On the name Derponomicon: it is a combination of derp and the Greek words nomos (law) and ikona (image). Thus, the name may be translated as “an image of the laws of the dumb.”
A few years ago, I compiled The Derponomicon from a series of dialogs with a prog who was by far the most infuriatingly stupid person I have ever known. His responses are below. I did not correct his typos.
In this excerpt, his topic was the following quote from Augustine of Hippo:
“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.’”
As far at the Augustine of Hippo quote, it is most certainly in reference to a mideval kingdom system of government. Equating a mideval kingdoms system of government to the modern day US government is once again, like comparing apples and hippos. In modern day US, tax dollars pay for roads, bridges, air traffic safety, clean air, clean water, inspected food, the military, satellites, the infrastructure of plumbing/electric/utilities/etc. we all enjoy, and about a zillion other things. In a kingdom, the people were lucky to get a water source. You literally cannot exist in modern society without taking advantage of what society (I.e. The government) provides. When you step on a sidewalk, or use electricity, or drive on a street in a car that isn’t exploding, etc. You are taking advantage of what the government provided to you.
Ignorance of history, a conflation of society with govt, and an argument from ignorance.
A response to my favorite Sowell quote:
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
-Thomas Sowell
On the Thomas Sowell quote, As I have mentioned before, he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd, which really says a lot about who he speaks to. Of course the lesson of economics is a finite amount of everything, otherwise no one would need to buy it. But that general statement isn’t new casserole true. The first lesson of economics is laziness. People will pay for anything that requires the least amount of work. When people are given the choice between growing their own food for free in their backyard, or buying food at a restaurant or a prepared meal, what will most people choose? When given the choice between paying for produce and meat and making food yourself, and ordering a pizza, what will most people choose? MOST aspects of our economy are built on taking advantage of people’s laziness. People are willing to pay for any product or service that will make their life easier. So generally speaking there is pretty much an unlimited amount of goods and services that Americans are willing to buy if they can afford it, from a service that cleans up dog shit in your yard, to custom hats for your baby. So in America that rule doesn’t really apply. What does however have a finite amount to go around is wealth, and the more wealth we hand up to the top percentages, who know how to manipulate and hide it, in the most literal way takes from everyone else. There are only so many slices of the pie to go around, and when the richest people get the most pieces of pie, that leaves nothing but a slice and some crumbs for everyone else to fight over.
More baseless smears, more deflection, more yammering that the economy is a zero-sum game. The denial of scarcity is the cherry on top.
Comments
82 responses to “The Derponomicon: Part 2”
So I’m guessing he has no familiarity or understanding of logical fallacies.
Which is weird, because it seems to be his super power
Fallacy Man! He rushes to destroy logic in the mighty Fallacymobile! It runs on distilled derp!
Two brilliant examples of completely missing the point.
The blind worship of government in the first response juxtaposed with the disdain for individuals (the first lesson of economics is “laziness”, like all these goods and services lazy Americans love to purchase just spring fully-formed from the earth) is also rich.
The last response is most likely a big fat case of projection.
Without comment, I’m going to cut and paste a few reactions to the Frederic Bastiat quote discussed here earlier:
A few other quotes on the Trump budget
(from a University physicist/professor)
And my favorite one, which I think I’ve c+p’d here before but it’s so good I have to do it again
If you don’t like Christianity, don’t have one!
My favorite is in the first comment on the Bastiat quote. Basically admitting that government education for poor and inner city kids sucks, but.. it’s better than nothing? I didn’t ask for follow-up. Probably should have.
“My favorite is in the first comment on the Bastiat quote. Basically admitting that government education for poor and inner city kids sucks, but.. it’s better than nothing?”
Actually in prog world it is the only alternative, because it isn’t about education as much as indoctrination…
Yet they see no problem with government-funded science resulting in only science likely to reach government-friendly conclusions at the cost of precision, quality, and impartiality gets funded.
The sentence you quoted there makes no sense whatsoever. Who do they think will supply the funding and for what purpose?
Also, colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
I get that he was trying to say corporations will only pay for studies that advance their preferred agenda. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that government funding works the same way, with the further handicap that government doesn’t have to compete for money in the market.
I honestly think this may be a bit of proggie projection as well since they seem to wrap themselves in echo chambers all the time so they would assume that the evul corporashuns so as well. The difference is that the corps are trying to make money. I am sure I could pay a team of scientist to tell me that consumers would buy green turds at $50 bucks a pop but if I make my business decisions on bad data I am going to get soaked. If I am trying to run a successful business I want to know what people actually want to buy, not a bunch of yes men reinforcing my bad decisions. It’s shit like the latter that got us ‘OMG HILLARY BY 30 POINTS!’ the week before the election. The difference is that government by definition cannot fail so they don’t care if they’re right they only care if they look right, which means they would benefit the most from promoting bad data in their favor.
Actually, you can buy [green turds](http://lavantacoffee.com/products/green-kopi-luwak-arabica) for $119/lb.
