The Material

I love this new novel by Camille Bordas:

* How “rape” used to mean someone being dragged into an alley by a stranger, gagged, beaten up, savagely penetrated, and left for dead behind a trash can. How “rape” had now come to encompass any sexual act performed without obtaining verbal consent. He was okay with that, in principle: words taking on larger meanings, larger responsibilities over time — language was a living entity, it adapted to its speakers. But then it seemed to him that when that happened, other words had to step in to fill the vacuum left by the bigger word’s promotion. He felt there should be a word for what “rape” used to mean. He wondered how women who had been left for dead in alleys felt about it. The new meaning.

* “I still haven’t fucked anyone in the city of Chicago,” Olivia said. “Chicago virgin.”

* “Because our stepfather molested Sally when she was a kid and my mother took a little too long to believe her.”

* “And all this stuff about comedians killing themselves in such high numbers because they’re so sensi tive, because they feel everything so strongly …last I checked, dentists were still killing themselves more than us, and construction workers had the leading suicide rate by profession. Does that mean they’re the better artists? That they should be the ones onstage instead of us?”
“Seriously. What did your stepfather do?”
“Who cares what he does?”
“He still works?”
“Yes. He’s a forester.”
“He molested a child and he’s still allowed around people?”
“It’s not the kind of forest where people go,” Olivia said. “And Sally never pressed charges.”

“That bitch has been getting all the attention,” she said.
“Exactly!” Olivia said. “I mean, right? No one ever asks about me. We’re identical, but my stepfather molested her and not me. How do you think that makes me feel?”

* “Why would I come after you?”
“Because I was mean to you in class the other day.”
Dorothy wasn’t supposed to say things like that. Never question your teaching methods in front of your students was the rule. If you were not proud of how a class had gone, you either forgot about it or found a way to tell yourself the kids had learned something from the fiasco. In that way, teaching was different from performing. The audience shared part of the responsibility.

* “after the constant stress of your twenties, the self – doubt of your thirties, and the anguish of your forties, it’s nice to relax a little bit. It’s like biking down a hill now.”

* his job as a comedian was to grab onto the most horrible of these thoughts and shape them right in order to serve them back to those who’d run away from them. He was in the business of finishing people’s horrible thoughts so they didn’t have to go there themselves.

Posted in Comedy | Comments Off on The Material

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

The New York Times published Nov. 6, 2023:

Ever Had a Horrible Boss? ‘The Fund’ Is the Perfect Rage-Read.

In Rob Copeland’s “The Fund,” we learn about the notorious hedge-fund giant Ray Dalio — and the manipulative professional hellscape over which he has presided.

Ray Dalio is the titan behind the world’s biggest hedge fund — a deep thinker and confidant of some of Earth’s most powerful people. Now 74, he has worked diligently over the past few years to publicize his “Principles,” perhaps in the hope that his name will live on.

In “The Fund,” Rob Copeland has done him the favor of assuring that it will — attached to one of the pettiest bullies you’ll ever meet on the page. This is a terrific dagger of a book packed with cringey detail, just long enough to efficiently disembowel its subject.

Most of “The Fund” doesn’t feel like a book about finance. Instead, it is about how a man of surpassing mediocrity used money to control and humiliate, and how much people abased themselves for it. Which, come to think of it, makes it one of the better books ever written about Wall Street.

Rob Copeland writes in this great 2023 book:

* Amid Pure Alpha’s extraordinary growth, the Bridgewater founder continued to give frequent media interviews in which he identified imminent market crashes that rarely happened. Dalio predicted a bear market coming in 1994; a “blow – off phase of the U.S. stock market” in 1995; “bombs away” for the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1997; and a “deflationary implosion” for 1998. Each time, he explained away the misfires as a learning opportunity…

* Paul McDowell was one of the carriers. Roughly once a month, he would stand in front of a group of new hires and deliver the same speech: “Newton had his Principia . Ray has his Principles. The only difference is that Newton’s were limited to physics.”
The rules were presented to the newbies as a secret menu filled with acquired tastes that would not only seem more palatable over time, but also improve their lives inside and outside work. This was a winning pitch — being let in on a secret was alluring.
The doors blew open in May 2010, when the finance blog Dealbreaker got its hands on The Principles. The blog introduced the document, which it called “The Tao of Dalio,” with a healthy hit of snark (“WTF is this shit?” read the introduction). The blog quoted an anonymous employee who said, “The Principles are pretty cultish, as is the culture of the whole company. At one of our town halls [Dalio] handed out personally signed copies of them to everyone.”

