A lot of people are confused about whether money is real or imaginary because they don’t realize that it is a spiritual, rather than material, thing. Before I go on, I need to make clear that a thing is neither good nor bad for being spiritual rather than material. Food is material and revenge is spiritual; both angels and demons are pure spirit. I am only talking about what the thing is, in so doing I’m not saying that it’s either good or bad (except in the trivial Thomistic sense that being is good considered differently).

Another misconception I need to get out of the way before I can actually say what I mean is that “spirit” is not merely “a different kind of matter.” For various reasons, a lot of people seem to think that spirit is basically glowing matter that has the ability to move through ordinary matter. That’s not spirit, that’s a TV ghost. When I say that something is spiritual rather than physical, I’m saying that it is not any kind of matter.

OK, with those common misconceptions cleared out of the way, we can finally get down to business.

It is fairly straight-forward to see that money is spiritual instead of material; the easiest way is to consider what happens when you get rid of the matter.

Suppose I lend you ten dollars, in the form of a ten-dollar bill. Then when you repay me, you repay me in the form of ten one-dollar bills. You have given me back exactly what I lent you, but the matter is completely different. This is not possible with material things, it is only possible with spiritual things. The bills are merely physical signs which point to the spiritual thing.

This is true of any money, by the way, not merely of fiat currencies. Suppose I lend you a pound of (pure) gold. Suppose you return to me some other pound of (pure) gold. Despite the matter being completely different matter, you have perfectly repaid the debt. The thing lent was not specific gold, but merely a quantity of gold. The thing returned was the same quantity of gold. Yet the matter is completely different.

You can observe the difference if I lent you a gold statue. If you merely returned to me the same quantity of gold but in the form of coins you would not have repaid what you owed me, because what you owed me was the specific statue.

That money is spiritual rather than material is why so many disagreements arise about it. Because we are a hybrid of spirit and matter, we recognize the spiritual, but in general we do it through the intermediation of matter. That is, we see the effects of spirit on matter and infer the spirit. You can see this even with where spirit got its name from—breath. Aside from on very cold days when we can perceive condensation, we do not see people breathe. We see their chest move, we hear their voice—we perceive various things from which we infer the breath. Or again consider the wind in the trees. We see the tree move and infer the wind, we don’t see the wind itself. These things are analogous to how we perceive spirit by its effects.

Because of this, we create physical signs to point to the spiritual thing we call money, though if you want to get extremely accurate the thing we call money is the same concept as debt (in the moral sense). These physical signs can be anything, since they are not the thing but merely a thing which points to the thing. At one time they might be records on a clay tablet or a stick, at another quantities of metal, at another pieces of paper, and at another records in a computer.

Like all signs, it is possible to lie with signs. You can see this in forgery and also when governments inflate fiat currencies in order to pretend that they have more money than they really have. None of these things make money unreal, they only make the signs pointing to the money unreal.

Recognizing this solves a great many problems around money, such as in this tweet:

Quite frequently the quarrelsome atheists one runs into online are very poorly educated; in many cases they’re basically fundamentalist Christians who swapped the bible out for a biology textbook as the holy book that they don’t read. This seeming lack of knowing anything that would normally be learned by reading books lends itself to them coming up with some really weird creation myths for the existence of religion. Consider this recent one left in a comment to my post You Can’t “Believe In Science”:

Regarding experimentation, science requires observation, not experimentation as such. Paleontology is observational science, like astronomy. Simples. But anyway, the difference between science and religion is that scientific ideas are tested against observation while religious ones are not. Science rejects hypotheses which don’t agree with observation; religion keeps them and adds excuses. The Problem of Evil should have done away with the “everything was created by a perfectly good God” hypthesis, but religion has kept it and added excuses: Free will/God is impossible for puny humans understand/Best of all worlds/Etc. The flaw here is that adding excuses to a failed hypothesis doesn’t make it more likely, it makes it less likely.

While I’ve seen similar creation myths for religion from atheists, I’ve never seen this exact one. According to this myth, people first came to believe that God exists and created all that is, and reasoned out that He is perfectly good, then later discovered evil and invented the idea of free will and the concept of the world being too complicated for us to understand in detail in order to explain away this new discovery.

I doubt that the fellow who wrote this actually believes it; based on previous experience with him I doubt that he really believes anything at all; he seems to be a rhetorical thinker who just types stuff that happens to sound good at the moment. That’s pretty typical of the type, which is why I’m using it here for illustration. (Btw, rhetoric, on a technical level, is generally a micro-narrative or series of micro-narratives. Understanding this will make it easier for me to talk about it.)

