guilty of murder. You have a chance of avoiding prosecution if you defend yourself with a hunting rifle. Especially if it has a retro wooden stock and not a military-looking black stock.

Are preppers paranoid, or just anti-fragile?

The following is from an article at the Daily Mail (which is a British online tabloid):

The mother of the loner who massacred 26 pupils and staff at a US primary school may have played a major part in his catastrophic mental breakdown, it emerged last night.

Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse.

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son in Connecticut.

Mrs Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’ – so called because they are preparing for a breakdown in civilised society – who apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges.

That backfired horrifically on Friday when Adam Lanza began his killing spree by shooting his mother dead in bed.

He fired four bullets into her head – possibly as she slept – then took three of her guns to Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where he killed 20 children and six staff.

I am highlighting this excerpt from the article not because I necessarily agree with it, but because it’s significant that other people are saying it. There’s this meme out there that “preppers” are mentally unstable with irrational paranoia. And this Newtown incident is only going to confirm, for some people, that “preppers” are a danger to civilized society.

I recently skimmed the book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I would say that preppers are practicing what Taleb would call “anti-fragility.” Although I’m not 100% sure that Taleb would see it that way, because he tends to have a conventional politically correct SWPL left-wing worldview more than half the time.

I might add here that several readers criticize Half Sigma for pushing the phrase “value transference,” but Taleb makes up dozens of new words and phrases in every book he writes and he seems to get away with it, although in my opinion it makes his books very hard to read.

My current take on Adam Lanza

Adam Lanza appears to have been a lot more mentally messed up than just being a mere nerd. Nerds normally graduate from high school and go to college. Adam’s mother took him out of high school, and then Adam disappeared from society and never attended any formal education or worked at a job. Apparently, she didn't think he was capable of leading a normal life. There are also the weird allegations that he didn't feel any physical pain.

It’s also telling that Ryan says he hadn’t seen the brother since 2010. And that probably means he also hadn’t seen his mother since 2010. That’s pretty strange; there must have been something very dysfunctional going on for Ryan to have completely turned his back on his family.

So this is not a case of beta-male rage, at least under my definition. This feels more like a case of a guy who was mentally ill and probably should have been committed to some institution, but unfortunately we no longer commit crazy people to institutions. We let them become homeless or become criminals. But what happens when you have a mentally ill person who also has a very high IQ, and a mother who has the resources to take care of him?

There’s a good chance we may never learn what exactly was wrong with Adam Lanza. The MSM still hasn’t told us anything about what was wrong with James Holmes. Remember him?

Did Adam Lanza have congenital analgesia?

There have been several news stories reporting that people said that Adam Lanza didn’t feel any physical pain. For example, the AP reported :

Richard Novia, the school district's head of security until 2008, who also served as adviser for the school technology club, said Lanza clearly "had some disabilities."

"If that boy would've burned himself, he would not have known it or felt it physically," Novia said in a phone interview. "It was my job to pay close attention to that."

It sounds to me like Adam had an extremely rare condition called congenital analgesia, which is actually a very dangerous thing to have because people with that condition will injure themselves without knowing it.

I think it’s interesting that in this article, about a man who suffers from the disease, the guy explains how his brother, who also had the disease, committed suicide.

So if Adam Lanza had congenital analgesia, there was a lot more going on than a mere case of a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome.

* * *

It's also interesting to note that Ryan told police he hadn't seen his brother since 2010. Which probably means he also hadn't seen his mom since 2010. And it's pretty unusual for someone not to visit his mother and little brother for two years, given that they don't live so far from each other. If true, this probably means they were both pretty messed up and Ryan wanted nothing to do with them.

It's also not uncommon for people with mentally disabled siblings to severely resent their parents for giving all the attention to the sibling with the disability. That may have had something to do with it.

Post-massacre predictions

Because of the especially heinous nature of this crime (innocent young children gunned down—if he had to get back at someone for his shitty life, why not kill the actual people who had teased him in high school?) I think this will have more lasting impact than previous massacres.

(1) There will be new momentum to get gun control legislation passed. (This is not an endorsement, merely a prediction. I write this to ward of hate comments. For some weird reason, HBD blogs attract a lot of pro-gun people. Even though belief in HBD should mean understanding that there are a lot of people out there whom you shouldn’t feel comfortable with them owning guns.)

(2) Backlash against aspergery people.