* The Bridgewater founder’s persistent pessimism became a source of ribbing among the Bridgewater ranks. Parag Shah, the firm’s head of marketing, opened one meeting with a too – close – for – comfort joke. “He’s called fifteen of the last zero recessions,” Shah said of his boss.

* The headline for the profile on the cover asked, “Is Ray Dalio the Steve Jobs of Investing?,” a question that McDaniel intentionally left unanswered in the piece.
Over time, the question mark faded. The next publication to compare the two men was Wired, which in an article about Apple acolytes included Dalio as an example and said he “has been called ‘the Steve Jobs of investing,’” a reference to McDaniel’s piece. That was enough to get Dalio’s official biography on Bridgewater’s website changed to read, “Ray has been called the ‘Steve Jobs of Investing’ by aiCIO Magazine and Wired Magazine.”

* Dalio began to talk about Jobs ad nauseum, and some at Bridgewater concluded that he was less interested in Jobs’s accomplishments at Apple than in his outsize public persona. In Jobs, Dalio could see a model for his own hero’s journey. Both men were, charitably, viewed as jerks. Both had multiple legs to their careers. The difference was that while Jobs in his second stint had built Apple into a universally envied model for the technology world, Bridgewater was mostly known just in finance.
Dalio concluded that the difference wasn’t in their work, but in their messaging. The solution was to have Walter Isaacson write Dalio’s biography. Those around him didn’t pursue it the first few times it came up, but Dalio persisted in asking if it was possible, so Bridgewater staffers put out the request. Word came back from Isaacson’s camp: it was a pass.

* [Dalio] gestured to Isaacson and asked, Wouldn’t you agree that both Steve Jobs and I are shapers?
Isaacson’s eyes darted side to side and he let out a nervous cough. He might have been a corporate guest, but he was a journalist, too, and he had demanded — and received — complete independence from Jobs in writing the book. Isaacson certainly wasn’t about to aggrandize Dalio just for picking up his guest’s travel costs. Isaacson dodged the question a few times, then launched into his pat talk.
Once it became clear that Isaacson wasn’t interested in shapers, Dalio slumped in his chair and was more subdued for the remainder of the talk.

* Dalio soaked up the spotlight, on all platforms. Some weeks it seemed as if anyone who asked for an interview got one.

* Ferrucci, one of the world’s foremost experts in artificial intelligence, told colleagues he couldn’t figure out where to even begin to apply hard science to Dalio and McDowell’s creation, the Book of the Future. It was a mess of pseudoscience, wrapped in a patina of philosophy. Before Ferrucci’s arrival, it seemed there had been no double – blind tests, no anonymous surveys, and, no, not even a simple regression to show that the adoption of The Principles’ methods led to better results. (“I don’t believe in regressions,” Dalio told one employee who suggested it.) Even a cursory look at the data showed the opposite. The more time that folks at Bridgewater spent on The Principles — and its associated arguments, dottings, trials, and public hangings — the worse the company’s investments seemed to perform.

* The inventor of IBM Watson, who had trained a computer to answer trivia on any topic of the world, couldn’t make heads or tails of Dalio’s thought process. Ferrucci’s team could produce no obvious, predictive pattern to when the Bridgewater founder would bring up one Principle or another. The employee ratings, or dots, had equally little evidence of logic. Ferrucci, the AI expert, shared with colleagues a gradual awakening: Dalio’s system contained more artifice than intelligence.