You can see the basic flow of the rhetoric in the quoted paragraph. He started off with a story of how science is about observation. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was largely based off of pictures he’s seen of people looking through telescopes and microscopes. (It’s too much to go into here, but in many ways the “scientific revolution” was really the avalanche of knowledge gained when lens-making technology got good enough to make telescopes and microscopes, rather than any change in methodology.) From that mental image, now called Observation, he proceeds to try to distinguish Religion from Science using this. That is, he goes on to tell the story of how Science uses Observation. Since Science uses Observation, Religion must not use Observation. What story to tell?

Well, here he runs into a problem, since obviously in any normal sense of the word “observation” which isn’t code for “looking through a telescope or microscope” looking at a man heal a cripple or walk on water or feed 5000 people when there was only a few loaves of bread and a few fishes would be “observation.” So merely observing things can’t be the story of Observation he wants. However, with falsificationism being a popular idea among atheists, he brings it in as the backbone of the story he’s going to tell. So in Science, Observation allows you to falsify theories, which Scientists heroically do. This is in contrast to Religion, where Observation is not used to falsify theories. He doesn’t bother coming up with an example of scientists rejecting a theory based on observation, probably because this would be far more difficult than he consciously realizes. (It would be far easier to come up with examples of scientific theories being retained in the face of contrary observation. E.g. Newtonian mechanics, the inability of quantum mechanics and relativity to be reconciled, the Standard Model being kept despite observations indicating dark matter, etc. etc. etc.)

He then needs to tell a story of Religion ignoring observation. It would not work for his rhetorical purpose, however, to simply appeal to the fact that Religion (he really means Christianity; this is less true of non-Abramic religions) rests on testimony rather than observation. And this is not because virtually no one actually conducts scientific experiments for himself and relies on testimony. It’s because the narrative flow must be the ignoring of observation. So he comes up with the astonishing idea that there were people who were ignorant of evil that came to believe in God for unspecified reasons, then discovered the existence of evil and rather than rejecting their idea came up with a rationalization for it. It’s dumb as the proverbial solid waste from a dog, but it does have the correct narrative flow.

Now, while these micro-narratives have nothing to do with reality to an impressive degree, they do feature a common theme I’ve seen frequently from this kind of atheist: they get really offended when people don’t take their judgment to be the final word on a matter. They will identify something that they perceive to be a problem and get mad when people don’t instantly change their minds, but instead offer an explanation. This would be nonsensical unless the atheist were infallible, which I think gives some insight into the psychology behind it. Somehow or other (and I suspect there are many possible causes) they have come to be their own authority.

It is unpleasant for anyone to see an authority which they respect being disrespected.

Within the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson has the invaluable role of being the chronicler of Holmes’ adventures. This does introduce a minor problem, though, which is that it’s utterly at odds with Holmes’ assurances of discretion to his clients.

This is not every case, of course; there are cases where Holmes has no duty of secrecy to anyone. A Study in Scarlet does not bring about this problem, and I doubt that The Sign of Four does either (the only person to whom Holmes might owe discretion, there, became Watson’s wife and was thus available to wave her rights to confidentiality). But as soon as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes begin we run into a problem with A Scandal in Bohemia.

I know that the King said that in two years it wouldn’t matter who knew that he had had an affair with Irene Adler but it is none the less hard to imagine that he would take it kindly to his affair with Adler being made public for no reason other than the publicity of Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Jabez Wilson was, perhaps, not owed any great duty of discretion, so we can pass on the Red Headed League.

The Case of Identity was, I think, a bit cruel for Watson to have published, since it would have created much embarrassment for the woman who came to Holmes. This, however, could be dealt with by Watson changing the names. Few people would be over-likely to recognize the original in the story if her name, as well as the name of her stepfather, and also of the places and businesses were changed.

None of this will work for The Boscombe Valley Mystery. Here, Holmes promised a dying man that for the sake of his daughter he would not reveal the dying man’s former life as a highway robber and murderer. The whole point was to keep from his daughter what her father was. Even if the names had been changed there could be no mistaking who the story was about, especially since she was the one who had called Holmes into the case. There can be no excuse that the case happened many years before, as she was a young woman during the story and would still have been a young woman at the time of publication. (Further, since The Sign of Four took place before The Boscombe Valley Mystery (since it refers to Watson as a married man, and he married in The Sign of Four) the earliest the latter could have taken place would have been about 1887, and The Boscombe Valley Mystery was published in 1891.)

This was by no means the only such case. The Adventure of the Naval Treaty seems equally harmful to ever publish, even with names altered, as does The Adventure of the Second Stain. In both cases the preservation of someone’s reputation requires that no one ever find out what really happened, and the details are utterly unmistakable.

These are just the cases where Holmes either implicitly or explicitly promised to never reveal the damaging secrets to anyone, and Watson’s chronicling them is an inarguable breaking of that promise. Probably the majority of cases Watson chronicles would constitute a violation of privacy and trust to the people concerned.

Stranger still, more than a few people who come to Holmes have heard about his adventures as published by Watson and nevertheless come with a hope of discretion on the part of Holmes.

