Skeptic Project

Tomorrow I will be going to a festival that will be well attended by Paultards, Birchers, and a variety of other nuts. Got any good questions I should ask?

Ask them to tell you the difference between Keynesian and Austrian economics.

What's the festival?

Ask them why they don't spend as much time trying to prove their conspiracies are not true as they do trying to affirm they are.

"Tea Party Pants-off-dance-off?"

Good guess. It's called the Fancy Farm Picnic (yes, I'm serious). It might be on C-SPAN.

Well what a day. I met numerous tea baggers and Paultards. I met Abe Lincoln. He supports Rand Paul and believes that states rights, including the right to seceed. I met a Paultard who spouted the constitution and said safety regulations were unconstitutional because they weren't in the constitutional. I asked him if the same holds true about the air force. He got mad and walked away. I was told by another Paulbot that Jack Conway (Rand's opponent) was a member of the establishment, I was wearing a Conway sticker. He never said whom they were.

A lot more fun was had, but I'm too tired to talk and am probably rambling.

You might want to read H.L. Mencken's famous essay, "Homo Neanderthalensis":

http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/menckenneander.htm</p>

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged - and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple - and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.

Mencken could probably add Austrian economics to his list of things easy for stupid people to understand. Ludwig von Mises notoriously rejected the application of mathematics and statistics to the field of economics, possibly because he resented that his brother, the mathematician Richard von Mises, inherited the math genes in the family and he didn't.

The reason for all the lying is that CTs want the gold standard to have been "ended" as close to the creation of the FRS as possible. They then often talk about FDR's anti-gold hoarding legislation, but then forget to mention the reason he attempted to prevent hoarding is because we were on the gold standard, otherwise it wouldn't have mattered. The glorious President Nixon was the one who ended the gold and silver standard.

As for Y2K and Gary North, at the time I was working as lead programmer and network administrator at an unnamed .com start up, and at the time it was fairly obvious to anyone from the technical world that the Y2K problem only effected a small amount of machines and perhaps embedded systems. We all knew there'd be no power outages, economic collapses, etc, because most systems actually use unix epoch, this includes Windows, Unix, Linux, etc. The worst case scenario in reality was simply dating problems, and a few of those did occur.

I remember people like Gary North and others saying crazy shit about Y2K, in fact at one point one of my crazier relatives, a second cousin, believed nuclear weapons were going to automatically launch themselves and planes fall out of the sky. Topics like those were actually common in some books, but they make no sense what so ever. If our nuclear missiles and planes are only as safe as knowing what year it is, we've got bigger problems than just bad programming.

A real problem is the Y2K38 or Year 2038 problem, which will be an actual problem and is something people who actually know something about computers really worry about. That is the 32bit registers won't be able to hold the unix epoch any longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2038_problem</p>

The whole 2012 thing reminds me of a more supernatural approach to Y2K, it's essentially the same broad doom-saying by people who have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

@Special Ed

Other than the laissez-faire approach, and the idea that the complexity of human behavior makes it difficult to have mathematical models and scientific analysis of economics, the subjective theory of value, and marginal utility from Austrian economics are taught in schools.