The Dark Enlightenment is, as I have previously noted, a large and messy phenomenon. It appears to me in part to be a granfalloon invented by Nick Land and certain others to make their own piece of it (the neoreactionaries) look larger and more influential than it actually is. The most detailed critiques of the DE so far (notably Scott Alexander’s Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell and Anti-Reactionary FAQ nod in the direction of other cliques on the map I reproduced but focus pretty strongly on the neoreactionaries.
Nevertheless, after we peel away clear outliers like the Techno-Commercial Futurists and the Christian Traditionalists, there remains a “core” Dark Enlightenment which shares a discernibly common set of complaints and concerns. In this post I’m going to enumerate these rather than dive deep into any of them. Development of and commentary on individual premises will be deferred to later blog posts.
(I will note the possibility that I may in summarizing the DE premises be inadvertently doing what Scott Alexander marvelously labels “steelmanning” – that is, reverse-strawmanning by representing them as more logical and coherent than they actually are. Readers should be cautious and check primary sources if in doubt.)
Complaint the first: We are all being lied to – massively, constantly, systematically – by an establishment that many DE writers call “the Cathedral”. Its power is maintained by inculcation in the masses of what a Marxist (but nobody in the DE, ever, except ironically) would call “false consciousness”. The Cathedral’s lies go far deeper than what most people think of as normal tactical political falsehoods or even conspiracy theories, down to the level of some of the core premises of post-Enlightenment civilization and widely cherished beliefs about the sustainability of racial equality, sexual equality, and democracy.
An interesting feature of the DE is how remarkably little conspiracy theorizing there is in it. Instead, DE thinkers tend to describe the Cathedral as what I have elsewhere called a “prospiracy”. The Cathedral is bound together not by a hierarchy of internal control and explicit membership; rather, it runs on a shared set of ideological premises not all of which are held or even completely understood by the people who act as part of it.
To a first approximation, the ideology of the Cathedral can be described as “leftist” (many DE writers use the term “Progressive”, not meaning it as a compliment). However, the DE analysis of Cathedral ideology is actually much more complex and less reductive than these terms might imply (a point on which I expect to expand in later posts).
I will note, by the way, the known backgrounds of several key DE thinkers creates grounds to suspect that my own critical use of “Cathedral” in connection with software engineering had some influence on the DE terminology. I do not particularly claim this as an accomplishment, but there it is.
Complaint the second: “All men are created equal” is a pernicious lie. Human beings are created unequal, both as individuals and as breeding populations. Innate individual and group differences matter a lot. Denying this is one of the Cathedral’s largest and most damaging lies. The bad policies that proceed from it are corrosive of civilization and the cause of vast and needless misery.
Another way the DE puts this complaint is that nobody on the conventional political spectrum takes Darwinism seriously enough. Left-liberals self-identify as the friends of evolution out of a desire to be “on the side of science”, but if they really understood the implications of evolutionary biology and psychology they would be more horrified by them than Christian fundamentalists are.
The emphasis on this complaint is probably the single feature which most distinguishes the DE from other kinds of conservatism and anti-left-wing reaction. I’ll be writing about it at more length because I think it is the most interesting and challenging part of the DE critique.
While I don’t intend to do that here and now, I cannot exit this summary without acknowledging that many people will read this complaint as a brief for racism. In fact the DE itself contains two relatively distinguishable cliques that have processed this complaint in different ways: the Ethno-Nationalists and the Human Bio-Diversity people – in DE jargon, eth-nats and HBD for short.
If you come to the DE looking for straight-up old-fashioned racism, the Ethno-Nationalists will supply your requirement as hot and hateful as you like. The HBD people, on the other hand, are interested in value-neutral Damned Facts. They trade not in invective but in the nuts and bolts of psychometry and behavioral genetics. A signature consequence of the difference is that European-descended white people don’t necessarily come off “best” in the comparisons they make.
Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).
If this sounds like a libertarian critique, it in many ways is. One of my commenters noted, astutely, that the DE bears the imprint of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s libertarian polemic Democracy: The God That Failed. Some of the leading DE thinkers describe themselves as ex-libertarians, but their thinking has often taken some very dark and strange anti-libertarian turns since. (I’ll have more to say about this in discussing Mencius Moldbug, who is worth a post all to himself).
Note to commenters: Please do not dive into attacking or defending these premises; that will be appropriate when I discuss them individually. Appropriate discussion for this post is whether I have missed major premises or gotten these wrong in any significant way.
I expect future posts in this series to include both a closer focus on individual premises ansd on individual cliques within the Dark Enlightenment.
To me the most interesting aspect of DE is the explanation of the mechanics of social control -> The ‘Cathedral’ is a closed-loop of manufacturers and implementers of ‘public opinion.’
This explanation resonates very well with me. It explains the farcical level to which 100 year old solid Psychological science is brushed off as pseudoscience by major journalists and academics. No creationist can compete with this level of mendacity.
Looking forward to this series of posts, Eric. May I suggest that you create a specific tag for the series, to make it easier to point interested parties to the whole thing?
“While I don’t intend to do that here and now, I cannot exit this summary without acknowledging that many people will read this complaint as a brief for racism”
Don’t forget sexism.
There’s quite an interesting site that attempts to organize and gloss Mencius Moldbug’s writings, giving them a more logical structure than the blog interface would normally allow.
http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/
even this post contained nothing else of value, it was worth reading just for the inclusion of the word (and concept of) “granfalloon.”
I hope you’ll write about what Dark Enlightenment folks think would work better than what we’ve got, if they’re been at all specific about it.
Individually, their arguments present as coherent, but in the amalgam, it’s a boiling cauldron of chaos. Instead of a movement aimed at synthesis, it appears to be a bitch session on steroids.
> If you come to the DE looking for straight-up old-fashioned racism, the Ethno-Nationalists will
> supply your requirement as hot and hateful as you like. The HBD people, on the other hand,
> are interested in value-neutral Damned Facts.
I impression I got was that the core premise of the Ethno-Nationalists is that not all cultural memes are created equal – most are negligible, some are quite beneficial, and some are actively harmful to their tribe. Some ethnicities simply evolved better social expectations/norms (on the average) and this process can happen in parallel with genetic effects.
This does not strike me as inherently racist – although it does appear that many ethno-nationalists are (ab)using it to reach racist conclusions. But it seems that some of the Human Bio-Diversity people are having the same problem.
(It’s also possible that I’ve added in a lot of my own impressions and accidentally steelmanned the Ethno-nationalists.)
>the core premise of the Ethno-Nationalists is that not all cultural memes are created equal
There’s some of this going on, yes, mixed up with old-fashioned racism and nativism. I think it would be theoretically possible to disentangle these tendencies from each other, but I don’t see the Ethno-Nats actually doing that.
Some interesting thoughts. I have only recently learned of the “dark enlightenment” community, but they mirror some of the thoughts I have been having for at least a decade.
I don’t know enough about the community to be cognizant of what you might have missed, but the mention of Christian traditionalists reminds me of one point of interest – that we should be very careful about rejecting religious beliefs as nonsense. While such beliefs may be largely nonsensical, there may be a reason why those beliefs have persisted for centuries – and we should know WHY we reject a tradition before we do so.
Are you trying to coopt and subvert the DE by writing the “Traditional Christians” out of it? The Traditional Christians are very much a part of it, and were the originators of most of the viewpoints. Far from the DE being based on evolutionary theory, the truth is this: the Dominionist and Reconstructionist ideas promoted by Rushdoony dug down right to the time of the Reformation, encouraging a reboot of all intellectual thought from that point forward.
The DE has been an effort to unplug people from the matrix, promoting the Bible and Rushdoony ideas in a form and context that modern people will find palatable. That means couching it in evolutionary terms. Even atheists can see truth; all the DE “truths” were present in the Dominionist movement starting in the 1960’s. But religion isn’t a popular meme, so it had to be couched in atheist terms.
The “traditional Christianity” that is a part of the DE is anything but traditional Christianity. It isn’t the Catholicism you grew up with Eric. It is a rejection of modern Catholic, Evengelical, and other meme-clusters.
Also, Economics is a part of the DE. The themes of equality, sexual, racial, are not the only ones; economic equality is another “equality” of great interest to DE theorists. The DE “gestalt” is dimly perceived by outsiders, because they haven’t read Rushdoony. Almost noone mentions him; many DE bloggers today learnt their things not firsthand, but second hand from the disciples of Rushdoony. Understand Rushdoony’s gestalt, and the entire DE comes into focus, and you can see why every part of the map you first posted, belongs there. There are no outliers. They are all part of the whole. You can’t atomize the DE into “sexual” or “racial” components; it is a somewhat fragmented mass that is based on a coherent, very comprehensive world-view.
>The DE has been an effort to unplug people from the matrix, promoting the Bible and Rushdoony ideas in a form and context that modern people will find palatable.
I’ve read up on Rushdoony. Having done so, I find your assertion that he is the fundamental inspiration of the DE to be not merely false, but crazy in an obsessively deluded way. Furthermore, if it were actually true, the DE would be entirely a noisome fever-swamp of bad ideas, rather than just rotten in spots.
You hint at it, but you miss the DE assertion that “Civilization is failing”. There is not a lot of consensus on what a non-failing civilization should look like, but is a lot of the essays I have read there is a vaguely 19th century feel. “Civilization is failing” isn’t unique to the DEs, but definitely sets them apart from most of the strands of progressivism which still rely on marxist historical determinism.
After that, I would reorder the “complaints” with “Democracy is a failure” coming second after “Civilization is failing”. That feels to me more like a causal ordering, the latter two are closer to descriptions of the mechanisms by which the failures are occurring as well as complaints.
I just get the feeling that the free masons are behind all this.
Individually, their arguments present as coherent, but in the amalgam, it’s a boiling cauldron of chaos. Instead of a movement aimed at synthesis, it appears to be a bitch session on steroids.
TomA, aren’t all broad political/ideological movements chaotic? I see a lot of chaos among Democrats, Republicans, the Right, and the Left. Even libertarians argue and disagree. The (first) Enlightenment wasn’t exactly internally conflict-free, either.
And of course it’s a bitch session. Don’t all movements start as reactions against something? Nobody says “Let’s synthesize something new” until after they’ve said “This sucks, we need something better.”
Out of curiosity, why do you believe this ideology worthy of a lengthy series? Nothing against it, I’m just wondering what the trigger was.
>Out of curiosity, why do you believe this ideology worthy of a lengthy series? Nothing against it, I’m just wondering what the trigger was.
Because they have a flavorful mix of dangerous truth-telling and utter bogosity going on.
You’ve “read up on” Rushdoony, but have you read what he wrote? His take on social ills, and the solutions to them, are the underpinnings of the DE.
>[Rushdoony’s] take on social ills, and the solutions to them, are the underpinnings of the DE.
No, this is you squatting that weird little reconstructionist hole you live in and imagining that ideas similar to yours have a great deal more influence than they actually do. Mencius Moldbug, who is as good a single touchstone for DE thinking as exists, would laugh at Rushdoony. And at you. Rightly so; the fact that you champion a Holocaust-denier like Rushdoony is funny, in a sad and twisted way.
They are not much different from other ‘movements’ – people who are utterly convinced that things are ‘bad’ (no disagreements there), but *they* have a magic bullet that will cure our social ills (or at least make things ‘much better’). They’re no different than the marxists who prattle on about ‘real communism’ or libertarian anarchists who are sure that their ‘system’ is bound to work. They are totally disconnected from actual events of actual world history and any evidence that the world rejected their ‘systems’ because of bad experiences with them.
Eric, how much do you think the mix is genuine confusion on the part of the DE types and how much do you think it’s making use of the old saw about the best way to sell a lie is to couch it in as much truth as you can?
>Eric, how much do you think the mix is genuine confusion on the part of the DE types and how much do you think it’s making use of the old saw about the best way to sell a lie is to couch it in as much truth as you can?
I don’t think, in general, that these people are lying at all. Except by lying to themselves.
What you mean by “prospiracy” I have typically called “implicit collusion”, which is to say that the people involved do not need to overtly conspire with one another, nor do they need to share any ideology at all. The only thing they need to share is the desire for certain outcomes.
The Establishment includes people with widely-divergent ideologies, but who have certain goals in common. And the “Dark Enlightenment” is its mirror; people who can and do disagree with each other on many things, but share the goal of dethroning the Establishment from its privileged position of legitimacy.
@Joshua
> I impression I got was that the core premise of the Ethno-Nationalists is that not all cultural memes are created equal
Indeed, any criticism of ${Culture} is branded as raaaaacist (a running joke whose origins are long lost is that this word always has five consecutive As in it). To my way of thinking, the assumption that a particular ethnic group MVST have certain cultural norms is the truly racist idea at work in that particular argument.
The really ugly thing about the casual use of “raaaaacist” (as well as “sexist”, “homophobic”, etc.) is that it lumps together people who notice that certain measurable characteristics are not uniformly distributed across ethnic and gender lines (regardless of whether they think the reason for that distribution is cultural, genetic, or some combination) in with the true racist who thinks that members of other ethnic groups are sub-human (and everything else in between). There is no longer a word that conveys the latter idea.
So what happens is that a lot of people publicly go along with the scam, and piously pronounce their belief that the Emperor’s clothes are magnificent. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, knowwhatimean, &c. And then one day they realize that they are expected to engage in destructive behavior rather than admit the Emperor is naked. They are called “raaaaacist” one too many times. And then they say “Fine, call me ‘raaaaacist’. I don’t give a damn anymore.” and as long as they’re in for a penny, they might as well be in for a pound.
This is a recipe for Nazism and its functional equivalents.
That’s a decent start. I think it’s right to pull out Moldbug-derived neoreaction and focus on that, rather than attempt to capture the wider community holistically.
Before going into neoreactionary claims in detail, it’s worth looking at where they originate. What’s original to NRx (the critique of democracy being, as you say, mostly Hoppe’s, with some Carlyle and Maine thrown in) is the historical analysis of where the currently dominant ideology came from—a continuous evolution of protestant Christianity. To a large extent, this analysis comes from reading old books: seeing the political conflicts of the past through the eyes of those engaged in them, not through the post-match summaries written by triumphant liberals. Those are almost always surprising, even for relatively recent political conflicts (Radish did a good issue on the opponents—including prominent female opponents—of women’s suffrage, for example).
Many of us are familiar with your concept of the Cathedral, which may perhaps have increased the salience of the word, but there’s no real connection between the two ideas. Incidentally, use of that term is a real sticking-point for the more traditional traditionalists; there is still some discussion of whether to avoid the term to accommodate them, or whether keeping it serves as a useful filter. It defines what you call the “prospiracy” theory: the system’s ideological leadership is right there, in big fancy buildings, openly telling everybody what they should think, as opposed to being hidden away in some secret cellar as some conservatives seem to believe.
>What’s original to NRx […] is the historical analysis of where the currently dominant ideology came from—a continuous evolution of protestant Christianity. To a large extent, this analysis comes from reading old books: seeing the political conflicts of the past through the eyes of those engaged in them
I think this is very good as a description of Mencius Moldbug and his fans, which I grant is the most important and interesting strain of neoreactionary thinking. But I don’t think it comes near describing every NRx, if only because few people besides Moldbug are intellectually capable of that kind of historiography.
@John Dougan
“You hint at it, but you miss the DE assertion that “Civilization is failing”. There is not a lot of consensus on what a non-failing civilization should look like, but is a lot of the essays I have read there is a vaguely 19th century feel. “Civilization is failing” isn’t unique to the DEs, but definitely sets them apart from most of the strands of progressivism which still rely on marxist historical determinism.”
The “Civilization is failing” can be traced back at least to Plato. He too was a reactionary who railed against Democracy. Plato himself was a member of the nobility and seemed to have been in favor of reinstating a rule based on birth right.
I think the “all men are born unequal” meme is part of the Indo-European heritage that croppes up time and again in, e.g., the Indian and Medieval European caste systems, British Class society, South African Apartheid, American slave holder economies, and USA segregation policies.
This is not universally human. In contrast, there has not been such an ideology of castes within, for instance, the Han Chinese cultures since the Han dynasty (200 BCE). Note, the Han Chinese did and do discriminate against non-Han people (I am not sure to what extend this is based on birth or blood).
I sense a distinct unwillingness in the HBD to get involved in real human population genetics. Darwin had to poke in the dark as he did not know the basis of genetics. But we have come a long way since then.
So, I think the HBD people can better be studied using the historical model of IE caste ideologies than as a scientific movement based on a deep understanding of human population genetics and evolution.
Eric,
Apropos of Mancur Olson, you will find that Olson himself develops the idea of an “accelerating Olsonian collapse” as you call it, in his later book “The Rise and Decline of Nations”—a valuable read, if only for the story of a guild of imperial Chinese gilt-paper producers biting one of their number to death for the crime of more-efficient production…
Winter, I think you are way off. “All men are born unequal” is not, in and of itself, support for a caste system, slavery, segregation, or any of the other things you are lumping it with. Sure, supporters of those things might try to use that statement as a justification, but it’s not at all equivalent to “All members of group A are superior to all members of group B, and this distinction should be enshrined in law.”
I am puzzled by the the “prospiracy” theory:
Isn’t this just the “communism of the ruling class”, where the nobility or other elite groups protect its members and distribute income and power among themselves. The other side of this “communism” is the construction of a united, ideological, front against their mortal enemies: the ruled underlings.
It is an eternal running gag that the elite never believes the fairy tales they tell the masses. That has been the basis of a lot of good literature over the times. It boils down to people telling the world they not only do a good job, but it is for the better of humanity. Such a “prosperacy” is not so much possible, but to be expected.
@PapayaSF
Is there anyone who will argue that not all men are physiologically different? Is there anyone who ever said all men have exactly equal ability?
The whole HBD thing is about genetic group differences. And the whole discussion and argumentation sounds a lot like Francis Galton and the ideology behind Apartheid, but with again a new pseudo-scientific coat. But I admit I have not read too far into their publications (life is too short).
Hey, if we would listen to the geneticists, we should put a bounty on marrying people that are genetically as different as possible. So, why bother cataloging all these minute genetic group differences if we are better off mixing them thoroughly. Unless, of course, you want to preserve these group differences.
>So, why bother cataloging all these minute genetic group differences if we are better off mixing them thoroughly. Unless, of course, you want to preserve these group differences.
That’s not a justified inference. The Ethno-Nats do want to “preserve these group differences”; the HBDs, on the other hand, have more of a pitiless, neutral “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” attitude.
Technical issue: this long article would be better split into teaser and the rest of body, i.e.with “Continue reading ?”, like e.g. previous article.
@Winter maybe it would be more useful to make a distinction between macro-inequality or castification (castes, slavery, whatever) and micro-inequality or role-specialization, which is based on age, wealth, professions, and gender.
(The parallel with macroevolution/speciation and microevolution/adaptation is intended.)
@Winter try to get Plato right, because he was incredibly influential throughout history and there may still be a lesson to learn from him. The basic idea is that the two worst systems are tyranny and democracy. Of course in the modern world they seem literal opposites. Plato would see them similar because they are at the end of the unrestrained, in tyranny there are no restraints on the tyrant and in classical democracy on the popular will. Anything else, monarchy, aristocracy, whatever, would be seen as restrained, as something checked and balanced in a way. If we interpret them as strongly constitutional systems we are not very far off.
Plato also pointed something out that the Neoreactionaries tend to forget too, that culture determines everything – that a polis is “man written large”, so whatever character or personality or values people have will be reflected in politics. According to Plato democracy, unrestrained, comes from a population who are themselves unrestrained hedonists, “gimmedats”. Tyranny the same way, the people simply think that it is a more efficient way of getting stuff and this is how tyrants rise to power, then of course they turn off the taps and repress the people. Platonic aristocracy or monarchy would come from a culture of sober, self-restraining people, who are dedicated moderates in everything. Who want little from politics and thus are more willing to accept a restrained, limited form of it.
Again these 2300 years old ideas so we don’t have to accept them. We just need to understand properly how these ideas were shaped through history.
What category does it make me if I think this: you can take two groups of people who have hardly any biological differences, and neither is inferior, and there are hardly any differences in success.
Yet if you mix them, you find out that due to the differing cultures, that tacit understanding that everybody knows how things are supposed to be done around here is lost. That unspoken assumption is lost that both you and me know that in such and such as situation what is reasonable and fair to expect because this is cultural.
People then begin treating each other differently. They call the police if the neighbor plays loud music in the evening, because they no longer expect a shared understanding of how loud is too loud and how late is too late. You have to regulate your music to the decibel and to the exact time of the day, and enforce it. People call the police on a bar brawl or even kids brawling, because there is no shared cultural understanding on the difference between assault and just boys being boys. Suddenly you have to spell everything literally out in rules, laws, regulations. Even the language of your rules and laws changes. You no longer can write rules like “excessive drinking” is forbidden on the bus, you must say exactly how much or none at all. Legal terms like “reasonable doubt” weaken, because the shared cultural understanding is lost regarding how much is reasonable. Frivolous lawsuits ensue, because people no longer see what is ridiculous, what is not – they see the laws in a positive way, laws are laws, instead of laws codifying a cultural understand of what is right.
What would you call this? Note that this is not even necessarily racial, national or ethnic. When suburbias spread to a small town and urbanites move out similar process happens.
>What would you call this?
I give it a name: the Putnam effect, after a sociologist who noticed it and sat on the data for years because he feared giving political ammunition to nativists.
@AnomalyUK
>To a large extent, this analysis comes from reading old books: seeing the political conflicts of the past through the eyes of those engaged in them, not through the post-match summaries written by triumphant liberals.
This would be nice if it was true. But what happens instead is the same technocratic, geeky approach that often characterizes libertarians too – not understanding that a polis is man written large, they see it as solely system changes, while they should see it as changes in the general ways of thinking, desires, attitudes of people.
I mean instead of worrying about how exactly democracy is not a good technology for making decisions, Neoreaction should ask the question – why did people begin desire democracy, what was the desire that could not be satisfied otherwise, what changes in attitudes matched better with democracy etc. etc.
So psychological, cultural analysis, philosophical anthropology, that sort of stuff, it is missing from Neoreaction. People approach it is simply systems design problem.
I mean what I miss from here is something that conservatives had not so long ago. Consider Eric Voegelin and the “immanentizing the escathon” theory. That describes the changes in mental culture, mindset, philosophy, worldview, that created the political changes. Consider Michael Oakeshott writing about the cult of rationalism. Consider Weber and the protestant ethic. Consider Chestertons many critique’s of the modern mentality. Consider Strauss’ Three Waves of Modernity: http://de.scribd.com/doc/40235747/The-Three-Waves-of-Modernity This is how you try to dig down to the root. To figure out the changes in the soul, so to speak.
I mean the Three Waves is such a great work, one way I recognize an intelligent conservative is that I mention it and his eyes glow up. How comes the Neoreaction basically never discusses it instead of stuff like crime stats?
What I am not seeing in this post is a overview of why each component of the Dark Enlightenment are a threat to libertarian ideals. It not that you are wrong it just doesn’t come across clearly.To me the post reads like it was written by a conspiracy theorist and lessen its effectiveness.
@Winter
> Is there anyone who will argue that not all men are physiologically different? Is there anyone who ever said all men have exactly equal ability?
There are metric assloads of people who assert that there are no statistically significant differences in intelligence among ethnic groups or between genders. These people apparently do grant that individuals come in varying IQs, but that given large enough numbers, those differences average out nicely.
Given the statistics about men having a few IQ points higher mean and significantly higher standard deviation than women, they insist that it cannot be true. The tests are biased, and besides, women are oppressed by Teh Patriarchy, so they don’t have the self-confidence to do well on IQ tests. They just need some more self-esteem. So we should hire women with lower qualifications to help get them that self-esteem.
Given statistics showing that Ashkenazim, East Asians, Europeans, and Africans have IQ averages in descending order, they insist that it cannot be true. The tests are biased, and besides, Africans are oppressed by slavery, Jim Crow, Apartheid, etc., so they don’t have the self-confidence to do well on IQ tests. They just need some more self-esteem. So we should hire Africans with lower qualifications to help get them that self-esteem.
These are uncomfortable facts because they can be used by supremacists to fool those ignorant of statistics into buying the “All X are superior to all Y” fallacy, which promotes hiring low-IQ members of higher-IQ groups over high-IQ members of low-IQ groups, a decidedly sub-optimal course. But they are facts, and insisting that they are untrue just because bad people can use them in bad ways leads to the bad people having kind of a perverse moral high ground because they aren’t lying to us about something we all know, but political correctness prevents us from admitting in public.
The thing is that we don’t know how much of those statistical differences is based in genetics and how much in culture, and as long as we’re forbidden to discuss the subject, we’ll never know.
@The Monster
“There are metric assloads of people who assert that there are no statistically significant differences in intelligence among ethnic groups or between genders.”
That was not my point. Even these people agree that individual humans differ. And assertions about group statistics are pretty useless in this regard.
You do not select your spouse based on the average anatomical and emotional characteristics of their gender. You pick a person.
Likewise, when I interview a person, I really do not care one iota about the average population statistics of the person’s gender, genetic, or cultural background. I have to evaluate that single person.
Let me ask the “culture or institutions” question to everybody, @AnomalyUK, @ESR, @PapayaSF, @Winter and everybody else:
Ignore know whether you agree with or consider desirable the following or not, which one do you think is _easier_, and see it purely from the angle of easiness or difficulty:
1) In a democracy but with a fairly conservative culture, to argue “Just as the household needs a head, the country needs a father or occasionally a strong mother too, hence, monarchy.”
1) In a family that lives in a new monarchy, but culture is still fairly liberal, a father to argue to his teenager kids, god forbid even to his wife too, that “See me as the benevolent king of this household, this is the normal way of things, just look at how our country has a king too and it prospers, our family will be happy and prosperous too.”
Again feel free to consider both ridiculous shit, that is fine. But which ridiculous shit would you consider easier?
So, does culture determine institutions or institutions determine culture?
@Monster,
What is the practical significance of learning that different social groups have varying levels of intelligence? We still can’t predict how the individual will do which is the real issues. A smart African still same need for opportunity for advancement and training as a smart Ashkenazim. A low IQ Ashkenazim need all the help a low IQ African gets.
I think both sides are wrong in this issue. The focus needs to be on the individual and find out what that person needs. We have to realize that because of history demonstrable differences between ethnic and social groups are an explosive topic. With superficial differences used to justify great evils.
Don’t get me wrong by taking what I am saying is that it all fuzzy. There are things we know about people’s minds that are absolute and repeatable true, there are things that are demonstratively false. But in the middle there is a middle area where we know something broadly but can’t pin it to an individual except for what is essence trial and error.
General intelligence is within that area. All you can do in a practical sense is observe the individual over time and adjust accordingly.
@The Monster
“Given the statistics about men having a few IQ points higher mean and significantly higher standard deviation than women, they insist that it cannot be true.”
Do you know how difficult it is to get IQ tests right so they give 100 as the average of both men and women? Every time that is a major effort.
This pure number fetishism. With a standard deviation of 15 points and a test retest reliability of several points (down to correlations in the 0.7 range), what individual judgment can be based on an average group difference of a few points?
“Do you know how difficult it is to get IQ tests right so they give 100 as the average of both men and women?”
The counterargument is that that’s exactly the wrong thing. If men and women have different average levels of intelligence, making the test show them as the same is nothing less than falsifying data to achieve a desired political end.
>>What’s original to NRx […] is the historical analysis of where the currently dominant ideology came from—a continuous evolution of protestant Christianity. To a large extent, this analysis comes from reading old books: seeing the political conflicts of the past through the eyes of those engaged in them
>I think this is very good as a description of Mencius Moldbug and his fans, which I grant is the most important and interesting strain of neoreactionary thinking. But I don’t think it comes near describing every NRx, if only because few people besides Moldbug are intellectually capable of that kind of historiography.
I’m not sure this is specifically a DE idea. See
http://mises.org/daily/3769
@Jay Maynard
“The counterargument is that that’s exactly the wrong thing. If men and women have different average levels of intelligence, making the test show them as the same is nothing less than falsifying data to achieve a desired political end.”
No, that is a weighting. An IQ test has verbal and non-verbal sub-tests (and other sub categories). On average, women make some sub-tests better (in general, the verbal part), men are better in others (in general spatial shapes). The same holds for other subdevisions of the population
The message from all these tests is that the “General” in “General Intelligence” is not so general. It is pretty easy to make an IQ test that gives your favorite sub-group an advantage by selecting the sub-tests and their weighting.
But you should never use a general IQ test result as an end-point. What you need is to go back to the test and look where that number is coming from. What are the strengths and weaknesses? In children, where would remediation help? The number itself is not particular useful.
There’s a lot more to Moldbug’s criticism of democracy than you say. (I’d link to what I’ve written about it, were I finished with the thing…) I’ll try to condense it: The feedback system of voice (as opposed to exit) is best understood as a state of limited war — in some cases, the sides only line up to be counted, but the party paramilitary is not an uncommon phenomenon. It incentivizes adjustment of the demographic situation (see Steve Sailer’s ‘Sailer strategy’), the undermining of property rights and the expansion of government (to free up more spoils to be distributed to supporters), high time-preference of governing officials, and the mass production and propagation of politically useful lies.
Another point is that ‘McCarthyism’ was not inaccurate — there really were commies everywhere, though they eventually split with the Soviets, just like Red China did. (I don’t think Moldbug makes this point, but my impression is that the split was brought about in part by the abandonment of the proletariat in favor of a strategy of organizing the intellectuals and the lumpenproletariat — promoted by the Young Lords and originating with certain elements within the Frankfurt School. (How about that: something they /actually were/ responsible for!) Then that got mixed up with Freud and Reich and it all turned into an elaborate theoretical justification for sex and drugs. The Secret Speech and so on were probably relevant also — and the containment doctrine, and the absence of a four-term president who, well, may not have actually gotten violently irrumated by Uncle Joe on a regular basis but that is certainly the impression that is given, and Moldbug /does/ mention that. (Forrestal’s death is an interesting case.) None of that stopped the Harvard Crimson from endorsing the Khmer Rouge in the early ’70s, though.)
It did.
Winter:
Yes.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/general-theory-of-corruption.html
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/theory-of-ruling-underclass.html
“Another way the DE puts this complaint is that nobody on the conventional political spectrum takes Darwinism seriously enough.”
Yeah – I’ve been noticing this for a while. Moreover, I’ve noticed that Western culture has decided to provide “hard stops” for certain types of personal limitations, but not others. We’ve instituted the ADA to help those with physical limitations, and redistributionism to help those with productivity limitations. However, we’ve not done anything about those with social, artistic or happiness limitations (the government doesn’t guarantee you a minimum number of close, trustworthy friends, a minimal ability to do something like paint or sing, or to actually achieve happiness).
And for those who might be able to compensate for some of their limitations with some of their strengths, we’ve banned that through legislation (by banning both prostitution and heroin).
esr> Note to commenters: Please do not dive into attacking
> or defending these premises; that will be appropriate when
> I discuss them individually. Appropriate discussion for this
> post is whether I have missed major premises or gotten
> these wrong in any significant way.
Somewhere in the grey area between criticizing their premises and wondering if you missed something: It isn’t clear to me, from this thread or your previous one, what makes the Dark Enlightenment worth your time to investigate in the first place. (Reading your blog entries was the first time I heard of this memeplex, so I’m going by your posts exclusively so far.) People who reject the ideology of Enlightenment have been around ever since the Age of Enlightenment itself. What is it about this bunch that makes you find their bullet points original, nontrivial, insightful, or potentially-impactful enough to bother with? If you could clarify this in one of your future posts on them, I would appreciate that.
Please disregard my last post. I just found your response to
Alsadius
>Do you know how difficult it is to get IQ tests right so they give 100 as the average of both men and women?
Wow. I hope it is not true, because that would open a particularly weird rabbit hole. Because, obviously, at first look it should not be done because IQ is not _defined_ as “whatever is equal in the average woman and man”. On the other hand, it is also true that it would be very hard to do it fairly, as it could be argued that you get different results because it measures specifically masculine types of intelligence more, like math more than emotional intelligence. So again in that case IQ would be defined as “whatever men are good at”. It would be hard to justify why one type of skill or intelligence worths more than another. And that too is not a good definition.
Shit, I did never think about it. Probably the only solution is is giving up the idea of general intelligence. Otherwise there are only wrong choices.
@Winter on 2014-02-20 at 09:08:49
You in the Netherlands may not yet have lawsuits filed because the outcome of some selection process did not yield results in strict proportion to the ethnic mix of the population. They contend that since there are no aggregate differences between groups, any deviation in results must mean the process is biased..
I would be much happier with double-blind processes, where identifying information is scrubbed until the selection is as far along as practical. Let the chips fall where they may.
@Shenpen on 2014-02-20 at 11:40:54
Intelligence tests can still be useful so long as you do not insist that every group get the same average score. You normalize so that the average score for the entire population is 100, and go from there. The individuals will still have individual scores, according to individual variation. We will still find genius in the strangest places, and idiots in upper class families.
There is the possibility that someone may have been stunted before they have a chance to be measured, but that does not make them any more suitable for an intellectual occupation.
One thing that I’m curious about, is what attention DE gives to the value of memes, and to what degree that good memes can overcome genetics, and to what degree bad memes can overcome good genetics. This has been touched on in a few comments, and I also suspect that proper elaboration will come in future posts. Perhaps the focus of my curiosity is whether or not memetic issues are significant enough in DE writing to deserve special attention.
I personally think that memetics can be just as important to understand as genetics, to the point that I consider ideas to be living organisms despite their abstract nature, and that a species intelligent enough to be a host for idea ecosystems can, to some extent, overcome genetic handicaps. Having said that, I have come to this conclusion (as well as a few other odd conclusions of what constitutes life) from a couple of esoteric starting points, so any thoughts by DE writers on the matter would have to have been developed independently…
In any case, I haven’t had the time to delve into DE, or even just Mendus Moldbug beyond a couple of blog posts, so I’m going to find this analysis rather interesting, I think, as an introduction to DE thought.
@Shenpen
Originally, IQ was developed to rank school children and applicants. It made perfect sense to ensure that the average boy did not end below the average girl. So they tweaked the subtests to get equal averages and deviation.
But indeed, “general” might not be the correct term.
@BobW
We rarely sue each other. However, there were a few tests. Sending identical application letters with names indicating different ethnic backgrounds. Sending actors of different ethnick backgrounds to job interviews with identical stories.
The results were predictable: Everything that suggested a non-white background was a disadvantage.
Name and shame was very effective I understood.
@Winter
The legal climate in the United States is much more sue-happy and presumes as the legal default that any difference between an employee or similar population and the population statistics of society as a whole is due to intentional racism; the employer is required to prove a negative. The most egregious example of this was when the government, on its own self-righteous initiative, sued Sears and dragged the case on for years, even though the government hadn’t identified any discriminatory policy and didn’t have a single person who had complained of unfair treatment.
In-place editing left “racism” when that should have been “${POPULAR}ism”. The Sears case specifically was about alleged discrimination against hypothetical women.
I continue to be amazed by the lack of an examination of the human condition from within the mathematical context of set theory instead of the usual nebulous geopolitical, psychological chicanery. The Founders came up with the concept of “limited government” and “enumerated powers”. And I think they arrived at that language because they had an inherent understanding that large granfalloons (of any type at all) always become extraordinarily dangerous. They understood that the least dangerous group is the individual and that coincidentally, the most precious group to be protected is; the individual. Set theory applied to networks arrives at the same conclusion. But I guess it’s just too easy and boring to wave away all of these social groups as dangerous and rule the individual as supreme. So instead, everyone finds a way to justify “their” group as being somehow different to the “other” groups. And so we end up discussing the entrails of each one trying to discern which one is better than the other. When in fact, all groups; and I do mean ALL groups; are as dangerous as each other if they scale up large enough.
Just as a sort of meta comment, I see a lot of use of the word “they” and the term “DE” as if it’s an atomic entity we can talk about. I don’t think that’s true, and I think it’s cognitively dangerous to let English fool you into assuming that the granfallon “really exists”. There’s a lot of things getting lumped under that label here. In another universe with a different dominant political philosophy, many of them would be actively antagonistic towards each other. It isn’t really a criticism of the nonexistant gestalt that there’s a lot of mutually contradictory beliefs in it.
ESR really already said this, but I think it’s worth reiterating, if you’re trying to speak of the whole “DE” at once you’ve probably already lost. The only unifying factor seems to be the belief that modern liberalism is profoundly wrong, rather than superficially wrong (which, frankly, a lot of what we call “conservativism” in the conventional political sphere sort of amounts to).
@esr
“the HBDs, on the other hand, have more of a pitiless, neutral “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” attitude.”
Then let them do their homework on genetic variation among humans.
>Then let them do their homework on genetic variation among humans.
Oh, they have. In impressive detail, with cites into the published literature. I’ll write about this.
Eric spotlights a crucial difference betweeen what he calls the Ethno-Nationalists and the HBD people “The HBD people . . . trade not in invective but in the nuts and bolts of psychometry and behavioral genetics. A signature consequence of the difference is that European-descended white people don’t necessarily come off ‘best’ in the comparisons they make.”
That’s pretty good evidence that the two groups should not be considered under the same label, because the only thing they really have in common is that both reject a central doctrine of the secular Cathedral; namely, that all groups are created statistically equal. The HBD people, whom I do read, believe this is empirically false; moreover, that making policy based on faith that it is true leads to making bad policy. E.g., disparate impact laws, or race and gender quotas. They don’t seem unduly fussed by who comes off best. Ethnic nationalists also reject the idea that all groups are equal, but because they are sure that theirs is best.
Putting them under the same label, especially one like “Dark Establishment” coined by a defender of the faith who detests both of them, is like calling Islamists and atheists together “Dark Materialists” because both reject the central doctrine of the divinity of Jesus.
DE is a label only, not a movement that can be usefully discussed as an “atomic entity,” to use Jeremy Bowers’ term.
>Putting them under the same label, especially one like “Dark Establishment” coined by a defender of the faith who detests both of them
I agree with the rest of your comment, but you seem a little confused here. It’s “Dark Enlightenment”, and the term was promoted by its core thinkers, not its detractors.
Before delving into individual critiques, perhaps its useful to speculate about genesis conditions and evolutionary context of the DE movement.
Global affluence has skyrocketed in the past half century due to the hyperdrive of technology. Food, communication, and basic medical care are now abundant in many parts of the world, and consequently the struggle for daily survival is no longer the dominant imperative. In this context, basic survival skills are less important than political skills which garner a larger piece of the abundance pie. In other words, voting for a living is a more successful strategy than self reliance. There is no value judgement in this, the herd is just responding naturally to the environmental conditions of relative abundance.
Into this social milieu comes the legion of farsighted intellectuals who foresee grave consequences should there once again be a return to scarcity. In a prior age, they might be called prophets of doom, and their diversity of prophecy will ensure that at least a few will be shown correct when the next interval of scarcity arises.
As so my questions are, have we seen this phenomena before, or is this something characteristically new and different in the annals of human evolution? Has technology rendered abundance the new norm? Are political skills in permanent ascendance? Will scarcity return and reward self reliance again?
@Robert Conley
>What is the practical significance of learning that different social groups have varying levels of intelligence?
It obliterates the presumption that hiring more of certain groups and less of others than their representation in the general population is “defacto racism/sexism/etc.”
A sane analysis of the “glass ceiling” indicates that women are not actually being discriminated against; the jobs for which they’re underrepresented are jobs for which there simply aren’t as many women qualified as men. But few people undertake such analyses, leaving us with simplistic statistics of the underrepresentation.
No one challenges the domination of the National Basketball Association by persons of West African descent, because their genetic advantage in the “fast-twitch” muscles needed for sprinting and jumping is blatantly obvious, (Look at the 8 finalists in the Olympic 100 m dash over the last few decades, and try to find one who is not of West African descent.) and the value thereof to the game is beyond question. Last time I checked, there were exactly two ethnic Chinese players in the league, despite the fact that they make up a quarter of the world’s population, which by “de facto” thinking means that a quarter of the players in the world’s premier league ought to be Chinese.
But “feminists” observe the lack of women in STEM disciplines and ASS|U|ME it is due entirely to discrimination by evil men and a culture that discourages women from entering into those disciplines. The truth is that the narrower standard deviation in female intelligence means that there are far fewer women at the levels needed to be productive in STEM. (There are also far fewer women than men at the low end, but having an IQ above 85 but below 120 doesn’t really help a lot in STEM.)
I think this is you reluctant to confront the fact that neoliberalism (what you call libertarianism) and fundamentalist Christianity are joined at the hip. Rushdoony is indeed Murka’s own homegrown version of Sayyid Qutb, but he has had much more influence over American political thought than you would like to admit. Scratch a prominent “libertarian” politician and, alarmingly often, you will find a stealth theonomist crouching in wait for the opportunity to impose Biblical law and stone unbelievers to death. (Ex.: Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul.)
The Rand/Hayek/Mises wing of libertarianism, to which you and to a certain extent Mencius Moldbug belong, consists of people to whom the I’ve-got-mine economics of reconstructionism appeal, but who do not want to deal with the icky God stuff and attendant morality. That doesn’t stop them from forging alliances with the reconstructionist wing against perceived common enemies (to wit: social democracy and egalitarianism).
So yes, I would say Ted Walther is right: Rushdoony lies at the very heart of the DE, and with it the whole right-libertarian complex in America.
>Scratch a prominent “libertarian” politician and, alarmingly often, you will find a stealth theonomist crouching in wait for the opportunity to impose Biblical law and stone unbelievers to death. (Ex.: Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul.)
Sarah Palin has never described herself as a libertarian and is not a Dominionist anyway; I have examined her record in detail, aided by a friend who lived in Alaska and has met her.
The Pauls have no trace of Christian fixation in their politics other than opposition to federal funding of abortion – they are not on record as even having called for the repeal of Roe vs. Wade.
And your general claim about libertarians is, as usual, completely disconnected from the facts. Libertarians find Rushdoony’s sort revolting. Even almost all conservatives find Rushdoony’s sort revolting. Holocaust denial? Really?
The Dark Enlightenment specifically opposes Enlightenment political philosophy, or at least it opposes the political philosophers usually associated with the Enlightenment (such as Locke and Rousseau). In particular, many members of the Dark Enlightenment—especially neoreactionaries—embrace a more traditional understanding of sovereignty and reject the notion of “natural rights”.
Sovereign just means “possessing supreme or ultimate power”, i.e., there is no higher power that can bind the actions of a sovereign organization. A recent post by ESR shows the disconnect well:
From the Dark Enlightenment point of view, this is a political perpetual-motion machine: the government is sovereign by definition, so there is no “we” who “let” it have some powers and not others.
Closely related to this understanding of sovereignty is a rejection of “natural rights”. Instead, many partisans of the Dark Enlightenment believe that all rights are political. When people say “X is a right”, what they usually mean is “X is good, and the government should enforce X”. Dark Enlightenment thinkers often agree with their opponents on what constitutes “good”, but absent an enforcer the notion of a “right to X” is meaningless. (Does a gazelle have a “right to life” that is violated when a cheetah kills it? Does a cheetah have a “right to property” that is violated when hyenas steal its kill?)
This view can be summarized by the maxim “Might makes right”—not as a moral principle, but as a fact. (A less inflammatory phrasing might be “Every right derives from might.”) From this perspective, the liberal (and libertarian) defense of “natural rights” appears as a simple category error: the confusion of a Humean ought with a Humean is.
>(A less inflammatory phrasing might be “Every right derives from might.”)
This is true, and the reason I advocate for an armed citizenry both physically and morally prepared to defend the rights it asserts.
>the liberal (and libertarian) defense of “natural rights” appears as a simple category error: the confusion of a Humean ought with a Humean is.