* He invited the British historian Niall Ferguson to a sit – down in Westport. Ferguson was a safe bet to understand the importance of Dalio’s discovery. He was a Harvard professor (many of his former students worked for Bridgewater), prolific author, and like the Bridgewater founder a bit of an iconoclast. One of Ferguson’s animating philosophies was that Western civilization was more fragile than it appeared. Ferguson was also on retainer as a paid consultant for a number of financial firms, and when he got the invitation from Bridgewater, his first thought was that, if he played his cards right, he might have a chance to make some spare change.
Ferguson’s hope burst when he read the more than one – hundred – page document sent over from Bridgewater laying out the economic machine. He noticed almost immediately what he considered to be fundamental flaws. The paper ignored that one nation’s culture might lead to better or worse economic outcomes. It also discounted what Ferguson called “the caprices of decision makers,” including the role of human agency and ingenuity that could, for instance, lead one country to declare war on another, or to choose peace.
If this work had been done by one of his graduate students, Ferguson would have flunked the person. He couldn’t believe that he was reading, as he put it, the “holy texts” of Bridgewater.
Never one to shy from a good argument, Ferguson traveled down to Bridgewater… “There isn’t a way of modeling the historical process, and there’s definitely not a way of modeling the choices that highly indebted countries make.”
Ferguson stole a glance over at his host. Dalio was still sitting, but Ferguson and others present could tell he was on his way to steaming, shaking his head slowly, legs beginning to tap with antsiness. The professor pressed on. While it was possible to cherry – pick historical examples of nations that had collapsed under their debts, plenty of countries had grown fast enough to render the debts moot. Also: wars, coups, cultural changes, competing legal systems, effective and ineffective political leaders, and all sorts of other factors, including human consciousness, couldn’t ever be quantitatively measured, let alone cleanly placed into a formula.
“There is no cycle of history. It’s a fantasy,” Ferguson said.
Dalio jumped to his feet, shaking. The professor was claiming the secret of Dalio’s success couldn’t possibly be so.
“Where’s your fucking model, Niall?” he bellowed at his guest.
The room stood still. There was no model — that was the whole point. The world, and its people, were endlessly complicated. There was no cracking that nut. Before Ferguson could get that full thought out, Dalio repeated himself.
“Where’s your fucking model?”
It was about this time that Ferguson realized he wasn’t going to be hired at Bridgewater anytime soon. Employing a stiff British clapback, Ferguson turned to Dalio with a sniff and chose his words carefully. “I always feel that when someone uses the f – word, they’re losing the argument.”
The professor wrapped up his talk and headed for the door. Not long after he got home, he heard from one of his former students who had been among the rows of Bridgewater employees in the room. After Ferguson departed — and with everyone still present — Dalio had called for an instant poll. Who won the debate: the Bridgewater founder or the guest?
Dalio won, of course.

* Dalio got what he wanted. He was not only the face of the firm, but as had been amply demonstrated over the preceding years — no matter how it was spun publicly — he had veto – proof control over management decisions.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in Bridgewater and Dalio’s budding fascination with international strongmen. Since the late 1980s, Dalio had been convinced that the United States was in an inextricable fall, not merely economically, but culturally. He saw U.S. politics as on a slow descent into unproductive unproductive squabbling, a journey that could end in nothing less than another civil war. At times, he called himself “an economic doctor,” with the prescription to fix all that.
In place of U.S. hegemony, Dalio looked for a better blueprint abroad. He seemed particularly smitten with societies ruled by powerful autocrats. Thanks to Bridgewater’s long history of managing money for Singapore’s government – run funds, Dalio became friends with Lee Kuan Yew. The elder man, who served as Singapore’s prime minister for a staggering thirty – one years, was a controversial figure whose long tenure achieved stability for his nation at the cost of freedom. Lee governed through what was essentially one – party rule, restricting freedom of speech and dismissing the value of democracy…
Over dinner at Dalio’s New York apartment shortly before the Singaporean leader’s death, the men discussed the best models among world leaders. Lee gave an unlikely answer in a posh Manhattan setting: Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, Lee said, had stabilized Russia after the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. To Dalio, the analogy would have been seamless. He, too, had stabilized Bridgewater after a tumultuous stretch.
Dalio turned his attention, bordering on obsessive, to meeting Putin.

* DALIO HAD been fascinated with China for decades, long before the growing nation became a mainstream destination for Western businesspeople. In China, he found the perfect confluence of his interests. The culture of the collectivist society demanded its citizens defer their short – term interests and gratifications for those of the state and its rules, for the promise of a long – term reward.

* My publication, when I joined, was in a tussle with Dalio over an investigative cover story that quoted a Bridgewater former executive saying, “My fundamental belief is that Bridgewater is a cult. It’s isolated, it has a charismatic leader, and it has its own dogma.”

Posted in Guru, Wall Street | Comments Off on The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

Nobody Runs Society

Philosopher Michael Huemer writes Sep. 7:

* While Joe Biden was still running for President, people were saying that he was a puppet, controlled by some other forces. A popular theory on the right is that this was “Obama’s third term”.