You know what’s sad? I knew about this and obviously my subconscious set me up for this very joke.
Government is magic. When you receive your first paycheck’s worth of tax revenue it’s almost like the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist; upon deposit or cashing, those funds transform into divine selflessness and wisdom, which is why every business that tries to replicate local DMVs or Offices of Planning and Zoning fails miserably no matter how similar they appear.
“corporations will only pay for studies that advance their preferred agenda.”
Guess what? A corporations agenda is actually everyone’s agenda. That corporation has to provide goods and services to people who want them at a price people will pay for them.
“DeVos wants to gut public schools in favor of charter schools, many of which will teach evangelical Christianity as fact.”
Only evangelical christians can operate private schools. This is known.
Montessori first taught learning disabled (e.g. retarded) children at her school(s). But private schools won’t teach special needs students, dontchaknow.
Their opposition to charter schools is an admission that govt. schools are inferior, that given a choice people will choose otherwise, so they should be forced to have the inferior product either by force or by removal of alternate choices.
God, I fucking hate the evil progs.
Not only that, but it lays bare their complete disregard for poor and minority students whose families can’t move away from the schools they have just admitted are shitty.
“Christo-Fascist takeover of America”
Anyone want to break it to these people that the fascists in Italy and Germany were atheists or pagans at best (Franco, not withstanding)?
There is some debate as to whether or not Hitler considered himself a christian, but in general modern dictators/tyrants generally come in 2 forms: Muslim and atheist. There are some that pay lip to service to the religion of their power base, but the real christian dictators are few and far between.
I believe it may be a waste of time trying to reason with someone who uses the term ‘Christ-fascist’ in this context unironically.
that however does not prevent Christians from leveraging fascist ideas and ideology.
That said, while there absolute are Christian Fascists running around in America today they are few in number and generally politically powerless. They have not taken over ANYTHING except the fever dreams of progressives
Derp! That’s a whole lot of misdirection.
“he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd”
Translation: “everyone I don’t like is a white supremacist”
You know who else is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd…
JonTron?
Vanilla ice cream enthusiasts?
Anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin?
Bleach makers?
Harry Reid?
Antifas?
Mayonnaise and Wonder Bread sandwiches?
Dairy farmers?
he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd
Nothing says white supremacy like submitting to the teachings of a black man. The KKK must be kicking themselves to know that they went about their devilry all wrong.
*observes fellow Klan member reading Sowell*
Dude… you’re white supremacying all wrong.
OT and not in the links: I made a thin crust pizza this morning for breakfast. Italian sausage, hard salami, pepperoni, red onion, bell pepper, jalepeno pepper, parmesan, gruyere, fontina, romano, mozzarella, asiago, and provolone cheeses with black olive on top. It is thin crust but the generous amount of ingredients made the pizza about 2 inches thick.
Christ, it’s good.
Yeah, the best pizza is one in which you can barely taste the crust.
No sauce?
Oh, yes. Sauce. I forgot to sprinkle basil over it, dammit.
Olives ruin a pizza.
That is all.
So there’s basically an infinite amount of goods and services, but a finite amount of wealth with which to buy those goods and services. If that isn’t weapons-grade derp, I don’t know what is.
That’s why stores have sales, duh.
That is based on complete ignorance of what money and wealth are. Weapons grade indeed.
A lot of people make the mistake of conflating money with wealth. While a man with a lot of money may be wealthy, money is merely a medium of exchange, and worthless on its own. True wealth is found in the possession of or ability to acquire useable goods and services.
I love the government pays for stuff argument. A lot of robbers in history would give part of the booty to the poor to build good will. The mafia in italy and ISIS do this. Fascists in 30s romania and the golden dawn in greece gave food, helped repair houses etc. Power 101 you have to give stuff to your folowers
+1 Robin Hood, Unrepentant Monarchist.
Pablo Escobar.
The original Latin Kings
I read that second comment literally 8 times as I tried to understand it.
“I want free stuff”
The concept that I don’t farm because of laziness is insane.
It is like he hasn’t heard of the idea of division of labor.
Based on family history, 100 years ago I would have been a farmer. My Dad got us out of the business 60 years ago. Or, more accurately, my Grandfather kicked my Dad out of the business. My GF was a pretty smart guy for only an 8th grade education.
Based on family history, 200 years ago, I would have been Australian.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet then.
Nah, no Chinese blood in my family at all.
A criminal?
That book “3 felonies a day”? They don’t HAVE to be accidental.
In for a penny, in for a pound, eh wot?
Well, that lead on the church roof – they called it stealing, but he quoted the bible “God helps those who help themselves”.
Didn’t matter when he went up in front of the beak.
It’s funny. Last time I went to Sydney, it cost me about $800. He got there for 6lb of lead.
I read GF as girlfriend and did a spit take.
I did too and had to read the sentence a few more times for it to click.
Your first quote reminds me of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbNFJK1ZpVg
and then we read the derp.