* * *

Commenter SFG answers the question of why people who read HBD blogs are pro-gun:

It's pretty simple. You're on Team Blue, or Team Red. (There are smaller teams, like Team Yellow for the libertarians, and Team White (or Brown?) for the WN people.) If you join a team, you start believing all the other stuff the people on that team believe, because you get your news from sources on that team, and you don't have time to evaluate each and every proposition on its merits. So HBD people are on Team Red (or White) and tend to be pro-gun for that reason--they're always reading articles about how gun control isn't really the answer on the conservative sites they frequent. Similarly, liberals, who I presume you agree with on abortion, etc., tend to be wrong about race because they're always reading about how it doesn't really exist, etc. on the liberal sites they frequent.

Plus there's the affiliative drive, or herd instinct. Even people who claim they have no herd instinct tend to find a virtual herd like libertarians, anarchists, or far-left hippies, and agree with those people.

Adam Lanza identified as the shooter

According to Fox News, Adam Lanza, 20 years old, is the shooter. His brother Ryan, from Hoboken NJ, is being interviewed by law enforcement but he is not a suspect.

* * *

Based on a NY Times article, Adam Lanza appears to have been an aspergery kid with above-average IQ. This seems to be a common thread in these types of incidents.

The Daily News article is more informative than the NY Times. Of note is that Adam’s father, Peter, is rich. He was paying the mom $240,000/year in alimony.

CBS quotes a neighbor, “he was very thin, very remote and was one of the Goths.”

The Washington Post quotes a neighbor: “Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye. Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can’t tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so].”

Ryan Lanza [mis]identified as shooter

Mass shooting in Connecticut

Queen of Versailles

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. Photo Credit: Lauren Greenfield

Despite the fact that Queen of Versailles has a 95% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.com, none of the many reviews I’ve read really explain the class issues of the movie which probably underlies why SWPL move reviewers like this movie so much.

The movie started out being about “billionaire” David Siegel’s quest to build the country’s largest private house, loosely modeled after the palace of Versailles.

What none of the mainstream reviews mention is that Siegel may be rich, but he is prole through and through. When a prole becomes super-rich, he doesn’t stop being a prole.

The main character in the documentary is not David, but his trophy wife Jackie who is thirty years younger and if anything she is more prole than her husband. Jackie grew up in a prole family in Binghamton New York, mysteriously graduated from R.I.T. with a degree in engineering (she must have been barely smart enough to graduate), but quickly realized what a boring career that was and moved to New York City and became a model.

As I’ve written before, proles typically are lousy at choosing spouses, and she definitely proves that point because her first rich husband beat her. David, himself, could have chosen a more practical second wife, because Jackie is only good at spending his money on prole crap, but David is a guy who seems to spend a lot of time thinking with his penis. David says at one point that his wife is like having an extra child around the house. Not mentioned in the movie is that David previously lost a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by one of his former employees.

Jackie, who is thirty years younger than her husband, dresses like she’s starring in some MILF porn video (at least before the MILF starts taking off her clothes). Every outfit she wears scandalously shows off her large, presumably surgically augmented, breasts. Jackie has a pack of effeminately-groomed white-haired dogs who have not been very well house trained. And a pack of seven children plus her niece. Jackie has a closet full of hundreds of pairs of shoes. She buys food at McDonalds and shops at Walmart, both places that more upper-class woman would never go near if there was a camera filming them.

It’s interesting to observe how her daughters are very prole in both their sense of style and their body types (in other words they are kind of chunky, reminding me of Bristol Palin but not as pretty). Private school didn’t rub off on them. Maybe it’s because they live in Orlando and not in a rich enclave such as Palm Beach.

These are definitely people that the typical SWPL movie reviewer can look down on and feel superior to, even though they are filthy rich. It further helps the story that Siegel is a well-known supporter of Republicans, which makes him even that much more disgusting. I have to agree that it’s a sad indictment of the Republican Party that the majority of the super-rich vote Democratic, and the ones who vote Republican are classless proles like David Siegel.

David Siegel didn’t become rich by inventing something or manufacturing computers. Nope, he made his money in real estate, specifically in selling time-sharing vacations. The movie shows how his operation works. Proles on vacation in places such as Las Vegas are enticed into viewing a presentation on the time-sharing resort in return for some free gift, and then a member of the prole sales staff applies high-pressure sales tactics to get the prole vacationers to purchase a timeshare they may not even be able to afford, but they only need to put 10% down and the banks finance the rest. It’s a scam-based business model.