The right thinks that illegal immigration is part of the Democrats’ plan to “replace” American voters with more reliable Democratic voters.

All of this is a kind of cognitive disorder, the brain going haywire and losing touch with reality.

* A terrorist group selects the few extremists out of the millions of people in a society. People like that are not all over the place. So it’s highly unlikely that if you elect a leader, that leader will just happen to turn out to have secretly been one of these extremists.

Anyway, extreme ideologies that support this kind of violence typically support violence against the outgroup, not against one’s own group. To have a leader planning a “false flag” terror attack would basically require the leader to be something close to a psychopath. There aren’t that many psychopaths, and it’s highly unlikely that the President would just happen to be one.

* Carrying out a conspiracy like this requires working with many other people. It would be hard to find enough sociopaths to work with you, without accidentally revealing your plan to any non-sociopaths.

* …Joe Biden would disregard all of us and do some crazy thing that none of his advisors wanted, like running for a second term, or agreeing to debate Trump.

I can predict this even though I don’t know Joe Biden, because I have met people. This is what most people are like. They don’t just do what you tell them.

…Being senile doesn’t necessarily mean you’re pliable. You can be senile and just as ornery as ever, or even more so.

* One way we know this is that there are big incentives for people to make accurate predictions of major social events (usually, there is a way to make money off it if you can anticipate a major change before other people do), but no one seems to be able to predict much.

Michael Huemer writes June 15, 2024:

If a group of criminals is holed up in a building with some hostages, the police may not just blow up the building. They have to attempt to secure the safe release of the hostages. But if a group of enemy soldiers is hiding in a building with some civilians, the military may blow up the building. Collateral damage is allowed…

If you view the Israel-Hamas war in the light of other wars, it is not particularly shocking or unusual. (Or rather, Israel’s conduct is not unusual; it is highly unusual, though, that one side should have so little concern for its own civilians as to deliberately put them in harm’s way.) It’s just normal war fighting.

…Perhaps the opponents of Israel’s war are viewing the terrorists (Hamas) like a criminal gang and applying the norms for policing to Israel’s response. Viewed through that lens, Israel’s response looks outrageous–roughly like if the police responded to a robbery in progress by blowing up the building.

…War is usually conducted against another society, whereas criminals are part of one’s own society. (Exception: civil wars.) Perhaps we want to show greater moral consideration to fellow citizens (even evil ones) than to foreign enemies.

…Enemy armies are usually a much greater threat than private criminals, even criminal organizations. This matters because, perhaps, when the threat is greater, you are justified in taking more extreme measures.

* Ordinary criminals usually do not seek out a fight with the government.

…Israel should treat [Hamas] more like a foreign military, since (a) they belong to another society, (b) they are a military threat comparable to a small army (and much greater than any normal criminal group), and (c) they actively seek conflict with Israel.

…the reason that so many civilians are being killed in Gaza is that the government of Gaza (Hamas) does not want to protect its civilians. They probably actually want more of their civilians to be killed, because (a) they think those people are going to heaven, and (b) it makes Israel look bad to the rest of the world. So Hamas deliberately puts military targets in schools, hospitals, etc., so that more Palestinian children will die (which shows that Hamas is more evil than the Nazis; even the Nazis would not have used their own children as shields).

June 1, 2024, Michael Huemer writes:

Polls indicate that 70% of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Question for Republicans: Why do you think Trump let that happen?

He didn’t do anything about the election fraud because there wasn’t anything to do, because he had made the whole thing up. He didn’t order any investigations because he didn’t have any information to investigate; he didn’t have anyone arrested because there was no one to arrest, because nothing happened.

Btw, you can equally well wonder why the Republicans in general haven’t tried to have the election fraud that so many of them claim to believe in investigated. Do they not care about it? Are they completely incompetent? Or is no one trying because everyone knows there is nothing to investigate?

It’s also funny how Republicans in general have responded to the alleged problem. Again, 70% of them allegedly believe the election was stolen. This includes many ordinary voters, public officials, and pundits on Fox News and such. Yet no one is trying to find out why Trump didn’t do anything to stop the fraud before it happened. In fact, they have bizarrely little curiosity about the whole thing.

According to Trump, the greatest crime in election history happened on his watch, and he knew about it 6 months in advance. When did he first learn of the conspiracy to steal the election? How did he find out about it? What secret information did he have? Who was involved? And how could he let this happen?