This is also a fair criticism. The classical-liberal/libertarian position is, however, salvageable under a consequentialist interpretation that unpacks to “If ‘All persons are not equal before the law’ is not one of the premises of your politics, your politics will end badly'”. This is actually a topic I’ve been meaning to blog about, and analyzing Neo-Reactionary thinking will be a good context in which to do it.
@Shenpen: I would say your second example is easier, because it’s closer to the (traditional) truth: the head of a household is (in nearly any culture) like a monarch of the family.
@Jeff Read: I think that your view of the Right is a lot like the famous Steinberg New Yorker cover, looking West from NYC: lots of things get vague and compressed. Rushdoony is a marginal figure, and the idea that Christian social conservatives like Palin and Ron and Rand Paul want to impose Biblical law and stone unbelievers is absurd. It’s like claiming Elizabeth Warren is “really” a Trotskyite.
>Christian social conservatives like Palin and Ron and Rand Paul
I don’t think that’s even a fair description of the Pauls. They may talk conservative sexual morality, but other than opposing federal funding of abortion they show no sign of wishing to do more than talk.
>Elizabeth Warren is “really” a Trotskyite.
Don’t bend over that far backwards to be fair. Elizabeth Warren sounds far more like Trotsky than any libertarian has ever sounded like Rushdoony. That will remain the case until libertarians begin denying the Holocaust and advocating the stoning to death of homosexuals under Leviticus, which we can expect not before hell freezes over solid.
You are correct; that was just rushed writing on my part. I meant “Christian social conservatives like Palin, and people like Ron and Rand Paul.” I don’t consider the Pauls to be socons, though there is some overlap at times.
O RLY? Then can you explain why they are both so chummy with that theocratic bastard (and Rushdoony’s son-in-law) Gary North? Ron employed North as a research assistant in the 1970s, and more recently as the director of his homeschooling curriculum project (Christian homeschooling is another Rushdoonyite movement). And Rand, when expounding his monetary policy, cited North’s work — which advocates a gold and silver currency standard on no basis but a Biblical one.
Do bear in mind, also, that in in North’s own words, the goal of the Reconstructionists is a stealth takeover of the Republican Party, and eventually of the country when it defaults on its debts. They cannot afford to publicly show their hand now, so they lie in wait for the right opportunity.
The rotten stank of Rushdoonyism is strong from the Pauls, and a lot of secular libertarians still haven’t washed out of their clothes.
Honestly? People who call themselves ‘progressive’ are in possibly the least conducive position possible to be condemning their political enemies via degrees-of-separation from evil people. Not that this stops them anyway, but you expect some modicum of shame, or at least minimal self-awareness, from people who present themselves as intellectual advocates of progressivism.
You do know that nearly every anti-war demonstration and Occupy encampment was organized by Communists of one sort or another? (International ANSWER, Socialist Worker’s Party, etc.) And that Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats said good things about them, and even participated? That an Obama campaign office had a Cuban flag and a picture of Che on the wall? That Obama has friends and associates who are Communists? That he nominated people who were Communists as late as the 1990s, and publicly admired Mao? That there are too many links between Democrats, socialists, and outright Communists to list? So, by your standards, Democrats have an equivalent problem, only far worse.
We could play this game all day, Jeff, and there’s no doubt I’d win on points, but I’ve got to go now.
>So, by your standards, Democrats have an equivalent problem, only far worse.
No, let’s zero in on the real difference. People like Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama regularly recycle the memetic weapons of their Communist allies (“you didn’t build that!”). Libertarians never, ever echo Dominionist memes; given the difference in fundamental ethical premises, doing so would be beyond insane.
Not as bad a position as the conservatives who tried to drag Obama’s name through the mud with ties to the likes of Bill Ayers. Ties which, by the way, turned out to be less substantial than the Pauls’ ties to a man who advocates stoning as an acceptable punishment for homosexuality.
Ties which, by the way, turned out to be less substantial than the Pauls’ ties to a man who advocates stoning as an acceptable punishment for homosexuality.
So, Rushdoony got jobs for Ron and Rand? Ghostwrote a book for them? Started their political careers in his living room? Ayers-Obama is a far stronger link than Rushdoony-Paul.
[I seem to have a previous comment stuck in moderation, by the way.]
I’ll look forward to it. I’ve often cited the post Natural rights and wrongs? for being a sterling example of clear thinking on this subject, and I’m keen to see what else you have to say.
@esr:
“they are not on record as even having called for the repeal of Roe vs. Wade.”
As a strong atheist and libertarian who thinks that the government regulating abortion is worse than it not doing so, I’d point out that Roe v. Wade is a *horrible* legal opinion. It doesn’t provide any useful framework to figure out what other rights should be recognized under the same thinking, or how to limit that model to a non-infinite set of Rights. Even if the Pauls were to come out for repealing that case, without details as to why they oppose the case Decision, there still wouldn’t be any support of them trying to force Christianity onto the American people.
> I’d point out that Roe v. Wade is a *horrible* legal opinion.
That is true. Even though I broadly agree with the policy outcome, it is badly thought out and badly written.
Yes, whatever you think of abortion, Roe was an awful decision. It also did not “make abortion legal,” it made it illegal to make abortion illegal (a subtle but important distinction). At the time of the decision, abortion was already legal in states that had about 30% of the US population.
The redpillers are curiously missing from your list. Much as eth-nats contradict the meme “racism practiced by white people is bad”, redpillers are a reaction against… well, I’m not sure, but it seems to include “you should treat women as you would any other human being” and “having sex doesn’t defile women”.
Well, whatever it is, the thing where eth-nats don’t care about being called racists, it’s analogous to the thing where redpillers don’t care about being called sexists. I’m surprised that you left them out of the list.
Also, I don’t think white people not always being at the top of the pyramid is a particularly new or cunning invention. White racism has historically been primarily concerned about the inferiority of black people; everything else can take a back seat.
Is this that thing where Bill Ayers sassed someone back in 2009 and they took it really seriously? Remind me never to try to make a joke around you people.
>The redpillers are curiously missing from your list.
I believe I mentioned them in the first post. I’ll get back to them in a later one.
“I’m not sure, but it seems to include ‘you should treat women as you would any other human being'”
Since there are only two types of “other human beings” – men and women – this statement translates to
“You should treat women as you would treat men”
Which is unbelievably silly and cruel. Or maybe you could break the bones in the hands of a few women when shaking hands to learn this lesson.
Steve, do men always use the same (maximum?) amount of handshake pressure with each other, regardless of estimated tolerance/evidence of pain?
@Steve Johnson
> ““I’m not sure, but it seems to include ‘you should treat women as you would any other human being’”
Yes, by respecting their wishes, not by being equally rude to everyone.
RP is a reaction against the social script where men become providers to women in exchange for sex. This is a sucker’s game in current conditions where women hold all the legal cards in marriage, are happy to jump ship to a better mate, and in reality want sex with exciting, non-provider types. This applies doubly in a feminized world where provider males are taught to be effeminate, sensitive and to look on women as “equals”. If you’re following so far consider that due to welfare the provider (sorry, “male oppressor” lol) is increasingly replaced by the state. In other words, you no longer even have to _meet_ your provider, let alone have sex with him, because his resources have been provided to you courtesy of the taxman. RP’ers in general have little interest in activism. What they are interested in is exploiting this knowledge for fun and profit.
@Roger Philips
“RP is a reaction against the social script where men become providers to women in exchange for sex. This is a sucker’s game in current conditions where women hold all the legal cards in marriage, are happy to jump ship to a better mate, and in reality want sex with exciting,”
That is a social script in nesting birds too. So, that is really not much of an explanation. One of the alternatives is explored by gay commu ities. Maybe the RPs look for guidance there?
What I have seen with single mothers does not square well with your narrative.
The more resentful ones maybe — bloggers like the author of Married Man Sex Life aren’t reacting against marriage or men taking up the provider role, only the idea that the way to a woman’s heart is “deference and respect” as opposed to “strength and leadership.” (And I’m not sure “reacting against” is the right term even there.)
One theme of the DE is that there are numerous fault lines running through our modern society and numerous groups are fracturing into warring parties. Social cohesion is yielding to incipient melee. All that’s needed is a spark.
The recent revolutions and attempted revolutions seem to be reactions to bad government (corrupt, uses a lot of torture) rather than exacerbated social divisions.
Rwanda wasn’t just a spark– more like a conspiracy. Has the source of all those machetes been established?
> “If ‘All persons are not equal before the law’ is not one of the premises of your
> politics, your politics will end badly’”.
I’m confused here, but should this be “If ‘All persons are equal before the law’ is not…'” because in my world view it is inequality in the eyes of the law that ends badly, not equality in the eyes of the law.
>it is inequality in the eyes of the law that ends badly
You’re right. Possibly there’s an extra negative in the sentence that shouldn’t be.
@ Nancy Lebovitz – “The recent revolutions and attempted revolutions seem to be reactions to bad government”
Good point. Another theme of the DE is that a lot of governments are poorly lead and abuses are becoming more common. How many of us would have predicted that a real Big Brother government would arise in the US at the present time?
[Pardon me for drifting off-topic.] @grendelkhan: Ayers’ jokey “confession” is irrelevant. The known facts fit the hypothesis. All of Obama’s known pre-book writing ranges from awkward to awful. He was stalled on his book, and Ayers “helped” him with it over a period of months. Ayers writes well. The book turned out very well-written, in a similar style to Ayers’, and often using phrasing, metaphors, and similes found in Ayers’ writings. It’s not exactly a stretch to suspect Obama got enough “help” to make the book essentially ghostwritten.
>in DE jargon, eth-nats and HBD for short.
Maybe “granfalloon” doesn’t go far enough. I’ve been reading several “Dark Enlightenment” sources (mostly Takimag, to which John Derbyshire, Fred Reed, and Steve Sailer contribute, and Alternative Right, though not so much since they changed to “Radix Journal”; plenty of AmRen as well; incidentally, I started reading AltRight for Jack Donovan, but I haven’t gotten into spearhead) for about four years, and I don’t recognize any of the jargon people are using.
It’s like those “10 texting codes all parents should know” pieces. I’ve never sent, received, or heard of a “KPC” (Keeping Parents Clueless) or a “GNOC” (Get Naked On Camera).
I actually hadn’t seen the term “Dark Establishment” until I saw it on Takimag’s “The Week That Perished” on January 27th. It’s silly to group everyone into this. Is Gavin McInnes a part of the “Desktop Environment” because he contributes to TakiMag?
Not outliers at all
Search for Sunshine Mary (https://sunshinemaryandthedragon.wordpress.com/) commenting on Jim’s blog. They respect each other immensely and agree on almost everything, except for a few minor details such as that she thinks we are fallen angels, he thinks we are risen killer apes, he believes in Darwin, she believes in God, he hopes for the technological singularity but expects a lengthy dark age, she expects the life thereafter.
But, agreeing on inequality, on the nature of man (fallen angels and risen killer apes wind up in much the same place), they agree on pretty much everything that matters. He brings the bad news of Darwin, she brings the bad news of God the father and sin, which sound remarkably similar.
We have not been specific about it, because we think that almost anything would likely work better than what we have.
The public service is largely independent of the politicians. They cannot be fired, they cannot have their budget cut.
For example the SEC protected and favored the Ponzi schemer Madoff, in a fashion that smells massively of corruption. The Senate summoned them for questioning. They refused to answer questions, and refused to invoke the fifth amendment, placing them clearly and unambiguously in contempt of the senate, and their silence in the face of questioning was an implicit admission of guilt.
Nonetheless, the senate lacked the balls to charge them with contempt.
So the practical effect is that government lacks any central control, so government funds are a commons, government regulatory power is a commons, which guarantees that the commons will be exhausted, unlimited spending, unlimited regulation. That is why they cannot pass a meaningful budget, why laws grow to thousands of pages.
Anarchy, monarchy, and despotism are all solutions to this intolerable problem of the commons.
This is anarcho tyranny: Everything is illegal, except crime which legal. The anarchy is that there is no center, no central authority, the tyranny is that the government buts into everything.
Anarchy without tyranny is a solution, tyranny without anarchy is a solution.
@PapayaSF:
>@Jeff Read: I think that your view of the Right is a lot like the famous Steinberg New Yorker cover, looking West from NYC: lots of things get vague and compressed. Rushdoony is a marginal figure,
Indeed he is: I’m a social conservative myself, and I’ve only heard of him in the past year or two, from only one or two sources.
@Jeff Read:
>O RLY? Then can you explain why they are both so chummy with that theocratic bastard (and Rushdoony’s son-in-law) Gary North?
Why are you so chummy with that anarchist bastard Eric S. Raymond? You’re a regular commenter on his blog! You must be a closet anarchist yourself!
People sometimes have friends and associates with political view that they disagree with, or even find outright offensive. And one person may sometimes think that another person’s opinions on a particular issue are spot-on while thinking they’re stark raving mad on just about every other. (For some reason, saying that brings Richard Stallman sharply to mind for me).
There are indeed factors that incline social conservatives to something like libertarianism (belief in original sin inclines us to supporting decentralized institutions with lots of redundancy built in, such as free marketism and democracy), but by and large we’re rather suspicious of it, and there’s no small number of us that voice the opinion that it’s a front for the Left (which ends up sounding just as crazy to the better-informed as your allegation that it’s a front for the Right).
>I’ve only heard of [Rushdoony] in the past year or two, from only one or two sources.
Yeah, well, keep the brain bleach near to hand if you investigate – a social conservative will need it worse than I did. I commented to Ken Burnside that a precis of Rushoony’s thinking and public statements reads like some mad scientist took every dark left-wing fantasy about so-cons and reified it as a walking talking pile of putrid slime.
My brother and I spent a couple of months in Singapore long ago when Lee Kuan Yew was the man. It seemed to be a pretty open and free place as long as you followed the rules – a more or less benevolent dictatorship, although I am sure that in many ways, it was much worse than I knew. Once, when we drove past Changi prison, my father said that that was where all the members of the opposition party were and that a person did NOT want to go there.
Of course, the problem with tyrannies is the issue of who is the tyrant.
Unlike open-source projects, tyrannies react very violently to an attempt to fork them.
@winter
Name & shame is good. Double-blind might also work. What is manifestly unjust is to make merit the official criterion, and ethnicity(race) an unofficial after-the-fact criterion. It was bad when the favored group was white, and it’s bad when whites are not the favored group. I want no favored group. It’s divisive.
The Netherlands is a high trust society. The U.S.A. used to be one. Interest group politics are one way to turn high trust into low trust.
@Winter
Men do not work in pre-agricultural societies. They hunt, they fish, they rumble with the neighbors, they may play at a craft. None of those things is work.
Agricultural societies got men to work by making sex and marriage contingent on it. Now that bargain is breaking down.
It’s particularly bad in the USA, where minimum wage, taxes, and employment regulations have priced low skilled labor above its value. There is a demonstrated demand for the low skilled labor of between 10 and 14 million people. American citizens used to do those jobs. Now the low skilled American male has very little to contribute to a family. Welfare makes him completely dispensable.
The effects reach into the middle class. It’s interesting that the Progressives “celebrate lifestyle choices” most do not follow. The political class, including the Progressives, tends to behave very socially conservative. It’s as if they’re encouraging their constituents to self-destruct.
Don’t tell me about all the politicians who can’t keep their pants on. It’s a disease of the political animal since time began. Someone who is skilled at persuading others to do what he wants often applies those skills to his sex life.
And I’m a conservative who’d has never heard of Rushdoony outside of this blog. Jeff, your conspiracy theories are showing.
@Winter
Yes and the term “cuckold” comes from birds also. Are you dense? Not all birds are running the same script. So it is with humans. One wonders how you can come back to me time and time again, continually making a fool out of yourself, responding without bothering to understand anything at all, every response a passive-aggressive defense of your retarded politics. What you said doesn’t contradict me in any way, but you will no doubt return with some equally retarded and poorly considered remark.
Nobody cares about your observations, because you’ve made it clear time and time again that you are bad at interpreting them. Every observation is interpreted as a validation of your cute little worldview. If you get married to a woman she has all the legal rights, and all of the legal rights pertain to things _she_ wants from the marriage anyway. The fact that some single mothers STILL fail it at life and end up losers has no bearing on the matter – except to show that by trying to “help” losers by giving them special rights and privileges you just turn them into bigger losers.
Not so. For example East Asian is not a disadvantage.
Everything that suggested a NAM (membership of an inferior race) was a disadvantage. This is partly because members of inferior races tend to have affirmative action degrees and affirmative action qualifications, and partly because members of inferior races often arrogantly demand one sided respect – they demand to be treated with unreasonable courtesy, while being shockingly discourteous, and often menacing and violent, because being deemed impolite to a NAM can and will get your business shut down by the government, while NAMs are taught “self esteem” (meaning rudeness, menace, and violence) in school. See for example this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRfjLfyXYlA “racism in the elevator”, where the black is blissfully unaware he is performing to stereotype.
The same, of course, applies to female applicants for much the same reasons. Though they don’t threaten violence or use physically menacing body language, they will scream like a drunken naked fishwife and/or burst into tears. They are apt to reject logic as a phallocentric male plot.
Because eggs are more valuable than sperm, men inherently tend to treat women as more valuable than men, which results in disruptive female behavior in the workplace.
Secondly, since women are markedly less capable of tech than males, they are particularly underrepresented in tech, and underrepresentation is of course illegal, so any time they have a real or imagined grievance, they can sic the state onto the company and any random males in the company that they happen to capriciously feel like destroying, thus females in tech much more privileged, much more dangerous, than females in other industries.
This double dose of privilege causes grotesquely inflated egos, which in turn causes casual and unthinking arrogance, capricious malice, and reckless malice.
Sometime ago, at Gasonics, a female employee complained her supervisor was sexually harassing her. She was assigned to a different supervisor. I never observed her doing any actual work, while I did observe her vigorously attempting to seduce her new supervisor, on one occasion diving under his desk. Eventually she made a complaint of sexual harassment against her new supervisor, and was transferred to me. I immediately asked her, in the presence of numerous witnesses, while standing a quite considerable distance from her, to perform a task that she considered beneath her dignity – though I had been doing it.
I left her to it. Some hours passed, and it did not get done. I courteously chided her about this, again in the presence of numerous witnesses, and she responded with a raised voice and sharp words. I lost my temper and proceeded to shout her down. Immediately my boss, and his boss, came into workshop at a dead run, as if the place was on fire. She proceeded to embrace my boss and weep noisily and wetly on his shoulder.
Men just don’t do stuff like that. The presence of fertile age women in the workplace is just inherently disruptive, partly because they are inherently inclined to certain kinds of misbehavior (drama), mostly because men are inherently unwilling to restrain them from bad behavior, partly because political correctness forbids us to restrain them from bad behavior characteristic of females.
Men, and women past fertile age, do not weep on the shoulder of their boss’s boss.
Fertile age women in the workplace are very likely to have sex with their boss, or their boss’s boss, that being human nature, and if they manage to restrain themselves, they will not restrain themselves from giving their boss high hopes whenever they want to get their way, which enables profoundly disruptive behavior.
If a woman has sex with her boss, she will not view her equals as equals, but inferiors, indeed as nonexistent, resulting in damaging and disruptive behavior. If she has sex with her boss’s boss, or is even thinking about having sex with her boss’s boss, she will treat her boss as inferior or non existent, resulting in very damaging and disruptive behavior.
James A. Donald on 2014-02-22 at 16:40:30 said:
But, agreeing on inequality, on the nature of man (fallen angels and risen killer apes wind up in much the same place), they agree on pretty much everything that matters. He brings the bad news of Darwin, she brings the bad news of God the father and sin, which sound remarkably similar.
This sounds very much like what Dorothy Sayers wrote in The Documents in the Case. Sayers was a devout Catholic and a respected Christian apologist, in addition to writing best-selling mysteries and translating medieval literature. TDitC is a mystery novel, and of course one must not confuse the voice of characters with authors – but one should not totally dissociate them as well. In TDitC, an Anglican vicar has some college friends who are scientists over for dinner, beer, and talk. The vicar remarks at one point that it’s a good thing the Church stuck to the Fallen Nature of Man; if it had been dropped, when Science came along with Evolution it would have been forced back on them after all.
@Roger Philips
“Yes and the term “cuckold” comes from birds also.”
I would not compare inter-species parasitism with intra-species sexe-conflicts.
@Roger Philips
“Are you dense?”
That would be one explanation. The other would be that you are not very clear in your writing.
Summary of what follows: If the RPs do not like the law, they should stop whining and change it. Also, do not blame the women, these laws were all written and enforced by men long before women got a say in the matter.
Follows long rant.
@Roger Philips
“Not all birds are running the same script. So it is with humans.”
Nesting birds where both parents take care of their children have comparable “marital” conflicts. Actually, observations of nesting bird colonies read like a soap. What I do not understand is why people complain about the infidelity of the other sex? That has been around before humans existed, and will be around after humans have gone the way of the dodo.
Men and women are evolutionary put in a split mind, they need to care for their children to have a chance to pass on their genes, but the best odds are found when you mix your genes with other people than your spouse, the other care taker. But these spouses might quite and leave you alone if you do. That is the same problem many nesting birds (and others) have to deal with.
However, the social problem that seems to enrage these RPs is that society in the USA (and many others) at some point decided that the personal care for children was to be delegated to their mothers (women) and the financial care and protection was delegated to the fathers (men). Then it was only a small step to enshrine in law that every woman and child was to be cared for (financially) by a man, ie, the father of her children.
Indeed, that is unjust, not modern, and a relic of ancient times etc. Still that is the deal in most of the world: If you father children, you will have to pay for them and their mothers.
Some cultures care less for the women, and fathers are only required to take care of their children and can let their deserted mothers die. But there is no inherent reason to give the fathers any rights, only that they pay for the children and mother. In some countries fathers get all the rights, e.g., Arab countries, in others they get none, e.g., the USA.
This has nothing to do with justice or equality for the law. This is pure and simple a way to get children and women an income to live from.
If a man does not want that, he should not marry and certainly not sire children. It is much cheaper to go for commercial sex (actually, that was what K did in Kafka’s novel. He was put to death for it).
But, as you wrote, I am probably too dense to understand the intricacies of these matters.
@Roger Philips
“One wonders how you can come back to me time and time again, continually making a fool out of yourself, responding without bothering to understand anything at all, every response a passive-aggressive defense of your retarded politics.”
One learns a lot while being corrected by the well-informed. What I still have not yet mastered is the meaning of “passive aggressive”. I also am not aware that I defend some particular politics. Maybe someone can inform me about what policies I am defending?
@BobW
” American citizens used to do those jobs. Now the low skilled American male has very little to contribute to a family. Welfare makes him completely dispensable.”
I was told the USA sneakily let in a lot of illegal immigrants to lower the wages of menial jobs. Only after the wages had dropped enough were the borders closed effectively.
And, as Jessica wrote elsewhere, men are indeed dispensable. If you want to change that, make sure you offer a woman something she wants and needs. To often I read men whining that the government should help men being relevant again.
@JAD
“Not so. For example East Asian is not a disadvantage.”
Sorry, but these were also discriminated against. Our employers are not particularly choosy in whom they discriminate against.
I have no idea what the point is in the rest of your comment. Except, maybe, that you work at a dysfunctional company.
Sometime ago, at Gasonics,
I’m sorry you had to put up with that instance of inappropriate behaviour, but you seem to be letting both HR and your bosses off very lightly here. It’s possible, I’m sure even in the testosterone-soaked world of tech, to find workplaces where a little professionalism and impulse control keep that kind of thing in check, at least some of the time.
The deal in most of the world has been that if you produce children, a man has to be a husband and father, and woman has to be a wife and a mother, not “financial support”. Children need their biological fathers to be fathers. They don’t need “financial support”
The trouble is that in our society, the woman is not required to be a wife, and the man is frequently forbidden to be a father.
If women get the right to choose, then men should get the right to choose. If men do not get the right to choose, neither should women. If men should be forced to support children, women should be forced to be wives and mothers.
Evidence?
There is a social and legal requirement that men turn off their hormones and stop thinking with their dicks when they enter the workplace’
There is no social or legal requirement that women turn off their hormones and stop thinking with their pussies when they enter the workplace, and if HR and management tried to enforce such a requirement, instant lawsuit.
@JAD
“Not so. For example East Asian is not a disadvantage.
Sorry, but these were also discriminated against
Evidence?”
Eh, you mean you have reason to doubt that Dutch employers discriminate against assorted East Asians? I do not feel particular driven to dredge up old Dutch newspapers to get at the discussions about the isolated position of Chinese immigrants.
Why is it difficult to believe the Dutch can behave irrational?
@JAD
“The deal in most of the world has been that if you produce children, a man has to be a husband and father, and woman has to be a wife and a mother, not “financial support”. Children need their biological fathers to be fathers. They don’t need “financial support””
Sorry, but the deal I heard was unrestricted sexual access in return for money.
There was no legal or social requirement for the husband to be home more than necessary to fulfill some legal paperwork. He could fight foreign wars or trade with whatever remote part of the world he chose to.
That changed after WWII, but only slowly. Only in the 1970s divorse became readily accessible to women.
@JAD
“If men should be forced to support children, women should be forced to be wives and mothers.”
Advocating sexual slavery, how fitting.
@Winter
Advocating financial and economic slavery. How repulsive.
@Ted Walther
Actually, my personal opinion is that women should earn their own income. But indeed, I also think both parents are responsible for personal and financial care of their children.
Moreover, I see a clear line between financial obligations and forcing people to have sex against their will.
@Winter
Yeah, because garnishment of wages and foreclosure of your home is NOTHING like rape. Oh wait…
Seems to me that both of those things are bad; one is just worse than the other. And being opposed to one doesn’t imply support of the other.
@A
Indeed, my thoughts in clear text. The world is not black and white.
I have good reason to doubt that Californian employers, among others, discriminate against East Asians, and no reason to believe that Dutch employers are different.
In California, some Han Chinese employers discriminate against other Chinese races, but white employers, not knowing the difference, do not. (I kind of get the vague impression that it is the little ones not liking the big ones, but I cannot tell the difference either, or even pronounce the names that distinguish them)
I see this series of blog entries as ESR wanting to get in on the ground floor of Dark Enlightenment thinking, and co-opt, control, tailor, and influence the “movement” to the best of his ability (for example: minimizing the influence of Christian traditionalists, as well as mentioning that the DE concept of “The Cathedral” was possibly borrowed from his own writings). This steerage is reminiscent of what ESR did to the Jargon File, and it fits his general nature: he is a power-hungry propagandist by trade and by type — it’s what he does best (see: “Open Source”). Dark Enlightenment ideas agree with a lot of ESR’s ideas, and noticing this, he wants to make sure he gets credit and can shape history, just in case the DE movement turns out to be important or influential in some (minor?) way; might as well stake a claim early just in case. Certainly this comment will be ignored, or textually sneered at and dismissed as pop psychology (or deleted? Dare to dream). But, it’s the truth. Search your feelings!
>But, it’s the truth. Search your feelings!
I don’t have to search my feelings. I’m laughing at your paranoid silliness.
Yes, I’m going to take over the Dark Enlightenment! Resistence is useless, prepare to be assimilated! BOOGA BOOGA!
/me collapses, giggling helplessly
@Winter
Nobody but you would have trouble absorbing the meaning of this sentence. Again, just dripping with resentment and negation.
@Winter
You are quite possibly the stupidest regular on this site. I’m sorry, but there is no other way to put it. RP’ers are not MRA’s. They’re not agitating for legal reform or “equality”, they are trying to see things a they are for fun and profit. Blaming women isn’t a core attitude of RP (in fact, the purest RP’ers are against this resentful loser attitude). I mean, you’d think that, being unable to read my posts, that you’d go and do some research but alas you are the sort who just goes on and on about things you have no fucking clue about. Some RP’ers (the ones that don’t make it) become creatures of resentment. The truth does that to some people (hint: look in the mirror). Your whole response is PURE projection. Don’t respond to me until you are capable of at least the _slightest_ comprehension.
@Roger Phillips
“RP’ers are not MRA’s. They’re not agitating for legal reform or “equality”, they are trying to see things a they are for fun and profit. Blaming women isn’t a core attitude of RP (in fact, the purest RP’ers are against this resentful loser attitude).”
See, it worked, I learned something. Some of my misconceptions have cleared up.
And I appologize to all Red Pillers that I confused them for MRAs.
@JAD
“I have good reason to doubt that Californian employers, among others, discriminate against East Asians, and no reason to believe that Dutch employers are different.”
We are talking not about high tech jobs. This is about an existing imigrant community that came to the Netherlands to work in restaurants and likewise menial work. Chinese students with a good education have much less problems from employers.
“Marital rape” is nothing like rape, as is proven by the fact that within living memory it was not only legal everywhere in the world, but socially required almost everywhere in the world.
Coercion that enforces random sex is bad for society, bad for women, and bad for children, is rape.
Coercion that enforces sex with the father of one’s children is good for society, good for women, and especially good for those children, preventing women from irrationally engaging in self destructive behavior that they are notoriously prone to engage in. It is not rape, but traditional marriage.
Most divorces are female initiated, most divorces hurt the children the most, the wife second, and the husband does fine.
Consider for example the divorce of the reality show star Kate Gosselin, woman has eight children by a decent, reasonably attractive husband, who loves her and loves his children. Acts like a complete shrew towards the only man who will ever lover her and her children. (Recorded on television being a shrew) For the sake of his beloved chidren, he puts up with his shrewish wife. She, predictably, ditches him. Advertises for a handsome six foot tall millionaire with no children. Is shocked to discover that no other male wants a woman past her prime and encumbered with eight children.
Kate Gosselin was videotaped continually treating her husband like dirt, as the man she reluctantly settled for seeing as all her preferred choices would not return her phone calls.
She then divorced him, depriving him of his much loved children, depriving her eight children of a much needed father, and herself of a much needed and entirely irreplaceable husband.
And I have seen a similar dynamic in every divorce that I have observed, though of course with considerably fewer children. In every divorce that I have observed the wife was utterly and spectacularly out of contact with marriage market realities. The result of the divorce is that the man, who very much did not want the divorce, was much better off, free of a hateful and unfaithful shrew, and the wife was very much worse off. As the wife goggles fell from his eyes, he usually found a considerably younger replacement.
At the age of thirty eight, with eight children and a notorious shrew, Kate Gosselin’s chances of marrying even a homeless obese seventy year old alcoholic are about equal to her chances of being kidnapped by terrorists and becoming the wife of the sultan, but she specifically requires her new husband to be rich, six foot tall, physically fit, and childless. (Her previous husband was not rich, not six foot tall, and only ordinarily fit, which is presumably why she divorced him.)
Meanwhile her husband, having lost the wife goggles, now has a 22 year old hot girlfriend, and if the girlfriend is lucky, might consider marrying her.
We should not allow wives the choice to refuse their husbands, for the same reason as we should not allow ten year olds the choice to take heroin. Women with raging hormones, which is to say fertile age women, women between andrenarche and menopause, lack the ability to exercise such choices competently.
I see: So Dutch employers like some Chinese and do not like other Chinese. Therefore racist.
But if both parents are responsible for the personal care of their children, they have to live in the same household. And if they live in the same household, one person has to be head of household. And that person has to be the husband, because women will not stand for being head of household. A woman being the head of household is like the dog being the alpha male. The dog gets terribly, difficult, tense and upset.
And so, if both parents should be responsible for children, and obviously they should, for though men and women are unequal in many ways, they are equal in that children need their mother and their father, then you have to conclude that traditional marriage should be enforced. And, since it is and always has been primarily female misbehavior that disrupts traditional marriage, enforced upon women.
@JAD
Like esr, you are frothing at the mouth insane demonizing our very recent past, a past that many of us personally experienced and remember quite well.
The deal is stated quite plainly in the New Testament
“Coercion that enforces sex with the father of one’s children is good for society, good for women, and especially good for those children, preventing women from irrationally engaging in self destructive behavior that they are notoriously prone to engage in. It is not rape, but traditional marriage.”
James, you have accomplished something that very few have managed: you’ve creeped me out.
just_some_guy: “I see this series of blog entries as ESR wanting to get in on the ground floor of Dark Enlightenment thinking, and co-opt, control, tailor, and influence the “movement” to the best of his ability”
gigglesnort What are you smoking and where can I get some? That’s some seriously good shit, man.
“This steerage is reminiscent of what ESR did to the Jargon File”
Mark Crispin, is that you? Or some other alter kacker unhappy that ESR brought the Jargon File into the modern era?
And I appologize to all Red Pillers that I confused them for MRAs.
AIUI (and I am far from wishing to present such understanding as comprehensive) the Manosphere Venn diagram has three main not hugely overlapping regions, the ones who want to manipulate women (PUAs or panty-whisperers, though there are also ones like MMSL who are more grownup about it), the ones who have been manipulated by women and are angry about it (MRAs or bitter divorcees), and the ones who have thrown up their hands in disgust at the whole business (without necessarily embracing homosexuality) (MGTOWs), but I don’t know much about them.
Nervous laughter from ESR and ESR Toadie #N. Check. Must have struck a nerve…the truth has been exposed and will set the reader free!
Most people whose beards are turning gray can remember the time when this system, traditional marriage, was universal and universally accepted. I don’t recall anyone complaining about it other than overweight never married lesbian feminists built like cattle trucks.
TomA:
> How many of us would have predicted that a real Big Brother government would
> arise in the US at the present time?
Anyone who was paying attention during *any* part of the 1900s would have.
Adrian – I think you’re describing the “manosphere” rather than the “Dark Enlightenment.” MRA’s — judging by COTWA and AVFM — don’t share a lot of understanding with the PUA/Red Pill blogs (the latter may fairly be called DE; the former may not).
Per the OP there are a lot of DE blogs that don’t have a “manosphere” focus (VDARE, for example, which focuses on immigration restriction rather than relations between the sexes).
Me? ESR Toadie #N??!
This is not nervous laughter. This is overt, ROTFL belly-laughing.
Jay Maynard:
>J.A.D:
>>“Coercion that enforces sex with the father of one’s children is good for society,
>>good for women, and especially good for those children, preventing women
>>from irrationally engaging in self destructive behavior that they are notoriously
>>prone to engage in. It is not rape, but traditional marriage.”
> James, you have accomplished something that very few have managed: you’ve
> creeped me out.
I think that J.A.D has a slightly different idea of “coercion” in that sentence than you do.
Adrian – I think you’re describing the “manosphere” rather than the “Dark Enlightenment.”
Indeed, as Winter was confused about two groups who both fall within the former rather than the latter.
Not the biggest derail ever, really.
The DE is largely a movement of nerdy ex-libertarian spergs. Besides the usual boredom reducing time wasting my assumption is that most are hoping the movement becomes popular enough for them to quit their day jobs and complain on the internet for a living. Also, since I know many are government employees pretty close to the poz I imagine a great deal of it is just coping mechanism (if you ever spent any time working in the government you know what I’m talking about). There are some normal in there you wouldn’t mind having a beer with, but its only going to move further and further in the other direction now that its a “thing”.
When you look at that DE chart what you see is people with dramatically different fundamental philosophies. So much so you had to throw out whole wings for your write up. The only thing really holding these people together are a toleration for unpleasant but true hatefacts. Namely HBD, the corruption of the political system (and the role of universal suffrage with no effective constitutional control), and the fact that things may not actually be “progressing” anymore and maybe haven’t for some decades now. Beyond these things, and even what should be done about them, there is no agreement. Generally the only thing I think you could get these people to agree to on a policy basis is:
1) We should stop turning this place into Mexico because that’s obviously bad.
2) We should stop firing people because they say whatever it is PC forces are up in arms about this year.
3) On a personal level you should try to keep your daughter off the pole.
I would add that HBD has implied ramifications beyond the mere facts.
1) Immigrations (it sucks, especially if its NAMs)
2) Disparate impact (get rid of it)
If you believe in HBD it’s hard not to get to #1 & 2.
I have other things I think it implies that are more controversial. Like the idea that the reality of genetics should mean we place less emphasis on outcomes are a moral indication of people with all sorts of cultural, social, political, and economic implications. But that is more debatable.
Unless he’s pulling an Andy Kaufman, Mark Crispin has been dead for over a year.
And anyway, Eric does have a history of injecting his own personal biases into Jargon. For example he describes the hacker political zeitgeist as “moderate to neoconservative” when, so far as I have been able to observe, it is overwhelmingly predominantly left-liberal. In fact, hackers — being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology than most — are far more likely to advocate economically progressive policies like guaranteed basic income than even mainstream liberals.
He also included “jargon” entries (such as “anti-idiotarianism”) that had little to do with hackerdom and much more to do with the warblog community he was a part of in the early 2000s.
Bringing Jargon into the modern era is one thing; attempting to use it as a personal soapbox is quite another. Eric rightly deserves credit for the former, but there is also considerable evidence of the latter.
>such as “anti-idiotarianism”
That wasn’t bias, it was just reporting. When I added that entry in the 9/11 aftermath it seemed to getting traction in hacker circles. Now it has fallen out of use there and I’m not sure how to mark it; “obsolete” doesn’t seem quite right. I may just remove it entirely.
My experience is that “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” turns people into libertarians, not left-liberals. Not that I expect you to ever be able to admit that.
The fools who accuse me of injecting my biases have missed something basic; were I doing that, I would have described hackers a a bunch of anarcho-libertarians
@JAD
“Coercion that enforces sex with the father of one’s children is good for society, good for women, … . It is not rape, but traditional marriage.”
“Most people whose beards are turning gray can remember the time when this system, traditional marriage, was universal and universally accepted.”
Go back a generation or so more, and the same arguments were used to uphold slavery and torture. These were also practiced and accepted since the dawn of history.
But I would not be surprised at all if you would advocate these too.
It was not wives that complained about traditional marriage.
@JAD
“It was not wives that complained about traditional marriage.”
I am sure you can find examples in every country, but here is a Dutch example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aletta_Jacobs
(she wrote a lot about how marriage customs and law should be changed)
And here are some female critics of marital rape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Feminist_critique_in_the_19th_century
@JAD
winter
Built like a diesel truck. Never married. No children. What would she know or care?
@JAD
“Built like a diesel truck. Never married. No children. What would she know or care?”
About wives and children? Likely much more than you as she practiced as a GP specialized in marital affairs.
Wives and husbands traveled far to tell her their worries and problems.
>Mark Crispin, is that you? Or some other _alter kacker_ unhappy that ESR brought the Jargon File into the modern era?
Say WHAT? I have not heard that expression in YEARS. I grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood that had a certain number of old Yids. It’s a Yiddishism that means roughly ‘old fart’. Ashkenazi Jews tend to have a very high life expectancy, so naturally they have a suitable expression.
Odd. Previously, the youngest person I’ve ever heard *use* that expression is now pushing 70.
>Say WHAT? I have not heard that expression in YEARS.
It’s perfectly appropriate, though. I’d say “old shitter” is a better literal translation. I was a bit surprised to see it used it by a gentile with a Texas accent. Where’d you pick up that lexical item, Jay?
>My experience is that “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” turns people into libertarians, not left-liberals. Not that I expect you to ever be able to admit that.
FWIW – Having known a lot of people who’ve gone each way – libertarian and left-liberal, my observation is that people who really think through the ramifications of technology tend toward libertarianism. The people who (consciously or not) bask in the glow of the mainstreaming of technology and think about how now they have the possibility of achieving wealth, power and actual *status* (as opposed to being an outcast stuffed in a locker) – those people buy into the left-liberal groupthink big time, because that’s what all the ‘right thinking’ people do (in the blue areas, if you want to be able to associate with the right people, get invited to the right parties, etc, you need to fit in and ape the party line).
>It’s perfectly appropriate, though. I’d say “old shitter” is a better literal translation. I was a bit surprised to see it used it by a gentile with a Texas accent. Where’d you pick up that lexical item, Jay?
In the sense of ‘old bullshit artist’? Very possibly, I really just picked up the meaning from context and that one could work too. If Jay were in Florida I could easily see it, but Texas is a shock. :)
>In the sense of ‘old bullshit artist’?
Not quite. “Old bullshit artist” implies someone who is consciously deceptive; “alter kacker”, if I grok it correctly, is someone who can’t help emitting crap.
I’m not sure where I got it, but I do use that and another Yiddishism, “oy gevalt!” (which I got from a long-time friend, also a Texan) when the occasion seems to call for it.
You have to admit that “alter kacker” carries a bit more…emphasis than simply “old fart”.
@esr
“My experience is that “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” turns people into libertarians, not left-liberals.”
The European Pirate Parties tend to be rather fond of the welfare state, ie, a guaranteed/basic income for all:
Australia
“A new Basic Income will be introduced for persons aged 18 and over: ”
http://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Policies/Welfare
UK
“We need a better ways to reduce poverty and support people when they need support. We will be investigating how a Citizens Income could be implemented in the UK and will promote reforms that would lead to such a scheme being the back bone of welfare reform in the future”
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/media/uploads/Manifesto2012.pdf
Germany
“The Pirate Party also supports an unconditional basic income for citizens and direct democracy via e-democracy.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_Germany
>The European Pirate Parties tend to be rather fond of the welfare state
Well, there’s a surprise, given that a lot of their support base is all about wanting to take other peoples’ stuff for free to begin with. The leadership, people like Falkvinge, is smarter – and more libertarian.
It’s been said that Yiddish has many terms for obnoxious people for the same reason that Eskimos have many terms for snow…
but I’d always understood “alter kacker” to mean simply “old fart”. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was a more precise meaning.
Winter, I have to object: it’s yet to be demonstrated that the Pirate Parties embody the hacker ethos in any meaningful way.
@esr&Jay Maynard
I responded to:
If anything, the founders of the Pirate parties were “more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” than the average politician/citizen etc. The result was not a change away from “liberal” or “left” political thinking.
I know quite a number of people cognizant in technology and its socioeconomic effects. I did not notice a change in their political leanings.
Whether or not they had “communist” ideas beforehand was not part of the original assertion.
>Whether or not they had “communist” ideas beforehand was not part of the original assertion.
That’s not what Jay means. He means that there’s little evidence of almost anyone in the PP being part of the community of makers that espouses the hacker ethos. To the extent that’s true, what the PP institutionally believes cannot be used to confirm or falsify claims about hackers.
I don’t think the overlap is zero, but I don’t think there’s a lot of it either – and what there is is mostly confined to a relative handful among their leadership and their core technical people. If this weren’t so, PP propaganda would have a different flavor than it does.
And to be clear: Eric’s argument, since it was about the Jargon File, related specifically to the hacker community. I agree with Eric in that hackers are much more likely to be libertarians than leftists; I have no idea who Jeff Read’s hanging out with that leads him to believe otherwise, unless it’s a case of confirmation bias. (Which is not the case with me, since I’m not a full-gospel libertarian in the same way that the average hacker is.)
@esr:
>>The European Pirate Parties tend to be rather fond of the welfare state
>Well, there’s a surprise, given that a lot of their support base is all about wanting to take other peoples’ stuff for free to begin with.
From what I’ve seen, thinking seriously about the ramifications of technology makes one take the concept of intellectual property less seriously, at least to the extent of being more willing to release your ideas to the public under permissive terms rather than trying to sell instantiations of them (for example, you, or Lawrence Lessig), and possibly to the extent of advocating the complete abolition of copyrights and patents (me, RMS).
If one is a conservative, like me, one’s general sense of the societal value of private property is likely to remain strong while this reevaluation of intellectual property takes place, and one is likely to move in a more libertarian direction (I remain a conservative, but a more libertarian conservative than I was, I think). If one is a libertarian, the same is likely to happen, and you remain a libertarian (In either case, you reevaluate IP as more of a monopoly and less a valid extension of the concept of property).
If you’re a left-liberal, with an already weak sense of the societal value of private property, then rather than causing you to realize that IP is not really property, thinking about the ramifications of technology and realizing how damaging IP is causes you to become even more skeptical of the value of private property in general. You remain a left liberal.