The problem with David’s business is that it was heavily leveraged, and when the 2008 financial crisis hit, it didn’t work out so well. I get the impression that David could have given his prized Las Vegas property to the banks at a big loss, and by so de-levering he could have walked away quite rich, but he stubbornly refused to do that and as a result he was unable to continue to finance his opulent lifestyle, including the construction of his Versailles-like house in Orlando. In fact, he has to cut costs by firing all of his servants except for two nannies and a driver, and putting his kids into public school. Jackie doesn’t take well to being put on a budget because she is unable to stop buying crap that she doesn’t need. In contrast, David doesn’t care so much about the crap, he wants to be rich so he can feel superior to other men and have a trophy wife.

Toys, the new class divide

According to a NY Times article, the toy store is yet another class divide, with SWPL parents shopping for special toys not sold at Toys R Us.

I know about this from personal experience, because I was asked to buy my nephew “Magna-Tiles” but I discovered they weren’t sold at Toys R Us.

Now why wouldn’t a toy manufacture want it’s toys on the shelves at Toys R Us, the world’s biggest toy store chain? According to the article, they enjoy the exclusivity of only being at small elite toy stores, but it still seems like an bad marketing strategy to me.

More rich people want their taxes raised

As reported by the NY Times:

A broad swath of the nation’s leading chief executives dropped its opposition to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans on Tuesday, while the White House quietly pressed Wall Street titans for their support as well.

Will Republicans give rich people what they want? (Although it's only CEO's of value-creating companies who support higher taxes. There's the implication that the wealth-transferers of Wall Street still want low taxes so they can become even richer while creating nothing of value.)

Tweeting pope: should we be scared?

The pope is now on Twitter.

While this seems really cute (and one can’t help but notice that the pope uses an iPad, what a huge endorsement for Apple), I can’t help but wonder if there’s a dark side here? This direct connection between the pope and hundreds of millions of Catholics who believe that the pope speaks with the voice of God means that it’s now a lot easier for the pope to tell people what to do. Popes used to be more powerful than kings. They used to order non-believers burned at the stake. This could start happening again.

* * *

So far, he hasn’t said anything scary, but I’m going to be following.

* * *

On the other hand, this could be the death blow to Catholicism if the pope can’t pull in as many followers as Lady GaGa.

Are people reading less?

superdestroyer writes:

Look around the next time your on an airplane and see who still reads novels/books (either the analog or digital versions). Most 20/30 somethings are watching bad movies on their tablets while older people are the ones who still read.

Once upon a time, when you were outside your house, the ONLY thing you could do to entertain yourself was to read a book or a printed newspaper. Now there are a zillion other things you can do.

And yes, I think I read fewer books because it's so easy to surf the web, watch something via Netflix, or play some videogame instead of reading.

I am not sure if this is really such a bad thing as it sounds to old fogies.

A short post in defense of science fiction

Science fiction is the favorite genre of engineers, and engineers are the value creators. Science fiction inspires engineers because it’s about the what if, the possibility of great things that can happen in the future if engineers can put their minds to the task and invent them.

Of course we know that both engineers and the genre of fiction that they love are looked down upon by the SWPL class. The same class who love Apple products which would not be possible were it not for a lot of engineers who were fans of Star Trek and Robert Heinlein developing the technology.

The real story of Hanukkah

Antiochus IV Epiphanes ruled the land of Israel (as well as much larger area of the Middle East) as one of the successors of the three generals to whom Alexander the Great left his kingdom after he died. According to 1 Maccabees, he wanted to unite the citizens of his empire behind the Greek religion, and declared that all of the Jews had to convert. There were a lot of Jews who went along with this. No doubt, they liked the idea of being able to eat delicious foods like pork, and the Greek culture was more advanced than Jewish culture.

But Mattathias, a Jewish priest in charge of the town of Modin would have none of this. When Antiochus sent some of his officers to convert the town, Mattathais killed one of the officers, as well as a Jew who publicly converted.

Mattathias then led a bunch of renegades into the desert and they started gathering an army. There was an early battle which occurred on the Sabbath, and the Jews refused to fight because it was the Sabbath. As a result, Antiochus’ army slaughtered a thousand Jews. After that, Mattathias said there would be no more of this not fighting on the Sabbath. This was a lesson the Jews had to relearn in 1973 when the Muslims attacked them on Yom Kippur.

After Mattathias died, he son Judas Maccabeus took over. Mattathias and Judas Maccabeus were badass. Not only did they kill a lot of gentiles, the also killed Jews who had abandoned their religion. The real miracle of Hanukkah is that Judas Maccabeus was able to defeat the gentiles with a much smaller guerilla army. After Judas Maccabeus took over the temple, they had eight days of celebration and he declared those eight days should be celebrated in future years. Thus the holiday of Hanukkah. However, the story didn't end with the re-dedication of the Temple; there were many years of fighting which followed.