Ultimately, I don’t think that there’s any solution to this. Just pick up any book trying to reconcile the chronology of the Holmes stories and you’ll discover that Conan Doyle clearly didn’t worry about the details. When Watson’s wife—Mary Morstan—became inconvenient, Conan Doyle basically just forgot about her. (It’s more complicated than that, but not tremendously more complicated).

So, what are we to make of Watson’s chronicling of Holmes’ cases being a contradiction of Holmes’ duty to his clients?

I think that one clue to why this was the case can be found in the titles of most of the Holmes stories. The majority of the stories began with “The Adventure of.” These were not really detective stories in the sense of how the genre would evolve in the 1920s. Conan Doyle obviously thought that the science of deduction was interesting but he equally obviously didn’t think of it as something that the reader would be doing.

(I’m still not sure when the idea of the mystery story being a game between the reader and the author began or, more importantly, when it became commonplace. It was certainly well established by the time of Fr. Knox’s Decalogue, but that was published in 1929. You can see some of this in G.K. Chesterton’s advice on how to write a detective story, which was published in G.K.’s Weekly in October of 1925.)

Since these are adventure stories where the science of deduction is meant only to be interesting but not something where the reader is trying to solve the mystery before the author, I suspect that Conan Doyle did not expect the reader to pay attention to details in the same way that later mystery authors would expect that. I suspect that this is why he was not bothered by the conclusion of a story making it impossible for Watson to have published it.

(Incidentally, I think that the contradictory chronology is more an effect of the stories being written many years apart and Conan Doyle simply having forgotten what he wrote early. I’ve faced this problem in writing my own detective stories. The result is I started keeping a file for all of the miscellaneous facts such as birthday, height, weight, age, siblings, siblings’ age, etc. Annoyingly, I had to re-read my own books in many cases to find out whether I wrote down such details before, though now I mostly can write them into the file whenever I invent a new one. Conan Doyle wrote Holmes stories over the course of nearly forty years; if he was not making a conscious effort to be rigorous about details it would have been shocking for him to not mis-remember things he had written decades before.)

If you go to the right places you will see colorful signs that proclaim a creed which contains among its dogmas, “science is real.” Online, you will see many people arguing over “science” and “what science says.” It’s interesting that people proclaim their faith in, and debate about, something which they cannot define and which cannot be coherently defined.

The idea of “what is science” was debated throughout history, but very hotly in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was called the “demarcation problem,” and it proved to be a failed endeavor. It is simply not possible to define “science” in a way that includes things that clearly are sciences and excludes things that clearly are not. (I will only give a brief sketch of why not, since it’s a big topic that justifies more than a little reading of books on the subject.)

First, we can dispense with the “scientific method” frequently taught in schools because (depending on how you interpret it) it either is generally not what scientists do or else describes what everyone does in all attempts to study the natural world. (See There Is No Scientific Method.) People who want to figure out how to read bird entrails¹ make observations, form a hypothesis, and conduct experiments to test the hypothesis. Paleontologists who study bones don’t conduct experiments².

As Lee Smolin put it in The Trouble With Physics, it can’t be that Science uses a method. Witch Doctors use a method. It can’t be that Science uses math, astrologers use math.

There have been many attempts at the demarcation problem, but I think that the two greatest efforts are Verificationism and Falsificationism. There have been various forms of these, but since this is a sketch I’m going to treat each as just one thing, since all of their forms have the same problem.

Verificationism defines science as those studies of the natural world whose theories can be verified. Falsificationism defines science as those studies of the natural world whose theories can be falsified.

The problem with both is that outside of some very simple investigations into the natural world which have already been done, you run into an infinite recursion problem in trying to decide what is a verification or what is a falsification of a theory. I’ll use another example from Lee Smolin’s book The Trouble With Physics, since it was so well chosen.

Suppose I have a block of marble and present the theory that there is a marble head trapped within it. I propose to test this theory by using a hammer and chisel to clear away the marble of the block from around the marble head. I do so, and lo and behold, there is a marble head. I made a prediction and then what I predicted came to pass. Did I verify my theory?

But suppose that I struck too hard with the hammer and the marble crumbled to dust. There is no marble head to be seen, only a pile of marble rubble on the floor. Has my theory been falsified?

(Another example of how falsificationism doesn’t work is the error in the orbit of Uranus. In theory, when Uranus wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Newtonian mechanics should have been falsified and the theory discarded. Except it wasn’t; if there was a Neptune-sized planet in Neptune’s orbit, that would also explain why predictions of Uranus orbit weren’t correct… and there turned out to be Neptune. So the falsification turned into an even better verification. The same thing with Neptune led to the discovery of Pluto, except that was by accident because the problem was actually with the estimates of Neptune’s mass, not the influence of another planet.)