In any of the above cases, various details of your personality and values may cause you to be more (you, me, RMS) or less (Pirate parties, judging by their name) willing to honor copyright laws while they still exist.
@Winter on 2014-02-23 at 10:40:02 said:
You have it backward. The stricter tax enforcement starting in the ’70s killed much of the legitimate cash economy in the USA. The people who used to work in it lost their livelihoods.
The legitimate cash economy involves untaxed and unregulated goods and services that are otherwise not unlawful. It is cheaper to pay someone in cash to paint your house or mow your lawn. Now it’s too dangerous. We pay others, typically Spanish speaking Anglos, to assume that risk for us. They do not contract with American citizens. Illegals are less likely to rat on them.
The low end of the labor market is extremely sensitive to labor costs. The demand does not go away, but the government distorts it with perverse incentives. This is a policy failure, not an enforcement failure.
Europe has a large cash economy. You interface with it any time you pay a handyman in cash.
It is not whining to notice all this.
@Jay Maynard
Harlan Ellison had a short story, “Looking for Kadak”, in his collection “Approaching Oblivion”. It includes a Yiddish glossary. It has been decades since I read it last, so I’m fuzzy on the differences between a schlemiel and a schlimazel.
@esr&Jay Maynard
So the original assertion had nothing to do with “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology”. It is about being a specific type of hacker, which might or might not include FSF members or non-US hackers
>So the original assertion had nothing to do with “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology”. It is about being a specific type of hacker, which might or might not include FSF members or non-US hackers
It was Jeff Read who brought in “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” (while grinding a political axe), not Jay or myself.
Wearing my wandering-anthropologist hat:
1. I have observed hackers all over Europe and Asia (and in South Africa, too) to be very similar psychologically to their American counterparts. Similar in senses of humor, tastes in food and music, and (yes) even in skepticism about conventional politics. It’s rather heartening, actually.
2. American-style ideological libertarianism is uncommon outside Anglophone countries, but hackers tend to have gut-level libertarian instincts everywhere I run into them. This is true, and startlingly noticeable, even in the notoriously collectivist/conformist culture of Japan!
3. FSF hackers in the US are an outlying group, skewing both more politically active and more left than most American hackers.
4. Curiously, self-reported “FSF people” in Europe are much less political than their U.S. counterparts. My observation of this has been explicitly confirmed by leading FSF Europe people I’ve spoken with. They don’t have an explanation and neither do I.
I think FSF hackers in the US skew left because the FSF’s ideology is explicitly leftist. This is no doubt a good part of the reason the FSF hasn’t captured more mindshare.
I think the reason for this is that the leftist memes present in FSF rhetoric fit more comfortably within a typical European’s Overton window than within a typical American’s. So, to a European, joining the FSF feels more like community service and less like political partisanship.
“but I’d always understood “alter kacker” to mean simply “old fart”. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was a more precise meaning.”
That’s the wrong way of looking at it. Yiddish has far fewer words than English does, and the same word or phrase has to do quadruple duty. It’s all context and tone of voice. Often, to know the true meaning of ‘alte cocker’, you actually have to have met the person referred to…a bit contradictory, but somehow it works.
> people like Falkvinge
I haven’t read much of his, but I was not impressed by his recent “analysis” of purported bitcoin manipulations.
Re: libertarian vs. liberal, and IP.
Government is needed to hand out money, partly because of the problems government creates by granting monopolies on things like IP. Even if we waved a magic wand and patents and copyrights disappeared, the pernicious effects would last for awhile.
So it’s certainly possible to have both libertarian and liberal sympathies, with the realization that if we had the political will things would probably be better, and the simultaneous realization that things are really bad for a lot of people right now.
The democrats seem to want to create a permanent underclass for political reasons, and the republicans seem to want to get rid of the underclass with the sink or swim (aka starve or adapt) philosophy. The populace is rightly wary of either extreme, but the political compromises made in the name of not being extreme (with the added bonus of enriching the heavy donors) are bad law in anyone’s estimation. So we lurch along until the next great depression. Then what?
@esr
If you look at European history, the state is more often the liberator of the common people than the oppressor. Opressors were often local aristrocracy. The term “robber baron” has to be taken literally.
In general, Europeans look at collective power to keep local gangs in check. Libertarianism is extremely rare. And the FSF is seen as a moderately “right wing” movement.
>If you look at European history, the state is more often the liberator of the common people than the oppressor. Opressors were often local aristrocracy.
If you are describing the thinking of Europeans accurately, I can only conclude that Europeans are remarkably stupid. No “robber baron” ever built a Dachau. The signature achievement of the modern state in its most fully developed form is not liberation, it is the death camp.
@ Jeff Read:
“the hacker political zeitgeist … so far as I have been able to observe, [is] overwhelmingly predominantly left-liberal.”
I suspect that there are two different things going on. First, perhaps, is the social milieu in which yourself. For example, all things being equal, I would assume that a hacker in Boston or Berkley would be to the “left” of somebody from Austin, Iowa, or my current Pittsburgh. (Seriously, we’ve got a lot of engineers and IT folks with pictures on their desks of them, their kids, and dead deer). If you are in one of the coastal areas, I can see how the hackers around you would be to the “left” of a national political median or libertarians.
Second, is that folk want to avoid association with the Republican Party and popular Conservative speakers because they are or are seen as being somewhere between icky, stupid, evil, and wrong, and thus reflexively adopt the Democratic Party to avoid the taint. However, these exact people may support many of the exact same ideas which libertarians support (maybe even Libertarians). When you look at the gamut of libertarian ideas, like ending foreign wars, getting rid of regulation, getting the government out of marriage, drug, and gun regulations, you’ll find a lot more hacker support. Getting rid of (or streamlining so as to be transparent) social support and spending isn’t the only key element of libertarian thought.
@esr
We had exactly one regime that created death camps. But we had thousands of petty aristocrats who laid bare the lands of Europe. All our political structures were developed during those centuries where local chieftains were brought to heel by a larger state.
The people in Kiev are not calling for abandoning the state because they know their neighbors will walk over them. Just as the British did with the Irisch and the Swedes with the Germans. As Russia did with Poland in the past and is doing now with those heavily armed people in the Caucasus.
Our history is reflected in our politics as is yours in the USA.
>>If you look at European history, the state is more often the liberator of the common people than the oppressor. Opressors were often local aristrocracy.
>If you are describing the thinking of Europeans accurately, I can only conclude that Europeans are remarkably stupid. No “robber baron” ever built a Dachau. The signature achievement of the modern state in its most fully developed form is not liberation, it is the death camp.
Talk about your ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’. Usually the primary thing centralization achieves is to make oppression more effective. The upside was, being more centralized generally gave you a leg up on oppressing your neighbors rather than the other way around (human nature to prefer being oppressed by your own gov’t rather than someone else’s, I suppose).
Compare the histories of Spain, France, and Poland, which rather suggest to me a strong link between effective centralization and oppression of others.
Though centralized power being established and then breaking down, leading to warlordism (or German princes) is a terrible thing.
>We had exactly one regime that created death camps.
Oh? Well I suppose if you’re *very* selective about who you consider ‘we’.
>But we had thousands of petty aristocrats who laid bare the lands of Europe. All our political structures were developed during those centuries where local chieftains were brought to heel by a larger state.
Which states then proceeded to do an even better job of laying bare the lands of Europe.
>The people in Kiev are not calling for abandoning the state because they know their neighbors will walk over them. Just as the British did with the Irisch and the Swedes with the Germans. As Russia did with Poland in the past and is doing now with those heavily armed people in the Caucasus.
Yes, you’re a nasty dog-eat-dog bunch. See my previous post about what centralized states did to their neighbors.
There’s a middle ground though, you know. The US also faced some dangerous external threats in its early days (before and after Independence). You can federate for common defense without having to create a black-hole-that-sucks-in-all-power overbearing centralized state. Which *was* the American approach, and it worked quite well for a while.
> No “robber baron” ever built a Dachau. The signature achievement of the modern state in its most fully developed form is not liberation, it is the death camp.
I’m not convinced the death camp is the signature achievement of the state.
Tthe genocides after the breakup of Yugoslavia suggest that a state can be instrumental in preventing that sort of thing.
What if the Nazi death camps were just what Patrick Maupin called “get rid of the underclass” – but with a more active, organized (“German”?) approach than just a “swim or sink” policy.
>What if the Nazi death camps were just what Patrick Maupin called “get rid of the underclass”
No. The Jews were, if anything, an overclass. The way to understand the Nazi death camps, and the Gulag, is as the logic of statism taken to its conclusion, which is expressed in Bertolt Brecht’s grim joke: if the government doesn’t trust the people, it dissolves them and elects a new people.
@Greg
The bigger the state, the higher the population density. Check your European history, starting, if you like, from the old Greek.
>The bigger the state, the higher the population density. Check your European history, starting, if you like, from the old Greek.
Often, yes, but not always. There were small, dense states and large, not-particularly-dense states.
But what is that supposed to tell me?
This is not on topic, but about the smartphone wars.
I guess Stephen Elop’s burning platforms have come full circle. Nokia just announced three low-end Android devices in Barcelona, weeks before the merger with Microsoft is to go through. Elop gave the presentation himself, so at least it doesn’t appear as if the project was done behind his back. Allegedly the phones are about getting Android users, and I imagine especially developers, to use Microsoft’s services and get them to contribute to the MS ecosystem. The devices have an Asha-like UI overlay and no Google services and no Play store. I suppose the theory goes that the success of the Android ecosystem will somehow rub off on Microsoft’s (fastest-growing OS in smartphones according to Elop, yay). One might also think that Nokia has lost any remaining faith in Windows Phone, and possibly so has Microsoft.
I really can’t see how anyone thought these phones were a good idea. Maybe nobody did, but Nokia is just trying everything anyway. They finally made an Android phone, which is what everyone has been asking for, but the three models are all under 110 euros, so there’s no nice hardware. Which should have been the point of a Nokia Android phone. I doubt that being somewhat compatible with Android apps gets Nokia anything at the low end, when the competition is more compatible in various and significant ways. Microsoft’s online services haven’t exactly been a draw compared to Google’s.
Interestingly enough, the idea of making Android phones to pull people to Microsoft’s services does seem somewhat compatible with the new CEO Satya Nadella, formerly of Microsoft’s “Cloud and Enterprise” group. Apparently he’s never been as dogmatic about getting everyone and everything onto Windows as some of the other executives at MS.
Nothing to add, but my compliments to the comment thread here.
@esr:
> The Jews were, if anything, an overclass.
Yes, arguably the resentment of “they are stealing my money through taxation and welfare” is dwarfed by the resentment of some other whole group of other people doing spectacularly better than my group because they are outcompeting us. I’m not close enough to know whether San Francisco is really becoming the powder-keg it is sensationalized to be, but I imagine the class resentment would be much higher if race were significantly involved, as well.
SF and Berkeley/Oakland have a small contingent of very radical left activists, who are fond of making violent stinks now and then. The recent Google bus kerfuffle* only made the national news because it involved Google. Normally the national media ignores their antics (and even the local media downplays them), because they reflect badly on the lefty cause-of-the-moment (Occupy, anti-Bush, etc.). In short, I’d say class resentment in SF is up from “barely visible” to “slightly more visible,” but riots and civil war are unlikely.
*The hilarious solution to this “crisis”: Google and other private buses will be charged for “using” public bus stops, but because there’s some sort of law that forbids making a profit from this sort of tax/fee, the money will be used only to… pay for the collection of taxes. In other words, more city employees and a larger bureaucracy. Thank you, anti-Google activists!
ok fine i’m crazy and paranoid. let esr be esr.
on another note: does anyone suspect that James A. Donald (Foghorn Leghorn, here) is using an alias? i just can’t imagine someone being so deliberately shock-evil (that is pretty much what he’s doing, i think, while pretending to be cold and calculating) without worrying about consequences vis-a-vis his employer, etc. maybe he’s in a wheelchair or something and this is his last laugh.
@Greg
“Often, yes, but not always. There were small, dense states and large, not-particularly-dense states.
But what is that supposed to tell me?”
If population density grows when states grow, then states are not the institutions that destroy the population.
I love the term “steelmanning”. It reminds me how (in French), François Guillaumat likes to “save” concepts, by extracting the good kernel in them that is being corrupted by layers of lies — he will then save the “democracy” by having it mean empowering individual citizens to make decisions about their individual lives, at which point it coincides with the free market, as opposed to “pseudo-democracy”, the collectivist religion based on electoral mysticism that reigns in current western States.
After strawmanning and steelmanning, can we have lioning, and together set off to see the wizard of Oz?
Looking forward to your next installments.
@esr:
” The Jews were, if anything, an overclass.”
Is it possible that they had high economic standing with low social standing? If so, they could be considered a social underclass, despite having a disproportionate amount of wealth. Thus they would be very easy to loot from as (almost) nobody would object.
@Patrick Maupin:
I’d point out that the original “get rid of the underclass” approach was taken by the Progressive movement in the US during the early 20th century with forced sterilizations of “imbeciles” and other undesirables. Apparently Hitler got his ideas from them.
@Garrett and others
“Is it possible that they had high economic standing with low social standing?”
What I understand is that Jews between the wars were not notably richer than other people.
There were rich and poor Jews like there were rich and poor Catholics and Protestants. If any of you has evidence that Jews were considerably richer than non-Jews in pre-war Germany, I would like to see it. I never have found any such evidence.
This whole “rich Jews” myth was part of the anti-semitic propaganda.
After the war, the remaining Jews were generally treated badly. In Poland there were even pogroms after the Germans left.
>After strawmanning and steelmanning, can we have lioning, and together set off to see the wizard of Oz?
Creating a position that is full of false bravado and cowardly bluster? I can’t come up with a non-satirical example.
Eric, how sure are you that it’s worth letting James. A. Donald post here? That comment about marital rape was literally the nastiest comment I’ve seen from him, and enough to make me wonder if it was worth reading comment threads at all.
He does affect the tone of the place.
>Eric, how sure are you that it’s worth letting James. A. Donald post here?
He does pose a severe challenge to my principles. But if I begin banning for opinions that I or others find obnoxious, where does it end?
But if I begin banning for opinions that I or others find obnoxious, where does it end?
Interesting question. If you find yourself trying to drive a poster away by insulting them and/or their ideas, that might be a clue about where the line should be.
I think high quantity combined with low quality is an issue.
>I think high quantity combined with low quality is an issue.
That’s a point, and I did once before restrict a wack-job to one post a day. I will bear this in mind if JAD erupts again.
Another theme of the DE seems to be an identification of various trends in modern society and an assertion that these trends are leading to some imminent and dramatic impact. As such, there is an underlying anxiety about the future, followed by a detailed prescription of remedial actions. What is striking is the diversity of trends (both pro and con) and wide range of solutions. In some respects, it models as a memetic mutation machine that uses the internet to inseminate the population at large. This is a strange new entity indeed.
I never got the specific impression that the DE was saying that Democracy is a failure like socialism was a failure, not that that isn’t so. Rather, I think the DE insists that “rule by many” turns very quickly to “rule by fiat” when mixed with unrestrained crony capitalism.
If I were to sum up my own impression of what the DE thinks of Democracy, I would say this… Democracy works in groups no bigger than villages, and it works there so long as individual villagers are free to leave the group whenever they wish, or feel their voice is no longer represented there. Taking this to it’s logical conclusion, I think we see that in truth, no government system, democracy or not, ever really works so long as those people subject to it cannot vote with their feet, i.e., truly place a “none of the above” in their ballot and not be subject to the whims of the herd.
To my mind, the only problem the DE fails to address is the cage. You can’t have anarchy inside a prison cell and live peaceably. Humanity is currently constrained to a fully-explored volume of +/- 3 vertical miles of oxygen on a surface of 148,940,000 square kilometers, or approximately 0.02 square kilometers per person (and that is presuming significant chunks of people want to live on Antarctica). We are prisoners of Earth, and sometimes the warden lets us out into the yard, but most of the time, they’re just trying to keep the riots down. Until cheap space travel is a reality, every system of government is a race to the bottom.
TomA: very interesting point, though I think that sort of thing isn’t limited to the Dark Enlightenment.
When you want people to do something, it’s very tempting to exaggerate the effects of not doing it.
It’s possible that we’re in such a competitive memetic environment that people are amping up the fear level more than they used to, but this is a guess. It’s possible that things aren’t worse, or that they’re worse, but it’s a cycle.
@TomA the “history is moving to a dramatic conclusion” meme is a strand that has been present in Christianity for several hundred years, at least. It operates at such a visceral level, that it is hard to shake, even when someone rejects Christianity, or religion. Those gut feelings and impulses stay with you. Given the heavy Christian underpinnings of the DE, this attitude about history shouldn’t be surprising.
@Nancy
“That comment about marital rape was literally the nastiest comment I’ve seen from him, and enough to make me wonder if it was worth reading comment threads at all.”
I am afraid the Dark in DE does attract people with a longing to the brutal aspects of ancient times.
>I am afraid the Dark in DE does attract people with a longing to the brutal aspects of ancient times.
On the other hand, sometimes it takes a werewolf to speak Damned Facts.
Re-reading James’ comments, you guys are overreacting. You are intellectual-ego-invested in a view of the world that will not easily permit you to see what he was saying.
The definition of rape at this point in time has been thoroughly distorted to mean just about any sexual advance that a woman deems unworthy, even post-act, even after having committed herself to a husband.
It used to mean forcible rape, forcible meaning at the threat of lethal force. It used to literally mean, “Your life or your open legs.” That is truly criminal, an unquestionable violation of a human right of independent control of their own body and reproductive systems.
Now it seems to mean just about anything women want it to, accepting any modifier in front and being thereafter freely associated with criminal activity. The very existence of the term “marital rape” implies that women can commit to marriage, and then refuse the very thing their husband freely entered into a marital contract for, namely sex with her. That’s blatant fraud. It would be no different than if I married a woman, committed my body to the marriage on paper and in front of witnesses, but hid %50+ of my income from her and sent it to another woman, or my own stash for my own purposes. That would be me committing the fruits and labor from my body to a woman’s life, and then freely taking it away from her, it would be fraud. Somehow we allow this very act by allowing the term “marital rape” to exist. When you are a woman, and you commit yourself to a man, that means you’ve given him your body just as he has given you his. It means he gets access to it, just as you get access to what he brings to the table by sacrificing his body. Refusal of intercourse in marriage, particularly after a courtship where significant fun in the sack was advertised, is fraud. Women should be shamed for doing such things, not praised for defending a non-existent virtue.
Now, certainly the case *CAN* exist where a husband is physically abusing his wife and sex is part of that physical abuse. That is wrong. But that’s not what we’re talking about. The term “marital rape” implies that women are allowed to withhold the very thing they have committed themselves to give freely to their husbands. The term only exists to justify society-wide fraud.
Jeremy, a wife withholding sex from a husband is an issue calling for discussion, counseling, or divorce, not force. If the husband was withholding income, that would also call for discussion, counseling, or divorce, not for her pulling a gun and taking it by force.
@ Nancy Lebovitz – “competitive memetic environment”
I’ve often wondered if we are experiencing meme overload in our modern technology-driven, high communication landscape. In my experience, when people are overloaded with too much information, they tend to shutdown active reasoning and fallback on inherent mental habits. Could the DE be self-defeating by virtue of overdosing their target audience? At the very least, I doubt that many people are willing to invest the many hours (days) necessary to fully digest all the messages and analysis there.
@TomA: I think DE is potentially valuable, because it could cause people to question currently unquestionable premises that have negative social effects. Maybe social democracy, feminism, and anti-racism aren’t working as they are supposed to. Maybe civilization itself is threatened. Maybe some old, discarded ideas have some merit. And even if those old ideas deserve to be discarded, it’s always a good idea to check your premises and have outside criticism that forces you to look at problems with your worldview that you are otherwise inclined to ignore.
@esr
“sometimes it takes a werewolf to speak Damned Facts.”
But is James a werewolf or a vampire?
The slogan of the French Revolution was ‘Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite’. DE seems to define itself by negating all three. JAD, seems to share that conviction.
But a complement set of people that only agree on a negative does not have to have anything in common. JAD seems to be a proof of that too.
@ PapayaSF
To make a dent in any societal problem such as you suggest, you’re going to have to reach a lot more than just a few intellectuals with lots of time on their hands to read DE literature. Sad to say, but rapp music is likely moving the needle far more than esoteric discourse by the DE. It hits a wide swath of impressionable minds and bypasses the cerebral cortex. I think of it as brainwashing by proxy for fun and profit.
@PapayaSF
Jeremy, a wife withholding sex from a husband is an issue calling for discussion, counseling, or divorce, not force.
Then I would suggest that a man withholding funds from a wife or ex-wife should not incur penalties that raise the force of the state to enforce alimony/child-support/etc… If one act is allowed the force of the state, then certainly the other should be too.
I mean, lets be real here, I don’t disagree with you or anyone else that the use of force to extract sexual relations from a wife is an abuse of power. Likewise, divorcing a man for any reason (and they don’t need much these days) and using the power of the state to forcibly extract such payments, is just as evil.
So if we’re going to say, and enshrine in law (which is backed by the force of state), that men must financially support wives and mothers no matter what (and we have absolutely done that), then how can we justify telling men that they cannot use force to extract what they need from marriage?
esr, my original post on this thread was eaten by a spam filter I think. I had a much more on-topic comment to make earlier, and I submitted it twice just to make sure the system got it.
Would you therefore be against returning to the common-law principle that a wife is presumed to consent to sex with her husband?
After all, I assume you are aware that it is not uncommon for a rape prosecution to fall to the ground because all the prosecutor can establish is that a sex act took place. And that’s in cases where the putative victim is not married to the defendant, and the facts alleged are as prototypically central to the category of “rape” as any you’d care to name*.
Law is a big, blunt instrument, particularly when the state of mind of the victim is an element of the crime that has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Ordinarily I believe it really is better to let a certain percentage of people go unwhacked by the big blunt instrument who richly deserve a whacking, than to let the same percentage be collaterally whacked all the way to San Quentin (for example). But it’s truly hard to say that when the victim of the unwhacked rapist is to remain yoked to her tormentor until death doth them part, as is in danger of being the case under this particular failure mode of “traditional marriage”.
I beg to differ.
*It occurs to me that for all that George Lakoff’s attempts to bring some linguistics into the US political sphere were an embarrassing exercise in liberal condescension, as our host has pointed out, a certain amount of knowledge of lexical semantics could have saved more than one American public figure. All this flailing about with “rape-rape”, “legitimate rape”** and whatnot is aiming for the concept of “slap-bang in the middle of the rape radial category” and missing by a foot-in-mouth mile.
**And how entertainingly Freudian a slip is that? A legislator uses legitimate as a synonym for genuine. This is my shocked face.***
***Yes, my footnotes have footnotes. Sometimes my footnotes to footnotes have footnotes. See recursion, n.
@esr
>On the other hand, sometimes it takes a werewolf to speak Damned Facts.
I subscribe to the tripartite vampire/werewolf/zombie view of society. When your only alternative are to be a vampire or a zombie, being a werewolf starts to look pretty good.
In the VWZ view of society, people are divided into three classes:
vampire/elite/bankers/dominant minority ethnic group
werewolf/elite potential
zombie/workers/proletariat/masses
Werewolves see themselves and their kind as real humans, everyone else as vampires or zombies.
Vampires see themselves and their kind as real humans, everyone else as werewolves or zombies.
Zombies see themselves and their kind as real humans, everyone else as vampires or werewolves.
I would certainly not be against returning to a state of society where women are presumed to have actual agency in the direction of their own lives. Bearing this imaginary thought process out to a conclusion, if a woman commits to a man she has made a choice of her own free will and should therefore bear most of the consequences of that choice regardless of how horrific that man ends up being. Using the state to correct the injustices in such marriages is also a horrific abuse of power, however well-meaning we may be.
To clarify the werewolve category: potential to be elite, the more trustworthy, tamed ones are high level servants or hit-men and garbage-men of the elite.
@TomA: DE will never be as popular as rap, true. But all ideas and viewpoints start small, and trenchant critiques by a few can have an outsized influence.
@Winter: The slogan of the French Revolution was rather different from the reality and consequences, was it not? I think you are inadvertently making a DE point: “enlightened” happy-talk often does not deliver what it promises.
P.S.: Not to defend the Ancien Régime, which was corrupt, oppressive, and amazingly stupid. E.g. they felt that aristocrats and clergy should not pay taxes, but that the poor should be taxed heavily, because it made them work harder and grow stronger, like pruning a tree. (A tidbit from the fascinating book For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams, which I highly recommend.)
Your imagination is either remarkably fertile when it comes to furnishing examples of how wives can perpetrate injustices on their husbands, or remarkably barren when it comes to seeing the woman’s side of the story. I can’t decide which. Can you honestly not imagine a situation in which a woman might enter into such a commitment on the basis of imperfect information about her less-than-darling fiancé? The list of scenarios starts with the guy’s brain going violently loopy five years after the wedding, and gets successively harder to prove to a jury from there.
Also, “regardless of how horrific”? Seriously? Are you actually saying “if you don’t want to be repeatedly raped for the rest of your life, don’t marry a rapist?” I mean, as far as it goes, it’s good advice, but it’s not like they all have “rapist” tattooed on their foreheads. Here’s what I’m saying: if you don’t want to be repeatedly raped for the rest of your life, put a bullet between the fucker’s running lights* the first time he tries. If you happen to be one of my friends (and y’all know who you are), convince me that that’s what happened and I’ll help you get rid of the body.
The last time I was accused of denying women agency on this blog, I actually was, and I admitted it. This time, not so much.
*…and keep shooting until he isn’t a threat any longer. But y’all knew to do that, right?
I can imagine lots of scenarios where a woman might enter into a commitment with a man based on false or incomplete information. The difference between our viewpoints is that I am willing to apply “caveat emptor” equally two both sexes, preserving my own correct perception of actual equality between the sexes.
@PapayaSF
“@Winter: The slogan of the French Revolution was rather different from the reality and consequences, was it not?”
Violence and blood breed blood an violence. The slogan and the philosophy behind it did live on beyond the madness that followed. So much so that people are still organizing themselves to burry it.
But if the “savior” is anything like JAD, we might end up straight in the ancient regime (which did more than not paying taxes)
>If population density grows when states grow, then states are not the institutions that destroy the population.
You haven’t even convincingly demonstrated correlation, and you’re already leaping ahead to confuse it with causation? OK.
So if we’re going to say, and enshrine in law (which is backed by the force of state), that men must financially support wives and mothers no matter what (and we have absolutely done that)…
We haven’t. Alimony is not automatically awarded in every divorce; it’s decided on a case by case basis, and since Orr v. Orr it can’t be sex-based per se (that is, you can’t have a state law that says women but not men get alimony, and men sometimes do though that is by far the less common result). According to this, twelve states have adopted the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, which allows it “only if the party seeking support ‘lacks sufficient property to provide for his reasonable needs,’ and ‘is unable to support himself through appropriate employment.'”
In general, family law (including divorce) is very fact-specific, with judges getting a lot of discretion to order support or not order it according to the facts of the case. The kid who marries a stripper and divorces her a month later (no-fault) may not have to pay her anything. Someone who marries a woman for twenty years, keeping her out of the workforce to look after him, then trades her in for a younger model and tosses her out into the job market after she’s hit “the wall”….he might well have to compensate her.
@Garrett:
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and if you look at a map of where the sterilizations took place, it’s interesting, as is the way that Democrats simultaneously get tarnished with this reputation and with being baby-killers in general, while simultaneously being tarnished as the party pandering to the fastest growing classes.
Also interesting is that one of the true possible compromises between just letting people fend for themselves and forced sterilizations is completely unpalatable to both the Rs and the Ds — namely, if you have a couple of kids and you then require welfare, OK, but let’s make sure you don’t have any more kids, before we give you any money.
@Joseph W.:
> In general, family law (including divorce) is very fact-specific,
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
OK, but let’s make sure you don’t have any more kids, before we give you any money.
I’ve always liked the idea of free food containing fertility suppressants, though I suspect the biochemistry isn’t quite there yet.
>>Eric, how sure are you that it’s worth letting James. A. Donald post here?
>
>He does pose a severe challenge to my principles.
I applaud Eric’s principles.
In parallel with the moral argument for not just banning J.A.D., I believe there has been, and expect that there will continue to be, instrumental value in seeing J.A.D.’s perspectives in the context of Eric’s Dark Enlightenment posts.
@Greg
“Which states then proceeded to do an even better job of laying bare the lands of Europe.”
“You haven’t even convincingly demonstrated correlation, and you’re already leaping ahead to confuse it with causation? OK.”
Not quite. It is you who said that states were a black hole and laid bare the lands of Europe.
Also @esr
“The signature achievement of the modern state in its most fully developed form is not liberation, it is the death camp.”
So, here are two commentators who claim that the modern state lays bare the lands of Europe and builds death camps.
My observation is that the population of Europe grew with the growth of the Modern Nation state and the European Union. Which is difficult to reconcile with the notion that the Nation State is a black hole and “lays bare the lands of Europe”. With 750M inhabitants, that seems not very likely in Europe. The same in India (1B) and China (1.5B). We can argue until the cows come home about the causes and consequences, but the population of Europe grew together with the reach of the state.
The number of death camps in European history was limited. The Russians have had camps since the 19th century and the Germans during WWII. That is about it for for two millenniums of European history.
@esr
“I can only conclude that Europeans are remarkably stupid. No “robber baron” ever built a Dachau. ”
Our host seems to seriously underestimate the devastation wrecked onto Europe by petty aristocrats. Read Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”. The locals were well aware who was the bigger threat.
That’s far from “it” if you look at two millenniums and the area that now includes 750M people. There have been various conflicts smaller than WWII that have included death camps.
@Mikko
“That’s far from “it” if you look at two millenniums and the area that now includes 750M people. There have been various conflicts smaller than WWII that have included death camps.”
Which did you have in mind?
There have been genocides, eg, by the Romans, Franks, and British (against the Irish). But genocides and pogroms are not a monopoly of the state. Maori’s and Papua’s have committed genocides.
But what is a death camp?
The German death camps were industrial execution places specially build to large numbers of civilians. They complemented death squads in the east. I understood the claims above as organized actions targeted at rounding up and exterminating large numbers of civilians.
Then you have labor camps where people are worked to death, like the Gulags. These can be included if you like. How many of these were there in European history?
In Yugoslavia there were reports of death/concentration camps. But that conflict was the result of a civil war following the breakdown of a state.
All this “the state is the ultimate destroyer of human life” rests on the overlapping leadership of four people: Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. The mass atrocities all followed extensive (civil) wars and ended with the loss of power or death of these leaders. None of the countries involved has committed anything on this scale before or after their rule.
So what lesson can we draw from the middle half of the 20th century that allows us to understand, say, 17th century Britain, or late 19th century France?
She specialized in having sex with her patients. Naturally she would demonize their husbands and fathers.
If traditional marriage was so horrible as to be comparable with torture or slavery, you would expect to hear some runaway wives complaining about it.
You, and esr, are interpreting the Dark Enlightenment as if people could believe whatever is politically convenient, the way you and esr believe things.
What unites the very disparate factions of the Dark Enlightenment is truth. The reason Jim and Sunshine Mary agree on the nature of man is that they observe the actual nature of man, and Jim explains that nature by Darwin, and Sunshine Mary explains it by the fall.
@JAD
“Naturally she would demonize their husbands and fathers.”
Nothing like that. An anecdote of her’s (she did not intend it to be funny, though) was about a couple with a very obese husband. They came to her because the man was so heavy that he could not lie on top of his wife. They were desperate, because they wanted intercourse but he did not want to hurt his wife. I will not insult your intelligence with the advice she gave them. Her whole career was targeted at making couples happier.
In short, she demonized no one. Most certainly not the husbands. In contrast with JAD, who demonizes everyone and their uncle.
@JAD
“If traditional marriage was so horrible as to be comparable with torture or slavery, you would expect to hear some runaway wives complaining about it.”
You could visit a women’s shelter near you? On second thought, I would advice them to call the police if they see you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_shelter
@JAD
“What unites the very disparate factions of the Dark Enlightenment is truth.”
History is full of people who saw the truth, and the absolute eternal truth. The consequences were rarely nice.
During my youth I saw people around me cleaning up the mess left by the last batch of people who had found eternal truth. Btw, that batch too was inspired by a misunderstanding of Darwin (ie, they had not paid attention in population genetics class).
What women in the shelter are typically running from doesn’t look much like traditional marriage.
(The disturbing thing, according to one of my relatives who used to work for state DHR, is that the bulk of them go back to the men they were running from anyway…which fits what that article says.)
@Joseph W.
“What women in the shelter are typically running from doesn’t look much like traditional marriage.”
Link is broken. However, with current laws and the ability to divorce on will, most women will just get out of the marriage. What remains are “special” cases.
What JAD is advocating is the marriage of lore, where there was no divorce and no help for abused women. Beating and abuse was (thought to be) legal.
http://www.historyofwomen.org/wifebeating.html
It still is like this in many places of the world, where women cannot file for a divorce and have no independent means of income, e.g., India and Pakistan. In many parts of the world a man can kill his wife with impunity if he thinks she has had sex with another man.
> I think high quantity combined with low quality is an issue.
ESR,
The pattern that I see goes something like this:
– You make an honest attempt to examine a woman’s issue that most people would steer clear of.
– The conversation makes some headway.
– One of your regulars will chime in with something outrageous (usually based on some small grain of truth, buried somewhere in a big pile of horse potatoes)
– After a small amount of bantering, some flood-gate opens up and the thread fills up with bitter, angry men and becomes a swamp of misogyny.
– Most of your regulars, including all of the females, jump ship
JB has gone above and beyond in trying to reason with JAD & Co in such threads in the past but I suspect, even she has grown weary of it.
If your number one rule is not to waste people’s time….
@bpsouther
It does remind me of the Argument clinic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
>My observation is that the population of Europe grew with the growth of the Modern Nation state and the European Union. Which is difficult to reconcile with the notion that the Nation State is a black hole and “lays bare the lands of Europe”. With 750M inhabitants, that seems not very likely in Europe. The same in India (1B) and China (1.5B). We can argue until the cows come home about the causes and consequences, but the population of Europe grew together with the reach of the state.
It is my observation that growth of states *follows* population growth, though it’s difficult to even totally correlate population growth and state growth as there are exceptions.
The causes for the population growth are fairly independent of the existence of a centralized (modern as we think of it) state. Then once the state has grown, the killing can start on a much grander scale. A sufficiently noxious state (it doesn’t even require malice, just perverse incentives) can even be able to contribute to genuine demographic collapse.
“Can you honestly not imagine a situation in which a woman might enter into such a commitment on the basis of imperfect information about her less-than-darling fiancé?”
Does this sort of thinking reduce the costs of hypergamy? That is, because of the ease of divorce there is much less need of up-front vetting and thus easier for man to attract (if only temporarily) more women?
“The list of scenarios starts with the guy’s brain going violently loopy five years after the wedding, and gets successively harder to prove to a jury from there.”
I thought the the traditional marriage vows included the line “in sickness and in health” and “for better or worse”. Perhaps that’s a reason to do away with them altogether, though if you’re actually going to take them, I’d hope you’d hold up your end of the bargain.
winter:
We have had hundred of regimes that created death camps, starting with the genocide in the Vende by the French Revolutionary regime. Every communist regime created death camps.
It is an inherent dynamic of democracy. The ruling coalition is united by an official belief system. I tdemonizes the heretic minority – helps if the heretic coalition includes a market dominant minority like Tutsi or Jews or Chinese. Then the majority exterminates the minority.
In Algeria, the program of the democratically elected government was to kill everyone less holy than their extremely holy selves, and as the civil war wore on, they got holier and holier, so that towards the end, instead of aiming to exterminate the minority, they were trying to exterminate just about everyone.
>Every communist regime created death camps.
Furthermore, Winter, the meat grinder is still running in North Korea. Convenient for you to forget that, I guess. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with your identification with your oppressors.
People rarely exterminate the underclass. The worst you usually do is force them to work at swordpoint, thereby firmly encouraging them to leave (see the entire history of the gypsies)
Jews were not an overclass, but a market dominant minority. The real overclass hires a market dominant minority to do its dirty work, and the market dominant minority thinks it is part of the overclass. But when the shit hits the fan, the real overclass blames the market dominant minority, and holds a pogrom. If it fails to hold a pogrom it is likely to lose power to someone who will.
Thus, for example, the Wiemar republic purchased votes by printing money to pay people to not work. (Sounds familiar.) Eventually, as predicted by Hitler, this policy caused currency collapse and became worthless. Hitler used the graphic image of a townsman taking a wheelbarrow of money to a farmer and asking for food, and the farmer replies he already has a wheelbarrow, and that is pretty much what happened. As predicted by Hitler, the mainstream politicians blamed the Jews for the hyperinflation.
But the mainstream overclass, being civilized folk, failed to hold the pogrom logically implied by blaming the Jews, so up pops Hitler, who tells the Germans how horribly weak the mainstream overclass is. Look how they are unable or unwilling to defend Germany against these horrible Jews, who hate Germany and are undermining Germany. Hitler then holds the pogrom logically implied by the overclass blaming the Jews.
The commissar vanishes.
Recall that photo montage of various people around Stalin getting airbrushed out of the photo. http://clogginsart.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/commissar-vanishes.html
Esr is old enough to remember when he and his entire family took what is now called “Marital Rape” as completely legitimate and proper, like spanking a badly behaved child for throwing a foolish tantrum in public. But somehow, he now forgets.
Similarly, eight years ago pretty much everyone was against gay marriage, viewing it indeed as a reductio ad absurdum. Now, everyone is not only in favor of Gay marriage but they always were.
>Esr is old enough to remember when he and his entire family took what is now called “Marital Rape” as completely legitimate and proper,
Don’t project your slimy beliefs on civilized people. Even as a child I knew better than this.
Winter – whoops! Let me try that link again.
Thank you for the link; notice though that in the first paragraph, starting with “most magistrates disagreed…” — that in that era, wife-beating was increasingly unlawful. This fits the legal history I’ve read elsewhere — in Blackstone’s day (18th Century), the courts were ceasing to allow it (according to him this had started in the 17th century under Charles II), except among “the lower orders of society” — see this (scroll to “chastisement”); and also this 1871 Alabama case…I’ve read a 1913 Colorado case that was even more emphatic that a man could be found guilty of assaulting his wife, and had “no right to control the acts and will of his wife by physical force” (Bailey v. People, 130 P. 832 (Colo. 1913), which cited various other state courts that had outlawed the practice over the preceding 50 years, but I couldn’t find a free online copy).
Which doesn’t change the truth of what you said since there certainly was an earlier era when wife-beating was lawful, though I do not know just what JAD’s position is.
Is it me or is this thread morphing into a DE pustule? The OP was a request by Eric for input on canonical omissions.
If the affinity map is accurate, JAD’s views are relevant to discussions of the Political Philosophy / Secular Traditionalist / HBD slice of the DE. He brings up ideas that are not shared by many A&D folks (thank $DEITY); (perhaps throttled down) they may be of value.
The question is, how many people (in, say, North America and Europe) share these slimy beliefs?
Okay, let me try to address the question posed by this post…
Many of JAD’s expressed views are related to his take on HBD, and from what I have seen, his views are shared by some other HBD people.
But JAD also seems to lean heavily in the “Secular Traditionalist” direction. Is this a separate DE premise – that the “progression of culture” (apart from HBD issues) is a failure?
>Many of JAD’s expressed views are related to his take on HBD, and from what I have seen, his views are shared by other HBD people.
He reads more like an Ethno-Nationalist with a side order or Neo-Reactionary to me. The HBD blogs I’ve seen don’t spew hatred.
If this was a real problem, we would have seen complaints about it divorce proceedings. As far as I can tell, most of the complaints, seeming all of the complaints, come from never married diesel dike lesbian feminists, many of whom were themselves habitually violent towards their sexual partners and used their social and legal position to sexually exploit young and vulnerable victims.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
When you were a child, no decent person doubted the rightness of “marital rape”, only the usual thuggish bull dyke lesbian feminists. The term had not yet been coined. No one, not even the usual bull dyke lesbian feminist thugs, thought of it as “rape”
You could not possibly have thought of it as “rape”, because the word did not yet have so broad a meaning.
Same premise. Men, groups, of men, and categories of men, are not equal. Nor are women equal to men. Realizing that women are not equal to men, one is freed to observe the actual nature of women. Observing the actual nature of women, it is obvious that the old rules on marriage were correct and constructive, and the new rules on marriage brutally destructive, causing immense and horrifying suffering. Observe the high death rate among the children of divorce and single mums.
The new rules make it impossible to form a binding contract for the purpose of bearing and raising children, thus smash freedom of contract. Prisoner’s dilemma, negative sum games ensue, the biggest losers being children, and the second biggest losers being women themselves, for example Kate Gosselin, just as the greatest victims of rent control are renters, and the greatest victims of price control on oil were motorists.
To agree to raise children, have to agree to live together and stay together. To agree to live together and stay together, each has to accept a duty to sexually gratify the other whether in the mood or not.
Furthermore, Winter, the meat grinder is still running in North Korea.
I think Winter was talking about Europe originally, it’s a bit mean to accuse him of sweeping the Norks under the carpet and all.
I spew hatred? The only person I see spewing hatred is you. You previously demonized the victorians, now you demonize your own family and your past self, hence the propensity of leftists to murder each other in the millions.
What have I said that expresses hatred of inferior races or women?
Well, for starters, some might interpret the un-ironic use of the phrase “inferior races” as perhaps a teensy bit hateful.
New Snowden documents reveal evidence of a proactive disinformation campaign by government spy agencies to disrupt online blog content. JAD, are you working for the NSA?
PapayaSF commented:
And yet, under the new regime, the poor faced enormously higher taxes, conscription, and “the maximum”, and a gigantic number of poor people were executed for violating “the maximum”
As the regime became ever more broke, despite ever higher taxes, “the maximum” was enforced with ever greater brutality. At one point they issued “the maximum” regulations on flayed human skin, so as to intimidate people more violently. The ancient regime never used flayed human skin to publish its taxes.
(“The maximum” was in theory liberty, equality, and brotherhood, but in practice was extorting goods from people at swordpoint, because taxes were not working)
The Kate Goselyn divorce, videotaped on reality television, is in practice absolutely typical of modern divorces. Search upthread for a summary. The long and the short of it is that fertile age women, being hormone crazed, are prone to ridiculously self destructive behavior, hurting their children, their husbands, and themselves, in that order. Women need to be subject to male authority to protect them from themselves.
What have I said that expresses hatred of inferior races or women?
Contempt is near enough.
JAD:
Winter:
The people you will find in a woman’s shelter are seldom married, and if married, have been separated for a long time.
Love is war, love is a battlefield.
Traditional marriage was created to resolve and eliminate the conflicts of interest between men and women by means of a binding contract that aligned their long term interests. What you will find in a woman’s shelter is the creation of progressives – women supported by uncle sam, bearing little thuglets, no two of them to the same father. What you will find in a woman’s shelter is what happens when both parties have complete freedom each to pursue their particular self interest, and are unable to form a binding contract. You will also find the propensity of women without male authority in their lives to pursue their short term interest at the expense of their long term interest.
@JAD
“We have had hundred of regimes that created death camps, starting with the genocide in the Vende by the French Revolutionary regime.”
Civil wars tend to go bad. Especially when they are mixed with real wars. So we chalk up another death camp in Europe, now in the midst of a civil war? Please give some more examples of these hundreds.
But (civil) wars have been fought since the dawn of time. No states are needed. We already knew the French revolution devolved into mass murder. Much like the random Mongol/Mogul conqueror or internecine wars between nomadic tribes.