The alleged “miracle” about the light burning for eight days was never part of the original story. This was made up by pussy pacifist rabbis hundreds of years later who wanted to de-emphasize the martial nature of the holiday.

If Judas Maccabeus were in charge of modern-day Israel, he would force all of the Palestinians to convert, or boot them to the other side of the Jordan River. He would tear down that mosque that was built on top of the Temple and reconstruct the Temple.

Hanukkah is an obsolete holiday because Jews should be celebrating their victories over Muslims since the founding of Israel and not stuff that happened two thousand years ago. Pacifist Jews who don't want to reclaim the entire land of Israel for Jews and who don't want to tear down that mosque that's defiling the holiest site of Judaism are not honoring the holiday of Hanukkah.

* * *

It occurs to me that this would make a great videogame. You play Judas Maccabeus, and the goal is to kill gentiles with your sword, and after you kill a lot of gentiles your level increases and you learn "spells" which are invoked with Jewish prayers, and you would see Hebrew letters going across the screen. After you capture the Temple, you'd get extra bonuses from going there to sacrifice animals. Eventually, when you are high enough level, you will be able to kill Antiochus himself and free the Jews.

John McAfee regrets saving money on taxes

As reported in USA today:

He asserted that the government of Belize is rife with corruption, executions, bribery and extortion. He said police there want him back because he has become an embarrassment to Belize. He said police have raided his Belize property eight times.

"The reason I avoided the authorities is I believed then and I believe even stronger now ... the intent to question me has nothing to do with Mr. Faull's murder,'' he said. "I cannot ever return to Belize. The issues I'm discussing are hurting the government, hurting tourism.''

"The government was mad at me before,'' he said. "There is no hope for my life if I ever return to Belize.''

McAfee supposedly moved to Belize to avoid paying U.S. taxes. I guess he now wishes that he had just sucked it up and paid the taxes.

* * *

Commenter HAR says:

McAfee appears to still be a US citizen, so he still had to pay federal income tax. Maybe in Belize he could avoid property and state taxes, but there are US states you can move to that don't have income tax. It's more likely that he moved to Belize so he could have a harem of hookers and be somewhere where he could feel like a big man.

In that case, I guess the reason for McAfee's move to Belize is a mystery.

Vampire sex

Has anyone else noticed that there's a massive amount of contemporary fiction, which would fall under the romance genre, about sex with vampires and other supernaturals?

The blogger Whiskey would probably say that women "hate hate hate beta males" so they are attracted to stories about women like themselves who have sex with powerful supernatural alphas.

Actually, he already wrote about this in 2008, but I think the trend has even gotten worse since then.

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t mentioned vampires before, except to review Twilight and to note briefly back in 2009 that “science fiction/fantasy involving spaceships or Hobbits is nerdy, but vampires are not nerdy because girls like vampires.”

Pure nerd

Click here to see a photo of Brian Kernighan, the guy who wrote the book about C, the programming language.

He's a pretty nerdy-looking guy. He's currently a professor at Princeton University, which demonstrates one benefit of attending college at an elite university like Princeton; you get to be taught by semi-famous people.

Evidence of credential inflation

Catherine Rampell had a NY Times blog post a few days ago about credential inflation. She posted analysis from a company which analyzes job ads, and the analysis show that, since 2007, an increasing percentage of ads say that a college degree is required for the position across a very large variety of jobs which traditionally did not require college degrees.

So we see that a college degree is becoming more of a “necessity” these days for people who want any sort of decent middle-class income, because without that piece of paper proving that you attended classes for four years, one can get shut out of the job market.

Does illegal file sharing increase GDP?

If a popular musician releases a new album, and there are 1 million legal purchases (say at iTunes) for $10 each, this is measured as a $10 million increase in GDP.

So then it should follow that if an additional 10 million people illegally download the same album, GDP should be increased by another $100 million because valuable new copies have been created.

* * *

And the answer is…

According to Wikipedia, “Gross domestic product (GDP) is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. GDP per capita is often considered an indicator of a country's standard of living.”

Based on the first sentence, pirated music does not increase GDP because it’s not “official recognized,” but that’s really circular reasoning because maybe it should be officially recognized. If someone pirates music instead of buying it, this causes a measured decrease in GDP but no decrease at all in the standard of living; in fact it creates an increase in the standard of living if in lieu of buying music the person spends the money on something of tangible value.