Both verificationism and falsificationism fail, ultimately, because there is no way to instantly and certainly know that the verification or falsification means what one takes it to mean. There is always the possibility of experimental error, interpretational error, or some unknown factor which is influencing the experiments in unknown ways. Of the three, the unknown factor is the biggest theoretical problem, but I think that the issue of interpretation is the biggest problem in practice.

To see what I mean, consider things that used to be considered prestigious science which are now in disrepute. IQ studies that prove that white people are superior to everyone else, for example, or skull-measuring in order to classify races, or identifying criminals by the shape of their face. All of these considered themselves to be sciences. They all methodically measured things. They tested their theories and found their theories stood up to those tests. The problem, of course, is that they were grading their own tests.

But this is a problem everywhere. Physicists don’t call biologists in to decide whether their experiments legitimately give support to the theory they’re testing. Chemists don’t call in phrenologists to decide whether their experiments really show what they think they show. Biologists don’t ask electricians to judge their interpretation of fMRI data in brain activation. Physicists ask physicists, and phrenologists ask phrenologists, just as astrologers ask to be judged by other astrologers. This is what peer review means; it means that people who do not question the assumptions of a field judge particular ideas, experiments, observations, etc. under the lens of these shared assumptions. All peer review tells you is whether the work is, roughly, on par with the rest of the work in the field. It intrinsically can’t tell you whether the field is any good.

There are a great many people who are willing to grade their own tests and give themselves high marks; which of these people can we trust?

Well, that’s the problem. There’s no way to tell. All you can do is to look at their observations, experiments, interpretive framework, and judge for yourself. (Or you can find people you trust who will do this looking and judging, and have them tell you their conclusions. The number of people who do this out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of the desire for money or attention, which will bias their evaluations, is annoyingly small.)

So to come back to where this post started, it is simply not possible to hold that “science is real.” No one can say what the science is that might be real or fake. The word “science,” in that sentence, simply has no referent.

It would have been much better if the sign had simply said what it actually meant, which, IIRC, would have been, “anthropogenic climate change is real and is bad no matter what that change is because the climate is currently perfect.” That may be true or false, but at least it’s meaningful for those words to be put in that order.

1 I mean from scratch. Most bird-entrail readers, like most people who can administer a pH test to determine acidity, do so according to how they were taught by others with no attempts at observation or experimentation, but only following instructions that most couldn’t explain. But if someone wanted to resurrect the lost art of bird entrail reading, they’d begin by making observations—looking at bird entrails and also at what happened. Then they’d make guesses about what the bird entrails mean, then slaughter some more birds and see if these guesses were confirmed by fresh events. If they were, they’d gain confidence in their theories about what the bird entrails mean.

2 People will occasionally try to shoe-horn paleontology into this shoe by claiming that the “experiments” they do are predicting intermediate forms of animals then looking for them. The thing is, they don’t. They dig wherever there are bones and find what they find. Also, since the preservation of any given animal is overwhelmingly unlikely, the absence of anything in the fossil record is never taken to mean anything other than “we haven’t found it yet, if it’s there to be found.”

I was recently asked on Twitter:

As a Christian and and a writer, what are your thoughts on depicting characters using the Lord’s name in vain? I’m curious because in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday someone exclaims “God blast it!”

Here was my reply:

The first thing is to get straight the meanings of taking the Lord’s name in vain. One major division:

1. Invoking God’s name to support a lie in court^†
2. Invoking God’s name to support a lie elsewhere
3. Invoking God’s name irreverently
4. Invoking God’s name trivially

In court is generally the worst because of the effect that it has; it is using God’s name in order to support a lie to wreak injustice. This is not to say similar things can’t be achieved out of court, but usually court has the greater effect and thus is worst.

Invoking God’s name irreverantly, I’m hesitant to give an example of, but to sketch it out, attributing some sort of vice to God, such as, say, lust, would qualify. Bad, but not so bad as is using God’s name to convince people of a lie.

The example you gave is of the forth kind. The thing is, properly speaking, a prayer, but one that is not, in fact, meant. It’s invoking God trivially, since it’s done without thought. (The idea behind it, which is only being invoked by repetition and without intent, is that the “it” is some injustice, and so God is being petitioned to right this injustice.)

The morality of portraying this in fiction will depend very greatly on exactly how it’s done. If it’s portrayed in such a way as to portray it as good, that is, as something for the reader to aspire to, this would be to tempt people into sin and is bad.

If it is portrayed neutrally, it is likely to be harmless or so close to harmless that there are almost certainly bigger pieces of wood to worry about removing from one’s eye before the delicate operation of getting this mote out.

If it is portrayed in a negative way, e.g. as a habit of the villain or a moment of weakness in a hero, then it could even be positive, since there is benefit to be gained from error being shown to be wrong in fiction.

