Damn those pesky schoolboy errors

Cheers to anon for these clips of Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot strutting their funky stuff







Personally, I agree with virtually everything Taleb is saying, and has been saying for some time now

Except one tiny little thing

Taleb seems to think he was the only fucker out there who saw what was coming

Taleb is essentially promoting a varient of the 'cockup not conspiracy' aka 'tragic schoolboy error' explanation of how the world works

This is important, I think, because some variant of Taleb's Black Swan' thesis is set to become the orthodox explanation for what is happening to the world's finances

and, as such, no-one is to be held accountable for what lies ahead

Sure, the majority of mid-level contributors to this mess were daft fools driven by greed and fear; with no comprehension of where they were headed

But to believe that only Nassim Taleb, and some net based Loons, were the only people who could see a crash coming is nonsense - and more than a little arrogant

It's also worth remembering that, at the same time the seeds for the current crash were being sown, the key components of a fully-blown surveillance and detention state were being rushed into place in the same countries that were inflating the bubble.

It's also worth asking yourself just how much, or little, wealth the people responsible for inflating the bubble have lost personally

The fact that history is littered with, admittedly simpler, smaller scale, occurrences of the same kind of kleptocratic economic terrorism is also a bit of a give away

No doubt any non Loons passing through this blog would, if they could be bothered, dismiss my outpourings as being those of a deranged paranoid lunatic

But then there's the small matter of my blog, and countless others out there, detailing quite specifically what lay ahead

So, sorry, claims that what is happening was inherently unpredictable don't impress me much at all. And shame on all those fuckers out there in cyberspace and the mainstream media who devoted their time to sticking the knife into us 'tinfoil hatters' when the infrastructure for chaos-driven rape and pillage was being laid down piece by piece

Taleb's almost certainly correct when he argues that the specific outcomes of this crash can't be predicted with any degree of certainty

But, there again, if you control all the guns, money and food would you need to?




(Something which dawned on me whilst pondering the Conspiraloon vs the Non Conspiraloon mental models for comprehending how the world of high finance works is that the Loon looks upon the financial markets as being a means of waging war on ordinary people. And, in war, any successful general makes provision for the unexpected, engages in contingency planning, retains reserves, and makes cold-blooded calculations about what proportion of his own forces he is willing to expend. In warfare, chaos and Black Swan events are pretty much a given and positively encouraged. Your objective is to comprehensively fuck up your enemy's ability to comprehend and respond to what you are doing, and then kill him. Non Loons who simply take the markets at face value will probably lose me totally at this point...)

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