I’d estimate that 0% of Republican elites believe the “stolen election” story. Every one perfectly well knows that it’s just a desperate lie Trump made up to avoid admitting that he lost, something that you tell the gullible masses so they don’t blame you for your failure.

Even Republican voters don’t really believe it—they don’t believe it in the way that, say, they believe their son’s last birthday happened. Their “belief” in the stolen election story consists of their enjoying the way it feels when they say it. This is the “belief” that you present to the world as your position and that you tell yourself you believe, as opposed to the thing that you actually know happened.

That is why they aren’t blaming Trump, wondering why he let it happen, or wondering what the point would be of voting for him again. This also makes sense given that they have no evidential reason for believing the story—as opposed to instrumental reasons for “believing” it—and given the fact that, frankly, it’s just about the most obvious lie, from the most obvious conman we’ve ever seen in public life. It could not be more obvious if he had a big Pinocchio nose growing out of his face every time he talked.

Michael Huemer writes March 2, 2024:

What do far leftists like about Islam? They like that Islamic extremists hate America. That’s what really matters to them. It’s more important to hate America than to recognize democracy, or free speech, or to treat women or gays like human beings.

The far left’s hatred of America is not explained by America’s mistreatment of this or that group, else they would hate the countries that treat those groups far worse. Rather, hatred of America is a fundamental ideological axiom. Their complaints about America’s alleged oppression of minorities are not driven by concern for those minorities; they are just a tool for attacking America. That is why woke activism doesn’t focus on practical steps to improve the lives of minorities (e.g., programs to reduce out-of-wedlock births, increase graduation rates, or reduce gang violence); it focuses almost entirely on convincing everyone that America is evil.

Posted in America, Hamas, Islam, Israel | Comments Off on Nobody Runs Society

Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper & The Alt Right Addiction To Contrarianism (9-4-24)

01:00 Tucker Promotes Holocaust Revisionism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3E5ZSUVmKg
02:00 Tucker promotes Hitler apologist, https://outsidethebeltway.com/tucker-carlson-promotes-hitler-apologist/
19:00 John Podhoretz vs Tucker Carlson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmA4Q_z7rsc
29:40 John Podhoretz apologizes for launching Tucker’s career at the Weekly Standard
32:00 Tabletmag: I Was Raped Because I Am Jewish, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rape-jews-antisemitism
34:30 Kip joins to talk about the sexual dating market
43:00 Elliott Blatt’s charisma
53:00 Opioid epidemic, https://www.shadac.org/opioid-epidemic-united-states
1:11:00 Ben Smith on Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and the alternative media, https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/09/01/2024/six-ideas-for-fall
1:16:20 After Hostages Executed, Left Blames Bibi | Caroline Glick In-Focus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jhMUcSjEVI

Posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, America, Tucker Carlson | Comments Off on Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper & The Alt Right Addiction To Contrarianism (9-4-24)

Why Does Liberalism Fuel Mental Illness? (9-3-24)

01:00 Will the 60 day Harris honeymoon begin to fade: Byron York on the state of the 2024 election, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnCe8_Tvh_s
06:00 Bret Baier: The Harris campaign – Looking toward to the 9/10 debate and will there be a second one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MVddDebrgs
12:00 Seriously Entertaining: Musa al-Gharbi on “Off the Record”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-uS14D1Vxw
13:00 Happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
19:00 Elite Gatekeepers with Musa al-Gharbi, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJzYAUfGeIs
30:00 This author (Abigail Shrier) thinks she debunked the entire field of therapy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wagZLXs4vs
40:00 Stop obsessing over our children’s happiness | Abigail Shrier | The Reason Interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwfIKOrWXCk
41:00 Bad Therapy review, https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/bad-therapy-review-fifties-dad-mental
54:00 Marcia Angell: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/
1:07:00 Kip joins
1:08:00 News: Turkey wants to join the BRICS bloc of developing economies, official confirms, https://apnews.com/article/turkey-brics-developing-economies-erdogan-foreign-policy-15a2428e73e804732085f78b9c5c3c50
1:09:20 I don’t believe in widespread voter fraud corrupting the 2020 election
1:24:00 This is why you’re not popular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzNesJpthY
1:26:00 Elliott Blatt joins to share that he crushed it today!

Posted in Kamala Harris | Comments Off on Why Does Liberalism Fuel Mental Illness? (9-3-24)