(The same basic analysis will apply to recognizable modifications, such as “gol-durn” or “dagnabbit,” skewing more toward harmless than in the originals.)

† This would consist of things like “I swear to God that I saw this man stab the victim,” or, “as God is my witness, I saw this man stab the victim” or “I saw this man stab the victim and may God strike me down if I’m lying,” where the man invoking God to support the truth of what he was saying was lying. In so doing he is making God a party to his lie, or at least trying to.

There are exceptions to the rule that one should not quote ancient writers on economics, I’m sure, but I couldn’t tell you what they are. To be clear, I don’t mean that one shouldn’t read them—one should. I just mean that they shouldn’t be quoted. The problem is that the context is so different that so much explanation is required that any value in the succinct expression of the quotation is completely lost in all of the necessary explanation if you don’t want modern audiences to completely misunderstand it.

This necessary explanation comes from several places, including the modern context of communism distorting all modern economic conversations. There are many economic ideas which are not communism and are in fact antithetical to communism that can very easily sound like things that communists would say. This is, in part, because communists are dishonest and are constantly trying to trick people into communism, but it remains that anything which might sound like a thing a communist would say must be distinguished from communism unless you can rely on your anti-communist bona fides with your audience. Since there are few places in the modern world with context, one can rarely rely on this.

For all of the inconveniences of the evil of Communism, a much bigger cause of the need to provide context is the wildly different economic context of the modern world from the ancient or even the medieval world. (I talk about this at length in Usury and Lending at Interest.) The short version is that there is unimaginably more scope for investment and the creation of goods and services than there used to be. Ancient and medieval writers could neglect things like investing in a business to create wealth because, while it existed, it was such a small fraction of the economic activity which went on that it made sense to omit discussion of it from general discussions. Another major issue was the extremely limited quantity of non-human energy which was available. If work was to be done and it wasn’t a man doing it, for the most part it was a beast of burden. There were some minor exceptions but work was done primarily by labor. In modern times we have portable fuels (such as gasoline) which can directly power engines as well as electricity. Enormous amounts of work are done not by men but by machines. This work creates an enormous amount of wealth but also requires a great deal of careful management and maintenance. All of this produces an incredibly complex interdependence of many suppliers, craftsmen, designers, and service jobs. We have unbelievably efficient transportation networks that can move not only goods but even food over vast distances. All of these things are made more affordable and also more available by carefully planned storage of goods and foods at different places.

The principles of economics have not changed since the ancient world, which is why it is worth reading ancient and medieval writers about economic principles. However, the specifics have changed to an almost unimaginable degree. The sorts of quotes people like to pull out from ancient writers are always about the application of principles to specifics. You can draw useful lessons from reading these, but only when you are sufficiently aware of the context of the original to extract the principle being illustrated and translate it.

In economics, one of the central questions is: what should goods and services be priced at? The answer that generally works is “God knows but since He isn’t telling us by divine revelation, supply and demand will sort this out better than human beings can.” A competing theory is the “labour theory of value.” Like most bad theories, there are two versions of it: the one that people use, and the technical definition they fall back on when people point out how stupid the version they use is. Sometimes called a “Motte and Bailey fallacy,” this sort of thing comes up a lot whenever people want a conclusion that they can’t defend.

The popular version of the labor theory of value is that a thing’s value is the amount of labor that went into making it. This is ridiculously stupid (“if I pay you to dig a hole, I won’t pay you more because you used a spoon”), so when it is challenged, it tends to get redefined to Marx’s “socially necessary labor time.” In theory this is something along the lines the average amount of time workers currently take to produce something, or some such. It’s specifically defined in such a way as to be not rigorously computable. Its only real function is to give the labor theory of value sufficient wiggle room to get out of simple examples of how stupid it is.

One of the problems with stupid ideas is that, when people advance them, there isn’t anything to take seriously. This can become something of a defense for the person who advances it, since the only open question when an obviously false idea is put forward is, “why would a person ask me to believe something that he obviously doesn’t?” He can then retort with how you should consider the argument, not resort to ad-hominem fallacies. The basic problem is that much of the norms of civil discourse assume that all parties are acting in good faith. When someone does not act in good faith but lies and says that he is, the norms of civil discourse have to way of handling this.

That’s actually not true; it’s only true of the norms of civil discourse in the modern context. The context for which the norms of civil discourse originated relied very heavily upon a man’s reputation, which would be gravely harmed by propounding nonsense. In modern contexts, people do not have reputations and it is often considered bad form to consider them even if a person does have them. This is simply not a workable system; no civilization will survive where people have the unlimited right to waste the time of others.

