• Comedy,  Norm Macdonald

    Remembering Norm MacDonald

    Today I’ve been listening to Norm MacDonald clips on Youtube autoplay (along with lots of other people apparently), then for some reason I looked at my kindle highlights from his book – one that struck me was

    Thanks to my father, who is gone but thought of fondly and often. We will meet again, Dad, in the place you live and I cannot imagine.

    “Though of fondly and often” is the best any of us can hope for in the long run.

    After reading a bit of Tolstoy recently I really do see how MacDonald was influenced by him – seeing things as a whole is how all of his comedy works, much the same way Tolstoy’s stories (that I’ve read) were really all just explanations of ONE mysterious thing.

    Comments Off on Remembering Norm MacDonald
  • Uncategorized

    Random thoughts after a visit to Myrtle Beach

    1. People have gained an average of 10 pounds since the beginning of the pandemic
    2. Social comity has frayed, the easy things that keep a society running, parking in handicapped spaces, smoking in non-smoking areas, glass bottles by the pool, etc.
    3. Delta 8 seems to be everywhere
    4. It takes a lot to get arrested these days
    5. Originality in tattoos is rare
    Comments Off on Random thoughts after a visit to Myrtle Beach
  • rationalism,  Uncategorized

    Argument for Minarchism in mathematical form

    Pardon the ramble – I will be organizing this at some point – but in the spirit of creating artifacts

    From listening to Michael Malice wax morally on about anarchism

    I’m reminded of Albert Jay Nock’s comparison of State Power and Social Power – they operate at each other’s expense to some degree.

    But to expand on that (this is not Nock’s thinking) – there is a need for order, and real costs to lack of order (at certain levels of anomie we reach the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) the question is who supplies that order – in the best case for State Power you have the English policeman found in European stereotypes, in the worse case you have modern day North Korea. In the Social Power cases you have at best David Friedman’s wildest dreams (or Utah as seen in brochures), at worst you have Mississippi in 1940 where everyone is white except you.

    Formula for Minarchism (where order is defined as “liberty” in the mid century sense of the word):

    80% of State Power is interchangeable with Social Power in producing order
    80% of Social Power is interchangeable with State Power in producing order
    Quality declines as more of each power is used after 20% – and State and Society decline at different rates

    Order is maximized at Power Unit * Quality

    I’m pondering what that equation would be.

    Comments Off on Argument for Minarchism in mathematical form