Ah, the finite pie myth. This was depressing.
Does this chap realize taxes didn’t pay for Rome’s engineering accomplishments (i.e. road, aqueducts etc.)? Romans had, at its zenith, little or no taxes.
How did they pay for it? Trade and commerce took care of it. And of course spoils from war.
So much for ‘were smerter dan dose stoopid ainchents’ angle.
‘Rome at its zenith.’
And the economy isn’t one fricken pie. It’s many, many much pies. They act as if once eaten that’s it. None are made anymore. This is where we come to WEALTH CREATION.
And the first lesson of economics isn’t ‘laziness’ you clown. Basically, economics is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Scarcity is the one factor that impacts the laws of supply and demand and explains why it’s referenced all the time.
Laziness. What an idiot.
“When people are given the choice between growing their own food for free in their backyard, or buying food at a restaurant or a prepared meal, what will most people choose? ”
Mr, progtard here implies that it’s due to laziness that I don’t grown my own food. (which I actually do some) It’s not because I’m lazy, it’s because I spend the time that it would take to grow my own supply doing things that I’m more efficient at in order to make money that I can then buy food and other things with. This dip shit would have us all be sustenance farmers. I have no interest in living a life where the amount of rain we have spring and how late the last frost happens determines how many of my family starve in the ensuing winter. I also like that there are other humans around me who specialize in tasks I’m not proficient in, like being a tool maker, or an automobile manufacturer, or maybe a doctor so I can trade some of my money for antibiotics so I don’t die from an infected cut when in 30 years old.
“When people are given the choice between performing open heart surgery on themselves in their backyard for free, or paying a team of surgeons in a hospital to do it, what will most people choose?”
he describes market choices as an anti choice argument. I think. It’s pretty dumb.
+1 David Friedman
I like that a lot. I’ll have to steal that sometime.
Here’s a citation that uses the whole quote. Originally Friedman, Via Landsberg, via Perry:
Iowa Car Crop
That’s a great quote from Augustine. And it seems like your friend is unaware of history, as governments have always paid for stuff for the people; the fact that you quoted a Roman to him just makes the ignorance more stark, as the Romans are famous for public roads, utilities (aqueducts), and welfare (panem et circensis). Your friend gets a little better in dealing with the second quote by at least acknowledging that wealth is limited, but with the pie analogy he seems to buy into the common fallacy that wealth is in stasis, that there’s a set amount to be divided up and that it can be divided up without adverse effects. A lot of errors people make in economic thinking seems to stem from the failure to recognize that wealth is both limited (Sowell’s scarcity) and dynamic (it can be both created and destroyed).
“On the Thomas Sowell quote, As I have mentioned before, he is a favorite of the white supremacist crowd”
Naturally. Why go on?
My prog connections usually say ‘Sowell is an idiot so I don’t need to entertain his thoughts’. And it ends there.
Pinketty on the other hand….
Page 1 of the prog guide to derping is to handwave away any quote or data you can’t argue against and pretend like you already destroyed it or that’s it so retarded it’s obviously not worth debate.
I managed to get a prog friend of mine to take a Sowell book to read, Vision of the Anointed, i think it was.
Well, He said he’d read it, in fact he brought it back 2 days later,
“yeah, I can’t read that” He says,
“Why not?” I says,
“Don’t agree with it.” Says he.
“????” Says I
He didn’t read it, but knows he won’t agree so he can’t read it.
‘I can’t! I won’t!’
Estelle Costanza.
This guy doesn’t realize that time and effort are finite resources as well.
Oh, Bartholomew, I feel like St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion by Ambrose of Milan
Let me guess this is a guy who excelled at high school. Top of the class. This is what public education was built for.
The derp talks about growing one’s own food in the back yard “for free.” That isn’t “free.” Growing food is not an effortless activity, and if everyone were to do it without specializing, then we’d have a mass die-off because we simply don’t have the food capacity to sustain our population without modern agricultural techniques. The guy sounds like he thinks “organic” food grown by everyone is a feasible end-game for humanity. And once someone starts specializing and becoming better at growing food to help keep his city’s population numbers up, he’ll start using fertilizer (which he doesn’t have the time to make himself, so he must trade for it), and water management systems (someone else will build sprinkler systems), and tractors, and labor, and all the rest and now we’re back to factory farming. The exchange of goods and services by people who specialize in producing them.
One could waste a lot of back-breaking effort tilling his own field, perhaps with animal assistance. He would make a shitty farmer in the modern era. And given his finite time and skills, he can’t possibly learn how to build a tractor and work the fields to keep growing enough to live on. So he makes a trade-off. He uses his time effort to specialize in something at the expense of doing something else. If one has a knack for farming, he farms, and if he has a knack for understanding machines, he builds tractors, and so on. This is called “opportunity cost.” It is why I stated at the outset that one’s labor isn’t “free.” Humans used to do exactly what he suggests, and we didn’t have enough time left in the day to do much else.