@JAD
“It is an inherent dynamic of democracy. The ruling coalition is united by an official belief system. I tdemonizes the heretic minority”
So, give me a list of the death camps in the UK, or my own country, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain?
In the 7 centuries that France existed, you came up with one local example during a civil war. Peasant uprisings have been endemic in France and they all devolved in blood baths (from both sides).
@Adrian Smith/esr
“I think Winter was talking about Europe originally,”
Indeed, I was writing about Europe. I did not add things like the British camps in the Boer wars nor the various death camps in the Americas where they “concentrated” the natives. Yes, North Korea is a meat grinder. It also seems to be the only contemporary example of what is claimed to be a universal aspect of states.
And we have to compare it with the state-less blood bath that is already raging for years in the great lakes region in Africa, where state power has been shown to be the only thing that is able to stop the different genocides.
@JAD
“What have I said that expresses hatred of inferior races or women?”
You advocated the extermination of Hutu’s and were fond of the extermination of the Hereros in Namibia. Just as you applauded the murdering of one million Indonesians by Suharto for being communists (but you admitted hating people for other reasons than these two). Furthermore, you advocate marital rape as a way to keep women in line.
@JAD
“When you were a child, no decent person doubted the rightness of “marital rape”, only the usual thuggish bull dyke lesbian feminists. The term had not yet been coined. No one, not even the usual bull dyke lesbian feminist thugs, thought of it as “rape””
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Feminist_critique_in_the_19th_century
@JAD
“Esr is old enough to remember when he and his entire family took what is now called “Marital Rape” as completely legitimate and proper, like spanking a badly behaved child for throwing a foolish tantrum in public.”
No. Most people considered violence against women as illegitimate. The fact that marital rape and abuse was not discussed was because most people never engaged in it. Those who did, hid it from the public eye. An unhappy spouse makes an unhappy family. I am only a little younger than Eric, but I know that marital abuse was universally considered a sign of evil among the people I met.
@JAD
“What you will find in a woman’s shelter is the creation of progressives – women supported by uncle sam, bearing little thuglets, no two of them to the same father.”
Sorry, the USA does not hand out money in the Netherlands. In woman’s shelter you find women that have nowhere else to go. These are not the ones with a good job and relatives who can protect her. It is disingenuous, but illustrating, that you blame the victim for being weak and isolated.
@JAD
“What have I said that expresses hatred of inferior races or women?”
There is indeed another interpretation:
You consider women (and inferior races) as a kind of animals, and you love animals.
I am not sure this love will give you any credit.
@JAD
I would attribute “hate” to the arguments and rhetoric that lead to mass murder. One does not hate one’s inferiors any more than one hates non human animals.
Despite the myth of lynching, it is extraordinarily rare to find examples of members of a superior race making race based attacks on members of an inferior race. If it ever happened, you guys would have a more plausible poster boy than Emmet Till, just as if women could do science, you would have a more plausible poster girl than Marie Curie, and if women could pilot, your poster girls would survive, unlike Amelia Earheart and Kara Hultgreen . It is extremely common for members of inferior races to make race based attacks on members of a superior race.
Similarly, the rhetoric used in this thread by Winter and Esr led to the murder of over a hundred million people during the twentieth century.
@JAD
“Winter:
You advocated the extermination of Hutu’s and were fond of the extermination of the Hereros in Namibia
Liar”
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4289&cpage=1#comment-379574
So a whitewash of the 1972 attempted genocide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burundian_Genocide#1972
> . Women need to be subject to male authority to protect them from themselves.
Yeah, I read some of those. They got pretty boring after “Assassin of Gor”, though.
I’m starting to suspect JAD is a “moby” troll, poisoning the well of the discussion by associating the DE side with nutjob rantings. Have you checked to see if he and “Winter” have the same IP?
Despite the myth of lynching
All done on early versions of Photoshop, was it?
@JAD:
“Now, everyone is not only in favor of Gay marriage but they always were.”
My views on this have been slowly evolving. Part of this comes from having a number of friends of the family when I was a child who are gay. Some, obviously so (the interior decorator), and others I’ve only recently discovered. Mostly because it didn’t matter. As I got older, I realized that sexual orientation only mattered if you were interested in the person, or were trying to set them up with somebody. Otherwise it was pretty irrelevant in day-to-day life.
Gay marriage is an issue which I think has been drastically overwrought by its proponents. It’s existence has also been blown way out of proportion by its opponents. Regardless, it is legal to be Out and live with your same-sex partner everywhere in the US and has been in most of the US for some time, which has generally been the goal of the gay rights movement.
I’ve personally supported the concept of same-sex marriage for some time – perhaps 10 years; not being gay it wasn’t at the top of my list of issues to devote a lot of mental effort thinking about. What I was uncertain about was whether the US Constitution required that this be an available option. It was the opinion of the Iowa Supreme Court in Varnum v. Brien which convinced me that it was.
“Have you checked to see if he and “Winter” have the same IP?”
I must say, that would shock me. But then, Dr Jekyll had no memories of Mr Hyde.
I shudder at the thought.
For what it’s worth, I think Winter’s and JAD’s prose and emotional styles are very different.
It would be interesting (for completely irresponsible values of interesting) if the commenters included an aggressive Communist in the same style as JAD.
>It would be interesting (for completely irresponsible values of interesting) if the commenters included an aggressive Communist in the same style as JAD.
Winter, in a move that was either evil or idiotic, has described himself as “a commie”. If he was serious, nothing he says about the rest of his beliefs or experiences is to be trusted, because lying as a way of drawing in the gullible is a Communist staple. I think it is safest to assume he was serious and should not be trusted.
Surely one can characterize a believed untruth as a lie without characterizing the believer as a liar.
This most gentle of cognitive dissonances is arguably necessary to form any sort of functioning society.
@JAD:
>I would attribute “hate” to the arguments and rhetoric that lead to mass murder. One does not hate one’s inferiors any more than one hates non human animals.
To mislabel ones equals as ones inferiors is indeed hatred, and can easily lead to mass murder. Indeed, I know of few, if any, instances of mass murder wherein the murderers did not believe the victims to be members of an “inferior race”, and thus to possess less of a right to life than the “superior race”.
“Sin is crouching at your door”.
North Korea only proves Winter’s point: when a state builds death camps, it is because of a toxic cult of personality or nationality within the state, not ipso facto because it is a large state. In NK’s case it’s the Kim family. Indeed, Juche split off from Marx/Lenin/Mao style communism back when Kim Il-sung was in power.
Anyway, your thesis — that large states invariably lead to death-camp situations — is trivially disproved by, oh, I don’t know — ALL of Western Europe. Most Western European nations have considerably larger state apparatus than does the U.S., yet their prisons are safe, humane places where rehabilitation and reintegration of the convict back into society is the goal. In the U.S., by contrast, prisons are hellish places where abuse by wardens and fellow inmates is common, and the intent of the prison system is twofold; 1) exacting a primitive form of revenge against the convicted; and 2) extracting nearly free labor from the convicted for public and private enterprise. And even if you manage to get out, it becomes vastly more difficult for you to integrate back into regular society once you leave. America also still has a constabulary that’s all too eager to throw you into one of these dank holes for smoking an herb that’s commonly sold in cafés in Winter’s native country, despite a couple of states legalizing it.
@Trimegistus:
>I’m starting to suspect JAD is a “moby” troll, poisoning the well of the discussion by associating the DE side with nutjob rantings. Have you checked to see if he and “Winter” have the same IP?
JAD has been around far longer than ESR has been discussing the DE. Of course, so has Winter, but, unfortunately, I don’t believe JAD is a sockpuppet.
@esr
“Winter, in a move that was either evil or idiotic, has described himself as “a commie”.”
I would bet on idiotic. But there seems to be a large difference in what you consider a communist and what is considered a communist in Europe.
@esr
“I think it is safest to assume he was serious and should not be trusted.”
That is a good strategy with anyone you only know under a pseudonym from a blog forum.
However, I am curious about the way you could “trust” me so that I could abuse that trust? It is not that anyone here would run errands for me or send me money.
>However, I am curious about the way you could “trust” me so that I could abuse that trust? It is not that anyone here would run errands for me or send me money.
I do not trust the factual claims of people who show evidence of Communist indoctrination.
I think it is much more accurate to assume that he meant “commie” in the American sense (roughly, anything to the left of, say, Bill Clinton).
@Patrick Maupin
>Surely one can characterize a believed untruth as a lie
> without characterizing the believer as a liar.
Ah, but persisting in the belief when given (what should be) compelling evidence of its falsity means one is either an idiot, a fool — or a liar.
> This most gentle of cognitive dissonances is arguably necessary to form
> any sort of functioning society.
Guns don’t kill people. Cognitive Dissonances Kill People!
@John D. Bell:
Yeah, but there are several extremely religious people where I work, and it would serve no useful purpose for me to constantly think of them as any of those things. I might add that the same applies to the way they think of me.
@esr
“I do not trust the factual claims of people who show evidence of Communist indoctrination.”
That is always good policy. Even when people think they are right. You might have noticed that I make it a habit to add links to independent evidence whenever I can.
It is true that I do not take being called a Communist as an insult. But I am not easily insulted.
I would happily supply evidence of the extend of my “Communist indoctrination”, but as Jeff Read already noticed, there is a large discrepancy between what you in the USA consider a “Communist” and what we in Europe consider a “Communist”. This makes it difficult for me to identify the “Indoctrination” you talk about.
@John D. Bell:
“Ah, but persisting in the belief when given (what should be) compelling evidence of its falsity means one is either an idiot, a fool — or a liar.”
That works both ways. It is just that we disagree widely about what can be considered compelling evidence.
Eric, do you mean that iif people were posting recipes here, you’d trust Winter’s less than recipes from non-communists?
>Eric, do you mean that iif people were posting recipes here, you’d trust Winter’s less than recipes from non-communists?
If I thought there were any way for Communists to achieve their ideological goals by falsifying recipes, I would trust a recipe from a Communist a great deal less. Since I don’t know of such a way, my degree of additional mistrust would be very small – proportional to my estimate of the likelihood that there is such a way that I have not imagined.
Wow. Since we are drifting so far off topic, it might be worth putting the above into perspective.
Random chance and mutation (in any population of living things) will ensure that there is a spectrum of aptitude across all specimens. At one end are the highly productive and capable (as in self-reliant, resilient, and robust), and at the other end are the least productive and capable (as in weak, incompetent, needy, and loud). If you are in the former group, selective voluntary cooperation is an enhancement to the survive and thrive imperative. However, if you are in the latter group, coercion via egalitarian entitlement is a desperate necessity for survival.
If you happen to be quite intelligent, but think that you may be in the latter category due to possessing a skill set that may not be particularly valuable during times of deprivation and hardship; then the idea of Communist government will have great appeal. As a parasite, it is in your self-interest to advocate for third party redistribution of resources. Trying to persuade someone to alter or renounce a core survival habit is a bit like trying to persuade them to give up bipedalism and become a quadruped again.
This, I suspect, is the essence of Winter’s motivation and world view.
James A. Donald on 2014-02-26 at 18:34:52 said:Thus, for example, the Wiemar republic purchased votes by printing money to pay people to not work. (Sounds familiar.) Eventually, as predicted by Hitler, this policy caused currency collapse and became worthless. Hitler used the graphic image of a townsman taking a wheelbarrow of money to a farmer and asking for food, and the farmer replies he already has a wheelbarrow, and that is pretty much what happened. As predicted by Hitler, the mainstream politicians blamed the Jews for the hyperinflation.
I don’t think there is a single accurate statement in this paragraph.
The Weimar hyperinflation occurred because the German Empire tried to finance WW I with fiat money, and because the victorious Allies demanded reparations in gold or “hard currency”. From 1914 to 1920, the mark fell from 4.2/$ to 60/$. When the reparations came due in 1921-1922, the Republic issued vast amounts of “papiermarks” to buy foreign currency. This was a self-accelerating process. By 1922, the mark was down to 320/$ and then 800/$.
In 1923, French troops occupied the Ruhr to enforce delivery of goods in payment of reparations. The workers of the Ruhr went on strike, and were supported by papiermarks issued by the Republic (so in one sense the Republic did pay Germans not to work). As the value of the mark declined, the Republic issued even more papiermarks – a positive feedback loop.
The inflation process continued until the mark was down to 4.2 trillion/dollar.
No one blamed “the Jews”, except possibly Hitler and his followers. Incidentally, when did Hitler make any particular prediction about future inflation? In his speeches in 1922? The hyperinflation episode was no help to the Nazis – in the May 1924 elections they drew only 6.5%, and only 3.0% in December.
In November 1923, the Republic issued a new “rentenmark” which was backed by hard assets and remained stable. It was replaced by the Reichsmark in August 1924, which remained stable for the rest of the decade.
James A. Donald on 2014-02-27 at 05:09:40 said:Despite the myth of lynching…
“myth”? The U.S. Census kept statistics on it. They recorded nearly 4,700 lynchings from 1882 to 1965. 28% of these were of whites, BTW – nearly all before 1900, whereas about half of the lynchings of blacks came in 1900 or later.
it is extraordinarily rare to find examples of members of a superior race making race based attacks on members of an inferior race.
How about the deliberate genocide of the Hereros of German South-West Africa to make room for white settlers?
Kate Gosselyn is absolutely typical middle class female misbehavior.
Similarly, the women you find at a women’s shelter are typically sleeping around with several different very bad men – a more extreme form of the same sexual impulses that caused Kate Gosselin to destroy her life and her children’s lives and attempt to destroy her long suffering husband’s life.
A typical successful female lawyer usually winds up as a bitter cat lady. While our worst females live on welfare and deliberately expose themselves to crime, our best females dysgenically fail to reproduce. The ones in the middle wind up, in very large proportion, emulating Kate Gosselin.
This is self hurting self destructive behavior, resulting from uncontrolled female hypergamy, resulting from women pursuing their short term hypergamous impulses without regard to long term costs.
Making marriage no longer a binding contract freed both men and women to pursue their sexual impulses. This has far more damaging consequences for women than it has for men. In the ancestral environment, females did not normally get to make their own sexual choices, and they have not evolved to be good at it. Demonstrably, if you just open your eyes and look, they are horribly bad at it.
>A typical successful female lawyer usually winds up as a bitter cat lady.
Nonsense! My wife is not bitter!
(Er. That was a joke, people.)
@TomA
“This, I suspect, is the essence of Winter’s motivation and world view.”
I must be very bad at expressing my thought as I recognize nothing in your argument. And I have a job that pays well.
@esr
I would know no way to spread my political views through recipies. I also do not think I have good recipeis to share. I do make a passible Soto Ayam if I can get the ingredients.
I’m surprised Eric hasn’t linked JAD’s point to statism by noting that the state increasingly undercuts males running the provider strategy (that is to say the vast majority of men). A great deal of the feminist hoopla is, when you look at it closely, about women feeling they shouldn’t have to mate with lower-quality, weak men to have their way. One way this manifests is taxpayer subsidization of the costs of their mating choices. So you can have a career and kids without resorting to mating with a man boring enough to do the child-rearing for you, because you have, for example, state-subsidized child-care and maternity leave. In essence, mass-cuckolding.
>I’m surprised Eric hasn’t linked JAD’s point to statism by noting that the state increasingly undercuts males running the provider strategy (that is to say the vast majority of men).
I would, but other commenters have already done a pretty good job on that one.
The myth is that blacks were lynched for whistling at a white woman, and that only blacks were lynched.
The truth is that they were lynched for rape, mugging, burglary etc, and that plenty of white people were lynched for similar crimes.
The proportion of blacks among those lynched was disproportionate, but the proportion of blacks among those imprisoned in San Francisco by today’s progressives is even more disproportionate. Wherever you see gentrification by progressives, you will find that they are furtively enforcing Jim Crow, but in a manner far more cruel, arbitrary, and unjust than the original Jim Crow. For example nationwide 98% of those in jail for marijuana offenses are black, even though eighty to ninety percent of people who use marijuana are white.
Jim Crow was a civilized and competent reaction to real problems. What we have now, as for example in gentrifying San Francisco, is a furtive, barbaric, cruel, and incompetent response to those same real problems.
For example nationwide 98% of those in jail for marijuana offenses are black, even though eighty to ninety percent of people who use marijuana are white.
Well, that could be because whites are on average more discreet about it.
Well, that could be because whites are on average more discreet about it.
Or even because the police don’t care much about whites doing it.
Maybe, but I suspect it’s mostly a matter of when and where. Police rarely break down a door because someone is smoking in their living room, but are much more likely to bust someone smoking while driving or standing on a street corner. And, of course, lots of pot busts happen because that’s what the police can get someone for. E.g. they see a known pimp/thief/gangster hanging out somewhere or rolling through a stop sign and want to bust him, and that joint in his pocket is a good excuse.
@ Winter – “And I have a job that pays well.”
But do you have a skill set that would be useful if, for example, a natural disaster eliminated your government support system and you were forced to survive by your own means?
Long term affluence and government dependence (particularly for urban dwellers) renders people impotent vis-a-vis our ancestral aptitude for survival. A side effect of that degeneration is an allegiance to government nannyism as the ultimate safety net.
One could argue that nation states and governments have permanently eliminated the ancient environment of hardship and deprivation, but hedging that bet by enslaving the productive is not my idea of Utopia.
I suspect that the anti-democratic element in the Dark Enlightenment — the urge for a return to monarchy, feudalism, or straight-up anarchy — is a reaction to November 2008 and especially November 2012. When the American people can elect, and then voluntarily re-elect, a completely unqualified person despite abundant evidence of his massive incompetence and corruption, it does tend to confirm Toqueville’s most dire predictions about the failure mode of American democracy.
If the voters had kicked out Obama in 2012 I doubt there would be nearly as much hostility to democracy as such within the Dark Enlightenment, and more of a focus on how to pick good leaders and what qualities to look for.
“Slowly” have they?
Perhaps. But everyone else’s views changed abruptly and all at the same time, as if in hate week in 1984.
In 2006 everyone against gay marriage. In 2008, even Obama was still against gay marriage. In 2010, everyone was for gay marriage and always had been.
The change on “marital rape” was similar. At one time, their no words to express the thought. Even the usual diesel dyke feminists had to express themselves with long winded circumlocations. A couple of years later, everyone is against marital rape, and, like esr, always had been.
The transition on “Marital rape”was similar.
Moldbug has read Rushdoony and mentioned him once. He was neither laughing nor venerating. Moldbug is good at compartmentalizing authors, not letting their Holocaust denial prevent him from considering what they have to say about schools.
The truth is that they were lynched for rape, mugging, burglary etc, and that plenty of white people were lynched for similar crimes.
According to wikipedlo, sounds like white folks were mostly lynched out west. And a lot of the black folks strung up in Dixie seem to have been *suspected* of such crimes.
The proportion of blacks among those lynched was disproportionate, but the proportion of blacks among those imprisoned in San Francisco by today’s progressives is even more disproportionate. Wherever you see gentrification by progressives, you will find that they are furtively enforcing Jim Crow, but in a manner far more cruel, arbitrary, and unjust than the original Jim Crow. For example nationwide 98% of those in jail for marijuana offenses are black, even though eighty to ninety percent of people who use marijuana are white.
Gentrification is rich folks pricing poor folks out of the property market, this is obviously some more specialised meaning of the word, you’ll have to give me a link, or at least useful search terms.
Jim Crow was a civilized and competent reaction to real problems.
Black suffrage?
Civilisation and competence are clearly relative terms.
@JAD:
For one thing, change appears to happen all at once, but it doesn’t really. Peer pressure is really strong, and a lot of people won’t voice what they are feeling until they are sure they won’t be ostracized or ridiculed.
For another, in the case of gay marriage, many (including me) originally wrote it off as grandstanding, assuming, for example, that a civil contract could provide everything that a marriage could.
Well, guess what? From tax advantages to insurance to being able to get into the ICU by saying “I’m his husband,” marriage still had the upper hand. Between that slowly dawning realization, and the reactionaries (e.g. in Texas) trying to take away even the civil contract ability, it’s not wonder that it looks like public opinion changed really fast.
As far as marital rape goes, no matter how you define it, neither the act nor the false accusation of the act will happen when two reasonable people are married, so the concept probably wasn’t even on most peoples’ minds until the feminists brought it to the fore, and, of course, there are enough people in the country that it is possible to find a heinously bad poster child for any given potential behavior, so of course, there are married men who rape their spouses.
But then also, of course, there are wives who maliciously and falsely accuse their husbands of rape, so it’s arguable that the law used to let bad men get off scott-free, but is now yet another club that can be wielded by bad women.
The question is — how many bad men get caught by these laws who wouldn’t have gotten caught by simple assault laws, and how many bad women use these laws to ruin the lives of their husbands?
And here is where JAD may actually have a point, although I don’t know because I haven’t studied the issue — in this day and age when women have a lot of resources available to them and have been taught to have agency, it should be a rare case for marital rape to happen at all — if she no longer wants sex with her husband, she can leave.
James A. Donald on 2014-02-26 at 18:34:52 said:
Rich Rostrom commented on Premises of the Dark Enlightenment.
But no matter what the allies demanded, the Germans did not pay. The hyperinflation set in some time after the Germans had ceased making any payments on the reparations, and at a time when they were successfully borrowing very large amounts of foreign money which they never repaid.
Thus the cause of the hyperinflation was the Weimar overclass – not foreign bankers, not Versailles, not the Kaiser, and not the Jews.
Versailles reparations did not cause the sufferings of the German people, because they did not pay the reparations for the most part. The German overclass of Weimar caused the sufferings of the German people. Democracy caused the sufferings of the German people. And the democratically elected overclass needed to find someone to blame. We now misremember them as blaming the allies and Versailles, but in fact, they blamed the Jews, thus paving the way for Hitler.
The germans did not genocide the Hereros, since around half of them survived and Namibia is to this day predominantly Herero, nor did they kill them “to make room for white settlers”
The problem was that the Herero were quite successfully making guerrilla war on white settlers, having adopted a policy of killing all white settlers man woman and child. German’s could not tell the difference between civilians and terrorists, so adopted a policy of draining the ocean to catch the fish, killing all Herero man woman and child until the guerrilla war stopped. When the guerrilla war stopped, they stopped killing Herero. Hence, not genocide.
esr wrote:
Communists sought to attain their goals by influencing art, why not recipes? You may have noticed that the government makes a considerable effort to discourage people from eating meat, and the people at the root of this discouragement are radical leftists, arguably communists.
The Meiji reform government adopted a policy of encouraging its people to eat meat on the theory that this would make them more manly, energetic, and entrepeneurial. I do not know of any evidence that this works, but observing vegetarians and the children of vegetarians, it is plausible that it works. The Japanese still accept this theory in that they refer to men who stay in their mother’s basement and don’t chase girls or jobs as “herbivores”, a term entering English as “herb”.
Whether the theory is true or not, it would lead communists to discourage westerners from eating meat, and, lo and behold, they have done so.
@Adrian Smith:
> Someone else:
> > Well, that could be because whites are on average more discreet about it.
> Or even because the police don’t care much about whites doing it.
It’s a lot of things. One is that yes, whites tend to be more discreet (or if you prefer furtive).
Another is that most drug crimes (non-dealing drug crimes) are as a result of *something else*. Very few (relatively) people will walk down the street, stop at a newpaper box and use it as a table to roll a joint out of a baggie. But they will drive around with the baggie in their pocket and when they get pulled over for a broken tail light and a cop notices, shall we say, a certain odor, it’s game over.
Historically (this is changing) there were also cultural differences in the way *most* blacks and *most* whites interacted with cops. Go watch Chris Rocks “How not to get your ass kicked by the cops” video.
Most cops really don’t give a shit if you smoke dope (most I know anyway). But they DO care if you get in their face and act an ass. Most of us care about that, but if you do it to a cop and you have *anything* illegal on you where he can find it, you’re going to jail.
True story, a buddy of mine was a cop in a smaller city just south of Oakland. He was patrolling one afternoon and pulled into a strip mall parking lot. As he pulled in a black dude came out of the store. As soon as ole boy saw Officer N he started screaming obscenities. This being California in the 2000s there was nothing Officer N could do about it except ignore it. Ole Boy’s friends came out and they got in a car. Ole Boy was mouthing off the whole time. Then Ole Boy started waving his Drivers License out the window.
At this Officer N pulled him over. He admitted that he was violating Ole Boy’s civil rights, that he had no probable cause, that he had just had enough. As he walked up to the car he saw a big old crack running all the way across the windshield. Now his stop was as legal as the day is long. Because he was irritated, and he *could*, he pulled the ID from everyone in the car. One of the younger gents in the back seat was wanted on a $200 failure to appear warrant.
Yeah, he went to jail. And Officer N. made sure he knew he was going to jail because Ole Boy was acting an ass.
Now, I’m not going to say that no white people are dumb enough to do that. I’ve got some friends who are dead for dumber shit, and some who’ve been to jail because of shit just as dumb (in fact for drug offenses). But in the white community (at least when I was in my teens and 20s) having a criminal record of anything other than DUI was double plus ungood. You got to date the lower end of the range, you had a harder time finding jobs etc. In the black community (at least in Chicago) having some sort of record was considered normal and certain crimes were *cool* to have a record for.
Then we can get into access to decent lawyers–my fathers’ lawyer’s son had huge substance abuse issues, but Mom was part owner in a local bank and Dad was an attorney. Kid had troubles but no worries. OTOH, if your parents don’t see a drug conviction as all that big a deal then they let the public defender handle it. White parents are more likely to be scared of their kids future and take out a second on the house to defend him/her. Which means better representation and better results (again, witness this. Not with drugs, but with a friend who lost his fucking mind, stole a car off a dealer’s lot and drove it to California. His parents were not wealthy (lower middle class) but they got a better lawyer than they could afford and he came >< that close to getting off with probation. Then he lost his f*ing mind again and went to prison for a year or two).
So it's a lot more complicated than that.
But then most things are.
@TomA
“But do you have a skill set that would be useful if, for example, a natural disaster eliminated your government support system and you were forced to survive by your own means?”
I can swim and know how to rescue drowning people.
This is actually a funny reaction of you. Around ten million people live on land that is below sea level. If the pumps stop, the whole area will be flooded in a few weeks.
http://www.nedwater.eu/pictures/netherlands%20below%20sealevel%20groot.gif
In case our society breaks down, we will have to move east, mostly into Germany.
You cannot nourish a population of 17 million of a postage stamp size country like the Netherlands without a very extensive infrastructure. So our main survival skill is that we can self-organize very rapidly and thoroughly.
@JAD
“You may have noticed that the government makes a considerable effort to discourage people from eating meat, and the people at the root of this discouragement are radical leftists, arguably communists.”
You forgot to mention that Hitler was a vegetarian. And he loved animals.
@JAD
“The germans did not genocide the Hereros, since around half of them survived and Namibia is to this day predominantly Herero, nor did they kill them “to make room for white settlers””
Another of your whitewashes of brutal mass murder and genocide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_Genocide#Genocide
@JAD
“Democracy caused the sufferings of the German people.”
You mean after the Kaiser had laid the whole of Europe to waste out of sheer stupidity?
@Patrick Maupin
“As far as marital rape goes, no matter how you define it,…”
A well published case in the Netherlands was a running divorce where the husband broke into the home of his estranged wife and raped her before the divorce procedures were completed. Legally, they were still married and he could not be prosecuted for rape. I do not know how it was handled then, as it was around 1980 IIRC.
@ Winter – “I can swim and know how to rescue drowning people.”
But in the system of communist government that you favor, a commissar would first have to grant you permission to offer this service. And presumably you would hope to support yourself by charging for this service?
@ Winter – “So our main survival skill is that we can self-organize very rapidly and thoroughly.”
Exactly so. In times of disaster, the productive set about rebuilding their world through ingenuity and self reliance. The incompetent form into roving gangs to pillage their needs from the productive. In essence, re-instituting on a small scale what communism does on a large scale.
If the pumps fail and you self-organize into a gang to head east and pillage Germany, you may be surprised at the reception you get.
@Winter:
Yes, as I wrote, there will always be the outliers. But bad cases make for bad law.
I think the laws were definitely too far one way in many jurisdictions (physical “correction” by the husband was OK), but now in many jurisdictions the laws arguably go too far the other way. We hardly ever seem to do things in an nuanced fashion, or when we do, it’s too detailed. In some ways, it’s analogous to hate crimes — we have extra penalties on top of the preexisting penalties. Rape involves either violence or the threat of violence, either of which is already addressed by other statutes.
(I meant to say “most rape”, but got distracted and lost my train of thought.)
The remainder of rapes involve lack of consent, which sometimes has a legal bright line (underage), but usually is a slippery slope, which is so vague that I have heard of women not even realizing they were “raped” until their feminist friends explained it to them, at which point they effectively withdrew consent after the fact.
@TomA
We have never experienced such a level of anarchy in the four centuries of the Netherlands. ( or Belgium or UK, or even France).
Anyhow, with current population density, 90% of the population will die when transport collapses. So your ideas of autarky are unhelpfull.
@Patrick Maupin
The problem seems not to lie in rape laws, but in an utterly dysfunctional legal system.
@ Winter – “We have never experienced such a level of anarchy in the four centuries of the Netherlands.”
The reputation of the Dutch used to be symbolized by the boy with his finger in the dike. I guess now it should be the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.
@TomA
That story of the boy and the dike exposed a shocking ignorance about the physics of our defenses. It was written by an North American.
Comparing the current plight of the people in Sommerset (UK, 7 weeks of flooding), and the inhabitants of New Orleans (half the city flooded) with our own, I have my doubts that we are the ones with the head in the sand.
@ Winter – “Comparing the current plight of the people in Sommerset (UK, 7 weeks of flooding), and the inhabitants of New Orleans (half the city flooded) with our own, I have my doubts that we are the ones with the head in the sand.”
1953 North Sea Flood, 1836 dead & billions in property damage in Netherlands alone. Do some homework before you start bragging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953
@JAD:
Search upthread for my story of a misbehaving woman at Gasonics. It was not peer pressure, but state repression, that caused everyone to pretend to not notice her misbehavior.
What happens is the state starts enforcing certain opinions, and everyone then announces they agree with those opinions, and, like esr, that they always have agreed with those opinions, and that anyone who disagrees with these opinions is shocking, disgraceful, insane, evil, and utterly outside the pale.
@JAD
A democratically elected Parliament voted the Kaiser the funds for that war, and the German people subsequently elected Hitler who promised to do it over right.
And don’t tell me Hitler was appointed not elected – he was no more and no less appointed than Allende or Angela Merkel. Ängela Merkel was “appointed” because her party, like Hitler’s party, won the election.
@JAD:
“and that anyone who disagrees with these opinions is shocking, disgraceful, insane, evil, and utterly outside the pale.”
If it is going to be socially acceptable for people to listen to omnipotent spirits talking to them telepathically, I find it hard to criticize what those voices tell them to think. In the grand scheme of having zombie Jesus telling you not to associate with gay people, the “not associate with gay people” is the least irrational part.
JAD> utterly outside the pale.
This use of this term (the expression “beyond the pale” originally referred to Jews who lived outside of the “Pale of Settlement” in which Catherine the Great originally authorized them to settle in Russia) in this context sends my irony meter to 11.
Garrett> In the grand scheme of having zombie Jesus telling you not to associate with gay people,
I don’t recall that particular Scripture verse (and my parents met and married while students at what is now known as Manhattan Christian College, so I’m pretty sure I’d have heard it if it were recorded that He said it). When did Jesus say anything about associating with gay people? I seem to recall He associated with a lot of people that were generally considered social outcasts, like prostitutes and tax collectors.
@TomA
“1953”
During WWII, my countrymen were not in control of the territory. It took some time to get everything back into shape.
After that disaster, it took 30 years to make sure that could not happen again.
Libertarians have not yet been able to explain to me how this type of infrastructure can be set up in their way. At least not without some private entity getting full ownership of all the land with the right of taxation and force.
James A. Donald on 2014-02-27 at 17:17:48 said:
The myth is that blacks were lynched for whistling at a white woman…
The Emmett Till case became infamous because it was so extreme.
… and that only blacks were lynched.
Who ever claimed that? The Census recorded about 1,300 lynchings of whites. As for the public image, the lynching victims in The Ox-Bow Incident were not black. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Colonel Sherburn kills an obnoxious drunkard who has abused him in public (after warning him to stop), and then has to face down a lynch mob – and he isn’t black.
One of the most notorious lynching incidents was the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia. Frank was a Jewish businessman who had been convicted (almost certainly wrongly) of the murder of a girl. After his death sentence was commuted to a life sentence, he was taken from prison and lynched. Frank was not black.
However, after 1900, 90% of lynching victims were blacks killed by whites.
The truth is that they were lynched for rape, mugging, burglary etc, and that plenty of white people were lynched for similar crimes.
There were many cases of lynching where the victim was in fact guilty of the heinous offense he was charged with. I don’t think there were many lynchings for mere property crime.
And there were many cases where the victim was “guilty” only of “disrespect”, e.g. resisting violent abuse at the hands of whites. Lynching was ultimately a tool of intimidation – a demonstration that whites could do whatever they wanted to blacks with impunity.
For example nationwide 98% of those in jail for marijuana offenses are black…
A “statistic” almost certainly pulled out of a bodily orifice.
The Monster on 2014-02-28 at 22:50:38 said:
This use of this term (the expression “beyond the pale” originally referred to Jews who lived outside of the “Pale of Settlement”
No. It refers to the “Pale” in Ireland, the area under English control in the 15th and 16th centuries. It was around Dublin, and was bounded by a ditch and rampart. Usage of “beyond the pale” is attested in this context in the 1500s – meaning outside the community of civilized and decent people.
That meaning would make no sense applied to the Pale of Settlement; most of the population inside and outside was Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian.
The Russian “Pale of Settlement” for Jews was created in 1791.
Lynching was ultimately a tool of intimidation – a demonstration that whites could do whatever they wanted to blacks with impunity.
Another way to describe a process of intimidating someone into behaving respectfully is called “civilization”.
Today, of course, different people are subject to the tools of intimidation but since Anil Dash didn’t hang Pax Dickinson from a tree we’re much more enlightened.
Of course Pax Dickinson didn’t rape someone either.
If this was true you would have a better lynching poster boy than Emmet Till, who was not lynched for whistling at a white woman, but murdered for groping someone else’s wife, something that has happened to plenty of white men.
The problem seems not to lie in rape laws, but in an utterly dysfunctional legal system.
No, overall our legal system is excellent. The problem is in laws that are specific to rape, and in the rape-guilt ideology, the Cult of the Victim, and the moral panic that caused them.
For example, if you’re accused of killing someone and claim self defense, you can introduce evidence that the dead guy was belligerent — to try to show he might’ve started the fight just as you said. But if you’re accused of raping someone, you can’t introduce evidence that the accuser was promiscuous — to try to show she might’ve slept with a near-stranger/non-boyfriend/non-husband, just as you said. We have also abolished the old requirement that an accuser’s testimony be corroborated (for example, by medical evidence that she was forced). This tends to convert rape trials into pure “he-said/she-said” swearing contests, inviting the jury to decide who’s lying by observing the witness’ demeanor. This is a huge problem because human beings are really really bad at that. Even when they haven’t been falsely indoctrinated that rape allegations are 98% true, or other such nonsense. If juries are going to decide cases on such an inherently unreliable method — especially when so many have been indoctrinated — there’s no telling how many innocent men are convicted.
(It’s actually worse than that because the prosecution is allowed to call social workers as “expert witnesses” to talk about “typical victim behavior,” and to say that whatever the accuser did is “typical” of how victims behave. The problem of course is that these social workers can’t tell the true from the false accusers any more than you and I can; so they don’t really know what is typical for true as opposed to false victims. And they tend to be heavily indoctrinated. But because they come cloaked in the mantle of “expertise” they can be used to sway the jury towards conviction — where the accused has only his word.)
Our legislatures have tried to go further. A few years ago, Congress removed the requirement of “non-consent” from the military rape statute…and worse, they placed the burden of proof on the defense to prove that the accuser consented. Happily, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held that this resulted in “an unconstitutional burden shift to the accused”…and Congress took that part out of the statute, though they still haven’t put consent back in as an element of the crime. The very idea of making an accused prove his innocence is anathema to American legal traditions, but that’s what Congress tried to do, under ideological pressure.
@Joseph W
Scroll up and you will find an extended account of how a random police officer will always be able to jail some random guy he does not like.
But it is even worse
http://columbialawreview.org/ham-sandwich-nation_reynolds/
@JAD
“and the German people subsequently elected Hitler who promised to do it over right.”
Hitler’s rise to power did not include a majority of votes. It did include the use of violence against political opponents. Elections and democratic freedoms were a thing of the past years before Hitler started WWII.
But against an “elected” mass murderer we have unelected Stalin and Mao.
It is an old paradox: A democracy can elect a tyrant, and a monarch can decree elections. It all has happened and is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
>Hitler’s rise to power did not include a majority of votes.
False.
On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime.
@JosephW
Many countries consider sexual relations between ranks an offence in the armed forced. Germany even considers sexual relations between a superior and subordinate as highly suspect/illegal in any context.
The USA special in always seems to strive to jail people as long as possible. Most countries I know heavily weigh circumstances in determining punishment.
Joseph W.,
A woman could desire sex — even from several partners — and still be raped. Furthermore, physical evidence of rape is difficult and humiliating to acquire — and becomes more difficult the more time goes by. So under the old rules, in order to see justice done, a rape victim, already terrified and traumatized and probably not willing to talk about what happened, is now under pressure to act fast to avoid running out the clock, and to possibly expose herself to a court medical examiner in a way with which might itself be traumatizing given, you know, that she was just raped.
To absolve rapists if their victims were promiscuous, or to require victims to provide physical evidence of their violation, puts women at risk.
>To absolve rapists if their victims were promiscuous, or to require victims to provide physical evidence of their violation, puts women at risk.
But the implied relaxation of standards of evidence puts men at risk. One careful regional study found an incidence of false-rape charges of fully 41%. I’m not a big fan of MRAs, but they have a point about this.
@esr
I was always sceptical of this “plebiscite”, but after looking up the history again, I admit you are right. At that time, we must assume Hitler did win over a large majority of the German voters.
http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-531909.html
His statue then would be comparable to that of Putin in Russia after his first reelection, I think.
>I was always sceptical of this “plebiscite”, but after looking up the history again, I admit you are right.
Grasping the implications of this fact was what turned me into an anarchist. That was when I understood that, no matter how severe the failure modes of anarchy are, they cannot be as horrifying as the failure modes of statism.
@ ESR – “they cannot be as horrifying as the failure modes of statism.”
Many roads can take you to tyranny, some more benign than others; but the road back is never easy.
@esr
“, no matter how severe the failure modes of anarchy are, they cannot be as horrifying as the failure modes of statism.”
My conclusion was that states are tools: They can be wielded to great benefit but also to great harm.
Just like knives and guns.
>My conclusion was that states are tools […] Just like knives and guns.
States are not tools. Unlike knives or guns, they develop institutional imperatives of their own. That is how they end up with elected dictators.
He got more votes than Allende, and more votes than any previous Wiemar leader. There was a majority in favor of totalitarianism and war, they only disagreed on the details.
The current and previous British governments have used plenty of violence against political opponents”, see, for example, kettling, where the police arrange for political opponents to be beaten up by “änti fascists”. Similarly in the US, observe the lack of criticism of Obama, compared to the criticism of Bush and Clinton. People know that criticizing Obama, particularly for his ignorance and inability to handle the long complex sentences that his speech writers are apt to write for him, will get you punished for “racism”
Sarah Palin can deliver a complex speech ex tempore from very brief notes, containing long sentences correctly used. Obama reads from a teleprompter, and stumbles.
@esr:
>False.
>On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime.
By that time Hitler was firmly in power and it is highly questionable if that plebiscite was anything resembling a free election. Even the elections of ’33, in which the Nazi’s gained only a plurality, were only dubiously free; many communists had been rounded up and arrested before the election, and the leadership of the SPD had fled to Prague.
That said, democracy in Germany was already dead or dying by 1930, before Hitler was yet in power, for a few reasons:
First of all, the Weimar Constitution had some rather critical weaknesses, notably the interaction of articles 25, 48, and 53 (this might have been solved if the article 25 had been written so that the President put himself up for election whenever he dissolved the Reichstag).
Secondly, the German Empire had had a fair degree of popular legitimacy, and the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic was damaged by the way its founding interacted with the end of WWI and the treaty of Versailles, so Germany’s commitment to democracy was weak from the start.
Thirdly, Germany was very heavily polarized in the lead-up to the Machtergreifung, and such polarization tends to be bad for the stability of any government, in that neither side trusts the other to play by the rules, and so neither side is willing to play by the rules lest the other run roughshod over them. It’s quite possible that, had the Nazis not come to power, the Communists would have, unless some means of de-escalation could have been found.
Tools like Skynet?
A woman could also desire sex from several partners, get what she wanted, become embarassed about it after the fact and angry when none of the guys call her back, and excuse herself by saying it was not really her choice.
The vast majority of rapes, strange to report, somehow seem to happen to women when they are out on the town and cruising for a dicking. Home invasion rapes and abducted while jogging rapes are extremely rare. In crime victimization surveys, wife of head of household reports a rape rate indistinguishable from zero.
If a significant proportion or rapes were rape type rapes, I would expect more joggers and fewer half drunk sluts.
@esr:
>Grasping the implications of this fact was what turned me into an anarchist. That was when I understood that, no matter how severe the failure modes of anarchy are, they cannot be as horrifying as the failure modes of statism.
Quite frankly, I’m not sure that there’s any difference. I’m not just saying that I’m not sure there’s any difference in how bad it gets, I’m saying that I’m not sure there’s any difference in substance.
>Quite frankly, I’m not sure that there’s any difference.
I am. It takes coercive organizations with the scale of a nation-state to organize the darkest horrors – the Nazi/Soviet/North-Korean death camps, the Angkha massacres, and their like. History is pretty clear on this.
Comparing the election debate on immigration in Australia, with the election debate on immigration in Britain, it is highly questionable that the recent British elections resemble a free election.
Not only is the policy of the Australian government illegal according to Cathedral law (the Australian navy illegally uses violence on illegal immigrant ships in international waters, and Australian marines illegally set foot on the sands of foreign shores to dump illegal immigrants back on the shore from whence they came), but the Australian electoral debate on this policy was also effectively illegal according to Cathedral law.
Similarly, it is obviously as difficult and dangerous to criticize Obama, as it is to notice a woman’s misconduct in the workplace. Were the last two US elections fair and free?
JAD> from whence they came
The word “whence” means “from where”, so that sentence fragment literally means
“from [from where] they came”.
I wrote:
And when I discuss Obama’s mental disabilities, esr goes apoplectic with rage and accuses me of depicting Obama as only half human.
>And when I discuss Obama’s mental disabilities, esr goes apoplectic with rage and accuses me of depicting Obama as only half human.
No, it’s your racist sub-human similes about blacks in general that piss me off. They’re not justified instances either from Obama’s feckless stupidity or from the statistical evidence about group differences, no matter how much you want that to be true.
Yeah how about when Sarah Palin decreed in 2008 that is Obama was elected Putin would invade the Ukraine?
Of course she was excoriated for this. (She can see Russia from her house!) But it doesn’t sound dumb now does it?
If not justified, perhaps you could try arguing the evidence instead of screaming “Heretic!”
But it would almost impossible for you to discuss the evidence without yourself committing heresy against the latest official doctrine. Observe how Charles Murray now sings his master’s song.
@JAD
“Sarah Palin can deliver a complex speech ex tempore from very brief notes, containing long sentences correctly used.”
I am more shocked by the fact that you praise the intellectual capacities of a woman. That sounds as if you are changing your ideas.
