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We’re erring on the side of positive expectations again. This time with Bjørn Lomborg. His new book is Best Things First. There he sets his sights on cost effective, acheivable goals that will lift the world’s poorest out of miserable conditions and inch us along in the direction towards those sustainable goals we hear about so much. We ask the minuscule billions of dollars question: Are the world’s most prosperous ready for such tangible win-win?
James, Rob and Steve aren’t quite done with Barbenheimer; they discuss Ohio’s pro-life prospects; and muse on words that make them feel sophisticated.
(And to whoever kidnapped our co-host, could you please return him?)
Song of the week:
- Soundbites from opening clip: Truman and Oppenheimer
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Clever title!
Good podcast. The Hollywood strikes are an interesting topic. The battle involves the ideas of A.I. writing screenplays, people selling their likenesses and voices, and the entire business model of streaming. The industry is on the precipice of the biggest change since the end of the studio model era.
I wrote an essay that explains Malthusianism and hard leftism.
The left hates capitalism and cheap energy precisely because it leads to human flourishing. Not because they are mistaken about exonomics.
Hang on. Lomborg’s first point is how to keep perhaps millions of children from dying each year.
But the Left doesn’t want there to be MORE PEOPLE.
The point about education doesn’t fit either, since the Left doesn’t want children or adults to be educated to understand what their government is doing. They only want children to know that Heather Has Two Mommies.
I’m not seeing Rob’s claimed Wall Street Journal link in the Show Notes.
Ricochet 5.0 – Wooeee!
Back when 1.0 was ditched, it was convincing that the old bones just couldn’t handle the traffic.
But from then on, and I suspect with 5.0, despite real and significant under-the-hood improvements, each new version has just been glamor for Font Nerds.
People’s advocacy of various political positions often comfortably relies on the fact that what they claim to desire will never actually come to pass.
For example, pacifists know that they will be defended by force, even if they claim to morally disapprove of defense by force. Their pose merely permits them to respond to that defense with total ingratitude.
Defunding the police and closing the prisons are two variants of this pose.
Libertarians are also often guilty of this, demanding open borders (politically possible) coupled with an end of the welfare state (politically impossible).
Public goods only. It has an actual definition. Look it up.
You can’t get rid of redistribution unless you get rid of the inflationist Fed.
You can’t get rid of the income tax or central bank discretion unless you figure out how to never have another war, which we can’t. Trading with the Chinese mafia was the biggest mistake we ever made.
Conservatives and libertarians are never going to make much headway until you get rid of inflation, even the supposed “good” 2%. I mean, artificial intelligence can actually pass the bar. This is deflationary and it’s never going to stop and they are going to print into that. Then the debt to GDP will keep going up excessively. Then then we get really terrible inflation with financial repression or we get war.
Just wanted to enjoy this bit again.
The easiest way is to outlaw abortion, as some countries do. I just can’t fathom why people allow abortion.
That Rob sort of shrugs his shoulders at abortion and uses an arbitrary trimester look at it politically (sure let’s kill them early so it doesn’t get really messy later) in order to allow abortion is a monstrous view of many conservatives that I find horrendous.
It seems that abortion was largely illegal before 1973. After 50 years it may take some time to move the dial back again.
A. A conservative politician might say, is your purpose to reduce the number of abortions, or to pat yourself on the back for your purity?
If the only choices are “legalize everything” or “legalize nothing”, the vast majority will — reluctantly — select “legalize everything”.
B. The organism that exists after nine months of gestation is unquestionably a child. But the organism that existed at the beginning of that period is unquestionably not a child, as the term is normally understood.
C. Involuntary servitude is illegal, even if it is for a laudable purpose.
Ok. You find it horrendous. Find. The vast majority of people don’t find early abortion horrendous and will vote for it. Even about half of Republicans. How are you going to deal with that?
Ok. You find it horrendous. Find. The vast majority of people don’t find early abortion horrendous and will vote for it. Even about half of Republicans. How are you going to deal with that? Whatever you think of the majority opinion it is still the majority.
Very few people who are pregnant got that way involuntarily. Even if they were using birth control that “Failed,” that falls under “assumption of risk.”
Under the law, you are not normally responsible for outcomes you made “reasonable efforts” to avoid.
I suspect that might often refer more to degree than actual “fact.” And the fact is that sex has possible consequences even if you take “reasonable precautions.” It’s not like someone is just walking down the street or sitting on their sofa at home trying to be safe, and then BAM! suddenly they’re pregnant. Some degree of “risky behavior” is generally required.
In terms of other law, if you go into a liquor store to rob it and don’t have a real gun, or it doesn’t have real bullets in it, or you just put your finger in your jacket pocket and PRETEND to have a gun, you can’t claim to have taken “reasonable precautions” if the clerk has a heart attack from fear, and dies.
Every time you engage in the “risky behavior” of driving a car, there is an unavoidable chance that you will kill or injure someone. However, to be charged with a crime, you also have to have been operating the car in a dangerous manner.
What level of decent prenatal care can the government force?
As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen said:
Sorry – I haven’t got a clue what you are asking.
You boys need to expand your universe on your “climate change” experts. You’ve recycled Bjorn Lomborg so often that at the end of the podcast he muttered the phrase “fix climate change” a couple of times. Why not get a distinguished geologist like Dr. Ian Plimer on – someone who can talk about the geologic record and how climate has always changed. That we worry about CO2 as a greenhouse gas at a concentration of ~400ppm is ludicrous. No one can stop the climate from changing. We don’t have a climate crisis, we have a corruption crisis.
There are so many dumb, anxious and angry people in this situation, and the government can’t improve it. You can’t force people to like the kid or take care of it even if they’re going to give it up right away and it’s a proven bad thing. This is just too complicated for simple government force to fix it.
Just to be clear, I’ve gone round and round with people on the right that even think the Plan B pill is bad.
Climate change is the Universal Communist Bludgeoning Tool. I have no idea what to do about it.
On weekends, I frequently torture myself by listening to KCBS out of San Francisco. They have those guys so freaked out about climate change, you can’t even get your head around it unless you hear it in person. Every single problem we have is due to climate change. They do the hard sell every day on that channel.
Then they babble about de-growth. We have inflationism, a system that relies on constant credit increase otherwise known as constant debt increase. The debt-to- whatever-you-want-to-call-it has to grow constantly otherwise it collapses. Real geniuses. You can’t de-growth anything unless you start communism the hard way.
Dynamic insertion
😂😂😂
Sure, but once the accident happens you are legally and morally obliged to deal with it. You can’t finish off the injured person, even if it is clear that they will have a terrible life after the accident. You can’t leave the scene or neglect to call the authorities. Those things are a crime, and they are a far closer analogy here.
would there be redistribution from a deflationist Fed? Just trying to figure out what you mean by “redistribution”.
That’s a good start. My point would be that it was a bad analogy to start with. The original/designed/intended/whatever purpose of a car is not to run around injuring or killing people, from which it must be constantly restrained. But the original/designed/intended/whatever purpose of sex IS reproduction.
I might go with something like, if you get in the car intending to drive to Phoenix – or maybe just around the block and then back home – but end up in Tucson, you’re not allowed to destroy Tucson because you intended to go to Phoenix, or perhaps just back home.
Or to put it another way, you can make no mistakes, but still “lose.”