The solution to this, by the way, is not any kind of censorship. It’s the restoration of taking into account reputation into discourse. I don’t mean ignoring an argument in favor of considering a reputation, but rather that the benefit of doubt is given on the basis of a person’s reputation. If a man makes a coherent argument from premises I accept, then I should consider his argument on its merits, because it stands only on the premises. The problem comes in when—as often happens—he makes it on the basis of premises I don’t know the truth value of, or invokes sub-arguments I’ve never heard of or considered. In these cases I cannot consider the argument on its own, but must do my own research, which may cost me significant time and effort. In that case, reputation is a very useful guide as to whether this time and effort would be well-spent.

When it comes to something like the labour theory of value, when someone will not present you with the arguments themselves but assures you that Marx laid this all out well if only you’ll go and read his books, the best thing to do is to decline to do this work and to assume he is just another in a long line of liars. You will not convince the Marxist this way, of course, but you weren’t going to do that anyway. You can’t argue a con-man into honesty.

“Oh, it’s so terrible that you just dismiss his arguments without considering them!” cries the pearl-clutching classical liberal.

No, that’s not what I did. I showed how the argument he actually put forward was demonstrably false. What I dismissed without consideration are the arguments which he did not put forward but assured me he could if only he cared to, but instead instructed me to go research. Is it possible he does in fact know of arguments he will not present, but I would find compelling if I spent the many hours involved in researching them for myself? Yes. Well, no, actually.

The just price of a good or service is determined both by the good that it can bring and also by the difficulty in obtaining it. A few minutes spent thinking about the topic makes that clear. If a good or service does no one any good, it doesn’t matter how hard it is to obtain, its just price is not high. If a thing brings great value but is very easy to obtain, its just price is low. If two things are easy to obtain and one brings more good than another, its just price is higher. This is complicated by the fact that a good or service may bring different amounts of good to different people, and thus the just price for each of them may be different. (E.g. Piano lessons are worthless to a person who does not want to learn piano, but may be valuable to one who does.)

Now, someone can assure me that there is some sufficiently complicated version of the labor theory of value which does not contradict this, but this can be of, at most, academic interest because this complicated version can’t do anything that a communist wants it to do. Is it possible that I’ve made some mistake and there really is a complicated version of the labour theory of value which legitimately points to a different system? Yes. It’s also possible that we’re all mistaken and the world really is flat, too. This kind of universal defeater can’t consistently be used without wasting everyone’s time and the selective use of a universal defeater is unprincipled. So for me to trust him when he tells me that he’s got something really good but can’t reveal it right now, I’m going to need some sort of reason to trust him like, for example, people that I trust telling me that he’s trustworthy.

That is, if someone I don’t know is going to ask me to trust him, he better have a reputation to back that up.

P.S. The main reason people propound the labour theory of value is in order to claim that factory owners don’t provide any value but steal it all from the people who work for them. Since owning equipment is taking on risk (as well as the obligation to keep it in good repair) that most people don’t want to take on, this is false. This makes any attempt to justify some sort of double-complicated ultra-secret labor theory of value twice as presumptively a waste of time. There can’t be such a theory, and even if there was, it couldn’t do what they want.

There’s no reason to venture into the jungle to find a mythical train that doesn’t go anywhere.

Having recently heard a review that included a plot synopsis of the 2023 film Barbie, it’s a bit striking how much the film is genuinely misandristic. The thing I want to talk about is how genuine mysandrists also hate women, just as genuine misogynists also hate men.

(For those who don’t know, misandry is the masculine form of misogyny; andros coming from the Greek meaning “male” and gymnos from the Greek meaning “female.” Anthropos refers to all human beings and was the equivalent of the English “man” until we dropped “were.” “Were” was pronounced “vehr”, similar to the Latin “vir” from which we get words like “virile”. You can still see “were” it in the world “werewolf.”)

It is no accident that people who hate one sex will hate the other; it’s actually unavoidable. A person can start out only hating one sex but then they come up against the fact that whichever sex they start out not hating is complementary with the other sex. At this point they’re faced with a choice; they can either give up their hatred (which is unlikely) or they can start hating the other sex too. As a practical matter they will always hate only a large subset of whichever sex it is they just discovered needs its complement. In general they will find some unhealthy sub-set of their preferred sex and call that the real or true version of that sex and hate all of the members who are healthy. You can see this is man-hating feminists who also hate mothers, or red-pill misogynists who call fathers who marry the mother of their children fools (usually with more colorful slang). In both cases they may even hate the member of their own sex who violates their hatred more than they hate the opposite sex.

People whose lives tend to be defined by hatred tend to be alike. It is, I think, a natural consequence that a person who closes himself off to much of what is human cannot have much variety. Anyway, you will tend to observe in both mysandrists and misogynists the same tendency toward a deification of what they hate within their demonization of it. Misandrists hold that males have throughout all of history brutally oppressed women; misogynists tend to hold some version of women using men and spitting them out like the husks of sunflower seeds. Both varieties of this remind me of the reaction one has to an antisemite explaining how the Jews secretly rule everything—really, if they’re this much smarter, stronger, cleverer, cooperative and just generally better at winning than everyone else, they deserve to be in charge.