Maybe our discussion do have an effect.
@esr
“It takes coercive organizations with the scale of a nation-state to organize the darkest horrors – ”
It also takes an organization like the nation state to get population sizes where this question comes up. History is pretty clear that populations tend to collapse when states collapse. With China as a consistent example.
The controll group is New Guinea. Inter village warfare kept stateless Papua population densities low until Indonesia and Australia pacified the island.
Not so. Population collapses when a civilization collapses and a dark age ensues, dark ages being the normal human condition, much as ice ages are the normal climate condition.
And the state does not collapse until after the dark age has well and truly begun. Rome did not fall until 410AD, but world copper production collapsed after 250AD – thus the collapse of Roman GDP, and thus presumably the collapse of Roman population, preceded the collapse of the Roman State by 160 years.
Similarly, the Song Dynasty collapsed in a left singularity, similar to that of Czarist Russia, with economic collapse and extraordinary mass murder causing the collapse of the state, not the collapse of the state causing economic collapse and mass murder. Copper production collapsed well before the Song Dynasty fell.
Compare this graph of copper production with the the governments of civilizations. Copper production collapses before the government does.
@JAD
The western Roman empire had been long gone when Rome fell.
The Song dynasty collapsed in two parts. The north was subsequently conquered by Mongol tribes, the south was conquered by Djenghis, who also overran the depopulated north. Djenghis did not destroy the state but took over.
It is telling that you gloss over the Lushan rebellion and the start of the Ming dynasty. Two of the worst disasters in human history.
Women are, on average, only slightly less intelligent than men, though because of smaller variance, the most intelligent of women is substantially less intelligent than the most intelligent of men, so fields for which only smarter men qualify are unlikely to have significant female participation.
Rather, the problem with women is lack of self control, short time preference, and uncontrollable hypergamous lust. (Kate Gosselin illustrates why allowing females sexual choice is bad for females) Lack of self control and uncontrollable hypergamous lust tends to improve at menopause, but short time preference remains a big problem even after menopause.
In the ancestral environment, pregnancy was so painful and dangerous that women with self control, long time preference, or controllable lust, would not have allowed themselves to get pregnant. Women had to be crazy so that the species could continue.
@JAD
“In the ancestral environment, pregnancy was so painful and dangerous that women with self control, long time preference, or controllable lust, would not have allowed themselves to get pregnant. Women had to be crazy so that the species could continue.”
This will get very high on my list of stupid just-so stories for rationalizing prejudices.
Pinker is a highly unreliable source, who adjusts history to suit progressive politics. The events you mention had absolutely no effect on world copper production, therefore are very far from being the worst disasters in human history. Looks as if most Chinese did not notice the Lushan rebellion, because the ones producing and consuming copper did not notice it.
By the time the Ming dynasty got started, copper production had already collapsed, thus presumably the Song Dynasty suffered economic collapse and population collapse long before they fell, and long before the Ming dynasty rose – the fall of the Song dynasty being a symptom of economic and population collapse, not a cause.
The Song dynasty, like Czarist Russia, suffered a left singularity. The state devoured civil society. As the Roman empire was devoured by its legions, the Song dynasty was devoured by its bureaucrats.
@Winter
People who treat words like “prejudice” as a cudgel to hit anything that makes them feel bad with, those people are inevitably neck deep in the stuff themselves. How does it feel to live the life of an unthinking animal?
@JAD
The Lushan revolt was during the Tang and tha it caused a significant reduction in population is not contested, just the 2/3 reduction claimed by Pinker. But as no one can come up with better numbers, his are a good first guess. The Ming dynasty followed the mongol dynasty, not th Song.
Your numbers on copper are not tracing population as people do not eat copper.
Btw, the Chinese, then as now disagree with your analysis.
@Roger Philips
“People who treat words like “prejudice” as a cudgel to hit anything that makes them feel bad with,”
For people who call me names at every opportunity, you (pl) are quite easily insulted.
But the original quote was a just so story by any definition, and I found it stupid. Previous comments by JAD have convinced me that his judgements of the nature of women are largely, or entirely?, based on prejudices. If you have evidence this conclusion is wrong, I would be grateful if you could share them with us.
Eric, is there a potential synthesis at the end of the road for DE (presumably with objective merit), or is it more likely be a transient idea spasm?
>Eric, is there a potential synthesis at the end of the road for DE (presumably with objective merit), or is it more likely be a transient idea spasm?
That’s one of the things I’m trying to figure out by doing this survey.
Copper tracks GDP, though over time GDP rises relative to copper, because we are still transitioning from copper to iron. In a population near malthusian equilibrium, GDP tracks population. Fumes from copper smelting show up in the arctic ice, so we can accurately know world copper production.
We see two major declines of copper production, both of them resulting from empires going decadent and oppressive, preceding the fall of those empires. This indicates that the corresponding population collapses resulted from state violence against their subject populations, from over taxation and, in the case of the Song dynasty, over regulation.
@JAD
Population traces food production and distribution. Copper traces GDP and trade.
So, what should I believe, contemporary reports and a census of all people in Tang China, or copper traces in the arctic?
We already have a synthesis, a canon on which everyone agrees. Eric cannot see it because he cannot believe it, and he cannot believe it because he is not allowed to believe it.
We agree on the nature of man and society, that being observable reality, even though we disagree as to whether Darwin or God is responsible for observable reality – which observable reality Eric will not permit himself to see.
The Enlightenment is a good news religion, the heretical spawn of Christianity. The Dark Enlightenment is the bad news of reality. The Reaction is the (quite diverse) political response to this bad news. We agree on the bad news. We don’t agree on the causes of the bad news (are we risen killer apes or fallen angels), and we don’t agree on the solutions, other than that democracy is a really bad idea, equality is impossible and that attempts to achieve equality are harmful at best, and apt to lead to mass murder at worst..
>[Eric] cannot believe it because he is not allowed to believe it.
JAD says a few things that are damned but true, many things that are damned and false, and some things that are just silly. This one is in the just-silly category; if anybody told me what I am allowed to believe, JAD would have been banned from this blog long ago.
You are not relying on contemporary reports and a census. You are relying on Pinker. Pinker lies.
@Winter
I’m neither insulted, nor should I be grouped in with JAD anymore than esr is.
As opposed to your ideas, which are driven by evidence and logic? lol. The anointed one never thinks his prejudice “counts”. The reason I keep responding is because it entertains me to watch you try to play the master of rationality while constantly playing on emotions, association, misinterpretation, morality, etc, in service of your little secular religion.
@JAD:
>But it would almost impossible for you to discuss the evidence without yourself committing heresy against the latest official doctrine.
*rimshot.
ESR. Parroting the latest official doctrine.
I think I’ve finally figured out JAD. He’s a stand-up comedian. HHOS.
>ESR. Parroting the latest official doctrine.
I’m guessing you wanted to be able to convey a stark-staring-dumbstruck expression with that. It is pretty funny, isn’t it?
Somebody poke me when “anarchy is good, and all adults should routinely go armed” slips inside the Overton Window.
It might be that your beliefs remain inside the Overton window because you are logically persuaded of the truth of these beliefs.
But the right hand edge of the Overton window has been heading leftwards far and fast, and with it, the entire libertarian movement has been dragged leftwards far and fast, so that less and less remains of libertarianism. Funny thing that. Are all the other libertarians logically persuaded of views far to the left of those that they quite recently espoused?
>Are all the other libertarians logically persuaded of views far to the left of those that they quite recently espoused?
Since you ask … no, they’re not.
“which observable reality Eric will not permit himself to see.”
He don’t know him vewy well, do he?
There’s a lot of room between “equality is impossible” and “all humans must be equal”. The former is true, but the conclusions that JAD draws from that observation are…deeply evil.
Winter, thanks for the link to Glenn Reynolds’ article – he is an excellent writer. I don’t agree with his views because I think prosecutorial discretion is a major protection for the accused, at least when there isn’t a moral panic spurring them on to “get more convictions” in a certain class of case. If you try lots of cases on weak evidence, you will convict more innocent men, because (as I linked above) human beings are just not that good at detecting lies and truth. (Maybe someday we’ll have the technology to do that reliably.)
Many countries consider sexual relations between ranks an offence in the armed forced. Germany even considers sexual relations between a superior and subordinate as highly suspect/illegal in any context.
I’m not sure what your point is — but in fact in the U.S. military, sexual relations between different ranks is often (but not always) punishable as fraternization. The Army’s policy is in paragraph 4-14 of this regulation. Short version: it’s outright forbidden between officers and enlisted, unless they’re married; but whether it’s forbidden between officers of different rank, or enlisted of different rank, depends on circumstances.
The problem of trying rape cases on weak evidence — which is what I was talking about — applies whether the accuser is the same rank as the accused, or has a different rank, or is even a civilian. What Congress tried to do in military cases was reverse the burden of proof on consent…that is, to force the accused to prove consent, instead of making the government prove non-consent…only, happily, the courts interpreted that as forbidden under our Constitution. I mentioned that to illustrate how far this ideology has gone, since normally no American would dream of saying the accused must prove his innocence, or any part of it.
The USA special in always seems to strive to jail people as long as possible. Most countries I know heavily weigh circumstances in determining punishment.
You’re quite mistaken. At court-martial, U.S. jail sentences are surprisingly light — in fact, the judge or panel is given maximum flexibility to consider both the crime and the person who committed it (and the rules are written to favor the accused…i.e., the accused has a lot more control over what comes in at sentencing than the prosecution does). If you look at the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, you will see that U.S. civilian courts likewise do not simply shoot to the maximum on each case, but rather have to take a variety of factors into account in deciding who gets what.
Most of the “Occupy” movement claim to be anarchists, and you cannot get more perfectly compliant with official truth than that mob, who loudly demand that Obama do whatever he is about to do next, for example they held a protest loudly demanding that he legislate and budget by executive order, by an amazing coincidence, a few days before he proceeded to legislate and budget by executive order. The Cathedral is acquiescing, reluctantly, with concealed carry, therefore that also is inside the Overton window, though that is the right hand edge of the overton window, while “anarchy” is pretty much dead center of the Overton window (communism being the left hand edge, so the commies call themselves anarchists.)
These days there are so many “anarchists” that the real anarchists call themselves feudalists.
@esr:
>I’m guessing you wanted to be able to convey a stark-staring-dumbstruck expression with that. It is pretty funny, isn’t it?
I’m not sure stark-staring-dumbstruck was what I was going for. I was more just savoring the hilarity of it. Because it’s hi-$ING-larious, where $ING is your two-syllable present participle intensifier of choice.
In my case:
export ING=flippin’
What’s the best way to infix $ING to “hilarious”? Is it to lengthen the /I/ to an /ai/, so that you get /haifl?p?nleri.?s/, or to reduplicate the /l/ on either side of $ING, so that you get /h?lfl?p?nleri.?s/?
Ah, consarn it. The blog software ate the joke tags around my final paragraph, and replaced my IPA characters with question marks. Let’s try that again with X-SAMPA and square brackets:
[linguistic nerd aside]What’s the best way to infix $ING to “hilarious”? Is it to lengthen the /I/ to an /ai/, so that you get /haiflIpInleri.Is/, or to reduplicate the /l/ on either side of $ING, so that you get /hIlflIpInleri.Is/?[/linguistic nerd aside]
The USA has minimum sentencing guidelines that impose crushing penalties on relatively innocuous and nonviolent acts… and then they can tack on an additional “…with a deadly weapon” penalty if you have a gun on you. Let’s face it — sentencing is a political football in the USA that has little to do with actual justice. Add to that the fact that USA jails are privately run hellholes/labor camps and you’ve got another thing that factors into determining who gets what: profit.
@Joseph W.
“If you look at the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, you will see that U.S. civilian courts likewise do not simply shoot to the maximum on each case, but rather have to take a variety of factors into account in deciding who gets what.”
I was thinking of, e.g., sentencing a 19 yo boy caught with his 15 yo girlfriend for full rape. Including adding him to a public sex predator list.
Comment policy at slatestarcodex: the short version is that comments must be at least two of true, kind, or necessary, and there’s a reporting system. This is a new policy. I think it’s sensible, but I can see wanting to find out how it works out.
One thing I’ve learned from this thread is that there are people who are pro-lynching, something which never would have occurred to me. At this point, I wonder why I ever believed there were no pro-lynching people.
Eric, I’m not sure that Hitler’s vaguely democratic ascension to power is a strong argument against democracy. It might be that democracy has the best odds of preventing mass murder without being a guarantee against it.
What I’m seeing as the two primary causes of mass murder are strong governments which attempt to purify society and military expansionism. (Killing people in other countries on a grand scale for in order to increase one’s power is a little less cowardly than killing people on a grand scale in one’s own country, but I can’t say it’s a huge improvement.)
Sub-factors are forced industrialization (China, the USSR) and forced de-industrialization (Cambodia). I haven’t seen a theory for why some Communist governments engaged in mass murder and others didn’t.
Eric, do you have ideas about how an anarchist territory could protect itself from governments?
>Eric, do you have ideas about how an anarchist territory could protect itself from governments?
Oh, lots. That’s one of the easy problems. But this thread is ratholed enough already.
@Nancy Lebovitz
“What I’m seeing as the two primary causes of mass murder are strong governments which attempt to purify society and military expansionism.”
In the examples usually given, the guilty governments were single person tyrannies. The atrocities seem also to have been determined by that single person’s idiosyncrasies: Stalin’s paranoia (and psychopathy?), Hitler’s obsession with racial purity combined with antisemitism, Mao’s believe in autarky, Pol Pot’s believe in peasant purity.
The obsessions of these leaders were in each case bad for the cause (i.e., the elite in power). Stalin almost lost the war against Germany due to his fear of competence. Mao actually lost power after the great leap forward and had to start a civil war to regain it. Hitler’s holocaust withdrew much needed resources during the latter days of the war. Pol Pot simply destroyed his country and was easily deposed by the Vietnamese.
Current leadership in North Korea seems to be more diverse and their atrocities seem to be more functional (equally appalling but less suicidal).
The other examples are generally ethnic cleansing attempts in civil wars (India/Pakistan/Bangla Desh, Rwanda/Burundi/East Congo, Yugoslavia, Central Europe during the inter-bellum).
@Roger Philips
“As opposed to your ideas, which are driven by evidence and logic? lol. The anointed one never thinks his prejudice “counts”.”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/prejudice
From JAD’s earlier comments on women, or better people, I have become convinced that 1-3 fit him well. Please prove me wrong.
As to myself, I do have prejudices, especially of the 1.b kind. If you find them in my comments, please let me know so I can amend my ways. Actually, if you find any of these 4 traits in my comments, please inform me so I can offer a rational and reasonable justification or retract them.
My original comment was targeted on the fact that JAD dishes up Just-So stories to justify his “believes”. And this particular Just-So stories was stupid. That these believes are prejudices was a side note.
@ESR, @JAD
>And when I discuss Obama’s mental disabilities
I find it interesting how easily you guys discuss this about a guy who used to teach at Harvard. Are the selection methods – for IQ, memory etc. these stuff at least, not necessarily for honesty etc. etc. – of the Ivy League aren’t so reliable as they used to be? How the heck can a guy with bad memory memorize the tons of stuff necessary for a law degree from a prestigious place?
I mean if the Ivy League (or for that matter OxBridge) degree and especially a teaching job there is not a good heuristic for assuming someone is smart, then what is one?
>I mean if the Ivy League (or for that matter OxBridge) degree and especially a teaching job there is not a good heuristic for assuming someone is smart, then what is one?
As Jay said, an Ivy League degree can mean (a) you’re bright, or (b) you’re a diversity poster child who was waved through for political and PR reasons. I’m commenting to add a third case: (c) you have wealthy parents and took a bullshit major like “Peace Science” or “Gender Studies” that never required you to activate a brain cell.
Winter — I was thinking of, e.g., sentencing a 19 yo boy caught with his 15 yo girlfriend for full rape. Including adding him to a public sex predator list.
“Statutory rape,” not “full rape.” Very different crime, very different sentence. (I actually had a client sentenced at court-martial for this very thing; he did about 2 months in jail though he also receive a bad conduct discharge.) Sex offender registration — for a certain number of years — is mandatory for that crime, and I think that part is absurd…the judge should have the authority to remove it for nonviolent sex offenses, but he doesn’t.
JR — The USA has minimum sentencing guidelines that impose crushing penalties on relatively innocuous and nonviolent acts… and then they can tack on an additional “…with a deadly weapon” penalty if you have a gun on you. Let’s face it — sentencing is a political football in the USA that has little to do with actual justice. Add to that the fact that USA jails are privately run hellholes/labor camps and you’ve got another thing that factors into determining who gets what: profit….
Could you be more specific? I’m not going to read the whole Federal Sentencing Guidelines, nor the whole federal criminal code, to figure out what you mean.
What you say is not my experience with US jails (and I have had a few clients in them). Beyond the fact that being locked up at all is “hellish.”
P.S. – A response of mine to your earlier comment — for reasons I don’t understand — refuses to post; when I try to repost I get a message that says I’ve already posted it, but it doesn’t appear. I tried changing a couple of words, but the same thing happens. I’ll try again in a little while minus the links.
A woman could desire sex — even from several partners — and still be raped.
Yes. But don’t forget where the burden of proof lies. Suppose you shoot someone in self-defense. You get tried for murder. You want to provide evidence that the man was a lifelong mugger and stabber, and attacked people on other occasions.
A man could be a lifelong mugger and stabber, yet still be murdered. His evil career is not positive proof that you are innocent — but it’s evidence. And if it’s evidence of innocence, it ought to be allowed. And indeed it would be, because there is no “homicide shield” law to keep this evidence from the jury. You’re not limited to presenting conclusive proof of your innocence. You can normally present anything that tends to show you could be innocent. There should be no exception for rape.
Furthermore, physical evidence of rape is difficult and humiliating to acquire — and becomes more difficult the more time goes by. So under the old rules, in order to see justice done, a rape victim, already terrified and traumatized and probably not willing to talk about what happened, is now under pressure to act fast to avoid running out the clock, and to possibly expose herself to a court medical examiner in a way with which might itself be traumatizing given, you know, that she was just raped.
No doubt. But that’s exactly the problem. In passing “shield” laws, we’ve decided that the accuser’s privacy is more important than not convicting innocent men. And as value judgments go, that’s simply terrible (it’s not as bad as reversing the burden of proof on consent, but happily, that one failed). If the evidence is weak — for whatever reason — then no one should be prosecuted, period.
To absolve rapists if their victims were promiscuous, or to require victims to provide physical evidence of their violation, puts women at risk.
As far as I can tell, it was never true that rapists were “absolved” if their victims were promiscuous. In military court, at least, the classic instruction was that rape could be committed “on a female of any age, on a man’s mistress, or on a common harlot.” (And yes, men could be and were convicted of raping prostitutes, even in the “bad old days,” if the evidence was sufficient.) Promiscuity was simply evidence that the “girl next door” on the stand had a habit of doing the very thing the accused said she did. But it could be overcome by other evidence that, on this occasion, she did not.
For a great example of what a rape trial looked like under a saner regime, there’s an excellent article about a court-martial in 1918. I think my link to it was the problem for my prior comment, but if you google “trial and execution of private william buckner” it’ll pop up in the first link. (The “classic” instruction I mention is in footnote 12, as is a cite to a case where a civilian was convicted of raping a prostitute). The victim screamed and was overheard; she fled the accused as soon as she could; there was blood on her clothes to show a struggle; the accused admitted to one of his buddies that he’d chased her into a field and “done business to her”; the “consent” story he told was independently rebutted; he was convicted. And best of all, the sentence was death by hanging, as it should be for real, forcible rape.
Shenpen, the qualifications to become a teacher at Harvard or the University of Chicago, where Obama lectured in Constitutional law (!), are basically “either be really smart and knowledgeable, or be a minority”. That’s what affirmative action is, and the result is that it’s quite possible for someone who only seems to be smart to be accepted into a teaching position.
The real evil of affirmative action is that it destroys the real accomplishments of those minorities who are able to achieve the positions without the assistance of the affirmative action program, by making it impossible to tell who got there by being good and who go there by being black.
RE: marital rape.
They way I see it is, if a man does not pay you money he owes you, it does not entitle you to take it by force. Breaking a contract, even committing fraud, is not automatically grounds for using violence.
Yes, people are entitled to sex in marriage, because marriage is generally a vow to not have sex outside marriage (unless _explicitly_ agreed as an open marriage by both parties), and it is of course not a vow of celibacy, therefore the only way out from the dilemma that it means an implicit promise or even contract for sex. Yes, I think such promises can be enforced, by legal ways. No, it does not mean that it is OK to enforce promises or contracts by random violence. Rather it can be grounds for divorce based on the fault of the sex-withholding party, or back in times before that was allowed then it can be grounds for social pressure and shaming. Not for violence.
How is that not obvious that “do people owe sex in marriage” is not the same question as “are people entitled to take sex by force in marriage” ?
BTW I am a bit disgusted by the whole topic. If any marriage comes to this dilemma, the love is basically lost at that point and things are pretty damned anyway, so isn’t it better to focus on how to not get there, both on the individual and social level? I find it weird why people want to focus too much on how to handle the fringe cases that are screwed up anyway now matter how it is handled, instead of focusing on how people should not get there. It’s like worrying about whether prisoners life-sentenced to max security prisons get treated well or not or not. Just focus on trying to make things so that as few people as possible have to face these questions, right?
@Winter Re: Aletta Jacobs
Sidenote: one of the hypotheses of the Manosphere is that many political, social etc. movements can be understood as a way to optimize the sexual strategies of their members, even when it is about something else. What follows from this is that remarks like “feminists are ugly” or “objectivists are basement dwelling pimpled neckbeards” are not simply a superficial way to dismiss someone’s ideas based on their looks, but the hypothesis that in such political or social movements people with low sex appeal are – maybe even just subconsciously – trying rewrite the rules of society in a way that their sexual rank becomes higher, and this is what is really behind such movements.
Of course what made me think about this was the photo. Here is another example from HU : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosika_Schwimmer and thousand others from all over the world.
I am going to be fair in this. Every time I see a guy who looks like http://betapedia.com/extras/top-ten/ rant about Objectivism on Facebook I am thinking the same thing – there is a hidden, maybe even subconscious sexual strategy optimisation going on here.
Interesting.
My impression of Obama is that, especially in his first campaign, he showed intelligence, or at least enough intelligence to attract and keep smart people. It was him and/or his team which paid close attention to the details of winning the nomination and of the electoral college, and who went to the new money in Silicon Valley instead of just relying on the usual old money sources, They also at least listened to programmers who worked on improving the publicity for his campaign.
In short, he wasn’t a pointy-haired boss. Some of you probably believe he wasn’t in charge at all, but I haven’t heard anyone nominated as the brains behind the throne.
What I suspect is that he’s smarter in well-defined situations rather than in real world situations– good at chess rather than at poker which suddenly turns into Calvinball.
As for JAD claiming that it’s dangerous to criticize Obama, I have no idea what world he’s living in– I see plenty of criticism, some of it quite nasty, from both the left and the right.
>My impression of Obama is that, especially in his first campaign, he showed intelligence, or at least enough intelligence to attract and keep smart people.
Yes, Obama is just smart enough to be really dangerously stupid. Dimmer-witted people than he can’t persuade others to follow them into the land of delusion. For a consequence straight from today’s headlines, see Putin’s invasion of the Crimea.
Shenpen, good point, but the other half is that insisting that some group of people is sexually unattractive is a way of lowering their status.
>As Jay said, an Ivy League degree can mean (a) you’re bright, or (b) you’re a diversity poster child who was waved through for political and PR reasons. I’m commenting to add a third case: (c) you have wealthy parents and took a bullshit major like “Peace Science” or “Gender Studies” that never required you to activate a brain cell.
Need for a little clarification here. (c) generally means you’re a ‘legacy’, as in you’re a descendent of an alum. Many legacies are dumb as posts, but they often come from wealth and tend to have the right connections. An Ivy League education is at least as much about networking and future insiders building relationships with other insiders, as anything else.
Taking Harvard, the Ivy with whose undergrads I am most familiar (many friends who attended)… the average Harvard undergrad is shockingly *not smart*, and the Harvard undergraduate curriculum is not challenging. The graduate schools are somewhat different. It’s a self-perpetuating multi generational insiders’ club, a would-be aristocracy. It’s not a meritocracy, except that they’re very picky about which poor people they let in (and there’s no shortage of hungry outsiders who want into the club).
>Need for a little clarification here. (c) generally means you’re a ‘legacy’, as in you’re a descendent of an alum.
Often the case but not invariably so. Some case (c)s are just rich and stupid.
What do you think Obama should have done?
Out of curiosity, what’s the obvious thing that he would have done if he weren’t dangerously stupid, which would have prevented Putin from invading the Crimea?
>Out of curiosity, what’s the obvious thing that he would have done if he weren’t dangerously stupid, which would have prevented Putin from invading the Crimea?
Put the U.S. in a posture that represented a threat of war that was credible to Putin – straight up old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy and geopolitics. Obama’s ideological commitments, his delusional belief in “soft power” and the “international community” among others, prevented this.
As it is, we’ve just told our allies that mutual-defense treaties are worthless pieces of paper to be sacrificed any time domestic politics makes that seem expedient. Our ability to stabilize brink-of-war confrontations will suffer accordingly. Eventually, lots of Americans will die as a result.
Yes, Obama is just smart enough to be really dangerously stupid.
Obama makes me think of one of my top 10 principles for understanding politics, something Orwell talked about: There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals will believe them.
I’m not the student of military history that you are, so could you make this a bit more concrete? Does this entail deploying troops to stand around in Ukraine looking threatening (would the Ukrainians be cool with that?), or have the fleet floating around offshore? What does “geopolitics” mean? in this context? It seems a bit counterintuitive to me that credibly threatening to involve ourselves in yet another Land War in Asia would have been a good idea.
>I’m not the student of military history that you are, so could you make this a bit more concrete?
Not in this thread. Perhaps I’ll do a separate post about it.
If esr is actually an anarchist, has to be pro lynching, at least for serious crimes against the person, which appear to be the overwhelming majority of actual historical lynchings in the US (If blacks were lynched for being disrespectful, etc, you would have a better poster boy than Emmit Till, who was not lynched for whistling at a white woman, but quietly murdered for groping someone else’s wife, something that is apt to happen in the South without regard for race)
But because esr is PC, will not dare to say he is in favor of lynching – revealing that either he is no more an anarchist than the anarchists of the “Occupy” crowd, or docilely submits to and follows the ever moving Overton window. The right hand edge of the Overton window has now moved so far left as to prohibit not only real anarchism, but also real libertarianism.
China, quite obviously, did not industrialize under Mao. The great leap forward was a total failure. Similarly the area accessible to trains and all weather roads did not substantially increase in Russia under communism. The Soviet economy expanded by conquering more advanced regions, not by economic growth. When I visited Cuba in the 1990s, their stuff was caught in a time warp from the revolution, and when the Germanies were unified, German businessmen visiting East Germany to organize privatization found that East Germany’s industrial assets consisted mostly of poorly maintained factories dating from World War II.
Every country that has industrialized, has been industrialized by “robber barons”, illustrating Ayn Rand’s thesis that modernity is a creation of the entrepreneur and the joint stock corporation.
>If esr is actually an anarchist, has to be pro lynching, at least for serious crimes against the person
My view of the matter that a person can only be said to be “lynched” when he is killed by a crowd outside of the legal due process of his society.
Anarchy does not imply the absence of law, only of monopoly government; indeed, Anglo-American common law derives from decentralist legal systems that developed under stateless tribalism. Because I expect any functioning anarchy to have a legal due process, I’m both an anarchist and against lynching.
About the Crimea crisis.
Things are complex. First, the two halves of Ukrain do not want to be together. That is the reason the same president has been chased away twice. Any armed attempt to keep them together will start a civil war. Second, the Crimea was Russian until 60 years ago and contains a harbor Russia cannot afford to lose under any circumstance. Third, Putin is losing support in Russia quick. If he backs down, he is gone.
Playing chicken with him will end very badly.
What I expect is a backroom deal. The people of the Crimea will get to “chose” to go back to Russia. Ukrain will split officially or inofficially into a European and Russian part.
If Russia invades all of Ukrain, Europe might start a massive rearmament arms race with. Or Germany might do that alone (it is one century ago that Germany started WWI).
The comming election for the European Parliament could become interesting.
Harvard these days is not an indicator of intelligence or ability: Michael Mann graduated from Harvard, and he is white and male. If black or female, even less an indicator of ability due to affirmative action. Harvard selects primarily on PC, and thus on the ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast. It is the same problem as Islam. Islamic theocrats, like PC theocrats, tend to be dim, and PC theocrats are even dimmer when selected for race and sex.
Selection of our elite for ability was strongest in about 1870 or so, to judge by their writings and the pace of scientific progress, and has been diminishing ever since.
@Wimter
I tried that before, and you couldn’t even to the point where you understood what I was saying. So you’ll be surprised to learn I won’t be wasting my time like that again.
And… of course your reply contains no substance showing why his story can’t be falsified. That’s a strange theme in your posts. Nor do you make any attempt whatsoever to repair what he said to get at a more reasonable story, etc. In other words, the same old chimp-level secular religion pushing we’ve come to expect from you.
esr:
And the state, of course, gets to decide what is the legal due process of our society :-) How very convenient for you.
Assume (optimistically) that defense organizations are not enforcing law on their own behalf, but on behalf of those they protect, and that they are not paid by the case, that is to say, not paid directly by the complainant as a lawyer is, but rather supported by those protected, either with insurance type cash payments, where the client pays the same whether a victim of crime or not, or less concretely with social status and the ensuing economic rewards of social status
The latter arrangement seems to have been typical of lynchings, which were organized by high social status people who gained additional social status by protecting society, and subsequently obtained economic rewards from their social status.
In that case the incentive of those implementing defense is to punish when they reliably know, and are seen to reliably know, that the accused is guilty. And it does seem that in most lynchings, those organizing the lynching did reliably know, and were seen to reliably know, that the accused was guilty.
I wrote:
Since esr ignorantly hates and demonizes our recent past, parroting the official PC line, he might find this hard to believe.
The example I had in mind was Stanford, founder of Stanford University. Stanford University gained its initial status from the high status of its founder, and the high status of its founder came, in substantial part, from lynching bad people.
@Roger Philips
“And… of course your reply contains no substance showing why his story can’t be falsified.”
Rudyard Kipling wrote a book full of just so stories. I am pretty sure I can not do better explain the genre than he did.
Anyhow, to give you a hint, there was not a shred of a suggestion of observations or archeological investigations about life of early humans that would even begin to give rise to his story. It is furthermore biologically and medically complete nonsense. That is simply not how and why women get pregnant.
I wrote:
As the Overton window moves ever leftwards, people abruptly and in unison change their beliefs. Since this is obviously false and hypocrtical, two rationalizations come into play: One is that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, that we always believed what we now believe, and the other is that our recent past, including esr’s own parents, were evil, monstrous, hateful, and demonic. We observe both rationalizations, sometimes simultaneously.
Michael Mann is not bright, and is not a diversity poster child.
Once you get into Harvard, you are pretty much guaranteed to graduate if you persist, work hard, keep paying money, and keep your nose clean, so the output is no smarter than the input – and the input is increasingly selected on grounds other than ability. Since 1920, and arguably since 1870, we have seen a steady trend towards a less IQ selective intake.
There are some Harvard courses that are known to be hard. If someone takes such a course, and graduates in it, he is indeed smart, but what tends to happen is that someone takes such a course, and then switches to a known easy course because he cannot handle the hard course, for example Michael Mann. If someone switches from a known hard course to a known easy course, his Harvard degree means “stupid”
@Winter
And yet, with the greatest of ease and without remembering the exact text I can pull out something of value from it, namely the idea that pregnancy was a big risk for women and therefore they needed adaptations to deal with that risk, and that this idea is predictive of some of the absurd behavior women exhibit (just as male behavior that is incomprehensible to women can be predicted along the same lines). And that’s not even _trying_. But *you* – the serial negater – are unable to get anything of value out of it, which is why you’re seen uttering “nonsense” like the quoted text. And even what you said isn’t nonsense because ultimately is makes perfect sense – you just have to translate it out of loser speak first.
So according to you it is highly unusual for a woman to get pregnant because her legs spontaneously spread a little when a bad boy stands close to her?
The smart people were having orgasms because Obama can speak in elite dialect. But elite dialect is an unreliable indicator of intelligence. What indicates intelligence is the ability to express complex thoughts when not reading from a teleprompter.
If Russia invades all of Ukrain, Europe might start a massive rearmament arms race with.
As they need all their spare change to stop their banks falling over and they’re desperately dependent on Russia for NG (coming through Ukraine), I think discretion is probably going to commend itself as the better part of valour there.
Apparently the Crimea was transferred to Ukraine under Krushchev as some sort of gesture of solidarity/ethnic dilution/whatever, but they never envisaged Ukraine up and *leaving* with it.
Some of you probably believe he wasn’t in charge at all, but I haven’t heard anyone nominated as the brains behind the throne.
Rahm Emanuel, at least early in the first term, I heard.
> My experience is that “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” turns people into libertarians, not left-liberals. Not that I expect you to ever be able to admit that.
There is a strain of singularity/”post-scarcity” thinking – among people I might not precisely describe as hackers, but who are definitely part of today’s internet milieu nonetheless, which holds that something like a basic income guarantee (or, as a darker alternative, welfare tied to an increasing amount of pointless make-work) will become necessary for some people to be able to live at all as increasing levels of automation cause structural unemployment by making it so that society simply does not need nearly as many people as exist to work. Some believe that post-scarcity is already here, if only resources were allocated more efficiently.
(I’ve occasionally seen it pointed out that one of Karl Marx’s key problems was believing – wrongly – that the technological base for post-scarcity [though not described in those words] had already arrived in the early industrial era. The irony of this typically escapes the people who believe it has arrived today)
>There is a strain of singularity/”post-scarcity” thinking – among people I might not precisely describe as hackers, but who are definitely part of today’s internet milieu nonetheless, which holds that something like a basic income guarantee (or, as a darker alternative, welfare tied to an increasing amount of pointless make-work) will become necessary
I know. This is what we call “failure to learn from history”.
Democratic welfare states erected on any premise have an inevitable failure mode that I have elsewhere described as “Olsonian collapse”. This is on topic because it’s one of the things the DE gets right.
The particular strain of post-scarcity thinking you’re describing hasn’t figured out that the least unstable versions of a basic-income-guarantee system are despotisms and oligarchies in which the concept of political equality has been necessarily jettisoned. They should study the terminal period of the Roman Republic and learn to be more careful what they wish for.
@Roger Philips&@JAD
“And yet, with the greatest of ease and without remembering the exact text I can pull out something of value from it, namely the idea that pregnancy was a big risk for women and therefore they needed adaptations to deal with that risk, and that this idea is predictive of some of the absurd behavior women exhibit (just as male behavior that is incomprehensible to women can be predicted along the same lines).”
People (M/F) crave intercourse, irrespective of consequences. That is the single biological adaptation needed for the species to sustain. This craving is widespread in eukaryotes. This is exactly the same drive that makes a male spider or preying mantis run to his death and salmons to swim to their death.
Your reasoning starts with an inability to give a plausible time in human evolution when the relation between sex and pregnancy became common knowledge.
All humans tend to have sex unless forced into abstinence, on average, only one in eleven intercourses leads to a pregnancy (none when feeding a baby), and pregnancy is only observable after a delay of weeks. Take that together and for a “primitive” mind, bathing in the moonshine might be just as “obvious” a cause of pregnancy as intercourse. Mythology is rive with women getting pregnant from the gods (as rain, even). Detailed knowledge about the biology of human reproduction is very recent (19th century). Even today there are widespread believes that widows can give birth to a child of a long dead husband half a dozen years later. The figure of the stork delivering babies is linked to a very, very old believe that birds transport the souls to and from the afterlife. And we all know you need a soul to create a baby.
So you might excuse me for ignoring such non-sense as this just-so story (I know you won’t, but still).
@Adrian Smith
“As they need all their spare change to stop their banks falling over and they’re desperately dependent on Russia for NG (coming through Ukraine), ”
Our banks are currently starting to being privatized again. So the EU is becoming a lot less desperate. And rebuilding an army is not done in a few weeks anyway.
Around 30% of our NG is currently delivered through the Ukrainian pipeline AFAIK (which was a very stupid decision, I agree). Russia depends on this gas for 50% of its income. The last time Russia closed that pipeline they needed a lot of time to rebuild trust in Gazprom. That is, it did cost them a lot of money. It is still possible to build LNG terminals in Europe and more pipelines to the Caspian sea. That would worry Russia quite a lot.
And while the Russians are busy “protecting” Russian speaking Ukrainians, there are a lot of Chinese needing protection in eastern Siberia.
I might remind you of the strategic armed response of the USA to Russia destroying Chechnya and invading Georgia. That is, they did nothing. This gives us a good hint how the USA will respond this time.
@esr
“Democratic welfare states erected on any premise have an inevitable failure mode that I have elsewhere described as “Olsonian collapse”.”
Everything will end. That is not an argument. All other forms of rule have ended in history. Eventually, even the Swiss Eidgenossenschaft, that has lasted since the 13th century, will end.
I see few parallels between the Roman republic and a modern welfare state like Germany. The Roman Republic was unable to incorporate non-Roman (the city) people into their political system. That does not go together well with conquering the Mediterranean. We also can doubt the democratic nature of a republic that consists mostly of people with few (plebeians) or no (slaves) political rights. The Roman republic lasted shorter than the empire. The difference is even more marked when you take the East Roman empire into account. A crucial difference was that the empire was able to integrate non-Romans.
You wrote on the Olsonian collapse:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1255
That happens under all forms of rule. Every ruler needs to placate his power base which will consist of various interest groups. Things go downhill fast whenever one interest group (e.g., the top 1% of capital owners, or party members and their families) succeeds in monopolizing power.
Furthermore, all communities have to deal with people who do no paid work, temporarily or permanently. Be it children, the elderly, the bodily or mentally infirm, stay at home parents, or those without marketable skills. That has always been a sizable fraction of the population. Often that has been well over half the population. So, claiming that one way of solving that problem is the road to hell, and another is “natural” requires more than some armchair philosophical hand waving.
As I have written earlier, I do not see the ominous signs that North and Western Europe are on the road to hell. Much less so than almost any country I can think of (Canada could be one example, but I welcome better examples).
So, please explain why I am on the road to hell and, say, Brazil or China are not? Or countries where they do not pay taxes, e.g., Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia.
@Winter
Your reasoning starts (as always) with ignoring what I said and responding to something else – in this case what JAD said, and what you therefore assume that I said. Certainly, there is nothing in my post that presupposes any “common knowledge”, like people up and deciding to have sex in spite of knowing about the link between pregnancy and sex. But you are simply incapable of this level of nuance, so once again we’re bogged down with me trying to stop you from going on about imagined bullshit. I mean you could choose to read what I said and see that evolutionary filters on sexual behavior don’t require any knowledge on the part of the filtered. Now that’s what *I* said. Now if you show yourself capable of understanding what *I* said, maybe I’ll take the time to start talking about what JAD said, and whether what he said really presupposes “common knowledge”. But don’t get your hopes up.
@Roger Philips
“But you are simply incapable of this level of nuance, so once again we’re bogged down with me trying to stop you from going on about imagined bullshit.”
We all have our limitations.
I went back to the original comment by JAD
I would like to draw your attention to that women with self control, long time preference, or controllable lust, would not have allowed themselves to get pregnant. In my understanding, JAD supposes here that women in these times had a knowledge about the outcome of intercourse that would give an incentive to avoid it. Actually, I can not see any interpretation that does not implies that women knew of the link between intercourse and pregnancy during the (old) paleolithicum.
Now your response was:
On itself, this seems like the response of someone who for the first time hits on the idea of natural selection and, more specifically, on the idea of sexual selection. That is high school biology. Nothing wrong with that. But the quote from JAD above is far beyond that level reached already by Darwin halfway the 19th century. In light of knowing about natural selection, JAD’s comments are stupid Just-So stories that supply more disinformation than information.
I have no idea why you are so fond of calling me names? I do not see how this helps in this discussion.
@Random832
Some believe that post-scarcity is already here, if only resources were allocated more efficiently.
I can not begin to describe how annoying these people are, to do so would require me to learn Yiddish. But as a proxy for that I wrote an article taking an even more extreme scenario than they claim exists and showing that scarcity still exists: Scarcity in a Post-Scarcity World
(I assume that Eric doesn’t mind the article pimping because he has previously read it, and it is on top-, wait, there is no topic here anymore.)
— Foo Quuxman
@Winter
Again, you have zero error-correction ability. Maybe he meant to imply something specific about what women knew about pregnancy, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter, because what he said can be corrected by replacing all the stuff about consciousness with evolutionary filters. Either way women had to take on some behaviors – including uncontrollable sexual urges and short-term mating preferences – to score the bad boy seed to cuckold the nice guys with. In slave society this appears “crazy”, especially in severe cases where women are chasing men who’ll fuck them (with contraception of course) but otherwise hold them in total contempt.
No, what supplies “disinformation” is your continual denial of anything that makes you feel bad. Which is probably why you’re such a poor thinker and couldn’t see the usefulness of what he said, buried as you were in the mere _surface_ of it. There aren’t any “untrue” statements – you just aren’t trying hard enough.
I’ll stop calling you names when you stop saying stupid things. Then maybe I’ll listen to you about what “helps” the discussion. I am on discussion forums for fun and intellectual development (I repeat myself), and the best way to do that is to be a “bad” person – precisely because the morality of slave society is arranged around limiting the amount of fun any one person can have.
@Roger Phillips
“Either way women had to take on some behaviors – including uncontrollable sexual urges and short-term mating preferences – to score the bad boy seed to cuckold the nice guys with.”
Almost all of your words have moral overtones implying women are sluts (==bad). In can easily filter them out and replace them with “neutral” versions. However, JAD is well known to take these moral judgments as an argument to deny women agency.
@Roger Phillips
“No, what supplies “disinformation” is your continual denial of anything that makes you feel bad. ”
What is there that makes me feel bad? That women and men are pursuing the same goal of mating with those they fancy as often as they fancy is not something I feel bad about. Also, I know perfectly well that these drives are build into our DNA and are molded by culture and experience. Personally, I do not see much difference between man and women in this respect, except that statistically, men tend to take more risks.
But JAD is shooting off half/quarter truths and contorted anecdotes to argue that women are unable to determine their own destiny. I feel that my role as a “participant” on this blog is to add my $0.02. As this is not a scientific formal debate, I feel free to add my personal opinion about his arguments.
@Roger Phillips
“I’ll stop calling you names when you stop saying stupid things.”
He who waits for the end of human stupidity will have an eternity in front of him.
@Roger Phillips
“precisely because the morality of slave society is arranged around limiting the amount of fun any one person can have.”
Sorry, I have no experiences in slave societies, so I cannot help you here. Where I live, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll are still legal to any extend you want
(at least the use of drugs is, do not try to sell them).
@Foo
“But as a proxy for that I wrote an article taking an even more extreme scenario than they claim exists and showing that scarcity still exists: Scarcity in a Post-Scarcity World”
Currently, there is enough food produced in the world to prevent starvation. It is also not beyond imagination to supply everyone with clean water and vaccinations. The step towards adequate shelter (a roof) for every family seems not very bold.
In this respect, the world produces much, much more than is needed to supply the basic needs of survival for every human being. That is an interpretation of “scarcity” that was very much in front of the minds of those who coined the term a few centuries ago. That is also the type of scarcity that is targeted with a basic-income-guarantee.
Since 1963, we have a system in the Netherlands that guarantees everyone an income if there is no other source, and it works pretty well. People in that system do have to try to get work, though. This is still a step away from “a basic income for everyone no matter what”, but not so much. Germany too has a system somewhat like this. I do not see how such a thing could be rolled out globally.