So we see that GDP is a bad measure of a country’s standard of living because it is bulked up by value transference and purchases of positional goods, and as I mentioned in another recent blog post, it doesn’t measure important things like quality time spent with your family.

I would say that illegal music downloads have led to an increase in the standard of living, because before people could only listen to the music they could afford, but now people who are willing to violate the copyrights of the intellectual property owners (which appears to be violated as commonly as jaywalking in Manhattan) can listen to a huge library of enjoyable music even if they are not rich.

The psychology of torrenting

The smart way to download copyrighted torrents is to do a “hit and run,” that is as soon as you get what you need, you stop seeding the torrent. Besides using up your bandwidth, seeding a torrent means that your IP address is constantly being broadcast to the world and increases the likelihood that law enforcement would choose to make an example of you. (Of course they can only make an example of a tiny minority of torrent downloaders, because there must be millions of people in the United States alone who have participated in this activity.)

Of course, if everyone followed my “smart” advice, that would kill torrent sites because nothing would be seeded and you wouldn’t be able to download anything. So why to people seed torrents? Either (1) they don’t realize what they are doing because the default behavior of the torrent software is to seed the torrent after it’s downloaded; or (2) they are being good Samaritans. And I think there’s some irony to the fact that people who feel they are doing a good deed for their fellow man are actually viewed as criminals by the government and the big media corporations.

Everything I wrote above goes double for the people who actually create torrents and post them. Posting torrents seems like something that would attract extra attention from the authorities. There are some torrents out there in which the posters really look like they put in a lot of work for no compensation other than feeling good about helping their fellow man obtain free stuff. Although I suppose it’s not so dissimilar to my unpaid blogging.

* * *

DaveinHackensack writes:

You don't understand the difference between creating your own content and giving it away and giving someone else's content away without their permission? I would never use a torrent site for the same reason I would never steal from a book store: stealing is wrong. Do you not agree? Or do you not think there is any objective morality, and all that matters is the chance of you getting caught?

I don’t really see that I addressed this question one way or the other in this post, before you asked the question. But thanks for asking.

Of course I understand that basis for the distinction. I could ask back, you mean you don't understand the difference between property that physically exists and can’t easily be reproduced (like a barrel of crude oil or a plot of land), and something that exists only virtually and can be copied infinitely for free (such as a digital music file)?

The concept implementation of intellectual property is just a near-arbitrary collection of laws which have been heavily influenced by lobbyists for big corporations and other value transference interests. Refusing to share information could just as easily be seen as petty and greedy rather than a valid protection of “property” rights.

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The cross-out is because yes, I am not stupid, I know that the theory behind intellectual copy is that it encourages creative works and R&D. Would a drug company invest $1 billion in a developing a drug they couldn't make a profit from it? Not likely. Although the profit motive means that we have zillions of drugs for treating erectile dysfunction, and not so many for treating life-threatening conditions that only affect a small number of people.

With respect to entertainment media, one has to imagine if the world would be a better or worse place if there were no copyright protection for digital files, or if the copyright protection were a lot shorter (say only for a few months after the release of a movie). Perhaps movies might have a few less special effects, and the big actors and actresses would make $25/million year instead of $50 million/year. I could live with that.

Why people believe what they believe

In 2011 I wrote:

The conventional theory of politics is that people figure out by themselves what their views are on various issues, and then they decide what political party to belong to based on their views. This conventional theory is wrong. It works the other way around. People know what team they belong to (Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, etc.) and then they adopt the views of their team.

Smart people tend to have more consistent views on political issues (consistently liberal or consistently conservative, for example) because instead of using their intelligence to independently figure out the correct views on issues, they use their intelligence to figure out what their team believes. Smart people tend to be more conformist then dumb people.

A reader emailed me a link to a blog post at Marginal Revolution about a research paper from Yale Law School that backs me up. Half Sigma was right once again. To quote from the paper:

Only the third theory—the “Expressive Rationality Thesis” or ERT—was fully supported by the study. That theory alone predicted both that ideologically motivated reasoning would by symmetric and that it would be amplified by higher CRT. Those hypotheses reflect a theory that sees ideological motivated reasoning not as a reasoning deficiency but as a reasoning strategy suited to the interest that individuals have in conveying their membership in and loyalty to affinity groups central to their personal wellbeing.

That’s a complicated way of saying that people first belong to a group, and then adopt beliefs held by the group. I disagree with calling this behavior “rational.” While one can make a valid case that it’s rational to at least present to other people in your group that you share their beliefs, in reality the vast majority truly believe their group’s beliefs. It’s instinctive behavior and not something that people give rational thought to.