You can see what I mean, by the way, in the language that’s often used around power. It’s talked about as if power is something someone hands out to people, and it’s complained that it’s been handed out unfairly. This is to entirely miss the point of what power is: power is the ability to compel people to do things against their will.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Life is not about power, but about love. God pours being into us to the point of overflowing and we, in immitation of Him, pour this abundance into each other. That’s why we’re here in the same time and space and able to influence each other: in order to love each other. (Oversimplifying, of course.) If a person is worried about power, he’s missed the point and is guaranteed to be unhappy. (Again, overismplifying.)

But, that said, power is a coherent concept, and can be discussed on its own terms. And on its own terms, power is never something that can be shared. Power is force. It is strength. Someone can’t share their strength with you. You either have your own strength or you don’t. To complain that an enemy soldier who is trying to shoot you isn’t sharing his power with you is nonsense. Shooting you is his power.

You can coherently claim that women are as powerful as men, but for most of history wanted different things and so used their power to achieve different (possibly complementary) aims. That may be true or false, but it at least doesn’t contradict itself. You cannot claim that women are as powerful as men but men have always and everywhere oppressed women. If women were oppressed, by definition they were not as powerful. Similarly, you cannot claim that men are smarter than women and also that women constantly use males for their resources without the males realizing it. If women are always fooling men, it means that men aren’t as smart. (“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me a hundred million times…)

In a competition, a good competitor can have a bad day. He can even have a few bad days. What a good competitor cannot do is always lose. If he always loses, he’s a loser.

There are exceptions, but a huge number of haters are in this weird position of claiming that their preferred group are losers who deserve to win by some merit other than the ability to win, while simultaneously claiming that they’re also not losers. Usually (when pressed) this is by claiming that they’d win if the other side would forfeit. Which is true enough, but also completely pointless. The stronger will only help the weaker out of love and if you’re appealing to love, you’re in a completely different framework where complaining about power makes no sense.

Of course, it is not a surprise that people who are using a false framework end up incoherent. If you start from a lie, you will inevitably contradict yourself. Still, it’s curious how it happens, and how often it happens the same way.

It is surprisingly hard to get children to believe that the ice cream rhyme is:

I speak softly.
You speak softly.
We all speak softly
For ice cream.

If you are ever inclined to believe the rumors that children are gullible or trusting, just try to get them to believe that this is the rhyme. You’ll soon discover that they can make donkeys seem tractable and compliant by comparison.

A type of evidence which came up, not infrequently, in murder mysteries from the golden age of detective fiction was the identification of typed notes to the typewriter they came from. Sometimes this was unimportant and often it was misleading, but the evidence was always strong and, moreover, was the sort of evidence which could link things that would have been hard, otherwise, to link. The advent of printers (which could not be identified in this way) was a real blow to detective stories.

That said, I do not know how uniquely identifiable typewriters actually were. It was stated in books from more than one author that each typewriter’s writing was as unique as a fingerprint, and though on one level it makes sense, it does also seem a bit implausible. On the other hand, manufacturing standards were not as strict and the output not as uniform in the early 1900s as they are today. It is plausible that there was a fair amount of variety in the exact shape of the letters, and with fifty two of them (including capitals) and ten numbers, there was a reasonable scope for individual variation.

That said, manufacturing standards weren’t abysmal, and there were an awful lot of typewriters sold. This may be why authors would sometimes give typewriters some more uniquely identifying characteristics, such as a character consistently out of alignment or another which was chipped. Chips, like scars, are fairly unique.

Be that as it may, the thing was certainly accepted in detective stories from the golden age and served their authors well. It could be very handy indeed to find out that a document could not have existed before a certain date because that’s when the typewriter which wrote it was purchased; it could be even more handy to find out that a threatening note was typed on the machine in a particular office to which—in theory—only a few people had access. It’s much harder to do that, these days.

Having said that, it does just occur to me that printers do occasionally leave unique imperfections in the documents that they print. It’s not common, but sometimes when they are failing they will start leaving streaks of various kinds that look the same on every page. I doubt I’d be likely to use this in any of my stories, though, since it’s far more obvious to the person writing the incriminating note than the minor variations used to identify typewriters. Still, it’s worth keeping in one’s back pocket.

This weekend I took part in my first Weightlifting competition. More commonly known as “Olympic Weightlifting,” it’s the sport which is comprised of the snatch and the clean-and-jerk. I made all six of my attempts, below are my best snatch, then clean-and-jerk:

The obvious question to ask is how did I do, and that’s a rather interesting question because there are so many different ways of taking it.