@Winter – “Since 1963, we have a system in the Netherlands that guarantees everyone an income if there is no other source, and it works pretty well. ”
Only in the pragmatic sense. All mature democratic political organizations (especially in times of abundance) evolve toward vote bribery because it is so efficient at ensuring incumbency. You are now making the dubious presumption that welfarism is a long-term good for society. However, just the opposite is true. You have deliberately suppressed the motivational driver for people to improve and overcome their hardship. In the long run, this weakens society and sows the seeds of future pathology. First person charity works for those in temporary distress. Government sponsored welfare is a disease.
@TomA
“All mature democratic political organizations (especially in times of abundance) evolve toward vote bribery because it is so efficient at ensuring incumbency. … ”
This sound as if it was printed in a leaflet. I read nothing in there that gives even a hint that you might actually know about the Netherlands and their economical system. In the 50 years of its existence, it has never been a real problem. And you obviously did not experience it if you think it kills the drive to work.
I’m having a bit of trouble; could you help me out here? This guy did indeed graduate from Harvard, but he died in the 1970s and I don’t understand why he’s worth talking about here. Michael Mann the climate guy studied physics at UC Berkeley, not Harvard. (There’s also a British sociologist, but he went to Oxford.)
Is this some sort of “Eugene versus Debs” thing, or what?
>Often the case but not invariably so. Some case (c)s are just rich and stupid.
No, that’s BU. ;)
@Winter:
In the 50 years of its existence, it has never been a real problem.
Netherlands birth rate: 1.76 births per woman, well below replacement level.
Netherlands national debt: @$609,898,000,000 and growing.
In other words, never say “never.”
You can’t really draw a trend line here.
Perhaps not as percentage of GDP, but if the best the debt has been in 20 years is 45% of GDP, and it’s constantly growing, and the population is aging and eventually shrinking, I don’t see how the numbers work in the long run.
>if the best the debt has been in 20 years is 45% of GDP, and it’s constantly growing, and the population is aging and eventually shrinking, I don’t see how the numbers work in the long run.
Less people (the country is pretty full as it is) and increased productivity ?
@Grendelkhan&PapayaSF
The trend is down as a percentage of GDP and I think too in absolute value.
But in 2008 our banks discovered that you should not lend to USA home owners (nor the likes of Madof and Goldman Sachs) and had to be saved with ~10% of GDP in debt. It will take some time to get rid of that debt again.
Note that pension obligations are all coverred by capital, in the order of ~100% of GDP. (that is why we have such big banks).
It seems no one is overly concerned by our debt. We occasionally pay negative interest on state bonds (people pay us to lend us money, I have no idea why)
>>if the best the debt has been in 20 years is 45% of GDP, and it’s constantly growing, and the population is aging and eventually shrinking, I don’t see how the numbers work in the long run.
>Less people (the country is pretty full as it is) and increased productivity ?
Increased productivity, manifesting as economic growth, is the usual fantasy about how to get out of this sort of situation. The *degree* of growth generally required, usually puts the lie to the fantasy.
Less people, as in population decreases over time, actually makes things worse. MUCH worse. There’s a reason they call that scenario a demographic time bomb. Because over time your number of productive workers will go down much faster than your number of pensioners, causing your entitlement system to collapse.
There’s a reason why many European countries are so eager to take in ‘immigrants’ of dodgy quality and questionable, incompatible culture- because those countries know they need *someone* to hold jobs and pay taxes to support the entitlements establishment in coming decades, and it won’t be the children of the native population (they don’t have enough children).
One nice thing about a welfare state- it lets you model other people’s children as a commons. (And you know what happens to commons.)
@kn: That’s a lot of productivity growth to count on.
@Winter: If your pensions are 100% funded, good for you. The US has scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities. But according to online sources, your debt is still continually growing, and while the percent-of-GDP was improving for a while, the trend has been bad for five years.
@PapayaSF
The last five years, indeed, were bad. Some $100B and more have disappeared. Much of it in foreign parts. The US has spend a lot of it.
As a result, liabillities have been reduced, and we have to work longer.
Your reasoning is based on the assumption that we cannot adapt. But things do change. And people do vote for politicians that predict more cutbacks.
> That’s a lot of productivity growth to count on.
>The *degree* of growth generally required, usually puts the lie to the fantasy.
Don’t know, I didn’t do the math, and I’m not very good with big numbers.
>There’s a reason they call that scenario a demographic time bomb. Because over time your number of productive workers will go down much faster than your number of pensioners, causing your entitlement system to collapse.
The solution to that (or so I’m told) is that people will have to remain productive longer, i.e that the age at which people retire and start drawing a pension is to go up.
Meanwhile youth unemployment rates seem to be rising as well, and yes, I’ve also heard that recipe of importing foreign workers to work and pay taxes to finance pensions.
I’ll readily admit that i don’t know how that all adds up.
@Winter: “people pay us to lend us money, I have no idea why”
@kn: “I’ll readily admit that i don’t know how that all adds up.”
In any scam you’re involved, if you don’t understand the accounts, the sucker is YOU.
As for the belief that migrants will somehow “solve” the problem with runaway deficit spending: it cannot possibly.
(1) When each one on average spends more than he makes, each newcomer is in average a mouth, not an arm. An increased liability, not an asset.
(2) When you have to bribe newcomers to come, you’re attracting mouths, not arms — and indeed actively turning domestic and foreign arms into mouths, thereby ever decreasing your average earning/spending ratio.
(3) If not before, when the debt is so large that there is not enough money to be borrowed anymore to pay for the interests of the outstanding debt, then the system will find itself unable to buy votes and/or to pay its booted goons to beat up the slaves. Then there will be a default, a run, a lot of sore losers, unrest, a collapse, and people who find they have to pay “their” debt the hard way.
(4) western politicians are knowingly selling “their” people to indentured servitude to arab oil countries. These countries know they won’t be able to collect the debt from western democracies if these countries if the white slaves revolt, and are insistant in favoring arab migration to Europe, massive tax-paid breeding programs for them and citizenship, so that when whitey stops dancing, “democracy” will compel him and/or kick him out of his former continent.
(5) arab oil dictatorships will keep bailing out the West until the change in demographics has turned the West arab, at which point they will come collect the loot.
(6) Thirty-odd years from now, it’s game over.
Karel ?apek had it right: western rulers will keep selling their countries to the Newts, until nothing is left but newts everywhere.
http://fare.livejournal.com/172472.html
> Scarcity in a Post-Scarcity World
> 1 Matter/Energy (sometimes called Mattergy)
The supply of energy in the form of junk matter is not unlimited, but to a population of mere billions it might as well be. I stopped reading here, I assume the rest of the list was similarly either theoretical or depending on an assumption that population growth will necessarily fill the remaining capacity even as increased lifestyle comfort tends to lead to declining birthrates.
To get back on topic: We are borrowing against future growth, and future growth is not happening. Due to social decay, and overbearing regulator state resembling the late Song empire more than it resembles the late Roman empire, technological progress in most fields ended in the west in 1972. Progress in computing continued, but that too is now ending. The only major field where technological progress continues is DNA and hard disk drives, which is not yet in a position to cause major economic growth.
@Farre
“In any scam you’re involved, if you don’t understand the accounts, the sucker is YOU.”
About negative interest rates on government bonds.
“As for the belief that migrants will somehow “solve” the problem with runaway deficit spending: it cannot possibly.”
The USA is doing pretty well now for two centuries.
http://www.suntimes.com/business/savage/13994636-452/negative-interest-rates-are-possible.html
Banks buy bonds at negative interests rates not because this in itself is profitable, but because they are required to. It’s how they pay for the privilege to be part of the banking cartel with fractional reserves, whereby they can lend money they don’t actually have and earn interest on that, which you can’t, for you’re not part of the “regulated” industry, aka cartel.
It certainly has worked great for the monopoly banks for over a century. For the people? Not so. That’s how megadeaths of citizens have been financed.
>“As for the belief that migrants will somehow “solve” the problem with runaway deficit spending: it cannot possibly.”
>The USA is doing pretty well now for two centuries.
If you don’t understand the broader context, you’re a fool. If you choose to ignore the broader context because doing so suits your argument, you’re dishonest.
For 2 centuries the US has been drawing immigrants who sought opportunity, there was no welfare state to draw them with benefits, and even as delightful as the US is, a very large percentage of immigrants went back (the ones who stayed were the ones who were successful). The culture of those immigrants, and the larger culture of the US, also mattered a great deal.
But, now the US itself has been having problems. We still draw off people from other countries looking for opportunity (generally in the form of a brain drain), but we also draw immigrants who come here primarily looking for benefits. The overall culture of the US is also not as well suited to absorbing immigrants, though in that regard we are still vastly superior to Europe.
The problem Europe has with immigrants, is that to a large degree all the good immigrants are taken. As in, all the ones with talent and ambition (more opportunity in the US), as well as cultural compatibility. Which for Europe is important, because what you *really* don’t want is to import a permanent underclass, and cultural compatibility (or ability to actively assimilate newcomers) is required for newcomers to actually succeed. Generous social benefits also factor into the equation.
So when you’re importing low-quality immigrants (because all the better ones go elsewhere), who are of a culture not compatible with your own, and your own native culture doesn’t really do assimilation, and there’s good odds the immigrants are just farming you for social benefits… what you’re really doing is importing an unsuccessful underclass with a taste for freebies. Thus your plan of importing workers who will industriously foot the bill for your own retirement is not looking promising. (When the BEST you can hope for is to import more Polish plumbers to offset the entire villages of inbred Pakistani peasants….)
Allegedly, more than ninety percent of “asylum seekers” remain permanently on welfare. I have not checked these statistics, and do not really know where they come from, but politically correct sources are reluctant to provide any alternative statistics.
The plan to import a replacement for those missing grandchildren is not going well, for if it was going well, we would have the data.
OK then, how about the Japanese plan: Robots.
It used to be that when IC manufacturers announced a new generation, x micrometers, or y nanometers, that referred to the line pitch, how close together they could draw lines on a silicon wafer without the lines merging into each other.
This, however, has remained stuck at 64 nanometers for some considerable time, yet they are still announcing new technology generations, and labeling them by a distance, for example 22 nanometers, even though there is nothing on the chip that corresponds to such a distance.
Due to social decay and the destruction of capitalism, most technologies have maxed out, or gone into actual decline. We can no longer put a man on the moon. Computer technology appears to be maxing out, in that line width has stopped shrinking.
When I was working at Gasonics, I suggested that we rinse the test silicon wafers in hydrofluoric acid. This horrified my boss, because it would attract a horde of toxic waste bureaucrats dressed in moon suits. It is no longer practical to do that sort of thing. You know how chemistry sets for children have become more and more boring, because of regulation. Well guess what. Chemistry sets for scientists and technologists have also become more and more boring.
You know how chemistry sets for children have become more and more boring, because of regulation.
They say there’s hardly anything you can’t eat in the modern ones. The shame of it.
@Winter
For some reason you have a hard time grasping that I don’t believe in morality – at least not in the same sense that you do. With regards to the loosening of controls over female behavior what I find more interesting than morality is: do you think, once women get what they want (as measured by behavior, not words), that all those male slaves who burned themselves out in shitty jobs in exchange for sexual and reproductive goodies are going to keep at it? Historically most men didn’t pass on their genes. I don’t claim to know the outcome. If the current political trends continue then it won’t matter, because they’ll be forced under law to provide more and more resources to the children of strangers via taxation.
Women and men may have the same mating “goals”, but they do not approach them in the same way. Hell, men and goats have the same goals, as do amoeba. All life simply wants to keep on going, because all the life forms that didn’t want to keep on going died out. But an amoeba and a man go about it in very different ways, and “go on” in totally different forms. And it makes you feel bad that womens’ reproductive behavior might be curtailed, a measure that some think might be necessary for the grand life-form of _civilization_ to go on.
And women have to be more choosy with mates, and women have to get resources from “stable” men, and … I understand English isn’t your native language; do you know what “negation” means? Your constant unwarranted skepticism itself shows a disturbing lack of skepticism.
So.. this is an informal chat with everyone’s 2c, but you complain about half-truths and anecdotes. Nice one.
Every response you write is constructed on a platform of slave morality.
@adrian Smith They say there’s hardly anything you can’t eat in the modern ones. The shame of it.
Depends on where you look.
http://www.thehomescientist.com/kits/CK01/ck01-main.html
Bad sexual behavior by women has enormous costs for other people – in economic terminology, their decisions have very large externalities. We penalize, exclude, and discriminate against smokers for vague, small, and improbable hypothetical externalities. You don’t seem worried we are denying smokers agency.
Suppose we did not have a legal system that transfers resources from particular men, and taxpayers as a whole, to badly behaved women. Then the costs of bad behavior would be carried largely by the woman’s own family. Whereupon, the family, to protect itself, would severely penalize such bad behavior – would beat her like a rug. We would be back to the 1820s sex rules in no time – somewhat modified because we now have aesthetically acceptable contraception and reliable paternity testing, but still the bottom line would be that adult women would not be permitted bad behavior. Because even adult women will, like children, be protected from the consequences of their decisions, because there are some decisions that no one really expects adult women to make responsibly, they would, like children, be restrained from certain decisions, and beaten if they misbehaved.
Because no one is willing to let women suffer the consequences of decisions that everyone knows they will make badly, we either wind up subsidizing bad behavior, or forbidding it.
Depends on where you look.
http://www.thehomescientist.com/kits/CK01/ck01-main.html
I think that’s meant for homeschooling use under adult supervision, you could probably get away with assuming a certain level of common sense in court.
“The kit can be used with a religious curriculum or a secular curriculum”
Thass reassuring.
@JAD
“Allegedly, more than ninety percent of “asylum seekers” remain permanently on welfare. I have not checked these statistics, and do not really know where they come from, but politically correct sources are reluctant to provide any alternative statistics.”
You should really be more specific about these numbers. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work in most countries. So all of them should be on welfare. I do not think you want to say that these people are so eager to work that they are willing to risk their asylum by breaking the law.
@JAD
“Bad sexual behavior by women has enormous costs for other people – in economic terminology, their decisions have very large externalities.”
Numbers please.
I am not living in the USA, so I will not comment on the situation there. But I do not see this supposed parasitic behavior around me. I also do not see any numbers about this. In the last decades, our laws have been changed to dramatically reduce the duration and amount of alimony and it is explicit policy that all women should earn their own income. Children is another matter. But our women are pretty late when they start getting children, on average over 30. I do not see how I can integrate that in your parasitic “model” of society.
@JAD
“We penalize, exclude, and discriminate against smokers for vague, small, and improbable hypothetical externalities. You don’t seem worried we are denying smokers agency.”
Visit a cancer ward in your neighborhood for a second opinion.
Smokers are allowed to smoke themselves to death (half of those who do not stop will die from it). I do not see why non-smokers should be exposed to carcinogenic smoke. Please explain that to me. I cannot help it that your legal system is dysfunctional and is unable to separate moral outrage from effective actions. The rest of the world has different problems, e.g., a lot of people dying from smoking.
@JAD
“Whereupon, the family, to protect itself, would severely penalize such bad behavior – would beat her like a rug.”
We already know you advocate the torture of women.
@Roger Phillips
“For some reason you have a hard time grasping that I don’t believe in morality – at least not in the same sense that you do.”
Then you should work on your word choice. Because your words tell a story of a very conventional and conservative morality. If that is not what you want to communicate, you should choose other words.
@Roger Phillips
“And it makes you feel bad that womens’ reproductive behavior might be curtailed, a measure that some think might be necessary for the grand life-form of _civilization_ to go on.”
Maybe that is because I am from a country where women start getting children at the early age of 30, and then get too few children. The reproductive behavior of European women seems to be to delay and opt out.
The reason, I am told, is that these women want to start a career, settle in a stable relation, and have good housing before they have children. Which makes your rants completely off target. You are simply cursing me for the ailings of your own society.
@Roger Phillips
“Every response you write is constructed on a platform of slave morality.”
Please explain this “slave morality”? I associate “slave morality” with American plantations and classical Rome. My country does not look like these.
So what do you mean by “slave morality”?
Asylum seekers are almost always granted asylum, no matter how improbable their claim, even when, as is usually the case, they are from the majority group that is doing the oppressing, as for example the Boston Bombers were, rather than the minority group that is plausibly being oppressed.
The only asylum seekers that do not get asylum are those that belong to politically incorrect races, religions, or ethnicities, for example Tutsis generally do not get asylum, because the guys who are impaling Tutsi women with large objects are the official Congo army which has UN, US, and US state department support, and, of course, Christians fleeing Islamic or Buddhist genocide, presumably because Christianity is not approved for much the same reasons as Tutsi are not approved. Just as whites can never be victims of racism, neither can Tutsis, nor can Christians ever be victims of religious persecution. That is equality.
Fatherless children tend to predate on those around them, and as a result have a life expectancy that is about a decade or so shorter than those of children with fathers. (seven years shorter for children of divorce, a bit over a decade shorter for those born fatherless) This enormously exceeds the death rate due to smoking. Fatherless children are produced almost entirely by bad female behavior, which behavior attracts gigantic subsidies, in the US about fifty thousand dollars a year per badly behaved female.
Presumably, absent those gigantic subsidies, the number of fatherless children would be considerably fewer, but on the other hand their predation would likely be more serious, and their life expectancy even shorter.
So what do you mean by “slave morality”?
Could be this.
@JAD
“Asylum seekers are almost always granted asylum, no matter how improbable their claim, even when, as is usually the case, they are from the majority group that is doing the oppressing, as for example the Boston Bombers were, rather than the minority group that is plausibly being oppressed.”
I see I can stop reading. That is most certainly not true. The number for the UK and Germany is currently below 10%. For 1999
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1156406.stm
Things have tightened since 1999 (see last figure)
http://www.duitslandweb.nl/naslagwerk/Geografie/Migratie/Gastarbeiders+en+asielzoekers.html
@Adrian Smith
“So what do you mean by “slave morality”? Could be this.”
I get it:
If you look at my comments you might see that I am accused of being too optimistic. And I cynical? That is a stretch.
Now, when I read JAD’s and Roger Phillip’s comments, that is a different matter. Pessimistic and cynical might be understatements.
So, all this “slave morality” is just projection?
@Winter
No, you should stop imagining and start *reading*.
“I am told” just about sums up your entire intellectual mode of operation. I am not cursing you, nor do I even care about any of these things except for how to gain from them. Insofar as I am “cursing” you it’s because you can’t stick to *what was said*, preferring to go off on fanciful imaginings that satisfy your emotional needs. I wonder how many times I’ll have to say this before it sinks in and you stop doing it. You say I am being “completely off target” because you were “told” (lol) something that is _completely consistent with what I said_. The only way you could keep saying these things if you are simply responding without having even the barest understanding of what I’m saying. That your disagreement is emotional is proven by the fact that you believe you’re disagreeing with me regardless of the logical relationship between what you say and what I say.
What’s incredible is that species of person who can’t do the most cursory investigation on their own even in the age of ubiquitous search engines. I mean, all you have to do is type “slave morality” into Google and you will get some leads for research. But does this occur to you? No! It’s amazing that you got this far into our conversations without bothering to look this term up, given how frequently I’ve used it. And yet there you are, soldiering-on with your comments without bothering to understand a single thing.
@JAD
“Fatherless children tend to predate on those around them, and as a result have a life expectancy that is about a decade or so shorter than those of children with fathers. (seven years shorter for children of divorce, a bit over a decade shorter for those born fatherless)”
I am sure you can give us citations for these numbers. Preferably from those welfare states of Western Europe.
I would specifically like to see how those numbers are corrected for the fact that parents of children with (mental) handicaps or other health problems are more likely to divorce. And also for the fact that single mothers are much more likely to be (very) poor.
If you look at my comments you might see that I am accused of being too optimistic. And I cynical?
I think being optimistic about the prospects of the Netherlands being able to avoid subsiding into dhimmitude, squalor and debt slavery is different from being cynical about, I dunno, the supremacy of the market for bringing benefits to humanity, or whatever you may have been accused of.
I guess master morality is alpha and slave morality is beta, roughly speaking.
@Roger Phillips
“No, you should stop imagining and start *reading*.”
You should enroll in a course in writing skills. Reading is all about guided imagination. If you chose the wrong words, you push the wrong images.
The original quote was
Words like “uncontrollable”, “urges”, “short-term”, “score”, “bad boy”, “cuckold”, and “nice guy” are all morally loaded. They cannot be used without implying a moral judgment. If you are unable to see that I advice you to take a course on creative (or scientific) writing. It really helps.
@Roger Phillips
“You say I am being “completely off target” because you were “told” (lol) something that is _completely consistent with what I said_.”
So, please, tell me why Dutch women start families only after their 30ied birthday? How does that mesh in with the previous quote about “uncontrollable urges” and “cuckold”?
@Roger Phillips
“With regards to the loosening of controls over female behavior what I find more interesting than morality is: do you think, once women get what they want (as measured by behavior, not words), that all those male slaves who burned themselves out in shitty jobs in exchange for sexual and reproductive goodies are going to keep at it?”
You seem to be asking to curtail women’s reproductive choices because they are too promiscuous and get children without their own income and above that they are getting too few children because they wait for a stable relation and a good job for themselves. Furthermore, you are mixing defenses of JAD’s comments in ways that make it very difficult for me to see whether you defend JAD or the specific opinion in the comment.
In short, I get lost in your reasoning every time I try to understand you. The fact that I seem to be the only one responding to your comments makes me pause.
@Roger Phillips
” I mean, all you have to do is type “slave morality” into Google and you will get some leads for research.”
My experience on this blog is that here words do not mean what they mean outside of this blog. I might come up with a meaning of “slave morality”, but how could I assume you use it in the same way as it is used everywhere else.
And specifically, how can I make even a plausible guess that you might use “slave morality” in a way that paints you with the characteristics of “slave morality”: Cynicism and pessimism.
(see link in previous comment)
@Adrian Smith
“I think being optimistic about the prospects of the Netherlands being able to avoid subsiding into dhimmitude, squalor and debt slavery is different from being cynical about,”
If you are from the USA, the quote about us being in “squalor and debt slavery” is highly ironic.
@Adrian Smith
Hit the Post button too early
“is different from being cynical about, I dunno, the supremacy of the market for bringing benefits to humanity, or whatever you may have been accused of.”
I am not sure whether I am cynical about markets. I do think markets can fail and I believe unregulated markets tend to fall prey to large scale manipulation and fraud. But is that cynicism?
I’m not from the USA (though I did grow up there), I’m British (but based in Japan). It’s not that you’re in squalor and debt slavery now, it’s that in some scenarios you *could* be, whereas it appears that all the people in the USA who are in squalor and debt slavery brought it upon themselves by having bad time preferences.
Or something.
@Adrian Smith
“I’m not from the USA (though I did grow up there), I’m British (but based in Japan). ”
That sounds much more interesting than my life. ;-)
@Adrian Smith
“It’s not that you’re in squalor and debt slavery now, it’s that in some scenarios you *could* be,”
Ok, I get that. Historically, we see that nations tend to simply default on debts. So debt slavery of whole nations is rare. But the Netherlands have a good track record on debt service. IIRC equal or even better than the British.
But as they say, prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
Re: Ukraine. I am toying with an idea. Is it possible that ideologies are the luxuries of strong nations and weak ones have only interests?
There seems to be a pattern. France wins the War of Spanish Succession, becomes the superpower of the known world, feeling safe from any external threat, internal conflict arises, first the Fronde then the Revolution which invented the terms “left”, “right”, and “reaction”. A century later the British Empire is the superpower of the world, invents “liberalism” and “conservatism” (Gladstone / Disraeli). From about 1950 on, most right-of-center ideas are invented in the US, not just libertarian ones, it also includes Richard P. Weavers neo-platonist medievalism etc. etc. It seems that you have to fairly strong to afford to have ideologies. Maybe weak nations can only have interests, largely one interest: to be independent.
The point is, in the revolution in Ukraine pro-Western liberals fought shoulder to shoulder with hardcore ultra-right-wing ethnic nationalists. Can Ukraine afford the luxury of having ideologies, or they only have interests, mainly meaning independence from the Kremlin?
>the least unstable versions of a basic-income-guarantee system are despotisms and oligarchies in which the concept of political equality has been necessarily jettisoned.
Actually I was pondering something like that as an acceptable solution – anyone can choose to have either a franchise or a guaranteed basic income, not both. As this is a choice, it is not quite an oligarchy. This means the level of basic income depends on either the generosity of the elite or the threat level of protests, riots, revolutions. Democracy is a form of formalized, pacified revolution anyway… But people who live in reasonable comfort don’t want to go out on the street and get their head bashed in. Actually most people I know (OK cultural differences should be counted in) does not care that much for stuff like voting rights, they just want comfort and safety for their family. Sounds like something stable.
This would both solve the emotional argument of “OMG you guys want to leave people starving on the streets !!!1!!one”, as then the answer is “No, I will vote on a basic income for them – just not let them vote for it.”, which defuses it fairly well, and it would solve the fairly obvious problem that automatization is catching up with IQ levels. I.e. back in the past people could move from an automatized agricultural sector to new industrial jobs, then when that was automatized too to the service sector, but sooner or later everything low-IQ will be automated and markets will not be able to generate low-IQ jobs.
Failure mode: elites not being generous enough, there are too many riots. Eventual police state, then revolution, democratic welfare state established. Possible solution: a fairly safe level of BI + inflation tracking hardcoded in a constitution.
>Actually I was pondering something like that as an acceptable solution – anyone can choose to have either a franchise or a guaranteed basic income, not both.
Superficially attractive, but unstable towards oligarchy of a rather nasty kind. This was explored fictionally in F.M. Busby’s Rissa Kerguelen sequence.
The problem is that if disenfranchising people is too easy, the wealthiest n% for some n have an easy way to increase their power – force people onto the GBI and off the voter rolls. The value of n is controlled by the economic value of being in the voter/oligarch class: the higher it gets, the more the oligarchs will be willing to pay out in GBI to suppress political competition.
Unfortunately, a smaller voter class raises that value, so you have a self-reinforcing spiral with an ugly end.
@Winter
It’s incredible how I can point out to you, more than five times (more even?) that your problem is your endless lecturing over how I should write or how things should be defined or how I made you imagine some stupid bullshit, while making not the slightest effort to understand me, and yet you are able to continue with this charade. I have a good understanding of the genre of “scientific writing” (as you call it). The problem is that YOU don’t understand the first thing about thinking or writing, which is why you waste your time with babble about how I should write, which is nothing more than a defense mechanism.
What’s entertaining about this is that it is essentially a request for me to explain to you what I meant in the first place, but suitably veiled to make it look like there’s some kind of contribution to the discussion on your part. Sorry, but if you want to know what I meant you’ll have to quote the bit you don’t understand and ask me for more details instead of making up random statements that have nothing to do with them. Then we can talk about *what I said* and maybe some time this century get away from your little fantasies.
You seem to be imagining things again. I’m not “asking” for anything, nor do I even think it’s necessarily a good idea. But you are serially incapable of reading a simple sentence without inventing endless bullshit like this. I mean after your incredible leaps and imaginings I should have known that by writing “some people think X” that you would immediately assume this was a ploy on my part to covertly promote a belief in X beyond simply putting it up for *consideration*. But it is only natural for you to project your own feeble idea of cunning onto me even when I am so blatantly open with my views.
Haha what? What does this have to do with _anything_ I said? You suffer from the problem of injecting morality and insinuations into everything that’s written. Like if I say “bad boy” – and apparently it makes NO DIFFERENCE that I might put it in fucking SCARE QUOTES – you assume I’m pleading for some change from society against some class of evildoers. You haven’t even begun to understand the content of what I’ve written, nor do your objections to your own imaginings (the ones you fantasize me of having said) make any sense.
Well, some people are incapable of nuance of thought.
You’d expect someone who admits he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying to spend more time asking me questions that would get him closer to understanding what I meant, and ZERO time trying to argue with me. I have said this pretty much every time I’ve responded to you ever, and yet you keep doing it, even as you admit that it’s all true and that you really have no idea what I’m talking about.
@Winter
>As I have written earlier, I do not see the ominous signs that North and Western Europe are on the road to hell
I do, but differently. Partially demographics and immigration, and partially the general culture is becoming lower-T, unmasculine, etc. There is an incredibly strong desire to avoid any kind of aggressivity, violence, confrontation. Most NWE people I know basically have no politicial opinions until they see anything that remotely looks like nationalism or militarism or racism or any kind of aggressive-looking ideology, in that case they freak the hell out, then basically go back to sleeping. Basically NWE has no political ideology or thinking besides some kind of a reflexive, unthinking, just fear-based anti-fascism. People know what they don’t want, namely fascism or generally anything that could be aggressive and scary, but have no idea what they want. Similar thing happening in the bicoastal US for example, so that is not a better counter-example either. Rather a good counter-example would be Brazil and Russia, more or less. Not saying that they are all fine, of course not, just no suffering from this particular problem.
I speak from experience. As a Hungarian, I am used to people who are hardened by very difficult economic conditions, which necessarily create more masculine, more aggressive, compete-not-cooperate attitudes. Living in Austria I find the people incredibly meek and “beta”.
Just a story. Our first child was just born in Vienna. In the pregnancy preparation course, I was the only old-fashioned man who gave a dressing down to the doctors who assumed the fathers will be basically working as midwives during the birth. I told them that is a womans job. They found that weird. However, it ended well because in a such a meek culture, anything even remotely confrontational, just a strict gaze, a judging frown with the eyebrows, a commanding gesture with the fingers, nothing truly aggressive, still kinda intimidates people, so I basically “bullied” (quotation marks because in my vocabulary this is not actually bullying, just being firm and a bit commanding) a nurse and a male doctor to help the midwife to help my wife so we had a fast, well-done, almost easy (although this is never easy) birth. Later on, I saw the other new fathers basically nurseing and hugging their babies for hours long as if they were a second mother, not a father. Nobody except me understood that a father is not a second mother – not a second nurturer, but rather an authority figure, provider and most importantly protector. It was very weird – I saw my role through the pregnancy and birth as a protector, checking and judging if the nurses, doctors do their job and give her everything she needs, and being prepared to kick ass (verbally) if not. Every other man saw himself as a second mother and as an empathic girlfriend of their wife, not a protector. Wow. This is the difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And again I was not even aggressive in any way, just things like a commanding or judging type of eyebrow movement with a throat clearing sound basically made these people jump.
So basically your problem is that you have a lot of these meek betas, male second mothers, and on the other hand you have to face people way more aggressive than me, like Putin or the average Turkish migrant. You have no chance unless you toughen up these people somehow.
Perhaps you could argue that this does not matter much because in a highly regulated and high-tech society smarts > aggressivity. Obviously, people who are a dumb enough to say threat others with a beating will just be locked up, OK, fine, solved. But people who are basically just aggressive in a legal way, who just look everybody in the eye and say “I. Want. This. Now.” can only be countered by making your NWEs into real men again who can look back in the eye and say “No. Way.”
@Roger Phillips
“You’d expect someone who admits he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying to spend more time asking me questions that would get him closer to understanding what I meant, and ZERO time trying to argue with me. ”
I must agree with you, my intellectual capacities are not up to the task of understanding your writings. I seem to be even unable to come up with the intelligence needed to ask you for an explanation.
So, I have to give up and console myself with the fact that I will never understand what you want to say.
@Roger Phillips
“I have a good understanding of the genre of “scientific writing” (as you call it).”
I sincerely hope you answer peer reviewers and editors with a different attitude. Else, I do not see how you would get anything published, ever.
@Roger Phillips
“… even as you admit that it’s all true and that you really have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Yeah, that seems to sum it up quite nicely.
@Shenpen
“Basically NWE has no political ideology or thinking besides some kind of a reflexive, unthinking, just fear-based anti-fascism.”
There are an awful lot of neo-fascists running around to feed that anti-fascism. You might have considered that being anti-violence helps keeping the streets safe?
It is not that, in contrast, the current ruling party in Hungary seems to lead the country onto a direct road to peace and prosperity.
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2013/eur/220287.htm
@Shenpen
“In the pregnancy preparation course, I was the only old-fashioned man who gave a dressing down to the doctors who assumed the fathers will be basically working as midwives during the birth. I told them that is a womans job.”
I think you missed out on this one. Getting your child delivered in your own arms is an experience not to be ridiculed. But everyone his preferences.
@Shenpen
“But people who are basically just aggressive in a legal way, who just look everybody in the eye and say “I. Want. This. Now.” can only be countered by making your NWEs into real men again who can look back in the eye and say “No. Way.””
Things seem to normally work out quite well. When a threat arises, e.g., youth gangs recently, there is a delayed response that catalogs the ring leaders and puts them all in jail at the same time. Next time, a new tactic will be developed. It is an arms race.
Violence leads to jail time. We have a very effective version of “detention during Her Majesty’s pleasure” for people who are “insanely violent” and where normal detention does not help.
I am toying with an idea. Is it possible that ideologies are the luxuries of strong nations and weak ones have only interests?
I don’t think this can be right. Taliban-led Afghanistan had nothing but ideology (albeit a religiously-based one). Blowing up one of their main tourist attractions was against their interests, as interests are normally understood, but they did it readily. Ditto hosting al-Qaeda and refusing to hand over Bin Ladin after 9/11, which Mullah Omar justified both on religious grounds — he would not hand a Muslim over to the kaffirs — and traditional ones, that it wouldn’t comport with the tradition of hospitality.
P.S. – Also, France didn’t win the War of the Spanish Succession.
>Most NWE people I know basically have no political opinions until they see anything that remotely looks like nationalism or militarism or racism or any kind of aggressive-looking ideology, in that case they freak the hell out, then basically go back to sleeping.
Here’s a hypothesis to explain it without needing your declining masculinity theory :
Political ideologies emerge, and people get vocal about them, when there’s a need, i.e. when people are discontent with the situation as is, they want change, and develop ideology about why things have to change and the direction they have to change in.
(and maybe D.E. is an illustration of this)
If that’s so, then maybe the fact that most NWE people don’t voice strong political opinions is merely an indication that they are quite content with the social and political environment they find themselves in – with nationalism or militarism or racism being perceive (or remembered) as enough of a threat to warrant a reaction against.
What is NWE? Google isn’t giving me much joy here.
In the pregnancy preparation course, I was the only old-fashioned man who gave a dressing down to the doctors who assumed the fathers will be basically working as midwives during the birth. I told them that is a womans job.
Eh, asscrack, most guys in Western countries want to be present at their kids’ births, they just presumed you would too. My sons were born at home, one in the UK, two here in Japan. You don’t need doctors unless there’s a problem, and they can tell pretty reliably from the sonograms whether there’s going to be one. Midwives did everything, I didn’t have to do much at all, including give myself horse doses of testosterone to make up for the humiliation..
sooner or later everything low-IQ will be automated and markets will not be able to generate low-IQ jobs.
Certain alleged sectors of the DE would probably think it was very sanguine of you to imagine that process is going to wipe out the low-IQ jobs and then stop.
> What is NWE? Google isn’t giving me much joy here.
I think Shenpen used it as shorthand for North & Westen Europe(an) – that’s how I read it anyway.
@ Shenpen – “You have no chance unless you toughen up these people somehow.”
This comment brings to mind something I read about the early years of WWII. After Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the war, Churchill recognized that US military manpower needed toughening before taking on Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Hence the largely disastrous Africa campaign of 1942 in which poor generalship, equipment, training, and raw inexperience combined into a series of early defeats on the battlefield. It didn’t take long to learn from this experience and the rebound was both fast and effective. My point is that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.
What then is your theory of why no one voices opinions about female misbehavior in the workplace when a female disruptively misbehaves in their workplace?
I love the quote from Rommel after he fought the U.S. in North Africa: “I never saw an army so badly trained or one that learned so fast.”
>What then is your theory of why no one voices opinions about female misbehavior in the workplace when a female disruptively misbehaves in their workplace?
The first and up till now only stories about female disruptive misbehavior I’ve heard were on this blog, and afaik they all referred to the US So my theory is that this s a non-issue for NWE.
@kn
“The first and up till now only stories about female disruptive misbehavior I’ve heard were on this blog, and afaik they all referred to the US So my theory is that this s a non-issue for NWE.”
I have worked for 30 odd years now in environments where the majority of employees were female. I never have seen or heard anything like these stories. And I am NWE too.
Maybe it is JAD’s special influence on women and it only happens when he is around ;-)
>Maybe it is JAD’s special influence on women and it only happens when he is around ;-)
Shit.
I really hate to have to back JAD up on this. But it’s not just him. I haven’t seen a lot of that sort of that disruption myself, but I have seen some and it wasn’t my “special influence” either. The ugliest internal corporate crapfest I was ever mixed up with involved disruptive and incompetent behavior by a black female. Not, thank goodness, aimed at me; affected parties called me in to mediate.
The genesis of the problem was that the woman (a) was not very bright by comparison to the geeks she had to manage, (b) threw her weight around when it wasn’t appropriate, and (c) as a black female manager at an otherwise almost all-white and mostly male tech firm, knew she couldn’t be canned or even demoted without legal and PR repercussions that the firm would have been very reluctant to risk.
This demoralized and pissed off people who had to deal with her, and I couldn’t blame them for that. And part of what was demoralizing about it is that her political immunity was a truth they were not allowed to speak. Even I could not safely go near that landmine, and I was on the Board of Directors!
I don’t interpret the experience is JAD would; he needs these incidents to be evidence of black and female inferiority, which I don’t. No, the problem was that as an unintended consequence of civil rights law this woman had power and immunity without responsibility. That can make anybody stupid and arrogant, no matter what their skin color or the shape of their genitalia.
My takeaway from this was as a specific real-world confirmation of my philosophical belief that all “protected class” laws should be abolished. Because if this person had had to compete on her own merits instead of getting a free ride as a diversity poster child I rather suspect she would have kept her act together. She wasn’t actually natively dimwitted or malicious, just…spoiled. And somewhat infantilized by the laws created to protect her.
Furthermore, I believe on information received that this sort of thing is far, far more common in other sectors of industry that don’t habitually select for intelligence as much as tech firms do – and especially, ruinously common in government bureaucracies.
@esr
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It does sound like stories from the old East European countries where incompetent party members could not be opposed at work.
I once heard a story like yours about a black secretary who did not work at all, nothing (USA, ultra techy nerd environment IIRC). The man who told me was himself European (literally), and had a black girlfriend (mentioned just for context). The secretary could not be fired.
What set your and his story apart from JAD’s is that no sex was involved. Female reproductive strategies are the root of JADs message. And it was this sexism that kn and I refered to.
@ESR I think Winter and kn are right about one thing – this sounds like a uniquely American experience that baffles people with experiences in NWE or any other parts of the old world. Perhaps because despite immigration the Putnam Effect had less of an affect (at least in Austria you basically rarely find non-Europeans in office jobs, they take the blue-collar jobs), anyway, I am not sure why, but there is still shared sense of social standards, a sense that certain kinds of overly selfish, egotistical, delusional or uncooperative behavior is just “NOT OK” and people who try this get the clue, fast. Basically they get to face a passive-aggressive everybody going silent, looking the other way and clearing throats kind of thing which reminds them to backpedal.
Basically, perhaps due to a lesser Putnam Effect – society is diverse but white-collar jobs not – NWE office culture stayed “high-context”. And that prevents this.
The closest thing I experienced to that – and rather in Eastern Europe – was the wife of the boss / daughter of the rich influential man kind of thing.
(Sons of rich influential men were in a way an easier case – they would not do any work, but they would not really care about how other people do their work as long as they do his. With this kind of an usually absent boss there is an increased workload, but complete freedom. They would basically just party and enjoy life.
Funny how that reflects medieval life in the modern age. “princes” are out hunting and jousting and feasting and don’t care about anything. “princesses” micromanage the “household”.)
@esr: What became of your consultation/mediation?
@Everybody: I would point out that there is a lot of concern over “diversity” in government and government-like positions. Sometimes this can useful (members of the police who are members of the local community and reflect local demographics can in some cases police better), sometimes not (hiring a more “diverse” group of firefighters, etc.). In the “not” case, there’s usually some form of objective standard which can be measured against. Unfortunately, in a desire to be more “diverse”, people with non-measured deficits are likely to be hired in order to fulfill the diversity non-quota.
I know for a fact that concerns like this happen in public safety. I volunteer as an EMT in the Pittsburgh area where the whole concept of ambulance service was started ~40 years ago (in part) as a way to provide employment for black people. Now when I pull into a hospital and look at all of the EMTs and paramedics I work with I notice that the vast majority are visibly white.
>@esr: What became of your consultation/mediation?
The immediate tsuris was smoothed over. The underlying problem couldn’t be fixed, but didn’t flare up into an acute phase afterwards.
This is outside my field, but that sounds suspicious to me. Here’s a datasheet describing manufacturing samples with sub-25nm half-pitch, for example. If chip densities weren’t increasing, wouldn’t it be… news?
@Garrett
>people with non-measured deficits
It is not just that. I worked in 6 jobs in 3 different EU countries, and at every interview it was clear to me that it is not about me presenting my qualifications and they presenting an attractive package, but also about establishing personal rapport, a “good vibe”, a mutual feeling that they and me are a good “cultural fit”. As a candidate I have at least in 3 cases I have told halfway through the interview that the package is attractive but you as a boss and I are not a good match and it is better not to go on. The last time was an overly “Prussian” type boss in Vienna who said stuff like “I want to be able to send you to manage a project a thousand kilometers away and hear no feedback but 6 weeks later that it is done.” I told him no way, I expect more support, this is too military style to me, and left the interview. (Now I have heard that boss was fired so I could take a look at them again if for any reason my current job becomes problematic.)
And of course I am entirely OK with them doing the same thing.
Because a job cannot be based on entirely objective rules. There must be a good personal fit, camaraderie, good teamwork or else it does not work well. I think jobs must be “high-context”, e.g. everybody must “feel” when and how much overtime is OK without having to write it down, if you base everything on objective, explicit rules it just cannot work well because nobody is intelligent enough to make a perfect set of rules.
The point is, if an interviewer is allowed to reject a candidate for being a bad cultural fit or “he looks kinda shifty” or similar stuff, which I think he should be, then you probably have to accept that some interviewers will be racist.
And if you make rules against racist interviewers, you also made rules against the interviewer who rejects the candidate for simply being unsympathetic, a poor cultural fit, looking kinda shifty or talking too loud and boisterously or whatever.
Unfortunately you cannot ever separate these two.
So the endgame is, you either must base everything on perfectly objective standards and no personal sympathy, personal rapport and a cultural fit which never works, because we want people to willingly, voluntarily do whatever is best for the organization instead of blindly following a job description, or you have to put up with racist interviewers. There is not really any other choice.
@James A. Donald
>Due to social decay and the destruction of capitalism, most technologies have maxed out, or gone into actual decline. We can no longer put a man on the moon.
Social decay – being more risk-averse – is an appropriate observation, but the NASA was never a capitalist institution. What the NASA had is the lucky option to buy from efficient capitalist firms. This option was explicitly denied to e.g. Soviet governmental agencies of the similar kind because of stuff like the CoCom.
BTW, do you and others here, @ESR realize that this is one of the most important things that changed since the end of the Cold War? That the same kind of capitalist firms who used to sell stuff to the NASA or to the US or any European government can now sell it almost everywhere? That basically any not-quite-Western nation with enough fossil fuel money can basically just buy themselves into high-tech? High-tech know-how used to represent the historical, cultural, Enlightenment-based, closely guarded advantages of Western nations, but today they became a commodity.
Basically tomorrow morning Dubai or Russia or any nation that has fossil fuel money could decide to want to have a high-tech factory or ten, put money on the table and Western capitalists would gladly bring the know-how, build the factory, train the workers, do everything.
Have you ever considered this? Compared to the Cold War it is an utter game-changer.
I mean ponder this. How would the whole history of colonialism looked like if Africans could just trade ivory to Westerners in return for building them a machine gun factory and an ammo factory?
Continuing the previous comment – the advantage in the 1980s American military tech had over the Soviet one was in electronics, computing, IT. The MiG-29 was very good as far as flying characteristics went, it was the onboard electronics where it was backwards. Today this all became a commodity. Any third world nation with resource based money can basically buy a bunch of Rapsberry Pis and build it into say rockets or any weapon really.
Have you guys ever pondered this? The game was completely changed and it does not get analysed nearly enough.
That’s an interesting insight, but properly using technology is more than having the money to buy it. It requires a level of social competence and expertise. Think of Soviet aircraft unable to fly because ground crews drank the alcohol-based hydraulic fluid. Israeli greenhouses left for the Gazans, who simply destroyed them. Corruption. Underlings unable or unwilling to bring problems to the attention of dictators/managers.
Heck, look at healthcare.gov: even a complex website that interfaces with scores of existing databases is, in theory, well within the competence of the United States government, and we all know what happened there.
Has anyone considered that diversity policies could actually be a way to placate the elite members of minority or weaker groups instead of actually helping the average members of those groups? A good example is woman quotas in political representation, boards of directors, other places: they are going to be recruited from the ranks of well-educated, fairly rich women, which means the average cleaning maid may have just lost an ally. If you offer good jobs to well-educated, upper-classy men of color, they may be less likely to care about the problems of poor men of color. And so on. It is at least a possibility.
>Has anyone considered that diversity policies could actually be a way to placate the elite members of minority or weaker groups instead of actually helping the average members of those groups?
Oh yeah, the extent to which this is true and/or intended is actually a live and acrimonious controversy in “social justice” circles. I must admit I derive a low pleasure from watching those idiots tear into each other over this.
>Basically tomorrow morning Dubai or Russia or any nation that has fossil fuel money could decide to want to have a high-tech factory or ten, put money on the table and Western capitalists would gladly bring the know-how, build the factory, train the workers, do everything.
This is actually a very old situation. The Ottoman Turks were quite happy to rely on imported Western military technology.
>Have you ever considered this? Compared to the Cold War it is an utter game-changer.
Not so completely different as you might think.
Ask Toshiba. http://articles.latimes.com/1987-09-10/business/fi-6976_1_toshiba-machine
Or Rolls Royce. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_VK-1
Oh, that’s a common belief among affirmative action/”diversity” skeptics. The payment of racial indulgences to the likes of Jesse Jackson is easier and gets better press than trying to actually do anything for average black people.
Hasn’t that always been the way it works with poverty? We go trawling through the worst places in the nation, skim off the cleverest, the most talented, the most gifted, and leave the rest as a vast human surplus. It’s hardly a new invention from the folks who brought you “diversity”.
I know-a-guy who knows-a-guy, and… the site isn’t that complex and chalking it up to a generalized dislike of all things governmental misses the point. It is, indeed, a problem with a cultural disconnect; people think you can order software the way you can order a pizza or a car, and they’re horribly, disastrously, expensively wrong. Healthcare.gov was implemented badly by every standard imaginable. Information did not percolate up from the ground floor to management. (The executive branch really did think it was ready to launch until it went public.) The federal acquisition rules are byzantine and impossible for outsiders to follow. The operations people were not competent enough to know how broken things even were.
It’s not impossible to do this stuff right; I’ve heard good things about the Government Digital Service in the UK, for example, which was started in the wake of a similar healthcare-related government IT disaster. IT horror stories are the stock-in-trade of any large organization, governmental or not.
I sincerely hope that someone can, at some point, write a book about it. There are some amazing stories to be told. The Brill article in TIME (apparently now paywalled, fooey) leaves a lot out, but it’s the best write-up I’ve seen thus far.
@Shenpen
The problem that the anti-racists are yet to realize, is that “anti-racism” is itself ultra-racist because it is at the expense of the ultimate minorities: the individuals. And so it is that, in your poor little singleton minority (or maybe your team) trying to get something done at work, you have to bow down to the oppression of the pseudominorities whose interests are threatened by your hiring rules.
All the “good” egalitarianism, whether it’s the nuggets of worthwhile feminism or the positive version of anti-racism, is distinguished by being *more* discriminating. But somehow the losers got their hands on the whole show and the whole thing became anti-discrimination, anti-privilege, anti-power. And of course the humble little pseudominorities will be happy to take some of that evil privilege off your hands, and the do-gooders will be happy to help you “check your privilege”, all for the common good of course. lol
@JAD
Winter on 2014-03-05 at 02:19:23 said:
Your source tells us that the figure is less than ten percent, and also that the figure is 72.5%
The low figure supposedly proving that the government is tough on asylum seekers, and the high figure that supposedly proving that most asylum seekers are genuine.
Obviously one figure or the other has to be a lie, and in fact both figures are lies, in that asylum seekers are never sent home unless they belong to groups of which the Cathedral disapproves.
The Australian government stashes asylum seekers in third world processing facilities, where they stay till processed, which is to say, forever, or simply dumps them on third world beaches.
Germany and UK are not dumping asylum seekers on third world beaches. Therefore, are accepting near one hundred percent of asylum seekers (excluding, of course, those few people who are actually fleeing persecution, who usually get sent back to their persecutors, since in practice most persecution is Cathedral approved)
Dubai can do that, and proved it by building the Burj Khalifa. Singapore is famous for being able to do that. The United States and Russia, not so much. Russia screwed up the Olympics, the US screwed up freedom tower and the healthcare website. Buying technology is not trivial. The capacity of the US government, and western governments generally, to even purchase complex technology, has been falling rapidly and steadily, the high point arguably being the Manhatten project.
Affirmative action, crony capitalism, and anarcho tyranny are the primary causes. Note that the healthcare website was organized by an affirmative action Obama croney, whose operations were seriously hampered by anarcho tyranny.
Similarly, the bank that pissed away the largest or second largest amount of money in the activities leading to the 2007 financial crisis was run by an affirmative action CEO who bribed (crony capitalism) the management of Fannie and Freddie, who suffered no adverse consequences for accepting these bribes (anarcho tyranny)
The organizing principle of capitalism has been the joint stock corporation, which created technology and conquest. Charles the Second authorized the East Indies Company to make war and peace, thus founding the British empire. The joint stock corporation is itself based on double entry accounting, which enables the delegation of money and authority. Double entry accounting has been rendered essentially illegal by Sarbannes Oxley, creating a situation where no one knows where the money goes. Jon Corzine, the man of many hats, did not know what happened to some billions of his customers money (Obviously he did not want to know, but only under Sarbannes Oxley would the claim to not know and not be able to know be plausible). The banks after the financial crisis did not know, and still do not know, who owned what mortgages and what rights in the mortgages.
Shit redux.
Eric’s story reminded me of a similar event from a few years ago. I have a good friend (engineer, mathematician, computer scientist) who worked for a major oil company in Houston doing leading-edge reservoir modeling. He was a participant in a large technical meeting that included a black woman manager (very bright, but affirmative action hire). There is a lot of testosterone in big oil, and women on the fasttrack tend to fall into one of two categories. They either have big brass balls and earn their way up the ladder, or they are hare-trigger feminists that blackmail their way up. During the meeting, the woman manager made a statement that was inadvertently false and problematic if left unchallenged. My friend bent over backwards making a polite, but necessary correction. After the meeting she headed straight to HR and a shit storm of epic proportions ensued. When the smoke cleared, he was fired as an employee, rehired at a higher rate as a home office contractor, and the woman was mollified with the scalp. The problem here was not that a ridiculous injustice was perpetrated, but that there is no mechanism of self-correction built into the corporate managerial system. This behavior has now been internalized as social entropy.
They are not manufacturing working chips, and the process may not necessarily ever lead to working chips. They have produced samples with a fifty nanometer line to line spacing, but not working integrated circuits with a fifty nanometer line to line spacing. (Current working circuits have a sixty four nanometer line to line spacing, and have been stuck at sixty four for quite some considerable time)
If the US could no longer build high towers wouldn’t it be… news?
Observe that the top floor of Freedom tower is labelled floor 104, but is in fact floor 94. Similarly, CPI statistics are being gamed to provide the illusion that real GDP per capita is still rising – see shadowstats for the gory details. The amount of car or bread that the median male salary can buy has fallen steadily and substantially.
US median wage in 2010 was $26,364. US male median income in 1972 was $10,540
A Buick, which back in 1972 was a typical car most people would buy, cost about four thousand dollars in 1972, say 40% of male median annual salary.
Today’s Honda Civic, which is a typical car most people would buy today, costs about twenty thousand, about 75% of median salary.
Which looks to me like a massive fall in living standards. The electronics in the modern car are nicer, but I really don’t give a $#!& about the stereo. The working class guy of 1972 could take a girl for a ride a lot easier than the working class guy of 2010. Electronics be damned.
In 1972, a loaf of bread in the US cost about ten cents. A man’s median annual salary could buy one hundred thousand loaves of bread
In 2010, a loaf of bread in the US costs about a dollar. The median annual salary can buy one quarter as much bread.
When your society is in decline, you do not want people to know your society is in decline. So you lie. And everyone goes along with the lie for fear of punishment and hope of reward.
“US median wage in 2010 was $26,364. US male median income in 1972 was $10,540”
Citation needed
Grumble. The problem with backing up JAD’s observations is that while the facts are the facts, the conclusions he draws from them are often a real stretch…
But I do feel compelled to point out, in support of “asylum seekers are never sent home unless they belong to groups of which the Cathedral disapproves”, the case of the German family who came to the US seeking asylum in order to escape what I agree is a draconian German law that says that one must send one’s children to state-approved schools or else lose them entirely. The Obama administration went to great lengths to uphold the right to deny them asylum, even though, in the end, they are not going to deport them, at least not now.
There are at least three important things to note in that comparison. 1) 1972 was just before the OPEC oil shock, a massive blow to all Western economies. 2) A Civic today is a far, far better car than that Buick: better mileage, safer, longer lasting, more standard options. 3) Part of the statistical drop in median income is due to the immigration of tens of millions of Third World peasants from south of the border.
Have the loaves of bread also improved?
And today’s clothes washer is way inferior to the 1972 clothes washer, in that the rotor is lighter, which causes problems, and it just does not get your clothes as clean. That is not just the golden memories of youth, but also choice magazine reviews.
Median male income 1972 was a living wage. You could take care of yourself and your girlfriend. Median income 2010 is not really a living wage. Someone on that wage needs to supplement it with a bit of crime, and shaking down his girlfriend for the substantial welfare payments she gets for her numerous thug spawn. We are seeing America become majority underclass, black culture deteriorating and white underclass assimilating to black culture. And the cities, though they do not look like Detroit, are in increasing need of a coat of paint.
I have been away from silicon valley for a while. When I came back, the place was noticeably poorer and shabbier. San Francisco looks OK, for the moment, still OK, but if they are gentrifying, they are just barely keeping ahead of the tide of chaos.
Optical lithography has bottomed out. Shorter UV wavelengths turn out to be impractical, because they are more like very soft X-rays than light. This might well be exhaustion of the low hanging fruit, rather than social decay. On the other hand, the continual announcements of new generations, when actually stuck at sixty four nanometers is, like mislabeling the top floor of the Freedom tower, suggestive of social decay.
Moore’s law may well resume using imprint lithography in place of optical lithography, in which case the pause in Moore’s law will have only been a matter of exhaustion of the low hanging fruit. DNA technology continues to advance, so we are still making progress with the very small, But a lot of technologies have stopped advancing, and stayed stopped.
It may be too soon to announce the end of Moore’s law. But we have a pause in Moore’s law, and that pause was not announced.
@PapayaSF
>A Civic today is a far, far better car
This is a very typical argument I hear in economics-oriented circles (“people back then did not have smartphones, they would have considered Wikipedia in your pocket totally sci-fi”) and I think this should be addressed because it totally misses the point:
I think most people are more interested in social status than comfort or features.
From this viewpoint, the amount of effort needed to acquire a status symbol of middle-class respectivity matters.
The hedonic treadmill means that acquiring products that are more comfortable, have more features etc. raise pleasure levels only very, very temporarily. However as far as these products are social status symbols, they work differently.
This is something Adam Smith got very right very clearly. He wrote if you for example live in a place and time where a good worker is generally able to afford a linen shirt, and if he cannot everybody thinks he is bad and lazy, then terms like “necessities”, or “needs” or “a fair living wage” means income high enough to afford it. A “fair wage” is an income level that allows one to purchase the accepted status symbols of his class and station in society. Social dynamics are driven by status, not comfort, and the perceived opinion of others usually matters more than mere stuff.
Of course once conditions become tougher status symbols could be lowered, but in practice this does not happen, they are “sticky”. This happened a lot in EE. Basically today in Budapest the average 25 years old married couple cannot buy a 2-bedroom apartment which used to be the respectable standard for starting a family in. However, they generally feel ashamed and nervous of making kids in their parents house – they think they should be able to afford it, it still stayed a norm, a status symbol of respectability despite that most people cannot do it.
At some level wishful thinking in people means they assume bad times are only temporary – which keeps the status symbol levels sticky. Remember the Great Depression period, guys sleeping on benches in three-piece suits.
This “status symbol are more expensive” thing is utter nonsense. Status is a zero-sum game. By definition, you can’t either raise or lower the average man’s status. It’s all displacement, and increased status spending is economic waste, not progress.
Technological progress matters. It’s the only thing that matters, and keeps up from falling to barbarianism under the pressure of bigger government.
@Jay Maynard
“asylum seekers are never sent home unless they belong to groups of which the Cathedral disapproves”
But that was not the point. The point was:
@JAD
“Allegedly, more than ninety percent of “asylum seekers” remain permanently on welfare.”
Asylum seekers whose applications are rejected do not get welfare. They work.
Lets recapitulate this example of the JAD debate cycle
0) JAD gets hammered in the discussion and made to look like a brute and devious fool. Time to change the subject
1) JAD sprouts outrageous claim
“Allegedly, more than ninety percent of “asylum seekers” remain permanently on welfare.”
2) It is pointed out that asylum seekers are not allowed to work so are forced to depend on welfare. It is remarkable that 10% are so eager to work that they break the law. Or else his numbers are bogus.
3) JAD responds with another outrageous claim, slightly shifting the subject
“Asylum seekers are almost always granted asylum, no matter how improbable their claim, even when, as is usually the case, they are from the majority group that is doing the oppressing,…”
4) It is pointed out that this is completely bogus. In the UK and Germany, less than 10% of asylum seekers are granted asylum. Note that a link to independent data is given
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1156406.stm
5) JAD starts to attack the data. But it is still just ten percent.
“Your source tells us that the figure is less than ten percent, and also that the figure is 72.5%”
6) JAD has found a new attack front and shifts the discussion:
“Germany and UK are not dumping asylum seekers on third world beaches. Therefore, are accepting near one hundred percent of asylum seekers”
Note that we are now talking about people whose asylum application has been rejected and who are designated illegal immigrants. These people do not get welfare. So the original claim has turned out to be completely bogus.
7) There are now two options:
a) People take the bait and start to discuss a completely different point
unrelated to the original claim GOTO 1)
b) JAD thinks of a new outrageous claim and changes the subject
GOTO 1)
@JAD
“Median male income 1972 was a living wage. You could take care of yourself and your girlfriend. Median income 2010 is not really a living wage.”
So, where did all the real (inflation corrected) growth of the GDP go between 1972 and 2010?
http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/
@JAD
And now USA GDP per capita
http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-per-capita
@JAD
Maybe the second graph can help to explain where all the economic growth went?
http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-do-americans-earn-what-is-the-average-us-income/
One big decline is that people used to be able to work their way through college and come out debt-free. To put it mildly, this is no longer the case.
@Faré
>By definition, you can’t either raise or lower the average man’s status.
This is an oversimplification for two reasons. One, it is not simply a ladder, not a ranking of everybody above or under others, like a military hierarchy. It’s not simply about everybody having a high score in the game and it is compared to everyone elses.
It is more about creating categories. In the best cases, there can be such a thing as “middle-class respectibility” that could encompass as much as 50 to 80 percent of families. There are relative status differences inside that, but largely irrelevant. “Class” (under, working, middle, upper (modern times), or serf, burgher, noble, aristocrat (Middle Ages), or slave, liberated, citizen, cavalry, patrician (Romans) ) is usually a good heuristic to approach that.
Second, as I said above, it tends to be sticky. Just because Average Guy cannot really – not easily – acquire the status symbols required for his class, it does not mean they cease to be so. That is because of human optimism.
Winter on 2014-03-06 at 03:01:53 said:
Do they?
If you are not actually sending asylum seekers back, as the Australian government does, and no other government does in substantial numbers, and not imprisoning them, you are, in fact, accepting them. And if you claim you are not accepting them, as in the self contradictory articles that you cite, you lie.
Then the question is, what proportion of these de-facto accepted asylum seekers work. Allegedly very very few.
And none of the data you point to provides any actual evidence that it is more than a very very few.
Winter on 2014-03-06 at 03:15:02 said:
These statistics are, as shadowstats explains, fake. By understating inflation, you get a fictitious rise in real GDP.
Our arguments have the same pattern over and over. I point to observable evidence that something is going horribly wrong, you point to official announcements that everything is just fine.
@JAD
“I point to observable evidence that something is going horribly wrong, you point to official announcements that everything is just fine.”
Nope, I point to statistics that show there is a lot of growth. It just ends up in the pockets of a happy few.
I do not see thas as “things being fine”.
Btw, you use stats, I use them too.
That the top floor of Freedom Tower is labelled floor 104 should tell you what government statistics are worth.
@JAD
“And if you claim you are not accepting them, as in the self contradictory articles that you cite, you lie.”
That is a lot of contorted and tortured logic to weasle around the fact that 90% of asylum seekers’ applications get rejected, and these poor people end up as illegal immigrants. And without a permit, you do not get welfare.
So your original claim that 90% of asylum seekers end up on long term welfare is trivially true while they wait for a decision and after that, 90% of them ends up as illegal immigrants WITHOUT welfare.
If you have better evidence, show it.
Electricity consumption per capita is a good proxy for GDP. It grew hyperexponentially before 1972, on a trend line that projected a singularity of infinite energy abundance in finite time.
After 1972, continued to grow but at a markedly lower rate, projecting a civilizational peak, to be followed by decline.
After 2007, not growing, arguably declining.
@JAD
“That the top floor of Freedom Tower is labelled floor 104 should tell you what government statistics are worth.”
You use median income yourself. If you have better numbers, please divulge them.
I know perfectly well that USA politicians are only marginally more trustworthy than you yourself. But these economic numbers concur with the other evidence.
You just have to keep in mind that USA growth rates are approximately equal to those of the Euro zone.
Still, whatever numbers you take, there has been a lot of economic (productivity) growth in the last 4 decades. And almost all of it has flown in the pockets of ~10% of the population. The other 90% is still on the level of real income of 1970. Just with a lot of debt added.
@JAD
“Electricity consumption per capita is a good proxy for GDP.”
It is not. According to that measure, the DDR outgrew West Germany. PP GDP per capita is a good proxy for income.
>According to that measure, the DDR outgrew West Germany.
If you believe economic statistics from East Germany, you’re more unintentionally funny than JAD is.
Whenever asylum seekers get sent back, progressives make a fuss. Except for Australia, the numbers of people they are making a fuss about are absurdly small. Therefore, the number of people sent back is absurdly small. Therefore, the proportion accepted is absurdly high..
@JAD
Winter
http://www.shadowstats.com/, which tells us that GDP per capita has been falling by amount roughly comparable with the amount that electricity consumption per capita has been falling
@JAD
Winter:
Not only did the DDR outgrow West Germany according to their official electricity figures, they also outgrew West Germany according to their official GDP figures.
The advantage of electricity consumption figures is that in the west, they usually come from private sector sources, hence are slightly more reliable than figures from official sources.
I have been googling up on asylum seekers being deported. In Europe, there is much indignation about the deportation of a dozen here and half a dozen there.
The one country that is actually serious about deporting asylum seekers is Australia, the subject of gigantic amounts of outrage for its numerous horrid violations of international law – which is to say, violations of US state department law.
During the previous Australian government, thirty thousand asylum seekers arrived on the Australian mainland, none were removed. The new Australian government proposes to deport about a thousand of these, far outweighing all the deportations from all of Europe.
That is a rejection rate not of ninety percent, but of three percent, which must be around a hundred times higher than the rejection rate from Europe, and is correspondingly generating a hundred times the outrage.
@JAD
“The advantage of electricity consumption figures is that in the west, they usually come from private sector sources, hence are slightly more reliable than figures from official sources.”
The downside of these figures are that they do not tell us about the development of the GDP.
@JAD
“I have been googling up on asylum seekers being deported. In Europe, there is much indignation about the deportation of a dozen here and half a dozen there.”
Indeed, but they still do not get welfare like you falsely claimed.
@JAD
“http://www.shadowstats.com/, which tells us that GDP per capita has been falling by amount roughly comparable with the amount that electricity consumption per capita has been falling”
So what? I should reject all the numbers from all the economists of the world and embrace some random numbers from someone who is has an axe to grind with the USA government? Yes official USA numbers are “doctored”, but these can be corrected using common criteria.
As econometrics was invented in my country, we did get a reasonable introduction to it on high school. So do not come to me with such number hustling.
Do you know what a much better proxy for GDP is? Garbage
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/tracking-economy-and-gdp-through-trash
And that shows a clear increase of per capita GDP
http://www.solidwastedistrict.com/information/uswaste.html
@esr
“If you believe economic statistics from East Germany, you’re more unintentionally funny than JAD is.”
Normally, I would go for the West-German estimates (or even those of the CIA fact book). But as JAD is coming up with random statistics to fit his message, I see no reason why I would not do so myself. East Germany was notorious for the energy inefficiency of its economy.
Everyone who claims asylum immediately on entering the UK, no matter how improbable the claim is on its face, automatically and immediately gets welfare http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=1050_0_4_0
The details vary from country to country, but it is pretty much the same everywhere, even in Australia, which continually makes the news for its tough anti asylum seeker policy. If any country was as tough or tougher than Australia, they would get the same condemnation Australia does.
Just about every asylum seeker gets welfare, hardly anyone gets deported, and the most insignificant deportations are met with PC outrage.
Indeed it is
Which shows per capita waste generation has been falling for the entire period of the graph, which starts in 1994, hence presumably per capita GDP has been falling for the entire period of the graph.
No it does not. Reread. Look at the gray line in your second link, not the black Iine. The gray line is per capita waste generation, and that has been falling since 1990
The first link goes from 1994 to the present, with per capita waste falling the whole time, and falling a lot faster after 2007, and the second link goes from 1960 to 2001. (It is the year on year figure, so integrate to get the trend)
Combining the two, we conclude that per capita garbage, and hence presumably per capita GDP, maxed in 1994, fell slowly to 2007, and has been falling hard and fast since 2008.
To be more precise, integrating the graph in the first link, garbage, and hence presumably GDP fell horribly in 2008-2010, stabilized for a while, then resumed falling horribly.
@JAD
“Everyone who claims asylum immediately on entering the UK, no matter how improbable the claim is on its face, automatically and immediately gets welfare”
As I wrote before, they are not allowed to work. So they are forced on welfare. To hold this against them is devious and a cheap rhetorical trick. That is, typical of your commenting style.
@JAD
“Just about every asylum seeker gets welfare, hardly anyone gets deported, and the most insignificant deportations are met with PC outrage.”
Asylum seekers receive welfare until their application is rejected. After that, they are illegal immigrants without rights. Illegal immigrants do not receive welfare payments. I am repeating myself, but you come up with the same tricks time and again to weasel out of your earlier deceptive lies.
Btw, deporting is horribly expensive. It is much cheaper (but not very human) to let these illegal immigrants care for themselves.
@JAD
“No it does not. Reread. Look at the gray line in your second link, not the black Iine. The gray line is per capita waste generation, and that has been falling since 1990”
You were comparing now with 1970. USA GDP has risen since then. If you look at my other graph, you would have seen that personal income of majority of the people has not increased much since 1990:
http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-do-americans-earn-what-is-the-average-us-income/
So, it looks as if trash does not follow GDP, but (median) household income in the long term. Now we have another data point for where all the money went of your growing GDP.
You can calculate the real GDP by converting dollars into constant “trash” (median household income) for each year and recalculate the dollar GDP per capita in each year in terms of trash. And then you see that the GDP per capita increases, but the increase ends up in the pockets of only a few. Doing this for electricity is left as an exercise for the reader.
@JAD
“To be more precise, integrating the graph in the first link, garbage, and hence presumably GDP fell horribly in 2008-2010, stabilized for a while, then resumed falling horribly.”
You are kidding, are you. Or did you really miss the worst depression since the 1930’s?
Trash (and electricity) fell sharply because people in the USA had to reduce consumption sharply to adapt to a reduced income and increased debt servicing.
It is really clear that you live in some phantasy land where you work magic with random numbers. A little like Hitler moving fictive armies in his bunker.
But their applications are rarely rejected – they merely not accepted, so that they float along in comfortable limbo sucking on the taxpayer teat forever. Even Australia, of all the white countries the one by far the most hostile and unsympathetic to asylum seekers, has only one thousand out of thirty thousand asylum seekers reclassified as illegal immigrants without rights. The Australian government has repeatedly ordered the public service to move along, but the public service ignores their supposed political masters and drags their feet, with the effect that once an asylum seeker sets foot in Australia, he is set for life. Therefore the Australian government, finding the public service will not follow orders, but the navy and coastguard will follow orders, is trying to keep asylum seekers out of the hands of the public service.
And the Australian government has had a lot more success in getting asylum seekers classified than all the other governments of white nations put together – which is why deportations in other countries are a dozen or two dozen.
@JAD
Winter:
Official government statistics tell us that the GDP per capita is much higher than in 1990 and is now rising steadily. Trash per capita indicates that the GDP per capita is much lower than in 1990, has been falling ever since 1990, and is now falling considerably more rapidly than before.
@JAD
“But their applications are rarely rejected – they merely not accepted, so that they float along in comfortable limbo sucking on the taxpayer teat forever.”
Where? The procedure can past very long, but eventually 90% and more get rejected. If you do claim it is otherwise you should come up with evidence. And asylum seekers do not get “normal” welfare, but often just boarding.
@JAD
“Official government statistics tell us that the GDP per capita is much higher than in 1990 and is now rising steadily. ”
That is because GDP/capita is only weakly related to median household income. Trash production is related to disposable household income, not the income of some off shore tax store.
@JAD
“Trash per capita indicates that the GDP per capita is much lower than in 1990, has been falling ever since 1990, and is now falling considerably more rapidly than before.”
Trash per capita is marginally lower now than in 1990. Now, we are in the mids of the worst recession since the 1930. The link shows that the average y/y change of trash is approximately zero, except after the 2008 collapse and the last quarter of last year. The 2001 low in the old link is a local minimum in the new link. In 2000 and 2004 the growth was high.
As I wrote, there is a huge difference between GDP/Capita and median household income. The GDP/capita keeps growing more or less, but that growth does not end up in the pocket of the median household.
It is rather stupid to assume that someone who earns several thousand times the median income will produce an equal number of thousand times the amount of trash of a median income household in the USA.
In short, real GDP of the USA is now considerably bigger than in 1972. Household income of the majority of people much less so.
So, for more information, there are many web site that explain the concept of price parity and big mac indexes and the real growth of GDP.
Yes, the US has been in serious trouble after 2000. Mostly due to stupid endeavors like starting foreign wars and blowing investment bubbles to draw in foreign capital. But that is outside of your “all crashed during the 1970s”.
> That is a rejection rate not of ninety percent, but of three percent, which must be around a hundred times higher than the rejection rate from Europe, and is correspondingly generating a hundred times the outrage.
There is a difference between not deporting someone and granting them asylum. The practical effect of this difference is that people who have merely not been deported are not entitled to welfare, and work illegally.
@Random832
“The practical effect of this difference is that people who have merely not been deported are not entitled to welfare, and work illegally.”
We all know that. But JAD wants to state that asylum seekers are all lazy people who only come to us to be on welfare. Admitting that they stay to work under bad circumstances for below minimum wage does not fit in his world view. So he simply will not admit that these people are actually working.
Winter commented on Premises of the Dark Enlightenment.
in response to :
The Dark Enlightenment is, as I have previously noted, a large and messy phenomenon. It appears to me in part to be a granfalloon invented by Nick Land and certain others to make their own piece of it (the neoreactionaries) look larger and more influential than it actually is. The most detailed critiques of the […]
@JAD
Applications are in the tens of thousands.
Expulsions are in the dozens.
A ratio not of ninety percent, but of 0.1%
There is vague talk of voluntary repatriation of thousands. Assuming that they actually volunteer, which is not happening, that would be a ratio of ten percent, not ninety percent. The government of every country announces it is getting tough on asylum seekers, but even in the toughest of them all, they come in and they don’t go out.
The evidence is that asylum seekers come in, and they don’t go out.
@JAD
Winter:
1. Offshore income is not part of GDP.
2. A rich person produces more garbage than a poor person. The poor person throws out his couch, the rich person knocks down his mansion and builds a new one.
You cannot explain the falling level of trash by the proposition that the evil capitalists are hording all the money. Everyone in the west is getting poorer. The expensive houses are all being purchased by rich Chinese who made their money in China, so if anything, garbage should overstate GDP.
According to official statistics, we are not. Supposedly we have grown a great deal since then
Per capita trash peaked in 1990, and since then has been falling, at first slowly, now rapidly. Recessions come and go. Twenty four years looks more like a civilizational peak than a recession. It is falling, and falling, and falling faster.
Supposedly we are out of the recession in that we are now supposedly growing, but trash is still falling.
Supposedly the recession did not start until 2007, yet trash was substantially lower in 2006 than it was in 1990
The big mac index shows substantially higher inflation than the official cpi, so, like garbage production, shows decline in real GDP per capita while official real GDP per capita continues to rise.
Europe has been in bigger trouble, and the trouble began a long time ago.
In the 1940s, science slowed, and became corrupted by “consensus”. Instead of experimenters telling the scientific community what they saw, the scientific community told experimenters what they should see, the official state priesthood absorbing scientists and science. In 1972, technology and growth in GDP slowed. Trash indicates that GDP per capita peaked in 1990, electricity per capita that it peaked in 2007. Different indicators give different dates for the peak, for the peak is broad and nearly flat, but we are now past that peak by most reasonable indicators.
What counts as “garbage” in these stats? There has been an increasing amount of recycling and composting going on for decades now. Less stuff going to landfills is not, in and of itself, an accurate measure of prosperity.
@JAD
See, never admitting or even acknowledging that rejected Asylum seekers do not get welfare.
The Australian government proposes to deport everyone who has applied for asylum and has been rejected on appeal, which is a thousand or so out of thirty thousand, indicating that 97% of asylum seekers are still on welfare, even in Australia with its extremely tough policy, a policy so tough that Australia is supposedly in breach of international law and treaty obligations.
European governments propose “voluntary repatriation” for this category, which is again a thousand or so out of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, indicating that well over ninety percent of asylum seekers are still on welfare, assuming that those rejected don’t get welfare, which is not true. Illegals in the US get welfare, and Europe is softer on illegals than the US.
America theoretically has the same policy as Australia – deport all unsuccessful asylum seekers – but, as with Europe, actual deportations are rare, and people who are eligible for deportation are rare, and usually the victims of Cathedral approved persecution. The Cathedral/State department being extremely powerful and influential, most persecutions are State Department approved, because if unapproved, deters most regimes.
If ineligible for welfare, eligible for deportation. The proportion deemed eligible for deportation or “voluntary repatriation” is insignificant, even in the very toughest white countries. Therefore the proportion ineligible for welfare is insignificant.
“Grumble. The problem with backing up JAD’s observations is that while the facts are the facts, the conclusions he draws from them are often a real stretch…”
This illustrates a form of cognitive bias that makes certain subjects impossible to discuss. Given a set of facts that could be interpreted to justfify racism/sexism/homophobia/etc., the reaction of far too many people is not to carefully point out how those interpretations are logically flawed, but to throw out the facts themselves.
I heard an example of this yesterday on KMBZ radio’s afternoon drive-time program. It had been alleged that women firefighters had lower standards for physical strength than the men, and in short order the chief of the KCMOFD called in to set the record straight. He clarified that the women have to meet precisely the same standards, and stumbled all over himself communicating that the dropout rate (between the initial pre-screening and the final acceptance testing 8 weeks later) for men is 3% and for women 7% while trying not to express such a “disparate impact” in a politically incorrect manner. The problem is that is impossible, which is why he fumbled so badly. It’s clear that the desire to hire more women causes the department to accept women into the initial phase of training (as paid employees) who would not be accepted, with identical qualifiations, if they were men. (The only alternative explanation is that the 8-week preparation somehow favors men over women, which is quite unlikely given the desire to equalize the numbers.) He could not bring himself to state that on a statistical basis, there aren’t as many women as men who can meet the standards, because that can get you fired.
The result of this aversion to inconvenient truths is that the only people telling the truth are people who don’t mind being called racists, sexists, and/or homophobes. Marinate on the consequences of that, and weep for the future. I say it’s a recipe for a Hitler to come to power because the voters are tired of being lied to.
I don’t understand why trash is considered to correlate so well with GDP. I work in an industry whose genesis was taking trash and converting it to usable products. We were so successful at that that we ran out of the type of trash we wanted, so had to start using raw materials as well. So successful that we were renamed and split into multiple groups, groups now called Fine Chemicals and Refining and Plastics and so on.
I’m pretty sure my industry greatly increased GDP in the process of getting rid of trash. I’m very sure that disposal wasn’t the reason for the industry, yet it happened anyway. Why should we be the only ones to have done that?
@ David W
The kind of trash measure they’re talking about is measured before it gets to you – the operation of your business does not reduce the amount of household trash that has been generated.
@JAD
> If ineligible for welfare, eligible for deportation.
False. Or, rather, you’ve confused “eligible for deportation” with “worth the effort of deporting”. What if you’d rather let them work illegally?
@JAD
Random 838
Numbers eligible for deporting, but no one wants to deport them, rather let them work illegally, are typically a thousand or so out of tens of thousands, of order five percent or so. “Voluntary repatriation”. Numbers actually deported are typically a few dozen, of order 0.2 percent, except in the case of Australia, which is in international controversy for getting tough on asylum seekers.
Therefore, the other thirty thousand or so are on welfare.
“Numbers eligible for deporting, but no one wants to deport them, rather let them work illegally, are typically a thousand or so out of tens of thousands, of order five percent or so.”
Citation needed.
“Numbers eligible for deporting, but no one wants to deport them, rather let them work illegally, are typically a thousand or so out of tens of thousands, of order five percent or so.”
Citation needed.
Could not find where I read “thousands”.
Did find a UK paper http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migration-uk-asylum that reports that forty percent get approval to stay, twenty five percent get sent back, and the rest, no one knows what happened to them.
Probably that thirty five percent are working illegally.
google asylum “voluntary repatriation”. The numbers that they piously hope will voluntarily repatriate themselves are an order of magnitude too small for them to be rejecting any significant number of asylum seekers
@JAD:
Do you have a cite for this? When we move to smaller geometries, we get smaller transistors, closer together. Or is it all a fake moon landing?
Patrick,
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated
You remember when CPU hertz stopped mattering and they switched to advertising dual+ cores? That’s roughly when chip dimensions stopped driving Moore’s Law.
They were using megahertz as a proxy for megaflops. They stopped, but it seems they’re still using nanometer as a proxy for flop density.
Notably, this is straight-up false. No chip dimension is smaller than the stated node name anymore. Admittedly this is recent, Bohr may have not been paying attention. But, it was inevitable, as node names continued to shrink linearly as everything else slowed.
Yes, it is as fake as the GDP figures, wherein everything supposedly gets better and better while the people get poorer and the cities get shabbier and more dangerous.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated
Which tells us:
When they said they were making eighty nanometer chips, they meant they could print wires on the chip eighty nanometers from one wire to the next.
When they said they were making sixty four nanometer chips, they meant they could print wires on the chip sixty four nanometers from one wire to the next.
But today:
Today’s patterning technology still relies on 193 nanometer laser light from argon fluoride lasers. We have been using 193 nanometer laser light from argon fluoride lasers since 1982. We have been using light of this wavelength for twenty two years. And, as long as we continue to rely on optical lithography, we just cannot reproduce patterns much below eighty nanometers. Sixty four nanometers is as far as it will go, and that is expensive and barely workable.
Eighty nanometers is the smallest reasonably achievable with 193 nanometer wavelength light, sixty four nanometers the smallest unreasonably achievable.
@JAD:
Thanks for the interesting article. Yes, the node names are misleading and there is some marketing involved, and it’s arguable whether anybody really has a 14 nm node, but the article itself is also somewhat misleading.
Although they don’t say it clearly in the article, even if you decide that your metric is the pitch of the wires on the first metal layer, there is as much space between wires as the wires themselves occupy. So the minimum feature size is the width of the wire, or half the pitch, meaning that an 80 nm pitch translates to a real minimum feature size of 40 nm, and that 64 nm pitch you are describing translates to a real minimum feature size of 32 nm.
But really, the node name has historically been about minimum feature size, and, at least for logic devices, you don’t necessarily etch the wires on the first metal layer to the same resolution as the transistors underneath. This is how the node size can be (somewhat legitimately) shown as smaller than 1/2 the wire pitch.
The smallest feature size on Intel’s FinFETs is 8 nm — that’s the fin width. But they can’t do things that fine in both directions simultaneously, so the gate lengths are 35 nm. How do you define the feature size? 8 nm is clearly too small, because it doesn’t accurately reflect the performance and size gains. But 35 nm is too large for the same reason. So they do some math and hand-waving, and come up with 22 nm. Most of the math and handwaving is about getting the transistor density you would expect. For example, when moving from 45 nm to 35 nm, you would expect to fit 45**2 / 35**2 = 1.6 times as many transistors within the same area.
As far as the capabilities of the lithography go, that 8 x 35 nm is a real number, reflecting the size of the real FinFET device on the real chip. Several advances in lithography have been made to achieve this, such as computational lithography and immersion lithography. Yes, it’s time to go to a smaller wavelength (and equipment is ready for that), but the cost is still quite high.
Your point about the 64 nm wire pitch being unreasonable is absolutely correct, but the truth is that, except for high volume, expensive chips (e.g. Intel’s bread and butter), most semiconductors (including the ones my company makes) are not run on bleeding edge processes, and never have been.
But again, the 64 nm pitch reported in the article directly corresponds, in the absolute worst case, to a 32 nm minimum feature size (e.g. if wire pitch were always exactly related to the node, it would be a 32 nm node), so the situation is not as dire as a cursory read of the article might suggest.
@alrenous:
For some reason, I didn’t see your post right away.
So Intel’s FinFET fins aren’t really 8 nm wide? How wide are they?
Here is a photo. http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com/2013/04/ibm-finfet-isolation-considerations-and-ramifications-bulk-vs-soi/ In a sense, the blade of the fin is 8nm, but the fin is about fifty nanometers high, and the more important measure for device density is the fin to fin spacing, which is 64 nanometers.
Not it has not. When they said 90 nanometers in 2003, they meant 90 nanometers line to line, which meant that the minimum feature size had to be less than 40 nanometers..
For example:
@Patrick.
I’m stealthy.
The fins themselves are made by getting clever with chemicals, which allows them to be smaller than the smallest possible resolution of the light used, but, as per JAD, their minimum spacing is still determined by by the limited laser tech. Moreover the fins by themselves are useless and have to have stuff put over them – they could make them thinner but it wouldn’t allow more electronics to fit. You could make an argument that I was imprecise. Every photolithographic feature is larger than the node size. If you really want to call me on it, then I’m two generations early. Third generation finFETs will be called something smaller than every feature on the chip.
The pitch width, defined as the wire plus the distance to the next wire, is a direct and reliable measure of the fineness of photolithography. This is the 64 nanometers Donald cites. Despite many side alleys being explored, chips are still fundamentally machined photolithographically.
The point is that the chips used to be named directly after this, and, even though it’s still critically important, they’re not. They could have gone to 64nmST (shortened transistor) and suchlike, but they didn’t. They could have simply gone to flops per square inch, or whatever the relevant denominator is. Didn’t do that either.
Absent corroborating indicators I wouldn’t think it was a serious problem. Inertia and rational ignorance and such. However, these are companies in a country where many of the highest status people are professional liars – actors and politicians. Much else, but I’ll leave it at that for now.
They’re acting like they have something to hide. And, on inspection, they do.
So there’s two possibilities here.
One: Moore’s Law has been interrupted by physics. Lithography is the best way, and this is the practical limit of lithography. Welcome to the backside of the logistics curve.
Two: Moore’s Law has been interrupted by innovation decline.
Optimistically, we’re in situation two, and though Moore’s Law will actually get interrupted, it will cause an ‘Oh Shit’ moment in optics research, which will manage to catch up and restart Moore. It’s pretty impressive they managed to keep it going so long already, frankly, without very novel lasers or an alternative to lithography.
Pessimistically, we’re in situation two but the innovation is no longer possible. Public choice rotted universities? Regulation has strangled resource flow to R&D? The smart money gets its paycheck from the government these days – i.e. conspecific parasitism is unstable? All of the above and more besides?
People have become so obsessed with appearance they would rather learn to lie rather than to accomplish?
@Alrenous:
> Third generation finFETs will be called something smaller than every feature on the chip.
Sure. The thing is that what used to be a single parameter is now really multiple parameters. So they use easy numbers that are designed to map roughly to transistors/area. They should switch to that metric, but the marketing guys think the customers are too stupid to understand what they are buying.
> The pitch width, defined as the wire plus the distance to the next wire, is a direct and reliable measure of the fineness of photolithography. This is the 64 nanometers Donald cites.
Correct again. But it’s not a given that metal one will be etched at as high a resolution as the transistors, and it’s not correct to think that a 64 nm wire pitch means that, in historical terms, it should be called a 64 nm node.
> So there’s two possibilities here.
Three, actually. We have the physics, we have next gen equipment that can etch a lot finer, but nobody wants to pony up the cash. Under this scenario (which I believe is the correct one, FWIW), Moore’s Law indicates the maximum rate of improvement, given a world hungry for ever-smaller, ever-more-powerful parts. When the hunger is sated, the market will say it doesn’t need the next generation yet. But all it takes is a single killer app, and it’s off to the races again.
@JAD:
You don’t go back far enough in time or size. As I wrote, the article is kind of confusing, but you can tease the truth out of it if you read carefully. For example, the article itself states:
The minimum wire pitch was twice this, because you had to have space between the wires. The semiconductor guys boxed themselves in by describing nodes and describing their roadmap in terms of nodes, but nobody actually buys nodes — they buy more and more transistors that go faster and faster.
The caption on the globalfoundries chart in the article states:
Note the “one half pitch” above. But why, then, in this chart, does the gate size start off below the node node size and then flatten? The article also addresses this:
In other words, the lithography for the finest feature actually got ahead of the named node curve. And if you look at globalfoundry’s chart, it’s crossed back over the curve and maybe there are some lies on the 22 and 14 nm generation (where, again 22 and 14 are proxies for usable transistor density rather than describing actual feature size.
In any case, I submit the following:
– Newer lithographic systems are already available, but the cost is prohibitive. Yes, the lithography industry may be slowing, but it’s pure economics (which is not necessarily a bad thing)
– Even if you’re studying lithography in isolation, a 64 nm wire pitch corresponds to a much smaller feature size (probably drawn at 32 and then etched down below that).