One question to ask is how I did relative to other people, but even that requires clarification. How did I do relative to other people in my weight class? I was in the 109kg weight class (it’s from 102-109), and I totaled more than 100kg behind the next 109 and less than half of what the top 109 lifted. That said, I’ve only been doing Olympic Weightlifting for about two months while they’ve almost certainly been doing it quite a bit longer, so that’s not a very interesting comparison.

I lifted more than the other people in my session (the sessions are broken up by entry total, the session I was in being the one for people with small totals), but that mostly means that I lifted more than some children and a 64 year old man who weighed about three fourths of what I did.

How did I do for someone my size and age who has only been Olympic Weightlifting for two months? I don’t know. I haven’t seen any statistics on weightlifters in the 109kg, 40-45 age group who have only been lifting for two months. And I’ve done powerlifting for years, so I started with a decent (but not amazing) strength base. Are there any statistics for males in my exact situation, or even one similar? Who knows? Who cares?

The problem with trying to answer this question is that when you really dig into it, it either doesn’t matter, or matters but is known to God alone. (That latter one being the moral question of did I apply myself appropriately, given the gifts I have and the relative importance of this task compared to other tasks I’ve been given.)

Some people deal with this issue by saying that in a weightlifting meet like this, when you’re not one of the people who (speaking realistically) might win the cash prize¹, you are just competing against yourself. In which case I established a baseline, which is all that I could have done. So, on this metric, I did as well as I could have.

That doesn’t seem quite right to me, though.

It does seem to me that those of us who were never going to win the cash prize were still competing, but not against other people or ourselves. The feeling I got at the meet was that we were all on the same team competing against the weights. When a lifter made a lift, he scored a victory against our common foe.

We didn’t merely cheer for each other and try to encourage each other; that might be mere good sportsmanship. When someone made an attempt, we knew what he was going through and it felt good when he made it, and bad when he missed. The weights he is struggling against are the same weights we struggled against, or would soon struggle against.

We were competing, but it was against the weights. Our opponents were not flesh and blood, but rubber and steel.

1. There actually was a cash prize in this meet, btw, computed on the basis of Sinclair Score, which is the weightlifting equivalent of the Wilks Coefficient.

Something that’s been on my mind for a while since my YouTube channel was found by a few atheist channels for low-intelligence atheists is how it’s possible for people to be as stupid as many of the commenters who showed up are. I don’t mean low-intelligence. Most of them aren’t very bright, but I’ve met plenty of people who aren’t very bright who aren’t stupid. What I mean by stupid is something like, aggressively unable to understand anything. And I don’t mean that they’re stupid because they’ve failed to see that I’m correct—that just makes them wrong—I mean that they don’t even have any idea what I or anyone else is saying. And they’re aggressive about how much they don’t understand it. And I don’t just mean on the subject of contention—I’ve run into idiots who don’t understand what you mean when you say that the sky is blue.

This perplexes me. How is it possible for a human being to get into this condition?

One possibility, of course, is that they’re just trolling me. On the internet where we only have text and not the clues of facial expression, etc.—which are much harder to fake consistently—it’s much easier to troll people. And where the interactions are one-offs, I’m pretty willing to believe that they’re just trolls. But I’ve also had consistent interactions with people over time where this seems less plausible.

In some cases it seems like they’ve imprinted on the Christopher Hitchens debates, where they want someone to try to prove something to them so they can feel smart saying variations of, “I don’t believe you.” It’s curious to watch how often these people don’t even know what they’re saying when they imitate the atheist-Christian debates that they’ve watched. For example, they’ve imprinted on the idea that the atheist position is one of pure negation (the unthinking man’s version of Anthony Flew’s The Presumption of Atheism), and so they always deny that they have made any claims, even right after they’ve made claims. They do this so often it is obvious that they don’t know what a claim is.

I think it’s related that they are also, generally, raging narcissists. They will intrude into discussions of the nature of reality to tell you all about themselves, then demand that you do things for them such as try to convince them of things even when you clearly state you don’t care what they believe.

It’s very strange because their use of language—which is intrinsically rational; it’s no accident that logos meant both “word” and “rationality” and “argument”—makes them seem rational even when everything they say is irrational.

One thing which comes to mind is that perhaps they’re some sort of weird birth defect that never received a human soul; not really human but merely some form of highly clever simian. While theoretically not impossible, this is a dangerous idea and probably should be considered last.

Another possibility is that they are human, but very damaged by anger. Anger is well known for making it difficult for people to think and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that these idiots always seem angry. This isn’t really a better possibility, though, because it does not leave open any greater possibility for helping them than if they’re merely a clever simian. People can choose to be less than human; that is one of the meanings of Hell. You can’t make a person think, if he wills to not think. So what can we do?

I suppose that this is one of those cases where there is nothing to do but be patient and pray. Perhaps, for the people who seem this way, helping them is given to someone else and not to me, and all I can do is pray to strengthen the person to whom helping them has been given.