– Studying lithography in isolation is not useful. Moore’s Law doesn’t even mention lithography.
That last observation doesn’t mean that things are not slowing down. One issue is that, as geometries get smaller, errors go up. But the next killer app might be error-tolerant circuits — there is a lot of research going on there. If somebody brings out a toolkit that lets you usefully not care about most errors, expect people to spent more money on more transistors per chip.
The fins of a finfet are the inputs of a nand gate
When we first went to sixty four nanometers, the inputs to a nand gate were 64 nanometers apart.
They are still sixty four nanometers apart.
I suppose thinner fins improve power or performance or some such. But they are still sixty four nanometers apart.
Moore’s law will resume if we get a working device where the inputs to a nand gate are forty five nanometers apart.
Winter commented on Premises of the Dark Enlightenment.
Birds are undisturbed by a cuckoo in the nest, while men are homicidally enraged by the proverbial red headed step child. That men care about actual paternity, rather than social paternity, indicates that humans have understood reproduction for long enough for evolutionary adaption to that knowledge to happen.
Since men are evolutionarily adapted to that knowledge, we may conclude that women are also evolutionarily adapted to that knowledge, that in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, humans generally knew about the birds and the bees.
Indeed, it looks as if in the few hundred years that condoms have been around, men have undergone adaption (to not liking them)
Could a cop kick down a plebeian’s door and shoot his dog? Seems to me that the plebeians had a lot more rights than moderns do.
What caused the republic to come undone was that the plebeians tended to vote for the guy who promised them the most goodies, without worrying about little things like the constitution of the Roman Republic. Executive orders, anyone?
Obama can and does now budget and legislate by executive order. That is the equivalent of Gracchus touching the tribune. Sulla will follow.
Nitrogen is transparent down to 150 nanometers, and fused quartz down to 160 nanometers, so logically it is possible to get optical lithography down to 160 nanometers. For a high refractive index fluid, would need to use a perfluorocarbon in place of water, for example perfluoro n butane.
So they gave up on optical lithography before taking it to its final limits.
They were getting close to the last of the low hanging fruit on optical lithography. Below 160 nanometers, UV is not light, but ionizing radiation, but they did not get the last of the low hanging fruit.
If women were able to determine their own destiny, we would not have fifty percent fatherlessness. The overwhelming majority of divorces turn out extremely badly for the woman and her children, and the overwhelming majority of divorces are female initiated and reflect female misbehavior.
I am not arguing Darwinism, therefore women need to be subject male authority to protect them from themselves. I am observing that women need to be subject to male authority to protect them from themselves, and arguing, contrary to Sunshine Mary, that this is due to Darwinism.
Darwinism explains this, but Sunshine Mary explains it by original sin. Either way, it is a fact requiring explanation.
@JAD:
Aren’t you the one who just explained that we can only barely do 64 nm wire pitch now? That’s true, which means nobody was doing it until very recently and few are doing it now in production.
Intel is a process leader, and at their 32 nm fast logic node, their closest (metal 1-3) wire pitch was 112.5 nm. But don’t take my word for it:
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/technology-brief/32nm-logic-high-k-metal-gate-transistors-presentation.pdf
Page 5 shows their pitch scaling graph, but page 14 has actual numbers for the node under discussion. If you don’t believe ’em, maybe you can find an earlier version on the wayback machine. Of course, Intel has enough cash to either fake a moon landing or bribe archive.org to change the past, so maybe we’ll never know.
So all you have to do is take it, by force, from those evil greedy kulaks who produce, and generously give it to the poor suffering victims who consume it.
Been tried.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22longevity+project%22+divorce
The propensity of fatherless people to wicked and self destructive behavior is pretty obvious. You must have observed it with your own mark one eyeballs. That is why we call them bastards. So if it failed to show up in statistics, the obvious conclusion would be that those statistics are cooked. But, it does show up in statistics.
Exactly!
And you know that no sex was involved because no one mentioned sex. :-)
But for this to work, people have to be allowed to notice misbehavior. And since Europeans are even less allowed to notice female misbehavior than Americans …
With photolithography, how small you can go is limited by the wavelength of light, or rather the half wavelength. There are tricks by which you get smaller than half wave features, and we are still getting better at those tricks, but is like rolling a pea around with your knee.
The most recent reduction in the wavelength of light used in photolithography occurred twenty two years ago.
@JAD:
Or last year. Whichever.
Bear in mind that your “22 years ago” was about the first published test results of the 193 nm excimer laser in semiconductors — AFAIK the first commercially available steppers didn’t come until at least 3 years later.
Likewise, various companies have been working really hard to get to this point for a long time, but the science, engineering, and economics all have to be there.
The point is that there always have been and always will be challenges to Moore’s Law, but it has held up remarkably well. Past performance does not guarantee future results and all that. As I mentioned earlier, the next challenge will probably be better fault-tolerant logic, because when things get that small, the defect density will probably be going up.
EUV does not work, and there was never any real prospect that it would work. A serious attempt to advance photolithography would attempt to use 160 nanometer coherent light, not ten nanometer incoherent light.
Contact lithography, in place of photolithography, may well work. EUV on the other hand is PR bullshit and always was PR bullshit. Because EUV is energetically ionizing, when it hits the resist, it sprays penetrating electrons for a considerable distance in all directions.
“and the overwhelming majority of divorces are female initiated and reflect female misbehavior.”
[citation needed]
@JAD:
This is confusing. You started off saying that, because of social decay and progressivism, we can no longer do real science, and as evidence you “showed” that there has been no real semiconductor shrink since 65 nm. When I showed that your metric — line pitch — is not, and has never been, the same as the node number, you basically used the same argument as alrenous — if we’re not at the limit now, then we soon will be.
And then when I show that people are doing science for that is real enough that other companies will pay money for it (which includes science other than EUV — there are a lot of approaches being taken, including contact lithography, because there is probably big money if you can do this cheaply), you apparently turn into a Malthusian.
FWIW, your evidence about how lying about the number of stories in a building means we’ve lost it is also laughable, and neatly ties in with the marketing on the node numbers. People don’t think in terms of feet or meters — they think of stories. So when someone builds a building that has really tall ceilings on a few stories and a lot of mechanical equipment with really, really tall ceilings on other stories, and the marketing guys just divide the total height by the median story pitch and call it a 104 story building — that kind of gloss is not at all anything new, or particularly worrisome.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/10357829/Why-do-women-initiate-divorce-more-than-men.html
For Refugee issues from a non-PC perspective, this is a great resource:
http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/
We have been at the limit for quite some time.
Photolithography has been at the wavelength limit for several decades. They reacted by going from visible light to shorter and shorter wavelengths, eventually to 193 nanometers – two decades ago. And then they stopped going to shorter wavelengths.
When we failed to go shorter wavelengths on schedule, and failed to go to some thing other than photo lithography, that was when we departed from Moore’s law.
If progress was genuinely continuing at the projected rate, they should have gone to 160 nanometer light over a decade ago, and then proceeded to deploy contact lithography in place of photo lithography about eight years ago.
According to Dr. Subramanian Iyer, Fellow and Chief Technologist at the IBM Systems & Technology Group
Lyer proposes that we pursue Moore’s law by means that are:
“, as is already happening, and has been happening since the sixty five nanometer node.
For example, one can get more transistors per unit area without improving resolution by making transistors vertical, and by stacking one layer of transistors on top of another layer of transistors. This, however, is not going to reduce the cost per transistor.
Moore’s law is that you four times as many transistors per unit area every four years, which requires that sizes halve every four years, that that our ability to manipulate small stuff improves by a factor of two ever four years. Not happening any more, has not been happening since we got stuck at 193 nanometer photolithography
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2069740/the-moores-law-blowout-sale-is-ending-broadcoms-cto-says.html
Really? Moore’s Law stopped being predictive two decades ago?
>Really? Moore’s Law stopped being predictive two decades ago?
maybe you were “not allowed to notice it”, or you “know this but are too scared to admit it”
Patrick Maupin on 2014-03-10 at 17:52:14 said:
Sixteen years ago, when we should have gone to photolithography with 160 nanometer coherent light, or contact lithography, but did not.
However this did not immediately effect chip production, because it takes a while for the latest lithography to be applied to the latest chips. Although 193 nanometer coherent light photolithography was developed two decades ago, the industry did not move to 193 nanometer until 2003-2004, with the 90 nanometer node.
So, in terms of production of chips, Moore’s law still going fine in 2003-2004.
It should have gone to 160 nanometer, or contact lithography, not long after that, and did not, so that was when Moore’s law started to unravel. With the 65 nanometer node, in 2007 costs per transistor per hertz fell, but did not fall by as much as they usually did.
So the deviation from Moore’s law was baked into the technology two decades ago, when a follow up to 193 nanometer coherent light photolithography failed to appear on schedule, but only started affect price and performance in 2007.
Cost and performance kept improving until quite recently, though at a slower and slower rate, as people found ways to wring more and more performance out of photolithography with 193 nanometer coherent light.
The 45 nanometer node used the same lithographic scale as the 65 nanometer node, and was in this sense the first fake node, but it nonetheless delivered substantially better performance at lower cost. Subsequent fake nodes, still using the same lithography process as sixty five nanometer or ninety nanometer, less and less so.
Density continues to increase, but this is more from stacking stuff up vertically, which has very limited benefits compared to actually making things smaller. Still using the same scale masks as the 65 and 90 nanometer nodes.
So, deviation from Moore’s law shows up in technology going into the process two decades ago ago, shows up in ICs coming out of the process less than a decade ago, and has only just recently bottomed out, in the last few years.
@JAD & Others
“So, in terms of production of chips, Moore’s law still going fine in 2003-2004.”
Moore’s law: So what is it that is growing exponentially?
The lives and death of Moore’s Law by Ilkka Tuomi.
First Monday, Volume 7, Number 11 – 4 November 2002
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1000/921
The only conclusion that we can draw is that something is growing, and that might even be growing exponentially. But there is nothing you can pinpoint as the thing that is doubling every ~18 months or so.
Maybe computational power, if you can find a way to reliably quantify computations or computational power.
But this means you can say both that Moore’s law was broken and not depending on what feature you are choosing to track.
> Eric Raymond (1999) makes a similar conversion from components to component density and gives an exact mathematical form for Moore’s Law, defining it as “The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t – 1962) where t is time in years.”
I actually researched this one carefully. I found that this was Moore’s original formulation; he later changed the doubling time to 18 months. The change has gathered remarkably little comment.
@esr
“I actually researched this one carefully.”
No doubt. The problem lies much deeper: There seems to be no “real” physical measure that has doubled/halved every 18 months over 48 years (~32 doublings!).
I agree the US economy is substantially more sluggish and less efficient as a pure economy (is there a term of art for that?) than in 1950, and it looks like a monotonic change at a never-insignificant rate, so less efficient than 1970, too. But technological advances are a big compensating factor, and measurement difficulties are large, so it’s hard to get a clear picture of whether we’re worse off than 1970. (The impact of transistors is not just huge, but complicated and sometimes subtle. Some lesser but still significant changes like antibiotics and severalfold increase in manufactured-good reliability have similar difficulties. Also restrictions on freedom of exchange push people into getting more of stuff than they want, and it is hard to value that. E.g., the 1970 CAB system forced air travel to be very expensive in ways that had a side effect of incentivizing plushness. The modern much-stronger-than-in-1970 zoning/planning regulations limit housing density in ways that can push people to have larger lots and houses than they’d choose to pay for with unconstrained choices. And both today and (differently) in 1970 a bizarre mess of employment and tax laws push people into a mix of medical costs and benefits that they would not freely choose.) I think we’re better off overall, but it’s enough of a close call that I tend to be more critical of people who think they have any sharp answer than to people whose judgment call disagrees with mine.
I think the US clearly retains the technical capability overall to build and operate big skyscrapers. Tall buildings are a lot easier than reliable economic air transport, which we still manage without special difficulty. (Incidentally, I am not an expert, but my impression is that the international pattern supports the idea that ability to manage reliable economical air transport is a better indicator of societal/tech dysfunction than ability to build and operate big buildings. Formal property law and land use policy seems to attract huge local idiosyncrasies, and actual land use policy tends to be a hotspot for corruption which is idiosyncratic too.) The rights and incentives around urban buildings in the US are so screwed up that it’s common not to have much simpler buildings — like housing or big box stores — in places where it would make sense. That’s not to any important degree because the would-be owners lack the technical capability to make them or operate them. It’s largely because the formal institutions they operate under are so screwed up they can’t do it there. Secondary factors are things like lack of law and order. Any lack of technical capability is so far down the tertiary factor list it’s hard to notice.
I think the decline in semiconductor progress is mostly because it has gotten harder, and only to a lesser extent a reflection of institutional and societal screwed-up sluggishness. I think this because my Bayesian prior probability for technical limits limiting explosive growth is fairly high, so I don’t require much evidence to infer it, and because I note that that some biotech (DNA sequencing, frex) managed to explode at impressive rates over part of the same period, so it doesn’t look like the US system has completely lost the ability to innovate rapidly in $10M-$200M high-tech. Possibly future historians will look back and determine that the USA finally lost that ability hard right around 2002 (or whatever cutoff would best accommodate that last great DNA sequencing nostalgic tech explosion, I dunno). But my Bayesian prior for that is significantly smaller.:-|
eric:
Density, to my surprise, and contrary to what I assumed and initially incorrectly claimed, is still increasing. Typically a transistor occupies an area one hundred times the square of the node size, and has for a very long time. This, however, is increasingly being accomplished by means that are: “orthogonal to the scaling path.” – which is to say, the transistor is increasingly vertical.
The cost of processing the chip tends to be proportional to how high you stack stuff, so this approach fails to bring down costs.
>I found that this was Moore’s original formulation; he later changed the doubling time to 18 months.
I rechecked. I got Moore’s 1965 formula right, but the later change to an 18-month doubling time was not his, it was some random Intel executive.
@JAD
“Density, to my surprise, and contrary to what I assumed and initially incorrectly claimed, is still increasing.”
After posting my comment, I thought about the exponential reduction in size. If Moore started with a line width of 0.1mm (10^-4 meter), 32 times halving the line size would bring this down to below 10^-13 meter. That is a fraction of the size of a hydrogen atom. Clearly not within current understanding of physics.
However, if Moore started with only a single transistor on a chip, 32 doublings would increase that to 4 billion transistors on a chip. Even in 2012, there were CPU chips with five billion transistors and GPU/FPGA’s with well over six billion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
If you are hoping for radical change, rather than easier updates to facebook, you hope for us to be able to manipulate matter on the molecular scale. If we are stuck manipulating matter using 193 nanometer light, and stuck with transistors that occupy a box that is roughly 400 nanometers by four hundred nanometers by four hundred nanometers, we are not going to be able to manipulate matter on a molecular scale.
If you define Moore’s law in such a way that it is still working, it is not going to take us anywhere very exciting.
Further, once a technology stops advancing, and photolithographic resolution has stopped advancing even though transistor density continues to increase, that technology usually starts to retreat after a generation or so, as for example tall buildings and man in space.
The DNA people are independently working on the very small, and may well give us access to the very small even if chip fabs do not. DNA writing appears to have maxed out, and is probably declining, but this may be because improved DNA editing has lessened the need for it, but the supposed evidence that the singularity is near, or even closer than the dark age, is looking weaker every year. We keep undershooting those projections.
@JAD
“If you are hoping for radical change, rather than easier updates to facebook, you hope for us to be able to manipulate matter on the molecular scale. If we are stuck manipulating matter using 193 nanometer light, and stuck with transistors that occupy a box that is roughly 400 nanometers by four hundred nanometers by four hundred nanometers, we are not going to be able to manipulate matter on a molecular scale.”
If you want to go in that direction, I would advice to grow organic brains on demand. The average honey bee has the computational power of quite a big computer set up. And it runs on a little sugar water.
Note that neurons and synapses do manipulate matter on a molecular scale.
@JAD
And here is the link I forgot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
(computational power in neural brains scale as the number of synapses and the log of the average number of synapses that contact each neuron)
@JAD
Work is already done on Interfacing Neurons with Carbon Nanotubes: Electrical Signal Transfer and Synaptic Stimulation in Cultured Brain Circuits
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/26/6931.short
@JAD “If you are hoping for radical change, rather than easier updates to facebook, you hope for us to be able to manipulate matter on the molecular scale.”
While I was in high school (about twenty years ago), I concluded that, in general, technology had limits, and those limits were primarily based on what people need, rather than physical limitations. I based that conclusion on looking at keyboards, and looking at 24-bit color, and realizing that there was really no reason for them to “advance” to new heights. I didn’t have any prediction on how far computing power would advance before it slowed down, but I suspected that the primary driver for computing power would be games, and as far as I could see, I’ve been mostly right.
At the time, I was ignorant of the technical limitations of silicon, and I was ignorant enough that I might have even believed that there would be no limitations (although perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I just didn’t give any thought to such limitations). I also realized that engineers and weather analysts would always /want/ to push the technology further, if possible, but those would be special niches with extraordinary needs; it’s difficult to say whether this would be enough to push the envelope in silicon.
In any case, it seems that we’re pushing the boundaries of what silicon will allow us to do–but I think the case can be made that we’re pushing the boundaries of what /people/ want silicon to do, too! But just because we reach these boundaries, doesn’t mean that society is in any sort of decline. It just means that we’ve reached a plateau, where most of our needs are met (or at least, are limited by the constraints of the physical universe).
That isn’t to say that our society isn’t in decline, of course, but I think looking at the unchecked exponential growth of regulations and of bureaucracy is a better measure of that, than the loss of Moore’s Law. (Which causes me to wonder: is there a Moore’s Law for Bureaucracy? If not, there probably should be–and I also suspect that, like Moore’s Law for Silicon, there’s a cultural “plateau point” where, once we reach it, the Law becomes meaningless. Perhaps we’ve even already reached it without realizing it….)
We are very far from the boundaries of what graphene will allow us to do. Indeed the, reason we cannot build graphene transistors is because their maximum size is a few of nanometers.
Yet the tallest buildings in the US were built in 1972, same time as the last man on the moon. There was an immense and urgent political and military need to build the replacement of the twin towers with same or higher height, yet they could not do it.
I see a lot of black African countries with their own airlines, but where I see high buildings rising, looks to me like centers of civilization, prosperity, and high technology. Highest tower in the world is built in Dubai, the chips that power your smartphones are built in Taiwan by a company owned by an organization whose central office is in Dubai. The native population of Dubai is not very high IQ, but their high IQ king recognizes the importance of importing smart people, and refusing to import stupid people.
Of course. But if social decay prevents you from doing technologically advanced stuff, you forget how to do it, or don’t even try in the first place.
>Yet the tallest buildings in the US were built in 1972, same time as the last man on the moon. There was an immense and urgent political and military need to build the replacement of the twin towers with same or higher height, yet they could not do it.
The challenges were not technical but political.
>I see a lot of black African countries with their own airlines, but where I see high buildings rising, looks to me like centers of civilization, prosperity, and high technology. Highest tower in the world is built in Dubai, the chips that power your smartphones are built in Taiwan by a company owned by an organization whose central office is in Dubai. The native population of Dubai is not very high IQ, but their high IQ king recognizes the importance of importing smart people, and refusing to import stupid people.
And despotism is good for ‘cutting the red tape’ and ‘getting things done’.
Politics wanted a tall tower. Failed to get it.
>Politics wanted a tall tower. Failed to get it.
One political interest wanted it. Ran into opposition from other political interests that had other priorities.
“Ran into opposition from other political interests that had other priorities.”
Including grotty unglamorous priorities that people sometimes avoid talking about explicitly, but which are clearly significant in their political tradeoffs. E.g., how many important people making a career in NYC politics wanted a tall tower enough to champion it against all featherbedding-related difficulties? Without knowing much about the tower project in particular, I won’t be surprised if the answer is “zero”. And even if it’s not strictly zero, I rather expect that such people were not numerous enough to form an effective coalition.
Meh. Maybe we don’t really want a tall building anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index
What exactly is the business case of having the tallest sky-scraper?
@Winter:
It’s a guy thing.
According to JAD, the only people who think size doesn’t matter are those with small buildings.
In large cities, office space is expensive, and high office space, with an impressive view, is really expensive. More floors generate more revenue.
At some point there is going to be tradeoff between the higher cost of high floors and the rent you get from additional floors, but in major cities, pretty much every building is well below that tradeoff. In practice, tall buildings simply make more money.
High building are also a demonstration of technological superiority. If you can build a tall building, you can build integrated circuits for the latest smart phones. Similarly for buildings with gravity defying design, like the Sands Hotel. Who can doubt that those who built that totally impractical hotel did so with the intent of making lots of money and have, indeed, been making lots of money?
>At some point there is going to be tradeoff between the higher cost of high floors and the rent you get from additional floors, but in major cities, pretty much every building is well below that tradeoff. In practice, tall buildings simply make more money.
There’s a limit. Required elevator capacity goes up proportionately to the floor area, that is the square of height. This means that if you want to hold trip time to ground below any fixed bound, the elevator shafts have to take up an increasing percentage of floor area as the building gets higher. There’s a turnover point above which adding more height is a net loss to building capacity because you lose floor area to elevator shafts faster than adding floors gains you area.
The fundamental problem is that the design payoff is rising linearly with height while communication costs to keep it running are increasing as the square of height – I use this as an instructive analogy for scaling costs in software engineering when I give talks.
Sky lobbies and double-deck elevators are kluges to partly get around this problem; any building with them has already reached this limit. They have a diminishing-returns problem, rapidly blowing up trip times for people on higher floors. The World Trade Center was just on the edge of being uneconomical even with these; taller buildings like the Petronas Towers are display objects that don’t actually make economic sense.
@JAD
So Patrick is right, it is a guy thing. I wonder what the female equivalent is.
The guys who built the Burj Khalifa, twice as many floors as the Trade Towers, claim to be making out like bandits, though for a while it looked as if they were going to lose a bundle. Therefore the Burj Khalifa is below that limit.
They dealt with the elevator problem by simply making very fast multi deck elevators, Vertical bullet trains, elevators that can lift three hundred tons at very high speed. Eight meters per second downwards, limited by ear adjustment problems, considerably faster upwards, eighteen meters per second upwards, the fastest elevators in the world, with the biggest weight capacity in the world. It is profitable because they charge a ridiculously high amount for floor space, and yet they are pretty much full. A ridiculously high corner office is a status symbol.
If you want to transport more people up and down your elevator shaft, you make it a vertical train – more elevator decks, faster elevators.
At some point the weight of the elevator cable is going to be a problem, but in the Burj Khalifa, thirty ton cables lift three hundred ton elevators, so there is still the capability to go higher. You cannot go faster, because of inner ear adjustment problems, but what is wrong with four deck elevators?
In Shanghai, people are suggesting that the tall towers will prove to be expensive status symbols and will lose money, but that is not the perception in Dubai. Dubai previously planned a lot of megaprojects that, with the real estate downturn, never got built, but now real estate prices have risen, making megaprojects profitable once again.
Shanghai’s towers, to be profitable, hope that real estate will go up. In Dubai, however, real estate has gone up.
The libertarian case for rebuilding the Twin Towers as tall or taller than before is that it would likely be a viable business plan under free-market capitalism, and that it’s only the dragging weights of chained-market capitalism that is making it non-viable. (And if rebuilding turns out not to be viable in a free market, then so be it – but we can’t find that out unless we first get rid of those chains.)
The Dark Enlightenment case, as I understand it, is that it’s politically important to rebuild the Twin Towers even if it doesn’t make business sense to do so, and that the lack of political will to do so is a bad sign. It shows our civilization to be sick and declining, overwhelmed by the parasite load spawned by the progressives and the Enlightenment.
@JAD
Your description tells me these taller than tall buildings are just peacock tails. They cater to status “I am higher than you”.
It used to be straightforward to use size compensation to explain things on the web, then some joker invented variable font sizes. Now it grows ever harder to explain how our inadequate push forward in megacodpiece technology threatens the protection of our most vital bodily fluids.
“the female equivalent is”
Big domes to lure male sports fans inside! I have always had trouble quite understanding the official politics of arena funding, so I figure my Bayesian prior probability for a shadowy female coalition acting out sublimated urges ought to be high, right?
@William Newman
Domes as the female equivalent to male sky scrapers? Why not?
@Winter:
> They cater to status “I am higher than you”.
OTOH, there’s a huge difference between building a tall building because you want the tallest building, and building a tall building because lots of potential tenants want to live/work in said tallest building. Lots of people do, in fact, get rich catering to vanity.
The peacock’s tail is an honest signal of a healthy and successful peacock, and a tall building is an honest signal of a healthy and successful society.
Someone paid serious money to be higher than you, means he has serious money, and can expend it to get difficult and impressive engineering feats accomplished. So maybe he is the guy who you should talk to to get ICs built for your proposed cell phone.
@JAD
It is a honest signal, but it is bad for the individual cock.
If you saw peacocks with drab tails, would you conclude that they had switched to a more rational mating system, or that something was horribly wrong?
@Alpheus @JAD @everybody
> but I think looking at the unchecked exponential growth of regulations and of bureaucracy
You know, it just occured to me that one of your biggest and unadmitted problems in the US is that your goverment is really good at enforcing all those regulations, so you get to feel the pain of each of them. You seem to have one of the most efficient governments in the world in the sense that for example US policemen seem to bother about prosecuting really minor stuff, instead of just being lazy, unefficient and bribable as in many countries. Maybe they stand to gain from it somehow, dunno, but they seem to be really motivated. So actually you could profit from some laxness, from inefficiency of enforcement, from some corruption.
Imagine a place where if you own a restaurant and there is an inspection, you can basically bribe the inspector at a low cost. In that case it does not really matter that much if there are 10, 100, or 500 regulations, as none of them are enforced.
But of course, it has its own failure modes, as if the bribed inspector is OK with gross abuses, like totally rotten food, and because of having this non-functional governmental system there are no free-market methods to combat that, too much corruption could mean third-worldly circumstances. Like, getting a bad diarrhea. So let’s modify our model a bit.
Imagine another place, where there is a shared, common understanding of what regulation is sensible and what not. The inspector will not oversee actually rotten, unhealthy food for a bribe, but he can be bribed cheaply into not enforcing the senseless regulations.
That would be a good enough place, because it would mean the country is functioning according to civilized norms, yet basically it is shielded from government: no matter how many stupid rules they make, for a small bribe they will not be enforced, only the sensible ones.
In a way, corruption *is* a proper libertarian solution for the growth of government. It is a market for protection agains the government – if done right, and not overdone.
The question is, are there places in the world today that implement this golden mean of corruption, of being able to bribe yourself out form the stupid rules but not the sensible rules, so end up with civilized rules being enforced but still shielded from the growth of government?
> If you saw peacocks with drab tails, would you conclude that they had switched to a more rational mating system, or that something was horribly wrong?
Do you understand that constructing (or not constructing) a skyscraper is the result of a conscious decision, and that having a bright tail is not?
@Random832:
> constructing a skyscraper is the result of a conscious decision
But what of the desire to construct such a thing?
@Shenpen:
Somehow that seems unlikely, because the concept itself seems unstable.
Is this the end of Moore’s Law?
A glorious peacock’s tail is an honest signal of superiority, and a building with many habitable floors is an honest signal of superiority. Americans urgently needed to send such a signal, wanted to send such a signal, and could not.
This is the myth that the US government has unusually low corruption. That is only so if you see lower class corruption, and fail to see cathedral class corruption. To get anything done in the US you need a “consultant”, which is to say person who has a special in with the bureaucrats. You give him some money, and he then gives the bureaucrats some money.
The problem is not corruption, nor is it tyranny, rather the problem is anarcho tyranny. If you need the approval of one guy to be allowed to create value, you will pay him his cut, then create value. If you need the approval of a hundred people to create value, they will each want ten percent, for a total of a thousand percent, you are just not going to be able to create value.
Things come to a halt. Then, to get things moving, an “inner ring” is apt to form, a small conspiracy of people who by various means of influence, can get approvals in blocks, forcing each approver of a hundred approvers to accept less than one percent of the added value, providing order in the anarchy of government. However, the inner ring tends to rely on people of the same ethnicity who went to the same school and go to the same church. Inner rings collapse under the impact of affirmative action, which is what is happening now.
This is hilarious:
http://tumblr-argument-generator.lokaltog.net/
>http://tumblr-argument-generator.lokaltog.net/
Priceless. I just shared it to G+.
@JAD
“If you saw peacocks with drab tails, would you conclude that they had switched to a more rational mating system, or that something was horribly wrong?”
“A glorious peacock’s tail is an honest signal of superiority, and a building with many habitable floors is an honest signal of superiority. ”
You are totally into that guy thing, aren’t you?
The world is not teeming with peacocks. However, I have a dozen swans breeding every year around the corner in the center of town and geese are so numerous over here they have to be culled to limit damage. Neither swans nor geese have these ultra-healthy honest tails advertizing their strength. So much for these tails as an asset.
The same with all these tallest buildings. Dubai is a fair for tourists, and Malaysia is not exactly the strongest economy out there. The Germans are doing pretty well economically, competing head-on with the far east. They are not in the “we have the longest” contest.
>Domes as the female equivalent to male sky scrapers? Why not?
There’s an all-female undergraduate dorm at a certain university, that is comprised of a pair of broad, low-rise towers. (McCormick Hall for those interested.) I have always found it hilarious that they built the girl dorm to look like tits – awkwardly shapes ones yes, it’s an engineering school.
@Greg
You know there are male and female cathedrals?
Notre Dame in Paris is female
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre_Dame_de_Paris
You should look at the Western facade, with the two towers and the central window.
>Notre Dame in Paris is female
>http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre_Dame_de_Paris
>You should look at the Western facade, with the two towers and the central window.
Thanks! I hadn’t thought of it in a while, but there was a period where I had a powerful fascination with Gothic architecture. While some of the theories about the ‘meanings’ hidden in the architecture of cathedrals is pretty out there, some of it is interesting and more plausible.
And I’ve actually been to Notre Dame- I wasn’t in Paris long, but I had to see it.
Winter:
The cpu in your computer is not a reliable indicator of who now has the technological lead, since Windows can only run on Intel architecture. The CPU in your cell phone is a better indicator, since it is relatively easy to port the cell phone OS between CPUs. And chances are that the CPU in your cell phone is built by a company with headquarters in Dubai.
Singapore is one of the strongest, probably the strongest, economy out there, and parts of Malaysia and parts of the more northerly parts of Australia are more or less colonies of Singapore.
@JAD
The waver steppers that produce the CPUs in my phone are desigened and build in the Netherlands. There is hardly competition for them. Anywhere in the world. So, where is the cutting edge of technology?
The people in Dubai neither desing nor build CPUs much. The people of Singapure are indeed at the cutting edge of technology. But they did not build the tallest building. That were the people of Malaysia.
> Inner rings collapse under the impact of affirmative action, which is what is happening now.
I am confused as to why you consider this to be a bad thing. Without the “inner ring” to conceal its impact, won’t the corruption wither away?
Winter commented on Premises of the Dark Enlightenment.
And wafer steppers have not improved since 2007.
Wafer steppers are produced in the west, so, like most western technology, are stagnating. I hope that the east asians get into the act, so that we wind up as subjects of the Chinese empire rather than in a dark age.
Observe Chicago for counter examples. The corruption produces greater dysfunction without an inner ring, because the state becomes more anarchic (tragedy of the commons) without an inner ring.
For example, obviously regulation produces revenue for regulators, in the form of payoffs through “consultants”, in the form of direct payouts, for example Angelo and the “friends of Angelo”, and in the form of the revolving door, for example Jon Corzine, the man of many hats. Thus each regulator is incentivized to produce more regulation, resulting in today’s extraordinary avalanche of regulation. An inner ring would say “Hey, hold back, you are killing our golden goose. Your regulations are cutting the squeeze we get from our regulations.” The function of the inner ring is to stint the commons.
@JAD
It seems the Chinese bought two ASML waver steppers. They disassembled one to study. They could not reassemble it to specs.
But we are improving. From stagnation for decades we are now only stagnating for half a decade.
Winter:
One technology after another has been stopping. Science became, in substantial part, official state religion in the late 1940s, a transformation that has now become rather obvious in the form of Global Warming, A lot of technologies stopped in 1972, and most of the remainder stopped in 2007-2008.
@JAD
“A lot of technologies stopped in 1972, and most of the remainder stopped in 2007-2008.”
You mean, gasp, the the deepest recession in a century effected technological progress?
I assume you exclude all of biotechnology, medical technology (Real-Time MRI), and developments like quantum computing, LOFAR, and graphene from your considerations?
I am also pretty sure that most people in the world would consider the spread of first, mobile phones, and then smartphones to be “technological progress”.
If official statistics are to be believed, we have long been out of the the recession, yet technological progress has not resumed.
If official statistics are not to be believed, the deepest recession is looking kind of permanent, presumably as a result of the end of most technological progress.
Medical technology has not done anything interesting in recent times. The most recent big important medical improvement was the ICU, the ability to keep very badly injured people alive long enough to patch them up. Real Time MRI was first demonstrated in 1986, and was moving into medicine shortly after. It is now frozen in mid move. Similarly graphene. Graphene transistors will only be useful if we have lithographic methods with much higher resolution than our 2007 resolution. Which we do not have, and it is far from clear we are ever going to have.
Your list of of stuff is for the most part a list of stuff left high and dry by the halt to progress in 2007. Real Time MRI was coming soon in 1996, and it is still coming soon. Kind of like flying cars, which have been coming soon since the late 1960s.
Lofar may well give us a new eye on the earth and the universe. If it does, yes, that is progress. If the greenies, eurocrats, and science bureaucrats do not strangle it in its cradle – then it will have been progress.
@JAD
You left out quantum computing and a lot of stuff going on in graphene that goes beyond your obsession with transistor scales. Not to say the progress in biotechnology which did most definitely not stop in 2007.
You are also mixing up fundamental science, proof of concept, and wide-scale application of technology. Graphene is no good because it has not been widely deployed in industry, RT MRI is no good because the fundamental principles have been invented decades ago but is only now coming into wide deployment.
As every technology is either in active deployment or still in development, it will never be right in your eyes.
@JAD
“If the greenies, eurocrats, and science bureaucrats do not strangle it in its cradle – then it will have been progress.”
LOFAR is operational
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOFAR
There are no useful quantum computers. There are no useful applications of graphene. These are, like flying cars, all technlogies left in limbo by the technological halt..
Lofar is operational at generating jobs for official science bureaucrats. Not yet operational at seeing things formerly unseen.
@JAD
“There are no useful quantum computers. There are no useful applications of graphene. These are, like flying cars, all technologies left in limbo by the technological halt.”
As I wrote, when technology is new and in development, it is no good according to you. When technology is deployed, it is not new.
So with every example of new technology that is deployed on a large scale, you come back with “that is old technology, invented X years ago”. And with each example of new technological breakthroughs you come back with “No one uses that”. Meanwhile, new technologies are deployed all the time and even newer technologies are invented all the time.
@JAD
“Lofar is operational at generating jobs for official science bureaucrats. Not yet operational at seeing things formerly unseen.”
I saw these pictures. But this is cutting edge. Again, when it is common knowledge, it is not new according to you. When it is not common knowledge, it is useless.
Recent Results on Clusters of Galaxies with LOFAR
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014AAS…22343105W
@JAD
“These are, like flying cars, all technlogies left in limbo by the technological halt.”
This is fun!
On technological “stagnation”:
Technology: Photonics illuminates the future of radar
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7492/full/507310a.html
The rechargeable revolution: A better battery
http://www.nature.com/news/the-rechargeable-revolution-a-better-battery-1.14815
Optomechanics: Hardware for a quantum network
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7490/full/507045a.html
Hysteresis in a quantized superfluid ‘atomtronic’ circuit
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7487/full/nature12958.html
Materials science: Fast-track solar cells
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7467/full/nature12557.html
The correct LOFAR paper link is:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/260628287_Micro-Jy_imaging_at_150_MHz_for_the_LOFAR_EoR_project
Micro-Jy imaging at 150 MHz for the LOFAR EoR project
Michiel A. Brentjens, S. Yatawatta, V. Pandey, V. Jelic, A. G. de Bruyn, L. Koopmans, S. Zaroubi
01/2014;
And in many cases both – it was invented twelve years ago and was in the process of being deployed, and then, somehow, in 2008, deployment got indefinitely delayed.
Where is my flying car?
Last tall buildings built in the west, 1972, fastest warplane, 1972, last man on the moon, 1972.
Lithography kept advancing – until 2007.
For most technologies, the halt goes all the way back to 1972. Most of the remainder halted in 2007-2008. In particular, and especially, the jewel in the crown, lithography, had its last major advance in 2003, and a distressingly small advance in 2007, and since then, has remained stuck, with the result that advances in density are “orthogonal to the scaling path”, and fail to bring us advances in computing speed and cost.
Winter quoting the LOFAR project:
You will notice they are not discussing what the maps reveal. This is a paper about LOFAR, not a paper about what LOFAR sees, as if Galileo had given a report on telescopes rather than the phases of Venus and the moons of Saturn – science bureaucracy, not science.
Indeed, whenever you quote from scientific sources, on any topic, the report turns out to be a report on official science itself, the holy church reporting on holy church affairs, not a report on what is seen that was formerly unseen, not a report on actual observation of external reality, though it may contain announcements of dogma concerning what would be observed if anyone was so impious as to actually look.
Perhaps a future LOFAR paper will discuss things seen that were formerly unseen. But it has not happened yet, and we have no very strong reason to suppose that it will ever happen.
@JAD
As with everything, when it is new, it is unproven, when it is proven, it is not new.
But this is about advances in technology. Now we can build LOFAR, sequence neanderthaler genomes, build quantum computers, and get more energy from fusion than we put in. These are technological feats that were not possible before.
On the other hand, halving line widths in lithography is just another dot improvement in your words.
Building LOFAR is unimpressive. We could also hire people to dig ditches with spoons and hire other people to fill them in, and we probably do. Building LOFAR and using it to see what was formerly unseen would be impressive.
We cannot in fact build quantum computers, in that we cannot build quantum computers that compute anything useful.
We cannot get more energy from fusion than we put in. The headline that reads “Scientists make nuclear fusion break even for the first time” is, like semiconductor node names, simply not true. The energy applied to cause fusion was huge, the energy released by fusion was too small to be directly detectable as heat, but was instead calculated from neutron flux. “Breakeven” was achieved by simply not counting the energy from the lasers in the laser driven implosion. The ratio between the laser energy in and the fusion energy out was astronomical.
That we see headlines that this is a sign that science and technology has halted, not that it continues, just as the fact that the Freedom Tower is credited with ten more floors than it actually has is a sign that science and technology has halted in the west.
@JAD
A, yes, if it is new it is not proven, and when it is proven, it is not new.
I think the main problem here is that you cannot cope with reality. Obviously, you have to insist all people who witness reality to differ from your phantasies must be lying.
And when that fails, you shift the goalposts from technology to usefulness or economics. And from stagnation since 1972, to 1992, to a whopping 6 years ago.
@JAD
“That is because they are lying.”
They do not say what you want them to say. There is a difference.
@JAD
“For example, Freedom tower has 94 floors, not 105,”
This is neither technology nor science, so why bring it up.
@JAD
“and we are nowhere near break even on nuclear fusion. If you read the fine print on the supposed nuclear fusion break even, they are not counting the energy of the laser beams used to compress the pellet.”
All they said was that it was an important milestone. And it was a marvelous technological achievement. You do not like it, but it still is a marvelous technological achievement. Also, when they were really lying they would have lied in the fine print.
@JAD
“The lies are themselves evidence of decline.”
People have lied since the dawn of time. That does not mean all people who disagree with you must be lying about what they see.
Building high buildings is high technology. The west cannot build as high as we used to be able to, so now, instead of building, we lie.
It is a fake milestone. They said “breakeven” but the laser pinch is further from breakeven than Sakarov’s T3 Tokomak in 1968.
Not as marvelous as Sakarov’s T3 in 1968.
Our closest approach to fusion breakeven was JET in 1997, similar design to the T3 but bigger and more powerful, which produced around fifty percent as much fusion power as power expended heating up the plasma. (sixty five percent according to an overly optimistic and misleading measurement) Since then, we have been getting further and further from breakeven, not closer and closer.
If progress was actually continuing, the west would not be lying. One lie, all lies.
ITER was an attempt to build something like JET, only even bigger, but the bits did not fit together. It was never assembled Had it been assembled, almost certainly would have accomplished breakeven, but was instead all screwed up due to bureaucratic chaos.
Comparing JET, which worked, to ITER, where the pieces, like a badly made jigsaw, just failed to fit together, tells us the west has passed its technological peak.
ITER was to be the next step in fusion after JET, as 160 nanometer light was to be the next step in photolithography after 193 nanometer, and they just simply did not happen.
The third premise: Democracy has failed [us].
Really? ‘We’ are conveniently missing. Is it not that ‘we’ have failed democracy? When you let women vote as equals of men, when you let welfare recipients vote, when you give the institutional college a black check in fiat money, what do ‘we’ expect. We get the government and economy we deserve.
The Roman Republic started with a ‘democracy’ of sorts and became an empire before it quit being a republic. The British Empire, the United States Empire. These are not failures but smashing successes. The problem is corruption with institutional force working without without needing direct application of violence everywhere by financial engineering. If we compare democracy to heaven, democracy is a failure. Democracy does not fail until the culture fails. I consider free markets/ecologies to be natural democracies where an individual’s vote is the size of the vitality he puts on the line.
Hesitant to necro-bump, but this is the most recent post for which this seems on-topic.
I’ve just finished Christina Hoff Sommers’s (with Sally Satel) One Nation Under Therapy, and a recurring theme is the psychological and practical harm done to individuals when they are expected and encouraged to treat any sort of negative event–from ungraded wrong answers in school to torture–as a psychological injury for which professional help is required. Something about it bugged me, and it wasn’t until the end that I realized that the pattern I was trying to identify was loss of agency.
It strikes me that the package of political cant against which the Dark Enlightenment rails has at its core the common feature of inculcating a state of learned helplessness akin to the staked elephant. “Therapism” presumes and teaches that individuals are incapable of handling and overcoming adversity without technocratic help, various government schemes are based on the presumption that individuals are incapable of making prudent decisions, and preferential-treatment programs are tacit claims that members of the groups in question can’t compete on a level playing field; all instruct that Mongo simply pawn in game of life, and that we should entrust the modern hierarchy with running our lives for us.
This is the broadest and most cohesive pattern I’ve been able to identify, but is there another superpattern that more regularly encompasses the memetic disease afflicting Western society? In either case, why, as Moldbug notes, is that ratchet always creaking in the direction of individual helplessness, and what makes the majority of the population so susceptible to it?
My impression is that Neo-Reaction also has the premise that the vast majority of people need to be taken charge of. Am I being unfair?
A minority of people make modern society function. The majority are a problem.
Most people do need guidance and coercive supervision. The problem is that if your premise is equality, the state will wind up applying that guidance and supervision to those that need it least, while letting those that need it most run wild, a problem summarized as änarcho tyranny.
When a drunk Indio with no valid driving license runs you off the road in California, he will not be punished. That is anarchy part of anarcho tyranny. When your child eats a sandwich into the shape of a gun in school he will be punished. That is the tyranny part.
@Nancy
“My impression is that Neo-Reaction also has the premise that the vast majority of people need to be taken charge of. Am I being unfair?”
Unfair only insomuch as you don’t identify that that attitude (which I will call parentalism) underlies a lot of political philosophies.
One of the statements I ran into when plowing through this stuff is (paraphrased) the Progressives (and most of the modern viewpoints, from Burkean conservatives to libertarians) are about Progress, while the Neo-Reaction is about Order.
I can envision an order without parentalism; I can also envision a progress with parentalism. So it seems to me that that is an orthogonal issue.